Tag Archives: Feminist Ire

Parenting a Gender Fluid Child/What to say to Douchey People

Posted on June 30, 2016 by Taryn de Vere

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Over the last 10 years I’ve seen a huge shift in the way gender is expressed in children. Where parents are less enforcing of gender binaries children are allowed the space to explore their own and other genders. I think this is a wonderful step forward for humanity. I long for a world free of toxic masculinity, (and toxic femininity), free of the strictly enforced gender binary system. a world where humans can just be humans, and can self identify in whatever way is comfortable and enjoyable for them.

I have a 6 year old son. He lives with me and 3 of his siblings 4 days a week and spends the other 3 with his dad. When he is at my house he likes to wear clothing traditionally associated with girls. I have no idea if this is a passing phase, if he is just a curious child exploring gender options or if he will grow up to be a transexual, or a drag queen (I should be so lucky!), or even if he may be transgender. I cannot know where his love of dressing up will go (if anywhere). So I treat him the same way, I don’t make a big deal out of any of it, I love him and support him and follow his lead at all times in this regard. I let him know the same message that I have been teaching him since he could understand me ‘It’s ok to be you. Live authentically. Be yourself. You are loved’. Last week he asked us to start calling him by a different name, a ‘girls’ name. All of my kids were fine with addressing him by his new name and using female pronouns. He has made it easy for us by saying that he wants to be addressed with the new name only when he is dressed as a girl.

Since then I have become more open about this to the people in our lives. The responses have been overwhelmingly supportive, bar a couple of people whom have come at me with some pretty awful stuff. These are people who would consider themselves to be fairly tolerant. So I wanted to address some of the objections that I’ve heard, as I suspect perhaps there are other parents out there in a similar situation to me, and it may be of some use to them (I hope).

Why does he only do this at your house? I think he only does it at my house because he only has access to dresses, make up ect at my house. Also he feels comfortable to do it at my house. He used to wear nail polish to pre-school but the other kids made fun of him and now he refuses to wear it in public. He LOVES wearing nail polish and has loved it since he was a toddler. I believe he feels comfortable and safe and accepted in my house which is why he chooses to dress in a feminine way when he is with me.
You must be doing something to encourage him. That is irresponsible. Trans adults wouldn’t be that way if they’re parents hadn’t encouraged them when they were little. (Yes someone actually said that to me.) I am encouraging him, this is true, but not in the way you think. I am encouraging his natural expression of himself. I am supporting him in the choices he makes for himself. I am not standing at his bedroom door suggesting he wears dresses or asking does he want me to do his make up. I follow his lead. I feel this is the responsible course of action. I want all of my children to feel supported in how they choose to express who they are. As for the idea that transgender children are a result of overly liberal parenting I can only say that science disagrees. Gender Dysphoria is the medical term. Look it up.
This is a result of your hatred of men and masculinity. This would imply that trans people are part of an Evil Feminist conspiracy to wipe men from the face of the earth. As far as I am aware, no such conspiracy exists. Also I love masculinity. I love (a lot of) men. I greatly dislike toxic masculinity. I was raped and abused by toxic masculinity. I see toxic masculinity as the poison of the modern age. It hurts everyone it touches, most especially the men who embody it. Just because I love equality doesn’t mean I hate men. I have so many beautiful, strong, caring, loving, heart-opened men in my life. I love them. I have 3 sons. I do not have a crazy agenda to try and turn my sons into women. Sigh.
You are creating a drama about this when there doesn’t need to be one (ie. discourage this and it will all go away) I agree there doesn’t need to be a drama. It’s a 6 year old child who likes to dress up. It may never be more than that. What is the big deal? I will not discourage any of my children from pursuing their truth. I would consider that to be horrendous parenting. I don’t see any of it as being a big deal or a drama. No matter where this goes all I can deal with is what the present moment is offering – and that is a small child who likes to dress up, and that’s fine with me.
Gender Fluid children just lack good strong male role models. (Yep, I know again, can you believe it. Someone actually said that to me.) Oh dear, where to start with this one. Everything cannot be explained away with Freudian theory? Now I am no where near to being an expert on gender fluidity or Gender Dysphoria. I know shamefully little about the subjects. But I do know some gender fluid people (probably more than the person who said this to me) and I see them as harbingers of the future. People who are here to lead us and show us a way out of the strictly enforced gender binary system. I admire them their bravery and strength in being who they are in a world that very much would like them to sit in this box over here please and don’t get out. Second to this argument – why is it that it is just the lack of male role models that concerns? Is there a study somewhere to show that children raised with ‘good male role models’ never grow up to be gender fluid? Can anyone point me to any evidence at all that would support this strange conclusion?
He is just doing this to get attention from you. You mustn’t be playing boyish games with him enough. This is him reaching out to try and get your attention by doing things he thinks you like, like dressing up and make up. There’s a lot to plough through here, firstly it is very sexist to assume that all I am into is clothes and make up. Make up would be very low on my list of interests and while I do like to get dressed up myself I have very little interest in talking about it, or dressing others. Most of the activities I do with my kids are things that ALL of us will enjoy, so we bake together, we go to the beach and build sand castles, we read stories, we make stories, we watch movies, we give each other foot massages, we make art (a lot of art), we play ball games and frisbee and do gardening. These are the things I do with my kids. These are the same activities I did with my older 4 children and none of them have magically turned into gender fluid or trans people as a result. I do not think there is a logical correlation between having a mum who doesn’t play much lego with you and choosing to wear dresses. Also the effort to apportion blame (on me) indicates a belief that there is something wrong with him dressing this way, which I do not agree with.
He will end up socially ostracised and it will be your fault for encouraging him. I believe that hiding what we truly are causes sickness and sometimes suicide. I do not want that for my children. I want them to live authentic lives, rich with love and support and ease. I know that the world hasn’t quite caught up with accepting everyone for who they are and so I try and teach my children resilience, for no one, not even the most privileged escape the inevitable cruelty of others. Emotional intelligence, resilience and self love are things I try and teach my kids, so that when someone is a douche to them they can handle it. It is the best I can do to prepare them for a sometimes cruel world. I also wouldn’t want friends for my kids who wanted them to be something they are not. I wish for true friends for my children, the kind of friend who sees exactly who they are and loves them for it and stands by them. If I had to choose for my kids between them hiding their true selves to fit in and living authentically and getting shit for it – living authentically would win hands down everytime.

Taryn De Vere is an eccentric dresser, a writer, mother of 5, a conscious relationship coach for Love With Ease Please http://www.lovewitheaseplease.com, a performance artist https://www.facebook.com/A-Chaotic-Embrace-113263035681066 , and a sex positive parenting educator https://www.facebook.com/sexpositiveparenting

Photo by Eamonn Brown Photography

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Posted in Equality, queer, Sexuality, The family and tagged equality, family, Feminist Ire, gender, lgbtq, parenting, trans, transgender, transgender ireland. Bookmark the permalink.

The Dark, Lurking Horror of Parenting Girls

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Taryn de Vere

Here’s some common rape – prevention tips “Don’t drink too much”, “Don’t wear anything too revealing”, “Text a friend to let them know your plans”, “Hold your keys in between your fingers” and of course “Never, ever walk down a darkened alleyway”. These are the things young women are being told by parents, teachers and society. I understand that the reason people are saying these things to women and girls is because they don’t want anything bad to happen to them. But do they actually prevent women from being sexually assaulted?

In the majority of cases I don’t believe they do.

All these rape-prevention tips are attempts to keep away the monstrous stranger. But as statistics collected by R.A.I.N.N show 3 out of 4 rapes are committed by someone known to the victim.

