DISNEY will earn more from The Lion King than from any other cartoon in history. That’s not just because Disney is the best marketing machine in popular entertainment, but because this movie offers a fantastical solution to that most vexing political problem of our time: the role of fatherhood.
This fantasy is far more important than the accuracy of the film’s detail. As it happens, The Lion King is an insult to lions, hyenas, Africa and children. My cinema was packed with children who were forgiving and enthusiastic; they quarried the cartoon for laughs and filled the place with the sound of their own pleasure. They forgave this cartoon its formulaic score and crass zoology. They rewarded Disney and their adult relatives with the goodwill of having a good time.
Among the unexpected outcomes of Roman Polanski’s re-arrest on the charge of sexually abusing a girl in 1977 a new concept: rape that isn’t rape. The unseemly hypothesis was offered with gravitas by Whoopi Goldberg: that what he did was not ‘rape rape, ’ she said.
Rape rape is?
Rape.
This manoeuvre is revelatory. It says nothing useful about what Polanski did to the child. But it tells us something important about the distribution of respect and blame.
We know everything we need to know from the testimony given to the Grand Jury by the girl herself. We’ve known for long enough what went on: according to transcripts of the child’s evidence to a Grand Jury (transcripts unsealed, on the web), Polanski set her up, got her drunk, raped her and took the precaution of avoiding a possible pregnancy by anal rape. Her evidence is not challenged. Whoopi is wrong. Rape is ‘rape rape’. She didn’t consent. On the contrary she repeatedly withheld her consent. Her descripton of the mise en scene is flat, detailed, bare. According to her testimony, her commentary during Polanski’s apparently protracted rape was clear and simple: ‘No…no…no…’ She said No and meant No.
What else did this girl have to do to make her non-consent clear? And what else did he – and we – need to know to be persuaded that what he did was rape. As in rape rape.
She said she was afraid. Of whom, what? ‘Him.’
What did she want to do? ‘Go home’.
The semantic debate reprises an era when culpability lay not with the perpetrator but the victim. Above all it is a bid to reinterpret rape as always something else, particularly in a certain strata of society where anything goes, and everything is known.
This is a context where big men’s accountability is only accidental, a bit of bad luck. It is, therefore, a context that encourages complicity.
Now her expressed wish that the case be abandoned is mobilised in his favour. But she at least – unlike Polanski – is holding on to her pride and dignity in a context that hasn’t delivered justice.
She insists that she has not only survived the harm he did, she has ‘prevailed’. She doesn’t want her body to be available for public consumption.
She blames the criminal justice system for this mess. Not only did she not get justice – justice was seen to be not done. And now her testimony is being impugned.
Had Polanski done the right thing in 1977 she would not be in this position. She deserves to be released from this burden by Polanski doing, finally, the right thing: the right right thing.
Watch the hands of young men in prison, moving pens across the page, and you see a story scrolled on their scarred fingers and bulging, busted knuckles. Their heads bowed in concentration, lips sometimes moving as they spell words to themselves or ask, how do you spell before…or gate? And yet they have more to tell us than we might imagine about a passion for violence.
Edvard Munch, ‘The Scream’
As a Writer in Residence in prisons between 2005 and 2007, I’d gaze at these young men’s heads and hands as they’d write about everlasting love – their relationships are usually in crisis; about their babies’ births – so many are dads; their life stories – ‘I could write a book!’
I’d promise them that they’d surprise themselves, that they would do some beautiful writing and they would discover what that feels like.
Before I started this, I thought I knew about violence. I’ve been writing about it for years. These narratives by self-confessed, card-carrying thugs got me thinking, though, about the logics of violence: how much they love hurting people – and getting hurt.
This emerges when they focus on what actually happens: when their knuckles hit walls, when wrists break, bottles scrape scalps, when their knives slip into someone’s skin or kidney. The first, exasperating answer to questions about what it feels like, is usually: ‘nothing’. Even if it were true – and it isn’t – feeling ‘nothing’ demands effort, however.
As a journalist I’ve interviewed many men and women who have killed someone. Bombers, kidnappers, snipers, all with a cause; men who kill women who rejected them, men who like killing women; women who kill men who have put their lives in peril. But prisons are swelling with boys and men whose dangerousness is ascribed to nothing much: postcode killing, turf, peer group pressure, self-defence, to just…this or that. These terms conceal as much as they claim to reveal.
