One could tell Clavicular’s lawyer by his jurisprudential profile, even before he got out of his car. Middle-aged, raincoat, grown-out and grayed Julius Caesar haircut and the confident, portly bearing of a lifetime of legal accomplishment. He was brash. You could feel how brash he was from behind the glass, how much Jameson he could put away in victory or late-night reconnoiterings. He opened his door and kicked his rumpled pant legs straight, before striding to the middle car and giving the window a curt knock of his knuckles. A young Jewish couple with a dog exited the other car on the left of the triumvirate. The man wore the largest yarmulke I’ve ever seen, so big you could see it from the front like a beanie. He and his girlfriend looked dressed for a high-school semi-formal in a Disney script. The TikTokers prowled some distance away as the lawyer and the dog-bearing friends converged on the middle car with Nevada plates. You knew who was in there. 

First out was a dark-haired middle-aged woman who, I thought, could only be Clavicular’s mother. They looked alike: same nose, same flex to the high cheekbones when she clenched her jaw. She had a maternal concern and loving gravity about her, as she held the door open for Clavicular’s spray-tanned girlfriend, Lily Snyder. Snyder is one of the smallest women you could ever see. In addition to the proverbial 10 pounds, the camera must put on half a dozen inches. Then, out he came, Clavicular in the flesh, with a gaggle of tall dorkish pals who looked as if they’ve been slouching on their looksmaxxing regimens. 

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For more than a year, Clavicular, or “Clav” as people call him, has dominated social media — and even made it into the style pages of The New York Times — for encouraging young boys to chisel their jawlines by smashing their faces with hammers, grow their penises by hanging weighted shopping bags from them for hours, and take meth to curb appetite. This is called “looksmaxxing,” and looksmaxxing allows one to “mog,” which means to dominate or overshadow someone in person. It’s worth noting that the term “mog” was derived by recluses on internet forums, who spend as little time as possible in rooms with real people, where “mogging” might come into play. Clavicular teaches that you can mog someone financially, or with your height or looks. Clavicular thinks he’s so handsome and buff that he mogs everyone just by appearing in front of them.

The press casts a jaundiced eye on him but largely allows that he is handsome. But nothing can prepare you for how very, very small he is in the flesh. As he passed the windshield of my car, it looked like he’d been shirking on his own looksmaxxing. Or perhaps there’s not much you can do with his physique. There is no way this self-proclaimed aesthetic model of masculinity is six foot two as he claims. His shoulders are small and narrow, and not a hint of musculature was visible through his tight suit jacket. His obsession with bodybuilding suddenly seemed warranted: he has no body. He dapped up his Jewish friend with the dog five-foot-ninedly. The friend went into the dap with the energy of someone who has watched too much Entourage, saying something like, “Whaddup playa. Let’s get this, boi.” The group all turned to go get it, and the friend transferred the leash of the dog to Clav. They formed a posse 10 people deep, and Clavicular didn’t exactly stride to the courthouse doors; perhaps it isn’t within his gait to stride. He is so short his head floated among a barrage of shoulders. 

There were no more than three local news stations and one national outlet at the doors of the courthouse, and yet as the Clavicular posse approached the steps, the lawyer screamed at the paltry sum of newscasters. “Let him through! Clear a path! Get out of the way! This is ridiculous! Let him through!” The dog began barking, and the media backed up to keep clear the already-open path. The young TikTokers came from behind and began shouting, “We’re with the BBC! Black c—k loves you, Lily! We’re with the BBC!” BBC, get it? They’d been practicing this accosting earlier. But rather than go into the courthouse, as is their constitutional right, they seemed frightened and peeled off from the group and ran back to the woods.

All their talk about the BBC was directed at Clavicular’s tiny little girlfriend, Lily Snyder. In Clavicular’s world, where the libido and sexual expectations have been formed entirely by the internet and porn, every woman is assumed to ultimately prize penis size above all else. And who, pray tell, has the largest penises? Not Clavicular and his friends, who film themselves discussing Gaussian distribution probabilities that prove conclusively that every girl they meet has had sex with at least one very large penis. Penises much larger than their own. They despair about it. 

That’s why Clavicular hangs shopping bags full of weights — or produce, it’s unclear — from the end of his penis. But we’re not there yet. 

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This was a revelation of the full scope of the Clavicular algorithm, internet pathology breaking into the real world. A premier brand of Vixen, one of the largest porn companies in the world, is “Blacked,” whose content focuses on white women cheating on their white husbands and boyfriends with black guys with very large penises. Clavicular’s content lives algorithmically within this cuckolding pathology. If you watch his videos on Twitter, say, to learn a little more about him before covering his rape arraignment, suddenly your video feed is filled with cynical slop podcast clips about penile insecurity, interviews with vapid white pornstars talking about the biggest black penises they’ve ever filmed with, how they recover afterwards with ice and days on the couch, and then those horrible softcore-porn fruit videos, in which AI-generated fruits have hypergamous sexual misadventures. (Those horrible, horrible fruit videos.) There’s also him consoling a depressive friend, who was recently cuckolded by a black sex performer after he lost a pathetic “boxing” match to him. You are but one thumb flick away on your feed from Clav to the “cuck” chair.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the mainstream young-American algorithm. At any rate, Clavicular does not have a very large penis; he has a normal penis, and he’s insecure about it. In Clavicular’s world, you can “mog” someone with your face or your finances, but there is no outmogging a very large penis. The frightened TikTokers have tried to symbolically “cuck” him, before cucking themselves by running away into the woods.

We filed into the court and sat in the pews. There is a courthouse physiognomy: faces that only a cop, military vet, or armed guard possess, and such faces abounded. There is also a physiognomy of the arraigned — the actual people who may or may not have committed some crime, assembled here. They appear sad, tired, nervous, accommodatingly polite, hopeful. A protester came in with a roller suitcase. Everyone looked at it and then at the guards with the same thought: it’s a bomb. The protester had tried to film himself arraignment-maxxing outside the courthouse. That is, he filmed the film crews and complained about how there was no story there. “Most journalists are Ivy-League educated and here they are sitting around doing nothing. Nothing’s going on here.” He refused to turn his mic off in the courthouse, and the guards escorted him out.

Clavicular’s lawyer waddled in at high velocity. With him was the woman whom I took to be Clavicular’s mother, but no Clav. The “mother” was very pretty but very thin. Out of vanity, she has made herself too thin as she deepens into middle age. She has a kind of beauty that is negated at the wrong turn or vantage, but amplified at the correct angle. This is the physiognomy that becomes obsessed with the camera, obsessed with its intimate angles. She knows what her good side is. 

She has the same nose as Clavicular, the same cheekbones, the same frame, the same vanity. Even with Clavicular out of the room, I felt they were webbed together. I could feel the genealogical join. She looked like she had done some crying leading up to this date, tears she had kept to herself. Courtrooms are asexual spaces, but any large gathering of humans will create a sexual field. She had the only sexual presence in the room.

Suddenly, out he came, walking in on his little legs alone, no average-sized males towering over him. We’ve seen him before, of course, but optimized for the American internet stream and not with our own eyes. I’ve long believed that Clavicular did not come to look the way he does through one-man hammer parties in his bedroom, but by the archaic process known as aging. But this belief did not hold up to scrutiny in the courtroom: he looks like he’s never aged. Clavicular looks like a little boy. But a chiseled little boy. Imagine a cherub making gains at the gym without growing a day older, and you get a sense of the confused physiognomy he’s cut the ribbon on. His testosterone levels are not exactly in orbit. He has no physical presence. There is no sexual energy about him. He is, after all, infertile (he says so himself) and one can feel it in his anti-magnetism. His arms are weird, and his biceps sit oddly high and near the armpit as if the structure was never meant to develop them, and his musculature is bewildered as to where to place them. I took back everything I had ever thought: his looksmaxxing is completely warranted. His frame was never meant to be big. He had to do something about how small he is. He has no legs.

He was small and nervous. There was a long, dry, white stain running down the bag of his right trouser leg — raw milk, semen, the possibilities are endless with a character like him. You could see it clearly when he stood up. He stood between his lawyer and the woman I thought was his mother. They are the same exact size. They have the same muscle mass. Clavicular has the body of a too-thin middle-aged woman. He sat down and stared ahead. He was handling himself well, but you could see a nervous twinge every now and then. When his lawyer bent over to whisper to him, he thought he was supposed to stand and jerked almost to his feet, but his lawyer indicated he could stay seated. He was such a little boy, I felt almost sympathetic. 

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Finally, the judge strolled in 20 minutes late, and we all rose. It felt a bit like the opening of a Catholic mass, and then we sat back down. But Clavicular was up first, so he and his lawyers stood back up. He had already surrendered his passport. The bail was set at $10,000. The judge asked if he understood all this. “I do, Your Honor.” There was neither contempt nor apathy in Clav’s voice. He was nervous, polite, good-willed, scared. He was a scared child trying to be polite. The judge rattled off more procedural prose, and Clavicular leaned into his microphone and said eagerly, of his own respectful volition, “Thank you, Your Honor.” But the judge was shuffling papers and missed this act of a respectful little boy on his best behavior. This tugged somewhat at the heart. The judge mogged Clavicular. 

The woman I thought was Clavicular’s mother turns out to be Melinda Thompson, a lawyer. But I do not throw my psychoanalytical intimation out with the bathwater. Standing side by side, the way she looked at him, I maintain there was something libidinal in her gaze. She saw herself in him. She loved him. And if this woman can love Clavicular, can gaze upon him with concern and worry, can I do that too?

I can’t. You see, Clavicular’s birth name is Braden Peters, and while Peters is something of a surname glowdown from “Clavicular,” that “Braden” carries vital information directly to the American gut. If we knew nothing about Braden but his name, we could intuit with no small accuracy his class, his bearing, his destiny: solvent, suburban, no personality, generically handsome and insecure about the size of his penis. If nomen est omen, then the Clavicular arraignment was really the story of the American “Braden.” The facts of his biography and the allegations of the case are all things a Braden would do. 

First, Braden was born in New Jersey. This is not a crime, but an affluent genesis in Hoboken — with a businessman for a father and a stay-at-home bodybuilder for a mother — does not bode well for the development of a personality. He attended a private all-boys Catholic high school, was bullied for being very small, and started experimenting with testosterone — formerly known as “going through puberty.” However, Braden belongs to a generation that has distinguished itself by thwarting the course of puberty and outsourcing it to third parties, and so he began taking testosterone, hitting himself in the face with hammers, and attaching weighted shopping bags to his penis. You know, to permanently stretch it. 

Braden was kicked out of Sacred Heart University in — you saw this coming — Connecticut, for selling drugs after just three weeks. This sounds halfway promising, until one realizes Braden was not inviting classmates into his room to get high, but to take off their pants and bend over so he could shoot them in the buttocks with steroids and help them make big gains in the gym. Expelled, Braden worked at a restaurant, polishing his 18-pack, hitting himself in the face with hammers, and microdosing meth to curb his appetite. Without college, Braden was sexually educated by porn and, insecure about his penis and having never seen Austin Powers, he got earnestly into penis pumps and began diversifying his natural penis-enlargement techniques from the rudimentary weighted shopping bag. 

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As all people do who are going up in the world, Braden went down to Florida and started streaming his life on Kick, the medium that has replaced reality television and monetized boredom. His manosphere predecessor is a bald, closeted delta male who feigns wealth by renting luxury cars and mansions. I’m speaking of Andrew Tate who, now caged and whimpering from jail for sex trafficking, has left Braden the last unwittingly self-satirical protagonist among the internet ruins; the lone voice expressing nausea at cunnilingus and explaining that attempts at producing a female orgasm are a bad ROI — better to optimize one’s ejaculato praecox.

This brings us to the innocence of Cape Cod. One summer during his rise in fame, when tiny little Braden was still 19, he filmed himself getting a 17-year-old girl drunk on his stream. (Correcting for Gen-Z psychology, they were then 13 and 12, respectively.) Braden had Ubered her over to his grandmother’s seaside McMansion with the promise of helping her become famous. According to the police report, the girl said hello to Braden’s grandmother and mother before climbing the stairs to Braden. Braden, she alleges, instructed her to say she is 18 on the stream and to pretend the vodka he gave her was water. 

On the stream, she becomes visibly flushed and intoxicated and says to Braden, leaning in for a kiss a floor above his granny, “Wait, I’m so drunk, though,” to which Braden says, “It’s OK,” and kisses her. 

After the camera turned off, Braden allegedly took the drunk young woman to his bed and began “throwing [her] in different positions,” as the criminal complaint alleges. When she woke up the next morning, it was to Braden already having sex with her and “pushing her head backwards.” When he was done, the complaint continues, he “coldly” ordered her the Uber home she’d expected the night before and — we imagine — gazed out over the ocean, brooding on the size of his penis. 

The world in its present form would not exist without the internet. We wouldn’t have the 1,001 gender identities without the fractalizing sales funnels of technocapitalism’s targeted marketing and audience segmentation. We wouldn’t have cancel culture without the medium from which to be canceled and through which to lodge anonymous protest. We wouldn’t have President Trump without Twitter’s creation of a “public forum” and  Trump’s presence and aptitude in such a place. And finally, we wouldn’t know who Braden Peters is without this ecosystem. We wouldn’t, in an analog world, open up the newspaper and find an interest piece on a guy named Clavicular going around to obscure college campuses encouraging young men to put their penises in tubes and vacuum pump them. In a parallel, still-analog world, “Bradens” are still allegedly inviting young women to their grandmother’s McMansions, getting them drunk to have sex with them, waking them up in the morning by having sex with them, and then coldly whisking them away — we just don’t hear about it nationally. 

The defining feeling of this century and driving force of technocapitalism is boredom. Mankind’s attention span has been caged these three decades in the visual medium of the internet, whose momentum relies entirely on monetizing the metadata this boredom gives off. Boredom and brief reprieve from boredom: ejaculation. The video gamer takes a break from gaming to ejaculate to porn. The pornstars — Sky Bri, Mia Malkova — now take a break from porn to stream themselves playing video games, oftentimes with dorkish video gamers. It was inevitable that the pornstar would find her way into a deeper intimacy with her true audience. Clavicular would not exist without the internet, but he also would not exist without porn. If porn is tails, Clav is heads, and together they make the Janus-face of the internetic structure.

Outside of figures like UnHerd’s Yanis Varoufakis, most of the Left has never woken up to this reality: when automation replaces labor, the exploitation of user metadata replaces the exploitation of labor. In so doing, we continue widening the frontiers of what we outsource to the computer: we have outsourced natural memory to the “download” and the “file save”; we have outsourced public discourse to tweets; writing to podcasts; sex to masturbation and pornography. If we are indeed building a machine god through the internet and AI, porn is its cybernetic libido and sexual imagination. This is Braden’s world. Braden’s “stream.” He is a next-gen narcissus staring at his reflection. You are driven by boredom to his stream, and he makes money off your observation. But you are not looking at him, you are looking at his reflection. Braden Peters is making money staring into the mirror and you’re staring in it with him. Marshall McLuhan clarified the meaning of the Narcissus myth in Understanding Media: the viewer does not see their reflection as their reflection, but confuses it for an external object. Clavicular, a tiny little fella, has conclusively confused himself for his buff internet image. I went into this wanting to push his face into the water. But the tenor of our age is irresolution, and I must say I’m not bored by what I’ve seen. Not at all. In fact, I think I’ll come back Nov. 24, for the next hearing on probable cause, in the flesh, for the human observation of Braden Peters. I don’t want his face to fall through the water just yet — not until society is ready to give him a swirlie.

Heading out of the courthouse, Clavicular is height-mogged by everyone: his friends, the guards, the newscasters. His tiny head bobs in a sea of normal-sized people. He is asked for comment from his right. He turns his head so far right that he gives the newscaster his left profile all the way behind her. Jawlines and profiles become very important to people so shy they can’t look others in the eye.

His lawyer is chewing everyone out again. “Clear a path! Let him walk!” And the TikTokers meet him at his car. They yell: “BBC owns you! BBC owns you!”

That, of course, immediately raises a simple, shocking question: why did British police services turn a blind eye to the gang rape of tens of thousands of young girls? I should have a fair idea. I was a police officer for 25 years, including five as a detective in the Met’s anticorruption command. Working on sensitive investigations into police wrongdoing, I saw first-hand how law enforcement responds to scandals and crises. I’ve watched senior officers, faced with uncomfortable truths, wriggle like greased piglets. I’ve witnessed logic-defying decisions for nakedly political reasons. I am firmly of the view, then, that the whole scandal has unambiguously revealed rank cowardice by constabularies across the UK, where the most senior whistleblower in the entire country was a lowly detective constable.

The answer, in the end, is simple. Racism, for police services from Chester to Penzance, remains the original sin. From the Scarman Report to the Macpherson Inquiry, the police have long served as Britain’s sin-eaters, devouring social problems on our behalf. As former Met Commissioner Sir Robert Mark famously wrote: “The police are the anvil on which society beats out the problems and abrasions of social inequality, racial prejudice, weak laws and ineffective legislation.” That was over 40 years ago, and little has changed since. This institutional reticence over race goes beyond the police themselves: even the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s (IOPC) review of the rape gang scandal tiptoed around the heritage and religion of offenders.

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There are two main reasons why race remains such a potent factor in police decision-making, The first is the politicisation of policing, and its role in supporting the state-mandated policy of multiculturalism. Ever since the late Eighties, successive governments have baked antiracism into law. The reasoning here was essentially benign: nobody would deny racism has long dogged British policing, from the bungled investigation into the Stephen Lawrence murder to concerns over stop and search.

Yet given the scale of the rape gang scandal, is it now unreasonable to ask if any babies were chucked out with the bathwater? I think they were. I describe it as “Tsunami Policing” — where the solution to a policing problem is, initially, like a gentle offshore wave. Then, as it rushes towards the landmass of reality, urged on by opinion formers and politicians and grasping police managers, it becomes a monstrosity. This describes the post-Macpherson Met’s obsession with race, whereby Scotland Yard played “trendy vicar” one minute, Torquemada the next. By the mid-2000s, any ambitious officer unwilling to play nice still was unlikely to make National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) rank, the policing equivalent to army brigadiers and above. This quickly shaped decision-making at senior levels across the country: what happens in London soon spreads to provincial forces.

With so many incentives to toe the line, no wonder more free-thinking coppers stayed away, with the remainder grimly susceptible to groupthink. We used to call it “having the CD Rom inserted” — whereby a reasonably competent copper would morph into a pound-shop commissar to achieve the next rank. The next time you watch a press conference with a senior officer, play “bullshit bingo” with the language they use, usually involving words like community, proportionality and diversity. Meanwhile, away from the TV cameras, thousands of young girls were raped, abused and treated like chattel in their own hometowns.

The second reason why race is a third rail issue for police? Public order. The raison d’etre of British policing, imprinted into its DNA, is Keeping the King’s Peace. And as we saw in Southport and elsewhere last summer, austerity-ravaged services are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale disorder. Riots, especially those with a racial element, are the ultimate manifestation of police failure, even as forces like Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire are petrified of seeing a repeat of the 2001 disturbances in Oldham. I suspect, then, that chief constables were inclined to see the rape gang scandal as another intractable problem, confined to a marginalised section of the white underclass. To pick at that particular scab might risk public disorder. Better to speak to “community leaders” — to keep the peace, even at the price of allowing organised paedophile networks to operate in plain sight.

Given the Government’s unwillingness to launch a full public inquiry, we’re sadly unlikely to see a candid account of the informal “corridor conferences” held at force HQs, let alone the “Gold Group” decision-making meetings held by senior officers. Instead, under-trained and under-resourced constables, working in child protection, will be used as scapegoats. Far better, instead, to boost transparency at the highest levels: wouldn’t it be glorious if officers at Gold Group meetings were forced to wear body-worn video cameras?

Of course, a lack of accountability infects every corner of the British state: see the public inquiries into Royal Mail or Covid. Yet, to my mind, this gives the police even less of an excuse. We expect the police to be better, to be held to a higher standard. There’s an old saying in the job: the public get the police they deserve. Except they don’t. The public gets the police a handful of technocrats and opinion-formers think they deserve. During the Blair years, a clique of lawyers framed laws like the Human Rights Act to embed progressive politics, and politicised continental-style judiciaries, into our national life.

A flexible, Common Law system was replaced by all-knowing, all-seeing diktat, designed to ensure fairness and equality and unicorns dancing on rainbows. And with them came reams of forms and risk assessments and meetings and committees: the panacea of multi-agency working, with police units moving into town halls and going native with their social worker colleagues. Suspects became “clients” and cases were viewed through the prism of equity rather than justice. Beard-stroking and hand-wringing became the order of the day, freeing officers to attend development courses and conferences while they planned their next promotion.

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Of course, race wasn’t the only issue. Investigations into the rape gangs disaster have discovered the usual witches brew of public sector failure, from parlous resourcing to recruitment, training and retention. Yet all this surely raises one more question: what can be done? If nothing else, we need the same enthusiasm for reform as we saw in the Nineties, when a laddish “canteen culture” was rightly expunged, even as their technocratic replacements just made the same mistakes in reverse. As for more specific changes, there are currently far too many forces, leading to inconsistencies in operational practices and decision-making. Another problem involves a lack of proper oversight; far better to replace the disastrous Police and Crime Commissioner experiment with non-partisan local police boards. The post-Blair mass of ill-considered law needs to go too. On that last point, the police should find some courage, finally calling bullshit on time-wasters like Non-Crime Hate Incidents.

In the meanwhile? The centre cannot hold. The rape gangs scandal is the quintessence of two-tier policing, which is probably why the Government is more comfortable with public inquiries into ancient history like the Miners’ Strike. Whatever the answer, it requires moral courage. I hope, somewhere inside the policing machine, a new generation of coppers is prepared to show some minerals, to shake the tree, to remember why they joined in the first place. To police, in short, without fear or favour — because who wants to live in a society that stands by while children are raped?

For women, this problem is sharpened by the twin pressures of sexual violence and pornography. Last week, the Edinburgh sexual crisis centre Beira’s Place reported that growing numbers of young women were seeking counselling after having been choked during sex. The Times responded with harrowing testimony from the mother of Emily Drouet, a fresher at Aberdeen University who killed herself in 2016 after being physically and mentally abused by her ex. In court this ex, who was known as the “alpha male” on campus, admitted to seizing her by the neck. Elsewhere in the story, a sex worker blacks out after being strangled by a trusted regular, who then rapes her unconscious body. “She thought she was in control,” says a sexual crisis worker. How many of us have said the same?

Women are now rarely shamed for sexual desire; on the contrary, they are shamed for not having appetites for acts which, not too long ago, were quite fairly viewed as degrading or disgusting, or both. As sex is “liberalised”, the scenarios we conjure up during intimacy are becoming more harrowingly patriarchal. It would seem that sex-positive feminists are, on this issue, becoming strange bedfellows with pornographers and the ever-escalating super-stimuli they concoct. These feminists have also taught us, among other harmful falsehoods such as “you can buy a woman’s consent, and she’ll happily sell it to you like the liberated businesswoman she is!”, that it is perfectly normal for men to desire to inflict physical harm on the women they sleep with. This in itself should remain, as it was not too long ago, extremely controversial. After all, if feminism is all about choice, then we must be absolutely sure that the choice to be brutally choked by a boyfriend is one we make out of genuine desire, and not ambient pressure and shame about being called frigid.

What, exactly, is so empowering about being choked? And why is it that the most radical, liberating acts of the modern sexual repertoire are those which rehearse the most oppressive, shackling truths about being a young woman in a modern city — that at least one of the men a few paces behind you at night might want to strangle you, to debase you? It might be that our male partners simply don’t notice the endless news stories that underlie these fears: most recently, the trial over the 37-year-old NHS worker Natalie Shotter, who was orally raped to death on a park bench. Having seen such stories, a woman’s instinct when feeling a hand creep up her neck and tighten out of nowhere might reasonably be to slap it away in rage. If feminism cannot stop women being made to do things that disgust, hurt and frighten them, what is it for?

Once, sex itself was transgressive — so much so that Anne Boleyn succeeded in changing the national religion by withholding it. Now, we are in an arms-race of sexual extremity, propelled by the internet and an ever-more-casual dating culture. Most of the young women I speak to say they’ve been choked without permission. Many of them chirp, “but I don’t mind, of course!” with a coquettish glance. Then, upon further questioning, they begin to ask themselves whether they do actually like it — or whether they’ve simply been going through the motions. It’s an uncomfortable realisation.

Here, the Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray has something to say. In a more convincing echo of John Berger’s theory that “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”, Irigaray writes that women derive “vicarious pleasure” from pleasing men — though indifferent, or even repulsed, themselves. Sex is a “masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own… she does not know, or no longer knows, what she wants”. When Irigaray was writing in the Eighties, modern kink culture was still contained — it was born in the gay leather bars of the Fifties, working its way into top-shelf magazines such as Bizarre and the mainstream via The Rocky Horror Picture Show before becoming a routine, even perfunctory, part of internet pornography. Today, Irigaray’s once radical take seems depressingly conventional and hard to argue against. Young, inexperienced women, made to feel prudish or illiberal for not wanting to feel scared or unsafe during sex, go through the motions of ever more extreme acts; the validation they receive, apart from those — I suspect, a minority — who genuinely enjoy “breath play”, is the “vicarious pleasure” Irigaray envisioned.

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Sex is the most political thing in the world; the idea of it being a space free from the power dynamics of gender, where being “submissive” and “dominant” is entirely disconnected from the fact of — in heterosexual arrangements — one partner generally being easily able to overpower the other, is pure fantasy. There is nothing wrong with finding those physical realities themselves erotic — and with discussion, and trust, people should do whatever the hell they like. But for the submission, even hurting, of every woman a man sleeps with to be so routine as to be unannounced suggests little to no interest in what women want. This is not the noble act of subversion which kink is so often breathlessly told to represent. Nor is the claim of sex as a politics-free zone — chill, babe, all the other girls do it! — evenly meted out; in one rattling breath, young women are told not to take unconsensual slapping, choking or spitting as a sign of a troubling thirst for sexual violence — so judgemental! — but also to respect a partner’s proclivity for those things as a sainted feature of their identity. It is this mindset which has fostered a culture in which a middle-aged bloke feels comfortable standing at a bus stop on Battersea Rise with a furry tail and gimp mask — a recent sighting in the wild to which not only I, but an entire busload of Year 7s, was recently treated.

The thing about sex is that precisely because it is so swamped in political factionalism, it is the subject, perhaps aside from death, most prone to the airiest theoretical concoctions, the most pretentious, hopeful bullshit. Take Audre Lorde’s vision: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life-force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” That such a lofty take has avoided outright ridicule — and has, I suspect, worked its way into the notebooks of nose-ringed undergraduates since Uses of the Erotic was first published in 1978, goes some way to explaining the aesthetic problem that “prudish” feminists have when saying that maybe not every woman should be choked. “Sex-positive” feminists insist that to question kink or to avoid degrading acts is to live within “negativity” and to be joyless. How different is this from the million times we’re told we’re “no fun” for refusing things — that the last girlfriend did it, why can’t you?