So, with this in mind what are we teaching girls about that? Are we telling them to watch out for the man who lives next door/the older cousin/the guy you’ve been dating for 6 months/his best friend? Are we teaching them that 1 in 4 relationships are abusive and that you need to know the signs of abuse before embarking on one? Are we teaching them how to spot the signs of an entitled person? How to spot status seekers? How to rid their lives of anyone who treats them with disrespect? Are these things fundamental to every parenting book/school class room?

I wonder also why most campaigns focus on women, putting the onus on them not to get raped or be assaulted. Violence against women seems to be the one area where the focus is on potential victims to take responsibility for decreasing their chances of being attacked. I’ve never seen a poster giving tips to stop me being potentially run over by a motorist , or a poster warning me on the dangers of being in the presence of someone smoking. So why in this one area of violence against women, are poster and ad campaigns directed at potential victims? Another issue with these campaigns is that most of the campaigns I’m aware of seem to promote the idea that sexual assault occurs between strangers. I’m yet to see a campaign that aims to impart the knowledge that 75% of assaults happen between people who know each other. Why are most campaigns ignoring the statistics on this? And where are all the campaigns reaching out to the perpetrators of these crimes?

According to the UN It is estimated that “35 per cent of women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or sexual violence by a non-partner at some point in their lives. However, some national studies show that up to 70 per cent of women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime”. So, if you’re a woman or a girl you’ve got a 35 – 70% chance of being sexually or physically abused by a man. And these statistics are not taking into account other forms of abuse – verbal, emotional/psychological, financial abuse and cyber abuse (unsolicited dick pic anyone?)

I don’t know ONE WOMAN who has not been subjected to something on this list of awful. Not one. That’s 100% of the women I know who have been abused in some form by a man. I can hear the ‘not all men’ brigade jumping in at this point, and I want to say – Sure, not ALL men, just enough that 35 – 70% of ALL women will experience abuse or assault. Plus these statistics are based on reported incidents of crimes against women. And many women do not report. If I had of reported every assault against me I would have spent most of my 20’s and 30’s in copshops and courtrooms.

I have lost count of the amount of times I have been harassed online or physically/sexually/verbally/emotionally or financially abused by men. At a rough guess I’d say maybe 200 men have combined to abuse, denigrate, assault or intimidate me over the course of my life. 200 DIFFERENT men that is.

I did a rough survey of women’s experiences on a few women-only groups that I’m part of on Facebook, to find out if my experience was unusual. Women shared having experienced varying degrees of abuse and assault with a couple of women saying they also felt it would be up to 200 men who had been abusive to them in their lifetimes. Other women said they had had one bad experience only. It was by no means a scientific study but it gave me a slightly broader view on what was happening outside of my circle.

I can’t help but wonder what the statistics would be if there was an official system in place for reporting crimes against women – one where women could share their experience regardless of if they want to pursue anything legally (if they are fortunate enough to live in a country where the crimes against them are considered to BE crimes that is). Or even something like the Everyday Sexism site, which collects and collates women’s experiences from around the globe.

Every time I read official statistics on rape and sexual assault I feel angry that none of my experiences are counted in those statistics. And it is too late for me to report them now, the first time I was raped was 20 years ago and in another country. Plus being a witness at a rape trial when I was 17 significantly deterred me from reporting any of the crimes committed against me. I know I am not alone in that most women do not report this kind of crime, especially when they know the person who has committed it, which as we know is in 75% of cases.

The dark, lurking horror for me as a parent of two girls is that I know there is little chance they will escape this. I know in my woman’s heart what most likely waits for them. It is frighteningly likely that at some point a man is going to try and hurt my daughters.

Given all I know about abuse and assault I feel that it is my job to prepare my daughter’s for the likely possibility of being assaulted or abused. Of course I never tell them that I think they might be assaulted, instead I teach them about consent and boundaries, so they know what is and isn’t ok. I teach them about respecting their own and other’s bodies. I want the lines to be SO clear for my beautiful girls. I want no doubt in their minds when someone crosses a line. I want them to KNOW it is wrong.

I teach them what I was never taught, to be fierce. To be so fierce that they feel comfortable yelling and shouting at anyone who makes them feel uncomfortable or wrong. I want them to know how to scream and what to scream.

I practice scenarios with my teenage daughter, “A guy does this to you, what do you do?” I say, “You need to scream as loud as you can for help.” I teach them that no matter how well they know the person that they should act like he is a stranger because people are more likely to help a woman who is being accosted by a stranger than get involved with a ‘domestic’.

I teach them emotional intelligence, so they can articulate what happens to them. I teach them resilience so, if they need it, they can heal. So if it happens my girls will be strong within, are less likely to fall to pieces, or to lose weight, friends and jobs because of what has happened to them. Alongside of all of this I’m trying to teach my daughters that there are also lovely men out there, that they can trust, men who are allies, men who are respectful and that hopefully these will be the majority of the men they encounter. And while I’m doing this a little voice inside me is saying “it just takes one.” One man to hurt my child.

And while I’m teaching my girls all the things no one ever taught me and I wish they did, I’m thinking “Fuck this awful world, that is making me teach my daughters to prepare for what feels like their inevitable assault. Fuck this.” And I’m getting angry about it, so fucking angry.

Because I know that this could all change in one generation. If we were all teaching our sons to be respectful to women (and each other) this would change. If there were actual consequences for being disrespectful towards women – this would change. If men were speaking out to other men, calling them on their sexist bullshit – this would change. If society actually gave a shit about women – this would change.

Because who wants to live in a world where parents have to prepare their daughters for abuse by men?

Not me.

Taryn De Vere is an eccentric dresser, a writer, mother of 5, a conscious relationship coach for http://www.lovewitheaseplease.com, performance artist https://www.facebook.com/A-Chaotic-Embrace-113263035681066 , and a sex positive parenting educatorhttps://www.facebook.com/sexpositiveparenting

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Posted in feminism, The family, Violence against women and tagged abolitionism, daughters, feminism, Feminist Ire, Human trafficking, Media, parenting, Rape Culture, sexual assault, Statistics, violence against women, women. Bookmark the permalink.

Dear Brock…

Posted on June 9, 2016 by Taryn de Vere

Photo by Eamonn Brown Photography

Dear Brock,

I read your letter to Judge Persky and, as someone who works with survivors of male violence and a survivor myself, I found it rather distressing. I’m posting your letter below along with my response in purple:

“The night of January 17th changed my life and the lives of everyone involved forever. I can never go back to being the person I was before that day.”

As the person you were before that date was a man who was happy to rape women I think I can speak on behalf of society here and say that we are all glad that you can never go back to being that person.

“I am no longer a swimmer, a student, a resident of California, or the product of the work that I put in to accomplish the goals that I set out in the first nineteen years of my life.”

How is any of this relevant? Is it actually possible you are expecting people to feel sorry for you because the fact that you raped a woman and got caught means that your life has changed for the worse?

“Not only have I altered my life, but I’ve also changed [redacted] and her family’s life. I am the sole proprietor of what happened on the night that these people’s lives were changed forever. I would give anything to change what happened that night. I can never forgive myself for imposing trauma and pain on [redacted]. It debilitates me to think that my actions have caused her emotional and physical stress that is completely unwarranted and unfair. The thought of this is in my head every second of every day since this event has occurred. These ideas never leave my mind. During the day, I shake uncontrollably from the amount I torment myself by thinking about what has happened.”

If you actually feel so remorseful why did you plead not guilty and drag her through the courts, making your victim recount every traumatic thing you did to her? I have a sneaking suspicion Brock, that the thought of having to suffer the legal consequences of your actions has been the thing that has debilitated you.

“I wish I had the ability to go back in time and never pick up a drink that night, let alone interact with [redacted].”

Alcohol is not to blame for what you did. You are. Alcohol does not turn people into rapists.

