Beatrix Campbell's Blog

More than 30,000 pictures and videos were taken by Dominique Pelicot of his wife, middle aged French woman Gisele Pelicot, without her clothes on, without her senses, and without her permission or knowledge. She had never seen his industrial cache of images of her in induced abjection, until the police discovered them inadvertently, and learned that they were shared among unknown numbers of men in a covert network, Without Her Knowledge. 

She decided to waive anonymity and wanted some of the filmed scenarios be shown in the exceptional 2024 rape trial in Avignon of 52 men – her former husband and 51 others living in and around her village in southern France. Dominique Pelicot had filmed them after he secretly invited them to enter his wife’s bedroom and rape her whilst she was unconscious.

One of her abusers, Husamettin Dogan, reprised the ghoulish scenario  in October 2025 when he appealed against his conviction for rape (to which he had initially pleaded guilty) and nine-year jail sentence. He appeared in court in Nimes to present himself as the victim: he had been manipulated by her husband, he said, who filmed him enter their bedroom, wearing only a condom, where he raped her: No, not rape, he told the court, just ‘sexual acts’.  

For a while, he’d said, he thought she was dead. He didn’t explain whether he wondered how she’d died, or how, therefore, she had consented to anything, or why, then, he persisted. 

Some of the video footage, showed Dogan penetrating an inert Gisele Pelicot and also trying to force her to ‘perform oral sex’ on him. He claimed to have been there for only half an hour, but the police had produced video footage of him at her home that lasted more than three hours. 

The Pelicot trial had been an epochal event in which the main witness, the woman, ‘could say nothing about her experience but the videos spoke for her.’ It told the world something it hardly knew about some men, and their proclivities; their technology of sexual surveillance finally opened the aperture on a hitherto closed community that shared their malign sexual interests, their dedicated voyeurism and their sexist world view.

The trial showed how for a decade these men had been closeted in a masculine culture that preserved men’s secrets, that licensed their privileged gaze and their warrant of entitlement – a kind of material and visual droit de seignior – that is understood thanks to the great feminist insight: the politics of seeing.

Among the remarkable features of the trial was that Gisele Pelicot appeared in person, and announced that shame changed sides, that it belonged to them, not to her. She insisted that the public arena should be allowed to witness their bodies abusing hers. 

Then she performed another radical reversal of the rape relationship: during the trial she faced them and stared at them when they gave their evidence. She confronted them with the one thing they had been guaranteed to avoid: her gaze. It was a scarcely-noticed rebellion that disrupted the power of the male gaze that had animated the whole project.

‘Without their Knowledge’ was devised by her husband to deliver the unconscious,  unseeing woman in a decade-long, elaborately constructed mis en scene, to recruit male accomplices.

The project realised, in extremis, the gender power axis that film theorist Laura Mulvey described in her 1975 Screen magazine essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in which she argues that ‘the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.’

It structures ‘ways of seeing and pleasure in looking.’ Women are the spectacle, they appear but don‘t define or direct the cinematic narrative, nor do they impinge on what the viewer sees: the gaze, says Mulvey, is constructed through a patriarchal lens.

Mulvey published this hugely influential theory in 1975. In 1972 the art critic John Berger’s revolutionary Ways of Seeing, a book based on a television series made by Mike Dibb, had theorised the politics of seeing and described men as the surveyors of women, and women as doomed to survey themselves: to gain any control over the process, the woman must ‘interiorise’ it in order to ‘constitute her presence’.

Men see, women are seen, ‘men act, women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.’ 

These insights, formed in the white heat of the Women’s Liberation Movement, help us think about the politics of seeing in the Pelicot crime scene and then in the trial.  

In Dominique Pelicot’s meticulous preparations over a decade, his ardent attention to his wife’s everyday comforts camouflaged the drugs he fed her in the evenings that rendered her comatose. She could neither consent nor contribute anything to her metamorphosis from a sentient woman of a certain age to a prostrate, inert, imagined player – an object whose objectification was consummated by the ubiquitous gaze of the abusers and the man behind the camera. 

This absolute antithesis of consent – the  mission of ‘Without her Consent’  – ensured the men’s absolute sovereignty. 

In this drama, however, Gisele Pelicot was not inanimate, she was alive: without her will she was transformed, transported into their fantasy and thus traduced. 

Psychologist Elly Hanson has elaborated a weighty challenge to notions of consent: she cautions that in reality ‘much consensual sex is unwanted, harmful or profoundly regretted.’ 

Gisele Pelicot’s predators were assured that she had consented, that her unconscious participation was part of a game. But it seemed to have escaped them that this was a contradiction in terms: she could not know to what she had consented, and she could not consent to what she could not know. 

Hanson insists that the objectification of Gisele Pelicot was not only a ‘violation of her dignity, a kind of mocking – you will be what I want you to be – but also part of a group process: what they were doing together is pivotal.’ 

The men’s game was enacted in both their rape and the circulation of it, and the collective pleasure in it. 

Hanson argues that this critical dynamic, sometimes overlooked, ‘is how offenders are engaged in a collective project of dominance – co-constructing their version of warped masculine power – vicariously enjoying each other’s dominance, performing their own, and losing themselves in the power of the whole.’ 

This dominance of the gaze, ‘is a part of the violation of their victims’ vulnerability – this sense that they can wholly take in their victim, whilst they themselves are impenetrable (double meaning intended).’

The beating heart of this offending is the body’s massive surge of sadistic, omnipotent energy and contempt. Typically, adds Hanson, these men often ‘move into victim-stancing when faced with their abuse,  a form of gaslighting that so often bamboozles and confuses, whether it be to narrate oneself the victim of earlier abuse or of the other offenders.’

This was manifest in the Domminique Pelicot case, in  ‘a deep-seated sense of aggrievement on display, the feeling that flows from thwarted entitlement.’

When Gisele Pelicot insisted on facing the perpetrators during the trial, looking at them, staring at them, she exposed them to the last thing they sought: the experience of being seen. Seen this time, that is, not within their own cult of sexual surveillance, but by the public and above all, by their victim, herself.

During the months of that long trial, Gisele Pelicot was witnessed by crowds gathering inside and outside the court, no longer an object, but a speaking subject with a lot to say. So, the politics of the gaze and of sexual objectification were aired unequivocally. 

If it was hard to imagine that Gisele Pelicot could recover her privacy thereafter. Nonetheless there would have been a general consensus that she was entitled to it and that her society would support it.  

But we were reminded of the mass media’s perverse – and patriarchal –  sense of entitlement in April 2025 when Paris Match published uninvited photographs of her out walking with a male friend. She had changed her name and her where she lived. If she had forfeited anonymity during the trial, she now sought to regain her privacy.

The behavior of Paris Match contrasts with the strategy of press photographer, Ray Belisario, Britain’s first and most famous invader of royal privacy who confronted the monarchical mantra ‘be seen, above all be seen’ but only in conditions of sovereign choosing.

The intrepid Belisario was known as the first British paparazzi, but his mission was much more disciplined than that might imply: he was a republican, he was not interested in snooping inside royal closets or under their skirts, he wanted to breach monarchical fortifications that controlled who and what their subjects could see. 

His mission was to confront the constitutional historian Walter Bagehot’s proposition that the monarchy’s ‘mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon the magic.’ Mystery secured their sovereignty. That was his political target. Paris Match, by contrast, trespassed on a life that did not parade power, but the opposite, and re-iterated uninvited, unwelcome intrusion that had become the story of her life.  

Gisele Pelicot sued and she forced Paris Match to concede and pay compensation to services for women subjected to violence. 

She would show that this woman had not survived multiple rapes and 30,000 images taken in the most sordid circumstances without her consent, only to have a mighty, mass circulation magazine publish her image, yet again without her consent. 

At the end of Dogan’s appeal case, on 9 Oct the court resolved to increase his prison sentence, and the Prosecutor Dominique Sie confirmed the social heft of the Pelicot revelations: Dogan’s stance was a clear illustration, he said, of persistent rape culture and male domination. Unusually, perhaps uniquely, Without Her Knowledge was understood not as indivudual malevolence but a system that was simultaneously contested and prevalent.

Photograph: Sky News / AP

Bravo Ruth Davidson ��� the first openly gay political party leader in the UK, former leader of the Scottish Tories, former Member of the Scottish Assembly, former journalist and former army signaller ��� now a member of the House of Lords.

With characteristic verve she denounced Lord Peter Mandelson in September when his craven excuses for continuing his ardent friendship with ludicrously rich and pathological sexual abuser of girls, Jeffrey Epstein.

The allure of this elite networker, conman and convicted sex offender was irresistible to Mandelson ��� even after Epstein���s conviction he proclaimed ���we love you���.  He had been jailed for trafficking in minors and years later was alleged to have sexually abused scores of young women.

Mandelson���s scarcely credible excuse was that he never witnessed abuse and wrong-doing, and ���never sought or was offered��� introductions to young women, ���perhaps because I���m a gay man.���

Oh no, protested Ruth Davidson, Epstein was notorious for entertaining grandees on his Lolita Express  and his luxury ���paedo island���.  ���I���m absolutely disgusted,��� she said, ���don���t you dare use that as a shield.���

Her fierce rebuke brought to mind Mandelson���s less than felicitous commitment to the gay movement that made his sexual orientation legal and his marriage to his partner possible.

 He had no time for the social movements that challenged and changed the law on domestic and sexual life.

In 1998 he reacted with fury when gay Tory MP Matthew Parris commented to Jeremy Paxman in a BBC Newsnight discussion, that there were at least two gay members of the Cabinet: Paxman baulked and did his best to apologise to Mandelson. But he was having none of it.

His private life was private, he insisted ��� even though everyone ��� including his constituents, seemed to know and weren���t bothered, and even though he would invoke his private lfe when he wanted to boast about his grandfather, the Labour politician Herbert Morrison. 

In the event, the abject BBC banned any mention of Mandelson���s ���private life��� for the next decade.

In 2006  the Liberal MP Simon Hughes, another militant guardian of his private life,  was outed and forced to acknowledge that he was ���bisexual.���

Here���s what I wrote about these politicians and their private lives in The Independent on 29 January  2006:

Coming out can be horrible, scary, embarrassing and unfair. It is not easy, and it never stops. But you must do it, especially if you have power, and most especially if you are a politician. Parliamentary culture has no excuse for making it so difficult, but Members of Parliament have no excuse for not coming out.

There are only two excuses with merit: that you would be sacked, and that you cannot bring yourself to tell your mother. Politicians are not sacked, and if you are a politician, somebody else is going to tell your mother. So, for a politician, there is no excuse.

This is not to say it is not onerous. Coming out to my family was worse than telling my parents I had been done for shoplifting (pinched a book from an art shop). It was worse than telling them I had failed my A-levels (they minded for me). And it was worse than telling them I was going to get married (no one was good enough).

It is worse because gay people have to do something no heterosexual person ever has to: draw attention to something you do not want them to have in their head, your sexuality and your sex life. And it is worse because you are giving your parents something to deal with at that point in your life which is about autonomy.

In the early 1970s, I told my mother I had fallen in love with a woman. I was 23, married, and intoxicated with the Women’s Liberation Movement. I had my own home, my own Hoover, my own husband – all the signifiers of having my own life. Although this new thing was tumultuous, I was suddenly living my life; it was such a surprise, such a thrill. But still, this was something so seismic that it rustled everything, all the way to my mother. Of course, it was my business, not that of my mother, but it was an issue, because being gay is always an issue.

