Ceri-Lee is a bright and confident 24-year-old who juggles taking care of her young child with training to be a paramedic. In contrast to the loving family and happy life she now has, her childhood was pure hell. For nine bleak years, she was sexually abused and raped by her father, an ordeal that began when she was just eight years old.

But Clive Bundy, the man that subjected Ceri-Lee to unimaginable hurt and terror, has recently discarded his old life and now identifies as a woman. Ceri-Lee has felt compelled to speak out, in condemnation of a justice system that helps dangerous sexual predators to evade detection and to potentially target other child victims in female-only facilities.

In 2016, Bundy was arrested by police that had been monitoring his activities online. When they searched his laptop, they found numerous child abuse images, including a record of his abuse of Ceri-Lee. Bundy was jailed for 15 years but served half of that sentence, before being released a few weeks ago on licence.

Prior to his release, Bundy announced his decision to leave prison as a woman, stating that he has changed his name to Claire Fox.

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It may not be coincidence that his chosen name is that of a high-profile campaigner who has used her seat in the House of Lords to argue that transgender activism endangers free speech and women’s rights.

Last month, Baroness Fox asked — in an online article entitled “A ‘Trans’ Paedophile Stole My Name” — why Bundy chose to troll her in this way. “I can only speculate. One commentator suggests that sex offenders, specifically paedophiles, select the names of well-known people so that an internet search will only turn up the famous person, and not them.”

There is, however, she explained, one small consolation in what she sees as Bundy’s trolling. “Should Clive Bundy ever start using social media under the name Claire Fox, he might find himself subjected to anti-Terf trolls, who routinely target gender-critical women like me, barraging us with misogynistic abuse.”

It is largely thanks to a second British parliamentarian that Bundy’s new name is in the public domain at all. Under Section 22 of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, it is against the law to expose the former name of a person that has changed gender. But in March this year, Labour MP and women’s rights campaigner Sarah Champion raised the case in the House of Commons, where legislators are granted protection against civil and criminal liability.

Feminists have long pointed out that men who wish to sexually abuse women and children will seek out and exploit loopholes and opportunities in order to find new victims. Former convicts have been known to change their name by deed poll, for instance, and while they are required to inform the authorities immediately on doing so, many do not, and simply build new identities.

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With gender reassignment more commonplace — and easy — than ever, it offers a new opportunity for dangerous sexual predators to change both their name and their sex, and then to hide in plain sight.

These fears are well founded and well documented. Look, for example, at the case of Karen White, a convicted child sex offender and rapist who, while legally still a man, was put in a female-only prison where he went on to sexually assault two inmates.

Then there is the more recent case of double rapist Adam Graham who, prior to his conviction, declared himself to be a woman and changed his name to Isla Bryson. Having been sent to Cornton Vale, Scotland’s only all-women’s prison, he was only moved as a result of a massive feminist protest.

Ceri-Lee wants the names of Clive Bundy and Claire Fox to be linked on official records. But the law requires us all to pretend that no such link exists — that, essentially, the convicted serial child sex offender no longer exists.

Since hearing about her rapist’s release, Ceri-Lee has experienced flashbacks to her own abuse. “Him doing this has caused me terrible anxiety,” she tells me. “I am worried about the girls in my family being targeted by him.”

She is also distressed that, yet again, Bundy has successfully manipulated the system. When she was told about his decision to assume a new identity as a woman, “it was a real shock”, she says. “I had no idea that he would be allowed to change his name and his identity in law when he was on the Sex Offender Register.”

Before this child rapist declared his intention to live as a woman, Ceri-Lee was “fairly liberal” about gender reassignment, taking a “live and let live” approach. More recently, however, she has discovered for herself the implications and unintended consequences of self-ID, the law that permits adults to change their gender without a medical diagnosis. In a world in which men can now legally enter single-sex spaces once earmarked for women and girls, Ceri-Lee’s opinions have shifted.

When she told her family members about Bundy’s transition, “at first, all we could do was laugh”, she says. “It’s so ridiculous… There’s just no way a man like him feels like he is a woman. He is so macho. He was always very proud of how manly he was.”

At the time of his arrest, Bundy denied every offence he was charged with. “The police said they’d never been faced with anyone as manipulative and coercive,” says Ceri-Lee. “Why can’t they see this is just him, again, trying to trick the system?”

Ceri-Lee was at home with her child when the Victim Support Officer called her out of the blue to let her know her father hadn’t been considered for parole because of an altercation in prison, before casually adding: “‘Oh, and by the way, he’s given us permission to tell you that he’s now female and calling himself Claire Fox…’ It was as if [the officer] was telling me what was for dinner.”

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Had Bundy not given permission for Ceri-Lee to know his new identity — more power-play, and an example of his coercive and controlling tactics — neither she or the rest of her family would have had any idea that Bundy had “disappeared”, replaced by a woman called Claire.

Inevitably, Ceri-Lee has been accused of transphobia. “Somebody asked on Twitter how long it’s going to be before I’m convicted of a hate crime,” she says, “because I will never, ever refer to him as female. When he made me handle his male genitalia, he definitely wasn’t a female then — and he will never be a female in my eyes.”

Horrified that a sex offender such as Bundy could now freely visit a public swimming pool full of children, Ceri-Lee asks: “He didn’t abuse little boys, he abused girls — why should he ever be allowed to go into female-only spaces?”

She insists her motivation is not transphobic — “in fact, I feel an affinity with these people: I know what it’s like to be a child faced with a secret that feels wrong but [you] can’t tell anyone. I know the bravery it takes to come out and say something. I felt wrong in my body because of being sexually abused, so I understand what it feels like to want to escape it.”

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Aware that to criticise anything to do with transgender ideology can have adverse consequences, Ceri-Lee admits she was worried about the effect that going public might have on her medical career. She was hoping to go to university to become a paramedic when she was told of her father’s release from jail.

The NHS has certainly been captured by trans ideology, with some Trusts having issued guidance which states that patients should be admitted based on the ‘gender they identify with’ and therefore can choose which ward, toilet and shower facilities they use.

Ceri-Lee is determined to continue her campaign, but waiving her right to anonymity, in order to go public about the identity of her abuser, has already cost her dearly. “It was the most difficult decision I have ever made. I think of myself as quite a confident person. I can walk the streets and people don’t know about the little girl that was abused and who wanted to kill herself.

“He told me I could never reveal what he was doing to me, or other family members would get hurt,” she says. “But I am done with being scared of him.”

Appalled that Bundy’s new persona has, with the stroke of a pronoun, all but erased from the public record what he did to her, Ceri-Lee is now determined to ensure that any medical transition will not give him access to vulnerable female victims. “He will do it to other girls,” she says, “I just know he will. I have to get the message out. But if I can stop one girl from having to go through this then it’ll be worth it.”

“Many women only feel comfortable talking about the intimate and devastating details of male violence in a safe environment. And a safe environment means a women-only one,” writes Karen Ingala Smith in a new book, Defending Women’s Spaces. This is her debut, but she is already hard at work on her second, about femicide. Ingala Smith has spent a total of 32 years working in women’s organisations that tackle men’s violence. As the CEO of the nia project, a service for women and girls who have been subjected to sexual and domestic abuse, and the founder of both Counting Dead Women and the UK Femicide Census (analysing cases of women and girls killed by men), no one is better-placed to comment on what female victims of male violence need.

However, the existence of Defending Women’s Spaces is deemed so dangerous that the ticketing giant Eventbrite deleted the link to the online launch a few weeks ago, and began issuing refunds. According to Eventbrite’s Trust and Safety team, the event was in danger of violating its policy on “hateful, dangerous or violent content”. Keeping women and girls safe from male violence, and enabling them to recover from it — the main topics of the book — are now seen as hateful activities, according to those that believe excluding trans-identified men is bigotry.

Feminists fought for the introduction of the 2010 Equality Act, which allows for the provision of separate or single-sex services in certain circumstances — for example, in toilets, changing rooms, refuges and hospital wards. So why do our hard-won rights still need defending?

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In recent years, trans rights organisations such as Stonewall have been campaigning to end female-only provision. For example, in 2015, Stonewall’s submission to the Women and Equalities Select Committee Inquiry on Transgender Equality included demands for a review of the Equality Act to include “gender identity” rather than “gender reassignment” as a protected characteristic. They also argued for removing any circumstances in which single-sex spaces were allowed.

The charity Gendered Intelligence have also made it clear they would do away with our right to single-sex provision by calling for “a comprehensive review of the legislation affecting trans people (and intersex people) with the aim of deleting the exceptions laid out [in the Equality Act]”. Both groups, along with political parties such as the Greens, Women’s Equality Party and some sections of Labour, are also in favour of self-ID, which would allow men to identify as women without the requirement of any medical intervention. Doing so would legally permit them to access women’s single-sex services.

Ingala Smith is fighting back. “This is not about trans people in women’s spaces,” she says. “It is about men in women’s spaces. Declaring yourself to be a woman does not alter that you are male.” She is in step with the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, who last week wrote to Nicola Sturgeon to warn her that self-ID would be open to abuse by male sex offenders, and thereby put women and girls in danger. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has also raised a number of concerns about such a policy.

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Nevertheless, the Women’s Equality Party last week became the latest political entity to jump on the bandwagon, passing a motion that supports self-ID. (That motion was proposed by its leader, Mandu Reid.) What does Ingala Smith think of a political party supposedly set up to defend the rights of women taking this line? “Reid has just signed the party death warrant.”

For those who want to understand why feminists campaign against trans-identified males being permitted to enter women’s spaces, Defending Women’s Spaces is extremely useful. Most transwomen with a Gender Recognition Certificate retain male genitalia and, as Ingala Smith explains, “criminal behaviours of those who had legally and medically transitioned from men to transwomen follow male pattern offending”.

Ingala Smith examines cases such that of Karen White —a transwoman with intact genitalia who sexually assaulted a number of female inmates when placed in a women’s prison — and transwoman Katie Dolatowski, a child sex offender who gave a false name to staff and ended up living in a women’s refuge for 71 days among vulnerable women and children.

She also points out that there is nothing stopping transwomen setting up services of their own. “Some women would help transwomen set up services for them to escape or recover from men’s violence. But some trans women will not want to use them because they want to be validated as women.” They want their ideology validated, even if it means making vulnerable women physically uncomfortable.

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Ingala Smith’s publisher Polity approached her to write Defending Women’s Spaces because they saw that books challenging trans orthodoxy are becoming increasingly popular. However, its publication was not without its obstacles. Alison Phipps, a former professor of gender studies at Sussex University, tweeted: “I am withdrawing my peer review labour from publishers giving transphobia a veneer of intellectual legitimacy by publishing ‘gender, critical’ books. Very sad that my previous publisher Polity is on that list.”

“There were some trans activists gunning for me even before I was in a position to speak openly about my views of women-only spaces,” Ingala Smith says. “As I’ve spoken out more and more about women-only spaces, what has been hard is a gentle freezing out by some other leaders of women’s organisations. Veiled comments about being aggressive, being accused of being insensitive and causing upset. At the end of the day, my priority is women who’ve been subjected to men’s violence and doing my best for them.”

Ingala Smith is one of only two CEOs running services for victims of male violence putting the safety of women over gender ideology. She openly applies the exceptions permitted under the Equality Act to provide women-only refuge and other single-sex support.