My favourite word, why, isn’t much use in this context, it rarely attracts answers beyond the banal. But the journalistic mantra: ‘who, what, where, when’ allows us to delve.
Fighting appears to be without cause. It isn’t, of course. What these young men in prison tell us that there are causes. And more, there is cause: They believe they’re making themselves as men. The project is domination, pain, power…They represent themselves as soldiers and troops. But the discipline of writing discloses to us and them how they build their hatreds, how they invest in hazard. They spread macho mayhem, but they also do themselves serious damage.
A prodigious fighter said if we saw him from the top deck of a bus we’d think he was ‘a terrorist’. Then he eloquently deconstructed his ‘scraps’. Bashing someone again and again with broken knuckles was not about loss of sensibility – he wasn’t out of control. He says he loved pain. ?His affrays produced pleasure. Combat was also an invitation, an incitement: he wanted to be wounded. His injuries banished other psychic agonies. He provoked pain because it gave him corporal peace.
The young men I met in prison, with lined paper and pens and wounded hands, all seemed to know what this means. They read each other’s writing and recognise themselves; the unsaid becomes an open secret.
I suggested to them that writing is a way of sorting stuff out. They don’t do it for grades, it doesn’t meet any targets, but it is useful. ‘This mattered, miss,’ said one statuesque, silent young man, on his last day inside, gripping his prize: his text, in print. These young men’s writing does not celebrate violence – even if that’s what they usually set out to do – it clarifies its dreadful allure.
Bruffy is serving five years for offences associated with violence and weapons. He is 21 years old and has been in and out of prison many times. He wrote this piece about the last time he was released.
Soldiering
I got through the gates, I could see my mum and dad in the car.? It is a big moment for all of us. I hadn’t seen my family for four months,? I was lively but I sensed it was complicated.
My dad says, ‘Hello son, good to see you.’ He’s smiling.
My mum doesn’t turn round, she doesn’t look me in the eye. I could hear her tears.
‘What’s up with you, I’m fucking out now!’ I say.
‘I’m all right, just a bit upset,’ she says.
‘Promise me you’ll keep your head down,
I don’t want you going back in there.’ ?I give her a hug, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not!’
But I am imagining the looks on my friends’ faces, my boys.
And me top boy again, back on the scene.
I get dressed and I’m feeling good, bouncing. I’ve got £500 – half of it from the postal orders my mum sent my in jail.
I see my boys. Instantly it was like I’d never been in prison, forgotten.
Now it’s not ‘I’ve changed me ways.’ Its ‘I fucking soldiered it.’ It’s
‘what’s happening?’
The life I live is party time, danger.
I get a gun, I’m eating tomazies, I’m uncontrollable.
‘Can I have some money?’ Every day I do the same: wait for my mum to come home from work, have an argument, get money, go out.
What I’ve put my family through is enough for a lifetime –
I’ve took the piss, robbed them blind.
My mum is good to me.
My mum would give me her last £1.
But she doesn’t influence me. I give her nothing.
I’m a horrible person. I feel so guilty.
When I’m in jail
. That’s when I start thinking.
Prez served nearly a year for prolific fighting when he was 19 years old. Here is his exercise in empathy, a new work in his lexicon: he writes about his girlfriend’s feelings, and explains his own. Only towards the end of his sentence did he write about his childhood.
Her to Him:
You’re my boyfriend, in crime.
The fighting and the drugs are taking over you
. When I see you, crew to crew,
I see my boy rowing and swearing.
You look like a terrorist with a devil inside.
I’m the most important girl in you life
I never again want to see you in a hospital bed.
With a machine plugged in you.
To keep you alive
I want you to stop.
But I know I don’t matter enough.
Him to Her:
Me and my boys we love to fight.
The pain we gain is what we live with
. Love and crime, its all pain.
Love is a pain because the one you love is always on your back
. ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that.
But you are doing it, and at the end of the day
you are going to lose your girl.? Crime is pain, “I love to fight
. Hitting a lad for the first time is lovely.
The pain you gain will be the pain you love
. You’ll have the power.
My knuckles are broken, at first I feel nothing.
Long enough to hit him again
. The pain starts when I am calming down.
