sexism

Grand ideas

I recently filled in an application to speak at an event about children in Care. The form asked me to summarise in a limited number of characters what I would bring to the table as a speaker. I wrote:

We have collected BERRI data on the psychological needs of over a thousand children in residential children’s homes over the last five years, and surveyed and trained over a thousand residential care staff to provide care that is tailored to those needs. We can present what this data shows us, and how we have used it to improve the services that are offered, and commissioning decisions made about children. For example, we have learnt that the level of challenge presented varies remarkably little by age or gender, though the types of needs are slightly different. Some types of needs (eg behaviour, risk) are affected much more by proximal stressors (eg exclusions from school, gang involvement, substance misuse, sexual exploitation) whilst others (eg relationships) are affected more by historic adversity and the nature of early attachment experiences. We can present how staff variables (demographic factors, burnout, empathy, ability to formulate) affect the care they deliver, and how the price and types of services commissioned relate to the needs of the child and the impact they make on the life of the child – if at all!

The government spend a billion pounds a year on these 7000 children, and we have good evidence that by better targeting the psychological needs of individual children they can improve outcomes whilst saving costs.

It struck me when I looked at that paragraph that this was simultaneously a grandiose claim and underselling the potential of the systems we have developed*. I think that tension between over and under-selling what we can do reflects one of the big challenges of being an entrepreneur – seeing the potential, whilst being realistic about the frustratingly slow steps it takes to achieve it. I can see so much that we can achieve, and the way that collecting the right data can help put children’s needs in the heart of commissioning decisions, improving outcomes whilst saving substantial amounts of money but it is very hard to get this information in front of the right people. I’ve tried to speak to politicians, policy makers, experts in the field, commissioners, clinicians, funders and the media. I’ve spoken at conferences, written a book, contributed to policy documents, delivered service improvement programmes in major providers in the sector, I’ve even given evidence before a select committee. But because I try to answer the questions that are asked, I don’t always get the chance to promote the products and services that we provide. And it isn’t my personality to aggressively sell what we do.

Looking back, I think that I believed that if you work out a better way to do something, a technique that saves time or money or improves outcomes for people, then once people knew about it then it would start to gain traction until it became the established way of doing things. I figured that was how we had progressed from horse-drawn carts to steam engines, cars and now electric vehicles, or from papyrus to paper to typewriters to computers to the plethora of voice-activated, photo-capturing, text and graphic app laden smartphones – finding iteratively better ways to solve problems. I knew that sometimes there were two simultaneous steps forward that competed (like VHS and Betamax) and that variables like marketing, networks and budget could influence the choice, but I generally thought that the best solutions would win through. Maybe it is my left-leaning political bias or my hippy upbringing, but I think in my heart I have held onto a naive idea of fairness in which everyone should be motivated to solve social problems, and people should be rewarded for their effort and insight.

I suppose the concept that we live in something of a meritocracy is quite a widespread belief, and entrenched in western cultures, that good ideas will surface and the best people will rise to positions of power. That’s taken a bit of a crushing for me over recent years, as I’ve seen the covert influence of the super-rich and we’ve had several prominent examples of terrible people rising to the top of systems that have failed to keep up with social and technological change, but somehow I am still hoping for the system to right itself, because it feels like society should be a functional meritocracy.

I think it is particularly well articulated in the USA, because they started as a nation of immigrants who created their own society. To quote the American Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal”, are entitled to “the pursuit of happiness” and will rise to their natural position in society. That sounds like a fair way to run a country, but of course the reality has never quite matched the headlines, given the theft of land and resources from native peoples, the decimation of the natural environment and the evils of the slave trade. But somehow the myth of the American Dream has persisted. First described by James Truslow Adams in 1931, it describes a culture where anyone, regardless of where they were born or what class they were born into, can attain their own version of success in a society where upward mobility is possible for everyone. The American Dream is achieved through sacrifice, risk-taking, and hard work, rather than by chance or the privilege of your pre-existing connections. In Adams’ words it is:

a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position

Whilst I can see so many places where people are not starting the race from the same starting line, because of geography, race, gender, religion, socio-economic adversity, sexuality, age, or so many other variables I have clung on to my optimism that if you can work out a solution to a big social problem, or have an idea that can really work to make life easier (and/or make lots of money), then it should be possible to gain traction with it, get key people to support you, and get it to happen. The reality is that so many people who think of themselves as examples of a working meritocracy have in fact been handed a huge head start by their privilege. As we joked the other day on Twitter, all the wrong people have imposter syndrome because it is mutually exclusive with entitlement. It seems that private schools in particular train people to expect to be leaders and wielders of power, as we see in the preponderance of Prime Ministers educated in Eton (and in the irritating arrogance of Lottie Lion and Ryan-Mark in the recent series of the Apprentice). Having attended an ordinary comprehensive, and never having been aware of any negative repercussions of my gender or heritage, it has been quite eye-opening to see that maybe the playing field isn’t as level as it appears, even for someone ostensibly white and middle class**.

One figure that has stayed with me is that of all the money invested into fledgling businesses in the UK, 89% is given to all male founder groups, 10% to founder groups containing men and women, and just 1% to all female founders. I couldn’t find any UK numbers, but the figures look even worse if we consider race, with black women only receiving 0.0006% of the of the $424.7 billion that has been invested into startups globally between 2009 and 2017 by venture capitalists. Those white men probably think they simply have better ideas, but the evidence doesn’t support that, whilst the statistics say they are 89 times more likely to be funded than all female groups, whilst a white male entrepreneur is thousands of times more likely to be funded than a black woman, and will have the confidence to ask for much larger sums of money. Only 34 black women have raised more than a million dollars of investment in the last decade. This doesn’t reflect the quality of the idea or the work ethic of the individuals involved (as meaningfully empowered women on boards increase corporate social responsibility and may have a positive impact on the profitability of the business, and diversity increases profitability). It reflects the stereotype of what the (predominantly white male) funders think successful entrepreneurs look like – and they imagine young geeks from silicon valley who are predominantly white and almost always male. And that sucks.

It might also explain why men in suits with glossy patter are able to sell systems they have pulled out of the air for eight times what we charge for properly evidenced tools that do the same job better. Or maybe that’s just a coincidence. But whether or not the playing field is flat isn’t something I can solve alone, and it is unlikely to be resolved within the timescale that is critical for me to make a success of my business and to maximise the impact I can make on the lives of vulnerable children. That means that, despite how discouraging it is to realise that we are not living in a meritocracy where the strength of the idea is enough to sell it to those who matter, I need to find ways to shout louder, communicate what we do better, and get our message in front of the right people.

Because we are tantalisingly close to having all the data we need to understand the critical variables at play in the psychological wellbeing of children and young people in Care, and which placements and services can help to address them. We have an exciting partnership growing with a group of local authority commissioners that will couple our data with commissioning data, and we are applying for grants to help us to gather and analyse that data across much wider samples. We are also scaling up the previous project we did looking at whether BERRI can help to identify suitable candidates to “step down” from high tariff residential settings into family placements with individualised packages of support. These larger scale projects mean that we will be able to show that the model works, at both the human and financial levels. And with a little bit more momentum we can start making the difference I know we are capable of. The trick is hanging onto the vision of what is possible and celebrating what we have already achieved, whilst having the realism to put in the graft that will get us there. I need to keep pushing upwards for longer than I ever imagined, in the hope of reaching the fabled sunlight of easier progress – even if so many variables skew us away from the meritocracy that I imagined.

 

*I think that’s why I used the pronoun “we” and shared credit with my team, even when I was asked to describe myself as a speaker, rather than taking full credit on my own. This transpires to be a common female trait, and part of the double bind for women where being assertive is seen as aggressive whilst being collaborative is seen as lacking leadership. In fact, many words are used exclusively towards women and highlight how pervasive these biases about women in leadership roles are.

**albeit a second generation immigrant to the UK, with Jewish heritage

Drama vultures: Some comments on social media

For young people, social media can be a very significant part of their social life. As Mark Brown put it, “Social media went big at the same point that austerity did. We lost our libraries, youth clubs and schools funding but we got smartphones and snapchat instead.” It has also been a means of connection for people who were technologically savvy but socially isolated. This is a surprisingly broad group, including both “geeks” (with subgroups of angry young men who have been radicalised by anti-feminism and the alt-right), those with social communication deficits (who like entirely written communication, as it means that they no longer feel excluded by the pace and non-verbal elements of real life social interactions) and people who are socially isolated because of their geography, disabilities, sexuality, gender identity, culture or more introverted personality, as well as an increasingly broad demographic who have simply discovered the convenience of social media as a means to connect with likeminded others. It can be enticing as a way to gain some social validation, either through “likes” of your content or photographs, or through a sense of belonging to a community of people with shared values or interests. And with so many different platforms, there can be many different qualities to this interaction, and functions that social media serves in people’s lives.