While there is a place for dreamy empowerment narratives about sex, a feminist needn’t assert it in every avenue of her life, least of all the office. In reclaiming female sexuality in this way, Lorde connects it to the general virtues of women, women who dance, love, work. What about the off-duty feminist, prone and alone in her bed as I am now, who is currently doing none of those things? What about the vast stretches of time when, rather than ravenously exploring subversive sexualities and wresting eroticism from the clutches of our oppressors, we just want to scroll on Twitter instead? I am making the case for a more brutal vision of female sexuality, one which — alongside seeking no doubt world-shaking experiences — sometimes simply cannot be arsed, and is equally blunt about brushing off coercion to do things which are, frankly, grim. Let’s uncouple kink from virtue and bring it all back to basics: do I like this, do I like them? And if you don’t, get the hell out of there.

But she was told her presence in the courtroom “would give a bad impression”. What the prosecuting counsel meant by that was: a jury might expect a real rape victim to be too distraught to listen to the details of the attack; by doing so, she might undermine her credibility. Instead, she sat outside the court while her elder brother relayed all the details.

Miss M had been traumatised by the performative nature of the cross-examination — the way the defence advocate (the Scottish equivalent of a barrister) “played to the jury” as he repeatedly accused her of lying. When Coxen was acquitted, via Scotland’s controversial and soon-to-be-scrapped Not Proven verdict, she was left asking herself what she might have done wrong.

“So much of it seemed to come down to the way we, as complainers, present to the jury,” she says, “the way we have to behave in order to be seen as ‘good victims’. I wondered: ‘Should I have behaved in a different way? Would the jury have seen me as a victim if I had demanded a screen?’”

Three years later, Miss M successfully brought civil proceedings against Coxen. Unlike in criminal cases, in civil courts complainers are offered a choice: between having their case decided by a jury or a sheriff. Miss M opted for a sheriff. This time, she says, she was able to sit in her own section of the court, rather than in the public gallery — and all the theatrics were gone. “The questioning style of the defence advocate in the civil case was so much better,” she says. “He had to do his job and test my evidence, but he wasn’t playing a game; he wasn’t trying to get a reaction out of me.”

A crucial difference between criminal and civil proceedings is that a prosecutor must prove the defendant’s guilt “beyond reasonable doubt”, whereas someone bringing a civil claim can succeed in proving their case if it is “more likely than not” what happened.

Nonetheless, as one of only two women in Scotland whose allegations of rape have been through both the criminal and civil process, Miss M’s experience could be regarded as a litmus test in the hostile debate currently polarising the country’s criminal justice system. It centres on a proposal — to find out what would happen if a rape trial took place without a jury.

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On one side of this debate are Lady Dorrian, Scotland’s second most senior judge; the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain; and Rape Crisis Scotland. All of them are currently backing a pilot of juryless rape trials — proposed in the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill currently going through Parliament. On the other side of the debate is (almost all of) the rest of the legal profession: the Law Society, most KCs, and the Scottish Solicitors Bar Association (SSBA), which represents defence solicitors and has already pledged to boycott the pilot.

Those in favour of it believe some jurors allow their judgement to be influenced by “rape myths” — the myth that false allegations are common, for example, or that a delay in reporting makes a complainer less credible. They argue that defence lawyers play up to those myths — and point to the low conviction rate — 51% for rape compared to an overall conviction rate of 91% across all offences. Juryless trials, proponents contend, could provide a more effective, less adversarial process.

Those against the pilot see it as a direct attack on one of the most sacred tenets of British justice: if members of the public can be trusted to deliberate on complicated fraud cases, if they can be trusted to set aside racial or sectarian prejudices, why can’t they be trusted to disregard rape myths? They also argue that the low conviction rate is not down to rape myths but to insufficient evidence. “I have never seen anything to suggest juries don’t convict in cases where the charge has been proved beyond reasonable doubt,” says Thomas Leonard Ross KC.

“A lot of rape cases come down to the question of consent; they rest on the jury accepting the credibility of one individual over another. Both parties may be believable, but the jury is told it’s not a straight 50:50. It’s up to the Crown to prove the case. If the jurors feel they couldn’t have it on their conscience for someone to be jailed for six years on the basis of the evidence they’ve heard, they will [acquit].”

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Ross says changes to the system mean defence advocates now face heavy restrictions, known as rape shield provisions, in what questions they can ask — to the point where material they consider significant is being deemed inadmissible. He agrees that questions about previous sexual history are not appropriate, but he says restrictions “can even include what happened in the lead-up to the alleged incident. Take a situation where a girl texted a boy earlier in the evening to suggest they meet up for sex, though she had told the police a different story. Of course she is entitled to change her mind, but, at the very least, these messages show she was not honest in her initial statement.”

Over the last 12 months, the defence lawyers’ outrage has spilled out into the media — with the most senior woman at the Scottish Bar comparing the proposal to Adolf Hitler’s scrapping of juries after the 1933 Reichstag Fire trial. That the debate has become so acrimonious can be partly explained by the context in which it is unfolding. The pilot is just one of a panoply of proposed reforms — which include scrapping the Not Proven verdict, reducing the number of jurors from 15 to 12, and setting up a specialist sexual offences court. And it coincides with an exodus of defence solicitors, after dramatic cuts in the Scottish government’s funding of legal aid.

One lawyer, who did not want to be named, pointed to the fact that criminal defence solicitors earn far less than those working for the prosecuting authority — even though the former work longer, more unsociable hours. “It’s not just that defence solicitors feel they are being screwed — although they are,” he says. “It’s the visible reality that the whole justice system is in ruins.”

So, resentful as they are about their own plight, defence solicitors may be predisposed to oppose a reform that will change the way their clients are represented — and on which, they insist, they were not properly consulted.

But the juryless rape trial pilot is also caught up in the backlash to the #MeToo movement. Some defence lawyers I spoke to believe the pendulum has already swung too far in favour of rape complainers, and that “special interest” organisations such as Rape Crisis Scotland — and, in particular, its chief executive Sandy Brindley — are pursuing a feminist agenda.

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For their part, feminist campaigners accuse the Faculty of Advocates of misogyny. They cite, for instance, its failure to adequately deal with lawyers such as Brian McConnachie KC — who in 2020 said in a text that he “might shag [Sandy Brindley], just to have something over her”.

McConnachie also sent a sexually explicit photograph of himself from the toilets of a High Court — shortly after defending a rape accused. It took three years for him to be fined £8,000 for professional misconduct. He was not suspended from practising as a lawyer or expelled from the Faculty.

There are many legitimate questions to be asked about potential juryless rape trials. It’s unsurprising though, that for some, the legal profession displays a “nothing-to-see-here” attitude that smacks of complacency.

Appearing before Holyrood’s justice committee in January, the Lord Advocate delivered a damning assessment of the experience of rape complainers: “What is happening at the moment just isn’t good enough,” said Dorothy Bain.

“All the efforts made over the years to bring in changes, such as the rape shield provisions … and supportive measures for vulnerable witnesses — none of that has shifted the dial on the basic problems: complainers’ anxiety about becoming involved in any way in the criminal justice process … and a lack of understanding and support that leaves them feeling abandoned.”

The Lord Advocate said “the ordinary adversarial approach” was not suited to sexual offence cases and referenced an appeal court judgement from 2020 — in which the complainer had been awarded damages for trauma caused by serious deficiencies in the way the trial was carried out. Scotland’s most senior judge, Lord Carloway, criticised the judge, the Crown and the Defence, adding that the woman had been subjected to repetitive, and at times irrelevant, questioning, without any intervention.

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It was in this context that Lady Dorrian’s Review was set up, and her recommendations made. Of these, the pilot of juryless rape trials proved the most controversial. The research that informed it was contested. Analysis of the deliberations of “mock juries”, carried out by academics from Glasgow and Warwick Universities, found “considerable evidence” of jurors expressing unfounded assumptions. But a UCL study — which involved “real” jurors later completing a “rape myth” questionnaire — found that claims of bias in judging sexual offences cases were “not valid”. The two studies have been pitted against each other, though all that this contradiction demonstrates is the difficulty of gathering conclusive data when you are legally prevented from interviewing actual rape trial jurors about their actual deliberations.

Many of the details of the pilot — including its length and how it will be evaluated — are yet to be determined; but, if it is passed by Parliament, juryless rape trials will be used for all cases involving a single complainer and single accused.

The conviction rate for such cases is thought to be around 25%. Brindley, of Rape Crisis Scotland, claims this statistic shows “guilty men are regularly walking free”. She points to research from New Zealand showing that defence lawyers would opt for a jury nine times out of ten, because, when it comes to the credibility of the complainer, “it is easier to persuade a jury to entertain doubt”. This is not so very different from what Ross has told me; but while he views the caution of jurors as a crucial protection for the accused, Brindley views it as a barrier to securing justice for complainers.

Another potential benefit of the juryless rape trial would be the requirement that judges provide written “reasonings” for their decisions — something juries are not asked to do. The impact of such reasonings has already been seen in the three civil cases, in which the sheriff or judge’s explanations brought clarity and closure. “I was badly affected by not understanding why the Not Proven verdict had been given in the criminal trial,” Miss M says. The sheriff in the civil case found Coxen guilty on the balance of probabilities. “The judgement helped me understand what evidence had been considered important, and the thinking behind his decision.”

Defence lawyers on the other hand argue that judges are as likely to have unconscious biases as jurors — perhaps more so, given the narrow and socially-conservative demographic from which they are drawn. This is something that worries some complainers too. “The majority of judges are middle-aged, privately-educated men,” defence solicitor Matthew McGovern says. “This is significant when it comes to the type of single complainer/single accused rape cases the pilot is seeking to address, because those types of nights out, where there is alcohol and drugs consumption, are far removed from the lives judges have lived.”

Of even greater concern to McGovern, who is on the SSBA committee, is the possibility the pilot will place undue pressure on judges to return guilty verdicts. He believes this pressure would come not just from politicians — who might measure the success or failure of the pilot by its effect on the conviction rate — but also from public opinion, via the media.

“Juries are anonymous,” McGovern says. “Judges, on the other hand, are high-profile figures with accountability, but no right of reply. If they acquit ‘too many’ people, there will be FOI requests and front-page stories.

“I’m not suggesting those judges will be sitting there with a calculator working out how many people they should acquit and how many they should convict; but it will become an unconscious bias, which, ironically, is the very thing the pilot is seeking to address.”

Moreover, a lack of financial capacity means Scotland’s proposed juryless rape trials would be presided over by a single judge, rather than the panel of judges adopted in other jurisdictions that have dispensed with juries — most recently France. Simon di Rollo KC, who represented Miss M at her civil case, is one of the few advocates to broadly support a time-limited pilot — yet even he thinks a single judge set-up is less than ideal. “We all have our idiosyncrasies, and one person won’t necessarily spot everything,” he says. “The opportunity to discuss [the case] would obviously improve the decision-making process.”

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With the Law Commission of England and Wales also proposing the introduction of juryless rape trials, the progress of the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill is being closely followed south of the border as well. Whether the pilot actually happens will depend at least in part on the Scottish government’s willingness to take on the SSBA — which is bent on a showdown. “No client of McGovern Reid will ever be exploited as part of a social experiment to satisfy the demands of the Special Interest Groups,” McGovern’s pinned tweet says.

“I think this is the hill [defence lawyers] are going to die on,” says Brindley. “You have to ask yourself what it is that they are scared of? Do they not trust judges to be able to evaluate evidence or is it that they trust judges too much to evaluate evidence and they worry there will be fewer acquittals?”

McGovern is clear his main fear is that the last remaining protections for his clients will be removed. He also fears the politicisation of the justice system will lead us into dark places. He says you only have to look at America to see what’s at stake: “Trump has politicised and weaponised the entire system; only anonymous juries have stood up to him.”

When I ask him if sabotaging a pilot passed by the Scottish Parliament would, in itself, be undemocratic, he insists the opposite is true. “First of all, [defence lawyers] are not compelled to try to make the best of what we consider to be poor legislation,” he says. “But also, we have concerns about the politicisation of the judiciary undermining the rights of ordinary citizens, so we think we are protecting democracy.”

Judge-only rape trials have the potential to forever change the Scottish legal system. Once juries are no longer inviolable, what’s to stop them being removed from other types of trials, such as those involving domestic violence, in which many of the same arguments would apply? No wonder the legal profession is so exercised. And yet, perhaps they do hold the answer to the problem Bain identified: the reluctance of many rape complainers to come forward, and the retraumatisation of those who do. We won’t know, unless the pilot goes ahead.

“Everyone keeps saying it’s not a fair trial without a jury, but I didn’t feel I got get a fair trial with a jury,” Miss M says. “When people say the name of the advocate that cross-examined me in the criminal trial it takes my breath away more than when they say ‘Stephen Coxen’.

“I know how much better the civil case, without the theatrics, was. It feels ridiculous that some lawyers aren’t willing to at least give the pilot a go.”

There was, of course, a public inquiry. It concluded that most of the diagnoses by Higgs and another paediatrician, Geoff Wyatt, were incorrect. Higgs was subsequently banned by her local health authority from dealing with child sex abuse cases. But this scandal is not what it seems, and it destroyed far more than the careers of two medics. It baked into child protection services a scepticism of children’s accounts of their own experiences.

The campaigning journalist Beatrix Campbell has followed the Cleveland case since it broke in 1987. A year later, her first book on the scandal, Unofficial Secrets: Child Sexual Abuse — The Cleveland Case, was published. In it, Campbell examines how Cleveland council made child sexual abuse a priority, engaging with medical experts and innovative diagnostic procedures, only to be met by a backlash from statutory services. Children had not been abused, it was decided. Rather, the scandal was a witch-hunt against parents.

Now, her new book, Secrets and Silence: Uncovering the Legacy of the Cleveland Child Sexual Abuse Case, revisits the scandal — with the proof necessary to back up her earlier suspicions. The 30-year rule allows certain government documents to be released publicly three decades after they entered the National Archive. Thanks to this, Campbell found evidence that “there was a cover-up, and that the doctors and social workers were not wrong about so many of those children having been sexually abused”.

Shocking failures led to the government inquiry coming to a completely false conclusion. For instance, the only international expert consulted was Dr Ralph Underwager, who in 1992 helped found the False Memory Syndrome Foundation — an organisation that claimed counsellors and parents were manipulating kids into believing they had been abused. Underwager became mired in controversy when, a year later, he gave an interview to a Dutch paedophile magazine in which he said that paedophiles should “boldly and courageously affirm what they choose”.

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Campbell also found evidence that the Government knew at least 80% of the diagnoses of these children were correct — but hushed it up because the Treasury had warned that dealing with this abuse would be expensive. Saving money was more important than saving children. Local MP Stuart Bell set the agenda, saying it was simply “not possible” that all these children could have been abused. He became, says Campbell, “the advocate for accused adults”. Margaret Thatcher, who was prime minister at the time, made clear her deep mistrust of social workers, and of feminists. Two days before the inquiry was announced, she was asked if she would “allocate extra funds to deal with the rising rate of child abuse referrals”. She replied simply, “no”.

Support fell behind the police — who, Campbell argues, were the main culprits in enabling abusers to evade justice. “Cleveland had a macho, misogynistic police force,” she says. And, as has been proved time and time again, “asking a patriarchal service to police patriarchal behaviour is pointless”. Cleveland was unlike other authorities, “for example in Leeds, where there was a very well-developed, collegial culture between police, paediatricians, social workers, rape crisis centres”. In Cleveland, by contrast, police “were pretty much told they didn’t have to liaise with other professionals over child sexual abuse, and that was a complete disaster, and one that was repeated in many subsequent child abuse scandals”.

The media also failed, quickly falling in line with the government. National newspapers called for the blood of social workers, and the local Evening Gazette ran a “Give Us Back Our Children” campaign. Ultimately, no perpetrators were identified, let alone charged or convicted. Following the inquiry, 27 families sued the NHS, as well as the council and individual medics, costing the state £1 million in out-of-court settlements.

Campbell tells me that what she finds most cruel in this whole story is that the children at its heart — whose difficulties had prompted responses by professionals — were then subjected to a very public inquisition. Only a handful of those children have ever come forward to tell their stories, and just one has done so both before and after reading her social service records. When, at the age of 40, Minnie* first approached Campbell out of the blue, she asked: “Are there a few of us, like me?”

In Minnie’s eyes, Marietta Higgs — who one journalist at the time of the inquiry described as “the most hated woman in Britain” — was a hero. Minnie met her after being referred to social services at the age of 10, following her brother’s revelations about child sexual abuse at the hands of their sadistic stepfather. Minnie was examined by Higgs, who found signs of rape. Higgs made Minnie feel safe. “She was my saviour,” she says.

For Campbell, this is what a good child protection system looks like: “The abused child who describes an experience of feeling saved.” And yet, the name of Marietta Higgs has long been used as a warning against overactive imaginations in social workers, doctors or other advocates for children. It has been evoked to discredit victims who choose to speak out later in life, as Minnie has.

The disgrace of it is that, when her name was first being dragged through mud, secret documents that vindicated Higgs’s conclusions were circulating around Westminster. A confidential dossier put together by the Northern Regional Health Authority was sent to the Ministry of Health in 1988 and presented to Parliament. It exonerated Higgs and accepted that around 70-75% of the diagnoses were correct. Campbell got hold of the document while updating her original book on Cleveland. She assumed that Higgs had read it, but when she visited her at her home in 2017, discovered she had not. Higgs has since retired.

One of the many disappointing things about the Cleveland scandal is that it had been preceded by a moment of enlightenment, largely triggered by feminist activism: people working in health and social services had been paying better attention to testimony about sexual abuse. Campbell sees the scandal as “a devastating example of a backlash against what feminists had achieved: as a result, all of that learning was thrown away, squandered, and condemned”.

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As a result, the campaign by Cleveland parents, and the public humiliation of the doctors at the heart of the scandal, focused on the accused adults, rather than the vulnerable children. Jean La Fontaine, a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics who specialised in the study of sexual abuse, told the inquiry:

“Whenever we come to consider this issue, the children seem to get lost in the system. In the public inquiry, and before it, we heard a lot about parents’ rights. Perhaps it’s one of the tragedies of Cleveland that the children’s voices have not been heard.”

The legacy of this, which lasts to this day, is tragic. “It shaped the entire approach to child protection politics for three decades, and was completely catastrophic,” says Campbell. Services today are still heavily influenced by what happened in 1987, in that few children are believed, and it is almost impossible to secure a conviction when they are. We just have to look at the so-called grooming gangs scandals in Rochdale, Rotherham and elsewhere to see how children are routinely disbelieved. “We now have a situation where, if you want to sexually abuse children, you can just do it, because you will get away with it,” says Campbell.

This could have been stopped in 1987, when there was a unique opportunity in Cleveland to bring the prevalence of child sexual abuse out of the shadows. Instead, it set back the issue significantly. It plunged Britain back into a dark age, by telling future generations of abused children that if they spoke out, they would not be listened to. It also created professional anxiety among doctors and social workers, who feared being treated as Marietta Higgs was.

Campbell met endless obstacles in the course of her reporting, from unobtainable documents to the influence of “false memory” organisations on the general public. Campbell even found herself arguing with her publishers’ “sensitivity readers”, who were offended by the description of “anal dilation” being used to detect whether the children had been anally raped. “I am offended at child rape, and those that seek to cover it up,” she tells me. The truth is gruesome, but that doesn’t mean we should hide from it.

As for the Cleveland children, they are now well into adulthood. Aside from the small number that have ever spoken out, where are they now? “We don’t know what happened to them because there was no follow-up,” says Campbell. “It would be like 121 children falling off a cliff in a bus and surviving terrible injuries, and nobody was interested in how they managed.” We can only hope her reporting is the first step towards the public hearing these children’s stories again — and, this time, believing them.

*This name has been changed.

What Martin achieved in such a short space of time is remarkable. Like the criminalisation of marital rape, it is a change that forces us to reconsider social norms. When it comes to the body — particularly the female body — what is and is not illegal matters. It shapes how we understand both ourselves and how we expect to be treated by others. Following the law change, guidance on upskirting was added to the Department of Education’s Keeping Children Safe in Education booklet. This has not led to the imprisonment of multiple snap-happy teenage boys; its punitive impact is minimal. But as my partner, a teacher, tells me, there’s now an awareness in schools that it is unacceptable to dismiss upskirting on the basis that “boys will be boys”.

So, Martin deserves to feel proud of her activism. Yet in both her recent Guardian piece and her new book, No Offence, But, one gets the impression that she now feels torn. Partly, this is because she is now defined as “the upskirting girl”, her activism reduced to what was, for her, an experience of violation. But Martin also seems to be subtly distancing herself from what she actually achieved. “I’m proud that my political activism has had a lasting positive impact,” she writes, “but I also have a complex relationship with it.”

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This complex relationship is very obvious throughout No Offence, But. Billed as a progressive handbook offering “a space to explore the problematic, distracting or lazy comments we so often encounter”, its chapters each focus on a particular phrase: “Not all men”, “I see no colour”, “I don’t do politics”. Some are written by Martin, others by guest contributors. The tone is one of preaching to the converted. In her own sections, Martin is keen to emphasise her growth, but she also seems unduly embarrassed by her former self. Both her furious feminist awakening and the visible, measurable achievements that ensued are suddenly positioned as somewhat immature, unsophisticated and, worst of all, privileged.

There’s a certain strand of social justice activism that is not always kind to feminists who get their hands dirty. Ten years ago, when Caroline Criado Perez fought a successful battle to have Jane Austen appear on the new £10 note, her detractors were keen to denounce hers as “banknote feminism”. Criado Perez’s campaign had stressed the importance of female visibility and heritage; her critics zeroed in on the fact that Austen’s image would be appearing on money, something that marginalised women sorely lacked. A straightforward achievement was belittled because it was associated with the Bank of England.

In a similar fashion, feminists who work with, or to change, the criminal justice system can find themselves denounced as “carceral feminists”. “The thrust of the accusation,” writes Julie Bindel in Feminism For Women, “is that those of us that want consequences for men who rape and otherwise abuse women are unconcerned with the fact that the prison system is a problem in general.” The accusers tend to ignore the fact that many feminist organisations, such as Bindel’s own Justice for Women, state that they would prefer it if prisons were not necessary, accepting them only as a last resort, given that no one has come up with anything more effective. As Bindel argues: “It should be possible to challenge the race and class hierarchies upheld by the criminal justice system” without putting women at risk by junking it completely.

Indeed, it is possible. But if one does not wish to bear the taint of complicity, it is uncomfortable. Unfortunately for Martin, she seems to have realised this only after she succeeded in making the world a safer place for women.

Alison Phipps, a sociologist at Newcastle University, has made herself a leading voice against so-called carceral feminists. In her 2021 book Me, Not You, she includes Martin’s upskirting law in a list of things that should be opposed on the basis that they “move us away from our ultimate goals”. (She comments, disdainfully, that the new law was announced “to loud applause from mainstream feminists”, because if there’s one thing worse than being practical, it’s being practical and mainstream.) There’s a perfect world out there, and by making it illegal for a man to stick a camera between your legs and take a photo of your crotch, Martin has apparently made it that much harder for us to find it.

Me, Not You is a difficult book to read, because it is so staggeringly misogynistic. Women who seek legal solutions to sexual violence are routinely compared to racists and fascists, their desire for justice dismissed as an unhealthy reaction to trauma. “Being raped,” writes Phipps, “often involves a visceral fear of death, whether the rape is physically violent or not — it is what makes us freeze, instead of fighting back… And if we freeze, perhaps we need our ‘kill’ after the experience is over. Unlike Arya Stark, we do not do our own killing. Instead, we ask the ‘Angry Dad’ or ‘White Knight’ of the state or institution to do it for us.”

I won’t quote the rest of that paragraph, but suffice it to say that Phipps uses the fact that accusations of rape by white women have been used to justify violence against black men to argue that “allegations of sexual violence” — by which she means real ones, as well as false — are “tools of oppression”.

Rape victims have long been demonised, the narrative being that their violation has left them damaged, vengeful and morally suspect. Think, for instance, of Medusa, known not for what was done to her, but for the literal monster it made of her. Centuries later, these myths are still with us. In Down Girl, Kate Manne describes how the rape victim who goes to court “is envisaged not as playing her difficult part in a criminal proceeding, but rather as seeking personal vengeance and moral retribution”. Contrary to Phipps’s claims, imputing vengeful urges to rape victims is not intersectional feminism — or any form of feminism — but the same old patriarchy.

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Then again, in the non-carceral world that Phipps envisages, there would be no rape anyway: “There would be no national borders. There would be no prisons. There would be accountability, but not vengeance. … There would not be powerful groups dominating more marginalised ones through violence.”

One has to admire the chutzpah of a middle-class white woman writing a book that dismisses feminists who engage with the criminal justice system as “bourgeois white women” before offering up John Lennon’s Imagine as a radical solution to injustice. Then again, what is a feminism that retreats from engagement with tainted institutions left with, other than imagination?

In her chapter critiquing the phrase “the police are here to protect us”, Martin indulges in a similar form of straw-manning, only using her younger self, rather than other feminists, as the target: “I believed the police force to be a heroic institution that worked tirelessly to make society safer. They found the murderers and locked them up, they stopped violence before it got out of hand.” Did Martin really have such an idealised vision of the world? Or is it just necessary for her to pretend she did, in order to justify her earlier work? Has she heard the other feminists whispering behind her back, and decided to redeem herself, by rejecting carceral complicity?

I find it hard to believe that someone who went on to achieve so much was ever as naïve as she now implies. And I find it hard to read her undermining her activism. “It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I started to be more of a critical thinker,” she writes — meaning “someone who recognises cultural, social and geographical contexts and applies theories”, as opposed to someone whose analysis is “determined mostly by their automatic emotional response, their personal context and existing opinions”. Of course, Martin’s anger at being upskirted was an “automatic emotional response”; her highly successful legal campaign was rooted in her “personal context and existing opinions”. But now, it seems, she knows better than to let her feelings get the better of her.

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How is this anything other than a step backwards? Society has long taught women to consider our emotional responses unreliable, to view ourselves as less rational than men, less capable of seeing things objectively. The feminist claim that “the personal is political” is turned against us, as though somehow, anything that is too informed by what has happened in our own lives cannot be truly relevant to anyone else.

In this feminism designed for utopia, theory is always more attractive than flesh-and-blood human beings, especially the female body, which is too messy, too unsophisticated, too implicated. It is not a coincidence, I think, that anti-carceral feminism finds common cause with trans activism, both movements raging against the inconvenient women who continue to assert the boundaries of their bodies and the validity of their trauma.

This version of feminism is, in the end, not a turn away from complicity with power, but a turn away from women. It tells us to stay quiet in the aftermath of violation, for the greater good; it tells us to bear the costs of doing nothing, so that we may be pure enough for an imagined utopia. It tells us to behave as if we don’t have bodies, as if we can exist somewhere beyond the world as it is. Imagine there’s no upskirting. Imagine there’s no rape. Imagine there are no women. It isn’t hard to do, for some.

