On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

  The UK fares little better. A 2020 Amnesty Report described the government as ‘deliberately and destructively’ preventing child refugees from being with their families (adult refugees have the right to bring their families to the UK but not the other way round).86 In relation to migrants, the dictum – ‘women and children first’ – is bypassed or turned on its head. In 2008, the Secretary of State’s first recommendation in relation to mother and baby units in prisons was that pregnant women or women with young children should only be imprisoned when there are no suitable alternatives to custody, a recommendation more or less systematically ignored or overridden in relation to migrant women from the point of arrest.87 The average age of the ten children separated from their asylum-seeking mothers in the Cambridge investigation was three: ‘They came at six o’clock in the morning. There were five, four police officers and one woman from DWP [Department for Work and Pensions]. They were not nice. They gave me no time to say goodbye to my children [aged four and two].’ Two women were separated from their babies while still breastfeeding; by the time they were reunited they had stopped lactating. Another woman, after being arrested, heard nothing of her children for three weeks. Her ‘manager’ told her she would not be able to see them until she had been to court: ‘WHY. I had done nothing to hurt them and I am not even yet found guilty.’88

  In Ireland, as Luibhéid has documented, mothers and children found themselves at the heart of a storm over migration, and its pawns. Until 1 January 2005, Ireland granted citizenship rights to anyone born on Irish soil or seas, the aim being to increase the birth rate of the true Irish-born. The provision was overturned in response to a large influx of immigrants, mainly seeking work, in the 1990s. Ireland had entered the global economy, rapidly changing from a country of emigration to one of immigration. It became known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’, with growth figures that outpaced the rest of Europe. The atmosphere started to shift. Pregnant asylum seekers, or those who gave birth in Ireland, especially African women, were now characterised as parasites and scroungers. ‘Pregnancy rates and childbearing patterns became the primary form of knowledge about migrant women,’ Luibhéid writes, ‘that was produced and disseminated in ways that reduced them to their sex organs’ (this of course had been no less true before, when giving birth on Irish soil had conferred automatic citizenship on their babies).89 In 2002, a woman became pregnant as the state was trying to deport her. Her right to remain relied on Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution, which guaranteed the right to life of the unborn. ‘It is obvious’, the Supreme Court stated in its ruling against her, ‘that the rights of the born, in this context, cannot be less than those of the unborn.’90 Clearly ‘rights of the born’ was a euphemism for anti-migrant voters and for the state’s right to enforce its deportation policies unobstructed.

  In such cases, a barely concealed revulsion towards migrant sexuality comes very close to revealing itself. This too has a history. The earliest ‘undesirable’ immigrants to the US under the Page Act of 1875 were Chinese women suspected of being prostitutes.91 During debates over the British Nationality Act of 1948, which remained in force up to 1983, it was argued by MPs from both major parties that alien women were entering the country ‘for immoral purposes’ or as spies and that they were paying British subjects to marry them so they could qualify as British subjects themselves: ‘We do not want people in this country who can do a great deal of harm by being British citizens,’ the Labour MP Barbara Ayrton-Gould said in a House of Commons debate on 13 July 1948, ‘and who have no loyalty at all to Britain or to the things in which we believe.’92

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  As I have been writing this chapter, I have become steadily more aware that the very fact of recounting these cases – a true litany of horrors – is risky. That to describe what is being done to these women might seem to re-enact their status as victims, embedding them further inside an unjust world with no – or only a forced, one-way – exit; even if not to do so is to be complicit with their invisibility, the carefully cultivated ‘cultural production of ignorance’ which works to hold national identity in place. As this book argues throughout, strange and fetid undercurrents of fascination pulse through the worst stories of our time. Think of the images of weeping and drowning children which have become iconic: the little girl wailing at the Mexican border; or three-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi cradled in the arms of the stricken man who in September 2015 discovered the boy’s body washed up on a beach in Turkey. Or that image of Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, drowned as they tried to cross the river into the US from Mexico (the image whose authenticity was denied by the Texan border guards). In 2015, versions of the Guardian headline – ‘Shocking images of drowned Syrian boy show tragic plight of refugees’ – spread across news outlets across the world. ‘Tragic’ and ‘plight’ might give us pause. They render the agony timeless, turn the drowned child into an object of raw pity, obfuscate the human agency, the historical choices and wilful political decisions, that lie behind them. We must be wary of the lure of pathos.

