Category: not angry just disappointed

The value of trigger warnings

Oh dear, Vagenda. This week, one of the authors has come out against trigger warnings. Her reasoning? She had PTSD, and doesn’t like them because she prefers to confront her problems, and also the internet isn’t a safe space.

For the first point, good for her. Seriously, good for Rhiannon, and I’m glad that she’s fairly on top of her mental health problems and has found a way to live with them and deal with them. She’s one of the fortunate ones: many others are not in this position. There are many who would rather avoid seeing things which remind them of trauma, many who would like to be able to close the tab and get on with their day, instead of inadvertently reliving horrors.

And it’s these people who I’m thinking about when I put trigger warnings at the top of things I have written. If I’ve helped even one person avoid pain, then I am glad. It’s a little thing for me to do, which can make the all the difference for some people.

Trigger warnings are not for yourself; they’re for others. And if Rhiannon from Vagenda prefers not to avoid things, she can use the trigger warnings to seek out content to expose herself to as part of her own personal healing.

Rhiannon uses the metaphor of epilepsy to illustrate her point that the internet isn’t a safe space: that, for all the warnings about strobe lights, epilepsy can be triggered by light flickering through the trees. It’s worth noting here only a very small fraction of people with epilepsy are triggered by strobing effects. I’m not, and I’ve had several hours of being hooked up to gooey electrodes staring into a flashing light to prove it. When I was younger and newly-diagnosed, I used to hate that they would put the “epilepsy warning” up before films and plays and so forth, because I had epilepsy and didn’t have a problem with flashing lights. It annoyed the fuck out of me. Then I started thinking of other people, and I realised these warnings weren’t for me, but were hugely valuable for others. The same is true of trigger warnings.

And yes, they’re imperfect. Everything is, at the moment. I’ve sat in meetings riddled with manarchists complaining about the need for safer spaces policies, because there’s no such thing as a safe space.

No. There isn’t. But that doesn’t mean we should use that as an excuse to stop trying and stop using these interim measures which do help.

If you read the comments on the Vagenda piece, you will see people who find trigger warnings a vastly helpful resource in mitigating effects of mental health problems and being able to make decisions. These are the people I am thinking about when I defend trigger warnings, even as my own personal abuse triggers are never covered in trigger warnings.

The Vagenda piece begins with a dog-whistle complaint about people being mean to Julie Bindel and Suzanne Moore, who joked about trigger warnings after both of them exhibited startling levels of transphobia. In the last paragraph is another point:

 Often, it is coupled with a sense of passive aggressive glee (“um. You should have put a trigger warning on that”).

This, perhaps, betrays more of the backlash from the privileged over being called out, and I do wonder how much of it was the motivating factor behind the commissioning, writing and existence of the piece. Trigger warnings are hardly complicated. Think of common scenarios that might fuck someone up, and if you write about it, stick a line at the top that you’ll be talking about this. If you’ve missed something which is triggering and someone says so, you lose nothing by doing popping in that simple little line.

It astounds me that people are kicking and screaming against something so simple which can make the difference between suffering and being all right. It astounds me that some are being flippant about it, laughing and joking over something which is easy, yet so important.

Yes, trigger warnings aren’t the magic bullet. But they’re an interim demand which can help make many feel ever so slightly safer in a fundamentally unsafe world.

The shit I get and how I deal with it

I get a lot of shit. A lot of abuse, often misogynistic, sometimes heterosexist and once or twice, a smattering of ableist nonsense. It comes with the territory of being a woman with an opinion who is present on the internet.

Once upon a time, I kept a folder on my computer of screencaps, titled “Misogyny and abuse”. Almost daily, I’d have to update it. I gave up. It was sapping my time and resources, and I realised how uniform it was. There was nothing I could learn from the reboant chorus of cunts who couldn’t stop wishing they could cut my bitchdyke pussy out.

If you google my real name–which my haters seem to think is some sort of state-guarded secret and utter it with the delight of a schoolchild upon having discovered their teacher has a first name–you’ll find several hate-sites, at least two of which are specially created just for me. They feel like they’re so clever, having discovered the link between the Zoe Stavri who sometimes writes articles in the mainstream press, and the @stavvers who tweets “look at this article written by me”. They like to post unflattering pictures of me, and hurl abuse over every single thing I say, making sure to tweet at anyone I follow to let them know “the truth” about me. The truth being, that I’m a woman with an opinion, who sometimes doesn’t photograph particularly well.

