The culture & class of sexual violence

The politics of women's speech

Whenever I write about rape the articles are usually pretty popular around my own set, I’m not sure this will be one of those. 

There were two main, very personal issues that were critical in me start writing for a public audience on “the gender issue”, one was rape and the other was disability.

I wrote a story in Quillette about my history of sexual abuse and that of my close childhood friend and cousin Nicky. Nicky later became profoundly disabled and needed nursing home care. 

By the time she died in 2016, I hadn’t had a conversation with Nicky for four years, because she had lost the ability to speak.

When Nicky and I were kids, there were no computer games and no entertaining day time television, we spent many hours in each other’s company simply getting to know each other, looking at each other faces and talking. By the time she lost her speech, I could read Nicky’s thoughts in her eyes and in the movement of her brow. I could read her energy and she could read mine.

I knew Nicky carried sexual trauma in her body and I could feel the different ways her body reacted to the staff of the hospitals, psych wards and nursing homes that were her home in those last years. Sexual trauma survives the loss of the ability to talk about it.

As soon as I found out the males cold identify into female care roles, I immediately thought of Nicky. 

When I started to write, I wrote personal testimony of things I knew. Testimony is vital in the public discussion of the protection of women and girls because sexual abuse and trauma are largely hidden and unmeasurable. I knew that sending a male to take care of Nicky’s intimate care needs would have been state sanctioned rape, the intention of the carer would be immaterial.

Rape is so common among women and especially poor and disabled women. I know for a fact that nursing homes and are packed with women who carry sexual trauma.

When I wrote about the experiences Nicky and I had in childhood, transactivists told me that I was weaponising my trauma, and Nicky’s illness, against the vulnerable men who needed to care for women’s intimate needs as a gender affirmation practice.

Rape is political, disability is political, the way taxpayer money is spent to care for the vulnerable is political, and immigration is political.

If people will remember, a number of years a go a group of Lebanese boys and men went on a rape rampage through Sydney, the fact that half of them were named Mohammad, or versions of that name, didn’t help community tensions about Muslims and mass migration.

Not once did it occur to me that people identifying the rapist as Lebanese, implicated my Lebanese husband or the Lebanese people I know in the crime.  I remember feeling disappointed when I found out that the rapists were Lebanese, but in no way, on any level, in any corner of my mind, would it have occurred to me to silence the rape victims in identifying the ethnicity of their attackers, or in talking about the culture and religion of their attackers as a contributing factor to the attack. The idea of suggesting such a thing, to save the reputation of Lebanese people, would never occur to me, because Lebanese are obviously wonderful, hospitable and kind people.  

In the feminist world, we talk about rape culture a lot, and international cross culture studies have found that more patriarchal cultures, and cultures that diminish the value of women, do have escalated incidence of sexual violence. The links between rape and culture and rape and certain interpretations of religion are well established. The connection between sex and rape is also real, but the there is no connection between race and rape. These concepts are so simple we could explain them to a child.

This is why when Alan Jones foolishly read out a racist letter referring to “Lebanese men” as “vermin” in 2005, I was disgusted. Tensions in Sydney continued to escalate and in 2005 there were riots in the Sydney beachside suburb of Cronulla between young white Australian men and Lebanese Australian men.

In 2009 Jones was forced to apologise to the Lebanese Muslim community and pay $10,000 to the president of the Lebanese Muslim Association, after a human rights complaint. The complaint was upheld because race and religion are protected characteristics in Australian law.  Lebanese men have protection in law from discrimination.

Unfortunately, sex is no longer protected in Australian law, nor, by association, are the vulnerabilities of sex to rape. Therefore, we need to be careful who we are silencing, and be mindful about who does, and who does not, have power.

In retrospect, the Lebanese gang rapes, the trial and conviction, the releasing of details and the surrounding outrage, did lead to racial tension, it did lead to some bad feeling toward Lebanese Muslims and Lebanese in general. But to react to this by asking the victims to be silent or to not talk about the cultural or religious aspect of rape would be really stupid and abusive.

Of course, the progressive middle class in Australia are really stupid and abusive, and the ABC and it’s media friends have continued to imply that talking about culture and religion in relation to sexual oppression of any kind, is distasteful to their middle class palate.  Therefore the only people who now talk about the link between rape and specific cultures and religions are the political right and the great unwashed (the working class). 

The progressive left is allowed to talk about sexual violence and culture, but only in the pen they are given, and in those boundaries they talk about almost nothing else. What the left call “gendered violence” is what white men do to white women. From this elite prison the left then go around calling women the bad names when they raise concerns about the safety of female bodies in relation to sexist, patriarchal and backward cultural and religious ideas. Allah forbid we suggest some sexist ideas are sometimes concentrated in particular regions or community groups.

My contention is not that we only ever talk about dangerous cultural or religious concepts in relation to sexual violence, but that the way to deal with racial tension is not to silence women about cultural and religious aspects of rape or sexual assault. If Lebanese Muslims have a male violence problem in their community, then they need to be called to account, just as the Catholic Church was held accountable for paedophile priests. If they don’t have a problem, then there is no need to stop women talking about it, because it will be easily debunked with public debate. After all, you will remember race and religion are protected in ways sex is not, ie. in the discrimination law.

When the debate about the link between mass migration and “grooming gangs” sparked up on gender critical twitter, I again stepped in to defend women’s right to speak about this issue.

An open letter has been circulating, signed by a group of middle class correct thinkers, who say they are not as racist as wrong speaking gender critical women. I immediately asked for the wrong speak evidence, of which I was provided none.  Someone showed me a screen shot of tweet from Kellie-Jay Keen referring to “Muslim men” in a way that implied that this group may have comparatively more sexist ideology than other groups of men.  I didn’t see the context of the tweet and based on the overwhelming volume of work Keen has provided to the gender critical movement, I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

Giving people the benefit of the doubt is not “excusing racism”, the middle class have consistently given the benefit of the doubt to men over women, on almost every issue, so they understand the concept.

As soon as I started to defend women from claims of far-right association, and said they were allowed to criticise a religion (people criticise my religion all the time), I waited for the accusations to come that I am also am racist and culturally ignorant. So they did.

I know for an absolute fact that I have had more contact with Muslims than almost all of the people who signed that letter. Someone once told me that mentioning my family in this way was “the black friend” defence against racism. I would really be playing the long game after 30 years of marriage and two children.

The dynamics in UK politics is of course slightly different, and the class volume is turned up a thousand decibels. Maybe it is because Tommy Robinson and the right have been so vocal about the problem of the grooming gangs, but if no one else raised it first, people should be questioning the influence of the progressive culture on the press and the police. 

The neglect of the left in recognising some sexual violence has given the right this opportunity to claim dibs on the issue and that is not the fault of gender critical feminists. I am reminded of Andrea Dworkin’s famous quote that to “right-wing men we are private property. To left wing men, we are public property.”

Ultimately unprotected women will run to safety. If sections of the right are offering sanctuaries for women to speak out, you will hear women speaking from that direction.  This is why I write in a right-wing magazine. Women have their own side.

It is not that women are leading right on immigration it is that working class women live in the real world, and free of the stifling constraints of middle-class respectability, are able to openly agree with the right when they are correct about something.

Women raising concerns about the effect of mass migration on sexual violence in the population is not racist. Please disprove women who make claims of religious and cultural based sexism, bring the data, but stop shamming them, you are embarrassing yourselves and promoting rape culture.