The absolute, stinking lack of sincerity
MP Caroline Lucas tweeted.
Pleased that my Urgent Question on bullying and harassment in House of Commons has been granted.
I'd ask MPs please to ensure that their focus is on those affected. This is not about settling old political scores.
— Caroline Lucas (@CarolineLucas) March 12, 2018
You’ll never guess what the replies said.
Are you going to table a question about Telford grooming gangs?
Is she heck!
Still out of touch
The prophet Muhammad had a nine year old wife called Ayesha who he was having sex with when he was fifty two years old and if that isn’t peadophilier then I don’t know what is
Its not all about you, look outside the ivory towers of parliament and start doing things in communities. Its why your voted in!!!!!!
Typical mp making it about themselves and ignoring whats actually important
Those are the ones at the top; the rest are nearly all the same. It’s Dear Muslima all the way down.
Glosswitch considers this “it could always be worse” riposte:
A woman – in this instance, Green party co-leader Caroline Lucas – has raised the topic of bullying and harassment in the House of Commons, only to be reminded that worse things happen in less privileged environments.
This is something certain women tend to forget. Thankfully there’s usually a male journalist on hand to remind us of our “not experiencing as much sexism as we could be experiencing” privilege.
Or a male pundit or “thought leader” or sage or Voice of Wisdom or Hero of ScienceAndReason. They’re very dedicated about springing into action whenever a woman objects to local bullying and harassment.
In this case it was Andrew Neil, who managed not only to draw comparisons between middle-class MPs and abused young women in Telford, but to then inform Lucas there was “no comparison […] None. Don’t make it”.
Neil is not the first man to advise women on how best to redirect their feminist efforts. Whether it’s Piers Morgan lecturing Women’s Marchers on the plight of their Saudi sisters, or Fox News’ John Moody reminding #metoo campaigners that FGM is worse than groping, perhaps we should salute the courage of those who have been brave enough to say “look! Over there!” whenever critiques of male power have got a little too close to home.
They would have a point, Glosswitch goes on, if they were the ones actually doing anything about Telford and Rotherham, but they’re not.
When working-class victims and carers in cases such as Rotherham and Telford have spoken for themselves, men in positions of power have disbelieved them. What use is one woman’s testimony if it can’t be used to discredit that of another?
The absolute, stinking lack of sincerity of men who exploit one example of men’s abuse of women to trivialise another would be bad enough if abuse were some free-floating, unavoidable problem that women just had to face. It isn’t, though.
Misogyny is so deeply embedded in society it feels normal, like the weather. Nonetheless, while it would be self-indulgent to complain of the rain when others are facing a tsunami, it is not self-indulgent to tell the man who is harassing you to desist. The fact that other men elsewhere might be doing worse is neither here nor there. Respect for women is not some scarce resource which must be distributed only to those who need it most. There is enough for everyone.
That is, there is potentially enough for everyone. It’s not something that is naturally scarce, like strawberries or diamonds; it’s something that could be infinite, if people simply decided to have it and exercise it.
Dealing with bullying and harassment in the House of Commons isn’t even just about the rights of the members directly affected – it means that their effective ability to represent their constituents is grievously reduced. It’s an attack on the political power of women – and anyone represented by women – in the whole U.K.
But of course, that may well be all the better reason to distract from it for some of these commentators.
Why are they referred to as ‘grooming gangs’? It’s another grotesque euphemism for organised sexual predation.
“When working-class victims..,” there’s obviously more than misogyny involved, the English class system is involved as well.
If anything is done about bullying and harassment in the House of Commons, wee Andrew might find himself having to ask some of his long-time friends awkward questions on live TV. He probably already knows that some of them would not find the results of a thorough investigation very flattering. If he were doing his job as a political journalist properly he might have broached the subject long before Caroline Lucas was even an MP.
