This is the currently one of only two rape crisis centres in London (the new Ealing centre is already open), and it may have to close its waiting list if the funding cut goes ahead.
Via gorilerof3b.

RASASC is asking people to write direct to council leader Mike Fisher:

We need your help – urgently. A decision was made to cut the Corporate Funding Budget of Croydon Council two weeks ago and there was pressure on the Council Lead, Mike Fisher, to do some cost saving, pretty quick.

Fisher chose the easiest option as the corporate funding applications were due for ratification. So instead of cutting jobs, pensions, council staff or even not giving the third sector an inflationary rise across the board – he gave himself a rise in pay and slashed one department’s budget of £1 million!

The cuts for RASASC of £27,000 per year is the equivalent of supporting 2,700 survivors of sexual violence on our helpline, seeing 23 survivors face to face for one year specialist counselling or supporting 108 survivors through our Advocacy department from reporting their rape to the end of their trial.

We need your help to save our services! Please email mike.fisher@croydon.gov.uk to voice your disgust at these cuts and speak for the thousands of London women this will affect. It will only take 5 minutes of your time but may stop the only Rape Crisis Centre in London from having to close our waiting list.

They have put together a model letter which gorilerof3b has also posted.

cross-posted from the F Word

But Jenni Russell at Comment is Free went to the launch, and “no one mentioned women’s existence once”:

As I stood listening, I began to feel a rising tide of outrage. There was just one problem with this message of transformation and innovation – which was that every single one of the five speakers arguing for change was a man (white, at that). That every name mentioned as a new Demos adviser was that of a man. That no one mentioned women’s ­existence once. And that when we were shown a brief video about how power must be shared with the people, every silhouette and every symbol on the screen was – quite unselfconsciously – that of a man.

Very… er… radical.

(Crossposted from The F-Word)

This October, a new series of feminist workshops is going to launch – I’ve been working on this project, along with zohra moosa (you can read about us here).

Spotting Sexism will be a four-week workshop for a small group, on feminism and how it applies to our lives. You can read more about it here, along with information on how to sign up.

It will involve:

• Weekly 2-hour phone-based sessions
• Facilitated conversations on key topics, such as: unpicking the sexism in our daily lives & in the media, how sexism affects different groups of women, and how to become a feminist activist
• Guest speakers
• A safe space to ask difficult questions, where it’s OK to make mistakes or just not quite understand some of the feminist jargon out there
• Activities tailored to help draw out your knowledge and experiences
• A private online community forum, just for participants
• Extra resources, reading lists and ideas for taking what we discover further…

How did we end up treating human beings in this way?

Mario, the MRC’s legal adviser, came to the UK in 1978, with his wife and sister-in-law, after escaping from Colombia, where the government had 68,000 of its opponents behind bars. They were terrified and knew nothing about asylum law. All the immigration officials who dealt with their claim, however, were helpful, courteous and surprisingly knowledgeable about Colombian politics. The three of them were granted temporary admission. The following year they were given full refugee status. ‘I can only be grateful to the UK for the protection offered to me and my family during those difficult days… After nearly 30 years here, I have two children and one granddaughter. We feel British. When I come back to the UK after visiting my elderly parents I always feel as if I am coming home.’

Mario’s is not an isolated case. I’ve spoken to a number of refugees who arrived in the UK 10, 15, 20 years ago. Most were impressed and surprised by the warmth of the welcome they received, and none of them went through the demeaning experiences that many of today’s asylum seekers go through.

What happened during those intervening years? Of course, there has always been racism and intolerance, but only in recent times have these sentiments been allowed to drive and shape official government policy.

Let’s see if the right-wing press will take a one-week amnesty, at least, from their racist/xenophobic anti-immigrant reporting. (Recent headlines: “Has mass immigration wrecked Britain?”, “Do you think immigration is to blame for rise in violent crime?”, and a classic – “Immigration out of control”. Meanwhile last week the Daily Mail served up this dehumanising headling: “Father of four finds 12-strong colony of illegal immigrants living in his LOFT”.)

Incidentally, any UK readers seeking inspiration on this issue from across the Atlantic could do worse than checking out the fairly recently-launched blog The Sanctuary.

Arrested only days after 9/11, the four men tried in the case were meant to have been planning an attack – two of the men were found guilty by a grand jury, only to have the Justice Department voluntarily asked the judge to throw out the case.