She was good, as I knew she would be. Whenever anything homophobic was said in our house, only by my father, she would challenge him with the tenacity of a sly fox. She was a hospital nurse, she worked with gay people, they were part of her universe.

After I told her, she must have been sleepless, because she woke me in the middle of the night and said: “Homosexuals should have the same rights as anybody else.” Then she went back to bed. She did not mind me being gay; what she struggled with was another loved one in my life other than her.

I dreaded my father’s reaction. I did not want to talk to him about my sexuality and I did not want to negotiate his political prejudice. He was a British bolshevik who prized the muscular iconography of revolutionary heroism. He endorsed a leftist fiction that homosexuality was a bourgeois deviation. It was a legend encouraged by spy scandals implicating upper-class fops, or class contempt for posh camp.

His working-class hauteur was transformed not by me, but by watching Quentin Crisp’s bewitching autobiography on television. My father wept. Whether it was Crisp or his daughter, he softened, and took strength. The reaction I was not prepared for was from sympathetic relatives who congratulated me for not, well, looking like a lesbian. “You’re not an evangelist.” Oh, but I am, I thought. I had been compromised by my good manners.

And I will never forget coming out to a boss. This was during the ecstatic swirl of 1970s sexual politics and the organisation was hot with scurrilous gossip about a couple of women who had fallen in love. I went into his office and told him I expected him to do the right thing, to support them. (I knew he had not.) He had affairs, but his desk was crowned with photos of his wife. His reputation was intact. I also told him I expected him to do the right thing by me. Instantly, I saw a blush, not of embarrassment, I am sure, but of arousal. We all know the place of lesbians in the fantasies of some men. I was exposed. He was not.

Among my lesbian friends, some women are out with everyone except their mothers. One friend survived a custody battle in the days when lesbians always lost their children. She had to do something no heterosexual person in a custody case has to, describe “what you do in bed”. She did that, she survived grotesque humiliation and the hazard of losing, she showed her valour, but she could never use the “L” word to her mother. Why? “I didn’t want her to reject me.”

That nightmare – losing your mother – is indicative of the risk. Every gay man or woman I know has a story of great imagination, dignity and fortitude. Being gay commands great courage. As the brutal death of poor David Morley reminds us, being gay can get you killed. The greatest heroism is shown by people who are ordinary. They are not stars, they are not politicians, they have no social power, no back-up, only other gays.

The most culpably craven are politicians. Their mothers are no excuse; they routinely recruit their “private life” in the service of their power. Simon Hughes has told us about the respectable poverty of his parents. Peter Mandelson, the former MP who never wanted to tell us he is gay, has assiduously told us about his genealogy: his grandfather was the right-wing, post-war Labour politician Herbert Morrison. The connection, presumably, added value to his CV. Mandelson used his public power, his proximity to the Prime Minister, to control what the BBC could say about him.

Neither Mandelson nor Hughes resisted the temptation to intervene in the private lives of others. Simon Hughes, in many ways a likeable advocate of liberalism, used his power to restrict access to abortion. He is a Christian. His church has, for a millennium, regulated where men put their willies, what women may do with their bodies, when and if they have babies, and who may couple with whom.

Mandelson was a guru of the late and unlamented cult, the Third Way, that sponsored the misogynist family policies of the first term when, lest we forget, one government priority was to cut benefits for lone parents.

The marque of New Labour’s modernity was the aura of representivity of the class of 1997: the energies of the black movement, the women’s movement, the gay movement that transformed Labour’s parliamentary profile. These were the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which had confronted the historic settlements that shaped modernity, colonialism, patriarchy, and the polarisation between work and home, public and private. These were the movements that brought us the idea of personal oppression and the concept that “the personal is political”. But they were ostracised by New Labour, which lent its endorsement to the idea that it was right on to be right off.

It is a fable of populist politics beloved by politicians – always more conservative than the civil society they represent – that private life is private. The notion relies on conventional wisdoms about nature and tradition, it trades on public anxieties during times of social rupture, and it invokes traditional power as a way of restoring security. Their moralism makes them conservative about the “private” lives of the public.

The vanity and grandiosity of the parliamentary mission is personal; career politicians do it because, they tell us, they want to make the world a better place. Neither Hughes nor Mandelson has any right to claim the shield of private life, not because they are “public” figures, but because political power, uniquely, allows them to intrude in our collective “private life”, for better or worse.

A private domain, a sequestered refuge beyond the marketplace, uncontaminated by politics, is a fiction. There is no such thing as private life. Our sexualities are social relationships. Sexual orientations, births, marriages, deaths, domesticity, all of this is as intensely regulated as traffic lights, or the nuclear bomb.

The solitary confinement of women in the home was not an effect of evolution but the outcome of a 19th-century power struggle between men and women, and the intervention of public men – in the state, corporations and trades unions – which determined when, whether, and how much women may be paid for their labours.

Marriage is as natural as Pot Noodle; the impetus for modern marriage en masse is relatively recent, it was the public enforcement of women’s personal dependence on men rather than on the church or the state. Church and state determined when marriages may begin and whether they could end. The state determined, until recently, that men may beat and rape their wives, but they may not bond sexually with men.

Everything about our bodies, how we imagine them, where we put them, with whom, whether on a bus, or in a park or in a bath house, or a home, has been the subject of public regulation. Desire and pleasure, likewise, have been scrutinised and legislated by the public guardians of corporeal activity. When we are born, we are scrupulously monitored, tested and immunised, and now the Government is fighting for access to our DNA. I do not mind the state accessing my DNA, but then I do not think there is any such thing as privacy. These claimants of privacy, Mandelson and Hughes, never had it; people talked about their sexuality all the time. They knew that.

Hughes’ resistance to definition has resonance. Heterosexuality’s dominion ensures it is never defined. And it claims the power to define the deviation. Hughes’ protest is, inevitably, about shame. He may not feel he is gay. But there is a difference between what he is and what he does. Desire is activity not identity.

That is the beauty of the label: gay is what you do, not what you are. And that is why his denial is a lie; by lying he revealed he is not proud of himself or other gay people. He has done a disservice to young people finding their sexuality, and older people who had to fight for it. Hughes and Mandelson have a generational public duty to be proud. I am, because I, like them, belong to the generation that made our gay lives liveable and lovable.

Perhaps Sir Keir Starmer ‘misspoke’, perhaps he forgot or Trump-like didn’t really know what his 2024 election manifesto did and didn’t pledge, when he decided to withdraw the party Whip from four MPs on 17 July 2025 for allegedly transgressing the manifesto. 

‘We had to deal with people who repeatedly break the whip because everyone was elected as a Labour MP on the manifesto of change and everybody needs to deliver as a Labour Government.’

He should consult that 2024 document, punctuated by photographs of himself and proclaiming how he has changed the party.  He would be reminded that Starmer’s cruel cuts are not delivering the 2024 manifesto, and they aren’t supported by public opinion.  

Nowhere in the manifesto is there a promise to cut disability benefits, keep the two-child benefit cap or abolish pensioners’ winter payment allowance. 

These MPs did not disavow the manifesto, he did. He has emerged as, a conjuror of the false promise, an Honorary Gentleman who is for turning.1

The punishment of York’s MP Rachel Maskell is emblematic of the chasm between the leadership cabal and the voters. Maskell is a former physiotherapist and trade union official, a popular advocate of ethical socialism. Her values are what could be called decent – she is a Christian whose voting record is generally consistent with the values of the progressive electorate, from the environment to public ownership of national utilities and transport, social welfare, equality and human rights. 

You have to wonder what the Labour Party is if not a manifesto that the Maskells of this world could promote. 

Starmer by contrast is shut, ambitious yet on the wrong side of history on much that matters, not least re-distribution of wealth and power, and above all Israel. His notion of the party appears as the antithesis of, for example, Labour’s post-war leader, Clement Atlee who, arguably, steered Labour’s most momentous change agenda ever; he was on the right, but he broke bread with politicians across the firmament and, most important, grasped the necessity of the left’s presence and roots in popular feeling. 

Not even Tony Blair, on a mission to re-locate Labour to the centre of the political firmament, was so insecure as to invoke the Inquisition. 

Not so the Starmer clique. When Chancellor Rachel Reeves proclaimed ‘this is a changed party, not a party of protest’ she identified: merely what it wasn’t. But what else could it – should it – be after the Tory deluge and genocidal war-making?

Starmer’s latest round of Parliamentary detentions is indicative of a theory of the party as an audience, a subaltern servant, not a movement – a space in which multitudes can muster, experience the pleasures and productivity of solidarity; a space to think, a source of collective self-discovery and a resource to do stuff that answers society’s problems. 

It is not just that the leadership is managerial and macho, it is worse, much worse, it is pathological, animated by visceral hatred of the left – exemplified by the serial harassment of Diane Abbott. 

By the time Starmer was elected Prime Minister in 2024, he had emptied the party of half its membership, though Labour remains the biggest political party in an emaciated political culture. His government is weak, adrift from a a social base, for which, evidently, it has little interest or respect. 

In their book Get In Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund chronicle the modus operandi of Starmerism – furtive, furious, manic and yet strangely maladroit. His boot camp regime won’t equip the party with strength and valour, more likely an indecent scramble to who knows where.

In 1980 Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refusal to respond to recession and roaring unemployment.  ︎

Photograph: Reuters

Perhaps Sir Keir Starmer ���misspoke���, perhaps he forgot or Trump-like didn���t really know what his 2024 election manifesto did and didn���t pledge, when he decided to withdraw the party Whip from four MPs on 17 July 2025 for allegedly transgressing the manifesto. 

 ���We had to deal with people who repeatedly break the whip because everyone was elected as a Labour MP on the manifesto of change and everybody needs to deliver as a Labour Government.���

He should consult that 2024 document, punctuated by photographs of himself and proclaiming how he has changed the party.  He would be reminded that Starmer���s cruel cuts are not delivering the 2024 manifesto, and they aren���t supported by public opinion.  

Nowhere in the manifesto is there a promise to cut disability benefits, keep the two-child benefit cap or abolish pensioners��� winter payment allowance. 

These MPs did not disavow the manifesto, he did. He has emerged as as, a conjuror of the false promise, an Honorary Gentleman who is for turning.1

The punishment of York���s MP Rachel Maskell is emblematic of the chasm between the leadership cabal and the voters. Maskell is a former physiotherapist and trade union official, a popular advocate of ethical socialism. Her values are what could be called decent ��� she is a Christian whose voting record is generally consistent with the values of the progressive electorate, from the environment to public ownership of national utilities and transport, social welfare, equality and human rights. 

You have to wonder what the Labour Party is if not a manifesto that the Maskells of this world could promote. 

Starmer by contrast is shut, ambitious yet on the wrong side of history on much that matters, not least re-distribution of wealth and power, and above all Israel. His notion of the party appears as the antithesis of, for example, Labour���s post-war leader, Clement Atlee who, arguably, steered Labour���s most momentous change agenda ever; he was on the right, but he broke bread with politicians across the firmament and, most important, grasped the necessity of the left���s presence and roots in popular feeling. 

Not even Tony Blair, on a mission to re-locate Labour to the centre of the political firmament, was so insecure as to invoke the Inquisition. 

Not so the Starmer clique. When Chancellor Rachel Reeves proclaimed ���this is a changed party, not a party of protest��� she identified: merely what it wasn���t. But what else could it ��� should it – be after the Tory deluge and genocidal war-making?

Starmer���s latest round of Parliamentary detentions is indicative of a theory of the party as an audience, a subaltern servant, not a movement – a space in which multitudes can muster, experience the pleasures and productivity of solidarity; a space to think, a source of collective self-discovery and a resource to do stuff that answers society���s problems. 

