The BBC’s new policy on “equality and diversity”, reading as though it is straight out of the W1A comedy series, aims to combat “heteronormative culture”. According to their chief radio and education honcho, the former Labour cabinet minister James Purnell, just over half (51 per cent) of 18- to 21-year-olds identify as heterosexual. There is no doubt that the BBC needs to engage younger viewers, and prise them away from their iPhones and laptops, but is the problem it seeks to address really about more “heteronormativity”, bearing in mind most of us don’t know what that even means?

In order to encourage more “woke” viewers, the Beeb commissioned an internal survey of 300 LGBT staff, which found that there are areas “requiring improvement, including a heteronormative culture, a need for inclusive non-binary language, insufficient support for trans staff, and a need to adopt LGBTQ or LGBTQ+.”

I wonder how many lesbians, as opposed to gay men or transgender individuals, took part in the survey. As is fashionable these days, the focus seems to be disproportionately on men and the transgender community. The identity list keeps on growing: it currently stands at LGBTQQIPA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Polyamorous, and Asexual).

However, much of this new wave of identity politics obsessing the Beeb and others appears to be largely about members of the “snowflake generation” wanting to be seen as that little bit special. Indeed, the few people who are not included in the ever-growing list, and who cannot even claim to have once worn an adult nappy at a fancy-dress party, can wear badges identifying as “straight allies”. Aside from the fact that some people do not wish to display their sexual preferences on a lapel, as an out and proud lesbian, I am dead against this idea, not least because it takes far more than a declaration of support to identify someone who will stand up for a gay colleague in the face of bigotry and abuse.

The BBC has, rightly in my view, faced allegations these past few years of sexism. After the Jimmy Savile scandal and the unequal pay revelations, it is clear that it needs to make amends to half of the population before worrying about using “non-binary pronouns”.

The quest to engage younger viewers is no doubt necessary to secure the future of the network, but many of us will opt to switch channels if the BBC does not get its priorities straight.

The post Virtue Broadcasting appeared first on Standpoint.

In an article for the New York Times recently, the German academic Ulrich Baer wrote: “The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognised members of that community.” How true.

By far the worst censors and McCarthyites are the transgender activists and their allies. Guardian commentator and Corbynista Owen Jones has angered a number of feminists by telling them they are “on the wrong side of history” because they believe they have the right to discuss their rights as women, and because they refuse to accept that “trans women are women” and that “some women have penises, some men menstruate”,  as goes the trans-lunatic mantra.

There are currently any number of men on the Left who are happy to see women like me silenced and bullied for not toeing the party line. It suits men such as Jones to be able to scream “transphobe” at feminists whilst being seen as a “progressive” by other leftist men.

I recently attended a meeting organised by a group of feminists in Bristol who were concerned about the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would enable any man to “self-identify” as a woman (or vice versa) without any medical intervention whatsoever.

The organisers had, for the first time in the history of such events, released details of the time and place prior to the meeting. In the past, trans activists had bullied and harangued the venues that had hosted individuals, such as myself, who are considered to be “transphobic” until they achieved the desired result and forced the venue to cancel. This time, the venue, a well-known community centre that has hosted a number of “progressive” events attended by liberals and leftists, refused to be intimidated. They were inundated with angry and threatening emails and telephone calls (beginning as soon as the venue was advertised) and promises to disrupt the meeting for “promoting hate speech”.

On my arrival, one hour before the event was due to begin, I was greeted by dozens of activists blocking all of the entrances as well as the stairwell. They were waving banners and placards with slogans such as “No TERFS [Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists]  on our Turf” and “Transphobia Kills”. The protesters had donned black balaclavas, jackboots, and combat trousers, with some holding very large dogs.
I was there to report on the event rather than speak at it, but was nevertheless blocked from entering the building. One trans activist, a man who identified as a woman, his face covered in a black mask, kept trying to knock my phone out of my hand, while another, this time a woman, screamed at me that “transphobia is violence”.

Police arrived early on but did nothing except capitulate to the protesters, and find a way to lead the attendees into the building via a side door. Why are they so reluctant to intervene?  I heard a man who had come to hear what the feminists had to say called a “scab” by one of the trans activists.

Even some judges are scared to challenge these thugs. In a recent case a trans activist was convicted of violently assaulting a 60-year-old woman in a bid to stop her and others from attending a meeting to discuss the gender identity madness. The judge insisted that the victim referred to her aggressor as “she” throughout.

Universities are also riddled with censorious hypocrites, revelling in power and sanctimonious piety. The National Union of Students is largely responsible for this vile culture of silencing.

I recall one particularly nasty episode recently when I was invited by staff (as opposed to students) to debate a pornographer at Essex University. Prior to the event there was the usual attempt to ban me appearing at Essex at all, as this po-faced, jargon-drenched petition indicates: “We don’t believe any university that claims to be trying to create safer spaces for women can tolerate the presence of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism on Campus, and we need to do our best to cancel this event.”

I was followed through the campus grounds being screamed at by students, all accusing me of the usual smorgasbord of transphobia, Islamophobia, etc. The pornographer I was debating, a vile individual who had won awards for producing hard-core rape propaganda, was ignored.

As I was leaving the lecture hall, I could hear the little babies screeching on about how unsafe their space was because I was on campus. I asked if they would talk to me in a civil manner, and one of them replied that he did not “allow hate speech” in his vicinity.

The new McCarthyism has become firmly embedded within gay male culture. Many feminists have long been critical of gay men dressing and performing the worst parodies of femininity, but when we have complained, few took notice. When I, in the early 1980s, heckled a drag act at a gay club in Leeds, I was beaten up and thrown down the stairs by gay men, while the bouncers stood and laughed.

However, in 2015, drag was banned by Free Pride Glasgow because “transgender people do not wish to be parodied”. This is Orwellian in the extreme. Actual women are not allowed to be offended by men using nasty, misogynistic stereotypes to “play the part” of a woman for entertainment, in case men who claim to be women, but who are actually men, get offended. But women, when we object, are “transphobic”. Perhaps Alice could pass me the looking glass?

The post The new McCarthyism appeared first on Standpoint.

Many of those in favour of Champion being sacked cited the fact that she chose to write a piece in the Sun against such gangs. But many of her critics are cultural relativists. I should know. I have been investigating these gangs since the early 2000s and came across this attitude on a regular basis. Those with the knives out for this feminist truth-teller are scared that Corbyn’s administration will be accused of “Islamophobia” — a term invented by and used by Islamists to shut down debate.

Corbyn and his Stalinist cronies do not need or want working-class voters any more, or at least not those that read the Sun. Corbyn’s distaste for Sun readers is more important to him than rooting out sexual predators and dangerous criminals.

Champion has undertaken various roles relating to combating violence and abuse of girls and women during her time as an MP. She has every right to speak out against the criminal gangs that use girls and women as merchandise, such as those in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere.

It is not just police, social workers and some charities that refuse to look at particular demographics relevant to the way grooming gangs operate in certain towns in the UK. On Radio 4’s Any Questions last month, Labour MP Yasmin Qureshi, the Shadow Minister for Justice, would not answer the question as to whether there is an issue about Muslim grooming gangs.

As feminists from Muslim backgrounds have pointed out for decades, these gangs get away with their crimes because within these communities men get away with all kinds of abuse against girls and women, and it is also sanctioned within the informal sharia legal system.

The women I met during the research for my forthcoming book on the global sex trade told me that there is often a racial motivation to sexual exploitation. I interviewed a number of black and minority ethnic women who had survived the sex trade, and they told me that often men from such communities pimp girls and women because it is an easier and safer way for them to make money than dealing heroin. Muslim-born feminists have been trying to expose the truth about the misogyny within their communities, but have often been silenced by white liberals who would rather appease so-called “community leaders” than support women against abuse. This is nothing short of a disgrace. Sarah Champion, unlike Corbyn, is on the side of the victims.

The post Champion Silenced appeared first on Standpoint.

The venue had been damaged not by anti-feminist bigots such as men’s rights activists, but by the new wave of so-called “radicals” who are in fact anything but. Transgender activists and their allies had stormed the opening night of the library, located in a small artists’ studio that the collective had raised money to rent, shouted abuse and threats at both the organisers and the crowd that had come to celebrate this new venue, accusing them of excluding “trans women, sex workers, and non-binary people”. They objected to some of the feminist texts in there, such as classics from the 1970s, saying they were “trans-phobic”.

Red wine was thrown on the books, posters were torn down, and the women who had come for what they thought would be a pleasant evening of chat, laughter, and the requisite warm white wine were taken aback at being the target of a mob.

The protesters handed out a pamphlet that said: “This library is run by women who hate other women.” One ripped down a poster while another set off the fire alarm, at which point the police arrived.

It would be easy to dismiss this incident as a one-off, perpetuated by bored attention-seekers who no one takes any real notice of. But unfortunately this is not the case.

Despite being a feminist and human rights campaigner all my adult life, for the past 13 years I have been targeted by baying mobs, both in the UK and elsewhere, who accuse me of being a “bigot”, “fascist”, “as bad as Hitler”, and various other horrendous slurs against my character. Why? Because I dared to write an opinion piece in a liberal newspaper in which I complained about a man who identified as a woman claiming that he was entitled to counsel rape victims. I have been “no-platformed”  from events at which I was due to speak about rape and child sexual abuse, and prevented from lecturing students on violence against women, despite being invited by feminist societies.

