I saw this tweet at some point during the weekend, and Beatidude and I had a polite exchange of tweets over it.

@rphillips2001 How do you propose that we convince abortion rights supporters to respect life?

— Roamin’ Catholic (@Beatidude) May 6, 2012

My question to him – which he could not answer – was how can prolifers convince the rest of us that they themselves “respect life”, when they campaign to make abortion illegal, and in the US (Beatidude is an American) campaign to shut down life-saving healthcare services.

There are ethical arguments to be made about abortion. I am no longer willing to debate those issues with people who do not share the basic human rights view that it is the pregnant woman’s responsibility and right to make her own decision for or against abortion, because I do not trust those people to argue honestly.

And this is why.

I once admired and respected Bruce Kent, formerly Monsignor in the Catholic Church, because he seemed to me to be a man of moral courage and principle. In 1987, convinced that nuclear weapons are a moral hazard, he refused to comply with the orders of the Church hierarchy and left the church and his priesthood rather than cease to campaign against nuclear weapons.

The Second Congo War, also known as the Great War of Africa, began in 1998 and officially ended in 2003: but hostilities still continue nine years later. By 2008, it’s estimated the war and the aftermath had killed 5.4 million people. At least 70,000 women and girls were raped.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, abortion is illegal. Doctors Without Borders, caring for victims of the conflict, began to perform abortions on women made pregnant by rape who begged for a termination, and to provide care for women who had had an illegal abortion by an unqualified practitioner and were suffering from the aftereffects.

They did this because they heard the stories from women like this one:

“I will give you an example: One night, robbers came to a house and demanded that the man hand over his wife and daughters or die. He refused. So they began to cut him. They cut off his fingers and blinded his eyes. His wife couldn’t stand it anymore. ‘Take me and let him go,’ she screamed. And they did. Then after they had gang-raped her and each daughter, they robbed the house and left.”

She waited again — for what felt like eternity — before she went on, tight-voiced and loud. “Then the husband began to scream. He threw the wife and daughters out of the house. Those women had no place to go,” she said. “No one, no one,” she paused, “would take them in.”

There was an audible gasp in the tent.

No one would take them in? I felt my arms get a little weak. No one? Where did they go?

The questions came from everywhere at once: “Why not? What are you talking about? Why, in God’s name, did the husband put them out? Do you mean that the husband got angry at the wife?” The disbelief and incredulity in the group was palpable.

“Wait a minute,” I called from the other side of the tent out of my own growing sense of agony. “What in that culture could possibly justify that kind of behavior — from either the rapists or certainly of the husband?”

The woman raised herself up in the old plastic chair. “Men,” she said, “must begin to believe that women are human beings. They must stop saying that women ‘want it.’ Because he believes that women want it; he threw them out. They all do. And the families that will accept the woman back refused to take the child that comes from the rape.”

I am a long-time supporter of Amnesty International. Amnesty International worked with Doctors Without Borders in the Congo, helping these women and other victims of the conflict. AI published this report on Surviving Rape in 2004:

I wish for them to be helped, because I’ve known so many women who were raped but who have had no help. No help at all. In any case, when I see them I feel uncomfortable because, well, you see, I had the fortune to have someone who could help me, but when I go to the hospital and meet all those women who are going through such pain, it makes me sad. For these, I can only wish that the women of Congo be helped because they have suffered so much. Yes. Help especially with medical care.

In 2007, after years of debate, in direct response to the rapes in the Congo, Amnesty International changed their previously-neutral position on abortion.

Violence against women violates women’s rights to life, physical and mental integrity, to the highest attainable standard of health, to freedom from torture and it violates their sexual and reproductive rights.

Upholding women’s human rights, including their sexual and reproductive rights, is essential to preventing and ending gender-based violence.

The lived experience of girls and women shows how central are sexual and reproductive rights to their freedoms and dignity including their right to be free from gender-based violence and as a remedy where they have been subjected to such violence.

What this meant is:

“Amnesty International’s position is not for abortion as a right but for women’s human rights to be free of fear, threat and coercion as they manage all consequences of rape and other grave human rights violations.”

The Vatican’s reaction was, immediately, to urge Catholics worldwide to stop donating to Amnesty International.

And on Tuesday 25th September 2007, Bruce Kent wrote a short article in opposition to Amnesty International (and reacting to a column by Zoe Williams) that destroyed my respect for him.

The reality of Amnesty International’s decision to support a raped woman’s right to choose abortion, and to receive healthcare after an illegal abortion, was this, from an Amnesty International report published in 2004:

In the course of the armed conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), tens of thousands of women and girls have been victims of systematic rape and sexual assault committed by combatant forces. Women and girls have been attacked in their homes, in the fields or as they go about their daily activities. Many have been raped more than once or have suffered gang rapes. In many cases, women and young girls have been taken as sex slaves by combatants. Rape of men and boys has also taken place. Rape has often been preceded or followed by the deliberate wounding, torture (including torture of sexual nature) or killing of the victim. Rapes have been committed in public and in front of family members, including children. Some women have been raped next to the corpses of family members.

The civilian population of eastern DRC has been the victim of war crimes and grave human rights violations on a daily basis. They have seen combatants from around 20 armed factions fighting for control of the land and its resources. In a context of the collapse of state authority in the east, national and international laws are no longer observed and all the armed factions have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate sexual violence with impunity. Rape has been used deliberately and strategically to attack the fundamental values of the community, to terrorize and humiliate those suspected of supporting an enemy group and to impose the supremacy of one group over another.

In addition to the trauma of rape, survivors’ rights are further violated in the aftermath of the rape, deepening their suffering immeasurably. Most women suffering injuries or illnesses caused by the rape – some of them life-threatening – are denied the medical care they need. Because of prejudice, many women are abandoned by their husbands and excluded by their communities, condemning them and their children to extreme poverty. Because of an incapacitated judicial system, there is no justice or redress for the crimes they have endured. Continuing insecurity means that women live in fear of further attacks or reprisals if they speak out against the perpetrators.

What did Bruce Kent have to say about the Catholic Church’s belief that girls and women who had undergone the trauma of rape should have the Congolese law against abortion enforced on their bodies, and this care provided by Doctors Without Borders go unrecognised as a human right?:

Then, within five days, we offer the morning-after pill to avoid unwanted pregnancy. Medical treatment also involves prophylactic antibiotics against the most common sexually transmitted infections (syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia), and tetanus and hepatitis-B vaccinations. The treatment of physical trauma such as lesions, wounds, or other injuries is also recommended. Follow-up is extensive and the total duration of medical treatment is at least six months. For every such treatment for these women, from the very outset it’s essential to identify how abortion can take place. Abortion is illegal in DRC, so we have negotiated the possibility of carrying it out at a local level, with the head doctors in the health zone, but also with our practitioners.

Additionally, on a legal level and for reasons of protection, a medical certificate attesting rape is systematically produced and offered to the patient. During 2005, in our North Kivu projects, 17 percent of women accepted the medical certificate and 21 percent filed a complaint with the local authorities. Finally, we strive to guarantee our two main principles — confidentiality and free health care.

Well, you can read the whole thing at the Guardian website still. But this is all Bruce Kent had to say about the girls and women raped and suffering in the Congo and in other war zones:

• “It is outrageous for Williams to suggest that the church wants to punish those teenage girls in the developing world who are dying because of unsafe abortions.”
• “Unborn children also have human rights.”
• “Those women who have suffered the horror and indignity of rape will not be short of pastoral care from a range of humanitarian groups.”

That’s it. That’s all. Bruce Kent, like myself, had been an Amnesty International supporter: like myself, he doubtless knew more about the reality of the Congo conflict than the average reader of a newspaper. If he had honestly looked at the situation of those rape victims in a war zone, and been prepared to write down that yes, those women, those girls, raped and pregnant and alone, ought to be forced against their will to bear a child though neither their husband nor their father would support them – though no one would take them in – though the “pastoral care” that Bruce Kent bragged of was insufficient to provide homes and and farms for seventy thousand women and their children whose men would not accept them – if he had still been prepared to say, better have those women starve than allow them to have an abortion: well, I would not agree with him – but at least I could have respected his honesty, his willingness to have the debate that he pretended to want.

To write such an article – to openly and plainly say that the Catholic Church would not support either Doctors Without Borders nor Amnesty International in their determination to treat the rape victims of the Congo and other conflicts as human beings, entitled to decide for themselves to have or to terminate a forced pregnancy – might well have made some Catholics think twice about their facile “Abortion is bad” response. I think Bruce Kent is an intelligent, empathic man and he knew that if he was honest about the position of the Catholic Church versus Doctors Without Borders/Amnesty International, most people would disagree with the Church hierarchy’s position. And so he intentionally withheld the facts, and asked with plaintive dishonesty:

Why should Amnesty now leave its traditional focus and take up a position supporting abortion? It is not a hands-on welfare body dealing with cases on the ground.

You cannot have a debate with someone who will not be honest about their position. And I have not found that prolifers are willing to be honest about theirs. They will not talk about the women whom their policies condemn.

Joan Chittister wrote, in National Catholic Reporter, after hearing the story quoted above:

A dark silence hung heavily in a tent full of monks and ministers, catechists and keepers of ancient faiths for a long, long time.

The pain now had another dimension to it. These countries have been “converted” for centuries. You have to wonder, don’t you? What have they been told about women by the religious men who catechized them? What snide jokes and demeaning theology are still being taught about women by patriarchal religions? By the actions of exclusion and control and invisibility and domination and subordination of women by church men and holy elders everywhere? Even here. Even now.

From where I stand, it seems to me that male “protection,” paternalism and patriarchal theology are not to be trusted anymore because the actions it spawns in both men and women have limited the full humanity of women everywhere, and on purpose.

The prolife movement are not the only ones who deny the full humanity of women. And some at least are genuinely ignorant or youthfully innocent: holding a blithe belief that really bad things don’t happen except to women who deserve them. But no long-term supporter of Amnesty International could believe we live in a world where all goes well: no one who believes in the humanity of women could believe a woman raped because she could not bear to see her husband tortured, then deserves to be treated as less than human by those who are supposed to be providing, as Kent put it, “pastoral care”.

Arrested for being a public nuisance outside a takeaway shop, the 15-year-old blamed her behaviour – screaming and bashing the counter – on the systemic abuse she had suffered at the hands of two men inside. During six hours of videotaped testimony she went on to say how she’d been lured in by the men with gifts – drinks and a phone card or maybe something to eat – and made to feel “pretty” before eventually being asked to “pay for” the vodka with sex. She even handed over underwear spotted with the 59-year-old accused’s DNA.

Nine months later, in August 2009, the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to charge the two men as the girl would make an “unreliable witness” and the lawyer doubted any jury would believe her.

Three-quarters of the time, when sexual offences against children are reported to the police, the adult alleged to have committed the offence will not go to trial. According to NSPCC research, a third of children who are sexually abused “do not tell anyone at all about it, let alone report it to the police.”

The teenager who screamed and yelled and told the police this year saw her evidence – believed at last – form a central part of the case against the gang of nine men found guilty of raping and trafficking children.

As a white feminist, I feel like Fleet Street Fox and Julian Norman: this is about adult men raping and abusing girls, and race doesn’t enter into it.

But:

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Monday 29th November 2010:

The Cornwall and Derby villains who used girls as sex toys believed that their victims had “asked for it”, which in our permissive age is an easy excuse. Very young girls are sexualised in the social environment, so paedophiles must feel they are only helping themselves to the goodies that are on offer. But in the case of the Asian men, disgusting cultural beliefs further validate their acts and their uncontrollable lechery is, in part, a symptom of repressed sexuality and sick attitudes.

Most Asian men do not go around raping young white girls and women; many have happy and equal relationships with white partners. However, an alarming number of Asian individuals, families and communities do believe that white females have no morals, are free and available, deserving of no respect or protection.

Up in Bradford a few years back, I met Muslim pimps, some wearing mini Koran pendants on heavy, gold chains. “Not our girls,” they reassured me, “just them white girls from the estates, cheap girls. They love it man, all the money they make! What else will they do with their lives? We’re helping them make a career.”

Much laughter, until I asked them what they would do if a white pimp groomed their daughters. They would kill the pimp and the girls too, they said. They would too.

Fleet Street Fox:

Training children to not fight you off doesn’t make it consensual. It’s grooming, and it’s rape. Over a period of time these girls were plied with alcohol, money and drugs, bullied, and made to feel reliant on their abusers. They were extremely vulnerable, with damaged childhoods that made them glad of any attention no matter how vicious and wrong it was. Because the abuse was being spread among friends it was normalised, but nothing detracts from the fact the men who carried out those acts are rapists.

It doesn’t matter what colour they are, or how they went about it, how long it took or how much money they spent on drugs and booze, or whether crisps were offered. Rape is rape.

Baroness Warsi:

“There is a small minority of Pakistani men who believe that white girls are fair game,” she said — choosing her words with care but not mincing them. “And we have to be prepared to say that. You can only start solving a problem if you acknowledge it first.”

She is clear that the colour of the victims’ skin, as well as their vulnerability, helped to make them a target. “This small minority who see women as second class citizens, and white women probably as third class citizens, are to be spoken out against,” she said.

This puts her at odds with some commentators who argue that the racial element was coincidental and that sex abuse occurs in white gangs. She says the Rochdale case was “even more disgusting” than cases of girls being passed around street gangs. “These were grown men, some of them religious teachers or running businesses, with young families of their own,” she said. Whether or not these girls were easy prey, they knew it was wrong.”

Her second challenge is to British Muslim leaders and preachers who have been equally appalled but nervous of speaking out.

“In mosque after mosque, this should be raised as an issue so that anybody remotely involved should start to feel that the community is turning on them,” she said. “Communities have a responsibility to stand up and say, ‘This is wrong, this will not be tolerated’.”

So far, she added, the response from organisations like the British Muslim Forum and the Muslim Council of Britain has been “fantastic”.

Sayeeda Warsi says her father Safdar asked her what the Government was going to do about it and she said she didn’t know. (Haven’t we all had family conversations like that?)

“Dad then said, ‘Well, what are you doing about it?’ I said, ‘Oh, it’s not me, it’s a Home Office issue’.” At this her father, Safdar, gave her a remarkable lecture.

“He said to me: ‘Sayeeda, what is the point in being in a position of leadership if you don’t lead on issues that are so fundamental? This is so stomach churningly sick that you should have been out there condemning it as loudly as you could. Uniquely, you are in a position to show leadership on this.’

So she is, in principle. Will she?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown asks: Who will care for the lost and abused children?

The recession and benefits cuts will make these young lives even more exposed to domestic violence, sexual exploitation and mistreatment. The PM and Deputy PM and too many members of the Cabinet represent constituencies with low levels of poverty and relatively few problem families. Their voters despise the “feckless, fecund and feral” underclass, so the politicians can happily ignore the losers.

Today [29th April 2012] an NSPCC report warns that almost half of the 90,000 children in care are sent back to abusive and neglectful families. Austerity means more applications for care and more returns. More than 70 per cent of such children interviewed by the NSPCC did not want to go back home. The assessments are that poor and hasty decisions are being made – in my view to save money. Abusive parents, from what I know as a journalist, can accuse returned children of treachery and subject them to increased torment. Many youngsters will have to be taken into care again or will run away.

The statistics are grim: 14,000 children are living with relatives because their own parents are alcoholics or drug addicts. According to the Missing Persons Bureau and Make Runaways Safe, around 100,000 children under 17 go missing every year, a large number to escape from brutal parents. Unicef and OECD reports have, over the past five years, concluded that too many children in our country have broken lives and no hopes for their futures.

Two days ago in the New Statesman, Simon Danczuk, Rochdale’s MP, and journalist Myriam Francois-Cerrah, discussed “the relevance of race and religion to the grooming case”. When Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Sayeeda Warsi independently speak about their direct personal experience of the interaction of racism and sexism, this should not be dismissed or devalued. On the 10th May Question Time, almost the entire panel cheerfully engaged in slut-shaming and victim-blaming with hardly a thought that when an adult man rapes an underage girl it is not her fault. As the one ethical panel member, Lord Oakeshott, said,

That cannot be right – this was an evil crime, whatever the girls were wearing, and we must focus on that, surely.

If only.

We so seldom see the perpetrator of rape unequivocably blamed.

We so often see white men like Ched Evans or Dominique Strauss-Kahn or Julian Assange excused for committing rape.

And though I honour Sayeeda Warsi for speaking out so publicly, I notice that she does not consider taking a lead against the austerity cuts to children’s social services. From the NSPCC’s 2011 report:

Children’s social care spending in England is expected to be reduced by an average of 24% in 2011–12 – this is significantly more than the overall real-terms reduction in local government spending of around 10%, and more than the budget reductions for most other local authority services. For example, adult social care spending was projected to fall in 2011–12 by less than 2%. The cuts are most apparent in English urban areas and those authorities that have a high proportion of looked after children. Seven councils plan to reduce this spending in 2011–12 compared with the previous year by over 40% and a further 38 plan to shrink their children’s social care budgets by over 30%.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:

She had such hate in her eyes they singed you when you tried to get her to talk. Her thighs were dotted with cigarette marks and she told me one of her rapists had branded her for not being nice to him. Sometimes Lizzie ran away from the care home and returned when she was frightened or desperate. After some months she started to trust me and we went out to Pizza Hut or clothes shops and once I took her to Richmond Park. She had never seen deer before, or real paper kites. Soon after that she disappeared for ever. Her key worker was sure all the damage was caused by sending this child back to her chaotic and cruel home. I still dream of her sometimes.

So what does our Government say or do? It is obsessed with finding fairy godparents to come forth and adopt unwanted children. There will never be enough such mums and dads for the more-than-90,000 kids in care and some adoptions break down, leaving children even more hurt and angry. The only other “strategy” is to pass all responsibility and blame to local authorities, as Tim Loughton, Children’s minister, did this weekend: “It is right to keep families together… We’ve toughened up the law, so local authorities must make a rigorous assessment of parents’ suitability…” blah blah blah. While they squabble, more children suffer or disappear into the twilight underworld of crime and prostitution.

“Sayeeda, what is the point in being in a position of leadership if you don’t lead on issues that are so fundamental? This is so stomach churningly sick that you should have been out there condemning it as loudly as you could. Uniquely, you are in a position to show leadership on this.”

If only.

—
Update, 22nd July

This is how racism takes root: “The different ways the media covered two cases of men grooming children for sex show how shockingly easy it is to demonise a whole community” by Joseph Harker:

By now surely everyone knows the case of the eight men convicted of picking vulnerable underage girls off the streets, then plying them with drink and drugs before having sex with them. A shocking story. But maybe you haven’t heard. Because these sex assaults did not take place in Rochdale, where a similar story led the news for days in May, but in Derby earlier this month. Fifteen girls aged 13 to 15, many of them in care, were preyed on by the men. And though they were not working as a gang, their methods were similar – often targeting children in care and luring them with, among other things, cuddly toys. But this time, of the eight predators, seven were white, not Asian. And the story made barely a ripple in the national media.

This is heroism:

PFC Bradley Manning, a 24-year-old Army intelligence analyst, is accused of releasing the Collateral Murder video, that shows the killing of unarmed civilians and two Reuters journalists, by a US Apache helicopter crew in Iraq. He is also accused of sharing the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and series of embarrassing US diplomatic cables. These documents were published by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, and they have illuminated such issues as the true number and cause of civilian casualties in Iraq, along with a number of human rights abuses by U.S.-funded contractors and foreign militaries, and the role that spying and bribes play in international diplomacy. Given the war crimes exposed, if PFC Bradley Manning was the source for these documents, he should be given a medal of honor.

This is rape culture:

Instead, the Matrix plays dirty and lets loose a sex bomb upon our intrepid Neo. When you can’t contest the message, you smear the messenger. Sweden is tailor-made for sending a young man into a honey trap. Sweden has particularly thorny anti-rape legislation, where a conviction might be secured from something as thin as an anonymous accuser’s allegation.

In any case, our lucky Neo Julian Assange was only able to enjoy his fugitive-from-justice status for a few hours. By noon, the charges were already dropped, and he was free to be defamed from one end of Sweden to the other, not to mention the countless websites. It’s a simple system: the websites show the headlines, and the headlines report the web gossip. It’s Character Assassination 101, but why in Sweden of all places couldn’t the dirty tricks department make the accusations stick?