The interesting thing is how followers of my dedicated hate-Twitter all seem to be misogynists who I’ve called out. Birds of a feather flock together, and the particular strobilating dingleberry who runs my hate-Twitter seems to be the standard around which they can rally.

Then there’s the time I had a death threat. It was qualitatively different from various haters saying “I wish she’d die” “I could kill her” “I could rape her” &c &c (all of which as happened countlessly tedious times). They’re not threats. Let me tell you what a death threat is. I once pissed off a particularly prolific misogynist and all-round scumbag. He decided to tweet what he thought was my address, followed by an announcement that he’d like to break my neck. The good news is, it wasn’t my address, or that of anybody I knew. As far as I know, none of those people had their necks broken. As I understand it, the shitbowl in question got into trouble with the cops for trying to pull similar shit with other people.

And that’s the common-or-garden misogynists, but let it be known that I also get a fair bit of trouble from another group of bigots: the TERFs. They don’t like me much, because I’m a vocal ally of trans people and speak out against transphobia. The only thing distinguishing them and their methods–attempted doxxings, timeline-stalkings, outright hate speech–from the misogynists I spoke about before is that this lot hate on a specific group of women. While Suzanne Moore may not be a TERF herself, her attempted scapegoating of trans people for “abuse” is a hair’s breadth away from the out-and-out hate speech the TERFs perpetrate.

Maybe it’s because I’ve had heaps of abuse levelled on me in the past that helps me see, clear as day, the difference between abuse and criticism. Yes, even rude criticism. Abuse comes from above, from a person with privilege, desperate to cling on to it. Criticism so often comes from below, rudeness returning fire from a war I had inadvertently declared. In these instances, I step back. I educate myself. I don’t make the same mistake twice, and I become better. If I did anything else, it would make me the bully, not the person I’d harmed.

As for the rest of it, that sort of shit, as I said, comes with the territory of being a woman with an opinion on the internet. At first I was afraid, I was petrified. Then I came to an epiphany: they are doing this because I, as a woman with an opinion on the internet, am a threat to them. They want me to shut the fuck up and stop making life as a misogynist harder for them. They feel their ability to dominate slipping away, and it scares the fuck out of them.

Oderint dum metuant, fuckers.

I feel a little frisson of glee from knowing they are scared of me, then I hit the block button, because I actually don’t want to hear any of their shit. I keep my comments moderated on my blog, because it’s my space, and I can do what the fuck I want with it. I don’t read below the line on things I’ve written that I have no control over.

They’re frightened because I’m right, and that’s all I need to know.

I wish Suzanne Moore would stop digging

The other day, columnist Suzanne Moore wrote a reasonably decent article about anger. I say “reasonably decent”, because it contained a honkingly problematic line:

We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.

This line, when viewed in the context of the sheer number of trans Brazilian women who are murdered, is not a good thing to write, as this blog by Edinburgh Eye–which I recommend you read fully–explains really well. At that point, when this was drawn to Moore’s attention, she could have apologised for a thoughtless, flippant line, apologised, learned something and we could all go on to appreciating her reasonably decent article about anger.

If you’ve read the title of this post, you’ll know this wasn’t the case. Instead, she responded with open, vitriolic transphobia about “cutting dicks off”, and complaints that we were not focusing on the real issues. Fairly standard shit, including whinging about intersectionality, and listing all the books she’s read which somehow shows she definitely can’t possibly be transphobic. I storifyed the first 24 hours of it. You don’t have to take my word for it and can view the whole thing in context.  Particularly notable was when she shared a flippant joke with Caitlin Moran about the whole thing.

I’d hoped that was the end of that, and we could all go back to our lives, but apparently I was wrong, and Moore’s still digging, deeper and deeper.

She wrote an article in the Guardian, complaining about the whole thing. It’s largely a rehashing of the tweets. She starts off with the “some of my best friends are trans” argument in record time, moving swiftly into once again listing some books she’s read that (possibly) show she’s right. Then she dips her toes into how the big mean intersectionals are shutting down discussion, claiming she’s read bell hooks. Then comes Suzanne Moore’s point: that we shouldn’t care about tiny little things like the oppression of trans people and her contribution to it, but we should instead focus on the cuts, literally saying this:

 So to be told that I hate transgender people feels a little … irrelevant. Other people’s genital arrangements are less interesting to me than the breakdown of the social contract. I am asking for anger and for alliances. Less divide and rule. So call me a freak.