It is not just that the leadership is managerial and macho, it is worse, much worse, it is pathological, animated by visceral hatred of the left ��� exemplified by the serial harassment of Diane Abbott. 

By the time Starmer was elected Prime Minister in 2024, he had emptied the party of half its membership, though Labour remains the biggest political party in an emaciated political culture. His government is weak, adrift from a a social base, for which, evidently, it has little interest or respect. 

In their book Get In Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund chronicle the modus operandi of Starmerism – furtive, furious, manic and yet strangely maladroit. His boot camp regime won���t equip the party with strength and valour, more likely an indecent scramble to who knows where.

In 1980 Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refusal to respond to recession and roaring unemployment.�� ���

Photograph: Reuters

 

* Rising and falling stars: Aimee Challenor

(First appeared on Byline, September 2018)

Somewhere in England there is a girl who was raped, tortured and electrocuted by a well-known local Green Party figure in Coventry, David Challenor. During his criminal trial his victim described his rituals in which he dressed as a little girl or a baby in a nappy, at a house used as an official Green Party address in 2015. For anyone, this case is cruel and cautionary – for Greens it is a huge political crisis.

We know that nothing is more important than community respect and validation for the survivors of sexual crime. This girl didn’t get it. Her lonely journey to the criminal court was vindicated – last month the perpetrator, David Challenor, received a 22-year-sentence.

But she was denigrated and abandoned by the people who mattered most, her intimate community, the Challenors, well-known Green Party activists. It was the abuser they supported, not his accuser.

The police interviewed members of the family in October 2015, including Aimee Challenor,  who had just left the care system and began the process of transitioning to a girl. Aimee was an ambitious young trans activist who became Green Party equalities spokesperson in 2017 and a party candidate. Hailed as a ‘rising star,’ Aimee Challenor pitched into the party’s deputy leadership election.

She insists that despite the criminal charges she was ‘building bridges’ and attempting reconciliation with her father, who she twice appointed as election agent – there are no criteria regulating agents, according to the Electoral Commission. But she declined to inform the party leadership until Challenor was sentenced. Individuals knew, but didn’t act.

Coventry Pride took swift action after learning of the case in 2016. Why didn’t the Green Party or other organisations associated with Aimee Challenor, like Stonewall, follow its lead?

Members are now asking whether there was anything else Aimee Challenor didn’t disclose, they are alarmed by robust research by veteran social media monitors.

that reveals her own involvement in adult-baby fetish network

The scandal has scalded the Green leaders. An inquiry has been launched, David Challenor has been expelled. When mutiny among party members forced Aimee’s suspension in early September, Aimee Challenor quit, accused the party of transphobia and blocked Caroline Lucas on Twitter as a trans exclusionary radical feminist.

But the inquiry needs to do more than poke around the guile and cruelty of David Challenor and the Green Party needs to do more than lament its own misfortune in being gulled by the Challenors. And it needs to ask why the party’s initial official statements about the scandal pathetically paid more attention to Aimee Challenor’s need for support than the vindicated – but traduced – child.

The inquiry should ask how the party lost its marbles about gender and sexual politics and whether the party’s hard-line trans policies provided what sexual violence scholar Prof Liz Kelly calls a ‘conducive context’ that shielded the Challenors from scrutiny.

How did an open and democratic party sometimes behave like the Inquisition hunting trans heretics, particularly feminists, who have been harassed and disciplined, notably the lesbian activist Olivia Palmer, who has been expelled?

How could it come to pass that the Green Party has forced luminaries Rupert Read and Jenny Jones  to publically recant their scepticism.

Aimee and David Challenor mobilised Twitter widgets to block ‘trans exclusionary radical feminists’  – last year Aimee Challenor proclaimed the campaign’s success in blocking 50,000 people deemed ‘terfs’ and bigots, and getting one vocal feminist transsexual, Miranda Yardley, being banned from Twitter for life.

When Miranda Yardley was invited to address North Surrey Green Party, they were forced to disinvite Yardley and then became the subject of a ‘transphobia’ complaint themselves. The Green Party executive didn’t protest against ‘terfblocking’. The party’s universally-respected leader Caroline Lucas hated it, but described herself as powerless to resist it. I myself complained to a senior member of the Party about terf-blocking and others did, too. Apparently no action was taken. Now Lucas herself has been terf-blocked.

The inquiry should ask who in the leadership supported Aimee Challenor’s legal action to silence Green Party activist Andy Healey – he launched Gender Critical Greens, a feminist resource, and insisted on identifying Challenor as a man. The legal action against Healey is still unresolved. Healey was not allowed to address the party conference, whilst David Challenor was given a platform to propose motions despite his impending trial on the most serious child sexual abuse charges.

Other political parties should not be smug about the Greens’ crisis and catharsis – they’ve tolerated a trans modus operandi and ideology that is bulwarked by a kind of religiosity, by claims that to debate its hypotheses is to eliminate trans people: debate is death.

The Working Class Movement Library in Manchester was aghast to find itself targeted by a trans campaign to staunch its funding.

Gay organisations, too, have been blasted by trans harassment, Manchester’s Queer Up North Festival Organiser, Jonathan Best, chronicles his grim experience. Gay people are increasingly alienated by the seemingly endless expansion of categories attached to ‘gay and lesbian,’ including trans, that have nothing to do with sexual orientation.

A closed Facebook group was promoted to name and shame academics deemed transphobic, by Goldsmiths University trans researcher Natacha Kennedy. Kennedy is also Goldsmiths’ Mark Hellen – they are one person, two personas. They appeared as ‘joint’ authors of a paper on ‘transgender children’:

Sussex University philosophy professor Kathleen Stock became a cause celebre when she was pilloried for urging philosphers to engage in the gender debates flaring in social media. She was condemned as transphobic by the students union but in July the university’s vice chancellor Adam Tickell ventured where the Green Party does not tread by affirming both trans people’s human rights and academic freedom, ‘I hold a deep rooted concern,’ he wrote, ‘about the future of our democratic society if we silence the views of people we don’t agree with.’

The Liberal-Democrats, the Tories and Labour, gay organisations and mass media commentators across the political spectrum should all start asking how they fell for trans folly that is not sustained by science, that doesn’t enjoy consensus among many trans women and trans-sexuals, and certainly not among maybe most women.

The dogma has been assiduously promoted as a new civil rights frontier and fortified by no-platforming, bullying and what can only be called blacklisting of dissenting voices deemed ‘terfs’ and ‘bigots’ on the wrong side of history. The mantra ‘There is no debate’ is recited not only in the Green Party but across the political firmament.

It is as though nothing is real, there is only ‘gender fluidity’ and freedom of choice that synchronises marvellously with neo-liberal erasure of oppression and exploitation. The notion that anyone can be anything they want to be, that a man is a woman if he says he is, empties ‘woman’ of meaning  – some Greens refer to non-women to satisfy trans sensitivities.

The Challenor case is an arrow to the heart of Britain’s twisted sexual politics. Already gay activists are joining feminists and saying they are sick of the narcissism, misogyny of some trans activists:

The Green Party’s inquiry is, therefore, more important than the Green Party itself – it should open a window on the degradation of political culture.

The inquiry should also review the Green Party’s child safeguarding policy and processes. Although the party has vigorously promoted an extreme trans policy and practice, I have trawled through GP policy and can’t find a specific policy or protocol on child abuse and safeguarding, despite massive public concern in the wake of the Savile scandal in 2012, despite the work of Caroline Lucas and her Parliamentary colleagues in securing the launch of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, and its public reports on institutional complicity in child abuse.

 

Aimee Challenor was a teenager undergoing transition with the support of Mermaids, an organisation chided by the High Court, and criticised by some for advocating medical interventions at puberty  that amount to child abuse:

The Challenor family had been subject to its own High Court proceedings because of the parenting the children in the family received. Whilst many children who exit the care system do so with dignity, independence, qualifications and readiness to enter the adult world, Aimee Challenor appears to have been in a family who fought against children’s services’ support and yet, by her own account, turned to the parents for support and reconciliation after leaving the care system.

The inquiry must ask: Did no one in the Green Party at the time recognise the consequential vulnerabilities which the leadership are at now at pains to stress? Did the executive consider duties of care towards a teenager going through profound personal changes, with an extreme trans ideology, being propelled into a leadership position?

Is the Green Party preparing for a possible Serious Case Review into the Challenor case, which would undoubtedly be interested in the context and culture of the child’s family and her abuser, his activity in other contexts and other institutions?

Did the leadership and executive’s support for Aimee Challenor’s trans agenda, and the party’s early, strident rush to endorse an extreme trans position, obscure child safeguarding responsibilities?

On a personal note, I should say that I am a Green Party member. I’ve stood as a candidate in local and parliamentary elections. My own journey into these debates was provoked more a decade ago by no-platforming and censorship of debate:

This forced me to address the issue itself.  I have benefited from feminist writing, obviously, the eloquent essay on gender, race, class and identity politics in the Jenner  and Dolezal cases in the US by political scientist Adolph Reed Jnr, and the intelligence of many transgender women and trans-sexuals. They are profoundly dismayed by the authoritarianism and speciousness of trans policy in the Green Party and the spectacular nastiness of some extreme trans advocates: Sarah Brown, a Liberal Democrats candidate in Cambridge, notoriously rebuked a fellow councillor Richard Taylor with ‘suck my formaldehyde balls’.

I support Gender Critical Greens and Woman’s Place_UK and their campaign for women’s places and safe spaces, I have chaired two of their public meetings. Trans activists have harassed the organisers and the venues, frequently obliging the organisers to change venues. In Newcastle this summer Northumbria University agreed to a last-minute booking of their out-of-town campus. A local trans activist put out an alert warning trans people that they’d not be safe in the city: watch out there’s terfs about

Many heart-sick Green Party members are now voicing their worries and urging a full review that goes beyond the Challenor debacle and reassesses policies on trans, gender and sexual politics generally, and the safeguarding of children specifically.

Some of us will give evidence to the Parliamentary committee on the Gender Recognition Act. Given the fate of others, and aside from my own decisions about whether I remain in the Green Party, we need to know whether this will this result in disciplinary action, and whether the party is prepared to forfeit seasoned and intelligent activists over bullying, misogyny and cultish trans dogma?

Members of other organisations should be asking themselves the same questions.

 

Check out Jorg C’s forensic takedown of Aimee Challenor and Challenor’s husband Nathaniel Knight, a person with long-standing and acknowledged interest in fetishism and fantasies about sex with children: https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/something-rotten-at-the-heart-of

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post Somewhere in England’s Green and Pleasant Land… appeared first on Beatrix Campbell.

 

FUREDI INTO THE ABYSS

Is there a consensus about sexual abuse of children and rape generally? The answer to this question would seem self-evident but it isn’t. There are laws, of course, but laws don’t describe consensus. Nor do they create consensus. Laws may describe prohibitions and rights, but they do not effect either rights or prohibitions.

The eminent lawyer and former Appeal Court judge, Stephen Sedley cautions that ‘Any state can set out rows of shining rights, like medals on a leader’s chest…’ But rights only have meaning, he says, in their implementation, and their application to intractable conflicts of interest.

Long-standing laws proscribing sexual acts with children exemplify Sedley’s point: sexual offences laws attract many-a-medal but few rights. More than 90 per are never reported, and fewer than 10 per cent of reported rapes ever reach a courtroom. Legal prohibitions are not the same as legal rights.