Other feminist allies and progressives, such as the redoubtable Maryam Namazie, have been no-platformed and pilloried for pointing out that religious fundamentalism is harmful to women, and for daring to challenge the cultural relativists who support the “right” of women to be covered from head to toe in the name of “modesty”.

The accusation by an NUS representative that human rights activist Peter Tatchell  was guilty of “racism and transphobia” was the final straw for many liberals. “But Tatchell is a national treasure,” they bleated over their organic muesli, recalling with horror when another hero of the intellectual elite, Professor Mary Beard, came under fire for daring to sign a petition against censorship. 

Tatchell and Beard are both figures lauded by mainstream liberal society, whereas radical feminists such as myself are seen to be a bit too edgy for them to support. During the time I was being censored and picketed, few progressives spoke out publicly in support of me, for fear that they would also be given the “Bindel treatment”. But when the bullies began to target the liberal lovelies, all hell broke loose. After all, this McCarthyite madness could actually affect them.

The latest casualties in this war on logic are two women who are largely unused to controversy, both of whom are well-loved establishment figures.

The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been called “transphobic” and told to apologise because she dared to rely on logic and truth as opposed to wheeling out a naked emperor when she said in an interview on Channel 4 News, “When people talk about ‘Are trans women women?’ my feeling is trans women are trans women.”

Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray, who is a classic liberal feminist and tends never to involve herself in controversial issues, also refused to capitulate when the trans activists and their cronies came after her  following a piece she wrote in a Sunday newspaper. What was so terrible about the piece as to provoke calls for her to be sacked from the BBC, and subsequently to being picketed at a literary festival? Murray made the startling observation that men who chose to live as women in later life have had a different experience in growing up from women raised female.

The values at stake are liberal ones, and yet the liberals are largely to blame for the normalisation and widespread nature of the new censorship. The trans activists and their allies do not go after bigots, fascists or right-wing moralists, but progressives, while the liberals say nothing and hope they remain out of range. 

Prior to Tatchell and Beard being targeted, I was more or less alone in the criticism and bullying I encountered from those who told me I was a fascist for saying, for example, that a penis is not a “ladystick”. I received daily messages from people saying they were appalled at what was happening, but dared not speak out lest it happened to them. Indeed, both Tatchell and Beard defended themselves by agreeing that I was “transphobic” and that they disapproved, but free speech, etc, etc. Now the new McCarthyists have come for Adichie and Murray, will the elitists finally drag their heads out of the sand and speak up?

The post War On Logic appeared first on Standpoint.

There has long been a cultural taboo regarding women drinking whisky, despite them having a long association with it. Maria Hebrea, an Egyptian woman who lived in the 2nd or 3rd century, devised an early version of a whisky still. By the 18th century, women in the US were producing most of the whisky, before industrial distilleries became popular. In those days, whisky was used as a medicine to treat everything from headaches or infected wounds, and was distilled at home in the kitchen. Men would often ask women to marry them based on their distilling talents.

In America, during the decades after Prohibition, mainly due to the association between prostitution and women drinking or serving whisky, women were not even permitted to drink liquor at the bar.

Today there is a crop of new female distillers, blenders and tasters. Why, then, is whisky still considered a “man’s drink”?

In Britain women tend to order wine, vodka and gin compared to darker spirits. Certain drinks are seen as strictly for women. As a lover of whisky and other dark spirits, I have often been offered long drinks such as vodka and orange, or sparkling wine, both of which I dislike and rarely hear women ask for whisky.

This is not surprising. Whisky has long been packaged and advertised to appeal exclusively to a male market. Until recently, whisky bottles were usually chunky, heavy, and decorated in minimalist, dark logos. In 2013 the whisky brand Dewars launched its “Meet The Baron” advertising campaign, in which a knight in shining armour character went to the assistance of various male whisky drinkers in difficult situations, for example being saddled with an unattractive woman. The Baron would find a way to replace her with a group of lingerie models. The message was clear — attractive women desire male whisky drinkers. After numerous complaints of sexism, the campaign video was removed from various websites, though not before nearly 300,000 people had seen the clip. The campaign is a clear example of how whisky companies tend to focus on the heterosexual, red-blooded male. It is interesting that despite the amount of effort that goes into market research and focus groups prior to ad campaigns being launched, no one thought that this particular commercial might come across as a badly-thought-out piece of circa 1970s knuckle-dragging nonsense.

The whisky bottle is often a prop in TV detective dramas, in particular when being snuck out of the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet by the senior copper wishing to strike a gentleman’s deal with a colleague. It has always been regarded as part of the wheeling and dealing of powerbrokers. Think of the dinner parties in the Edwardian era, in which, after the food is finished, the ladies go into the parlour to drink coffee and play bridge, while the men drink whisky, smoke cigars and talk politics.

But as more women turn to whisky, depictions in popular culture reflect this shift. The singer Lady Gaga described Jameson whisky as one of her “love interests”. Pop artist Rihanna sings about it. The actress Christina Hendricks is featured in an advertisement for Johnnie Walker Black Label. My favourite US sitcom of the moment, Grace & Frankie, features the two main female characters enjoying a pair of whisky flights bought for them by potential suitors.

Things are slowly changing. Not only is whisky drinking in general on the rise (according to International Wine & Spirit Research, consumption across the US has increased by almost 30 per cent from a decade ago), but more women are trying it.

According to those who run the Whisky Lounge, a London- based tasting club, its London Festival last year was an even split between female and male attendees. In Taiwan, where whisky is hugely popular, women make up almost half of all whisky drinkers.

Another reason for whisky’s increasing appeal is that new whiskies are being produced that can be mixed and used as a base for cocktails. Bourbons tend to have a sweet streak, and grain-to-bottle distillers are creating all sorts of complex, flavourful spirits.

Food writer Rachel McCormack has been a whisky fan for over 20 years and is writing a book on the topic, Chasing the Dram: Finding the Spirit of Whisky (Simon & Schuster), having travelled around the Highlands and Islands of Scotland researching and drinking for the past year and a half.

“For me whisky was never a man’s drink,” says McCormack, who grew up in Scotland. “My parents had two couples who were friends and both of the wives drank whisky and soda. They were both very tall. My parents were both small and drank gin and tonic so I just assumed from a very young age that whisky was a tall person’s drink, not a man’s drink.”

McCormack says that during her research she has never experienced sexism, from distillers, distributors or her male counterparts. “The really serious aficionados are the same. You like whisky, you want to know more, you want to share what you like drinking, they are thrilled you are at their whisky event, and don’t care if you are a woman or a man. This is something I found highly contrasts with the wine industry as I have felt deliberately excluded and even elbowed out the way by middle-aged men at a few industry tastings.”

But it was not always like this, even in whisky-obsessed Scotland. During the 1950s and 1960s, pubs in working-class areas were male-dominated. In those days women mainly drank sweet sherry while the men downed beer with whisky chasers.

“What changed in Scotland and elsewhere, was women going into pubs,” says McCormack. “When you start drinking you want something sweet, and entry-level whisky is quite smoky and fiery. If you look at most student bars they will sell more cheap bourbon than cheap whisky as it is sweeter. For young women, the image in their head is often still that that’s their grandad’s drink so they dismiss it.”

Billy Abbott runs Dramboree, a weekend summer camp about whisky. I ask him why, traditionally, whisky has been seen as a man’s drink. “It’s a hangover from the days when drinks were even more gender-divided than they are now,” he says. “Al Murray’s ‘glass of white wine’ or ‘fruit-based drink for the lady’ is funny because of how true it was for years.”

Outside casual drinking, the world of whisky fandom is male-dominated. “A few days of hanging out in Facebook whisky groups is enough to depress anyone with an inclusive attitude to whisky,” says Abbott, “but fortunately there are more people challenging those attitudes, and things are starting to change.” These days, he is seeing more women who are “geeky and knowledgeable” about whisky. He knows three master blenders, five prominent whisky writers, more than ten brand ambassadors and three whisky club organisers, all of whom are female. 

Do male whisky drinkers fear their female counterparts? “In the whisky world, it often seems to be the people who like to have a special ‘away from the wife’ place or interest,” says Abbott. “The number of dens and man caves in which I’ve seen pictures of walls clad in shelves of meticulously-sorted whisky is both impressive and depressing. They often seem threatened by the intrusion into their special manly world, and I see that continuing while people divide their private spaces by gender lines.”

Jason Standing is a founder of a London-based tasting club, Whisky Squad, which began as a group of friends meeting to hold tastings, and has grown substantially from its first meeting six years ago. Whisky Squad holds monthly meetings and currently has 500 people on its mailing list.

“I used to find that most tastings would be very competitive and a bit macho, with the men showing off how much they know about whisky,” he says. “We then began doing blind tastings, and this changed things, because all you were doing was talking about the experience you were having in tasting that whisky.”

Why have women been reluctant to drink whisky? “It is literally the historical social meaning ascribed to it, and the packaging,” says Standing, “which is ridiculous. A lot of it is prestige- driven, which is why it is sold more to men. But within the single malt community, because it is perceived as having more distinctive and diverse flavours, and the packaging and marketing is less geared to men, more women are turning to whisky.”

Lora Hemy is Head Distiller at Halewood Wines and Spirits, in Liverpool. She is working on distillery projects in Wales and building new English and Welsh whisky brands. Has whisky’s depiction in popular culture led to women feeling as if it’s not “their” drink?