Swedish bloggers uncovered the full story in a few hours. The complaint was lodged by a radical feminist Anna Ardin, 30, a one-time intern in the Swedish Foreign Service. She’s spokeswoman for Broderskapsrörelsen, the liberation theology-like Christian organization affiliated with Sweden’s Social Democratic Party. She had invited Julian Assange to a crayfish party, and they had enjoyed some quality time together. When Ardin discovered that Julian shared a similar experience with a 20-year-old woman a day or two later, she obtained the younger woman’s cooperation in declaring before the police that changing partners in so rapid a manner constituted a sort of deceit. And deceit is a sort of rape. The prosecutor immediately issued an arrest warrant, and the press was duly notified. Once the facts were examined in the cold light of day, the charge of rape seemed ludicrous and was immediately dropped. In the meantime the younger woman, perhaps realizing how she had been used, withdrew her report, leaving the vengeful Anna Ardin standing alone.

From the New York Times, 18th November 2010:

“According to accounts the women gave to the police and friends, they each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange had ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke. The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use.”

Lindsay Beyerstein at The Big Think, 6th December 2010:

One accuser says she agreed to sex on the condition that Assange wear a condom, only to discover that he’d penetrated her without one. The other accuser maintains that Assange refused to stop having sex after a condom broke.

If consent is predicated on condom use and one partner surreptitiously avoids using a condom, morally, that’s a form of sexual assault.

Linnéa in Feminism and Tea “Sex by Surprise”, 6th December 2010:

Julian Assange’s UK based lawyer called what Assange was charged for “sex by surprise” and it is insinuated that this is a Swedish crime.

First of all, let me put this straight: there is no such crime as “sex by surprise” in Sweden. Assange is charged for rape, sexual harassment and duress, and this is, what is called in Swedish legal terms, on “sannolika skäl;” a classification that means that the prosecutor has enough evidence to make her believe it is likely the verdict will be in her favour. There is fairly strong evidence, then, it is not charge pulled out of thin air. “Sex by surprise” or överraskningssex as it would be translated in Swedish is slang for rape. It is a term that is used when speaking about rape, but jokingly, or keeping it light, a word that brings with it positive connotations, which makes the word inappropriate in itself, but it is nevertheless synonymous with rape.

Angus Johnston on Julian Assange: Condoms, Rape, and “Sex By Surprise” – Update, 7th December 2010:

The Swedish authorities have released details of the allegations against Assange. They claim that he used his body weight to hold one woman down during a non-consensual sexual act, that he had sex with her without using a condom in violation of her “express wish,” and that four days later he ”deliberately molested” her “in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity.” The other complainant alleges that he took sexual advantage of her while she was asleep, and that he did not use a condom.

I should note for clarity’s sake that Assange hasn’t actually been charged with anything. He’s been arrested, and the Swedish authorities have specified the charges they’re considering filing against him, but those charges have not been filed at this time. Sweden is seeking to extradite him for questioning, nothing more.

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, 7th December 2010:

The key here is “consent”, which was withdrawn. That means that the woman was non-consenting. Having sex with a non-consenting person is rape. This shouldn’t be so complicated.

I don’t know if Julian Assange is guilty, of course, but I’m deeply disturbed by the people who aren’t content with suggesting that Interpol is politicizing a crime that shouldn’t be politicized, but instead slurring the victims with the usual course of rape apologist tactics, including accusing a victim of the high crime of being a “radical feminist”. I suppose we should find this evidence against her, instead of evidence that Assange has sex with other people in the community of political radicals to which he belongs. I’m sorry, but why on earth is it so hard to believe that Assange is the kind of guy who power trips on women by promising to use a condom and then slipping it off during sex? This is one of the most common kinds of sexual assault there is, and a favorite way for guys with power issues to get cheap thrills at the expense of women, who they often feel are contemptible and weak. Are we to assume that someone who clearly gets a rise out of making the most powerful nation on the planet scramble around in a chickens-with-heads-cut-off manner doesn’t have a tendency to ego trip? Are we to assume someone who risks life and limb for this isn’t the kind of guy who might get smaller kicks out of smaller, less internationally interesting power trips? Why are we to assume that?

Nearly two years later, this is still all we know. Julian Assange has been living on bail in “a mansion in eastern England“, resisting returning to Sweden to face the charges of sexual assault, claming to believe that the US will extradite him from Sweden. Bradley Manning has been kept in a maximum security prison.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir on Bradley Manning, America’s martyr for open government on 29th May 2012:

Little did I know when I was helping with the preparations for making public the historic leak “Collateral Murder” – the 2007 footage of a US Apache helicopter firing at and killing a group of people claimed to be insurgents, which included a Reuters journalist, released by WikiLeaks in 2010 – that the person possibly responsible for the courageous act of bringing the war crimes exposed in that video into the public domain, where it belonged, would end up in a military prison, even subjected to torture for months. Today marks two years of imprisonment of Private Bradley Manning. Two years out of his 24 years is a long time in military prison. His treatment has been highly controversial, every step of the way.

Following every bit of information available during the first few months of his ordeal made it clear that the US government was going to use Manning as a warning to anyone else who might feel compelled to report on war crimes, or any other crimes they witness from within the system. Blow the whistle, goes the warning, and you will be buried alive by the state, shredded by the same secrecy machine a whistleblower would try to expose.

Today, hearing that his final appeal to the UK Supreme Court had been denied, Julian Assange walked into the embassy of Ecuador in Knightsbridge, London, and asked for political asylum.

The official statement of the embassy is:

“This afternoon Mr Julian Assange arrived at the Ecuadorian embassy seeking political asylum from the Ecuadorian government. As a signatory to the United Nations Universal Declaration for Human Rights, with an obligation to review all applications for asylum, we have immediately passed his application on to the relevant department in Quito.

While the department assesses Mr Assange’s application, Mr Assange will remain at the embassy, under the protection of the Ecuadorian government. The decision to consider Mr Assange’s application for protective asylum should in no way be interpreted as the government of Ecuador interfering in the judicial processes of either the United Kingdom or Sweden.”

Among other things, this means that the £240,000 bail bond posted on Julian Assange’s behalf by high-prolife supporters (including Jemima Khan) is probably gone for good: Assange was supposed to be back at the mansion in Kent by 10pm, and he is now a guest of the Ecuadorean embassy until they decide whether to offer him political asylum.

Prat. #Assange

— David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) June 19, 2012

Why did Julian Assange pick Ecuador? (It has an extradition treaty with the US.) Did he think they wouldn’t regard accusations of rape as all that serious?

By January 2012, over 100,000 people around the world had signed a petition on Change.org against torture clinics in Ecuador where lesbians were imprisoned and tortured to “make” them turn straight. On 23rd January:

the Ministry of Health was ready to meet with Fundacion Causana and take responsibility for the violence against LGBT. Now the Ecuadorian government is working hand in hand with Fundacion Causana to eradicate these clinics from Ecuador, free the women trapped inside, and launch a national public awareness campaign to fight homophobia.

“After ten years of outcry, the nation of Ecuador- through the Ministry of Public Health- has entered into a commitment with civic organizations and society in general to deconstruct the belief that homosexuality is an illness and root our the use of torture in these clinics. We extend our thanks to all the men and women who signed our petition. It has been invaluable to have this support in starting to change this reality.” – Fundacion Causana

The petition read:
Although over 30 “ex- gay clinics” have been closed this year, hundreds still remain open. These clinics which claim to “cure” homosexuality have decreased in popularity in recent years yet still remain a horrific reality for many. Escaping patients report cases of physical and psychological abuse including verbal threats, shackling, days without food, sexual abuse, and physical torture. Paula Ziritti, 24, spent two years in one such facility and for three months was shackled in handcuffs while guards threw water and urine on her. She describes numerous accounts of physical and sexual abuse. Ziritti says, “The closure of the first clinics by the government is good, but not good enough. Why is the clinic where I suffered still open?”

Bradley Manning and Wikileaks are worth supporting.

Julian Assange is not.

Update, 11:20pm:

Assange interviewed the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, on the Russia Today TV channel last month. In their exchange, the Australian explained that he had been under house arrest in England for 500 days and elicited sympathy from the left wing populist leader.

By choosing Ecuador, he has alighted on a country that is clearly in accord with his political views, not closely aligned with the United States and, he will hope, beyond the reach of the European arrest warrant system.

Some legal commentators have doubted whether Assange would have strong grounds to take his appeal to the ECHR in Strasbourg. He may have decided on his dramatic switch in tactics having been discouraged about his chances of success in Europe’s highest court. (Guardian)

Also, Stavvers:

Assange is not Wikileaks. For starters, Wikileaks is a large project which is staffed by many people other than Assange. Another difference is that Julian Assange is most likely a rapist, and Wikileaks is not. It is therefore perfectly simple to support Wikileaks while acknowledging what Assange did is completely and utterly wrong.

Update, 20th June

Ian Dunt, Assange has betrayed Wikileaks and its principles:

Assange’s dismissal of these charges, and that of his overly-eager supporters, is simply abysmal. It is part of a depressing tapestry, where violence against women – alleged or proven – is treated as a sub-plot to politics, music or sport. Chris Brown, who violently assaulted his then-girlfriend Rihanna, is now invited to perform at award events as if nothing had happened. Mike Tyson, who was convicted of raping an 18-year-old girl, announced yesterday he was bringing a show to Broadway with the help of celebrated film director Spike Lee. Assange’s supporters, who include some of the most respectable and impressive figures on the British left, seem to have the same blindspot. Unfortunately, his actions have smeared by association people as pivotal as film director Ken Loach and campaigning journalist John Pilger.

Assange has used the political sympathies of those who support him to protect himself from allegations which any moral society would take seriously. The very idea that it is easier for America to extradite someone from Sweden rather than the UK is laughable to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the current extradition treaty. If you breathe wrong in this country, Theresa May will pack you off to the US for trial. That’s how subservient we have become to our transatlantic cousins.

Update, 13th August

Julian Assange missed the Olympics. Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, announced on Ecuador’s state TV that “a large amount of material about international law needed to be examined to make a responsible, informed decision” but that he hoped to be able to announce on Wednesday 14th August whether he will grant political asylum to Julian Assange, who is wanted in Sweden for questioning for (allegedly) raping two women. His defense is that he was afraid that Sweden, which has more stringent protections against extraditions to the US than either the UK or Ecuador, might allow the US to extradite him anyway, even though – Assange’s supporters claim – Assange is afraid he has already been secretly indicted and may face the death penalty. Which if it were true, would mean Sweden would never allow him to be extradited: he could spend up to six years safely in a jail cell, by which time Obama will be out of office, hopefully Bradley Manning will be free, and US politics could have lost interest.

#getonthatplane #julianassangeisarapist bit.ly/MWnAKW

— Another Angry Woman (@stavvers) August 14, 2012

Yesterday, Saturday 7th July, Edinburgh held its second Slutwalk.

The Slutwalk, if you didn’t know, was inspired by comments a Canadian policeman made to a group of college students last year, advising them to stop dressing like sluts in order to avoid being assaulted. I don’t like the word “slut”, and I’m distinctly unhappy about people who tell me I should “reclaim” words I don’t like, so in May last year I was initially unsure whether I’d go to Slutwalk 2011.

Then I read this article in Ekklesia, by Jill Segger, and I changed my mind. She wrote:

Walk the streets in a police uniform and people will take you for a constable. Go on the town on a Saturday night dressed provocatively and someone will be provoked. Given that men respond far more readily to visual stimuli than do women, it is likely to be a woman dressed in this manner who will be subject to the kind of attention which may later prove to have been unwanted.

There is a middle way between dressing like a ‘slut’ and being enveloped in a burqua. Modesty is the guide to that choice. Most women want to ‘look nice’ and to attract the admiration of a possible partner and there is nothing to object to in that. But the very concept of ‘sluttishness’ is an indication of how far off beam this argument has gone.

Here are the exhibitionists of Slutwalk 2012, gathering in Parliament Square, just after half past one on a very rainy Saturday.

I read this argument against the slutwalks – the casual victim-blaming, the comfortable presumption that men “react to visual stimuli” and do not assault women who are dressed modestly, not “provocatively”. The sly insinuation that women who dress provocatively are really out to get male attention, and only decide afterwards that it “may have been unwanted”(the classic rape culture defense of she consented, but later changed her mind and called it rape) and I knew that, uncomfortable though I was and am with the word “slut”, as uncomfortable as I assume Jill Segger is, I was definitely against this and on the side of good, old-fashioned feminism:

However we dress, wherever we go, Yes means yes, No means no.

Or, as these two put it even more succinctly:

Caroline, a solicitor and a high court advocate:

I have a tattoo on my waist, and on the night of the party you could see the outline of my tattoo through the mesh of my top (I was wearing a Halloween costume). I showed my attacker the tattoo whilst we were talking, and from the way I was cross examined, the assumption seemed to be that showing a guy a tattoo is the biggest statement of intent known to man. I showed him my tattoo, so of course he thought I wanted to have sex with him.

At the party, I was chatting to my attacker along with a group of other people I hadn’t met before. I invited them all to come and speak to me again later – again this was apparently a clear indicator that I wanted to take things further with him. The amount of alcohol I drank also came up that night. For the record, I’d have a few drinks, but was far from drunk, not that that should have made the slightest difference to anything.

While all of this was happening in court, I’ll never forget the looks I got from several of the jury (the male, middle aged ones). It was pretty obvious what type of person they thought I was.

Jill Segger goes on to argue:

The reclaiming of a pejorative term in order to defuse its power to demean has proved an effective tactic in countering racism and homophobia. But there is a significant difference: no one has any control over the colour of their skin or their sexual orientation. Freely chosen behaviour is an entirely different matter and it is open to question as to whether the burlesque style on show in the ‘slutwalks’ is liberating or just exhibitionist.

Segger talks about the “freely chosen behaviour” of women who identify or are identified as sluts. She doesn’t talk about the one factor that every sexual assault has in common, across the board, on the street, in the Meadows after dark, in your own home: the presence of at least one rapist. No woman chooses to be raped: rapists choose to commit sexual assault.

5. The implication sometimes arises–in rape as with no other crime–that if the victim can be blamed, then it’s no longer rape at all. A robbery victim who acted incredibly reckless and gullible may be called stupid, but they won’t be accused of giving their money as a gift. But rape seems to be somehow diminished if the victim was taking an extraordinary risk of rape, as if “I’ll take a shortcut through the park, even if I am still dressed for clubbing” was an equivalent thought to “I’d like to have sex with just anyone who comes along.” (The Pervocracy, Seven Points On Rape, Prevention, and Blame)

6. The resulting discussions invariably make rapists out to be some kind of inevitable force of nature. Rapers gonna rape, what can you do. The idea that anyone can be educated about or deterred from committing sexual violence is dismissed out of hand. The discussion of rape becomes all about the victim and her choices, and despite some “rape is bad, yo” lip service, the rapist’s choices go unremarked upon until they disappear and some chick apparently raped herself. (The Pervocracy, Seven Points On Rape, Prevention, and Blame)

Because this is a civil liberties issue. “This intense focus on women to not drink, to not get themselves raped, has little to do with actually preventing sexual violence. Why are we telling survivors of rape and sexual assault not to drink? Why are we holding them responsible for anyone else’s conduct?”

But meanwhile, we’re still on Parliament Square, in the rain, and Slutwalk 2012 hasn’t yet moved off down the Royal Mile to Holyrood, so let’s get started.

PerverseCowgirl on why “sexual objectification” isn’t that hot (isn’t intended to be that hot) for the “object”:

This erasure of women’s personalities and preferences happens in real-life interactions, too. I’ve been on dates where the guy asked perfunctory questions about me but zoned out during my answers; I’ve had dates where the guy repeatedly steered the conversation toward sex, no matter how much I tried to talk about other things (usually, these are the same guys who zone out when I talk about my work or family or hobbies); I once had a guy come up to me at work and ask me out (this was when I worked retail in a mall) and when I said I was married he shrugged and replied “I don’t mind”; I’ve had guys in clubs grab my hand, put it on their crotches, and end up in a tug-o-war with me as I tried to yank my hand back and they tried to hold it in place; I’ve had guys in clubs hit on me by coming up behind me on the dance floor – completely sight unseen – and grinding against my ass. And I would hazard a guess that most women have experienced at least one of these things, as well (probably all of them).

Caroline:

I will never know why the jury found my assailant not guilty – and why they decided that I was a liar who would falsely accuse someone of something like that. But given the way I was cross examined, I can only assume that it was because I was a woman who went out with friends, and drank. I chatted to people I’d never met before, and I kissed a boy. I even showed him my tattoo – therefore I deserved everything I got.

I wasn’t in court when the verdict was announced, but the policeman in charge of my case was. After the jury announced their decision, the judge decided that they should be told about my occupation and the fact that I was a high court advocate. Apparently several members of the jury looked ashen at this news – I guess that once they realised that I was an educated professional, rather than a drunk woman with tattoo at a party, I stopped being the sort of woman who deserved it.

Rebecca:

The first was when I was about 14 and on the bus home from school. It was really crowded so I was leaning against the luggage rack with my back to the rest of the bus. A middle aged Asian guy was pushed against me, but as the bus was so busy I didn’t think there was anything sinister in this, although it definitely felt a bit strange. I was a pretty innocent 14-year-old, so I didn’t realise until I got older that he was rubbing his semi against my leg the whole time. Arrrrgh, it’s making my skin crawl thinking about it now.

The other time I always think about, was about give years ago. I was walking down Old Street on my way to bar with friends. It was summer and about 7pm, so still light out. I was wearing a knee-length skirt and heels (although really, is it even relevant what I was wearing?). A guy walking in the opposite direction put is hand up my skirt and grabbed my crotch. When I turned around and screamed at him as he walked off, he called me frigid, which was nice.

About halfway down the Royal Mile, we passed a couple of shops on the left-hand side where the women who worked there were standing in the doorway watching the march go by – and applauding us enthusiastically.

Anita Sarkeesian:

Image based harassment includes everything from vulgar photo manipulation to creating pornographic or degrading drawings of rape and sexual assault with the target’s likeness. These harassment images are then sent en masse to the target through email, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or any other online service with messaging capabilities. Part of the trolling strategy with these images is also to try and get them to appear in search results for the target’s name as a way to attack their online reputation.

This harassment is best classified as a cyber mob attack as it’s a hate campaign loosely organized through various internet forums. Participating harassers will share these images as a way to show off and gain validation from their peers as well as to try and recruit others to join the harassment campaign.

The ultimate goal of this behaviour is to try and intimidate, scare and silence women by creating an online environment that is too hostile, toxic and disturbing to endure.

Those three women in pink? They marched together, holding hands, in the pouring rain, and stayed in the chill to hear the speeches at the rally. They were dressed for summer weather but it was summer somewhere else. They were well hard. It was freezing. I was impressed.

Rebecca:

Below I’ve asked some of our writers to tell us about incidences where they’ve been groped, felt-up or assaulted against their will. The incidences that you wouldn’t necessarily report to the police, or even tell anyone about afterwards, but seem to happen all the time.

And then, I want to hear about the times it has happened to you. Let me know in the comments section below, or tweet us @xojaneuk with the tag #casualsexualassault.

If anything, I want to highlight quite how common a bit of casual groping is to most women trying to go about their daily lives, and just how invasive it is. Because, while we know that serious sexual assault and rape are terrible and violent crimes that need to be punished, we’re all guilty (myself included) of dismissing the rest of it as just something that happens.

Captain Awkward, The art of “no,” continued: Saying no when you’ve already said yes:

Imagine you’re at a party. A guy offers you a drink. You say no. He says “Come on, one drink!” You say “no thanks.” Later, he brings you a soda. “I know you said you didn’t want a drink, but I was getting one for myself and you looked thirsty.” For you to refuse at this point makes you the asshole. He’s just being nice, right? Predators use the social contract and our own good hearts and fear of being rude against us. If you drink the drink, you’re teaching him that it just takes a little persistence on his part to overcome your “no.” If you say “Really, I appreciate it, but no thanks” and put the drink down and walk away from it, you’re the one who looks rude in that moment. But the fact is, you didn’t ask for the drink and you don’t want the drink and you don’t have to drink it just to make some guy feel validated.

