A week on from #ClaphamCommon...

 

A week on from the Clapham Common vigil for Sarah Everard that turned terrifyingly quickly into a hideous example of excessive force by police officers, women are still being condemned for expressing their anger, articulating their pain, sharing their experiences, and making the simple demand to be free and safe on the streets. Make no mistake - freedom is safety for any group that has been oppressed. The two concepts cannot be unlinked. If you are not safe, you are not truly free.

And a week on, it is hard to be optimistic.

Plenty of men, aided and abetted by deeply unhelpful women, keep piping up to tell women that street attacks are rare, that Sarah Everard was unlucky, and the "real problem" is being attacked, raped, killed by someone you know, possibly in your own home or workplace.

This is not constructive. All you're really saying is that women are not safe anywhere. Women's safety is not an either/or proposition - the streets need to be safer for everyone, just as more needs to be done about abuse suffered by women at home, at work, on university campuses, in schools and so on.

And focusing on the greater likelihood of women being killed by someone they know rather than a stranger on the street is a distraction from the problem of "less serious" street offences against women being dealt with properly. Street harassment, indecent exposure, kerb-crawling - none of this is taken seriously enough even though it is not uncommon for someone to start their campaign of violence against women with these "minor" offences. It is symptomatic of a broken criminal justice system if there aren't the resources to do a better job of dealing with these crimes before someone is raped or murdered.

Hell, a woman tried to report an incident of indecent exposure as she was leaving the Clapham Common vigil last week and it was not taken seriously at the time. It's not as if there was a shortage of police officers in the area when she was trying to get home around 8pm last Saturday night. My friends and I saw them waiting in vans in laneways in the area from 5pm onwards. It was only after this woman's story received significant media coverage that the police launched an appeal for witnesses and information a full six days after the vigil. We should not have to go to the media for the police to be shamed into doing their job properly.

Equally, it is not helpful to constantly point out that men are more likely to be murdered than women. More than 90% of all murderers and rapists are men. Male violence and aggression is the issue here. If this can be addressed better, men and women are safer. We all win.

For women, statistics show we are less safe at home than men, we are more likely to be raped than men, and if we report rape, the chances of a successful prosecution are staggeringly low. And when we don't report rape because of fear, embarrassment, shame, being unconvinced that we'll be taken seriously, not wanting to make a fuss, not wanting to relive the experience in a court room, it becomes harder for other women and men to come forward and report these hideous crimes against our bodies. 

Then nobody wins. Apart from rapists.

And, of course, because every woman's experience of male violence is different, we don't all feel equally safe or unsafe in the same places. My one experience of sexual assault was a street attack by a stranger in Dubai in 2006 but in 2021, I am happily married and feel safe at home. As a result, I am more wary of street attacks 15 years on - perhaps even more so now that the arthritis in my left ankle and knees has worsened and my fear of being grabbed and being physically unable to run away - even if mentally I am ready to run to the next county - is real.

The day after the vigil, I tweeted a picture of my swollen left foot, a legacy of spending about an hour standing in the one spot.

There were some supportive replies - and one arsehole called me a freak and suggested I join a circus, which proves my point that women are not necessarily safe anywhere and can be subjected to vile abuse from a stranger even while resting on the sofa after attending a vigil for a murdered woman.

But that is just my experience - I am not going to use my feeling of greater safety at home than on the streets to diminish another woman for whom domestic violence means she feels safer when she is not home. All the violence needs to be dealt with and a massive part of that is achieving wholesale cultural change. Women will continue to "take care", to do all the things we're told to do to stay safe on the streets, but until we are not viewed by too many men as expendable, as useless, as easy targets, as semen receptacles, as territory to which they have an inalienable right, nothing much will change.

Over in Australia, there were brilliant scenes of angry women marching in multiple locations calling for justice for women after multiple sexual assault allegations were levelled at men in positions of power, including the federal government. Prime Minister Scott Morrison's disgusting response to this was to tell parliament: "Not far from here, such marches, even now are being met with bullets, but not here in this country, Mr Speaker."

Great. So Australian women should be grateful they weren't shot for speaking out. He is not pledging to take any action, he is merely complaining that his words were twisted. He gaslit a nation by trying to make himself the victim. That is how low the bar has been set by a prime minister - and it shows just how far we have to go. 

Meanwhile, here in the UK, the systemic sexism continues in myriad ways. Just this week, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that care workers are not entitled to minimum wage for sleep-in shifts - this is a terrible, reductive decision that will disproportionately affect women. In the UK, 85% of direct care and support-providing jobs in adult social care are done by women. Depressingly, it was Lady Justice Arden whose written ruling stated that "sleep-in workers ... are not doing time work for the purposes of the national minimum wage if they are not awake." Sleeping while on call in facilities where any number of emergencies can take place during the night is not the same as a relaxing night's sleep in one's own bed. It is work. And it is predominantly women's work.

And that is just one example. We are fighting battles on multiple fronts. There was some momentum for women's rage this week but it already feels like it is subsiding, that the right to protest will be limited on the grounds of noise and disruption, the very essence of how protests work. 

The issues that affect our lives and our bodies every single day will be swallowed up by the news cycle, by ridiculous patriotism pissing contest stories about flags, by divisive vaccine nationalism, by our own sheer exhaustion at it all. 

   

Photography by Heloisa Freitas/Pexels

There's never a right time for women to get angry

 

Last night, I attended the vigil for Sarah Everard. I am not going to apologise for this. Women are done with apologising, with trying to please others, with being quiet, with being told to take care. 

The Metropolitan Police could have worked constructively with the organisers of the official vigil to ensure it was Covid-safe. The ambiguous High Court decision by Mr Justice Holgate left the door open for the Met to work with the organisers, to use commonsense, to trust women. Instead, the organisers reluctantly cancelled. Sisters Uncut stepped in and called on women to meet at Clapham Common, not far from where Sarah Everard was last seen alive, to hold the vigil anyway. 

As soon as the Met made it difficult for the organisers to plan a Covid-safe event, the vigil was always going to be tinged by protest and anger. Let us not be naive. 

I am in a Facebook message group that was started a few days ago to plan our attendance at the vigil. When it was cancelled, some of us decided not to go for perfectly good and sensible reasons, and some of us decided that a socially distanced, mask-wearing walk n the fresh air of Clapham Common would be our Saturday exercise. It just so happened to coincide with a vigil. If any of us ended up getting fined for breaking lockdown rules, we would chip in. 

We kept an eye on the news and Twitter and when we discovered there was a strong police presence at Clapham Common and Clapham South tube stations, Clapham North became my tube station of choice, followed by a walk down the Clapham High Street, something I hadn't done for more than a year even though it's only a few miles from my house. 

I had a little bunch of daffodils from Sainsbury's hidden in my bag, rather than buying a more ostentatious bouquet to lay down in Sarah's honour, so it wasn't immediately obvious to any police officers that I was en route to the common. I didn't know those flowers would be trampled by police officers a few hours later. 