I can barely hold a conversation with someone without having my mind drift into thinking these thoughts. They torture me. I go to sleep every night having been crippled by these thoughts to the point of exhaustion. I wake up having dreamt of these horrific events that I have caused. I am completely consumed by my poor judgement and ill thought actions. There isn’t a second that has gone by where I haven’t regretted the course of events I took on January 17th/18th.”

How self obsessed. No word of the pain and trauma the victim has suffered, it is all about you.

“My shell and core of who I am as a person is forever broken from this. I am a changed person.”

The women of the world can only hope that the shell and core of you is broken and forever changed. We hope being held accountable for your despicable actions will teach you not to rape in the future.

“At this point in my life, I never want to have a drop of alcohol again. I never want to attend a social gathering that involves alcohol or any situation where people make decisions based on the substances they have consumed.”

Stop trying to blame your rapey behaviour on drink culture. Many, many men (and women) drink and don’t rape. You do not get to use drink as a free pass to rape people.

“I never want to experience being in a position where it will have a negative impact on my life or someone else’s ever again.”

Then stop raping.

“I’ve lost two jobs solely based on the reporting of my case.”

You lost two jobs because you raped an unconscious woman. Not because newspapers reported it.

“I wish I never was good at swimming or had the opportunity to attend Stanford, so maybe the newspapers wouldn’t want to write stories about me.”

Being good at swimming has zero to do with this. What university you go to has nothing to do with this. If you felt entitled to rape an unconscious woman as a swimmer and a Stanford attendee then chances are you would have raped someone else at some point, regardless of what uni you’re at or what skills you have. It was not all just an unfortunate unavoidable fate that you found yourself with the perfect storm for raping a woman. You chose to rape her. Being written about in papers is a side effect of being a criminal. If you didn’t want to be written about, you shouldn’t have committed a crime.

“All I can do from these events moving forward is by proving to everyone who I really am as a person.”

Yes? Who are you really as a person Brock? I’m not hearing a lot of remorse in your actions or words.

“I know that if I were to be placed on probation, I would be able to be a benefit to society for the rest of my life.”

Really? How?

“I want to earn a college degree in any capacity that I am capable to do so. And in accomplishing this task, I can make the people around me and society better through the example I will set.”

But I thought you said being at college was part of the problem that lead you to rape a woman? What example are you planing on setting? How do you plan on making society better Brock?

“I’ve been a goal oriented person since my start as a swimmer. I want to take what I can from who I was before this situation happened and use it to the best of my abilities moving forward.”

How about realising that who you were before this was a person who could justify raping an unconscious woman in an alleyway beside a dumpster? How about deciding that maybe being the guy with those values doesn’t serve you or society anymore? How about ditching that guy and starting afresh?

“I know I can show people who were like me the dangers of assuming what college life can be like without thinking about the consequences one would potentially have to make if one were to make the same decisions that I made. I want to show that people’s lives can be destroyed by drinking and making poor decisions while doing so.”

Again Brock, this is NOT about drink. Stop trying to blame alcohol for your rapist mentality.

“One needs to recognize the influence that peer pressure and the attitude of having to fit in can have on someone.”

Are you suggesting that your peers pressured you to rape a woman?

“One decision has the potential to change your entire life.”

It wasn’t one decision, it was hundreds of decisions. You decided to take advantage of her, you decided to lift her shirt, you decided to lift her skirt, You decided to pull down her pants, you decided to insert things into her vagina. Each of the actions you took were decisions and at any point you could have stopped. Your attempts to make this look like one poor decision made whilst under the influence of alcohol belies the actual lack of responsibility you feel about your actions.

“I know I can impact and change people’s attitudes towards the culture surrounded by binge drinking and sexual promiscuity that protrudes through what people think is at the core of being a college student.”

Again drink is NOT responsible for rape. Rapists are. Sexual promiscuity? Let’s look at that. Promiscuity implies someone who likes to have sex with lots of people. Rape is NOT about sex. Sex is consensual and enjoyable. Rape is a tool of violence and power and is completely unrelated to sex. Men who rape are not promiscuous – they are rapists. Putting the focus here on sex and alcohol is a red herring and is COMPLETELY MISSING THE POINT that rape is not at all linked to promiscuous behaviour or enjoying sex. The idea that you are going to change people’s attitudes to drink and sleeping around is completely unrelated to what you did. If you suggested doing talks on respecting women’s bodily autonomy or offered to spend your life raising money for rape crisis centres then you’d be somewhere in the area of genuine understanding and remorse.

“I want to demolish the assumption that drinking and partying are what make up a college lifestyle”

This is completely irrelevant.

“I made a mistake, I drank too much, and my decisions hurt someone. But I never ever meant to intentionally hurt [redacted].”

But Brock the problem is that you DID intend on intentionally hurting her. You forcibly raped her. While she was unconscious. Do you expect us to believe that you actually thought that you weren’t hurting her when you did this?

“My poor decision making and excessive drinking hurt someone that night and I wish I could just take it all back.”

STOP. BLAMING. DRINK.

“If I were to be placed on probation, I can positively say, without a single shred of doubt in my mind, that I would never have any problem with law enforcement. Before this happened, I never had any trouble with law enforcement and I plan on maintaining that. I’ve been shattered by the party culture and risk taking behavior that I briefly experienced in my four months at school.”

The only thing you have been shattered by Brock is your own ideas, actions and behaviour. Party culture has nothing to do with what you did so stop trying to abrogate responsibility onto random concepts. You say you have been shattered by the ‘risk taking behaviour’ that you ‘briefly experienced’ in your four months at school. This wasn’t something that happened because you fell under a mad spell of risk taking during a 4 month period in your life Brock. This is something you were very likely fed from when you were a child. In order to do what you did you had to have a belief that it was ok to do that to a woman. That’s indicative of a pretty rotten core belief system Brock. It didn’t happen because you fell under the influence of some ‘risk takers’ during a few months of college. You are consistently trying to nullify your own responsibility for your actions. I find that kind of despicable Brock.

“I’ve lost my chance to swim in the Olympics. I’ve lost my ability to obtain a Stanford degree. I’ve lost employment opportunity, my reputation and most of all, my life.”

So much about you, so little about your victim. What of all she has lost Brock? I am reminded of that statement ‘Me, me me!’ when you constantly talk about how tough things are for you now. What of the woman you raped Brock? What of her employment opportunity, reputation and life?

“These things force me to never want to put myself in a position where I have to sacrifice everything. I would make it my life’s mission to show everyone that I can contribute and be a positive influence on society from these events that have transpired. I will never put myself through an event where it will give someone the ability to question whether I really can be a betterment to society.”

Frankly I find a lot of this to be nonsensical. Surely you have already put yourself in a position where you have to sacrifice everything? I am still very confused Brock by how you plan on being a positive influence on society – in fact I find myself feeling very distressed at how little you seem to understand what you did and why you did it. The thought of you speaking to masses of students about any subject other than your own ignorance on these matters alarms me greatly.

“I want no one, male or female, to have to experience the destructive consequences of making decisions while under the influence of alcohol. I want to be a voice of reason in a time where people’s attitudes and preconceived notions about partying and drinking have already been established. I want to let young people now, as I did not, that things can go from fun to ruined in just one night.”

I want no one, male or female to have to experience the destructive consequences of being sexually assaulted. That’s what I want Brock. Because I am one of those women who, like many women, has been sexually assaulted. I have been raped on two separate occasions (once while I was so drunk I was unconscious, much like your victim) and I have suffered the innumerable sexual aggressions some men think it is ok to do to women – slapping my bum, grabbing my breast and in one case sticking their tongue in my mouth. Sadly we live in a world where many men think it is ok to assault women. I’d love it Brock if you were as passionate about ending sexual violence towards women as you seem to be about the completely unrelated issues of binge drinking and promiscuity.