It was supposed to be the first terrorist attack planned from American soil. It was quite unusual behaviour for the department to not only throw out its own case, but then go after its own prosecutor.

The podcast considers whether the decision was taken as part of a vendetta against Richard G Convertino, the prosecutor, who repeatedly ruffled feathers, breaching protocol and failing to get along with his colleagues. But the Justice Department’s attempt to bring criminal charges against Covertino failed and he then he sued them.

All of this is fascinating, but more so are the couple of glimpses of the information at contest in the trial – for example, one piece of evidence was a home video shot at Disneyland. In the podcast, it becomes clear that there’s a section of this video filming a duck pond – the prosecutors argued that some singing translated to an anti-US screed – the defence said it was a song about ducks. (The podcast producers don’t get their own independent translation, sadly enough!)

The case rested heavily on some sketches in a day planner – which could be a map of a US air base in Turkey, or not.

Last month Mr Livingstone called for a “fresh start”, with a one-off amnesty for migrants without “regular status”, in spite of his party’s stance. “Migrants contribute hugely to the economic, civic and cultural life of London and the UK,” he said. “To have a substantial number of them living here without regular status because of deep-rooted failings in the immigration system, some dating back over a decade, is deeply damaging to London as well as to them.”

This is really good news.

And particularly timely given this piece on AlterNet by Jessica Hoffman, calling on white feminists in the US to wake up and smell their privilege, and get to work on issues that intersect with racism, including immigration.

As Women of Color Blog and others have been documenting for ages, immigration is a feminist issue – and that doesn’t just apply in the US. Hoffman talks about how “women and trans and gender-nonconforming people are suffering gender-based violence at the hands of federal immigration officials”.

We know the same happens here in the UK.

The reason this is good news is not because one amnesty solves the whole problem, or even that it’s unproblematic. But the debate around immigration has been dominated by a right-wing, racist, xenophobic “keep them all out!” framing for way too long.

I can’t even remember the last time I saw a policy on immigration which wasn’t about making the rules tougher. Here’s hoping this is the first of many moves towards reform.

In some ways, this list is probably insufficient to reflect our particular class system in the UK (perhaps someone will be inspired to write one specific to us). But at the same time, it is still a useful exercise. You can find the full list at Social Class & Quakers, the blog which seems to have kicked off this meme.

At the same time, these privilege lists are not a new idea – Barry Deutsch has compiled a list of these lists ranging from white privilege to non-trans privilege. Deutsch’s has also added his own take on this idea – the male privilege check list, which my fellow F Word blogger Louise has reminded me of this morning. (Number 14 – “my elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more this is true” – might be of particular interest to some of the commenters on Gracchi’s post earlier this week).

Feel free to experiment with these memes in the comments section.

The protest has been mobilised to counter Ann Widdecome’s ‘Not on your life…’ roadshow, which the Tory MP is dragging up and down the country to promote ‘pro-life’ amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill that would chip away at women’s rights.

Similar protests will take place when the roadshow hits Liverpool, Coventry and Cardiff – see the Abortion Rights website for more info. The group has also produced a detailed briefing on the bill’s progress through Parliament, and efforts to tack on anti-abortion amendments.

Here is a flyer with directions and more information.

This was cross-posted at The F Word

The meeting is at 6.30pm in the Amnesty UK Human Rights Action Centre in New Inn Yard, nearest tube Old St.

Of course, watchers of UK politics will be aware that the launch comes at a time when ministers are putting serious thought into a shake up the prostitution law along the lines of the Swedish model, to make the act of buying sex explicitly illegal – so women will not be charged for selling sex, but the men who buy their bodies will face prosecution. Today we learn that 52% of Britons agree with this approach and 65% agree that buying sex is an act with exploits women.

The Swedish government pioneered this legislation in 1999 and, although the move has not been without controversy, it has apparently produced a drop off in the number of prostitutes on the street, and perhaps on the numbers of women trafficked into the country.

Of course, there are lots of different perspectives on the best way to tackle prostitution, but from a left-wing perspective the only real competing approach is legalisation. It is easy to be tempted by the idea that legalisation is a panacea, that would bring in unions, protection for prostitutes, police assistance and a lessening of the discrimination faced by prostitutes, or women who have been prostitutes. But this ignores the facts of the case.

Let’s look a little closer at what prostitution really is. A 2004 Home Office report found:

• 70% of those in street prostitution began as children or teenagers
• 85% reported physical abuse in their family
• 45% reported sexual abuse in their family
• 70% spent time in Local Authority care while children

And that doesn’t even touch on the issue that a man who uses a prostitute must accept the risk that the woman has been trafficked.