With niche communities, pockets of self-referencing and self-reinforcing cultural norms appear. Whether it is the sensitive niche sexualities of tumblr, or the offensive-as-possible culture on 4chan, the visual memes of imgur, the glamorous selfies of instagram, the endless stream of headlines from twitter, the business focus of linkedin, the many facets of reddit, videos on youtube, livestreaming on twitch or periscope, various blog platforms, an almost endless variety of podcasts, massive web forums on every topic imaginable, or even the comments sections of various publications, each has a different personality and norms. Some are ephemeral, with content disappearing after a certain time. Others stand as searchable archive with a long-term record of past content. Some allow people to broadcast outwards and collect followers, whilst others are focused on more reciprocal relationships. Some allow privacy restrictions that mean you can limit access to friends and family. But most have some means for others to indicate their approval or disapproval. And that means that there can be a sense of being judged or rewarded according to what you post. Sometimes this is based on the quality of the content, but it can also be based on political/group affiliation or appearance – with attractive young women who post photographs or video in particular getting a lot of attention. Some sites allow interesting or amusing content to float to the top where more people will see it, allowing particular posts to be read by remarkably large numbers of people. These can include inspiring content like non-zero days or unintentionally hilarious content like the penis dunking thread on mumsnet (mildly NSFW) that had me failing to contain my laughter during a BPS committee meeting. Some people seek out notoriety by writing controversial or entertaining content. Others who feel they don’t get enough positive attention seek out more negative peer groups, or seek attention in less functional ways. There are also less healthy pockets of social interaction on the internet. There are pro-anorexia communities, and sites that discuss and even encourage self-harm and suicide. There are bullies and trolls, and even people who fake being bullied in order to seek sympathy or justify introspective disclosures*.

One of the great advantages, and problems, with social media is the potential to be anonymous. This is a great leveller because it makes other users blind to your gender, age, race, appearance, physical ability/disability, sexuality, wealth, social class or other sources of prejudice – although many people choose to display these characteristics anyway and seek out similar people for a sense of belonging within specific online communities. However, the very anonymity and ability to create a character for yourself online can be problematic, as anybody can pretend to be anything. As well as the proverbial middle-aged lorry driver pretending to be a teenage girl, there are people pretending to be of different social demographics to infiltrate or undermine these communities. For example, many alt-right trolls attempting to fuel the gamergate conflict signed up “sock puppet” accounts as women and people of colour to pretend that their movement was more diverse or to defend them from criticism for sexism and racism. More obviously there are trolls, who use the anonymity to bully, harass and try to get a rise out of others, safe in the knowledge that social media is functionally a lawless zone, where only the very most serious of attackers, who challenge national security or make repeated overt threats towards targets in the public eye ever see any attempt at identification or prosecution.

By contrast, if you slip up on social media and say something stupid or embarrassing it can be shared with hundreds of thousands of people, your identity can be outed, and the impact can spill out into your real life in unpredictable ways leading to a roulette of inequality in which an ill-judged racist or sexist joke having more consequences than a year-long campaign of rape and death threats.  Or, you can become a target whose personal details are released on the internet (known as doxxing) by someone who dislikes your opinion or feels slighted by you, or subject to “revenge porn” where intimate photographs are published by an ex-partner without the consent of the subject. In America you can even become the target of hoax calls intending to send in an armed response team (known as swatting). And (as in many things) it is women and people of colour who always end up being disproportionately punished.

Having been on the internet since the 1990s, I’ve had an interesting personal history on social media. I was part of the eBay forums around the launch of eBay.co.uk for several years. As well as giving advice about scams and using eBay to buy and sell, there were lively off-topic discussion, running jokes and fundraising activities. But even within a seemingly diverse and healthy community of strangers there were many interesting signs of dysfunction. There were cliques and factions with marked animosity between them. There were people who claimed to be things they were not, including a “detective” and a “vet” (who was so desperate to uphold the facade she tried to get the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons to amend a register entry for a genuine vet to match her name). There was a lady who faked her own death and posted as her (supposedly bereaved) husband, but was rumbled by an astute poster spotting contradictions in her story. When I foolishly mentioned being a psychologist in a conversation that only contained four other active users, that information spread much more widely than I had expected. I started to receive disclosures and allegations, messages about distressing feelings and even what appeared to be a suicide note (with the help of moderators I alerted authorities, and the suicide was not completed) so I soon learnt to be much more private and anonymous.

On clinpsy we have also had our fair share of tea-cup sized dramas, despite having very little need to intervene as moderators compared to the large volume of members and posts. I blogged about some examples two years ago, and I can only think of two people we have banned since then (although I did block someone from registering after they were very antagonistic and inappropriate on facebook after we failed to activate their registration between 10pm one night and 4am the following morning). I did recently have the interesting experience of having someone apply to work for me who had been banned from the forum. They didn’t seem to think I’d know about that, despite the fact that they used the same email address in their application as they had when they had been banned. They withdrew their application when I said that I knew and we’d need to have a conversation about it if they wished to progress their application.

It is an interesting thing that social media crosses the boundaries of communication that we are familiar with. The written form seems somehow impersonal and emotionless compared to forms of communication that contain the non-verbals, and yet somehow emotions are conveyed and evoked. The nature of speaking to strangers who may or may not be conveying the truth, and where we know little about them except for what is posted, involves a lot of extrapolation and ambiguity. It is hard to judge the response of the audience or how far information will spread, and deceptive safe feeling that we are posting in our own homes and usually under pseudonyms, yet it can suddenly become very personal and intrusive. On the clinpsy forum we monitor usage quite closely, and have zero tolerance of personal abuse or inappropriate content. In order to avoid knee-jerk responses or being hooked into unhelpful patterns, and to help us keep on top of maintenance and development tasks on the clinpsy forum, we work as a team. We keep a log of moderator discussions, user reports of concerns and reasons for banning users in a hidden moderators area on the forum. We tend to have quite a rapid response time for removing content for moderator consideration, and quite consistent views about where to draw the line, which has made clinpsy relatively drama free.

That isn’t the case on other forums, where much more banter and jokes are let fly, and these can be quite offensive, particularly if the dominant demographic is young white men. Racism, sexism and misogyny are quite prevalent in some online communities. Many women hide their gender to avoid quips about getting back in the kitchen, or banter about rape (which can be a term used in video gaming communities to refer to trouncing another player). But in some places it can even go a step further than that. 4chan, for example, used to ask for topless photos if anyone mentioned being female with the delightful phrasing “tits or GTFO”, and provoked many young women (at least one of whom appeared to be below the age of consent) to share sexually explicit images of themselves. 4chan also had links to child pornography (although I believe that this was eventually prohibited and split off onto another forum). Reddit has subreddits for misogynist men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, and incels (men who consider themselves to be involuntarily celibate – that is, they are too unpleasant to attract consenting female partners but do not recognise this, and turn the blame onto the women instead, with extreme examples like Elliot Rogers and the man behind the recent Toronto van attack), although again some attempts at prohibition and moderation are creeping in after bad publicity following the recent school shooting.

As a female poster in some male-dominated communities it was initially quite a culture-shock, but it is good to socialise outside the same narrow bubble, and there are also very positive aspects of being part of an online community. There is a hive mind of information on every topic that means you can gain immediate and often highly skilled advice on everything from how to rewire a light fitting, or how to distinguish a wasp from a mortar bee, to which model of television has the best features within a certain price bracket, or how to complain if a parcel doesn’t arrive. The community might be a rapid source of news, or entertaining new memes. There can be reviews of films, music, events or games that lead you to try new things, and erudite discussion about politics, current affairs, history, different cultures, religion, sports, science, religion, mental health, relationships and any topic that takes your interest. There can also be mutual concern and support when things are not going well, and shared delight when people experience unexpected success. So there are definite positives. The problem is that they can come at a price, and some people are more likely to pay the price than others.

Anyone who has been part of an online community knows about how they seem to inevitably create remarkable interpersonal dramas. These are like road traffic accidents – as a neutral spectator they both repulse you and make compulsive viewing, but as a participant they have the ability to cause genuine harm. When a person starts posting erratically or there is public conflict, or even when a person or group is bullying a vulnerable member if they do so in a way that is seem as amusing, it is viewed as entertainment or public spectacle. And, like a fight in a school playground, they inevitably attract a circle of spectators who both encourage and influence the unfolding drama, both joining in to sub-conflicts in the audience, and throwing in more fuel if it seems to be petering out. I’ve been in that circle a few times for different reasons, and it isn’t a fun experience. And as it starts feeling more personal and more antagonistic emotions start showing in how you post, and that seems to fuel the aggressor to go in for the kill, and other posters to join in. Our ability to reason and to predict the way that others will interpret and react to our posts reduces, and the stakes start to feel higher, and yet it somehow becomes harder to leave the conversation whilst feeling threatened or misunderstood. So you get drawn in to the battle, trying to clarify your intended meaning, defend yourself from perceived attack, or persuade others to see your point of view. Perhaps you criticise the other person, who then becomes more antagonistic or defensive. By the time you are in the thick of things there isn’t an obvious exit without either victory or shame.

Walking away from an online community because you don’t like how you are treated feels a lot like social exclusion and can have a significant impact on your sense of self, but to stay once you have attracted negative attention can mean the slow attrition of insults and snide digs that someone once described as “death by a thousand paper cuts” (a less severe/more protracted version of the Chinese torture method death by a thousand cuts, in which it is hard to criticise any individual action as being unduly aggressive or breaking any rules). Frustratingly these can often be the kind of microaggressions that align with real life experiences reflecting the casual degradation of disempowered/minority groups. And, as ever, women and minority groups seem to be disproportionately the target for them. Even a phrase like “calm down love” is loaded with patronising layers of meaning about women being ruled by their emotions and lacking the calm logical analysis of men. It implies that caring about anything enough to show some emotion about it is already losing the battle.