Fortunately, women fighting for sex-based rights are beginning to prevail. The confusing law around gender self-identification has now been clarified thanks to the legal cases brought by, for example, Maya Forstater and Allison Bailey. Those campaigning for self-ID often claim that the law states employers and service providers must treat someone who identifies as the opposite sex as that sex. But that is not the case, and employers who follow the Stonewall rule that “trans women are women” can be sued for unlawful discrimination towards women. Ingala Smith celebrates the victories of those feminists bringing legal cases against their employers, universities, and rape crisis centres.

“Women on TERF Island are fighting back,” she writes. “We are resisting the ideology that threatens to roll back the rights… and services that our fore-sisters fought hard to achieve.”

During this period, before feminism had had much of an influence, female police officers endured a barrage of sexist comments in the canteen, and out on patrol. Malton’s nickname among her male colleagues was “The Tart”. Nevertheless, she rose through the ranks to become a Detective Chief Inspector in the Metropolitan Police, becoming the inspiration behind Helen Mirren’s character, DCI Jane Tennison, in the hit Nineties crime series Prime Suspect. Now, Malton has written a book, The Real Prime Suspect, which tells the story of Britain’s police culture from 1970 to the current day.

There couldn’t be a better moment for its publication. Awareness of misogyny within the police service has never been higher, public confidence in police attitudes towards violence against women never lower. I found feminism in 1979, during one of the most shameful periods of police sexism, the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, an investigation doomed from the start because police decided that many of the 13 women brutally murdered by the serial killer were asking for it. But in the era spanned by Malton’s career, things haven’t changed enough.

The abduction, rape and murder last spring of Sarah Everard by serving police officer Wayne Couzens exposed the persistence of misogyny within the service. Indeed, the College of Policing was this month compelled to issue a statement reassuring the public that “officers who abuse their trust to groom vulnerable victims, or engage in sexual impropriety, including harassment, are more likely to be dismissed and barred from policing” (italics mine). The college admits that there are many officers still in post who have been found to have committed such offences.

The Real Prime Suspect documents recent events, and Malton acknowledges that all is not yet fair and equal when it comes to women in the police service. She certainly reveals the roots of the current toxic culture by telling her extraordinary story of success in the days when female police officers had barely any legal or employment rights, and were often seen by male colleagues as inferior irritants. But her book reads as though the bad old days are long gone.

It’s true that the police service Malton left in the late Nineties was a very different service to the one she’d joined. Women were by then serving in most areas of policing, and it was no longer deemed acceptable to openly refer to female officers as “bikes” or “dykes”. A lesbian, Malton chose not to be out at work in those early days — it was already hard enough being a woman in a testosterone-fuelled environment where resentment towards female officers was rife. But her colleagues soon suspected that Malton might not be interested in men, except as hard-drinking companions, and she would regularly be presented with vibrators, because, as she was often told, all women need is a good fuck.

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Despite her treatment, Malton persevered. She had always wanted to become a detective, and, following the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 — which led to a change in working conditions for women as well as equal opportunities with their male counterparts — her dream began to look like it might come true. “You’re the first split-arse DI we’ve had here,” she was told by her superior officer at her first Central London posting. By 1989, she had made Detective Chief Constable.

That same year, I met Malton at a conference. She was representing the Hammersmith and Fulham Domestic Violence Unit; I was campaigning against violence towards women. In a session on police responses to domestic abuse, a senior male officer claimed that things had changed significantly since the days when the crime was seen as a “private matter” between a married couple. Malton leapt to her feet and told her superior: “bullshit!” She then went on to outline every way in which the police were still letting down victims, winning applause from many of us in the room.

We didn’t know it then, but Malton’s life was about to change forever. In 1990 she had a meeting with a “striking, petite woman with a fabulous smile and a cascade of red curly hair”. Writer Lynda La Plante was developing a script for a TV series about a female DCI leading a murder enquiry. At the time, Malton was one of only three female DCIs in the Metropolitan Police. Soon, she began working as script consultant on what was to become the stratospherically successful Prime Suspect.

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Many of the best-known scenes in the show came directly from Malton. In the first episode, when Tennison is, against many of her colleagues’ better judgment, made head of a murder enquiry following the sudden death of her male counterpart, she is addressed by a young copper as “ma’am”. Mirren throws him a withering look and says: “Call me Boss or Guv, but don’t call me Ma’am. I’m not the bloody Queen.” I remember posters in lesbian clubs with those words coming out of Mirren’s mouth in a speech bubble. Tennison quickly became a major feminist icon. But, though Malton was by that point “out” at work, she advised La Plante that the public was not ready to empathise with a lesbian protagonist. Tennison was developed as a heterosexual woman who fails at relationships because she puts the job first.

Another line that ended up in Prime Suspect came from a story Malton told La Plante about the sexist banter to which women subjected, day in, day out. The character of DS Bill Otley, a vulgar misogynist, was based on an officer Malton had worked with, who had once pointed at a female colleague and asked his mates: “Who would fancy that skinny dyke?” But there’s one anecdote that shocked even me, told to me by Malton a few years ago, when we were working together on a Radio 4 documentary about sexism within the police service, Malton told a hilarious but grotesque story about how male officers, after a few Friday night drinks in the police bar, would see how many 10p pieces they could get under their foreskin. “One officer managed £3.20,” she told me.

When Prime Suspect was on air, a number of serving and retired female officers contacted Malton to tell her they recognised the misogyny exposed by the storylines. Thanks largely to Malton, the dire situation for women in the police became common knowledge. But in some ways that makes it even more shocking that male officers are still getting away with it.

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A whopping 70% of civilian police employees working alongside police officers reported witnessing sexual harassment, according to research conducted in 2018 by the London School of Economics. Of the 311,776 Unison members polled (two-thirds of whom were women), more than three quarters reported sexist jokes; one third reported intrusive questions about their private life; and more than a fifth reported inappropriate leering or staring. There were also complaints about sexual gestures and hints that sexual favours could lead to preferential treatment.

Meanwhile, as reported by the Centre for Women’s Justice, almost 700 cases of alleged domestic abuse involving police officers and staff were reported during the three years leading to April 2018. This data covers three quarters of police forces. It shows that police employees accused of domestic abuse are a third less likely to be convicted than the general public. Fewer than a quarter of complaints of domestic abuse resulted in disciplinary action.

Horrifying case studies abound, and there are hundreds we never hear about. A recent Times expose showed that many disciplinaries of male police officers involving vulnerable females are held in private. It has recently been revealed, for instance, that a number of serving male officers shared deeply offensive WhatsApp messages — such as one who wrote that he “enjoyed the need”, while on duty, to physically restrain a very vulnerable and disturbed 15-year-old girl, because he got pleasure from a “struggle snuggle”.

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Still, the impression one could be left with, having read Malton’s book, is that the vast majority of male police officers are exemplary, brave public servants. I don’t accept this version of events. Malton’s story is inspiring, but even though it’s now 25 years since she left the Met, she remains in many ways fiercely loyal to her tribe. You know the saying: once a copper, always a copper.

So, despite the candid scrutiny of old-style sexism in the cop shop, The Real Prime Suspect is a bit of a puff piece when it comes to the police service today. What we need is a book by a retired female officer who is willing to do a warts-and-all expose. Because it is only when the public becomes aware of the extent of woman-hating in the service that root and branch reform will become unavoidable. Let us hope there is a brave whistleblower out there, who can show the nation how much worse our police force is than DCI Tennison’s.

Cultured, middle-class parents increasingly see their offspring as projects that require vast amounts of time, attention and money. These parents, led by the “child-centred approach”, have little or no time for anything that benefits wider society; instead, their own family unit becomes their universe. And despite there being, in my opinion, no unselfish reason for having children, those of us who choose to remain child-free are routinely called selfish.

In Crouch End, I experience more stigma for being child-free by choice than I do for being a lesbian. It didn’t used to be like this.

Throughout the Eighties, I knew several lesbians who lost custody of their children from previous heterosexual relationships due to the prejudice of Family Court Judges. It was deemed “unnatural” for lesbians to raise children. It is very rare, among the liberal chattering classes, to hear this nonsense today. I rarely sense any uncomfortable vibes from middle-class heterosexuals when they realise I am a lesbian. In fact, for this demographic, I am quite useful at a dinner party: I improve their equality and diversity index. But the conversation always turns to children. Having established that I am in a long-term, happy relationship, the next question is inevitably: “Do you have children?”

I used to say “no” and brace myself for the sympathetic nod, but a few years ago, I started to give an expansive explanation, whether they wanted it or not. And trust me, they really didn’t!

Seeing friends raise children over the years has taught me about the massive curtailment of freedom that comes with it, not just to socialise, but to work, do political activism and sleep. Having children costs a fortune: money that I think can be better spent supporting women (and their kids) to leave violent men. I would far rather my time and disposable income went towards helping children living in poverty than having my own.

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But when I say all this to North London liberals, the disapproval is palpable. It is as if I am saying I hate children — including, more to the point, their children. Obviously, that is not true. I am told I don’t know what I am missing, which is also untrue: I know exactly what I’m missing and I want none of it.

The first time I publicly questioned the sanctity and sanity of having children, it was obvious I had broken the golden rule: never question what one friend called “the sunshine miracle of motherhood”. The emails started arriving — dripping in vitriol — including one from an infertile woman who likened me to Hitler for “wanting to phase out the human race”.

Having children, though many parents seem to forget it, is a choice. But women who choose to not have children are often warned that they will regret their decision later in life, yet we rarely talk about the possibility that the opposite might also be true — that women who have children might wish they had not.

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Take the experience of Anna (whose name I’ve changed), a woman in her thirties who contacted me on social media. She had seen the massive pile-on I experienced when I challenged a group of women who were pontificating about how selfish child-free women were. One had said to me: “Leave us to do the hard work of raising the next generation, why don’t you?” Anna told me she had regretted becoming a mother but felt that she was unable to speak about it to anyone.

“I told my doctor I regretted having children and that I was deeply depressed,” wrote Anna. “She sent me to a psychiatrist. I told her that I had felt totally railroaded into having babies, not by an abusive partner or religious parents but by society that values me primarily as a breeder.”

As a campaigner against male violence, and as someone who grew up in a working-class community, I am well aware that many women do not actively choose to have children. For many mothers, particularly middle-class ones, it is a lifestyle choice; for women in violent or controlling relationships, it is often imposed upon them. The same goes for those raised in conservative religious communities in which women have a duty to produce children; anyone who does not is seen as having failed and can be punished and ostracised.

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Still, anyone who admits to regretting motherhood is seen as a sociopathic monster — even though it’s not that rare to regret having children. Last year, a YouGov poll found that 1 in 12 parents did. Society can be unkind to those women who choose not to reproduce, but it can also be unkind to those that do. Working class mothers, in particular those raising children alone, often find that affordable childcare is non-existent; women who can’t afford to not work, as well as those that actively wish to, find that their lives are made near-impossible after they have children. Witnessing how these difficulties affect mothers certainly helped me decide that motherhood was not for me.

Liberal feminism seems reluctant to address the fact that women like me are frowned upon. There is a common assumption that those of us who actively choose not to reproduce are selfish, rootless and have no concern for future generations. It is not just conservatives who suggest this, but also liberals and Leftists. They feign concern about “falling birth rates” being a “threat to the future of humanity”. The hypocrisy is staggering. Nobody, surely, decides to have children in order to produce a future workforce; no one actually breeds because they are worried about who will care for elderly people in the future.