This failure goes to the crux of consensus and whether we mean what we say about sexual assault and rape. Failure to implement the law contributes to the lack of consensus: it doesn’t create it, but it facilitates it. This gap exercises great minds in the criminal justice system, social justice and feminism. It is also the abyss into which sociologist Frank Furedi throws himself. He is a prolific emeritus professor and a go-to-contrarian in the right-wing media. He bundles random hypotheses into purported grand theories about the meaning of modern life, and his methodology is sound-bite rhetoric.

His work is an archetype of child abuse scepticism, a hyperactive, cynical engagement with nowness that masks hubris, an addictive againstness that is parasitical – it squats on terrain, phenomenon and agendas made by others, only to criticise or condemn.

Furedi reads the gap between sexual offences law and implementation as evidence not of hidden crime but of perils imagined by moral crusaders: the gap, therefore, between crimes, reported crime and justice outcomes, is confirmation that sexual abuse is bad but rare. He goes further: irrational paranoias and scandal-mongering menace civil society. Typically, he used the 2012 Jimmy Savile scandal to air a grand theory about the crisis of civilisation as we know it: Moral Crusades in an Age of Mistrust.

He omits concepts of power, oppression, suffering and inequality, and enlists ‘sexual violence’ instead as a transcendent  term: ‘panics’ about rape and child sexual abuse sponsor his complaints about threats to civilisation, consensus, reason, public institutions and public safety, everything.

Let’s consider Furedi’s case and his method.

Consensus: Furedi argues that there is, or rather was, a moral consensus: everybody agrees that sexual abuse of children is wrong. But (contrary to the evidence) he insists that it is rare and it is exaggerated by feminists and other ‘moral entrepreneurs’ for their own political ends.

Furedi argues that moral consensus is being – or has been – disoriented and even displaced by the promotion of distrust in traditional institutions, and aversion to risk and the ordinary hazards of everyday life, ‘There is little consensus even on some of the most elementary questions about the meaning of life,’ he argues

Scandal: A moral apocalypse has been created by scandals that never clarify or clean up society, they just make people feel bad, they lead only to a ‘sense of disorientation’; Irrational suspicion and  ‘sightings of new evils are an integral feature’ of moral crusaders who promote an ideology of evil that ‘rarely accepts that a problem has been solved.’

Sacred childhood: Amidst this loss of faith in the established order, he suggests, an idealised icon of hope glows, it is the child, a sacred ideal of innocence, an optimistic gleam in an otherwise incoherent world. Thus, he argues, we insulate childhood from sex and everything else, children are sacralised and sequestered, under the perpetual surveillance of anxious parents fearful of everything outside their domestic bubble.

He offers no evidence. Nor does he consider trans-Atlantic debates about the sexualisation of children in popular culture and the polarisation between masculinities and femininities in the marketing of childhood.

Culture of fear: He accuses paranoid adults of seeing sexual abuse everywhere – we won’t let our children just be; we invest not in their future but our own. We smother children not with love but with fear. His misanthropic prospectus brings a cynical frown to anti-oppressive movements and leads him to defend traditional institutions and consensus from challenge.

Thus, he claims panic is induced by the ‘tendency to massively inflate the peril of paedophilia’; scandals – typically the Jimmy Savile scandal – are a ‘moral crusade’, exemplified by the police inviting ‘the entire nation to recollect any incident of abuse that might have happened to them in the past’; by feminists contending ‘that the majority of young girls and women are subjected to some form sexual abuse by family members’ – for this he offers no evidence. He relies on the arch sceptic Richard Webster, who also offers no evidence.

There is a loss of authority, he says, exemplified by a chilling example, ‘the Catholic Church has lost significant moral capital as a result of the involvement of a few of its clergy in a series of sexual abuse scandals.’ Well, yes.

Crisis of authority: loss of trust derives not from the impact of survivors and radical social movements, not from the rise of democracy and the decline of deference, not from political scrutiny, but from moral crusaders, self-interested moral profiteers who exploit a few mistakes and misdemeanours to terrify everyone into feeling that they just can’t leave the house.

So successful has this been, he says, that even the authority of judges is called into question. He cites the movements to revisit the Hillsborough stadium disaster and abuse in North Wales children’s homes: The independent panel of inquiry into the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster in which 89 people lost their lives ‘called into question’ the inquiry by Lord Justice Taylor. Furedi is wrong – the panel vindicated the Taylor inquiry and went further by accessing evidence of wrongdoing by South Yorkshire police that was unavailable to Taylor. The launch of the review by Julia Macur into the evidence available to Sir Ronald Waterhouse’s inquiry and his report, Lost in Care, ‘indicates that the authority of judicial independence is not beyond question.’ It might have. But, wrong again, the issue was not ‘the authority of judicial independence’ but whether Waterhouse had full access to evidence, and the ability to investigate it.

There is, for sure, an important debate to be had about the conditions in which scandals and public inquiries do or do not sponsor political change. The scandals following the Aberfan colliery disaster in 1966, Hull’s triple trawler tragedies in the 1968, the thalidomide drug scandal in the 1950s-60s, all exposed reckless disregard for safety.

The inquiries did not necessarily yield reform: in Aberfan the National Coal Board, the trade unions and civic authorities, were all implicated, and the potential agents of challenge and change were, therefore, compromised.

It took a decade – after mighty, lonely campaigns by the women of the fishermen’s families – before new laws regulated the fishing industry; It took three decades of campaigning by the Hillsborough relatives movement and the people of Liverpool, for the authorities responsible for the Hillsborough football  stadium disaster to be called to account; it took four decades for relatives of  the British Army’s murderous action on Bloody Sunday in Derry, Northern Ireland, to get the full story of what happened to the 13 unarmed people shot by the British Army.

All of these outcomes were contingent on whether the truth could ever be told, by whom, and to whom – to everyone?  – and on whether it was made to matter. These are questions of political culture, the ‘balance of forces’ and hegemony. Politics and power, however, are nowhere in in Furedi’s chronicle, in which scandal is moralised rather than politicised.

A good example is telephone hacking, cited by Furedi as just another blow to institutions and reputations. The ‘crime’ at the heart of the hacking scandal was industrial scale, illegal hacking of people’s telephone conversations. Although it was initially represented as the price celebrities pay for being seen, the politics of hacking came alive in the House of Commons Culture Select Committee hearings in 2011. That was when the traffic of personnel between the Metroplitan police, the Murdoch press and Downing Street was disclosed. That was the moment when the hacking scandal became much more than the invasion of individuals’ privacy – though that was cruel enough; that was when we learned of secret and illegal surveillance that circulated between, and served the interests, of the Met, Downing Street and the Murdoch media empire.

The Murdoch media had established a symbiotic relationship between hackers, senior Metropolitan police officers, and Downing Street. They could spy on anyone. They could ruin anyone – not least their adversaries.

Children, teenagers, sex and violence: Furedi’s modus operandi appeared in 2012 in a blog that indicated his general approach to sex and sex crime.

In 2012 the British government launched a campaign directed at teenagers about sexual violence in relationships, and in particular, boys’ sense of entitlement. That year the parenting website Mumsnet launched its own campaign We Believe You campaign against rape.

The Home Office initiative was a novel campaign that fielded a ‘top man’, deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, to promote equality in young people’s sexual relationships.

Furedi rushed into print. He had been triggered by an advert on London Underground, ‘REAL MEN GET RAPED… Talking about it takes real strength.’ He admitted that he didn’t get it. But that didn’t stop him.  He threw in a third ingredient, the trial of two boys convicted of attempting to rape an eight-year-old girl. ‘The Home Office campaign is so obsessed with ‘raising awareness’ about an alleged epidemic of sexual violence that it wouldn’t recognise a healthy teenage relationship if it bumped into one. Once rape has been redefined as a normal feature of human relationships, it will end up being ‘discovered’ everywhere,’ he protested, so boys had been subjected to a ‘showtrial for being naughty and were convicted of attempted rape at the Old Bailey in London’ despite the fact that the eight-year-old ‘admitted in court that she had made up the story of her ordeal’.

There was indeed widespread unease among children’s advocates about the criminal trial. However, the boys were not tried for being ‘naughty’ and it wasn’t a ‘showtrial’. The judge and the lawyers divested themselves of their usual wigs and gowns, and during the trial the boys were allowed to sit with their mothers.

In 2010, the boys had been seen taking the girl to various locations to attack her. The girl’s mother had told been another boy that they were ‘hurting’ the girl ‘and doing really bad things.’ The mother found the boys in a field where they were trying to assault her daughter. The girl had been consistent in her evidence at the time, but under cross-examination at the Old Bailey, she retracted. (Not unusual.)

Nonetheless, the jury believed her contemporaneous statements and delivered a guilty verdict.

The implication was that the Home Office campaign had pathologised intimate relationships between young people. Furedi went further, he mounted a defence of pressure: ‘pressure – unwanted or wanted – is integral to every attempt to strike up a sexual relationship.’ It is? How does he know? And should it? Is that how it is for him? Generalising from masculine intuition, he complains that heterosexuality is being criminalised by efforts to clarify what is meant by sexual violence and the question of consent.

The Home Office campaign could hardly bear the weight given it by Furedi: Theresa May, who was then Home Secretary (and later Prime Minister) supported women’s movements’ attempts to improve the criminal justice system’s response to rape. She recognised that the system should not just seek to prosecute perpetrators but to prevent abuse.

Research conducted among teenagers by Bristol University scholars revealed that 90 per cent had been in an intimate relationship, 30 per cent of girls experienced violence from a partner; a sixth of girls felt pressured to have ‘sexual intercourse’ and one in 16 had been raped; one in 17 boys felt pressured into sex.

The Home Office then commissioned a campaign to raise teenagers’ awareness. But the Department of Education and Secretary of State Michael Gove baulked at spreading the campaign to schools – the most obvious location. Despite research showing that publicity didn’t penetrate unless accompanied by action to engage people in the issues, there was no follow-up in schools. May tackled Gove about this, but to little avail. ‘A sorry story,’ confided one of the officials involved.

Mumsnet: Furedi also trashed a parallel campaign by the online parenting network, Mumsnet. It conducted a survey of 1,600 women that confirmed long-standing findings from other research: 10 per cent had been raped, 30 per cent had been sexually assaulted, 80 per cent didn’t report these attacks to the police.

Mumsnet had created a phantom, he said, ‘The process through which this fantasy was concocted is fairly typical of the modern pathologisation of sexual relations. First, an online poll carried out by an advocacy group is miraculously transformed by a journalist into ‘research’. And of course, there is no need to raise any questions about how the poll was conducted or how representative was the sample on which it was based. Then, by the time the story hits the rest of the media, it is yet another case of ‘New research shows…’ – a phrase we hear all the time these days, and which should always set alarm bells ringing. Finally, the 80 per cent claim is magically converted into fact.’

He accused feminist scholars of promoting ‘an epidemic of rape’ by their ‘methodological exaggeration of male violence.’ Not only did they inflate the figures, he said, ‘they constructed survey questions that stripped sexual acts of context and, therefore complication, ‘Since that time, discrete acts of rape have been so denuded of meaning that they have become indistinguishable from the normal ambiguities, tensions and pressures involved in everyday sexual encounters.’

Furedi himself could have inquired into the conduct and methdology of the poll. He only needed to ask Mumsnet. He didn’t. I did.

Mumsnet explained that, of course, surveys among their members are not representative samples, they are Mumsnet users. Mumsnet explained: What had been learned was that ‘official data can miss important aspects, because it’s not asking enough questions, or asking the right questions. In lots of other situations, the official record is simply silent because the research is never undertaken.’