There is little time for compassion or reflection online, and it is hard for an onlooker to intervene in a way that is helpful to diffuse conflict. Thus vulnerable people may end up re-victimised, and people with dysfunctional ways of relating often play these out over and over online. I can particularly recall one poster who had a distinct cycle of debate, feeling criticised, rage and then burning out to a final phase of being shamed and apologetic, trying to make amends to avoid rejection – and the community becoming increasingly intolerant of these emotional extremes. At times it felt like observing a digital version of a disorganised attachment relationship, with the forum community functioning as the inconsistent/abusive parent. It came as no surprise to read disclosures about an abusive childhood, use of crisis mental health services and a personality disorder diagnosis. But s/he was far from alone in having dysfunctional ways of relating to others online. In fact it seems that many people with such difficulties are strongly attracted to the accessibility and 24 hour nature of online communication, and can find significant support from strangers there. But it often comes at a high cost, or with significant risk, because of the prevalence of trolls and the way dramas are amplified by having an audience, and the way social media can serve as a written record of whatever unfolds that is hard to erase. There might be the right to be forgotten under GDPR, but how does this actually work in practise when comments are quoted and replied to, or captured in screenshots and posted elsewhere?

There are plenty of examples of how vulnerable people are enticed by the sense of belonging in a group, or the superficial success of social media influencers, but harmed by the messages they are given. This can range from unhealthy roles models such as the one I blogged about previously to being encouraged to harm others or given advice on how to harm themselves or commit suicide (the Daily Mail recently ran a scare piece on a “Blue Whale” game that culminates in telling children to commit suicide, though snopes felt there was little evidence to substantiate this). It would seem to me that the bigger concern is the indoctrination of larger numbers of young, socially isolated people in toxic beliefs such as alt-right ideologies, through writing that blames others for their ills. Whether it is “psychologist” Jordan B Peterson whose 12 rules for life serve as an introduction to his regressive beliefs including “enforced monogamy” in which he appears to advocate that to prevent male violence women should be allocated to partners and forced to remain monogamous to them (which is rightly being called out as sexist/stupid/victim blaming). It might have sold 1.1 million copies, and he might make £80k/month in patronage, but this isn’t a new enlightenment. Enticing simplistic sexist answers are not the cure for angry young men who feel left behind by progress, I would argue they are the very fuel that will convert them into the school shooters, rapists and perpetrators of future violence and harassment. But it is hard to offer up an alternative perspective or contradictory evidence when an angry mob descends on any divergent opinion, claiming that they are the true victims and that the sexist/racist drivel they promote is being censored by sensitive snowflakes (the new version of “its political correctness gone mad”). Ironically, these repugnant views that are allegedly suppressed/unspeakable are getting lots of airtime, whilst stifling free expression of opposing/alternative views** as progressive voices fear becoming a target of the mob.

In short, its a messy and unregulated space, and there are both interpersonal conflicts and large scale culture wars playing out in it. How to protect people in a digital age needs a lot more thought, both at the level of educating children about critical thinking and empathy, and in terms of regulation of social media, and enforcement of crimes committed via digital media. But with middle aged and older politicians doing the legislating it is hard to see how that is going to happen.

*if you find this surprising, consider the bug chasing community, who are people actively seeking HIV infection in order to gain care, sympathy and a sense of belonging
**including me, as I avoid using certain terms on social media or in the tags and category labels for this blog, as I dislike the surge of abusive/antifeminist responses they trigger

The tip of the iceberg

Harvey Weinstein is the tip of the iceberg, and whilst men might be shocked about the numerous allegations and the audio recording of him persistently not taking no for an answer when inviting a woman he had sexually assaulted into his hotel room, most women I know are not. Far from it. We’ve all been there and heard that. We find it familiar. Men are socialised to believe that they need to be persistent and wear women down, rather than backing off when she expresses reluctance. There is also so much social shaming of women’s sexuality that people assume the gender norm is for women to play coy and men to have to overcome their defences.

The Daily Mail coverage* implies that any woman who talked to Weinstein, worked for him, or was pulled in for a photograph is complicit in his abuse. I think they are looking for blame in the wrong place. Whether intentionally or unconsciously, they seem to feel the need to misdirect blame as they are complicit in the objectification of women and the idealisation of powerful men regardless of their exploitative behaviour. What about looking at first and foremost at the man who is assaulting and raping women, then at  the staff who set up and cover up such actions for him, the PR and legal team who defend it, and the board who turn a blind eye to it and then finally at the social norms that allowed him (and so many men with power) to do these appalling things over and over again so for so long?

The Daily Mail coverage, and many other articles (and numerous men in the comments sections), imply it is the responsibility of the female victims to speak up, when they are the very people whose vulnerability and lack of power was exploited, and who then carry shame and traumatic memories that they have to overcome to maintain their ability to work and operate in an environment where Weinstein and men like him have all the power. That’s a really difficult ask. Women who speak up about sexual assault are dirtied by association, accused of being liars, have their sexual history raked over, and are then blamed for not fighting back, not speaking up earlier, giving mixed messages, continuing to interact with the person. There is no winning. And they have to revisit traumatic memories and tell shaming and highly personal stories that expose their vulnerability to their colleagues, friends and the general public. Anyone who speaks up is exceptionally brave. Anyone who chooses to stay silent is still not culpable for the actions of their abuser.

There is also this narrative that concerns should have been reported to the police, and that only a conviction shows an allegation is true and all else could have a multiplicity of motivations from revenge to extortion. The problem is that few examples of harassment or sexual assault have witnesses and clear cut evidence, and this narrative acts as if suspicions and personal experiences without witnesses are enough to build a case and achieve something purposeful for the victim. Sadly, in my experience, without biological/medical evidence they are not. The examples that were reported to HR departments and the police led to no prosecutions and were never compiled. Even Bill Cosby with 50 allegations has only had one reach criminal charges and that reached a hung jury. Savile had allegations and rumours, and some reports to police and the BBC, yet nothing happened until after his death. The Fox CEO and lead newscaster were only dismissed after multiple allegations and have faced no criminal charges (and in fact got a $40 million parachute in the former case and continued to be endorsed by Fox despite multiple allegations in the latter). I hope things are changing for the better, and clustering of multiple independent allegations can be used as evidence in cases like this, but that has not been the case to date.

The saddest figures are the way that sexual crimes do not reach convictions by comparison to other forms of crime. I’ve read estimates that 90% of rapes, sexual assault and child sexual abuse go unreported to authorities, and that 90% of those reported do not reach prosecution, and that less than half of those prosecuted lead to a conviction. That means that 99% of perpetrators don’t get convicted – and there is bias in which ones do, as richer, more powerful and more intelligent perpetrators are much harder to convict than those facing the disadvantages of poverty, mental health problems and learning disability, who are more likely to leave evidence or confess and don’t have the deep pockets for an expert legal team to defend them.

I think the most telling detail of all in this story, is the terms of Harvey’s contract with the weinstein corporation, which cannot fire him for sexual misconduct provided he pays any compensation to victims himself to keep any costs away from the company. I mean imagine having lawyers write that in, and the board accept those terms of business. To me that suggests he knew he was a serial abuser, and so did everyone else in the company. I like this little snippet from the onion: How Could Harvey Weinstein Get Away With This?’ Asks Man Currently Ignoring Sexual Misconduct Of 17 Separate Coworkers, Friends, Acquaintances. I think it speaks to how common harassment and sexual impropriety is, how it has been normalised as something men do if powerful enough to have the opportunity, and how we are socialised to turn a blind eye to it.

I blogged a year or more ago about rape culture and my own experiences of feeling at risk of being raped. What I maybe didn’t say explicitly is that from personal experience, even without the acute trauma of a violent incident or serious assault, it is incredibly hard to speak up, and incredibly hard to get anyone to take you seriously when you do. You feel responsible for being a victim, confused, ambivalent and shamed about what happened – and, importantly, you often don’t recognise it as assault, abuse or harassment unless it is a violent or traumatic event because it has been so normalised.

Writing this I remembered another example that has stuck with me from the same era of my life. I was sixteen and in an A-level physics lesson, watching a demonstration at the front, when, masked from view by the people sitting in front of us, a boy from my class put his hand on my breast. I was shocked (although not frightened or distressed), but I interpreted it as a flirtation rather than an assault, and felt like he’d have just claimed it was accidental and I was making a fuss about nothing if I said anything. There was no implicit threat, but there was no negotiation or opportunity to decline either. I was already the only girl in the class, and I wanted to belong and be “one of the lads”. It felt like it would have been prudish to complain about something so trivial, and overreacting to interrupt the lesson to make him stop. Saying even a whispered “stop it” would have caused everyone in the class turn around and stare at me, and would have made a big scene about something small. So I said nothing. And he took my silence as compliance and did it again the next week. He waited until I was seated and stood behind me. He put his hand into my top that time. It turns out it gets harder to speak up once you haven’t the first time. So he kept doing it in every demonstration he could for the rest of the course. He was in a band with friends of mine, and I never said anything to them about it either. I didn’t tell a teacher or even consider reporting him to the police, because it felt confusing and happened in public and therefore didn’t match up with my internalised template of a sexual assault (which would have involved threat or coercion, and probably a stranger rather than a peer). Plus I’d been socialised to think of that kind of attention as flattering, and his actions as a form of flirting and something I should laugh off if unwanted.