Still, according to some, I should not only face stigma and disapproval for being child-free, but also be financially penalised. Demographer Paul Morland argued in The Times last week that, in order to address the “problem” of the falling birth rate, those without offspring should pay additional tax. “This may seem unfair on those who can’t or won’t have children,” he wrote, “but it recognises that we all rely on there being a next generation and that everyone should contribute to the cost of creating that generation. Use the funds to fix the UK’s broken, expensive early-years care system.”

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To accuse child-free people of having less stake in the future is absurd. I am a feminist and what is feminism if not an attempt to change the world for future generations? As a campaigner against all forms of violence against women and girls, my work affects more children than you can cram into a four-bedroom Georgian terrace. When asked what will happen when I die, with no kids to carry on the family name, I always say that I am proud that my legacy will be making the world a slightly better place. Meanwhile, I have witnessed friends give up on trying to change the world in favour of having children, their focus shifting onto their own, ever-shrinking world.

When I came out in the Seventies, lesbians fought back against stigma. I was informed on many an occasion by certain ignorant heterosexuals that it was a shame “you can’t have kids”. I would respond by informing them that lesbians did, in fact, have wombs. Over the years, we campaigned to change the laws that prevented lesbians from adopting and fostering, and challenged the family courts when children were removed from lesbian mothers at the behest of embittered ex-husbands. Today, it is commonplace for lesbian couples to have and raise children together, and I am delighted that they have legal protection as parents. But it’s time, now, to fight back against the stigma directed at those women who choose not to procreate. After all, the expectation that “having a family” is something we all want to do is rooted in sexism. For the record, I do have a family, it just happens not to have any kids in it.

An investment of $391 million would address root causes of incarceration by funding mental health services, housing and rehabilitation, along with a programme named “Community Based Violence Reduction”. So far, so good. But the reforms would also redefine how victims and offenders should be dealt with, with increased funding to “restorative justice” in “serious felony level cases that would otherwise result in detention and incarceration”.

Restorative justice (RJ) is described as an alternative to prison; it is a non-punitive response to criminal behaviour. The idea is to bring together the person who inflicted the harm (the “responsible person”, in RJ terminology) and the victim, often in the presence of community representatives. The perpetrator is supposed to accept responsibility for the harm inflicted and reach an agreement with the victim about how to make amends.

De Blasio’s reforms were welcomed by prison reform campaigners, as well as pretty much every liberal in the State. Alissa Ackerman, a sex crimes policy researcher at California State University and one of the few facilitators of restorative justice sessions for rape victims, has said that RJ, “allows survivors to have their pain heard and stories acknowledged, and is an opportunity for the person who caused the harm to be accountable for their actions”.

I spoke to one proponent of RJ, who asked not to be named “in case I am seen as colluding with carceral white women”. White himself, he is a newly trained lawyer in Washington DC, specialising in “replacing the racist system with a true healing process for both parties”. “Anti-rape feminists are probably responsible for more black men being incarcerated than anyone else in modern-day America”, he says. “Locking up African Americans is a product of slavery.” Ben went on to suggest “community resolution” and “non-violent strategies” to address sexual assault.

But for feminist activists campaigning against male violence, who have seen the consequences of the reforms up-close over the last three years, RJ constitutes the very opposite of justice.

Sarah, whose name I’ve changed, runs a support service for victims of male violence in NYC and is “appalled” that RJ is becoming a substitute for criminal justice sanctions. “What we are seeing is what we have seen forever”, she tells me, “which is the under-policing and under-protection for women, including women of colour. But some BLM activists are claiming that feminists calling for CJS sanctions for rape and domestic abuse is flat-out racist, because black men are overrepresented in the prison population.” As a result, she told me that “black and brown women, indigenous women … are the ones who are bearing the consequences of us not holding men accountable for their violence. They are the ones who are being murdered and raped and their abusers are walking free.”

According to the ideals of RJ, after a crime is committed the offender and the victim should meet face-to-face. The victim is not to blame or judge the perpetrator, but rather describe the impact of the offence, in order to “heal” and become “empowered”. RJ sees victim and perpetrator as equal, both in need of support and understanding. Supposedly modelled on the conflict resolution practices of certain indigenous cultures, there is much talk of circles. Healing circles are held for the perpetrator, before a sentencing circle takes place; later, there are follow up circles. The outcomes may include an apology or financial compensation. Some participants, including the victim, sign a confidentiality agreement.

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RJ is considered a suitable remedy for domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse and sex trafficking, among other violent crimes predominantly committed by men. Most of these crimes are committed against women by men known to them: male family members, partners and colleagues. “The perpetrators have worked very hard, often for years, to condition the person they are abusing to not disclose, to minimise, to protect his emotions: to protect his character publicly”, says Sarah. “They’ve been using manipulative tactics to inspire self-doubt, blame and fear, in the person they are abusing.”

And victims of this kind of abuse may feel coerced by RJ practices, which are conducted, as Sarah said, “without any understanding of the dynamics of power and control, the impact of a trauma-coerced bond, and also the amount of time and commitment that it actually takes to elicit genuine behaviour change in abusers”.

I meet with Diane, whose name I’ve changed, at a café in Harlem, NYC. She was introduced to me by her rape counsellor. Diane was seriously sexually assaulted by a senior member of her church, having been targeted and sexually harassed by him for months. “I decided to report him to the police, despite the fact that my community is rarely well served by the cops.” Diane and the perpetrator are African American. “There are too many vulnerable young people in the church, and I didn’t see why he should poison the congregation.”

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The perpetrator, considered to be a man of “good character”, with no criminal convictions, admitted to the lesser charge of inappropriate sexual touching, denied committing serious sexual assault, and agreed to partake in RJ.

“I was contacted by the local service that runs these things,” says Diane. “They told me it was important that we reach an agreement and rebuild trust. I was told nothing could be gained from taking him on a route where he could end up in jail. It felt like I had no choice.”

But having read up on RJ, Diane decided not to participate in it. “I was judged and blamed by the service”, says Diane, “as though I should have accepted the scraps from the table and have him say ‘sorry’ or whatever. He got away with what he did to me, and a man like that pretending to regret what he did would just be lies.”

One report, published in 2016, is often used to justify replacing criminal sanctions with RJ. It is entitled “Restorative Practices in cases of Intimate Partner Violence, Sexual Assault and Dating Violence: A Roundtable Discussion”. While it claims that RJ focuses on victims of violence and their needs, the report also ironically reveals who is actually centred in the process. One attendee is quoted as saying about perpetrators of male violence: “Do we actually blame them as a perpetrator when they were violated at a young age?”

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To be taken out of the criminal justice system and put in a situation where everybody is required to empathise with him — including his victim, who is forbidden from blaming or shaming him — is a violent man’s dream come true.

Like most on the Left, I believe that only the most dangerous criminals should be locked up. I have criticised the fact that the most vulnerable and disenfranchised are most likely to be in jail. But the campaign to end male violence is my life’s work. Victims have to come first. One service provider working with sexual assault victims describes reports from young survivors in California that they are “sick of going to rape circles”. She has also heard from women and girls of colour being pressured to engage in RJ instead of making police reports.

While RJ is not yet widely practiced throughout the US, it is growing in popularity in several states — and threatens to become federal policy. In its 2022 budget, the Office on Violence against Women requested $25 million, “to support restorative justice responses to domestic/dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking, and research, evaluation, and technical assistance related to such responses”.

The media consistently reports that research shows RJ is very successful. One paper, by Mary P Koss, is often cited. Koss asked victims to complete a survey about their PTSD symptoms before and after they engaged in RJ, and concluded that victims who complete an RJ process exhibit a marked decrease in those symptoms. But PTSD symptoms almost inevitably decrease as time passes after the traumatic event. Asking the victims and perpetrators of serious crimes to “hug it out and move on”, as Sarah describes it, was simply not shown by the research to be effective.

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I asked several experts on violence towards women if there is any reliable data about the efficacy of RJ and was met with a resounding “no”. When I spoke to Marcia, a veteran advocate for victims of male violence, she pointed out that in cases of domestic violence, putting the perpetrator and the victim in a room together is “outright dangerous”. Perpetrators of domestic abuse, and of sexual assault, are more likely than any other offenders to repeat their crimes — often against the same victim. But the well-publicised evaluations of RJ don’t include follow-ups that measure the recurrence of violence within domestic abuse scenarios.

Marcia asked for anonymity because “right now there is so much intolerance on the Left that even those of us who are part of the Left fear retaliation if we don’t conform.” She emphasised that rape victims want their rapists prosecuted, but with the Left advocating for RJ, victims “feel that there is no movement standing behind them. They feel utterly alone.”

The idea that serious, sexual and violent crimes should be dealt with by “community leaders”, outside the criminal justice system, is shockingly naïve at best. At worst, it is re-victimising women, and giving perpetrators a free pass. Liberal cities like New York are conducting an experiment with women’s safety and lives — and ignoring whatever they have to say about it.

The police eventually turned up and moved us on, but not before we had made our point and incited curiosity and solidarity from passers-by. Our demonstration was even reported in the Yorkshire Evening Post. Our message had been heard.

That sort of in-your-face feminism was — alas —  a bit sidelined by the internet. Along came the rise of keyboard activism, whose warriors prioritise sending out petitions and messages of condemnation on Twitter over taking to the streets alongside their sisters. Partly that’s convenience but partly it’s because the internet is where a lot of the violence is incited and savage verbal attacks take place.

Take the particularly vicious campaign against Milli Hill. Last November, Hill, founder of the Positive Birth Movement and the of bestselling books including Give Birth Like a Feminist, was the victim of an online pile on when she took issue with the phrase “birthing people”. She wrote: “It is women who are seen as the ‘fragile sex’ etc, and obstetric violence is violence against women. Let’s not forget who the oppressed are here and why.”

On they piled. Slowly at first, but then harder and faster: “anti-LGBTQ”, “transphobic”, “toxic” “dangerous”… And people she had worked with dropped her. So she laid low for 8 months and then wrote a blog about her appalling experience.

At which point it all kicked off again. One trans activist tweeted at Hill: “Milli, you obviously haven’t learned from the response JK Rowling got from her post. You aren’t incorrect that obstetric violence is sex-based. But how difficult is it to acknowledge that not everyone who is capable of giving birth, identifies with the female or woman label?”

Rowling shot off a blinder in support:

Judging by the tsunami of supportive emails and letters I've received, if women learned anything from the response to my post it wasn't that they should sit down and shut up. Solidarity to the brave and fabulous @millihill (and I love your books, by the way!) pic.twitter.com/dLdsYR73Qd

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) July 15, 2021

The response from women everywhere was amazing. As I write, the tweet has been ‘liked’ more than 24,000 times.

Rowling’s refusal to be cowed by the bullies is giving strength to other women to stand up and speak out. Rowling keeps going because she knows that thousands upon thousands of women have her back.

This feels like a significant moment. Feminists are rising up.

And as this brilliant sisterly solidarity plays out out on the internet, it’s filtering out on to the streets again. More and more women are putting down the keyboard and picking up the loudhailer — some for the first time.

