Mind the Gap

Ann Widdecombe MP and Lord David Alton are touring Britain with hard-line anti-abortionists All Party Parliamtary Pro-Life Group, Right To Life, Christian Medical Association, Care and LIFE to present their anti-abortion message as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill moves through Parliament.

On 4th March, they come to Cardiff.

And we will be there to greet them.

The event at City Temple begins at 7.30, so we’ll start assembling outside from 6.30.

After the event has started we’ll probably head off to a pub or bar for a discussion.

The Bristol gang is coming down and various Cardiff groups are mobilising so it looks like we’ll have a good crowd.

Every 34 minutes a rape is reported to the police in the United Kingdom. Thousands more victims do not come forward.Yet three-quarters of local authorities have no services for rape victims and only one in twenty rapes reported to the police leads to a conviction. This failure to bring rapists to justice amounts to a near licence to rape.Women are being failed by the criminal justice system, and left with nowhere to turn for support. We need your help to make a difference.

See the website.

FEM 08 – the fourth in the widely acclaimed series of FEM Conferences – will take place on Saturday 26 April 2008 at Sheffield University Students Union. The conference is free and open to all.

Speakers confirmed for FEM 08 include:

- Germaine Greer
- Kira Cochrane, Editor of Guardian Women’s Page
- Zohra Moosa, The Fawcett Society
- Jess McCabe, Editor, The F Word
- Damian Carnell, Nottinghamshire Domestic Violence Forum

Sessions at FEM 08 will include:

- Women’s poverty
- Sexism and the City
- Refugee women
- How to… run a feminist group
- How to… lobby the Government
- How to… run a Reclaim the Night march
- Abortion rights

FEM Conferences are an acclaimed series of national conferences that aim to educate and inspire women and men to get active in feminism. FEM 08 is organised by volunteers, supported by the Fawcett Society and Oxfam, and hosted by the Sheffield University Students’ Union Women’s Campaign.

To book your free place at FEM 08 visit www.femconferences. org.uk today!

For general enquiries email kat@femconferences. org.uk

FEM 08 | Saturday 26 April 2008 | Book your place today! www.femconferences. org.uk

www.femsoc.org. uk - Celebrating and supporting UK feminist activism!

–
Julia Downes
Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies
The Coach House
5 Hillary Place
Leeds
LS2 9JT

http://www.leeds. ac.uk/gender- studies/about/ downes.shtml
http://www.myspace. com/ju_venile

A day of feminist discussions and workshops in London on Sunday 9th March:

See their myspace.

Check their website and myspace for details.

This is the first of what will hopefully be a series of posts for people who want to know more about feminist theory, but are not sure where to start. I’m not an expert, I’m just a reader and I’m still learning myself, but hopefully these posts will provide a way into some influential feminist theories.* I’ve decided to start with Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay ‘The Personal is Political’ because it’s one that informs our thinking on this blog.

‘The personal is political’ is one of those phrases that feminists tend to bounce around a lot, but not that many people seem to have read Hanisch’s essay. This is a shame because it’s still relevant and challenging and I think it’s very important that people read beyond the famous title and absorb the rest of what she’s saying.

Hanisch was a member of the New York Radical Women and her essay was written as a response to the argument that consciousness raising was just “therapy.” “Consciousness raising” refers to the early women’s liberation movement activity of women getting together in groups to discuss their own oppression. In her 2006 introduction to the essay Hanisch writes, “they belittled us no end for trying to bring our so-called “personal problems” into the political arena.”

Is the Personal Political?

First, it’s important to note that the phrase ‘the personal is political’ manifestly does not mean that everything a woman does is political or that all her personal choices are political choices. In feminist terms, the ‘personal is political’ refers to the theory that personal problems are political problems, which basically means that many of the personal problems women experience in their lives are not their fault, but are the result of systematic oppression. In this respect, Hanisch is drawing heavily upon Marxism – the focus is off individual struggle and onto group struggle.

The theory that women are not to blame for their bad situations is crucial here because women have always been told that they are unhappy or faring badly in life because they are stupid, weak, mad, hysterical, having a period, pregnant, frigid, over-sexed, asking for it etc. The personal is political proposes that women are in bad situations because they experience gendered oppression and massive structural inequalities.