At the end of sixth form he and his friends were presenting silly awards at the leavers prom. They awarded me “a pair of jugs for the biggest and best female contribution to science” on stage in front of all my peers. I understood the innuendo, smiled and took the award with good humour, posing for a photo when prompted to do so, with the two measuring jugs held at chest height. Having breasts and doing science meant I was a legitimate target for sexual humour, and not a single teacher or pupil checked in with me afterwards or spoke up to suggest otherwise. I didn’t even think of it being normalised sexism or publicly acceptable harassment. That wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time. It was as acceptable a source of humour as giving baby bottles full of beer to the “underachievers” bound for Oxbridge. I don’t look back on it as traumatic, but I’d be horrified if the same thing happened to my daughters now, because I’d place it in a different context.

I didn’t speak up about the guy who plied me with alcohol and repeatedly undressed me down at the docks either. I didn’t think he had committed a crime. I think in my teenage mind his behaviour was not that different to my other experiences of persistent sexual approaches, except that I had made myself more vulnerable by being intoxicated and in a private location with him. I was acutely aware that I had kissed him in front of other people, that I hadn’t said no explicitly, and that it would be my word against his. That belief was then socially reinforced – I told several mutual friends what had happened, and the group response was to make us shake hands and pretend to get along. A year or two later he unexpectedly stuck my hand on his erection at a party, and I didn’t bother saying anything to anyone then either. Somehow that didn’t fit the box for sexual assault in my head either.

I suspect that to my friends and family, my lack of action about these events will seem incongruous with my adult personality. I’m quite a confident person, who has strong opinions and would normally speak up about issues. But as a teenager, and in context, I didn’t know that was an option, didn’t see it in the same way, and wasn’t able to. I felt I had to continue to allow young men who had been sexually inappropriate to me to be part of my social circle. If I had been an aspiring actress who was auditioning for a role that might kickstart my career, and when I was sexually assaulted it had been by a powerful industry kingmaker of a man with the capacity and reputation to shame me to the media or sabotage my career I can only begin to imagine how powerful the forces at play would have felt. I grew up in a progressive culture, and have the benefits of many aspects of privilege, intelligence and social support. Yet looking back I am shocked at how vulnerable I was, and how normative that is. Men are given the implicit social message that sexual dominion is the reward for status, and that women will show token resistance that they should overcome. Women, on the other hand, are implicitly trained to expect sexual advances, to see them as flattering and to look for a socially acceptable way out. We are taught not to offend men, to be polite when rejecting advances, not to “lead men on” by allowing them to develop expectations we later decline. We are taught to feel responsible for male sexual behaviour towards us, and guilty when we did not anticipate risks. The power balance is stacked in favour of the perpetrator and against the vulnerable and those lower down the hierarchy – and this is multiplied when women and girls have experienced past abuse or assaults, especially if they have been powerless to resist, or been shamed and/or disbelieved when they disclosed.

Sadly, society is full of powerful men who exploit women, and other people who normalise this, turn a blind eye to it, play along with or facilitate the behaviour, or continue to suck up to them for personal gain regardless of what they do to others. It is a serious social problem, and the fact that a serial sexual assaulter and overt misogynist was elected president of the USA says it all really. I am just glad that people are starting to speak out more against institutional abuse, and that perpetrated by people in power. At least with Weinstein the consequences are substantial: he has been fired, kicked out of BAFTA, his CBE is likely to be withdrawn, his wife has left him, and he has been roundly condemned by industry colleagues and public figures. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have kicked him out stating:

We do so not simply to separate ourselves from someone who does not merit the respect of his colleagues but also to send a message that the era of willful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment in our industry is over. What’s at issue here is a deeply troubling problem that has no place in our society. The board continues to work to establish ethical standards of conduct that all Academy members will be expected to exemplify.

That statement is so much better than talk of Weinstein as a “sad, sick man” entering rehab as if the cause of his bad choices was some kind of irresistible medical condition. There are other appropriate outcomes too: Police in the UK and USA are investigating rape and sexual assault allegations, and this story has allowed other victims to speak up about other actors, directors, managers and powerful men in many industries. The #metoo hashtag has shown how endemic the problems are. There are encouraging signs that victims are being believed, perpetrators are facing justice or social stigma, and cultural norms are being challenged. I hope that this momentum continues enough to make meaningful change.

And whilst I’m on my soapbox, I must mention the Twitter statement after they suspended Rose McGowan in the wake of her calling out Ben Affleck for denying knowledge of Weinstein’s pattern of sexually exploiting/assaulting women. They said

“Twitter is proud to empower and support the voices on our platform, especially those that speak truth to power. We stand with the brave women and men who use Twitter to share their stories, and will work hard every day to improve our processes to protect those voices”.

What utter drivel. Twitter have consistently failed to act on reports of harassment and have been the tool of choice employed to hound and threaten so many women. They empower hate mobs more often than providing a platform for those speaking truth to power.

Regulating and providing consequences for the content on social media according to the laws that apply to other forms of communication is a step that is desperately overdue. Publishers who profit from users on their platforms should be accountable for their response to inappropriate content that is reported. To motivate this I believe that users who are the victims of campaigns of antagonism, threats or unwanted sexual content should be enabled to seek financial redress where the platforms do not respond sufficiently to prevent such harassment.

*this is an indirect link to an image of the DM coverage, so as not to provide traffic for their horrendous clickbait content

Unwanted approaches: An example of everyday sexism in my social network

I was having a conversation with a man on social media the other day, when he said to me that women “don’t really experience unwanted approaches on the street”, and that if they do they are “mainly lighthearted and easily deterred”. He didn’t believe me when I said that for almost every woman, unwanted approaches are a common experience, not just in social settings like pubs and clubs, or even in the evening, but when going about our normal business in the daytime, like walking to the shop, catching a bus or train, in our workplace or educational establishment. I said I thought most women would be able to recall a recent unwanted approach, and an example in which the man became antagonistic when he was ignored or rebuffed. He was incredulous and felt this was an exceptionally rare event.

So I asked my network on twitter whether any women aged between 18 and 40 would answer a few quick questions on the topic. I phrased the questions as neutrally as possible:

  • Can you think of a time that a male stranger whistled at you, commented on your appearance or made another form of unsolicited approach to you in public?

  • If so, how long ago was this?
  • How did you respond?
  • What was the man’s reaction to your response?

  • How often have you experienced a negative response to rejecting or ignoring unwanted approaches or comments from strangers?

  • If you want to make any more comments, or state your age, or tells us any more about the situation feel free to do so here.

It wasn’t a research study, and I had been explicit about the topic when asking the question amongst my network, but none-the-less I felt that it might bring up some negative memories for people, so I tried to signpost people what to do with that at the end.

  • If this survey has brought up any bad feelings or memories, please seek appropriate support from your friends, family, GP or a listening and advice service such as supportline (who can be contacted by phone on 01708 765200 or by email at info@supportline.org.uk)

Before you read the results, if you want to add your responses to my survey, feel free: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/VWLKQS5

So, what were the responses?

To date I have received 97 responses from women aged 22 to 37, and the results were depressing if not surprising.

Fewer than 4% of respondents said they couldn’t immediately recall an example of an unwanted approach in public from a male stranger. 79% of the women said that they have experienced “numerous” examples of unwanted approaches, most of them overtly sexual.

Screen Shot 2017-03-14 at 22.27.21More than 42% can recall examples within the last month, and 72% within the last year.screen-shot-2017-03-04-at-01-11-3580% ignored the approach, 19% gave some kind of negative response. screen-shot-2017-03-04-at-01-11-49But here is the key part – whilst 59% of the time the guy then backed off and 10% of the time he was friendly or accepted the person was not interested, more than 31% of the time he was “negative, unpleasant or threatening”. screen-shot-2017-03-04-at-01-11-57Only 13% of women surveyed couldn’t remember a getting a negative response from a man after being ignored or told they were not interested. More than 50% had experienced negative, aggressive or unpleasant responses on several occasions with 9.5% of women saying this happened to them “often”.

Screen Shot 2017-03-14 at 22.31.53

Thirty six women gave examples of unpleasant responses they could remember from the past year. These included:

“When you ignore them, they’ll usually say something about the fact you’re ignoring them e.g. call you stuck up”
“Shouted something along the lines of me being miserable because I didn’t respond”.
Typical responses are along the lines of “fuck off then”, “stuck up bitch”, “you think you’re too nice” or “you’re not that nice anyway”
“When I ignored him he grabbed my arm and pulled me towards him.”
“Called me a whore”
“It was along time ago but I remember being called a stuck up bitch but then nothing else”
“In groups, men will continue to shout and on occasion follow me down the street.”
“Started swearing at me, said I was ugly anyway”
[in relation to men offering money for sex from their car] “when i ignored them they shouted that i was a stuck up rich bitch”.
“I was followed home by a man who started walking beside me. I stated he was making me uncomfortable and that he should leave me alone. He wouldn’t leave stating that he just “wanted a hug”. When i refused he became quite hostile and his body language was aggressive but he eventually left.”
[when I told him to go away] “he got very up close to my face and then finally left”

“Continually returned to talk to me, vaguely threatening, called me a lesbian”.

“Laughed in response to my negative reaction, saying that what he had done (touched my bottom) was what men do in his country (Ireland)”

“He scowled and they walked off without further comment”.

“Verbally abused and insulted. Groped.”

[Told me] “You’ve got a black heart” comments that I’m a “snob” or “stuck up”

“He kept trying to talk to me and come into my personal space (within arms length), even after I explicitly told him several times that I didn’t want to talk to him and that I just wanted to go home so please leave me alone, and physically backed away from him several times.”