Earlier this week, more than 300 women and a smattering of men gathered at Glasgow Green in protest at the ongoing case against Marion Millar. The Scottish accountant was arrested, interrogated and charged under the Communications Act for sending six tweets in 2019 which were deemed to be offensive. One tweet included a photograph of a bow of ribbons in the green, white and purple colours of the Suffragettes, tied around a tree. According to the complainant(s), the ribbons represented a noose. For her crime, Millar faces six months in prison, away from her young family.

Even though the hearing was postponed, the protest went ahead, with supporters congregating on the green, waving banners and placards reading, “#WomenWontWheesht” (wheesht is a Scottish colloquialism meaning ‘shut up’) a hashtag that has come to symbolise the feminist refusal to be silenced.

They chanted, sang, and made a fuss. It was excellently old school. And they were full-throated in outrage for police and prosecutors targeting women for supposed “hate crime” when convictions for rape and male violence are at an all-time low.

For as long as there has been male violence and oppression, women have protested. The very first women-only direct action on record was in Manchester in 1905. Christabel Pankhurst and millworker, Annie Kenney, disrupted speeches by prominent Liberals Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey, asking where the men stood with regards to women’s political rights.

In November 1910, suffragettes stormed the House of Commons to protest against the hostility of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith to women’s voting rights. The police responded by attacking the women with truncheons, and many were beaten, sexually assaulted and humiliated.

Thus was the women’s case proven. The women hit back and rampaged through Westminster smashing windows and attacking property. They were arrested, but this particular direct action went down in history.

Feminists threw flour bombs at the Miss World competition in London in 1970; invaded the Ideal Home exhibition in protest of lesbians having their children removed by the state in the 1980s; and spray painted buildings and stormed churches during sermons in the campaign to criminalise rape in marriage.

It is only visible action that will shame governments and other state agencies into change. Social media could never replace standing outside a court building and shouting our demands in full view of the public. That’s why I’ve helped organise hundreds of public demonstrations across the UK against domestic abuse and injustice towards women.

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It’s important we are heard because there is currently a concerted effort from both the Left and the Right to silence us: the Left won’t let women talk about their sex-based rights; the Right is stripping resources from the places were abused women find shelter. And something is shifting. Women are getting noisier. Women are making a stand. Just look at the masses who turned out to express their anger and grief over the Sarah Everard murder.

And those who stand up inspire others to do the same. Just like Milly Hill, who told me: “Other women made me feel braver, and I wanted to in turn help other women to feel braver.” And JK, too, standing up to the bullies and facing down the death threats.

I have interviewed 50 young women over the course of two years for my forthcoming book on feminism, in order to explore cross generational understanding and cooperation, which recently has been lacking between young feminists and the Second Wave, like me.

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But each and every interviewee told me a similar story – that they are rising up against the liberal notion that everything bad that happens to them is “empowering”. They are getting angry about the global sex trade, about forced marriage, FGM, and daily sexual harassment. That is why more and more younger women are taking to the streets – to reclaim them.

Like Marion Millar and her supporters, feminists young and old will not be intimidated into silence or capitulation. It is the antithesis of our movement. Feminism exists because women have been under the cosh patriarchy for centuries. My favourite chant, constantly heard at feminist rallies is, “Women’s tradition: Struggle not submission.”

I will never forget the exhilaration of my early public protests and direct actions. I was even held in a police station on one occasion, having been accused of public order offences. I was finally released without charge the following morning, and I recall feeling the sweet sense of freedom. I want all women and girls to feel that freedom, but every hour of every day.

Last week, testimony from pupils at Highgate School, Latymer Upper School, Dulwich College and elsewhere was circulated online from a website called Everyone’s Invited, a name that is bleakly witty. The allegations are posted anonymously by those at both private and state schools and universities across the country: but the media emphasised the private schools, where the cognitive dissonance is more dramatic, and the photographs are better.

There are stories of forced fellatio, emotional bullying and rape, drunken and sober. It is repulsive to read, and the schools had to respond. They will listen to The Times, if not the students, whose parents pay £21,600 a year. Allegations were reportedly ignored or soothed away with conundrums such as: we believe you — but will others? Now Dulwich College has called the police on two of its own pupils and Highgate offered an apology and promised to commission an independent review: the medium guns, then, and they need them, because anger is building.

The term “rape culture” is used to describe what is happening in these schools, and this makes me uneasy. The very phrase seems to offer the possibility of mitigation, for rape is the only crime in which this race for mitigation exists: if everyone is complicit, no one is guilty. Is a culture convictable? Is it punishable? I would be amazed if there were more sexual assaults in public schools than in state schools, even as the word entitlement is also used of these children: why would there be? Who is not entitled when it comes to young female bodies? Sexual assault: the great leveller.

There will be hand wringing and an offensive and cosmetic penance. Let us see how many careless teachers are sacked, how many teenage rapists jailed. There will possibly be a handful of out-of-court settlements, and then — nothing much at all. And that’s for the public school girls. Will the girls from state schools get any justice worth the name? The experience of the victims of the Rotherham grooming scandal suggests not. The victims will carry their burden alone; many will break, not under the burden of the crime, but under the burden of the disbelief: a double abandonment. That is usually the way.

For the private school pupils, though, it is different. Their stories lead the news pages, which may give them hope, but the defensive propaganda has already begun, as it does when these institutions, entwined with the British state for centuries, feel themselves threatened. They can afford skillful PR. They are selling a dreamland, after all; but a dreamland for some is not a dreamland for others. It has begun to roll out already; and there will be more of it.

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My teenage son is not a rapist, wrote an anonymous mother in a Sunday newspaper, of an anonymous son that no one is calling a rapist: call him then a straw rapist. Do not blight a generation of schoolboys with upsetting allegations of rape, they say, ignoring the basic truth that rape is upsetting, and should always be treated as such. I would call these the old guns. There is an element of tribute in the reporting of the crisis for the public schools, even as this is described as “the next major scandal” for the country. But gawping is not justice. It is, quite often, a way of not seeing. It is entertainment.

And people, and journalists, will gawp. I was educated at a minor public school: almost half of newspaper columnists are, which is probably why our journalism on this subject is not better. We circle the fountain of inequality with jealous eyes; we rarely challenge it. Shame can still a pen. So can envy. Even progressive newspapers do not attack private schools as they should (it is not education they offer — if they did it would be cheaper — but social privilege) because so many journalists are educated there, and so are their children. Better to be a hypocrite in private than a fool in public. If you want justice, don’t look at us. We’re banging on the door too.

We do this because they are enchanted castles: it is no coincidence that Hogwarts is quite obviously an English public school, and strictly selective, though all fees are paid by the magical government, magically. Free public school standard education for all and an elite which includes everyone: that might be the most fantastical thing J K Rowling ever wrote.

But that enchanted girdle that public school winds around your future will only extend so far if you are female. The pay gap between the privately educated and state school educated university graduate with the same class of degree (7%-15%) does not exist for women, according to Engines of Privilege by David Kynaston and Francis Green, the definitive polemical book about private schools. Those girls who walked out of lessons last week in protest, might turn to this next.

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But first, there are allegations like this: “In year 9, a teacher said to a class of 13-year-olds that ‘wife’ stood for ‘washing, ironing, fucking etc.’ It came to a head for me when I was sexual assaulted by my then boyfriend and his friend at 17. I tried to confront them about it and was told I was ‘over-reacting’.” That is the race for mitigation, but they wouldn’t call it that. They imbue it subconsciously, completely, and without critical thought. Perhaps it will matter this time. But, again, I doubt it. William Knowland, the Eton master fired for his lecture The Patriarchy Paradox — “saying smash the patriarchy amounts to saying smash human nature and biological reality” (a straw mob now?) — had support for his reinstatement from thousands of alumni, and boys.

It is ageless. What should be a moment of genuine crisis, a catalyst for change, borne on the rising tide of domestic violence under the pandemic and the singular, shocking murder of Sarah Everard and the police’s response, will likely ebb away. The private schools at least have the resources for counselling, if they are minded, which is part of their ocean of privilege; the state schools do not. I grieve for all victims, but will the state school girls even be heard amid the clamour?

Perhaps, if we are lucky, we will learn exactly what has happened in these schools, and whether the privilege they inculcate in their pupils has contributed to something ignoble, and terrible. We will learn what happened in all the schools where girls are unsafe, and how to make them safe. Or will we learn that — as I think more likely — men of all classes like to harm women when they can get away with it, and they can get away with it as easily in an enchanted castle as anywhere? It is a kind of equality: of misery.

All of this is to say, a Joe Biden administration will be a marked improvement on the politics of the past four years precisely because it’ll be a return to business as usual — and because the 78-year-old Biden’s extra-long tenure in public life makes him an especially predictable president, even before he’s signed a single bill into law. Whatever he might do in office, he will certainly not surprise us! Indeed, he hasn’t yet: from his campaign promises to the scandal that briefly threatened to sink his candidacy back in the spring of 2020, the twists and turns of Biden’s path to the White House could be seen coming a mile off.

We know, too, all the ways in which a Biden presidency will be a negative — and they’re worth taking note of, before we’re put to sleep by the blissfully boring politics. For there is at least one policy issue on which Biden might well be worse, not better, than Trump —it’s precisely because Biden has long styled himself as a champion for women that we know how lacking his feminist credentials truly are.

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Back in the 1990s, Biden was a tough-on-crime Democrat and a leading proponent of the legislation that would eventually become the Violence Against Women Act. His statements and positions then followed what would become a familiar pattern: what women needed was not liberation, but protection. Not rights or respect, but rules and regulations — for their own good, of course. And if one of these damsels in distress rejected the state’s attempts to save her? Well, then she was part of the problem.

Biden was an early advocate of no-drop prosecutions and mandatory arrests in domestic violence cases — policies that punish female victims who don’t go along with the state’s preferences vis-a-vis how to resolve such conflicts. That a woman might have good reasons for not wanting her partner arrested, or not wanting to be mired in the criminal justice system herself, was immaterial: those who refused to testify in domestic violence cases against their partners were subject to arrest or imprisonment. Sometimes, their children were, too.

Long after data had emerged to suggest that mandatory arrest policies made America’s domestic violence problem worse, not better — and that they diminished battered women’s trust in the system supposedly designed to help them — Biden continued to push them as a solution. When the Violence Against Women Act was signed into law in 1994, it cemented the role of the state as saviour — and the notion of women as too hapless and helpless to act in their own best interests.

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Biden is proud of this legislation; he’s touted it repeatedly as an indicator of how good his presidency would be for women, how long he’s been fighting on their behalf. Of course, under the circumstances, it made for a persuasive contrast: who wouldn’t prefer a president who protects women over Mr. Grab-em-by-the-pussy? You could almost overlook the fact that Biden’s care for women seemed to always take the form of chivalrous head-patting, that it was insulting in its own way. As Barack Obama’s Vice President, Biden toured colleges around the country to promote the administration’s commitment to combatting campus assault. His vision of female empowerment always had a funny way of sounding a lot like benevolent sexism: “The greatest sin is the abuse of power,” he would tell the assembled crowds of students. “And the cardinal sin of them all is for a man to raise his hand to a woman.”

In practice, the result of all this state-sanctioned white-knighting is not the woman-saving panacea it claims to be. Since the passage of VAWA, countless victims have ended up unwittingly ensnared in the criminal justice system when they didn’t agree with the state’s desire to prosecute. And on campus, third-party reporting mandates mean that women are labelled victims whether they agree or not, forced to have their sex lives dissected by Title IX tribunals who are highly motivated to expel alleged offenders lest they lose federal funding. (One exasperated accuser told authorities, “I’m fine and wasn’t raped”; administrators disagreed, and expelled her boyfriend anyway.)

