19 Mar 2021 | Opinion, Ruth's blog, United Kingdom
I can’t remember my first protest. I was born into a family where participating in a protest was a normal part of my childhood. My mum claims that my first protest was before I was born – she was eight months pregnant at a demo against mine closures in Scotland.
I have been on marches to save jobs, demos against political extremism, protests against injustice and vigils of remembrance. I’ve even organised a few. I have waved banners, handed out leaflets, marched, chanted and on occasion cried for more decades than I am prepared to acknowledge. I’ve exercised all of my democratic rights – hard-won – to campaign for change and to seek to remedy injustice to fight for a better world. And as an MP I was also protested against. It’s the democratic tradition that I was born into and one that I hold very dear.
Which is why events of the last fortnight in the UK have been so disgusting.
Index has been highlighting how repressive regimes, and others, have been using the Covid-19 pandemic to impose restrictions of their citizens since the start of the crisis. How free expression was being limited and our human rights curtailed. In the UK, most of us have taken it on faith that these were temporary measures and that liberal values would prevail – after all protests have continued throughout the pandemic. But not this week.
This week it wasn’t the Chinese Government in the frame for arresting people in Hong Kong, or Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus, or the military coup in Myanmar – it was the British Government and some very over-zealous policing of a vigil for a murdered woman.
Many people have written about the impact of Sarah Everard’s awful murder. Personally, I cannot stop thinking about her family and how distraught those that loved her must be. A vigil to remember her and as safe place for women to unite to highlight their lived experiences and their daily fears does not seem an extremist request – even during a pandemic. There are always ways to make sure that these things are done safely.
But as awful as the images were of women being forced to the ground and arrested by male police officers on Saturday night were, it was what came next that is so worrying for those of us who cherish the right to freedom of expression, the right of protest, the right to engage in the political process.
On Monday the Government brought forward new legislation in the Police, Crime, Sentences and Courts Bill which specifically restricts the right to protest. In fact according to the BBC: “The proposed law includes an offence of ‘intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance’. This is designed to stop people occupying public spaces, hanging off bridges, gluing themselves to windows, or employing other protest tactics to make themselves both seen and heard.” The law specifically targets people who protest alone.
Demonstrations by design are meant to disrupt normal activity. They are meant to annoy and irritate the establishment – because they are designed to challenge the status quo, or highlight an injustice. Rarely do people organise a protest because they are happy with the actions of their Government.
As the DUP MP Gavin Robinson said during the debate: “The loose and lazy way this legislation is drafted would make a dictator blush. Protests will be noisy, protests will disrupt and no matter how offensive we may find the issue at their heart, the right to protest should be protected.”
This bill needs to be amended. Our right to protest needs to be protected. And we need to defend it – loudly.
To be clear – Index will always defend the right to protest, even during a pandemic, because it’s one of our basic human rights.
17 Mar 2021 | News and features, United Kingdom
Violence against women and girls begins and ends with censorship. Domestic abuse, sexual violence and all forms of exploitation rely on silence and censorship above any other weapon.
Without curtailing the freedom of a woman’s speech, you cannot curtail her physical and sexual freedoms. Every perpetrator knows that you must convince a victim that if she speaks things will get worse:
“They will take the children off you if you tell anyone.”
“If you say anything, I will have you deported.”
“I will lose my job if this ever gets out and then we would lose the house.”
And of course, the most chilling of all, the threat we associate with tyrannical regimes in faraway lands which is happening on pretty much every street in the United Kingdom:
“I will kill you and the kids if you don’t do what I say.”
The outpouring of grief by women in the wake of the death of Sarah Everard is not just because of our sorrow at her loss and the loss of all the other 119 women who fell to her death at the hands of a violent man in the last year.
The case of the killing of Sarah Everard has reminded women that we have been self censoring on behalf of society who didn’t want to hear about our fears and our pain. We have been putting on a face.
Women say to their friends when they leave them on the street, “text me when you get home.” It is our way of saying I love you and I want you to be safe from likely harm. We have made our language palatable and chipper to mask the reality of what that means. 2.3 million people are living with domestic abuse in the UK, you are likely coming across them week after week.
When you ask them how they are they say that they are fine, because even if it was safe to tell you, it isn’t socially acceptable to do so. She says she’s fine and that she is looking forward to seeing her family again, she knows you cannot bear the truth. She is censored by social norms. She literally cannot move through life truthfully because while we claim to want women to come forward, in reality you don’t want to hear about her rape last night in the queue at Tescos.
Society colludes with perpetrators of abuse by feeling too awkward to confront the scale and reality of violence suffered by women. For the last three years more than half of all violence crime was committed against women. The complaint of women over the past week, months and years and the constant drum beaten by the women’s sector is that women’s voices are not listened to.
Too often we fail to criminalise rape or sexual violence because the police and courts simply cannot find away to give a woman’s voicing of her account an equal billing to that of a man. 55,000 rapes were reported in the UK last year, less that 10 per cent were charged and made it to court and 1,800 rapists were convicted. Does this statistic scream come forward we can hear you?
All state and most private institutions don’t put in place specific measures to enable victims of violence and abuse to be freed from their social and personal censorship. It is on all of us to learn the language that helps these people speak, because at the moment we are all colluding in keeping women pretending and censoring every day. We have done this to such an extent that most women stopped noticing that they were pretending.
Society must get better at confronting and talking about the tyranny of male violence against women because if we don’t we are actively supporting tyranny on our shores.
8 Mar 2021 | News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116379″ img_size=”full”][vc_column_text]I was a teenage journalism student when I first discovered the magnificent Nellie Bly.
It was my first week at university in Northern Ireland and my tutor handed each person in our class a list of suggested books to read for the upcoming term.