The rape survey and the campaign emerged from online conversations, ‘Mumsnet is a female-dominated site where users are anonymous, and as such it is an environment where women can talk about sex, bodily functions and the nuances of relationships in great detail, and without being told to pipe down. And that has a significant effect on the kinds of conversations that take place.

‘The campaign grew out of an entirely organic set of discussions and surveys that the users themselves carried out. What was really noticeable about those user conversations was the way in which users were led, by other women, towards the naming of their experiences as rape or sexual assault.

‘Incidents that they had previously thought of as ‘just a bit off’ or ‘don’t know whether that was OK’ or ‘I haven’t thought about it for years’ or ‘I suppose I didn’t say no and scream and shout’ became recognised for what they were – rape and/or sexual assault. So, the survey that we carried out was conducted in an atmosphere of heightened awareness among our users.’

Mumsnet explained to me that, ‘the definition of rape and sexual assault to cover all non-consensual sexual activity is challenging, especially for people – not all of them men – who have grown up believing that a bit of slightly forcible slap-and-tickle is nothing to make a fuss about.

‘We have seen users on Mumsnet become extremely angry and upset when other users tell them that the experiences they’re relating – sex instigated while they were asleep, anal sex taking place suddenly or without discussion, condoms being promised but not worn – were non-consensual and thus categorisable as a criminal offence; the women themselves don’t always want to see their experiences and their relationships that way. So, it’s not only Furedi who struggles with this.’

A year after Mumsnet’s survey, it was vindicated by Office for National Statistics  figures showing that only around 15% of rapes are reported to the police.

Furedi does not report official statistics, instead he finds the main culprits in a coven of feminist academics and journalists, primarily Mary Koss and Ms Magazine. There is indeed a story here (though Furedi doesn’t tell it) about the politics and technologies of measurement when surveys delve into the most intimate and defended crimes. Feminist researchers had criticised official surveys for failing to address context and complication, as well as official under-reporting.

Koss and her colleague Cheryl Oros published the first rape survey showing that only a quarter of women who had experienced legally-defined rape described it as rape. Her work attracted the attention of Ms magazine, which sponsored a federally-funded survey on rape among college students. Koss was writing in the context of a revolution in rape awareness and research, not least the discovery in the 1980s that official statistics, based on police reports and national crime surveys, did not reach into or record women’s experiences.

The Ms Magazine survey discovered that a quarter of students had been victims of rape or attempted rape, yet only a quarter of those whose assault met the legal definition actually named it as rape.  This is the story of ‘one-in-four’ and the entry of ‘date rape’ into the lexicon of sexual politics.

It became a template, regularly revisited and refined, for research on sexual violence. Bonnie Fisher and Francis Cullen, writing in 2000 about the development of measurement, ‘Measuring the Victimization of Women: Evolution of Current Controversies and Future Research’, comment that,  ‘What they developed, therefore, was systems of criteria, measurement, and vocabulary that were sufficiently subtle to cope with women’s reticence, shame and ambivalence about their experience, particularly in the context of entrenched social scripts about sex and violence.

‘Researchers have come to realise that conceptually defining and then operationalising sexual victimisation are complicated and, to a degree, imperfect enterprises—especially when deciding when an unwanted sexual advance crosses the line from imprudence to criminal behaviour.’

They also had to anticipate and address the inevitable criticism that as activist academics they would find what they were looking for. The methodological challenges ‘opened the way for conservative commentators to charge that the supposed “epidemic of rape” is an invention of feminist scholars.’

Scholars and pundits remained divided. Was the perceived extent of rape a ‘constructed’ or real public health and justice problem? What were the linguistic and psychological implications of these dissonant narratives?

After decades of experimentation, surveys have become more refined, yet ‘Letting a woman tell her own story’ doesn’t necessarily resolve the discrepancies: half of women describing acts legally-defined as rape still did not consider it to be rape. It is when acts are described explicitly that rape estimates increase.

Bonnie Fisher comments that how people construct incidents ‘may be a large, not a small, source of “measurement error” in how people respond to questions.’ The implications are heavy, ‘For virtually any other crime (e.g., larceny, burglary, robbery), the idea of measuring objective, rather than socially constructed, reality would raise barely a ripple of concern.’

The early feminist estimates have been consistently confirmed in the US by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and in the UK by the Office for National Statistics. In 2016 the BJS published a survey which found that 20 per cent of students had been sexually assaulted since entering college, and 34 per cent during their lifetime. In the UK, in 2016 the Office of National Statistics published the first official breakdown of on children and rape statistics derived from the National Crime Survey. (The ONS updated its child sexual abuse findings in 2019). The breakdown showed that 30 per cent of rape victims are children

Furedi didn’t get it. But ‘It looks as though our ‘concoction’ was not too far off the mark,’ commented Mumsnet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post Sex crime and ‘shining rights’ appeared first on Beatrix Campbell.

Witch hunting in North Wales

In lush mountainous Wales, an English literary scribe, Richard Webster, wandered, with his tape recorder, formulating a hypothesis that witch hunters were stalking its green hills and valleys. Webster didn’t believe in witches, of course, but he believed that other people behaved as if they did, hunting out an imaginary enemy within: a child sex abuser. Webster became an influential sceptic whose attention had been caught by the Cleveland child abuse controversy in 1987 and who, in the decades that followed, elaborated a quasi-conspiracy theory about the ‘creation’ of child sexual abuse. In the 1990s he was outraged by the convictions of men running cruel regimes in children’s homes in Staffordshire and Leicestershire – the Pindown regime and the Frank Beck convictions for sexual abuse: moral panic and witch hunting was afoot, he charged in his 1998 book, The Great Children’s Home Panic.

He became the stand-out champion of men convicted of rape and buggery of vulnerable children over whom they exercised almost absolute power, whose authority was guaranteed by their control over institutions in which children were effectively incarcerated. Their victims, by contrast, he maligned as scoundrels and ingrates.

He made the extravagant claim to a Home Affairs parliamentary committee on 14 May 2002 that investigations into children’s homes in Wales were witch hunts ‘without parallel’, that 80-90 per cent of around 580 suspects were ‘completely innocent.’ His grandiose exposition was that zealots and moral crusaders were spreading moral panic and that pro-active policing into suspected sexual abuse was creating miscarriages of justice. He wrote a book about the investigation into Bryn Estyn children’s home in North Wales, which he averred was ‘one of the most extraordinary stories in recent British history’. That made him, too, extraordinary – by association.

Something about men being accused of sexually abusing children and young people roused his indignation. At a time when most constabularies in Britain were investigating sadism and sexual abuse in children’s homes he rose to the defence of the accused in his 736-page book Bryn Estyn: the Making of a Modern Witch Hunt, self-published in 2005.

Webster became the influential vector of a hypothesis floated during the 1990s and 2000s, that was all the more alluring for being airless, excessive and derived from the denials of convicted sex offenders. He became an exemplar of bookish scepticism that was less about scrutiny of the sequence of events than mere  disbelief. Webster also came to be regarded as saintly. After he died, his collaborator Bob Woffinden, a campaigner against miscarriages of justice, wrote an obituary in The Guardian on 31 July 2011: Webster’s ‘generosity and big-heartedness were extraordinary,’ he wrote

But Webster’s vaunted kindness did not extend to the victims, particularly the dozen young men who died or killed themselves as a result of their experiences in the North Wales children’s homes gulag.

Webster’s theory and practice

His intellectual mooring lay in his critique of Sigmund Freud and in Norman Cohn’s history of medieval movements of mass delusion.

Webster’s 1995 book Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis claimed that not only was Freud’s ‘seduction theory’ of childhood abuse (later repudiated by the great man) wrong, but Freud was also wrong to retract: it was all wrong. Freud had ‘cajoled’ his patients into creating memories of events that never happened. So, Freud, his apostles and – above all – his feminist critics were all implicated in an epochal con.

Webster found inspiration in Norman Cohn’s book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, a study of ‘millenarian fantasies,’ collective delusions, cults and ‘dreadful irrational fantasies’ in Europe during the Middle Ages. However, he misrepresented Cohn’s thesis: Cohn had compared the great peasant revolts with the millenarians: the peasant revolts were mass movements, highly organised, coherent and focused; the millenarians, he argued, were by contrast isolated, alienated and marginal.

The modern discovery and re-discovery of sexual abuse has no equivalent in millenarian or witch hunt histories: unlike them it is anchored in real events, not outsiders, cults or quacks; mass experience that has found articulation in the health and welfare professions, feminism, criminal justice, and the laws of modern states.

Webster promotes a theory of contagion among social workers, police, therapists  and feminists who ‘retreat from practically all forms of scepticism,’ and who share an ‘ideological taboo against disbelieving any allegations of child sexual abuse.’ He offers no empirical research to substantiate this grand hypothesis.

In 2005 the Orwell Press – founded in 1988 by Webster himself – published his magnum opus, The Secret of Bryn Estyn. It is commended on the cover by a cadre of eminent sceptics. Prof Jean La Fontaine comments that he ‘admirably succeeded’ in doing what the ‘police and public inquiries failed to do: discover what really happened.’ What really happened, apparently, was mass delusion.

That’s not what two expert inquiries discovered: one led by a social services director John Jillings, was long-suppressed, the other, a judicial inquiry by Sir Ronald Waterhouse,  had no doubt that what really happened was all too real: widespread sexual abuse. The 2000 Waterhouse report, Lost in Care, described boys’ experience of Bryn Estyn as, ‘a form of purgatory or worse’ from which children emerged more damaged than when they entered and for whom the future had become even more bleak.’

The star in Webster’s book, The Secret of Bryn Estyn is himself: Webster places himself and his method at the centre of the story. He describes his tools, his battery-powered tape recorder, his journey to a strange country where he offers guidance in the phonetics of Welsh – a language which very few people speak in Wrexham where Bryn Estyn is located – and which, I am assured by a Welsh-speaker he doesn’t get quite right. He provides maps for seekers-after-truth whose sense of North Wales is likely to be mountains, lakes, choirs, second homes, rather than institutions incarcerating naughty boys. His promiscuous details hold out the reassuring promise of really knowing things, of being there.

 

He establishes himself as a passionate champion of convicted sex offenders, and the scourge of social workers, journalists and police officers and, not least, the wounded survivors of Bryn Estyn’s purgatory.

Alison Taylor

The North Wales narrative began in the mid-‘80s with an indefatigable social worker, Alison Taylor: boys had been telling her about violence and sexual abuse in children’s homes; she discovered that other carers and social workers had reported allegations, to no avail. Taylor reported the allegations to managers and then to police. In 1987 she was suspended after passing on the allegations to the police. She didn’t give up and in the early ‘90s delivered a dossier to the authorities. It emerged that 10 reports had been made to the local authority before her own.  In 1994, former social services director John Jillings began an inquiry, together with Jane Tunstall and Gerrilyn Smith. Lack of co-operation by the authorities almost forced the Jillings team to quit. In the event, the panel produced a report which the local authority insurers demanded be destroyed. In fact, some copies were shared under elaborately secret  circumstances with some journalists. It was not until 2013 – with the renewal of public interest in child sexual abuse – that the Jillings Report was made public.

Alison Taylor also took the story to the press – it was covered in Wales and the reporter Dean Nelson got the story into the Independent on Sunday and thus the London media.

