Feminist Fight-back!

Today I learnt of two things to make my little Inner Feminist jump up and down with glee. (Except she wouldn’t actually do that. Externally I am a bastion of uncoolness but my Inner Feminist is far too cool to actually jump and down with glee, or with anything else for that matter. She despairs of the rest of me, as you can imagine…)

First was the news, long awaited and almost virtually unexpected, that Saudi Arabia’s government has passed laws making domestic abuse a crime in the Kingdom. As of now it is against the law to use physical or sexual violence against women, and law enforcement agencies are now beholden to actually investigate, prosecute and punish those who carry out domestic abuse. The law also makes provision for refuges and support for women suffering domestic abuse, and places an onus on all its citizens to report such abuse if they become aware of it happening to a colleague.

Now I’m sure there are plenty of cynics out there muttering “too little, too late” and wondering why on earth I, whose pet cause and passion is the eradication of domestic abuse in all its forms once and for all, would be jumping for joy at this news. And to be fair to you, O Cynics, there is a fairly substantial part of me which simply states “duh!” After all, it’s not exactly rocket science to expect that any and all human beings, regardless of gender, sexuality, race, religion, colour, creed and love-or-not of ‘Dogtanian and the Muskehounds’ should be treated with respect and kindness; that any show of violence and abuse is resolutely declared intolerable and stamped out like the plague and pestilence it actually is. To be even fairer to you, O Cynics-Who-Might-Not-Love-Dogtanian-But-Whom-I-Still-Consider-Friends, there is also a part of me which wants to berate the Saudi Government for a) stating the bleeding obvious; b) taking so long about it and c) not going far enough. But you know what? I am going to jump for joy on this one because as far as I’m concerned this is progress. Baby steps, yes, but none of us could run before we could walk, crawl or shuffle on our bums, and if this is the Saudi equivalent of bum-shuffling then we should all immediately start on the praise-and-reward-and-encouraging-them-to-try-crawling-for-a-bit-now side of things. (And yes, I’m using the Country-As-Recalcitrant-Child Analogy. I went there…)

For a country like Saudi Arabia, which has a particularly, um, interesting view of women and their rights, this is actually a fairly major cultural shift. Whether or not it’s because the Kingdom is a Islamic country is something I’m not going to speculate on; I’m eminently under-qualified to make such judgements and am only a teeny-weeny way through my reading of the Qur’an, but whatever the root causes and cultural beliefs up to this point, the new laws and focus on domestic abuse is a fairly spectacular change. The issue of domestic abuse has always been legally considered a private matter in the country; until this year, there were no campaigns to highlight the problem or raise awareness amongst the population. Earlier this year posters appeared depicting a woman wearing the niqab with only her eyes showing, one of which appeared to be blackened and bruised; the slogan “some things can’t be covered up” became the campaign strap line. It’s quite an arresting image, actually, and if it helps even one person escape the cycle of domestic abuse then more power to Saudi Arabia’s elbow, says I…

The other thing making my Inner Feminist punch the air with glee and do a little jig, metaphorically speaking, was my/our discovery of the Hollaback! Campaign. Hollaback! began in the United States and has now made its way to us here in Blighty; the campaign aims to highlight, combat and abolish the ‘cultural norm’ of street sexual harassment in all its forms. Its message is simple and clear: if it makes you feel uncomfortable, it’s not a ‘compliment’ and it’s not ok. End of story. It’s a straightforward enough message, but one which definitely needs pointing out if you ask me; I know several people who’ve been on the receiving end of said unwanted attention, have been on the receiving end of it myself in fact, and knowing how to deal with it at the time would have been extremely useful.