Before I even got to the common, I had to moderate my behaviour. It's always women who have to moderate their behaviour, to not make a fuss, to not cause any trouble.

Holy Trinity Church at Clapham Common was our meeting point so we could walk safely to the vigil together, masks on. It was weird to meet with friends I hadn't seen in ages and not instantly throw my arms around them as we did in Before Times. At the bandstand, we stood near the back - two of the group had bicycles so it would have been a bit rude to barge through to the front - with our masks on, without touching each other or anyone around us. 

The police presence when arrived was not heavy, it did not feel like we'd be kettled at any minute, most of the officers, all wearing masks, were women. We did not feel scared. 

Then the first dickhead incident happened. Some maskless bloke with strong Piers Corbyn energy got up on the bandstand and started to speak, to yell at us, a group that was almost 100% women, to tell us why we were here, as if we didn't know what we were doing. It was peak mansplaining. It was disgusting. He started making irresponsible statements that could prejudice the trial of the police officer charged with Sarah's murder if they were widely broadcast or shared on social media. 

We got angry, we started shouting, "NOT YOUR PLACE!" over and over again until he was led away by police. People started to applaud the police - some of us felt uncomfortable with applauding the Met after the events of the previous days but at least it gave a sense that maybe, just maybe the police would be on our side this time. No such luck.

People were adding to the carpet of flowers on the bandstand steps, we held a silence for Sarah Everard as a police chopper hovered overhead, a member of Sisters Uncut spoke powerfully from behind her mask. It was a simple speech. Without the aid of a megaphone, she would call out a sentence and then we'd repeat it to ensure everyone heard. 

There was no talk of politics, no calls for high profile resignations, she said we were there in "grief and anger", she demanded that women be safe no matter who they are or where they are. It was powerful and respectful of Sarah. We called her name in unison. Our masks soaked up our heartbroken, furious tears. 

And for a lot of us, that was it. That was the vigil. It was precisely 6:31pm when I texted my husband to tell him I was heading home. Because that's what women always do. We take care, we do the right thing, we let people know where we're going and when we get there. And still men attack us.

As we walked away, we sensed that things were about to turn. The benevolent, woman-dominated police presence was absorbed by a lot of men in hi-vis vests over their uniforms. I heard cries of "SHAME ON YOU!" as I walked toward Clapham Common tube station with a friend. By the time I got home, about 40 minutes later, the scenes were horrific. I did not recognise the vigil I had just left - it was always going to be tinged with anger but it was peaceful. My friends and I started to piece together what happened after we left.

To my utter horror, the Piers Corbyn tribute act earlier in the evening was just the warm-up. Piers Corbyn himself turned up along with mostly men - again the men making a women's event all about them - with placards calling to free Julian Assange. Julian Assange. A man who hid for years in an embassy to avoid answering rape charges. How dare anyone bring that man's presence to a vigil for a murdered woman. I felt sick.

There was an excellent Twitter thread from Helen Lewis who stayed on for longer than I did. She said there were indeed assorted fringe groups trying to take the focus off Sarah Everard and off our collective grief for murdered women, but heavy-handed police attempts to disperse the crowd set off an inevitable, horrible chain of events. These were the scenes that will forever be remembered from yesterday - flowers trampled by police officers, people who were still on the bandstand were effectively kettled. The photo of 28-year-old Patsy Stevenson pinned to the ground by police officers, her terrified eyes above her black mask, will be the image that lives on for years. 

Helen got it right when she said that if the police presence hadn't become so heavy-handed, people would have drifted off of their own accord into the cold night. 

Inevitably, I have been told on Twitter that I should have been fined for attending the vigil. Inevitably, everyone who attended has been accused of being paid protesters. Inevitably, the mindless "crisis actor" accusations have been bandied about. Inevitably, the fact that there is no evidence that outdoor events where everyone wears masks cause spikes in coronavirus cases has been roundly ignored.

Inevitably, we have been told that last night was "not the time" to do this.

But we've been here before. We have held vigils for other murdered women. We have dutifully tweeted and changed our Facebook profiles in impotent rage. And we have been the ones to modify our behaviour. 

We are the ones who carry keys as a potential weapon when we walk alone at night, we choose our routes carefully, we stick to main roads and well-lit streets, we pledge to text our friends when we get home safely, we tuck ponytails into collars to make it harder for us to be grabbed from behind, we quicken our pace or cross the road when we hear footsteps behind us, we think hard about where we sit on buses and trains at night, we think twice about short hemlines and low necklines, we catch taxis we can ill-afford even if we're not necessarily safer with a cab driver, we make pretend phonecalls and invent husbands and boyfriends because apparently some men will only respect our boundaries if they think they might piss off another man, we are the ones who constantly change and think about our behaviour. Not men.

We are the ones whose bodies are likened to stolen, unlocked cars by men who still think we're asking for it. We are the ones who are told by men that it is rare to be attacked on the streets, as if that is going to reassure any of us. We are the ones who are told men are assaulted and raped too even though it's almost always by other men. We are the ones who are told men are assaulted and raped too even though making it harder for women to speak out makes it harder for male victims to speak out too.

But still we're told now is not the time to get angry. Because of Covid. Because it's too soon. Because we're wasting our time. Because, because, because... 

Because if we don't do it now, when do we do it? When another woman is murdered? When the government makes it near-impossible to protest? 

If not now, when?

The tiresomeness of conspiracy theories

 

I blocked someone on Facebook this week. It's not something I do often or lightly but let's-call-her-Louhi stunk up my page with her ongoing and increasingly desperate attempts to convince the world that Covid-19 is a plot to control us all. 

She started by suggesting I Google "Covid vaccine vending machines" - I duly did and told her that all it brought up was news stories about vending machines for coronavirus tests. Louhi told me I'd missed the point and said this was the first step toward vaccine vending machines. She conveniently ignoring the myriad ethical, legal, logistical and hygiene issues that would need to be overcome for this dystopia to be a reality. 

Her proof that vaccine vending machines were coming comprised a quote from CS Lewis and a dream she had about a mall full of chemo chairs that were used for mass vaccination of a subservient public.

Louhi spouted ludicrous nonsense about how Captain Tom Moore merely died of old age, not pneumonia and Covid-19 - a conspiracy that would involve his family lying to the media, with the backing of the staff of Bedford Hospital. But I blocked because she shared an awful meme with the title "Anal Schwab" - it featured incoherent blather about how it's unfair that Covid deniers were called conspiracy theorists and it used an unflattering photograph of Klaus Schwab - this was linked to her idea that anal coronavirus testing is the government getting us to literally bend over for them. 

I pointed out to that Klaus Schwab's image is frequently used by vile anti-semitic conspiracy theorists but Louhi refused to acknowledge that - and she wasn't going to admit that her collection of dreams, moronic Googling, a CS Lewis quote, and a meme from a disgusting corner of the internet did not prove her points. If she seriously thinks the current UK government is capable of anything close to her wild conspiracy, it has escaped her attention that their sheer incompetence rules this out - their mendacity is out there for all to see. 