Nelson’s previous experience had taught him that the victims could be vulnerable and sharing their story could feel like a journey back to hell. ‘I went first to the NSPCC to make sure there would be some counselling for people,’ Nelson told me. Contrary to the myth that disclosure is easy, encouraged by 15 minutes of fame, or compensation, some of the men he met just could not endure the telling of it. Nelson’s reports also referred to allegations about police involvement – notably a recently-retired police officer. He was unnamed superintendent Gordon Anglesea. Anglesea sued Nelson, the Independent on Sunday and several other press and television organisations, and in 1994 he was awarded a massive £375,000 in damages.

Webster would not accept that Peter Howarth was a sex offender who terrorised his pupils at Bryn Estyn: no, he was a martyr who had a gift for ‘reading difficult adolescents’ and who was ‘keen on bringing out any hidden potential he might divine.’ Their exposure of Peter Howarth’s notorious regime, he protested,  ‘constitutes one of the most terrible instances of collective ingratitude which is to be found in recent history.’

Anglesea got his comeuppance, however, when a fresh investigation, Operation Pallial, was launched in 2012 in the wake of a new wave of historic abuse allegations. Anglesea was prosecuted and jailed in 2016.

John Allen, the owner of several children homes in North Wales, that earned him an estimated £30 million paid by local authorities to ‘care’ for vulnerable children from all over the country, was also re-investigated, prosecuted and jailed for life.

Webster’s book had repeated the slur that the accusers did it for the money and blamed Nelson for the deaths of three witnesses who killed themselves after Anglesea’s successful libel trial. He implied that Nelson set them up, ‘witness manipulation’ the saintly Webster called it.

‘Webster couldn’t understand that all this was so painful to these men,’ Nelson told me. Webster never met Nelson, but confidently accused him of being ‘credulous’ for taking the North Wales victims seriously.

Webster’s critique of the Bryn Estyn investigation rests on his attempts to discredit both the accusers and the messengers. While the Waterhouse report commends whistle-blower Alison Taylor, the social worker who first called attention to the assaults on boys, Webster condemns her.

In her attempts to expose violence and abuse, he wrote, she ‘almost inevitably bestowed upon herself a quite extraordinary degree of power.’ Power? Taylor’s efforts were rewarded by dismissal in 1987 and disrespect by people who really did have power – police and public service managers. All she had was knowledge but that didn’t give her power.

Webster’s review of the Waterhouse report in the New Statesman on 13 March 2000, headlined Can a Whistleblower be Wrong? re-iterated his rather obsessive grievances about her. It provoked a successful libel action by Taylor against Webster and the New Statesman. She won and secured a settlement that required Webster and the New Statesman to read out in court an apology and a retraction. Webster wouldn’t have it, and went back to court, where Britain’s senior libel judge, Mr Justice David Eady, ruled that the requirement to read out the retraction would be ‘unjust and unfair both the general readership of the New Statesman and the public more widely and to Mr Webster.’

‘Intrinsically dangerous’

Pro-active police investigations of children’s homes were known to their critics as ‘police trawls.’ In the early 2000s, complaints about these investigations prompted the the parliamentary Home affairs Select Committee to launch an inquiry. Webster, Woffinden and journalist David Rose presented the case against them to the Committee in 2002, Webster argued they were ‘intrinsically dangerous.’ Rose proposed that perhaps 50 innocent men out of 100 suspects had been wrongly convicted. Woffinden argued for a strict, three-year time limit on investigations and prosecutions. All three claimed that compensation was an incitement to falsely accuse.

The troika had a sympathetic ear in the committee chair, Labour MP, Chris Mullin. But the committee’s report in 2002 did not agree that the allure of compensation attracted false allegations and convictions; it did not agree to statutory time limit, it did not call a halt to the police inquiries. It reminded the police that they had a legal duty to investigate if they suspected criminal activity.

Yet the hearings had a chill effect. A decade later the Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer commented, ‘the concern was that the police might have been over-eager in some cases, with the risk that false allegations might be made. Ten years later, post-Savile, the concern is that the police failed to give complainants more information, in particular to tell them that there were other complainants who might also be prepared to support a prosecution.’ A new consensus was needed, he said.

The deaths of Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith released many muted voices. In 2012 allegations of historic abuse in North Wales were revisited and in 2013 Gordon Anglesea was arrested. Webster didn’t live to see Anglesea back in court. Some his victims didn’t live to see it either. But there were others, and they did.

In 2016 Anglesea was convicted and jailed for 12 years for sexual offences against boys between 1982-87. He died in prison.

Webster didn’t live to witness the demise of Anglesea and fresh investigations in North Wales. His reputation lived on, however: he had become a doyen of British scepticism about sexual abuse, consulted and cited by scholars and journalists, wrapping what the Australian criminologist Michael Salter describes as the excitable ‘pleasures of disbelief’, in a seemingly erudite account of the TRUTH.  Not as he saw it, not as you might see it, but simply the truth.

Webster exemplifies scepticism as a form of negative faith. He mounted one conspiracy theory to vanquish another: professionals talking to each other, researching, going to conferences!  A kind of cruel piety gripped his life, he spent years being a champion of convicted serial sex offenders, shunning the suffering of their victims, and learning nothing about what people do with their troubles, or wherein trouble resides.

 

 

The post The Secret of Richard Webster appeared first on Beatrix Campbell.

 

Peter Ellis cases rises from the dead

New Zealand’s child abuse controversy: sex offender gets to the Supreme Court

A case that flooded New Zealand’s media a quarter of a century ago came back to life when the Supreme Court took the radical decision on 2 September 2020 to hear a third appeal by Peter Ellis against his conviction and imprisonment for sexual offences against children in a Christchurch creche – despite his death a year earlier.

Parents were horrified – including mothers who had initially resisted their children’s complaints about Peter Ellis, who blamed themselves for their children’s sudden, alarming behaviour, and who, confronted by their children’s persistence, were eventually persuaded.

It was grim, too, for children who had been the prime witnesses in the criminal trial and who were faced yet again, with a crusade to impugn their testimony – evidence that had been accepted by judge and jury in a criminal trial in 1993, two Appeal Courts and a judge-led independent review in 2001. Their evidence had been vivid, robust, consistent and accepted. And for three decades it has been traduced by Ellis’s supporters and advocates of the notions that children are  susceptible to suggestion and that child abuse is an urban legend whipped up by witch-hunters. The case was a cornucopia of vehement conflict during the 1990s about children’s evidence, memory, professional practice, witch-hunts, moral panic, feminism, child care, everything.

Peter Ellis had been an unsettled, flamboyant New Zealander in his late 20s who’d been in trouble with the law before he had the good fortune to be allocated a job in Christchurch Civic Creche in 1986 as part of his probation.

It was a time when New Zealand, like the UK and many other countries, was reforming its approach to childhood adversity. In the government published a review that announced that ‘ill-treatment and neglect are not uncommon and occur in all sections of our society,’ it introduced the 1989 Children and Young Persons, and their Families Act, and appointed a Commissioner for Children. This was also a time when men were being encouraged to work in a field they’d hitherto avoided, child care.

According to a judicial inquiry into the case by Thomas Eichelbaum, Ellis was known as ‘an outgoing, uninhibited, unconventional person,’ sometimes ‘risqué and outrageous.’ He was gay, but that was no bar to his job; he was trusted by many parents, ‘although according to what children said in their interviews, his boisterous games, tricks and teasing were not universally appreciated.’ His friend and advocate, Lynley Hood, noted in her 650-page bestseller on the case, A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case, that he was also a drinker – he’d have a drink at lunchtimes whilst working at the creche.

It all began in 1991 when a boy told his parents that he ‘hated Peter’s black penis’. (Peter Ellis was white). The remark was reported to the creche, Ellis was suspended, an investigation began, parents were alerted and over the next 2 years 118 children were interviewed. Most made no allegations of abuse, but 20 children did. In June 1993 Ellis was convicted and jailed for 10 years for abuse, including penetration.

In 1994 Ellis appealed. The appeal was dismissed. In 1999 he appealed again – according to Lynley Hood, he believed that the children’s evidence ‘had been given a weight and confidence to which it was not entitled’, and furthermore it had been given ‘unjustified credibility because of misconceptions about children’s evidence’; the evidence should have been treated at least with the greatest of caution and at best by total exclusion.’

Memory test

The story had flooded the media, Ellis acquired ardent champions, notably Lynley Hood, some alleged mental instability in some parents and the malevolence of child protection professionals, who were accused of going to conferences and contaminating each other, children and parents with their ideas, of being feminists or christians, and of being wrong.

The case became a test of children’s credibility. Their evidence was subjected to intense pre-trial assessment and argument, a criminal trial and two Appeal Courts. The second appeal in 1999 had relied heavily upon submissions by two eminent scholars – frequent witnesses for the defence: Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck, whose research focused on children’s suggestibility. The appeal was dismissed.

It was a classic case of the child sexual abuse backlash, the memory wars’ and what the American political scientist Ross Chiet calls the witch-hunt narrative.  

The Eichelbaum Report

After Ellis was released from prison he resolved to go on making his case, now for a free pardon and Royal Commission of Inquiry. The Ministry of Justice didn’t concede a Royal Commission, but it commissioned an independent inquiry by former Chief Justice Sir Thomas Eichelbaum.

His task was to investigate and report on current best practice in interviews with children and the investigation of multiple abuse cases, and to assess whether the Civic Creche case had been conducted accordingly. He was also required to consider several other inquiries, including Cleveland and Orkney, and Britain ’s Memorandum of Good Practice regulating interviews with children.

Here’s what he concluded: During the trial the defence argued that the questioning of the children had been oppressive. He acknowledged that, ‘the ideal position would be if the evidence of the complainants in such cases arose clearly and precisely, without any previous questioning, but it would be unreal to have any such expectation.’ It was also acknowledged that parents had been talking to each other, but the judge in the criminal case had not been persuaded that this had a ‘deleterious’ effect on the children’s evidence.

The defence claimed that the prosecution had been selective in its presentation of the video-taped interviews to the court, and withheld some disclosures that were deemed outlandish. The trial judge had allowed the defence to play any or all of the tapes to the jury. In the event, the defence played some of the tapes. Eichelbaum commented, ‘This merits emphasis, since there seems to be a common misconception that the jury was unaware of the bizarre allegations’.

Eichelbaum enlisted two international experts to assess the children’s interviews: Prof. Graham Davies, an expert on children’s testimony, and a contributor to Britain’s Memorandum of Good Practice, a guide to the conduct of interviews, and a Canadian psychologist, Dr Louise Sas, a specialist on the impact of trauma and the conditions in which children disclose sexual abuse.

Prof Davies did not find any evidence to support contamination, he thought some interviews were too long or repetitive, but he concluded that there were few gross violations, and by the standards of 2000 the quality of the interviews stood up ‘surprisingly well’, in fact, the standard was ‘exceptional for the time.’

Dr Sas regarded the child witnesses as reliable, and she ‘expressed the view that there would probably have been more convictions, had the contamination issue not been given such prominence.’

Lay to rest

Eichelbaum concluded that, the formal interviewing was ‘of a high standard for its time. Even by present day standards it was of a good overall quality. The interviews did not meet best practice standards in every respect, and if that degree of perfection were the test, few if any interviews of this kind would pass.’

His report offers a full account of the children’s allegations, their context and timing. An alternative account is provided by Lynley Hood’s book, A City Possessed. It invoked medieval witch hunts to argue that child abuse is ‘a major folk tale theme’ that now emerged as ‘urban legends.’ She insisted that – contrary to the evidence – most abused children ‘disclose voluntarily’ and most ‘suffer no long-term harm’.