For all her having read bell hooks, it looks like Suzanne Moore missed a vital bit:

“The vision of Sisterhood evoked by women’s liberationists was based on the idea of common oppression. Needless to say, it was primarily bourgeois white women, both liberal and radical in perspective, who professed belief in the notion of common oppression. The idea of “common oppression” was a false and corrupt platform disguising and mystifying the true nature of women’s complex and varied social reality…

The emphasis on Sisterhood was often seen as the emotional appeal masking the opportunism of bourgeois white women. It was seen as a cover-up hiding the fact that many women exploit and oppress other women.” -bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

And yes. In her call to unite around the thing she wants us to unite around while sweeping her own contribution to the oppression of other women under the carpet, Moore has been part of the problem hooks highlighted.

Once again, Moore said some shitty things on Twitter:

Not one trans activist has engaged with economic argument or attack on welfare. Why not?

At this point, the utterly fabulous trans activist Roz Kaveney pointed out that she had, amongst participating in her other interests (which included writing the Rhapsody of Blood novels, of which volume 1, Rituals, is now out and you should read it, because it’s excellent. A truly queer, feminist fantasy novel. Sorry for the digression, but it’s brilliant). Roz then gently explained why there was a level of anger about Moore’s initial comments, to which Moore embarked on a bizarre rant about “Latin culture”, and culminated in a rather dismissive “I get that . I must not say the penis thing.”

It’s abundantly clear that Moore doesn’t want to learn from this issue, to the point where she just flat-out tweeted this:

I am not going to apologise. Get it?

This sort of reaction is horribly unhelpful and stands in the way of ever being able to unite against other forms of oppression, such as the brutal government attacks on anyone vulnerable. Moore fucked up. It was a minor fuck-up at first, but with her reaction, it escalated into something far uglier and far harder to heal. Moore feels like we can never move ahead if we worry about such trivialities as the oppression of trans people, but the reality is that this oppression is far from trivial. It might seem tiny to Suzanne Moore, but that’s only because it’s something that she doesn’t have to worry about herself. In order to build a movement that can actually unify, though, she should care about it, and should monitor her own contribution to oppression of other people–a lot of whom are women. An apology would be a nice place to start.

Suzanne Moore has shown she holds some nasty views. Some defend her actions as a response to the vociferous criticism she received, yet the level of bigotry in her tweets shows that if these tweets were in anger, they were always there, lurking under the surface. Likewise, if she is being flippant and sarcastic, it denotes a lack of empathy and interest in the struggle of a fellow group of humans.

It’s quite sad, really, because Moore’s article on anger was reasonably decent, and did make some points about gigantic problems in society. It’s a shame, then, that as well as addressing some, she also contributes to others herself. No one oppression is so important that all other oppressions must be neglected and ignored. There is no “let’s do this tomorrow, after we’ve fixed the real stuff.”

This is all real. It’s all important. You can be good on one thing and absolutely terrible on another. And isn’t it better to try not to be terrible on anything?

Shit I cannot believe needs to be said: why “rape prevention” advice is dangerous nonsense

Following my blog on Caitlin Moran’s dreadful comments about how she lies in bed thinking about how easily she could rape women wearing high heels, I was surprised to see a comment thread where some agreed that she had a point. A similar pattern occurred later in the week, when I came across this ghastly, inexplicably Red Riding Hood-themed advice put out by Durham City Council, which informs women “Don’t make yourself vulnerable by getting too drunk”.

Once again, people were defending this as good advice. This was not just lengthy mansplanations–although I certainly did receive some lengthy mansplanations. Women, some of whom were feminists, saw nothing wrong with putting out this sort of advice. I’d hoped fervently that the archaic “short skirt” argument was a dead horse these days, but it is apparently alive and healthy. And so I cannot believe that, as 2012 draws to a close, and the world might end tomorrow, that I have to write a blog explaining why putting out advice like this is not just nonsensical, but dangerously nonsensical.

Put simply, rape prevention advice targeted at women shifts the responsibility for a rape from the perpetrator to the survivor. We should know by now that rapes don’t happen because the survivor is wearing a short skirt, or a pair of heels, or she has been drinking too much. This should go without saying. Yet implicit in all of this rape prevention advice is the assumption that actually these behaviours displayed by some women are related to them being raped, and if they would just not do these things, nobody would get raped.