I tend to have two reactions to this street harassment malarkey. After the initial yell of “oi, darling, nice legs/tits/arse/whichever body part has taken my fancy!” my initial, culturally-and-socially-ingrained response tends to be “wheee! Clearly I am considered attractive; this therefore validates me as a person in the eyes of the world!” and induces a warm and fuzzy glow of feel-good-about-myself vibes. The second reaction, usually when I’ve got home and had time to process things, is one of violent, bitter and futile rage: “Oi, White Van Man I’ve Never Met Before In My Life, how dare you pass judgement and comment upon my person!! Just because my body type is female doesn’t make it public property, nor does it give you the right to sexualise it any old way you fancy, you blimmin’ pervert!” That’s the inner monologue I tend to direct psychically to the perpetrator, along with muttered threats of doing unspeakable things to them with pointed objects. In fact now that I think about it, I’d quite like to get my hands on the doctor who told his student that I had a “lovely anatomy” – I’m not sure what’s worse: being seen as a sexual object or a piece of meat, but either which way I’d quite like to insert scalpels where the sun don’t shine…

Now clearly there are worse things happening on the streets to the sisterhood and the population at large. The whole ‘stranger rape’ thing is very rare but it does happen, not to mention the levels of assault and general violence which seem to go on at chucking-out-of-pubs-and-clubs time, but it’s this sort of low-level insidious sexism which becomes the ‘cultural norm’ and passes without comment. I’m not saying every time someone yells “nice tits!” or whistles at a woman she should turn round and administer a swift punch up the bracket or fire off a witty retort – safety and self-preservation at all times, after all – but keeping your head down and doing nothing just reinforces the message that it’s perfectly ok to carry on doing this sort of thing when it actually bloody well isn’t. And this has got nothing to do with any form of self-loathing where my body’s concerned; we’ve reached a pretty amicable consensus these days in that I acknowledge its flaws and faults and it points out its fabulousness and that’s that, but the point is it’s my body. I can slag it off or sing its praises to all and sundry but I’m buggered if I’m going to let anyone else objectify it or pass comment on it out of context. It’s one thing for your boyfriend to say he thinks you’re sexy; it’s quite another for some random loser in a van to yell things at you out of his window. Hollaback! aims to be a place for people to come together to record these incidents without feeling like victims; it might only be a tiny drop in the ocean chipping away at the massive rock bed of culturally normative sexism but it’s a start, and if it makes even one person more aware of the issue then it counts as a Good Thing in my book.  

And the next time some random idiot in a white van (why oh why is it always White Van Man who does this?!) yells something at me, I’m going to have one hell of an arsenal of comebacks to fire at him.   

Sometimes There Are No Words...

So it looks like ‘Professional Atheist’ Richard Dawkins has reverted to the “open mouth and insert foot” school of communication recently, after one of his Tweets asserted “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages though.”

There are so many things wrong with that statement – and that train of thought – that I can’t even begin to get my head around the utter wrongness of it. First of all, you aren’t comparing like with like, Richard, and as any half-decent scientist worth their PhD knows, if you’re doing that sort of experiment then you have to find comparable groups. Islam is a religion, millions of people strong, which mostly exists in the poor and deprived countries of the world (although there are exceptions, such as the large Muslim population of Britain – although one could argue Britain is getting more and more deprived, but that’s another story). Trinity College Cambridge is an academic institution, less advanced in years and numbers, which mostly exists among rich and middle-class white males (although there are exceptions, for surely even in the hallowed halls of Trinity there must be the odd token woman on a scholarship or ethnic minority student…) No, no, no; if you’re going to use this type of argument you need to make more of a comparison. You could use another religion, for example – try claiming “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than the Jews”, for example, and see how long you last on the Twitterverse…