As a reporter, I am supposed to bear witness: to expose the truth relentlessly and seek justice. I thought I could cope with seeing such horrific things; I would reassure friends that I was fine and point out that I was not the victim in these scenarios. Over the years, I have avoided examining how being immersed in a world of rape, child abuse and femicide has affected me. I would always support those feminist activists who threw in the towel to retire to Spain, but I would feel a bit bemused by their actions. Why would you want to take up gardening, instead of being an agent of change?

Then something shifted. Investigating yet another atrocity, over the past few years, I have been overwhelmed by anxiety and depression, unable to sleep. I now understand why some activists retire.

It began with the murder of a seven-year-old girl. Nikki Allan lived with her mum and three sisters in a run-down block of flats in Sunderland. One day, in 1992, a man took her to the wasteland outside a derelict warehouse and sexually assaulted her. When Nikki screamed, he pushed her through a window into the building, chased her into a far corner, and shattered her little skull with a brick. He then stabbed her 37 times, before dragging her into the basement. There he left her, propped up against the wall like a rag doll.

Police focused their investigation on a man named George Heron, seen as the local oddball. They effectively coerced a confession out of him. The following year, he was acquitted of murder at trial, after the judge ruled the confession out, but was forced to go into hiding because people in the local community were convinced of his guilt. Nikki’s mum, Sharon Henderson, believed Heron had got away with her daughter’s murder, because the police repeatedly told her that there were no other suspects. The media reinforced this narrative.

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I picked up the story in 2006. Visiting my parents in Darlington, not far from where Nikki was murdered, I saw a photograph in the local paper of a woman standing by the grave of a child. The headline read: “Mum’s bid to dig up daughter”. Sharon was asking police to exhume Nikki’s body, in order to test it for DNA evidence, following a change in the law on double jeopardy, which prevents someone being tried again on charges of which they’ve been previously acquitted. More than a decade after her daughter’s murder, Sharon was still fighting for justice.

“I always said I would never, ever give up campaigning for Nikki until her murderer was locked up,” Sharon told me. “Not until the police answer for that first so-called investigation.”

I first interviewed Sharon shortly after reading that newspaper story. A single mum from a rough part of town, she felt that the police weren’t taking her seriously. Over the years, I’ve kept in contact with Sharon, admiring her tenacity, and her refusal to accept that the police had done right by her daughter.

And then, in May 2022, the unexpected happened. A man named David Boyd was charged, 30 years after Nikki was murdered. A child sex offender, with convictions dating back to 1986, Boyd lived three doors down from where Nikki disappeared, and had moved away from the estate shortly after the murder. When questioned, Boyd had lied, presenting a made-up alibi. So focused were the police on Heron, they didn’t even bother to check it.

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By this point, I had started working on a podcast series about Nikki’s murder, originally with the intention of marking the 30th anniversary, and to give Sharon’s campaign a boost. It felt like we were close to getting justice. I attended every day of the trial, renting an apartment close to Newcastle Crown Court. Sharon and her family would come there between sittings, for respite. I saw, as I had over the previous 17 years, how much pain Sharon was enduring. But here she was, struggling on. The evidence at trial was harrowing. Sharon did her best to listen. But most of the time she would leave the public gallery after only a few minutes, sobbing. “Imagine listening to what that bastard did to your bairn,” says Sharon. “The details of how he murdered her will never leave my mind.”

Day in, day out, the particulars of the murder were played out: the forensic pathologist who examined Nikki’s body in situ back in 1992 came to repeat her evidence, 31 years later. A blood splatter expert, she painted a vivid picture of what had happened to Nikki in life and in death. We saw video footage of the crime scene. Nikki’s body was pixelated out, but the brick that had killed was in plain sight.

“Vicarious trauma” is a term used by psychologists to describe the effect of witnessing or hearing horror stories. It is increasingly recognised as a potential consequence of working directly with seriously hurt and injured individuals — an occupational hazard among Accident and Emergency personnel, for instance, or social workers who witness child cruelty. With wider recognition of the condition, it is becoming more commonplace for employers to offer counselling to staff who encounter atrocity in their working lives.

I feel uncomfortable claiming to be experiencing “vicarious trauma”. I’m not the victim here. I have always felt it important to be resilient, when focusing on the women and girls directly affected by a crime. But something snapped in me, with this story.

During the trial, I would find myself crying at home for no apparent reason. I would be too tired to blank out the stories I’d heard, but then have trouble sleeping. I’d stay awake watching Netflix as a way of escaping my intrusive thoughts, my hypersensitivity, and a feeling of deep, deep despair. I suffered extreme neck and shoulder pain, attributed partly to five weeks of scribbling in a notebook every day in court, but also to the tension of hearing the evidence, and trying not to cry on the press bench. I started getting headaches. I would imagine all kinds of horrific things happening to my loved ones, anything from car crashes to brutal murder.

What was it about the Nikki Allan case that kept me awake night after night, driving me into a depression? It was not the first time I had reported on the case of a murdered child, or seen such terrible evidence in court. But in time, I have come to realise that so many aspects of the case resonated with my own childhood experience, and what I escaped. Growing up in the North East, I witnessed how the police dismiss working-class women, in particular single mothers; I saw how child sexual abuse was minimised. Boyd was free for 30 years to abuse girls a short drive from the rough housing estate I grew up on, where men targeted me and my friends.

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By Mary Harrington

I was first flashed at when I was nine years old. Aged 12, a man violently grabbed my breast as he walked past me in the middle of the town centre. At 16, I was raped by an older man I considered a friend. My job cleaning in a pub ended abruptly when a campaign of horrific sexual harassment culminated in an attempted rape. By this time, I was 17, and had recently joined the ranks of feminists fighting against sexual and domestic violence.

I was drawn to the cause partly because of my own experiences, but also inspired by the widespread protests about the police investigation into the so-called Yorkshire Ripper. The misogyny and class prejudice that underpinned this investigation — the idea that the victims were “common prostitutes” and were therefore somehow complicit in their fate — felt familiar to me. Many of the women I was raised among would be seen as the kind who would be “asking for it” simply for going to the pub alone, when they should have stayed safely at home.

Returning to the North East, spending time so close to where I was raised, amid Nikki’s grieving, traumatised family, I sometimes caught myself wondering how my life would have turned out had I stayed put in Darlington. Had I never found feminism. Sharon’s life could have been mine.

But anyone doing this work, immersed in the harsh reality of it, is bound to struggle with the toll it takes on our mental health. I see rape and domestic abuse routinely dismissed and minimised. Victims are dismissed, disbelieved, or blamed for their own predicaments. I also see men excused. They are reassured that what they have done is “not so bad”. Meanwhile, women such as Sharon Henderson are fighting against a system that views them as irritants.

And if the crimes themselves aren’t taken seriously enough in the mainstream, why would those of us reporting on them be given any consideration? Instead, we see the trivialisation of both sexual violence and of the hellish side effects of campaigning for change. I will never understand how Sharon must feel, having lost her seven-year-old daughter to murder; I do know what it is like to be silenced and misrepresented when speaking out against atrocities committed by men, and police inaction.

So, I will always be inspired by women like Sharon (in May, Boyd was found guilty of Nikki’s murder and jailed for life, with a minimum term of 29 years). One positive I cling to, in this bleak state of affairs, is the sense of solidarity that often flourishes between women. Sharon may never have considered herself a feminist campaigner until the unimaginable happened. But the rest of us have so much to learn from her tenacity.

‘Three doors down‘, Julie Bindel’s podcast series on the case of Nikki Allan, is out now

Since the advent of “content creator” platforms like the one offered by Pornhub, it can also be a very well-paid job. One performer, Wolf Hudson, explains how he went from earning $4,000 a month working for porn studios, to well over $10,000 as a free agent monetising his work through Pornhub’s Modelhub service, which launched in 2018. “Content creation has shown that performers have always been in charge,” he says. “Without us, there would be no industry.”

For Milf performer Cherie DeVille, Modelhub was a source of “autonomy, power, a good bit of money”. Siri Dahl says it’s the reason she was able to buy a house. More than that: she credits her porn work with giving her, as a survivor of sexual abuse, an arena in which she had full control of her sexuality. “Like, one of my favourite things about the industry I work in is the fact that we care about consent.”

Through Modelhub, verified performers can collect a share of the revenue from ads served against their videos. They can also charge consumers for downloads or custom videos. Essentially, it was an answer to the problem that had been stalking porn since the internet decimated the industry in the Noughties: how the hell was anyone going to earn money from making it? Which means that Modelhub was Pornhub’s answer to a problem Pornhub had played a significant role in creating.

By the time Pornhub was founded in 2007, the porn industry — like the music industry and Hollywood — was already foundering under pressure from the internet. Porn had done very well out of the VHS era — some histories even credit it with VHS’s victory over Betamax in the format wars — and had been expected to do equally well from DVDs. But DVDs arrived at roughly the same time as the mass internet, meaning that porn was, suddenly, everywhere all of the time. And all of it was free.

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By Ann Manov

Previously, consumers had expected to be ripped off for their porn, handing over fistfuls of dollars for a handful of scenes strung together. Now they could download an illegal torrent of anything they could imagine, a process made simpler by the foundation of the “tube” sites, which allowed users to upload their own videos — or anyone else’s. It wasn’t in the sites’s interests to police copyright violations, since they made their money by serving ads, and more videos simply meant more eyeballs, which meant more profit. So, the late Noughties were a golden age of pornography for almost everyone involved, apart from the people who actually made it.

In a 2009 sketch of life in “the Valley” (the San Fernando Valley in LA County, where porn studios have historically made their home), the writer Susannah Breslin charted a bleak scene. The producers, nearly all men, were largely despairing of turning a profit, as they competed against pirated versions of their own work; the ones who did were those willing to push their scenes to greater and greater extremes of shock and violence. The women who participated talked, not about liberation and empowerment, but about their debt and shame. One female performer told Breslin, through tears: “It is kind of wrong, I think, and it’s very degrading, I think, and it’s just — I need the money that bad.” She made $500 for a shoot.

At the time Breslin was writing, at least, porn was not an industry that universally “cared about consent”. It’s a principle that often seemed to be honoured more in the breach, through scenes that eroticised the coercion and rape of women. A woman who says “yes” to being beaten and fucked on camera because she needs $500 to get through the next week is hardly offering her free and happy participation.

The “sex work is work” position sometimes attempts to negate experiences like this by trying to argue for continuity between sex work and other forms of labour. “Maybe the difference is the contact or the penetration?” argued a 2015 post by the academic Lisa Wade. “But there are other jobs that centrally involve bodies and some involve kinds of penetration. What about the dentist climbing in your mouth?”

This would be a more robust comparison if dentists were paid for allowing us to climb into their mouths rather than the other way around, if PPE wasn’t required in dental surgeries, if the average dentist’s salary wasn’t upwards of $200,000, and if more dentists ended their shifts crying about the degradation of it all. It only holds if there’s nothing uniquely valuable about sex, and yet the sex industry would not exist if there was nothing uniquely valuable about sex.

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More convincing, perhaps, is the argument that sex work can be degrading, but the degradation is a function of a badly structured industry rather than inherent to sex work. And it was Pornhub that decisively changed that structure. Under pressure from tube sites, many of the studios that populated the Valley went bust, at which point Pornhub (or, more specifically, Pornhub’s parent company Mindgeek) was there to buy them out. The result, explained a 2014 Slate article, was “a vampiric ecosystem”: “Mindgeek’s producers make porn films mostly for the sake of being uploaded on to MindGeek’s free tube sites, with lower returns for the producers but higher returns for MindGeek.”

Eventually, though, vampires need new blood. Modelhub was a way to provide this, and the performers could only be grateful for it. After all, it was better to be your own boss than be exploited by a studio. It didn’t matter that Pornhub was the reason their economy had collapsed: the condition of the “content creator” on any platform is one of Stockholm Syndrome, endlessly prostrating yourself to the algorithm gods that profit from your labour.

But Pornhub was still, at base, the thing it had always been: a tube site, with all the problems that implied. There were the copyright breaches, of course, but there was also much worse. “If you let just anyone upload anything,” says DeVille in the documentary, wide-eyed, “you’re going to get anyone uploading anything.” So, there was revenge porn. There were spycam videos, videos of rapes and assaults. There were children. “If you’re interested in the ‘Content Formatter’ job,” warned a Glassdoor post quoted in the 2014 Slate article about Pornhub, “just be aware you’re basically a glorified child porn screener, and you will be watching disgusting videos all day.”

In theory, moderation should have meant that none of this material made it onto the site. In practice, a team of about 30 was attempting to screen between 700 and 1,000 videos a day. Scrubbing through at high speed, with the sound off, it is impossible to tell a simulated rape from the real thing. Even if a video was flagged, there was no guarantee it would be removed: former moderators have said that management discouraged them from pulling popular content. And even if it was taken down, there was nothing to stop it being uploaded again.

Like the performer Breslin had met in the Valley, the moderators doing this work undergo it for money, not desire: it’s easy to joke about “watching porn for a living” until you realise the stuff they were filtering included incest and bestiality. Moderators ended up suffering burnout and panic attacks. As one researcher into the industry has said: “Horrifying labour conditions make free porn possible.”

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For a long time, though, Pornhub remained a PR triumph, thanks to a mix of quirky data-mining stories (which state has the most searches for cheerleader? The answer may surprise you), celebrity tie-ins (hello Kanye) and headline-grabbing gimmicks, like sponsoring a snow plough. That finally started to change in 2020 with Nick Kristoff’s New York Times article, “The Children of Pornhub”. Among the horrors he detailed were a missing 15-year-old girl from Florida whose mother found 58 videos featuring her on Pornhub, and a 14-year-old girl from California whose sexual assault was uploaded and seen by a classmate. Because the uploaders of illegal content tended (for obvious reasons) not to be verified users, they couldn’t profit from this material. But Pornhub could still serve ads against it.

In the documentary, the performers sound — for the most part — appropriately horrified that this material existed on the platform where they worked. But what distresses them most of all is the terrible unfairness of their work (on Pornhub) being associated with child sexual abuse footage (also on Pornhub). The documentary doesn’t push this point, but the disjunction still stands: they seem to believe they should have their share of Pornhub’s profits, without responsibility for the abuses that helped underpin them. Plus-size performer Gwen Adora dismisses the reaction to Kristoff’s article — which resulted in payment handlers including Mastercard and Visa cutting off services to Pornhub, and Pornhub deleting millions of unverified videos — as a “Twitter kerfuffle”.

On the one hand, pornographers maintain that the highest value of all is sexual self-determination, embodied in their work. On the other, when women and girls are violated and their violation is compounded by being turned into a masturbatory aid, this is simply a “kerfuffle”. Siri Dahl explains how distressed she was that Kristoff quoted her in his article without mentioning the fact that she’s a survivor of sexual abuse. Her experiences do not seem to have made her more empathetic to women whose abuse happens through porn. If your job relies on a platform that makes money from rape, maybe your job simply shouldn’t exist, however nice it is that it’s enabled you to buy a house.

The porn industry breaks everything down in the end. The studios strip-mined the bodies of performers, then Pornhub strip-mined the studios in turn. But even the winners in the flesh trade — and the performers interviewed for this documentary are undoubtedly in the top tier of their profession — seem to be corroded by belonging to it. Sex work is work, but what kind of work?

A kind of work where sharing a shopfront with child porn is an occupational hazard. A kind of work where the mythology of individualism bleeds into a near-sociopathic solipsism. A kind of work where people become things, and what happens to those things ceases to be anyone else’s concern. A kind of work where the exploitation is baked in, all the way down. Once you accept the proposition, all kinds of moral compromises become possible.

The full scale of Carrick’s offending began to emerge at Southwark Crown Court this week when he admitted 47 rapes, nine sexual assaults, three counts of coercive control, two of false imprisonment, and a string of other offences. The charges relate to attacks on 13 women in London and Hertfordshire over a period of 17 years. The court heard that Carrick remained a serving officer throughout that time, even though the Met were told about repeated allegations suggesting he was a threat to women. The senior officer who eventually investigated the case concluded that Carrick had an “appetite for degradation and control”. Surely someone should have noticed – and suspended him?

The parallels with the case of PC Wayne Couzens, the Met police officer who raped and murdered Sarah Everard, are staggering. He too had a nickname among colleagues: “the rapist”. Both men served on the parliamentary and diplomatic protection squad, where firearms are routinely carried. Both passed vetting procedures to get onto the squad, despite the allegations against them — rape in Carrick’s case, indecent exposure in Couzens’.

Both men, and this is perhaps the most frightening aspect from the point of view of public protection, used their warrant cards to deflect suspicions. Before attacking a woman in September 2020, Carrick flashed his warrant card to persuade her he wasn’t a threat. Couzens did the same to persuade Sarah Everard to get into his car in south London during a Covid lockdown in March 2021.

Carrick told his victims they would not be believed if they complained about a policeman – and he was right. He forced some women into a tiny understairs cupboard, where they were kept naked and cramped for hours. In all, the Met police received nine complaints about him for a range of alleged offences that included domestic abuse, burglary, harassment and assault. No action was taken.

The question of how Carrick and Couzens came to be on the force and remain there goes to the heart of what is wrong with policing in this country. It is the harshest possible indictment of selection, training, supervision and disciplinary procedures, all of which appear unequal to the task of dealing with even the most flagrant predators. Complaints take years to move through the system, are sometimes handled by colleagues of an accused officer, and appear to start from a point of scepticism towards the complainant.

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It’s not so much a “get-out-of-jail-free” card, as a way of avoiding detection and punishment altogether. The first complaint against Carrick during his police career was filed more than 20 years ago, when he was accused of actual bodily harm against a girlfriend who was trying to leave him. No action was taken and he was reported by another girlfriend in 2004, but the Met’s department for professional standards did not investigate.

Five years later, Carrick qualified as a firearms officer and was almost immediately accused of abusing a girlfriend. The Met was informed but took no action. And so it went on: there were other allegations leading up to July 2021, when a former girlfriend went to Sussex police and accused him of rape. Even then Carrick wasn’t suspended, but was placed on ‘restricted duties’ for a few weeks. It was decided he had no case to answer and he was allowed to carry a firearm again. Carrick has now pleaded guilty to raping both women. He was finally caught in October that year, when a woman he had met on a dating site accused him of rape.

The urgent question that the Met needs to answer is “how many more?” How many other serving officers have been accused of sexual assault or domestic abuse, yet are still serving on the force? An answer emerged just after Carrick’s guilty pleas were reported, when the Met admitted it is investigating 1,000 sexual and domestic abuse claims involving around 800 of its 35,000 officers. Those of us who live in London are policed, in other words, by a force where about one in every 50 officers is under investigation.

The new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has admitted that “hundreds” of his officers need to be sacked. Rowley believes it is too difficult at present to get rid of bad officers, but we are entitled to ask what is being done about the ones who shouldn’t be there. Have they been placed on restricted duties? Rowley inherited this mess from his predecessor, the unlamented Dame Cressida Dick, who appeared to be in denial about the scale of the problem. “Sadly, on occasion, I have a bad ‘un’,” she said after Ms Everard’s murder, falling back on the tired old “bad apple” defence.

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At least Rowley admits it’s worse than that, and he has some notion of how Carrick was able to stay on the force. “We failed as investigators, where we should have been more intrusive and joined the dots on this repeated misogyny over a couple of decades,” he said on Monday evening. He acknowledged that the failures were “systemic” and that senior officers should have been more determined to root out a misogynist like Carrick.

Most of the questions being asked at present are about the role of senior officers, but police forces are supposed to be held to account by elected Police and Crime Commissioners. They are paid generous salaries, in excess of £80,000 a year, but it’s hard to see that they have had any impact at all on the culture of misogyny and impunity that exists within so many police forces. Decent officers have been complaining for years that they aren’t listened to or, worse, that their careers suffer if they try to report anxieties about colleagues. Four years ago, the Centre for Women’s Justice launched a super-complaint against a number of police forces, alleging that they were letting off male officers accused of domestic abuse. Some of the women who spoke out were themselves police officers, and one of them described how her partner warned her he had friends in high places. An official response, in June last year, recognised “systemic deficiencies” in the way some forces deal with allegations against officers and staff.

Carrick’s admission of large-scale offending confirms the widespread feeling among women that we can’t trust the police — and that the actions needed to regain public trust aren’t being taken swiftly enough. Three months ago, an interim report into the culture and standards of Met by Dame Louise Casey recognised a raft of failings, including officers facing multiple accusations from colleagues being allowed to stay on the force. Rowley said at the time that the findings of the report moved him to tears, but his remarks about the difficulty of sacking criminal officers make him sound alarmingly helpless.

“We have some very worrying cases with officers who’ve committed criminality whilst police officers and yet I’m not allowed to sack them,” he said last week. He says he has the backing of ministers to change the police recruiting system, which is an urgent priority in the midst of a drive to employ thousands more officers, but it’s hard to know why someone didn’t think of this earlier. Surely blocking men with criminal records of a history of allegations against them should have been a priority years ago?

Rowley spent much of Monday apologising for failures in the Carrick case, and he knows that the Met will face another drubbing when the final Casey report is published later this year. She has written to the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, suggesting that the non-statutory Angiolini inquiry into the rape and murder of Sarah Everard should be expanded to look at Carrick’s conduct and the missed opportunities to identify his pattern of behaviour. “If this is not possible,” Casey adds crisply, “I am willing to volunteer myself.”

It’s hard to avoid wondering why we need so many inquiries, when the obvious course of action is to combine them into one, along the lines of the Macpherson inquiry into institutional racism. I called for exactly that more than 18 months ago, when I was Co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, but the result was a resounding silence.

Labour has now promised to introduce new national standards of police vetting, but over a period of decades, a hierarchy has developed in which misogyny and bullying have been normalised. Our perverse police culture is unable to identify burglars and rapists, yet apparently willing to tolerate sexual predators in uniform. What woman would trust them again?

To Elliott, this incident didn’t come as a complete surprise: it was the second time his property had been subjected to vandalism in three months. In October of the previous year, someone had sprayed the word “SCUM” across the facade of his house.

In both cases, the perpetrator’s identity was a mystery, but his or her motivations were not. Elliott had been accused of rape in 2017, in an entry on the now-notorious Shitty Media Men list — a Google document of crowd-sourced, anonymous allegations of bad behaviour. The apparent crimes were usually (but not always) sexual. The list triggered investigations into the conduct of various male professionals in the media world, including The Atlantic’s Leon Wieseltier, who was fired afterwards, and The Paris Review’s Lorin Stein, who resigned. Elliott, who in addition to the rape allegation was accused of sexual harassment, coercion, and unsolicited invitations to his apartment, says that his agent dropped him after he was named, and that friends and professional opportunities alike suddenly disappeared. At the time the list emerged he had been hoping to launch a career as a screenwriter (his memoir, The Adderall Diaries, had been recently made into a film starring James Franco). His move to New Orleans came after he concluded that this was no longer possible, that he needed a fresh start.

Elliott isn’t the only man to maintain that the allegations against him are false. “I didn’t do what I’m accused of on the list. But obviously I wronged somebody to the point that they want to mess with my life,” one anonymous man told The Cut in 2018. But in a world where the accused talk about quietly moving on from the list as an act of feminist solidarity — in that man’s words, “taking one for the team” — Elliott is alone in his relentless desire to clear his name.

One of his earliest attempts came in the form of an essay in Quillette titled “How An Anonymous Accusation Derailed My Life”, which was published in September 2018. The response was heated. But it was the lawsuit he filed a year later, just before the statute of limitations for such a case expired, that caused the biggest uproar — maybe even more so than the list itself. “Stephen Elliott Continues to Be a Shitty Media Man,” read one representative headline. It was not the alleged rape, but the news that he was suing the list’s creator, Moira Donegan, for defamation, that triggered the vandalism to Elliott’s home and car.

Elliott reported those incidents to the police, a fact he tells me he recently shared with Lila Shapiro, a journalist from New York Magazine who was writing a five-year retrospective on all things Shitty Media Man. But when that story was published last week, there was no mention of the vandalism. Rather than bringing readers up-to-date, the story dwelled deeply on the circumstances surrounding the original creation of the list — and in Elliott’s case, assembled prior reporting, previously published accounts, and testimonials from his former friends and colleagues to paint a picture of him as a man with a long, fraught history of overfamiliar, boundary-challenging behaviour.

Elliott was the kind of colleague who would hold your hand, climb into your lap, overshare about his sex life and ask impertinent questions about yours, oblivious to how uncomfortable he was making you. He doesn’t dispute this — “I can be needy, I can be clingy,” he tells me, though he believes that there’s some context missing: “The cues I misread were more like, I thought we were friends. It’s never a sexual situation.” But this is the thrust of the piece, more or less: in choosing to focus on Elliott’s personality, his way of moving through the world, it suggests that we can elide the problem of his having been accused of a crime that not even his fiercest detractors actually seem to believe he committed.

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Full disclosure: Elliott and I have several friends in common, and my husband and I met him once for a drink near his home in New Orleans when we were there in 2019. I found him appealingly guileless, but I also did not struggle to understand why some people don’t; Elliott is notoriously open about the topics most people keep under wraps, and it’s not hard to see how that frank vulnerability could seem, or be, manipulative under the proper circumstances. (The New York Magazine piece includes a quote from memoirist Elissa Bassist, who describes failing to set firm boundaries with Elliott because “I was so afraid of hurting his delicate feelings”.) Even his defence against the allegation that he raped someone is kind of a kinky overshare: where other men on the list described racking their brains to figure out which sexual encounter might have spawned the accusation, which woman had come to see what happened as nonconsensual, Elliott says he has no such back catalogue of encounters to pore over because he doesn’t have penetrative sex with women.

That, he tells me, is what makes the framing of this story so frustrating. A woman who felt uncomfortable about Elliott’s over-familiar behaviour “has a right to her interpretation. What you feel about what happened, it’s not invalid. It’s not really objective,” he says. “What is objective is rape.”

But this is what’s so strange about this case: not that Elliott’s sexual history makes the rape allegation implausible, but that nobody seems to care. Hence the focus on his documented history of making women uncomfortable, which is supposed to be understood as different in degree but not in kind from the felony of which he’d been accused. No charges were ever brought against him, and no other women alleging rape or even sexual misconduct ever came forward, anonymously or otherwise. As novelist Claire Vay Watkins said: “Stephen Elliott did not rape me, did not attempt to rape me. I am not anywhere close to implying that he did. I am saying a sexist negation, a refusal to acknowledge a female writer as a writer, as a peer, as a person, is of a piece with sexual entitlement.” It’s a neat rhetorical trick: in one breath, Watkins emphatically does not accuse Elliott of raping her, while also emphatically suggesting that he’s the type of guy who would.

The New York Magazine piece seems to confirm this with a previously unpublished and fairly shocking allegation from a woman identified as R.D., who said that when she walked into a writing class hosted by Elliott, he “stopped the class and dove at me and threw his face into my tits and started moaning”.

