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?

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

When the news became a great big trigger warning...

The news cycle since last Thursday has been more unedifying than usual. Perhaps it is naive to expect that people would largely agree that the correct way to deal with a peaceful protester at an elite dinner is not to push her into a pillar and frogmarch her out, grabbing the back of her neck. And perhaps it is naive to expect that if a couple is having an argument so loud it can be heard in the street as well as in neighbouring flats, a reasonable response would be to knock on the door to see if everyone is OK and, if there is no response, call the police.

Yet here we are, arguing all over the internet about all this. I can only imagine how horrific it must be for so many women who have been victims of physical violence or domestic abuse, which can be physical, emotional, verbal or psychological - or an awful combination of these types.

On Thursday night, Janet Barker, a Greenpeace campaigner, along with a group of fellow activists, managed to barge into the Mansion House dinner just as Chancellor Phillip Hammond was about to give his speech. She was dressed in a red cocktail dress and heels, she carried a small bag, a phone and a bundle of leaflets, and she wore a Greenpeace sash. Her fellow protestors were similarly dressed - red cocktail dresses and sashes for the women and tuxedos for the men - and the obvious question is how did they get as far into the building as they did? It is astounding in these paranoid times, that they were not stopped at the entrance, bags X-rayed and leaflets inspected. I've been to events at the Houses of Parliament and Portcullis House and the security was on par with catching a plane.

But get into the dinner they did. And when Janet Barker walked towards the front of the room, Mark Field MP took it upon himself to stop her - which would have been fine if he'd handled it almost any other way other than the way he did. 

He could have been a true class act and defender of free speech by stopping her, asking her to tell the room why she was there, and then handed her leaflets around the room. Or he could have steered her away by the arm rather than push her into a pillar and grab her by the scruff of the neck, his face magenta with instant rage.

For so many women who have been attacked in that manner, whether in public or private, the endless repetition of the footage for a solid two days cannot have been easy. The pushing into a wall, the grabbing of the neck, instantly weakening defences - it's appallingly familiar for too many. It gave me a brief flashback to the time I was pulled off a footpath in Dubai and pushed into a bush in an attempted sexual assault. And I managed to get away, albeit with laddered tights and a scratch on my chest. I can only imagine how much worse this footage would be for women who have suffered worse violence at the hands of men, especially over a sustained period of time.

Field's defence was that he "acted on instinct" but if that was his instinct, he really does need to take some time away to reflect as to why his immediate reaction was rage and excessive manhandling of a woman who was clearly representing a group known for peaceful protest. Please note that "peaceful" in this context means "non-violent", not "quiet" or "non-disruptive". The Greenpeace protesters who woke me up one morning in Durban in 2011 to protest a gas industry event in my hotel made a racket but nobody was in any danger. They were allowed to sing, bang drums in the street and chant unimpeded. One activist managed to get into the hotel business centre and change the wallpaper on the computers to the Greenpeace logo. There was no harm done. I giggled to myself when I went to the business centre to write up my notes from the gas event on one of the altered PCs - it was excellent mischief.

And nobody was in any real danger last Thursday night. 

Nobody else at the dinner felt the need to react so disproportionately. Plenty of people who were at the Mansion House dinner were at the Conservative Party conference of 2017 when Simon Brodkin, a "prankster" (read: overgrown schoolboy who is about as funny as burning orphans), barged in and handed Theresa May a P45. On that occasion, no male MPs felt the need to be a Billy Big-Balls hero and push Brodkin into the wall or frogmarch him out by scruff of the neck, Theresa May was the very model of British good manners when she took the P45 form in the same way that many a Brit is too polite not to take a leaflet from someone at the tube station, and the security guard who escorted Brodkin out did so with a single, gentle hand to the back.

Following on from the usual suspects defending Mark Field, news broke of a noisy row at Carrie Symonds' flat, which would not be newsworthy except the argument was with her partner, one Boris Johnson, the man most likely to be the next prime minister. He has been staying there after his second marriage broke up. God forbid he rent a place in Uxbridge, his actual constituency, but that would require him to show some sort of commitment to his job as an MP.