And moving my fingers about. And the pain I gain makes me forget the
pain that I bottle up.
All the time, all my life.
The pain has been there inside of me since ever I can remember.
In my body, all over; When my mum was getting knocked about by my
dad.
And then my mum wasn’t giving a fuck about us all
. It was like my dad knocked it out of her
Then I couldn’t trust my mum.
Couldn’t rely on her. I became a devil
. Mum couldn’t control me at all
. I didn’t like pain at that point –
that came later, when I was older, when I was fighting.
Gegs is serving a life sentence for murder. He is 21 years old and a powerful presence on the wing, whose pleasure writing his life story inspired several other young offenders to put pen to paper.
Thug
I’m not a psychopath. I’m a thug. A thug just fight and fights and fights.
I’ve been fighting since I was ten years old, I’ve been carrying knives
since I was 14 years old. I’ve been threatening and terrorizing people.
I like it. But I don’t want to die. And I don’t want other people to die.
My life story is about this. I seek pain, I appreciate pain.
I think about causing pain and being in pain.
The pain I really desire is laughing pain. It relieves me, calms me.
I never want to die, but I love being at risk. And I love surviving.
It gives me a fright: I freeze I don’t flinch,
I stand firm, knowing I’m going to go through something terrible.
Not My Blood
I did not really know what I’d done until the prosecutor stood up and
said, ‘do you plead guilty or not guilty to Section 18?’
Who was this lad? I didn’t know. I still don’t know.
‘Guilty.’ Guilty of what? I didn’t know.
I felt so angry, I was coming down off the drugs, sick, I wanted to throw up, but I didn’t. My head ached, like my brain was loose, banging on my skull. When I closed my eyes I saw red. My fingers were twitching, red; covered in blood, not mine. I couldn’t clench my fist; pain. Somebody else’s, I didn’t know who. My skin was pale, white, very white and rougher than tar.
The man I did not know
A group of lads had stared at us, we held their gaze.
‘Let’s s have it then,’ I said. We were all throwing punches, kicks. I see
black red.
I see a knife in a lad’s hand. I pull my knife from my sock, the knife
plunges into his side.
I don’t know this lad.
I shout, ‘Do you want more?’
I pulled him towards me and slowly trailed the blade across his throat. He
begged for his life. I watched the knife on his throat.
Writing and reading this, I’m feeling sorry for that man. I was affected by his panic.
I decided not to kill him. I buried the knife into his thigh, stood up, spat at the man I didn’t know. My boys said, ‘you’re crazy.’ For nearly killing the man whose name I do not know.
Troublesome
I see the car window, my arm moves back,
My fist is clenched, hits the car window, smash.
Pain shoots up my arm, to my elbow and then to my knuckles.
I spread my fingers and clench my fist again.
It wasn’t stinging pain. It was laughing pain.
I punch again. Every pain I get I start laughing.
Anger is always there, it makes me want to fight. I don’t want to.
So I bring a different kind of pain to me. It gets my anger away…
I hit him and watch him go down, wobbling, wobbling.
I see him run out. I order a pint, the barmaid pushes it over, we both drop
it. We both say sorry.
A girl runs up to me, ‘they’re fighting outside, go and help them.’
A lad comes running at me with a metal bar. I grab my knife from under the pool table, I plunge the knife into him. I pulled the knife out, then the knife goes in.
I heard him shouting, ‘Why are you doing this?’…
I didn’t want to kill him, I just wanted to seriously hurt him. I don’t want to think about this. Writing it puts me in it, in that moment, as if my hand holding this pen is my hand holding the knife…
I feel shady, tight, horrible. Other prisoners say to me, ‘What you in for?’
I tell them what I’ve done. Murder. Their faces light up. Excitement,
they’re talking to a murderer.
I feel nothing, nothing at all.
My new book, Agreement! The State, Conflict and Change in Northern Ireland, is published in May 2008, with launches in London, Belfast and Dublin.
‘The spinners of history are rarely the makers of history. The real story of Ireland’s journey to pace and justice is murkier, more treacherous and often moe inspirational than our political masters would have us believe. Bea Campbell is a great chronicler of our times: humans and politically astute, with a keen understanding of the double dealing, interplay and courage that underpinned the long peace process, which was really won by ordinary men and unsung women in Northern Ireland.’
