On Violence and On Violence Against Women Read online

  In every case, the writing takes us deep into parts of the world crying out unambiguously for justice while refusing to reduce by one iota the contrary pathways of the mind. An old man in Nagaland who had been a fighter in the secessionist war against India remembers the violence of his own actions at the risk of his heroic pride. A young man searching for the truth about his father’s political murder finds himself, despite his strongest impulses, recoiling against the knowledge he desperately seeks because he knows it might defeat him. A young woman subjected to sexual violence goes looking for the violence which has scarred her; another, also damaged by assault, embraces her own capacity for bloody violence as deepest pleasure. Both these stories turn the tables on the accusation that women sometimes ask for the violence they suffer, since in each case violence went after them long before they made the vocation of violence their own (the argument that women ‘ask for it’ fatally mistakes symptom for cause). These stories have inspired me. Their willingness to go so deep into the entrails of violence I see as grounds for hope. Like, for example, the story of a state massacre of students whose spirits, against all human and inhuman odds, lift themselves out of the bodies in the morgue into the shadows of a new communal world.

  My sister, the philosopher Gillian Rose, wrote of ‘the equivocation of the ethical’, by which she meant the importance of not assuming that ethical rightness is something that anybody ever completely owns. We are all subjects of violence, not least because we are embedded in a violent social world.65 There is always a point in any ethical position or turn – the struggle against injustice, the fight for a better, less violent order – where it starts and stutters, trips and breaks, before setting out on its path once more. At the beginning of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes: ‘What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think about what we are doing.’66 If there is one thing of which writing about violence has convinced me, it is that if we do not make time for thought, which must include the equivocations of our inner lives, we will do nothing to end violence in the world, while we will surely be doing violence to ourselves.

  1

  I AM A KNIFE

  Sexual Harassment in Close-up

  Given the media coverage, not to say frenzy, it might seem as if the sexual harassment of women had never been in the public eye before. At the very least we need to question why it took the fall of a powerful media mogul to turn the story into front-page news, and whether the endless photo spreads of his female targets weren’t designed to provoke not just outrage and a cry for justice, but the pleasure of the voyeur. This of course is the pleasure on which the cinema industry thrives and which had made these women vulnerable at the outset. Past pictures of actresses smiling with Harvey Weinstein, his arm proprietorially around various parts of their bodies, only repeated the offence, since everyone looked as if they were having such a good time. Later these images would be used by Weinstein’s lawyer to undermine the charges against him, as if the photos ‘were proof that nothing untoward had happened’.1 More institutions and public figures were to follow – from news anchors and comedians to MPs, celebrity chefs, financiers, billionaire businessmen, cult gurus, schoolteachers, cardinals and Benedictine monks – with less screen potential, one might say. But I could never quite get out of my head the feeling that these women were once again being asked to audition for their parts or were being paraded across the red carpet on Oscar night.

  This is just one reason why celebrations of #MeToo as a historic breakthrough in attitudes towards harassment should be viewed with caution. Remember the images of Angelina Jolie walking across the international stage, arm outstretched to greet William Hague as part of their 2014 London ‘summit’ (sic) against rape as a war crime? It struck me then that she was being offered as a trade-off or collateral damage – woman as bait served up to the fantasy life of everyone – as the price for bringing such violence to an end. The initiative is now seen as a costly failure since the number of rapes recorded in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, on which they focused their attention, rose in the following year and has shown no signs of any significant decrease since then. It is just one facet of this ugly reality – one more thing to contend with – that, while attention to violence against women may be sparked by anger at harm and a desire for redress, it might just as well be feeding vicariously off the forms of perversion towards women that fuel the violence in the first place.

  Sexual harassment has existed ever since there has been a world of work, while sexual violence against women goes back way before then. Feminists have long insisted that harassment occurs whenever women find themselves in the vicinity of men in positions of power. It also takes place on the street. Vanessa Grigoriadis of the New York Times Magazine had often been whistled at and catcalled as she walked through the city, but when researching her book on campus sexual harassment in 2016, she noticed that men seemed to be stopping and harassing her even more than usual.2 Her father was dying at the time. It was not exactly that these men could read her thoughts, but certainly she felt that they were picking up on her vulnerability, seizing their moment to probe into what was already an open wound. They were excited by her distress (just as one target of Weinstein’s advances said he was clearly roused by her fear3). The aim of harassment, this would suggest, is not only to control women’s bodies but also to invade their minds. Grigoriadis’s experience is telling. Though the modern city is scarred by dereliction and poverty, it can also be a place of relative freedom where a woman can muse and fantasise (the great thing about fantasy as inner freedom is that it interferes with no one other than yourself). Harassment is always a sexual demand, but it also carries a more sinister and pathetic injunction: ‘You will think about me.’ Like sexual abuse, to which it is affiliated, harassment brings mental life to a standstill, destroying the mind’s capacity for reverie.

