by Laura Bates
Surely this is obvious. Nobody is really expecting women in Clapham to venture out only in groups of three, armed with rape alarms and baseball bats. So what is the impact of issuing such advice? It starts to suggest to the general public that, specifically in cases of sexual assault, victims should be taking responsibility for their own safety and, implicitly, may be partly to blame if they are attacked.
If you think this is an exaggeration, just look at the first sentence from one of the articles: ‘Women are being asked to take more care while walking around alone at night after an incident involving a man who reportedly tried to grab a woman on a riverside path.’ Imagine reading this sentence as a recent victim of assault, as you deliberate whether or not to report what happened last night when you hurried home from work on your own in the dark.
The way we approach and discuss these topics matters. It has a huge impact. The most recent British Attitudes Survey (BSA) revealed that more than one-third of the British public – from whom rape trial juries are drawn – insisted that sexual assault victims bear partial responsibility for their attack if they have been ‘flirting heavily’ beforehand, and more than one-quarter believed they are partially responsible if they are drunk. This kind of police advice can only compound such attitudes.
The notion of telling women to take responsibility for their own safety from sexual violence is as old as it is ridiculous; from women-only train carriages (which suggest male violence is inevitable and so women’s behaviour and freedom must be altered and constrained to accommodate it), to police campaigns suggesting it is a victim’s job to try to avoid being raped. It sends an insidious message, reinforcing attitudes that blame victims and allow perpetrators (cast as a blurry, inevitable evil rather than determined, deliberate criminals) off the hook.
Perhaps most worryingly of all, these messages are coming from the institutions that are supposed to be tackling criminals, not policing victim behaviour. The past week also saw ‘banter’ about rape between members of the public and the official Merseyside police Twitter account; an exchange that was retweeted nearly 1,000 times. It comes hot on the heels of revelations about officers who left an abusive voicemail on the phone of a woman who had reported domestic abuse, calling her a ‘fucking slag’ and a ‘bitch’.
Now look back at the recent figures revealing that more than a quarter of all sexual offences (including rape) reported to the police are not even recorded as crimes, and ask yourself how important attitudes towards sexual violence victims are.
This is a desperate situation, and demands active measures such as training at all levels to counteract rape myths and victim-blaming attitudes among those on the frontline of law enforcement. We know that only around 15 per cent of victims of sexual violence feel able to report to the police. Isn’t it time we started asking why?
Originally published 5 September 2015
EVERYDAY AND INSIDIOUS
Drip, drip, drip. It’s not a single incident that makes gender inequality so harmful. In fact, individual incidents are often maddeningly difficult to protest, quick as people are to respond that you’re overreacting, imagining things or making a fuss about nothing.
The easiest way sexism seeps into our collective consciousness is by starting before we are old enough to challenge it. Pre-school girls worry about the size and shape of their bodies. Babygros in pink and blue promise future princesses and potential presidents, strictly delineated by gender. Research shows that parents interrupt girls more often than boys and that boys are more likely to speak up in the classroom. When children are taught that girls are particularly bad at a certain subject or activity, their performance declines accordingly. So what impact does it have when we tell them boys are naturally good at science, or sell them T-shirts that say ‘I’m too pretty to do maths’?
By subjecting girls to sexism, harassment and assault before they are old enough to question it, we ingrain in them the notion that they are second-class citizens and must simply accept this behaviour as part of life. When sexual assault becomes a normal part of the school day, we send the clear message that it is a normal part of daily life too. By excusing and praising boys and blaming girls for everything from sexual harassment to dress code violations, we teach them that women’s bodies are men’s to use, and that the fault lies with victims, not perpetrators.
I recently spoke at an event about some of the issues facing teenage girls, including body image pressure, mental health problems, online abuse and more. Seeing a little girl of nine or ten in the audience with her mother, one of the organizers went to warn the lady about the nature of the talk, concerned that the content might be too mature for such a young child. The mother explained that she was fully aware of the topics, and had brought her daughter on purpose. At the end, the little girl came up and thanked me. She said the talk had been particularly useful, because she’d received her first unsolicited ‘dick pic’ a year ago and hadn’t known how to respond. At another talk, a shy 14-year-old came up afterwards and told me, in a voice barely louder than a whisper, that over the past year she’d been pressured by ten different boys to send them nude pictures of herself. Most of them she barely knew.
These little girls go on to grow up in a world in which they rarely see themselves portrayed in the media (particularly if they’re disabled, transgender or girls of colour). Their stories just aren’t told by the Hollywood machine that churns out hundreds of hit movies each year but affords women only 28 per cent of speaking roles and sees them remove their clothes three times more frequently than their male co-stars.
As they attend college or university, young women are faced with sexual harassment and assault often so extreme that those outside the education system would find it difficult to believe. Yet our stubborn societal insistence that gender equality has already been achieved makes it incredibly difficult to speak out about the reality of misogyny on campus without being branded an oversensitive snowflake. Young women aren’t clutching their pearls and looking for something to complain about, as some right-wing commentators would have you believe. They are battling a litany of abuse in pursuit of their education, a situation so severe that many I have spoken to have simply dropped out of higher education altogether.