Louhi has gone from my Facebook world, I'm enjoying the peace and quiet, but it did get me thinking about the increasing prevalence of conspiracy theorists. They have been around long before the pandemic, but they're certainly emboldened by the current state of affairs. 

Coincidentally, on Friday night, I binge-watched all four episodes of Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Hotel Cecil on Netflix, a documentary that is a magnet for conspiracy theorists.  

True crime documentaries straddle the fine line between information and voyeurism - and Hotel Cecil certainly veered toward the latter. It is told in a way that keeps you guessing if you don't know anything about the tragic case of Elisa Lam. The worst people are the conspiracy theorists - a couple of YouTubers, a self-proclaimed web sleuth, and a journalist who really needs to find something else to do for a living. The documentary centres around the investigation into the disappearance of Elisa Lam, in particular the CCTV footage which shows her behaving very strangely in the hotel lift.

The evidence is drip-fed over the four episodes and the most irresponsible filmmaking involves letting the conspiracy theorists continually insist Elisa was murdered. The police investigators and the forensic pathologist - who has the sad task of determining how the 21-year-old died - are the good guys. They kept an open mind as to whether her death was murder, an accident, or suicide. When it was revealed she was bipolar and the toxicology report found she had been under-medicating, it became increasingly clear her death was an accident rather than a murder. 

Disturbingly, the conspiracy theorists were talking as if they wanted her death to have been a murder. They were so obsessed with coincidences and details that were irrelevant or, worse, were misinterpreted by these amateurs. None of them knew a damn thing about bipolar disorder or how it can affect sufferers, cause erratic behaviour, and distress themselves and others. If they had any knowledge at all here, they might have been more open-minded about how Elisa Lam died. 

Thankfully, in the case of Elisa Lam, this is not how the investigators or the forensic pathologist went about their duties. But the alleged journalist who was interviewed for Hotel Cecil should be embarrassed - I can imagine him getting frustrated if an interview subject didn't give him the answers he was expecting or hoping for, and being unable to cope if an interview subject threw him a curve-ball. And the guy who called himself a web sleuth should not be allowed near any criminal investigation.

And therein lies the problem with all conspiracy theorists. Their starting point is an end point. 

Conspiracy theorists are so convinced something must be true that they seek out any evidence, no matter how tenuous or ridiculous, to try and prove that specific theory rather than looking at the available evidence with clear eyes and mind. 

And if you dare challenge their fragile little world with facts, you'll be condemned as one of the sheeple who needs to wake up. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Photography by byronv2/Flickr

Peter Sutcliffe's mirror on misogyny

 

Peter Sutcliffe is dead and nobody should be upset that he is gone from this world. We will never know exactly how many women he killed or attacked. We will never know exactly how many lives he ruined. 

Thankfully, today's coverage is centred largely on the victims and the people left behind to pick up the pieces after women they loved were taken cruelly away from them. 

Naga Munchetty did an excellent interview on BBC Breakfast this morning with Richard McCann, the son of Wilma McCann, believed to be Sutcliffe's first victim. She was compassionate, she let Richard speak through his grief and complex feelings about his mother's death and the man who was responsible, she reassured him that he has nothing to be ashamed of. 

The appalling events between 1975 ad 1980 could have ended much sooner - Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times before he was finally brought to justice, and the Wearside Jack hoax tapes were a devastating distraction, wasting police time, allowing Sutcliffe to kill more women. Misogyny infested the West Yorkshire police force at the time, fuelling incompetence. This horrific account of a press conference is sickening:

Today's coverage of Sutcliffe's pathetic demise has not been perfect. The footage that did not need to be broadcast was that of a jovial interview with one of the killer's former colleagues. We saw the unedifying spectacle of a man laughing as he said they all knew Sutcliffe was the Yorkshire Ripper and that he even answered to this name. And still he laughed, reducing dead women to workplace banter.

It is vile misogyny, just as it is vile misogyny to diminish some of the victims as "just prostitutes" rather than individual women with their own stories, often of hard lives, of limited choices. It is vile misogyny to dismiss any of the victims as somehow asking for it, to create a hierarchy of dead women from sainted virgins to scorned sluts. 

But this is what happens when sex workers are among the dead, as if their lives matter less than those of other women. This narrative reared its ugly head for years in discourse surrounding the Yorkshire Ripper just as surely as it did a century earlier when Sutcliffe's grotesque namesake, Jack the Ripper, was terrorising women in London. 

Our dead bodies are not there for workplace banter, for our corpses to be picked over by hideous vultures seeking to push misogynistic narratives from our carrion, for making people feel better about their attitudes to women, for helping people convince themselves that the safety of some women is more important than that of others. 

Instead, let us take this moment to remember the names of the victims we know and to reflect that we may never know the names that would surely complete this tragic list:

Wilma McCann

Emily Jackson

Irene Richardson

Tina Atkinson

Jayne MacDonald

Jean Jordan

Yvonne Pearson

Helen Rytka

Vera Millward

Josephine Whitaker

Barbara Leach

Marguerite Walls

Jacqueline Hill

And these are the women who survived attacks by Sutcliffe, more women whose lives will be forever affected by his violent hatred of women:

Anna Rogulskyj

Olive Smelt

Tracy Browne

Marcella Claxton

Marilyn Moore

Upadhya Bandara

Maureen Lea

Theresa Sykes

Say their names. Say all their names.

Photography: Tasha Kamrowski/Pexels

The pandemic of "honour" killings

 

Let's start calling so-called "honour" killings by their real name. They are misogynistic murders. They are the murders of girls and women who have done nothing wrong. They are murders committed almost exclusively by men, although women can be complicit. They are murders with vile motivations such as a taking false offence, feeling an unwarranted sense of shame, a desire to control girls and women in everything they say, do and think, a heinous jealousy that is never flattering, a desire to maintain a sickening patriarchy where men and boys enjoy freedoms that they deny to the girls and women in their lives.

The disgusting reality of misogynistic murders was brought into sharp focus last week with Honour, the ITV drama based on the 2006 murder of 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod at the hands of her own father and uncle. Three of her cousins and two family friends were also convicted in relation to her killing. Her non-crime was to leave an abusive forced marriage and find happiness with a new boyfriend, who killed himself 10 years after Banaz was murdered. 

Banaz had gone to the police multiple times to share her very real fears that her life was in danger, even naming names of the people of whom she was rightly terrified, but she was not taken seriously until she went missing. Her body was found in a suitcase buried in a derelict garden in Birmingham, after she was killed in South London a few miles from where I'm now sitting. She is buried at the cemetery down the road. Her family tried to insult her one last time with an unmarked grave but a granite memorial stone now marks her final resting place, paid for by the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation (IKWRO), police officers and Nazir Afzal, the tenacious lead prosecutor in her case.

One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the ITV drama was the portrayal of Diana Nammi by brilliant, brave Saudi actress Ahd Hassan Kamel. Diana is a British-Kurdish activist who came to the UK as an asylum seeker, founding IKWRO in 2002. There is a scene where she expresses her sheer frustration that because she is a woman, she is not considered a leader in the community where Banaz and her Iraq-Kurdish family lived.