“Yesterday walking home from work, when I ignored his first calls and whistles, he continued and followed behind a safe distance [I kept walking past my home] until he got bored of no response”.

“Yelled who do you think you are etc, then made negative comments about my physical appearance”

[I ignore them now] “In the past when I’ve said something back [the response has been negative] examples have included laughing at me”.

“He swore at me and said something aggressive”

“Derogatory comments”

“More comments about being rude or stuck up. Its just a joke. Even more comments”

“Male strangers often act offended or aggrieved if you do not react the way they would like you to. You are told that you are uptight/rude etc”

“Usually it’s mocking behaviour. Worse if they have been drinking alcohol”

“swearing, name calling- normally whenever I don’t just choose to ignore the behaviour”

“sometimes they might make themselves as big as possible (as if reminding you they can physically over power you), some might follow for a bit”

“Being touched anyway (occasionally), verbal abuse (occasionally), more generally just a refusal to go away meaning that I have to continue to deal with them.”

“when I said I had a boyfriend, he aggressively said I shouldn’t have wasted his time”

“when asking men to let go of my arm/ stop pulling me towards them in a night club or bar, the most common response is for them to laugh. Very often (about) 1-2 times a month): men instruct me to “smile” or “cheer up” when seeing me in the street. If I meet this instruction with a negative reaction, almost always the man tells me to lighten up or not be so serious (or something to that effect) as he was just being friendly (as though attempting to make me feel guilty about my response)”

“People being rude swearing, trying to touch you or calling you arrogant.”

“Being told I was a bitch, ugly, or worse (if I ignored them); being told to shut up or receiving more sexualised comments (if I confronted them).”

“start laughing at me”

“He carried on as before with the harassment”

“Called me something along the lines of an uptight bitch.”

“They have commented negatively or have laughed when I have ignored them or told them to leave me alone.”

“Insisting, pushing, coming in my personal space. Not often, but particularly when the man was drunk.”

“You’re ugly anyway, are you a lesbian, why are all women so up themselves I could go on…”

“It was along time ago but I remember being called a stuck up bitch but then nothing else”

“They’ve insulted me if I’ve ignored them or asked them to go away, usually the insult is about my appearance”

“I’ve been called a ‘fat slut’ when rejecting an advance, as well as ‘stuck up bitch’.”

“You must be f**king up yourself to turn this down!”

Sometimes misogynistic comments were coupled with racist ones:

A guy once asked for my number, when I said “sorry, I have a boyfriend” he proceeded to call me a nigger…which was particularly interesting considering he had JUST asked for my number but as I declined he quickly decided that actually my black self isn’t worthy… I still think about this often and as you can imagine it infuriated me and still does.

Remember, the majority of these incidents took place in the street or on public transport during the day, rather than during nights out socialising in pubs and clubs.

Other respondents recalled annoying but not as aggressive things like:

“A guy continuing to ask/plead to come into my home after I’d repeatedly, politely said no”
“Grinning and doing it again”
“He kept going with the analysis of my facial expressions until I left, and suggested that I get some more rest as I looked tired.”
“There was some kinda of “aw why not, love” type response”
Recoil/shocked [that I’d respond negatively]
“All right love I’m only joking, whatever.”
“Generally they look pissed off and then walk away”
“He moved on to another woman on the bus”
“It was a group in a car, they laughed and drive off”
Often males getting defensive or annoyed that I do not appreciate their approach.

Some gave specific examples or reflections:

I would estimate that I experience negative responses after ignoring unwanted approaches around 20% of the time. This can range from a particularly intense stare, the person making a clearly audible comment about me (but not directly to me), or being told directly that I’m ‘stuck up’, a ‘bitch’ or them retracting their ‘compliment’ to then tell me I am in fact ‘ugly’.
[I remember a] Group of teenagers (mostly male) blocking my path in park on way home. Several leered, one asked if he could “lick my pussy”. I blamed myself for walking that way at night and never repeated the journey.
I remember I was in a packed pub at age 22 said excuse me and went to make my way past a group of men. One rubbed his erect penis against me (through jeans) as I squeezed past.
I was wolf whistled at by a van driver last week then shouted abuse because I didn’t respond. My mother told me I should be flattered by the wolf whistling.
I remember a bad experience for me once when I was at college. I walked up the stairs at the train station and there was a group of lads from the college who were training to be footballers running down the stairs and one of them slapped my bum really hard on the way down. That was humiliating.
I’m 29, I feel that this kind of experience and way of approaching and interacting with women, viewing them as objects has been the norm and socially acceptable. It was only when I met my bf (now hubby) at 24 that I understood what acceptable behaviour (inc sexual) was and realised I’d been sexually assaulted by my previous 2 partners.
I was sitting on a train station bench, drinking from a straw, and three male passers-by asked me to give them a blow job. At first I ignored them, but they kept hassling me, and one said, “We’ll pay.” They were very persistent and only stopped to get on their train.
I get unwanted attention from men almost every day – it’s animalistic.
I am 24 and have experienced the above for several years. I can recall it happening since my early teens.

So that’s the reality of what women experience, and is probably familiar to most women reading this. Worse still it is normalised by the most powerful man in the world, who has attempted to brush off and justify repeated examples of sexual assault, walking in on women whilst they are changing, sexually harassing employees and those he deals with in business, and criticising the appearance of fellow politicians. He has even attempted to excuse “locker room talk” about women, such as discussing teenage girls and his own daughters in sexual terms and normalising sexual assault on women by saying that he can “grab them by the pussy”. We are in dark times indeed. A Polish MEP felt emboldened enough to say in a debate about the gender pay gap today that women deserve to earn less because they are smaller, weaker and less intelligent than men.

Most of the men I know are feminists and would be appalled to read the results of this survey, let alone by what the neanderthal MEP said. In the general population however, there is probably more diversity. I think some men are aware of the issue, but others are probably not. So feel free to share the evidence of what is happening, in 2017, to ordinary women going about their business in the daytime.

Of course many other groups experience harassment, and in some cases this is much worse than that women experience. For example, I am sure that the recent spike in xenophobia means that many people of colour, or whose religion is apparent from their dress or appearance are on the receiving end of much more aggressive and intrusive unwanted approaches, as the videos from public transport that have been shared on youtube over the last few months demonstrate. I am sure that gay people receive both harassment and unwanted sexual approaches, and I know that trans people are disproportionately targeted for harassment and sexual assault (in fact, I recently read figures that suggest that half to two thirds of transgender individuals have experienced a sexual assault). I am not saying that there are not some examples of men being targeted for unwanted sexual approaches by women. There are multiple factors which intersect, and multiple reasons for individuals being vulnerable to be targeted in this way. However, I simply surveyed the example with which I am most familiar and the example that was the topic of my conversation.

The incidence of sex crimes and is an embarrassment that we need to address, and too often blamed on the victim. We all need to be responsible for our own behaviour, and for gaining consent before we touch anybody else or engage anyone in any sexual activity – that is so basic that I shouldn’t even need to spell it out, and it should be taught to every primary school child as part of PSHE. No harassment is acceptable, and unsolicited sexual approaches to strangers in public outside of the context of a social setting should really be a thing of the past, no matter who they target.

Note: Minor edits to quotations have been made for clarity and anonymity, but never to change the nature or severity of the incident.

A promise to my daughters

As well as being on the progressive left politically, I’ve increasingly identified as an active feminist over the last decade. I’m sure that this has been apparent from my blog, which has at times posted about this topic explicitly. So this has been a depressing few months for me. After the inauguration of a racist, misogynist sex pest as the POTUS, and in the context of the thoroughly depressing situation in the UK with the toxic politics of austerity and Brexit, I have been thinking about the kind of world I want for my daughters. I have also been thinking about what I can do to to instil in them the values that I think are important and will help them have the kind of future I would want for them.

The massive turnout across the USA and around the world for the Women’s March has been a heartening message in a hard time. It is empowering to think that women all around the world and for several generations, as well as their allies, are working towards the same goals of equality and to further progressive causes (such as caring for the environment, LGBTQ and BME rights, and the value of science/evidence over propaganda and opinion). That sense of community and caring for each other and the future is also a refreshing change from all the aggressive posturing, selfishness and commercialism that seem to saturate the narrative at the moment.

The placards and quotes from the Women’s March have been particularly inspiring. I particularly like those shown on the MightyGirl blog. They illustrate how women all over the world are bringing up the next generation of girls to approach the world on their own terms and have whatever aspirations they want, without the boundaries of sexism and prejudice holding them back. There is one placard that says “I am only 4 years old, but I know everyone is equal” and that is the simple truth – until children are skewed by the prejudices they see around them, they understand the fundamental truth that whatever differences there are between people in how they look or how they live their lives, we are all equal in importance and all deserve to be treated with kindness and respect.

My children have often surprised me with their insight into international conflicts and world events. I remember driving them home from the supermarket when they were four years old, and them asking why the rich people of the world couldn’t give jobs to all poor people so that they could afford the things they need like food, clothes and places to live. I couldn’t really answer that, because I don’t think there is any justification for levels of inequality that mean that the richest eight men in the world have more money than the poorest half of the world population. Yet we have stopped seeing how odd and obscene that is, because we are implicitly given the message that we live in a meritocracy, and wealth is earned through hard work (when the reality is that many people inherit wealth, and few would argue that even the self-made plutocrats work harder than anyone else in the wealth spectrum). A year later, after explaining why poppy badges were being sold I remember having a conversation about whether there were still wars in the world. I said that there were, and most of them were to do with people having different religions. We talked about how wars don’t only affect soldiers, and how a recent bombing campaign had destroyed schools and hospitals. My daughters suggested that “we need to send people in that country postcards to remind them that schools are really important”, as “that is where children will learn that people are equal even if they are different, and you need to be kind to everyone”. I’ve never felt prouder.