Helena Kennedy
‘Outstanding … an impressive and insightful book. The story of international diplomacy and political deals has been told elsewhere, but this details another story, about the contribution of civil society, the women’s movement and a “coalition of the committed” to a unique constitutional moment, and to the means by which the state might reinterpret itself and be changed.’
Now it’s official: the state sponsored death squads for years in Northern Ireland and this collusion prolonged the war.
Nuala O’Loan is a heroine. None of us should under-estimate the moral courage this fastidious lawyer has mobilised merely do her job as Northern Ireland’s police ombudsman: to tell the world that collusion describes the relationship between the British state and loyalist gunslingers.
Raymond McCord is a hero. When his own loyalist leaders and militias refused to acknowledge his quest for justice for his murdered son, he risked his life by turning to the purported enemies of his state – the human-rights organisations.
McCord joins the band of relatives who become heralds for their lost loved ones, whose journey confronts them with the state itself. McCord didn’t retreat when he found himself in a web of special branch and loyalist assassins.
The human-rights advocates are heroes too, because they would not bow to the slur that they were mad, bad or Provo agents provocateurs for investigating the state’s patronage of death squads. Lest we forget, the ombudsman’s investigation was prefigured by an earlier report naming the guilty men, published by Jane Winter, the forensic director of British Irish Rights Watch.
None of these people are republicans. But the sectarian slur ricocheted across the ombudsman’s bows again yesterday when Lord Maginnis – a liberal in the unionist firmament – dismissed her report not only as “rubbish” but as having “an alternative agenda” – code for Provo propaganda.
The devastating McCord report that was published yesterday tells us that allegations of collusion once dismissed as rubbish are true. But that epochal admission risks being swamped by an old paradigm: tribal paddies dragging the reluctant Brits into their dirty war. It is time for a paradigm shift. It is time for Britain to be brave and tell the truth about itself. It must narrate a new story about that 30-year conflict.
The ombudsman tells us that the collusion prevailed between the prelude to the ceasefires and the new millennium. Her investigation was constrained by the narrow focus imposed on her: she was only able to investigate the murder of Raymond McCord Jr, a 22-year-old RAF cadet. But Mount Vernon, his north Belfast neighbourhood, is both the local and the larger story of collusion.
Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland secretary, acknowledges that this is very embarrassing for the state. This is progress – when O’Loan published her heart-stopping chronicle of the RUC’s disastrous role in the Omagh bombing of 1998 she was insulted by unionists, abused by the chief constable and abandoned by Downing Street. The ombudsman was being warned by No 10 that she was on her own.
At least this time Hain has accepted her critique. Even so, he consigns it to the past. But the past lives on – the ombudsman insisted yesterday that Ronnie Flanagan, the former chief constable, had responsibility for everything that happened in the police force he commanded, whatever he did or did not know. He has not been called to account before a public tribunal, and no one expects him to be now. Indeed, after his retirement he has been reincarnated with her majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary.
Flanagan wasn’t alone. He was part of an entire system. Who were the civil servants who staffed that security system in Northern Ireland during the Mount Vernon terror? Where are they now? What else were they doing to thwart justice while the state was investing in the Mount Vernon boys? What did these civil servants think they were doing? What did they tell the politicians sequestered in Hillsborough Castle? And the biggest question: what was the overarching agenda?
The Mount Vernon boys were state-sponsored assassins. Special branch ran their local leadership. We now know that British security services had penetrated all the paramilitary organisations. Was there ever an audit of all the murder, rape and pillage?
Collusion tells us about our institutions and their purpose. After 1987 – when the loyalist paramilitary organisations were beginning to contemplate peace – Britain re-armed, reinvigorated and refocused them, taking control through its proxies among the warlords, and prolonged the war. Their reputations as ruffians, religious maniacs and pumped-up thugs merely gilded the reputation reserved by the British as law-abiding peacemakers.
But by enlisting the Protestant militias as auxiliaries while presenting itself as a neutral arbitrator, Britain left itself vulnerable to exposure. It could not stop a father seeking justice for his son wherever he might find it – not from the UVF or Protestant politicians, but among the human-rights groups, in Dublin, in Washington and at the United Nations.
All these pressures are bearing down on Britain. It has been exposed not as peacemaker but as perpetrator, spreading terror and spilling blood; as the most powerful presence among the warlords. That is the national narrative we need to contemplate before we can consign collusion to the past.