But Diana is a leader. It is so important that Britain has elevated her to this status because of her important work, which included helping bring Banaz's killers to justice. In 2014, she received a Barclays Woman of the Year award,s a Women on the Move award from UNHCR and named one of the BBC's 100 Women. In 2015, she received a Voices of Courage award from the Women's Refugee Commission in 2015 and an honorary degree from the University of Essex in 2016.  

This is important because Britain needs to be better than the misogynistic murderers of Banaz Mamod, to take a stand, to speak the truth that there is nothing honourable about honour killings. A vital part of this is for Britain to be a place where women, regardless of their ethnicity, are empowered to be community leaders, to be taken seriously when they defend vulnerable girls and women and denounce misogynistic, patriarchal cultures - all of them everywhere - in no uncertain terms.

Appalling stories such as that of Banaz Mahmod are low-hanging fruit for racists. There will always be the people whose first reaction is to blame immigration, to claim that if "these people" weren't allowed in the UK, then such murders wouldn't happen here. 

This is a dreadful notion for two reasons. 

Firstly, while Banaz Mahmod would not have been killed on British soil if her family didn't come to the UK, it is entirely possible that she could have been killed in similar circumstances in Iraq - the problem of so-called honour killings would simply happen elsewhere and that is equally as unacceptable as when it happens here. The banning of immigration and, in particular, the stopping of all asylum seekers being allowed to seek safety in the UK, simply moves the problem to other countries. If Britain is serious about the moral high ground and about stopping the bloodshed, it is essential that we condemn all so-called honour killings, no matter where they happen.

And secondly, it is wrong to claim that such murders are only the domain of immigrants, that the only hands that are gripped around innocent necks or holding knives or tightening ligatures or pointing guns in the name of false offence or bringing supposed shame to families and, in particular, to men belong solely to foreigners.

In the UK, the number of women killed by current or former partner is on the increase. Data from the Office for National Statistics showed that 80 women were killed by a current or former partner between April 2018 and March 2019, a 27% increase on the previous year.

If you think these men's motivations are any different to those of the pathetic men who were offended by Banaz Mahmod making her own life choices, you're mistaken. When women are murdered by men close to them, it doesn't matter what colour anyone's skin is or whether anyone's family has been in the UK for a few years or since Roman times. The killers are still men who hate women. They are still offended because a woman has dared to leave or spurned advances or was perceived to have strayed or flirted or fell short of some impossible standard. These men, just as surely as Banaz Mahmod's killers did, feel a misguided and bogus shame, feel like they have lost control of women they considered their property, feel their pitiful male pride has been wounded by women who would not comply. 

If we are serious about ending this misogynistic turf war that is fought on women's bodies, more needs to be done. We should absolutely engage with all communities in Britain, to uphold courageous people such as Diana Nammi who shine a light on this hatred and violence at great personal cost. But we also need to acknowledge that murderous misogyny is not exclusive to any one community or ethnic group. It is a dark stain on every town and city and as long as women are killed by people close to them every single week, it shames us all.   

Photography by Joanne Adela Low/Pexels 

Young women should never stop travelling

Phuket, 1998. I was 22. I had about $1,000 in credit with a Sydney travel agency after I cancelled a trip to spend Christmas 1997 in Japan. Naturally, there was a bloke involved in that particular debacle. When I was back at work in the new year, feeling more feisty than heartbroken, my boss told me I had "way too much annual leave owing" and asked if I could take a week's leave soon. How dare I save it all up to take a long trip later that year, eh? 

"Fine!" I said with all the breeziness I could muster. "I'll be on the beach in Thailand next week."

My boss made a noise like Henry Crun and said: "Oh, I didn't mean quite so soon...".

I knew my rights so I went to the travel agent after work and used the credit to pay for a week in Phuket, one of those rite-of-passage places for young Australians. I was on a plane within days of the ridiculous conversation with my boss.

None of my friends could get the time off work at such short notice or they were short on funds, so I buggered off for a week by myself. I rode an elephant, saw some alarming monkey-based entertainment, posed for a photograph with a snake coiled around my legs and shoulders, bought myself awful pink sapphire earrings that made my earlobes look infected, drank beer with some friendly Irish lads, got into an argument over a sunlounger on the beach after being told I'd paid the wrong person, the usual holiday fun...

In the middle of the week, I met two young Swedish men over breakfast at the hotel. They were hiring motorbikes to go to Karong Beach and asked me if I'd like to join them. Sami looked like a bulkier version of Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper but seemed very sweet and Ari was blonde and cartoonishly muscle-bound like Johnny Bravo and seemed rather sure of himself. Within half an hour, we were careening around a winding road on motorbikes. No helmets because it was the age of invincibility that everyone should experience in their 20s. I was on the back of Ari's bike, clinging for dear life. I took a peek over his shoulder and realised the speedometer was broken, stuck on zero.

"How fast are we going?" I yelled over the wind rushing into my face.

"Who cares?" he replied. And I didn't particularly care.

The three of us spent the day on the beach, which was uneventful until a sea creature stung me and my pallid chest and bikini-exposed abdomen briefly erupted in red spots. The lifeguard had some potion which calmed the rash down and then we were back on the bikes in search of a bar.

When one of the bikes broke down, Sami and Ari abandoned both bikes by the roadside and we walked to a bar. A terrible Bon Jovi cover band played, the beer was watery and, after a few hours, I was bored so I made my excuses and got a tuk-tuk back to the hotel. I paid the driver and as I handed him the cash, he grabbed my face in his hands and aggressively kissed me. I snatched the money back and ran into the hotel. The concierge, a pretty young man who sported eyeliner and a long coke nail, asked me how my night was and I told him it was OK. 

As I cleaned my teeth vigorously, the phone in my room rang. It was the concierge, not for the first time that week, calling my room to ask me if I wanted to join him "on my motorbike for discotheque". Every time he called, I'd politely refuse. 

I'd had enough of that day so I went to bed, naked under lovely, crisp hotel sheets, and promptly fell asleep. A few hours later, I was woken up by a solid, naked man spooning me and licking my ear, his erection making inquiries around my buttocks.  

It was Ari. I sat bolt upright, gathered the sheets around me like a toga and demanded to know what he was doing.

"I thought you wanted this," he said.

"No, when did I ever give you that idea?" I asked.

"Oh, come on..."

"If you don't get out of my room right now, I will scream so fucking loudly, the whole hotel will hear."

And with that, he gathered up his clothes from the floor and left. I will never know if he had assistance in accessing my room or whether I simply forgot to lock the door or didn't lock it properly.

It could have been so much more horrific. The result of the whole sorry situation was four days of awkward breakfasts at the hotel before I flew back to Sydney. I weighed about seven stone back then. It would not have taken much for Ari to pin me down and rape me or worse. 