RJW, there’s good reason for that phrasing (grooming). Sexual predation could be simply the grab and abuse type. But then there’s the much more insidious grooming type of predation. Initially the activity looks entirely socially normal and acceptable interactions. but the intent is to gain trust and create an air of normality. The child is then gradually pulled into progressively more transgressive and secretive behaviour and at the same time socially isolated from those who may observe or act to recalibrate their behaviour. Often times the first child is then used as a hook to catch the next one and so on. The pattern of behaviour is deeply reprehensible precisely because it uses ‘normal’ interactions to achieve the end abuse. Australia and New Zealand (and I assume many other countries) have specific offences related to grooming that rely on demonstrating that pattern of behaviour as opposed to the end abuse.
Rob, there are laws in the UK dealing with the grooming of youngsters, but if the cases covered by the press are anything to go by, investigations do appear to be mainly focussed on the internet, with teams of officers posing as children to trap on-line predators. Completely neccessary, of course, and quite effective, but there seems to be little protection for those children being groomed on a more personal, real-life basis.
I still can’t do much better than this comment from two years ago. I hope I’ll be forgiven for reposting it:
A fictitious conversation somewhere the Middle East as imagined by Richard Dawkins* (Disclaimer: Should not be read as making any kind of statement about real Muslim women):
Woman 1: “Oh boy, this Burqa business is killing me”
Woman 2: “I know, it must be at least 140 degrees in here. Oh well, at least it hides the acid burns”
Woman 1: “Yeah, I heard about that. What happened?”
Woman 2: “Oh, just the usual stuff. I was caught reading a school book, so these men threw some battery acid in my face”
Woman 1: “Sorry to hear that”
Woman 2: “Well, what can you do. So when is your stoning?”
Woman 1: “Next Friday. My lawyer thinks I might get off the hook if I marry my rapist, but I hear he just got arrested for defending me”
Woman 2: “*Sigh* Life really gets you down sometimes doesn’t it?”
Woman 1: “It does”
Woman 2: “Hey! I know what could solve our problems! If sleazy white guys in the West got to have all the fun they wanted at the expense of white women, and the women just had to put up with it or face nonstop abuse, our situation would greatly improve!”
Woman 1: “Yes! that would be quite helpful!”
_____________________________________________
* Or anyone else who keeps peddling the Dear Muslima crap.
AoS, the cases reported in the media aren’t really anything to go by. There’s effort in other areas too. But the fact that gangs like this not only exist but seem to be quite common and persist for years or decades despite numerous complaints to the police suggests something is going badly wrong somewhere. People complaining – including the girls being abused – are systematically not believed.
Now why does that sound familiar?
Rob,
The agenda is still the same whatever method is employed.
iknklast &8
The phrase ‘systematically not believed’ is significant. Are they not believed because of class prejudice or are the police frightened of being accused of the dreaded ‘Islamophobia’. Are they really ‘not believed’ ?
RJW, I agree. The distinction is legally useful though because it enables what would otherwise be legal behaviour to be treated as criminal by stepping back and looking at the pattern, trajectory and intent. Pior to creation of grooming offences police, if they became aware of the activity and if they cared, could only warn the perpetrator to back off, or wait till they actually physically touched a minor or acted to remove them from parental control.
As euphemisms go it’s a whole lot better than saying they were chatting to the kids, which is invariably how it all starts out.
latsot, I agree with you entirely. The issue of not believing the abused is one that doesn’t really apply in the on-line cases, simply because it is on-line, with the potential abusers’ every word on record and so impossible to plausibly deny, and often with no real victims since the ‘children’ being groomed are actually police officers.
In real-life scenarios, even if the victims accusations are believed there’s still the problem of evidence to consider, and good, solid evidence is all-too often evidence of the abuse itself, rather than the grooming that preceded the abuse, which is too late for the victims.
One of the biggest problems is knowing the difference between a genuine, friendly adult engaged in innocent conversation with a minor, and a potential abuser in the early stages of grooming a child. It’s even harder to do so when a potential abuser is well-known to the child and/or to the child’s immediate family, whether as a friend or even a member of the family itself.
When it comes to grooming ‘gangs’, however, I am as bewildered as anybody as to how they can operate for so long before action is taken. Yes, there is the issue of difficulty in collecting solid evidence of grooming, but when children report actual, physical sexual abuse by multiple abusers and still nothing seems to be done to protect them or potential future victims, then something is seriously amiss.