Understanding that our oppressive situations were not our own fault — were not, in the parlance of the time, “all in our head” — gave us a lot more courage as well as a more solid, real foundation on which to fight for liberation.

So far so good, but Hanisch goes onto to say some things that are more challenging for feminists.

The pro-woman line

The “pro-woman” line is central to Hanisch’s argument:

What it says basically is that women are really neat people. The bad things that are said about us as women are either myths (women are stupid), tactics women use to struggle individually (women are bitches), or are actually things that we want to carry into the new society and want men to share too (women are sensitive, emotional). Women as oppressed people act out of necessity (act dumb in the presence of men), not out of choice. Women have developed great shuffling techniques for their own survival (look pretty and giggle to get or keep a job or man) which should be used when necessary until such time as the power of unity can take its place. Women are smart not to struggle alone (as are blacks and workers). It is no worse to be in the home than in the rat race of the job world. They are both bad. Women, like blacks, workers, must stop blaming ourselves for our “failures.”

The pro-woman line was not accepted by the entire women’s liberation movement:

In September of 1968 — six months before “The Personal Is Political” was written, the Miss America Protest brought home to many why the Pro-Woman Line theory we were developing was so important when it came to taking action outside the group. In another paper entitled “A Critique of the Miss America Protest” I wrote about how the anti-women faction of the protesters detracted from our message that ALL women are oppressed by beauty standards, even the contestants. Signs like “Up Against the Wall, Miss America” and “Miss America Is a Big Falsie” made these contestants out to be our enemy instead of the men and bosses who imposed false beauty standards on women.

This is a trend which I think we now tend to call “woman-blaming” and we still see plenty of it within feminism in the idea that if only women would stop doing things that cause their own oppression and bloody well stand up for themselves, many of our problems would be solved. Whether or not you think women bear responsibility for their own oppression and that of other women, it is inimical to the “pro-woman” line taken by Hanisch in which “the most important thing is getting rid of self-blame” and, by implication, blaming other women.

This article on body image and plastic surgery, which Vibracobra has already mentioned in a post, demonstrates the problems that come with women-blaming. Here, self-identified feminist Bidisha argues that women collude in their own objectification:

If any woman buys that line, she’s an idiot. One minute spent appraising oneself as an object, whether the conclusion is positive or damning, is a minute wasted. But it seems that there are lots of idiots out there. News that the cosmetic surgery industry is now worth billions, with breast implants being the most popular operation, is evidence of women’s thraldom to the porno ideal of big chest; thin everywhere else. In a scenario that could be a treatment for a future Eli Roth film, a woman crawls to a man she barely knows, begs him to cut her up, pays him for it and crawls home in pain to recover, thanking her lucky stars for this transformative experience. To the man, the woman is just another paying chump on the chopping block; to the woman, the man is a saviour.

Women’s real mental emancipation is still far away if they have so little actual pride, and such a high degree of self-objectification, that they are assiduously doing patriarchy’s job for it. They’re voluntarily turning themselves into pornography.
How submissive can you get?

Bidisha concludes:

I don’t have any body issues. For those who do, I’d recommend putting down that scalpel, going for a walk and remembering that the only way to get some self-esteem is to get some self-esteem, not make a date with Hugh Hefner

Bidisha takes what I’m guessing Hanisch would call the “anti-woman” line. She argues that women should stop buying into their own oppression, snap out of it, and get some “self-esteem,” from the self-esteem shop presumably. And she positions herself as an enlightened feminist who isn’t implicated in all this female “idiocy.”

I have a lot of body image issues and I’ve had eating disorders for over 15 years, so presumably by Bidisha’s reckoning I too am “an idiot.” Ok, but how does calling me (and all women who experience body image issues) “idiots” in any way advance women’s liberation? What it does do is let feminists who take this line off the hook when it comes to engaging in collective action against the systematic and structural factors that lead to women having body image issues. For example, sexual abuse, the pressure on adolescent girls to engage in sexual activity while at the same time being stigmatised for it, all the negative responses to adolescent female physical and sexual development, the rampant bullying of “fat” girls that takes place in school and the home, the bombardment with imagery representing beautiful as thin, and the incessant pressure to diet and lose weight. I’m sure you could think of some more. It is much easier to say that women are idiots, but sadly there are no self-esteem shops and blaming women for their own body image issues will not make any of the above problems go away.