Quiet Christchurch, she wrote, had been seized by moral panic and mass hysteria, an ‘inferno’ fanned by a coalition of feminists, child protection professionals and Christians and implausible children’s stories.

Hood had no evidence that was not available to jurors and judges. They were just wrong, she wrote. What she did have, however was disbelief. The problem was not sexual crimes against children, but ‘the models used by Eichelbaum, Davies and Sas that coerced children and ‘may seem in themselves to be forms of abuse.’

In the end, Eichelbaum had counselled that quality of interviews had been exhaustively ‘traversed in detail’ and revisited by a total of seven judges, ‘Mr Ellis’s case has had the most thorough examination possible.’ His wish, he said, was that the case ‘should now be allowed to rest.’

But it wasn’t allowed to rest.

In July 2019 the Supreme Court allowed Ellis another appeal. But then he died. In September 2020 the Supreme Court made the radical announcement that the case would go ahead – on the basis, in part, of the Maori tikanga tradition that a person’s prestige and reputation endures after death and extends to the person’s wider family.

The expert reports provided to Eichelbaum concerned the efficacy of the interviews with children, their memory and reliability and the implications of their behavior in the context of the abuse. The experts enlisted by Peter Ellis revisited the enduring debates about trauma, memory and suggestibility. These, said the Supreme Court, ‘raise issues of general and public importance and significant issues.’

These ‘significant issues’ have dominated debates about child sexual abuse for decades. Psychologists in New Zealand have noticed the alarming rise of applications to the courts, ‘mostly by defence counsel,’ to admit expert evidence about memory. Research published by the specialists Suzanne Blackwell, Fred Seymour and Sarah Mandeno, on applications covering the last 20 years, published in the summer of 2020 found that these were ‘almost exclusively in the context of sexual violence trials.’

The doyen of American law and psychology Thomas D. Lyon  explains in his 2019 essay, Child Witnesses that the overwhelming ‘difficulties children encounter in disclosing abuse’ leads most of them to remain ‘silent and only the most forthright children to disclose.’ Very few pre-schoolers make it to criminal court and as a result, investigators and the criminal justice system, typically encounter only children who are ‘unusually willing to disclose but susceptible to pressures to deny and recant.’

So, in New Zealand, the evidence of Ellis’s victims, who had been ‘unusually willing’ to speak, were to be excavated again: like the undead, never laid to rest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post Witch-hunters appeared first on Beatrix Campbell.

 

 

The Supreme Court hears a dead man’s appeal

A case that animated New Zealand’s media a quarter of a century ago came back to life when the Supreme Court took the radical decision on 2 September 2020 to hear a third appeal by Peter Ellis against his conviction and imprisonment for sexual offences against children in a Christchurch creche – despite his death a year earlier.

Parents were horrified – including mothers who had initially resisted their children’s complaints about Peter Ellis, who had blamed themselves for their children’s sudden, alarming behaviour, and who, confronted  by their children’s persistence, were eventually persuaded.

The case was a cornucopia of vehement conflict during the 1990s about children’s evidence, memory, professional practice, witch hunts, moral panic, feminism, child care, everything.

Peter Ellis had been an unsettled, flamboyant New Zealander in his late 20s who’d been in trouble with the law before he had the good fortune to be allocated a job in Christchurch Civic Creche in 1986 as part of his probation.

It was a time when New Zealand, like the UK and many other countries, was reforming its approach to childhood adversity. In the government published a review that announced that ‘ill-treatment and neglect are not uncommon and occur in all sections of our society,’ it introduced the 1989 Children and Young Persons, and their Families Act, and appointed a Commissioner for Children. This was also a time when men were being encouraged to work in a field they’d hitherto avoided, child care.

According to a judicial inquiry into the case by a former Chief Justice, Thomas Eichelbaum, Ellis was known as ‘an outgoing, uninhibited, unconventional person,’ sometimes ‘risqué and outrageous.’ He was said to be gay, but that was no bar to his job; he was trusted by many parents, ‘although according to what children said in their interviews, his boisterous games, tricks and teasing were not universally appreciated.’ His friend and advocate, Lynley Hood, wrote in her bestseller on the case, A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case, that he was also a drinker – he’d have a drink at lunchtimes whilst working at the creche.

In 1991 a boy told his parents that he ‘hated Peter’s black penis’. (Peter Ellis was white). The remark was reported to the creche, Ellis was suspended, an investigation began, parents were alerted and over the next 2 years 118 children were interviewed. Most made no allegations of abuse, but 20 children did. In June 1993 Ellis was convicted and jailed for 10 years for abuse, including penetration.

In 1994 Ellis appealed. The appeal was dismissed. In 1999 he appealed again – according to Lynley Hood, he believed that the children’s evidence ‘had been given a weight and confidence to which it was not entitled’, and furthermore it had been given ‘unjustified credibility because of misconceptions about children’s evidence’; the evidence should have been treated at least with the greatest of caution and at best by total exclusion’

A year later Peter Ellis was released from prison and resolved to go on making his case, now for a free pardon and for Royal Commission of Inquiry. The Ministry of Justice didn’t concede a Royal Commission, but commissioned an independent inquiry by former Chief Justice Sir Thomas Eichelbaum.

His task was to assess whether the Civic Creche case had been conducted in accordance with best practice. He was also required to consider several other inquiries, including Cleveland and Orkney, and Britain ’s Memorandum of Good Practice regulating interviews with children. His conviction had been confirmed by two Appeal Courts and by an independent Ministerial inquiry.

The case had flooded the media, he acquired ardent champions, some alleged mental instability in some parents and the malevolence of child protection professionals – they were accused of going to conferences and infecting each other, children and parents with their ideas, of being feminists and christians, and being wrong.

The case became a test of children’s credibility. Their evidence was subjected to intense pre-trial assessment and argument, a criminal trial and two Appeal Courts. The second appeal in 1999 had relied heavily upon submissions by two eminent scholars – frequent witnesses for the defence: Stephen Ceci and Maggie Bruck, whose research focused on children’s suggestibility. The appeal was dismissed. It was a classic case of the child sexual abuse backlash, the memory wars’ and what the American political scientist Ross Cheit calls the witch-hunt narrative.  

 

The Eichelbaum Report

After Ellis was released from prison he appealed for a free pardon and Royal Commission of Inquiry. The Ministry of Justice didn’t concede a Royal Commission, but it commissioned an independent inquiry by Eichelbaum.

His task was to report on current best practice in interviews with children, the investigation of multiple abuse cases, and to assess whether the Civic Creche case had been conducted appropriately. He was also required to consider several other inquiries, including Cleveland and Orkney, and Britain ’s Memorandum of Good Practice regulating interviews with children.

Here’s what he concluded: During the trial the defence had argued that the questioning of the children had been oppressive. He acknowledged that, ‘the ideal position would be if the evidence of the complainants in such cases arose clearly and precisely, without any previous questioning, but it would be unreal to have any such expectation.’ It was also acknowledged that parents had been talking to each other, but the judge in the criminal case had not been persuaded that this had a ‘deleterious’ effect on the children’s evidence.

The defence claimed that the prosecution had been selective in its presentation of the video-taped interviews to the court, and withheld some disclosures that were deemed outlandish. The trial judge had allowed the defence to play any or all of the tapes to the jury. In the event, the defence played some of the tapes. Eichelbaum commented, ‘This merits emphasis, since there seems to be a common misconception that the jury was unaware of the bizarre allegations’.

Eichelbaum enlisted two international experts to assess the children’s interviews: Prof. Graham Davies, an expert on children’s testimony, and a contributor to Britain’s Memorandum of Good Practice, a guide to the conduct of interviews, and a Canadian psychologist, Dr Louise Sas, a specialist on the impact of trauma and the conditions in which children disclose sexual abuse.

Prof Davies did not find any evidence to support contamination, he thought some interviews were too long or repetitive, but he concluded that there were few gross violations, and by the standards of 2000 the quality of the interviews stood up ‘surprisingly well’, in fact, the standard was ‘exceptional for the time.’

Dr Sas regarded the child witnesses as reliable, and she ‘expressed the view that there would probably have been more convictions, had the contamination issue not been given such prominence.’

Lay to rest

Eichelbaum concluded that the formal interviews were ‘of a high standard for its time. Even by present day standards it was of a good overall quality. The interviews did not meet best practice standards in every respect, and if that degree of perfection were the test, few if any interviews of this kind would pass.’

His report offers a full account of the children’s allegations, their context and timing. An alternative account is provided by Lynley Hood’s 650-page book, A City Possessed. It invoked medieval witch hunts to argue that child abuse is ‘a major folk tale theme’ that now emerged as ‘urban legends.’ She insisted that – contrary to the evidence – most abused children ‘disclose voluntarily’ and most ‘suffer no long-term harm’.

Quiet Christchurch, she wrote, had been seized by moral panic and mass hysteria, an ‘inferno’ fanned by a coalition of feminists, child protection professionals and Christians and implausible children’s stories.

Hood had no evidence that was not available to jurors and judges. They were wrong, she wrote. What she did have, however was disbelief. The problem was not sexual crimes against children, but ‘the models used by Eichelbaum, Davies and Sas’ that coerced children and ‘may seem in themselves to be forms of abuse.’

In the end, Eichelbaum had counselled that quality of interviews had been exhaustively ‘traversed in detail’ and revisited by a total of seven judges, ‘Mr Ellis’s case has had the most thorough examination possible.’ His wish, he said, was that the case ‘should now be allowed to rest.’

But it wasn’t allowed to rest.

In July 2019 the Supreme Court allowed Ellis another appeal. But then he died. In September 2020 the Supreme Court made the radical announcement that the case would go ahead – on the basis, in part, of the Maori tikanga tradition that a person’s prestige and reputation endures after death and extends to the person’s wider family.

Eichelbaum’s experts  had addressed the efficacy of the interviews with children, their reliability and the implications of their behaviour in the context of the abuse. The experts enlisted by Peter Ellis revisited the enduring debates about children’s evidence, trauma, memory and suggestibility. These, said the Supreme Court, ‘raise issues of general and public importance and significant issues’

These ‘significant issues’ have dominated debates about child sexual abuse for decades. The doyen of American law and psychology Thomas D. Lyon  explains in his 2019 essay, Child Witnesses, that the overwhelming ‘difficulties children encounter in disclosing abuse’ leads most of them to remain ‘silent and only the most forthright children to disclose.’ Very few pre-schoolers make it to criminal court and as a result, investigators and the criminal justice system, typically encounter only children who are ‘unusually willing to disclose but susceptible to pressures to deny and recant.’

So, in New Zealand, the allegations by Ellis’s victims, who had been ‘unusually willing’ to speak, were to be excavated again: like the undead, never laid to rest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post Living dead – the strange case of Peter Ellis, convicted child abuser appeared first on Beatrix Campbell.

July 2020

ON BEING NICE – DREAM ON

Molly Scott Cato is one of the Green Party’s popular politicians, an economist, and until recently an admired Euro MP for the South-West. She is likely to be elected to the party’s executive in forthcoming elections where – many of her supporters have been hoping – shewill confront the bitter conflict over gender politics and encourage a kinder, gentler temper.

Then on 29 June she tweeted an accusation: why was labour leader Kier Starmer being ‘so timid in defence of trans rights? Transwomen are women; transmen are men…’ Whoa, how did she know that Starmer was being timid? Maybe he didn’t want to be snared on admittedly ‘difficult’ terrain.

Like her, he urges people to be nicer. Unlike the Green Party, the Labour leader suggests that law reform to enhance trans rights ‘takes us into difficult questions,’ that should be considered ‘in a mature, calm way.’ By contrast the Green Party leaders say there is no difficulty, no debate.