  As far back as 1982, in their pamphlet Sexual Harassment at Work, the UK National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), which became Liberty in 1989, described harassment as an ‘intentional assault on an individual’s innermost privacy’.4 Ironically, in the light of recent developments, it also noted that a ‘moral complaints bureau’ had been set up by the US Screen Actors’ Guild to deal with ‘casting couch complaints’. In October 2017, a Hollywood Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace opened its inquiry, chaired by Anita Hill, famous for having brought sexual harassment charges against US Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991. We can only hope that this enquiry will be more effective (two years later, in October 2019, industry experts were reporting that the pace of change had been ‘glacial’).5

  In the past years, our understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment has been put under considerable strain. For all the remonstrations of the accused – ‘You are making a fuss about nothing’, ‘Things were different back then’ – the reality is crystal clear. Sexual harassment consists of unwelcome sexual advances which, pace the mostly – though not exclusively – male protests, are never innocent, a mere trifle, playful or a joke. And that is because however minimal the gesture, it nearly always contains the barely concealed message: ‘This is something which I, as a man, have the right to do to you.’ Women of course can also harass, but it is comparatively rare (the glee with which such examples are jumped on by those wanting to downplay the issue as a feminist issue is worth noting in itself). Sexual harassment, we might then say, is the great male performative, the act through which a man aims to convince his target not only that he is the one with the power, which is true, but also that his power and his sexuality are one and the same thing. As Judith Butler has argued, the performative always veils a hidden melancholia since, as the word suggests, performing, far from expressing a true, deep, essential self – something sacred and untouchable – is no more than skin deep (‘melancholia’ also because of all the other buried and unconsciously grieved sexual lives one might have led).

  To this extent, a feminism w
hich takes harassment as the unadulterated expression of male power and authority is in danger of colluding with the very image of masculinity which it is protesting against. These men indeed hold the power, but they do what they do – advance and insult in one and the same breath – precisely because they are anything but cocksure (like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain with precious little to show for himself). ‘Combine male fragility with white fragility and the perennial fear of falling,’ writes Dayna Tortorici, ‘and you end up with something lethal, potentially.’6 As psychoanalysts have pointed out, the idea of the phallus is a delusion, above all for any man who claims to own or embody it, since there is no such thing as an ever-ready penis that is permanently erect (a truly uncomfortable prospect, I am told). Harassment is ruthless, but it also carries a whiff of desperation about it, as if the one harassing knows somewhere that their cruelty, like all human cruelty in a precarious world, is sourced in a fraudulent boast. Not that this makes it any less of a threat. As Hannah Arendt argued, it is illegitimate and/or waning power that turns most readily to violence.

  But if we all now know exactly what harassment looks like – ‘in your face’ as recent coverage has sometimes felt to me – on the other hand, the borders around what constitutes harassment are blurred. Is harassment a form of violence? I have lost count of the number of times people have expressed outrage at the merest suggestion of an affinity between harassment and violence on the grounds that it tars the innocent (at worst thoughtless) and the guilty (at worst serial predators) with the same brush. It is true that the two should not be equated, but they are surely connected, like siblings or bedfellows. At the very least, they belong on a sliding scale since a sense of entitlement ready to turn nasty underpins both (Weinstein appears to have moved effortlessly along the spectrum). When Matt Damon insisted that some cases were really not so bad, Minnie Driver suggested men might not be the best judges of the issue: ‘We need good intelligent men’, she responded, ‘to say this is all bad across the board.’7

  Towards the end of her tribute to Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo (‘Khwezi’), who brought rape charges against South African President Jacob Zuma, Redi Tlhabi writes:

  * * *

  * * *

  She fought for every one of us – every woman who has been too afraid to say, ‘I was raped,’ too afraid to say, ‘That man groped me’ or ‘He demanded sex in exchange for the job, the lift, the favour.’ She fought for all the women whose bodies have been appropriated by men, known and unknown, through lurid descriptions and graphic imagery, men who whistle and undress women with their eyes in public and private spaces. Uncles who wink at them when their parents are not looking, the managers and senior colleagues who, in a handshake, quickly turn their index finger to circle their palms, knowing that they will not call them out. That they are too paralysed to react. That, even when they are being disrespected, they will pull away quietly and carry on as if nothing had happened.8

  * * *

  * * *

  Khwezi was eventually driven into exile after her case had been mangled to pieces in the courts and her house burnt down.