Here’s an idea Brock, how about you read up on sexual predators, abusers and rapists and you find out why they do what they do? How about you start a parenting revolution to teach people to teach their sons about respecting women and what the hell consent means? How about you spend the rest of your life tirelessly working to end sexual assault? Or, at the very least how about you indicate that you fully understand what you did, that you are incredibly sorry and that you dearly want to repair the damage you have done to your victim? That would be a good start.

Taryn De Vere is an eccentric dresser, a writer, mother of 5, a conscious relationship coach for http://www.lovewitheaseplease.com , performance artist https://www.facebook.com/A-Chaotic-Embrace-113263035681066 , and a sex positive parenting educator https://www.facebook.com/sexpositiveparenting

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Posted in Education, Equality, feminism, Harm reduction, Health, Sexuality, Violence against women and tagged Brock, Brock Turner, Criminalisation, feminism, Feminist Ire, Judge Persky, Media, Rape, Rape Culture, Stanford, violence against women, women. Bookmark the permalink.

How to Rid the World of Arseholes (in Two Simple Steps)

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Taryn de Vere

I will consider my parenting to be a success if when my children grow up they are:

Not arseholes.
Happy.

In that order.

I can cope with an unhappy non-arsehole, because I know how to support people to find their joy. Being an arsehole though is not an easily un-doable state of being.

The thing is that arseholes don’t just spring fully formed once a person turns 18. An arsehole needs to be trained up to become one. Usually this is through a process of drip feeding entitlement to them.

I know a kid who is manipulative, disrespectful to pretty much all the people in his life, will never get up in the morning for his parents, throws tantrums even though he is 9 and who gets away with everything I’ve just mentioned – all with no consequences. When I look at this kid I see the lovely little boy I remember him being as a small child and I see the emerging adult arsehole. Having known this child for a long time I feel desperately sad that he is being conditioned by his parents to grow up to become an entitled teen.

Entitled teens can go on to become what in the adult world we call abusers – men (and sometimes women) who emotionally, sexually, financially or physically abuse their partners.

Some of you might be thinking ‘Steady on, he’s only 9!’ And yes he is, but 9 year olds absorb the messages of the family and culture around them. Most kids are sponges that will soak up whatever they see role modelled. That is why a child who grows up in an abusive household is statistically far more likely to grow up to be an abuser (and to a lesser degree a victim of abuse).

“The single best predictor of children becoming either perpetrators or victims of domestic violence later in life is whether or not they grow up in a home where there is domestic violence. Studies from various countries support the findings that rates of abuse are higher among women whose husbands were abused as children or who saw their mothers being abused.”

Behind Closed Doors: The Impact of Domestic Violence on Children (UNICEF Report)

But the sad thing is that children can grow up to become abusers or rapists even if they haven’t grown up in an abusive household. All they need is to grow up being fed the perfect recipe of entitlement and inequality and like magic an abuser will (in the majority of cases) emerge.

An abusive mindset is the result of two factors:

A core belief in inequality
A sense of entitlement – in this case we mean entitlement to be “the belief that one is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment”.

That means that the person with the abusive mindset has to have a belief that they are a better, more worthy person than others. Usually they will believe that men are better than women, with themselves and other men they consider to be high status at the top and everyone else below.

The sense of entitlement can manifest in many ways. My abusive ex kept me (and everyone else in his life) waiting on him all the time. He was not apologetic about his consistent lateness as he felt entitled to arrive whenever it suited him (or sometimes to not arrive at all). The sense of entitlement could manifest as an expectation that things will always be done the way he wants them to be done and that he knows best at all times. There are innumerable ways in which a sense of entitlement can manifest and none of them are pleasant to be on the receiving end of.

The 9 year old I know gets away with being physically rough to his younger siblings. I once saw him hold his 5 year old sister in a painful grip as she cried and yelled at him to stop. He wouldn’t stop, even after I asked him to. I then got his parent and asked them to ask him to stop. He held onto her little body until he was ready to let go. It was a show of power over everyone present. Showing us all who was the boss. I had seen this behaviour before, in my abusive ex. Power and control are the two tools abusers use to control their victims.

The boy’s dad said ‘Don’t do that to your sister’ and that was that. He was not made to apologise, not made to repair the damage he had done, not talked to about respecting other people’s bodily autonomy and not given any consequences for his actions.

The parents of this child are teaching him that other people’s consent does not matter and that what he wants to do to other people is more important than what they want him to do (or not do).

What is that going to look like when he is 16? When he is 30? How do you think that boy is going to treat women when he gets older, bigger and stronger?

The parents of this boy are teaching him that force is acceptable to use on other people.

What will this boy do when he’s angry or annoyed with another student at school? What will he do when he is older and a girl says ‘stop’ or ‘I don’t want to do that’?

The parents of this boy are teaching him that he is entitled to live in a consequence-free world.

What will happen to this boy when he is an adult who can’t get his own way? What coping mechanisms will he have to fall back on having never had to feel the consequences of his actions?

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I hope you’re still with me here, and you can see the progression from child with no consequences to adult abuser. I don’t know about you but I sure as shit don’t want that for my kids.

So what can be done to make sure your kid doesn’t grow up to be an arsehole?

It’s simple, but not easy. There are two steps.

Boundaries and Standards.

Kids actually flipping love this stuff. Boundary setting makes them feel safe. They like to know the rules, and to know someone has shit sorted and they don’t have to worry about it. Create boundaries and standards for your kids according to the values of your household. For example in my house I have standards around language. I especially hate the term ‘Shut up.’ I find it offensive and de-humanising. So it is on the list with ‘Stupid’ and ‘Liar’ as the worst words that can be said in my house. It is part of the standards I expect from my kids that they will use respectful language with each other. The boundary setting I do is mostly around how I want to be treated and how I want them to treat others. The other golden rule of my household is when someone says ‘No’ or ‘Stop’ or shows in non-verbal ways that they are uncomfortable – then that MUST be respected. I’ve found a helpful exercise was to have all my kids write out a list of the 10 most important values they have around what kind of person they want to be. Then when they act inappropriately I say, ‘Was your behaviour in line with the kind of person you want to be?’ (sometimes showing them their list). Then I ask them what the person on the list would do next to fix the situation.

Enforcing them, aka Consequences.

This is the hard bit. You have to find the thing your kid loves more than anything and take it away from them (*insert evil laugh*) but seriously, this bit won’t work if it isn’t something they really love. For my teenage daughter it’s her phone, for my 10 year old it’s the internet, for my 7 year old it’s having friends over, for my 5 year old it’s Lego. Each kid has a soft spot – you need to find it and exploit it. That is the consequence hanging over their head if they embark on douchery. Now, only use this level of serious consequence when the behaviour warrants it. If that had of been my son in the story above this is how it would’ve gone down.

My friend comes to get me to ask me to intervene. I say to my child to immediately stop. If my child doesn’t stop I say, “If you do not stop right now you will be on an internet ban for 2 days”. Then once he has let her go I would say to my son that what he did was one of the worst things you can do to another person, that he has damaged the trust between himself and his little sister and that her needs to make it up to her. I would have him apologise to his sister, to my friend who he also disrespected by not listening to her and I would ask him what his plan is to repair the situation with his sister. Sometimes kids can need a bit of help in this area so I might say, “Her room is a bit messy, maybe you could offer to tidy it for her?” or you could suggest some other things that you know your daughter might like or enjoy. If he did something like that again I’d follow all the same steps and enact the internet ban. The really, really hard bit though is – enforcing the consequences. If you are anything like me this is where you slip up. My main problem was that I have so many kids I have trouble remembering who is on what ban, so to combat my lack of follow through I wrote the ban start and end times on the calendar on the wall as well as putting reminders in my phone. Whatever works for you, but follow through on the consequence is vital to the creation of a non-arsehole.