“The idea of whisky being an old man’s drink is an anachronism,” says Hemy, “but I think that feeds the constructed novelty surrounding the female whisky drinker. I like to think that is starting to change now, but I am still occasionally confronted with surprise even from within the industry when I talk about my love of drinking whisky as well as making it.

“Recently there have been some marketing campaigns directed specifically to women and this does feel problematic to me. I’d rather we focused on quality of liquid and base ingredients, barley provenance and fermentation rather than a gendered approach to advertising.”

Are we in the midst of a whisky revolution for women? “The history of whisky has been shaped by some very revolutionary women, going back hundreds and thousands of years,” says Hemy, “so if we are having a ‘moment’ it’s been going on a long time.”

“When I started the book,” says Rachel McCormack, “I didn’t realise how relatively few women drink whisky. One of the things I have done is get female friends to try whisky and find at least one they like. So far I’ve had a one hundred per cent success rate. So, you know, one woman at a time.” 

The post Would The Little Lady Like A Wee Dram? appeared first on Standpoint.

I would argue that being a Conservative and a feminist are mutually exclusive, because equality for women can only be won in a context of wider social equality. But how will young feminists view the Labour Party at present, when its male leaders appear to view women with such disdain?

Several Labour women have accused Corbyn and cronies of treating them appallingly. Thangam Debbonaire, whom I have known for decades as a great campaigner for the rights of women and children, was appointed shadow culture minister and subsequently sacked by Corbyn without even being spoken to by the great man. At the time, Debbonaire was being treated for breast cancer. She has now been reappointed to the Labour front bench, as a shadow whip.

Corbyn also ignored calls from anti-racist and feminist groups to boycott an event organised by the Socialist Workers Party, because of its treatment of two female members who alleged rape by a senior male member in 2012. Some members of the SWP leadership denounced the complaints as motivated by a “dangerous feminism”. The coalition of women’s groups drafted an open letter imploring Corbyn not to attend, and were told by senior party officials that he would not. The letter therefore did not go out, but both Corbyn and his ally Diane Abbott spoke at the SWP event to rapturous applause.

To my ever-increasing consternation, the formidable Nimko Ali, who has tirelessly led the campaign against FGM, is a supporter of the Tory Party and campaigned for Zac Goldsmith in the London mayoral election. “Labour are sexist, offensive and assume my vote,” she says.

Every time I criticise Labour men for their sexism, I am told that I should be using my energy to have a go at the Conservatives, because their policies and track record are far worse for women. I agree. But I will continue to highlight Labour’s sexism because I do not want young women who see the knuckle-dragging antics of Corbyn and friends to defect to the Tories.

The post Labour Misogynists appeared first on Standpoint.

Later this year, Members of Parliament move out of the Palace of Westminster while it undergoes renovations over the next decade. But the temporary building into which they will move is governed by sharia law. The building, located in Whitehall, was discreetly transferred to an Islamic bond scheme in 2014. Under terms of the lease, alcohol is banned on the premises. It is shocking but not surprising that any government buildings in the UK could be governed by Islamic law. 

Last month, the women’s rights organisation Muslim Women’s Network UK (MWNUK) demanded the resignation of the leaders of Birmingham Central Mosque after they dismissed the group’s concerns about domestic violence and forced marriages. According to MWNUK, the mosque’s chairman, Labour councillor and mayoral candidate for the city Muhammad Afzal, said that forced marriages were no longer a problem; that domestic violence only affected Christian communities because they get drunk; and that more men than women were the victims of domestic violence. Afzal has since withdrawn from the mayoral contest.

Alcohol is forbidden under Islam, although most Muslims in the UK drink it. When Islamists blame the West for the moral decay among young Muslims living in Western societies, alcohol is often cited. Alcohol was also blamed by some devout Muslims for the grotesque sexual assaults on more than 100 women and girls in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Pressure group MuslimStern, which has 20,000 followers on Facebook, said its mission was to “highlight the way the media was using the incidents to promote racism against minorities”. The group complained that the female victims had brought the unwanted attention to themselves by dressing in a manner that North African men were not accustomed to.

Following the attacks, the group put a message to its 20,000 followers on Facebook which read: “The government should ban the consumption of alcohol because it leads to traffic accidents, violence and rapes, and is extremely damaging to health. But for capitalist societies, this is too much to expect. So long as alcohol is not prohibited there will be no discernible decline in these cases.”

After four decades of feminist campaigning against men’s right to beat their wives there is widespread disapproval of it among right-thinking British people. Legal sanctions against domestic violence do not allow alcohol as a mitigating factor. Even men’s rights activists tend to shy away from publicly justifying beating up women because they refuse to obey, even if they secretly condone such actions. Indeed, the only group that still publicly and shamelessly defends wife-beating is the Islamists. The cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, whom the then Mayor of London Ken Livingstone described as “one of the leading progressive voices in the Muslim world”, defends Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and said, of the verse in the Koran about how it is acceptable for a man to beat his wife to keep her in line, that he accepts corporal punishment as a method of last resort — though only “lightly”.

Those who agree with al-Qaradawi would also presumably excuse forced marriage, marital rape and other forms of male coercion of women — all in the name of sharia and Islam. There is a reluctance to admit that FGM, another form of domestic violence, is primarily carried out within Muslim countries and communities, which have been reluctant to assist the UK authorities to make arrests and bring prosecutions.

Women and girls living under Muslim laws face restrictions on what they wear, where they can appear in public, and on their education and work. The prohibition of alcohol in a building owned by a Muslim is a step towards creating Islamic enclaves that live under a different legal system — the no-go areas that the police deny exist. And the fact that MPs, the country’s legislators, are apparently powerless to do anything about it implies that we are losing sight of the idea of equality before the law.

Alcohol does not cause abuse and violence, though it is often used as an excuse for the violence. Not all alcoholics are violent, and not all abusers have a drink problem.

The reality is that the majority of abusers are not alcoholics. They use alcohol as part of their wider abusive behaviour. Over the years I have volunteered in women’s refuges and also interviewed the victims and perpetrators of domestic violence. I have learned that violent men often blame the alcohol rather than themselves for the violence; they will go out and get drunk to create an excuse to get violent, or pretend to be drunk when perpetrating violence and affect not to remember what they did when drunk.

The problem is not alcohol, but attitudes towards women. The fewer rights women have in relation to men, the worse the domestic violence and other forms of abuse at the hands of men.  But women and girls living under sharia law in the UK are particularly vulnerable to domestic violence. Forced and early marriage, polygamy and draconian attitudes towards the role of women in the home result in wives having little or no power and husbands exerting theirs in any way they choose. In addition, the widespread practice of using patriarchal sharia courts to settle disputes between family members has resulted in a free-for-all within conservative Muslim households.

It is estimated that there are currently around 85 sharia courts operating in Britain. They enjoy the support of a number of non-Muslim establishment figures, including the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who said in an interview in 2008: “There’s a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious law.”

In terms of dealing with domestic abuse, sharia courts tend to take the side of the abuser and often tell the victims that they need to examine their own behaviour to try to find a way to stop provoking the violence. My research into sharia courts found that the clerics rarely, if ever, advise reporting the perpetrators to the police, but rather advise the men to take anger management classes and receive mentoring from so-called community elders so that marriages can be “saved”.

In 2011, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (Ikwro) found, following Freedom of Information requests to police forces across the UK, that 39 out of 52 forces had recorded a total of at least 2,823 “honour” attacks by family members on women and girls during 2010. Some forces showed an increase of nearly 50 per cent in such cases from 2009. This is the context in which hardline Muslims in the UK claim that wearing the burka is simply about freedom.

The status of Muslim women in relation to men is unlikely to improve unless Muslim women are better represented within the political system. Last month MWNUK wrote to the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn asking him to look into allegations of “systematic misogyny displayed by significant numbers of Muslim male local councillors”.

MWNUK says that female Muslims were discriminated against and blocked from seeking office by Muslim male Labour councillors operating under the patriarchal “biradari” caste system, and that the problem had been an “open secret” within Labour, which it accused of being “complicit at the highest levels”. In the letter to Corbyn, the organisation said: “Labour politicians have deliberately turned a blind eye to the treatment of Muslim women because votes have been more important to them than women’s rights.”

During my time with Naz Shah, the Labour MP for Bradford West, during the 2015 election campaign, I heard from Muslim women who complained that they had been undermined, sabotaged and blocked from becoming councillors, with many selection “deals” decided behind closed doors.

When MWNUK launched a report, last year, on sexual exploitation in the Asian community, it had a major impact because its publication coincided with the revelations of child sexual exploitation by Asian gangs in Rotherham. It challenged the view that the the issue was purely one of race and that somehow Asian girls were left untouched by abusers because of loyalty to their own culture. MWNUK found that a worrying number of Asian women and girls were slipping through the net, as agencies, including the social services and the police, grappled with the difficulties of gaining victims’ confidence because of cultural sensitivities — those same points of faith which are exploited by their abusers to ensure their victims’ silence.

It confirmed what many already knew — that many Muslim girls and women are trapped in a cycle of abuse and violence because of a lack of services. What’s more, it recommended that a helpline be set up as an outlet for them to confide their problems and seek advice.

