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.
5 Feb 2021 | Opinion, Ruth's blog, United Kingdom
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116171″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Picture the scene.
A freelance photojournalist attends a demonstration, does his job, documents the protest, sells the images to a national newspaper and then goes home. A few hours later, five police officers arrive at his home, confiscate his equipment and his mobile phone. He is arrested in front of his family. He is taken to the police station, fingerprinted and has his DNA taken. He is then put in a cell.
You would assume that I’m describing an event that happened in Russia or Belarus or Myanmar. I could be outlining a plot in a Hollywood film. I’m not. This happened in Kent, on Thursday, last week.
Andy Aitchison is a freelance photographer. He was taking photos of a protest at Napier Barracks in Folkestone, where people had gathered to raise concerns about the treatment of asylum seekers held inside. Andy wasn’t part of the protest, he was there as a member of the press. He sold the images to The Guardian, among others, and then, job done, went home.
Six hours later, the police arrived at his home and arrested him in front of his children on suspicion of criminal damage. They weren’t interested in his press card or why he was there. But they knew enough to seize his equipment including the memory card holding the images and his mobile phone. He was taken to the local police station, processed, fingerprinted, had his DNA taken and then held in a cell for seven hours.
When they finally released him, he was remanded on bail until 22 February and barred from going back to the Napier Barracks. This prevented him from covering the impact of a fire that occurred on the site the following day.
Andy is a journalist. He is registered with the National Union of Journalists. He is protected under Article 10 of the Human Rights Act.
The British Government talks a good game on media freedom. They are launching a National Action Plan for the Safety of Journalists. They are proposing legislation to protect free speech on campus. They have spoken out about Putin’s show trial of Navalny. Of Lukashenko’s repressive regime. Of the military coup in Myanmar. But what credibility do they have if they are enabling British journalists to be arrested on UK soil – for doing their job?
Index is truly disgusted at this behaviour. The authorities have absolutely no right to arrest a journalist for doing his job. Andy needs to be de-arrested immediately. His equipment needs to be returned to him immediately. And he needs an apology.
The British Government has zero moral authority to promote free speech and free expression around the world if they won’t abide by it at home.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You may also want to read” category_id=”41669″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
15 Dec 2020 | News and features, Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Today, Tuesday, the British government has finally responded to its own consultation on Online Harms. Our role at Index on Censorship is to defend free expression and free speech for all citizens wherever they live. This includes in the UK.
Index has significant concerns about the government’s proposals and their unintended consequences on our collective right to free speech. We are concerned about the global impact of these proposals and the message that is being sent by the British government – by instituting restrictive policies for social media companies – to repressive regimes who relentlessly seek to undermine the rights of their citizens.
While acknowledging that there are problems with regulation of online platforms, Index will be engaging with policy makers to try and make this legislation better in protecting our right to free expression.
Our key concerns are:
- Legal but harmful
The British government is proposing a new classification of speech. Legal but harmful content, such as abuse, would be deemed illegal online but would be perfectly acceptable offline. A lack of consistency in our legal framework for speech is ludicrous and would have significant unintended consequences.
- Emphasis on the platforms not the perpetrators
The penalties outlined in these proposals focus on the role of the platforms to regulate their online spaces – not their customers who seemingly have limited personal responsibility. It also fails to acknowledge that this is a cultural problem and therefore needs a carrot as well as a stick.
- No one is going to be fined for deleting too much content
The proposals will fine social media companies for not complying with the new regulatory framework. Although ministers have issued warm words about protecting freedom of speech it seems highly unlikely that a platform would be sanctioned for deleting too much content, leaving social media companies to always err of the side of caution and delete challenging content even if it isn’t contravening the legislation.
- Digital evidence locker
These proposals seemingly advocate the permanent removal of significant amounts of content, thus curtailing a victim’s ability to prosecute, as once deleted by a platform there is no way to retrieve the content even by law enforcement. This includes evidence of terrorism atrocities; 23% of the Syrian War Crime Archive has already been deleted by the platforms. The lack of legal protections in place for the platforms to store this content (out of sight) for access by law enforcement, journalists and academics results in a lack of prosecution and analysis. Index believes a compromise would be the creation of a legal framework to allow social media platforms to create Digital Evidence Lockers.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
3 Aug 2020 | News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”103857″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]Just 37% of UK academics have said they would feel comfortable sitting next to someone who, in relation to transgender rights, advocates gender-critical feminist views, a new report on academic freedom in the UK has revealed. The report by Policy Exchange, released today, is one of the largest representative samples of UK- based academics carried out in recent years. It explores the concern that strongly-held political attitudes are restricting the freedom of those who disagree to research and teach on contested subjects. The report also proposes what might be done, in the form of legislation and other measures, to ensure that universities support intellectual dissent and all lawful speech is protected on campus.
Protecting academic freedoms was one of the founding principles of Index in 1971 and continues to be an area that we are concerned about, so we very much welcome the debate inspired by this report and look forward to hearing from other voices.
Read Index CEO Ruth Smeeth’s foreword for the report:
“It was recently suggested to me that I might have been a target of a little too much free speech in recent years, so it could be viewed as strange that I am so passionate about protecting our collective rights to free speech. But honestly, I have a romantic view of one of our most important human rights.
Free speech should be challenging; it should drive debate and ultimately force all of us to continually reflect on our own views. Free speech should manifest in different ways in different forums. In literature, it should drive our intellectual curiosity about the world around us. In journalism, it should shine a light on the powerful and ensure that the world is informed. And in academia, it should drive debate about the status quo demanding that we continually evolve as a society. It’s only by the guarantee of this core human right that we can ensure that we are the best that we can be, that our arguments are robust and that they can sustain criticism. Simply put, debate makes us better as individuals and as a society, it also makes our arguments more rounded and demands of us the intellectual rigour that drives positive change.
That’s why this publication is so important. Throughout our history, we’ve seen a cyclical approach towards academic freedom, but the reality is that only when our centres of learning are truly independent have we thrived as a society. This research isn’t about determining who is right or wrong, or whose voice is more valuable on any given issue but rather the proposals are designed to ensure that there is still a free and fair debate on our campuses. That the academic freedom that we all should cherish is given the protections it needs. It does the country no good if our educators, our academics, our scholars and most importantly our students feel that they can’t speak or engage without fear of retribution.
We all know that legislation is not a panacea to the chilling effect of what is happening in our public space for anyone that challenges the status quo. It can’t and won’t change the culture on campus but what it can do and what this document squarely aims to do is inform, engage and start a debate about what should be important to us. As a society, we need to have our own national conversation about our core human rights and how they should manifest in the twenty-first century. We need to decide collectively where the lines should be between hate speech and free speech, between academic inquiry and ‘research’ designed to incite, between journalism and purveyors of fake news. This research is an important part of that conversation.”
Please read the report in full here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