I started writing this because I watched my 6 year old son playing with some other children and one of them belted my child across the head from behind. The mother of the violent kid did nothing. I went over and told her that her child had hit my son and she turned to her kid and said ‘Don’t hit people!’ and that was that. There was no apology to my child, no attempt to repair and no consequences. And I thought, ‘Man, this sucks. That kid is learning some pretty toxic stuff from his parents.’ Now maybe she was having a tough day or whatever, I get it no one is a perfect parent and if there was such thing they wouldn’t be a perfect parent 100% of them time. But this is the kind of parenting I see everywhere. And it depresses the hell out of me.

1 in 3 women in this world will be a victim of domestic violence or sexual assault in her lifetime. To put it another way – that’s roughly speaking 1 in 3 men who are abusing women. I have 3 sons who will grow up to be 3 men. I don’t want one (or any of them) to be one of the men who abuse. I personally have been on the receiving end of extensive abuse (sexual, emotional, financial and physical). In every case my attacker or abuser was a man. A man who was once a boy.

Taryn De Vere is an eccentric dresser, a writer, mother of 5, a performance artist https://www.facebook.com/A-Chaotic-Embrace-113263035681066/?fref=ts&ref=br_tf and works as a conscious relationship coach and a parenting advisor for lovewitheaseplease.com

https://www.facebook.com/lovewitheaseplease/?fref=ts

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Posted in feminism, Harm reduction, The family, Violence against women and tagged feminism, Feminist Ire, parenting, violence against women, women. Bookmark the permalink.

Breda O’Brien, clickbait and being devoid of empathy

Posted on September 19, 2015 by Stephanie Lord

Breda O’Brien has a regular, offensive clickbait column in the Irish Times where she gets paid actual money to peddle her narrow, bigoted view of the world that doesn’t tally in any way with actual evidence of what happens in real life. She goes to great lengths to portray women who’ve had abortions as being at best cold and indifferent about their experiences and at worst, callous, unless they are members of Women Hurt. For Breda, the only time it’s acceptable for a woman to talk about her experience of abortion, is if it is in the context of being a negative experience in your life. Ideally, the more torment connected to it, the better – because it will be the only time that your experience has any value at all. It doesn’t matter for her or even the Irish Times, that her stories are possibly not actually true, it just matters that some people will believe them. If you throw enough stones, eventually you’ll hit something. Today’s offering is no different.

O’Brien opens today’s drivel by saying that Irish women talk about their abortions all the time with her. Maybe there are women who talk to O’Brien about their experiences but she is hardly the most likely of people you would confide in;

“Breda, you are a well known anti-abortion activist so I need to tell you, I was raped at 14 and had an abortion at 6 weeks.”

“That choice was morally wrong and is exactly the same as drowning a three year old child. ”

“Um, thanks Breda. I’m glad I got that off my chest by talking to you.”

Given the exposure Tara Flynn and Roisin Ingle’s stories got in the Irish Times last week, it’s hard not to read O’Brien’s piece as a direct retaliation towards these courageous women. It’s basically an eight hundred word fuck-you to Roisin and Tara.

She also says that women have told her of going for post-abortion counselling in a pro-choice organisation only to be told, “you did what was right for you at the time. Put it behind you and move on.” But I find it a stretch that any pro-choice organisation would simply tell a woman “move on” after she said she found her experience difficult to deal with or that she had regrets. Because that is not how pro-choice people or organisations operate. That is a fiction. Unlike O’Brien, we recognise that women have different experiences while noting that the vast majority of women who have terminations do not regret them.

O’Brien says that these women feel dismissed and diminished, while not for a second noticing the irony that women who do *not* regret their decision are dismissed and diminished by O’Brien and her Iona cronies who are given a national media platform on which to do so. No person’s experience should be diminished, but the women who allegedly seek comfort from O’Brien should not be taken as representative of the sum total of women who have had terminations – just as the women who do not regret them are not the sum total, we merely note that they are the overwhelming majority. O’Brien goes to great lengths to couch her language in terms of pseudo comfort and “common humanity” and then denies to other women the capacity to make decisions for themselves believing that she knows better.

She decries those of us who speak of cells and the right to choose and implies that we are the same as Roman men who left babies to die on the side of a hill as we dehumanise the “victim.” At no point does it register with her how she dehumanises women who make the decision to abort without regret; women who terminated because of the suffering that continuing the pregnancy might bring, or the risk to their health or wellbeing, or because they were in a violent relationship, or because they simply did not want to be pregnant. If pro-choice feminists who advocate a woman’s right to choose are for O’Brien, like the Roman men who leave babies to die of exposure on the hillside then what does that make the women who actually choose to abort? This of course is the woman who is a spokesperson for the people that carry signs at their rallies saying “Abortion is Witchcraft” (forward to 2:52 of this video). Does that sound like empathy to you?

Anti-choice ideology ignores that fact that legal and medical structures that deprive a woman of full control over her own reproductive system condemn women to being second class citizens. O’Brien attempts to portray herself as being understanding, attempting to make us believe she empathises with women in crisis pregnancies by saying if she had become pregnant as a teenager, she is “not sure what (she) would have done.” Perhaps that’s true. She wouldn’t be the first woman to be against abortion until faced with a crisis pregnancy and had she accessed a termination, she certainly wouldn’t even be the first anti-choice woman to terminate and subsequently stand outside that very same clinic and denounce the women who enter it.

But you are not empathising with a woman in a crisis pregnancy when you actively campaign in favour of laws that compel women to endure a forced pregnancy, a court ordered c-section, and then tell us that she should have been made to carry that pregnancy to term. Being empathetic does not mean heaping judgment on women who had abortions and telling them their decisions was morally wrong. Since when did empathy extend to stigmatising and criminalising women and advocating that they go to jail? You cannot attest to empathise with women in crisis pregnancies when you deny them a choice in their medical care that will literally result in their death.

O’Brien also carefully adds a sentence about Aylan Kurdi so that there is to be no misunderstanding as to where she stands – comparing the drowned three year old to the terminated weeks old foetus. She could have written a column about how Europe should open its borders to the refugees, or about how Hungary is treating the thousands walking through their land, tired, cold, and hungry, searching for a better life. She could have even spoken about the reasons why women choose abortion and acknowledged that if you want less abortions, you need to make it easier for women to have children. That would be the logical thing, but this is not about logic, this is about curtailing women’s choices because Breda O’Brien views them as vessels and nothing more.

The majority of people in this state are pro-choice despite all of us of child-bearing age having never had our say on the Eighth Amendment. My own mother wasn’t even old enough to vote when the Eighth Amendment was passed. Prochoice activists acknowledge that abortion can often be a difficult decision for a woman. We also acknowledge that the decision to terminate can be a source of great relief to many. The difficulty for anti-choice activists is that they cannot contemplate, due to being completely devoid of empathy, why it would be a relief for many women and why not every woman struggles with it, so in order for them to understand it they must portray these women as uncaring monsters like the Roman patriarchs or of course, witches.

Anti-choice activists do not understand, much less care, that when a woman is pregnant, she is more than a receptacle to carry a foetus to term, with thoughts, feelings, financial pressures and very often, other children to take care of. Just as it would be wrong for a woman to be compelled to terminate against her wishes, it is wrong to compel her to carry a pregnancy against her wishes. Women are more than the contents of their wombs and their existence has more reason than bearing children, and if we want to talk about moral value, then we must acknowledge that an embryo does not have the same moral value as a living, breathing woman who bears it, simply because it has the potential to become a human being. The inability to empathise at the very core of anti-choice beliefs is the reason why there is a woman on trial in Belfast for supplying her daughter with abortion pills, and it is the reason that a woman who has an illegal abortion in this state will get 14 years in prison. Reducing a woman’s humanity and placing it on a par with a week old embryo is not empathy, it is stomach-churning fanaticism. Perhaps had O’Brien actually been faced with a crisis teenage pregnancy, she may believe that had she taken certain decisions that she should have faced 14 years in prison, although at that time it would have been a life sentence (presumably for her own good), but that is not empathy.

