‘I learnt to act like porn stars so boys would like me’ – Jemima tells MTR how her life changed when exposed to porn at 10, by @meltankardreist

Cross-posted from: Melinda Tankard Reist
Originally published: 26.11.17

‘I shaved my pubic hair and became highly sexual…my innocence was stolen from me’

Jemima (her real name withheld by request) is a 19 year old university student living in Melbourne. At age 10 she saw pornography for the first time. Her life began to unravel, culminating in sexual assault by a group of teen boys when she was 14 and leading to severe mental health problems. I got chatting to Jemima at the recent Justice Conference in Melbourne. Within a few minutes her story poured out and she agreed to allow me to record her experience. Articulate and insightful, Jemima helps us see the way porn exposure so young shaped her view of herself, what she was good for, how she should behave and to understand the long-lasting ramifications nine years later. 
Read more ‘I learnt to act like porn stars so boys would like me’ – Jemima tells MTR how her life changed when exposed to porn at 10, by @meltankardreist

Meet Frilledneck Fashions & the sexualisation of young girls by @meltankardreist

Cross-posted from: Melinda Tankard Eeist
Originally published: 15.07.16

collectiveshoutnewlogoLast year we exposed global dancewear company California Kisses for posting sexualised images of underage and even pre-teen girls on their Instagram – images that attracted hundreds of comments of a sexual nature from adult men which CK failed to even moderate.

popthatBut it seems the message is not getting through. Yet another dance wear company (which also sells swimwear) is regularly posting sexualised photos of underage girls on its popular social media account. Frilledneck Fashion is an Australian company trading online internationally.

frilledneck

Note how the young girls pictured are dressed, styled and posed. Even when dressed in dancewear, girls are not depicted dancing (see the image above of the girl in red lying supine with an arched back.) Clothing is designed to emphasise certain parts of the body, drawing attention to adult, sexual features children do not yet possess. Girls replicate poses and sultry facial expressions that would be common in sexy adult female models. There are many other examples of even younger girls we have chosen not to show.
Read more Meet Frilledneck Fashions & the sexualisation of young girls by @meltankardreist

20 reasons why Coles and Woolworths should #BinZooMag by @meltankardreist

Cross-posted from: Melinda Tankard Reist
Originally published: 17.06.15

Zoo Weekly has a long history of exploiting and objectifying women for the enjoyment of male readers. During this time, supermarket chains Coles and Woolworths have quietly profited from the sale of this unrestricted magazine in stores around the country. There are a lot of reasons why Coles and Woolworths should rethink the sale of Zoo Weekly, but we’ve narrowed it down to just 20, in no particular order.

1) Zoo invited readers to send in photos of their girlfriends’ breasts to ‘win a boob job

2) Zoo posted this image on their Facebook page and asked young fans which half they preferred- and why.
Read more 20 reasons why Coles and Woolworths should #BinZooMag by @meltankardreist

Paedophile: Misleading language & child sexual abuse

cross-posted from Everyday Victim Blaming

orig, pub. 21.11.15

We have become increasingly concerned about the (mis)use of the word ‘paedophile’, particularly on social media. We wanted to write a short and succinct piece about the problems with using this word, and we’ve referred to Prof Liz Kelly’s piece Weasel Words: Paedophiles and the Cycle of Abuse and the Child & Women Abuse Studies website.

It has become clear that the term ‘paedophile’ is now most commonly used to collectively describe child sexual abusers. It seems to refer to a type of abuser – usually one who is abusing children outside of the familial setting, the ‘loner’ with uncontrollable sexual urges, who appears ‘different’ to others within the community.

One issue with this is the assumption that most abuse takes place outside the family. This is not the case. Children are most at risk from adults who are in a family caring role – usually fathers or step fathers. The description of ‘paedophile’ is a move away from those men we know are most likely to abuse – our fathers, grandfathers, brothers, family friends. They are the men sharing our lives and and this term takes us into the more comfortable place of ‘other’. It presumes a fundamental difference between men who sexually abuse children and ‘ordinary’ men; a difference that does not exist in reality.

The dichotomy of ‘paedophile’ vs ‘ordinary men’ is a dangerous one. Ordinary men are the ones abusing children. Generally, these men do not only have a sexual attraction to children. These men have wives and partners and girlfriends and maintain successful sexual relationships with adults as well as abusing children.