If you’ve ever been in an uncomfortable situation with someone who smothers you and has a hard time letting go, think back to when you first met. Chances are there were behaviors like this – offering things you don’t want and then getting mad when you turn down the “favor,” and not hearing you when you say “no.”

Alisande:

Initially (for about five seconds) I ignored him. When he grabbed my arm and tried literally to drag me across the ground I kicked him and told him to “fuck the hell off,” only for him to retaliate by slamming to the ground next to me, and kicking me in the crotch (which is less painful than you might expect when your assailant is wearing wellies), before reaching under my skirt to try to pull down my tights – he was too far gone to actually manage it.

I hit him across the arms and face before a security guard Sarah had called pulled him off me, and ordered him across the site but not, as far as we could tell, out of the festival. The next week newspapers reported that a rape had taken place at the site over the weekend.

Aja Romano TV Tropes Deletes Every Rape Trope; Geek Feminism Wiki steps in

When Fast Eddie noted the deletion of the [Rape] trope page [on TV Tropes], he added, “There is no explanation needed beyond the fact that the topic is a pain in the ass to keep clean and it endangers the wiki’s revenues. We just won’t have articles about rape. Super easy. No big loss.”

Well. Except that tropes where characters, especially women, are forced or coerced into doing things without their consent are so numerous that TV Tropes hasn’t effectively gotten rid of them all, and probably couldn’t even if they tried. Similar tropes pop up all over the site, and clicking on a few reveals that the site is now a mish-mash of available content warring with the bahleeted presence of any trope that contained the unwanted word “rape.” So Fate Worse Than Death, And Now You Must Marry Me, Old Man Marrying a Child, and Droit du Signeur are still content-approved, but drastically varied tropes like Rape as Comedy, Mind Rape, and Rape, Pillage, and Burn are all gone for good.

So was Fast Eddie being sarcastic when he described the ousting of an enormous chunk of content as “no big loss”? It’s tough to tell, given what seems to be his blasé attitude about clearing out the contents of his archive to “keep the advertisers on board.” But surely Fast Eddie must be aware that TV Tropes isn’t just a repository of fan clichés and geek trivia. The categorization of tropes that hurt, marginalize, and perpetuate victims of rape and rape culture—particularly women—is incredibly important in a cultural moment where debate about sexist tropes is greater than it ever has been.

Layla Ibrahim, 23, in jail for “perverting the course of justice” (refusing to withdraw a rape allegation):

It was a couple of weeks after she reported being attacked in the early hours of a cold January morning in 2009 that Layla Ibrahim, then 21, noticed a change in the attitude of the police. Yes, the police had documented the injuries to the back of her head and breasts, the black eye, the bleeding from her vagina. They had listened closely as she described the two strangers who attacked her, how the main perpetrator had worn a Nike hoodie, how she thought she had temporarily lost consciousness after being knocked to the ground, how she had felt a “thud” in her vagina but had no clear recollection of what had happened.
…..
Layla was told she would be charged with wasting police time if she didn’t drop the case. She refused – after all, she said, she’d been violently attacked. Eventually, the charge was upped to the more serious offence of perverting the course of justice. A year later, in June 2010, Layla – then six months pregnant – was convicted and sentenced to three years.

The story of Layla Ibrahim, now 23, is as bizarre as it is alarming. How can a woman end up jailed after reporting an attack on herself? And when there appeared to be powerful evidence of the savagery of the assault?

Petition Justice Secretary to Pardon Layla Ibrahim

Virginia Gazette, 17th March 2012:

A 27-year-old man accused of rape last October by a College of William & Mary student is taking the unusual step of suing his accuser for more than $6 million. … Jeffrey Weaver accuses the 20-year-old woman of knowingly giving false information to police and health care workers, and repeating it to college officials while seeking to have him removed as a student at W&M. The Gazette is not naming the woman because she was considered a rape victim when the case was adjudicated.

Sarah Woolley:

My tactic is shaming. When a nasty article is humping my hip on the underground I use my best Julie Andrews voice to ask “What DO you think you are doing?? Please, do NOT touch this, it is designer, darling.”

It’s a little harder to be funny when it’s hit and run and you can’t shout at them. It’s a little harder to be in control if he’s trying to pull you into a car or he’s plunged his hand down your bra at a gig, as has happened to me. The police say watch where you go; watch what you dress; the time of day. Hey lady, just exist a little less, yes?

Alyssa Rosenberg, TV Tropes Bows to Google’s Ad Servers, Deletes Discussions of Sexual Assault in Culture:

Rape is obscene. But that’s not because it’s dirty, or sexually alluring, something that needs to—or could be—confined to people at a certain age or a certain stage of life. Rape is obscene because it’s a violation of community norms and standards, not in some settings, but in all settings. It’s a gross, violent attack on the humanity of the victims. I would say rape is an adult topic, but children are victims, too. Part of what’s obscene about rape and sexual assault is that their existence eliminates our ability to let children live in a world that they assume is safe.

Talking about rape may involve talking about sex, but it’s not primarily about sex. A depiction and discussion of a naked woman having consensual sex, and a depiction and discussion of a woman being raped are fundamentally different things, and it’s disturbing that we’d allow algorithms that can’t tell the difference to elide sex and rape. It’s one thing to talk about tailoring content, in news or non-fiction, for ratings or traffic. It’s another to see the structures that governs profit-making online silence a discussion altogether. Ad servers who are literally providing a financial disincentive to discuss rape and sexual assault should be ashamed.

The rally outside the Scottish Parliament was short, but moving. One woman spoke against shame and in praise of honouring our bodies and asked us all to shout “I am sacred” and I tweeted this and got a response I’m still mulling over. (I shouted “I am an atheist!” I’m afraid. Well, I am.) Another woman spoke about how often trans women are killed, sometimes after a rapist discovers the woman he chose for sexual assault is transgendered.

There is a fantasy that many right-wing thinkers entertain that there was a eutopic past where everything was lovely: women and children were not raped, nobody was gay, where rape survivors gave birth and then had the baby adopted, and abortion, abortion never happened.

The Sisters and Brothers of the Order of Perpetual Indulgence are part of a worldwide order of queer men and women of all sexualities: the tenets are The expiation of stigmatic guilt, and The promulgation of universal joy.

The rate of false report in rape cases is reckoned to be similiar to that of other crimes – rather lower than the 10% false report rate for car theft. The conviction rate for rape, if a woman gets as far as reporting the assult to the police, is 6.5% in Scotland. Rape Crisis Scotland identify specific problems with the “corroboration requirement”. But for some men, rape is “an abhorrent and degrading act” – which is obviously not committed by the majority of very decent men who have been accused of rape but are not convicted. Those men, like Caroline’s assailant, clearly do not deserve to be publicly exposed: after all, she had a tattoo, she got drunk, she even danced with him and kissed him: how could he have deserved to be convicted? Similiarly, John Warboys, decent man, hard-working taxi driver, load of complaining drunk women obviously making stuff up: how could anyone want to destroy the reputation and livelihood of an innocent man falsely accused by a drunken slut?

Avizandum Times:

The constant push to increase the number of rape convictions does not sit particularly well with me. I admire much of the work that Rape Crisis do, but I do find myself getting more than a little annoyed with them over their constant desire to see more people convicted of rape. I am sure we are all in agreement that rape is an utterly abhorrent offence and those who commit such an offence should be punished for it. However, I am concerned that many campaigners (and even those in a position of power) are advancing the idea that more convictions are obtained for rape at any cost: even the reputation and life of an innocent person accused of rape.

Here is the thing. When you say you believe rape is terribly abhorrent and all rapists should be punished severely but the low conviction rate for rape is just fine and it makes you feel uncomfortable when people talk about trying to get it higher – you don’t convince me that you really think rape is bad: you’ve convinced me that you think most rape isn’t bad enough to warrant conviction. And quite often “not bad enough” isn’t about the degree of force employed by the rapist, but by the modesty and sobriety of the rape survivor.

Research done by the FBI in the 1980s seems to suggest that one man may commit many rapes until he is finally caught, and that far from being a spontaneous lustful assault, rapists plan out their strategy both for committing the crime and getting away with it. Often they succeed.

Caroline:

What I didn’t know when I went to the police was that he had allegedly raped another girl a week before me, and she didn’t report it. She was at the party that night, and didn’t say anything. She could have just taken me to one side and told me he was bad news – I guess she was too scared, but I knew I had to stop him before he did the same thing to someone else.

Shaker Time-Machine, Feminism 101: Helpful Hints for Dudes:

6% of college-aged men, slightly over 1 in 20, will admit to raping someone in anonymous surveys, as long as the word “rape” isn’t used in the description of the act—and that’s the conservative estimate. Other sources double that number (pdf).

A lot of people accuse feminists of thinking that all men are rapists. That’s not true. But do you know who think all men are rapists?

Rapists do.

They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again.

Virtually all rapists genuinely believe that all men rape, and other men just keep it hushed up better.

At the rally, one speaker reminded us that in Deuteronomy, Mosaic law (the same used to justify no gay marriage on pain of flooding) a woman who was raped within the city walls would be stoned to death with the rapist, because the law assumed that if it had really been rape she would have screamed loud enough for someone to come to her rescue. Sex workers are most vulnerable to rape and least likely to report being raped to the police. (There is a evil cultural presumption that raping a prostitute “doesn’t count”.)

There is the “anti-bullying” message that Eoin Clarke was recommending to our attention earlier, which explicitly assumes that it’s only wrong to call a girl a “slut” if she’s actually a virgin.

The best anti bullying message I have read in a very long time: twitter.com/DrEoinClarke/s…

— Éoin Clarke (@DrEoinClarke) July 7, 2012

The Saturday of Edinburgh’s Slutwalk was also the deadline for Julian Assange to be extradited to Sweden for police questioning about Assange’s alleged rape of two women. Both testify that they had consented to sex only with a condom, and Assange wanted and had sex with them without using a condom. One of them says that Assange had sex with her while she was asleep. Assange is still in the Ecuadorean embassy in Knightsbridge, and likely to be there for some time.

The Ecuadoran foreign minister has said he thinks the rape charges are “hilarious”.

To Assange’s fans the two women are either invisible or they are liars or CIA stooges (or just dismissed as “legal problems“). When Assange himself has been asked about them, he has said,

“I am simply not charged. That’s all. That’s all that is important in this matter. What has been said to date is sufficient.

It’s true that Assange has not yet been charged, but he has also managed to evade being questioned by the Swedish police: he cannot be charged until he has been questioned.

Assange’s lawyer claims his client wouldn’t get a fair trial in Sweden; as Stavvers notes, Sweden is by no means a country where rapists are reliably convicted, and Assange is actually less likely to be extradited to the US from Sweden than he is from the UK. (The US have made no move to have him extradited.)

It is not true that what Assange is said to have done would not be considered a crime in the UK.

If the complainant was asleep or otherwise unconscious then the jury can be directed that there is a rebuttable presumption that there was no consent, and there will be little scope for successfully defending a charge of rape for a defendant who took no steps to ensure the complainant was awake.

This blog post has become very long for a fairly short march and rally. Time to end, and to thank Stills Edinburgh again for their reception staff kindly lending me a polishing cloth to get my camera dry.

Petition Justice Secretary to Pardon Layla Ibrahim

US petition: Secretary of Defense: Require military to register as sex offenders

On 18th August 2010, Julian Assange applied for a residence permit to live and work in Sweden, hoping to create a base for Wikileaks there, because of the country’s laws protecting whistle-blowers. Swedish law prohibits extradition for political crimes: Swden have repeatedly said that the ECHR would intervene if Assange were to be extradited to face inhuman or degrading treatment, such as Assange claims to fear in the US.

If Julian Assange were genuinely afraid of being extradited to the US more than anything else, he would have stayed in Sweden. He fled because he did not want to be questioned by the Swedish police about the allegations of rape made against him by two women in August 2010. He has spent two years trying not to go back to a country where he wanted to live and where he would be safe from being extradited – but where he might well spend up to six years in jail for rape, if the Swedish authorities decide to charge him and if he is convicted.

Government sources in Quito, Ecuador, confirmed today the President, Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado, intended to grant Julian Assange asylum in Ecuador. They also admitted that the offer of asylum was made to Assange several months ago – before he walked into the Ecuador embassy in Knightsbridge on 19th June, following “confidential negotiations” with senior staff at the embassy.

Apparently the British and Swedish governments were aware that Julian Assange had requested asylum in Ecuador and their embassy in Knightsbridge had discussed this.

• The British government: “discouraged the idea”
• The Swedish government: “not very collaborative”

On Monday 13th August, President Correa had told the state-run ECTV that he’d make a decision this week whether he would give Assange asylum, claiming “a large amount of material about international law had to be examined to make a responsible informed decision”.

Since 19th June, Julian Assange has been living in one room of the embassy – with a high-speed internet connection.

Reported in the Guardian this evening:

Ecuador’s foreign minister Ricardo Patiño indicated that the president would reveal his answer once the Olympic Games were over. But it remains unclear if giving Assange asylum will allow him to leave Britain and fly to Ecuador, or amounts to little more than a symbolic gesture. At the moment he faces the prospect of arrest as soon as he leaves the embassy for breaching his bail conditions.

“For Mr Assange to leave England, he should have a safe pass from the British [government]. Will that be possible? That’s an issue we have to take into account,” Patino told Reuters on Tuesday.

Two weeks ago Christine Assange, Julian’s mother, was invited to Ecuador on an official visit. She met with the President and the Foreign Minister and with Fernando Cordero, head of Ecuador’s legislature.

Other top political figures in Ecuador have been vocal about the government’s support of Assange’s bid. “Our comrade the president, who leads our international policy, will grant Julian Assange asylum,” said María Augusta Calle, a congresswoman of the president’s party, and former head of the Sovereignty, Foreign Affairs and Latin American Integration Commission during the 2008 Constitutional Assembly, during a meeting with Ms Assange.

Christine Assange:

Well, I don’t believe Julian’s capable of rape, and the women themselves have stated that the sex that they had was consensual and non-violent. You need to remember that in Sweden the definition of rape can include categories under consensual and non-violent sex. The tweets between the women and their friends indicate that they had no problem individually regarding their sexual contact with Julian. In fact, Woman S.W, when she was being interviewed by the policewoman Irmeli Krans was so upset that the police were going to allege that Julian was wanted for rape that she couldn’t finish her interview and didn’t sign her statement.

Ben Emmerson, one of Assange’s defense lawyers, described how Julian Assange

penetrating one woman while she slept without a condom, in defiance of her previously expressed wishes, before arguing that because she subsequently “consented to … continuation” of the act of intercourse, the incident as a whole must be taken as consensual.

In the other incident, in which Assange is alleged to have held a woman down against her will during a sexual encounter, Emmerson offered this summary: “[The complainant] was lying on her back and Assange was on top of her … [she] felt that Assange wanted to insert his penis into her vagina directly, which she did not want since he was not wearing a condom … she therefore tried to turn her hips and squeeze her legs together in order to avoid a penetration … [she] tried several times to reach for a condom, which Assange had stopped her from doing by holding her arms and bending her legs open and trying to penetrate her with his penis without using a condom. [She] says that she felt about to cry since she was held down and could not reach a condom and felt this could end badly.”

As in the case of the first incident, Emmerson argues that subsequent consent renders the entire encounter consensual, and legal.

No. There’s no evidence the two women consented, merely that they decided not to fight back. If events happened as Julian Assange’s own defense lawyer says they did, and presumably his version of events is from Assange himself, then Assange raped those two women.

From Fugitivus via Captain Awkward:

Rape isn’t about gender so much as it’s about power and privilege; but power and privilege are so completely tied to gender that that can sometimes get lost. I think sometimes it can be clearer to see how horrifying rape is, and how much it really is rape, when it’s done to somebody with power and privilege, somebody it isn’t supposed to be done to, somebody it’s not okay to do it to.

But mostly, I related this story because when Guy 1 told me why he didn’t fight back, that was the first time I really understood why some girls don’t. He put it so well: when somebody you knew, somebody you trusted, does something so frighteningly outside the boundaries of normal and expected behavior, that person becomes a stranger who is capable of anything. And, more importantly, a stranger who has already proven that they are willing to do anything.

I think if Julian Assange prefers to live in a room in Knightsbridge for the next few years, with access to the Internet, instead of facing the consequences of his actions in Sweden, well: let him stay there. In effect he has sentenced himself to jail without appeal. I can’t say it’s what he deserves, but it’s some consequence for his actions.

Doreen Lawrence, two days ago:

Had it been her own son accused of murder, she just cannot believe she would have tried to protect him from justice. “I couldn’t live with myself, because that would be living a lie. My conscience wouldn’t allow me to – and my children know this.” [Decca Aitkenhead] asks if Lawrence thinks they truly believe in their sons’ innocence. She sighs.

“Well I think those types of people, they’re…” She breaks off. After a long pause, “It’s like they feel that they have the right, or their sons have the right, to do whatever they want to do.”

Update, 23:46pm: “Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa on Twitter Tuesday denied reports in the British media that he has decided to offer Wikileaks founder Julian Assange asylum.” (NBC) Apparently the decision has not been made yet – the Guardian may be getting ahead of itself (or may be plain wrong, though I can’t think it’s likely).

Update, 15th August: Apparently Correa is going to make an announcement Thursday, and the UK have let Ecuador know that:

You need to be aware that there is a legal base in the UK, the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987, that would allow us to take actions in order to arrest Mr Assange in the current premises of the Embassy.

We sincerely hope that we do not reach that point, but if you are not capable of resolving this matter of Mr Assange’s presence in your premises, this is an open option for us.

It went on:

We need to reiterate that we consider the continued use of the diplomatic premises in this way incompatible with the Vienna Convention and unsustainable and we have made clear the serious implications that this has for our diplomatic relations.

In effect, if Ecuador continue to shelter Assange, the UK may decide to temporarily break off diplomatic relations with Ecuador. This would be an extreme action, and it is open to the government of Ecuador to describe it as an “unacceptable, unfriendly and hostile act” but Ricardo Patino is not truthful when he says it would be “an attempt against our sovereignty”: that would only be the case if the UK entered the embassy while it was still legally an embassy.

If it ceases to be an embassy, and the diplomatic staff are allowed to leave peacefully, then there is no action against Ecuador sovereignty by entering a building in Knightsbridge to arrest a man wanted for questioning in Sweden.

(But see Carl Gardner on Julian Assange: can the UK withdraw diplomatic status from the Ecuadorian embassy?. Recommended.)

Update, 16th August. Julian Assange has been formally offered and accepted asylum in Ecuador. He is, of course, still inside the Ecuador embassy in Knightsbridge.

Jennie Kermode:

Of course, a martyr can be a political asset like any other, and many people are assuming that’s why Ecuador has taken him in (and now granted him asylum) – to make a grand statement and stick two fingers up at the United States. If I were them (and if I were Assange) I’d be more wary. The value of assets varies over time. Can he really guarantee that Ecuador won’t choose to sell him on in the future? In 2006 the IVK PAX study found that Ecuador had the fourth highest kidnapping rate of any country in the world. In such a context it would be easy for a valuable asset to disappear and turn up in American hands without anybody being able to prove who was responsible. No law could protect Assange from this.

PME200:

He is wanted for rape. People are still saying that he is wanted for “sex without a condom” which is an offence only in Sweden. Wrong. The European Arrest Warrant issued in respect of him clearly gives four offences that he is wanted for. They are one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one of rape.

Charles Crawford:

In other words, if a man-shaped diplomatic bag is seen emerging from the Ecuadorean Embassy and we prod it with a pitchfork to confirm that it contains only diplomatic items, a squeak of ‘Ouch!” would give us all the legal options we need to ask the Ecuador Embassy politely to undo it and show us what or who is therein. …..
By the way, I also gather that IF Assange is extradited to Sweden and then a US extradition request is sent to Sweden, HMG still have the legal right to be consulted on how that application is processed. Strange but true. So not only would Assange have the benefit of all Sweden’s legal and human rights checks and balances – he’d have ours too.

(Update: My own thoughts on Could the US extradite Assange?)