Believing that because you never had an abortion that nobody else should have one either is about as far away from empathy as you can possibly get.

#Repealthe8th

@stephie08

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Posted in Abortion, Equality, feminism, Health, Reproduction and tagged abortion, Abortion in the Republic of Ireland, anti-choice propaganda, Criminalisation, feminism, Feminist Ire, gender, Ireland, politics, prochoice, women. Bookmark the permalink.

Canadian court approves drug injection facility. Is sex work next?

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

The Canadian Supreme Court issued a landmark decision today in Canada v PHS Community Services, a case concerning the Vancouver supervised drug injection facility Insite.

Insite had been operating for several years, and there was both anecdotal and scientific evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness in keeping injecting drug users alive, improving their access to safe injection information and encouraging them into treatment – without leading to increased numbers of new or relapsed users. It operated under a discretionary exemption to federal drug laws, an exemption which the Conservative government eventually decided not to renew.

The Court had a few questions to answer, but the key one from my perspective was whether this decision breached Insite users’ rights under Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states:

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

The Court unanimously ruled that it did. It stated:

The Minister made a decision not to extend the exemption from the application of the federal drug laws to Insite. The effect of that decision…would have been to prevent injection drug users from accessing the health services offered by Insite, threatening the health and indeed the lives of the potential clients. The Minister’s decision thus engages the claimants’ s. 7 interests and constitutes a limit on their s. 7 rights…this limit is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. It is arbitrary, undermining the very purposes of the CDSA, which include public health and safety. It is also grossly disproportionate: the potential denial of health services and the correlative increase in the risk of death and disease to injection drug users outweigh any benefit that might be derived from maintaining an absolute prohibition on possession of illegal drugs on Insite’s premises.

In response to Canada’s argument that it was a “policy question” whether or not to grant such exemptions – you can read this argument as saying “we know we haven’t got a leg to stand on as far as evidence is concerned, but we should be able to impose our moral and ideological view anyway” – the Court stated:

The issue of illegal drug use and addiction is a complex one which attracts a variety of social, political, scientific and moral reactions. There is room for disagreement between reasonable people concerning how addiction should be treated. It is for the relevant governments, not the Court, to make criminal and health policy. However, when a policy is translated into law or state action, those laws and actions are subject to scrutiny under the Charter…The issue before the Court at this point is not whether harm reduction or abstinence-based programmes are the best approach to resolving illegal drug use. It is simply whether Canada has limited the rights of the claimants in a manner that does not comply with Charter.

So strongly did the Court feel about the matter that it did not, as I had feared it might, take the easy way out and issue a mere declaratory order (essentially, one that acknowledges a right was violated without requiring any concrete action on the government’s part). Instead, it mandated the Minister for Health to grant the exemption. Although exemptions are discretionary, it stated, that discretion must be exercised in a manner compatible with the Charter – and

On the trial judge’s findings of fact, the only constitutional response to the application for a s. 56 exemption was to grant it.

Clearly, this is a massive victory for the users of the Insite facility, for harm reduction principles, and for simple common sense. It’s also a welcome step along Canada’s slow path of developing a constitutional right to health (like Iarnród Éireann, they’re not there yet, but they’re getting there). And finally, it points in a favourable direction for the outcome of another landmark case, Bedford v Canada, a challenge to laws that criminalise various aspects of sex work.

To summarise Bedford briefly, it concerns provisions of the Canadian Criminal Code that outlaw keeping a “bawdy-house” (which basically means any place regularly used for commercial sex, even if by only one sex worker), living off the proceeds of another person’s sex work, or communicating in public for the purposes of engaging in paid sex. These provisions were struck down by an Ontario Court on the basis of absolutely mounds of evidence showing that they materially contributed to sex workers’ risk of violence – without having any demonstrable effect on the amount of paid sex actually taking place. Judge Susan Himel found that

there are ways of conducting prostitution that may reduce the risk of violence towards prostitutes, and that the impugned provisions make many of these “safety-enhancing” methods or techniques illegal.

The parallels to the Insite case should be obvious. Both concern behaviours that the government wishes to condemn on moral grounds, and the use of criminal laws as a tool of its condemnation. Though in both cases a deterrent effect was also alleged, this was not supported by the evidence before the court. To the contrary, the only effects demonstrated were threats to the lives and safety of vulnerable people affected by the laws – in violation of their Charter rights to life, liberty and security of the person.

Of course, the two cases aren’t entirely analogous. Insite concerns the direct provision of a type of medical care, while Bedford is really about avoidance of harms caused by third parties (there is a significant body of evidence linking criminalisation of sex work with diminished access to health care, but the plaintiffs didn’t make that argument). And it was significant in Insite that addiction is viewed as a disease: the Court saw this as undermining Canada’s claim that it is not drug laws, but rather drug users’ behaviours, that give rise to the dangers they would face if the injecting facility was shut down. In the ongoing Bedford case, Canada is continuing to blame sex workers for their own risks, and “disease” is obviously not something the plaintiffs can (or would want to) come back with.

Nonetheless, it’s hard not to see the Insite judgment as a decisive victory for evidence over ideology, a rejection of the imposition of laws that have a demonstrably harmful effect on a particular population and no apparent beneficial effect apart from making some people feel good about the morally-derived “message” conveyed. And that has to bode well for the future of Bedford (currently awaiting an appellate decision, which itself is likely to be appealed to the federal Supreme Court). It’s still always possible that the courts will find the Criminal Code provisions against sex work so materially different to the withdrawal of Insite’s exemption that a different ruling must apply. But if I was Terri Jean Bedford, or any Canadian sex worker, I think I’d be wearing a hopeful smile today.

Swedish authorities mislead Irish media about sex trade law

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

In ‘Sex in the New Europe’, anthropologist Don Kulick notes Sweden’s vision of itself as the role model for all of Europe when it comes to social policies. He writes (internal citations omitted):

By identifying particular issues as morally clear-cut ones, and by ‘taking a stand’ on those issues, Sweden can portray itself as a kind of moral beacon that others will want to follow…That Sweden could use its position in the EU to influence the policies of less enlightened member countries was a frequently marshaled argument during the referendum campaign for why Sweden should join the EU. Indeed, while the political right maintained that Swedes should vote to join the EU because membership would ‘Europeanize Sweden’ after too many years of Social Democratic rule, the Social Democratic counterappeal was the messianic vision to ‘Swedenize Europe’. Although sober voices warned that ‘[w]e should not fool ourselves into thinking that we will be so strong in the EU as to change 300 million other people’, the hope that other member states will follow Sweden’s lead on issues it holds important continues to circulate in the country: ‘Sweden has to be a role model’ (föregångsland ) as one article put it.

While I agree with some of the policies Sweden has tried to export, and disagree with others, I have no problem on principle with the attempt to influence other states. If you really think you’re doing the right thing, of course you should encourage others to follow your lead. But any marketing venture ought to abide by certain codes of conduct, a primary one being truth in advertising. And it’s pretty clear, from reading some Swedish materials that are not part of the propaganda effort for their ban on buying sex, that “truth” is a disposable commodity in this campaign.

This has been brought home again by interviews given in Ireland this week by visiting Swedish police authorities. Jonas Trolle, head of the crime surveillance unit in the Stockholm Police Department, was quoted in the Irish Times as stating that

If we talk of specific figures, the number of girls in street prostitution on a night in Stockholm would be five to 10. If we talk about indoor prostitution – found on the internet, about 80 to 100.

Trolle’s assertion that the police know approximately how many “girls” (ugh!) are involved in indoor prostitution – which he quite mistakenly assumes is only found on the internet – runs entirely counter to what the Swedish government told UNAIDS in its 2010 submission:

Estimates of the number of people involved in commercial sex in Sweden vary widely and are very hard to estimate since it is mostly hidden and initiated primarily through the Internet or telephone.