But I digress. As with any argument between a couple, only the couple knows the full story, but we do know this argument was loud enough to be heard on the street and through walls, Ms Symonds was heard saying "get off me" and "get out of my flat", Mr Johnson was heard saying "get off my fucking laptop" and smashing sounds were heard. It's the kind of language and sounds that are familiar to many a victim of domestic violence.

The ethics of the neighbours giving a recording of the altercation to the Guardian newspaper is being furiously debated - along with the ethics of other newspapers making hay from it all while spouting fauxrage at the neighbours who recorded the argument and claiming Ms Symonds is "furious" based on what "friends" have apparently said, rather than anything she has directly told a journalist. There is definitely an intelligent debate to be had about media ethics here, especially in regard to whether this endangers Ms Symonds' safety. The Daily Mail, in particular, should remove from its website a diagram of the apartment building, including a floorplan of Ms Symonds' flat - that invasive crap goes way beyond the public interest defence.

However, it is stunning that anyone says the police should not have been called. The ire has been directed at "nosy neighbours" and their own politics have been thoroughly dissected in today's papers. But in this sort of situation, where an argument can be easily heard outside a flat, where it sounds as if there are people in distress and possibly in physical danger, calling police is absolutely the right thing to do.

It is pretty common for police to arrive only to be told everything is fine, but there are plenty of occasions where the arrival of the police has saved someone's life or is the turning point for an abused partner to leave a dangerous relationship. In the wake of the Johnson-Symonds row, people have spoken up about how they were grateful for the neighbours who called the police, or how they would have left an abusive relationship sooner if the police were called earlier or, tragically, how people were left badly injured or killed because nobody picked up the phone.

I have been the "nosy neighbour". In 2005, I called the police multiple times on the couple in the flat across the hall from me in Sydney. They were drug addicts who would have noisy and violent fights that would spill out of their place and carry on outside the door to my flat, usually in the middle of the night. This went on for months. On one occasion, after I knocked on their door telling them to be quiet because I was trying to sleep, the woman bashed on my door when I was back in bed, yelling that she would "kick my cunt in". Then there was the day when I burst into tears at my desk, crying frustrated tears of distress and exhaustion because I was too sleep-deprived to do my job properly.

That story did not end happily. The parents of the woman called me, desperate for information about their daughter, particularly as they were caring for her child from a previous relationship. One night, the woman knocked on my door to tell me she was pregnant and too scared to tell her boyfriend - I told her she would have to start taking better care of herself if she was serious about continuing the pregnancy and that she should end the relationship. I let her know that her parents were very worried and would take her in. She told me it was too hard to leave him and scuttled back to her flat. The good news is that ultimately she did leave the toxic relationship, but not long afterwards, her boyfriend committed suicide in the flat - by this time I'd moved to Dubai and a friend who lived upstairs told me the sad, sorry story.

I don't regret calling the police. The police officers' interventions could have defused life-endangering situations, even if they always sent the police away and said they were fine. Calling the police several times was still the right thing to do. And it is the right thing to do, regardless of whether the couple is a wretched pair of drug addicts or a privileged couple who are on the verge of being the most powerful twosome in the country.

The more we argue about the morality pushing women into walls and grabbing their necks or whether we should call the police if we overhear a nasty argument, the less safe women will be. Why the hell is anyone who professes to be decent tolerating this?

Photography by George Hodan

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

Incels and Daesh: lethal mysogynists

This month, so-called incels finally got the attention they have been craving so pathetically after Alek Minassian became their poster boy. Ten people were killed and 15 injured in an act of terrorism in Toronto - a van mowed people down as they went about their business and Alek Minassian was arrested for the atrocity.

It has since emerged that Minassian frequented white supremacist sites and praised racist murderer Elliot Rodger, who, aged 22, shot people at random and then killed himself. Minassian posted on Facebook: "The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!".