Stavvers:

So Assange is stuck indefinitely in a poky little building in Knightsbridge. If he so much as sets foot outside, he’ll be arrested and extradited to Sweden. In his bid to avoid accountability and due process, he has chosen to imprison himself. – Julian Assange has imprisoned himself indefinitely without trial

So let’s leave him there.

—
Update, 7th September

Why was there nobody at the Ecuador Embassy tonight for #Assange ? When I went there was only police. It felt odd!

— Kay Kanabar (@KayKanabar) September 7, 2012

Good.

Because 6% of college-aged men, slightly over 1 in 20, will admit to raping someone in anonymous surveys, as long as the word “rape” isn’t used in the description of the act—and that’s the conservative estimate. Other sources double that number (pdf).

A lot of people accuse feminists of thinking that all men are rapists. That’s not true. But do you know who think all men are rapists?

Rapists do.

They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again.

Virtually all rapists genuinely believe that all men rape, and other men just keep it hushed up better. -Feminism 101: Helpful Hints for Dudes, Part 3

Last night on Newsnight Craig Murray decided it was his job to give the name of “Fröken A” – the first woman that Assange admits to having had non-consensual sex with (though Assange and Galloway and even Todd Akin are at one in agreeing that just because the sex wasn’t consensual this doesn’t make it you know actual rape).

Dear George Galloway:

So, the first point outlines pinning a woman down in order to force her into sexual activity. The second is tricking a woman into sexual activity to which she had not consented. The third is non-consensual–albeit non-penetrative–sexual activity. The fourth is having sex with a woman who is completely unable to consent. The fifth is exactly the same as the second.

You’ll notice, George, that the recurring theme throughout all of this is that the women were not consenting. There’s a word for sex without consent. Rape.

I find it rather concerning that you dismiss this as merely, as you put it, “bad sexual etiquette”. Bad sexual etiquette is not saying “thank you” before leaving. What Julian Assange is accused of is far more than that. It’s rape, George. It’s rape.

That makes Murray the latest in a whole lot of men (and a few women, notably Naomi Wolf) who outed themselves over the Assange case as people who think … well, so differently about sex, consent, and rape to me, that reading what they write often makes me feel mildly ill.

And equally, have outed men like PME:

Julian Assange did not come across to me as a frightened man. He came across today, in my subjective view, as an arrogant, egotistical, manipulative coward. The last few days have really changed my view on him, and not for the better. His speech took us no further. It gave no detail of anything that would happen next, of any remorse, or of any recognition of the two women who have alleged serious sexual assault. I joked before he came on that his appearance would remind me of a scene from Evita. For the drama he plied on, and for his astounding egomania, I fear I was far from wrong.

I’m not going to link to Craig Murray’s blogpost. It’s perfectly findable if you want to find it. I have linked to his blog before. He names “Fröken A” in his blogpost again, so no, he doesn’t get a link.

The essence of Craig Murray’s defence is: “Lots of other people did it! And besides, “Fröken A” deserves it.”

Some dates: The two dates on which all three – “Fröken A” and “Fröken W” and Julian Assange himself – agree that non-consensual sex took place, are 14th and 17th August. On 18th August, Assange – unworried by any of the things he has since claimed to be worried about with Sweden – applied for a residency permit.

Initially – after discussing the incidents with each other and realising that Assange had been insistent that he wanted unprotected sex with each of them, very much against their wishes, both women just wanted to find out if they could get him to take an HIV test. Not until 1st September did a public prosecutor look at the evidence and conclude that this was rape and sexual assault, and on 15th September 2010, Julian Assange left Sweden, apparently to avoid police questioning.

Craig Murray’s first argument is that it doesn’t matter because “Fröken A” talked to Aftonbladet and her name was then published in the New York Times a week after Assange had applied for a residency permit, six days before Swedish Director of Prosecution Marianne Ny concluded

“There is reason to believe that a crime has been committed,” she says in a statement. “Considering information available at present, my judgement is that the classification of the crime is rape.”

Ms Ny says the investigation into the molestation claim will also be extended. She tells AFP that overturning another prosecutor’s decision was “not an ordinary (procedure), but not so out of the ordinary either”.

On 23rd November 2010, “A file containing 100 pages of interview transcripts, investigatory notes and other material in the case”, pretrial discovery material, which had been provided by the prosecutors to Assange’s lawyer in Sweden, Björn Hurtig, and which had then been faxed to the office of Assange’s lawyer in England, Mark Stephens. Björn Hurtig advised on the cover letter:

“Please note that the documents are legally privileged information for Mr Julian Assange and nobody else.”

On 10th January 2011 the US Congressional Research Service published a report concluding that there was probably no US law that Julian Assange had broken and that even if they could show he’d broken the law, they probably couldn’t extradite him, because it would be impossible to extradite for a political crime.

Shortly after this, the highly confidential documents that had been provided to Julian Assange were anonymously leaked on the Internet. Naomi Wolf professes belief that this must have been done by the prosecutors, because how could anyone suppose that the founder of Wikileaks would do anything other than respect a “legally privileged information” notice?

The file relates how Assange’s separate sexual encounters with two women in Sweden last year led to the criminal investigation, telling the story through police interviews with the two alleged victims, and with friends to whom they’d confided. There is nothing in the extensive details to support Assange’s past assertions that the Swedish criminal probe is part of “dirty tricks” campaign against WikiLeaks.

It does not occur to Craig Murray that feminists – human rights supporters – could have any objection to his revealing “Fröken A”‘s real name, nor that he could have any ethical obligation to respect the British law, custom, and practice of protecting a rape victim’s identity given so many other people had disrespected it:

The furore that I “revealed” her name on Newsnight is a pathetic spasm of false indignation by establishment supporters.

A google search on ["Fröken A"] reveals 193,000 articles, virtually all relating to her sexual allegation against Julian Assange. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation last week broadcast nationwide a documentary investigating ["Fröken A"]’s allegations and not only naming her repeatedly, but showing several photographs of her and Assange together; it is a documentary everybody interested should watch. Literally thousands of newspapers and magazines all over the world have named her, including the New York Times and the Times of India, aside from those near 200,000 internet entries. The Twittersphere numbers are astronomical.

Incredible how often ‘human rights’ are invoked as man’s rights. Women are human too. #Assange

— Carolyn Leckie (@carolynleckie) August 21, 2012

Instead, Craig Murray complains that the two BBC interviewers “spoke over him”, and

I was insufficiently assertive and allowed myself to be shouted down, than which I really should know better. But I did succeed in getting over the fact, with examples, that whistleblowers are routinely fitted up with unrelated charges. And all the manufactured fury at my naming ["Fröken A"] might well lead people to research her claims and behaviour, which would be a good thing. So I am reasonably relaxed.

Craig Murray’s theory appears to be not that “Fröken A” and “Fröken W” are lying but that it doesn’t matter what happened to them. He appears to think “Fröken A”‘s story and motives ought to be questioned – this looks, from his enthusiastic transcript of an Australian documentary, like a simple rape apologist judgement: because “Fröken A” had consented to sex with Assange, had been social with him before and after the night of 14th August, she cannot possibly have any grounds to object to sexual assault by Assange. He was in her bed by her invitation: she has no right to complain to the police about anything he did to her, and the police shouldn’t take this kind of thing seriously, either.

I wish I didn’t know that about Craig Murray.

The argument that Julian Assange would never have leaked the confidential documents sent to him because the account of the police investigation serves to incriminate him is undercut by the plain fact that lots of people – mostly men – didn’t think this information incriminated him. Yes, he had nonconsensual sex with both women. Yes, they were upset enough about it to go to the police. But how can that be actually rape – “legitimate rape” as Todd Akin called it?

I have blocked more people on Twitter due to this in the past few days than I think I’ve ever blocked before. I make no excuses for that: blocking was often the only way to get a set of ugly assertions off my timeline. From Garve Scott-Lodge’s blog, the last of Assange’s rape apologists I blocked:

The admissions of Assange’s lawyer are:

1. He had sex without a condom with woman A, who had only consented to sex with a condom. Woman A indicated she did not wish this by trying to turn and squeeze her legs together, and reach for a condom.
2. He initiated sex with woman B whilst she was asleep, without using a condom. They were in bed together, having had consensual sex using a condom twice previously in that session.

In neither case is it indicated that the woman verbally asked him to stop. If it turns out that they did, then that will change everything. Neither does either woman claim that she was frightened to speak out.

If you define rape as sex in absence of consent, then both of these cases would meet that criteria.

“Fröken W” said that she had had to keep arguing with Assange about using a condom – that he had wanted to have unprotected sex, she had insisted otherwise, and when she woke up and realised he had penetrated her in her sleep and was not wearing a condom – a double assault, since Assange knew “Fröken W” would only consent to sex with him with a condom – she had been too tired to keep on arguing. To a man like Garve Scott-Lodge, from his own comment on his blog, if a woman eventually gives in (especially if you start while she’s asleep) this makes it not really rape.

Garve Scott-Lodge argues that after all, if Julian Assange and “Fröken W” had been in a long-term relationship, it would have been okay for him not to wait to find out if she wanted to have sex with him or if she wanted him to use a condom:

However, someone in a long-term, loving relationship of whatever gender mix, who has been woken up by their partner initiating sexual contact might find it surprising to have this behaviour defined as rape. If you don’t want to have sex you can say so, though you might decide to continue in order to please your partner.

From Shakesville, 2008:

I have some wacky notions about sex.

You know — like . . . . The person who you are having sex should want to have sex with you.

Like . . . . . the whole time you’re having sex.

Go ahead, call me crazy. I’m asking for a lot, I know.

This is a followup to A Modest Proposal: The Thorny Issue of Sexual Consent from 2007:

And that’s when it hit me — my fool-proof solution to the thorny issue of “consent”:

1) Get a clear “yes” from your partner before engaging in sex AND 2) BECOME A BETTER LOVER

See, I’ve never really thought of it as a problem if my lover was chanting (or screaming) YES! YES! YES! “over and over for hours without interruption” during sex. (“Don’t Stop!” and “Keep doing whatever it is you’re doing!” also do not disturb me in the slightest.)

In fact, this situation has been so common for me that I had simply assumed that it was par for the course.

But the Julian Assange case has made two things distressingly clear: When a man you know and like/admire is accused of rape, first (and ongoing) reactions can fall into two groups, which get further and further away from each other as the dialogue about the Assange case, or any other, continues:

1. For some people – mostly men – it’s fear first of all that this means they might be accused of rape.
2. For some people – mostly women – it’s fear of being raped – with the added factor that many women will have been raped by a man they knew and trusted.

Although (1) is not rational nor fact-based – 19 out of 20 men are not rapists, false accusations of rape are 2-8% – the men who feel this fear treat it as very rational and not at all emotional.

Although (2) is based on solid data and rational judgement, the men who feel (1) treat (2) as an irrational fear, and demand respect for their own feelings while disregarding and belittling the feelings of those who worry about being raped.

And then there’s group (3), the men who read what Julian Assange did, and thought not “Well, there’s nothing wrong with that” but “Well, that’s exactly what I’ve done many times and I’m not a rapist, so obviously Assange isn’t either!”

The problem for those of us in group (2) is that although we know group (1) is much larger than group (3), there is usually no way to tell which is which.

Consider: if every rapist commits an average of ten rapes (a horrifying number, isn’t it?) then the concentration of rapists in the population is still a little over one in sixty. That means four in my graduating class in high school. One among my coworkers. One in the subway car at rush hour. Eleven who work out at my gym. How do I know that you, the nice guy who wants nothing more than companionship and True Love, are not this rapist?

I don’t.

When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.

Captain Awkward has written some amazing stuff about human relationships and consent and how to deal with creepy guys and rapists, but this from one of her earliest posts, The Art of No:

Women are socialized to make men feel good. We’re socialized to “let you down easy.” We’re not socialized to say a clear and direct “no.” We’re socialized to speak in hints and boost egos and let people save face. People who don’t respect the social contract (rapists, predators, assholes, pickup artists) are good at taking advantage of this.

“No” is something we have to learn. “No” is something we have to earn. In fact, I’d argue that the ability to just say “no” to something, without further comment, apology, explanation, guilt, or thinking about it is one of the great rites of passage in growing up, and when you start saying it and saying it regularly the world often pushes back. And calls you names.

and a later post, The C-Word:

One of the things I explicitly want to do with this blog is to give people tools for saying “Hey, knock it off.” Defending your boundaries and speaking up for yourself is a habit that can be learned. You get more aware of where your boundaries are. You second-guess yourself less. It gets easier with time and practice. So, if you can, practice! Your voice might shake. But “no” is power.

There is power in not asking for permission to stand up for yourself. There is power in acting as if you expect to be believed and respected. But it’s not a perfect power. Rape culture is real. Predators are real. So the assumption that it’s women’s job to speak up totally falls apart as victim-blaming as soon as you start talking about predators and unsafe bystanders who are determined to get their way.

Julian Assange acted like a predator. He’s the one who did something wrong. His defenders are not acting as “human rights activists” or defenders of “free speech”: they are unsafe bystanders. They want to get their way.

Let’s just say No.

This post has trigger warnings.

It’s mostly about rape.

I’ve never been raped. Like most women who haven’t been raped, I do have a bunch of near-miss stories, starting from when I was six or seven and declined to go for a walk with a nice man who was hanging out at a lefty peacenik vegetarian cafe. My parents were there, volunteering, and I knew they knew most of the adults there, so I assumed (child me) he wasn’t a stranger whom I had to be wary of: I just didn’t feel like going for a walk with him. Shortly after I had persistently said “No” to him, and gone over to stand near someone I did know because his persistence made me feel uncomfortable, he left: I never (to my knowledge) saw him again. It was only much later that I wondered: what would have happened if I’d gone for a walk with him?

Of course I still don’t know. But I’m happy I don’t. I’m glad that my parents taught me it was okay to be a stubborn little girl who didn’t have to do what she was told. I told this story once to a woman with two daughters, and she went ashen and told me after a while that both her daughters had been sexually abused. It made her feel terrible to hear me say that – made her feel that she should have taught her daughters to be stubborn and disobedient – even though at the same time she knew, it wasn’t her fault or her daughters’ fault any more than it would have been my fault if I had decided I wanted to go for a walk and it had turned out that man was exactly what cynical-adult-me says he probably was.

I know a lot of rape stories. Mostly they’re not about violence, not about stranger-danger. Mostly, the rapist is never reported to the police. Although most of the rape stories I know are told by women, none of them are really about women.

All of the rape stories I know are about men with a massive sense of entitlement. That’s always what comes across most in rape stories, after the pain and devastation: that a man had an unstoppable sense that he was entitled to take what he wanted from a girl or a woman, and it didn’t matter in the least what she wanted. Many men don’t notice their sense of entitlement is massive: they’re too used to getting what they want from women.

Even Laurie Penny carefully does not identify the man who raped her, though she has said on Twitter that he has to her knowledge done the same thing to other woman. If she did, because the man hasn’t been charged, still less convicted of rape, he could probably, successfully, sue her for libel for speaking about the truth of her experience.

We say, “He’s innocent until proven guilty” as if we were talking about real innocence and real guilt instead of legal concepts meant to establish burden of proof; as if a truly guilty man was innocent before proven guilty, or is made innocent because they can’t prove him guilty. We act as if the man has every right to assert his innocence but the woman does not have the right to assert her own rape, especially if it might damage his career or community standing (never mind how she’s been damaged).

Say a man’s a rapist before he’s been convicted, and you could end up being sued, even if you are one of the women whom he raped. Because of this, news stories about rape tend to describe rape in passive-voice sentences, as if rape “just happened”, as if it’s some kind of unfortunate disaster like skidding on black ice or tripping over a step.

@nakedgrrl @kateharding I was told it wasn’t “technically” rape bc he eventually stopped (even though he started when I was asleep)

— Lady T (@FunnyFemLadyT) August 23, 2012

@funnyfemladyt @nakedgrrl Ugh. The first male friend I said, “I was raped” to responded with, “Are you sure?”

— Kate Harding (@KateHarding) August 23, 2012

Most of the lists of “how to avoid rape” tips are more of the same: the presumption that a woman can save herself from unfortunately getting raped by staying sober, dressing soberly, not walking home alone at night, not getting into a lift alone with a stranger.

Thing is, none of that actually works. A woman isn’t raped because of anything she did or said or wore: she’s raped because a rapist got rapey.

The thing is, you don’t have to hold a knife to someone’s throat or beat anyone to be a rapist. You don’t need to leave visible bruises to permanently damage someone. All that you need to do is to refuse to hear what they say, you render them invisible and take away their free will.

A woman can only avoid being raped by never being within arm’s reach of a rapist: never marrying a rapist, never going out with a rapist, never being at a disco or a pub or a party with a rapist, never trusting a rapist. And this is tricky, because while only one in twenty men are rapists, they look, act, and speak no differently from many of the other 95%.

What Facebook and others who defend this pernicious hate speech don’t seem to get is that rapists don’t rape because they’re somehow evil or perverted or in any way particularly different from the average man in the street: rapists rape because they can. Rapists rape because they know the odds are stacked in their favour, because they know the chances are they’ll get away with it.

These are some of the stories I know about rape. They’re only a small fraction of the stories you could read or listen to if you wanted to hear the other side of the story, not George Galloway‘s or John Pilger‘s or Glenn Greenwald‘s or any of the other nice liberal men who pop up to defend innocent until proven guilty or free speech or what you will. They’re not stories that any of the women who’ve shared rape stories need to read.

Internet, if there were ever a day you needed to look at a baby manatee, today is that day. is.gd/n0u12X

— Jess Zimmerman (@j_zimms) August 24, 2012

So if you’d rather not, do the otter thing.

Otter pup, sitting in a bowl, yawning. twitter.com/EmergencyPuppy…

— Emergency Cute Stuff (@EmergencyPuppy) August 22, 2012

[Update, 26th August - I'm putting part of a question and a Boggle cartoon first... hope this helps]

An anonymous 17-year-old asked Boggle:

“Ten years later, I’m still trying to resolve whether I can really call that rape, and whether I should hold myself partially responsible for never doing anything….”

“Enis”:

A month ago, we were making love. I was restrained to the bed; we did this all the time. The next thing I knew, he’s fingering my anus. I told him to stop, but he wouldn’t. He took his time, stretching and lubing. I was screaming and crying for him to stop the whole time. I won’t get into how much it hurt, but suffice it to say, I nearly passed out from blood loss as a result of his tearing open old scars. He freaked out when he saw the amount of blood on the bed and called 911. (This was after he’d had an orgasm). I spent a week in the hospital and ended up with 30 stitches to rerepair the damage. I’m still in a lot of pain.

I refused to see him while I was in the hospital. I didn’t take his calls. I gave the flowers he sent to other patients. He utterly and completely betrayed my trust. I trusted him with my safety when I let him restrain me, and he took advantage and hurt me. I want nothing to do with him ever again. I’ve been told he’s been on suicide watch at the local hospital several times since the incident. His friends and family tell me he’s sorry, that he didn’t mean to hurt me, and that I should forgive him. I realize that he may have not intended to hurt me; he did use lubrication, and attempted to open me up a bit first. If he had meant to hurt me then he would have just shoved his way in. But the fact is, I said no.

Me and my ex had the biggest argument we ever had, over me eating a strawberry. One day at his we decided to make a cake. We did it wrong &>

— Pawzilla The First (@pawzilla) August 24, 2012

Date Rape Engenders Awful Depression:

Two nights ago, I went to a party. My ex-boyfriend was present, but my current boyfriend was not. I had several beers, and while I wasn’t drunk, I was tipsy. I had to go to my car to get my cell phone, and my ex offered to accompany me. When we got to the car, he pushed me against the car and started making out with me. I tried to push him away and said, “No, I can’t” several times. He kept trying to pull my pants down, and every time he did, I pulled them back up. He took his dick out and tried again to pull down my pants. I know it sounds stupid, but all I could get out were meek “nos” and “I can’ts.” I was afraid of a confrontation because he and I have been friendly since we broke up. I eventually discontinued my attempts to pull my pants back up because I figured the easiest way to get out of this situation was to let him finish. He had sex with me. I wanted to cry the whole time, but as much as I wanted to scream, “Stop! Get the fuck off of me!” I couldn’t get the words out.

spent hours trying to make it. Obviously it was kind of fun cos we had each other for company. When we finished the cake we decorated it w/>

— Pawzilla The First (@pawzilla) August 24, 2012

Ex-husband of Fugitivus:

I had just told my ex-husband I wanted a divorce. I also told him we could have sex that night, because I assumed if I didn’t let him, he would rape me. He kept pushing for anal sex, which I unequivocally said I would not have. We argued back and forth, and I kept saying no. He finally backed down, we started to have “consensual” sex, and he switched over to anal. I didn’t fight him off, or continue saying no. I figured I’d just let him get it over with.