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By Lionel Shriver

Elliott has been generally candid since his cancellation about when and how he’s crossed the line with women: yes, he was pushy about asking to sleep in women’s beds. Yes, he put his hands in people’s pockets. But this, he says, categorically did not happen — and he also says something else: “Does that even sound plausible to you?”

He has a point: the story is outrageous. But not only that, it’s the one testimonial against Elliott that genuinely supports the conflation of a creepy person with a rapey one. Amid multiple reports of Elliott wheedling and whining to sleep in women’s beds (but then relenting, albeit poutingly, when told no), here was a legitimate instance of nonconsensual sexual contact, an incident that seemed to truly bridge the gap between “boundary challenged” and “violent felony committed”.

In other MeToo stories, this is where you would often see a quick journalistic aside: that another member of the class remembered witnessing this incident, or that R.D. told a friend about it at the time. Corroboration lends credibility, especially when the accused flatly denies it. But the this story contains no such note, and here’s where things get weird: Elliott says that not only is this story false, but that the accuser (whose identity he learned during fact checking) is someone with whom he had a multi-year sexual relationship. He also says that the woman in question violated him by carving the word “owned” into one of his buttocks with a needle while he was tied up and either blindfolded or wearing a hood, he isn’t sure which. (A friend of Elliott’s from the BDSM scene confirmed to me that he told her about the ass-carving incident several years ago during a conversation about his experiences as a submissive. R.D. did not respond to a request for comment. Shapiro declined to answer questions about her reporting process via email.)

Of course, none of this is to say definitively that Elliott didn’t abruptly halt a writing class to molest a newly-arrived student, nor can we know for certain that said student later carved the word “owned” on Elliott’s rear end. The only thing clear from these conflicting accounts is that the truth, buried as it is in a miasma of old grudges, kinky sex, and a transformative reckoning with the norms that govern relationships between men and women, is extremely complicated. But this is what’s striking about the Shitty Media Men list — and to a certain extent, the coverage of it ever since: it not only eschews nuance, but displays a practiced incuriosity as to what the truth might be. And when questions arise as to the veracity of the list, or the fraught implications of making it, the response is to downplay its seriousness until it sounds less like a groundbreaking movement for social justice and more like something a bunch of girls did at a slumber party. “That first night? It was the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life,” says one woman quoted in the New York Magazine piece.

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Illuminated here is the fundamental tension at the heart of MeToo: it is very difficult to demand that sexual assault be taken seriously, but simultaneously insist that false allegations thereof are no big deal. At the peak of the movement, it was not unusual to hear that it was “worth it” for a few innocent men to be ruined for the sake of social progress. In Elliott’s case, there’s also a heavy element of victim blaming: a representative tweet from literary influencer Maris Kreisman expressed that it was “infuriating but also mildly fun to watch Stephen Elliott place blame on everyone but himself”, as though being falsely accused of a serious crime were simply the natural, even entertaining, outcome of having a difficult personality. And indeed, it’s hard to imagine any other criminal allegation being treated this way, with the accused expected to fall on the sword for the sake of the greater good, guilty or not.

There’s something about this that recalls the famous scene in the movie The Fugitive, where Richard Kimball, played by Harrison Ford, is cornered at the precipice of the Cheoah Dam. He turns, pleading, desperate: “I didn’t kill my wife,” he shouts.

His pursuer replies, “I don’t care.”

That’s when Kimball jumps, but it’s not the leap that’s shocking; it’s the apathy that precedes it. The notion that innocence doesn’t matter, that the truth doesn’t matter. Stephen Elliott isn’t accused of murder, but there are nevertheless echoes of that same apathy in the public exhortations — of critics, of former friends, even of fellow accused men — to just stop fighting, already. To accept the rape accusation as a fair cop for all the discomfort he might have caused. To “conduct yourself with grace in the court of life”, as one former colleague puts it, “rather than the court of law”.

But for whatever it gets him (and it’s not likely to be much), Elliott’s determination remains a thorn in the side of that satisfying narrative about women coming together to take down the bad men once and for all. The idea that there should be serious consequences for serious crimes — and by extension, serious repercussions in the event that an accusation is made falsely or frivolously — isn’t just alarming, but a buzzkill. The idea of wielding one’s power responsibly, and being held accountable when you don’t, is not part of the patriarchy-smashing vibe we’re trying to cultivate, here. And on this front, it’s impossible not to notice the role reversal, and the parallels, between this and how women have long suffered for reporting sexual harassment.

The Shitty Media Men list might have been the outrage du jour, but it wasn’t until Elliott filed his lawsuit that people really got angry. Why did he have to ruin the fun? Why couldn’t he just take a joke? Why, in the age of MeToo, are you taking accusations of sexual assault so seriously?

It was not long before this that the neuropsychiatrist Dr Colin Shapiro had coined the term “sexsomnia”, and it was he who carried out a thorough investigation into the incident. He interviewed the defendant’s friends, family, and ex-girlfriends, and monitored his brain activity while sleeping. At trial, he expressed the view that the attack had been committed during an episode of parasomnia, otherwise known as sleepwalking. Several well-known triggers were present: alcohol, exhaustion, emotional stress.

The prosecution denied that the attack had been involuntary, but did not call on any other expert to contradict Dr Shapiro. The judge agreed with the defence, and the defendant walked free. A judge in the Court of Appeal, which examined the case comprehensively, deemed sleepwalking attackers “one of the most difficult problems encountered in the criminal law”. A sleepwalking victim is perhaps an even more troubling proposition, because a further question arises: could there have been a “reasonable belief in consent”? And can a complainant suspected of sleepwalking be expected to provide contact details of ex-partners, or submit to intrusive testing? One case of a sleepwalking victim — or so the defence argued — is the subject of a recent BBC documentary, Sexsomnia – case closed?

The facts are similar to the Canadian croquet case. Jade McCrossen-Nethercott — who has waived anonymity — fell asleep on a sofa at a small London house party in 2017. She had not drunk a great deal. When she awoke, she felt as if she had been penetrated. Her trousers and underwear were off. The man responsible was beside her. She challenged him. He said he thought she had been awake.

The documentary tells the story of her contact with the criminal justice system following this horror. We are shown an extract from her video-recorded account to police, in which she discloses a history of parasomnia. The defence, seeing this, instructed a sleep expert, who said there was “a strong possibility” of “sexsomnia”. But the phrase “strong possibility” comes from this media report; the documentary puts it much lower: “consistent with”. This is not the only piece of apparent one-sidedness in the programme. When we are played the recording of the Crown Prosecution Service lawyer telling Ms McCrossen-Nethercott that they are going to drop the case, the clear impression is given that the decision was based on only a single expert report, from the defence.

In fact, as is later written in a super-imposed caption, there was a report from a second expert. Not included in the caption is the fact that the report was commissioned by the Crown itself. An expert’s first duties are to the truth, and to the court, but it is not uncommon for bias to creep in. So it was quite proper for the Crown to obtain a second opinion — which, it turned out, also supported the “sexsomnia” theory. If I were the defence lawyer in a case like this, armed with two expert reports that suggested a real possibility of sleepwalking, I would be feeling very confident. As the CPS explained to Ms McCrossen-Nethercott, the expert reports meant that the evidential threshold of a 50% chance of conviction was no longer met. The court duly recorded a Not Guilty verdict. There would be no trial.

But Ms McCrossen-Nethercott challenged the CPS’s decision. In particular, she felt that the strength of the sexsomnia contention was not enough to end the case before trial: there was no evidence that she’d engaged in sexual activity during any of her previous sleepwalking episodes. One of the experts had said that this could have been her first episode. Ultimately, the Chief Crown Prosecutor who performed the review agreed with Ms McCrossen-Nethercott: these difficulties should have been examined in court. Small comfort, of course, when the defendant had already been formally acquitted. Ms McCrossen-Nethercott is now suing the CPS.

Her case is thought to be the first in which the complainant’s alleged parasomnia, rather than the defendant’s, is central. But there is no doubt that sexsomnia exists, and is not all that rare among those who sleepwalk. And although it is about three-times as prevalent among men as it is among women, it certainly affects both sexes.

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In an appearance on Woman’s Hour, the director of Sexsomnia — Case Closed? said she had found about 50 cases over the last 20 years in which the issue has arisen. In one of them, a young Yorkshireman was acquitted of raping a woman in his flat on the expert evidence of Dr Irshaad Ebrahim. It was slightly disappointing, therefore, to see Dr Ebrahim in the documentary telling Ms McCrossen-Nethercott that “there are a lot of lawyers trying to get business out of it [i.e. sleepwalking defences]… The ones who are enabling it are the ones who are advertising they can get you off”. A lawyer with experience in this niche area must surely be permitted to advertise their competence — how else is an innocent sexsomniac to choose a representative? And I doubt many, or any, lawyers are claiming that they can use the defence to “get you off”.

Other 21st-century parasomnic rape acquittals include an RAF serviceman, who in 2006 had sex with a 15-year-old girl after a party, and whose longstanding somnambulism earned him the nickname “nightrider” from his colleagues; a drama student who had sex with a non-consenting woman at a house party in 2008; and a roofer who in 2007 had sex with his friend’s wife after a barbecue. All these cases, and many others like them, have one startling thing in common: the defendants were acquitted entirely, with no requirement to submit to treatment, or to avoid the triggers that increase the chance of parasomnic attacks occurring.

And this is the issue that the Ontario Court of Appeal had to grapple with in 2008, after the croquet party acquittal. The trial judge’s finding that the attack had been involuntary was not open to challenge. But the prosecution argued on appeal that he had been wrong to find that parasomnia should result in an acquittal; rather, they said, he should have been found insane — and therefore liable to be detained. The Appeal Court agreed.

In Canada, as in the United Kingdom, the law divides involuntary acts into two separate categories of automatism: insane, and non-insane. And there were two recent precedents on how this should be done. First, R v. Parks (1992), in which a sleeping man drove ten miles to the home of his mother-in-law and bludgeoned her to death with a steel tyre lever. There, the Supreme Court had upheld the finding of non-insanity. Secondly, R v. Stone (1999), in which a man stabbed his wife 47 times after suffering an abusive tirade (she said, he claims, “that she couldn’t stand to listen to me whistle, that every time I touched her she felt sick… that I had a little penis and that she’s never going to fuck me again”). The judges in that case shifted the law firmly in the direction of insanity for such cases.

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The Supreme Court in the croquet case expressed the view that part of the reason for the shift in Stone had been the contemporaneous softening of the sentencing options available for “insane” defendants. The Court in Parks, they noted, had had an understandable reluctance to condemn a sleepwalker to indefinite detention in a mental institution. Post-Stone, however, outcomes became more flexible.

Here, “insanity” in the criminal law requires a “disease of the mind” — an outmoded phrase from an 1843 opinion of the UK Law Lords — but neither concept matches any medical definition. The legal distinction between insane and non-insane automatism has been described in various different ways over the years, but the real nub of it was captured by Mr Justice Bastarache in Stone: “The fundamental question … at the centre of the disease of mind enquiry [is] whether society requires protection from the accused.”

And so it should be. But in the United Kingdom we do not seem to have caught up. In 1991, in a case in which a 32-year-old man attacked a young woman he fancied with a rock and a video-recorder, apparently in his sleep, the Court of Appeal held that sleepwalking violence should generally be regarded as insanity rather than automatism. But as press reports of sexsomnia acquittals suggest — and as the Law Commission has since confirmed — common practice in the trial courts is to allow verdicts of non-insane automatism for sleepwalkers, as if they are no threat to society.

Automatism is better for the defendant in terms of outcome — acquittal rather than detention in a mental hospital — but also because of the different burden of proof. A mere doubt is enough for a non-insane automatism acquittal, whereas the defence have to prove insanity to be likely. There are, therefore, sound conceptual and public protection arguments in favour of treating sleepwalking as insanity. (Not that it would have helped Ms McCrossen-Nethercott: the defendant cannot be expected to disprove the absence of reasonable belief in consent.)

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Barristers need to strike

By Adam King

If we did treat sleepwalking as insanity — as many argue we should — there would at least be the possibility of giving violent sleepwalkers medical and other treatment, forcibly if need be, in order to protect the public. The case of former soldier Joseph Short illustrates the potential benefits of this approach. Short was accused of a 2011 rape in Scotland, but the Crown dropped the case after leading expert Dr Colin Espie supported a diagnosis of sexsomnia. He was then tried in Hull for a further rape, and acquitted on the same grounds. In 2016, he was tried in Birmingham for another two sex attacks.

This time, he was convicted, and received a 15-year extended sentence. Dr Espie had new evidence to give: Short had not followed his advice on how to reduce the risk of a sexually violent parasomnic episode. But some more formal constraints on his freedom might have saved Short’s later victims, assuming (which we should not) that he was in fact a somnambulist rather than a lying rapist from the start. In 2013, the Law Commission recommended a wholesale reconsideration of the law in this area. It has not been followed up. There is no evidence of an epidemic of false sexsomnia defences, but such cases ought to be dealt with consistently, and with public protection foremost in mind.

The law’s response to one of the earliest well-documented cases of violent sleepwalking may serve as inspiration. In 1843, a doting father, 28-year-old Simon Fraser, got up in the middle of the night, picked up his 18-month-old son, and killed him by repeatedly smashing the boy’s head against the walls and floor. He thought he had been fighting a monster. The jury found him not guilty, and — following some dispute between experts — not insane. There was, however, according to some reports, an informal arrangement agreed: for the rest of his life, his wife would lock him in his bedroom at night.

But these days it might be best if the Courts could deal with those who commit involuntary violence by subjecting them, in appropriate cases, to the enforced supervision of medical professionals and probation officers. It is unwise to leave even an accidental rapist’s remedy to his own sense of personal responsibility.

But Harvey is not a woman. He is a male serial killer.

The New York Times, formerly a paper of record, but more recently a censorious mouthpiece, referred to Marcelin its report as, “An 83-year-old Brooklyn woman”. In fact, almost all media reports of his latest crime – murdering and dismembering a woman he met two years ago online – refer to Marcelin as “she” and “her”.

Marcelin already has two convictions for killing women, and has served much of the past five decades in jail. He was released in 2019, but earlier this month, he was taken into custody again, after the severed remains of Susan Leydon were discovered at his home and local area. The “defrauding the government” on the charge sheet referred to his attempts to cover up his crime.

Marcelin began his long career of violence with an assault charge in 1957. In 1963, he was arrested and charged with attempted rape, but the case was dropped when the victim didn’t show up to court. As violent men do, he escalated, and murderered Jaqueline Bonds on 18 April 1963. He shot her in the head in front of witnesses in Harlem. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years to life.

While in prison, Marcelin served repeated stints in solitary confinement, about which he submitted numerous complaints that this amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment”. All were dismissed. Then, in 1984, having served only 13 years of his sentence, he was released on lifetime parole.

The following year, 1985, he fatally stabbed Anna Laura Serrera Miranda and dumped her body in a bag on a roadway near Central Park. Despite this being the second woman he had killed, he plea bargained down from murder to first degree manslaughter and was sentenced to just six to 12 years.

Every two years, Marcelin unsuccessfully applied for parole. At one hearing, he blamed his crimes on “youth and poor judgement and stupidity”, and was rebuked by a parole officer, who told him he was a “grown ass man”. Marcelin complained about this comment, but it went nowhere.

Following his 1997 parole hearing, Marcelin submitted a complaint to the court that he had been denied a fair hearing because all three members of the parole board were women. He felt that the nature of his crimes would lead women to be biased against him, telling the court, “I have problems with women.” But his complaint was rejected by a three-judge panel as speculative and baseless.

In 2001, according to the court filing, a guard “observed the prisoner [Marcelin] engaged in an act of oral intercourse with another inmate”. He had to face a hearing about it, but no penalty was applied. Eventually, in 2019, the parole board made the decision to release him.

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On 27 February this year, Susan Leyden was seen entering Marcelin’s apartment, carrying a multi coloured bag. On 3 March, a woman’s torso was discovered in a garbage bag in a shopping cart on a busy street in East New York, Brooklyn during the early morning hours. Five days later, a leg was discovered in Cypress Hill only blocks away from where the torso was discovered. The next day, detectives questioned Marcelin following reports that he had been seen leaving the apartment with the same bag. A search of Marcelin’s home turned up a human head, and electric saws he had bought from a nearby Home Depot. Then a severed leg was found, four blocks away, poking out of a tire, cut from the knee down and still wearing a sock. Astonishingly, Marcelin was caught on CCTV in a 99-cent store in Brooklyn, in his wheelchair, with Leydon’s severed leg, wrapped in a garbage bag.

Nora[1. Not her real name], an experienced lawyer and feminist campaigner based in Brooklyn, is furious.  “It outrages me that this perpetrator murdered one woman, was released on parole, then brutally murdered a second woman within months and was later paroled again. How would that be possible in a world that valued women’s lives?” She tells me that even with serial murders of women, some victims are seen as expendable.

At the time of his arrest, Marcelin was living at Stonewall House, New York City’s first LGBT-welcoming senior housing. No one seems to know when Marcelin began identifying as a woman, but there is no evidence that he had undergone treatment of any kind, and it would appear that he was presenting as male until very close to the discovery of Leydon’s remains.

“He needs to be incarcerated,” Nora says. “But at the same time, we need to protect incarcerated women. How would I feel if a woman I cared about were put in a cell with this defendant? I’m worried about women being confined with this person. We have to be able to talk about those concerns.”

I also spoke to Oren Yaniv, Director of Communication at Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office about Marcelin’s case. At first, Yaniv used male pronouns to refer to Marcelin, then within a couple of minutes he suddenly switched to “she”.

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“I don’t know what her driver’s license says,” he told me, when I asked if Marcelin had legally transitioned. “Usually in the US these days it is based on a person’s preference, so right now she identifies as a woman, and we are respecting that.” So does that mean Marcelin will be held in female correctional facilities? “To the best of my knowledge, yes,” he replied.

But what about the risk he may pose to the women incarcerated with a male serial killer? Wasn’t this of concern to the DA?“I’m sure that they are taking precautions now,” Yaniv said, “this individual has spent… years in prison already, where to my knowledge they did not kill anybody, I don’t think there are too many chainsaws in prison but… she won’t be the only accused murderer that’s being held in Riker and they have policies and precautions to, you know, minimise the violence of it.”

He also confirmed at trial, “we respect the person’s gender identity… She identifies as a woman, and we refer [to] her as a woman.” Marcelin will be referred to in court as she/her. The DA’s office and the correctional facilities will “respect” Marceline’s gender identity, make the bold assumption that his transition is genuine, call him she/her in court, and put him in prison with women.

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Susan Leyden, Marcelin’s latest victim, was a devoted single mother. At her funeral, her daughter Nicole said, “Mom had a heart of gold. She was so much fun to be around. Our relationship was more like sisters at times. Perhaps because it was just the two of us, I never wanted to leave her side.”

I feel for Leyden’s daughter, and her family, and the families of the other victims. They will have to listen to the court referring to a male serial killer as “she” and “her”. They will have to live with the fact that the second and third murders were entirely foreseeable and preventable if the authorities had only acted. And all the women who will be incarcerated with this man, and who are already vulnerable will know that they have been put seriously at risk.

Marcelin epitomises the worst example of unbridled male violence, and to pretend he is the same sex as those whose lives he destroyed is nothing short of an abomination.

It’s hard to deny that the practice of self-identification is increasingly open to abuse — in the UK, as well as in America. Only last week Baroness Nicholson broke the story of the rape of a woman in a female ward by a male-bodied transwoman, who had been allowed in the ward thanks to the acceptance by the NHS of self-identification.

Gender identity ideology often comes packaged in warm and fuzzy clichés. “Trans women are women”; “What impact does it have on your life anyway?”; “Can’t you just be kind?” But for how much longer can we ignore the grave consequences for women when predatory men take advantage of the new rules of this ideology.

As Charles Darwin put it, the female, “with the rarest of exceptions, is less eager than the male”. Males work to “sedulously display their charms before the female”, who “requires to be courted”. This distinction between chaste females and indiscriminately horny males became a central principle of evolutionary theory for much of the 20th century.

Females — the sex defined by production of large gametes, and in most animal species the sex that either lays eggs or gives birth to young — have a physical limit on the rate at which they can produce offspring. Once you’re pregnant, you can’t get more pregnant by having sex again. Males, on the other hand, are not limited in the same way: if they manage to find two sexual partners instead of one, the maximum number of offspring they could have is doubled.

This binary is neat, has instinctive appeal, and has been enormously influential in the wider public imagination. Perhaps most overtly nowadays, it remains popular in the “manosphere”, where men lament that “Chads” are swimming in attention from “hypergamous” women while average Joes get ignored.

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Except of course, like most tidy binaries, this one turns out to be an oversimplification. In her latest book, Bitch, zoologist Lucy Cooke addresses misconceptions about the role of females in the animal kingdom. One of the main takeaways is that the idea females are not naturally slutty is due for an update: today’s cougars “are leading sexually liberated lives, for the benefit of themselves and their family, with no shame attached”.

But why would they do this? Isn’t more than one baby daddy surplus to requirements? Though less obvious, there are evolutionary benefits to playing the field for females as well as for males. Having multiple fathers improves the genetic diversity of a female’s offspring, for instance, and provides insurance in case one is infertile. It can help you trade up in mates, too: if you’re “shacked up with Mr Average”, you might pay a visit to your “neighbour, Mr Fabulous, for some superior genes”.

Cooke tells us how anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy suggested as early as the 1970s that female philandering could serve a different purpose altogether: protecting offspring. One of the bleaker facts of life is that infanticide is a fairly common practice in our primate cousins, and the animal kingdom more widely, since it “forces the bereaved mother into oestrus, making her readily available for fertilisation” months or years ahead of schedule. Hrdy’s idea, inspired by her observations of Indian langur monkeys, was that by “confusing paternity”, mothers might secure protection, or at least benevolent tolerance, from males who think the baby might be theirs.

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The assumption of female monogamy was so strong that for a long time observations to the contrary were written off as anomalies. The idea that female songbirds, for instance — the very symbol of marital bliss — might be sneaking off to find a bit on the side was seen as ludicrous. Perhaps these poor birds were being raped, or else there must be some kind of hormonal malfunction.

Eventually, in the 1990s, these assumptions were overturned, partly thanks to the fact that biologists could now determine paternity through DNA. The conclusion they reached was this: polyandry (that is, when a female mates with multiple males) is much more common, across the whole animal kingdom, than we had previously thought. Many species thought to be monogamous have “affairs” — and often, it is the females that actively seek out these liaisons.

This rewriting of evolutionary theory to include female promiscuity is, of course, catnip to any popular science writer of a feminist bent. As well as in Bitch, this tale features prominently in Angela Saini’s Inferior and Cordelia Fine’s Testosterone Rex — books sold as explicitly feminist reappraisals of scientific consensus. Other topics Cooke covers will appeal to the same audience, from the science of the female orgasm to the lady spiders who dominate in the bedroom by killing and eating their lovers (in response to which, males show counteradaptations “that would make even Christian Grey blush” — oral sex, bondage, and threesomes).

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But what’s typically missing from these accounts is context. Because, although Cooke is right to refute the patriarchal falsehood that females only want monogamy, this doesn’t mean we should leap to the opposite conclusion that females seek as many mates as possible; or that there are no systematic differences between the sexual proclivities of females and males. Casual readers of Bitch will likely be left with both these impressions, though.

The benefits of polyandry to females are actually limited: one meta-analysis of 35 species found that overall, it had only a modest effect on the number of offspring produced, and no measurable effect on what proportion of offspring survived. Another meta-analysis, this time focusing on insects, suggests that you can have too much of a good thing: having multiple mates increased females’ fertility, but reduced their lifespan, leading the authors to conclude that the optimum number of mates was probably “intermediate”.

Rigid oversimplification though it may be, as a general rule of thumb Darwin was right: females are often “less eager than the male”, and this divergence can be explained by the different reproductive investments required by each sex. Reading Bitch, you’d be forgiven for thinking this theory was completely debunked, but in fact the logic remains sound, even if we’re now more familiar with the exceptions and caveats.

It’s tempting, if you believe men and women should be equal, to argue that this state of affairs is “natural”. But a key lesson of biology is that if you look closely at any blissful-seeming union, you will find an imperfect alliance, with each party driven by their own interests as well as shared goals. Conflict rages between sexual partners over when to mate, over how promiscuous each of them should be, and how much care each should devote to their shared offspring. The size of new-born mice, for instance, seems to result from a compromise between genes: the fathers’ encourage a developing foetus to grow larger by leaching energy from the mothers, while the mothers’ push them in the other direction.

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Another result of conflict between the sexes is that, bluntly, forced and coerced mating is common in the animal kingdom; from insects, to the chickens I’ve spent the last four years studying, to our cousins the orangutans, where one researcher observed almost 90% of copulations to be forced. This is a result of the difference in “choosiness” between the sexes: if on average females are more “choosy” than males, then there will be many situations where they don’t want to mate but a male does.

Perhaps this is why feminist science writers tend to avoid studying conflict between the sexes, even though it has obvious implications for the feminist movement: in this field, there are some inconvenient truths. Popular discussions of sexual conflict and potential implications for human society come almost exclusively from older male biologists, who are predictably (and not always unfairly) accused of insensitivity or suspect motives; a prime example being the spectacularly controversial A Natural History of Rape by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer.

In Bitch, we do hear about the nasty and exploitative side of sexual selection, albeit briefly. Cooke’s account of Hrdy’s infanticidal langurs alerts us to the fact that not all female promiscuity follows a “girl power” narrative — it can be the result of something much darker. In her chapter on genital evolution, we learn that the bizarre vaginas of female ducks — which have “helical piping”, “opposing spirals and strange cul-de-sacs” — likely evolved in response to the high rate of forced mating in these birds: their convoluted tracts seem to reduce the chance of fertilisation in such encounters and allow them some control over who fathers their offspring.

But despite the rest of the book being woven with — arguably premised upon — implicit or explicit anthropomorphisation, any such speculations in this case are quickly headed off by a footnote implying that to ask whether rape in human and non-human animals might be related phenomena is to “dangerously” suggest that “a rapist lives inside all human males”. Humans and animals are, in this case, completely different beasts. “This is a very important distinction to make”. It feels as though there’s a lack of curiosity in this kind of popular science book for any aspects of the natural world that don’t fit into the story their audiences want to hear.

It’s no surprise that feminist biologists have little appetite for potentially pessimistic messages from nature. For a start, it’s pretty much the polar opposite of “sex positive”. It’s also at odds with the current trend within feminism to minimise, rather than emphasise, differences between the sexes.

And then, of course, it’s just depressing. Most of us are reluctant to accept fatalistic views of the world, which skate too close for comfort towards potentially disturbing implications for our own species. Readers of popular books on feminism are on average likely to be highly agreeable people, who value pleasantness and see the best in others. They are probably also “low decouplers”, who feel ethically uneasy with “separating is from ought“. According to Cooke, the idea that sexual violence is more than just a man-made aberration is “dangerous” — perhaps even morally repulsive to contemplate.