When the horrific news about the murder in New Zealand of Grace Millane broke, it was chilling. Like me, on holiday alone in Thailand, she was just 22. Some news stories feel personal. It could have been me in the news in 1998 if Ari decided to proceed. And you can guarantee that there would be assorted trolls blaming me for the crimes, just as a disgusting cabal have in response to Grace Millane's murder. 

Indeed, there are probably people reading my account of the events in Phuket from 20 years ago and tutting at me for having the temerity to go to Thailand by myself or to agree to ride on motorbikes with men I'd just met in the hotel or to wear a bikini or to have a few watered-down beers or to jump in a tuk-tuk alone. I can just see these judgemental, joyless prigs going over my story like a hate-filled editor, drawing lines through my words with a blue pencil of sexist fury.

Nothing much has changed since 1998, except for the addition of Tinder and social media as a way of meeting people, which has given those vile cretins who blame anyone but murderers or rapists for murders and rapes a new way to tell women that they were asking for it. 

Jacinta Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand was right. Grace should have been safe in New Zealand. Her statement was one of immense decency and it should ring out whenever a woman is not safe on her travels. As Grace Millane's devastating story ebbs and flows in and out of the news cycle with the arrest and forthcoming trial of the accused, the sickening news broke that two women had their throats cut in Morocco. A suspect has been arrested for the murders of Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, a 24-year-old from Denmark, and Maren Ueland, a 28-year-old from Norway, and police are investigating more people.

Grace, Louisa and Maren should never be forgotten. But their legacy should not be an end to women travelling the world.

Since my Thailand trip, I've had assorted adventures, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied, all over the world - Turkey, Greece, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa, Laos, Ghana and Nepal are just a few places that spring to mind when I think of travel anecdotes best told over a beer. 

Over the decades, I've found myself in situations that might scare some people into burning their passports but what would be the point of that? In a perfect world, Grace, Louisa and Maren would have come home from their travels full of stories, they might have gone on to see more of the world, they would have lived long, fulfilled, happy lives.

But life isn't always that good to people. And the sad, depressing reality is that staying at home won't guarantee any woman's safety. Across the world, girls and women are killed in their own homes or their own towns and it is often by someone known to them, someone they thought they could trust.

Travelling is not the problem. Seeing the world is not the problem. Having adventures in faraway places is not the problem. Travelling alone is not the problem. Wearing a bikini is not the problem. Having a few drinks is not the problem. Hanging out with people you meet along the way is not the problem. Being independent is not the problem. 

"Doing the right things", whatever the hell that means, to prevent your untimely demise while travelling is no guarantee of safety either. I will happily offer advice about staying as safe as you can, based on my experiences travelling the world, especially when someone is apprehensive about going somewhere for the first time. But I would never tell anyone, male or female, not to travel. 

The rewards of travelling far outweigh the risks. Not everyone will come home safely. But when the act of coming home is a risk for so many, you may as well take your chances with a suitcase and a passport because being scared of the world is no way to honour the memories of Grace, Louisa and Maren.

Photo by Dương Nhân from Pexels

Feminism 2018: The state of things so far

We are only 21 days into 2018 but already I have rolled my feminist eyes so hard, I am in danger of being able to see out of my ear holes.

First, let's talk about where the hell the #MeToo movement is headed. It has been a great thing in many respects, getting women to speak out about their very real experiences of sexual assault and harassment, even if we have to constantly let men know that:
1. We are aware that men can be victims too and we are disgusted by attacks on men.
2. Encouraging women to speak out makes it easier for men to speak out. It does not negate horrible experiences men have had or make them any less awful. When women are cut down for speaking out, is it any wonder that men are often reluctant to share their own experiences?
3. The existence of this movement and the ensuing conversations, or the existence of women's shelters or services, are not affronts to men. They are entirely necessary.
4. Men can and should start their own movement, start their own conversations, open their own shelters and start their own services to help male victims of sexual assault, harassment and domestic violence.

Now we have allegations about Aziz Ansari via a woman identified only as "Grace" on the Babe website. Predictably, critics of #MeToo have seized upon this as a sure sign that the #MeToo movement is over, it has jumped the shark, it is now only concerned with the supposedly petty trifles of bad dates. Never mind that when a date turns bad, it can result in rape - that would require the naysayers to quit missing the point.

But here's the thing - our ladybrains are not so tiny that we are incapable of having more than one important conversation.

Just as we can talk about sexual assault and sexual harassment, as exemplified by the horrible Harvey Weinstein stories, we can talk about what happens on dates, when dates go bad, why they go bad, the worst-case scenarios on dates, how men and women behave on dates, understanding consent, reading non-verbal cues, raising women to be comfortable with saying no, raising men to accept no for an answer, the radical notion that both men and women can be horny, and that sex is not merely something that men get and women give.

And let's be honest here - the #MeToo movement really needs to trickle down a hell of a lot more than it is. Don't get me wrong - if I was appearing on the red carpet at the Golden Globes the other week, I would absolutely buy yet another black dress for the occasion - but the impact it is having on Hollywood and in politics needs to be happen for so many more women in so many industries. The #MeToo movement cannot just be the domain of the wealthy, privileged and famous. It needs to change the lives of the women who wait tables, pull pints in pubs, work on factory production lines, ring up groceries in supermarkets and so on and so forth.

Too easily, the working class women are forgotten in popular movements. Hell, many of them are too busy working for a living to be activists, let alone share their experiences in a few pithy tweets. Activism is frequently a luxury denied to those who could really benefit from wholesale social, legal and political change.

See also, the bungled attempt by Richard Branson to ban the Daily Mail from Virgin Trains. I completely agree that the Daily Mail teems with all manner of sexist and bigoted bullshit but the outcry from all quarters was faintly ridiculous. Anyone who gleefully thought this would be the end of people reading the Daily Mail on Virgin Trains didn't seem to grasp that the paper could still be bought at one of thousands of outlets across Britain and read on the train. And anyone who furiously accused Richard Branson of censorship and thought policing also, er, didn't seem to grasp that the paper could still be bought at one of thousands of outlets across Britain and read on the train.

It was never going to be a feminist victory and, on the same token, the critics from the right missed the point that Virgin is a private company and is therefore entitled to stock whatever the hell newspapers it likes. In any case, if anyone cares about Virgin's treatment of women - and indeed people in general - they might like to get outraged at the company suing NHS trusts, and their Hoovering up of NHS contracts, even though they are clearly not always the best candidate for the contract.

Indeed, the death of a woman has happened on Virgin Care's watch - the family of Madhumita Mandal probably don't give a damn what newspapers are available on the East Coast mainline. Mrs Mandal was triaged at Croydon University Hospital by a receptionist instead of a medical professional, a series of delays followed, an ovarian cyst ruptured, and she died of multiple organ failure four days later.

But these are the kind of stories Virgin would rather us forget. Hence the Daily Mail ban was a distracting stunt, albeit one that backfired badly.