  When Trump announced in June 2018 that he had ended the practice of separating migrant children from their families at the border, it seemed for a brief moment that these images might have worked. But they might just as well have pushed the problem in deeper. As anticipated, the outrage at the images of Ramírez and his daughter have been accompanied by no softening of US policy towards migrants whatsoever (in July 2019, immigration officers were granted the power to deport without appeal).93 Surreptitious cruelty, it would seem, is OK. In the end, it doesn’t matter what a politician does provided he brings the art of lying to perfection (Trump in the US, Boris Johnson in the UK). In fact these tales might suggest that the opposite is more likely or equally likely to be the case. Trump was not exactly lying. Rather, he knows that everyone will know only too well that the idea of ending the practice has never truly entered his calculations (the nod and the wink to his followers which are the backbone of his presidency). The problem is therefore not so much or only that he is a liar – the most consistent ever to have occupied the White House, as has been amply documented. Far more sinister and dangerous is just how reliably he can be trusted to do the worst. Trump has granted new freedom to trample on the most vulnerable, which, in the final analysis, all human subjects, including – or perhaps especially – Trump himself, fear themselves to be. The unspoken contract is to give licence to the shared unconscious pleasures of hatred. Loyal retainer to the pits of the psyche, on that component of his behaviour he will never let you down. Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony against Christine Blasey Ford, and the whipping up of fear towards the caravan of Central American migrants heading to the US border, are generally acknowledged to have fired up Trump’s base during the 2018 mid-term elections. Rage against women and migrants never fails.

  Finally, we must be careful not to render the rest of the world innocent, not even those who suffer most, or to rush from privilege to rescue in a way that simply redistributes the share of blame, of good and evil, in our own favour – especially when the display of virtue has hardened into a core facet of the internet. ‘Posting photos from a protest against border family separation, as I did while writing this, is an expression of genuine principle,’ comments New Yorker journalist Jia Tolentino, ‘and also, inescapably, some sort of attempt to signal that I am good.’94 Trafficking is mostly invisible but when it rises to the consciousness of the world as an open wound, it just as quickly mutates, a mere itch on our compassion. Or else it turns into a unique object of horror which serves to obscure the wider world’s iniquities.

  So, to end then with what must be the most vulnerable migrant category of all, the child trafficked into prostitution, target of what has become known as CSEC (the commercial sexual exploitation of children). Provoking what feels like righteous outrage, this child can then also be used, in a further twist of exploitation, to reinforce the self-serving rhetoric of what we have seen to be the corrosive powers of state: ‘The law must have a
n iron fist to smash those who prey on children’ was a Sun newspaper headline of 2003. The fact that these forms of childhood abuse are often a direct consequence of the state’s own racist migrant policies is of course unspoken or else seen as irrelevant. In Athens in the late 1990s, for example, riot police were used for mass deportations of ethnic Albanians, forcing many of them into a clandestine world, which made the sexual exploitation of children more likely. In the UK, child asylum seekers are being subject to abuse after being wrongly classified as adults by Home Office officials, even though assessing a person’s age based on their appearance is unlawful, and means, amongst other things, that they can be forcibly deported.95