When scouring the shelves of the campus library, I stumbled across ‘Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs’, a book which, 15 years later, I still pick up and flick through when I need a dose of inspiration.
Put together by the wonderful Eleanor Mills and Kira Cochrane, it is one of the first detailed collections of groundbreaking and history-making journalism by women over the last 100 years.
It includes powerful pieces such as Martha Gellhorn’s ‘Dachau’; Audre Lorde’s haunting ‘That Summer I left Childhood was White’ and the late Ruth Picardie’s deeply emotive, and last ever, Observer column, ‘Before I Say Goodbye’.
It was in this breathtaking anthology that I found Nellie, a fierce female who trailblazed her way through newspaper journalism and paved the way for female investigative reporters around the world.
Born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane in 1864, she began her career after her parents’ deaths by writing a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch.
That letter – signed simply ‘Lonely Orphan Girl’ – piqued George Madden so much, he immediately hired her.
It was Madden who suggested she change her name to Nellie Bly, taken from a popular Stephen Foster song at that time, and the rest, they say, is history.
From the moment she entered journalism, Nellie refused to conform.
Instead of writing about society gatherings and parties, a genre many women journalists were pigeonholed at that time, she sunk her teeth into social issues affecting women, from divorce laws to factory working conditions.
When working for the New York World in 1888, she feigned insanity to be committed into an asylum where she lived side by side with vulnerable women to expose the horrific, rat-infested and abusive conditions they were incarcerated in.
Her fearless piece, ‘Ten Days in a Madhouse’ led to the City of New York spending an extra $1,000,000 per annum on the care of those with serious mental health issues. She risked her freedom and her welfare for the truth.
She saw it as a small price to pay to highlight injustice, particularly for women who at that time didn’t even have the right to vote.
It’s been over 100 years since Nellie Bly penned her last article, but the bravery, tenacity, and resilience she showed back then still inspires me today.
In her own words: “I said I could and I would. And I did.”
Timeless.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
8 Mar 2021 | China, Cuba, Hong Kong, Media Freedom, Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Saudi Arabia, Turkey
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116366″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin has taken another foray into the world of American politics with The Trial of the Chicago 7, starring Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne and Mark Rylance. The film delves into the trial of seven activists arrested for inciting violence during clashes with police that resulted from protests against the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; it is a reminder of the importance of a fair trial.
Similar in tone, then, to BAFTA’s best film nominee The Mauritanian (pictured above) and the story of Mohamedou Ould Salahi.
Salahi was imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay due to perceived connections with terrorist group al-Qaeda for more than 14 years without charge until his eventual release in 2016.
In 2005, Salahi wrote a memoir that was eventually published in 2015 with numerous redactions and is the basis of the film.
Forty prisoners still remain at the camp and most have not been charged or tried with any crime. Despite this, as the film shows, legal challenges are deliberately stifled for political purposes.
President Joe Biden has committed to close the camp by the time he leaves office.
There are several recent documentaries that celebrate the crucial work of investigative journalists.
Collective is remarkable film about corruption and political cover-up at the heart of Romanian institutions.
In 2015, a fire broke out at Colectiv night club in Bucharest, resulting in the deaths of 64 people. Hospitals were overwhelmed by the casualties and the deaths of 13 of the victims were attributed to bacterial infections that arose from being treated with watered down disinfectant used to save money. The story would have been forgotten had it not been for the tireless work of a daily sports newspaper. The ordeal exposed corruption and corner-cutting that fuelled anger on the streets of Romania. Protests eventually led to the resignation of Prime Minister Victor Ponta.
During the film, lead investigator for the paper Catalin Tolontan says of the situation: “When the press bows down to authorities, the authorities will mistreat the citizens.”
Collective is an insight into how teams of journalists break such stories
Athlete A is another testament to the power of investigative journalism.
Over recent years, numerous scandals have revealed the toxic atmospheres of some elite sports teams. None more so, perhaps, than the sexual abuse of US gymnasts shown in Athlete A. The Indianapolis Star helped uncover victims’ stories of sexual abuse by USA team gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, who was found to have assaulted at least 265 girls over a period of two decades. The film’s title refers to Maggie Nichols, the gymnast who reported her experiences in 2015, only to be dropped from the 2016 Olympics team shortly after.
Collective and Athlete A highlight the lengths governments and organisations will go to keep quiet such scandals.
More extreme examples can lead to deaths, such as the brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi, investigated in The Dissident.
Khashoggi was a US-based journalist and columnist for the Washington Post and was murdered inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. The CIA eventually determined the killing was premeditated and ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
After its release in January 2020, producer Thor Halvorssen alleged there were attempts by “Saudi-backed trolls” to reduce its score on film-rating sites IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes to below 70 per cent.
“The moment you drop under 70 per cent, your film is essentially dead,” Halvorsson told Variety at the time. “People who follow individual critics will watch it; but the regular public will not.”
Public pressure that arises as a result of the revelations of the press are important, democratic displays of dissent. Their value is emphasised when authorities try to take away such expression.
Protests over a proposed extradition law allowing people in Hong Kong to be sent for trial in mainland China began in 2019. The law was met with such hostility by people in Hong Kong, that China eventually brought in the controversial National Security Law, criminalising any act of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with external forces.
The citizens of Hong Kong have suffered under the law, as have the press. On 6 January, 53 pro-democracy activists were arrested by Chinese authorities.
Do Not Split – which takes its name from a Cantonese phrase which translates loosely as “Do not split, do not divide, do not snitch on others” – follows the course of the early protests up to the imposition of the law that now threatens freedom in Hong Kong.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You may also want to read” category_id=”581″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