And of course, this isn’t true. This rape prevention advice is targeted at a very narrow model of rape: the predatory stranger in the dark alley. The vast majority of rapes do not happen this way–it’ll more likely be a friend, a partner, or an acquaintance, and it probably won’t happen in a dark alley. By reinforcing stereotypes about rape, we help maintain rape culture which benefits greatly from the assumption that rape is only a thing which involves a stranger jumping out of a bush. Were we to take rape prevention advice to its logical conclusion, we would need to put out a campaign informing women not to talk to men, not to go to places where men might be, and for the love of God don’t have a relationship with a man. This is just as nonsensical as telling women to make sure they get a taxi home after a night out if they don’t want to get themselves raped.

The net effect of rape prevention advice, then, is further patriarchal regulation of women’s behaviour. You will notice that rape prevention advice tends to tell women not to do certain things which “good girls” shouldn’t do: wear revealing clothing, get drunk, be independent. A good example of this is the targeting of high heels: why aren’t concerned citizens sagely advising women not to wear flip flops, when flip flops make just as much noise and reduce mobility? You can’t even kick someone in flip flops! There are two major differences between flip flops and heels, and both say everything we need to understand about rape prevention advice. The first is that flip flops are gender-neutral, and the second is that they are not remotely “sexy”.

What rape prevention advice does is develop a climate of fear around something which need not be feared. Rape prevention advice delivers a threat of rape: unless the woman complies with a set of behaviours, and if she does not then it will be her own fault that she gets raped. It’s a potent threat, and it took me years of walking home drunk through dark alleys in silly shoes for the fear to fade.

Some people prefer to defend rape prevention advice by saying it is just sensible personal safety advice, which also applies for protecting oneself against mugging. This would only be true if this advice were also thrown at men, and it isn’t. It really, really isn’t. Likewise, rape prevention advice is not the same as telling someone to lock up their car, or hide their wallet. It is far deeper than that, and rape is very different from theft.

Comedian Nadia Kamil perhaps provides the best demonstration of the difference between rape prevention advice and how other crimes are dealt with in this short sketch, which I recommend you watch.

Transcript here. This sketch absolutely perfectly demonstrates how ludicrous it is for people to hide, not living their lives in the way they choose to because of the threat of drunk drivers. And of course, that is nonsense: we’ve all seen how society deals with drink driving in massive awareness campaigns informing people not to drink and drive. This is exactly how it should work for rape.

The current state of rape prevention advice is unhelpful. It targets the wrong people and manages to further muddy the waters in our thinking about rape. Rape is not about what the survivor has done to bring it upon themselves, but, rather what the perpetrator does to make it happen, and there are still very few instances of mass-scale campaigning to address this. Sure, there’s a few and they have their flaws (see Lambeth Council’s Real Men Know The Difference campaign for an example of this), but we need to build upon this model. Rape prevention advice should–and must–consist of one simple message: don’t rape people.

For fuck’s sake, Caitlin Moran

Trigger warning: this post quotes some pretty strong rape apologism

Once upon a time, we could pretend that despite the fact she’s rubbish on literally everything else, Caitlin Moran was at least on the side of (some) women. Can you hear the record scratch coming? Well, it turns out that she isn’t. In an interview with a blogger, Moran made some utterly terrible comments about rape. In an interview, she said:

Yes. It’s on that basis that I don’t wear high heels – other than I can’t walk in them – because when I’m lying in bed at night with my husband, I know there’s a woman coming who I could rape and murder, because I can hear her coming up the street in high heels, clack-clack -clack. And I can hear she’s on her own, I can hear what speed she’s coming at, I could plan where to stand to grab her or an ambush. And every time I hear her I think, “Fuck, you’re just alerting every fucking nutter to where you are now. And [that it’s a concern] that’s not right.

Society should be different. But while we’re waiting for society to change, there’s just certain things you have to do. But again the thing is, so many things you could do instead are predicated on having money. She could come out of a nightclub and get into a taxi, that would be the right thing to do.

No billionaire heiresses are ever abducted and raped and murdered, because they are just being put into a taxi or have their driver waiting around a corner for them. Again, it’s not just a feminist thing, it’s a class thing. It’s a money thing. It’s a problem of capitalist society. That’s why I think often feminism links to Marxism and socialism, I don’t just want to help one bunch of people, I want to help everyone.