Using the clinical definition of paedophile, that of these men only having a sexual interest in children, stops us looking at strategies of abusers. These strategies are the same regardless of whether the abuser fits the clinical definition. Abusers choose the children they abuse and they make a deliberate attempt not to get caught – they make strategic decisions in order to facilitate abuse. The ‘paedophile’ discourse prevents us from discussing this and also helps the abusers avoid responsibility.

Describing men who sexually abuse children in this way focuses on their ‘deviance’ – an ‘abnormality’, a ‘sickness’. It stops us looking at men’s entitlement, the notions of ownership and we lose the option to talk about choice & responsibility for our own abusive actions. If ‘paedophilia’ is thought of in these terms, we become distracted away from the real issue, which is actually one of ordinariness.

Abusing others is a choice, as is not abusing others. If we use terms that allow abusers to say ‘I can’t help myself’, what does that say about the likelihood of preventing child sexual abuse? Child sexual abusers describe themselves as such; using terms preferred by abusers means we collude by using their language. We must challenge the notions of ownership, sexuality (especially that of men) and ensure that choice and agency of abusers is acknowledged and discussed. Othering them into ‘paedos’ or ‘sickos’ prevents that.

Let us call them what they are – sexual abusers of children or child rapists.

Ending Victimisation and Blame [Everyday Victim Blaming]: This campaign is about changing the culture and language around violence against women and children.  We aim to challenge the view that men cannot help being violent and abusive towards women and children.  We want to challenge the view that women should attempt to ‘avoid’ abuse in order to not become a victim of it.  We challenge media reports of cases of violence against women and children where there is an almost wilful avoidance of the actual reasons for these acts.  Power, control, women and children being considered ‘possessions’ of men, and avoidance of personal responsibility all contribute to a societal structure that colludes with abusers and facilitates a safe space in which they can operate. This is what we are campaigning to change. @EVB_Now

The Bexleyheath teacher, the judge’s comments, and our construction of victims and villains

cross-posted from bottomfacedotcom ~ Proud owners of lady parts

orig. pub. on 14.1.15

Back in my early teenage years I had this intense desire to become a singer. This lead onto singing lessons and my taking a GCSE in music (which I couldn’t complete due to my health). I had two teachers who worked with me on my voice. One was a guy who looked like Pike from Dad’s Army, and the other was a woman. She had red flowing hair down to her waist, and alabaster skin. She looked like a pre-Raphaelite painting. Over the course of our lessons I developed a crush on this teacher. Occasionally we would sneak out after class together and have a cigarette, and she had a tendency to treat me more as a peer than as a student. It made me feel so special and grown up. I didn’t know anyone else who had such a close relationship with this woman whom I entirely idolised. I’m glad to say that, though inappropriate, this was as far as our relationship went. When I think back to my school years I find it difficult to remember any girl friend of mine who didn’t have a crush on an older person. I tell you this story only to offer a glimpse into the mind of a teenage girl, hopelessly smitten with a teacher.

Today a judge, sentencing in the case of a teacher who had a sexual relationship with a teenage pupil, placed all of the onus for this relationship upon the pupil. The judge stated, “If grooming is the right word to use, it was she who groomed you, (and) you gave in to temptation.” This was a 16 year old girl, who had an entirely normal, if persistent, crush on a 40 something year old man in a position of responsibility. This man’s wife had had a miscarriage the day he took this young girl’s virginity on the school grounds. This man took blankets and condoms to the school. This man took this pupil to his home where he had sex with her. This man took a normal teenage girl’s crush upon a teacher and exploited it entirely, yet the judge felt the need to describe this child as “intelligent and manipulative”, despite acknowledging that she was a particularly vulnerable child, and identified the perpetrator as “emotionally fragile”. The semantic fields here are revolting. The perpetrator is emotional, fragile, gave in to temptation; thus he is painted as submissive. Meanwhile the child he chose to have sex with is a stalker, a groomer, manipulative and intelligent. All of which paint her as the aggressor. Despite the guilty verdict being handed to this man, the judge has created a situation whereby she describes the man who chose to sexually exploit a child as a victim, whilst the child who was exploited is described as a villain.

