Debating rape: the politics of sexual violence  | thearticle

Rape and sexual violence against women is in the news everywhere. Rightly so. It is a hugely important subject and needs to be thoughtfully addressed. In France, the Pelicot Trial dominated

the news for weeks and will return to the headlines when the appeals are heard. Partly, because it was such an extraordinary story of how over almost a decade Dominique Pelicot drugged and

raped his wife, Gisèle , and invited strangers who he had recruited online to come to his home and rape his wife, though nearly twenty of these men are now appealing. Pelicot’s daughter,

Caroline Darian, has also claimed that she was drugged, photographed in a state of undress and also raped by her father. But also, partly because of the ordinariness of the fifty

co-defendants, aged between 27 and 74, a cross-section of French provincial society. These were not monsters and yet their actions were monstrous. In many ways, it raised similar questions

to recent research into the behaviour of Nazis and their accomplices in what Timothy Snyder called, ‘The Bloodlands’, a subject brilliantly explored by the historian Christopher Browning in

his pioneering book, _ Ordinary Men _ (1992).  In Israel, not only were around 1,200 people killed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 but many women were raped before they were murdered and

some of the most haunting images were of young women, stripped and violently attacked by Hamas terrorists, and in some cases their bodies dragged through the streets in Gaza, cheered by

Palestinian civilians. Again, the word ‘ordinary’ is crucial. Those people cheering the terrible abuse of these young Jewish women were not obviously terrorists or even members of Hamas.

Many were apparently ordinary people, enjoying the brutality of the scene.  What was also striking about these violent attacks on women was the silence of so many western feminists and human

rights activists who preferred to criticise Israel for what they called ‘genocide’ than criticise the appalling violence of October 7, which included sexual violence against women. Israelis

and Jews in Britain and America have repeatedly accused international human rights groups of downplaying these reports of assault. Even BBC News, no supporter of Israel, claims it ‘has seen

and heard evidence of rape, sexual violence and mutilation of women during the 7 October Hamas attacks.’ The reporter Lucy Williamson wrote on the BBC News website, on 5 December 2023, less

than two months after October 7, ‘Videos of naked and bloodied women filmed by Hamas on the day of the attack, and photographs of bodies taken at the sites afterwards, suggest that women

were sexually targeted by their attackers.’ In Britain, recent news headlines have been dominated by stories of so-called ‘grooming gangs” (now often referred to as “rape gangs” to emphasise

the gravity of their crimes). Most of these gangs appear to have largely consisted of Muslim men of Pakistani origin, in perhaps as many as fifty British cities and towns, drugging and

raping mostly white working-class teenage girls.  There have been repeated calls for a second public inquiry, fiercely contested by the Labour government. It should be pointed out that a

Home Office report into grooming gangs commissioned by Sajid Javid when he was Home Secretary, claimed: “Research has found that group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are most

commonly white. Some studies suggest an overrepresentation of black and Asian offenders relative to the demographics of national populations. However, it is not possible to conclude that

this is representative of all group-based CSE [child sexual exploitation] offending.” What do these three news stories have in common, other than that they have achieved such prominence and

in at least two cases have divided opinion? What brings together a strange story of perversion and sexual violence in rural France, mass murder and rape by Hamas terrorists in Israel and

child sexual abuse by young men of Pakistani heritage in poor British towns?  Perhaps what is most striking about these stories is that reporting  in general _significantly underestimates

_the number of cases of sexual violence committed against women. According to a recent report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), “The CSEW [The Crime Survey for England and Wales]

estimated that approximately 700,000 people (560,000 of these are women) aged 16 to 59 years were victims of a sexual assault in the last year… Less than one in five victims of rape or

assault by penetration reported their experience to the police.” The ONS report continued, ‘The volume of sexual offences recorded by the police has almost tripled in recent years,” though

it attributes this increase mainly to “improvements in police recording and more victims being willing to report.” However, it then goes on to say, “Half of all sexual offences recorded by

the police didn’t proceed further through the criminal justice system due to evidential difficulties. This figure reflects the challenges involved in investigating sexual offences, despite

the majority of suspects being identified.” It should also be pointed out that these cases include “indecent exposure” and “unwanted touching” and this report doesn’t provide separate data

distinguishing these crimes from more serious cases of rape and sexual assault.  What is most surprising is the lack of consensus about the role of ethnicity in these cases. According to the

BBC News website in April 2023, “In her independent review of the Rotherham case, published in 2014, Prof Alexis Jay concluded that the majority of ‘known perpetrators were of Pakistani

heritage’ including five men convicted in 2010. Greater Manchester Police identified the men convicted at the trial in the Rochdale abuse scandal in February 2012 as “British Pakistani”. The

Telford abusers were men of “southern Asian heritage”, according to an independent inquiry carried out into the case. These reviews also mention concerns among police and social services

teams that “if they pursued groups of non-white offenders they might be accused of racism”. This seems straightforward, but clearly the government is concerned that these accusations made

against Pakistani grooming gangs run the risk of creating prejudice, perhaps even violence, against Muslims in British towns and cities. Last Friday, _ The Guardian _ wrote, “The use of

inflammatory language over grooming gangs risks vilifying entire communities and could lead to atrocities such as the mosque massacre in New Zealand that killed more than 50 people, the

health secretary [Wes Streeting] has warned.” Amidst all this division and lack of clarity, several conclusions are clear. First, that sexual violence against women has dominated some of the

major news stories of the past eighteen months in at least three different countries.  Second, that the figures for sexual violence in Britain are deeply disturbing — whether or not they

are worse than those of other countries.  Third, that responses to the two stories involving accusations against Muslim men raping either Jewish women in Israel on October 7, or white

working-class girls in British towns over more than twenty years, have been deeply divided between Left and Right. But the news story about the rape trial in France, featuring only white

victims and white perpetrators, has not divided opinion in the same way. In France, the perpetrators of the attacks on Gisèle Pelicot were universally condemned. When it comes to the sexual

attacks in Israel and in Britain, the responses have been more divided along political lines.  Finally, these issues are not going to go away, both because of the terrible prevalence of male

sexual violence and because of the political divide that seems unavoidable when claims about ethnicity, religion and sexual violence come together.      A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are

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