It seems incredible that after more than four decades of feminism in the West so many on the Left are willing to sacrifice women’s rights, in particular the rights of Muslim-born women, in the name of so-called religious freedom. Speaking out against sharia law in the UK is often viewed as racist. I have been listed on the website Islamophobia Watch since I published my first article about Pakistani grooming gangs in the north of England in 2007, despite the fact that I made it clear the men were committing such crimes because they knew the authorities would probably turn a blind eye.

I am tired of hearing from so-called Western feminists that to criticise the myriad ways in which Muslim men oppress Muslim women and girls is tantamount to Western imperialism. Feminists (many of them of Muslim heritage) who oppose the aspects of Islam that have institutionalised and normalised gender apartheid also oppose sexism within Christianity and Judaism.

It would be inconsistent and hypocritical if defenders of human rights and gender equality were not to expose and condemn the misogyny within Islam, yet many on the Left will defend grotesque and misogynistic practices and beliefs within Islam for fear of being accused of racism or Islamophobia. For what I have written about the anti-women doctrines within fundamentalist Jewish communities I have not been labelled anti-Semitic. In opposing some Catholic practices and naming them as discriminatory towards women I have never been accused of being against Catholic individuals, and have had the support of the progressive Left.

The creeping acceptance of sharia law in the UK has serious ramifications for every single Muslim woman and girl. It is also a sign that all women’s rights are under threat, because to support sharia — which many liberal and left-wing men in the UK appear to do — is to be against equality. To accuse feminists of being “anti-Muslim” because we campaign against sharia and its apologists is to suggest that the Muslim girls and women it affects do not count.

The post It’s Sharia, Not Alcohol, That Threatens Women appeared first on Standpoint.

The feminist action group Femen made the headlines again last September. Two members, both topless, leapt on stage at a Muslim women’s fair in north-west Paris to protest against the presence of fundamentalist preachers who allegedly justify rape in marriage, and other human rights abuses against women in the name of Islam. The women bore messages written in black across their chests, with one translating as, “Nobody makes me submit.”

When the women — one of Algerian origin, the other Tunisian — stormed the stage, two imams were debating whether it was permitted for a man to beat his wife. There were shouts of “Dirty whores, kill them!” from the audience, and a group of men jumped onto the stage themselves and assaulted the protesters before the police intervened.

Unsurprisingly in today’s climate of cultural relativism on the Left and within liberal feminism, the women, despite being of Muslim origin, were labelled racist and Islamophobic for disrupting the event and for displaying their breasts in front of religious men.

This is not the first time that Femen members have been accused of Islamophobia and racism. Chitra Nagaranjan, a black British feminist, wrote in the Guardian in 2013: “Femen’s actions also come at a time of intensifying international backlash against women’s rights that is increasingly being framed, perpetuated and accepted by male elites as rooted in ‘the West’ and imposed on other countries in a form of cultural imperialism. Unfortunately, statements from white French women saying things like ‘better naked than the burqa’ feed this narrative and are more likely to damage rather than support the struggles of the women they call their sisters.”

Following last November’s jihadist attacks in Paris, I wanted to find out how the divided women’s movement was dealing with the aftermath of such an outrageous assault on France’s freedom. French feminists have long been divided over Islam. Some argue that it is possible to redefine and reinterpret the teachings of the Koran to better suit it to equality between the sexes. But secularists insist that Islam has the subjugation of women and girls at its heart. The polarisation of views was compounded by the law against the wearing of the veil (and other visible religious artefacts) that came into force in France in 2004, and remains today.

Islamic feminists, as defined by researcher Stephanie Latte Abdallah, “claim the right to an interpretation (of the Koran) that promotes gender equality, new roles in rituals and religious practices, changes in the areas of family law, criminal law, and legal and political practices”.

The Left has allowed its tendency to blame the West for everything to offer a justification for terrorism as resistance to colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. As a lifelong feminist, and firmly of the Left, I have long been bitterly disappointed with those who supposedly campaign for women’s rights yet capitulate to Islamofascist men. Such women, in the UK, France and other European countries, have given their support to Sharia courts, the wearing of the full-face veil, arranged marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM), and gender segregation in public places. Supporting traditional Islam flies in the face of feminism, and even of basic equality between men and women.

Ana Pak is an Iranian secular feminist who works with refugees arriving in France from Iran, Afghanistan and Syria. Pak grew up during Khomeini’s rule. “The word Islamophobic comes from 1979 when [Ayatollah] Khomeini came to power and women went to the streets and marched to be free of the veil,” she says. “Khomeini and the Islamists obliged them to wear the veil, and that’s when they started calling these women Islamophobic.”

Pak was forced to leave Iran for France, having been arrested several times for campaigning against theocracy in Iran. Having escaped prison, she expected to be able to continue her anti-Islam activism in the democratic, secular country of her exile. “I was shocked to find that the French Left was capitulating to the Islamists, and that I was soon labelled as Islamophobic for resisting its doctrine. I have never stopped working against or fighting Islamists, in Iran first of all, and then in France. In Iran I was involved with the Left, but the Left has lost its raison d’être. Now the Left use the same words that the Islamists have used in their own campaign.”

Pak was dismayed by the reaction of some French citizens to the Charlie Hebdo attacks. “Immediately following the attacks at Charlie Hebdo I went in the evening with some feminist friends to the Place de la République, where we assembled to support the people who were killed. Two of my friends had banners with typical feminist slogans, like ‘No to the veil’ and ‘No extremism’, but the French people that were already there asked them to remove them because they could cause offence.

“After the Hebdo killings, a common reaction was to blame the journalists who ‘dared’ to criticise Islam, saying they were guilty of blasphemy. Now Islamists are killing those who drink wine and who go to concerts. Tomorrow it will be people who march in the streets. Islamists are taking power in France, and what they want once they are in power is to achieve absolute submission.”

Those who use the history of French colonialism to justify the massacres are misguided, she says. “Islamists have taken power in Iran against Iranians, in Syria against the Christians, in France against those who go out and drink wine. So the people who blame colonialism are wrong.”

Clara Carbunar is part of the World March of Women (WMW) France. She works with young women in Europe, some of whom are Muslim, as well as with multi-ethnic communities in France. “I was really mad after the terrorist attacks in Paris last January. Who was targeted? Journalists and Jewish people,” says Carbunar. “The Left gathered around the demand to end Islamophobia, following the attacks. There was a national march, but what was organised was a protest against Islamophobia without mentioning anti-Semitism. The two questions that divide feminists are lesbian and gay rights on one hand, and anti-Semitism on the other.”

One of organisations she attacks is the Party of Indigenous People of the Republic (PIR). Established in 2010, PIR campaigns against “Eurocentrism, Islamophobia, anti-black racism and Zionism”. “PIR have influenced the Left on Islam,” says Carbunar. “They announced a march against racism, and this was not a feminist demand at first. It was women who led the march, but nothing in their demands was about sexism. It was only about Islamophobia and racism. They define racism as against black people, Muslims and Roma, forgetting the Jews, who have been targeted a lot in France these last years. Obviously this is a major point of debate.”

According to many feminists I spoke to, PIR, co-founded by Houria Bouteldja, is both anti-Semitic and anti-feminist, and yet presents itself as progressive and leftist. “Bouteldja wrote that homosexuality is not an issue for the suburbs. She thinks Muslim women should follow Muslim men,” says Carbunar. “Bouteldja’s response to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo was to blame the victims for their fate.”

Writing about that massacre, Bouteldja declared: “I hold a grudge against Charlie Hebdo for making all of us carry the heavy burden of its inconsistency. I blame them for having missed the essential part, probably the only thing that matters: we are human, not doormats. I blame them for having stripped satire of its meaning, for directing it against the oppressed (which is a form of sadism) instead of against power and the powerful (which is a form of resistance) . . . I blame them for not having listened to these damn ‘Islamo-leftists’. I resent them for if they had heard us, perhaps we could have saved them from themselves, and maybe they would still be with us.”

“Charlie Hebdo was rooted in anarchist, extreme leftist grounds,” says Carbunar. “That’s where it came from and it was who was reading it, basically. But the Left then abandoned them after the massacre.”

Clearly, the problems of French society are complex — but the jihadis are not complex at all: they simply wish to destroy Western civilisation. Why then do some feminists apparently cast aside their principles of social justice and equality and not recognise that the Islamists who carry out such attacks simply wish to finish what the Nazis began?

I asked Thierry Shaffausser, an activist firmly situated on the hard Left, a campaigner for workers’ rights who describes himself as a feminist, what he thought was behind the Paris massacres. “There are many political responsibilities, including our own foreign politics in the Middle East,” he said. “My main fear is that violence leads to more violence and that bombing Syria will leave the local population in extremist hands. All the terrorists were French. Our country has produced its own terrorists.”

Why is that?

“France is increasingly tense and harsh with its minorities. France rejects the concept of minorities and wants to impose the idea of universalism, which means erasing differences,”  Shaffauser said. “At the same time, social inequalities increase, and the far Right is topping the polls. Daesh may provide an alternative political model for people who have been failed by the so called universalist republic.”

According to Shaffauser and others on the Left, the actions of the jihadists can be traced back to colonialism and secularism. “We have a law saying that schools must teach the positive effects of French colonialism. We have laws against wearing the veil. French Muslims are the second religion but they don’t have enough mosques in which to pray,” Shaffauser claimed.

Christine Delphy, a renowned feminist intellectual and co-founder of the journal Nouvelles Questions Feministes (New Feminist Issues) with Simone de Beauvoir in 1977, is a long-term member of the feminist organisation Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF). With such impeccable credentials one might assume that Delphy would be opposed to misogynistic practices such as the requirement for women to cover up in order to appear “modest” — but no. Delphy believes that feminists who consider the veil to be a symbol of women’s oppression are Islamophobic.