A while ago, the Guardian printed a letter from Professor Julia O’Connell Davidson of the University of Nottingham. She argued:

When 515 indoor prostitution establishments were raided by police as part of Operation Pentameter last year, only 84 women and girls who conformed to police and immigration officers’ understanding of the term “victim of trafficking” were “rescued”. At this rate, the police would need to raid some 150,000 indoor prostitution establishments to unearth MacShane’s 25,000 sex slaves. The fact that there are estimated to be fewer than 1,000 such establishments in London gives some indication of how preposterous MacShane’s claim is.

Abuse and exploitation undoubtedly occur in the UK sex sector, but only a minority of cases involve women and girls being imprisoned and physically forced into prostitution by a third party. More usually, those who are vulnerable are working to pay off debts incurred in migration, or to supplement paltry single-parent benefits. Their vulnerability is in large part a consequence of government action and inaction – its failure to regulate the sex sector, its immigration and welfare policies etc. And raids by police and immigration officials normally result in their deportation or prosecution for benefit fraud, not in their assistance or protection.

On the one hand, it’s clearly true that there isn’t nearly enough support for trafficked women, and undoubtedly many women will end up being deported. More can and should be done. But it is troubling to see this (all too frequent) distinction being made between the ‘real’ victims of trafficking – those at the most extreme end of the scale, who are physically imprisoned, and those who are ‘merely’ indentured into the sex trade.

Being forced to work to “pay off debts incurred in migration” is a horrendous underestimation of the true situation of women, who have very often been tricked into crossing borders with promises of jobs. Even those that may have known they were going to work in the sex trade find that they are not in control of their own bodies. To separate these groups of women out is to ignore the plain fact that these women are bought and sold like cattle – and the men who pay to have sex with them are, wittingly or not, raping them.

Do some women deserve to be put in this situation, just because they wanted to move to the UK, or they were involved in sex work already? Do they not fit a Daily Mail-esque view of who can be a victim? And let’s be clear – if this was any other form of labour, it would still be unacceptable to coerce someone into it, or to indenture them into that labour on the basis of an unpayable debt.

If the minister overestimates that there are 25,000 women in this situation in the UK, all to the good. But are we really able to support a situation where any human beings are enslaved? Let’s look at the impact legalisation had in the Netherlands:

The example of the Netherlands provides a good indicator of the expansion of the sex industry in recent decades and the growth of trafficking for the purpose of prostitution : 2,500 prostituted people in 1981, 10,000 in 1985, 20,000 in 1989 and 30,000 in 1997. The Netherlands has become a preferred destination in the world of sex tourism. In Amsterdam, where there are 250 brothels, 80% of the prostituted people are of foreign origin and “70% of them have no papers”, as they are victims of trafficking.

But as well as considering the links between prostitution and trafficking, we can’t avoid the other side of the equation that the Swedish approach seeks to deal with: demand. This response to the proposals in the Observer is extremely telling. Henry Porter comes up with a frankly rather clueless article urging us not to punish the men-folk for the evils of prostitution.

Here are his opening paragraphs:

Which is more immoral – a man paying for sex or a woman selling it? The answer used to be that the supplier was criminalised and made an outcast while the customer escaped all blame and rarely suffered much more than embarrassment when the police raided a brothel or cleaned up a red-light district.

This was wrong because it did not acknowledge that if blame was to be attached to the transaction, at least half of it lay with the man. To penalise the supply side of the arrangement failed to recognise that women were often forced into prostitution or were driven to it by desperation; also, it did not accord due weight to the responsibility of the customer.

In the context of the information that a man buying sex with a prostitute may well be taking part in the rape of that woman this is a ridiculous and grotesque line of argument. Even if she has not been trafficked, she is likely to have been economically coerced into it. The concept that this is a meeting of equal capitalists, one supplying a service and the other paying for it, is not, I would argue, one with much merit. In some cases, it may be true, but mostly it is a fantasy.

Over at the Independent, Joan Smith puts it like this:

You’ve got that bloated post-Christmas feeling, brought on by too much food and too much time with your nearest and dearest. What to do? Some people go to the gym, some meet their mates and go to a football match, and some want nothing more than a bracing work-out with a teenage sex slave….