  At the start of Children in the Global Sex Trade, Julia O’Connell Davidson almost apologises for not viewing this form of child exploitation as ‘uniquely terrible’. Hers is one of several books I read on this topic where it felt as if the author would have been far happier not having to write it in the first place (although such reluctance felt to me her most important qualification for doing so). ‘The belief that children are harmed by sexual abuse’, she writes on the opening pages, ‘is not enough, in itself, to explain the ferocity and turbulence of the emotions it arouses.’ What does the pitch of heady excitement over these particular victims do to all the rest? What purpose of distraction does it also serve? ‘Most Westerners know’, writes Davidson, ‘that vast numbers of the world’s children live and die in wretched circumstances’ (starving, without medical attention or education, labouring inhuman hours).96 And why is it impossible to accept that someone under eighteen – the legal definition of childhood – might be able to make a decision about their own life? Even if, as is the case in pretty much every story documented here, these young people are being presented with an impossible choice between ‘grief and nothingness’: the hardship and aggravation that awaits them as migrants in nations whose pull has turned out to be a colossal deceit; versus the emptiness, violence or simple lack of human and economic prospects which rules over their lives at home.

  In their treatment of migrants, the Western powers are chasing their own tail, drawing lines in the sand in the shape of their own vile cunning. This is a cautionary tale of what has already been, and, in this worsening political scenario, of what is likely to come. Targeting women refugees and asylum seekers, turning them into criminals, lays bare the pleasure in sexual hatred, alongside the increasingly violent forms of inequality for which women have always been punished – both of which continue to fuel gender injustice across the globe. Today’s migrants have become the ultimate scapegoats of a social order whose ever-expanding greed is on course to destroy the very air we breathe. As if they were the cause of it all, the perfect cargo for blindness, the best way not to see what is truly happening.

  AFTERWORD

  The idea of an ‘afterword’ on the topic of violence seems misleading, though ‘conclusion’ would surely be worse. Violence is not a subject about which any one can believe, other than in a state of delusion, that everything has been said and done. One of the traumatic aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic is that it has so often felt like an act of violence that has fallen without warning from the skies. We might call it gratuitous except that, for those living in a godless universe, the idea of gratuitous violence rained down from the heavens sounds empty. It is hard to imagine an entity or agent vast enough to match the horror, one for whom inflicting such untold cosmic torment might be an act of judgement or even a source of pleasure. Covid-19 threatens the possibility that we might be living in a senseless world.

  Who gains from Covid-19? The richest of the super-rich in the US who have made $845 billion in additional profit since the pandemic began; the rulers who use the justified fear of their people to seize increasingly demotic powers; the abusers for whom the enforced intimacy of lockdown gives them a new licence to kill. If for a second anyone allowed themselves to think that the virus is indiscriminate – the ‘great equaliser’, as some commentators put it in the early days – it has rapidly become clear that this virus, like the boils of the ancient bubonic plague, is scratching at the skin of our cruellest social arrangements, bringing the putrid sores of a viciously unequal world to the surface and hence more vividly to life. In fact, the pandemic is far from random, but most likely the result of human acts. The destruction of biodiversity allows – and, unless the devastation is halted, will go on allowing – microbes to leap from animals into humans across a broken, desolate, species chain (several such pandemics a year from now on is one scientific prediction). A key lesson to be learned from the pandemic might be that violence, like a virus, is an opportunist. It persists because it is so familiar with the ways of the world, knows how to seize its moment, driving home its capacity to endure, return, mutate and survive. The struggle against violence must therefore continue because, as long as the world continues to be scarred by the fault lines of injustice and inequality, the fight against violence has not been won.