“White feminists should accept that [veil-wearing] women want to develop their own feminism based on their own situation,” she wrote in a Guardian article, “and that this feminism will take their Islamic culture into account.”

The stock leftist analysis is that France is a racist country and that the only critique of religious fundamentalism is coming from the racist Right. But there are feminists in France who will not follow the cultural relativist line and vigorously challenge it.  One such is Malka Marcovich, a writer, historian and international consultant for women’s and human rights for the last 25 years. She is appalled by the attitude of many feminists in France, in particular those who believe that freedom of expression for religious fundamentalists is more important than it is for secularists and anti-Islamists.

“Christine Delphy is a minority in France,” she says. “The feminist majority have fought against cultural relativism. The struggle of many feminists is that we believe in secularism and universalism. It is the only system [under which] women can be free.”

Marcovich is concerned that those Muslim-born women who have rejected religion have been abandoned by the cultural relativists, and are not supported when they publicly criticise Islam. “They say we are racist, that we are colonisers,” she says. “The young women you see in the street wearing the hijab? Their mothers took it off. A lot of women from France have been saying for years that in certain neighbourhoods you can’t go out without wearing a veil, but nobody listened.”

She sees a danger in allowing the far Right to monopolise criticism of anything to do with Islam. “If you speak out, you are accused of being racist,” she says.

Amira (not her real name), an Algerian-born woman, has lived in the Parisian suburbs since 1974. Ten years ago    she began teaching at a primary school in a predominantly Muslim area, and was warned on the first day not to say anything “negative” about Islam to the children.

“I think they were nervous of me because at the job interview they asked about my religion. I was very clear that I do not have one. But they pushed, and I said I had been born into a Muslim family but that I had rejected all of it.

“Many of the girls cover up [with a hijab] once they are in the school grounds, and the head teacher, who is a religious Muslim, asked if I would also wear a scarf to cover my hair. I politely refused, and from that day I knew my job was at risk.”

Despite the obvious opposition to Amira’s secularist beliefs, she bravely decided to complain to the head teacher about the fact that the hijab was not forbidden at the school, a contravention of French law.

“He started screaming at me, jabbing his finger in my face, and asking what kind of whore I was to go against my faith and support the racist French system.

“After the jihadist attacks many of the teachers blamed the French for the massacre. I was disgusted. I really worry about what they are telling the girls and boys at school. They said it was to do with the history of colonialism and imperialism, and not the fault of the actual murderers.

“When I heard about the Charlie Hebdo attack I was frightened to go into school. One of the teachers laughed when she saw me and said, ‘Are you pleased they got what they deserved?’ I felt sick.”

Linda Weil-Curiel is an expert on FGM and an outspoken critic of Islamism and the cultural relativism of the Left. She commented: “Everyone starts off by saying, ‘Let’s not get confused, what Islamic State is doing is not Islam, it’s barbarism. Islam is not that, it’s peace and love and everything.’ But it is not, of course. And nobody will acknowledge the truth.

“Because of the veil, the feminist movement became divided. Some said it’s their freedom if they want to wear the veil. After all they’re former colonies and the French cannot impose their views on all these populations. The new generation says it is freedom to wear the veil.

“The generation of Muslims who settled here in the Fifties and Sixties were  assimilated, and the children were raised like any French child. Nobody asked for halal food or swimming pools where the girls were separated from men and boys. But after the Islamic revolution under Khomeini we have had a sort of Islamic revival among young people who were intoxicated by Islamism.

“As the suburbs became more turbulent, the elders were given power to bring social order. Then the imams began to have influence within neighbourhoods and on social issues.”

Annie Sugier, president of the Ligue du Droit International des Femmes (International League of Women’s Rights), disagrees on issues relating to Islam and the role of women within it, though LDIF aims to promote universal rights for women whatever their culture or religion.

“It is always violent people who create the agenda. It is happening now, it happened with Hitler and Stalin, with Napoleon, with all these people. The first wave of feminism was destroyed in the end by the fascists,” says Sugier. “Now the third wave will be destroyed by Islamists imposing their agenda.”

For Ana Pak, who escaped the Islamists ruling Iran, those who capitulate to these murderous fundamentalists cannot claim to be progressive. “Those who defend Islamism are not feminists at all,” she says, “because feminism means the emancipation of women from patriarchy, marriage, religion and any of the chains that keep us constrained.”

If French feminists could see Islamism as a reactionary, anti-feminist ideology rather than the cri de coeur of the oppressed they might be able to do more for the real victims — the women, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who suffer under Islam or are killed by terrorists.

“Islamophobia was a word that was invented and used by Islamists to shut down debate, and prevent people from being liberated,” says Ana Pak. “It is used against Muslim women. How can this be sane?”

Meanwhile, feminists and others on the Left in France and elsewhere in Europe — the very people that should be ensuring Islamist fascists can never come to power — instead find ways to defend them.

The post France, Islam, And The Second Class Sex appeared first on Standpoint.

The seminar I am attending is not speed dating or a singles event, but a course entitled “Love & Soulmate with Kathryn Alice”. For £75 a ticket, delegates are treated to a motivational talk from the warm-up act — a young man who explained to us how we could open our hearts to each other — and a seminar from the love guru herself. 

Alice, a Californian, resplendent in flowing blonde locks, pale-grey linen and a fixed, serene smile, is the author of Love Will Find You: Nine Magnets for Bringing You and Your Soulmate Together (Avalon, 2007), plus a number of CDs and audio products. Alice lectures on love all over the world, and has, according to the delegates on my table, something of a cult following. “I was about to fly to California to meet her,” said Irene (not her real name), a middle-aged Asian woman who has been single since her husband left her a decade ago, “but then I saw an advertisement for this seminar. I could not believe it. It must be fate.”

Although the seminar is clearly a money-making event, Alice is not raking it in like a number of others in the “love for sale” market. The hire of the hotel ballroom on a Saturday evening, plus the DJ, warm-up act and administration and advertising costs, would not leave a huge amount of change out of the joining fee. Perhaps such events are seen as loss-leaders, there to promote supplementary materials and encourage people to sign up to the more expensive one-to-one sessions.

The UK organiser of the event, Gail De Souza, agreed to speak to me following my revelation that I was at the seminar to research an article on the commercialisation of loneliness. De Souza told me that she had made a financial loss on the event, but that she did it “out of love”. The room was only about half-full, and many of the people there were linked to the organisers, but nevertheless such an approach to finding your true love can be addictive. Many of those attending had been to several such seminars previously and said they would continue until they found their soulmate.

Some will acquire a taste for such methods of meeting a partner and will go on to hire personal “dating trainers” to help them with their online search skills; pay for advice from a “flirt coach”; or even travel the world to other events like “Love & Soulmate”, believing that, as they are about to be told by Kathryn Alice, “There is someone for everyone out there. You WILL find them.”

This event is one of many examples of the increasing commercialisation of loneliness. The advertising industry has capitalised on people’s desire to find their soulmate and live happily ever after, and it has gone way beyond online dating services.

The dating scene is getting seriously pricey. A year with bespoke dating agency Berkeley International will set you back £10,000. Then there are dating “boot camps” such as Kama Lifestyles, which costs £800 a day.

Not only is the online dating business huge, there are now virtual dating assistants such as Vida Consultancy that, as it claims on its website, “specialises in getting dates with women you want to date, does all the work. YOU get all the credit. It SUCKS sending message after message to women who never write you back. What’s worse is if you’re getting any messages at all, they’re probably not from the girls you want to meet.”

Then there is Sam Owen, one of a number of so-called relationship coaches, based in Cheshire. Owen offers sessions at £125 per hour. There are also “flirtology” classes, such as the course run by Jean Smith, who describes herself as a social and cultural anthropologist. Smith claims in her publicity that “flirting is a science”. The course costs £1,797.

How did anyone manage to date, fall in love, or find a life partner before these people began charging you money to achieve it?

Money and sex have long gone together. We only have to look at the scandal involving hacked and leaked information on its members from the online infidelity site Ashley Madison. “I only signed up to catfish lonely liberal women,” commented one former member below an online article on the topic.

Dr Catherine Hakim, in a report for the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), recently argued that prostitution should be legalised and treated like any other financial transaction, such as paying to eat in a restaurant. In her report, Supply and Desire: Sexuality and the Sex Industry in the 21st Century, Hakim claims that the “sexual deficit” among heterosexual men (meaning that they want more sex than do women of the same age) can be addressed by legitimising the purchase of sex, and that decriminalising Britain’s £4 billion sex industry would increase protection of women. Despite there being no credible evidence for her claims, there are a number of countries in recent years, including the UK, that have had their GDP boosted by estimates of their economies that include the profit from the drug and sex industries.

In the past decade, increasing numbers of entrepreneurs have come up with new ideas for making money from loneliness: mail-order brides, dating coaches, synthetic “partners” such as RealDolls (life-like human dolls, created initially for sex, but also in more recent years for a type of faux companionship), and reproductive services to produce children to provide solace for the solitary.

Loneliness is a growing problem in the West, with some studies claiming it has become an epidemic among young adults in the UK. It is also a significant problem for older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1 million women over 50, and is set to get far worse as populations age even further.