Feminists are, in general, resistant to the idea that any aspect of sexism could be “natural”, or in male interests to maintain. It’s easier to assume that it’s all a big misunderstanding. But the point of science is to understand the world as it is, not to pick and choose parts to present in a certain light. A blinkered lack of imagination led decades of male biologists to ignore inconvenient evidence and assume females were passively monogamous. Correcting that imbalance shouldn’t mean assembling a contradictory narrative to promote in its place, despite the evidence.

The acceptance of pornography as part of everyday life, available freely and constantly via our private devices, was based on a compact that should always have been obviously implausible: that the media you consume will not change you in any way. That you can log out after orgasm touched only by yourself. And that anodyne outcome was considered possible even when the material being consumed was the most depraved imaginable.

A 2003 column by David Aaronovitch probably conveys a lot of my own thoughts about the subject at the time. Worries about the number of men accessing images of child sexual abuse were, he wrote, a “panic”. Such material was obviously harmful to the children depicted in it and should be prohibited on that basis, but it would be a mistake to automatically classify those men as paedophiles. They might, he conjectured, “be motivated as much by a strange curiosity as by a desire for arousal or release”.

A line is quietly drawn here: on the one side you have the “genuine paedophiles” whose interest in sexual images of children reflects their authentic interest in sex with children, and on the other you have the “strangely curious” who will never present an in-person risk. Implicit is the idea that there is something essential and stable in the individual’s nature which controls their relationship to pornography. Your sexuality pre-exists and overrides your media exposure. In other words, nobody becomes a nonce because of the internet.

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To think this way felt knowing, authoritative. The world was full of seamy horrors, but I was equal to comprehending them — and not liable to be shocked into overreaction. To recall that way of thinking now is to feel naive, unworldly. Exposure to extreme material reformulates desires, and desires can become actions.

Talking to the Guardian this year, Michael Sheath of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation (a charity which aims to prevent potential child abusers from becoming actual ones) explained the relationship of cause and effect like this: “Of course most people can watch extreme porn and walk away, but I don’t see those people. What we are seeing on a daily basis is the conflation of easy access to hardcore and deviant pornography, and an interest in child molestation. The link is unambiguous.” There’s a consensus among professional organisations that lockdown has heightened the risks by intensifying immersion in online existence.

Why was this so hard to see coming? By the end of the twentieth century, society had reached a broad accommodation with pornography in its print and video forms. Even if you didn’t use it personally, you probably owed something to it in your everyday life: pornography had driven the adoption of VHS, cable TV and the internet. Its online iteration would be a revolution in convenience but nothing else. To be against it wasn’t just to be a miserable dried-up prude, it was to have turned away from everything modernity had to offer.

When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she put anti-porn feminists in the authoritarian camp, happily building bonfires of smut that would light the way for Gilead. The narrator Offred’s mother is one of the book burners, and she takes her daughter with her. In one of Offred’s memories, a friend of her mother’s gives her a magazine to add to the pyre:

“It had a pretty woman on it, with no clothes on, hanging from the ceiling by a chain wound around her hands. I looked at it with interest. It didn’t frighten me. I thought she was swinging, like Tarzan from a vine, on the TV.
“Don’t let her see it, said my mother. Here, she said to me, toss it in, quick.
“I threw the magazine into the flames. It riffled open in the wind of its burning; big flakes of paper came loose, sailed into the air, still on fire, parts of women’s bodies, turning to black ash in the air, before my eyes.”

In this scene, the symbolic violence to women is done not by porn, but by the destruction of porn. And Offred’s exposure to it does her no harm at all: she sees a woman bound for male pleasure, and imagines her as the hero of an adventure story. That resilience is a quiet and total riposte to her mother’s entire politics.

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It seems strange to me now that a novelist should argue, effectively, that culture has no influence. And perhaps even stranger for a political writer to have believed it — someone whose life is spent in the work of persuasion, whose business is using words to change the way people think. But I believed it too. Twenty years ago, I thought that whatever the internet might do to porn, the porn would do nothing significant to us.

***

It’s hard to be a liberal. Free speech can be a dangerous thing. So can sex. Andrea Dworkin — one of the anti-porn feminists Offred’s mother would have read — understood that men use sex as a vehicle for domination precisely because they fear the vulnerability it engenders. As she wrote in her 1987 book Intercourse:

“Sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal, though pop-culture magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan would suggest that it is. It is intense, often desperate. The internal landscape is violent upheaval, a wild and ultimately cruel disregard of human individuality, a brazen, high-strung wanting that is absolute and imperishable, not attached to personality, no respecter of boundaries; ending not in sexual climax but in a human tragedy of failed relationships, vengeful bitterness in an aftermath of sexual heat, personality corroded by too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, conflict, a wearing away of vitality in the numbness finally of habit or compulsion or the loneliness of separation. The experience of fucking changes people, so that they are often lost to each other and slowly they are lost to human hope. The pain of having been exposed, so naked, leads to hiding, self-protection, building barricades, emotional and physical alienation or violent retaliation against anyone who gets too close.”

And she knew that exposure to pornography changes people too, because she had undergone it herself. Her analysis of the pornographic classic The Story of O, from her 1974 book Woman Hating, contains a brief but striking aside: “O is particularly compelling for me because I once believed it to be what its defenders claim — the mystical revelation of the true, eternal, and sacral destiny of women.” O’s sexual apotheosis comes when she asks her lover for permission to kill herself, finally becoming the nothing she was born to be.

The fact that Dworkin was speaking from experience when she spoke about porn is inconvenient for pornography’s defenders, whose usual defensive strategy is to say that anyone who criticises it must be speaking from fear and repression. Don’t like what you’ve seen? Then you simply haven’t seen enough. When the singer Billie Eilish described recently about how her consumption of porn from the age of eleven had, among other things, distorted her idea of what “normal” female genitals look like, one female adult performer responded with disappointment that the “vulva diversity” in porn was being overlooked.

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But no one actually paying attention to what Eilish said could genuinely think her problems would be resolved by more porn. “I think it really destroyed my brain,” she explained. “I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn… I would just watch abusive BDSM… it led to problems where, you know, the first few times I had sex I was not saying no to things that were not good. And it’s because I thought that that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to.”

It’s something Eilish has talked about before, but one of the things that made it so impressive this time was where she said it: in an interview with Howard Stern. Throughout his career as a shock jock, Stern has proudly stood for the crassest in free speech. (A typical Stern stunt: in 2014, the blogger Perez Hilton fingered one of Stern’s male writers live on air.) Before the internet, he was one of the main forces in creating crossover stars from the adult industry. An invite onto his show was a way to break into the mainstream.

Not that his support necessarily translated into respect for those who worked in the industry. When the performer Sasha Grey (famous for her extreme BDSM scenes, in which she was choked, punched and slapped) accused Stern of being a “closet racist” in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2009, he didn’t just defend his own honour, he attacked hers: “What a genius… Please. Just tell me how much cock you can suck and how far you can swallow a hot dog.” But he liked porn, and helped create a society where porn was the norm.

And yet, confronted with Eilish’s story, his response was absolute agreement. “When I was little, the only thing you had was, like, a New York Times girdle ad… The first time I had sex, I had no clue what the fuck I was doing. There was a certain innocence about it. And I often say, if I had porn when I was a kid, I mean, I would run around spanking people thinking that this was what they would like.”

What he says here is a betrayal of the underlying fantasy of porn. Porn deals, of course, in many different fantasies — fantasies of what women are like and what men are like, different kinks and fetishes — but underlying all of that is a fantasy of inert sex. Sex that, however physically demanding, only reveals and does not change the people involved.

In the same interview in which she insulted Stern (an interview which was, it should be remembered, a shop window for her work and persona as much as a genuine revelation of herself), Grey delivered a perfect articulation of that fantasy. “I am a pervert,” she told the journalist, rejecting the idea that women enter porn because of trauma. “If I am working out any issues through porn, it’s anger at society for not being open about sex.” She claimed her interest in BDSM dated to her childhood — that what she showed in porn was her authentic, inherent self, and that whatever she did was in the service of her own desire to get off.

At least one person who had worked with her expressed scepticism about this. A producer quoted in the article said that he thought her “extreme presence” was a calculated means to raise her profile. Certainly, all the incentives aligned to make extremity work for her: as the “dirtiest girl in the world” (to quote the title of the Rolling Stone interview) she won mainstream attention and breakthrough roles, including the lead part in Steven Soderbergh’s movie The Girlfriend Experience.

Sex is not a solo activity, and her partner in this case was not another person but a whole industry. Whatever interests and inclinations she arrived with, only some of them were valuable enough to be encouraged.

***

Sometimes it seems there’s a conspiracy between the people who make porn and the people who don’t actually watch much porn to maintain the fiction of harmlessness. For the former, the idea of porn as a vast and effective subterranean propaganda network is a threat to their bottom line; for the latter, it’s a threat to their sense of security in the world. But the people who use it know otherwise, even if they don’t often admit it publicly.

The horror filmmaker David Cronenberg is not anyone’s idea of an anti-porn feminist, not least because his films are insistently, gruesomely pornographic. My favourite of them is Videodrome from 1982. It’s the story of a cable TV executive called Max Renn, played by James Woods, who is searching for something genuinely hardcore to give his small channel the competitive edge. When he stumbles across a scrambled broadcast called Videodrome which shows highly convincing scenes of women being bound, beaten and killed, he’s transfixed.

As Max tries to learn more about these strange films, he is warned that he’s messing with something dangerous: “It can programme you. It can play you like a video player,” murmurs one of the many shadowy people he meets. It contains coded signals that cause Max to hallucinate and, eventually, to undergo physical changes. In the film’s most disgusting, and brilliant, scene, a vaginal opening develops in Max’s abdomen into which a writhing, pulsating video cassette is inserted by one of the Videodrome operatives.

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Whichever way you turn it, the symbolism of this is unambiguous when it comes to the politics of media consumption. You could neutralise it by arguing that it’s a satire on alarmism about the corrupting influence of media, but if the film is satirising anything it seems to be Max’s platitudinous justifications for the sex and violence he traffics in. He talks about “catharsis” and “outlets” and “providing a social good”; he ends up trapped helplessly in fantasies that leach into his real life.

Porn here isn’t just something you watch. It’s something that acts on the viewer, that transforms him in the most literal way. It’s a more sinister vision of what porn does than the one implied by Cronenberg’s contemporary and fellow Canadian Atwood in Handmaid’s; it is nearer by far to the analysis Dworkin puts forward. And, as with Dworkin, it’s born from a frank acquaintance with the complications of his own sexuality and the influences at work on it.

“I’m not Max,” Cronenberg stressed in the book Cronenberg on Cronenberg, but “that isn’t to say I haven’t noticed that I’m attracted to images of sexual violence, and wonder what that means about myself.” Videodrome is, obviously, about the institutional shifts of video and cable TV, not about the then-non-existent internet. But the way Max chances on Videodrome, rather than seeks it out, and the way it’s stripped of all marks of who made it and where it came from, makes it extraordinarily prescient about the way porn sites would reshape consumption.

Now extreme porn is so pervasive that whenever it’s implicated in some terrible crime, the easy way to dismiss the link is to say — well, everyone watches it, so there’s no significance if violent criminals do it too. This is a cop-out. Media does not exert influence absolutely or in the same way on everyone, but we accept that racist media can engender racism and sexist media can engender sexism. Why should an exemption be erected for erections?

“People who say ‘Revolution now’ and aren’t worried by it are foolish,” said Cronenberg (also in Cronenberg on Cronenberg). “The lesson of history — early, middle, late — is that revolution brings with it death, pain, anguish and disease: often nothing positive to replace what was destroyed.” We are two decades now into revolution in media that was also a revolution in sex, and there is no room left for naivety about what that means.

Before Wayne Couzens committed the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard this year, he watched extreme porn. While the double murderer and mortuary employee David Fuller was committing routine necrophilia against the corpses in his care, he was also recording his offences and adding them to a meticulously maintained library of the most horrific pornography, his trial heard this year.

And regular men choke regular women because they’ve seen it in porn, while regular women accept regular violence as sex, because that’s what they’ve learned to masturbate to. The desire, the fantasy and the act create a self-inciting feedback loop. In what Dworkin called the skinlessness of sex, participants are vulnerable, penetrable.

Whatever your sex is, porn can fuck you.

A lot of the kudos and awestruck response to the novel came from an awareness of Sebold’s previous memoir, Lucky. In it, she wrote in detail about a horrifying rape she suffered as a teenager. It was a violent rape by a stranger, without a doubt. In the memoir, Sebold explained that she had identified her rapist months later when a black man, Anthony Broadwater, greeted her in the street. Broadwater must have been a friendly man: he smiled at Sebold and, she claims, went as far as to say “Hey girl” to her. Although she identified a completely different man in a police line-up, Mr Broadwater was prosecuted and convicted on her evidence, backed up by some now discredited scientific analysis of hair types. The memoir, rather skating over some details, told a redemptive story of obtaining justice by finding the culprit and locking him up.

The years went by. Broadwater was released from prison the year before Lucky was published, after 17 years. Sebold, having told her true-life tale in a memoir, went on to publish The Lovely Bones. At the time, I was a book reviewer who sometimes worked for The Observer. They commissioned a review of it from me, and I panned it. I had a fundamental objection to it. I just didn’t believe it.

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Although a work of fiction is not true or false in the usual sense, there is no doubt that a novel can be entirely made-up, and yet fundamentally true. I didn’t believe a single word that The Lovely Bones said about human beings. I said, rather briskly, that 14-year-old girls were not like that; that Sebold thought people were defined by race (“Indian, and therefore mystic”) in absurd and damaging ways; that the novel went straight to courting emotion without troubling to be truthful.

It is bad manners to quote oneself, but I think my line that it was “a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment and whimsy” is bang on. I wish I’d known what effects that unfeeling quality might have had in real life on an innocent man. In the review, I also suggested that this huge bestseller, in the usual way of these things, would be succeeded in five years by a difficult second novel that did zip business and then she would disappear.

That was more or less correct. She published a second novel, not much liked, in 2007, and then fell silent. All the same, The Lovely Bones sold an enormous number of copies and was made into a big-budget movie directed by Peter Jackson. I got a tremendous amount of angry flak from some people involved with the publication of the book, some rather personally homophobic in tone, some bringing up the horror of Ms Sebold’s rape as if to show she was the sort of person who could not write an untruthful word. In the meantime, Mr Broadwater tried to put his life together, working in menial jobs, and choosing, he says, not to have children so as not to inflict the shame of his conviction on them.

Time went on, and, it having become clear that Sebold didn’t have another novel in her to film, her memoir was taken up by the film industry. An executive producer of the adaptation, Tim Mucciante — rather a hero of this case, considering that he was acting with pure disinterest — started to wonder about the degree to which the script had changed Sebold’s book to sustain plausibility. He hired a private detective to look into the case. It didn’t take the detective long to establish that Broadwater had been wrongfully convicted on the basis of Sebold’s testimony. 40 years after the event, the racial attitudes that find it terrifying that a black man should have the effrontery to greet a white girl in the street, and that send him to prison for years because of it, are no longer quite as strong as they were, and Mr Broadwater’s conviction has been quashed. Sebold’s memoir will not be filmed, and has been withdrawn from circulation.

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Sebold herself has apologised, sort of. As literary criticism formed the basis of my not believing her in the first place, let me point out her reliance on the passive voice, robbed of agency, and how she can’t decide whether she’s talking to him (you) in a friendly way, or of him (he) in a safely remote way. Broadwater’s life “was unjustly robbed from you.” “I will forever be sorry for what was done to him.” It was “the system that sent an innocent man to jail.” Mr Broadwater was “brutalized by our flawed legal system.”

Reading Sebold’s apology — which goes on about what an honest writer she is, how driven by social justice she always was, and how she has always tried to “act with integrity” — I can only say that the opinion I formed in 2002 is still unchanged. I wouldn’t believe a word that Alice Sebold writes. From her books, and from this statement, one can only conclude that she has always felt a pressing need to present herself as well as possible, according to the drifting preferences of the American marketplace. For other people, the truth — or the truthfulness underlying the superficially invented — matter a lot more.

This case is not remotely difficult. Alice Sebold’s rape was appalling. Her initiating a process that ruined an innocent man’s life was also appalling. The culture that created the rapist is horrifying; the culture that created blame for a black man saying hello to a white stranger in the street is horrifying. There is nothing to take forward from this terrible series of events, however.

Men and women should be listened to by the criminal justice system with investigative purity; the truth or otherwise of their claims examined irrespective of whether they are black, or white, or Indian and therefore, it appears, mystically gifted. For myself I can only say that sometimes, the full forensic weight of the criminal justice system can establish a “truth” where a practised reader of literary prose on the page can see falsity, manipulation, deceit and a self-preservation that doesn’t care what it stamps on and destroys in the hungry pursuit of fame.

Whenever these gangs reappear in public view, responses tend to fall into two categories. The first laments the youth and vulnerability of the victims and wonders which public-sector measures could be implemented to stop such things happening again.

The second type points out that the safeguarding lot are keen to talk about anything but the ethnic disparity between the victims (usually young, white, and working-class) and the rapists (usually of South Asian heritage, often though not exclusively Muslim). The implication is usually that if only we stopped bowing to political correctness, and allowing mass immigration into the country, nothing like this would ever happen.

One side blames poverty, inadequate sex education and institutional safeguarding failures; the other, immigration and political correctness. But there’s another aspect that neither side wishes to acknowledge.

That is, a subset of adult men takes an intense sexual interest in very young girls. This isn’t specific to one culture or ethnicity: today’s report from the Ghislaine Maxwell trial describes the grooming and abuse of a 14-year-old in a setting with different sociocultural traits and far more money, but which otherwise follows much the same pattern as that suffered by the girls in Hull and other UK towns. And we’ve embraced a culture that normalises extreme and ‘kinky’ forms of sexual self-expression — including for adolescents — while our medico-legal and cultural frameworks blur the official age of consent.

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Taken together, this results in a culture where even lovingly parented and closely supervised girls routinely encounter opportunistic pervs. Meanwhile, girls who are neglected, unloved or otherwise vulnerable are left with few defences against their attention. Why do neither the anti-immigration side nor the safeguarding hand-wringers want to confront this? Because sexual freedom is of net benefit to everyone who’s already empowered — including most of the angry editorial-writers on both sides.

This worldview holds that all forms of sexual activity are legitimate, and our freedoms on this front should be constrained only by consent. Perhaps the central contributor to this worldview is the cultural theorist (and paedophile) Michel Foucault, who made the case in History of Sexuality that there are no sexual crimes as such. Rather, there are only acts that we choose to construct as harmful.

Foucault took this up to the point of suggesting that children can in some circumstances participate in sexual activity without being harmed. We find traces of this argument in, for example, the Seventies campaign to cut the age of consent to 14 or in some circumstances 10. Further traces can be found in the Gillick v Wisbech 1986 legal case that blurred the legal age of consent by establishing doctors’ right to prescribe contraceptives to girls under 16 without their parents’ knowledge, where the girl was deemed mature enough.

Even as Foucault blurred questions of childhood sexuality, and Gillick opened the door to doctors condoning (safe) underage sex, pop culture was full of the voices of men pushing at legal restrictions on sexualising under-16s. It was 1981 when Ted Nugent released the song ‘Jailbait’, which includes the line “I don’t care if you’re just thirteen”. There are plenty more such works.

As an adolescent in the 1990s, I recall being beeped by van drivers from some time before 16. In 2002 a 15-year-old Charlotte Church took legal action against a website which was counting down the days until she turned 16 and could legally have sex.

And a quick straw poll of my Twitter followers asking for recollections of when they began to be hit on by adult men returned hundreds of replies, giving an average age of 10-12.

Would even more men be willing to admit desiring very young girls if it weren’t frowned upon? One study showed that men took longer to admit finding a female image attractive if he’d been told she was 14 or 15. This suggests that, unsurprisingly, men are more hesitant to give expression to desires they know are socially unacceptable. And the flip side of this is that, implicitly, we should make sure men are vigorously encouraged to go on repressing these darker desires.

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But that’s not what either sex is encouraged to do today. Rather, both sexes grow up to an insistent drumbeat of ‘sex-positive’ feminism, which asserts (with Foucault) that all sexual expression is valid provided it’s consensual. And the bandwidth of that expression is considerably wider than it used to be, because children are exposed to porn around the age of 11 or even younger.

Studies show porn use normalises violent ‘sexual scripts’ for boys, while for girls pornography use is associated with participating in group sex, either voluntarily or coerced, and also agreeing to unwanted sex acts. (Presumably these register as ‘consensual’ and are therefore valid and empowering.)

Growing up amid such imagery, we find young women today expressing a desire for intimacy bound up with violence, such as in this TikTok video where a girl longs for “the type to give you forehead kisses but also the type to choke you”.

Meanwhile, on social media, teenagers claim casual sex is a game, emotional intimacy is cringe and drug and alcohol abuse is something to celebrate. It’s now easier to see why the Hull grooming gang case may have been difficult to prove.

Consider ‘Anna’, one of the victims, who was 16 when the abuse started. The fact that she was over 16 meant investigators reportedly had to show that she did not, in fact, consent to being threatened, bruised, choked and violently raped.

How are police supposed to tell the difference between consensual and abusive choking and rape, when we can’t agree sexual acts such as choking are bad or even reach consensus on the proper age at which someone’s deemed capable of consenting to them?

Scandal after scandal breaks, and we go on pretending this culture is fine and all we need is better ‘consent’ education or more effective policing. But it should be clear by now that ‘consent’ is no protection from predators.

And neither are the police. They can only punish clear and provable violations of commonly-held public norms, which have already taken place. We have so thoroughly stripped sex of norms that it often only becomes possible to demarcate rape in cases where a girl is so grotesquely underage or unwilling that no one could seriously argue she ‘consented’.

No one wants to confront this. Instead, every time the scandal bubbles up again we bicker a bit about racism and safeguarding, then go back to sexual liberation as usual. Because in practice, protecting young girls from the seemingly ineradicable minority of hebephilic predators doesn’t just look like handing out contraception or telling girls not to talk to strangers.

Along with tougher sentencing for abusers, preventive measures might mean restrictions on pubescent girls’ social lives, so they’re less exposed to opportunistic predators. Such an approach might also seek to get skimpy and figure-hugging clothing off the shop rails — especially in outlets aimed at adolescents.  It might call not just for ‘education’ on how to make sense of pornography, but serious efforts to suppress it — not just for children but everyone.

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It might include not just ‘education’ in how and where to ‘consent’, or avoid pregnancy while leading a promiscuous life, but widespread social deprecation of sexual promiscuity. It might even mean re-evaluating the idea that it’s possible have both a stigma-free sexual culture and also public norms that keep predators away from young girls.

And even though all of these measures together might add up to greater protection from sexual abuse, some will claim they’re indistinguishable from the ‘patriarchal’ constraints on erotic freedom that sex-positivity has been working so hard, for so long, to do away with. Others will say I’m victim-blaming, and really what we need to do is teach rapists not to rape. But given that making rape illegal hasn’t stopped rapists raping, it’s hard to see what a few classes would achieve

As long as we keep resisting any constraint on our erotic freedom, we’re effectively asking young girls to be the change we want to see in the world. The cost of our ongoing failure to expunge the dark underbelly of male sexuality and attain liberated, empowered universal erotic utopia is counted on their youthful bodies.

The grooming gangs are a unique evil. The men who commit these crimes should be punished to the utmost. But the racialised atrocities conducted within those gangs are on us too: a grotesque caricature of a sexual culture in which we all collude.

Liberal adults demanded the right to sexual self-expression — including even loveless, violent, commercial, kinky, no-holds-barred or violent acts. Now we have it. And so do frightened, lonely, unloved, impoverished female children in depressed cities up and down the country.

Before our call, she’d emailed me explaining that she wanted to talk about incels, and I thought that Whatever was the best book about them ever written: the world is divided into ugly and hot people who compete in ruthless combat, with no relief in marriage and no reward but rot. It’s obviously depressing — when I first read it, I immediately made my first (and for many years, last) therapist appointment. I was a 21-year-old living with my brother on Gainesville, Florida’s Sorority Row. I had no romantic prospects.

A few years later, I was in graduate school further north, in a contrived relationship with a cheerful Connecticut lawyer. In a cold and sunny condo, on the smooth wooden flooring, I read Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior: it was one of the only books about ugly women I’d ever read. There it was, again, but Midwestern and dumpy, not French and brainy: the sick sad world, where you might get laid but you’ll never get better.

Reading Gaitskill’s fantastic latest book, the essay collection Oppositions, I began to see why she’d reacted so badly to Houellebecq: he sounded simple, scientific, and therefore stupid. And Gaitskill doesn’t brook stupidity. Her terror and her grace — alongside her disorientingly good looks — is her intelligence; an elegant and icy one that, in the end, is also merciful. Throughout these astonishing essays about literature, music and more, she seems to be circling the notion that curiosity—embracing the muddle —is the path to empathy for sick, sad creatures like us.

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Most of the essays in Oppositions are reprised from her 2017 collection Somebody With a Little Hammer. That title comes from her essay — included in both volumes — about teaching Anton Chekhov’s Gooseberries, with its famous speech: “At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall — illness, poverty, loss — and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now.”

Gaitskill serves as the person with the little hammer, but she doesn’t just remind us of unhappiness: beyond that, her job is to remind us how complicated living is, how little we know, how much we have left to do. Her job is to make us be adults.

That maturity — sometimes painful, often bleak — can prove unpopular, especially when it comes to sex. But here, Gaitskill is in a class of her own: braver, ballsier—just smarter. Twelve pages into an essay defending Lolita as a book about love, about how lovers strive for heaven and dwell in hell, she starts talking about how she was molested at five — and says she felt empathy for the man; that she was even aroused. Wow!

Anyone rushing to dismiss Gaitskill as unempathetic or cold would be hard-pressed: she inserts herself into these questions with unflinching bravery, and she knows suffering herself. But her “story”, like everyone else’s, is up for debate, and she doesn’t make herself a martyr or a hero. And her goal isn’t to condemn — not to condemn Mailer or Nabokov or her assaulters or the pretentious boyfriend obsessed with The Talking Heads: her goal is to complicate. Her goal is to change her mind.

She brings the same remarkable mixture of clear thought and startling vulnerability to questions of sexual consent: her essay “The Trouble With Following the Rules” is, for me, just about the best analysis of date rape ever written. It begins with Gaitskill’s description of her date rape as a sixteen-year-old girl dropping acid with strangers in Detroit, before questioning whether it was really rape. In a stunning turn, she says that when she was “raped for real” by an attacker who threatened to kill her, she got over it pretty quickly. Then, she writes about when a casual friend and her get drunk and he became aggressive and seemed almost to force her into sex.

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In a move reminiscent of Amy Hempel’s The Harvest, Gaitskill writes: “In the original version of this essay I didn’t mention that when I woke up the next day I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and that when he called me I invited him over for dinner again. I didn’t mention that we became lovers for the next two years.” That first draft made the story simpler, but the messy version is braver and more true.