 

According to a study published four years ago in the Journal of Trauma Practice, 89 per cent of women in prostitution want to escape; a field study in nine countries showed that between 60 and 75 per cent of women in prostitution had been raped, between 70 and 95 per cent had been physically assaulted, and 68 per cent displayed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in the same range as combat veterans and victims of torture. Other research, this time from Canada, suggests that women in prostitution are 40 times more likely to be murdered than the rest of the female population.

The truth is that women who work as prostitutes – without being forced into it, either by traffickers or poverty, without a drug addiction, or a lack of other, better options – are a tiny minority. As Smith says in her column the demand for prostitutes is met not by these women. It’s met by women who aren’t in it for kicks, or material for a new book, or for the experience.

The most enlightening bit of journalism I could find about the Swedish system was this story by the BBC, who sent a correspondent and a former prostitute to Stockholm to interview people about it. While it’s not a simpering celebration, and points out flaws in the application of the law – notably the shortage of exit services for prostitutes – it is interesting in terms of people’s attitudes. None of this “it’s half her fault and half his fault” stuff for police officer Jonas Trolle who says that he thinks “it’s not human to buy another person” or for the male taxi driver who said that “all men who visited prostitutes were guilty of abuse”.

In many ways, the tools we use to tackle the problem may be up for debate: but the point is surely to make it clear to everyone that women are not for sale.

Robert has already explained why we should be unapologetically covering the US election, despite being a UK blog. So I don’t think we should let pass without analysis the hysterical level of sexism that has been directed at Hillary Clinton during the campaign. Of course, this will all be very familiar to Clinton – back in August last year, we already had the Hillary nutcracker on sale for $19.99.

However, this seemingly gut-level-misogynist reaction to her campaign reached a new low in the run up to her win in New Hampshire, when she was interrupted by men shouting “iron my shirt”. You can see the photos here and AP has the story, although it strangely describes it as a “seemingly sexist” protest. The mind boggles as to what would need to happen to get them to describe it as definitively sexist.

Ready to dismiss this as a couple of extremist nutters? Well, think again. The US feminist blogosphere is buzzing with outrage at how the media has covered Clinton’s campaign. Feministing points to a Washington Post blogger who says she needs an electric shock collar; Wonkette notes that Chris Matthews – a host on the political TV show Hardball – pinched her cheeks (it’s not an exact equivalent, I suppose, but in a UK context this might be roughly similar to Paxman coming over and pinching Brown’s cheeks – or perhaps give him a friendly tickle); Melissa McEwan of Shakesville notes that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd accused Clinton of “playing the victim” – unwittingly casting a light on the gender politics of that particular newsroom in the process.

This has nothing to do with her political stance. Nothing on this list – all from the last two days – has anything to do with her position on any issue. And regardless of our views on Clinton’s specific politics, it’s truly been flabbergasting to see the reaction she has garnered simply for being a woman seeking power.

A version of this post was cross-posted at The F Word

BBC Radio 5 Live undertook an investigation, after a discussion in a chat room suggested that women were seeking out drugs to induce abortion without having to consult a doctor. We can surmise that someone suggested going to a Chinese medicine shop, because that is where they sent their undercover reporter, posing as an “illegal immigrant”.

Details so far are limited – the documentary will be broadcast on Sunday at 11.30AM – but the BBC’s story on it brings up some worrying questions about the availability of abortion, and the stigma associated with abortion.

First up, the reasons why women would put themselves at risk by downing illegal pills of questionable providence, when they should be able to access legal, safe abortion with a simple visit to their GP or a private clinic. As I said, the BBC sent their reporter undercover as an illegal immigrant, suggesting that they thought that might be one driver. The story goes on to say:

Abortion is not free on the NHS for every woman. If someone’s home country doesn’t have a reciprocal NHS agreement, or you are here illegally – then you face paying between £500 and £1,500.

If so, it is yet another worrying indication that the government’s prioritising of the drive to get rid of illegal immigrants over healthcare rights for all is dangerous and wrong-headed. But the BBC also suggests that it is likely that British citizens are seeking out illegal terminations:

Community health workers told us the issue of illegal abortion affects many women from young British teenagers who do not trust their doctor, through to people who are here illegally and are frightened of being found out.