There was no question in my mind that what had happened was rape. There was plenty of hopeful doubt, pretend denial, but never a question. I knew. I wished it wasn’t so, but I knew exactly what it was. I knew because I had said no, out loud, several times, and when somebody has sex with you after you have said no, that’s the definition of rape. But I also knew because of how I felt about it. Because it was so different from other sex. Because I spent my time imagining I was a tree outside, and telling myself, “He’ll be done eventually and then this will be in the past,” and afterwards, telling myself, “I’ll admit what happened once I live in a place he does not have a key to.”

strawberries, like, cos that’s what you do to cakes. We cut the cake into slices and put them on plates. I ate a bit of strawberry first. >

— Pawzilla The First (@pawzilla) August 24, 2012

Ched Evans:

[Clayton McDonald] took her back to the hotel where they had sex and were joined by Evans, who also had intercourse with the woman.

The jury was told that as the incident took place, Jack Higgins, an “associate” of the footballers, and Ryan Roberts, Evans’s brother, watched through a window.

Video recordings found on Mr Higgins’s phone showed he had been filming or trying to film the incident, the court heard.

Mr McDonald claimed that Evans asked if he could get involved, while Evans said it was Mr McDonald who asked him if he wanted to have sex with the woman.

The judge: “CCTV footage shows, in my view, the extent of her intoxication when she stumbled into your friend.

“As the jury have found, she was in no condition to have sexual intercourse.

“When you arrived at the hotel, you must have realised that.”

Upon seeing me consume the strawberry, he flew into a massive rage because to him, eating the strawberry *first* was somehow insulting.

— Pawzilla The First (@pawzilla) August 24, 2012

Gibson Lusigi:

“You came across these two women and were friendly towards them in a genuine fashion. You then invited them back to your student accommodation with the best of intentions.”
…
The court heard Lusigi, who was a mature student at the time of the attack in February, had massaged the women when they got back to his flat, but the victim had made it clear she did not want sex. Both women then ended up in Lusigi’s bed, where, while the victim was either drunk or asleep, he raped her.

When I say rage I really mean rage. Worst argument I’ve ever had with anyone. He made me cry. Because I ate a strawberry.

— Pawzilla The First (@pawzilla) August 24, 2012

A fun-loving, left-leaning chap who was friends with a number of strong, feminist women:

One night, a group of my friends held a big party in a hotel. Afterwards, a few of the older guests, including this man, invited me up to the room they had rented. I knew that some drinking and kissing and groping might happen. I started to feel ill, and asked if It would be alright if I went to sleep in the room – and I felt safe, because other people were still there. I wasn’t planning to have sex with this man or with anyone else that night, but if I had been, that wouldn’t have made it okay for him to push his penis inside me without a condom or my consent.

The next thing I remember is waking up to find myself being penetrated, and realising that my body wasn’t doing what I told it to. Either I was being held down or – more likely – I was too sick to move. I’ve never been great at drinking, which is why I don’t really do it any more, but this feeling was more profound, and to this day I don’t know if somebody put something in my drink that night. I was horrified at the way his face looked, fucking me, contorted and sweating. My head span. I couldn’t move. I was frightened, but he was already inside me, and I decided it was simplest to turn my face away and let him finish. When he did, I crawled to the corner of the enormous bed and lay there until the sun came up.

In the morning I got up, feeling sick and hurting inside, and took a long, long shower in the hotel’s fancy bathroom. The man who had fucked me without my consent was awake when I came out. He tried to push me down on the bed for oral, but I stood up quickly and put on my dress and shoes. I asked him if he had used a condom. He told me that he ‘wasn’t into latex’, and asked if I was on the pill. I don’t remember thinking ‘I have just been raped’. After all, this guy wasn’t behaving in the manner I had learned to associate with rapists. Rapists are evil people. They’re not nice blokes who everybody respects who simply happen to think it’s ok to stick your dick in a teenager who’s sleeping in the same bed as you, without a condom. This guy seemed, if anything, confused as to why I was scrabbling for my things and bolting out the door. He even sent me an email a few days later, chiding me for being rude.

This is the same ex who pretty much tried to rape me – that caused another argument.

— Pawzilla The First (@pawzilla) August 24, 2012

Some men have a massive sense of entitlement but don’t commit rape. Having a massive sense of entitlement is a necessary precursor to rape, but it doesn’t by itself make a man a rapist.

But all rapists have this massive sense of entitlement.

Fröken A and Fröken W are both clear: They consented to sex with Julian Assange only if he used a condom, and Assange didn’t want to use a condom. For quite a while there was a massive Internet meme going on that Assange was being charged because unprotected sex is illegal in Sweden.

“Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of feminism,” he said. “I fell into a hornets’ nest of revolutionary feminism.”

It would surprise many safe-sex campaigners I know that to insist on a condom when having sex with a new partner is “revolutionary feminism”. They would say, and emphatically, that it’s just common sense: if you’re having penetrative sex and you’re not absolutely confident of your partner’s STD status, use a condom. No man should find that condition surprising, nor – if he has any concern for his sexual partners at all – unwelcome. (Assange claims to find it “baffling“.)

But repeatedly, even though not using a condom makes it easier to prove that non-consensual sexual intercourse took place, many rapists are found not to have used a condom. They want unprotected sex – “not into latex” as Laurie Penny’s rapist put it charmingly, and they don’t care what the woman wants.

Julian Assange has a massive sense of entitlement.

I’m just saying.

The “invite them over the threshold once, they can come in again any time” thing? That’s how vampires work. Not sexual consent. VAMPIRES.

— Tom Phillips (@flashboy) August 20, 2012

Consistently, since her original “Dear Interpol” letter in the Huffington Post in December 2010, Naomi Wolf has been the most high-profile self-identified feminist to argue that Assange did not rape or sexually assault either of the two women. In February 2011 she wrote a much-cited essay Something Rotten in the State of Sweden: 8 Big Problems with the ‘Case’ Against Assange. She’s been outspoken in interviews and at parties – Naomi Wolf slams feminists’ response to the Assange rape prosecution (Thursday, 17th November 2011).

She’s been cited with relief from Cory Doctorow to Reuters:

Even well-known feminist Naomi Wolf criticized the international judicial hunt for Assange, writing that she personally knew “1.3 million guys” with similar complaints made against them by women.

But she had never faced an interview like Mumsnet, yesterday lunchtime (Thursday 6th September) Nor did she seem to be aware that Mumset had launched a campaign in March this year:

called We Believe You, and it has two simple aims. First, we want to shine a spotlight on the prevalence of rape and sexual assault in women’s lives; then, we want to pull apart the many myths surrounding rape, which make so many women feel that they will not be believed if they report this crime.

To all those women, we say: we believe you.

Mumsnet interviewed Naomi Wolf, and it didn’t go as Wolf wanted.

Not even in the questions being posted before Naomi Wolf arrived.

• Are we allowed to ask questions about J****n A*****e?
• Hi Naomi, How does a woman say ‘no’ if she’s asleep? thanks.
• Dear Naomi, Why do you speak so authoritatively on Swedish law when you can’t read Swedish and are not a lawyer? Do you have a response to these criticisms of your statements about the Assange matter? You got so many things factually and legally wrong. Thanks!
• I’m finding it very difficult to understand how Ms Wolf’s participation in a webchat does not invalidate the We Believe You campaign since Ms Wolf has spent the better part of the past 2 years spreading rape myths about a case she clearly does not understand since she has consistently made fallacious remarks about what constitutes rape under Swedish law and fails to understand the legal process in Sweden.
• Hello Naomi, just wondering if you would consider donating your time to rape crisis and womens aid so that you can get a better understanding of rape and the effect it has on survivors? I look forward to your response.
• Ms Wolf, I would like to ask about your assertion, made on Women’s Hour, that Sweden has the highest reported rate of rape, and yet one of the lowest conviction rates in Europe.
  According to the Swedish government this is partly explained by the fact that many crimes which would not be recorded as rape in other countries, are termed so in Sweden. The Swedish justice system also records individual incidents of rape separately so if a woman is raped by a man several times it is recorded as several rapes.
  The rate of conviction is 10%, which when you compare with UK is almost double, and compared with US of around 13%, is in line with other countries (still atrocious but not remarkable).
  I am very surprised that you base your objection to the transfer of Assange back to Sweden to face rape charges on dubious statistics, and disappointed that you would lend your voice to such a campaign.
  I would like to ask you how you reconcile the defence of an alleged rapist with your feminist ideals, and would like to ask MNHQ how they reconcile the invitation of someone who defends a rapist with the We Believe You campaign.
• Hi Naomi How do you think promoting rape myths and defending the right of men to penetrate women who are asleep and therefore cannot consent to sex, fits in with calling yourself a feminist? Also you appear like other Assange fans, to believe that if a woman consents to sex with a man, that means that she consents under any terms and doesn’t have the right to set conditions, like for example that he must wear a condom. Can you explain how that is a feminist position? Because it sounds to me very much closer to a rapey position.
  And Mumsnet, how does having a woman who defends the right of men to penetrate women without their consent if they have had previous sexual intercourse with them on for a webchat, fit in with your “We Believe You” anti-rape campaign?
• Have you read this article on the myths surrounding the Swedish legal system?
  Are you even remotely concerned about the effects that rape myths have on the victims of rape and the prosecution of rapists? Myths that you were perpetuating on Newsnight this week?

• Naomi, I just re-read the original Huffington Post piece you wrote about Assange here and once again am utterly gobsmacked by the viciousness of the tone and your choice to deploy that tone against woman victims in a way that serves to promote dangerous rape myths, such as the belief that women regularly ‘cry rape’ because they are upset about the behaviour of their male sexual partner. I understand from your ‘correction’ that you blame the Mail for your failure to get the facts straight before writing this; however I would like to ask, how, as an experienced journalist, were you so quick to jump into writing an attack piece against these two women without the most cursory checking of the facts? And how can you do that whilst calling yourself a feminist?

Naomi Wolf, Huffington Post, 7th December 2010:

As a longtime feminist activist, I have been overjoyed to discover your new commitment to engaging in global manhunts to arrest and prosecute men who behave like narcissistic jerks to women they are dating.
I see that Julian Assange is accused of having consensual sex with two women, in one case using a condom that broke. I understand, from the alleged victims’ complaints to the media, that Assange is also accused of texting and tweeting in the taxi on the way to one of the women’s apartments while on a date, and, disgustingly enough, ‘reading stories about himself online’ in the cab.
Both alleged victims are also upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first. (Of course, as a feminist, I am also pleased that the alleged victims are using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings. That’s what our brave suffragette foremothers intended!).

• I would also like you to justify your frankly bizarre claim on Newsnight recently that the 6% conviction rate is the result of victim anonymity. (Quote: ‘It had wonderful motivations, but the upshot here is that in Britain, only 6 per cent of reported rapes, which is a small fraction of all rapes, get convicted’) How many rape victims do you think would report if they did not even have that basic right of anonymity? Seriously?
  MNHQ, I admit in the light of the splendid We Believe You campaign I am a touch surprised at your giving airtime to Naomi Wolf. Please promise you won’t be getting George Galloway on next…. confused
• So what is your position on Assange then Naomi?
  If we accept your premise, that this prosecution is politically motivated, does that mean it shouldn’t go ahead even if those women in Sweden are claiming to be raped?
  Should we ignore women who describe being raped in cases where we like the politics of the men accused of raping them?
  I totally agree with you that in normal cases, rape victims are treated shamefully badly and rape allegations are not taken as seriously as they ought to be. But does this mean that because most rape allegations are not pursued with the vigour that they should be, it’s wrong for a state to pursue rape allegations in the case of men the state might not like and the rest of us might admire or agree with on other issues?
  Because you do realise that if that is your position (and it is the position of many people on the left) then it’s not a feminist position, don’t you? It’s a position which says that although women’s rights are all fine and dandy, when it comes to the really important things in life, like fighting imperialism/ poverty/ racism/ insert worthy cause here, women’s human rights have to go to the back of the queue? You do understand that feminism does not accept the premise that women’s human rights come last, don’t you?
  Actually Mumsnet, I’d bloody love it if you got George Galloway on.
• This will be interesting.
  I am *shocked* that Naomi wrote that huff post thing using facts gleaned from the Daily Mail.
  I too would be interested in why Assange’s worry about a theoretical extradition to the US (they haven’t applied for one) trumps the rights of two women to have their case heard.
• I feel really conflicted about this.
  Naomi Wolf was a hero for many years, I LOVED The Beauty Myth, read all her other books, even the dire Fire with Fire, and generally read her articles with interest and respect.
  I admit I have not followed the Assange case closely, but thanks to these links on this thread, I see that Wolf has adopted a very surprising and disappointing stance which seems to have liberal politics trumping feminism.
  Naomi – are you willing to rescind your original misinformed article about Swedish law / Assange’s case?
  How do you feel knowing you have disappointed so many people who by instinct and intellect self identify as feminists (ie a constituency you presumably identify with)?

Naomi Wolf: [enters, stage right]

Hello — I am glad to be here and have always admired the Mumsnet community. I will be talking about Vagina: A New Biography, which is about the latest neuroscience about women’s sexuality and how that relates to their courage and confidence, but I want to clear the air by addressing some issues first.

I want to set straight very strongly and clearly for the record a number of misconceptions that are around in the UK press right now, and that I see reflected in some ways below.

A) I don’t ‘support Julian Assange’ in the sense of defending anything he may be found to have done in terms of accusations of sexual assault. I have — based on my twenty-three years as a worker in rape crisis centers and battered women’s shelters, and as an advocate for women’s rights, due process and the rule of law, consistently pointed out — most recently this week in a globally syndicated column, www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sweden-s-other-rape-suspects-by-naomi-wolf which is why the UK press’ misstatement of my position is indefensible — that rape victims in Sweden whose assailants are NOT wanted by the US government face underfunded hotlines, brutal neglect by police, the highest rape rates and some of the lowest convictions in Europe — and that a situation in which the whole world waits for an accused assailant while thousands of injured, traumatized and desperate women are ignored by the same police and prosecutors — is a terrible miscarriage of justice for RAPE VICTIMS all over the world whose attackers are not pursued in the same way.

I also make the case that the US government is entirely capable of cynically making use of women’s issues to pursue its own agenda but that this cooption of this crucial women’s issue by my government has no bearing on whatever happened between these people, which should be pursued in a court of law with a single justice system, and with the US government, which cares nothing about the rights of rape victims in this case, not involved. No ALWAYS means No. Having sex with a sleeping partner who is not consenting is ALWAYS legally and morally rape.

No other reporter has called the Swedish Rape Crisis line — I did because, as a counselor for rape victims, I know these are the only people who really understand what Swedish rape victims go through. They described official neglect or worse, which is what rape victims face from police all over the world.

Over six hundred women in Sweden are waiting fruitlessly for space in shelters, trying to flee violent sexually abusive men. So once again: I am against the hijacking of the rape issue for unrelated government agendas that have nothing to do with justice and the wellbeing of rape victims and I am FOR justice and support for every single rape victim in the world, as my quarter-century advocating on their behalf and supporting them as a volunteer should make clear beyond any doubt. Now I look forward to our discussion.

• So should Assange be extradited so that he can face questions about rape allegations?
  What is your actual position on that?
• It is terrible when rape victims are subjected to police neglect or are disbelieved. Rape victims often find that, just as we think our ordeal is over, it is actually just beginning.
  These injustices are compounded by hacky poorly researched articles sneering snidely at them and rewriting their trauma and violation as “personally injured feelings”.
  Would you agree Naomi?
• With respect Naomi, the issue is not the UK press’s misrepresentation of your position. Please credit us with more intelligence than this. Our concerns arise from your own words, in articles you wrote and interviews you have given.

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]

• The fact that loads of other alleged rapists are not being pursued does not seem a good reason not to chase a prosecution for the one who happens to be well known.
• Naomi – Women Against Rape have also stated publicly that they feel, after so many years of fighting for rape victims’ rights that the Assange case is being hijacked for political reasons, largely men who don’t usually give a sh*t about the subject. But they have now been called ‘anti-women’. However it has also brought out of the woodwork a huge number of those that before one wouldn’t have known were apologists for rape, like Galloway and Todd Akin. Surely Assange should go to Sweden and face up to the charges, if he is innocent?
• Naomi – Do you think that the rights of Assange are more important than the rights of two women who accused him of serious sexual assault and rape?
  And what does that signal to any woman raped by an important political figure?
  Should DSK not have been investigated because of his political standing? Maybe that was a conspiracy too.
  This is why it is important that these cases come to trial. Because it is not up to journalists or bloggers to decide, but a judge and jury.
• My vagina gets really upset at the thought of rape victims being told they should lose their anonymity
• So, let’s get this straight, it seems you think they should lay off Assange because not every rape victim is privileged with the same political backing?
• My vagina’s a bit confused about whether you think Assange should face trial for rape allegations or not, Naomi.
  My brain’s a bit confused about it as well.
  To say nothing of my nipples. They’re waiting hopefully for a straight answer to that.

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]

• Mine too – almost weeps,
• What’s your favourite biscuit?

Naomi Wolf:

This is why it is important that these cases come to trial. Because it is not up to journalists or bloggers to decide, but a judge and jury.
I completely agree, a judge and jury should decide and I think progress is being made by Hague suggesting that if the US seeks to extradite (to send Assange to GTMO for reasons completely unrelated to the sexual allegations, they want to extradite him under the Espionage Act for releasing state secrets) Sweden should not extradite. Of course everyone should have a fair trial.

• Naomi published this letter in the Huffington Post without bothering to research the case properly. She based her opinion on an entirely discredited article in the Daily Mail and a retraction was printed since Wolf got the facts wrong. In this letter, she writes numerous rape myths. The actual title is Julian Assange: Captured by the World’s Dating Police. This is only one instance where Wolf’s words make a complete mockery of the We Believe You campaign.
• The condom didn’t break. He stopped the woman reaching for it.
  This is quite basic research really.

Naomi Wolf:

So that headline is not mine: editors post their own headlines and I do not agree with it. It was an immediate reaction of frustration to how millions of other women are completely neglected as I wrote above and I certainly regret my phrasing.

I do not write or post rape myths. My concern is always to support rape victims and support prosecution and conviction of rapists.

• I must have missed the bit where sticking your penis into a woman who was sleeping constitutes consensual sex. Weirdly, I’ve always assumed that women need to be, you know, awake to consent to sex. Silly me.
• What part of rape counselling training suggests sarky public pisstaking as being beneficial to survivors of rape?
• Can’t believe a feminist would take that trivialising, minimising and silencing tone about alleged rape victims, tbh.
  Bloody shocking, that letter.

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]

• Sorry, silly me, ALLEGED survivors of rape.

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]

• That letter is disgraceful.
  You should be ashamed.
• This the Twilight Zone *shock*

Naomi Wolf:

see my statement.

• This is embarrassing.

Naomi Wolf:

That letter is disgraceful.
You should be ashamed.
I do totally regret it.

• Naomi – Have you read the article linked earlier by David Allen Green where he discussed the legal implications of extraditing JA to Sweden and the chance of him being further extradited to US?
  Leading legal experts have stated that JA is safer from extradition to US if he returns to Sweden. Why would he want to prevent that, other than because he is trying to avoid a rape conviction.
• ‘I do not write or post rape myths.’
  How can you say that when that is EXACTLY what that Huff Post article was doing? If you have spent as much time supporting rape victims as you say you must be aware of the very widespread and damaging myth that women ‘cry rape’ when displeased with the behaviour of their male sexual partner. That was exactly what you were promulgating the idea of their having done in that piece.
  Perhaps you should admit that on this case you did write a rape myth, and try harder not to do it again?
• Yes our culture does ignore and trivialise lots of issues to do with women doesn’t it Naomi.
  Rape’s another one it ignores and trivialises. It doesn’t help when self-identified feminists buy into that by publishing open letters mocking alleged rape victims.
  - OK, sorry, cross posted, you’ve apologised for that letter so I’ll shut up about it. Thank you.
• oh dear, where has she gone. have you all scared her off!

