Tag Archives: The Independent

Violence in Vogue

Vogue Italia finds itself in an imbroglio about violence against women.

Every year editor Franca Sozzani attempts a ‘political’ spread. She is alert to the ambiguities of the fashion industry and tries to lend her resources of her 100,000-circulation magazine to a progressive theme.

So far, so noble. She tells The Independent:

I think about not what could make the magazine different, but what could make a good issue, that people will remember. Anyway, I’m using fashion! I’m using what everybody else is using. I’m more or less using the same girls that everybody’s using. I’m very politically correct in this way, but in the other way, I feel that we can use fashion in a different way.

Her April 2014 issue devotes a spread to the scandal of domestic violence and it has roused great tumult.

Vogue Italia photography by Steven Meisel

Photography by Steven Meisel for Vogue Italia

The controversy is less to do with the fact of Vogue doing violence against women, more to do with whether it can do it, whether the magazine has pulled it off.

Sozzani has explained her commitment to the project, it is ‘our civic duty’ she writes, ‘to convey a message against barbarism.’ She has expressed her alarm at the statistics showing that two women are killed every week in Italy — the same statistic as the UK.

Her photographer Steven Meisel captures exquisite corpses, horror scenarios evoking The Shining, and of course, the frocks.

Vogue Italia photography by Steven Meisel

Photography by Steven Meisel for Vogue Italia

Sozzani herself has said that when she considered the concept, ‘the idea was cinematic’. This, then, was a genre shoot.

But did she pull it off? Could women who, she writes, are suffering, ‘feel our nearness’?

Having registered how young people relish the horror movie genre, she writes that the death rate from domestic violence ‘is really a horror show.’

But of course it isn’t a show. And that’s a clue to the problem with the spread: it is defined by form, by cinematic allusion and the codes genre, but not the content of violence against — the cultures that sponsor men’s domination and defeat of women.

The spread doesn’t show the relationship so much as it rehearses the mis en scene that saturates popular cultures of violence. It doesn’t rupture them, it repeats them.

That’s why Vogue Italia’s domestic violence spread is controversial: its message is overwhelmed by the medium — the pleasures of seeing the bodies of women, dead or alive, are repeated, again and again.

A Very British Murder

Reports of the horrendous death of  Bijan Ebrahimi — a disabled man living in Bristol — seem doomed to point in all the wrong directions. He was murdered — beaten and torched to death — by neighbours who spread the rumour that he was a paedophile.

Bijan Ebrahimi by Nicholas Razzell

Bijan Ebrahimi, a ‘caring loving and unselfish’ man according to The Independent (Photo by Nicholas Razzell)

But the rumour could have been staunched by the police who investigated the allegation and found no basis for it. And police could have talked down Mr Ebrahimi’s assailants had they done their primary duty to the public: to keep the peace.

There are the inevitable squeals that Britain is obsessed by hunting down paedophiles — my discussion on the Jeremy Vine Show on 29th October 2013 repeated this theme.

It isn’t back up by evidence: the statistics announced in the same week, discovered by Labour MP Emily Thornberry, confirms that impunity meets people interested in raping or sexually offending against women and children.

But the murder of Mr Ebrahimi exemplifies the toxic mix of muddle, indifference and fury that surrounds the issue.

The story of Mr Ebrahimi’s demise really begins with the authorities’ failure to ensure public safety on his estate in Brislington, Bristol. He’d complained about children damaging the flowers and apparently, in frustration at his failure to engage anyone to stop this, he began taking photographs of the children spoiling his garden.

According to The Independent Mr Ebrahimi had been harassed by ‘youths’ attacking his flower basket. He called the police, he took photographs of the perpetrator, he defied police advice to stay inside his flat — effectively making him a prisoner in his own home — and when police finally arrived on 12th July a crowd gathered around the flat and shouted ‘paedo’.

Police arrested Mr Ebrahimi, checked out the allegations and found no evidence whatsoever, and returned him back to the flat where, by then, he was living amidst vital hostility.

On 14th July Mr Ebrahimi was dead — he had been beaten and torched. Several members of Somerset and Avon police service are the subject of disciplinary action and both the police and the local authority are scrutinizing the sequence of events.

What is apparent already, however, is that a disabled person’s life has been ruined and then taken; the primary duty of the police, public safety and security, was neither contemplated nor implemented.

When he was returned to his home, his angry neighbours were not addressed, they were not disabused of their prejudices, and the ‘youths’ were not called to account.

What is community policing if not this?

Was this case a sign of a society gone mad, obsessed by paedophiles, suspecting abusers of lurking behind every hedge?

Well, no, actually.

Is Rochdale so different from anywhere else? In 2012 a group of men were jailed for abusing at least 47 girls — even though evidence had been available to the authorities about these predators since 1991.

Is Oxford so different from anywhere else? In 2011 the police investigated evidence that a group of girls had been sadistically abused by a group of men — despite the efforts of some of these girls to tell their story to the authorities for eight years. It was the girls, not the men, who had been stigmatized.

In West Yorkshire, a group of men was jailed in 2008 after organizing the abuse of an estimated 50 girls at two schools. Did no one notice?

In the very week that the trial of Mr Ebrahimi’s tormenters was reported, the Labour MP Emily Thornberry announced that the investigation of rape and sex offences had dropped:  the number of rapes referred by the police to the Crown Prosecution Service in 2012-13  was 5404 — that is 2700 fewer than in 2010-11.

Thornberry commented that there has been a steady decline in the number of cases being referred to the CPS by the police, despite a steady rise in the number of people feeling confident enough to go to the police.

The current number of referrals to the CPS is the lowest in five years.