Perhaps religion is too inflammatory, however. Plus, as a Professional Atheist, it probably isn’t Dawkins’ strong point…ok, so let’s change it to a group which bears a relatively similar number of people to Islam: all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than black people…Yeah, not quite such comfortable reading, is it? Smacks ever-so-slightly of racism; inverted racism, maybe, since that does kind of go against the Daily Mail’s sacred belief that anyone who isn’t white is barely human and literate, but still – it’s racism just the same. You wouldn’t come out and say it in public, after all, would you? (Unless of course you read the Daily Mail, in which case why are you reading my blog? Go away before I set the Metaphorical Hounds on you!) Hell, you could use any group of people you like and this is still a stupidly obvious case of Rampant Islamophobia Disguised As Scientific Genius. Go on, try it. Take out the Trinity College part and switch it for any other randomly selected group which takes your fancy. Cyclists. Left-handed people. People who’ve had laser eye surgery. Women. Hell, you could even go the whole Twitterverse winning hog and state “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Noble Prizes than feminists”. Except then the Daily Mail will revoke your membership, because “the Muslims” might be hated and feared, but “the Feminists” are far, far worse…

Secondly, the overall assertion of this statement borders on the vile. So because only 10 people who have won a Nobel Prize of some description have been Muslim (take a bow Peace Prize-winners Anwar al-Sedat of Egypt, Yasser Arafat of Palestine, Shirin Ebadi of Iran [a woman too, no less…double whammy]; Mohamed El Baradei of Egypt; Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh; and Tawakel Karmen of Yemen [another woman…]; Literature Prize winners Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt and Orhan Pamuk of Turkey; and Science Prize winners Abdus Salam of Pakistan (physics) and Ahmed Zewail of Egypt (chemistry), the entire religion is deemed as having done nothing of note in the world since the Middle Ages – the inference being that it’s their gosh-darned slavish adherence to their silly old religion which has held them back in the first place.

I have a huge problem with this inference. Not just because it smacks of right-wing, white-man superiority (oh hello, haven’t we been here before…?) but because its sheer stupidity discredits someone of Dawkins’ intellect. I wasn’t aware the proportion of Nobel Prizes any particular sub-section of humanity had won was the thing we were supposed to value most, for one thing; clearly I missed that memo…But honestly, the man is just so full of hatred and intolerance towards anyone of a religious belief – especially Muslims, it seems, since this isn’t the first time he’s hurled brick-bats in their general direction – it’s like he can’t even think straight any more. And I say this as someone without a religious bone in her body! And that’s even leaving aside the fact two of the above-mentioned Nobel Laureates actually won awards for – duh! – science! It’s imperialist, jingoistic trash and it makes me sick to my stomach.

I understand he is a fervent atheist. Bloody hell, he goes on about it enough; you’d have had to be living in a small shack on Mars waiting for the Curiosity rover to find you not to know that Richard Dawkins Is An Atheist. I’m starting to think he believes he’s THE Atheist, and some of his rhetoric draws uncomfortable parallels with some of the most fundamentalist and evangelical religious speakers (of any religion). But bloody hell, there’s being an atheist and then there’s being a hate-filled, bigoted, intolerant twat…

His attack on Harry Potter, for example, was a master stroke of monumental stupidity and arrogance; children should not read these stories, he raged, because of the pernicious and corrosive effect they had on children – they were unscientific and taught kids to believe in magic, spells and wizards. To Dawkins, this is A Very Bad Thing. It matters not a jot that said books are works of children’s fiction (apologies to all my readers who one day dreamed of getting that elusive Owl Post…); oh no, for they are Against Science and therefore must be banned at all costs. There was also the ‘charming’ comment he made in December 2012 about the child abuse scandals rocking the Catholic Church: whilst the abuse was, he said, “horrible”, it was nowhere near as damaging to the child victims than being raised in the Catholic faith in the first place because of its mental torment and the psychological damage the religion caused people.

I’ll repeat that for those of you not paying attention at the back of the class. According to Richard Dawkins, it is worse for you to be raised as a Catholic child than it is for you to be sexually abused.

Oh, and let’s not forget the statement he made drawing parallels between the Qu’ran and Mein Kampf – you don’t have to read the Qu’ran to have an opinion about Islam, just like you don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about the Nazis.