"Incel" is short for "involuntarily celibate" and in their hateful little subculture, "Chads" are the men who are getting laid and "Stacys" are the women who have sex with these men. 

Incels do not take responsibility for their romantic and sexual failures. They are not interested in personal change so they can become happier, better-adjusted men. They just want to blame others for their lives, and this extends to harming innocent people in vile acts of terrorism. 

These are the men who may seem harmless enough when they whine about constantly being "friend-zoned" but for these men, there is no value in friendships with women if they refuse to have sex with them. Instead of viewing healthy platonic friendships as part of a normal adult life, these men view women as gratification machines and if they drop in enough friendship tokens, sex will eventually come out.  

If incels actually cultivated healthy friendships with women, they might learn that sometimes we don't have sex as much as we'd like either. Women get dumped, women get friend-zoned, women's partners may lose interest in sex - being "involuntarily celibate" isn't just for men. Sorry, guys, you're not special. And when this happens to a woman, it can hurt, it can be embarrassing, it can crush self-esteem and it can lead to feelings of worthlessness. But it's not women who are reacting to romantic and sexual disappointment by plotting cowardly acts of violence because a man wasn't interested. 

When women aren't getting laid, we might get together and whine about men over a bottle of wine or a tub of ice cream, but you're not going to find us organising to kill innocent people. Sure, not every woman will handle being rejected in an entirely rational manner but the murderous bunny boiler of Fatal Attraction is a rare exception, rather than the rule, as crime statistics will bear out. 

Like Daesh, the incels have started a deadly movement and the parallels are chilling. Incels and Daesh prey on vulnerable, lonely young men, men who feel disenfranchised, men who are yearning to feel powerful and important, men for whom the ability to control women to the point of rape and murder is appealing, men who get very angry when they are referred to as losers. And now, with the Toronto attack, it is clear that incels and Daesh are both planning to kill more innocent people in the name of hateful and perverse ideologies. 

Incels and Daesh both hate women. They do not like to see women empowered or educated. They feel entitled to women's bodies, whether it is for their own selfish gratification (can anyone seriously imagine either an incel or a Daesh recruit giving a damn about female pleasure during sex?) or to breed a new generation of haters. 

There is no respect for women in incel chat rooms or Daesh training camps. They both hold juvenile, reductive views of women, they want to control us but they are also disgusted by us. They are the very worst examples of toxic masculinity. Their murderous foot soldiers might be dismissed as lone wolves but they are the useful idiots for the leaders of horrific ideologies. They are both terrorist organisations. They both need to be stopped.

Photography by cocoparisienne

On innocence

The laughter of children. The joy of going to your first gig. It should not end the way it did last night in Manchester.

A homeless man should not be pulling nails from the faces of innocents.

It is not the time to mock the music of the young. We were all young once. We have all been to gigs our parents probably decreed a racket. Today, instead celebrate the innocence of our early musical tastes, the joy it brought us, the joy it may even still give us.

Today, we suspend whining about the NHS, we give thanks for our emergency services, we praise the police officers for they are all there when we need them most. They are the collective safety net, a civilising force, last night they did all they could to try and save innocent lives.

We were all young once, we have had the privilege of becoming adults, a privilege denied to many last night in Manchester. Every time such murderous outrages happen, it chips away at the innocence of us all, young or old.

Confused children demand explanations and we don't want to stain the clean sheet that is their innocent world view. Yet still parents across the country have had to try and make some sort of sense of the utterly senseless and vile.

The election campaign was  suspended today but tomorrow it must - and should - go on. Life must go on - it's not a cliche but a necessity. Those who seek to destroy the innocent are the ones who seek to stop everything we hold dear - democracy, but also joy, fun, laughter, music, happiness, love in all its forms. 

And innocence.

May we celebrate innocence wherever we see it, in children, animals, nature, in those untouched by cynicism, whether it's the idealistic kid or the delightfully naive grandmother. 