This morally panicked approach to campus sexual assault has made a mockery of both due process and women’s agency; the Obama-era strategy, with its focus on continual consent-seeking at every stage of intimacy, seem founded in the rather Victorian conviction that no woman ever really wants to have sex at all. And with Biden vowing to reinstate these policies — the rolling-back of which might have been the one good thing to come out of a Trump administration — women can expect more unwanted, “for your own good” intrusions into their private lives over the next four years.

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All of this is complicated by Biden’s own woman problem, which once presented the greatest threat to his chances to occupy the White House. In March 2019, a report surfaced of the former Vice President’s extensive history of cheek-smooching, hair-sniffing, and other instances of inappropriate touching, calling into question whether he was really the right man to represent a Democratic Party trying to position itself as the anti-Trump. A year later, this same history worked against him when Tara Reade alleged that he had assaulted her while she was working in his office as a Senate aide.

On both occasions, it was Biden’s huggy paternalism that opened him up to controversy; but it was also this — that special brand of intimacy with a whiff of protective condescension — that ultimately saved him. In a world primed to conflate “inappropriate touching” with “sexual misconduct”, Biden’s behaviour was odd, but also oddly sexless, in a way that made it difficult to pinpoint as a violation. And while his accusers were all woman, he himself did not discriminate on the basis of sex; Biden would bestow a grandfatherly hug and forehead-kiss on anyone, of any persuasion, who he perceived as vulnerable and in need of comfort. Inappropriate? Come on, man! It’s a public service!

Between the raunchy anti-feminism of Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement that positioned sexual misconduct as the only misconduct that matters, it is hard to make the argument that our next president will be bad for women — and indeed, this is not that argument. But Joe Biden’s brand of feminism ultimately does not do enough to grapple with the radical notion that women are people, with all the agency and complexity that this implies. Instead, his administration seems poised to continue protecting women, rather than respecting them, and failing to recognise that these two things are not always one and the same. Is he bad? No. Worse than Trump? Not by a long shot. But when it comes to women, his presidency should serve mostly as a reminder that we could, someday, do better.

Meighan’s attack was sustained and vicious, including punching her in the face, pushing her into a hamster cage and threatening her with a wooden pallet while repeatedly knocking her over. A child witnessed the “sustained assault”, the court was told, and contacted 999 to report that a “domestic incident was taking place”. The attack was captured on CCTV and produced in court.

The judge, in sentencing Meighan, said, “I could have sent you to prison for this,” before handing down an 18-month community order and told to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work. So why didn’t he send Meighan to prison?

Because whether or not an abused woman speaks up against her abuser, there’s one thing that is indisputable when it comes to domestic abuse: the bodies in the morgue. Every three days a woman dies at the hands of her partner or ex-partner, and under Covid-19 lockdown that number has increased.

Five weeks into lockdown, the number of women killed by men was almost twice that of the average over the same time period during the past 11 years. The UN were so concerned they referred to domestic violence as a “shadow pandemic”. Even once lockdown lifts, and things go ‘back to normal’, almost one in three women aged 16-59 will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime.

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This week, in order to address the problem, a ground-breaking Domestic Abuse Bill received its third reading in the House of Commons. It is a “once in a generation” opportunity to tackle the prevalence, protect the victims, and punish the perpetrators. It brings with it a new statutory definition of ‘domestic abuse’ and a range of measures designed to protect millions of victims. It is, for them, long awaited and will be celebrated.

But the Bill has limitations.

Karen Ingala Smith is the founder of Counting Dead Women which documents all women killed by men. For Ingala Smith, lockdown did not cause an increase in the number of abusive men, but it did give some a new tool with which to control women, and a further excuse for their behaviour.

“The normalisation and acceptance of men’s fatal violence against women is part of the problem,” says Ingala Smith, “and partly why it continues.”

She thinks that the bill doesn’t recognise sufficiently the fact that victims routinely try to protect themselves by doing what violent men demand — and often end up committing crimes. Many victims of domestic abuse also become victims of an unforgiving judicial system. A double blight.

Shockingly, almost 60% of women in prison or under community supervision are victims of domestic abuse, and for a significant number, domestic violence was a trigger to their offending. But current legal defences do not protect these women from prosecution or conviction.

Women being financially controlled by abusive men can often be compelled to steal food and other essential items. Others, some of whom I have met in prison during my work with Justice for Women, were coerced into benefit fraud; holding a weapon or drugs for an abuser; or defending themselves against their abuser.

Nearly half of women in prison report having committed offences to support someone else’s drug use, usually a partner’s. The Prison Reform Trust (PRT), presents evidence of how domestic abuse can lead victims to offend in its briefing, ‘There’s a reason we’re in trouble’.

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That’s why campaigners are still fighting for amendments as the Bill goes to the Lords. One such is a proposal by the supported by the PRT and the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) to address a significant gap in the law by creating statutory defences for survivors who offend due to their experience of domestic abuse.

The first clause would amend the law on self-defence, so that victims of domestic abuse acting in self-defence against their abuser would have the same legal protection that is already available to householders defending themselves against an intruder. The second would introduce a statutory defence for victims of domestic abuse giving them the same legal protection offered by the Modern Slavery Act for victims of trafficking who are compelled to offend (for example by being trafficked and compelled to work in a cannabis factory).

Jenny Earle from the PRT tells me that having specific defences on the statute book will ensure that fewer women are prosecuted and convicted of offences when they should instead be receiving support to exit a frightening relationship.

As this Bill progresses through the House of Lords, Baroness [Helena] Kennedy will be tabling these amendments.  “Legislative opportunities don’t come around too often,” says Baroness Kennedy. “We should seize the moment and align the protections with those given to victims in other legislation.”

Sarah had taken out numerous non-molestation orders against her ex-partner. She had moved home twice to escape her abuser and had a panic alarm fitted. The police had been called to more than 50 reports of domestic violence at the address.

On the night of the incident, her ex-partner broke into her house, and ordered her to take off her clothes. Sarah stabbed him in the belief he was about to rape her. She was initially charged with murder, which was changed to manslaughter with diminished responsibility. Sarah was given a 7-year 3-month prison sentence. If the proposed new clause to self-defence was available might have enabled her to be acquitted completely or not prosecuted at all, like Richard Osborn-Brookes, a 78 year old man who killed a burglar he feared would harm him.

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For self-defence to succeed, it is necessary to show that the defendant used force that was proportionate to the threat faced. The ‘householder’ defence was introduced following the case of Tony Martin, a farmer who killed a burglar who was trespassing on his premises. It was in response to public concern raised that a person who is defending his property should not be punished for doing so. The defence allows for a disproportionate, but not ‘grossly disproportionate’ response, recognising the level of fear and hyper-vigilance that may be experienced by the victim of the burglary could lead to a disproportionate use of force,

In fact for women in domestic violence relationships, that level of hyper-vigilance combined with their knowledge of the repeat pattern of behaviour, can and often does equally apply.

“There can be no justification for more favourable treatment in law for the householder,” says Harriet Wistrich, Director of the CWJ. “It is discriminatory and imperative that a similar defence should be available to victims of domestic abuse. Women should not be punished for totally understandable reactions to violence.”

The second defence, modelled on the Modern Slavery Act would provide a defence for women compelled to offend by their abuser.

Annie is one such woman. Having been coerced into assisting her abusive partner to evade the police after he committed a murder, she was charged with perverting the course of justice. Following the murder, the perpetrator called Annie and demanded she drove him to his lodgings, and to give him money and a pay-as-you-go mobile.

For Annie, the mental torture was far worse than the physical abuse. She is now diagnosed with serious emotional disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder. “Because of his abuse I had turned off every emotion to protect myself, and I would have done anything he asked me to,” she says. “But the CPS are carrying on the abuse and I feel I’m still under his control.”

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The CPS accepts that she was not involved with the murder at all, and that her actions did not help him evade the police, and he has since been convicted of murder. But it still intends to put her on trial for her actions following the murder.

“I did nothing wrong,” says Annie. “He held a knife at me the whole time I was driving him, threatening me the whole way, and yet I am the one that committed a crime?”

Irina is a Romanian woman who came to the UK on the promise that a Pakistani man she had met online would help find her work in the UK once they were married. In fact, he wanted to marry Irina so that he could depend on her for a spousal visa, as his was about to expire. The abuse began immediately: he did not help Irina find work and treated her like a slave throughout their 8-year marriage.

Irina had made previous allegations to the police about his abuse, including rape, but police took no action against him. Irina became very distressed one day and hit him with a cricket bat. She was charged with assault by beating. Irina has a psychiatric diagnosis of PTSD arising from the abuse but nevertheless, the CPS have decided it is in the public interest to prosecute her.

These stories are rarely heard — these stories of women trapped within the criminal justice system. Instead, we read about high-profile celebrity cases and men who are spared such incarceration by the silence of their victims.

But what about those women who are compelled by their abusers to break the law? What about the prisons teeming with those victims of domestic abuse? Isn’t it time we heard from them? So while the Bill is to be welcomed enthusiastically, offering a lifeline, literally, to so many women — there are still so many who need to be rescued.

Names of victims have been changed.

Why do 999 calls shoot up at Christmas and in the summer holidays? Because abusive partners find themselves at home with their families for a few days. Imagine, then, what’s going to happen when these angry, frustrated and violent men are shut up inside for weeks on end because of the coronavirus. The nation’s pubs are closed and there isn’t even any live sport to distract them.

According to the ONS, an estimated 1.6 million women suffer domestic abuse in England and Wales in a normal year. (Men are at risk, too, but the statistics show that women suffer more repeat incidents and more severe injuries.) With the lockdown, all those women will have even fewer opportunities to ring for help or go online for advice. In some places, they can’t even escape to the park to make a discreet phone call for help or support, because they have been shut. Thanks Hammersmith and Fulham. But this council isn’t alone in its short-sightedness. Very little has been done to address the problem. In fact, it has barely even been acknowledged by Government.

It’s as though our ministers live in a rose-tinted world where home is the safest place to be, oblivious to the mass of statistics that tell a different story. We know that domestic abuse — the type that gets reported to the police, at any rate — is linked to deprivation, insecure employment and over-crowded housing. And those in the least secure jobs, the cab drivers and construction workers who are mostly self-employed, are the immediate losers amid the pandemic. They’ve had to wait 10 days longer than employees to find out what the Chancellor proposes to do for them. Frustrations and tensions will have been ratcheting up.

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We also know that anxious, depressed men are likely to turn to drink, with a quarter of victims of domestic violence reporting that their abusers were using drugs or alcohol at the time of an attack. During lockdown, a spike in alcohol abuse is inevitable — and people are already drinking more. Off-licences are being allowed to remain open, following reports that some supermarkets can’t cope with increased demand for beer, wine and spirits.

It’s not as though we don’t know what to expect. In China, a police station in the worst-affected province received three times as many reports of domestic abuse in February, compared with the same period last year. Some governments, notably those of Germany and Spain, have acknowledged the probable impact of coronavirus lockdowns. The German family ministry has posted emergency phone numbers for anyone experiencing ‘conflicts arising at home’, offering counselling to teenagers, pregnant women and victims of domestic abuse. In Spain, the government has set up an instant messaging service and an online chatroom to provide immediate support to victims. Such measures are welcome, even if they fall short of providing desperately-needed emergency accommodation.