Now I’ve read some of Dawkins’ work and, while some of it makes sense to me, an awful lot of it a) feels like he’s trying to be wordy and clever just to show how superior he is (his intellect up until this point has never been in doubt); b) feels like he’s SHOUTING VERY LOUDLY SO YOU AGREE HE’S RIGHT!!! and c) has the effect of feeling like you’ve been beaten over the head with something heavy and blunt. Nuance, it seems, is lost on him, as is moderation and tact.

I get the atheist stance; really I do. I even sympathise with it a little; I don’t follow any religion either, although I suppose I could most truthfully be described as agnostic rather than atheist because the honest, hand-on-my-heart truth is I just don’t know if there’s anything out there, but as a dedicated human-loving individual I like to advocate tolerance and harmony in the world. You believe in God, I do not. You believe in Allah, I do not. You believe in the Great Pink Llama in the Sky, I…am open to convincing on this front. Ok, seriously. The point is, if we all believed the same thing the world would be terribly dull and a bit too much like 1984 for my liking. You can believe in God and be a horrible person (hello Westboro Baptist Church); you can believe in God and be a nice person (hello many of the people I work at SHARE with); you can believe in Allah and be a horrible person (hello all you fundamentalist nutjobs who blow people up and stone your women to death for wearing a bit of lip gloss); you can believe in Allah and be a nice person (hello a very good friend of mine who shall remain nameless). Similarly, you can believe in nothing at all and be either lovely or horrible. It isn’t the be-all and end-all of things. I mean, I like to think I’m a reasonably decent specimen of humanity, even though I don’t believe in any religious convention of any kind. The fact that two people recently have been utterly surprised that I’m not a Christian in spite of all the “good work” and “nice things” I do bears that out, in a way; it’s great that the tenets of your religion match up with my own personal world view, but I’d humbly suggest that that’s a requirement to joining the human race rather than joining any religious faction.

I feel very disappointed that Richard Dawkins is slowly revealing himself to be nothing more than yet another superficial, hate-filled, bigoted individual with seemingly no capacity to develop a shared understanding or find mutual ground with the rest of society. There are always going to be people who use religion to oppress and promote hatred, just like there are always going to be people like him who use religion to oppress and promote hatred in a different way. I have no time for any of them, no matter what their colour, creed, belief or lack thereof: I subscribe to the Philosophy of Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted Theodore Logan, and I plan to stick to it.

Be excellent to each other.

And party on, dudes.

There are worse ways to live, after all…

"There Are Lessons To Be Learned..."

Ten years ago, Lord Lamming published his report into the murder of Victoria Climbié after her death in the year 2000. The cruel torture meted out to the eight year old girl by her great-aunt and the great-aunt's boyfriend before they finally murdered her sent sickening shockwaves throughout the country; nobody who read or heard anything about that case could ever forget the litany of injuries inflicted upon this child, or the anger they felt as failing after failing was uncovered in the investigation; something the Lamming Report highlighted extensively. Victoria was let down, the report concluded, by the very people who should have protected her from this abuse: Haringey Social Services and the police, in particular, were singled out as being particularly ineffective, perhaps backing up the assertion of the judge during the trial of Victoria's killers  that all those involved in her case were "blindingly incompetent". Heads, quite rightly, rolled.

Never again, they said...

Fast forward to 2009 and another report by Lord Lamming is released after another child is systematically abused and murdered. The 'Baby P' case - the death of 17 month old Peter Connelly at the hands of his mother and step-father in 2007 - once again sent sickened shockwaves throughout the country; the fact he had lived in the London Borough of Haringey - the self-same Borough whose social services had been identified as failing Victoria Climbié - meant that this time round the anger seemed even more forceful. There was yet another gut-wrenching litany of cruelty reported during the trial in 2008; yet another internal Serious Case Review - albeit one which was condemned by both local and national MP's for being little more than a cover-up job - and once again external reports were commissioned by the Government to look into the competence of Haringey Children's Services. Once again, heads rolled.