We need to take respite from the hideousness that happens, to have our own moments of innocence. When I left for work this morning, I left my husband sleeping, a well-earned lie-in after a late shift on a newspaper. I did not wake him for he needs respite from awful things. We all deserve that moment of peace, of blissful unawareness of terrible things, even if that state is temporary. 

It is important to remind ourselves that evil is not new, It just takes different forms in different times and we need to find different solutions. We must not be complacent but we must not be hateful either. We must learn from history, we must all take responsibility for being better people, for looking the problems squarely in the eye, for talking to each other, for not living in echo chambers where our own world views go unchallenged.

The "we" to which I refer is not the royal "we", or just my mates or people who happen to agree with me. The "we" is everyone, regardless of who we are, where we've come from, what events and influences and people and places have shaped our world views and led us up to this point.

And at this point, if we are incapable of suspending political opportunism, if our default setting is ugly cynicism, we are dishonouring the innocent lives lost. If there is to be any light at the end of a murky and complicated tunnel, reminding ourselves to celebrate innocence in all its forms is probably a good place to start.



Photography by Edward Zulawski/Flickr

No ifs, no buts, no excuses, there is a global problem with rape

"No punishment for man who raped girl, 12" was the stark headline on the BBC News site on Friday. Never mind that since 2009 under British law, anyone under the 13 is deemed unable to give informed consent to sexual intercourse. This negates the defence of consent in such cases, except the judge Lady Scott decided it was not in the pubic interest to punish Daniel Cieslak, who pleaded guilty to rape, saying it would be "disproportionate given the nature of the criminal culpability here". 

The girl in question said she was 16 and CCTV footage confirmed to Lady Scott that it was reasonable for Cieslak to assume this was the case. He procured alcohol for her even though he knew she was, at the very least, too young to legally consume it.

Well, if that decision isn't a goddamn gift for paedophiles as well as rapists in general, I don't know what is. What is the bloody point of even having age of consent laws when the line in the sand can be easily washed away on the strength of CCTV footage and a tearful defendant?

Still, the same judge has form here. In 2013, she sentenced Hamadache Hamza to just six years for weekend-long rape ordeal that took place in the victim's flat, despite the Crown Prosecution Service guidelines suggesting five years as the starting point for a single offence rape sentence, eight years for rape with aggravating factor, and life imprisonment as the maximum sentence. Lady Scott's reasoning was that Hamza had come to the UK from Algeria, overcome a difficult background, and set up a successful hairdressing business and this had to be taken into account.

Never mind that most people who are either immigrants or have come from a difficult background, or both, manage not to rape people. In the world of Lady Scott, these two factors lessen the severity of the crime of depriving a woman of her liberty and her right to personal safety and bodily autonomy for 48 awful hours - and she insults every law-abiding immigrant and every law-abiding person who has come from a disadvantaged background in one fell swoop.

These are just two of the endless cavalcade of examples of rape-related bullshit from all over the world. They are examples are from Britain but Britain is not unique in the ways it fails women and girls.

Rape is not unique to any particular race or religion or social class or profession. That is what makes the problem seem so insurmountable. To single out any one group is to throw the bodies of women under countless other buses. It is a grotesque game of whack-a-mole - while we villify one group based on the example of a few, women are still being raped by other men in other places and in other circumstances, whether it is at the hands of a stranger, as a weapon of war, or in the depressingly likely scenario of being raped by someone she knows.

What is particularly tiresome is the constant minimising of women's anger by men. Just today, a friend of mine from India posted an opinion piece on her Facebook page which advised women not to come to India. It was written by an Indian woman, it was an agonising cry from a woman who does not feel safe in her home country. Pathetically, a man jumped on the page to tell us that there was no use in getting angry.

With all due respect, sir, fuck off. When you are not feeling threatened on a daily basis, it is easy to wonder what all the fuss is about. But it is something women live with every day of their lives in every country in the world. I completely understand why millions of American women choose to take advantage of the second amendment and carry a gun.