Many of us live alone. According to the census, there were 7.1 million single-person households in England and Wales in 2011, an increase of 1 million from the previous decade. In the UK as a whole, 13 per cent of the population lives alone.

People spend money, join groups and organisations and put serious time and energy in the attempt to rid themselves of the feeling of loneliness. Surely, many would argue, finding a variety of ways to assuage loneliness is a positive thing, even if cash changes hands?

I have long been critical of commercialised sex and have spent decades, alongside other feminists and human rights activists, campaigning to abolish the international sex trade. The hostility I have had directed at me, by those on the liberal and libertarian Left and Right, has been extraordinary. My work on domestic violence, rape and child sexual abuse has left some men feeling defensive, and whenever I speak, or attempt to speak at universities these days I am more often than not “no-platformed” by the National Union of Students for, among other things, “whorephobia”.

“Because money is made out of prostitution, there are plenty there to defend it,” says Rachel Moran, a survivor of the sex trade and author of Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (2012). “Those shouting us down about how great selling sex is would not dream of defending domestic violence in this way, because it is not a commercial business, relying on good PR and advertising.”

My recent “no-platforming” was a few weeks ago. I was due to speak at the University of Manchester at a debate on feminism. My opponent was to be Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing commentator and professional anti-feminist. One of the justifications of banning me (but keeping Yiannopoulos) was the fact that I consider prostitution to be a cause and consequence of women’s inequality. It would appear that my critique of commercialised sexual abuse is more dangerous and unpalatable than misogyny spouted by men like Yiannopoulos.

Few would see the connection between the “Love & Soulmate” seminar I attended, and prostitution. But profiting from those seeking love is surely as unethical as making money from sexual gratification.

I wanted to find out from the delegates at “Love & Soulmate” whether paying money in the pursuit of love paid dividends. Jane (not her real name) is in her early thirties and works in the charitable sector in London. At the “Love & Soulmate” seminar I spotted her looking somewhat embarrassed when, as part of the obligatory ice-breaker exercise directed by the warm-up act, she was asked to turn to the person on her left, place her hand on his heart, and look directly into his eyes. (At this stage I pretended to be taking an urgent telephone call.)

Jane has been looking for a life partner since the break-up of a four-year relationship eight years ago, and had previously tried online dating. Having spent “hundreds of pounds” joining various sites and going on “pointless dates with unsuitable men”, she saw an advertisement on a women’s magazine website for the Kathryn Alice seminar and decided to try it out.

The seminar was at least two-thirds women. One woman was in her eighties, and had been looking for love since her husband had died some time ago. The majority seemed to be fairly young to middle-aged. The tables were set out in the style of a wedding breakfast and were littered with glitter and tiny red love-hearts. Red heart-shaped balloons decorated the room, and a DJ stood behind a deck in the corner, spinning tunes such as Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything”, and the Commodores’ “Three Times a Lady”.

I met Jane, a conventionally attractive woman that I would have assumed would have no trouble in the dating world, during the break. Had she benefited from the advice given so far by Alice and her colleagues? No, she told me. “It was all about what we needed to do differently,” she said. “The problem for a lot of women is that many of the men out there are not very nice, and tend to be afraid to commit. Most women can get dates if all we are looking for is a fling or a one-night stand.

“We were told that the only reason we had not met anyone yet was because we had not opened ourselves up to the possibility of it yet, or opened our hearts. But the reason why most of us would have been there was precisely because we had been looking, had been open to it, but had not been able to find the right person.”

Although women dominate such seminars and the types of online dating sites and apps that are geared towards finding relationships as opposed to casual sex, a growing number of British and American men looking for a wife will access a commercial service rather than use the traditional methods. This is an expensive business, according to a Reddit thread earlier this year. Men can pay as much as $50,000 (£32,700) to meet a woman this way.

For the women in the Thai sex industry, the prospect of a foreign husband and a nice house in the West is a far better than dire poverty. But the fact that some women are desperate enough to sell themselves to such men is no excuse for us to accept the fact that thousands of British men take advantage of their lack of choice. If a man cannot acquire a girlfriend the old-fashioned way, he should accept that it is unlikely a beautiful young woman in a faraway country will desire him. The UK government should take a stand against men who travel abroad to buy sex, as it allows poorer countries to sell its women like cheap holiday tat.

In Russia alone more than 25,000 women per year sign up to the country’s 1,000-plus marriage sites. Only 5-7 per cent of the women who sign up eventually find a foreign spouse, according to a study conducted by an American university.

The mail-order bride industry, now linked to online dating, has roots going back to when early European settlers in North America requested wives. The Virginia Company of London sent several shipments of mail-order brides in return for payments in tobacco. The first documented mail-order brides started where so many now end up: London. Today, the mail-order bride business is huge and extremely lucrative, with men being far less stigmatised for finding a spouse this way.

Prior to travelling to the potential brides’ country of origin — often the Philippines or Russia — the customer will look through an online catalogue to choose women to whom he is attracted. I spoke to Jim (not his real name), a British Asian from London who had recently been widowed and wanted “a second chance of happiness”. He told me that he was “bombarded” with advertisements for mail-order bride services via his email and social media sites while linked to several internet dating services. “It would never have occurred to me to actually look to buy a wife,” said Jim. “I wanted to date lots of potential partners so I could choose from them. But I became convinced that it would be best if I cut all the middle stuff out and chose a bride in one go.”

First, he had to pay money to access the email addresses of the women he liked the look of from the catalogue, and then for their addresses in order to send letters and gifts, which the customers were encouraged to do. Most of the women do not speak English so Jim had to meet the cost of translators and interpreters whenever he wrote to one of them or when they spoke via Skype. “It ended up costing me £10,000,” he told me, “just to sign up to the service, make contact with the girls and send them gifts and money. And I never did find my bride.”

According to a study conducted in Hong Kong and published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2013, those who have few friends, feel alone at work, or are sad about a break-up are more careless with their money, because they associate being wealthy with being socially accepted. The study found that lonely people can be drawn to gambling. Online poker and other forms of gambling attract lonely individuals as they almost always include a chat facility where players can get to know those involved in the games. Often this can lead to addiction and, of course, excessive spending.

Then there is the “girlfriend experience”, where prostitutes are paid to pretend they are in love with the man, and do all the things with him, including sex, normally associated with a close and intimate relationship. These women can be rented by the week, the month, or even longer. These services can be bought from any brothel and escort agency in Britain, but many men choose to travel abroad for the “girlfriend experience”, maybe because it gives them access to subservient women. I have interviewed women who have provided these services. They each told me that having to pretend to be in love with the punter is akin to torture. But when love becomes another service provision or commercial exchange, the one handing over the cash has the power.

Disabled men, including returning war veterans, are the latest to be targeted by those with money signs in their eyes. TLC (Tender Loving Care) Trust, a service set up by former pornographer Tuppy Owens, is linked to a charity (Outsiders Trust). It is, nevertheless, peddling the commercial services of individuals and escort agencies advertising sexual services. Checking the websites of the escorts listed shows that they are not particularly targeting disabled men, but simply adding to their customer base.

In 2010 the Telegraph revealed, following Freedom of Information requests, that some local authorities in England had used taxpayers’ money to pay for the services of prostitutes to be delivered to the homes of disabled men, similar to the Meals on Wheels scheme, and occasional visits to lap-dancing clubs. One man who suffered from a brain injury had had “sex work” built into his council care package. I took part in a TV debate earlier this year alongside a women who had bought a brothel in the north of England for her disabled son after taking him to Amsterdam (where prostitution is legal) for his first sexual experience.

The financial exploitation of loneliness can lead to a view that those without pots of money are destined to remain without a partner. Last year, a study conducted by retail analysts Mintel found that just 4 per cent of those with an annual income of more than £50,000 had never found love. However, the proportion of the loveless increases as you go down the income brackets, reaching 17 per cent for those on less than £9,500 a year. The research also found that those with an income of more than £50,000 were most likely to have fallen in love five times or more during their lifetime.

But is this love, or a synthetic version that is more to do with the wallet than the heart? Take the boom in buying a baby via surrogacy services. Babies can appease loneliness, and today it is easier than ever to order one over the internet. All you need is plenty of money. First, you are supplied with a catalogue by the commercial service supplying the eggs. The women selling the embryos are typically young, highly educated and conventionally attractive. Once the eggs are purchased, a womb, usually belonging to a poor, desperate woman, perhaps in India or Ukraine, is rented. If sperm is required, another catalogue is produced, this time full of photographs and life histories of good-looking, high-achieving men. At the end of the process, the gestational carrier will hand over the baby to the purchaser.

Last month, an Idaho woman named Brooke who had served as a surrogate three times died while carrying twins for a Spanish couple. Surrogate pregnancy is illegal in Spain and other European countries. The European Parliament called surrogacy and egg sales an “extreme form of exploitation of women” in an official resolution.

I called Jane a few days after the seminar to ask how she was feeling. Depressed, she told me. “I feel I was told at that seminar that meeting someone right for me is not a matter of chance or good luck, or even going to the right places, but that it is something I am doing wrong,” she said. “I was left feeling like I had no further knowledge about how to find a partner, and more determined to go out and meet men face to face and be prepared for disappointment. I don’t believe that if you follow her advice it will happen as a matter of science. You can’t buy your way into a perfect relationship.”

The post Money Can’t Buy Us Love: Profiting From Loneliness appeared first on Standpoint.