Never, ever again, they said...

Fast forward once again to last week, when it was announced that Coventry's Safeguarding Children Board are completing a review into the systematic abuse and murder of four year old Daniel Pelka by his mother and step-father, which is due to report back in six weeks time.

Don't bother, Coventry. Seriously, save yourselves the bother of reinventing the wheel and just take either of the previously mentioned Safeguarding Reviews, change the names and dates and Robert is, in fact, your mother's brother. Because from the sounds of it I don't think there are going to be any surprises in there. In fact I would pretty much lay money on where your report will highlight the failings were: Children's Social Services. Police. The school. Healthcare officials. It will be almost exactly the same fault-finding and recommendations which were first highlighted after the death of Victoria Climbié thirteen years ago.

Have we learnt nothing in thirteen years? Nothing at all?

Now I work alongside people who work with 'troubled' children and families; indeed, I work with said children and families myself. It's a huge responsibility and, if I'm completely honest, half the time I live in a state of utter paranoia that I might be missing something, that something might happen in one of these families which causes irrevocable harm...and the families we work with are not as complex as the families social services have to work with. I sometimes work alongside our social workers; I know how stretched they are, how pressured their workload is; how under-staffed they can be. That's not their fault; it is the fault of Councils for not employing more social workers to carry the load. But it is their fault if they suspect something is happening in a family and they don't at least report it; if they have to ask their superior whether something is or is not abuse then might I tactfully suggest that, passionate though you may be, you're in the wrong damn job, kid.

It isn't easy working with some of these families. I know that and I don't have to work with the most acute and complex cases, and yet there are days when I might as well bash my head against the nearest wall as it will be more productive. But that's the nature of the beast; that - surely - is why we choose to go into this field: to help people and do what we can to ensure these children and families have every chance to have a half-decent life? When I read about the horrific abuse meted out to Daniel Pelka I cried; not just because it was so horrific - which of course it was - but because he could so easily have been one of the children I come across in the course of my work. It haunts me that, maybe, there were chances to save this little boy at an earlier stage; before the abuse escalated, before it became so severe that social services had to become involved. And it made me think that maybe, just maybe, there are children I work with right now who could potentially - only potentially mind you, but that potential is enough - to become the next Daniel, the next Peter, the next Victoria...

I do my job because I love it. Not because it's easy, not because I earn mega-bucks or get medals for it or am likely to win awards for it, but because I love it. It was exactly the same when I worked for Victim Liaison or when I worked for Women's Aid; it was hard work and exacted an emotional toll, but I loved it. And I don't doubt that all those people who worked on Daniel Pelka's case, or Peter Connelly's, or Victoria Climbié's loved their jobs too; after all, it isn't really the sort of thing you go into if you don't have a passion for it as it will just eat you alive otherwise. But thirteen years on from Victoria's death we are still having exactly the same conversations around the water-cooler over what should be done, who should be blamed...nothing, it seems, has really changed. In two or three years time I expect we'll be waiting for the result of yet another Serious Case Review, after yet another child is abused and murdered by those expected to nurture and care for them; wondering who will get the sack for failing to protect said child; shaking our heads sorrowfully at yet another life lost...

I hope I'm wrong. I really, really hope I'm wrong. I hope this time the anger will be so white-hot and righteous that when we say never, ever, ever again we don't just mean it, we do something about it; something more than just enact legislation or carry out reviews or give people the sack. But, realistically, there will always be people prepared to torture, abuse and murder the children they are supposed to have been put on this earth to protect, and there will always be over-stretched and under-resourced services battling to keep up with the never-ending stream of cases coming their way. We are, after all, a society which founded an organisation for the protection of animals long before we founded one for the protection of children, and with the current programme of Government budget cuts with the best will in the world it's not going to magically improve overnight.

I don't have the answers, or any real conclusions. I just have a deep sense of foreboding and a terrible, terrible sadness...