  When Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds in May 2020, one of the most striking things about the moment was the way he stared unfailingly, without a glimmer of awkwardness, straight at the camera. As if he was announcing to the whole world: ‘See this.’ The new tragedy of the pandemic had, it seemed, emboldened him, allowing him to display a racism that in ‘normal’, that is non-pandemic, times operates more under cover, doing everything it can in order to hide itself, even if street killings of mainly black men in the US have become increasingly commonplace. In the case of Chauvin, I think we can be fairly sure that he reckoned neither with the charges that would be brought against him (raised within days to murder in the second degree in response to the ensuing protests, although still not to first-degree murder as the family demands), nor with the public outpouring which, across the world, brought the cry for an end to racist injustice and state-sanctioned violence spilling onto the streets. Something which, despite the history of civil rights struggle, continues to be at least partially obfuscated and denied became unavoidable, not least as the demonstrations brought the mostly silenced legacy of slavery back onto the stage of politics. Hence too the counter-rage that seemed to follow those protests with such indecent haste, when a white couple was photographed pointing their guns at black protestors as a way of proclaiming, behind the bastion of their enclave, that theirs were the lives under greatest threat. Perhaps, then, the racist backlash was not just a counter-attack, a defence of white privilege, or an attempt to put violence back on the other foot by casting the protestors as thugs, looters, arsonists, a danger to the peace – although it was undoubtedly all of these – but the result of a dawning, not fully conscious, recognition. Racist violence – institutional and at the heart of the law – which never wants to admit its own existence, let alone assume its own name, was now out there, in your face, in the proud, unflinching gaze of Derek Chauvin. In a time of pandemic, we see the world anew.

  This tension between the increasing visibility and the invisibility of violence has trailed the path of this book. Violence likes to boast. On a BBC Panorama programme in August 2020, an abused woman trapped by lockdown in her home described how her husband folded his arms, puffed out his chest and pronounced, ‘You think it was bad before? Let the games begin.’ But violence is also canny; the thing it appears to hate most is having to take responsibility for itself. We are living in a moment in which the capacity for denial appears to have reached new heights. Over this past year, more than one politician has persistently denied the reality of the pandemic, downgrading it, for example, to ‘mere flu’. And then, when the same politicians have been struck by the virus, they have used their own recovery – massively subsidised by lavish combinations of drugs and medical attention way beyond the reach of the many – to downplay it even more. Not a tremor of guilt for the thousands of deaths for which their own negligent policies are responsible. In fact, the toll has been the consequence of sheer government ineptitude: flagrant errors of judgement; pr
ocrastination; former policies of austerity that have decimated health care; more recently in the UK, a categorical first refusal by the government to follow the plea of its own scientific advisers for a circuit-breaking full lockdown to stop the spread of the virus in its second wave; the decades-old neglect of preventable diseases – obesity, type 2 diabetes – which have fuelled the pandemic, driven up the markers of poverty and inequality and stalled life expectancy across the globe. This is violence ‘under quiet conditions’, to re-evoke Rosa Luxemburg’s suggestive phrase, or, in Toni Morrison’s words, the violence that is ‘swallowing’ the dispossessed. And yet I for one have not heard a single politician acknowledge for a split second that their decisions have been deadly. It is true that no one can get a full grip on what is happening. But there is a world of difference between recognising that reality and ignoring the extent to which self-blinding incompetence is leading so many unnecessarily to their graves.

  For psychoanalysis, which has also accompanied me throughout these pages, it is more or less axiomatic that violence is the mental property or portion of everyone. But it is also something that is cast off like a discarded children’s toy, an aspect of the inner world which nobody wishes to own or have ever owned. One of the most obdurate forms of violence, therefore, is the one we call upon in order to stamp out our living, anguished, relationship to violence itself. Repression, suppression, denial, negation, projection, foreclosure, sublimation are just some of the terms deployed by psychoanalysis to convey the extent to which our minds are endlessly engaged in the business of tidying up the landscape of the heart so that, to put it at its most simple, we can feel better about ourselves. It is a losing battle. Although, as witnessed on a daily basis, this fact does not diminish by one jot the havoc and destruction that such a battle can create. Throughout this book I argue that it is the multiple strategies deployed in repudiation of one’s own psychic violence that grants violence its licence to roam, since it then becomes essential that someone else bear the responsibility, shoulder the burden, pay the price. Someone who, then, in an ‘ideal world’ – a dangerous notion, to be distinguished from the idea of a world you can struggle to improve – we can with impunity make it our task to subdue or eliminate (as if we are all engaged in a holy war).