But what was uncovered was sexual abuse of children not only by television personalities, but also by politicians and other so-called VIPs. There have been rumours for decades about a child abuse ring operating from Westminster, involving senior politicians, allegedly including Greville (now Lord) Janner, Cyril Smith, and the late Leon Brittan.

At the time of writing, numerous allegations concerning the former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath have emerged. In the early 1980s, when I volunteered on a Rape Crisis line, I heard Heath’s name in relation to sexual offences against children from two separate callers, one year apart, with no connection to each other. Over the years I have heard from a number of child protection advocates and campaigners that it was “widely known” that Heath was involved in organised child abuse rings. Such evidence was of course circumstantial.

However, a number of police investigations are now under way, following allegations from a retired police officer that criminal charges for pimping against Myra Forde, a former brothel keeper, were dropped, after she allegedly threatened to claim that Heath had abused children. Forde was later twice jailed for operating a brothel in Salisbury, Wiltshire, where Heath lived after retiring from active politics. The barrister who prosecuted Forde has since claimed in a letter to The Times that the case was actually dropped because three witnesses refused to give evidence. Forde has dropped her allegations, but ten police forces are now investigating Heath.

There was, and there remains to an extent, a conspiracy of silence. Children were rarely believed when they alleged abuse, particularly if the accused was a powerful person.

The conflation of sexual abuse with sexual identity began during the early days of the so-called sexual revolution, and carried on throughout the gay liberation movement in the 1970s. The word “paedophile” to describe a sexual identity began to be bandied around with impunity, but no other word in our language is so dangerously misused. It means, literally, “lover of children”. Child sex abusers seek solace in this term, and it is easy to see why it is to their advantage to embrace the label. Suggesting that child abusers “can’t help it” lends support to the notion that they are simply another sexual minority — as the commonly held but flawed view suggests with regard to the “gay gene”, predetermining sexual attraction and orientation — and that such men are pre-programmed to abuse children.

This is the view of so-called paedophile rights campaigners such as the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), active from 1974 until its disbandment in 1984. Its stated aim was “to alleviate [the] suffering of many adults and children” by campaigning to abolish the age of consent, which would legalise sex between adults and children. PIE gained a certain amount of credibility by allying itself with other sexual minorities that were engaged in effective liberation struggles, such as the gay rights movement. Homosexual acts had only recently been decriminalised in 1967, so any movement with the word “liberation” in its title was viewed by many as a force for good. In 1975, PIE representatives were invited to address a gay liberation conference in Sheffield. A headline in the Guardian read: “Child-lovers win fight for role in Gay Lib.”

In 1977, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) passed a resolution at its conference, supported by the vast majority of delegates, condemning “the harassment of the Paedophile Information Exchange by the press”. The scandalous fact that PIE was affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) from the late 1970s to the early 1980s has been well documented. NCCL officer Nettie Pollard, who worked in the organisation until the late 1990s and played a leading role in CHE, voted to support PIE at its 1975 conference. In 1983, at the CHE conference, Pollard reissued her defence of PIE’s “right to speak and organise freely”.

When it comes to the subject of child sexual abuse, there is no clear Left/Right divide. The sexual revolution of the 1960s led some left-wing liberals to believe that all sex was good sex, provided that both parties were consenting. But what of the argument that the age of consent to sex, currently 16 years old, is unnecessary, and that it is restricting the rights of children to seek sexual fulfilment?

The current climate — set by the Savile scandal and the torrent of child grooming cases in Rochdale, Rotherham and elsewhere — is one of concern and disgust at the scarcely believable prevalence of the sexual abuse of vulnerable children that had been allowed to happen. However, there still exists a group of academics, scientists and campaigners who appear to not only sympathise with the original aims of PIE but who are actively promoting them.

In 2013, a conference on sexuality was held by the University of Cambridge. One speaker, Professor Philip Tromovitch of Doshisha University in Japan, claimed in his presentation on “The Prevalence of Paedophilia” that “paedophilic interest is normal and natural in human males”. Also at the conference was a man not often invited to respectable events, at least not since his high-profile convictions and subsequent imprisonment for the possession of child abuse images. Tom O’Carroll, who gained notoriety in the 1970s as chair of PIE, is a campaigner for the rights of paedophiles.

Following the Cambridge conference, O’Carroll wrote on his blog that he felt “relatively popular” during his attendance. Aware of the publicity this conference gained, I contacted him to request an interview. I wanted to try to understand how his viewpoint — that paedophiles are an oppressed sexual minority, rather than a danger to children — could possibly hold water in the context of recent widespread revelations concerning child sexual abuse. O’Carroll has previously enjoyed support from so-called progressives for his views and aims.

It is now well- known that, representing PIE, he sat on the NCCL’s gay rights sub-committee from the late 1970s until the early 1980s. His book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case (1980), was favourably reviewed by Gay News and other gay publications. This was an era in which discrimination against the gay population was so bad that some would agree to align with the unlikeliest of allies so long as they were being similarly targeted.

Many of those who promoted the rights of the “paedophile”, such as PIE founder Peter Righton, a child protection expert and social care worker, have since been convicted of sexual crimes against children.

I wanted to find out from O’Carroll, a man rarely in the media these days, whether libertarian child abuse revisionism was still alive and well. I discovered that it was. O’Carroll is unrepentant, and sees himself and the likes of Savile as victims of an ongoing moralistic witch-hunt.

“In the 1970s I thought we were going to be embarked upon a journey like the gay people,” he told me when we met in a central London wine bar. “I would have quite liked [to be labelled as] ‘kindly’ because ‘kindly’ . . . relates to the Dutch and German kinder — children. So yes, being intimate, but also being nice with it. “I would say that if someone had sexual relations which were in the realm of what I called earlier the ‘kindly’ sort then that would not be abusive. Although these days one has to be careful because anything you do, no matter how kindly it is, it’s always subject to trauma later on — secondary trauma as a result of society’s hysteria over the whole thing.”

The writer and broadcaster Francis Wheen personally experienced the effects of child sexual abuse. Additionally, he suffered the attempts by PIE and its supporters to claim that the abuse did not happen. In 1968, Charles Napier, who would subsequently become treasurer of PIE, joined the teaching staff at Wheen’s boarding preparatory school, Copthorne, in Sussex.

“Napier was much younger than most of the masters there and he was quite friendly with the children so we quite liked him at first, because he seemed more on our level and not so forbidding,” says Wheen. “He had a little room off the workshop, and he would take us in there and offer us beer and cigarettes.

“I was 11 at the time, and it was incredibly thrilling, rather naughty and exciting. The word ‘grooming’ had never entered our vocabulary at that stage. One day he plunged his hand down my gym shorts and grabbed me, and I pulled his hand off and recoiled, and he then started slightly sneering at me and said, ‘Oh Francis, come on. Don’t be a baby.’ Very clever, tried to make me feel inadequate, to have to prove my maturity by going along with it. Other boys spoke about it. I wasn’t the only one.”

Wheen says that his classmates rarely spoke of Napier’s actions, and as such he was unaware of the sheer scale of abuse prevalent at his school. “Once or twice I would be talking to another boy in the dormitory and he’d say, ‘Did Mr Napier try it on with you? Oh he did with me as well.’ I didn’t have any sense quite how many boys were being abused until years later. I wrote about it occasionally when I became a journalist, and I did tell my parents, only some years later.”

In those days, says Wheen, boarding school was “like being in prison, shut off from the outside world, so the only people you see are the other pupils there and the teachers. And we couldn’t communicate with the outside world very easily. There was no telephone there, that we could use. The only way of communicating was through letters, and they were all censored.”

Napier, who is half-brother of John Whittingdale, the Culture Secretary, left the school in the early 1970s and went on to hold jobs working with children in Egypt and Sweden. He was convicted of child abuse-related offences in 1972 and 1995, but continued being employed in positions of trust.

In 2012, Wheen noticed that Napier was speaking at the Sherborne Literary Festival. Appalled at a convicted child abuser being given such a respectable platform, Wheen told his colleagues at Private Eye how he was assaulted by Napier as a child, and the magazine published his revelations.

“That was what kicked it off. The police got in touch with me and said, ‘Could I put them in touch with anyone else who’d been abused by Napier?’” says Wheen. “The police then spent ages tracking down pupils from the late Sixties, and they did a hell of a job. They managed to get school records, so everyone there, every boy who’d been at the school between 1968 and 1971, and as many as they could find, and in the end the numbers kept going up and up and up, by the end of them it was over 30, I think it was 34 different boys he was charged with, it kept going up. Even days before court they were adding more charges, and that was a school that had 100 pupils, basically something like a quarter of the school was being targeted by him. I certainly had no idea, that if I’d looked around in my classroom, even being there I wouldn’t have realised it.

“That’s it — so much of it is hidden, so much is not spoken about, that’s why it’s so startling when things do start being revealed, you think surely not. But more often than not, it does turn out to be the case.”

Last year Napier was convicted of sexually abusing 23 boys between 1967 and 1983, and sentenced to 13 years in prison. The judge remarked that a number of his victims had been profoundly affected by the abuse, with one committing suicide, and others seeking help for mental ill-health.

Wheen, who waived his anonymity in order to speak out against impunity for sexual predators, was in court for the verdict. He says that he was relieved to hear the judge make it clear that men like Napier do not escape punishment for abusing children, even if a case is brought against them decades after the fact.

