Month: July 2012

Sweden and rape: the myth of the feminist haven

National stereotypes of Sweden tend to involve pop music, loud jumpers, sexual liberation and a fairly good grasp of feminism and gender politics. Julian Assange labelled Sweden the “Saudi Arabia of feminism”, presumably due to their desire to ask him some tricky questions about the rapes he probably perpetrated.

A vital part of good gender politics is taking rape seriously. Rape is a frighteningly common occurrence, and is typically gendered. These issues must be dealt with sensitively. A few stories have come to my attention which suggest that Sweden is not doing very well at this at all. Trigger warnings apply for the remainder of this post, and any links.

In one case, a cis male perpetrator was acquitted for attempted rape because his survivor was a trans woman. The survivor had not had SRS, and did not have a vagina. The court ruled that because the perpetrator had set out to rape a woman and the survivor was not a woman the crime could not have possibly happened. This verdict seems to imply that, simply by being trans, a person cannot be raped. This “not a real woman” line rears its head from all corners, from the misogynists to some branches of radical feminism. It is a thoroughly repugnant, antediluvian mode of thought that needs to be extinguished.

Regardless of gender or sex, a person can be raped. That a court bought a defence that stated “actually, she turned out to be a man” suggests not only that trans women cannot be the targets of sexual abuse, but also cis men. The ruling reflects the patriarchal belief that rape is something that exclusively happens to women who make ideal victims.

Another case involves a young woman with Asperger’s who was raped. The perpetrator was acquitted as the Court of Appeal ruled that he could not read the woman’s expression due to her disability. This acquittal represents the swallowing of a different rape myth: that consent is the absence of a “no” rather than the presence of a “yes”. The implications of this case for other non-neurotypical survivors are quite, quite terrifying.

And of course, one can make the point that the allegations against Assange were not taken seriously by the authorities initially. While Assange’s cheerleaders like to suggest that this is due to some sort of evil conspiracy and the lying bitches were probably making the whole thing up anyway, there is a rather more mundane explanation for this: rape allegations against powerful men are seldom taken seriously. It was only as Assange’s star began to fall that Sweden began to take an interest.

A legal system is always inextricably bound up in the beliefs of the culture that created it. Rape culture is alive and well throughout the world, and therefore this damaging set of assumptions gains a degree of credibility as judges believe untruths and the minds of the lawmakers are swaddled in lies. Sweden is no different, and its implementation of “justice” is as likely to engage in rape apologism as any other legal system. It is not a haven of feminism, it is the same as anywhere else.

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Many thanks to @konvention who linked me to the article about the woman with Asperger’s.

German court rules non-consensual genital mutilation as assault: what will the future hold?

A bit of news I missed from last week: a German court has ruled that ritual circumcision of boys amounts to grievous bodily harm,  and ought not to be practised on children unable to consent.

The regional court in Cologne, western Germany, ruled on Tuesday that the “fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents”, a judgement that is expected to set a legal precedent.

“The religious freedom of the parents and their right to educate their child would not be unacceptably compromised, if they were obliged to wait until the child could himself decide to be circumcised,” the court said.

This is a big victory for bodily autonomy here, placing this right above any others, including carrying with it the implicit assumption that parents do not always know best for their children.

In an ideal world, of course, we would not need to be having this discussion: people would just know it was a bad idea to lop bits of genitals off someone without their consent because it might have been a good idea among a desert-dwelling nomadic people in the Bronze Age, and they would not do it. It is unfortunate that it requires state intervention to get this message across.

Using state intervention to rule for the essential right of bodily autonomy is problematic. Firstly, it has caused outrage and accusations of persecution from those who practice ritual circumcision, who view this risky and unconsensual procedure as an essential part of their cultural heritage. This may provoke tensions.

Secondly (and relatedly), state intervention does nothing to address the root causes of ritual circumcision: the genuine belief among many that this is what ought to be done because a possibly fictional book says so. Due to this rather dangerous belief, I am concerned the practice will continue anyway, in back rooms or by crossing borders to every other country in the world that fails to respect bodily autonomy. As for those boys whose parents followed the law, what might be their fate? The court has explicitly protected the parents’ “right” to “educate”, suggesting that these boys will be bombarded with “information” about why their bodies are dirty and disgusting and they should undergo a procedure that carries risks as soon as the law will allow it.

In this situation, is it really any more consensual than hacking a bit of penis off a baby?

And this is the thing that really needs to change, a shift in thinking from archaic tradition to a respect of bodily autonomy. It is one thing for someone to decide to remove their foreskin because they like the way it looks, or it’s a kink. It is quite another for this procedure to be performed on someone without their consent, or under conditions of coercive misinformation. Religion has an ugly habit of poking around in our pants and, as with issues such as clitoridectomies and abortion, it needs to stop.

Perhaps the use of state intervention will promote discussion of these issues, awareness of the absolute deal-breaker that is bodily autonomy. Perhaps it will provoke a slow shift towards religion relaxing its grasp on people’s genitals. This is the route that thought must go, rather than reaction and backlash and searching for loopholes.

What a person does with their body must be a free choice.