Collective Action

Another central tenet of Hanisch’s is the argument that:

There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.

Again this is pretty challenging. It proposes that women cannot really change their situations on their own and indeed, they should not try to do so if it would put them at risk – “when they can’t win and the repercussions are worse than the oppression.” The only way to effect real change is to work collectively. An individual woman deciding to stop wearing makeup might be living up to her own feminist principles so good for her, but it will not change anything, or improve matters for women who are in situations in which it is not possible to stop wearing makeup because they might lose their jobs or be made more miserable in some way. The only possible solution then is to work with other women, which is never easy.

Apolitical Women

Vibracobra has also discussed this passage in a post, but I’m going to repeat it here because it’s so important in this essay and is the bit feminists don’t like to quote so much for reasons that will become obvious.

One more thing: I think we must listen to what so-called apolitical women have to say—not so we can do a better job of organizing them but because together we are a mass movement. I think we who work full-time in the movement tend to become very narrow. What is happening now is that when non-movement women disagree with us, we assume it’s because they are “apolitical,” not because there might be something wrong with our thinking. Women have left the movement in droves. .. I think “apolitical” women are not in the movement for very good reasons, and as long as we say “you have to think like us and live like us to join the charmed circle,” we will fail. What I am trying to say is that there are things in the consciousness of “apolitical” women (I find them very political) that are as valid as any political consciousness we think we have. We should figure out why many women don’t want to do action. Maybe there is something wrong with the action or something wrong with why we are doing the action or maybe the analysis of why the action is necessary is not clear enough in our minds.

Here, Hanisch firmly rejects the idea that women who are in the movement, feminists we might now call them, necessarily know better than women who are not in the movement. Indeed, it’s very important that “we” should listen to “them” because they probably have damn good reasons for not being in the movement. Then instead of asking ourselves what is wrong with women who don’t want to be feminists, we should think about what might be wrong with our own thinking and actions; otherwise we will fail. This is challenging for feminists, especially these days in which feminism is increasingly conceptualised as a personal identity rather than motivation for political activism. I think the sense that feminism is a “charmed circle” may even have strengthened in some respects. I have read a lot of articles and blog posts over the last few years implying that feminism is something you join when you become “enlightened.” Therefore women should be strongly encouraged to sign up and if they don’t want to call themselves feminists, well, there must be something wrong with their thinking. There are even arguments that feminism improves your life – you can still earn lots of money, be hot and wear makeup and nice clothes and have boyfriends and you’ll probably have more orgasms when you’re a feminist. If that’s the case, women must be very silly indeed not to call themselves feminists! The problem with this is that it allows those of us who do identify as feminists to avoid taking on board a whole range of problems within feminism, for if women who refuse the identification become positioned as “the unenlightened” ones, why should “we” listen to what they have to say? Here’s an interesting post about why women can feel alienated from feminism.

Where I think Hanisch’s essay might be alienating to women now is in her insistence upon the relentless grimness of women’s lives. A lot of young women would probably feel quite angry and this and argue that their lives are really not that grim, but that’s not a reason to ignore a lot of the other points she makes. I think her arguments about women blaming, the importance of collective action and taking women who don’t want to call themselves feminists seriously still hold a lot of weight.

I’ll finish with a quote from the new introduction:

Political struggle or debate is the key to good political theory. A theory is just a bunch of words — sometimes interesting to think about, but just words, nevertheless—until it is tested in real life. Many a theory has delivered surprises, both positive and negative, when an attempt has been made to put it into practice.

*We have set up a new ‘Feminism 101′ category specifically for these theory posts so people can find them easily.

From Avaaz.org

This is a massive humanitarian crisis - one and a half million human beings locked up in the biggest prison on earth. Far from ensuring Israel’s security, it only stokes the rage and desperation fuelling this conflict.