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]

• I am just….speechless really.
  How on earth can you identify yourself as a feminist and yet be the author of that letter?
  You may well regret it – I am glad you do – but you wrote it. You sat down and thought of those vile words, sentences and paragraphs.
  You then took the time to send it to the editor of the publication in question.
  Let’s not pretending was a spur of the moment action, shall we?
  I think the whole concept of feminism is harmed by women like you.
  And it saddens me greatly to say that.
• In the Democracy Now debate with Jaclyn Friedman you cast doubt on one of Assange’s alleged victims because she went on to spend time with him afterwards and threw a party for him.

From the transcript:

Jaclyn Friedman: And I am speaking on behalf of the rape victims that I work with every day, and I’m speaking on behalf of myself as a rape victim whose situation was accused to have not been cut and dry, because you know what most women hear when they allege rape? They hear, “Oh, well, it’s ambiguous. We really can’t do much about this.” You know how endemic that is, and how much that is the reason rape is not reported and prosecuted?
Naomi Wolf: Well, I do. I do know, Jaclyn, which is why —
Jaclyn Friedman: It’s the exact thing you’re saying right here: “Oh, it’s not a real, cut-and-dried rape.”
Naomi Wolf: Jaclyn, please do not twist what I’m saying.
Jaclyn Friedman: And that is insulting to victims worldwide.
Naomi Wolf: What I’m saying is, it’s because —
Jaclyn Friedman: You just said it!

• This is actually quite common, in fact many victims go on to have a relationship with their rapist (not to mention those who are raped within the context of an ongoing relationship) – there isn’t a correct way to behave after you’ve been raped.
  How do you think your comments will have affected rape victims who have continued to be pleasant and amenable to the men who have raped them?

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]

• Were you surprised at the backlash against that letter?
  Have you heard of the Mumsnet We Believe You Campaign?
  It is the reason for your rather hostile reception here. It was a very personal campaign for many of us and we find it very hard to see a ‘leading feminist’ trampling on all the work that we did to draw attention to rape myths.

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]

• Naomi – if you’ve spent so much time supporting rape victims, how come you don’t know these basic things about rape?
  Like for example, many rape victims continue to have relationships with their rapists after they have raped them.
  How can you not know this?
  Seriously, I am not taking the piss, either you’re not aware of this, which seems incredible if you genuinely have worked a lot with organisations which support rape victims and survivors, or you chose to ignore that in order to make a political point, knowing that most of your readers would accept your basic premise.
  Seriously, how could you?

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]

• How do you define “non-violent rape” because I have never ever heard a feminist use that term. Rape is, by definition, violence. It can be accompanied by other forms of physical violence but the act of rape is always violent.
  The idea that there is a difference between violent rape and non-violent rape is a rape myth.

Naomi Wolf:

See below, I said there is no such thing as a nonviolent rape and my 2The Traumatized Vagina” chapter goes further than anything I have ever read to put together all of the latest data on how lastingly damaging in new ways we have not understood, any kind of rape or sexual abuse is to women, and I am glad to hear that prosecutors and lawyers representing victims are using that chapter in their aim to put rapists away.

• Erm, I think you’ll find the British laws on rape have been doing that since well before your book was published.
• I hope all those rapey men in the Occupy movement read your book and realise they are actually missing out on great sex by being mean. If only they just knew, it could transform everything!
• I can’t quite put my finger on it, but all this ‘traumatized vagina” thing makes me very squirmy. I realise you are trying to reclaim the word, and all that goes along with that, but it just doesn’t sit right. Is it just me??
  Is it that you are isolating one part of my womanhood for scrutiny when I am much more than a vagina?
• Yes and if we let them know that the more housework a man does, the more sex he gets, they’ll just abolish patriarchy completely won’t they BoF?
  Job done.
• Please can we come back to your claim on Newsnight that victim anonymity is a cause of the 6% conviction rate? How does that work, because it goes against everything I have heard from rape victims and those who work with them. Victim anonymity is usually considered to be a vital condition in allowing victims to report.
• I am still a bit open mouthed at the letter, for which I see you express regret, you haven’t been on my radar since The Beauty Myth. What happened to you? How will you regain credibility?

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]

• I see she is pointedly ignoring the questions about her promulgation of rape myths. *hmm*

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]
Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions some more]

• Naomi – Are you surprised by the line of questioning prevalent on this thread? Were you expecting such a grilling? Do you get such feedback in real life? Do your friends agree with the line you took on Assange?

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]

• In the light of the strength of feeling about your letter in the Huffington post and if you genuinely regret it now, have you considered submitting an open-letter apology to the two women?
  I think your ideas are really interesting, and it would be a shame if this incident overshadows your future work.
  I always have respect for people how are honest enough to fess up when they get it wrong

Naomi Wolf:

That is a good idea.

• Why does victim anonymity result in a low rape conviction rate?
  My vagina is positively tying itself in knots trying to work it out.
• I am interested in that question too

Naomi Wolf:

Because it covers up malfeasance and prosecutorial neglect, no one is accountable to rape victims for low conviction rates and rapists go free.

• “I did not understand why for throughout recorded history, the vagina and female sexuality had been targeted, abused etc. Now I do, because of the brain-vagina link. The point of the book is that you are much more than a vagina and your vagina is much more than a ‘mere’ sex organ.”
  I think the actual research into this focuses on the control of reproduction. It isn’t really about your vagina but rather who gets to dictate the contents of the uterus. Frankly, suggesting that mass rape is because of the vagina-brain relationship is so utterly offensive that I don’t even know where to begin. It’s certainly not what Gloria Steinem is arguing with the Women Under Siege institute.
• I think the brain-vagina link is actually fascinating.
  I think the arse-mouth link is also an area worthy of further research. Just how do some people come to talk out of their bottoms?

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]

• So when rape victims didn’t have anonymity, were reporting and conviction rates higher and were fewer women raped?
• But anonymity is a completely separate issue from those things. Victims who wish to waive their anonymity to complain about neglect by police and prosecution can choose to do so, and many do.
  How exactly is naming of victims supposed to lead to greater accountability? And what prevents it deterring large numbers of victims from coming forward?

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]

• “Because it covers up malfeasance and prosecutorial neglect”
  Can you explain that a bit more clearly please? Are you only referring to the American or UK justice system?
  You are aware, aren’t you, of the strong societal pressures against women reporting rape and the persecution (see the Assange case) of any women who does publicly name their rapist? Surely working, as you have claimed, in rape crisis centres has made you aware of this? How then, do you propose to defend women who do report rape from the societal backlash that she will inevitably suffer?
• Dear ms Wolf, Since rapists and other abusive males really are the number one thing that leads to vaginal/female unhappiness, it would be really excellent if you went ahead with your promise to write an official apology for defending Assange

Naomi Wolf [fails to answer these questions]

• Naomi, your response to the Assange matter is disingenuous at best. You haven’t responded to the criticisms of your assertions made by people with a lot more knowledge of Swedish law, and law generally, than you (eg:)
  I find it gobsmacking that you have bought into the conspiracy theory myths put forward by the nutty Assange supporters without taking the time to actually research UK extradition law or indeed read any of legal blog posts written for lay people (eg: the David Allen Green article in the New Statesman cited above).
  So disappointed. If this is how you research law, then I worry about how you research science.
  Your sloppy research and willingness to manipulate research and conclusions to suit your assumptions discredits your academic credibilities I am afraid. Good luck for getting through the Oxford DPhil.

Naomi Wolf:

Rapists rape with impunity in the US the UK and throughout western europe. In the UK only sic per cent of REPORTED rapes are ever prosecuted and you can’t even find conviction rates. In two years at the UK rape crisis center where I worked we had ONE prosecution, zero convictions.
What I see if that rape survivors are treated like shit with or without anonymity — by the courts and by the outcomes and by not enough helplines or centers etc etc etc. There will be a backlash just as there was when gay people started to eschew anonymity and come out to fight back against homophobic assaults. Their position was: this is not my shame. And now homophobic attacks are better documented, better prosecuted and paradoxivcally perhaps there is far less shame in being the subject of such an attack. I believe this is the analogy. It is not rape victims’ shame, it is the rapists’ shame.

• God, is it nearly over yet. I’ve got cramp in my feet from all the cringing.
• dear lord please beam me up.
  the tories are in for another couple of years and feminists are telling us we just need to shag better and patriarchy will fall.
  i can’t cope anymore.
• But anonymity is OPTIONAL – the rape victim can waive that right. You are trying to take away that option.

Naomi Wolf:

So this had certainly been a very frank discussion and that is good. I appreciate the chance to talk directly with you and hope to do so more. Thank you for your time and comments and please do reach out if you have more you want me to think about — yours Naomi

• Rapists rape with impunity everywhere not just in the UK or USA.
  I’m sure you have witnessed or at least been aware of the huge level of abuse that has fallen on Assange’s accusers. As soon as their anonymity was removed (illegally I should note) they were subject to an unrelenting torrent of abuse, rape threats, death treats etc. their names have been published, their previous sexual behaviour examined in minute detail and the underlying message is they were lying sluts who deserved everything they got because they were stupid enough to claim their right to have a sex life.
  If their anonymity had been kept, don’t you think they would not have been doorstopped, had their email addresses and phone numbers published, had their home address published so every conspiracy theorist could accuse them of being a USA stooge, been hounded in public and in private nor been subject to the daily excruciating process of going about their daily life?
  Surely, watching what happened to these women would make any sane woman think very carefully about accusing any person of rape? The very case you are an apologist for is a stark example of what happens to women who speak publicly.
  Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?
• So.
  George Galloway next?
• That went well
  Thank you Naomi and I look forward to reading your open letter of apology to those two women.

I’m sure we all do. Well done, Mumsnet.

(They gave her a hard time on the “science” in her latest book, too, which was what most of her non-answers to the questions about rape myths and rape victims were about.)

People have been asking, how did Jimmy Savile get away with rape and sexual abuse, hundreds of victims, for so long?

Rape culture.

This cartoon in the Daily Mail today shows how Savile did it.

His victims knew no one would believe them, they’d be laughed at and told they were liars.

How’s about that, then? They were right.

Click for larger image. The cartoon depicts two police officers outside the BBC, interviewing a homeless woman, with the clear implication that she is lying about having been raped by Jimmy Savile. “Mac on… The victims of Jimmy Savile filing compensation claims worth millions”.

(From the actual facts, which clearly didn’t worry “Mac” when he saw a chance to make a rape joke, there are so many victims, and so many institutions which were clearly negligent, that the total cost of all of the compensation claims will very likely be millions. It took the Daily Mail to leap from that to “So they’re lying in order to get the money”.)

The Mail has form for this:

The media plays a big role in the assertion that false accusations are as common (if not more) than rape and in implanting the belief that the majority of rape accusations are false. This appears to be a twist of logic around what being convicted of a crime means. It goes thus – the rape conviction rate is 6.5%. Therefore, the argument opines, every rape that is not convicted must be a false accusation. However, this ignores the fact that a false accusation of rape is also a crime.

Of course I am going to pick on the Daily Mail as they really are the worst offenders when it comes to deliberately misleading their readers over what a false accusation of rape is. When you search for ‘falsely accused of rape’ on their site, you are greeted with a list of headlines where the word rape is always presented in inverted commas (‘rape’; ‘sex attack’ ‘rape victim’), a punctuation device that implies disbelief. Stories where the man has been acquitted are presented as ‘cry rape’ stories and deemed to be false accusations – even when no-one has been found guilty of that crime (“Cry rape victim’s hell: Mr X was found not guilty of raping the woman last year after she claimed he had taken advantage of her while she was too drunk to consent to sex.”). When someone has been found guilty of false accusations then this story is likely to be printed, despite the fact that the 2,000 rapes that happen each week in the UK rarely make the headlines. This means that there is an over-representation of stories on a rare crime, and a real lack of representation of a far commoner crime.
….
Meanwhile, editorial from Melanie Phillips, Richard Littlejohn and Peter Hitchens repeat and perpetuate the myth that most claims of rape are false, stating that unless a rape is by a stranger, and accompanied with additional physical violence or weapon, then they are incidents where the woman regrets consensual sex the next day.

And to that we must now add the cartoonist “Mac”.

False reports of car theft are more common than false reports of rape.

Challenging the prevailing narrative is difficult, and the more outrageously wrong the narrative the more difficult it becomes to challenge. This may seem counterintuitive, but the problem is that a really false narrative is usually based on at least two if not more false premises, all of which have to be debunked at the same time in order to show how outrageously wrong the narrative is. Rape is a topic which has multiple false narratives, and even the construction of these false stories is difficult to talk about.

To challenge the prevailing narrative of rape in the tabloids requires a whole chorus of feminists debunking – something that’s surprisingly difficult to assemble.

Laurie Penny writes:

Sexism is so consistent a feature of the culture of media in Britain that it has become easy to overlook, like the whine of an alarm that has sounded for so long you’ve learned to ignore it. Until a few years ago, it was the modern “problem with no name”. However much it hurt to have to see slut-shaming, rape-apologism, victim-blaming and sexual objectification in the press every day over our cornflakes, women just had to ignore it, because challenging media misogyny in any way was next to impossible. It was just “the way things were”.

Simon Jenkins asks blandly:

It is hard to see what real benefit will come from any of this. The case is awash in malice, vilification, exaggeration and litigation. After today’s grilling, the BBC might well decide never again to let a child near a male studio presenter. Hospitals will be advised to recruit chaperones for males in children’s wards. MPs would apparently deplore anyone permitting children near adult strangers.

Or, you know. When a teenage girl says she’s been raped, even if she’s accusing a man with the stature of Jimmy Savile, believe her. Why is that so impossible, so unspeakable an objective?

Four charities who brought tabloid sexism into the Leveson enquiry: Eaves, End Violence Against Women, Equality Now, and Object.

Update, in relation to a conspiracy theory about the Freemasons brought up in the comments: Jimmy Savile was a Catholic. As William Oddie wrote in the Catholic Herald on 7th November 2011, he was born into a Catholic family, he went to a Catholic school, he was regular attender at Mass for his entire life:

But why not mention that an important part of his life was attending daily Mass? There’s a deep dedication in the life of a man who gives away 90 per cent of everything he earns and so tirelessly does all the other things he did. You’d think that an obituarist would want to ask a simple question: where did all that come from? It’s almost as though they couldn’t bear to accept that the answer was his Catholicism: even that Catholicism itself could ever be the source of actual human goodness.

From EWTN Global Catholic Network: What is the Catholic Church’s official position on Freemasonry? Are Catholics free to become Freemasons? the official position is that Catholicism is regarded as incompatible with being a Mason:

The Church has imposed the penalty of excommunication on Catholics who become Freemasons. The penalty of excommunication for joining the Masonic Lodge was explicit in the 1917 code of canon law (canon 2335), and it is implicit in the 1983 code (canon 1374).

Because the revised code of canon law is not explicit on this point, some drew the mistaken conclusion that the Church’s prohibition of Freemasonry had been dropped. As a result of this confusion, shortly before the 1983 code was promulgated, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a statement indicating that the penalty was still in force. This statement was dated November 26, 1983 and may be found in 13/27 (Nov. 15, 1983), 450.

The Catholic Encyclopedia goes into this in some more detail, noting more than 17 papal pronouncements against Freemasonry since 1738. Not only was Jimmy Savile’s character (solitary and unsocial) antithetical to Freemasonry, it’s improbable that he would ever, as a practicing Catholic, have joined the Masons – or been accepted had he wished to join.

From Bullied by the Boss:

There are rumours that, as well as being a paedophile, Savile was both a con man and a bully. And it was the dangerous combination of con man and workplace bully that allowed him to operate an open paedophile ring whilst employed with the BBC. It enabled him to tow a caravan around the country with a mattress in the back and abuse vulnerable girls at leisure.

If ever there was a reason to address ego maniacs bullying others in the workplace – this is it.

The company that produces “Keep Calm And Hit Her” t-shirts that were available on Amazon til this morning claims they were computer-generated, are not actually for sale, and have now been removed.

The vendor who sells these has been on Ebay since 2003, runs an online shop, and has 100% positive feedback.

“You say I never lift a finger to help around the house. Well, here it is, baby.”
For sale here.

“If you’re looking for sympathy, you’ll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis” for sale here.

“Cambridge University Netball Team” is for sale here.

The above four t-shirts are just plain nasty: the last four are openly pro-rape.

“Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. Yes is the answer” is for sale here.

“There’s a fine line between cuddling and holding someone down so that they can’t get away” is for sale here.

“#3 Never Fail Chat Up Lines: Excuse me darling does this old rag smell like chloroform to you” is for sale here.

“Statistically, 9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape” is for sale here.

On 8th August, PZ Myers published an email from a woman he knows and trusts (but who had asked Myers not to name her) at his blog. The email said that a well-known figure in the American skeptics community had

“coerced me into a position where I could not consent, and then had sex with me”.

Several other named and unnamed sources, known and considered credible by PZ Myers, have confirmed the incident and have described what may be other similar incidents:

…he deliberately got her very drunk while flirting with her — a story that corroborates a particular pattern of sexual assault. All of these are people PZ knows, and whose reliability he is vouching for.

It’s been noted that there will be no legal repercussions for this man, though there may be social repercussions:

So the best we can hope for as far as repercussions are that because his name is so popular, the accusations against him will give his potential future victims pause against trusting him enough to drink with or spend time alone with him. This might hurt his feelings, but it will not ruin his career or his life.

I’ve not mentioned the man’s name because I’d never heard of him before, and I’m fully expecting that most British readers of this blog haven’t either. He demanded that PZ Myers remove this post by 14th August: when Myers did not, he said he would prosecute Myers for defamation.

A supporter set up an indiegogo fund for people to contribute money for the purpose of prosecuting PZ Myers, for publishing these statements from named and unnamed sources.

(In the US, in principle, if a statement is proved to be true it cannot then be regarded as defamatory: and further, it is a known legal defense that you are allowed to report / pass on information as a general information or warning of danger: intent to defame must be proven.)

The man says himself:

My reputation is all I have. I did nothing wrong–legally or morally–and I intend to defend myself and prosecute Myers until he issues a retraction and apology, as stated by my attorney.

As with all such fundraisers, there are rewards for donating bigger and bigger sums – a month’s free subscription to an atheist journal, a year’s free subscription, a lifetime subscription if you give a thousand dollars.

It was the reward for donating five thousand dollars that got to me. Ahem. In a case that’s about a man who is said to have a pattern of getting women drunk and then sexually harassing, molesting, or raping them, the five thousand dollar reward is …

Well well.

They fell asleep and she woke up by his penetrating her. She immediately asked if he was wearing anything. He answered: “You.” She said: “You better not have HIV.” He said: “Of course not.” 12th July 2011

The longer Julian Assange delays his return to Sweden to be questioned by the police, charged with rape and sexual assault, and for the Swedish justice system to decide what to do with him, the less likely it is that he will ever be tried at all. It is already three and a half years since two women went to the police to discover if they could force Julian Assange to have an HIV test and, in the process of describing what had happened, gave evidence that Assange had attempted sexual assault on one woman and raped the other woman.

Since 19th June 2012, Assange has lived in a room in Knightsbridge, a guest of the embassy of Ecuador, his request for asylum accepted by the President of a nation who has little concern for free speech. Assange has, in effect, sent himself to jail without trial under much more unpleasant conditions than he would have been subject to in Sweden: where he would have been unlikely – even if found guilty – to have been sentenced to more than three years. If he intends to imprison himself in Knightsbridge until the statute of limitations expires in Sweden, he will stay there til August 2020.

Let’s just be clear about what Julian Assange is alleged to have done: both women consented to sexual intercourse with him if and only if he used a condom. Both women say that getting Assange to agree to that was a struggle, and that he attempted to circumvent their wishes: one woman says that the next morning, while she was asleep, Assange entered her without a condom and therefore without her consent. That was rape.