In September 2017, three major pieces of research were published in the same week. The first, a government-funded study, revealed that a shocking one in four girls is depressed by age fourteen. The second, a survey of 2,000 young people by charity Girlguiding, found that 64 per cent of teenage girls have experienced sexual harassment in the last year alone. And the third, The Global Early Adolescent Study, polled people across fifteen countries, showing that children felt straightjacketed into rigid gender roles in early adolescence, as the world expanded for boys and closed in for girls. Amid widespread coverage, I never saw anybody suggest a possible connection between these three sets of devastating findings.
And as the world around us sends us clear messages about our value and place, it also provides us with a litany of small examples of sexism, often combined with other forms of prejudice, so regular and expected that we slowly become desensitized to the situation. Part of dismantling the invisibility of gender inequality is taking off the blinkers that blind us to these daily abuses, because we are so used to the situation that we no longer even notice them at all.
YOU CAN TRACE A LIFETIME OF GENDER INEQUALITY THROUGH EVERYDAY SEXISM
In early 2012, I was groped on a bus in London. I was vocal about it and made sure everyone around me heard what had happened. Every other passenger looked out of the window.
Among the 100,000 stories submitted to the Everyday Sexism Project, near-identical experiences emerge again and again. Stories of women being masturbated at in public spaces came in their thousands, from Spain to Turkey, Germany to India. Women in Japan, England and Israel were told not to bother with higher education as it was their sole destiny to become homemakers for their future husbands. A woman was grabbed between the legs in a souk in Morocco and another
had her crotch groped in a nightclub in China. A woman in North Africa was demoted by her boss for refusing his requests for sex and an employee in Europe was sacked when she turned down her superior’s offer of a threesome.
Experiences shared by men and boys, such as being ridiculed for asking for parental leave, or suffering homophobic bullying for trying to stand up to lad culture, revealed the damage gender stereotypes do, not just to women but to everybody.
The stories came from people aged eight to eighty, be they wearing hijabs or bikinis, about sexism on aeroplanes and trams, at home, work and school. You can trace an entire lifetime of gender inequality through the experiences women have shared through the project . . .
It starts young. At eleven or twelve you begin to experience harassment . . .
‘I was twelve, walking home after school, when a white van full of builders drove past honking and doing sexual hand gestures and shaking their heads with their tongues out.’
When you make it to school, the sexism continues . . .
‘I’m eleven and I’ve just started high school. I’m constantly told by my peers and even my best friend that women should really just stay in the kitchen and clean so that guys can have a decent meal when they get home from work. They also make jokes about me and my friends being sluts and whores because we have breasts.’
Even within your family or an intimate relationship you may not escape sexism and violence . . .
‘I was raped by my father as a child. When I first told this to someone I felt comfortable with, my current boyfriend, he made a rape joke and said: “Well, you shouldn’t have led him on.” ’
When you reach university, you are bombarded with harassment and even assault on and off campus . . .
‘In the nine months I’ve been at university, I’ve been almost raped, thrown against a wall for refusing to make out with a guy, threatened (“I’m going to fucking kill you, bitch”) for standing up to a man sexually harassing my friend and groped or touched without consent on about 75 per cent of nights out. I’m sick of this.’
You graduate to a pay gap, and a workplace rife with sexism and harassment . . .
‘I was told by my boss and his boss that they prefer not to work with women. Many men used foul language deliberately to put me off working with them. I was paid less than male colleagues I managed.’
When you choose to start a family, you risk losing your job because of maternity discrimination . . .
‘I was brought into a company based on close to a decade worth of experience in my field. I then brought on nearly ten other highly experienced individuals. I had several former clients who loved me and loved my work . . . I was fired for being pregnant.’
On your way to and from work, you pass through public spaces which can be unsafe . . .
‘Guys have grabbed my butt while I was walking on the street minding my own business, my crotch too . . . I constantly hear guys making comments about me, I am beeped on the street and I am shouted at with what they might see as “compliments”. The last time a guy harassed me he said: “I would tear apart your ass.” ’
You walk past billboards and buses and magazine stands conveying an artificial ideal to which you are constantly compared . . .
‘I don’t have the giant boobs all the girls on the fronts of the magazines have. I don’t have the giant boobs and the perfectly toned ass that all the girls in the music videos have . . . I don’t have a little nose or perfectly straight white teeth. I don’t have a flawless, airbrushed complexion like every single woman on any of the multiple face cream/make-up/toiletries/whatever else adverts I see every day. I have small boobs, some cellulite on my thighs, a kinda big nose, slightly wonky teeth and some facial scars from a car accident a few years ago. And I feel ridiculous. I feel that because of all these things, I’m not worth anything as a human being.’
The sexism you face might combine with other forms of prejudice . . .
‘I overheard someone ask my boyfriend: “What’s f***ing a Paki like?” ’
Yet while all this is happening, other people seem not to see it . . .