Far from being the sort of comment from someone whose general feminism-lite attitude can at least be viewed as some sort of primer to feminism for the privileged, these remarks are a simple rehashing of that tired old rape myth: that what a woman wears can get her rape.

According to Moran, high heels function as some sort of rapist cowbell, advertising that there is a lone woman wandering abroad, ripe for the picking. I’ve never lain awake listening to the sound of heels and thinking about how easily I could rape that person, and I’m pretty sure vast swathes of the population share this nocturnal activity because we don’t believe the problem is what a woman wears.

Perhaps Caitlin Moran has been listening to some of the criticism levelled at her, though, by her attempt at a dimly intersectional analysis, over which the wail of a sad trombone sounds. Rape culture, unfortunately, will not be solved by Moran’s clever manifesto of All Women Shall Have Taxis. What if the taxi driver is a rapist? It’s not unheard of: recall, for example, the Black Cab Rapist who earned his moniker after raping women who had got into his taxi.

Moran’s comments ultimately do not resemble a feminist talking about rape at all. It’s the same old tired societal tripe, blaming the victim of rape. All Caitlin Moran has done is reheat it and feign concern for these women without offering any solutions other than “so be careful out there, or you’ll get yourselves raped.” This is not what needs to happen, and it is not what the young women new to feminism–Moran’s apparent target demographic–need to hear.

The problem is, of course, that society isn’t doing anything to change these beliefs which allow rape to happen. Rather than attack this, Moran contributes to it, repeating these beliefs and adding an air of legitimacy to them through the means of her status as a feminist role model. This is a dangerous path, and one which will ultimately prove to be an obstacle in the journey towards genuine social change.

I cannot believe that, as the year 2012 draws to a close, we are still having to fight on this front. I would have thought–almost certainly wishfully–that perhaps we would have won this by now, and that we would have laid down our floggers and interred the corpse of the “short skirt” horse. Perhaps it’s due to a desire to feel in control: it’s not nice to believe that there’s nothing we can do that will stop us getting raped, so the pervasive belief in wearing sensible shoes and getting a taxi home functions as a placebo button. Perhaps it’s so intrinsically linked with other rape apologistic beliefs that we cannot just throw that one on the fire by itself. In either case, this is no excuse for the repetition of these myths.

They’re just that. Myths. Stories. Everywhere we see the myths and lies about rape, we must attack them if we are to have any hope of success.

In her own way, perhaps Caitlin Moran is doing her bit for improving the state of feminism by being so consistently crap. It makes us think, it teaches us where we need to build and where we need to improve our thinking by the nigh-on perpetual onslaught of thought that’s ostensibly from our side but wrong, wrong, wrong.

Further reading:

It’s Just A Hobby– further unpacking Moran’s words
Sian and crooked rib– a robust fact check
Perestroika– unbridled, glorious ire

Julie Bindel, please stop

I have a pretty much hate-hate relationship with feminist-identified-feminist Julie Bindel, who I’ve previously been cross with for transphobia and biphobia. Bindel belongs to a certain faction of feminism which, as Roz Kaveney identifies, behaves like a cult, with some fascistic overtones.

Upon seeing this tweet from Bindel, therefore, I experienced that emotion with no name, which is shock without surprise. It was something simultaneously jaw-droppingly horrid, and completely in keeping with her track record:

Those women that proclaim “I’m not a feminist” should be paid less than men, have no maternity benefits, no access to refuges, and no vote.

That’s right. Unless we all renounce patriarchy and come into the light of feminism, we should apparently be immediately immiserated and disenfranchised. While in this 140-characters-or-fewer, Bindel doesn’t spell out a road map for how this goal would be achieved, there’s not a pleasant way of systematically immiserating and disenfranchising people.

Bindel has helped survivors of domestic violence before. Taking her point to its logical conclusion, will she ask each and every one of them whether they are a feminist, and if they say no–and remember, a lot of women do not identify as feminist–would she turn around to them and send them back to their abusive partners? Because this is what she is saying.

There is also the problem of women that Bindel has decided are not feminists: the trans women, the sex workers, the bi women and so forth. Are these women to be systematically immiserated and disenfranchised because Bindel doesn’t agree with them? This is what she is arguing.