  * * *

  In April 2011, the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Education under President Obama issued a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter on college harassment which became the defining document for policy in the US. The letter is a directive to universities on how to implement Title IX, originally part of the 1972 Education Amendments to the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex discrimination in education. Harassment is seen as a form of discrimination because it creates a hostile environment which impedes a student’s educational progress. Schools are required ‘to take immediate action to eliminate the harassment, prevent its recurrence, and address its effects’: investigate the complaint, appoint at least one Title IX co-ordinator, provide training for all campus law enforcement employees, publish grievance procedures and issue guidelines on what constitutes sexual harassment (a college where students are deemed in ignorance on this matter is automatically in violation of Title IX). Although it would be revoked under Donald Trump, it remains, in the words of Grigoriadis, ‘the era’s seminal text on college sexual violence’.9 ‘It is hard to overstate’, Jennifer Doyle writes in Campus Sex, Campus Security (2015), ‘the impact of this nineteen-page document.’10

  Sexual violence is upfront from the first page. Rape, sexual assault, sexual battery and sexual coercion are all included in the same category: ‘All such acts of sexual violence are forms of sexual harassment under Title IX’, although the use of the conjunctives – ‘harassment and violence’ here, ‘harassment or violence’ later in the letter – suggests a less steady link. This has been decisive. During her interviews with student activists against harassment, Grigoriadis found that refusal to define ‘assault’ as ‘sexual violence’, for example, was seen as a cop-out, immediately identifying the speaker as not aligned with ‘the radical cause’. (Though clearly on the activists’ side, she chooses to use ‘assault’ throughout her book.) ‘It’s all violence,’ one of them told her passionately.11 Likewise, calling out harassment as violence, they felt, was the only way to ensure that it would not be dismissed as petty interference or minor assault. This makes sexual harassment a safety issue: ‘The Department is committed to ensuring that all students feel safe in their school.’ In the 1982 pamphlet, the NCCL too defined harassment as a health and safety concern. Any university in ‘violation’ of the Department of Education directive – not enacting due process for the protection of its students and the pursuit of their claims – is considered ‘non-compliant’ and faces the possibility of having its federal funding withheld, a potentially catastrophic financial outcome which has never taken place. This made Grigoriadis wonder whether the Obama administration had not initiated a ‘political dance’.12

  Title IX was a breakthrough, but it is also flawed. Legal critics have claimed that it ignores ‘due process’: acting as a court of law while neglecting protections such as the right to an attorney, or full advance notification of charges against the accused. They also disapprove of the standard of evidence used in sexual misconduct cases: a ‘preponderance of evidence’ – meaning fifty-one per cent – rather than the higher standard of ‘clear and convincing’ evidence (‘hunting for a feather’, in the words of Brett Sokolow, introduced by Grigoriadis as ‘the nation’s top university sexual-misconduct adviser’).13 At moments, it is also unclear in these cases who is acting on behalf of whom. In one of its most striking clauses, the letter states that where confidentiality is requested or where there is a request not to pursue, the college concerned must take all reasonable steps to investigate and respond to the complainant, consistent ‘with the request not to pursue an investigation’. This is a rare moment when the possible human cost of assault, how it might silence someone who has been the target, is allowed to show through the legalese. In fact, this clause echoes anti-rape activists who have long insisted that no woman should ever feel obliged to make a formal complaint. ‘What’, asks Roxane Gay, ‘if she doesn’t want to tell her story?’14

  To which we might add: ‘What if she can’t?’ In May 2015 at Liverpool Crown Court, Farieissia Martin was convicted of murdering her partner after years of physical and mental abuse. Everything hung on how convincingly she could tell her story in the witness box. Sobbing and barely able to speak, she failed to persuade the jury that she was not guilty (for some reason, in their eyes, her vulnerability made her more likely to have been a cold-blooded killer rather than less). As Sophie Elmhirst asks in her investigation of the case, ‘how do you perform the story of your own abuse?’15 ‘Perform’ should give us pause, since it is so at odds with the legal priority of establishing the unvarnished truth. ‘I’d have to act the part, or no one would believe me,’ states the narrator of Louis’s History of Violence, as he explains his reluctance to press charges against his rapist – he wants to send no one to prison – or even to file a report with the police: ‘Being allowed to speak of a thing, and being obli
ged or summoned to speak, are entirely separate things.’16 Telling also takes time. ‘A big part of the problem’, actress Helen Hunt remarked in an interview about #MeToo in September 2019, ‘is that if a woman is assaulted, by the time they feel they can get the words out of their mouth there are statute of limitation laws that say “too late”.’17 How can you be expected to get the words out of your mouth when the very act of recall makes you choke? ‘That’s what they keep saying,’ the narrator protests in History of Violence, ‘file a report because that’s what they want, they want you to bear witness, they want you to bear it on your back […] and tough luck if the story is too much to bear, tough luck if it cracks my ribs, splits my skin, tears my joints, and crushes the organs inside me.’18