The reason why women collectively roll their eyes when they are told to be careful when they leave the house, is not because we are obstinate little flakes. It is because we know already. We bloody know. We make a habit of being careful all the damn time. We carry our keys in a position that is suitable for jabbing an assailant as we walk from the bus stop to the house. We install sensor lights near our front doors so we're not fumbling about in the dark for too long. We tell each other to text as soon as we get home safely. We help each other into taxis. We feed each other water and kebabs and paracetamol when we've had too much to drink. When Judge Kushner said that we are entitled to "drink ourselves into the ground" but our "disinhibited behaviour" could put us in danger, she was not saying anything new.

Still, at least Judge Kushner didn't compare women to cars or houses by using the horrible "You don't leave your car or house unlocked when you go out" rape analogy. Reducing our bodies to a comparison with the contents of a glove compartment or a jewellery box is appalling, reductive nonsense. And if you do get burgled because you forgot to lock a door, you might just get more sympathy than a rape victim who was drunk or wore a short skirt or wore a long skirt or only drank water or left the house or caught a bus or went to work or had the temerity to leave the house in possession of a vagina.

"You silly bugger; leaving the house with the door open!" is hardly on par with the disdainful spite of "Well, you were asking for it, walking around that part of town at that time of day..." when you've just had your body violated in the worst possible way, shy of actually being murdered.

And then if something horrific does happen to us, we'd better hope and pray our assailants aren't wealthy, privileged, or have a great future as an athlete or a city trader because they may just get a sweet deal from a judge.

That is if you report the crime at all. I know plenty of women who have not reported rapes. This is usually because of fear: fear of being disbelieved, fear of ending up on the wrong side of the law in countries where premarital sex is illegal, fear of spending a lot of time being humiliated and reliving a repulsive experience for no justice to be done, fear of bringing shame to the family, fear of the reaction of one's partner, fear of simply making a fuss...

Please do not start with the "But men get raped too!" line. Yes, they do. They do not get raped in quite the same numbers as women but male rape is no myth. And guess what? They are usually raped by other men.

And male rape is, like female rape, drastically under-reported. Oh Lord, I wonder why that might be? When men see what crap women are put through when they attempt to get justice for being raped, where is the incentive for them to report the crime when they are raped?

If more women are confident to come forward without being accused of "asking for it" when reporting a rape, perhaps it will follow that more men who are raped will come forward too. This is a prime example of how achieving justice for women and girls has the potential to help men and boys.

Indeed, the eternal pit of dick-driven ignorance was fed by the unctuous Philip Davies MP recently when he tried to derail the passing of a bill to recognise the Istanbul Convention in a bid to prevent violence against women and girls.

Predictably, all the douchebros came out of the woodwork to cheer Davies on because men get attacked too. Except clearly none of these intellectual bankrupts bothered to look into the finer points of the Istanbul Convention which quite plainly recognises that men and boys are victims of violence too. But that would require doing some research, becoming informed, not simply believing everything a pig of an MP tells you because it suits your hateful little narrative.

These are the same men who disbelieve the low rates of false accusation and see nothing wrong with someone who admits to grabbing women by the genitals, someone who feels so permanently entitled to access women's bodies, is now the president of the United States. Indeed, yesterday it emerged that Theresa May thought Donald Trump was "a gentleman". Brilliant. Britain's second woman Prime Minister has been gaslit by a self-confessed sex pest.

And so we continue, the women and girls of the world, to constantly take precautions against rape, to be constantly on our guard, because that is our normal. For some, normal means regular rape by a partner. For others, normal means rape at the hands of terrorists. For some, it just means never quite feeling safe.

If you have never felt that fear, you are automatically privileged. It is your duty to stand alongside those who are not so fortunate, the women and girls of the world.