It’s hardly a surprise when some women don’t want to assume the feminist identity if we have people like Bindel spouting such rhetoric, advocating not just for continuing oppression of women, but to increase it punitively.

The thing is, Bindel’s strain of feminism is so dated and fails to include vast swathes of women and women’s experience, that the only way to recruit more people into this mode of being is through threats of systemic violence. If you can’t get them to join you, beat them.

I long for a day when Bindel becomes a thoroughly irrelevant voice howling into the void, but that is not yet. The mainstream media consider her a voice of feminism, and for as long as she is marked as a representative of us, this circus will go on. Feminism must not be about replication of oppressive structures, but about their complete destruction.

By that token, Bindel is probably not a feminist. But that doesn’t mean she should be oppressed.

ETA: Bindel has clarified her remark with a further tweet, pointing out it meant exactly the thing I thought it meant. It totally isn’t fair enough.

ETA2: Julie Bindel has replied, using the “it’s just banter” defence. Her Twitter bio may say she’s not a fun feminist, but apparently I’m just humourless:

@stavvers in what way is saying you hate me polite? Not only have you had irony/humour bypass you appear to be getting a bit obsessed w me!

I’m not entirely sure when Julie Bindel started writing for lad mags, but if that makes her happy then good for her.

 

Dawn raids for perpetrators of abuse: something doesn’t sit right

Trigger warning for domestic violence

Imagine you’re in an abusive relationship. Imagine you’re asleep in your bed, your abusive partner snoring next to you. Perhaps you sleep fitfully, or perhaps you are sound asleep and drained. Suddenly, your slumber is interrupted by a loud banging at the door. It startles you awake. Maybe you are scared of your violent partner’s reaction to being awoken by this cacophony. Nothing good can come from this knock on the door so early in the morning, and you’re terrified of what it may mean.

Maybe you answer the door, or maybe it is kicked in. Either way, there are police swarming round your house. You’re not decent, perhaps you managed to get your dressing gown on. They flock towards your partner. You’re still not quite sure exactly what’s going on, you’re confused, startled and frightened. The police grab your partner. Maybe your partner looks at you with blame in their eyes, and you know they think you called the cops. You didn’t.

This morning, the Met proudly tweeted that they have been undertaking dawn raids on perpetrators of domestic violence, culminating in, as the BBC reports, 264 arrests. In a show of class, the Met also decided to tweet a picture of themselves outside someone’s house, probably easily identifiable to anyone who knows those who live there. Judging by the force’s use of the hashtag #SpeakOut, and contextualising these tweets among others encouraging third-parties to report domestic violence they think may be happening, it looks as though the abuse survivors may have been as surprised by these dawn raids as the perpetrators.

While domestic violence is a pressing and serious matter, it strikes me that what the police are doing probably isn’t a particularly sensitive intervention for the survivors. In many cases, the survivor will live with the perpetrator, so it’s not just the perpetrator’s home being stormed, it’s the survivor’s.

This is exacerbated by the emotional side of abuse: it’s never just physical. In many cases, it is not just fear which prevents the survivor from leaving the situation, but the complicated relationship dynamics. There’s often a hefty dose of emotional abuse in abusive relationships, leaving survivors feeling that there is nowhere else for them to go. Sometimes this might take the form of “it’s us against the world”. This could very easily be exacerbated by the police suddenly dragging a partner out of your bed.

Then there’s the fact that these arrests probably aren’t going to keep the perpetrator away forever. They’ll be released, whether it’s within hours, days, or months. I can’t imagine that none of them will blame their partners for this arrest, and this is likely to have dire consequences for survivors.

Of course, not all abuse is the same, and not all survivors feel the same. There might be some survivors who would welcome this sort of intervention, but thinking back on my own personal experiences, this would be literally the last thing in the world I’d want.

It’s important that we are more aware of people we know who might be in abusive relationships, but it’s also crucial to respect their wishes and offer support as a community. Dawn raids based on reports to the police are an unsustainable and, in many cases, unhelpful response. Instead, we must keep our eyes open, and support anyone we may know who needs help, in the ways that they want.

How the mainstream media derailed addressing child abuse

The two recent child abuse scandals have both found themselves derailed by exactly the same method: a protracted session of the mainstream media navel-gazing and taking pops at one another. The Jimmy Savile case turned into a study of why Newsnight didn’t report on the story. Meanwhile, the re-examination of the North Wales abuse scandal turned into a study of why Newsnight did report on the story.