Yet shockingly, the UN, European Union and Arab League have not yet taken any action. So our emergency campaign is urging the international community to end this blockade, ensure the free flow of supplies, and agree to the ceasefire which civilians on both sides desperately need. It’ll be delivered to the UN, EU and Arab League when it reaches 150,000 signatures, so sign and tell everyone you know:

The humanitarian crisis of a sealed-off Gaza is only getting worse, and a rain of missiles is falling on both sides. No genuine peace talks will be possible while the siege continues. In the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006, we saw how global pressure and assistance can help stop a crisis and protect civilians from harm — we cannot stay silent today about the crisis in Gaza.

- Starved of fuel for the last three months, the power station exhausted its reserves on January 6th, then shut down when deliveries were suspended altogether. Today a convoy has been let through “for one day only

- Hospitals, water pumps and sewage systems are on the verge of shutdown

- 91 of the drugs defined by the World Health Organisation have run out, including most childrens’ antibiotics – stopped at the border, along with fuel, pencils, schoolbooks, candles, and many foodstuffs- Dozens of people have died because they are being denied treatment

- 80% of the population depend on food aid which the UN says could run out this week”

Tens of thousands of people have now broken through the wall into Egypt to get essential supplies. See La Chola for a roundup of news and links.

The power is under constant threat and when the power goes out people will die

See also these Palestinian women’s blogs: Raising Yousuf: Diary of a Mother from Gaza, From Gaza with love and Heba’s Blog. There are links to more from these sites.

Please try and find time to speak up and show some solidarity with the people of Gaza who are living through this appalling situation, whether that’s by blogging, talking to all your family and friends, donating money to relief organisations, signing petitions, writing to MPs or organising a protest.   

The 52nd Carnival of Feminists is up at Figure: Demystifying the Feminist Mystique.

You might recall what I was saying in my post on Sunday about women of colour within predominantly white feminist groups often being expected to speak out against their culture before being allowed to speak for themselves. I’d now like to share this article by Dr Anene Ejikem, assistant professor of history at Trinity University, published at Pambazuka News (via La Chola ). In particular, these extracts stood out for me:

“In 1929 women in southeast Nigeria mounted a war against the forces of British colonial rule. The women targeted all the symbols of the new political order - the offices and homes of colonial officialdom, as well as its representatives. The “disturbances” and the demands made by the women at the Commission of Inquiry set up by the colonial government to investigate surprised the British. The women who testified before the Commission consistently demanded that women be represented in the new institutions which had been set up by the colonial government. More than 50 women lost their lives, but colonial authorities failed to appreciate the extent to which women felt aggrieved by colonial policies which rendered them invisible. Although the women organized and carried out this rebellion, it did not stop colonial authorities and missionaries from continuing to insist that African women were “no better than cattle and sheep” and completely lacking in agency.

“The assumption that African women lack agency continues to be the prevailing view.”

Almost eighty years later, the assumption that African women lack agency continues to be the prevailing view about them. This impression is so often at variance with what I see, for example, when I am at home in Nigeria where, every day, I meet women who struggle to feed their families and to send their children to school, daily making decisions that help sustain their families.”

“Researchers and development workers appear eager always to point to “Tradition” as the reason for African women’s lack of agency. Take, for example, the statement issued by a recent international summit convened to address the economic crisis in Africa.

“In Africa, the gender gap is even wider and the situation is more complex due to the cultural and traditional context which is anchored in beliefs, norms and practices which breed discrimination and feminised poverty. There is growing evidence that the number of women in Africa living in poverty has increased disproportionately to that of men.”…

…There is no doubt that there are many traditions in Africa that hamper women’s ability to lead economically prosperous lives, but to point to “Tradition” as the root cause of African women’s poverty obscures reality more than it clarifies it. First of all, there is no single “Tradition” which exists all over Africa. Secondly, what is considered “traditional” in African communities is often of relatively recent vintage and was colonially-generated. Foreign aid workers and African men are too eager to point to “Tradition” when excluding women from development projects. For example, in Kenya, local men - and “development officers” - are often quick to insist that it is “untraditional” for women to own land. The truth is, of course, that individual land ownership is not “traditional” for anyone in Kenya; individual land ownership was usefully introduced by British colonial authorities keen to claim the most fertile lands for Europeans.1 “What is considered “traditional” in African communities is often of relatively recent vintage and was colonially-generated. Foreign aid workers and African men are too eager to point to “Tradition” when excluding women from development projects.”