I’d like to think I’m good role model of a woman facing the world on my own terms, setting up my own business and being “the boss” at work, as my kids see it, and being an equal partner in my relationship, which does not conform to traditional gender roles. We’ve worked hard to expose our daughters to a range of interests, and given them a variety of experiences. I’d hope that they can make choices about what they enjoy or how they want to present themselves unencumbered by narrow gender expectations or unhealthy/unrealistic body norms. Our bedtime stories have characters of both genders who solve their own problems, rather than princesses passively waiting to be rescued by a prince to live happily ever after. I’d like to think we’ve also modelled the way that we interact with each other, and with a wide variety of people with respect. We have taught them to appreciate diversity and to admire those who defy convention or achieve something despite adversity.

But I’m not sure I’ve done enough to show that we can take action to address issues we see happening in the world around us. I should have taken them to the march on the weekend. I think it would have been a great experience for them, but frustratingly I’m still too unwell to travel. So I need to think of other ways to involve them in activism. And I need to do more myself than donate to charities, sign petitions and write messages on the internet. At a time in which the news is dominated by a super-callous-fragile-racist-sexist-nazi-potus I want my daughters to know that I’ve done everything I can to give them the maximum range of choices for their future lives, and the best chance of being judged by their actions rather than their appearance. So I will finish with the words from a placard that resonated with me: I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change, I am changing the things I cannot accept.

Rape culture and blame

I blogged a couple of months ago about the Brock Turner sexual assault case, and intended to write this post then, but I left it as a draft for some time – perhaps out of discomfort for the personal disclosure involved, or a sense of distance from the incident that made me want to post about my own experience. But it has never really gone away, because it is so prevalent, both in the tip of the iceberg of individual rape cases, and the massive underlying mass of the pervasive cultural acceptance of male sexual coercion of women (eg the horrifying statistics about misogynic beliefs and rape myth acceptance amongst male college students, particularly those involved in sports that I shared in a previous blog). It seems that just as racial tension has come to a head in America over police shootings, rape has come to a head with the Brock Turner case – with 1.3 million signatures on the petition calling for the judge to be sanctioned for his decision to go for a sentence well below the ordained minimum. And this week debate about whether the olympic diver proposal was romantic or inappropriate*. It seems that themes of sexuality and gender have become fault lines, showing wider problems in society.

Of course there have been many other cases making headlines since my previous blog on the topic, and rape and sexual assault are rarely out of the news. A woman who was raped in Qatar was found guilty of the crime of having sex outside marriage and given a suspended prison sentence and fined (I suppose we should be grateful that she didn’t get the 140 lashes that her rapist got, given they were nominally convicted of the same crime), whilst a woman in Argentina was convicted of murder for possibly having a miscarriage (though the only proven miscarriage in the case was the miscarriage of justice). Here a photographer lured young men to his home for photoshoots where he drugged and raped them. Another victim of campus rapists from athletics teams. This man used a woman’s desire to protect her children as leverage to stop her resisting his rape. This 7 month pregnant woman was raped at gunpoint. The list goes on and on and on. And there is evidence of systemic problems in how US police handle rape cases. Meanwhile lots of people have been brave about talking about their own experiences of “rape culture”. For example, this one, and this one.

I thought I might share some of my own experiences, to talk about both what it says about the culture, and the blurry line around consent. To give this some context, I’m not an extraordinary woman. Nowadays I’m a middle-aged mum. Non-smoking, rarely drinking, overweight and a bit of a workaholic, with that boring but comfortable lifestyle that many families fall into of school and work and supermarket shopping and homework and swimming and weekend outings to parks and historic places, with the occasional family visit or trip to the cinema. I’ve been happily married for 19 years this month, and I lived with my husband for 3 years before that. But even before that, I wasn’t extraordinary in appearance or behaviour, and I wasn’t reckless.

So when I say there were two occasions in my life when I felt I was at significant risk of rape, I’m pretty sure that other people have had similar experiences.

The first was when I was sixteen and had just started at sixth form. I would go out socially drinking with a particular group of friends from school most weekends, but I usually just had two or three single shot drinks with a mixer to make them last longer (vodka collins was a favourite, and much like a Smirnoff Mule now). One night I was with a group of friends outside a pub and one of the lads bought a bottle of “Thunderbird” fortified wine from a shop. He was pretending to drink himself and with nothing more than encouragement and peer pressure, he effectively persuaded me to drink more than I wanted to. I was a very innocent 16 and when he walked me away from the group and down the dock road out of sight I hadn’t expected more than a snog and a fumble.

However I suddenly became aware of my own vulnerability once we were away from the group. I was wobbly on my feet and nearly fell over, and in an amazing demonstration of both his strength and sobriety he practically picked me up and walked me firmly down the street. A minute later he put me on some concrete ground up a few steps from the road, hidden from sight by a lorry. It was then it became apparent that he was very determined to have sex and started taking my clothes off. I was putting them back on as best I could, but I didn’t know him well and didn’t want to risk him becoming violent (he was a foot taller than me, and I was too drunk to run away) so from his point of view I didn’t give a clear ‘no’. I was still kissing him to buy time to pull my clothes back up and trying to figure out whether anything else would appease him or whether there was a means to escape. But there was nobody in sight, and he was bigger and stronger than me, and this was in the days before mobile phones, so I felt completely on my own. Thankfully after half an hour or so he gave up and walked off. He left me dishevelled and alone, down the dock road of a town that was closed up for the night, having missed my lift home. But even as I stumbled back to the phone box, called my parents for a lift and made excuses about being drunk, I was feeling relieved that things hadn’t gone much worse. I look back and feel it was a lucky escape as no form of penetration occurred.

It was a frightening but in retrospect enlightening experience. Firstly, I learnt never to be drunk enough to lose my ability to run away or plan an escape with my full faculties. Secondly, I realised that from his perspective he was just trying to persuade me to do with him what another guy had lied and said we’d done at a party. He thought that it was just a matter of persuasion and persistence, which are socially acceptable aspects of the interplay between potential sexual partners – and importantly I never said no. Maybe if I’d have said “look Chris, I don’t want to have sex, stop it” he would have. However, maybe he’d have been angry that I was leading him on. Maybe if I’d have said “stop it, I don’t consent, if you force me to have sex it will be rape” he’d have been horrified and reconsidered his behaviour. I have no way of knowing. If we’d have been interrupted or I’d escaped and I hadn’t experienced him leaving of his own volition without sex, I think I would have felt it was a near miss. I don’t know if I’d have ended up reporting an attempted rape, but I certainly felt that repeatedly pulling my clothes back on was a pretty clear indication of lack of consent that he should have respected but didn’t.

Finally, I learnt that within that group of mutual friends he had done nothing wrong. They saw me leave willingly with his arm around me, and therefore everything that followed was presumed consensual. When I tried to steer clear of him they wanted me to make up with him as he was part of the group, despite the fact that I found his behaviour pretty sinister. However, for a teenage boy, plying a girl with drink, getting her to go somewhere private, trying to take her clothes off and ignoring the signals that she did not want to participate seemed a legitimate strategy, both to him and our mutual friends. He wasn’t a stranger, or someone menacing, and he was accepted within my social network. This made him very hard to avoid (and meant that on a later ocasion he cornered me at a party, put my hand on his genitals and used it to masturbate). Yet to everyone else was an ordinary guy who was above average in appearance and intelligence. He has gone on to have a successful life and now manages IT services for a bank.

The second time I felt at risk of rape, was after the tragic abduction and murder of toddler Jamie Bulger. A friend of a friend at university came to my door and said he was from Bootle and really distressed about it and wanted to talk. Although it was clear he had been drinking, in light of his distress I let him in, and we went up to my room as other people were in the sitting room of my student house. We later heard them leave, and after that his topic of conversation changed to how, despite having a girlfriend, he wanted to have sex with me. He tried to kiss me, but it was unpleasant and unwanted so I moved away. He started to undress, and try to grab at me. I realised I was cornered in the attic room of a house by a drunk man of substantial build with nobody else within shouting distance. However, this time I was sober and a bit more streetwise, so the balance of power was different. I told him that I wasn’t interested and wouldn’t be taking any of my clothes off. I suggested he get dressed and go back home, and I kept myself out of reach until he acquiesced. He knocked at the door the next day to nominally apologise in order to ask me not to tell his girlfriend.

Again, when I told my friends (and this time they were my friends, as opposed to mutual friends) they didn’t really see it as a big deal. I’d guess they didn’t see the story I recounted as having any bigger emotional connotations than “Drunk guy embarrassed himself. Assertive girl put him in his place”. And that wasn’t an entirely unreasonable perspective on the story, particularly given they were male friends and this was back in 1993, long before the days of #metoo. But it’s never quite as simple as that. Because even if it is only for one moment, the awareness that somebody else in your social network could force you to have sex against your will is a pretty stark realisation, even for an extraverted assertive girl. And however you think about it, it has an impact.