In the noise of the quarrelling over who should resign and why, and squabbles about the quality of journalism, the real story got lost.

Children were raped and abused. There were cover-ups and failures to fully investigate the systemic instances of abuse which occurred. People were denied justice for the horrific things that happened to them.

On 10th November, the Guardian ran nine separate stories and a liveblog about the crisis at the BBC; on the 11th eight stories on the front page alone. It’s a similar state of affairs in the other major news sources, except for the BBC, who are running with a third arrest in the Savile piece. Where mentioned within the BBC stories, the child abuse is thrown in as an afterthought.

There are many important questions remaining regarding the child abuse that happened, yet these questions are lost in the media circlejerk; the problem of which is perhaps exemplified by this Observer editorial which manages to make the issue about everything from journalistic standards to austerity, tacking child abuse on as an afterthought. These are questions which ought to form the crux of the issue, yet they are drowned out in favour of discussion of the internal politics at the BBC and who is reporting what best.

1) Who did abuse children? It seems certain now, that Lord McAlpine was not one of the men who raped Stephen Messham, the man who told his story on Newsnight. By focusing on who did not rape Messham–to the point where Messham himself, a survivor of rape and sexual abuse, was forced to apologise–the media have lost sight of the fact that these rapes happened and were perpetrated by some people. Who were they, and will they be brought to justice?

In a way, it’s not really the names of the abusers that matter. The answer may be neither high-profile nor particularly newsworthy, considering sexual abuse and rape are frighteningly common. However, as a matter of urgency, we should turn our focus on this: in the interest of justice, it matters not who did not abuse these people, but who did.

2) Why are there so many systematic failures to investigate abuse allegations? While there was some emphasis on the BBC’s failure to investigate–and perhaps cover up–the allegations against Jimmy Savile, little has been made of failures in other areas, particularly that of the police. The police failed to investigate allegations against Savile, yet are not facing a public investigation in the same vein as that for the BBC. Likewise, Lord McAlpine was misidentified due to a police officer erroneously telling a survivor that the man in a photograph he had positively identified as his abuser was McAlpine. How did this happen and will the police officer involved be held to account?

Likewise, criticisms of the Waterhouse inquiry into the North Wales abuse scandal still stand. That Lord McAlpine was not involved changes absolutely nothing about the fact that the inquiry failed to investigate the abuse that happened outside the homes. Why are we not talking about how these survivors of abuse have their hands tied in seeking justice due to a systematic failure to investigate what happened to them?

3) How can we create a climate where it is safer for survivors of abuse to come forward? In both the North Wales and Savile cases, the picture of what happened only came to light years later. We do not live in a world where it is safe for survivors to come forward. When a person in a position of power rapes and abuses, there will be an army of people willing to cover it up and cast an aura of disbelief on the survivor. Take a look at Stephen Messham being dragged through the mud for what happened to him.

Rape and abuse happen, and too often they happen in silence. These are not things which happened in the past, but continue to happen today.

There was a narrow window of opportunity for survivors of abuse in the past to come forward and tell their stories, which has been effectively closed by derailing what could be a discussion of the ugly realities of a culture which facilitates abuse into talk about the BBC. It makes it harder still for current survivors to come forward when they are effectively told this is secondary to a debate about journalistic standards.

Please let us not lose sight of the real issues, the crux of the matter. Let us not contribute further to the culture of silencing survivors. Let us keep what happened to these people at the front of our minds and challenge ourselves to ensure that this can never happen again rather than allowing ourselves the easy route of the well-rehearsed examination of media practice.

Rape and abuse happens. It happens a lot. How can we stop that?

Dear @mehdirhasan

Dear Mehdi Hasan,

I literally don’t know where to begin with the torrent of how wrong you were in your piece about being anti-choice and left-wing. I say anti-choice, because I noticed you said you didn’t like the labels pro-choice and pro-life, and anti-choice reflects better what you really are.

I guess we’ll start with the piece. Now, I really think the first thing you should do is read this from Vagina Dentata who explains eloquently why you’re completely and utterly wrong about how it’s possible to be a lefty and anti-choice. Make sure you read the whole thing, but this is the crux of the matter:

So no, you cannot be left-wing and pro-life. You cannot be left wing and “progressive” if you think half of the world’s population can hang-on or sacrifice or just stop being so bourgeois for demanding that they are treated as equals. To fight for equality is at the very least, to acknowledge the biological difference that keeps women oppressed and fight to overcome that. Women’s sexual and reproductive rights are part of our struggle for survival and will not be trivialised or ignored by men who claim to fight for equality.