‘A man masturbated across from me and the woman sitting next to me on a bus one time. And he was moaning and saying things to us. And neither one of us stopped it or knew how to stop it. The rest of the passengers ignored it.’
If you try to stand up, you risk being bullied or harassed further . . .
‘Was called a prude for objecting to Porn Fridays, where female colleagues’ faces were Photoshopped on to porn pictures.’
If you try to speak out, you risk being belittled at best, disbelieved or blamed at worst . . .
‘When I was raped, people said I was asking for it, that I was a slut and I had led him on.’
And yet, in spite of all this, people are standing up in their droves. According to the testimonies sent to Everyday Sexism, one group of teenage boys challenged sexism at their school by going in wearing skirts to show solidarity with the girls. University students set up a new feminist society to protest sexual harassment on campus. An engineer who was sick of being asked to do other people’s photocopying broke the printer at work to avoid the problem. A woman sick of cold-callers asking to speak to ‘the man of the house’ started putting them on to her 6-year-old son. An employee whose male colleague loudly accused her of being on her period when she disagreed with him replied: ‘If I had to bleed to find you annoying, I’d be anaemic.’ A woman who was called an ‘opinionated lesbian cunt’ responded: ‘Thank you. I’m proud of being opinionated, lesbian, and having a cunt.’
Every one of us has a moment when prejudice or inequality crosses our path, and we have a choice to make. Will you take a stand, or will you be the person who looks out of the window?
Originally published 16 April 2016
WHY DON’T TV SHOWS AND NEWSPAPERS CATER TO HALF THEIR AUDIENCE – WOMEN?
There is a cartoon by the artist Grizelda Grizlingham that shows a group of men sitting around a boardroom table, with only one woman present. The caption reads: ‘Well, you’re the only one who thinks we’re a sexist organization.’ The woman’s face is fixed in a grimace. I can’t help but think the cartoon would be equally accurate if a third or even half of the people around the table were women. Because, as recent history has shown, often nothing short of a full-scale campaign is enough to get people to listen to the perspective of ‘just the women’.
Such was the case in the recent example of comedian Dapper Laughs, whose portfolio includes extreme misogyny, real-life harassment of women and rape jokes. Yet until a 60,000-strong petition was launched, ITV was apparently quite happy to defend his show as ‘firmly based on treating women with respect and speaking to them in the right way’ and ‘neither sexist nor degrading to women’, according to a letter one viewer received after making a complaint.
Although the broadcaster did finally decide to axe the show after a public outcry, it first attempted to defend it again, with a spokesperson saying: ‘Comedy is subjective and we appreciate the content of the show might not be to everyone’s taste. We regret that any of our viewers were offended. However, as with all of our shows, the series content was carefully considered, compiled and deemed suitable for broadcast.’ This only sends one message to the viewer: we seriously thought about this and went ahead anyway. If you’re likely to be upset by misogynistic content, you’re not the core audience ITV was planning for. You are not the default viewer.
The same uneasy feeling might also have been experienced by female students at the University of Liverpool, when the script of a sexist, rape joke-fuelled play intended to be performed as part of an annual concert emerged on social media: this wasn’t written with you in mind.
These aren’t the only recent incidents to send women the clear message that they just aren’t the target audience. How did The Independent think its female readers would feel when confronted by Frank Warren’s recent column, headlined: ‘Call me an old git, but I just can’t see that there’s
a place for women’s boxing’? What about heterosexual Sun-reading female football fans coming across its offer of a date with a page 3 girl as a prize for participating in their fantasy league? (‘We might even let you pick which one, so feel free to start your research now.’) Its response to criticism (which included saying that the promotion was unlikely to offend the 93 per cent male target audience) was so transparent, it may as well have been phrased as ‘Calm down, love – this isn’t for you.’
It’s not just newspapers and television where women can find themselves crammed into repetitive, stereotypical roles or omitted altogether – it’s true across other media as well, from gaming to theatre. And the experience of feeling ‘this wasn’t created with me in mind’ is not exclusive to women – it is shared, in fact, by anybody outside the usually heterosexual, white, cisgendered, middle-class, non-disabled, ‘default’ target audience. Whether it’s the hyper-sexualization and exotification of black women (a classic case of the intersection of gender and race); the portrayal of disabled people as tragic or evil; the stereotyping of particular religions; or the appearance of gay or transgender characters only in storylines about sexuality or gender identity, as if these characteristics entirely define them. These stereotypes erase and invalidate people’s real and complex experiences, but those who object are often accused of being ungrateful – ‘You should be happy they included that character at all.’
Of course, the problem isn’t straightforward. Even in cases when writers try to push back against formulaic norms, as in the creation of the nuanced female character Skyler White in Breaking Bad, stereotypical expectations and judgements are so deeply embedded in audiences that the reaction can be a massive backlash against the character and even the actor involved. Actress Anna Gunn described her shock at discovering online forums with thousands of members dedicated to despising the character, where apparent hatred of the fictional Skyler’s strength and refusal to succumb to her husband’s wishes spilled over into death threats targeting Gunn herself.
