Sexual Violence

The Epstein Files and Me-Too

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The photo is of the heroic journalist Julie K. Brown

NANCY LINDISFARNE and JONATHAN NEALE report:

This article says four important things about the Epstein files.

First, though all the talk is about conspiracy theories, this case is of a piece with the cover-ups of the abuse of gymnasts by Larry Nasser; the cover-ups of generations of abuse in residential schools for indigenous children in Canada, the consistent cover-ups by the Catholic Church; the cover-up of the Smythe case by the Archbishop of Canterbury; and hundreds and thousands of other cover-ups by institutions all over the world. This is not some bizarre conspiracy. It is what the rich and powerful do.

Second, this is not just about Donald Trump. This cover up started way before Trump, and it goes way beyond Trump. Third, the liberal and centre mainstream media are unable to talk sensibly about any of this because the Democratic Party has been part of the cover-up. Fourth, as with almost other every abuse and Me Too case, this one came to light because brave survivors fought back.

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Jimmy Savile, Boris Johnson and the Slow Burial of the Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse

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An 8 minute read by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale.

We have recently published two posts about the wall of silence that has long protected sexual abuse in Britain. The first was about the Archbishop of Canterbury and dozens of other church officials covered up the gruesome physical and sexual abuse of many boys and young men. The second was about how Jimmy Savile’s abuse was covered up for decades. This post looks at another example of that wall of silence – the way that the Independent Commission of Inquiry into the sexual abuse of children was effectively buried. 

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Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Saville and the Wall of Silence

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A 6 minute read by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale. This is our second post about the wall of silence that has long protected sexual abusers in Britain. Our first post was about how the Archbishop of Canterbury and dozens of other church officials covered up gruesome physical and sexual abuse. We argued there that the protection of sexual abusers in British institutions is not a glitch in the system. It is how the system works. This post tells the story of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, several police forces and dozens of managers protected Jimmy Savile over several decades.

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Nancy and Jonathan in Conversation with Miranda Melcher about Why Men?

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Miranda Melcher of the New Books Network interviewed us (Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale) about our book Why Men? A Human History of Violence and Inequality. Miranda introduced us by saying, “This book is fabulous and fascinating, and asks some really big questions, like why do we have patriarchy and warfare all over the place? And was this inevitable?”

And then the three of us are off. The podcast of the interview is one hour and thirteen minutes long, which gives you a potted version of the whole book. You can listen to it here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/why-men

“Even a Dog Understands No” – An Update on the Harvard Abuse Case

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

Harvard students enter the classroom to protest. Notice the posters.

Last February, almost a year ago, we published a long read about the struggle of three anthropology graduate students and their union against alleged sexual harassment at Harvard by Professor John Comaroff. (You can find that article here.) This is a short update.

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Me Too: The Economists Organize

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write:

This short post is to update our readers on the Me Too firestorm that is beginning in economic departments in universities in the United States. [1]

Jennifer Doleac is an associate professor of economics at Texas A&M University. That is to say, she has tenure. Which is good, because on October 20 she sent out a dynamite of a tweet:

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Putin, Modi and Trump: Ukraine and Racist Right-Wing Populism

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

The invasion of Ukraine is appalling. The resistance is heroic. The situation is moving fast, and each step is politically revealing. There remains a great deal of confusion about Putin and Ukraine in the United States and Britain. This long read aims to unpack some of that confusion and to explain Putin’s rise, how he fits into the global racist right, and his reasons for invading Ukraine.

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Harvard, Sexual Politics, Class and Resistance

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A long read by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

As we write, the case of alleged sexual harassment by John Comaroff, a professor of anthropology at Harvard, is exploding. The Harvard case is particularly egregious, not least because of the elite status of the university.

In this piece we treat the Harvard case as part of a much wider set of problems concerning class, sexual politics, inequality and resistance. Our focus initially is on universities in the United States. But we need to remember that academic enterprise today is utterly international. Everywhere the industry relies on similar economic models, has similar intellectual concerns and fosters the considerable mobility of professionals and students from workplace to workplace around the globe.

We are particularly addressing anthropology and other graduate students in the United States and across the world. Our aim is to try to answer some of the difficult questions that come up again and again in online discussion of the case.