In Gaitskill’s vision, sexual partners have awkward, often painful, negotiations to make, often in the dark, often in a rush, often in confusion. And any decent, kind sex won’t come from rigid rules; it will come from, as she writes, “the kind of fluid emotional negotiation that I see as necessary for personal responsibility”. That negotiation may take years. By the end of the essay, she takes responsibility for pretending to consent, tripping in that apartment decades earlier, with that man who was poor and black and “high on acid and misunderstanding, just as I was”.

Gaitskill isn’t telling women to have lower standards for sex; in a sense, she’s telling them to have higher standards. In a remarkable piece on reading the Bible (“A Lot of Exploding Heads: On Reading the Book of Revelation”), she defines fornication not simply as sex outside of marriage, but as “sex done in a state of psychic disintegration, with no awareness of one’s self or one’s partner, let alone any sense of real playfulness”. It is a “primitive attempt” to “give ballast to the most desperate human confusion”.

Lately, outlets including the New York Times have been chattering about the idiotically termed “sex negativity”, supposedly in vogue among young women. However, after reading Gaitskill’s essays, it seems they’re not opposed to sex, but rather to what Gaitskill calls fornication.

“The Trouble With Following the Rules” is probably the best articulation of what, I think, women my age are so unhappy about: in the old sexual regime, the rule was for women to have as little sex as possible, and now the rule is to have as much sex as possible. But neither world really cares what women actually want or need, and in the new, supposedly liberated world, even if you aren’t date raped, as she says: “sometimes I did find myself having sex with people I barely knew when I didn’t really want to all that much.” Sex can be unpleasant or regrettable or confusing without being assault; with women under so much pressure and in so much pain, it’s hard to imagine otherwise.

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The sexual revolution killed feminism

By Mary Harrington

As she writes, all people have a mixture of strong and delicate parts; part of them wants strange sex, while part of them flinches from it. Often, we want many things we can’t articulate at all: that’s what being human is. We all know that, and we all deny that as we tell students to fill out “consent forms” on their phones before sex.

Gaitskill is trying — alongside other books of this year, such as Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again and The Right to Sex — to make sex complicated again. Often, it’s neither pure, joyous, free-willed pleasure, nor felony rape. As Gaitskill writes in her sympathetic but clear-eyed essay on Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat who later became an anti-porn activist, “I imagined that Lovelace simply lacked the confidence to describe what she did and felt in a nuanced way, and that the thing was very, very nuanced and contradictory. So she went with either ‘I liked it’ or ‘I was raped.’”

So many experiences are in between; in another anecdote, a woman in her fifties described how she was furious when she thought about how in her twenties, a man in the East Village would grab her breasts. But back then, she was giggly and flirted and loved attention. “So which is true, the giggly girl who just laughed when the guy grabbed her, or the angry woman in her fifties?”

Then she amps it up: apparently, some women orgasm when they are raped. What are we to do with this information? We live in a world of pain and compromise, and we need new language for “the sometimes excruciating contradictions that many women experience in relation to sex”. Without it, to quote her essay on the adaptation of Secretary (“Victims and Losers”), “every American has been “telling his her ‘story’ and trying to get redress for the last 20 years. Whatever the suffering is, it’s not to be endured, for God’s sake, not felt and never, ever accepted.”

Gaitskill accepts suffering. Perhaps that’s why girls my age love her so much. Gaitskill can see that even when we behave badly, we’re not just bad people making bad choices; we often don’t have good choices. We’re not sluts or evil or victims. We’re lost and lied to by everyone that was supposed to give us answers.

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How feminism ate itself

By Kat Rosenfield

Too many of us, like the protagonist of Secretary, “yearn for contact in an autistic and ridiculous universe, and… wind up getting [our] butt spanked instead.” We know that sex won’t save us, that work won’t save us, we know that feminism won’t save us, and we don’t think the old rules will either. There’s a sense of doom.

The last thing Gaitskill said to me, as I was leaving her home last week, was that she thought she’d have been a very different person if she hadn’t been raised in Michigan. Perhaps that’s the Midwesterner in her — a sense that the world where safety and comfort were a promise, where if you made the right choices the right things happened, has already ended. We showed up late.

But there, too, she’s different from Houellebecq. She might be dark, but she isn’t mean. She sees that everybody is suffering, men and women, beautiful and ugly. We are all both villains and victims. Across these essays, she’s attuned to the way art and experiences people dismiss as upsetting or triggering are simply attuned to the complexity of life — to the way that love is a living nightmare.

The police officer gives her a hard, cold answer: “That’s rape.”

This is a scene in the Emmy-winning I May Destroy You, which last year served to briefly focus the conversation about sexual violence on the underreported crime of “stealthing”. In the UK, where it is set, removing a condom without the consent of your partner is illegal. The same is true in Germany, and one jurisdiction in Australia. Recently, California became the first US state to ban stealthing — or removing, damaging, or otherwise interfering with the integrity of birth control during sexual intercourse. And a few weeks ago, Chile became the latest nation to follow suit.

But the fact that stealthing is a crime doesn’t necessarily help Arabella. She does not press charges, as she no longer has any physical evidence. She is not compensated for her purchase of emergency contraceptive. And the law doesn’t act as an arbiter between herself and the man who harmed her. It does help her in one way — by telling her definitively that her intuition is right: this act was wrong and hurtful and should not have happened. But is that enough?

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Did Bill Cosby deserve to go free?

By Kat Rosenfield

When we look to address wrongs — and to expand our understanding of what causes harm — we so often look to the creation of rules, laws and institutional responses, and stop there. The act of criminalising stealthing is meant to announce to perpetrators and victims alike — who, like Arabella, and possibly her own rapist, might not know — that it is classified as rape, and comes with potential consequences. When Chilean deputies put forth the bill, lawyer and politician Gael Yeomans followed up the announcement with, “Yes, gentlemen, that is a sexual assault even if you do not like to hear it.”

All this allows politicians to say: “we are taking this seriously.” But the promise of justice is a difficult one to keep, in practice. The United Kingdom has only had one successful conviction of stealthing. In that particular case, a man removed the condom in the midst of an engagement with a sex worker, continued to have sex with her despite her protests, assaulted her, and left without paying. His overt aggression and violence — he reportedly threatened to murder the judge presiding over the trial — made it easy to find him guilty.

But the overwhelming majority will not find justice within these systems — partly because it’s a crime that can happen without the victim noticing. In Alexandra Brodsky’s survey of people who were victims of stealthing, many of them didn’t realise the condom had been removed or tampered with until after the completion of the sexual act, sometimes not even until the partner had left. This makes it almost impossible to prove it happened.

People have long struggled to prove they have been raped for the very same reason: lack of corroborative evidence or witnesses. But with stealthing, it’s even harder to prove the intention to do harm. Condoms come off and they break. Making a case that the removal or damage wasn’t accidental or inadvertent is harder even than making a case that you said no when your rapist is insisting you said yes.

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Can you ever trust a jury?

By Adam King

The consequences of stealthing are very real, though. Those who spoke with Brodsky report scrambling for health resources after discovering what their partner had done: making appointments for STI tests, procuring PrEP to protect against possible HIV exposure, buying the morning-after pill. Some of these medical interventions have debilitating side effects, like cramps and headaches. Some might not work, meaning more medical interventions.

And all of these services can be difficult, expensive and occasionally impossible to access, depending on the victim’s location and financial situation. Even in cases of forceful rape, hospitals in America are not legally obligated to give victims PrEP or emergency contraception — Catholic hospitals in particular make it difficult to procure any medication that might interfere with a potential pregnancy.

So often, then, when citizens find themselves in crisis, they discover there is a wide gap between what is available and what is accessible, and between what might be useful to them and what they are told they can have. This is reminiscent of the pro-choice politicians who give lip service to “protecting Roe v. Wade,” while doing nothing to make abortion affordable for people with low incomes, or to restore clinics that have been shut down by anti-abortion activists’ nuisance suits, or to decentralise services away from abortion clinics — which are often the targets of harassment and threats of violence.

Sure, abortion is available — if you are lucky enough to live in a city that has a clinic or wealthy enough to travel for it, and of course if you have the funds to pay for the procedure. But it’s not accessible — doctors should be able to offer medical abortifacients directly to patients, or mail them to those in rural environments or in abusive situations.

This state of affairs has become so acceptable to most of the politicians in power that it’s very rarely discussed — even by those who say they care about reproductive justice. The subject is left to Hollywood: trying to access abortion services is so commonly understood as an arduous and complicated process that it’s become the plot of multiple films — Happening, Four Months Three Weeks and Two Days, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Plan B. In most cases, the primary character is finally able to find the care they need, even if it drains them financially, emotionally and physically.

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There is no spiking epidemic

By Tom Chivers

The new law in California makes stealthing a civil matter, giving the victim the opportunity to sue for damages in civil court. If the crime led to the transmission of a disease or an unwanted pregnancy, there is at least the chance of compensation, even if that chance is slim. The burden of proof is less heavy in civil courts than in criminal ones, but it’s difficult to imagine scenarios in which the judgement didn’t come down to trusting one person’s word over another’s — which historically hasn’t gone well for victims of sexual assault.

And this might be especially true if there isn’t a tangible result to the stealthing — no infection or pregnancy: if the victim did not accrue costs in the pursuit of health services. Was harm still done? Clearly, yes: trust has been violated, emotional fall out is likely. But when we try to convert that experience into dollars and cents — when trying to define the precise dimensions of the damage done — we reach for clarity and find only more murk.

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Sexual assault is the great leveller

By Tanya Gold

In her 1998 essay, “The Secret Sharer: Sex, Race, and Denial in an American Small Town” — recently collected in What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk about MeToo — JoAnn Wypijewski told the story of Nushawn Williams, a young black man who infected multiple women with HIV through unprotected sex, knowing he was positive. The small town of Jamestown, New York, wanted to show it was taking the harm done to these young women seriously — and prevent any more women from being infected. And so, it filed criminal charges against Williams for reckless endangerment and statutory rape (two of his partners were underage).

Many of the townspeople had opinions on the case — about how evil Williams must be, about what was “wrong” with the women and girls who had unprotected sex with him when HIV/AIDS was all over the media. Few paid much attention, however, to what those women and girls might need now that they found themselves infected — or even what could have helped them before their encounters with Williams. There were free condoms available through the health clinic, but they weren’t accessible, because there was so little outreach in the community.

Plenty of politicians contributed to turning this local case into a nationwide scandal — Rudy Giuliani said Williams should be charged with attempted murder — but few showed any interest in expanding medical access or offering childcare services to those low-income women who had had HIV+ babies from William. Everyone got what they wanted out of the situation: the politicians burnishing their reputations, the TV commentators using the AIDS panic to gain attention, and the media who made money by creating a scandal. Everyone except the women most affected.

I jumped at the chance, even though I am a member of the Labour party, and we worked amicably together for the next three years. Fast forward to 2021: Johnson is prime minister, Lord Greenhalgh (as he now is) is a government minister and I am out. Now I am in a peculiar situation: I have voted Labour all my life, yet was brought into City Hall by a Conservative administration — and sacked by its Labour successor.

The dismissal arrived last Friday afternoon, as I was writing and giving interviews about the dreadful murders in Plymouth less than 24 hours earlier (I have written a book about the relationship between misogyny, domestic abuse and terrorism). The last thing I expected, in the middle of such horror, was to be sacked by email.

After eight years of unpaid work on behalf of women and girls in London, it seems reasonable to expect that Sadiq Khan or Sophie Linden, the deputy mayor who replaced Greenhalgh, would have wanted to tell me themselves. But I have not heard a word from Khan and I only had a call from Linden yesterday after the Times published a story about the incident. Before that, all I had received was a series of diary notifications from her office, cancelling all the meetings I was supposed to have with her over the next twelve months.

The news was delivered in an email from Diana Luchford, a former civil servant at the Home Office, who is now CEO of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. I had to read it twice before the meaning sank in: I am out, thus removing independent scrutiny at a moment when the behaviour of the Metropolitan police towards women has been fiercely criticised.

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How artists lost their courage

By Jess De Wahls

Take the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer, followed the force’s callous handling of a vigil to commemorate her. Or its failure to investigate when two murdered sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, were reported missing last year. If ever an outside voice were needed to raise women’s anxieties at City Hall, it is surely now.

My sacking has been attributed to a “governance review”, even though I made it clear months ago that I wanted to stay on as Co-chair. Luchford’s email did offer a sop: that I could remain on the board as an “advisor”. But that would remove my influence over the agenda and access to important meetings behind the scenes.

As Co-Chair, I was able to make sure that vital issues raised by recent events were discussed. For example, I argued that we needed to know what the Metropolitan Police intend to do to improve the way they identify sexual predators in their own ranks, and to make sure that complaints of domestic abuse against serving officers are handled properly. I also expressed my concern, privately, that the Mayor’s focus on issues such as knife crime risked diverting attention from crimes against women, including black women in London who suffer disproportionately high levels of rape and sexual assault.

At the end of March, just weeks after the abduction of Ms Everard, the number of rapes reported in London reached a ten-year high. The figures are shocking, and I thought they would be discussed at the most recent meeting of the London Crime Reduction Board, which is chaired by the Mayor. When I asked why we were not talking about the rape statistics, I was told they would be on the agenda of the next meeting — in October.

Linden has insisted that the sacking has nothing do with my attempt to protect women-only spaces in refuges, which receive key funding from City Hall. Last year I became aware that some women’s organisations were becoming alarmed by tweets from the Mayor’s official Twitter account. They felt under growing pressure to admit male-bodied trans women — men who have not undergone surgery but “identify” as women — to spaces currently reserved for female victims of domestic violence. No one is suggesting that trans women who suffer domestic abuse don’t need services, but they should be provided without affecting the principle of women-only spaces.

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The transgender lobby wants to rewrite the law

By Maya Forstater

“Trans women are women, trans men are men,” Khan declared in February, repeating the mantra of trans activists. “Trans people deserve the dignity and safety of being recognised as their gender,” he tweeted a few months later when it was reported that the government had dropped plans to allow people to self-identify as the other sex. “I’m dismayed that the Govt has made a U-turn on its own consultation to make the Gender Recognition Act more straightforward.”

It didn’t matter that trans activists were demanding almost total deregulation of the legal process of “changing” sex, which would make it less onerous than adopting a child or getting a driving licence. Or that self-ID has huge implications for women, most obviously for vulnerable women who need spaces away from men in refuges, hospitals and prisons. Sadiq Khan was fully on board — and had ignored requests from women’s organisations, including the Labour Women’s Declaration, for a meeting.

I discussed the Mayor’s tweets with Karen Ingala Smith, indomitable CEO of nia, the organisation that provides services to victims of sexual and domestic violence in east London. We decided to write to Linden, warning her about the impact Khan’s statements were having on organisations that depend on City Hall for funding: “How can it have anything other than a chilling effect when the Mayor publicly takes sides with a group of activists on such a contentious issue?” we asked.

We received an equivocating reply, repeating the Mayor’s view that “trans women are women” and making the dubious claim that the “basic human rights [of trans people] remain unmet”. Linden told us that the Mayor’s approach to providing services “is led by the needs of victims and survivors on a clear principle of non-discrimination”, a puzzling statement since women’s organisations are highly unlikely to discriminate on grounds of age, race, religion or disability.

They might exclude someone with male genitals from a women’s refuge — but that would be a lawful use of the exemptions in the 2010 Equality Act. We wrote again, seeking an assurance that no women’s organisation supported by the Mayor would be penalised financially for doing so. Linden did not reply.

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Women don't feel safe with Starmer

By Joan Smith

Then, last October, we wrote directly to Khan, reminding him that he voted for what is now the Equality Act when he was a Labour MP in 2009. “If you no longer support the Act in full, including the provision to restrict access on the ground of biological sex in certain circumstances, we believe that such a significant shift should be publicly acknowledged and debated,” we wrote. Ten months later, we are still waiting for a response.

Now I’ve been ousted. Yesterday, Linden took to Twitter to deny claims that I had been sacked after raising concerns about transwomen in refuges. She reiterated: “This is simply not true. The structure of all our boards at City Hall is being changed. [My dismissal] has nothing to do with any views Joan has expressed.” In response, all I can say is that I’ve spent years advocating for the safety of women and girls — and having an outside expert at City Hall seems to me as important as ever.

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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The police have a woman problem

By Sarah Ditum

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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By Julie Bindel

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.

Americans love this quote. Not just for its lyrical qualities, but for the way it feels to say it, like planting your very own little flag on the topmost point of the moral high ground. We love it for the principles it enshrines: justice, fairness, protection of the vulnerable from authoritarian overreach.

That is, until one of those theoretical guilty persons actually escapes, in real life, and all those pesky rights they’re entitled to suddenly become really inconvenient.

Bill Cosby is the latest case to put Americans’ principles to the test, after his 2018 conviction for aggravated indecent assault — a landmark moment in the #MeToo movement — was overturned this week on a legal technicality. In 2005, Cosby was sued in civil court by a woman who alleged that he’d drugged and assaulted her. (This was long before the reckoning with Cosby’s history of serial sexual abuse that began in 2014 and ultimately resulted in 60 women coming forward with allegations of their own.) At the time, there wasn’t enough evidence to bring a criminal case against Cosby — and district attorney Bruce Castor made an agreement with the comedian: if Cosby waived his constitutional rights against self-incrimination, and testified truthfully in the civil case, he would not be prosecuted in criminal court.

Cosby did testify, did incriminate himself and ended up settling the lawsuit for $3.4 million. And while it’s easy to argue in hindsight that Castor never should’ve made such a deal, at the time, this was the next-best thing to seeing justice served. With no hope of moving forward on a criminal prosecution, here, at least, was a way that Cosby could be made to suffer consequences for what he’d done (and for his victim to receive recompense for the pain she’d experienced).  But in 2018, as the allegations against him piled up, a different prosecutor looked back at that case and decided to charge Cosby with criminal assault using his testimony from the civil case — and reneging on the promise made by Castor more than ten years before.

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Biden is the white knight women don't need

By Kat Rosenfield

Even at the time, both the prosecutor and the judge in Cosby’s criminal case knew that they were violating his due process right, and creating possible grounds for acquittal, by failing to uphold the agreement. So the verdict this week, handed down by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, is just a confirmation of what the law already implied: if one prosecutor makes a promise on behalf of the State, another prosecutor can’t come along and ignore it.

On the one hand, this is an enormous win for due process protections that puts important limits on how prosecutors can abuse their power. On the other, of course, it means that a rapist walks free (albeit after serving two years in prison).

And yet Cosby’s acquittal should still be welcomed — not just because it upholds an important principle, but because it sets a precedent for other cases, including those of sympathetic (or even innocent!) defendants who might otherwise have been railroaded by prosecutors.

For in reality, this is how it often works. As Andrew Fleischman, a defence attorney who works on behalf of wrongfully convicted clients in Georgia, told me: “Many of our most important rights come from people who suck.”

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America's Muslim #MeToo moment

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Miranda warning, for instance — the one that starts “you have the right to remain silent” — stems from the case of Ernesto Miranda, who kidnapped and raped a teenage girl in 1963. Miranda was totally guilty of a heinous crime (and he was convicted again at a second trial, despite the exclusion of his illegally obtained confession). But in overturning his first conviction, the court created a vital protection for all Americans, including people who are young, poor or otherwise vulnerable to being manipulated by the cops into incriminating themselves. Now, every person placed under arrest must be verbally instructed that they have the right to shut up and ask for a lawyer.

Meanwhile, the law that protected Cosby also protects people with far less wealth or resources, in a system where the state already enjoys immense power to wreck the lives of people who get caught up in the criminal justice system. Fleischman notes, for instance, that it’s not unusual for people charged with a crime — even something minor like marijuana possession — to have their children taken away by the state (a process that prosecutors often trigger intentionally, so that they can leverage the possibility of being reunited with the child to convince distraught parents to cooperate.)

It’s not hard to imagine a nightmare scenario in which the prosecutor promises a parent immunity from prosecution, and a better chance at getting their child back, in exchange for truthful testimony at the parental rights hearing in civil court — and then reneges on the agreement, using that testimony to bring a criminal case. But now, thanks to the precedent set by Cosby’s case, prosecutors won’t just get smacked down on appeal for abusing their power in this way; they’re also less likely to try it to begin with.

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The world after Trump

By Tanya Gold

If anyone should recognise the value of a due process victory, even for a terrible person like Bill Cosby, it’s American progressives (for whom criminal justice reform and decarceration is usually a central concern.) Instead, many are outraged over the acquittal. Partly this reflects a tendency on the Left to talk out of both sides of one’s mouth on the issue of crime, where decarceration and restorative justice is great, right up until it benefits someone we don’t like. (Take the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, when the same people who’d downplayed crimes like looting and arson during the summer protests of 2020 suddenly developed a wild enthusiasm for throwing the book at lawbreakers.)

But it’s also a failure of imagination: even as many progressives would readily agree that our law enforcement officers have too much power and too little accountability, that too many people receive draconian punishments that don’t fit their crimes, or that innocent people get railroaded every day by overzealous prosecutors who just want to put someone in jail, they’re also sure, deep down, that the someone will always be someone else. Not them, or someone they love.

Probably, they’re right. But if they’re not, and if they’re unlucky enough to someday end up getting caught in the grinding machine of our criminal justice system, the due process and civil liberties that sometimes allow bad people to go unpunished might suddenly seem like a pretty good thing.

The progressive world has a long and ignoble history of downplaying sexual misconduct for the sake of “the cause”. One such incident nearly tore the Socialist Workers’ Party apart in 2013, long before #MeToo, when a senior party member was accused of rape.

The female accuser didn’t go to the police, because she believed that the party’s hostility to the thin blue line meant involving them would result in her expulsion from the party. Instead, the SWP handled the matter internally — and she was told the accused was suspended from the party and told him to read up on feminism.

A glance at the track record of prominent male feminists, though, suggests that this may not have helped. Being an outspoken male supporter of gender equality is no shield against accusations of improper behaviour.

Take, for example, former GQ political editor Rupert Myers, who berated men’s rights activists as “cave-dwelling idiots” for denying the existence of “rape culture”. Being a self-styled feminist was no defence against a social media mobbing, though. When allegations circulated online at the height of #MeToo about Myers’s sexual behaviour, prompting a Twitter pile-on, Myers ended up being fired by the magazine.

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Nor is he the only one: other male feminist journalists who faced #MeToo allegations included Sam Kriss and Vice’s Michael Hafford. Even the Ground Zero of #MeToo himself, Harvey Weinstein, complained in 2019 about how the accusations against him have “eviscerated” his pioneering work in gender equality.

This isn’t a purely #MeToo phenomenon either. During the GamerGate controversy of 2014, a number of male journalists spoke out in defence of women — more than 15 of whom have since been accused of sexual misconduct, ranging from harassment and rape to consuming child pornography.

My aim here isn’t to re-litigate the rights and wrongs of every alleged misplaced hand, or ill-judged joke, so much as to wonder at this startling volume of “male feminists” at least alleged to be on the pervy side. Surely a commitment to feminism would have the opposite effect. Why, then, so many self-identified male feminists dogged by rumours of sexual misconduct?

Men’s rights activists might argue that in a climate where calls to “believe women” come thick and fast, even the most ambiguous situation can easily be weaponised to destroy a man’s career. Men accused of impropriety have claimed that the real motivation was politics — or simply a bad breakup.

To this the feminists might retort, following Mandy Rice-Davies, that they would say that, wouldn’t they. Everyone wants to believe the best about themselves, something that leads to what social psychology calls “moral licensing”. This concept argues that people justify ethically dodgy behaviour by referring to a past track record of virtue.

For example, one Stanford study showed that people who loudly proclaim anti-racist views are often, in practice, more racist than average. Are men who identify as feminist more prone to sexual misbehaviour because they imagine their political beliefs put them beyond reproach?

A radical feminist might reply, though, that imagining it’s merely self-deception is to misunderstand what feminism is. In this view, since patriarchy arranges men hierarchically over women, it’s impossible by definition for a male to be a feminist. Regardless of a man’s intentions, as long as patriarchy exists he’ll always be an oppressor; he will inevitably end up imposing his own patriarchal presumptions — and sometimes sexual attentions — when they’re not wanted.

But part of the difficulty is precisely in determining where sexual attentions might be wanted. There are, of course, clear-cut and inexcusable cases of rape and sexual assault. But some of the cases above provoked intense controversy precisely because the circumstances of the accusation were highly subject to (inevitably partisan) interpretation.

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And one under-discussed fact that complicates these controversies is that women do not, under every single circumstance, categorically hate men being sexually forward. In ‘BDSM’ circles, for example, numerous studies have shown that women are significantly more likely than men to fantasise about being dominated.

And enjoying male assertiveness isn’t just a kink among the whips-and-chains brigade. One study showed that 93% of women prefer to be asked out, rather than asking. Once in a relationship, too, a lack of male sexual initiative often makes women unhappy. Clinical psychologist Marianne Brandon, for example, describes how frequently female patients express frustration with male sexual partners who have learned that “to show respect to their female partners” they must “avoid at all costs any behaviour in the bedroom that may be regarded as aggressive or dominant”. In other words, male sexual initiative is often quite popular with women.

But not always. The same action might come across as deliciously confident in one context, but repulsively creepy in another. And the sheer volume of #MeToo accusations suggests something has gone very wrong how men and women assess which is which.

The institutional takeaway from #MeToo seems to have been that the solution to such unhappy encounters is more feminism, more consent and more bureaucracy for punishing people who get the context wrong. But if in fact women quite like at least a measure of male sexual initiative, provided it’s in the right context, then we may need not less aggression but better guidelines on context.

And here we face the troubling possibility that all these handsy male feminists weren’t overly forward because they were doing liberal feminism wrong, but because they took its lessons too literally.

For core among these lessons is the idea that men and women are basically the same apart from our dangly bits. As the quintessential liberal pop-feminist (and UN feminist advocate) actress Emma Watson put it: feminism is “the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.” It is, Watson tells us, “about giving women choice […] It’s about freedom. It’s about liberation. It’s about equality.”

And yet however loudly we bang the drum for equality, there remain some clear and well-documented differences between the sexes. Perhaps, as this UN Women training booklet does, this is a consequence of sexist male socialisation. But a simpler explanation is that humans are, while capable of rationality, also evolved animals — and that this translates to some normative differences in attitude and behaviour. For example, males commit 90% of all sexual assaults, and almost all violent crime.

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Of course, suggesting male aggression (including sexual aggression) may have some basis in evolution isn’t to argue it’s always good. But it is to argue that education is unlikely to get rid of it entirely. And if this is true, the core reason there are so many male feminist sex pests may simply be because they’re male. No amount of feminist “education” will alter this basic fact — even if women wanted to, which (at least according to Dr Marianne Brandon) is by no means universally the case.

If anything, sending a lechy male feminist off to read liberal feminism, like the SWP did, may make matters worse — for doing so will entrench the belief that differences between the sexes are pure social constructs. And a man who’s signed up to this worldview has no reason to imagine his sexual desires differ in any way from those of a woman he finds attractive. We are, he might point out, totally over the sexist stereotypes of women as pure vestal virgins — aren’t we?