  

"Nightmare of a Gang Rape Victim" image by Syed Ali Wasif/Flickr

An oath for oafs

Sajid Javid simply loves the idea of an oath of allegiance to British values! He is all excited after reading Dame Louise Casey's report on social cohesion because it recommends public office-holders take such an oath. Elected officials, civil servants and council workers would be expected to take this oath, should it ever become a requirement, according to the report.

But Sajid has taken an already scarily Orwellian idea one step further and said that all migrants, not just those seeking UK citizenship, should take the oath. 

Yep, he is mad about the oath. Sajid would rather talk about this oath instead of, oh, I dunno, his own decision to vote against landlords requiring their properties to be fit for human habitation while he is an actual landlord. But, hey, letting hard-working people pay through the nose to live in squalor is clearly a British value! Am I right, Sajid? Jolly good show, old chap! 

Hell, he is so keen to advocate for an oath that he has even started spitballing a few ideas for it. What a guy! I am so glad that as a permanent resident of Britain, owner of property in Britain, married to a British citizen, working, paying my taxes and voting in Britain, that Sajid is here to tell me how I can best direct my loyalty.

Sajid said the oath might include phrases such as "tolerating the views of others even if you disagree with them" as well as "believing in freedom of speech". OK, fine. So I have the freedom to say I find the vile and racist rantings of, say, Anjem Choudary or Jayda Fransen are utterly repulsive but I still must "tolerate their views"? I have zero tolerance for racism. If I had to take this oath, would I really mean it? What would happen to me if I publicly said I didn't tolerate the crap people like Choudary and Fransen come out with it? I'd be exercising my freedom of speech, as per the oath, but breaking the bit about tolerance.

"Freedom of religion" was another of Sajid's helpful suggestions. Yep, you can believe in whatever deity you like but what about freedom from religion? I am unimpressed, for example, that certain politicians voted against marriage equality with their religious beliefs being a factor in their decision. I find that sort of church-state crossover hard to tolerate - whoops, there I go again, being intolerant! Indeed, while we're talking about religion, would I be breaking the oath if I dared suggest that it is high time the Church of England was disestablished? If I say so, am I breaking the bit in Sajid's imaginary oath about believing in freedom of religion?

Sajid also suggested "freedom from abuse". If he means physical abuse, we already have laws against assault, rape and murder. These are laws everyone is expected to obey, whether or not they are a public official or not, and regardless of whether they were born here or came here from somewhere else. 

Or does he mean verbal abuse? If so, there are already laws against hate speech and death threats? Do the anti-hate speech laws contravene the "freedom of speech" part of the oath? Honestly, Sajid, this is a minefield! It's almost as if you're making this up as you're going along rather than thinking it through rationally.

Then Sajid said "a belief in equality, democracy and the democratic process" should be chucked into the oath which, the more I think about it, the more it starts looking like having about as much credibility as a pinky promise. Sajid, we currently have an openly misogynistic homophobe on the Commons Women and Equalities Committee in the form of Conservative MP Philip Davies. This is a man who this week tried to filibuster a bill to ratify the Istanbul Convention because men are victims of domestic violence too - even though the convention covers violence against men and women. If only there was a senior woman in the Conservative Party with the power to prevent ridiculous appointments to committees...

As for a belief in "democracy and the democratic process", sure, I can get on board with that. My belief in democracy extends to believing that the monarchy is undemocratic and has no real place in a modern society and that the House of Lords needs urgent reform. I am, apparently, free to say this but does the oath cover democracy and the democratic process as it currently exists or is there some wiggle room on that one, Sajid?

And finally, he suggested "respect for the law, even if you think the law is an ass". So this oath would mean that we must respect all laws at all times, no matter what? Blind loyalty for the win, eh Sajid? What if a public official who had to swear this oath found that stupid laws made their job impossible or compromised safety or would put a vulnerable person at risk? How would swearing to this part of the oath help whistleblowers who expose things that may well be legal but are morally wrong or dangerous or just plain ineffective? 