The Guardian, Monday November 14, 2005
The Sex Discrimination Act was passed 30 years ago this month, in a year when it was very heaven to be alive – 1975, the UN’s International Year of Women. It was in the sway of the women’s liberation movement and its delirious tumult, a year when the beautifully unruly mingled with the great and the good.
I recall a gathering of women at Lancaster House with the minister who got the equality legislation through a reluctant cabinet – the glinting Red Queen, Barbara Castle – being bewildered by all these women wearing badges saying “Director, Women’s Liberation Movement”. Could they all be the director? Oh yes.
That was the year when something truly historic happened: the state took the side of women. The equal pay act and the sex discrimination act converged with another epochal gesture: a Labour government and a labour movement, for the first time in their history, designed an economic strategy that didn’t do in women. The social contract awarded a national flat-rate pay rise. Low-paid women felt like they’d won the pools. That convergence did more than anything before or since to address discrimination and shrink the gender gap.
But it didn’t last. There was a counter-revolution. Within a couple of years the men resumed normal bargaining and we ended up with a Tory government.
The SDA’s impact on education and the professions, though slow, was exponential. Women are now the majority in professions from which half a century ago they were exiled. But instead of seeing women’s movements as natural allies, New Labour gave birth to itself as a project unencumbered by feminism, which it blamed (along with gays) for losing Labour elections.
That lack of rapport leaves us with the prospect that the gender revolution fizzles into an amended patriarchal settlement. So women are allowed to work, get into debt, get a PhD – but on condition that they do what they’ve always done: take care of men and children; pay a forfeit for motherhood; put up with porn in the office; and, over a lifetime, even if they’re as good as a bloke, get paid, promoted and pensioned less. It costs women millions to be women. And if they get a bit of power, they’re told to use it wisely – never make a scene.
So, what are we celebrating? It should be a source of national shame that we suffer a law that was past its sell-by date when it was enacted. While our government restlessly improvises new legislation by the minute to deal with purported enemies within, it seems oblivious to the large and small humiliations that smite the average woman as she journeys through an average life.
This is not to say the SDA was a waste of time. But it forced an individual woman to take an individual action to prove conscious discrimination, in a culture that is unconsciously, as well as knowingly, saturated with sexism. What to a woman is an affront is still, to our culture, normal, just a laugh.
When this law was enacted, it was legal to discriminate against women. All institutions did it. To place the burden of proof on a woman to show that there was something wrong demanded the impossible. We don’t have a national sensibility that has assimilated what gender discrimination means: harm, humiliation, poverty; it saps the will to live, it makes people ill.
The effect is that despite every statistic showing that discrimination is endemic and the pay gap is growing, our equality legal system is stuck. It conjures up Jarndyce and Jarndyce; it is interminable, extravagant, weird and useless. Charles Dickens’s exposure in Bleak House, currently a gorgeous BBC serialisation, changed the law.
So can we. We know our equality laws have not enlightened and changed our society. But there are alternatives.
The institutions should have a duty to be no-discrimination zones, safe from sexism. We will help them. Unison lawyer Peter Hunter points us to the Health and Safety Act, implemented 31 years ago and says: “that law should have been an incubator”. It generated a universal system of safety practice, inspection and prosecution. Employers have no excuses. The government sponsors monumental compensation schemes.
The same principle should apply to women’s wellbeing. “Why do we see a falling object as worse than the male brain?” asks Hunter. “You can’t recover from a lifetime of discrimination and poverty. Why shouldn’t a woman be able to say: that man is a health hazard in my workplace, I want him out?”
The government says it is sorted: public authorities must promote equality. But it is a tick-box duty, sequestered in administration. And then they spend fortunes resisting women’s cases.
By contrast, in Northern Ireland the Good Friday agreement made equality – on grounds of religion, race, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation and caring responsibility – a constitutional duty. All public bodies must promote it, measure it, monitor it. More than that, they must enlist those with a stake in it – the disadvantaged – to participate in producing equality as an outcome of the policy-making process. Civil society has the opportunity to be not merely an audience but a partner.
This approach transforms how you do equality, and what it might mean to be a citizen. If the most brutalised place in these islands can do it, why can’t we?
