Political Motivation – Equality Now

Hello. Welcome to another episode of Political Motivation here on the Women's radio station. I'm Rosie MacLeod. This is the station that connects women all over the globe from our studio here in London. In this show, I take a look at the grassroots campaigners working to improve the world for women and girls. Today's episode looks at the work of the international human rights group Equality Now. We One of the group's aims is to improve access to justice for female victims and survivors of sexual violence. Currently, there are some truly shocking statistics revealed by the rape Crisis website. 85,000 adult women in England and Wales are raped every year. That's about 11 rapes every hour. Although 90% of victims know their rapist prior to the offence, only 15% will report it to the police. Unsurprisingly, then, rape conviction rates are extremely low. Unsurprisingly, then, rape conviction rates are extremely low. Only 5.7% of reported rape cases result in the perpetrator going to prison. Equality now is seeking a fairer and more sympathetic legal process for victims of rape and sexual assault. Although there is as yet no concrete campaign for this, the group is calling for changes that will ensure a fairer outcome for women subjected to sexual assault. To this end, the group has been looking at the legal system and whether any of its laws are discriminatory. It's been looking at how laws are implemented and whether changing this could deliver justice more effectively. But the group's efforts are not just paper consuming. Jackie Hunt, the director of Equality Now's Europe Office, told me about one very imaginative way in which this campaign has been publicised. I'm here in London and I'm delighted to be joined by Jackie Hunt, who is the director of the Europe Office for Equality Now. Hi, Rosie. Really nice to be here with you. What Equality now does is try to increase access to justice for survivors of sexual violence, girls and women particularly. So as part of your campaign to improve the access for justice, you've actually teamed up with the cast and crew of the current TV series the Handmaid's Tale. So talk to me about that a little bit. It's a really fantastic collaboration, I think, to get people from different walks of life talking about issues that affect all of us on our daily lives, particularly women and girls. And what the cast of Hulu has done is have taken stories that we're working on. Not stories, real life examples of abuse that girls and women have suffered around the world. And they've talked to them and about them in ways that also intersect with what we're Seeing on TV through the Handmaid's Tale. So it brings to life what really happens and puts it in a very interesting way so that people who think they're looking at fiction then realize that actually a lot of these horrible things are happening in life too and they will want to do something about it as a group. Equality now tends to tackle the root causes of a problem and not just the symptoms. For that reason, it has identified the negative stereotyping of women in the media as a factor in poorly handled cases of rape and sexual violence. Here I am talking to Jackie Hunt again in more detail about the line she has drawn between the two and whether it is limited to the press and the media. We're having this conversation on the day that Rape crisis Glasgow has just had its funding cut and is now only available for, or can now only offer telephone appointments from now until further notice. Rape crisis is having. There's so much demand for their services now increasing and they've even in London and the southeast, I think they've closed. They've got a six month waiting list and they've closed their list because they cannot actually talk to all the women who need help. And if you just think about that for a minute, think about firstly the number of women and girls who need help and who aren't getting that help, but also the number of people who are suffering sexual abuse and that we're not talking about it and we're not doing enough about it. And the government, I think, also feels that because rape crisis is there, they will look after all these people without money for some unknown reason and they need all the support they can get because they have to be provid support for women. This is a health issue. This is a serious health issue that isn't being addressed. And speaking of people who should help and aren't helping, Germaine Greer has a book coming out about rape in which she's going to. The thesis of the whole thing is that, and I quote, most rape is just bad sex. I think I can't comment on that. I haven't seen the book, it's not out yet. Clearly, given that piece of information, it sounds very unhelpful. She gave an interview and she said something like, women confuse rape with a man's right to have sex with his wife, but there is such a crime as a rape in marriage. She didn't seem to know about that. Well, I don't know how anyone really, without doing a lot of research and investigating cases of rape can judge for themselves whether, you know what it is I have spoken and our partners around the world have spoken to a number of women who have undergone rape and sexual violence and from their accounts, and they've been the one to go through it, it is not sex gone bad, it is violence. I think the whole point about rape is it's nothing to do with sex. It's about men's sense of entitlement over women, it's about men's power over women and men's violence against women. It's nothing to do with sex. And it's not just penetration by a penis, is it's penetration by penis or an object against a will. Definition depends in various countries. But yes, I