The Times also reports Trolle as making the extraordinary claim that “Trafficking of women and girls into Sweden has been almost eliminated” (note that this is not a direct quote). Yet in September of last year, a Swedish police report stated:

it is difficult to estimate how many people may have been trafficked into Sweden in 2009. The number of trafficking victims found in Sweden depends largely on the resources that the police put in to detect this type of crime. These activities vary from one police authority to another and from one year to another. Nor is it possible to identify, or even to locate, all the girls and women mentioned in tapped telephone calls or observed during police investigations.

Referring to Stockholm alone, the same report says:

The information received during 2009 relates mainly to girls and women from Estonia, Russia, Nigeria, Albania, Hungary, Thailand and Romania…The foreign women who are for sale on the Internet in Sweden are mainly available for sale in apartments and at hotels in Stockholm. By preference, the women are sent to Sweden by ferry from the Baltic States and Finland, but buses are also used as a means of transport. Some women are sent to Sweden by air….As regards the transportation of Nigerian women, they are commonly first exploited in prostitution in Italy or Spain and are then transported further by air to countries such as Sweden. An increased proportion of exploited foreign women have been noted, principally from Albania, Hungary, Romania and Thailand. Occasionally, women from Africa are also being discovered.

Trolle goes on to tell the Times (and this is a direct quote), “Today it is impossible to run a brothel in Sweden”. This is a statement with a built-in escape clause, since the meaning of “brothel” itself can vary widely – for example, in Canada any place regularly used for commercial sex is an illegal “bawdy house”, while under English common law at least two sex workers must use the premises. (Swedish law, of course, doesn’t need to define it, since commercial sex is illegal wherever it occurs.) But the report refers to women

exploited for sexual purposes by people paying for sex in places such as apartments, hotel rooms or Thai massage parlours.

Now whatever about the apartments and hotel rooms, would any abolitionist stand over a claim that a massage parlour being used for paid sex is not a brothel?

Trolle’s colleague Patric Cederlof, Sweden’s National Coordinator against Prostitution and Human Trafficking, repeated to RTÉ News at One the denial that sex work had simply gone underground, again completely contradicting what the Swedish government admitted to UNAIDS last year. His defence of this position was that “if the customers could find these persons, we could find them”. By that logic there must be no illegal drugs trade, no child pornography, no film piracy… after all, given the obscene amounts of money being spent to combat these industries, obviously the police must be capable of keeping up with the consumers, right?

All governments, of course, have a tendency to spin the facts to make their initiatives look successful. But Sweden has more riding on this one than most. As Kulick writes in another fascinating piece, ‘Four Hundred Thousand Swedish Perverts’, the sex-purchase ban is the ‘jewel in the crown of Swedish sex law’, the culmination of that country’s attempt to establish an ‘official sexuality’ from which all deviance is pathologised; this perfect Swedish sexuality can then join the list of the country’s shining examples for the rest of the world to emulate. In a sense, the curious thing isn’t that their officials are misleading other countries about what the law has actually achieved – it’s that they ever admit the truth at all. But clearly they aren’t expecting things like the annual police reports and UNAIDS submissions to be picked up in other jurisdictions – and with the deplorable willingness of foreign media to simply report their propaganda without examining it, it seems their calculations are correct.

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Posted in Sex work and tagged Criminalisation, Feminist Ire, Media, Statistics, Sweden. Bookmark the permalink.

Dodgy Stat Diary, Day 1

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

The saying goes that two-thirds of all statistics are made up on the spot and three-quarters of people believe them anyway. This is supposed to be a joke, but in sex work research it often feels more like an understatement. Figures are routinely presented as fact when there is little or no evidential basis for them; estimates of the number of persons involved in one aspect of the sex industry are reported as if they referred to the industry generally (and as if they weren’t only estimates to begin with); and since journalists hardly ever bother verifying the data they repeat, one person’s wild-ass guess about the number of, say, migrant women in Italian brothels becomes an Irish Examiner editorial about how we have to start criminalising sex purchasers so we don’t end up like Naples, to where 80,000 women are trafficked each year. OK, I’m exaggerating, but that actually is the process by which wholly inaccurate sex work “statistics” are spread.[*]

As part of my lonely crusade against the abolitionist misuse of numbers, I’m going to do a regular feature on this blog in which some of the claims they make are traced back to source. I’m not a statistician, and I’m not going to tear apart every figure that actually derives from some sort of scientific study to see if it can withstand a rigorous methodological analysis. Brooke Magnanti is more of an expert on that sort of thing. But most of the time I won’t need to, since the stats alone are usually enough to discredit the person quoting it, once you see where they actually came from.

For today’s instalment, I’ll be looking at the claim made by the Dignity Project that “in Barcelona – which has the same population as Stockholm [1.5 million] – there are 20,000 people engaged in street prostitution”.

Now, you really only need to think about that for a minute to realise it’s totally bonkers. If there were 20,000 Barcelonans in street prostitution it would mean that more than one in every hundred Barcelonans was a street sex worker – a suggestion that defies credibility. A lot of things about the sex industry are counterintuitive, though, so it’s always a good idea not to dismiss things purely on the basis of common sense.

Fortunately, it’s dismissed easily enough after a simple Google search. While I couldn’t find any evidence of actual research which might underlie this statistic, I did find statements by two officials citing the 20,000 figure: a member of the regional government and a police ‘specialist in organised crime’. So are the Dignity Project correct? Hardly. First of all, the officials’ own source for that figure isn’t cited. Maybe some kind of scientific study was done, maybe one or the other of them just pulled it out of their head. The articles don’t say, so we don’t know. And that means we shouldn’t assume.

Secondly, neither official says that there are 20,000 people involved in street sex work in Barcelona. According to both articles, the figure relates to the number of people involved in “prostitution” – all forms, not just street – and in Catalunya, not Barcelona. As a whole, Catalunya has a population around five times that of Barcelona, and it includes a number of tourist destinations (such as the Costa Brava) where you’d expect a thriving sex trade. So it’s really not clear at all how many street sex workers there are in Barcelona, but there is no, absolutely no, basis for the Dignity Project assertion that there are 20,000 of them.

The abolitionist response would probably that it doesn’t really matter, because the reason that statistic was (mis-)cited was to highlight the difference between Barcelona’s numbers and Stockholm’s, and if there are 20,000 sex workers in all of Catalunya the likelihood is that a big chunk of those are in Barcelona (true enough) and whatever amount that “big chunk” is, it’s still more than there are in Stockholm. Of course, that assumes that the figure they’ve cited for Stockholm is accurate – a question I’ll probably address on another day – and that the Catalunyan estimation is correct which, remember, still hasn’t been verified.

But the main point of this post is to show the utter carelessness with which some of those campaigning on this issue (or reporting it on their behalf) approach little matters like facts. And you can bet if they aren’t verifying the statistics they cite, they aren’t verifying lots of other things, either. Bear that in mind the next time you hear their claims about the consequences of banning, or not banning, various elements of commercial sex.

[*] To emphasise the point, I actually feel the need to insert a disclaimer here that 80,000 women are not in fact trafficked into Naples every year.

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Posted in Dodgy stats, Sex work and tagged Feminist Ire, Media, Statistics. Bookmark the permalink.