When Boris Johnson was asked about the risk of a surge in domestic violence a couple of weeks ago, he replied with his usual combination of bluster and bragging, insisting that he had just put “record funding” back into councils even though the money wasn’t earmarked for — and is unlikely to be allocated to — services for victims of abuse. But the truth is that organisations trying to help women escape violent relationships were in dire straits before the coronavirus sent the country into quarantine. It was already the case that two-thirds of women in need of a refuge place were being turned away, forcing them to move in with relatives, risk becoming homeless or stay with a man who had beaten and raped them.

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Some of these women may now end up being killed in their own homes. Domestic homicides were already at a five-year high before the epidemic broke out. The latest Femicide Census makes sombre reading, listing 149 killings and demonstrating once again that that women are most likely to be killed by a current or ex-partner; in cases where perpetrator and victim were known to each other, more than half of the deaths occurred in households with a history of domestic abuse.

Perhaps Boris Johnson’s masculine War Cabinet should flick through it. The statistic that should really worry them is the fact that 68% of such killings took place in or immediately around the family home – the very place where they’ve told women to isolate.

During Gov briefings am I the only one thinking ‘where are all the women?’ Why are there no senior women in the “war cabinet” or used to convey those critical messages? Equality means better decisions. Don’t pack the women away during a crisis.

— Amber Rudd (@AmberRuddUK) March 18, 2020

In Greater Manchester, there have already been reports of abuse linked to the lockdown, according to Beverley Hughes, deputy mayor for policing and crime. Avon and Somerset police, too, reported a 20.9% increase in domestic abuse incidents in the last two weeks, from 718 to 868. And Police in Cumbria have asked postal workers and delivery drivers to look out for signs of abuse.

But thus far, despite an array of individuals and organisations — including Women’s Aid and the recently-appointed Domestic Violence Commissioner, Nicole Jacobs — pleading for some sort of Government provision, little seems to have been done.  The only concession the Government has openly made is to exempt those fleeing a violent relationship from lockdown enforcement fines.

But there’s absolutely no mystery about what the ministers could and should do. They urgently need to provide extra financial support for victims’ organisations to help cope with increased demand; they should instruct the police to check on households with a known history of domestic abuse; they should use domestic violence protection orders (DVPOs) to get the worst abusers out of their homes; and they should use empty hotels to provide emergency accommodations for women and children. They should also do everything within their power to promote the services that are already available for these vulnerable women.

As the scale of the pandemic was starting to become apparent, the Prime Minister boasted in the House of Commons that his Government has an “outstanding record in tackling violence against women and girls”. It was a dubious claim before coronavirus changed the landscape of the UK, emptying the streets and sequestering the population behind closed doors. It looks even more suspect now as thousands of vulnerable women look forward to the next few weeks not just with the anxiety we all feel during a global pandemic, but outright terror.

So writes the journalist David Thomas, who pens a weekly column in the Daily Telegraph charting his ongoing sex change, and which in his latest column involves telling readers all about the new breasts he has begun to grow as a result of taking female hormones. Thomas seems rather pleased with himself about the whole thing.

As a girl growing up my developing breasts caused me to feel self-conscious and embarrassed, purely as a result of the gawping, sexist males who made my life hell. This was an experience I shared with all the girls in my school, and indeed with girls everywhere. For Thomas, in contrast, flaunting his breasts is a thing of great joy and liberation.

The Telegraph writer’s views about womanhood have certainly evolved over the years. In 1992, Thomas, then a founder of the men’s rights movement, wrote Not Guilty: The Case in Defence of Men, a rant about how feminists have the brass neck to blame men for the terrible things they do to women, rather than themselves. To sum it up, his entire thesis seemed to be “Stop blaming men for the things that nasty women make us do to them!”

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In his hey-day as a men’s rights activist, Thomas suggested that one way for men to break out of the “prison of their gender” was to wear women’s clothing. This was at a time when feminists were critiquing the harmful beauty industry and arguing that femininity – the requirement to trot around in high heels, cake our faces with toxic chemicals and squeeze ourselves into restrictive and uncomfortable clothing – was a tool of our oppression, and an indication of our relative lack of freedom in comparison to that of men. But hey ho, each to their own.

In 1995, Thomas wrote an article in the Telegraph entitled: “If you can’t beat today’s women, then join them,” in which he argued that womanhood is filled with joys and privilege. As an example, he wrote: “A modern girl can play rugby, go to a strip joint, enter any profession and be applauded.” The piece was illustrated with a photograph of Thomas dressed in a flowery dress and holding a handbag.

This is the same man who complained in Not Guilty that “Western society is obsessed with women to the point of mass neurosis”. In the book, Thomas also stated: “The fact is, people are in pain. And right now, the ones who wear trousers and stand up to piss don’t seem to count for much when it comes to being healed.”

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Since he clearly thinks women have it far better than men, so perhaps his desire to live as a woman is his way of having it all; he has enjoyed a lifetime of male privilege and can now relax into womanhood. His columns tackle topics such as “facial feminisation”; how his sex change is going to leave him £100,000 short; who he will want to have sex with when he “becomes a woman”; and how to train his voice to be more ‘female’; and how women are very silly indeed to worry about ‘trans women’ in our public toilets. When I write about aspects of womanhood it tends to be about everyday issues facing the entire female sex, or large swathes of them, such as rape, sexual exploitation, domestic violence and murder, FGM, and forced marriage. Clearly I’m not prioritising the crucial issues that Thomas concerns himself with.

Ray Blanchard, the American-Canadian sexologist, best known for his research studies on transsexualism and sexual orientation, coined the term ‘autogynephilia’ in 1991 to mean “a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a female”. I reckon this term could apply to a man of 60 who seems thrilled when he looks down and sees breasts sprouting on his chest.

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Blanchard, who has been accused of transphobia and banned from Twitter (since reinstated) for arguing that transgenderism is a form of mental disorder, has written comprehensively on autogynephilia, and seems to confirm what many of us have suspected all along – that many heterosexual men who transition in later life often do so to satisfy a sexual urge.

At any rate it can hardly be said that men like Thomas really understand what it’s like to walk in our shoes. His case is similar to Bruce Jenner, who presented as a very masculine man, an Olympic athlete married to three different women with whom he had six children – before becoming Caitlyn Jenner. Jenner once declared that “The hardest part about being a woman is figuring out what to wear,” which is certainly a unique perspective.

I really could not care less whether Thomas calls himself Davina or David; I consider it to be entirely up to him what he wears and how he presents himself. But he has no earthly idea what it means to be a woman, and has spent the past three decades demonstrating just that. While feminists fight for the right for women to break free of oppressive sex stereotypes, the likes of Thomas claim them for himself. It is high time we called out narcissistic autogynephiliacs. I am sick of the cowards who hide behind the few of us who speak out against this male appropriation of what it really means to be a woman, as opposed to a male fantasy of one.

Become an adrenaline junkie
Says Polly Mackenzie, chief executive of Demos think tank

Tomorrow, Theresa May will probably have a lie in. Clean out some cupboards. The day after, she’ll go for a walk. Pop to the shops. She’ll tell herself she’s reconnecting with herself. Taking some time to heal. All of us who’ve lost a job in politics have told ourselves the same story.

By Saturday morning she will be crushingly, blunderingly, exhaustingly bored.

There is no job as fast and all-consuming as politics, and no job in politics faster or more all-consuming than being Prime Minister. In Number 10 if you haven’t made eight decisions before breakfast then you’re doing it wrong. Theresa May has been criticised for being slow-moving as PM, and yet she’s still working at a pace most people would find dizzying.

So my advice to Theresa is to refuse to slow down. Speed up. Don’t pootle in the garden or amble through the South Downs: go cliff diving. Learn to snowboard. Jump from a helicopter. If you want to be really brave, you could try taking out the bins. Find that political adrenalin in a daredevil lifestyle, and – like Ed Balls – you could find a future as a national treasure, after all. Maybe even as the next presenter of Top Gear?

Stay in the Commons
Says James Kirkup, Director of The Social Market Foundation

The first thing Theresa May should do is commit to standing for re-election in the next general election. The recent precedent of former PMs cutting and running away from the Commons at the first opportunity should be reversed. The Commons needs the experience and perspective of those who have held the highest office rather more than the lucrative international lecture circuit does. Stay in the Commons, Mrs May.

What to do there, though? A former PM has a platform and the ability to put things on the political agenda that few others can promote. Mrs May should dedicate herself to tackling domestic violence.

This isn’t really about legislative or administrative action. What she should seek is cultural change.

The furore over a late-night row at Boris Johnson’s flat revealed something grim about Britain: an awful lot of people still subscribe to the idea that domestic strife is no-one else’s business, that someone calling the police because they worry about a neighbour’s safety is to be pilloried not praised.

In the Johnson case there is no suggestion of any wrongdoing, but in too many other cases, where women are abused and killed, there is a history of neighbours, onlookers and even the police deciding that the preceding turmoil was “just a domestic” and looking the other way. That indifference helps get women killed.

Perhaps Mrs May’s finest moments as Home Secretary came when she confronted that attitude among the police. Once she’s free of high office, she should return to that territory, and deliver the same blunt message to the country as a whole.

Confront the realities of her ‘hostile environment’
Says Bidisha, broadcaster and author of Asylum and Exile

It’s patronising, sexist and ageist to suggest that a professional, ambitious woman with a lifelong political career should shut up, pack up, move on and tend her garden or get back in the kitchen. So I’m not going to suggest that Theresa May books a few countryside hikes of a lifetime, makes jam or sets up an allotment alongside that of her supposed opposition, actually Brexiteer ally Jeremy Corbyn, where they can toast the English sunset together with some elderberry cordial.

But I do think we’re in danger of over-sympathising with May, simply because of the political trials of the last few years. She certainly looks much more relaxed and relieved now. But before she was Prime Minister, she was the Home Secretary who introduced the (I believe) racist, sadistic and punitive ‘hostile environment’. She is one of the powerful chief architects of the divided, hate crime riddled England we live in now, not some innocent dupe who was left holding the baby.

I think Theresa May should live out her professional days working in a detention centre for asylum seekers, to see the pain she’s caused up close. Maybe it will humanise her approach somewhat. One can only hope.

Write her memoirs
Says Iain Dale, host of LBC 

We’re not very good at knowing what to do with ex Prime Ministers in this country. In America the country calls on the experience of ex-Presidents from time to time – and they enjoy a special place in the country’s affections and respect. Here? Not so much.

Theresa May would be well advised to take some time out to think about her future. It would be a big mistake to take the first thing that comes along. If Russell & Bromley or Christian Louboutin offer her an ambassadorial role, she should resist the temptation, even if it could lead to the delights of a lifetime supply of free footwear.

She should and must write her memoirs, even if they might not prove as financially lucrative as  those of other former prime ministers. It’s her duty to history to write them, even if the process would no doubt prove painful, rather than therapeutic.

My prediction is that she will set up a charitable foundation to promote women’s participation in politics and the protection of women against domestic violence, slavery and FGM. My further prediction is that her former chief of staff, Fiona Hill, will run it.