This gives us an important glimpse into rape culture. I’ve spoken before about how I was blamed for being raped. Three times I was blamed- it was my fault for having dinner alone with a male friend, it was my fault for not taking a rape alarm into a private property, it was my fault for being alone with a black man ( the last being from my racist ex husband). Other people I know have been blamed for equally tenuous reasons- what they were wearing, which taxi they climbed into, what they had to drink, where they worked. I’ve known of looked after children (children in care) who have been sexually exploited by grown men, yet the system has turned a blind eye to it because “that’s what those girls are like”. I’ve also seen rape and sexual exploitation ignored because of where people are from, and how they spoke. On the one hand, we have a gendered acceptance of sexual assault- with the premise that men are incapable of controlling their sexual urges and that women are the gate keepers of this. Then on the other, we have these terrible classist notions. In the above case the girl’s “troubled past” was noted. This is a classic example of this notion of the “chav” or “little slags”. The moment a victim can be identified as troubled, sympathy for them diminishes because then they no longer neatly fit the archetype of the “perfect victim”.

This archetype dictates that the perfect victim be a girl, white, middle class, virginal, young, cis, and straight. She is a “good girl” from a “good home”. Studies have shown that such victims generate more column inches and with more onus placed upon the perpetrator’s actions, with little information regarding the victim’s clothes, alcohol intake, sexual history etc. The name of the study escapes me, but if I can find it I will link to it later, but one study compared the media attention given to a white girl abductee and two black girls who were abducted. The two black girls together didn’t receive half of the media attention (nor police hours) the white girl did. We can see this same pattern regarding class with the media reaction to Karen Matthews and Kate McCann. Though obviously we now know the outcome of the Matthews’ case, it is still worth noting the way in which the media initially reported the case, with far more intense speculation being placed upon the general lifestyle of Matthews. Her class immediately set up the media in opposition to her.

The composition of our society means that we construct victims and villains along gendered, racial and class lines. These constructs feed into the way in which victims are treated in greater society, within the media and within the justice system. Facts rarely get in the way of the negative opinions of those who come from oppressed groups. This leads us to the point where the eventual victims and villains we are presented with, by the media and the judiciary, are often a poor reflection of reality. It would be nice to be able to be shocked by the judge’s comments regarding this young girl, but this is not the first time children have been victim blamed (as we can see in the case of childhood sexual assault in various children’s homes, and in the Rotherham grooming cases), and I am certain it will not be the last.

 

bottomfacedotcom: proud owner of lady parts: Writes, makes vulvas, swears. Past caring. Home ed. Parent of child w/ ASD ADHD. Has ME & FMS. Lucy tweets at @LUBBottom. She also has an etsy page: Little Shop of Vulvas

 

 

The Great Big Patriarchal Shaped Elephant In The Room #RotherhamAbuse by Outspoken Redhead

(Cross-posted from Outspoken Redhead)

As if to delight news channels across the country, August vomits up the moral panic of the inquiry into child exploitation and sexual abuse in Rotherham. 1400 children abused or exploited over 17 years by abusers, some of whom were Asian males. This is a news story with perfect components:

POLITICAL DRAMA!!!! Should Labour be blamed? After all it’s a Labour Council isn’t it, and its Social Services Department is probably staffed by bearded do gooders more likely to remove a child because their parents want to take her to Sunday School than challenge Asian people.  Labour grab this chance to score endless home goals by demanding the resignation of the Police Commissioner or else they will suspend him from the party! Oh yes, that’ll show everyone.  And anyway, isn’t this the Tories fault for introducing these Commissioners roles in the first place with their £120k salaries and then finding out no one can remove them.  All of these points may or may not be true, none of them have any relevance or any prospect of making things right for the victims.

RACE AND MULTICULTURAL DRAMA!! Up pop UKIP, making sly digs about different cultural values and even sensible people mutter that this is what Islam is like, painting non Muslim White women as whores and this is where it all ends.  People who have never read the Qu’uran feel qualified to pronounce on religion, at least other people’s religion, foreign religion that doesn’t belong here. Nigel Farage must have wept with joy that a UKIP MEP in Yorkshire is Pakistani and could be wheeled out to condemn his own community.  Look, a Pakistani person thinks this is a race issue, so it must be right, just as it is when a woman condemns feminism. This makes it TRUE!

