City Red Hot
1 hour ago
Monday, 25 January 2010
Natasha Walter: 'I believed sexism in our culture would wither away. I was entirely wrong'
I'm trying to establish just how often the feminist writer Natasha Walter gets angry. Is she ever in a rage before breakfast? "Rarely," she says. Does she ever rant at sexist comments on TV? "From time to time." Would she describe herself as an angry person? "Sometimes I think I'm not the raging sort."
I'm on a mission to discover what fires Walter up. She has been one of Britain's foremost feminist voices for more than a decade, a period in which she has written rationally, often compellingly, on everything from prostitution to parental leave and pornography to equal pay. They are subjects that can provoke real fury, and yet Walter's approach to them tends to be calm, sane, straightforward.
Which is great, of course, but her sensibility has always intrigued me. It's a hoary old cliche that feminists are intrinsically angry – a cliche that has been used to undermine feminists, to paint us as marauding harpies, steam belching from our ears – but like all cliches it holds a grain of truth. Most strong political arguments do, necessarily, arise from a wellspring of anger. So what makes Walter furious? What drives her?
We have arranged to meet to talk about her new book, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. It is organised in two distinct parts, and the first finds Walter taking a journey through the seedy underbelly of modern culture, an excursion that starts, in faintly surreal fashion, at a "Babes on the Bed" competition in a Southend nightclub, a contest to find a glamour model for Nuts magazine. It's difficult to imagine anyone more incongruous here than the intellectual, refined Walter; especially when the DJ starts shouting, "This is Cara Brett! She's on the cover of Nuts this week! So buy her, take her home and have a wank." The uncomfortable scene grows uglier as a series of young women take to a bed and strip off their bras to "joggle" their breasts before a throng of men.
The journey continues through interviews with a former lap dancer called Ellie, who helps illustrate just how sexist the culture has become: "Now," says Ellie, "women get told they are prudes if they say they don't want their boyfriend to go to a club where he gets to stick his fingers in someone else's vagina." She interviews a woman she calls Angela, who, in describing her work as a prostitute, says that "basically you've consented to being raped sometimes for money". And then there's pornography addict Jim, who says that "porn is way more brutalising than it used to be. There is this unbelievable obsession with [extreme] anal sex . . . It's far more demeaning to women than in the past."
It's all enraging material, and Walter marshals it well, but there still seems to be an edge of fury amiss. I ask what prompted her to write this first part of the book, and she says that it came about after a short newspaper column that she had dashed off. "It was just a little squib about lads' magazines. I didn't invest much in it, and it was one of those situations where you start getting more responses than you expected..."
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When the Media Is the Disaster
Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.
I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.
Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.
Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.
A third image was captioned: “A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store.” Yet another: “The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter.”
People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who’d survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn’t arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual “objective” roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.
The “looter” in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn’t the most urgent problem. The “looter” stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.
The pictures do convey desperation, but they don’t convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.
In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I’ve seen I’m not convinced.
What Would You Do?
Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.
By day three, you’re pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. And in the improvised encampment you settle in, there is an old man near you who seems on the edge of death. He no longer responds when you try to reassure him that this ordeal will surely end. Toddlers are now crying constantly, and their mothers infinitely stressed and distressed.
So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn’t likely to be anywhere near enough aid anytime soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply’s long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don’t think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.
The old man might not die, the babies might stop their squalling, and the mothers might lose that look on their faces. Other people are calmly wandering in and helping themselves, too. Maybe they’re people like you, and that gallon of milk the fellow near you has taken is going to spoil soon anyway. You haven’t shoplifted since you were 14, and you have plenty of money to your name. But it doesn’t mean anything now.
If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?
Or are you a rescuer? Is the survival of disaster victims more important than the preservation of everyday property relations? Is that chain pharmacy more vulnerable, more a victim, more in need of help from the National Guard than you are, or those crying kids, or the thousands still trapped in buildings and soon to die?
It’s pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn’t obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction....
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(Thanx Paul!)
"Children who kill never had a chance" by Johann Hari (April 2009)
Mary Bell
I have met children who became killers several times in my life: in the warzones of the Congo and the Central African Republic, and in the grey Young Offenders’ Institutes of Britain. When I read about the events that are alleged to have happened last weekend in South Yorkshire, I kept thinking about their small, paranoid eyes. Two brothers – aged ten and eleven – have been charged with torturing two other, younger kids. The victims had been hit with bricks, burned with cigarettes, and slashed with knives in a wild field.
We are a long way from knowing what happened in that field that afternoon, or who carried out these acts. But the visceral temptation when any children face accusations like this is to brand them as inherently evil demons who should be locked far from us for life. But the most famous case of child-on-child killing in British history – that of Mary Bell – shows us how flawed this initial reaction is.