Whether by coincidence or subconscious drive, I put on weight after those two events, adding 40% to my bodyweight over a four year period that has stayed with me ever since. At the time I didn’t connect the dots. I thought it might be due to the contraceptive pill, or a less active lifestyle at university. But it seems more likely looking back that I just didn’t want unwanted sexual attention, and a fat suit is quite good at narrowing your appeal and not conforming to the socially accepted norms for attractiveness.

But it does feel like the psychological equivalent of wearing anti-rape pants. That sucks because anti-rape pants are a terrible idea that I object to in the strongest terms**, because they place the responsibility for not being raped onto the individual women. Rather than stopping a few men being rapists and a heck of a lot of men feeling so entitled that they act like overcoming the woman’s resistance is a normal and acceptable part of the process of dating, it makes women take the responsibility for not being raped. Why should it be that we need special pants to indicate we are not accessible for non-consensual sex, rather than the default position? And why should I feel that being a more attractive version of myself would make me more vulnerable to unwanted sexual advances?

I should perhaps state the obvious here. I’m not a man hater, and I’m not tarring all men with the same brush. I don’t think of men as Schrodinger’s Rapist or at least, I don’t want to, because the vast majority of men I know are lovely human beings who care about other people. But yet, our survival instinct is a powerful thing. One fall down the stairs 20 years ago, and I am still careful about stairs and escalators. Two situations in which I felt vulnerable to sexual assault (and a fair few clinical cases in which I have heard stories of rape, sexual abuse and/or domestic violence) have made me see risk in men that I don’t know well, and to view being perceived as sexually attractive to those outside my trusted circle as a potential vulnerability. It is a troubling conclusion, and one I don’t know how to resolve.

*We’ve got men today saying it is ridiculous that people have questioned the romantic gesture of the Chinese diver proposal, even when the recipient of that proposal looks uncomfortable about it. They’ve been led to believe every woman wants to get married and is just desperate for her long-term bf to propose, rather than that deciding to get married and how to tell everyone about is should be a mutual agreement, or recognising that there could be duress involved. For me, the seed of doubt is in the body language and facial expressions when I watched the video. Of course, it might be a cultural difference, or the amount of adrenaline and anxiety about being in the spotlight with cameras all around her, but her face doesn’t suggest delight. It suggests hesitation and uncertainty. Quite the opposite of the rugby player and stadium manager involved in the proposal the previous day. From the silver medal diver’s reaction you could imagine the subtitles of the whisper in her ear, or the sentence after holding up the ring being “I don’t want it to be over, please say yes, don’t shame me in front of all these people” just as easily as you could imagine it being “I love you so much I want everyone in the world to know it, please forgive me for doing this in public”. And her response involved no grins, no kisses, no seeking physical closeness, just discomfort, tears, a delayed nod and then acceptance of his actions. Whilst we may never know the answers about the specific example, the themes have echoes in how gender roles are perceived across the world. So I believe the discussion is worthwhile and should not be shut down.
**I should also add that there is no evidence that these pants are effective. Instead it seems likely that a man motivated to remove the underwear of a non-consenting woman would play out in other forms of sexual assault or violence if he was thwarted by her pants. They also add to victim blaming of anyone who doesn’t use the product; “but if you didn’t want to get raped why didn’t you wear safer pants?” Similarly, a rapist might threaten the woman to get her to remove the pants, and this might then be twisted by defence lawyers to imply consent. I think this product shows a profound mis-reading of the problem. Most rape is by someone known and trusted by victim, not the kind of opportunistic attack by a stranger that will be thwarted by her wearing lock up knickers. Some thought about who will buy them, and how they will change behaviour suggests problems too. It seems to me that their main customer base will be women who are anxious about being raped who probably won’t put themselves in a position where stranger rape is possible, whilst women who buy these pants to mitigate a risky lifestyle might have false faith in their ability to prevent negative outcomes (eg if they wear them so that they can drink to unconsciousness they probably aren’t addressing why they are making themselves so vulnerable, or the risk to physical, emotional and financial well-being that this might lead to). It made me wonder about when you would wear the pants? Every day to reinforce helplessness and anxiety or just when you feel likely to be raped? If the pants are a means to say no to a partner when sex is not wanted that says something very disturbing about relationships that needs to be addressed in more than just her choice of underwear. Finally, would another person such as a partner or controlling relative ever make the woman wear the pants like a chastity belt?

Some thoughts on causing offence: 2 Trigger Warnings

The idea of cultural appropriation being offensive (which I discussed in part one of this blog entry) seems to go hand in hand with other recent social movements towards being more aware of the emotional well-being of others. This includes the use of social media to document the pervasiveness of small everyday actions that are a cumulative indication of how pervasive some prejudices are in society. The everyday sexism project has highlighted examples of how women’s daily experiences differ from men’s because of their gender, and there are similar projects to highlight the pervasiveness of racism. These small and often individually minor experiences, particularly in the context of race, are being termed “microaggressions” to denote the harm they cause when considered across a lifetime. I think these projects are helpful because, like the short films ‘Homoworld‘  and ‘Oppressed Majority‘, they humanise concepts that might otherwise be hard to explain, and show the massive quantity of incidents that might each in isolation seem too petty to raise. Without such examples or dramatisations it can be very hard to put ourselves into the perspective of another and to realise that their everyday experience is different to your own. And awareness is the first step towards behaviour change.

This change is happening at both the individual and organisational level. There is an increasing perception that organisations such as businesses, universities, public services and broadcasters having some responsibility for the impact of their content on customers, employees, students or their audience. This means being more aware of how the meaning of various content can impact differently on different people according to their experiences. This includes the use of ‘trigger warnings’ to orient readers/viewers/listeners about the aspects of the content that will follow that may resonate for them in negative ways. This could include mention of rape/sexual assault, violence, trauma, child abuse, racism, hate crimes or other forms of prejudice. The intent is to ensure that any person in the audience who has had traumatic experiences in their past is not re-traumatised by unintended exposure similar material without the option to prepare or opt out of that experience.

Although widely mocked, I think trigger warnings are quite sensible in principle. They aren’t there to molly coddle the delicate sensibilities of a whole generation of students (or social justice warriors) that don’t like being challenged, they are there to protect the small percentage of the population that have had traumatic experiences from post-traumatic symptoms. When I hear people on social media bragging about how they intend to trigger others, it seems like they lack either insight into what this means, basic human empathy, or both.

A trigger is a very specific word for what happens in the brain of people who have experienced serious trauma – normally experiences they have perceived as life-threatening – where the brain becomes sensitised to threat. When similar sensory stimuli to those associated with the event are detected, the amygdala goes into overdrive, and will put the person into a state of high physiological arousal (readiness for fight or flight) and make it harder for them to use brain functions apart from those associated with survival. Because the brain does not encode memories in narrative form very effectively during survival situations (due to much reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex) these sensory links often activate sensory memory fragments from the trauma, causing flashbacks and high levels of distress. This means that certain triggers can cause them to re-experience their trauma later on in their lives. Just as a war veteran might get flashbacks or nightmares about their war experiences, so people who have been seriously abused, raped or tortured experience unwanted intrusive images and memories of what they have been through when they see, hear or feel something similar to something they experienced during the trauma.

This isn’t something that has been made up, or reflects certain people being “sensitive flowers” either innately or by choice. It is a scientifically evidenced change to the brain after trauma. Intrusive images or thoughts, including re-experiencing of trauma is one of the diagnostic features of PTSD, and it is well established that certain experiences trigger these flashbacks. MRI scanners show the limbic brain (eg the amygdala) lighting up faster and brighter to threat signals that would not be perceived as threatening by others without the trauma, and the resulting decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Neurochemical analysis (eg from swab tests) have shown that this has a significant effect on the person’s neurochemistry and chemical messengers (like adrenalin and cortisol) are released that prepare the body for fight or flight. In short, this is a serious and well-documented physical response to serious trauma that I have blogged about previously. I’ve worked with lots of traumatised and/or abused children and adults and it is a really horrible thing to go though. It seems like a double dose of adversity for those whose abuse/trauma continues to echo through their life months or years later. It is not something to make light of or mock, and only a truly repugnant person would do so.

But being thoughtful about the impact of content on others, and orienting the audience about what is going to be covered, does not have to equal censorship. We should still talk about the tough stuff, study it, make art about it and even sometimes joke about it. It often makes for the most interesting debates, and it is through engagement with these complex and challenging issues that people learn to analyse the motivation of the writer/speaker and to appraise the context as well as the content of what is said.

As uncomfortable as it can be when people use it to say annoying, idiotic and offensive things, I am a believer in free speech. I don’t think being offended is a reason to silence someone. It is a reason to reply so that others are not persuaded by them, to ignore them, or to deny them their audience (because free speech doesn’t entitle you to a platform, and any website, venue or business can decide not to welcome/endorse somebody). But it isn’t a reason to stop them saying their piece, unless it incites violence or racial hatred and is therefore against the law. As hateful and bigoted as Donald Trump is, for example, the answer to the awful things he says is not to ban him from the UK, it is ignore him and deny him the oxygen of publicity, or simply to laugh at him. Mock his ignorance. Share your disgust. Highlight how hateful and harmful his ideas are, and how he has not earned the right to lead by showing any personal qualities that are admirable. Ensure that he faces legal consequences if he oversteps and breaks the law by inciting racial hatred whilst in the UK. But don’t censor him and allow him to take the role of being oppressed, as it would be counter-productive.

