I would say that it was mildly parochial to link to a campaigns video for an election that is taking place at my university (that UMSU students can vote in on 8th-10th March, from your student portal. :P), but as
a) it’s made out of LEGO,
b) its features probably the world’s only depiction of a police kettle made out of LEGO,
c) it’s pretty damn funny,
An abridged version of this article was printed in The Riveter (Spring 2011), the magazine of the The Riveters, the UMSU Women’s Collective
I recently told someone, as an aside, that we were wasting our time trying to change the 6% of rapes securing a conviction statistic. The person concerned proceeded to obsess over my view on rape conviction rates and completely ignored my argument that the processes actually involved in “conviction” do not stop rapes (and stopping rape, not trying to raise a number, is what we should be doing): directly proving my point.
Much is made of the 6% conviction rate, which is held up as an example of the institutional sexism of our criminal justice system. That sexism undeniably exists; indeed, the Fawcett Society released “Engendering Justice: From Policy to Practice” in 2009, which documented everything from women police being forced to wear male uniforms to the fact that women make up only 12% of senior police officers and 10% of High Court Judges. But of the rape cases that do make it to court, 58% are convicted, which is in line with other crimes.
While campaigning needs to continue to stop the police treating rape as a trivial issue, continuously going on and on about the Crown Prosecution Service not referring more rape cases to court is really just distracting from the real intention behind such efforts (i.e. stopping rape from happening at all). The CPS have to believe that there is a reasonable case for prosecution to be made, which will never be very likely for an entire category of crime which mostly takes place without witnesses or any evidence other than the word of the victim (and a significant number of rapes also take place with people the victim had previously consented to sex with). See “The Pitfalls of Prosecuting Rape” about the difficulties of proving and prosecuting rape. Using “6%” as a flagship statistic for the women’s movement is simply misleading.
Want a statistic to get angry about? Marital rape is illegal in only 104 countries.
Why misleading? Stop for a second and consider what a “conviction” is – it’s a little label that the government attaches to people that says “This person is EVIL. Stay away from them. Ignore them. Hate them.” In effect, “conviction” ostracises someone from society completely, perhaps to the satisfaction of those seeking vengeance, but giving the convict no reason to stop committing crime. And sure enough, the reconviction rate within two years of leaving prison is over 60% – so those rapists get out and almost immediately rape someone else (or rob them, or murder them, or whatever). Clearly, we are doing something wrong in the way we deal with crime in this country. And clearly, if we don’t want more people to get raped, we need to change that.
Because prison won’t change anything. Prison locks people away with a large number of people with drug addictions, poor social skills, and mental health problems, leaves them to rot without any meaningful activities, and then spits them out again with the stigma of a criminal record and less of a future than when they started. To suggest that locking away a rapist for however long you think they should be locked away for should be our focus as a movement, instead of asking what on earth they were doing raping someone and dealing with those issues because you think “something must be done”, is not stopping people from being raped; it’s making yourself feel better about the fact that someone was raped in the first place. Sending people to sit in a prison cell for a length of time and then letting them out again, because that’s what “raising the conviction rates” actually means, is going to achieve very little.
Prison cells in Alcatraz
I don’t want anyone, ever, to be raped, or sexually assaulted, or to have any sexual contact that they didn’t consent to. However, people *are* raped, the vast majority of whom are women. Our response to this as a society should be
a) to provide whatever care the survivor needs to recover as best they can. This is a non-starter and completely ignored and underfunded by everyone who isn’t involved in their support. Half of all rape crisis centres have been closed since 1984.
b) to determine why the rape occurred. Was the perpetrator unaware that the victim was not consenting? Are they a psychopath/sadistic/mentally ill? Do they understand the concept of meaningful consent, or do they see all women as mindless sex objects who exist for their own sexual gratification? Were they trying to terrorise someone else completely different but related to the victim? *Why*?
c) to provide remedies to deal with the perpetrator in that specific case. So consent awareness counselling, mental health treatment, childhood therapy, culture change, some way of convincing those men who rape that women are actual human beings etc. I’m no expert, but most motivations for rape are treatable; relatively few people rape for the sheer heck of it or with a long-term goal in mind. Perhaps these remedies should be administered within the community, perhaps the perpetrator should be taken out of their environment to receive them (in hospitals, rehabilitation centres, perhaps just a really, really long way away from the victim). In some cases, confinement might be a last resort. This would depend on the specifics of the case, but the guiding principles should be ensuring that 1) the victim feels as safe as possible and 2) the rapist does not rape again.
d) to take steps to ensure the reasons people believe that rape’s ok, however fleetingly, are minimised or eradicated within our society. This is where society really needs to up its game (and what so much of the women’s movement is thankfully dedicated to). Why do we trivialise male prison rape? Why does mainstream pornography fetishise coercive sex as more pleasurable than consenting sex? Why does seemingly every non-explicit conversation about sex we hear or read assume heterosexual penile-vaginal penetration? WHY THE FUCK do magazines like Cosmopolitan and Company tell women that if they don’t feel like having sex, they should have a “quickie” instead (I was 14 when I first read this)? Why do we consider it shameful for a man to be raped? Why did my school teach me how to use a condom but not how to ensure my partner(s) was actively consenting, or what consent even is?