Sorry, Sajid, you're going to have to work much harder to convince me that this idea for an oath is not just creepy and chilling, but also that it is not completely and utterly useless. Would this sort of lip service really help different groups in communities come together or get along better? Would this prevent a single act of terrorism? Nope. And nope. 

What I do know is that I have lived here long enough to know this sort of forced patriotism, this ridiculous, ill-thought-out jingoism is just a stupid distraction by Sajid Javid and if it ever happened, it would not do a damn thing to improve anything.

  

Photography by Karen Arnold

The lynch mob mentality is back. But did it ever really go away?

Gina Miller has received death threats, rape threats and utterly appalling sexist and racist abuse. This week a 55-year-old man from Swindon has been arrested over threats he is alleged to have made towards her.

And some people who disagree with Miller's role in using the court system to challenge the government on the way Article 50 should be triggered for Britain to the leave the European Union are actually apologising for the people who have made these threats. 

"What did she expect? She was asking for it!" has been the tone of the apologists. The same mentality that blames rape victims for their own attacks is now being applied to a woman who has every right to mount this challenge to Theresa May's increasingly useless government in regard to how we should leave the EU. 

Bear in mind the court challenge is not about keeping Britain in the EU, it is about putting the vote before parliament before triggering Article 50. Many Brexiters, despite banging on for months about sovereignty before the referendum, are now terrified of a ruling by Britain's independent judiciary that would mean our democratically elected members of parliament vote on how we should best proceed with the most monumental change to Britain's place in the world in our lifetimes. Miller and her fellow challengers are calling for the very model of British sovereignty to be used to start proceedings. Therefore it would appear that for many Brexiters, they only like sovereignty when it suits them, or they don't actually know what sovereignty means. 

In short, Gina Miller has - for making the case for Britain's exit from the EU to go through parliament - received death and rape threats. And people are saying she should have expected this.

No. Nobody should expect death and rape threats for having a different point of view. Miller should expect robust debate, certainly, but never death or rape threats. That is absolutely disgusting. In the year when Jo Cox MP was murdered for having a different political opinion to her killer, it is quite right that death and rape threats are taken seriously. We now know there are people out there who are barbaric enough to act on such threats.

Over in the United States, Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump's campaign manager, has also received death threats. And I have seen people with similar political views to my own take the same line elements of the political right have taken in the UK, that Conway is also deserving of death threats.

No. She is not. I am pretty sure I disagree with Conway on most issues, I do not see her a a feminist role model for helping get a self-confessed sexual predator into power, but do I think she deserves death threats? Absolutely not. She should expect to be challenged on everything she says, she should expect to be pilloried on Saturday Night Live, but she should not expect anyone to express an interest in killing her. 

When you know someone might want to kill you, it is absolutely terrifying. It is distressing, it erodes your trust in other people, it means you never quite feel safe. It is an awful punishment, a cruel psychological torture, and certainly not a punishment to fit the crime of having a different point of view. It is quite right that any civilised legal system takes death threats seriously.

The referendum result and the Trump victory in the US seem to have emboldened pitchfork wavers on both sides of the Atlantic.

But I am now starting to wonder if the pitchfork wavers ever went away. Are human beings in general even as civilised as we like to think we are? Multiple genocides have taken place since the world was shocked by the events under Adolf Hitler in WWII. And death penalty abolition is a relatively recent phenomenon in the context of centuries of history.

In Saudi Arabia and Iran, people are still executed in public, creating a repugnant spectacle. Thirty-one US states still have the death penalty. Nearly two-thirds of the world's countries still have the death penalty. The last person to be executed by guillotine in France was in 1977. In Britain, the death penalty was abolished in 1965, and in 1973 for Northern Ireland. 

When the death penalty was abolished in Britain, it took immense courage for members of parliament to do so in the face of much public opposition. After centuries of British history, in which so many people were lost to hangings, burnings at the stake, beheadings and obscenely imaginative torture, 1965 and 1973 marked a new era of modern civilisation. Our EU membership depends on not having the death penalty. Once we leave the EU, I would not be at all surprised to see renewed calls for a return to capital punishment. The possibility, no matter how remote, of Britain enjoying the civilising factor of no capital punishment for less than 100 years before it is swept back into the law books on a tide generated by a lynch mob mentality is sickening. 