The number of men who dismiss this as not really rape, who ignore or gloss over the issue of women who didn’t know Julian Assange’s HIV status (who still don’t) wanting him to use a condom for intercourse: it’s disturbing. Whether or not you are one of those men, if you want to believe that the women are lying, that this was a “honeytrap”, that the Swedish authorities only pursued the charge because they wanted to send Assange to the US – that’s all been discussed, ad nauseum, in 2012.

Just consider; the earliest and most consistent Wikileaks spin on the case was and still is: “Julian Assange is accused of sex without a condom” which, the Wikileaks spinners claimed unblushingly, “is illegal under Swedish law”.

(It isn’t. What is illegal under both Swedish and UK law, is for a man to penetrate a woman without her consent. If she’s given her consent only conditionally “if you use a condom”, then for him to penetrate her without a condom, when she is asleep and cannot give consent: that is rape.)

From “Ghosting” by Andrew O’Hagan:

I picked up my papers and went into the dining room with Julian. After a little while, [Sarah Harrison, Assange’s personal assistant and girlfriend] joined us. I wanted to discuss the book’s structure. Julian said we should consider having a chapter called ‘Women’.

‘I thought this was going to be like a manifesto,’ Sarah said.

Julian bristled slightly. They were a proper couple: flirting and fighting and not-saying. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘but with personal history woven through.’

‘I just think …’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘Just …’

‘Don’t worry.’ She turned to me. ‘He’s got such appalling, sleazy stories about women you wouldn’t believe it. I don’t want to hear all that.’

‘Hold on,’ he said.

‘No. Sorry. I don’t think that’s what the book’s about, your stories of sleeping with women.’

He wanted again to discuss Nick Davies, the Guardian reporter who had worked with him on the initial newspaper deal to publish the leaks. ‘The problem was he was in love with me,’ said Julian. ‘Not sexually. But just in love with me. Like I was this younger guy he wanted to be.’ He said the same thing about the Icelandic politician and activist Birgitta Jónsdóttir: ‘She was in love with me.’ I knew from then on that any understanding of him would involve a recognition of his narcissism. ‘I went to the local pub,’ he said, ‘and the people in the bar were gossiping about me, while I was there. One of them said: “The local ladies will be pleased.”’

On Valentine’s Day, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance released an ad celebrating sex with condoms. I saw it again on Joe.My.God’s blog on Friday, the same day LRB published Andrew O’Hagan’s account of ghostwriting Assange’s autobiography. And I thought of Julian Assange, imprisoned in a room in London rather than go to Sweden to stand trial for rape and sexual assault, and his aggrieved insistence that the whole problem was scary Swedish feminists wanting him to use condoms.

And all those men who think that a woman’s conditional consent to intercourse only with a condom doesn’t matter and who bluffly defend Assange because not using a condom when the woman’s asked you to isn’t actually rape, is it?

Come together to fight AIDS. Come together to celebrate joyous, consensual, enthusiastic safe sex. And condoms.

• Wikileaks is not Assange

Nigel Evans is a conservative and a Conservative.

He’s been a Conservative politician since 1985, when he was elected a councillor for West Glamorgan (the former administrative county in Wales that is now Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot). In 1992, he won Ribble Valley in Lancashire for the Conservative Party, and held it for them until last year when he lost the Tory Whip and became an independent. He held it through the 1997, 2001, 2005, and 2010 general elections.

From June 2001 to November 2003, Evans was Shadow Secretary of State for Wales: he was appointed a Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party from November 2004 to December 2005: from June 2010 to 10th September 2013, he was First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means – that is, the second deputy Speaker of the House.

He is also, as I find from his Wikipedia page, a disbeliever in man-made climate change and was a fan of The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Nigel Evans is on trial for rape, indecent assault twice, and six counts of sexual assault, and it is further alleged by the prosecution that the following named, senior Conservatives knew of his record of sexual assaults at least since 2003. Evans denies all charges.

Conservatives named by the prosecution as aware Evans had sexually assaulted someone:

• Patrick McLoughlin, Conservative MP for Derbyshire Dales since 1986, and now Secretary of State for Transport;
• Michael Fabricant, MP for Lichfield in Staffordshire since 1992, Lord Commissioner of the Treasury, Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party for Parliamentary Campaigning;
• Iain Corby, managing director of the Policy Research Unit – who, incidentally, appears to have deleted both his personal and professional Twitter accounts;
• John Randall, MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip since 1997, who was until October last year the Deputy Chief Whip;
• Mark Hoban, MP for Fareham, who was until October last year Iain Duncan Smith’s deputy at DWP.

There are also several other named and unnamed less senior Conservative MPs who apparently knew or should have known about Evans. But nothing was done until someone told John Bercow in March 2013, who reported the situation to the police.

Nigel Evans came out as gay in the Mail on Sunday in 2010, apparently advised to do so by other MPs a year earlier who had construed his behaviour over the years as a drinking problem combined with living in the closet:

A year before the 2010 general election, Mr Evans was advised by Mr McLoughlin, now a minister for transport, to come out as gay, the court heard. This followed an alleged assault on a parliamentary aide who claimed the Tory grabbed hold of his penis as he slept at his home in Pendleton, Lancashire, which was also reported to Tory whip Michael Fabricant.

The alleged incident was also discussed with Iain Corby, Corby, managing director of the Policy Research Unit, Mr McLoughlin and his deputy John Randall. The jury was told that the timing was considered “unfortunate” because it was less than a year before a general election.

It was agreed that Mr Evans should not resign – despite the wishes of the alleged victim that he do so – but would seek help for his drinking and that he should “not put himself in situations which could be misconstrued”. He was then told that he should come out as gay, said Mark Heywood QC, for the prosecution.

When Nigel Evans decided to stand for election as Deputy Speaker in 2010, Conor Burns – who had once helped Evans to bed and away from a young man he had allegedly sexually assaulted in the Number 10 bar of the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool during the 2003 Conservative party conference – advised him to
“socialise with MPs and not with young people or researchers”. It’s alleged that a “plastered” Nigel Evans, at that 2003 Blackpool conference, had approached a young man who was drinking with a journalist friend and put his hands down his trousers. This incident was reported to a member of the Conservative Party Board and is said to have been referred to Mark Hoban, then a junior Tory Party whip.

Although the party worker was “clearly upset and considered that he was a victim of a sexual assault”, he did not want the matter referred to the police or to become a disciplinary matter.

What else could a young man who wanted a career in the Tory party say when he had been handled by a man who had been a Conservative MP for 11 years, had been Shadow Secretary of State for Wales, was shortly to become a Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party? I doubt very much if Mark Hoban – presuming reports are accurate – urged the young man to report the assault to the police.

Nigel Evans said in September 2013, when he resigned as Deputy Speaker:

“As many of you will know following recent allegations, I was charged with alleged offences yesterday. I now have the opportunity to robustly defend my innocence and seek acquittal. I have therefore decided the best course of action is for me to return to the backbenches and this is a decision I have made myself after careful consideration.

“I did not have the Conservative whip as deputy speaker and I am not seeking its return until after the conclusion of events. I will sit as an independent MP for the Ribble Valley.”

Research has tended to show that most rapists commit multiple acts of rape and sexual assault. Rape is not a consequence of drinking too much, or of living in the closet, or of getting “mixed signals”: rape is a violent act of sexual entitlement.

Nigel Evans is entitled to a fair trial. But, supposing that he is convicted, and that it is proved all of these senior Conservative party members and MPs knew and did nothing until John Bercow finally went outside of the party and parliamentary structure and told the police (after Evans had, allegedly, raped a young man who was staying in his house after a party): what are the consequences for them?

None, I suspect. The Catholic Church has long demonstrated that knowing, and doing nothing, but urging the rapist to mend his ways, is an excellent method of escaping any legal sanction. But I hope, under the circumstances, that Rape Crisis Centres in each of those constituencies hold a very special hustings before the 2015 general election.

In December 2012, an 18-year-old athlete who belonged to the Aldershot, Farnham, and District Athletic club orally raped a 12-year-old girl.

The athlete’s name is Adam Hulin. You can see how promising he is as an athlete here.

A 12-year-old child is agreed by law and by ethics not to be old enough to be able to consent to sex. (Exceptions are sometimes made, humanely, when two children of about the same age get together and everything is consensual even if neither of the kids are really old enough. This does not apply when an 18-year-old uses a 12-year-old for sex: that is statutory rape.)

Adam Hulin pleaded guilty to oral rape and assault by penetration in Guildford Crown Court two weeks ago. He claimed the 12-year-old girl had lied about her age and looked “17 or 18″. The judge commented “I certainly wouldn’t want to do anything which would prejudice his future career” and let him off with community service and a £60 fine.

The girl’s mother said that her daughter “first interacted with Hulin on Facebook and then went out with him on her own for a drive in his car a short time later.”

She said he gave her a soft drink mixed with vodka before committing the offences and knew she was 12-years-old.

She said: “He’s lying about not knowing how old she was. He asked her on Facebook what [school] year she was in. When she said year seven, he replied with ‘that’s cute’.

“He knew how old she was when he plied her with alcohol.

“She didn’t see him as a threat. There’s no way she looked 17 or 18 when she was 12.

Chiller has linked to how to complain to the Attorney General about the light sentence and the judge’s disturbingly dismissive attitude to an 18-year-old rapist.

Amanda Marcotte notes in an article on sexual assault on US campuses, that while sexual assault is a common crime, rapists are far rarer: most rapists commit multiple rapes. Most 18-year-old young men would not react to a 12-year-old girl by raping her mouth and assaulting her by penetration. Adam Hulin took the trouble to get the little girl off on her own, buy her an Orange Fanta so that she wouldn’t taste the vodka (he got her to drink six or seven shots), and then sexually assaulted her in the back of his car while she was drunk. And has just been told by a judge that it’s okay – it’s just community service and a fine, not worth ruining his career.

The girl is clear she didn’t consent to sex, and it was noted by the prosecution that Adam Hulin asked her on his Facebook page what year at school she was in: when she said “year 7″ (last year of primary school) he said “cute”. His defence was that he thought she was over 16. But even if he thought she was, getting her on her own, getting her drunk, and raping her mouth while she did not consent, was still rape.

Let’s also look at a list Chris Coltrane was circulating on Twitter today, from the Metro, billed as “27 Annoying Things Men Do During Sex”. As Coltrane notes: these aren’t “annoying” – they’re sexual assault. Redefining sexual assault as merely “annoying” allows Adam Hulin to act as if he’s the injured party because the girl he raped told her parents and he found himself in court, facing a sympathetic judge who thinks it would be a shame to ruin his career just because he likes to get little girls drunk and sexually assault them.

Grace Dent wrote last year about the Oxfordshire sex ring:

The second cultural problem we have in British society is predatory older men of every race identifying poor, young, emotionally broken women in care homes and sink estates as easy pickings for abuse. Whether it be Savile and his establishment friends inviting girls to the BBC dressing rooms, or the seven men in the Oxford case – five were from Pakistan and two from north Africa – pulling up at a care home to lavish a bit of attention, a cuddle, a bottle of booze, a ride in a fast car or a fun night out on a girl who has nothing. The patterns of deceit are the same and I don’t think religious beliefs, skin tones or cultural traditions were the impetus of either of these group’s end games. Instead, a very bog-standard notion that poor girls make the best pickings in British society. In fact, help yourself, treat the local kids’ home like a drive-thru McDonald’s. It will be ages before anyone stops you.

The girl whom Adam Hulin raped wasn’t in care: she had a supportive, angry mother willing to stand up for her. But the judge in Adam Hulin’s case still wasn’t interested in stopping the rapist: he thought it would be a shame to ruin a promising athletic career.

Writing about Jimmy Saville and the “angry broads” who were preyed on as young girls in the 1970s and 80s, Grace Dent seemed to think it was a thing of the past:

The interesting thing about how we treated young women in the 1970s and 80s is it’s really a ticking time bomb as these naive young fillies grow into angry broads. There must be men the length and breadth of Britain who observe scandals like Jimmy Savile’s and sleep uneasily remembering past conquests. Because it’s all got so hardline now, hasn’t it? All this paedophile business. It’s so very unforgiving. I mean, it’s not really rape if she was 15 and she came to your house without a struggle, is it? And so what if you told her you knew important people and maybe bought her a few presents. That doesn’t make you creepy, does it? She was 15 – or was it 14? – but she looked at least 20. See the problem with women now is they’re all so bloody educated and they’ve got so many rights, they can tie men up in knots about the past and the police will bloody listen. Well, actually the police are beginning to listen, when pushed, and take it rather seriously. Soon, pervert, soon.

Operation Yewtree is catching up to some of the men who raped young girls then. But Adam Hulin’s light penalty says this isn’t as much a thing of the past as we’d like to believe. Or maybe just that justice grinds slowly. Hulin only has to pay £60 and do “community service”: but he was still found guilty of separating a young girl from her friends and getting her drunk so that he could stick his dick in her mouth against her will. No matter how fast he runs, that’s never going to sound good in the news…

In 1962, when Cambridge House in Rochdale was opened to give young men a clean safe place to stay, Cyril Smith was 34, already an important man in the local community, and he seems to have regarded it as his private pleasure centre. The hostel ran from 1962 to 1965, Cyril Smith had keys and could come and go at any time, and was responsible for bringing in several boys to live there who’d been in difficult home situations, often then to work for the local authority, so that Smith would have control both over their jobs and over their home.

“Everybody knew who Cyril was. I mean he was so big. I didn’t know Rochdale all that well. But I did know, because I was working in local government, that he was chairman of most important committee, the Establishment Committee, because they make all the appointments. He was responsible as chairman of the Establishment Committee for appointing the town clerk, borough surveyor, treasurer – they were all Cyril’s men.” – Eddie Shorrock

Cyril Smith never married. He had a brother and a sister.

His family are not individually identified when they issued this public statement:

“The person they are describing is not the person known to his family, friends, colleagues and constituents.

“Sir Cyril always denied the allegations made against him in the 1960s and those investigated by the police in subsequent years.

“We continue to be saddened that Sir Cyril is unable to defend himself against such allegations.”

The family said: “We find many of the claims bizarre and difficult to believe, an independent inquiry would determine their truth or otherwise.”

The Lancashire Police carried out a “thorough investigation” in the late 1960s into Cyril Smith’s actions at the Cambridge House Hostel, and the investigating officer reported to the Director of Public Prosecutions that Cyril Smith had in fact abused his position to indecently assault boys at the hostel. But the DPP recommended against prosecution, because there was no corroboration of the testimony of the young men who had been abused by Smith at the hostel, and

“the characters of some of these young men would be likely to render their evidence suspect”.

(As the victims of rapists consistently find, if sexual abuse has made their lives a misery, this will be regarded by the justice system as proof their testimony is unreliable.)

In 1966, Cyril Smith became Mayor of Rochdale, with his mother Eva acting as Mayoress. Simon Danczuk recounts a story from that time: Eva Smith had the contract to clean the Town Hall, which she retained while acting as her son’s Mayoress. But she was banned from entering the police station, based in the Town Hall, because she would search through its bins for information to help her son. It’s one of those funny-not-really-funny stories: what information was Eva Smith looking for to “help” her son?

In 1972 Cyril Smith stood for Parliament and became the Liberal MP. He was the Liberal Party’s Chief Whip from 1975 to 1977. He maintained a close relationship with T&N, a popular local employer in Rochdale and the biggest asbestos conglomerate in the world, writing to their head of personnel in 1981 to let him know that the Commons would be debating EEC regulations on asbestos in the next parliamentary session and to ask him: “Could you please, within the next eight weeks, let me have the speech you would like to make (were you able to!), in that debate?” He then delivered the speech that the company sent to him, claiming in the local paper to have “worked very hard on it”, and a year later declared 1,300 shares in T&N.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there are allegations about Cyril Smith’s sexual abuse of boys at Knowl View residential special needs school, which closed in 1994. He was knighted in 1988. He stood down as MP in 1992 over disagreements with the Social Democratic Party, but remained a prominent public figure til his death in a Rochdale nursing home in 2010.

After an article in Private Eye in 1979 accused Cyril Smith of spanking boys, David Steel asked him about the allegation.

“I asked Cyril Smith about it. I was half expecting him to say it was all wrong, and I would have been urging him to sue to save his reputation. To my surprise he said the report was correct.

“He had some kind of supervisory role, I don’t know what it was, in these institutions in Rochdale which he reckoned entitled him to be involved in corporal punishment.”

David Steel had not seen a story published by the Rochdale Alternative Press (RAP), in 1979, which firmly alleged that Cyril Smith got a sexual thrill out of spanking boys at Cambridge Hostel.

Nicolas Blincoe, who lived in Rochdale then, remembers that RAP

recounted an abandoned police investigation into a charity-run home for adolescent boys, set up by Smith and closed in 1965. RAP detailed Smith’s penchant for voyeurism, groping and spanking, delivered to teenage boys under the camouflage of corporal punishment.

If it emerges that Smith, who died in 2010, raped young boys at Knowl View, the failure to act earlier will seem unforgivable. But the guilt will be shared. Everyone in Rochdale read the RAP story. I pored over it as a 13-year-old. There was never any doubt over Smith’s guilt. So why did no one do anything?

The facts seem to be that in 1969, Jack McCann, Rochdale’s Labour MP, put pressure on the police to either charge Smith or close the case. McCann heard Smith’s side of the story at the home of local headmaster Jack Kershaw. Kershaw taught my father, who still bears a grudge against him for delivering a severe caning when he was seven years old. In a world that encouraged violence on small children, spanking older boys seemed trivial. The boys’ accounts in RAP made clear that Smith derived a thrill from the punishment, but it was not obvious that he understood his sexual desires. If he did not, who were we to play amateur psychologist?

Barry Fitton, a resident of Cambridge Hostel aged 15, had skipped a day off work to go to Manchester with a friend. Cyril Smith found out and gave the two boys the choice of leaving the hostel – which Smith knew would have meant the boy had to go back to a problematic family situation – or taking a spanking.

Barry was taken to his room. He was again told to take his trousers and pants down. He says Smith hit him several times with his bare hand.

“He was big and he was heavy. You’ll have seen the size of his hands. Imagine how that would feel slapping you around,” he said. “I was crying and he said ‘oh, there there’ and he stroked my arse and fondled my buttocks. I was scared, Cyril Smith was God in Rochdale.”

His fellow miscreant was next. The boy, who will remain anonymous, had been living in the Salvation Army hostel in the town when Smith turned up one day to personally offer him a place at Cambridge House. Smith also arranged for him to get a job at Crawford Woolen Mills. After his unauthorised day trip to Manchester, this boy was ‘interviewed’ by Smith. He was given a choice: accept punishment or leave the hostel. He accepted the punishment and was led to the ‘Quiet Room’ at the front of the house. He had to take his pants down, bend over Smith’s knee and was hit by the councillor four or five times on his bare buttocks. He left the hostel two years later.

It’s still legal in the UK for a parent or guardian to smack a child providing the blow doesn’t leave a mark.

Asbestos is the single greatest cause of work-related death in the UK.

I wrote some time ago about the massive sense of entitlement that men have that lies behind every rape story I ever heard.

Around 7pm on Tuesday 27th May, two young girls of the Dalit caste (the lowest-rank caste in India) were grabbed by men of a higher caste who were lying in wait for them – or other girls – to go to the fields after dark to have a pee and a crap. (The girls had been required to hold it in all day because they had no access to an indoor toilet, and modesty ruled they were not allowed to go out for this purpose in daylight.) The men raped the girls – they were fourteen and fifteen – and then murdered them.

Men in India often do take advantage of the near-universal practice of requiring girls and women to be “modest” and only go to the fields after dark, to lie in wait for a girl or two and rape them. (In areas where Hindu women practice chaupadi – isolation during menstruation and after childbirth – men find the isolated huts where menstruating girls and women sleep and rape them there.) The government and the police do not regard men raping women as a serious crime, nor do they regard it as a problem that the men who rape have found that the simplest way of disposing of the evidence is to kill the girls or women whom they raped.

Now what kind of person, hearing that story, reacts with: they should have had indoor plumbing! Lack of indoor sanitation killed them!

Lack of a toilet didn’t kill the girls of Katra, in Uttar Pradesh: the men who thought themselves entitled to rape them killed them. So much is obvious: why not say it? If the girls could have used an indoor loo, the men who wanted rape and kill would simply have found another opportunity to take what they wanted. That’s what men do, when they want to rape and kill. We know that: it’s what happens here in the UK, too.