The idea conveyed when “Tradition” is blamed for African women’s economic predicament is that African beliefs and practices constitute part of an ancient, unchanging way of life, not easily amenable to change. The reality too often is that aid and development workers assume that the existence of “Tradition” makes African women incapable of acting as authors of their own lives. Numerous studies now exist which point to the unwillingness or incapacity of development workers to engage African women in dialogue as a fundamental obstacle to the success of many so-called aid programs.2 Fundamental to any task of understanding Africa is the acknowledgment of the continent’s diversity. Not even within a single country do sweeping generalizations hold. An absolute priority to ending poverty in Africa is to listen to the experiences and wisdom of poor African women.”

“Who should speak for African women? Too often it is either African men or Western women. We need to hear more from the African women themselves whose lives we all claim we wish to improve. Also, we must incorporate the important critiques by African women scholars of the flawed categories that continue to be used to describe African women’s lives and African societies. Scholars such as Felicia Ekejiuba, Achola Pala, Nkiru Nzegwu and Oyeronke Oyewumi have written about how the categories used to describe African women’s lives often are derived from very different realities in other parts of the world and end up doing more violence to the women whose lives the activists/scholars claim they seek to ameliorate.”

Of course, when it comes to blaming “tradition”, it would seem pretty obvious that an assumption that tends to be applied across the board to all of Africa, Asia and South America, would be wrong, not to mention pretty lazy. It’s also the kind of thinking that should be triggering a few alarm bells, and reminiscences about our own history, as did this comment I saw recently from a white, middle-class, left-of-centre, often outspokenly anti-racist feminist:

“But sadly rather than be seen supporting women speaking out against the culture they come from the government would rather try and bully the “quiet” ones into speaking out in favour of the culture that is oppressing them.”

Actually, the author of this statement would say that she was arguing against religion, not culture and even less race. But there are obvious problems in separating these things, though that’s a whole other post. But the result of this kind of thinking is that what amounts to the vast majority of women on the planet are never allowed to speak for themselves. Why? Well, I mentioned the role of colonialism in my post yesterday, as a reason why so many traditions in former colonies seem oppressive to women. It would be good for us to remember that one of the excuses for colonialism, that still gets used today, is that Western Imperial powers were somehow improving the lives of the people in the countries they were colonising. Isn’t it alarming how close that attitude is to that of white feminist groups who exclude women of colour unless they’re prepared to give up their entire culture and heritage?

Of course, we don’t have capital, land, or cheap labour to gain from it, in fact we’re generally against that sort of thing. But we do have other things to gain: credibility, a warm fuzzy glow of being right, and above all, safety in our assumptions, so we can keep on enjoying a degree of privilege, which is quite similar to what colonialists had to gain from the same kind of thinking. In fact, a lot of white feminists’ entire identity is built entirely on the assumption that they have always been a bit different, a bit smarter than all the others, or that they were suddenly enlightened when they became feminists. Challenging that assumption is often the fastest way to be labelled an elitist, funnily enough. Burst that bubble, and that entire illusion is shattered, and you have to confront the actual consequences of thinking in this way. Only the bubble is often more like a cocoon or a carapace, we tend to take it with us wherever we go. Take, for instance, this extract from an F-Word post this month. I’m quite sure that it was well-meaning, and the author of it is trying to be self-deprecating rather than offensive. But it still seems slightly off:

“I have spent the last six weeks in Central America eating termites, climbing active volcanoes, drinking “local” alcohol purchased in old Pepsi bottles from street vendors of questionable personal hygiene and other such dangerous activities after which I am probably lucky to have escaped only with a broken toe and an unexplained rash. However, before I departed on my big dangerous adventure, I did promise our fearless editor that I would return with as much feminist-type stuff to write about as possible.

I had of course had fantastic visions of securing killer interviews with downtrodden indigenous women who had undergone forced sterilisation, teenagers who didn’t know what a condom was, people whose relatives had died from back-street abortions and stuffy politicians who thought that women should all go back to the cocina and make them some gallopinto.”