That is where we are now - there are plenty of distractions to steer people's minds and anger away from things that really matter. #MeToo runs the very real risk of being a movement that mainly helps the privileged and those in the wealthy, developed world. Meanwhile, the girls and women of the under-reported countries and women in minority groups and poor women in developed countries, continue to suffer.

While actresses are lauded for wearing black dresses, women are getting excited about an ineffective Daily Mail ban, and people are arguing on the internet about whether bright pink pussy hats are racist or discriminatory against trans women, violent rapes are endemic in India, the rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl in Pakistan dropped out of our news cycles, a doctor in Kenya is using faux feminism to try and legalise female genital mutilation despite a 2011 ban, women living in poverty in the US are more likely to be denied access to abortion, there is a real crisis in mental healthcare for black women in the UK, in Australia, the first Aborginal woman MP in the state of Victoria is receiving death threats for having the temerity to have an opinion on observing Australia Day, and in South Africa, a lesbian couple has been raped and burnt to death.

In 2018, feminism is as relevant and necessary as it has ever been but it remains to be seen how much will actually be achieved.

Enough with the "random nutter" narrative

We reached peak desperation from the right-leaning media last week when the Daily Mail website ran the following headline in relation to Thomas Mair, the man convicted and sentenced to a whole life term for the senseless murder of Labour Party MP Jo Cox: "Did Neo-Nazi murder Jo over fear he'd lose council house he grew up in? Terrorist thought property could end up being occupied by an immigrant family - and the MP wouldn't help him."

Firstly, fear of losing your council house does not justify shooting and stabbing a woman in the street in broad daylight. Secondly, the headline is nothing but vile speculation. Thirdly, it is stunning that we are meant to feel sorry for a man who is a textbook terrorist. He embodies the definition of a terrorist as someone who uses violence in pursuit of political aims.

We didn't find out until his trial that he repeatedly yelled: "Britain First!" and "This is for Britain! Britain will always come first!" as he murdered Jo Cox. It is disingenuous at best to think he was merely expressing a desire to put British interests first. As he killed a 41-year-old mother of two in cold blood.

Britain First is an extreme right political party that has been very successful on social media, but not at the ballot box, because of people unwittingly sharing their Facebook posts about issues most people largely agree on, such as opposing animal cruelty or helping homeless veterans, without realising they are a racist organisation. And there are enough people out there who agree with their bullshit and give it traction online.

The fact that he appears to have acted alone, that he was a lonely man, has softened the hard right narrative about Mair. But terrorism is not defined by the number of people involved in the act. It is about the motivations and Mair's motivations were political.

Because he did not kill Jo Cox while shouting "Allahu Akhbar!", because he is a socially awkward white man, he is more easily dismissed as a lone wolf, a random nutter.

The "random nutter" narrative is appalling. It is deeply insulting to all the people in Britain who struggle daily with mental health issues and manage to get through each day without committing murder. It minimises the seriousness of Mair's crime, it is a sly and repulsive distraction from his true motivations.

Just because he was a man of few friends, it does not mean his actions happened in a vacuum.

When Mair's house was searched, police discovered books on Nazi Germany, Nazi memorabilia, newspaper cuttings about Jo Cox. In the days and weeks before he committed his sickening act of terror, he searched online for information on whether a .22 bullet could kill someone if they were shot in the head, the human liver and vertabrae, political prisoners, serial killers, Nazi Germany, murders committed by the Ku Klux Klan, Jo Cox's Twitter page, coffins, paupers' funerals, lying in state, the anti-semitic and white nationalist Occidental Observer, former Conservative MP William Hague, and Ian Gow, who was the last MP to be murdered.

Mair is part of the extreme right and his views came about in the midst of anti-immigrant sentiments screaming from newspaper front pages. Sure, he took this to extremes with a house of Nazi paraphenalia but he is a product of a culture where it is perfectly OK to demonise all immigrants without question, to quote poorly extrapolated statistics about issues such as "health tourism" and refugees.

Welcome to the post-fact world! And the post-fact mentality, so beloved of ridiculous, hate-filled caricatures such as Milo Yiannopolous, has led to a post-responsibility mentality. The likes of the Daily Mail would sooner concoct a load of tripe about a family of imaginary immigrants threatening to move into poor little Thomas Mair's council house than take any responsibility for the messages they spew out that contribute to racism in this country and reduce constructive debate to a load of ill-informed noise.

But if we are quick to dismiss Mair as a random nutter, as someone whose obsession with Nazism is reduced to a cute eccentricity, we do ourselves no favours as a society. Mair, and people like Mair, are dangerous, hate-fuelled people.

I know this because I am related to one such person. My uncle, Stephen Lewis, died of cancer in Australia last year. It was a tragic death for its pitiful loneliness even if I do not miss his presence in my life. But while he was alive, I would tell people that if he went on a rampage with one of his guns, I would not be at all surprised.

Like Mair, Stephen had a house full of books on Nazism. They were stored in an orderly manner on his bookcase, with labels about their specific topics written on masking tape and stuck to the shelves. He dressed in army camouflage. He lived alone for most of his adult life. When he did speak, it was often to say something misogynistic or racist or homophobic. He was, most likely, a closeted, self-loathing gay man who felt like he could not come out, despite one of his cousins coming out as a lesbian without negative repercussions in my family.

He used to write bizarre letters to my grandfather when he was living in a nursing home, suffering from dementia. My grandfather never opened his mail so it was usually my father or I who would take a look. His letters described me as a "mongrel bitch", he told my grandfather I was working as a prostitute in the family home and, chillingly, said I'd be a "good target for his new gun".

And, like Mair, he was a man who had no real friends. In a sad way, this gives me hope for both Australian and British societies. It is darkly reassuring that I live in and hail from a society where the man who dresses in army camouflage, hoards Nazi books and memorabilia, owns guns, and whose conversation veers constantly to the racist, the sexist and the homophobic is a lonely man.

Bu while Mair and Stephen live on the fringes of society, never quite fitting in, struggling to hold down a job or form meaningful relationships, it has become quite clear by some of the revolting reactions to the murder of Jo Cox that such men have their sympathisers, their apologists and their defenders.

When the hatred boils over into acts of deadly violence against innocent people and people excuse this hatred and violence, we have a real problem. To pretend it's not political is to solve nothing.









Photography by Garry Knight/Flickr

Running away from Omar Mateen's homophobia

"It's like every time you read something about this asshole, he becomes a bigger asshole."

My friend Dana summed up Orlando murderer Omar Mateen perfectly. He is an onion of assholery. Layer upon layer of assholery interspersed with self-loathing, loneliness and the bitterest of bile.

It is important to talk about his homophobia. When Owen Jones walked off the Sky News set on Monday night it was because he felt Julia Hartley-Brewer and Mark Longhurst were deflecting the discussion away from the homophobic element to the massacre. Jones was visibly distressed throughout the discussion, tensions rose and the tipping point came when Longhurst, the presenter, said the crime was against "human beings" who were "trying to enjoy themselves, whatever their sexuality".