USELESS PUBLIC SERVICES DRAMA!!  Police, Councils, they’re all the same. Sitting on their gold plated pensioned arses, doing sod all except soaking up taxpayers money. Sack ’em all!  Ok, sack quite a lot of them.  Well, please for the love of God can we sack some of them so that we can all convince ourselves that this is sorted and has gone away and will never happen again?  Can’t we?  Isn’t this how it works?

Well, sadly no.  Sexual abuse of women and children isn’t like a flu pandemic.  It happens every day in every city, town and village in every so-called civilised and not so civilised country.  It’s perpetrated by black men, white men, religious men, atheist men, rich men and poor men.  Handsome men and ugly men, successful men and men who have failed in every other part of their lives. But you will see there is a common thread. It’s men, abusing women and children over whom they have some power.  Or power imbalance.  Because while it can often be the power of the priest, the politician, the famous radio star or the children’s entertainer which prevents their victims from speaking out or being believed if they do; sometimes it’s the powerlessness of the victim, a Looked After* Child (*yes, I do use the term wryly) or so often simply the powerlessness of the child that depends on its father for a home and security.

Sexual abuse exerts power and control, most of all by shrouding the victim in shame. It’s easy to spot a bruise or a burn on a child – but how does any teacher spot the signs of sexual abuse.  The psychological impact is often profound or over sexualised behaviour can make the child stand out but to make the link to abuse is close to impossible unless the child speaks out.  And then, as we have seen all too well, so many men are capable of swaggering while protesting their innocence and damning their accusers and achieving a successful prosecution is beset with difficulties. And is that even what victims want?  Most of all they want it to stop, for it never to have happened in the first place and for the shame and guilt to be removed, feelings that overwhelm, like Lady Macbeth dabbing futilely at blood and only being amplified by having to recount every detail in court to a man in a wig determined to show you and your 12 year old self as a slut and a liar.

The incidence of sexual abuse, shown by surveys of adults shows it is shockingly high and massively undiscovered.  1400 children in seventeen years in a town the size of Rotherham is the screaming headline figure. Why don’t we poll towns of the same size over the same period and ask the questions we never ask and see how high those figures are?  Perhaps we might find out what we don’t want to know – that sexual abuse is rife in every community, that it is entirely equality proofed in every way, except gender.  While we’re asking awkward questions, could we also consider whether we want families to be less ‘private’, more subject to scrutiny without screaming Nanny State! While we’re at it, do we want children to be able to talk freely about sexuality without shame from a very young age without having paroxysms of outrage?

Wow, if we were to have really difficult discussions, could we talk about patriarchy? Could we talk about how our male dominated society tells us sex is something men want and women give, that girls are sluts while boys are ‘lads’ and every day a national newspaper publishes pictures of women’s breasts for a bit of fun and how all of that might, just might, determine how many men view all women?

Could it be that if video games allow young men to rape prostitutes or kill them, it might be evidence of something really, really wrong?  We are told equality is a battle long won, look, we had a female Prime Minister.  Let’s just forget that for every year she was in power it was lawful for Denis Thatcher to rape her, a law repealed in my adult lifetime.

Actually, that’s all a bit difficult isn’t it.  Tell you what, let’s get back to political mudslinging, baying for sackings and making dark assertions about race.  Sexual abuse happens to the others, not us and is perpetrated by evil monsters, not that nice chap next door.  Let’s continue with our time-honoured hand wringing and say over and over “This must not happen again”.  Except, it already is.  Right her, right now and will continue until we start to name the real problem. Patriarchy. Or just Power, if that’s not as scary.  Either will do, but once again those in power choose Pretence.

 

 

 

Male Violence effects us all by @terristrange

(Cross-posted from the Arctic Feminist)

There’s been a lot of interesting news on twitter today.  Its started my wheels spinning.  Ian Watkins (lostprophets) has pleaded guilty to 11 counts of attempted rape of an infant girl.  Nigella Lawson’s attacker Charles Saatchi has been given license in the British media to slander her character despite the fact that he was photographically documented brutally assaulting her.  Oh and of course Karen Ingala Smith’s project “Counting Dead Women” has been taking off and been at the forefront of my mind.

Whats become even more clear to me is if a woman like Nigella Lawson, who is famous and successful, consistently in the public eye and many women in similar positions are subject to not only the threat of male violence, but to male violence itself, where does that leave women like you and me?  We become numbers added to body counts that only exist because some crazy feminist out there thinks our lives matter enough to count.