My problem with it, aside from the remark about the street vendors’ hygiene, is the feeling that the author was expecting to enter a museum of poverty, and to find a lot of her assumptions confirmed. I trust that had she secured any of those interviews and her assumptions hadn’t been confirmed, she would have published them anyway. But it still bothers me a great deal that they mostly revolved around the people in the country she was visiting being staggeringly ignorant. What’s also bothering me is the flippant, slightly amused tone in which it is delivered. Even if it is self-deprecating, that’s just the problem: this isn’t about poverty in Latin America, it’s about a middle-class English girl’s situation as someone visiting a third-world country. Those people and their putative horrible lives are nothing but props for her experience, which is probably also why her slightly amused tone carries over to her description of them in a slightly jarring way. They don’t get to speak for themselves at all. In fact, they’re not mentioned, they’ve been supplanted by the fictional people she might have spoken to.

And I don’t blame her for choosing not to speak to people. It was her holiday, and I can understand not feeling confident enough to do so. But there are so many other examples of people being denied the ability to speak, simply because the main forums for expression are dominated by white middle-class people, who end up speaking for everyone else. Plenty of white feminists, myself included, get outraged when someone claims to speak on behalf of all feminists, let alone all women in the UK. That’s why we get frustrated about being mis-represented in the press: someone with a louder voice is trying to tell us what we think, what we do, what we look like, what we eat and drink, and how we dress, which ends up being damaging to all that hard work we’re trying to get done. Yet we still do exactly the same thing to the vast majority of women worldwide.

In fact, isn’t it a little striking that, due to our privilege, we’re in a position to allow people to speak for themselves or not? Shouldn’t we be questioning the fact that, by and large, the most white, middle-class of us get to define what feminism is, and what’s good for all women worldwide?

It’s not enough for us to magnanimously acknowledge that “oppressed women” should be allowed a voice too. Although, to be honest, even if there was a monolithic “tradition” that applied across the board to whole continents and women in these dark dragon-infested places were being held at gunpoint by men, it would still seem self-evident that the women should be allowed a voice.

Maybe it’s time to start thinking of our privilege a little differently. It’s not enough to just apologise for it. After all, privilege isn’t just something innocuous, like blue eyes or a birthmark, even though it’s often inherited with even more certainty. Privilege is active, dynamic, and even destructive. It’s not enough for us to accept that women who don’t have our privilege can be part of the solution. We also need to examine in what ways our privilege actually makes us part of the problem.

You’ll also notice that, for the purposes of this post, I’ve pulled out the parts of Dr Ejikem’s article that apply to white feminists, ignoring the parts about the realities of life in Africa. So go back and read the rest of the article, now.

If you’ve been reading the F-Word recently, you will have heard of Richard Littlejohn’s comments on the Ipswich murders last year. Now, in the scheme of things Richard Littlejohn comes out with, this isn’t particularly surprising. In fact it’s both consistent with his political views that are slightly to the right of Maggie Thatcher, and with the fact that he thinks his own literary output is “a little more complex” than Tolstoi.

Sure, I think he’s pond scum, and I’d say he deserved a good, hard spanking, if I didn’t think he might enjoy it (or maybe even attempt to pay for the service). And there’s no doubt the view he expressed, that the seriousness of the crime should be judged by the merit (read: economic privilege) of the victim, is pretty heinous, as heinous opinions go. It’s not particularly well-founded either. Most of us have occupations that are less than useful. My job is pretty useless. Chances are yours might be. A lot of retail positions are useless. Most jobs, by and large, just contribute to making the world a worse place. Richard Littlejohn’s job is way useless. So what’s so particularly useless about giving orgasms for a living? If it was that simple, you know.

On the other hand, I’m having a problem, which actually prevents me from wanting to make any formal complaint about this. It’s not necessarily the urgent need to protect Mr Littlejohn’s freedom of speech, of which he enjoys more than most of us, bafflingly. The problem I’m having is that I don’t want Littlejohn to say something I agree with. The man is a caricature of the political position he stands for. I’m actually quite relieved when he says something dreadful like that. If he said something I agreed with, I’d most likely think “If Richard Littlejohn agrees with me, I must be wrong”. Wouldn’t you?