This belief that men and women are essentially the same leaves both sexes chronically at risk of misunderstanding human sexuality. A measure of male sexual aggression is neither entirely a social construct nor wholly curable via education. It has a biological substrate. And it’s not even undesirable to women, provided it’s in the right context. But managing it takes a measure of realism, compromise and — sometimes — a willingness to adopt social norms that treat the sexes differently.

This is anathema to the liberal feminist doctrine of sameness, a worldview so committed to ignoring any biological element to sex differences it’s bound to leave men ill-equipped to recognise and restrain their own sexual aggression. And on the other side, this doctrine of sameness leaves women shorn of social strategies for evading that aggression, leading to the (anecdotally common) phenomenon of women consenting to unwanted sex largely out of politeness. And it’s somewhere in this murky territory, I suspect, that many of the most controversial accusations of impropriety occur.

Then both sexes, wounded and perplexed as to what has gone wrong on the battlefield of intimacy, turn to supposedly neutral but in fact highly politicised procedures and pseudo-legal means of redress, in the hope that someone can adjudicate on who was right and who wrong. No one ever stops to wonder if part of the problem is that everyone is working off faulty assumptions.

What is to be done? At least if internet gossip is to be believed, teaching men to be feminists isn’t doing the trick. But contra received opinion, we may not help matters either by trying to demolish sexist stereotypes about male and female sexuality. Instead, if we’re to navigate our differences honestly in the interests of intimacy, we may need a feminist project to resurrect them.

Sofia’s are physical, a bullet hole over her left breast and a jagged line down her left arm from where surgeons had to cut open to repair the shattered bone. “There’s a saying here,” she says. “Small town, big hell.” Sofia (a pseudonym) is 42 and beautiful, slender with high cheekbones and almond eyes, square white teeth, and a kebab stick through a low bun of thick hair. A curly-haired toddler, her granddaughter, pads across a room that doubles as Sofia’s studio: she’s a self-taught seamstress, although it’s hard to sew with a hand that doesn’t fully close anymore.

Back in 2003, she was a teenage-mother-turned-sex-worker who had left small Fundación for a town on the Magdalena river in the state of Santander. She was kidnapped by a local paramilitary group and forced her to have sex with the leader, a man called Tiburón – “shark”. He was the one who shot her after she tried to run away on her third day of captivity. The man who had her kidnapped was a doctor, and he splinted her shattered arm. On the fifth day, he let her go.

She told no one about the rape, not even doctors at the hospital when she finally sought care weeks later. It was a motorcycle accident, she said; the clinic owner was friends with her brother, so he looked the other way.

Years later, a woman named Estella came knocking on Sofia’s door. Estella was helping sexual assault survivors connect with each other and seek recompence from the government; her program also offered contraception and sex education in a town where one residual effect of the trauma of war is astoundingly high rates of teen pregnancy and sexual violence. Sofia’s story began, slowly, to trickle out.

And then, in a country thousands of miles to the north,  Donald Trump was elected president.

No single nation has as much influence on abortion rights and access for the world’s women as the USA, and no single nation has worked as diligently to prevent women outside its borders from being able to end their pregnancies. Anti-abortion activists have agitated against liberalisation in countries across Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. The Trump administration made common cause with the authoritarian governments of Poland, Saudi Arabia, and others in restricting even open conversation about women’s reproductive needs on the international stage. And the long arm of US anti-abortion policy — which comes along with the alternate handing-out or grabbing-back of US money — continues to determine whether or not women who are not American citizens and may have never set foot on US territory can prevent pregnancy, decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy, or even find assistance if they’ve been raped.

That long arm has reached from hectic cities to far-flung villages to tiny towns, such as Fundación.

Trump effectively shuttered the Fundación program, along with hundreds of others across the globe, all combating sexual violence and funding family planning. Some may get back on their feet; many won’t. And even though he has left the White House, his legacy of anti-abortion alliances with some of the world’s worst human rights offenders remains.

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The United States has been on a zig-zag path of extreme restrictions met, impotently, by occasional recalibration to a conservative status quo. Texas is only the most recent state to have functionally banned most abortions. The US Supreme Court has accepted a case that challenges Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalised abortion across the United States; the Court could flat-out overturn Roe, making abortion immediately illegal in several states, or it could keep the decision technically in place but gut it into an empty legal shell.

And even though a Democratic president has been in office since January, USAID money to the Fundación program has not been restored. And after the election in 2024, a shift in power would almost surely mean being defunded yet again.

This has left international healthcare workers spinning, and trying to keep up with the Americans and their whiplash-inducing policy changes.

Fundación is less than an hour’s drive from Aracataca, the childhood home of Colombia’s beloved native son Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the purported inspiration for the village at the center of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Estella, 54, guides our driver over the town’s bumpy roads as she makes calls on her pre-smartphone cell, tapping out the phone numbers with her carefully manicured nails. We arrive at the door of 65-year-old twins Doris and Francia, who live in a ramshackle house cluttered with old objects and well-loved collections, both women have the same dyed caramel-colored hair, both raspy-voiced and tired-eyed. Doris wears glasses and a pink-striped spaghetti-strap tank top; Francia totes a bald, big-eyed baby, one of her 21 grandchildren.

Both women have lived the story of Colombia’s brutal civil war, and both women know that their lives were forever changed by the whims of more-powerful men who decided, for reasons that remain mysterious to them, to target their town – and then to target Doris and Francia and many other women in it. That story lives in their flesh, and even two decades later, they carry its heavy memory.

In 2001, Colombia’s civil war was raging, and paramilitaries had captured Doris and Francia’s town and forced their business to shutter. Doris and Francia turned to picking bananas for money, hitching rides on the backs of cattle trucks to get home. One evening, both women were plucked from the side of the road and gang-raped by soldiers. They could never go back to picking bananas – they could barely leave the house. They saw friends, neighbours, and family members threatened and even murdered. They stayed silent.

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That is, until they met Estella. Like nearly all of the women she works with, Estella is from somewhere else. She came here in 2002 when her family was displaced by the fighting, joining the many displaced families around Fundación who live in fear and poverty, and may never go back home. Estella encouraged the women she met to talk about their experiences, eventually forming an ad-hoc therapy group.

In 2016, Profamilia came to town. Colombia’s version of Planned Parenthood, it is the country’s largest provider of reproductive health services. In partnership with USAID, it conceived an ambitious outreach program to combat the high rates of unintended pregnancy and violence in Colombia’s rural reaches. Places with limited access to reproductive health care were targeted, as well as those with high rates of internally displaced people, extreme poverty, young people who were dropping out of school because of displacement, and adolescent pregnancy. One of these was Fundación.

“Some of these areas are where the biggest concentration of drug lands are,” says Marta Royo, the executive director of Profamilia. “So [USAID and Profamilia] were really focused on developing programs that could empower adolescents and give them an idea that there were other possibilities for a different future.”

They started with contraception, but quickly realised this didn’t capture the full scope of hardships rural Colombian women face. The high rate of teenage pregnancy in Fundación and many of the country’s other rural areas cannot be separated from the 50-year conflict that has made Colombia the nation with the highest number of internally displaced people on the planet, and second only to Syria in the number of forcibly displaced people generally (while most Syrians have left their country, 98% of displaced Colombians remain within their nation’s borders).

Violence against women was pervasive in the Colombian conflict, a tidal wave of trauma that rippled out for generations. In these same towns where families were ripped apart, women were raped, and people were forced to flee. There is now a generation of devastated people, uprooted, vulnerable, and trying to raise children and grandchildren in the shadow of a lingering catastrophe.

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Profamilia met Estella and women like her to ensure they, their children, and grandchildren had access to contraception and sex education. But less than a year into the program, Trump’s election victory upset everything. In his first week in office, the new President used his powers to issue the Promoting Life in Global Health Assistance Act (PLGHA), an executive order opponents call the Global Gag Rule that cut off funding to any organisation that provided abortions with its own non-US funds, advocated for abortion rights, or referred women for safe, legal abortions. This was just the latest and most expansive iteration of a policy put into place by American president Ronald Reagan in 1985, and alternately rescinded by Democratic presidents and restored by Republican ones.

Profamilia’s funding was cut because the organisation provides safe abortions in accordance with Colombian law. The USAID-funded program was stopped a year early, having only spent half of its $2 million grant.

Colombia wasn’t the only nation hit hard. The PLGHA applied not just US family planning spending, but all US dollars spent abroad, including money spent on HIV/AIDS, malaria, and nutrition — some $12 billion in 2018. It applied even to organisations that didn’t receive US funds — if they accepted money from groups that did, they had to agree to be bound by the PLGHA limitations.

When organisations sued over previous versions of the rule and argued that it violated First Amendment free speech protections, their cases were dismissed because of lack of standing. The First Amendment doesn’t apply to foreign organisations or foreign nationals working overseas, and there’s no law saying the US government cannot attempt to restrict free speech abroad.

The Trump administration’s position on women’s rights and health extended far beyond abortion, and was more conservative than previous Republican administrations. In 2019, the US issued its annual human rights report, and had made some notable edits. Much of the information on reproductive health that had been standard in earlier versions was stripped out, including statistics about contraception access and maternal mortality. Had those figures been included, they would have indicated that there remains a significant unmet need for contraception, and that unsafe abortion is a leading cause of maternal death.

It is this erasing of the politically inconvenient and the enforced silence that most rankles. In Colombia, abortion is legal under several circumstances, including for rape survivors. How, Royo asks, could the US come in and say, “let’s talk about democracy, let’s talk about freedom of speech, let’s talk about respect of the law,” and then implement a rule that doesn’t allow health organisations to work according to the laws of their own country? “The message that as a country they’re sending is the opposite of believing in women’s equal rights.”

Other Western governments agreed. In response to the Trump cuts, and perhaps seeking to distinguish themselves from the Americans as exemplars of feminism and human rights, Canada, Europe and the UK rallied behind women’s health. The Netherlands set up the #SheDecides fund so donors could fill the $600 million shortfall created by US cuts, and began by donating 10 million euros. Norway announced it would give $10 million. Canada gave $20 million. Along with the Gates Foundation and UNFPA, the UK co-hosted an international family planning summit which raised $2.5 billion, including a five-year annual commitment of £45 million from the British government for services abroad.

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Trump’s reactionary views on reproductive health pushed more progressive nations not just into the funding space, but into the discourse. To have countries like Sweden and Canada in the mix, Royo says, brought an explicitly feminist frame to the discussion, allowed solutions to be more expansive and creative, and gave health care providers more freedom to address the real problems in their country without tiptoeing around American abortion politics.

Shortly after he took office, Joe Biden undid Trump’s Gag Rule, restoring the US to a still-uneasy compromise of refusing to pay for legal abortion services, but at least funding pro-choice organisations for other services. The sweep of a pen, however, can’t build back dismantled infrastructure or immediately reestablish hard-earned trust. Pre-existing USAID contracts don’t just snap back; any NGO that was getting money now has to start from square one, identifying areas of need, drawing up plans, and jumping through American bureaucratic hoops for money that could very well be pulled four years from now.

Also, while his policies were devastating to reproductive healthcare access worldwide, Trumpism gave other nations something to publicly stand up against. Now that he’s out, and with Covid-19 wreaking havoc on economies, some countries are backing away from their Trump-era commitments. The UK is the most prominent: it announced a reduction in its foreign aid commitments from 0.7 percent of its gross national income to 0.5 percent, which creates a gap of more than £4 billion. Although the government has not yet said exactly where all the cuts will be made, women’s health organisations say they seem to be first on the chopping block: UNFPA, the UN’s primary family planning arm, said their UK funding had been slashed by 85%. Just a year ago, the FCDO promised UNFPA a whopping £425 million through 2025. Now, they’re reneging on that commitment.

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In Colombia, money comes and goes as the rules change, but the need doesn’t dwindle – especially for the country’s many rape survivors.

“Here in Colombia, rape is like, how can I put it – it’s part of the essence, it’s taken totally for granted,” Royo says. “Women and girls are raped and no one says anything. Part of the counseling we provide, it starts with recognising, no, that is not normal.” This is part of Royo’s frustration with the US funding fluctuations: much-needed money is conditioned on reinforcing broad stigma and silence on the sensitive topic of abortion. That feels uncomfortably akin to how women who are raped here are coerced and sometimes forced into shame and silence.

You hear this in the stories Estella’s women tell. Most are like Sofia’s and Doris’s and Francia’s: there is a rape, there follows years of secrecy, maybe there is an attempt to report, to make real what was for so long hidden, and then there is nothing – layers of secrecy and silence, a covering of ears even when women try to speak. In 2013, Estella told Sofia that the Colombian government was documenting the many war crimes and offering compensation to victims. Sofia was scared – “It was the paramilitaries. They had a lot of power. They still do” – but filed the report anyway.

That was years ago, and compensation still hasn’t materialised. “I haven’t even gotten a potato,” she says.

Still, Estella was proud of her. And after being so quiet for so long, it felt good to speak.

This article forms part of a project by Jill Filipovic and Nichole Sobecki: Abortion Access in Crisis and Conflict Zones

From as far back as 2002, victims described being attacked in the back of his vehicle. Yet nothing was done until 2007, when he was arrested, questioned, and released without charge. His victim, a 19-year old, has described how the police laughed at her when she told them about her injuries. It was the same story for all those other women who had flagged down Worboys’ cab after a night out assuming they’d be safe in his black cab. Investigating officers generally presumed the women were drunk, incapable and unreliable. The victims were blamed and the cabbie allowed to drive on.

Shocking new light on this cascade of police failures is laid out in Predator: Catching The Black Cab Rapist, a Channel 5 documentary airing tonight. Among other grim revelations, is the recording of a police interview with Worboys following that complaint in 2007. Officers can be heard bantering with the cab driver rather than interrogating him. Laughing and joking with him, they appear to be helping him construct a defence to the woman’s allegations of drug-assisted rape. One even says: “I thought maybe she’s sort of come a bit undone at the front when you was helping her …”

In turn, the victim, during her questioning, was made to feel like she “deserved it”.

It was only the following year, after a pattern was finally noticed amid all these reports, that Worboys was properly interrogated and, at last, charged with several assaults. Then, in March 2009, Worboys was convicted of one count of rape, five sexual assaults, one attempted assault and 12 drugging charges. He had pleaded not guilty, and still shows no remorse for his crimes.

The civil case against the Metropolitan Police brought by two of Worboys victims found that there were “serious operational failures” during the investigation. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report into the investigation was a critical opportunity to bring about change in police culture. But all that was recommended in terms of sanctions were “words of warning” for some officers.

It’s an appalling example of poor policing. But you would have thought, wouldn’t you, that 12 years after Worboys was finally convicted, the force might have got their house in order? Sadly, I think that, if anything, things have got worse. The police have a consistently pitiful record when it comes to dealing with violence towards women, and their excessive reaction to the Sarah Everard protests the other weekend does little to dispel the feeling that perhaps they are part of the problem.

Between 2012 and 2018 across England and Wales, almost 1,500 complaints were filed against police officers, special constables and police community support officers (PCSOs) across 33 forces involving accusations of sexual misconduct, including sexual harassment, exploitation of crime victims and child abuse. These officers and special constables, remember, do swear an oath to “cause the peace to be kept and preserved and prevent all offences against people…”

Of these cases, 371 were upheld, resulting in the sacking or resignation of 197 individuals. One case involved a Devon and Cornwall officer, who was sacked following accusations that he attended a victim’s address, stripped off uninvited, and joined her in the shower.

Another is that of Peter Bunyan, a PSCO based in Penzance, who was convicted of three rapes and one count of sexual assault against two victims in 2016 and jailed for 16 years. Bunyan had previously spent time in prison after being convicted of having sex with domestic violence victims and a woman with mental health difficulties while on duty.

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In data published in the Observer, figures from the Royal College of Policing’s current “barred list” – officers who have been dismissed from a force and are banned from joining another – show that nearly a fifth of offences inlude abuse of position for sexual purposes, domestic violence or harassment against the public and colleagues. Of the 555 officers barred since the list was introduced in December 2017, more than 1,100 reasons for dismissal are listed of which more than 200 involve sexual, harassment or domestic abuse offences.

Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in 2019 show that police officers are seven times more likely than doctors or teachers to be dismissed for sexual misconduct. Now this is, admittedly, a small percentage of the service — but this is only the visible part. Police action lawyers will tell you that vulnerable victims rarely follow through on a complaint against a police officer, and rarer still that such complaints are held up by the courts.

I have interviewed several women over the years who have reported being asked out on dates, or just blatantly for sex, by the police they have called out to a domestic violence or rape complaint. I have also heard far too many stories from women in prostitution about police sexually assaulting them during an arrest, or asking for “sexual favours” in return for letting them go free. And I will never forget observing a rape trial and overhearing the police officers in the case joking outside the court about the “sexual positions” the victim must have enjoyed during the attack. Last week, one young officer shared an internet joke of a similar ilk with his colleagues, as the search for Sarah Everard’s body continued.

Not long after a serving police officer was charged with Sarah’s murder, Oliver Banfield, a probationary police officer based in the West Midlands was given a non-custodial sentence and ordered to pay just £500 compensation having been found guilty of a violent assault on a woman walking home following a night out.

Banfield was seen on CCTV shouting “slag” at Homer as he wrestled her to the ground using police training techniques. Homer, who suffers depression and panic attacks as a result of the attack says it was though Banfield was “fulfilling a violent cop movie fantasy”.

The attack took place in July 2020 but Banfield was allowed to continue to work as a police officer until he was sentenced. Police took eight weeks to follow up on the report about one of their own colleagues and to visit the scene of the crime. It was left to the victim to persevere with her request to have access to the CCTV footage which police had failed to do. As Homer commented after the sentencing, “It was like I had reported a missing cat.”

And, so, public confidence in the police when it comes to sexual and domestic abuse is at an all-time low. Women just don’t trust them. Earlier this month, the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) lodged a super-complaint to the Police Inspectorate highlighting systemic failures women are experiencing when reporting domestic abuse perpetrated by police officers. Officers, it is alleged, manipulate the system and act in bad faith.

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This tendency is underlined by Nogah Ofer from CWJ, who describes the prevalence of certain behaviours within the Service as springing from a “locker-room culture” in which violence against women is trivialised and loyalty towards fellow officers and concern about impact on their careers are paramount. The Centre has been contacted, for example, by almost 50 women who say they have been seriously betrayed by those tasked with protecting them when they reported domestic abuse and sexual offences committed by police officers and staff. These cases are currently being investigated by the same police force that employs the accused officer.

The rape conviction rate, meanwhile, is stuck at an all time low. It might as well — and I am beginning to sound like a stuck record now — be decriminalised. In an attempt to correct this, in 2018, Met Commissioner Cressida Dick announced that the police had decided to abandon its policy of automatically believing those who report sexual assault.

The “I believe you” policy had been introduced in 2011 in response to low conviction rates. It was a simple way to reassure victims that they would not be automatically accused of lying — something which had been exposed in the 1982 film A complaint of rape. This fly-on-the-wall documentary by Roger Graef film featured a woman with a history of psychiatric illness being bullied and cajoled by a bunch of male officers as she tried to report a rape. They dismissed her story as “the biggest bollocks” they had ever heard. The screening of the film triggered a change in British law and a more sensitive approach to rape cases.

However, three years ago, Dick dismantled that in favour of the “open mind” approach. It was in response to a series of high-profile failed cases, including the Carl Beech fraud. But Dick also said at the time: “If [the allegation] is a long time ago, or it’s very trivial, or I’m not likely to get a criminal justice outcome, I’m not going to spend a lot of resources on it.”

In other words, this pretty much gave police licence to disregard those cases in which a woman may have been previously sexually active with the accused, or had been drinking, or had dared to dress as she wished. Naturally, it had little effect on the conviction rate. It just shifted the blame back on to the victims.

But as a shadow report on rape compiled by a number of leading women’s organisations found last year, to address that extremely low rate, no new laws or policy are necessary, rather police officers need to up their game under the existing framework. It was a lack of training, persistent sexist attitudes from officers, and a failure to hold police accountable which led to those endless blunders in relation to Worboys and similar cases, not the law as it stands. And this still hasn’t been addressed.

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Right now, as this shocking documentary airs, it feels like things are getting worse for women. The CWJ is contacted by a constant stream of women who report drug-assisted rapes, which never progress to the “risk averse” CPS. Calls to Refuge during lockdown have been up by an appalling 60%. And now our streets don’t even feel particularly safe, as all those women last weekend were protesting. The police are seen to be very much part of the problem.

Which leaves women in a pretty desperate position. Worboys may be set to spend a while yet in jail but there are many other predatory men out there getting away with it. And unless there is a radical shift in that locker-room culture, and accountability and how women are dealth with, those men will continue to feel as invincible as the black cab rapist

Except, of course, it turned out to be nonsense: for 2006-2008, the conviction rates for Snaresbrook and Kingston were within 1% of each other, either side of the national average of 63.9%. I suspect that this did little to dent the audience’s confidence in one of the profession’s most dearly held beliefs: arch references to Kingston juries still abound in London’s robing rooms.

But this was not the only surprise Professor Thomas delivered. The evidence, which came from analysis of over half a million criminal charges as well as a randomised trial with real jurors, strongly supported the proposition that white juries do not discriminate against black defendants. Indeed, it even appeared that a white defendant accused of a racially motivated crime is more likely to be convicted by a white jury than by a racially mixed one.

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Those findings do not, of course, call into question the unfairnesses suffered by the non-white population upstream of trial — if anything they could be said to emphasise them, given that non-white people are over-represented in prisons. But they did allay the fears expressed in the Auld report of 2001, which made a recommendation (not subsequently implemented) that “Provision should be made to enable ethnic minority representation on juries where race is likely to be relevant to an important issue in the case”. Whether the findings have entrenched themselves in the public consciousness more generally, however, is another matter.

Last month, Professor Thomas — now an honorary QC — published the results of a new study, commissioned by the senior judiciary to investigate “rape myths”. Her conclusions are thoroughly at odds with received wisdom.

The idea that many people — and therefore many jurors — hold seriously wayward beliefs about this uniquely enraging crime is not new, and has solidified in recent years. It first became common in the early 2000s for judges to warn juries to approach with caution defence counsel’s arguments about, for instance, a lack of physical violence, or a delay in making a report. Such warnings were swiftly approved by the Court of Appeal and found their way into the “Bench Book” — the judges’ bible of approved jury directions.

The need for these warnings arose from a developing understanding that inaccurate assumptions about how rape allegations should be analysed are widespread among the public. The 2010 Bench Book pointed to “research by those who are expert in the subject”, much of which derived its data from surveys. One cited author concluded that “the crucial determinant of judgments about rape cases is the extent to which people subscribe to rape myths. Thus it tends to be attitudes rather than an unbiased evaluation of the facts which determine judgments in these cases.”

And that message has grown louder in the decade since. In 2018 End Violence Against Women (EVAW) commissioned a YouGov poll and reported that “33% think that sex which happens without consent, but where there is no physical violence, isn’t really rape.” Horrifying to think that any jurors have that attitude, let alone a full third of them. No wonder, then, that judicial warnings have become more robust.

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For example, on the question of inconsistencies (which is of course a way to get purchase on the evidence in any trial) 2010’s bench book includes the following direction for sexual offences: “The experience of the courts is that it is unwise to approach the issue of inconsistency with the assumption that a true account is always consistent, or that an inconsistent account is always untrue. It depends on the circumstances and the individual.” And concludes with, “If…you are sure that the essential parts of the complainant’s account are true, you will no doubt act on that conclusion. But, if you are left in doubt about the truthfulness of the complainant’s account, because the inconsistencies cannot be satisfactorily explained, you must find the defendant Not Guilty.”

Fair enough. But the equivalent part of the 2020 version runs as follows: “Experience has shown that inconsistencies in accounts can happen whether a person is telling the truth or not”. And the line about doubt arising from inconsistencies that can’t be satisfactorily explained has disappeared.

Now, these are only short extracts, and much of the thrust is between-the-lines and therefore open to debate. But these warnings are not there primarily to help the defence. Some of them are felt to amount to a nudge in the other direction. Which might be fair — desperately needed even — if jurors believe rape myths. But it now looks like they don’t.

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The UCL Jury Project surveyed almost 800 recently discharged jurors and found that “hardly any jurors believe what are often referred to as widespread myths and stereotypes about rape and sexual assault”. They don’t believe that rape must leave bruises, that a victim will always fight back, that dressing “provocatively” is inviting an assault, or that rapes will always be swiftly reported. But haven’t previous studies repeatedly found the precise opposite?

The reason for the disparity, the Professor suggests, is that her study involved actual jurors rather than members of the public. The jurors had heard trials of non-sexual as well as sexual offences, and of those approached 99% agreed to participate, which means a very low risk of selection bias. Something may be happening, she says, when a member of the public actually goes through the solemn process of sitting on a jury.

Another possible reason for the disparity, it seems to me, is that conclusions from other research don’t always accurately reflect the questions asked. Take the 2018 EVAW headline I mentioned. The small print reveals that the question, with which 33% of respondents disagreed, was, “Do you personally consider it to be rape if they don’t want to have sex but feel pressured to even though there was no other physical violence?” Leaving aside the confusing and redundant “other” (what was the first bit of violence again?) this is absolutely not identical to “Do you think that sex which happens without consent, but where there is no physical violence, isn’t really rape?” Indeed, the 2020 Bench Book even says, “reluctant but free agreement is not the same thing as submission and is still consent even if reluctantly given.”

But why does it matter? Aren’t judicial warnings a good idea just in case? Well, sometimes the defence’s arguments — about delays and injuries and intoxication and inconsistencies — are good arguments. And if the jurors aren’t prejudiced, then a warning about rape myths could easily be taken as a veiled encouragement to ignore a good point. And bad defence arguments? They’ll surely be counterproductive with a myth-free jury.

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Shortly before Professor Thomas published her results the Crown Prosecution Service updated and expanded its list of rape myths, with a consultation on their accuracy and usefulness ongoing. Shortly after that, EVAW published another report, entitled “The Decriminalisation of Rape”. Under the heading “Obstacles to Conviction” is listed the very fact of trial by jury, and it goes on to state, “it has been widely accepted by criminal justice bodies that many members of the public continue to believe in long-standing myths and stereotypes relating to rape”. A lively public conversation seems inevitable — and desirable.

Also listed as an obstacle to conviction, interestingly, is the English “adversarial system” of criminal trials. Adversarial systems are having a bit of a moment: the software that creates those amazingly realistic faces of non-existent people, for instance, uses a type of Artificial Intelligence called a General Adversarial Network: progress is made by one algorithm trying to create something convincing, and another that tries to find the holes. This is very much not the tech equivalent of a continental inquisitorial magistrate. A bad defence point is best dealt with by a good prosecution point. It may turn out that the medieval jurists who designed our legal system were onto something.

And a similar process — a dialectic approach to enquiry more generally — is arguably a better route to the truth than any other. There has until now been very little questioning of the prevalence of rape myths among juries, and it’s not hard to see why: who wants to be “that guy”? But Professor Thomas’s research should be welcomed. Her methodology, and her conclusions, might turn out to be wrong. But they should not be ignored.