Sweden’s sex trade laws: not the answer

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Wendy Lyon

(Article by Stephanie Lord and Wendy Lyon)

There has been much debate recently around the introduction of the Swedish model of legislation to criminalise the purchase of sex. Championed by a group of well-meaning NGOs, and some with questionable origins, considerable column inches have been devoted to discussion of the benefits of criminalising the purchasers of sex workers’ services. For those who believe in women’s equality and oppose trafficking, it appears to be a safe enough endeavour to support. We are told by the “Turn Off the Red Light” campaign that all prostitution, regardless of consent, is a form of violence against women; that if demand for paid sex is eradicated, prostitution will end; that this is the best thing for women; that it has decreased prostitution in Sweden; that it reduces the numbers of women and girls trafficked and so on. It is unsurprising that people support this. Everybody is against trafficking, right?

But does it actually work? In short – no. In this debate, where you stand on the morality of a person commodifying their sexual services is irrelevant. If the goal of the Swedish legislative model is to eradicate prostitution and end the exploitation of women – it doesn’t work. To date, no evidence has been produced that the Swedish model has reduced the amount of prostitution. Not a single independent review has found this to be the case. Yes, the Swedish are correct when they say that street prostitution has decreased – but street prostitution in Sweden, as in every other country, is only a tiny percentage of total prostitution. As the Swedish Government’s 2010 Submission to UNAIDS stated, “Estimates of the number of people involved in commercial sex in Sweden vary widely and are very hard to estimate since it is mostly hidden and initiated primarily through the Internet or telephone. Although street prostitution does occur it is assumed to be only a fraction of total prostitution.”[1]

This is really not surprising, as criminalisation has never been successful in deterring prostitution in any country. Further to this, it hasn’t reduced trafficking to Sweden either. Consistent Swedish annual police reports confirm that sex trafficking is there and is even increasing. The law is seen as hindering traffickers from establishing operations in Sweden – but they are still easily able to operate from outside Sweden’s borders, which the police say makes it more difficult to apprehend traffickers.[2] It has also been reported[3] that clients are now less likely to report suspected trafficking cases since it may result in them being charged.

Proponents of the law believe that this model will work because many of them have looked to the Swedish government’s own evaluation of the law[4] – a bizarre approach, considering that most would never take it for granted that an Irish government evaluation of one of its own initiatives painted an accurate picture of reality. The Swedish government’s evaluation of the law has been widely criticised by many commentators – including Sweden’s Discrimination Ombudsman,[5] the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights,[6] and the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare[7] – for its bias, lack of research, unsupported conclusions, unclear methodology and exclusion of sex workers’ own voices. The evaluation said that police had no evidence of increases in off-street prostitution. However, it acknowledged that police do not normally investigate off-street prostitution unless it is linked to trafficking – so how do they know the extent of it?

We do know that in 2010 the number of prostitution reports increased five-fold over the previous year, but Swedish police say this was not due to an increase in prostitution but merely to greater resources being applied to tackle the issue.[8] This is absolute proof that there is a significant amount of sex work going on below the police radar.

More importantly, Swedish sex workers have reported significant adverse consequences as a result of the law – including that it has deterred some of the “ordinary” clients who only want regular sex, but has not deterred the dangerous ones.[9] In short, criminalising the purchase of sex in Sweden has meant for Swedish sex workers that the odds of any particular client turning out to be dangerous are much higher. According to the sex workers – as opposed to their self-appointed spokespersons – since the clients are more nervous about being caught, the decision about whether to accept them has to be made much more quickly and without adequate time to assess whether they are dangerous.[10] For them, the loss of “ordinary” clients now means they have to accept clients they would not otherwise accept, including those who demand sex without a condom.[11] By making direct contact between buyer and seller more difficult, the law is also said to have increased the power of intermediaries (or in common language, pimps).[12]

It has been widely recognised in the HIV/AIDS sector that sex workers who are not able to control their working conditions, most importantly condom negotiation, are at a higher risk of infection. This is the reason why virtually the entire global health sector supports the decriminalisation of sex work and granting sex workers occupational health and safety rights. The World Health Organization,[13] UNAIDS,[14] the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights,[15] the UN Secretary General,[16] the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health[17] – all of these have called for the removal of laws criminalising commercial sex between consenting adults, primarily because criminalisation is a recognised risk factor for HIV/AIDS.

It is a mistake to assume that criminalising only the clients removes this risk factor. In Sweden’s UNAIDS Submission, only 18.5% of sex workers reported using a condom with their most recent client.[18] The health and safety complaints raised by Swedish sex workers since implementation of the law are virtually identical to those raised by sex workers in jurisdictions where sex-sellers can also be prosecuted.

The Swedish evaluation acknowledged that sex workers feel stigmatised, hunted and stripped of capacity under the new law – but said this was a good thing since the aim of the law is to combat prostitution. [19] To sell this to the Irish public as something that will stop exploitation of women is a lie. It is, in fact, comparable to saying that drug addicts should have to use dirty needles because it might stop them injecting! Although, while we’re on the subject, this is similar to the approach Sweden takes to drug addiction – it has largely rejected harm reduction[20] in favour of penalisation and abstinence-based treatment – which doesn’t work.

Sex workers have been consistently denied a voice in the Swedish debate. So far, they have also been denied a voice in the Irish debate. Last year, the Irish Department of Justice went to Sweden to learn about its policies and did not meet with a single sex worker or representative organisation.[21] It is a major violation of their human rights to adopt a law that affects their lives without giving them a primary role in shaping the debate.

It is important to understand that the alternative to the Swedish or Irish models is not “legalisation” as found in places like the Netherlands, Nevada, and parts of Australia. Those schemes are aimed at controlling the public order aspects of prostitution, rather than safeguarding sex workers’ rights. A truly rights-based approach would look more like the model in New Zealand, in which most sex work is not “legalised” but decriminalised. New Zealand sex workers made a significant contribution to the scheme’s design, and while the law that was ultimately passed is not perfect, it does give sex workers more rights than any other jurisdiction in the world – including an absolute right to refuse a client or service, protection under occupational health and safety legislation, and the important safety mechanism of being allowed to work together, in pairs or small groups.[22] It is hardly surprising that New Zealand sex workers overwhelmingly respond positively to questions about their rights under the law.[23] The same cannot be said about the Swedish law. Not even the Swedish government makes such a claim.

Everybody wants to see an end to forced prostitution and trafficking. Sex workers themselves are very well placed to assist in this campaign, and their contribution should be welcomed and encouraged. The Swedish law does the opposite: it encourages them to avoid police and social services rather than engage with them. Coercion and abuse can never be addressed by making an industry more hidden and denying labour rights to the people working in it. Just as they would in any other sector, it is the exploiters who benefit when we decide that the sex trade is “different” and so basic standards of labour law should not apply.

[1] Government of Sweden, ‘UNGASS Country Progress Report 2010’ p.63

[2] National Criminal Police of Sweden, ‘Trafficking of Human Beings for Sexual and Other Purposes: Situation Report 9’ (2006) p.18

[3] Ministry of Justice and the Police of Norway, ‘Purchasing Sexual Services in Sweden and the Netherlands: Legal Regulation and Experiences’ (2004) p.19

[4] Ministry of Justice of Sweden, ‘Prohibition of the Purchases of Sexual Services: An Evaluation 1999-2008’

[5] Discrimination Ombudsman of Sweden, ‘Opinion on the Report ‘Prohibition of the Purchases of Sexual Services: An Evaluation 1999-2008’’

[6] Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights, ‘Prohibition of the Purchases of Sexual Services: An Evaluation 1999-2008’

[7] National Board of Health and Welfare of Sweden, ‘The Board’s Opinion on the Report ‘Prohibition of the Purchases of Sexual Services: An Evaluation 1999-2008’’

[8] The Local, ‘Big Increase in Prostitution Reports’ (2010)

[9] Ministry of Justice and the Police of Norway (n3), p.13

[10] Johannes Eriksson (Rose Alliance), ‘What’s Wrong with the Swedish Model’ (2006) p.4

[11] Ibid.

[12] National Board of Health and Welfare of Sweden, ‘Prostitution in Sweden 2007’ pp.47-48