Its also amazing that we still have people under the impression that being a child rapist is a “sexuality” and that we should all feel sympathy for men who brutalize children.  Erasing yet again the damage inflicted upon those who are raped in childhood.

Why do we hesitate to see male violence and the male sex caste for what they are?  Why do we not see that there is a war being waged against the female sex that has been going steady for thousands of years and that we are losing, badly?  Why do we not see that all women, no matter what they achieve are always under the threat of some man getting to define them (as victim) forever?  We desperately need to build communities that function away from men.  Refuges for our refugees.  We need to stop acting as if all of this is just a misunderstanding and get serious about putting an end to male violence, for good.

 

The Arctic Feminist: I lazily blog about whatever I want. Always from a radical feminist perspective

NOT JUST HORROR IN “AUNTY’S” HOUSE by @anewselfwritten

(Cross-posted from A New Self Written)

Dave Lee Travis, stalwart of BBC youth and popular viewing in the 70’s and 80’s, was sentenced on 26 September, after being found guilty of sexual assault. He was given a three month suspended sentence for assaulting a researcher on one of his shows. It’s hard to imagine that what she has suffered or been through since then has in any way been ‘suspended’ apart from her belief in the criminal justice system perhaps…

But Dave Lee Travis is just the most recent example of a string of now shamed BBC entertainers: most famously Jimmy Savile, as well as Rolf Harris and Stuart Hall. Understandably much of the focus in the media has been on the role of the BBC. It sits in our collective psyche as an important institution; beloved “Aunty” – an honorary family member – has essentially let down a generation. It has wittingly or unwittingly sanctioned crimes to take place against vulnerable people. And it has made a generation of viewers reconsider the nature of those programmes and celebrities that alongside schooling and friends made up the weft and warp of their childhoods.

But think about it – isn’t it time we, as a society, widened our focus when we consider and respond to child abuse? Any perpetrator of this crime needs to be brought to justice. Yet one of the most enduring institutions of all – the family – is overlooked in this welcome exposure of abuse in our different institutions.

The Office of the Children’s Commissioner recently launched its important inquiry into child sexual abuse in a family environment. You’re unlikely to have heard about this unless you follow these issues relatively closely or you’re an early riser. It received scant coverage on Radio 4 at around 5.35 am on Thursday 3 July then it sank with very little trace. This is an important inquiry that needs everyone’s attention, not just from professionals and people with a statutory role or function… But without the celebrity status to give it a profile or the whiffs of political scandal that are following the Home Secretary’s attempts to launch an inquiry into this issue, nobody will find it important or interesting.

But as a society we really need to. If Top of the Pops, Jim’ll Fix It, and It’s a Knockout were a favourite part of your childhood and teens you’ll know the feeling of shock, disgust and often disbelief that these people did these things. Those feelings can give everyone a window into an aspect of how it can feel to live with the knowledge and memories of abuse by a member of your family. Somebody you loved and trusted isn’t what they seemed, and there’s very little of what you may actually have held dear that hasn’t been contaminated by what went on behind closed doors.

Just as more abuse “scandals” continue to emerge and shock us further, so those realising and confronting that they were abused have to come to terms frequent revelations and reminders. What happened to many many individuals at the hands of “Aunty” needs to be fully investigated. And what has happened to probably hundreds of thousands of children at the hands of uncle, father, brother, grandfather, family friend, parent, cousin also needs to be investigated.

Childhood is a series of formative experiences, memories and routines. When you realise you’ve been abused it’s not just your memories of tea-time TV routines that are turned on their heads.

This is what the routine felt like to me.

ROUTINE ABUSE

Between the ages of five and eleven
Week days after half past three
Saturday Sunday twenty-four seven
Holidays? Let’s wait and see

Upstairs meant the serious business
Downstairs it happened more casually
Get to the kitchen – safety and happiness
Outdoors, uncharted territory

The rules are relatively easy to learn
I picked them up at five years old
You’re called, you go, it happens – a pattern
Now broken by having told

 

A New Self WrittenA New Self Written A brand new blog aiming to explore the power of poetry, public policy, feminism, current affairs, art. Interested in putting views out into the blogosphere and stirring the virtual pot now and then. TWITTER @anewselfwritten