Take Back the Night March in New Mexico against sexual violence.
Our response as a society should not be:
i) taking someone who has been convicted of rape, placing them in a large warehouse of people who see little or nothing wrong with rape (some of whom may have convictions for the same crime and continue to commit it in prison), leaving them there for an arbitrary period of time determined by a politician, and then letting them out again.
ii) getting upset that many people who have committed rape don’t get put in the large warehouse for an arbitrary period of time and then let out again.
iii) being in any way surprised that people continue to be raped because large swathes of our movement are all doing ii) in stead of b), c), or d).
Putting someone in a cage is not a solution to anything.
Critical Resistance, an abolitionist group in America has this to say about sending violent offenders, including murderers, rapists, and paedophiles to prison: “Many people do not believe that locking someone in a cage is an answer to drug addiction or poverty. If locking someone up does not address these problems, why would locking someone in a cage be any more of an effective answer to harm between people?
Prisons are not about reducing harm in our communities and in fact, our own experiences and studies have found that imprisonment actually serves to destabilize our communities. Prisons are violent institutions that only perpetuate violence and prisons as a public policy solution have failed to create safe communities.
Abolition does not mean that we don’t hold people accountable for their actions. But punishment creates the opposite of accountability — a sense of social isolation instead of responsibility to others. If anything, punishment makes future harm more likely since it encourages people to lash out. People who have seriously harmed another need appropriate forms of support, supervision and social and economic resources.”
65,000 people are raped every year in Britain, and the criminal justice system are providing justice to approximately none of them. I fail to see how trying to increase the number of people being failed by our system serves any one of them, or any of the people that convicted rapists go on to assault later on in their lives. We cannot, and should not, close down all prisons and release all rapists tomorrow, but a good first step would be for committed feminists to end their calls to have more people sent there. We need to stop rapists. Prison, as it currently stands, is evidently not stopping them.
I am writing to you with great concern regarding the pending deportation of Brenda Namigadde this week. Brenda came here in 2003 fleeing persecution as a lesbian. Even setting aside the horrors of a system that has left her in legal limbo for no less than eight years, it seems hard to believe that very system has also apparently deemed her not a lesbian. Given that Brenda fled to the UK in the first place as she faced threats on her life because she was living with her female partner, Janet Hoffman, I can only wonder by what criteria the immigration service deemed someone gay at all.
However, regardless of these questions, which go well beyond the specifics of an individual case, the fact remains that of Brenda Namigadde is deported to Uganda, she will be arrested, tortured, and killed. Whether she is in fact lesbian or not, though all evidence before everyone but the judge suggest that she is indeed gay, is absolutely irrelevant to this case: the Ugandan government clearly believe that she is a lesbian, and will duly persecute her as they persecute all homosexuals. David Bahati, a Ugandan MP, has already called for her to “repent or reform”, saying that “Brenda is welcome in Uganda if she will abandon or repent her behaviour. Here in Uganda, homosexuality is not a human right. It is behaviour that is learned and it can be unlearned. We wouldn’t want Brenda to be painting a wrong picture of Uganda, that we are harassing homosexuals.” Mr. Bahati is also responsible for trying to introduce a law that would sentence people found guilty of gay sex with life imprisonment. Only international pressure has commuted his original attempt to introduce the death penalty.
With this background then, it seems unfathomable that as a nation we can be knowingly sending a woman back to her certain death because of ideological views on immigration. Economic migration is a matter of fair debate, but when the Daily Mail holds sway over our policy-making over asylum seekers, we are playing with people’s lives for political expediency. As an LGBT person myself, I am horrified that the rights which I have the luxury of taking for granted, like the right to life, the right not to be tortured, the right to be out and proud, are to be denied to another simply because of the country she was born in.
As Home Secretary. you have the power to stop this from happening. I beg you to re-examine Brenda’s case and intervene so that she can have the right to life she is entitled to and we do not have blood on our hands.
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