mean sexual assaults and sexual violence and rape are all things that women suffer and they all feel the way a woman who has undergone that feels about it is, you know, kind of can only be described by her. But they are all, none of those are experiences that should ever happen. Well, thank you very much for speaking to me, Jackie. Thank you very much, Rosie, Lovely to speak to you. So to close today's episode, here's a discussion I had with Jackie outlining the need for improved access to justice for women and girls who suffer sexual abuse. Give me some examples of how sexual assault is reported in the media and why it's so problematic. One of the things, one example that I have was in a British newspaper and it talked about gang rape of two 13 year old girls by boys and young men who were aged between 17 and maybe early 20s. And the story was about how one girl was only raped once because she was less willing. And the boys weren't rapists or perpetrators of rape, they were promising footballers and people who would lose their promising career because of the action they had done. And it also then blamed not just the girls but mostly their mothers at the way they brought those girls up and said those girls weren't worthy victims. So it's very interesting to see also how that translates to the court and jury system in the uk. We've seen that if you're not a so called worthy victim, if people think that you're not particularly harmed by the sexual assault or the rape and they look at your perpetrator and they say, well, he might lose his, he might go on the sex offenders register, then they're more likely to let him off because they feel that he's the one who's going to be more harmed in the court system. Which is a terrible indictment of the way we perpetrate justice in the UK and in other places. Yes, I mean the Problem is that you can't tell what messages are going into your brain on a daily basis. Where I grew up in Bedfordshire, the icon for the local news was a map of East Anglia, which is that little semicircle that pops out that's nowhere near Bedfordshire. But I always think of that as signifying Bedfordshire on a map because it's all very subliminal. So when you read on a daily basis this biased narrative about how women were raped, what they were wearing, the circumstances, and it's told from a perspective that ultimately sympathizes with the perpetrators, that's going to have, if that happens hundreds and hundreds, even thousands of, of times over, it's going to lead to inequality and an ill equality in the law. It's also an inequality in the law, but also inequality in practice. And I agree with you that it's a drip, drip, drip effect of the things that we read and we absorb it subliminally, but then we repeat some of the messages. Unfortunately, there are a lot of surveys being done where people think it's fine to hit a woman if she's misbehaved, so called, or it's fine to blame a woman if she's been violated. There are examples of press coverage, for example, of women who've been killed by their violent partners. And the story has gone along the lines of the couple were separated in this particular case because he'd been violent. They were living separate lives. And then the story talked about her changing her status on Facebook because she met someone else. So of course her ex husband would be annoyed and go and kill her. Terrible, terrible, terrible stories of who's to blame for the violence and what women's behavior should be like. And that then translates into all of our consciousnesses and how we think about things and how we treat women and how we then follow through in the criminal justice system on issues of violence and discrimination against women. Yes, and an example that springs to mind is Riva Steenkamp. When she was murdered on Valentine's Day 2013, the sun was heavily criticized, and rightly so, for showing a picture of her in a bikini because she was a model. And it has sort of almost a cartoony narrative in the headline, which was three shots, silence, three more shots. And so it was like Playboy meets a graphic novel meets a cartoon. You expected there to be a cartoon picture of Pastoris with Kapow. The treatment of it was just so insensitive. And there was a lot more focus on her career as a model. The pictures of her in bikinis than there was about her murder. Yes. And if you see headlines in a lot of the media today about violence against women and girls, there's often talk about. I don't know, about even child sexual abuse. They talk about it as sex, and it's not sex, it's rape. And they talk about the perpetrator being a nice community guy. And wasn't he a pillar of the community? Oh, yes. And he did happen to kill his wife and two children, but, you know, the community thought he was great. No mention of her, her value in the community. She was not even a name. So it's very often they. They treat a woman as an object and they treat the man as some valued member of society who is justified in action he takes. And that really is a terrible situation and something that we all then are submitted to and then absorb in some way. So how are you looking to address this issue, apart from enlisting the help of the Handmaids? We look at the issue in the round. So we look at each different aspect of it. As I mentioned, the criminal justice system, the way laws are implemented, but also the way that women and girls are talked about. So we are trying to put out there a different narrative. We're trying to call out some headlines that are not very good. Actually, other people are doing a lot more work on the headline aspect that we are. Jane Gilmour in Australia, for example, has a program called Fix it where she sees these headlines