The other day, touched by yet another man whose feelings had been hurt by the reference to men who kill women, I tweeted a quote from Joanna Russ (1937-2011, science-fiction writer and feminist).

In 2012, Karen Ingala Smith began the project of counting how many women, each year, in the UK, are killed by men. In 2012, 126. The project still continues: Counting Dead Women.

Across the UK, official homicide statistics are counted by the government’s year rather than by the calendar year, and England and Wales produce a separate set of statistics from Scotland. While the government statistics cover the gender of the victims and the relationship of the killer to the victim, no official body counts are made of the gender balance between killer and victim, though it is noted that women are more likely to be killed by a partner or an ex-partner. The Counting Dead Women statistics for the same period (2012-2013) show 122 women each of whom was killed by a man.

Adding Karen Ingala Smith’s figures into the official homicide statistics gives us new information. The total number of homicides for 2012-2013 was 614 (551 in England and Wales, 62 in Scotland). 188 of the people killed were female (171 in England and Wales, 17 in Scotland). (Homicide rates in Scotland are the lowest since records began.) Finally, while there is no comprehensive record of children who are the victims of homicide, the NSPCC estimates that “on average” 53 minor children are killed every year in England and Wales, two-thirds of them under the age of 5: assuming roughly 50/50 for the gender of children killed (I’d be happy to take any more detailed data if someone can provide a valid source) that would suggest 162 adult women homicide victims, 122 of them killed by men – 3 out of 4 women killed, are killed by men.

But there’s an additional factor. In about 15% of homicides – almost equally for male and female victims – there is no known suspect.

Fairly obviously, none of the homicides counted by the Count Dead Women project fall into the “no known suspect” category: nor children who were killed. (Children are overwhelmingly likely to have been killed by a parent or a step-parent or another relative, not a stranger.) In 2012/13, that would mean about 26 women who were killed and we don’t know who did it – or about two-thirds of the adult women victims of homicide not known to have been killed by a man.

Unless we assume women are far more effective at killing and remaining unsuspected, it seems reasonable to say that the pattern is the same as where the killer is known: which suggests that the real ratio of women killed by men in the UK is nearer 90%.

Why aren’t we discussing the homicide of women as a problem of misogyny – the bigotry felt by men against women that causes men to think and act as if women’s lives, women’s autonomy, were worth nothing?

If nine out of ten of adult male homicide victims were known or reasonably guessed to have been killed by women – if even three out of four adult male homicide victims were known to have been killed by women – what do you suppose the public reaction would be? The careful, qualifying “Some women” before the dramatic splash “Women killing men” headline?

Overwhelmingly, the reaction of “SOME men” and “Not ALL men” comes from men. (Not all of it, of course.) As a woman pointed out: supposing a bowl of M&Ms is in front of you, and you are invited to help yourself, but you are warned: one in 20 of the M&Ms is poisoned. (Only one in 20 men are rapists, and murderers are rarer than rapists.) At least one in 20 of the M&Ms will make you feel very sick for a long time, and some of the M&Ms will kill you. There’s no indication from the outside of those brightly-coloured candy shells which ones will be delicious and which ones will make you ill or make you die.

If you are a man whose reaction to “Men kill women” “Men rape women” “Men sexually abuse women” is “Not all men!” tell me: presented with that bowl of M&Ms, are you going to happily eat handfuls of them, knowing that one in twenty is poison? Because only some M&Ms will make you sick or kill you, correct? Is your first concern, faced with that bowl of M&Ms, to keep reminding people that 19 out of 20 of those sweeties are totally harmless tasty treats, as if the harmlessness of most M&Ms in that bowl is more important than warning people of the existence of the poison M&Ms? If you pull a handful of M&Ms out of the bowl and offer them to someone, are you really going to be offended if they say “No – they could be poison”?

If there is a serious discussion going on about what the poison is, and why it sometimes kills, and how it got into the bowl, why would you want to keep interrupting that discussion to repeatedly tell participants in that discussion that 19 out of 20 of the M&Ms in that bowl have not been poisoned?

On 14th February 2015, a book Joanna Russ wrote in 1970 will celebrate its 40th anniversary:

“This book is written in blood.

Is it written entirely in blood?

No, some of it is written in tears.

Are the blood and tears all mine?

Yes, they have been in the past, but the future is a different matter.

As the bear swore in Pogo after having endured a pot shoved on her head, being turned upside down while still in the pot, a discussion about her edibility, the lawnmowering of her behind, and a fistful of ground pepper in the snoot, she then swore a mighty oath on the ashes of her mothers (i.e. her forebears) grimly but quietly while the apples from the shaken apple tree above her dropped bang thud on her head:

OH, SOMEBODY ASIDES ME IS GONNA RUE THIS HERE PARTICULAR DAY.”

Yesterday, Channel 4 News ran an anniversary programme, of sorts:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange – hiding for two years in the Ecuadorian embassy – is in “a prison cell with internet access” and “yearns to walk in the fresh air,” says a close friend.

Today, Slavoj Žižek, writing in the Guardian, seems to think that Julian Assange is hiding out in the Ecuador embassy because of something to do with Wikileaks and whistleblowing.

In August 2010, Julian Assange had sex with two women in Sweden. He was, so they both report, aggressive and unpleasant, and very unwilling to use a condom. When they talked to each other and realised he had had unprotected sex against their will with both of them, they went to the police to discover if they could force Assange to take an HIV test – and the police, listening to their account, realised that Assange had by their testimony committed sexual assault and rape.

Until Julian Assange stepped into the Ecuadorean Embassy, nearly two years after the legal due process began in Sweden, he had every element of the justice system due him. He was even on house arrest rather than in prison, in the confidence that he could be trusted with the large amount of money his friends would lose if he skipped bail.

Assange fled to the UK, and appealed against extradition to Sweden for police questioning. (He has not been charged, because Swedish legal procedure is that he would have to be questioned by the police, then charged.) Two years ago today, as the appeals process was about to run out, he stepped into the Ecuadorean embassy in Knightsbridge, and appears likely to stay there until August 2020.

The usual sentence for rape in Sweden is about 26/27 months. Had Julian Assange accepted in 2012 that he had to be questioned by the police, if they had then charged him, if he had been convicted, if he had been sentenced, he would probably be looking forward to release in two months time.

Most likely, he would already have been out of jail or never gone to jail: the Swedish conviction rate for rape is as low as in the UK, and good behaviour in jail usually earns the prisoner about one-third off his sentence.

He would not, of course – as anyone acquainted with the facts of US and Swedish law could definitively say – have been extradited to the US. Nor is it very likely that the US could have got hold of him unlawfully if he were sitting under full surveillance in the Swedish prison system. Julian Assange wanted to live and work in Sweden because he had confidence in their legal system to protect him from the US: he fled because he did not want to face trial for rape and sexual assault.

In November 2013, the US formally announced what had been clear for some time: they could not prosecute Julian Assange or Wikileaks for their role in publishing the information leaked by Chelsea Manning, because doing so would require the US government to also prosecute US news organisations, and they are unwilling/unable to do so.

That Assange may remain self-imprisoned in a converted women’s toilet in Knightsbridge until August 2020, and the women who gave testimony in the police in 2010 never get to face him in court, is not justice. Nor has it any connection with free speech or with any campaign against US injustices and war crimes. Assange himself is doing more damage to Wikileaks by this than the US ever could.

The Guardian has been doing a series of anonymous articles, subtitled The letter you always wanted to write. No one is named in any of the letters.

The letter published today is from a man in his early 20s, about an event from about six years ago: it’s directed to “the girl who accused me of rape when I was 15.”

Unlike many of the letters, this one is written almost as if the author hopes the target does read it:

I was 15 and you were 13. Exactly one year and four months apart. But they will say two years because apparently, in months, we are supposed to round up. I had never met you before, even though we went to the same school. After the usual Friday night routine of underage binge drinking and smoking to look cool, we ended up staying over at a mutual friend’s house. His not-so-traditional parents made it an ideal hangout.

The letter-writer, the 13-year-old girl, and a boy described as a “mutual friend from school” slept in the same room on three mattresses. The letter-writer and the 13-year-old girl had sex: he says the sex was consensual. He says they held hands after the lights were out, that the girl guided his hands to her breasts, that she took his belt off as he was taking her bra off, and that neither of them said anything except “Do you want to … ?” and the other said “Yes.”

Given the two of them were teenagers, by his own admission drunk, and neither of them had had sex before, this seems an inadequate negotation for enthusiastic consent. The letter-writer says:

I think we were both relieved when it finished. We didn’t use a condom, I guess because I never expected to have sex any time soon and if you did have one with you it wasn’t offered.
It was entirely mute apart from the simple, but essential, “Do you want to … ?” and “Yes.”

We parted with closed-mouth kisses and I returned to my mattress to sleep.

He woke up the next day with two police and his friend’s father shaking him awake: in another room, more police were comforting the 13-year-old girl, and the letter-writer’s friend was “shouting something” in his defence. He was arrested for rape, taken to a police station, his foster-dad came, he was interviewed “a police interview so in-depth and humiliating that I still refuse to let myself remember it” and then spent three months (October, November, and December) on bail, attending school in isolation, and having his foster-family placement reconsidered in case he was a threat to his foster-sister. In January, the charges were dropped, and he never saw the girl (one year, four months younger than him, who had attended the same school) again.

He writes:

I don’t know why you told your friend that I had raped you – maybe because you didn’t want to admit you’d had sex so casually or maybe because you were scared.
But I will never be able to forgive you for what you did to me.

You damaged my perception of women entirely and the only relationship I have since been able to sustain is with a man I can trust.

The thought that never seems to have occurred to him, in six years: what if the reason the girl said he raped her was because she didn’t consent: because he did rape a 13-year-old girl when he was 15.

From the PSHE Association:

37% of people surveyed by Amnesty International UK in 2005 felt that “A woman was partially or totally responsible for being raped if the woman had failed to clearly say ‘no’ to the man”.
A 2006 survey of young people’s attitudes found that 27% think it is acceptable for a boy to “expect to have sex with a girl” if the girl has been “very flirtatious”. It is concerning that seven years later so many of these attitudes still prevail.

This tells us we have to address enthusiastic consent, rape myths and victim blaming with young people to support them to navigate safely through their first sexual encounters. We must provide further support if these experiences turn out to be negative or nonconsensual.

Their “mutual friend”, whether he was awake or asleep when the other two had sex, appears to have defended the letter-writer. Presumably, during the months the letter-writer spent in isolation, on bail, the mutual friend defended him at school, too, and the girl had to be transferred to another school.

The letter-writer complains:

While the police seemed to hold true to innocent until proven guilty, my friends and their families certainly didn’t. Even when I returned to a you-free school, I never quite recovered.

He also says:

They did not give me any options to take action against you.

Teenage boys send rape threats to video game reviewers. Teenage boys commit rape.

In Scotland, the letter-writer would have gone before a children’s panel – who would, in principle, looked at what had gone wrong in the boy’s life and tried to make it better. (Children’s panels work, though: Scotland has a far lower juvenile recividism rate than England/Wales.) That, I think, would have been better for both him and certainly for the girl, than three months of his wondering whether he was going to be tried for rape, then being told that the charges would be dropped because it would be the girl’s word against his, and as we know, teenage girls are not considered reliable witnesses of their own rape.

Can we blame a drunk 15-year-old boy for not realising that the 13-year-old girl who had been flirting with him, who maybe wanted to have him touch her breasts, didn’t want to have sex with him?

I don’t know. (From his own description of the day he was arrested, he was still pretty drunk when the police arrived, and didn’t sober up for some hours even after he was put in a cell.) I don’t know what his background was, except for knowing he had been with a foster-family since he was twelve. I don’t know how drunk he was the night before, how drunk the 13-year-old girl was: teenagers unquestionably don’t have the same restraint and judgement as we expect of adults. Children’s panels deal with under-16s who commit crimes as children in trouble, not as adult criminals on trial, and that seems appropriate.

But that a 13-year-old girl who says “I didn’t consent, I was raped” should be believed absolutely, yes.

A drunk 15-year-old boy who says he thinks the drunk 13-year-old girl who was flirting with him wants to have sex with him is not as blameworthy as an adult man who says the same thing. But a man who thinks it’s his perception of the sexual encounter that makes him able to say definitely the girl is lying when she says she didn’t consent… no, I would not trust that man not to be a rapist.

I support statutory PSHE for many reasons but one of them is that no teenage boy should be confused enough to think that it’s his perception only of a sexual encounter that determines whether it was rape.

• Join growing calls for statutory PSHE education

The statute of limitations for the crimes that Julian Assange is evading justice for in Knightsbridge, will expire this August.

Swedish prosecutors will therefore travel to London to carry out the interview that Assange jumped bail to avoid.

During that interview, Julian Assange is likely to be charged with rape and sexual assault.

But as Assange doesn’t want to go to jail in Sweden for the crimes he has already admitted to in his testimony, it’s likely he’ll stay in the embassy in Knightsbridge until the statute of limitations expires in Sweden.

Doubtless he will still have defenders who think raping a woman while she’s asleep is not that big of a deal. But at least he won’t be able to claim he was never charged with any crimes: he just evaded justice.

This was first posted on Facebook on 23rd March 2020, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

Look, imagine an afternoon when you settle down to listen to Parliamentary debate for eight hours (with breaks for tea and food and actually a glass of wine about 8pm because OMG) and it is interrupted by:

The Alex Salmond verdict (at least 8 out of the 13 jurors decided Not Guilty for most of the charges, Not Proven for the attempted rape charge, and a horde of sexist gits all over Scotland rose up to cheer, including, unfortunately, SNP MPs Angus MacNeil and Joanna Cherry).

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics have been postponed by the IOC to 2021.

Boris Johnson announced at 8:30pm that from tomorrow the UK is in lockdown.

And all the while, in the Commons, the Coronavirus Bill is passing at a gallop through the Second Reading debate, the Committee of the Full House debate, and he Third Reading vote. It’s now off to the House of Lords.

The Deputy Speaker of the House, Eleanor Laing, said at the start of the debate that she wouldn’t accept any call for a division unless she was convinced there was an overwhelming need for it, and many MPs said – when presenting an amendment or an objection – that they didn’t want to have a division.

This is because, while MPs were sitting in the Chamber a good metre or two apart, a division of the whole House requires MPs to pack themselves into the division lobbies and stay there while two MPs for each lobby do a head-count. There is no social distancing possible during a Commons vote. And MPs know that COVID-19 is in the Commons – an unknown number of MPs are known to be infected from association with confirmed cases.

Calling for a division would have absolutely ensured that all MPs who took part in the vote got infected.

You may think that the House of Commons ought not to be still operating on such an antiquated (and tiresomely slow) method of having major votes, and you’d be right, but in consequence, while the Ayes from the government side on amendments were at times thin, nobody called out for a No vote – and the Deputy Speaker in the end galloped through a long list of government amendments to the bill without a single division and without, as far as I could tell, any of the amendments by Labour or LibDems or rebel Tories even being put forward for a vote.

The point made by both David Davis, Conservative MP for Haltemprice and Howden, and Chris Bryant, Labour MP for Rhondda, made very clearly in the Second Reading debate, was that this new legislation is unnecessary.
There are two Acts which have already been made use of by the UK government in the crisis – the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, and the Public Health Act 1984, both of which give the government extraordinary leeway to do things in an emergency that it would not ordinarily be allowed to do. Both were drafted, debated, and ultimately passed after much more debate than a single afternoon, and both include considerable checks and balances both parliamentary and judicial to prevent the government over-extending on its powers. As David Davis noted this afternoon in Parliament, the chief reason for the government drafting its own emergency legislation is to remove all of those checks and balances.

And while the UK governmet offered a compromise of six-monthly review, it’s far from clear, as Chris Bryant said, that this six-month review within the two-year sunset clause will allow Parliament to review and remove parts of the Act, or whether this will be simply an up-down vote where MPs will be invited to approve or not the entire bill. To be clear, the latter gives the advantage to the government – it might lose a vote on individual bits and pieces, whereas for the whole Act, Tory MPs will vote with the government rather than remove it.

The one opposition amendment which the government did accept, was a clear protest led by a Muslim MP with wide cross-party support, that even though the Coronavirus Bill urged cremation rather than burial, no one should be cremated against their known wishes.

Many MPs – Conservative, Labour, LibDem, and Green – made the clear point that if you are effectively banning people from going to work, the government has got to do more to make sure people have enough money to live on. Statutory sick pay needed to be raised; the generous offer of 80%-wages paid by HMRC ought to start in March, not on 1st April: self-employed people don’t get anything and will need to claim Universal Credit: people on Universal Credit already don’t get enough to live on and all those made jobless as businesses close down will have to wait 5 weeks to get anything, assuming Universal Credit even continues to function under the circumstances: tenants can still be evicted, the govenment’s only required landlords to give an extra month’s’ notice. The million undocumented workers in the UK must work or starve, they’ll get no financial help: refugees are still required to travel to Liverpool or Croydon to claim asylum: people stuck in the UK on visas about to run out are still at risk of being detained and eventually deported. One MP mentioned a woman from the Ukraine in her 80s who had expected to fly home at the end of her viist and was being told by the immigration authorities that she could always drive. (This is a 2400km journey by road through France, Belgium, Germany, and Poland, which Google Maps calculates would take a driver 24 hours “without traffic”.)

All these points raised were excellent, and aside from a few details like allowing refugee doctors and nurses to work in the UK for the duration of the emergency if the BMC/the RCN approve their credentials, I don’t doubt the government will ignore all of them, especially those that involve giving people enough money to live on for the duration of the emergency.

Boris Johnson was not present for the debate. Of course he was busy prepping for his video appearance.

The rules he announced were in essence close enough to the Spanish lockdown rules, I am advised: as of tomorrow, people will only be allowed to leave their home for the following reasons:

• any medical need, to provide care or to help a vulnerable person
• shopping for basic necessities, as infrequently as possible
• travelling to and from work, but only where this is absolutely necessary and cannot be done from home

and

• some form of exercise a day – for example a run, walk, or cycle – alone or with members of your household

Now I’m no longer walking to and from work and can’t go to the gym or for a swim (the plan is to work from home, once I get the hardware sorted out, which hopefully should be soon) my plan is for daily exercise, to take one walk a day – I intended as a routine to go round the local park and down the cycle path, which is just under a mile. Not a lot of exercise, but better than nothing. (I strenuously observed the 2-metres-distance rule, but noted that most cyclists and no joggers were bothering to do so, perhaps assuming that speed meant they wouldn’t be infected by the people they were passing.)

Of course Johnson is two weeks too late in instituting this kind of lockdown – and a lockdown where so many people will have to leave the house because the alternative is starving at home, is not much use as a public health precaution. I gather that Boris Johnson’s willingness to actually spell out clearly what “don’t leave the house” means to people who can afford not to, was inspired by the spectacle, over the weekend, of so many people jaunting off to enjoy the early spring sunshine on the beach, in the parks, hanging out with their friends.

But the jam-packed commuter trains apparently didn’t affect him at all.

To spell this out:

1. People who are fortunate enough to be in paid employment will get 80% of their pay (up to £2500 a month) from HMRC from the beginning of next month If their employer fired them because the business had to shut down before the wages-protection scheme was announced, well, too bad, they need to get another job or apply for Universal Credit.
2. People who are self-employed get nothing if they don’t work, except – if they fall ill – Statutory Sick Pay, £94 a week.
3. People who aren’t working can apply for Universal Credit and wait 5 weeks to get it.
4. Undocumented workers get nothing unless they carry on working.
5. The Coronavirus Bill also exempts local authorities in England from the legal obligation to provide social care.
6. If you own your own home and are in financial difficulty you can apply for a three-month mortgage holiday: but if you rent, your landlord can still evict you for non-payment of rent, just with an extra month’s notice.

If you want people to stay home and avoid spreading infection, you have to be sure they can afford to do that. And this Boris Johnson’s huge powergrab of a Coronavirus Bill fails to do – especially given the lockdown is from Tuesday 25th but even the most generously-supported will see no financial support from the government til Wednesday 1st April.

And Brexit was barely mentioned – by one LibDem MP.