Well, yeah, up to a point, but to downplay the homophobic element of what happened at the Pulse nightclub on the weekend is to run away from something that is clearly still a problem across multiple societies, even the ones that are supposedly progressive.

In its simplest terms, a man who had espoused homophobic views shot up a gay club and killed lots of LGBT people. It now transpires that he'd been in the club before with people recounting that he'd tried to pick up other men, had got drunk there, and behaved belligerently. Some are saying he was a self-loathing gay man. Others are saying he was simply scoping the place out and his attack was entirely premeditated. Either way, this is a man with a deeply disturbed view of homosexuality and a man who had the means to act on this view in the most despicable way possible.

When Mark Longhurst seemed keen to play down the homophobic aspect of Mateen's crime on Sky News, it was part of a bigger reluctance to look homophobia in the eye and admit that it is still a problem. It is brilliant that same-sex marriage is legal here in the UK, but David Cameron had to fight hard to pass it, the main opponents in Parliament were invariably religious, and it did not mean an end to homophobia here any more than Barack Obama's presidency ended all racism or a probably Hillary Clinton presidency will end all sexism in the US.

The investigation into the murder of 49 innocent people in Orlando has, so far, not revealed any direct links to IS. In his 911 call during his heinous rampage, he pledged allegiance to IS and was known to have made remarks in support of armed Islamic extremist movements. Anyone with an internet connection can learn about IS. Anyone who consumes most mainstream western media outlets can learn about IS that way. You don't need to communicate with them directly to spout off a load of hateful shit in support of those losers.

And naturally, the dickheads of Daesh claimed responsibility for the murders. Of course they did. Mateen is just the kind of pathetic useful idiot Daesh depends on for oxygen.

Young, messed-up, bitter men do the dirty work for IS both in the territories they occupy in the Middle East and in the west. And giving the toxic views of IS airplay in the media also helps their fucked-up cause.

And Mateen was certainly messed up. His first wife shared stories of his abuse towards her. Owen Jones deserves kudos for raising this unsavoury aspect of Mateen's character before he walked off the Sky News set. Domestic violence is yet another awful aspect to Mateen's dark character. His father, Seddique Mateen, gave a bizarre interview to CNN in which he disputed his first wife's claims about mental health issues, said the club needed better security, and said Mateen expressed disgust at the sight of two men kissing. Seddique Mateen also said he believed people should be in heterosexual relationships but that it was up to God to judge.

This is a view on homosexuality that echoes the words of many a conservative Christian - to love the sinner but hate the sin. I have seen similar views on homosexuality expressed by Muslims, as well as Christians, since the shooting. It is indeed a relief that religious people across the board are not interested in shooting LGBT people dead in cold blood but pushing the "hate the sin" rhetoric is something all conservative religious people need to think on, especially when there are still countries in the world where homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment, lashes and death.

The notion of hating the "sin" of homosexual activity is certainly alive and well. But anyone's sexual activity should fall squarely in the category of nobody's damn business but your own. As soon as  the "love the sinner, hate the sin" narrative gains traction, self-loathing and closeting is quick to follow.

Homophobic rhetoric frequently obsesses over sexual acts, reducing gay people to whatever they might do to get off. There just aren't the same derogatory terms for heterosexuals, based on what they do in bed, compared to the sex act-focused abuse frequently hurled at the LGBT community. Nobody has ever seen a heterosexual couple holding hands and called the man a "cervix-thumper" or the woman a "penis-clencher". But the insults aimed at LGBT people are frequently reductive and focus on inaccurate assumptions about what every LGBT person does whenever they have sex.

It would behoove religious conservatives, regardless of faith, to think about what they are doing to the next generation when they focus on hating the sin. Interestingly, in today's Evening Standard, Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) said that "the most important thing Islam preserves is the privacy of one's sexual activity" and that "it's up to you how you behave behind closed doors or in the privacy of your own bedroom". If only the countries where gay people are beheaded or shot or hung from cranes embraced this attitude towards sex. Iran, Saudi Arabia, I'm looking at you in particular.

But if gay-bashing still happens in our own countries, if marriage equality is still a fight in western countries, if homophobic insults are considered harmless banter, if dickheads publicly congratulate Mateen's actions, the LGBT community will not be truly equal and horrific crimes will continue all over the world. Some of these crimes may have an element of religious extremism, some may not. None are justifiable. It is important to fight the homophobia as well as the vile aspects of religious extremism. This is not an either/or. It is possible to be concerned about both problems and for a world without homophobic bigotry to start at home.

Refusing to acknowledge the role homophobia played in the Orlando shooting will do nothing to move any society forward in any positive way.



Photo: Flickr/Aivas14

An open letter to the Prime Minister of Thailand

Dear General Prayuth,

Thank you for your helpful travel advice to women planning a trip to your beautiful country. I have visited Thailand in the past and I would love to do so again so it is reassuring to know you are concerned about the safety of female travellers.

It is handy to know that I will not be safe in a bikini in Thailand unless I am, to quote your words, "not beautiful." This may explain an incident that happened to me last time I was in your country.

Let me elaborate. I was in Phuket for a week on my own when a man who was also staying at my hotel broke into my room in the middle of the night, crawled into my bed and pressed his erection against my back. I had been out with him and his friend at a bar that evening but I decided to go home early - the combination of cheap whisky and a bad Bon Jovi cover band wasn't really doing it for me, so I put myself in a tuk-tuk and returned to my hotel room - although not before the tuk-tuk driver grabbed my face and tried to kiss me as I paid, and not before the bellboy with the suspiciously long little fingernail asked me to join him on "motorbike to go to discotheque". 

The tuk-tuk driver was told where to go in no uncertain terms and the bellboy's offer was politely declined. I went to bed alone only to wake up a few hours later with the aforementioned penis rubbing against me. I said: "If you don't get out of my room right now, I will scream so fucking loud, the whole hotel will hear me." He left swiftly and went back to his own room. 

The worst consequence of all this was much awkwardness over the hotel breakfast buffet for the rest of the week. I did not end up being raped or murdered and I appreciate that the situation could have been far more terrible. But I still wasn't safe in your country. I realise that I am not 100% safe from violence in any country but at least you have offered me an explanation as to why this might have happened to me in Thailand.

Clearly, I am beautiful. 

And I wore a bikini by the pool and on the beach in Phuket. 

This powerful combination of my beauty and my bikini - even though it was one of those more modest ones with the big pants - made me a clear target for my fellow hotel guest and the halitosis-ridden tuk-tuk driver.

In order for me to ascertain whether I'd be safe in your country today, General Prayuth, I have included a recent photo of myself in a bikini. My holiday in Thailand was 16 years and a few kilograms ago so it could be that these days I fall short of your standards of assault-causing beauty.

Can I come to your country and wear a bikini with impunity at the ripe old age of 38 or will I still risk being attacked? Am I still looking OK for someone pushing 40? Your opinion on this matter is very important to me. 