Even President Obama has weighed in to say “Anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with them. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, ‘You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.’ That’s not the way we learn.” I’m inclined to agree. We are all responsible for this conversation, and in the therapy professions, genuine empathy has to include acknowledging the difference between the client’s perspective (or a colleague’s) and your own.

 

The battle isn’t won yet: Why feminism still matters and is relevant to everyone

It is easy for me to be complacent about equal opportunities. I’ve never personally been held back by discrimination. I mean, I’ve had people think it is their right to comment about my appearance, and I’ve even had a few individuals who have bordered on stalking because of my internet presence, and my gender has certainly been a factor in that, but I’ve never not been able to do anything because I’m a women. Likewise, although I’m a second generation immigrant and my heritage is from a cultural minority, I’ve grown up as a white British atheist and have never experienced discrimination (even if there have been occasional incorrect assumptions about my religion or politics). I’ve had a broad social network, but I’ve never witnessed my friends or colleagues experience overt discrimination either.

I’ve always seen gender stereotypes as something of a challenge, in fact. I was one of three female students who did A-level physics, compared to about 50 males, and got good marks in maths and hard sciences before I went into psychology. As a student I bought a Haynes Manual and replaced the starter motor of my Vauxhall Astra along with an oil and filter change, because I couldn’t afford the quote from the garage. Likewise I have learnt all about the construction of houses, and was involved in the design and manual labour of various home improvements. I’ve been an early adopter of technology and a fan of video games as an emergent art form. And now I lift big weights at the gym, defying the gender pressure to lose fat through cardio rather than build muscle. I’ve encouraged my daughters to be brave and strong as well as kind, and to want more to the story than for the main character to marry the prince and live happily ever after.

So from my position of relative privilege it is hard not to assume that the battle for equal opportunities has already been won. However, as soon as I look a little more broadly at the world this is clearly not the case. So many different examples illustrate how my experience is the exception rather than the rule.

In the UK women on average earn 21% less than men per hour. This is the case in most of the developed world and the disparity is much worse in less developed nations. Although there has been significant progress over the last 50 years to reducing this disparity, economists admit the gender gap in wages is likely to take at least the next 100 years to close. Even in the most conservative figures, when all the variables that affect wages, such as lower experience due to career breaks and lower levels of qualifications for some population groups are taken into account, women still earn 5-10% less when equivalently skilled and doing equivalent work. In the most senior roles there are far fewer women, and those that are present earn substantially lower salaries. The earnings gap is larger as people get older, and in the higher earning percentiles of the population, suggesting that choosing to care for children does sacrifice status and earnings for the remainder of the woman’s career. These are figures I find appalling.

Thankfully there are movements and books containing advice about how to counter this effect. Cheryl Sandburg’s “Lean In” movement encourages women to take a seat at the table where big decisions are being made in big companies. The excellent “Give and Take” by Adam Grant advises people who are natural givers to advocate for their dependents when making decisions and entering salary negotiations, if they are not assertive/demanding enough when arguing for themselves. And many women and men are advocating helpfully for the value that women bring to senior positions.

In psychology and therapy professions we hit another facet of gender politics, with the dominance of women in the workforce reflecting the idea that empathy and caring are perceived by much of the public as feminine qualities. This message that facts are the male domain and feelings are the female domain is seen to be natural and innate, because of the typical division in gender roles between hunter and home maker in the origins of our species. However, since industrialisation and the invention of effective contraception, these roles seem to be transmitted more as a story based on past experience than in terms of reflecting the current reality (in which we can purchase food by selling other skills, and few of us would be very good at hunting or gathering our own food if this involved strenuous physical activity). After all, women being naturally suited to be the home-maker was ‘true’ in a time that it was also ‘true’ that the earth was flat, bathing frequently would have been seen as a wasteful fad, nobody understood the connection between hygiene/sanitation and disease, and very few people stayed alive beyond their 40s.

I believe that providing attachment relationships is probably the single most important job in society. That quality of caring about another person, and holding them in mind is essential for each of us to be happy. It is a powerful gift, whether in terms of parenting, friendship or a therapy relationship. However, I have seen no evidence that efficacy in this role is determined by gender. It may be true that in general women have slightly better ‘folk psychology’ and men have slightly better ‘folk physics’, as Simon Baron-Cohen’s research has shown, but apart from the head start that pregnancy and breast-feeding give to mothers, there is a paucity of evidence that the gender of parent who takes the primary carer role affects outcomes for children. Certainly, women feel more guilt about returning to work or choosing not to be the primary carer, but does that reflect a genuine concern about attachment security or the projections of a society where a women is supposed to ‘have it all’ in the form of balancing work, parenting and their own identity, having gained expectations of being an equal provider whilst not having handed over equal expectations of looking after home and family.

By devaluing caring and empathy for men, we lose a significant proportion of the potential workforce for psychological therapies. Those that remain often have less traditionally masculine qualities than are typical for males (whilst women who gain places in clinical psychology typically have more of the ‘masculine’ qualities of assertiveness, ambition and intelligence than are typical of their gender). We also make it unacceptable for boys and men to express their feelings openly, or to seek help for emotional problems without shame. And of course there is the wider issue of devaluing homosexuality, and through association any gentler or more feminine traits in men (for example with the playground taunt of “gay” for disliked characteristics or outcomes). This leads to lower uptake of psychological therapies or treatments for mental health problems, along with greater rates of completed suicide in young men.

More recently social media has provided a new means of networking which have been widely taken up, especially by young people. Mobile phones, text, Facebook, Twitter, chatrooms, Vine, Snapchat, Instagram, Tumblr, forums, multi-player gaming and video chat have allowed people to find those with similar interests and to communicate in new ways, but have also been media in which new forms of bullying and harassment have emerged, along with pockets of rampant prejudice including misogyny. In these contexts sexism, racism and discrimination has emerged in new forms, and some media are better at moderating this than others. Online video gaming spaces, Facebook and Twitter in particular have proved to be free playgrounds for “trolls” (those who gain enjoyment by harassing others online) due to their lack of willingness to intervene about abusive content.

There have been remarkably sad examples of what happens when such media allows the predatory minority to find vulnerable targets, such as the tragic story of Amanda Todd, the teenage girl who was encouraged to flash over webcam and then blackmailed with these images by an adult man until the point she committed suicide. There was also the disturbing video manifesto of Elliot Rodgers, a college student who killed 6 and injured 13 before committing suicide due to the perceived injustice of him not being as attractive to girls as he felt he deserved to be.

In amongst the array of content on the internet a subculture has developed that is profoundly sexist and has disturbing ideas about how to “play the game” in ways that “put women in their place”. Some of the members identify as Pick-Up Artists (PUAs) or Mens Rights Activists (MRAs), but the idea that women now hold too much power, and that men have seized upon feminist and progressive thinking to impress women, seems to be a common strand. There is great anger from members of these groups against men who speak up for women’s issues or social issues more broadly, who are often disparagingly labelled “White Knights” or “Social Justice Warriors” (terms which are intended as insults, despite sounding pretty awesome). Many women have learned to use gender-neutral names on social media, and not to speak when playing multi-player online video games, rather than to risk the onslaught of comments, which range from “get back in the kitchen” to violent threats of rape and murder of them and their loved ones (especially when defeated by the superior skill of a female player).

The latest iteration of this undercurrent has been the harassment of women who have highlighted the sexist tropes within video games, or otherwise become a figurehead of progressive thinking within that culture. Anita Sarkeesian’s highly accessible video series “Tropes vs Women in Video Games” has been a focal point. When her Kickstarter attracted death threats, harassments and attempts to discredit and silence her the community spoke out by massively over-funding her project and giving it a much bigger audience. However, she has continued to be subject to a variety of death and rape threats for merely casting a light on the fact that a small percentage of the content of many popular video games is a set of tired old tropes in which women are the decoration, damsel to be rescued, or die as motivation for the hero’s vengeance, rather than the protagonist of the story. Likewise a bitter ex-boyfriend’s rant about female developer Zoe Quinn led her to be a target of harassment (with a thin veneer of concern about ethics in games journalism that was not evidenced by similar hounding of the journalists who were wrongly alleged to have given favourable write-ups of her work due to personal relationships with her) and games writer Brianna Wu, for writing an article saying that the old stereotype of a gamer has been superseded by a much wider demographic (perceived as a “death threat” to “true gamers”). In each example, the profound sexism of the antagonists is evident, and the impact on the target has included them needing to move out of their homes due to the severity of threats to their safety, after their identifying information has been discovered and released into the public domain (a harassment tactic know as doxxing).

So whilst I observe from the safe space of being a successful female professional, who to date has had very limited personal experience of sexism, I am reminded that feminism is far from being a battle that has already been won, and equality is far from ubiquitous in the hearts and minds of the whole population. The internet has always been a great leveller, by forcing us to judge people on their words and not on their gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality, disability or any other aspect of their physical self, and I think that is an amazing thing and as close to a meritocracy as we will ever experience. So I am saddened by the resurgence of such hate and vitriol into places where these variables shouldn’t even be relevant, and that there are now seemingly topics about which women cannot write without fear of a personal backlash. It shames me that I have a little bit of fear about the repercussions each time I express an opinion online through this blog, or twitter or my forays towards podcasts/videos. We all need to do our little bit to change this, to speak up for equality and against harassment, and to reclaim those spaces in which prejudice is showing – for the benefit of everyone.