This is, again, a significant sign of failure. Yet is it surprising? Only a few weeks ago, one doctor was accused of giving patients biased advice when they come seeking an abortion. A quick look at Pro-Choice Majority, a site which features the stories of hundreds of women who have had abortions, reveals that although many women feel supported in their decision by their doctors, it is not uncommon for women to feel like they are being judged. Here’s one quote from the site:

My doctor was very rude and gave me no information I had to look in the phone book for a clinic, luckily they took care of me. I believe it is any person’s right to an abortion if they believe it to be the right thing for them.

One of the reasons that Pro-Choice Majority is so important, is that it demonstrates that there are lots and lots of ordinary women out there who have had abortions; who don’t regret having those abortions. As Irina Lester recently set out at The F Word, the media tends to select women to talk about their abortions who have been traumatised by the experience. As she said: “If the dominant idea promoted in society is that abortion causes regret and depression and these are the only possible and valid post-abortion feelings, there is little surprise that women are finding it hard to cope.”

Perhaps it is also no surprise that some women – including teenagers who may not want to approach their family doctor, or who may have been rebuffed or felt judged – opt for the quiet, but illegal and potentially very dangerous alternative. It’s a sad indictment of our society that this still happens.

Cross posted at The F Word

Cartoon by Jacky Fleming

Teach children about consent in schools. Pour money into rape crisis centres. Overhaul sentencing of rapists. David Cameron’s speech today reads like a feminist wish list.

Speaking to the Conservative Women’s Organisation in London, Cameron outlined some statistics that those of us who are involved in feminist activism are all too familiar with:

• One in 20 women in the UK have been raped
• 75% of rapes are not reported to the police
• Of those that are reported, 5.7% result in conviction in England and Wales, (not mentioned by Cameron, this figure falls to 3.9% in Scotland)

This means, says Cameron, that of every 1,000 women raped, only 15 will see their rapist convicted. Or, to flip that around, for every 15 rapists that end up in jail, approximately 985 rapes are committed with absolutely no repercussions – for the rapist, that is.

For women who have been raped, services have been stripped down. The number of rape crisis centres in England and Wales has fallen from 68 in 1984 to 45 in 2007, and those that remain are facing severe funding problems.

So, what does Cameron want to do about it? Some of the ideas the Tories are putting forward are good – and, incidentally, all of them are borrowed straight from what those working on violence against women (generally a feminist, lefty bunch) have been saying for ages.

First off, Cameron wants to change the national curriculum so that kids learn about consent as a compulsory element of their sex education classes. He gets a gold star on this one: rapists are not, generally, creepy looking men hiding in bushes. Much more often, they are average, ‘nice’ guys – boyfriends, acquaintances, friends, who just do not understand or believe that ‘no means no’. Will a couple of lessons in the classroom be able to effectively change the underlying assumptions about women that make this possible? It seems a bit ambitious, but it can’t do any harm to try.

Secondly, Cameron wants to provide greater financial security for rape crisis centres by financing them on a three year basis. Another gold star!

But then we get on to the third proposal: review sentencing for rapists. Now, this is not a bad thing as such. Once a woman has gone through the mammoth task of seeing her rapist convicted, at least don’t insult her by giving him a paltry sentence.

And, fourthly – oh. There is no fourth point. Although Cameron goes to great lengths to set out the problem, there is a massive gap in his list of solutions: never mind about the sentences doled out to rapists, when you only manage to get such a tiny, miniscule proportion of them convicted in the first place!

Cameron has made a good start – but absent here is any real plan on how to cut the number of rapes by men who have already left the school system, or how to hoist up the poor conviction rate. Where are the promises of retraining for judges? Where are the promises of expert witnesses, to explain to juries that not all women behave the same when they are raped, and that rapists are still rapists, even if they attack a woman who has an active sexual life, wears a short skirt, or, horrors of horrors, gets drunk?

Just like with Tory promises to introduce equal pay audits, designed to force companies to confront and close the pay gap, there are also any number of questions about how the proposals they have put forward would be put into practice.

But the larger question is surely: what happened to our Labour government in all of this? Why hasn’t it put in place, at the least, these simple measures? Although the government has made some progessive moves, they just ditched plans to introduce expert witnesses. Why isn’t this issue further up the political agenda? The government is failing, and badly.

Want to do something about it?

Protest at this year’s Reclaim the Night march in London, on Saturday 26 November Saturday 24 November.

Send one of the Truth About Rape postcards, and puncture a rape myth (you could always pop one in the post to your MP)

Volunteer or donate to your local rape crisis centre

Just for men – some handy tips on what you can do to challenge our culture of rape.

Cross posted at The F Word