Napier’s conviction was not, however, the end of the matter for Wheen. “Soon after [the case],” he says, “I had a letter from O’Carroll, complaining I was being very unfair to his friend Napier, and if only I could understand, and that Napier was a very brilliant, witty chap, and it was very cruel of me to write about him like this.

“I also received a letter from some woman in the social services department, who told me that [child sexual abuse] was a complicated issue and I shouldn’t be tabloidy about it. There are still plenty of people today it would seem who think child abuse is not such a terrible thing.”

Part of the problem, it would appear, is the stark division in many people’s minds between what they understand as “paedophilia” and child sexual abuse committed by highly functioning, respectable family members or guardians. Men who sexually abuse children in the home are not usually labelled “paedophiles”: this word is reserved for people like Sidney Cooke, currently serving a life sentence for multiple convicitons of sex abuse against boys — evil-looking men who prey upon children previously unknown to them. And yet far more children are abused by someone they know.

Some experts, who try to unravel the phenomenon of paedophilia, in particular sexual libertarians, give the impression that being “attracted” to children is a sexual orientation rather than a choice to harm them. They suggest that these people are not “ordinary men” but part of a weird sub-group; that there is a medical explanation, rather than a social one, for their behaviour. That they are different from fathers or stepfathers, who abuse children in the home; or that they are inevitably victims of abuse themselves.

The dangerous implications of a resurgence of the “paedophile” label was evident in an article in the Guardian on January 17, 1996. It was a small piece noting a problem delaying the publication of the first British commentary on Catholic canon law due to a mistake in relation to papal infallibility. Within this document are two pages on how to respond to priests who “are paedophiles”. The Church’s position is that paedophiles have diminished responsibility because their sexual urges are “in effect beyond their control”.

In 2013, at the height of the revelations concerning Savile and other well-known men exposed as child abusers, Guardian feature writer Jon Henley wrote an article headlined “Paedophilia: bringing dark desires to light.” The standfirst read: “The Jimmy Savile scandal caused public revulsion, but experts disagree about what causes paedophilia — and even how much harm it causes.” The article caused some intense anger, but also drew support from others, including — unsurprisingly — some self-identified paedophiles, including O’Carroll.

In the article, Henley went to great pains to make a distinction between a medical diagnosis of paedophilia, and the act of child sexual abuse. “But not all paedophiles are child molesters, and vice versa: by no means every paedophile acts on his impulses, and many people who sexually abuse children are not exclusively or primarily sexually attracted to them.

“In fact, ‘true’ paedophiles are estimated by some experts to account for only 20 per cent of sexual abusers,” he continued. “Nor are paedophiles necessarily violent: no firm links have so far been established between paedophilia and aggressive or psychotic symptoms. Psychologist Glenn Wilson, co-author of The Child-Lovers: A Study of Paedophiles in Society, argues that ‘the majority of paedophiles, however socially inappropriate, seem to be gentle and rational’.”

This argument is, however, reliant on the notion that men who desire sex with pre-pubescent children cannot help themselves if they have a diagnosis of paedophilia. Many experts, such as Professor Liz Kelly, director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at North London University, do not agree. “The self-serving construction of paedophilia as a specific, and minority, ‘sexual orientation’ acts as a useful distraction to both the widespread sexualisation of children, and girls in particular, in Western cultures and the prevalence of sexual abuse,” she said.

According to Henley, any reasonable debate around so-called paedophilia is hindered by the moral panic that surrounds child abuse. But this could only be the case if such a thing as paedophilia existed, and if child sexual abuse was a rare occurrence. In any case, opposing the sexual abuse of children and upholding their human rights is not a “moral panic”.

Henley told me he was shocked at the level of vitriol, from a relatively small number of people, directed towards him following the publication of the article, which had been commissioned “from up high”.

“I should have been more explicit in my support of the victims of child sexual abuse, and my understanding of the traumatic consequences that child abuse can cause,” he went on. “But the level of hysteria and general panic around this whole subject means that no man would feel comfortable saying [that they feel sexual attraction towards children]. We need to reach a state where we can deal with this, so that abusers can be reached before, not after, they act.”

“The Jon Henley piece was extraordinary,” said Wheen. “I mean, that’s why it stood out for me, because it’s the one attempt I’ve seen in recent years to revert to the old ’70s case and say: surely there’s a case to be made and let’s not get over-censorious about this, and let’s approach this coolly and let’s lower the age of consent to four or whatever it might be. To me, [the article was] startlingly sympathetic, and I saw [Tom O’Carroll] rejoicing at the Guardian running it. I think it must have come as much as a surprise to O’Carroll as it did to everyone else.”

Christian Wolmar is the author of The Forgotten Children: The secret abuse scandal in children’s homes (2000). He believes that the “equal opportunities culture” of some London boroughs in the 1980s was such that, in order to promote the employment of “minorities”, criminal convictions of gay men were often unchecked, to avoid the appearance of discrimination. Wolmar quotes a 1995 report by Ian White about Islington council: “We were told that managers believed they would not be supported if they triggered disciplinary investigations involving staff who may be . . . members of the gay community.” This, of course, simply enabled child abusers to obtain jobs in children’s homes and other places where they would have access to vulnerable children. (Only an estimated 5 per cent of child sex abusers are women.)

“Organised abuse rings definitely exist. When I began to research Forgotten Children I was not a sceptic, but I was unsure as to what I would find,” said Wolmar. “PIE positioned themselves close to liberation movements as a deliberate ploy to attract the support of gays and leftists.

“Post-Savile, it was almost impossible to be a [child abuse] denier, but there will always be some. Nature created puberty for good reason. We know it is wrong to have sex with pre-pubescent children.”

Not all would agree with Wolmar on the matter of pre-pubescent children being non-sexual. In 1993, Nettie Pollard wrote an essay called “The Small Matter of Children” which begins by discussing “children’s rights”: “But baby boys are born with erections and girls with genitals swelling and vaginal lubrication . . . Masters and Johnson found that lubrication resulted from sexual stimulation in baby girls. Clearly, birth contains elements of sexual arousal for babies.

“Babies often react sexually when being held, or in other moments of physical pleasure. Reaction akin to orgasm has been detected in babies only a few months old, though masturbation and orgasm are rarely detected before the ages of one or two, and not all children masturbate.”

As Pollard’s views demonstrate, those who refuse to accept the harm done to victims of child sexual abuse are not confined to those directly abusing children. Some so-called experts in the field argue that for some adults, sex with children is a “natural” desire. In 2001 Glenn Wilson was ranked among the ten most frequently cited British psychologists in scientific journals. Wilson is co-author of the book Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation (2008), which states the case for a genetic basis to same-sex attraction and orientation. He is also co-author of The Child-Lovers: A Study of Paedophiles in Society (1981), in which he writes that “the majority of paedophiles, however socially inappropriate, seem to be gentle and rational”.

Qazi Rahman, who wrote Born Gay with Wilson, is a highly respected and much cited biologist based at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. I asked him if he believed that the urge to abuse children is actually hard-wired. He said: “There is growing evidence of biological and brain differences, where the brains are cross-wired.”

What about paedophile rights? If Rahman and Wilson use the “gay gene” argument to ask for homosexual rights, why not then for child abusers? All they have to say is that there is a medical or genetic basis, as opposed to the fact that they chose to abuse children for power and sadism.

Rahman agrees that this can be problematic: “Should we feel sorry for paedophiles? As soon as the liberals get that rhetoric going, we will not be able to make any subtle distinctions as to who is dangerous and who is not.”

Ken Plummer is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology at Essex University. Plummer, who is gay, contributed to a book called Perspectives on Paedophilia (1981). It was a supposedly objective look at paedophilia and was designed to be used on social work training courses. Plummer was a member of PIE in the late 1970s for “research purposes”.

Both Plummer and Pollard are warmly thanked in O’Carroll’s book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case (1980). In 2012, on his personal blog, Plummer wrote: “As homosexuality has become slightly less open to sustained moral panic, the new pariah of ‘child molester’ has become the latest folk devil.”

Last May, the Times journalist David Aaronovitch narrated a two-part investigation for BBC Radio 4’s Analysis. It sought to question how what were described as the “bizarre ideas” of Satanic abuse gained traction among police and social care professionals in the 1980s and early 1990s. Two of the contributors made formal complaints to the BBC for inaccuracy and bias following its broadcast.

I asked Aaronovitch whether he is concerned that his radio programmes could potentially contribute to a post-Savile backlash. However, his primary concern is not with the potential backlash against believing victims, but rather with a witch-hunt against potentially innocent victims of false allegations.

“The post-Savile hysteria is happening now,” he said, citing the number of accusations against VIPs that have yet to be proven. But will the doubt that he and others are casting — on whether organised abuse exists beyond rare exceptional cases — serve to cast doubt on those victims of abuse who are telling the truth? “No, we need to ensure that we identify false allegations.”

Judith Jones, a former senior social worker and expert in the effects of child sexual abuse on the victims, who was featured in the programme, disagrees: “We forget abuse memories because we can’t bear the truth. What David Aaronovitch is doing is suggesting that because wild claims of ritual abuse can be easily discredited then the hysteria about ‘ordinary abuse’ has gone too far. And yet he claims the opposite.”

Meanwhile, countless victims of horrendous sexual abuse in childhood are choosing not to disclose it to the police because of a fear that they will be told it was all their fault.

The post Britain’s Apologists For Child Abuse appeared first on Standpoint.