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EURIPIDES, WOMEN AND SLAVERY: GENDER TRANSGRESSION IN ANCIENT GREECE

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The Trojan Women at the Flea Theatre, New York, in 2016

Jonathan Neale writes: We start with a theatre, and two moments of astonishing gender transgression. One happened in a theatre on a hillside in the center of Athens on a spring day in late March of 431 BCE. The second happened there sixteen years later, in March of 415 BCE. Both took place as the audience watched tragedies by the poet Euripides. These plays were about gendered oppression, sexual pain, rape, slavery and the horrors of war.[1]

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#MeToo and Class Struggle at Work

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Rachel Maddow Friday night

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: Yesterday we tuned in to watch Rachel Maddow’s nightly one-hour show on the US cable news network, MSNBC. Something extraordinary happened. Twenty minutes into the show Maddow began to talk about the Harvey Weinstein case. Over the next forty minutes she set forth, in powerful and coherent detail, how her bosses had attempted to protect Weinstein from the exposure of his sexual harassment and rapes on NBC News. Maddow accused her bosses, her bosses’ bosses, and her bosses’ bosses’ bosses, of lying, and of actions that were illegal and immoral. On live TV. Continue reading →

The Roots of Sexual Violence

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale  write: Lurking behind any discussion of men and masculinities is a deep presumption that men are aggressive sexual predators disposed to raging violence, while women are passive victims good only for reproduction. If this binary construction is ‘natural’, if it is our DNA as a species, then what is the point of asking ‘Why are men and women unequal?’ ‘Why are lesbians and gays oppressed?’ ‘Why are many men violent?’ ‘Why is sexual violence so common?’

Yet these are old, very important questions. For thousands of years the most forceful answers have come from the people who dominate society. Continue reading →

Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh and seven useful insights about sexual violence

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Protest in St Louis, 2 October 2018

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: Last Thursday, Christine Blasey Ford testified before the judiciary committee of the US Senate. She said that Brett Kavanaugh, the nominee for the Supreme Court, had attempted to rape her when she was 15. He denied it. She told the truth and he was lying. Everyone in the room knew this, including all eleven Republican senators.

What happened next was something else. The Republican senators rallied to defend the right to rape. Sure, class also mattered, and abortion, and Trump, and the midterm elections. But centrally, they did not want Kavanaugh to pay a price for his sexual violence. An extraordinary moment of #metoo resistance had provoked that Republican backlash, and they closed ranks fast and hard.

When a system is working smoothly the mechanics of power are hidden. But when there is a breakdown, a ‘breach case’, we sometimes have an opportunity to see how the system works. And the links and deep loyalties that keep inequality in place become visible. The hearing has offered such an opportunity. It gives us a chance to formulate seven useful ideas about sexual violence. Continue reading →

Michael Kimmel, #MeTooSociology and Feminist Betrayal of Sex Workers in Academia

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Juniper Fitzgerald writes: I’ve made an entire alter ego out of the things people hate most about women: bodily autonomy and self-determination in the form of sex work and body modifications, among other things. The recent allegations against prominent sociologist Michael Kimmel, a man known for his scholarship on masculinity and masculine entitlement, unveil the things people love most about women—complicity in the form of apologetics and silence, among other things.

As a former sex worker and sociologist, the allegations against Kimmel sent me spiraling in ways I did not anticipate, and not just because I have repeatedly experienced sexual harassment in my academic career. I am particularly revolted by the allegations against Kimmel because I disavowed my hard-earned sex worker gut feeling in order to elevate his career. Continue reading →

Far Right Racism and Gang Abuse

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By Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale.

Three years ago we posted an article about gang abuse of young women in Oxford. This article is of national relevance now, because the fascist and hard racist right is making hay with campaigns against Asian and Muslim abusers. Two weeks ago 15,000 people marched in central London calling for freedom for Tommy Robinson. There were 500 anti-racist counter-marchers. Things are getting serious. Continue reading →

Covering up abuse – We are all gymnasts

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Rachel Denhollander at the trial of Larry Nasser

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: In the wake of Metoo, collective movements are now exposing cover-ups from the top. The target is no longer just one individual, a Strauss-Kahn, a Bill Clinton or a Clarence Thomas. These movements are shouting: it’s a whole system. The class inequalities that protect abuse are being exposed. This is a cause for joy, and hope.