It wasn’t that late when Jacqueline got off the bus. At 9.23pm on 17 November, she crossed a busy main road, not realising she had been spotted by Peter Sutcliffe, a 34-year-old lorry driver. Sutcliffe later told the police that he had just finished eating a portion of fried chicken in his Rover when he saw her. “I decided she was a likely victim,” he said.

She was only 100 yards from safety when he drove past, parked his car and hit her on the head with a hammer. He dragged her into a lane that led to some rough ground, struck her again but paused when he heard someone walking past. Then he returned to the attack, using a screwdriver to slash and stab her several times. Jacqueline had just become the final victim of the man known as the Yorkshire Ripper.

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A week ago, a women’s group, Leeds Spinners, placed a plaque close to where Jacqueline died. It bears an inscription that tries to fill in the character of a young woman most of us only know, if at all, as a victim of one of this country’s worst serial killers. The gesture gained extra poignancy when Sutcliffe’s death at the age of 74 was announced on Friday. He outlived his last victim by almost exactly four decades.

Rage at the incompetence of West Yorkshire police lives on, though. Sutcliffe was careless, leaving so much evidence that he was interviewed by detectives on nine occasions — but never once put on an identity parade or arrested in connection with the murders by the Ripper squad.

After Sutcliffe’s death, West Yorkshire’s current Chief Constable, John Robins, made a belated apology for mistakes in the inquiry. But even then he couldn’t resist a whinge. He complained that the hard work of bringing the Ripper to justice had been overshadowed by the language used by the upper ranks, who had described women as pawns and seemed to belittle the death of prostitutes.

Robins’s apology was all very well, but his force didn’t bring Sutcliffe to justice. The arrest was made in Sheffield in January 1981 by a traffic patrol from South Yorkshire, who were suspicious about the stolen number plates crudely taped to his car. And it’s not as though the language used by senior officers in the 1970s was incidental to the conduct of the investigation. On the contrary, it reflected a deep-seated misogyny that led to indefensible judgements about the victims and persuaded senior officers to doubt — and in some instances ignore — crucial evidence. To put it bluntly, some of the early victims, while definitely not involved in prostitution, didn’t meet West Yorkshire police’s exacting standards for female conduct. One woman had a black boyfriend! Another went to the pub without her husband!

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From early on in the case, detectives and the press wrongly assumed that the killer’s motive was a hatred of prostituted women. It didn’t bear a moment’s scrutiny: the first four attacks, all in the second half of 1975, had nothing to do with women who were selling sex. It did, however, appeal to the detective in charge of the inquiry, Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, who was convinced he was hot on the heels of a latter-day Jack the Ripper. He overlooked the fact that Sutcliffe’s first three victims, who all survived, were attacked in quiet residential streets and a country lane nowhere near Leeds’s red light district. One was a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Tracey Browne, who provided a photofit of her attacker that turned out to closely resemble Sutcliffe. But detectives decided she was too young and had been in the wrong place to belong in the series, thus ruling out a vital piece of evidence.

Another early victim, 46-year-old Olive Smelt from Halifax, also offered crucial testimony. She encountered Sutcliffe twice on the night of the assault in August 1975 — first in a pub, where he made an obscene remark, and later when he spotted her on his way home. Sutcliffe stopped his car and spoke to her again before striking her twice on the head with a hammer. He was slashing her buttocks when a passing car scared him off. Mrs Smelt described her attacker as around 30, with dark hair and a beard. She was also certain that he had a local accent. Sutcliffe was 29 at the time and matched her description closely.

Unfortunately, detectives were sceptical about Mrs Smelt’s value as a witness. In a secret report summarising the murders, she was dismissed in astonishingly pejorative language: “She is of loose morals,” the report declared, adding that “it was her usual custom … to visit public houses in Halifax on her own”. What detectives really believed about Mrs Smelt was revealed in a slip by then Chief Constable, Ronald Gregory, who described her in a newspaper article as “a prostitute”. It fitted the “prostitute killer” narrative and damaged Mrs Smelt’s credibility in the eyes of the inquiry, even though it had nothing to do with reality.

Sutcliffe’s fourth victim, and the first to be killed, was 28-year-old Wilma McCann, a mother of four. She was not involved in prostitution either. But Sutcliffe was tired of having his attempts to kill women interrupted and he targeted her in Chapeltown, a red-light area in Leeds where kerb crawlers didn’t attract attention. His fifth victim, 42-year-old Emily Jackson, whom he attacked in January 1976, was selling sex in Chapeltown as a result of a family financial crisis. Sutcliffe had realised prostituted women were easier targets, desperate for money and willing to get into his car. Mrs Jackson was the second woman to die, and her injuries were horrific.

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By the following year, evidence that should have led to Sutcliffe was mounting up. In October 1977 he made his biggest mistake, leaving a brand-new £5 note in the bag of one of his two Manchester victims. In a rare piece of effective detective work, officers traced it to a consignment of notes that had gone to a small number of firms in West Yorkshire, one of which employed Sutcliffe. He was convinced the game was up, but the line of inquiry petered out. Even so, Sutcliffe was a local man with a Yorkshire accent, his appearance matched photofits produced by another surviving victim, Marilyn Moore, and his car had been spotted in red light districts hundreds of times.

Yet when a junior detective, DC Andy Laptew, interviewed him as part of the £5 note inquiry and suggested that Sutcliffe deserved further investigation, Oldfield banged the table with his fist. “Peter Sutcliffe is not the Yorkshire Ripper,” he shouted, threatening anyone who disagreed with a return to traffic duties. There was a reason for Oldfield’s bizarre behaviour, though not a good one. Increasingly desperate about his failure to catch the killer, Oldfield was easy prey for an amateurish hoaxer who sent him anonymous letters and a tape. The man had a distinctive Wearside accent, something none of the survivors had described — but hey, what did they know? I questioned the tape’s authenticity when I first heard it but it flattered Oldfield, addressing him personally and reinforcing his ideas about the killer’s motives.

In the summer of 1979, he decided to ignore the surviving victims, with their regrettable personal habits, and release the tape to the public. West Yorkshire police wasted £1m on a publicity campaign, asking people to look out for a killer with a North-East accent. In Halifax, Olive Smelt was outraged; she told me so when I interviewed her after Jacqueline’s murder in 1980. But a floundering investigation had taken a catastrophic turn and three more women — Jacqueline, Barbara Leach and Marguerite Walls — would die as a result.

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West Yorkshire police’s apology has come too late for Mrs Smelt, who died in 2011. But I’m troubled by Robins’s claims about modern policing, not least the idea that misogynist attitudes have been “consigned to history”. It is true that police forces have better technology than they did in the 1970s, but I see no end to victim-blaming. The “short skirt” defence in rape cases has been replaced by a “digital strip search”, where victims are asked to hand over medical records, school reports and mobile phones, allowing detectives to access intimate photos and messages.

The result is evident in crime statistics: around 55,000 women report a rape to the police in England and Wales each year, but there were only 1,439 convictions in 2019-20. Victims are still being discredited and having their stories disbelieved; it’s more sophisticated than West Yorkshire police’s division of Sutcliffe’s victims into “innocent girls” and the rest, but the underlying impulse is pretty much the same. The situation is so dire that the Victims’ Commissioner, Dame Vera Baird, has argued that rape is being decriminalised.

In Leeds itself, women challenge Robins’s assertion that policing is now “wholly victim-focused”, ensuring that “those harmed by crime are at the heart of what we do”. His force operates the controversial “managed approach” to prostitution, allowing men to kerb crawl in Holbeck, a light industrial area to the south of the city centre, without fear of arrest — as long as they stick to certain hours. It didn’t prevent the murder of a young Polish woman, Daria Pionko, who was kicked to death in Holbeck by a sex buyer in 2015.

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The commercial sex trade always attracts predators, putting women who sell sex at risk, while local women say they are pestered for sex while out shopping or on their way to work. Last week a local headmaster, Ben Mallinson told the BBC he was afraid one of his female pupils would be abducted by men looking for sex, as several had already been propositioned. Holbeck is only four or five miles from Headingley, where Jacqueline Hill was murdered by a man who hated women, yet it now seems to be operating as a “managed misogyny” zone.

It has been painfully clear for a long time that Hill’s death and those of other women could have been avoided if West Yorkshire police had put aside their prejudices and listened to Sutcliffe’s surviving victims. On this tragic anniversary, it is hard not to think of everything Jacqueline might have done in those four lost decades: the friends she would have made, the career she might have have followed, and the children she could have had.

It is also hard to contemplate the fact that women in Leeds and other parts of the country still don’t feel safe from predators, let down by a criminal justice system that seems incapable of locking up violent men. Misogyny is as entrenched as ever — and I’m as angry now as I was when Jacqueline was murdered all those years ago.

Beech, who was convicted of perverting the course of justice at Newcastle Crown Court last week, spun lurid fantasies about a Westminster paedophile ring, dragging the names of a number of well-known individuals through the mud. His victims included the former prime minister Sir Edward Heath, the former Home Secretary Lord Brittan, the retired head of the armed forces Lord Bramall, and the former Conservative MP Harvey Proctor. His 18-year prison sentence is more than twice as long as that handed down to John Humble, the fraudster known as ‘Wearside Jack’ who did such terrible damage to the Yorkshire Ripper investigation in the late 1970s.

It is a troubling comparison, and not just because this is the second time senior police officers in this country have fallen for a not-very-subtle hoax.

Beech’s victims are rightly furious about Operation Midland, the Metropolitan Police investigation that left a whole series of well-known men under undeserved suspicion for years. Proctor, who lost his job and home as a result of Beech’s allegations, has called for Lord Hogan-Howe, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at the relevant time, to return his peerage. The son of another victim, the late Lord Janner, has called on the Labour MP Tom Watson to step down as deputy leader of his party, accusing him of “whipping up a moral panic” over Beech’s allegations.

What hasn’t been noted, in the midst of the furore, is the existence of another, overlooked group that has been drastically affected by his actions – the thousands of women and girls, not remotely well-known, who report a rape each year.

On the face of it, the two crimes are very different: most rapes are committed on women by men, while Beech’s fantastical allegations related to child sexual exploitation involving exclusively male victims and perpetrators. Such crimes are often historical in nature, as they supposedly were in this instance, and involve witnesses who were children at the time. They require incredibly sensitive handling, yet when a middle-aged man came along, making far-fetched claims of rape, torture and murder against public figures, the response of senior officers in the Metropolitan Police was to put him on prime-time TV before they’d carried out a full investigation.

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In 2014, Beech was interviewed by the BBC under the pseudonym ‘Nick’ and claimed that the abusers were “quite open about who they were. They had no fear at all about being caught.” In December that year a senior officer, Det Supt Kenny McDonald, solemnly described Beech’s allegations in TV interviews as “credible and true”. But it was only months later, in March 2015, that the police finally got round to searching Mr Proctor’s home, followed by those of Lords Brittan and Bramall.

I happened to catch the BBC’s interview with ‘Nick’ and I didn’t believe a word of it.

It reminded me of a crucial moment in the Yorkshire Ripper investigation, when I was invited to a press conference to hear a tape recording made by a man claiming to be the killer. I listened to the monotonous voice with a Geordie accent, raised my hand and asked whether the tape had been edited; when I was told it hadn’t, I pointed out that everything on it was already in the public domain. The head of the Ripper squad brushed my objection aside, along with others made by experts who believed, like me, that the tape was a hoax. Three more women were murdered and several seriously injured as the Ripper cops dismissed suspects – including the real killer, a local man called Peter Sutcliffe – because they didn’t have a Wearside accent. The hoaxer clearly bore a heavy responsibility for derailing the investigation, yet Humble got only eight years in prison.

The question of why senior officers allowed themselves to be taken in by such melodramatic nonsense, in 1979 and again in 2014, needs to be addressed. Beech, now 51, is himself a convicted paedophile, having pleaded guilty to charges of voyeurism, possessing indecent photographs and fraud at a separate trial in Worcester earlier this year. But while the behaviour of a single male paedophile tells us nothing about the veracity of women who make allegations about current sexual crimes, it is they who are being penalised as a result of the mishandling of Beech’s allegations.

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In 2011, in the wake of Jimmy Savile’s exposure as a serial sexual predator, the Metropolitan Police announced a new policy of automatically believing rape victims. It didn’t mean that allegations wouldn’t be thoroughly investigated, but it did mark a break from the scepticism and outright disbelief that many women had encountered when reporting a rape – including those who told the police they’d been drugged and raped by a black cab driver, John Worboys. The Independent Police Complaints Commission conducted nine inquiries into the Met’s handling of sexual assaults, in one notorious case reporting that detectives in south-east London had ‘encouraged’ victims to withdraw rape allegations to make their clear-up rate look better. In effect, the new policy put victims on the same footing as anyone else reporting a crime; the police don’t immediately dismiss your account of events or accuse you of insurance fraud when you tell them your car has been stolen.

The new policy didn’t survive long.

When a retired judge, Sir Richard Henriques, reported on failings in Operation Midland in 2016, he zeroed in on the protocol requiring officers to believe rape victims, urging that it should be scrapped. A policy designed to raise scandalously low convictions rates in cases involving female victims of male violence, in other words, was being targeted after the police made egregious errors in a very different type of case. The criticism caused shock waves; in April last year Hogan-Howe’s successor, Cressida Dick, announced she had abandoned the policy. Organisations supporting rape victims were horrified, predicting a further fall in the number of rape cases getting to court – and that’s exactly what has happened.

On Friday, coincidentally the very day that Beech’s sentence made headlines, The Guardian published an analysis of Home Office figures showing an alarming drop in rape prosecutions in England and Wales. Last year, fewer than one in sixty-five rapes reported to the police led to a charge or summons, amounting to just 1.5% of the total. There has been a significant rise in the number of victims going to the police – from 35,847 in 2015 to 57,882 in 2019, an increase of 61% – but there is now less chance than ever of rapists being prosecuted, let alone convicted.

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What we have seen is a radical change in how complainants are treated. In a previous article, I described how victims are being asked to hand over their mobile phones and sign forms allowing police to access a massive amount of private data, including school reports, medical records and even counsellors’ notes made after an attack. It’s been described as a “digital strip search”, something which is now the subject of a complaint to the Information Commissioner.

There are two scandals here. One is about the gullibility of senior police officers who rushed into supporting Carl Beech’s frankly improbable claims about a VIP paedophile ring, causing immeasurable grief to the wrongly accused and their relatives. The other is about the denial of justice to thousands of women who have suffered serious sexual attacks, but have little hope of seeing their rapists held to account.

Genuine rape victims are being treated with unwarranted suspicion because senior officers in the Metropolitan Police bet the farm on a male fantasist.

If that album were released today, progressive young men would be in woke heaven, supported by blue-fringed women in universities, claiming that the black and blue woman had been ‘empowered’ by her ‘choice’ to exercise her ‘agency’ and ‘partake’ in some ‘liberating BDSM[1. BDSM is a variety of often erotic practices or roleplaying involving bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, sadomasochism, and other related interpersonal dynamics]’.

And if feminists like me protested, we would be no-platformed for ‘kink-shaming’. It is extraordinary that today, strangulation is seen by some as ‘sexy’ and often referred to as breath-play.

Women are in worrying territory. Sex today is increasingly dangerous for them. In 2018, five women –Christina Abbotts, Lesley Potter, Laura Huteson, Anna Reed and Charlotte Teeling – died after what their killers claimed was “rough sex gone wrong”. That this alarming practice is deemed erotic, and is increasingly common, is the result of the normalisation of male violence. This, in turn, is due to the proliferation of hard-core, violent pornography accessed via the swipe of an iPhone – something that kids as young as eight years old are able to access.

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By Julie Bindel

Sex has long been used as a way to control and punish women. Often this is through the imposition of humiliating sexual practices; but it also in telling us when we can or can’t have abortions; or promoting the notion that paying for sexual access to women’s bodies is a universal male right.

Legal, social and coercive restrictions being exerted on women and their reproductive rights are becoming the norm – while they also grow increasingly draconian. The recent law on abortion passed in Alabama, US, for example, exemplifies this trend. Several other states are doing the same, such as in Georgia, where they recently passed the fetal heartbeat bill. But it is no good simply pointing the finger at places far away and shaking our heads. There are similar laws closer to home – in Northern Ireland for example.

As women’s rights go backwards, casual misogyny picks up pace. High numbers of women regularly experience harassment by men, according to a recent poll. Almost half have experienced unwanted sexual advances, 46% had been groped, and a quarter had been flashed at.

Online abuse is also massive. In this same survey, a fifth of respondents had experienced it. One reason that an offence that targets hatred of women has never been added to the statute book must surely be because the police, courts and prisons would snap under the strain of dealing with the sheer volume of it.

So how, then, should women react faced with such an increase in misogyistic violence, abuse, and increased restrictions?

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By Tanya Gold

We feminists have long campaigned using tactics including direct action and public protest. In Poland, when the government proposed a total ban on abortion, a women’s strike was organised, calling on women to take the day off from their work.

More recently, the actor Alyssa Milano proposed a “#SexStrike” as a response to the recent attacks on reproductive rights in multiple states across the country. It’s been taken up with excitement by women across the globe.

I’ve no doubt Alyssa Milano was well-intentioned when she called for the strike: “Until women have legal control over our own bodies we just cannot risk pregnancy.” We mustn’t forget those millions of women and girls around the world who don’t have that control. Whose bodies and reproduction are controlled by other people. Let’s not forget, either, that it’s the men who are responsible for 100% of unwanted pregnancies.

But sex strikes are an incredibly bad idea as a protest. They are playing in to the male narrative that sex is something women only ever do under duress. I am currently researching a book on what feminism is and is not, and have been talking to lots of young feminists about their relationships and encounters with men, and they tell me that heterosexual sex is seen by too many men as a form of labour women do for men.

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“My previous boyfriend,” one woman told me, “despite him presenting himself as a feminist ally, would expect sex when he wanted it even when I made it very clear I was not in the remotest bit interested.” So much for the new “feminism for men” –  or “I will stand up for your rights for as long as that suits me”.

This idea is reinforced by the sex strike: women are put in a position of treating sex as something they do for men, rather than for themselves. It only emphasises the idea that their worth is sexual. And it turns sex into something transactional. They belittle their sexuality by using it as a bargaining tool.

In any case, it is only possible to strike if you are in a position to withdraw labour. And as I will never tire of saying, sex is not ‘work’, no matter what these new feminists and male feminists contend. And given the prevailing climate of misogynistic behaviours, to withdraw sex puts women in a dangerous position where they could be forced and coerced into sex. It’s called rape.

There is no greater example to illustrate men’s power over women than sexual violence, alongside the constant battle to restrict women’s reproductive rights. We are living through a global pandemic of sexual violence at the moment and, women are punished by man-made laws for attempting to take control of our own bodies. I fear it’s going to take more than a hashtag for men to realise our bodies are our own business – and not open for business.

In this instance, disaster is not too strong a word for what’s happened to rape investigations. Victims who go to the police are already a tiny proportion of the estimated 510,000 women who experience rape or sexual assault each year, according to the government’s own figures. Now, though, the number of defendants being charged with rape has collapsed to a ten-year low. There was a drop of almost a quarter (23.1%) in 2017/18, with only 2,822 of the 41,186 rapes recorded by the police in England and Wales leading to prosecutions.

Women’s groups believe that much of the blame lies with draconian new rules on disclosure in rape cases, which are actively deterring some victims from cooperating with the police – and, it’s claimed, affecting decisions by the Crown Prosecution Service. Most people who saw the initial alarming headlines are completely unaware of what’s happening, even though it amounts to an unprecedented intrusion into just about every aspect of complainants’ lives.

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Victims (but not defendants) are being asked to sign ‘Stafford’ statements, which give the police blanket permission to get hold of school, college and medical records going back decades. Some forces have even asked for access to notes made in counselling sessions following a rape, raising the prospect of the victim’s most intimate feelings and fears being exposed to the defence and even her alleged attacker. Some victims have apparently been advised to delay seeking counselling, in case it leads to accusations in court that they’ve been ‘coached’.

To be clear, nothing like this happens in other criminal cases. If you were mugged on your way home from work, you would not be asked to release your entire medical records, revealing episodes of depression or an eating disorder when you were a teenager. You wouldn’t have to allow the police access to your school reports, which might show that you once lied to a teacher to get out of a PE lesson. But I’ve heard about a woman who pulled out of a case because she didn’t want the entirely irrelevant fact she’d had an abortion exposed in court. Another couldn’t face being questioned by defence lawyers about her history of anorexia, knowing that it would be used as evidence of her ‘instability’. I’ve even heard of a victim whose school records showed that she once forged her mother’s signature on a note, a long-ago indiscretion that was treated as evidence destroying her credibility as a witness in an adult rape case.

These rules were introduced following a review of rape and serious sexual assault cases ordered by the then attorney-general, Jeremy Wright QC, in January last year. It followed an outcry over the collapse of several widely-publicised rape cases including that of a student, Liam Allan, whose trial was stopped after late disclosure of material to the defence.

The Metropolitan Police later apologised to Allan, saying that the officer in charge had missed key evidence that led to the trial being halted among 57,000 messages on the alleged victim’s mobile phone. In London and elsewhere, the police acknowledge that they are swamped with data from mobile phones and other personal records, increasing the length and complexity of rape investigations.

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The Allan case prompted huge headlines, along with lurid claims that dozens of ‘innocent’ men might be languishing in prison because of disclosure failures in rape cases. But the results of the review ordered by Wright, published in June last year, were nothing like as widely publicised.

After examining 3,637 rape and sexual assault cases, the Crown Prosecution Service found 47 where the case was stopped amid concerns about disclosure – but concluded that none of them would have proceeded to trial even without the review process. In 18 of those cases, the police had felt under pressure to bring charges at an early stage because of fears that the defendant would abscond, commit further offences or interfere with witnesses.

No one wants men to be wrongly charged but the number of cases halted due to disclosure problems amounted to just 1.3% of the total under review. By then, Wright was about to move to a new job as Culture Secretary, and women reporting rapes were experiencing extraordinary levels of intrusion. I’ve even heard of a case where a rape victim was asked to take her mobile phone to a meeting at a police station so that her Facebook account could be accessed by the police and the defence.

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By Graeme Archer

Some complainants find the process unbearable and have said they don’t want to go ahead with a trial. Others, who very much want to see their alleged attackers prosecuted, have been told that their personal data includes material, such as explicit text messages, which has destroyed their credibility as witnesses. Victims’ advocates point out that a text message between friends, written after a few drinks, doesn’t prove consent in a sexual encounter several months later. But the collapse in the number of cases leading to prosecutions suggests that access to such material, even when taken completely out of context, is having dire effects. In September last year, the Guardian claimed that prosecutors in England and Wales had become markedly more risk-averse, alleging that CPS staff had been urged to take “weak cases out of the system”.

Rape cases are hard to prosecute, especially when the complainant and defendant knew each other before the alleged attack. But in an area of the criminal justice system dogged by myths about false accusations, it’s important to point out that the withdrawal of a witness, or indeed an acquittal, doesn’t mean that a complaint was fabricated or malicious. Juries have to be convinced “beyond reasonable doubt”, which is a high bar for convictions, and that happens only in about half of rape trials. The conviction rate is even lower (under a third) in trials involving younger defendants.

Suggested reading

My Radical Liberation Front will set the people free

By Bidisha

There is no doubt that last year’s moral panic about disclosure has had catastrophic consequences, not least in terms of the credibility of the criminal justice system. The new rules may not even be legal: following a complaint from myself, the Victim’s Commissioner for London and a number of women’s organisations, the Information Commissioner has launched a high-priority investigation into the way victims’ data is being handled.

The ICO is also investigating a separate issue into the practice of taking victims’ mobile phones, which are sometimes being kept for months while every last piece of data – some of it belonging to other people, who haven’t given consent for it to be examined – is extracted from them.

Victims don’t always realise, when they agree to hand over a phone, how long they will be without it. Last year, Dorset police were criticised by the Independent Office for Police Conduct for taking the phone of a stalking victim, Katrina O’Hara, leaving her unable to call 999 when she was attacked and fatally stabbed a few days later by an ex-boyfriend. “It is clear she was left afraid and vulnerable by not being able to contact police immediately,” the IOPC said.

Earlier this month, the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, tacitly acknowledged the existence of a crisis when he announced a major review of rape investigations. At the same time, the conviction rate among rapes reported to the police is said to have reached a historic low of 1.9%. However you look at it, the criminal justice system isn’t working for rape victims, not least because of a bizarre role reversal in which they find themselves treated with as much, if not more, suspicion as their alleged attackers.

#MeToo is about saying: this happened to me, I’m not lying, I’m not mistaken, I’m not exaggerating; it was abuse, and it doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. Here is my truth.

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The writer whose books simply have to be shared

By Polly MacKenzie

Sharing our truth is powerful and important, but there are many stages still to go before we find peace (forget about resolution, justice or karma!). Luckily, there are many books that can help this process.

My #MeToo story is called ‘Emotional Violence and Social Power’ and while I don’t have the space, strength or tears to go over everything that’s happened since I wrote it, I want to share some of the books that I’ve read since. I have no idea when or if true recovery will ever come, but the books I’ve named here, none of which are self-help books and all of which are written by experts in their field, are valuable reads. All the books take a holistic view, looking at the psychology, physiology, sociology and the cultural ramifications of aggression, survival, and the search for justice and emancipation from the triggering, flashbacks, nightmares and other effects of trauma.

Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery is an international bestseller and the definitive book on PTSD. Be prepared to cry. It’s a wrenchingly honest, compassionate and honourable read, written with deep understanding. Alongside that I would recommend several complementary classics: Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score and Babette Rothschild’s The Body Remembers both examine how psychological pain is held in the body as well as the mind.

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Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

I also strongly recommend Betrayal Trauma by Jennifer Freyd, which looks at the effects of detachment, abandonment, abuse of trust and violation in childhood. Freyd is a real buzz-name at the moment. The aptness of her acronym for the behaviour of wrong-doers when confronted, DARVO – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender – is evident in the reactions of high-profile abusive men as they are brought to account.

While I don’t think it’s our responsibility to psychoanalyse our aggressors or listen to their excuses, there are some fascinating books on abusers. They make for a grisly, shocking and – be warned – sometimes triggering read. Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door is a sensational introductory book and a good starting point.

For anyone who has survived an abusive relationship, there are some very striking and (again) classic works: Power and Control by Sandra Horley, Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft and From Charm To Harm by Gregory Zaffuto are all precise examinations of abusers who are often glib and charming on the surface and who rely on control, gaslighting, isolation and threats to first psychologically manipulate and then physically terrorise their victims.

More from this author

The fascist tendency sweeping the world

By Bidisha

Finally, as awareness of coercive control and abuse develops, I want to recommend a remarkable memoir by Helen Walmsley-Johnson. Look What You Made Me Do is a survivor’s memoir written with depth, literary flair, candour and clarity by one of the most insightful journalists working today.

When I read these books, I cried with pain, recognition, admiration and gratitude for these writers’ wisdom and compassion.