Become a councillor for Maidenhead
Says Marie Le Conte, author of Haven’t You Heard? Gossip, Power & How Politics Really Works

After three years in Downing Street, it is still unclear why Theresa May ever wanted to become Prime Minister. She clearly did not enjoy the constant media attention or the endless mingling, and it became very obvious very quickly that managing the expectations of several warring factions was not her forte.

What she has always obviously liked, however, is being an MP. From stuffing envelopes for her local party as a teenager to risking the integrity of the United Kingdom to keep her MPs together, she has consistently proved that she is more dedicated to the Conservatives than even most of her colleagues.

Another area close to her heart is Maidenhead; unlike several of her predecessors, she seems genuinely attached to her constituency, attending church there whenever she can and working as a marshal for the annual Easter race even when she was running the country.

So, what now? She could stay on the green benches as a devoted local champion, but she probably has had enough of Brexit wrangling for several lifetimes. Still, politics is in her blood, and going from No10 to retirement surely is a recipe for madness.

Instead, she could do worse than become a councillor in Maidenhead; attending village fetes, tending to neighbours’ hedge-based dilemmas, and staying well away from the national press.

In a way, it feels like the life she has always yearned for; she just took the long way round.

Do some volunteering
Says Julie Bindel, journalist, broadcaster and feminist campaigner

Theresa May, the sexists might say, should devote her time after retiring as Prime Minister to attending dance classes, and flying to NYC to look at shoes. I would far rather that she did volunteer work with asylum seekers and desperately poor migrants in this country, bearing in mind that she has spearheaded many of the heartless policies that have had a terrible effect on these populations.

May is responsible for the Windrush scandal, which wrecked lives and caused huge distress, and has also stood behind legislation that makes it impossible for asylum seekers to earn a living, whilst at the same time taking away their meagre benefits.

She might also like to spend some time taking calls on a crisis line for the victims of domestic violence.  The Tories, under her leadership, have not only close down refuges by removing resources, but are also responsible for the destruction of the criminal justice system which should be providing protection for the victims, and incarceration for the perpetrators that are a danger to women and their children.

May might benefit from a few days at a Rape Crisis Centre to see how the services operate on a shoestring, since her government took away the majority of funding for these support groups. The majority of Tory politicians do not live in the real world. May’s retirement could be the perfect opportunity for her to dip a toe in the water.

Play to her strengths
Says Tanya Gold, freelance journalist

Theresa May does not have a gift for joy – she wanted to be leader of the Conservative Party – so I cannot see her gambolling in the Isles of Scilly like Harold Wilson or sitting in a Farrow & Ball shepherd’s hut like David Cameron.

Prime Ministers used to stay in the House of Commons after they stepped down – or were ousted by a shrieking mob of wankers – but parliamentary democracy no longer has anything like that kind of lustre. So they skulk off, sulking, often to lament and too often to write a bad memoir.

My suggestion is that May should look to her gifts, which are bullying immigrants while pretending not to (the Windrush scandal should be a real stain on her conscience) and being shouted at by infantile men. She should become the head waitress at the awful London restaurant School Dinners, which serves school dinners to men too old to be at school, and like a good caning. It is as despairing as Brexit: “without a doubt the worst meal I have ever had in a London restaurant,” is an average review. It was as awful as the Paddington “fellatio cafe” which never actually opened. She could refuse to admit ethnic minority boys until they show her their papers.

School Dinners has closed down, but that only adds to the pathos.

Nothing
Says Peter Franklin, Associate Editor of UnHerd

What should Theresa May do next? Hmm, let’s see now… how about… nothing? Nothing at all, in fact.

One of the best things about May is that she became Prime Minister at a sensible age: 59. The trouble with young, energetic leaders of the Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau variety is what to do with them afterwards. You don’t want them haunting public life like the spectral Tony Blair or hiding in sheds like the sheepish David Cameron. It’s unseemly.

However, a mature leader – having done his or her last big job – can retire just like normal people do.

Having bungled Brexit and a general election, Theresa May is out on her ear slightly ahead of schedule; but a couple of years on the back benches and she’ll be good to go. There’ll be the inevitable memoirs of course, some charity work and such like, but other than that we need never hear from her again.

One would like to think that our ex-leaders would become wise elders, drawing upon their experience at the pinnacle of power to think deep thoughts about the system of the world. It says something about the shallowness of our politics (or perhaps the omertà of the establishment) that they have so little to share. Even Barack Obama, that most cerebral of ex-Presidents, hasn’t had much to say so far.

Therefore, let’s not demand too much of Theresa May. She’s only had three years in office, but it must have felt like thirty. She’s earned a long, happy and peaceful retirement.

When she was pregnant with her daughter Biddy, and on the run from her abusive former boyfriend, for example, she worked in a seamy Soho peep-show. Numerous clients took a perverse pleasure in ogling her expanding, naked form (the author spares us no gruelling detail: one particularly charmless crack-head barked the instructions: “Turn around and spread. I want to see that baby’s head”.)

Just as the reader is reeling from the crudity of the clientele, Carraway – as ever – complicates things with details of the unexpected. The day before she is due to leave to have her baby, the peep-show boss and other girls unveil a surprise: a baby shower, with a cake and a room crammed with gifts from the ‘regulars’ such as a buggy, sleepsuits, a Moses basket (“one man even gifted me his ex-wife’s breast pump just before he ejaculated into my booth.”)

Poverty is no place for the squeamish. One of the most useful things about money, it appears, is that it buys you some distance from the bodily fluids of strangers. In its absence, they’re everywhere: the traces of urine or bloodstains on old mattresses in rented accommodation; the ancient semen that is simply recirculated with a desultory mop around the peep-show floor; the blocked toilet and the pan of vomit in the women’s refuge that mysteriously appears every morning.

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Carraway herself does not seem very squeamish, particularly as a writer. There’s a lot in Skint Estate which is shocking, sad and scary, as well as funny and painfully honest.

The author exposes herself, knowingly, to the judgement of those in more secure situations, while demonstrating an intimate understanding of how those judgements operate. (At one point she describes herself, having adapted her accent and fallen in with a posh coterie of prosecco-quaffing Maida Vale mums, joining them in tut-tutting at a group of young working-class mums having an impromptu picnic with their babies, Maltesers and cans of beer. Afterwards, she feels ashamed.)

She writes, for example, about fleeing domestic violence with her young daughter. She went to live with a well-off man, Kingsley, who had formerly been imprisoned for assaulting her but to whom she is, in some ways, still close. It is not a wise choice, as her female friends tell her at the time, but then wisdom is sometimes a luxury available only to those with other options. Exhausted by financial precariousness, she takes up Kingsley’s unusual offer of posing as his wife in order to secure an inheritance from his father (Kingsley is now gay, and his father is homophobic).

If that sounds like a 19th century plot, then so is the economic situation in which this single mother finds herself: eking out low-paid jobs as a sex chat-line worker, a ‘secret shopper,’ a ‘web psychic’ and a ‘kiss ’n’ tell girl of misery porn’ supplying real-life stories to women’s magazines, but still not making enough to avoid the trip to the foodbank.

For a time such concerns abate, and Carraway temporarily enjoys a fixed roof over her head, and an abundance of branded items which she details with self-mockery mingled with the memory of desire: Boden clothes, a Rangemaster oven, Farrow and Ball paint, Le Creuset pans.

The author argues, accurately, that these are the means by which social acceptability is signalled, albeit a fraudulent kind of acceptability. Then again, it’s easy to dismiss the importance of brands if they’re financially within reach: when they’re not, they mean so much more.

But when Kingsley kicks off again, the safety suggested by the brands is destroyed: “WHORE has been sprayed across my Farrow & Ball No 26 ‘Down Pipe’ bedroom wall in red spray paint.” Even when things are bad, Carraway can’t help spotting little ironies: “He tries to break the Le Creuset pans, but they are very durable. They have a lifetime guarantee.”

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By Fiona Sturges

The intimate details of poverty aren’t discussed much in society, largely because – to generalise – the people who currently tend to write books and articles aren’t regularly exposed to such hardships, and the people who are exposed to such hardships don’t tend to write books and articles.

There is, of course, the noble journalistic tradition of immersing oneself in poverty for the purposes of writing about it, undertaken most successfully by George Orwell in his Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. But whatever insights such books deliver – and Orwell’s delivered many, including the unforgettable image of his landlord’s filthy thumb-print on an approaching slice of bread-and-butter – they cannot fully reflect the central panic of those who are trapped in the poverty cycle: that they will never, ever escape from it.

It is no coincidence that Carraway especially likes the writing of the US author Charles Bukowski, whose books, like his life, are full of financial uncertainty and an existence proudly played out beyond the boundaries of respectability. Like Bukowski, she keeps an authorial eye open even in the midst of howling chaos, mesmerised both by the potential awfulness and warmth of other people.

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Skint Estate, however, is also a sign of a recent phenomenon: that the publishing world is finally cracking open, after a long hiatus, a decisive conversation about class. It arrives just after Lowborn, the novelist Kerry Hudson’s powerful memoir of her peripatetic working-class childhood, being moved from one insecure dwelling to another by her troubled, heavy-drinking mother. Hudson’s book is written from the perspective of someone who has now escaped poverty, beginning: “Shall we start with a happy ending? I made it. I rose.”

Along with the tangible hardships and dangers she left behind – “sink estates, burnt-out houses and ice-cream vans selling drugs at the school gates” – is the weight of communal judgement that still falls upon the poor: “The names still ring in my head everyday: chav, scav, lowlife, NED, underclass, lowborn.” In her new lifestyle as an author, she can afford to eat well, enjoy films and books and can “heat my flat in the winter”. But there remains a sense of psychological dislocation: “I find myself unable to reconcile my ‘now’ with my past.”

Carraway and Hudson are two very different writers, and their experiences and voices are distinctively their own, but a couple of similar points arise from the histories they describe.

Both had ‘difficult’ mothers, although Carraway’s was more cruelly violent, both beating Carraway up and also rewarding her as a child for physically assaulting her own father as he slept. Hudson says of her grandmother – a former beauty who looked like Elizabeth Taylor in her youth – “my grandma was the most terrifying woman I’ve ever known” whose charm could easily turn to ice. Her mother, not ready for motherhood and largely adrift from Hudson’s father, struggled with depression and the erratic hope of fresh starts offered by unpredictable men.

There was love in the mix, too, although complicatedly expressed. For a child, it is the mother – so often harshly judged by society – who is nonetheless the last line of defence against a hostile world. But when the mother proves unreliable, buckling under wider pressures, what is it that keeps a struggling child afloat?

The lifebuoys, ideally, should be offered by wider society: the availability of social housing of decent quality, good state education with after-school provision, caring teachers, free school meals for children on low incomes, free or subsidised leisure activities, libraries that are geared towards welcoming children and encouraging reading. Such things were once imagined as the bedrock of a civilised society, and yet many of them – social housing and library provision in particular – have been steadily eroded, while teachers report trying to do their best for children in increasingly adverse circumstances.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, The Sunday Times carried a report on conditions in London’s Broadwater Farm housing estate, where the admirable headmistress of the estate’s Willow Primary School explained how she and her staff dreaded holidays, as many of their pupils would simply be kept indoors to keep them away from wider dangers of drugs and gangs. An accompanying photograph of accommodation for one family of six, a single cramped room with damp and ragged wallpaper, called to mind a Dickensian slum.