Perhaps you can start posting notices at beaches and by hotel pools to specify the maximum standard of beauty a woman can possess before she must put on a neck-to-knee swimsuit and shield her gorgeous face with a large parasol. On what criteria will you create these standards? After all, ideals of beauty vary between cultures, vary over time, vary according to individual opinion, and are not universal. You may have to create a whole new government department to work on this one or a new branch of the police department at the very least. 

Alternatively, General Prayuth, you could give the victim-blaming horseshit a rest and acknowledge that acts of sexual violence can happen to any woman, regardless of whose standard of beauty she does or does not meet. You could show some respect to Hannah Witheridge, who died along with David Miller this week (who has not been accused of being handsome while wearing swimming trunks), and do whatever you can to ensure whoever is responsible is caught. For the person or people who attacked Ms Witheridge and Mr Miller are the ones to blame for these terrible crimes, not bikinis or pulchritude. 

Yours sincerely,

Georgia Lewis

Good grief and pitchfork-wavers...

The reaction to the horrific death of Mikaeel Kular has been as predictable as it has been idiotic. As soon as his mother, Rosdeep Kular, was detained by police, before she was charged with murder, the online world erupted with pitchfork-waving calls for her execution. Twitter was, as ever, mindlessly playing judge and jury, with armchair detectives figuring it all out and demanding a return to capital punishment.

Obvious barbarism aside, capital punishment presents the risk of innocent people being executed, it is not effective as a deterrent and, on a brutally cold and practical level, if you believe in due process, it fails dismally as a cost-effective means of administering justice.

But when you are a kneejerking keyboard warrior, pesky little things like due process struggle to enter your mind. There is nothing weird or wrong about reacting with horror or disgust at the thought of a mother killing her own child. The very notion goes against our ideals of maternal love and humanity.

We expect mothers to love their children unconditionally and when a mother falls short of this ideal, everyone's a critic. Hell, a mother doesn't have to kill her child to be on the receiving end of an angry mob, whether it's Kate Winslet's parenting skills being publicly slagged off by Fathers4Justice or an obviously pregnant woman trying to enjoy a solitary glass of wine without some busybody turning up.

And here's the thing. We don't actually know yet if Rosdeep Kular killed her three-year-old son. The concepts of the presumption of innocence and the right to a defence are fundamental to the British justice system. The case has not yet been heard in a court of law but this does not stop people from piecing together their own version of events based on such snippets as Mikaeel's prolonged absence from nursery, the number of children Rosdeep Kular has, the number of men who fathered her children, and a particularly moronic collection of news reports about her "party lifestyle" based on photos pulled from her Facebook profile. None of these snippets, either individually or collectively, prove guilt.

You might have already condemned Rosdeep Kular but before you start tweeting about the joys of nooses or firing squads, it would behoove you to remember that anyone can be falsely accused of a crime. It could happen to you one day. It happened to a friend of mine. Unless you have lived a saintly existence, there are probably aspects of your life that could end up being unfairly and publicly scrutinised if you find yourself in the news because of a murder charge. I trust you would like a fair trial.

And speaking of fairness, there is not much that is fair about dragging kids out to ghoulish shrines of teddy bears and flowers in the wake of the appalling murder of a child. What are parents hoping to achieve by dumping stuff in a pile in honour of a child taken too soon? Would it not be better to honour the child's memory by donating the teddy bear to a kids' hospital rather than letting it get damp and rotten in the rain?

It is a weird ritual that seems to have grown in popularity since the death of Princess Diana. Are there actually any children who ask their parents if they can go visit such a shrine? And if not, how are parents explaining this morbid family outing to their kids? There is nothing wrong with kids knowing about death but dragging them out to a public shrine, whether they want to or not, seems unnecessary, mawkish and possibly a bit cruel if a child is particularly sensitive.

Kids find out about death sooner or later and, because kids are kids, they are curious and they will probably ask questions. Whether it is the passing of a person or a pet, the death talk is an inevitable part of growing up. I remember one of my first proper conversations about death taking place when I was about six and a much-loved teacher died young of breast cancer. I cried, I was upset, it didn't seem right that someone could die before they were old, but Mum talked to me about it and I learned from that conversation. Mikaeel's classmates are three years old. Three. How many of these children are properly toilet-trained, let alone able to fully register the enormous horror of what has happened? Why should they? They are three years old, for goodness sake.

But as long as "hang the bitch!" is the default mode of the masses in such cases and as long as parents continue to drag their kids along to these ridiculously grotesque public grief orgies, we will continue to lose sight of many of the principles of justice that we should hold dear.





Photography by noturordinaryconsort

Free speech, extremism and kneejerk reactions

There is nothing wrong with questioning British foreign policy in relation to Afghanistan. Expressing the sentiment that the current government does not care about us is not an outrageous point of view either. Anyone in Britain who holds either of these opinions should be free to express them peacefully.

Of course, if anyone expresses such views and brutally murders someone in broad daylight while doing so, they should be arrested, tried and, if found guilty, punished accordingly.

As Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale lie in hospital and await being declared medically fit to face questioning in relation to the death last week of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich, plenty of people are exercising their right to free speech to speculate, comment and generally attempt to put the world to rights. In the midst of this noise, there have been calls to ban religious extremists from being interviewed on TV. Yes, because such measures were so effective in stopping the IRA during the 1980s...

And who are we defining as religious extremists anyway? Is this definition only limited to Muslims in Theresa May's utopia? What about conservative Roman Catholics who believe all abortion is murder? Are they extremists too? Or Westboro Baptist Church, whose members routinely declare that "God hates fags"? Should their views be banned from broadcast?

Kirsty Wark's panel discussion on Newsnight last week, in which she grilled Anjem Choudary on whether he condemned the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby has been roundly condemned for giving him a platform to air his views. But all Choudary did was talk in circles and show a politician-like talent for not giving a straight answer to any question. Just as every time EDL members open their mouths, they remove any doubt that they are simplistic, hateful racists with no real answers to any problems facing modern Britain, Choudary similarly condemned himself with his own absurd words.

Choudary looked ridiculous and, in contrast, the comments from Julie Siddiqi, executive director of the Islamic Society of Britain, and Shams Ad-Duha Muhammad, director of Ebrahim College, were measured and intelligent. Muhammad was not afraid to say that it is perfectly reasonable to oppose British foreign policy and condemn the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby.

And then my Twitter feed filled with comments from America questioning why we're not all armed here. These people are free to criticise from afar just as I am free to respond to their claims and assertions. There were the usual armchair heroes who declared they would have shot him dead or wished the woman who bravely took the time to reason with the suspects shot them instead. It's too easy to ignore the simple fact that because nobody was packing a semi-automatic or automatic weapon, we did not end up with a mass shooting in Woolwich last week.

Given the horrific events took place right near a school, this is one of the few good things to come out of such an awful tragedy. The only shots fired came from armed police who incapacitated both suspects rather than killing them outright. As a result, the potential to glean further information about their motives and activities has not died with them. More arrests have been made in relation to Drummer Rigby's murder, and a fair trial can take place, which is a better outcome than summary executions in the streets of London.




Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com