My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (20.8.24), focussing on sexual abuse at a time of deepening institutional misogyny. A pending court judgement in Plymouth this week will raise the heat and debate once again. We need to be ready with context and pushback against racist agitation and misogyny. Most interestingly, a few days later, a right-wing pro-Life (the coordinator of SPUC) activist in Plymouth wrote a condemnatory letter back, advancing a women’s place as in the home (with all that implies).

The unexpurgated version below:

The government is currently reviewing laws addressing misogyny – the male-supremacist hatred of women. There is an obvious and observable rise in abuse of women in our country. The imagery of women’s bodies as sexual objects, as opposed to human subjects and thinking, feeling empowered citizens, is everywhere. This is a backlash against the women’s liberation movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s that challenged women’s oppression and won a few new rights for women in the workplace and community.

The backlash against women’s rights began in the 1990’s, but that was nothing compared with the online abuse of women and girls accessible to all today. Women as second class citizens, to be viewed and controlled for male gratification is back in fashion.

The webstreams of Andrew Tate, self-professed misogynist and male-supremacist, are viewed by millions of our male children every week. He says women belong “in the home” and men have the right to have sex with women, both mainstays of fascist ideology. Tate has nine million followers on X (formerly Twitter) and his You Tube videos encourage male domination. He is currently wanted by Police in the UK, and facing trial in Romania charged with rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women.

Unsurprisingly our schools report an accelerating rise in sexual harassment and boy-on-girl abuse, a three-fold increase over the last ten years. Over 90% of reports of sexual abuse of young people aged 15-25 were women and girls. And we have seen young men engage in random killings as a rebellion to being “incel”, claiming women should be forced to have sex with them.

Self-identifying as “sexist” and “misogynist” is becoming acceptable as part of the “culture Wars” sweeping the USA and Britain. And it is being encouraged and represented across mainstream media.

The result is that more than one-in-four women have been raped or sexually assaulted as an adult p some six-and-a-half million women. Two million women experience notifiable domestic abuse each year in Britain today, according to government statistics. Most domestic abuse is male on female, a high proportion involving routine sexual abuse. At least two women are murdered each week in England & Wales, usually by their male partner or ex-partner.

One-in-five of our children experience abuse inside their family, and about one-in-six children experience sexual abuse each year. That works out at around 600,000 children subject to sexual abuse inside their families right now.

68,000 rapes were recorded by Police last year with charges brought against just 2.6% of them – an institutional “Get Out of Jail Free” card for male supremacists. Over 10,000 sexual offence cases are waiting to go to court, the violently abused women waiting at least 2 years for any justice. Where is the hue and cry?

Media coverage is scant and biased. Despite the inspirational rise of the Me Too protest movement following the rape and murder of a young woman by a serving police officer, the lack of justice for women has only worsened.

And there is a racial bias, the cases of child sexual exploitation involving members of minority ethnic groups are usually front page news where the day-to-day cases of white men go unreported. Ever since the rise of the British Empire we have been encouraged to believe that people from cultures other than white Christian are more depraved, sexualised and bestial than we, the White British.

Sexism is allied to nationalism, xenophobia and racism.

The overwhelming majority of sexual abusers are white men. Britain has a long list of historic revelations of sexual exploitation gangs, white men from the middle and ruling-class use their institutions, wealth and privilege to hide in plain sight.

The prevailing idea that there’s a unique problem with ‘migrant sex gangs’ plays into a broader context of widespread deprivation and frustration about multiculturalism, migration and the out-of-touch professional and political elite.

Sexual abuse is abhorrent in every and any context. Its prevalence in Britain, the statistics let alone the experiences, suggests that there is a large minority of men who believe that women exist to serve and service them, and indeed are inferior human beings.

There is no greater proportion of abuse against women in our minority ethnic groups than white British. Fair to say, we should check our own behaviours before throwing stones. Respect is at a premium.

Sexism is on the increase in workplaces, reports suggesting we’re back in the 1960’s Mad Men days. Trade unions need to reboot and champion women’s equality all over again. In fact, we need to challenge all bigotry and oppression, before they overwhelm us.