More from this author

Why has the diversity debate left white working-class boys behind?

By Jenny McCartney

The relatively modest leisure activities which come so easily to middle-class children – swimming, bowling, trips to the seaside or camping – are frequently unaffordable for families who are barely making ends meet: the parents can spare neither the money nor the time from work, often in jobs which do not provide holiday pay. A crowdfunded appeal will open up more opportunities for the Broadwater Farm children this summer – yet there are similar stories from streets and estates all over Britain.

There are some thoughtful initiatives happening: Hudson goes back to Hetton-le-Hole near Newcastle to revisit one of her old schools – where, unusually, she felt welcomed and not ‘embarrassed about being poor’ – which has just undergone ‘poverty proofing’, a process set up by a charity to help children from poorer backgrounds not feel excluded by details that adults often overlooked.

One significant source of embarrassment was at not having “the latest, expensive water bottle” – something the children were keenly aware of among themselves – which the school solved by introducing a standard, school-branded water bottle instead. Yet the great sweep of government policy, particularly in areas such as housing, has been travelling in the opposite direction: towards the entrenchment of social inequality.

Why is it so? Part of the answer may be that policy begins in culture, the government’s instinctive reading of the public mood. For many years the prevailing cultural attitude towards those on the poverty line has been one of suspicion bordering on contempt, with middle-market tabloid tales of chavs and scroungers milking the system, being amply rewarded with benefits for irresponsibility.

Programmes such as the Jeremy Kyle Show selected the poor and vulnerable and held them up for mass ridicule and moral lectures. Even talent shows such as the X-Factor relied upon a mood of mockery, singling out any ordinary person who dared to believe they were more talented than the panel of judges perceived.

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By Giles Fraser

In a world in which branded goods were increasingly used as a signifier of who and what you were – to a much greater degree, say, than when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s – to be unable to afford them took on a measure of stigma. The policies of austerity fell most heavily upon those who could afford it the least. Housing costs soared while affordable housing stock shrank.

At the same time as the cultural and political climate turned chilly for the working-classes, a new development entered the jobs market: the ‘gig economy’ and the ‘zero-hours’ model of employment rendered low-paid incomes more unpredictable, and ate away at many of the old securities, such as paid holiday and sick leave.

Despite high employment, we have seen the re-emergence of the ‘working poor’: according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the in-work poverty rate is now the highest it has been in the past 20 years. For young graduates without family money behind them, the rise of the unpaid internship often barred them from the first step on the middle-class jobs ladder. Money made the world go round, unless you didn’t have it in the first place.

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Warehouse work needn't be worthless

By Polly Mackenzie

The publishing industry, up until very recently, has often seemed keener to discuss inequalities of gender and race than those of income and class (although frequently all such questions are intimately intertwined). That changed somewhat with Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass (the writing of which was crowdfunded), a searing account of growing up in a precarious household in working-class Glasgow which won last year’s Orwell Book Prize.

One of the things that McGarvey noted was how often the middle and upper classes spoke about the poor, and how little the poor talked for themselves. When they did, they were encouraged to emphasise shockingly personal stories rather than put forward any wider political critique (McGarvey’s own mother was an alcoholic and drug addict, who died aged 36). Class, he said, remained the “primary dividing line” in society.

Writing a memoir from the margins of poverty and family dysfunction is a courageous act: while reading Carraway, Hudson and McGarvey you can often sense the authors steeling themselves for criticism, fearing that – by exposing a troubled family history or their own complicated struggles to survive – they are somehow betraying those closest to them while rendering themselves dangerously vulnerable.

Those self-protective reflexes were learned in childhood, and for good reason. Hudson recalls how terrified she was of writing Lowborn, because children in impoverished, tough childhoods quickly learn to cover up abuse or neglect with silence, and it’s a hard habit to break in adulthood: “when I sit down to write it feels like an actual physical force is stopping me”. To speak in your own voice is automatically to invite judgement.

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My social mobility shame

By Darren McGarvey

Carraway is particularly sharp on parodying all the bizarre little nuances of class sneering that stalk her as an adult: “I am a terrible, scrounging, despicable little woman – when I celebrate my birthday at the Harvester, I visit the salad bar an unacceptable amount of times … I’m so disgusting that I’ve never even been to Center Parcs.”

The new writers on class are braced against their work being consumed as “poverty porn” or “misery memoirs” but they clearly hope for something more from it. They are asking to take up space in the public imagination, for their histories to be heard and considered, and perhaps to contribute to a wider movement for social change.

In a broader sense, that ground is also covered by the new anthology Common People, edited by Kit de Waal, in which 33 writers “reclaim and redefine what it means to be working class”. Being working class does not, of course, have to mean a parent with addictions or a childhood facing homelessness – many of these stories are decidedly joyful – but each one investigates a memory or a conversation that is not routinely heard.

One such is Daljit Nagra’s tender story of his academically gifted schoolfriend Steve, and the cultural factors that led to Steve – a white working-class boy – abandoning school at 16 while Nagra carried on to higher education “driven by a migrant psychology to succeed to a status higher than my parents”. They are still friends, and there are more insights in that moving story alone than in many a doorstop policy document.

It is one of the most insidious effects of class snobbery that it has tended to promote an image of working-class people as estranged from cultural expression, as if the arts automatically belong to a sphere that is never fully considered theirs. Yet this latest wave of working-class writers are demanding to be listened to, telling their own stories with freshly compelling, poetic, poignant and sometimes furious voices.

I hope that it is more than just a temporary phenomenon, and that a fundamental cultural shift is underway. Perhaps thereafter a changing culture will finally speak truth to policy, and this time ask the question: “Can things be different now?”

Toxic masculinity didn’t damage Donald Trump’s chances, showing that millions of people still respond positively – or at least indifferently – to the near-parodic version of masculinity on display at his rallies.

Such behaviour, which takes traditionally masculine traits and exaggerates them to disastrous effect, isn’t innate to men, and is rejected by a growing number of them. But when it’s sanctioned at such a high level, we shouldn’t be surprised if individuals further down the food chain copy it and make similar assumptions about how they are entitled to behave.

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Is Prevent producing terrorists?

By Mike Martin

The UK, like many modern democracies, has a raft of laws that commit our society to sex equality. But the way people actually treat each other in private is another matter. Domestic abuse is widespread, suggesting that toxic masculinity taken to extremes continues to define and distort many intimate relationships.

At the same time, our understanding of the phenomenon has expanded: since 2015, the law has recognised non-physical forms of domestic abuse, such as keeping women short of money and ‘gaslighting’, a type of psychological manipulation that encourages self-doubt.

What’s gone underreported is the relationship between domestic violence and murder statistics. Men do become victims of domestic abuse, but they’re far more likely to be killed by strangers; fully half of female murder victims are killed by a current or former partner, compared to only 3% of male victims. Two women die at the hands of an intimate partner every week, according to official figures.

A significant proportion of those deaths involve ‘over-killing’ – the use of much greater force than is needed to kill the victim. It featured in two-fifths of cases recorded by the Femicide Census in 2017, including one where a woman was struck 40 times by an axe and another where the victim was stabbed 175 times. The following year, when the public conversation was all about knife crime, the number of domestic homicides in London more than tripled to 29.

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Don't base policy on moral panic

By Joan Smith

It’s a depressing fact that there isn’t outcry over these murders, harking back to a time when violence in the home was dismissed as ‘just a domestic’. It’s worrying, too: it’s gradually becoming clear that the impact of such high levels of anger, aggression and assaults isn’t limited to the private sphere.

In the US, where mass shootings without an obvious political motive are common, the link between what happens behind closed doors and acts of public violence has been showing up in research for some time. One of the best-known studies, carried out by an NGO called Everytown for Gun Safety, found that the perpetrator killed an intimate partner or family member in 57% of mass shootings between 2009 and 2014. In many of these cases, the victim had suffered abuse for years.

Devin Patrick Kelley, who had convictions for violence against his first wife and his step-son, was trying to kill the mother of his estranged second wife when he opened fire in a church in Texas in 2017, killing 26 people. Nine days later, Kevin Janson Neal riddled his wife’s body with bullets and hid her under the floorboards before rushing out of their home in rural California and murdering four more victims. The young man accused of killing 14 students and three teachers at his old school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 was well-known to the police because his adoptive mother called 911 so many times, pleading for help when he verbally and physically abused her.

Violence in the home doesn’t always stay in the home – and a similar pattern has begun to emerge in relation to terrorism. People are surprised when I tell them that all four fatal attacks in the UK in 2017 were carried out by men with a history of domestic abuse; they’re even more taken aback when I explain that the same background turns up in relation to terrorist attacks in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Australia. That’s because the public thinks about terrorism as ideological, carried out by men who’ve been radicalised by Salafist videos or neo-Nazi propaganda.

The truth, as I’ve discovered while researching the histories of dozens of terrorists, is that many of them began in the same way as mass shooters: abusing their families – and, crucially, becoming desensitised to the effects of violence – behind closed doors.

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Why has masculinity become a dirty word?

By Douglas Murray

Last week, harrowing accounts began to emerge of the final moments of the eight people who died in the terrorist attack on London Bridge and Borough Market in June 2017. Two members of the gang, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba, are known to have abused female family members – his wife in Redouane’s case, and his elder sister in Zaghba’s. The ringleader, Khuram Butt, had previously tried to leave his pregnant wife to fight for ISIS in Syria, but was prevented from leaving the UK by members of his family. He led the London Bridge attack just weeks after his second child was born, leaving his wife a widow and his children fatherless.

Two weeks later, a right-wing extremist, Darren Osborne, staged a copycat attack, ranting about killing Muslims and driving another rented van into worshippers leaving a mosque in north London. Osborne had shown no interest in politics until a few weeks earlier, when his partner had finally had enough of his abuse (one of his many convictions was for ABH against her) and threw him out of the family home.

So many terrorists are men who have been abusing women for years before they become killers. And it’s not hard to see how domestic abuse lays the groundwork. Few men escalate their behaviour to the extremes of violence, but those that do are accustomed to terrorising women and children – and enjoy the sense of power that goes with it. Don’t forget that some of the ‘foreign fighters’ who turned up in Syria and Iraq to fight for ISIS admitted that they were attracted by the idea of owning ‘sex slaves’, surely the most extreme form of domestic violence it’s possible to imagine.

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How America sanitised FGM

By Joan Smith

Toxic masculinity is creating a pool of men who are susceptible to the propaganda of terrorist organisations – men who are responding positively to messages legitimising the use of lethal force against civilians.

Shocking as all this is, some good might come of it. Terrorism isn’t usually perceived as male violence – with all the connections that implies. But once we understand the link, we’ll have a tool to help us identify dangerous individuals before they launch an attack.

Eighteen months ago, MI5 revealed that it has a list of 3,000 active suspects who might be in the process of preparing a terrorist outrage, along with 20,000 others who have been investigated but aren’t believed to pose an immediate threat. The demand on resources is enormous, given how many agents are needed to watch just one individual. But those with a history of domestic abuse should be the highest priority.

Paradoxically, while toxic masculinity is facilitating terrorist attacks, it could also be one of the biggest warning signs for counter-terrorist agencies. Keeping tabs on it may be a means of saving lives.

Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists by Joan Smith is published by riverrun on 16th May, £16.99