and she writes what should have been written as a headline for various news media, which is really important and good work. And the issue, I think, is then to show positive stories of women, to try and break down the gendered roles of women. And we do that both through the normative value of the law. So we change the law to make sure there's no discrimination in there. And then as that goes through the criminal justice system, we hope also that people will start changing their attitudes. And at the same time, we talk in the media and through our own publications about the value of women and focusing very much on the perpetrator. So it's him who has a choice whether to commit violence or not. It's him who actually commits violence. And she is not the instrument of what happens to her. So one of the motivations for your Access to Justice campaign is a number of unsympathetic attitudes towards sexual assault that you think can be traced by back to how it's reported. For example, one third of people think a woman is responsible for being raped if she's drunk out late and or wearing A short skirt. One fifth of people feel it's sometimes acceptable for a man to hit a female partner if she's dressed revealingly. Now, by that logic, every woman in a swimming pool should emerge battered and bruised and really, worryingly, 43%. So almost half of teenage girls think male aggression towards a girlfriend is acceptable. Now, is it really? Is it solely the media reportage that we can trace this back to, or can we trace it back to the rise of violent Internet pornography? I don't think you can attribute this to any one particular incident. And I think we all have our role to play in making sure that we speak properly about issues and we hold each other accountable for the way we talk about things. What we are concerned about, and a number of groups are concerned about, is the increase in violent pornography and the fact that it's now ever more accessible to younger and younger boys and girls in schools are feeling very threatened by it, very sexualized by it and very anxious by it. And they in fact don't even recognize always what respectful sexual behavior is because they've had no other experience of it. And one of the points that many groups in the UK and other places are pressing for is appropriate sex and relationship education in schools, which eventually has been mandated, but now it's been put off here until 2020. But teachers need proper training, they need proper curricula. But we're looking at not just sticking a condom on a cucumber. What we're looking at here is teaching everybody about respect, respectful relationships to all people in the context. And as you start to bring up your young people from the very beginning, respecting each other, learning to work out whether someone is consenting to sex or not consenting to sex, how they want to be treated, how they want to be addressed, then hopefully we grow up with a society that is more respectful of all of us and we reduce then the instance of violence. Yes, I think you've hit the nail on the head because the average age at which kids, and I mean kids see pornography for the first time is 11. The average guy watches two hours pornography a week. And like now it is so, so violent. And so we're raising young people. And I mean, I've had this conversation with my friend Kate Smurthwaite, who, who I've interviewed many times on the radio. And her line was, we're raising young people, especially boys, not raising them by showing them that this is what relationships are about, but the message that they are accessing is that this is what sex and relationships are about. They're about violence, they're about misogyny. And my mum's friend, who's a teacher, said that she thinks the girls come into school, I'm not kidding, having copied the image of Internet pornography, sort of fake tan and heavy eyeliner. And it is really, really worrying because if you think about it, in the future, if all the guys have grown up watching violent Internet pornography for two hours a week, maybe more, then if you think about it, your child's teacher, your child's head teacher, your gynaecologist, your doctor, the Prime Minister, if these people are male, what ideas are they going to have about women? I recently talked to a young man, very pleasant young man. He was 18 years old and he was just about to take up his place at Oxford University, so obviously amongst the brightest. And he was telling me how he watched pornography regularly and whenever he met a young woman, he. His immediate thought was to those images in pornography. And he couldn't see her as a human being when he first spoke to her. And it took several days of them getting to know each other before he could start thinking of her as a human being and really then having conversations with her as a human being, because his whole mind was geared towards her in this picture of pornography. That's just one anecdotal example of one young man. But if that is an intelligent young man thinking through the effect of pornography on himself and still not being able to help himself, that does worry me. And another problem that we have along similar lines is the comedy clubs. Not the comedy clubs per se, but what happened in the comedy clubs in 2013 when that year was called the year of the rape joke? As soon as women's sorry, comediennes, as they used to be called, as soon as their ticket sales increased a bit and female stand ups were becoming more popular, the guys thought, I know, let's create a hostile environment to get rid of the competition a bit. And so you had this explosion of misogyny and rape jokes. I think there's. I have a very wise friend who tells me that as women