In 1968, in the sagging streets of the poorest part of Newcastle, a ten year old girl strangled two toddlers – Martin Brown, and Brian Howe – to death. She then cut their bodies, and with her best friend, a mentally disabled thirteen year old, she left notes in a nursery saying: “We did murder Martain brown, fuckof you BAstArd.” She was reflexively described in the press as a child who had been “born evil”, a “monster” and “demon.”
Now we know what happened to her to make her into such a child. Mary’s mother, Betty Bell, was a severely disturbed alcoholic who had been sectioned at least once. She worked as a prostitute specialising in sado-masochism – whippings and stranglings. The first thing she said when Mary was placed into her arms after giving birth was: “Take the thing away from me!” She rejected her daughter and repeatedly tried to kill her by feeding her an overdose of sleeping tablets. But eventually, she did find a use for Mary. Once she turned four, she began to pimp her to paedophiles.
Mary never knew who her father was, but she suspected her mother had been inseminated by her own dad. Later in life, she asked her mother point blank if this was the case. She didn’t deny it. Betty simply said quietly: “You are the devil’s spawn.”
When she was ten, Mary made friends with another girl who was being raped by a local paedophile. All they had known in their lives was violent abuse – and they began to act it out. Mary tried to cut off one of the boy’s penises with a razor – a plain, crazed act of revenge for what she had experienced since she was a toddler.
Yet it is strangely comforting to see evil as a primordial external force, something alien that can be hunted down and confined to cages. It dodges the colder truth that I have learned from all the child-killers I have met: we all have the capacity for terrible cruelty and sadism, especially if we are subjected to horror ourselves. Which of us can be confident that, given such Mary Bell’s childhood, we wouldn’t have done something depraved?
Yet the trial of the two children who killed Jamie Bulger – and the websites trying to figure out where they are now, so they can be lynched – suggests we have barely progressed since then. Excellent works of investigative journalism like Blake Morrison’s book ‘As If’ have uncovered evidence that these children were subjected to violent and probably sexual abuse. We don’t want to hear it. We want devils and demons and a black-and-white world that tells us: no, it couldn’t have been you; this crime belongs to a different species.
These killings are not political parables. However much right-wingers want to make this a story about welfare dependency and left-wingers want to make it a story of brutal Thatcherite economics, these rare murders have happened in Britain at the same rate for over a century. They have to be understood at the personal, human level.
To understand and explain these cases is not to excuse, or justify. We are talking about the most terrible thing that can happen to a person: torture, and murder. The children who do this need to be humanely detained for as long as they are a danger. But everything we know about children who kill tells us they are invariably victims of extreme abuse themselves, deserving of compassion, not hysterical condemnation.
I have watched my friend Camilla Batmangelidh – the director of Kid’s Company – work with children in South London who have bricked, bottled and tortured other children. She explains: “Since the Bell and Bulger cases, we’ve learned a lot about how a developing brain reacts to abuse, but the judicial system hasn’t caught up. We now know from brain scans that if you have really poor quality care in childhood, your pre-frontal lobes don’t develop properly. Those are the parts of the brain that think rationally, empathise, and exercise self-control. It is physically impossible for these children to calm down and think a situation through. Their brains haven’t developed that way.” So to treat them like morally responsible mini-adults who just made a bad decision – as the British courts do today – doesn’t make sense. It is a neurological fiction.
When this impaired brain chemistry combines with violent abuse and rape, the children can become time-bombs. “They have been taught to see the world through one template: you’re a victim, or you’re an abuser. That’s how they think human relationships work,” Batmangelidh puts it. “At first, they are abused, and at some point they become determined to be a perpetrator, because then at least they have power and control. If you think those are your only two options in life, it seems preferable.”
As she said this, I remembered the child soldiers in Central Africa who pointed guns into my face and smirked. Their families had been bayoneted in front of them, and they had buried the bodies themselves. In the warzones of the Congo, I met eleven and twelve year old boys who had seen their mothers and sisters snatched away, and were then picked up by the militiamen and trained to rape and kill. Like Mary, they were re-enacting the violence they had experienced in a desperate attempt to switch roles: this time, they were the Big Men.
Children who kill are a question of mental health, not morality. They are internally destroyed children, not devils. Given the love and support that they deserve, such children can develop their frontal lobes and their capacity for empathy over time, and be released. As Gita Sereny’s reportorial masterpiece ‘Cries Unheard’ shows, Mary Bell eventually developed into a morally responsible adult and “a very, very loving mother” – albeit one perpetually haunted by the knowledge of what she had done.
Haven’t we progressed enough since the Middle Ages to see these truths, and reject the barbaric theology of “evil” children?
When accusations like this bleed into the news, we need to stand at the front of the looming lynch mob and say: Stop. Think. In 1861, a leader in The Times commented on the trial of two eight year old boys in Stockport who had tortured and killed a toddler. It said: “Children of that age cannot be held legally accountable in the same way as adults. It is absurd and monstrous that these two children have been treated like murderers.” Isn’t it time we progressed to 1862?
Sleep Talkin Man
"Don't leave the duck there. It's totally irresponsible. Put it on the swing, it'll have much more fun."
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