The Larry Nasser case provides a brutal example. At Nasser’s trial last month more than 160 survivors of abuse testified about what he had done to them. Nasser was a doctor for the athletics department at Michigan State University, and for the United States national Olympic team in gymnastics. The stories the survivors told were moving, and horrific. Nasser abused thousands of girls, some as young as six, by fingering them vaginally and anally for his own pleasure, over a period of more than twenty years.

Nasser was only able to do what he did because dozens of people  covered up for him. This fits with what we have seen in the many cases the Metoo movement has begun to expose. Only a minority of men abuse. Most men do not do those things. But the men who do it, do it over and over again, so almost every woman suffers. Continue reading →

Abuse Inquiry – Something Smells

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goddard wig

Dame Lowell Goddard

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

Update on 30 September 2016. Yesterday the lead lawyer for the official British inquiry into historic child abuse was sacked, after protesting internally about changes to the workings of the inquiry. So we are recirculating a post we wrote last month. In hindsight, our post is too trusting of Dame Goddard, who now appears to have been trying to narrow the scope of the inquiry. But the general context we provide is still useful. Continue reading →

The Five Chinese Feminists

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Chinese feminists protesting against domestic violence in blood spattered bridal gowns

Chinese feminists protesting against domestic violence in blood spattered bridal gowns

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write:  Five Chinese feminists have been arrested for planning to protest against sexual harassment. They face five to ten years in jail. This post explains the background to the case, and suggests ways that other activists around the world can show solidarity.

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Gang abuse in Oxford

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

Last year seven men from Oxford were convicted in court on multiple counts of rape and abuse of young women and girls. They were part of a criminal gang that prostituted the girls for money. They concentrated on needy and vulnerable girls. The rapes usually began when the girls were between eleven and fifteen. The recent official report estimates, conservatively, that a total of 370 girls in Oxfordshire have been abused by gangs since 2005.

All seven of the men convicted were Asian. Six of the survivors testified. The fascist English Defence League has called a national demonstration in Oxford on April 4. They say that the council and the police did nothing because they were protecting Asians.

Unite Against Fascism and the local trades council have called for a mobilisation against the EDL on the same day, to prevent them from using the suffering of Oxfordshire children for their own ends. They are right to do so.

However, we need more than that. The local Labour MP, Andrew Smith, has called for an official inquiry to investigate how abuse on this scale was allowed to happen. He too is right.

But we also have to face the question of who is to blame for allowing the abuse to continue. In this blog we confront the racist arguments about abuse head on. In doing so, we have to say who is to blame for allowing the abuse to continue: the senior managers in the schools, the social services and the police.

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Creative Protests

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penn state mattress

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale direct your attention to some striking protests against sexual violence by students in the United States, India and Britain.

Over the last couple of years there have been many high profile protests against rape at universities in different countries. They show how it is possible, with very modest means, to mount actions that are effective, and enormously moving for the participants. Continue reading →

ISIS, Sexual Violence and Killing Gay Men

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale 

There are now many press and internet reports of rape by the Islamic State (ISIS). There are also reports of ISIS killing gays. These reports are being used to justify heavy bombing of ISIS fighters and civilians by the United States, Britain, France and other allies. These bombings are happening in both Iraq and Syria – ISIS controls parts of both countries.

We have to be careful with the evidence. On the one hand, the media usually ignore rape in wartime. On the other hand, there is also a long standing tradition of newspapers accusing the enemy of atrocities they have not committed. However, there does appear to be convincing evidence for widespread use of rape or women, and killing of gay men, by both ISIS and America’s allies. 

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Sexual Violence and Class Inequality

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Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale. To download a pdf of this paper click here NLJN31Jan15FINAL

shame delhi police

Resistance to sexual violence is increasing globally. There have been revelations of abuse in many countries, protests against rape in American universities, a riot in Delhi, and mass protests in Kolkota. It seems a tipping point has been reached and this movement will grow. This paper offers a new, and perhaps surprising, way of understanding the roots of sexism, and sexual violence which we hope will help take this movement forward.  Continue reading →