And when we start accepting that outspoken people, and particularly right now, outspoken women, should expect death threats for daring to express polarising opinions in public, we regress as a society. We start picking away at the threads that hold society together, the threads that keep us civilised, that prevent us from turning into brutes and savages. 

Right now, those threads are more delicate than ever before.

Photo by Dan Lipinski/Flickr

Kim Kardashian bound and robbed at gunpoint. The hilarity.

It is one thing to be nonplussed by the story this week that reality TV star Kim Kardashian was bound and robbed at gunpoint in Paris. But it is quite another to be openly gleeful about this turn of events and to publicly express one's joy at a wife and mother of two young children becoming the victim of violent crime.

"But she was asking for it, tweeting all those photos of her jewellery, flashing her wealth around like that..."

People who wouldn't dream of blaming rape victims for their own rape have blamed Kim Kardashian for her own robbery. But the most she is guilty of is bad taste and ostentation when she tweets another fabulous gemstone. You may find this obscene when there are people starving, but it's not justification for violent crime. Hell, people who wouldn't know one end of Twitter from the other get robbed of their valuables. Quiet people get robbed. Discreet people get robbed. Anyone who an opportunistic thief might suspect as having stuff they want can get robbed.

Jodi Foster, for example, would probably sooner drive a clown car to Mars than tweet a picture of her jewellery but it is well-known that she is a wealthy woman. Yet if she was bound and robbed at gunpoint, she would probably elicit more sympathy than a Kardashian.

My husband has expressed concern for me when I wear my engagement ring on public transport. The ring is not necessarily worth much financially but sentimentally, it is priceless. It is my grandmother's ruby and it is not a subtle ring. If some lunatic cut my ruby-clad ring finger off or made me hand it over at gunpoint while I was minding my own business on the tube, people would probably have plenty of sympathy for me. I've tweeted pictures of this ring. I wear it in public most days. Would I too be asking for it?

"She is just another useless reality TV star. Who cares?"

Welcome to fame in the modern world. This is a world where high school students view "reality TV star" or "YouTube sensation" as valid career choices. We have fed the beast by watching the TV shows, clicking on the YouTube link, reading about these people in newspapers and magazines and online, talking about them as if we know them personally. We have created the public interest for this sort of thing.

"But people get robbed all the time and it isn't front page news!"

Do you even understand how the media works? Stories that are considered to be of interest to the readers, viewers and listeners will get airplay. See the above point for why Kim Kardashian's robbery is more newsworthy than the bloke down the pub who had his mower nicked from the garden shed.

There are limits to how many stories any given news outlet can cover and it is up to news editors worldwide to make judgement calls on what will be published or broadcast, what gets priority, what the balance of subjects will be on any given day. Naturally people get upset if their pet cause doesn't get the attention they think it deserves but these people don't work as news editors and have no idea what the job entails or the competing pressures that are involved.

And the onus is also on everyone else, the consumers, to choose what media outlets we go to for our information. Don't want to read about Kim Kardashian? There are plenty of places to go where you will never see a Kardashian story. And guess what? Thanks to the miracle of the internet, you can usually share stories you deem more worthwhile really easily.

Take some responsibility for your choices rather than passively whining about "the mainstream media".

And the Kim Kardashian robbery is newsworthy, especially if you live in Paris. If I lived in Paris, I might want to know that there is a gang of audaciously violent thieves out there.

Yes, there are people out there suffering more than Kim Kardashian probably ever will. But the outpouring of joy over an incident that could have ended in her death is gross. It has degenerated into people publicly wishing she was raped or murdered. Where the hell is our basic humanity?

Sometimes I wonder if we have evolved that much from the days of throwing Christians to the lions for entertainment.


Photography by George Hodan