A few more points on your piece. I’m very disappointed in you, seeing you repeating the anti-choice porky pie that France and Germany have a 12-week limit, so the UK should too. What these countries actually have is a law which allows abortion on demand up to 12 weeks, i.e. you go up to a doctor, say “I’d like an abortion”, then you have your abortion. After the 12 weeks, the legal situation resembles that of the UK: you have to jump through hoops, provide reasons, see more than one doctor.

The rest of your argument, I’m afraid to say, is a hot mess of appeals to authority. You’ve just listed the few people who agree with you who aren’t thoroughly objectionable, many of whom died centuries ago. I’m also rather baffled by the fact that you’re not ashamed to agree with Jeremy Hunt, a man who has what I like to call the Copro-Midas Touch. Literally everything that man touches turns to shit. Are you genuinely comfortable with agreeing with a man who hides in trees to avoid being seen by journalists?

You’re also repeating the tiresome “it’s a baby” myth. Again, I’m going to refer you to one of my sisters, because pretty much everyone’s already said what I want to say, but please read this heartbreaking post from Fearlessknits about life at 25 weeks gestation.

I’m also rather concerned about you believing bodily autonomy to be “selfish and individualistic”. Mehdi, I hate to say it, but you’re really edging into fascist rhetoric here, constructing reproduction as some sort of common good. There’s good arguments in favour of the anti-choice position itself being inherently fascist, and I find your appeal to collectivism as an excuse to invade women’s bodies rather a good example of this.

Now let’s talk about your reaction to the whole thing, Mehdi. Now, I’ve noticed you’ve been whinging rather a lot about being called sexist for your views. The short answer is, that’s because you are being very sexist, Mehdi. Appallingly so. Once again, I’m going to refer you to a sister for this, as Reni Eddo-Lodge has explained beautifully why you’re a sexist.

Here’s why Hasan’s piece is anti-woman. He attempts to reframe the debate on his terms, snatching it out of the hands of people who can get pregnant, insisting on the premise of ‘ethics’ rather than women’s rights, and consequentially betraying his male privilege and over inflated sense of entitlement.

When he ponders which member of our society needs a voice more than the mute baby in the womb, he takes women out of the equation, completely; women’s thoughts, our hopes, our dreams, our aims and our goals—which may or may not include children.

You see, Mehdi, you’re silencing women. You’re telling us our rights don’t matter, our views don’t matter. Don’t think we haven’t noticed that the vast majority of supportive tweets you retweeted were from men. Don’t think we haven’t noticed you playing the time-honoured dog-whistle “reverse sexism” card. Your views are sexist, no matter how much you love your wife and daughters.

I will give you a bit of praise, for coming up with one of the most risible defences of sexist views I have ever seen. I’ll admit I laughed long and hard, because I’ve never seen anything quite so silly. You said:

This is indeed a “women’s issue”, yes, but is it ONLY a women’s issue? No wider ethical implications? (Oh, and no male foetuses??)

Mehdi, what about that meatsock incubator that’s holding the male foetus? That meatsock incubator is almost always a woman (sometimes it is a man, and these men can get a say about abortion too, as they’re affected by it). Ultimately, people with uteruses don’t like to be thought of as meatsock incubators, but your view constructs us as such.

Of course, you might dismiss my views as I’m a woman, and therefore, in your book, a selfish and individualistic babykiller. So just in case, here’s a really good piece by a man, Jonnie Marbles. Make sure you digest every word of this.

Anyway, I’ve spent rather a long time engaging with your arguments, and this is because what you’re saying is fucking dangerous and terrifying, an attempt to shift the Overton window further into our uteruses. However, a part of me thinks you were given the platform to espouse those worrying views, poorly argued, because the New Statesman are trolling for links. It works so well for the Daily Mail, and I can thoroughly understand why the NS might want a slice of the linkbait pie. That’s why I never linked your article, Mehdi. I don’t want to encourage anyone to continue publishing articles like yours.

Hope you’ve learned something from this, and will keep your opinions out of our wombs in future.

Stavvers xoxo