are making progress, so the backlash becomes bigger because we are challenging a space and of course, waves then are made. I think there are plenty of really good men who maybe get a little bit confused sometimes when it gets a bit choppy in the waters, but who ultimately have respect for women and want things to go well. Then there's a group of men who are misogynistic, who don't want women to progress and who see women very much in a stereotypical role that. That is subservient to them. And the more then women push back. I suppose some of those groups, especially, if I may say, in today's climate, feel that they have some kind of legitimacy and can publicly also make very disparaging, misogynistic and racist and other comments against women. Because often there's layers of intersectionality of abuse. So a woman, if you turn around and call her a with a black woman, would be called a black. So there's lots and lots of added layers of discrimination depending on who's talking and who's the brunt of the discrimination. Posh B. Well, you mustn't have any money. I don't think we need to go through all the examples. Other people go there for us, but it's absolutely true. But I also think there are lots now after the MeToo movement and Time's up, it's been the discrimination against women and misconduct, misogyny against women. Sexist attitudes are being called out. There are more people speaking out, men and women. Again, there's a backlash. But I think also more and more young voices are coming up and some of this behavior will not be tolerated in future. At the moment, it's just discussion in many different cases. I haven't seen it necessarily translate into access to justice for women who subject to sexual and other violence yet. But I think discussion has to be the beginning and then action will follow. And do you think that 2013 being the year of the rape joke, may have contributed to how sexual assault is reported in the press? By downplaying it, by trivializing it? Rape and sexual assault is trivialized all the time. In fact, almost it's become part of the wallpaper. So it's not only trivialized, it's not even noticed. Half the time it's like, oh, yeah, sure, sexual violence, it's like that. But nobody, I think we, in this country, in many countries around the world, we found that rape is not given the prominence it's due. There's very little justice. If you think about how many rapes happen, how few cases go to court of those, how few you get successful judgments. You realize how many people out there are not getting justice and how many men are getting away with it. And that continues around the world. And I think we have not looked at sexual violence. It is an epidemic. If it were a new disease that people had found, we'd have so many people focusing on it and taking action. But at the moment, it's as if it almost doesn't happen. Or if it does happen, it is just part of the wallpaper. And so there isn't enough being done by people who could do a lot more. And a lot of the brunt is by specialist services, for example, rape crisis and other services to actually look after the survivor and try and help her through rather than stop the abuse. Send out a message that's absolutely unacceptable and make sure the justice system works for women and girls. Do join me next time for another interview with grassroots campaigners looking to improve the world for women and girls. Don't forget, you can listen and listen again to previous episodes uploaded on womensradiostation.com you can tweet me on Rosie MacLeod 4 and you can tweet the station on mensradiostn. I'll leave you with some music. This is Gabrielle Sturbans and in the red. Driven to distraction Living on emptiness. Doing anything that I can think of Just to try to forget. I'm running low oh, running low. Doing next to nothing and I'm wondering when it's time to give up like when I'm dreaming in the air is thick I'm running but I'll never catch up I'm running low oh, I'm running low. But I can't stop now Driving down to the redstone all you stop Driving down to the red I stop can't turn back it's too late to start again. Try to put myself together Might as well hit the pedal instead oh, Can't let go But I'm losing to the beast inside. It never lets up Feels like there's no end inside I'm running low I'm running love. But I can't stop now Driving down to the. Oh you stop Driving down to the right. To start again. Try to pull myself together Will it be like this forever? Will ever learn to turn it around. To start again. But it can't stand now drowning down with the rest. Of. The. WRS Women's radio station, Voice of women Worldwide, Sarah's universal soul show. What does your soul or spirituality mean to you? Welcome to future classical woman awards with me, Stefania Passamonte on women's radio station. Welcome back. I'm Russ Cain. You're listening to in conversation with on women's radio station. I'm Angie. And I'm Patsy. And we're open to see what other programs we have on women's radio station, head to our website, womensradiostation.com Mirae B Ltd. We are a virtual PA consultancy. We provide remote administrative services. Our offering is diverse. We manage your calendar. We update your client database. We take care of your property in France and in London. We also offer bookkeeping and translation services. Would you like to know more? Please call 077-8684-8998 for further information. Mirae B Limited making the life of the business owner successful Struggling to get by financially, I was the same. I wasn't sure what we would do in an emergency. And then it happened. Bills were piling up and the kids needed activities to do over the holidays. 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