Actually, on one level, it’s quite useful to have a certified crazy bastard come out with a position that isn’t really that uncommon. I recall hearing quite a lot of people joking about the Ipswich murders when they were happening, because it was “prozzies”, you know. I was also told about an incident in the town centre last year, when a woman was assaulted by a man rubbing his penis in her face, and because they were both working-class, people at the office afterwards were highly amused about the “chav fight in town earlier”.

There’s also the fact that rape crisis centres are getting awfully thin on the ground, most likely because their job is being taken on by private concerns - charities, religious organisations, and so on, which means the help provided to victims of rape follows the agendas of those various organisations. Are a lot of them going to be well-meaning and do a great job? Absolutely. But that creates a risk that for a number of people, whether they deserve help or not will depend on their merits, whether what happened to them was an “occupational hasard”, or simply a tradition in the part of town where they live, which will help to make the crime that much more invisible, and create whole strata of society that, in fact, can’t technically be raped. Someone in government obviously thinks this is fine.

Not to mention the way stories get reported in the news. For instance, I don’t have to tell you who Maddie McCann is. But there has been a missing girl poster up in a Tesco near here for at least as long as Maddie has been gone, and no one’s heard of her at all. The difference being, of course, that Maddie McCann is very cute and photogenic, whereas this girl’s a little older, maybe eight or nine, and crucially, dark-skinned. So someone in the press – quite a lot of people, in fact – obviously believes that Maddie’s kidnapper is a monster, whereas this little girl, and hundreds like her, are obviously “no great loss”. Although it’s actually quite scary the way this situation gets turned against the cute, blonde, future all-round amazing person, as you’ll recall from the Daily Mail’s headline when the bodies of Holly and Jessica were discovered: “What he did to their little bodies”. If we complain about Richard Littlejohn, we have to complain about all the other people holding the same views, which is why it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to complain to Paul Dacre. Surely we should be complaining about Paul Dacre.

Actually, I was slightly surprised that none of the bloggers covering this complained about Littlejohn’s comment that none of the Ipswich murder victims would have undertaken missionary work in Darfur. What, people are homeless and dying in Darfur, so let them know it’s Christmas, Richard? Why not bring them a few vials of smallpox, for old times’ sake? Oh, I get it, they’re obviously in trouble because quite a few of them are Muslims. Stop them being Muslims then, shall we? That’ll solve everything.

It’s not just Richard Littlejohn who thinks prostitutes are a scourge of society, either. Kim at Bastante Already tells us about this charming gentleman in Atlanta, who likes to stalk, film and photograph local sex workers, in order to do his part in keeping them off the streets and hopefully out of business. Kim herself is a social worker, so is in a good position to assess the consequences of depriving sex workers of their source of income.

“This quote made me particularly angry: “”What’s really fun is catching [the prostitute] getting in the car with a john,” he says. “You flip on the light and most of the time the john dumps the prostitute. I’m hitting prostitutes in the pocketbook.”

My work is with the homeless population. Some of my clients have been prostitutes, some of these women prostituting to support a drug habit. The thought of this self-righteous prick thinking it would be “funny” to hit my clients in the pocketbook, as they tried desperately to obtain money for a fix or a place to sleep pisses me off.

Righty-O, pal: that’s gonna solve the problem, chasing them away.
‘Course, you don’t care about that.
Let the social workers figure out how to help these women — you have a town to clean up!”

All this to say that, before trying to right other people’s wrongs, there are a couple of basic rules that we should all remember. For instance:

-Don’t “let them know its Christmas”, particularly if by that you mean “let them know it’s not really Ramadan”.

-Don’t ever, ever do anything that might result in a sex worker being hit in the pocketbook, or indeed hit in the face by her pimp for not landing any business. Your opinion is important, but it’s not more important than someone else’s safety or livelihood. Although this rule may stretch to allow Richard Littlejohn to receive the wedgie to end all wedgies. Unless he actually likes it.

*special thanks for today’s post title go to Charlie Brooker’s voice recognition software