Scott Cato’s assertion attracted over 100 responses in no time, unusually polite, and mostly challenging her recital of  extreme trans dogma that ‘transwomen are women; transmen are men.’

Her tweet synchronised with an emission on the same day from the green direct action movement, Extinction Rebellion that typified what passes for political manifestos these days, it put up a pledge:

‘We do not believe that the existence of trans people…is a topic that is up for debate…transwomen are women, transmen are men…this is not up for debate.’ A torrent of protests followed and unhappy moderators found themselves having to defend a pledge the provenance of which was seemingly a mystery even to them.

Of course, trans people exist. And trans rights aren’t at risk from debate – people do not die from debate. But women’s rights and resources are at grave risk not only from the effects of ‘austerity’, funding regimes, but also from and extreme trans activism seeking to silence women and assail feminist organisations.

There is a fundamental problem – already evident in politics, in the institutions, from banks to publishers, in the voluntary sector, in sport, and in schools and universities – if a man is a woman because he says he is, then the category woman is emptied of meaning. How can we address the fact that women everywhere in the world are put upon, discriminated against, oppressed, under-paid, unpaid, raped and disrespected because they are women?

And how can we make the connections – vital for Green politics – between thoroughly gendered pillage, exploitation, pollution and patriarchy that is manifest from the Congo to the Amazon?

No sooner was the Extinction Rebellion pledge up than unhappy posts asked who decided this, what does it mean, what about women?  ‘If it helps I’m not enjoying it very much either,’ lamented a besieged moderator.

Scott Cato addressed the flood following her tweet by saying that yes, she too, wanted to end the toxicity that is stifling the Green Party. But telling members to play nicely is no match for bullying.  The authoritarian and narcissistic mantra ‘there is no debate’ is biblical not political, it is, in fact, the antithesis of politics.

The academic Sarah Ahmed goes so far as to defend ‘no debate’ and no-platforming of feminists in this way, ‘we do not agree that freedom of speech is freedom to speak unaccountably.’ But no-platforming, blocking and not-debating precisely prevents speaking accountably, it proscribes speaking, hearing and active participation in the  very production of politics.

 

IS THERE OR ISN”T THERE…?

Scott Cato and Extinction Rebellion were doing what they were simultaneously denying: they were participating in a debate it whilst prohibiting it.

Scott Cato clearly wants to heal a party suffering from septic shock, but her benign injunction is too late: playing nicely assumes that the players want to play, that they share an interest in the game, that they recognise politics as a context for necessary, peaceful, creative conflict – all of which is extinguished by ‘there is no debate’.

To understand this impasse, we need to go beyond the etiquette and structures of the Green Party to its sexual politics: it is liberal rather than radical and feminist, all about choice – choosing to sell sex, choosing to change sex. No doubt liberal goodwill to all men also motivated the party’s endorsement – without research, consultation or debate – of extreme trans dogma. Of course, people wanted to be nice and to support trans rights.

But liberalism became host to tyranny and misogyny. When damned feminists and gays, and people whose job it is to think, debated sex (bodies) and gender (cultures), and power; about prostitution, sex trafficking child sexual abuse, they met a wall of denial and harassment; when they queried cultishness and the injunction ‘there is no debate’, they were maligned as terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), disciplined and even sued.

Outside the pale of the Green Party, feminists and their supporters have been harangued –  J.K. Rowling’s careful and candid exploration of the issues is the latest in  a long and honourable line  – picketed, gigs cancelled, venues barred, some organisations’ funds have been threatened, funds lost; jobs have been threatened, jobs lost.

Amidst all this, the Green Party leadership either stayed shtum, or, like co-leader Sian Berry, were intransigent defenders of the dogma.

CHILD TORTURE  – THE CHALLENOR CASE

It was when a case of child rape and torture by Green Party member David Challenor became public in 2018 that the implications of this sulphurous state of affairs hit the party. He was the father of trans woman Aimee Challenor, a Green equalities spokesperson – notorious for abusive social media denunciations of ‘terfs’, and for improvising a social-media mass ‘terf’ blocking mechanism,  her boast was that 50,000 people had been blocked. Hardly an exemplar of online democracy.

Teenage Challenor had returned to Coventry (the Challenor siblings had been in care) in 2014, joined the Green Party, and embarked on ‘gender transition’. Aimee Challenor became a Green Party candidate and equalities spokesperson with ambitions to become party leader.

However, unknown to the party at the time, her rise and rise was shadowed by her father’s offence: David Challenor was arrested in 2015 for the kidnap, rape, and electrocution of a ten-year-old girl, whilst dressing up himself as a girl, at the Challenors’ home, which was also Coventry Green Party’s registered address. Apparently, he was also a fetishist who enjoyed dressing as a little girl in nappies and frocks.

Aimee had been interviewed by the police in 2015, and therefore knew about the case, but nevertheless appointed him to be her election agent in Coventry in May 2016.

After a radical High Court ruling in October 2016 against Mermaids, a ‘charity’ that facilitates sex change in children, David and Aimee Challenor mobilised an open letter supporting Mermaids. Green party leaders Sian Berry and Amelia Womack were among the signatories.

In 2017, Aimee Challenor returned to the family home. In 2018 David Challenor stood trial, was convicted and jailed for 22 years. The party’s response was to condemn him, of course, and to extend support to….no, not the tortured child, but to Aimee Challenor, who had failed to warn the party of this looming disgrace, and who claimed to have not known the ‘full details’ of his offences.

This was a clear breach of party rules: candidates and officers are required to inform the party of anything that might bring the party into disrepute; it also ignored the child safeguarding implications.

During this time Aimee Challenor’s partner, based in Aberdeen, was Nathaniel Knight.They later moved to the US, married and Challenor took Knight’s name.

Subsequently, the party and Challenor were criticised by the Verita independent report, commissioned by the party and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse report on abuse linked to Westminster, published in February 2020. Both were stern critics of the party’s low level of safeguarding awareness.

It was the Challenor case and Aimee Challenor’s performance as equalities spokesperson and the anti-feminist discourse promoted in the Green Party from 2014-15, including the public humiliation of a philosopher who was only doing his job: thinking, and finally the lack of awareness of child abuse, that provoked many party members to challenge the trans agenda – myself included.  I wrote a critique, urging the party to ask itself whether it had been induced into a  – witch-hunting and cultishness, to which the Challenors had vigorously contributed – that not only shielded them from scrutiny but created a kind of political coma about the misogyny and McCarthyism in the party.

This was only one flank of a larger reification of offended sensibilities and censorship spreading across organisations in the US and the UK. One of the protagonists,  Richard Firth – ironically Leeds Green Party’s equality, diversity and inclusion officer – participated in a little scam designed to get the feminist campaign Women’s Place UK banned from Leeds Civic Hall: WPUK had organised a celebration the 2018 centenary of (some) women getting the vote. The group was accused of transphobia – for insisting on women’s right to safe spaces – and the reservation was revoked at the last minute.

CROWDED COMPLAINTS

It was Richard Firth who lodged a formal complaint against me in 2018. A similar complaint was lodged against former deputy leader Shahrar Ali for tweeting a reference to my Byline piece. Firth’s complaint was focused on a couple of blogs and tweets which, he alleged, attacked trans people and party policy. Readers can see for themselves.

The complaint loitered in the crowded complaints system for almost a year. In September 2019 I was informed that the committee took no position on my views, only on the way they were expressed, ‘Given the respondent’s acclaimed mastery of language, she should have been more careful about causing distress, not just offence.’ I was urged to treat other Green Party members ‘with more courtesy in the future.’

There was no reference to whom – if anyone – I had caused distress. For the record, disagreement does not equate to distress. The complaint rested on the idea that I should have pursued concerns through the party’s clogged channels and, presumably waited and waited for a non-result.

So, I would not be suspended, but I would take a proverbial slap for not being nice to the clique that, in my opinion, brought the party into disrepute.  And I would be prohibited from standing for public office for a year. Irony upon irony, Richard Firth himself was suspended for a year and banned from holding off ice for two years in 2020.

Complaints saturated the party’s disciplinary process. One of the most egregious was against Sheffield activist Andy Healey, a promoter of the feminist site, Gender Critical Greens.

Clearly, there is a debate and there isn’t: it is mangled in the party’s disciplinary – rather than democratic – processes. Attempts to address the decline of democracy in the party, the toxic culture, and the implications of the trans modus operandi *at the party’s spring 2019 party conference – despite a clear majority in support of debate – were thwarted: no time was allocated for a conversation that most of the people at the conference wanted to have.

Therein lies madness and tyranny. So, we come back to the Extinction Rebellion and Molly Scott-Cato.

Without consulting supporters – difficult to do in intensely-devolved movements – a coterie in Extinction Rebellion introduced a polarising trans commandment for which it has no mandate. Scott-Cato’s sincerely-held wish for everyone to be nice and bring an end to nastiness is an impossible dream if she holds to the prohibition: there is no debate.

But Be Nice is no answer. The party is polarised and it must take a risk: acknowledge the divisions, admit that though they may never be resolved they can be addressed; create the opportunity for collective contemplation of the evidence, the science and the politics, the theory and practice of sex and gender. That is, to do politics properly.

 

Theo Simon proposed a late motion to the 2019 party conference to address a perceived crisis:

“Review and renew the democratic culture of the Green Party”. It was initially ruled out, but an overwhelming conference vote decided it should be ruled back in for debate. It was not given time, however. It proposed a safe, decisive and contained way to re-evaluate recent events – particularly in response to ‘gender critical positions’, and re-establish democratic principles: ”Conference acknowledges concerns that a culture has arisen in the party which may have lowered standards of civil debate, marginalised members complaints, and silenced members voices around particular policies. In particular we note allegations of the following: Pressures brought to bear from outside the party to have members suspended; Prejudicial suspensions, without prior warning, including of a parliamentary candidate; Court action being pursued against a member by party officers; Complaints of misogynistic bullying and of complaints going unanswered; Language-policing of members in discussion forums accompanied by legal threats; Blocking of members electronic communications and other access to party bodies; Disciplining of local parties over their wording of resolutions. We affirm that a culture of respectful, inclusive and transparent enquiry and debate is essential if we want to develop effective Green policy, retain membership, and build a democratic party worthy of office. We also affirm that all party officers and internal procedures must be seen to serve and protect these ends. We recognise that, in parallel to the independent Verita enquiry, work must now be done to re-establish trust in our democratic culture, policy-making and governance, both within the party and beyond. Conference therefore instructs GPRC, as guardians of party well-being, as follows: 1) To commission an expeditious internal enquiry into how this divisive culture has arisen and been perpetuated and what measures should now be taken to restore political health and amicable debate. 2) To invite submissions to this enquiry, relating to the period September 2016 to September 2018, from members and former members, with guarantees of confidentiality if required. This Internal Enquiry Into The Party’s Democratic Culture to be established within no more than one month of this motion, and to be concluded no later than the week before Spring Conference 2019, with findings and recommendations to be made available to members at that time. 3) To restore confidence in the ‘no fault’ suspension mechanism by confirming the procedure that GPRC is using to reach decisions on requests for immediate suspension. 4) To ensure that plans are drawn up by 14th December, and communicated to all members, for a Disciplinary Review process whereby members or former members can submit requests that suspensions, expulsions, complaint adjudications or other disciplinary sanctions from this period be reconsidered, such that any remedial action which is necessary may be taken.”

 

Personal note: It is with the greatest regret that I am leaving the Green Party.

J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues

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