there's our catastrophe

content note: rape, child sexual abuse

bill roache, march 2013, on jimmy savile:

Roache: “If you accept that you are pure love, and if you know that you are pure love and therefore live that pure love, these things won’t happen to you.”

Interviewer Garth Bray: “To some people that sounds perhaps like you’re saying victims bring things on themselves – is that what you’re saying?”

Roache: “No, not quite, but and yet I am, because everything that happens to us has been a result of what we have been in previous lives or whatever.”

…Roache: “Paedophilia is absolutely horrendous. Paedophiles should be sought out, rooted out and dealt with. But there’s a fringe of people who, particularly pop singers, they have these groupies, these girls, who come, they’re sexually active, sexually mature, they don’t ask for their birth certificate, they don’t know what age they may be. But they’re certainly not grooming them and exploiting them, but they can be caught in this trap. These people are instantly stigmatised, some will be innocent, some will not, but until such time as it’s proven there should be anonymity for both”…

Roache: “If someone has done something wrong the law will take its course. But even so, all of them, whether they are proven guilty or not, we should not be judgmental about anybody, ever. We shouldn’t go around condemning, unforgiving. We should all be totally forgiving about everything.”

(src)

bill roache, may 2013:

arrested on two counts of rape of a 15-year-old girl in 1967

like

if somebody is really really concerned about the effect of accusations of sexual assault on the person accused

do not be at all surprised if it turns out they have a vested interest here

this is a post about a rapist I know

I just heard that this Rapist Punk Dude’s rich parents paid for him to get surgery to close his distinctive very large stretched piercings and apparently he’s legally changed his name as well?   we don’t know what to yet

the level of support to avoid any consequences that he’s getting from his rich family and his apologist friends is so completely revolting

I’m also upset because I have a really shitty memory for faces (even for people who I’ve known for a while, like this guy) and I’m overly reliant on details like haircuts and body mods to help me remember and spot people like him and kick them out or at least warn people, especially because they quite often have really common names or change their names frequently, and I was confident that this at least was one dude I could spot across a room, and now he’ll have a different face and a different name.  I really hate knowing his fucking money has so drastically compromised whatever ability I had to keep people safe from him

fuck

this is a post about walking home alone at night and the fear of violence. 

It’s kind of late and I just got home.  I walked from my friends’ place: not far, maybe twenty minutes, alone, in my cheap plastic heels.  I like walking and I like to leave the instant I feel like it.  My dear friend offered to walk me home, I demurred, she pushed, I got slightly pissed off, I got my way.  I pretty much always do.  I’m used to it, this same tussle, over and over, every weekend, every night, for years — for my whole life.  

It’s a little bit more intense at the moment, though, here in Melbourne.  A week or two ago a woman was shot dead down the street from my friends’ place — but that was in the middle of the day.  Really I think Jill Meagher’s death made us all a little crazy.  I can’t tell you how awful it was, the whole story on every channel of every medium for a week.  I so thought she would be found alive, that it would all turn out to be a big misunderstanding.  And then I saw the CCTV footage, saw the way she was standing — that wary, I’ll-hear-you-out, don’t-wanna-provoke, arms-folded stance of women bailed up by men on the street, the stance I can feel now in my flesh memory, in the tension of my shoulders and the twist of my mouth, that I fall into many times in a week or even a day — and my stomach dropped. 

It’s unusual, that kind of violence from a stranger, especially towards someone like her — white, cis, professional-class, not homeless, not particularly vulnerable, except in that she was a woman.  Most often, as a woman, you have more to fear from the guy who offers to walk you to your car than from anyone or anything else.  I got so angry when I first realised that: that chivalry isn’t just kind of annoying and missing the point, but rather is a fucking con, a protection racket, manipulative bullshit that only puts you more at risk.  And I realised that very early in life, basically as soon as I was old enough to go out at night without my parents, so I’ve really never allowed men to walk me anywhere — not if they put it like that.  We can go someplace together, if I feel like it, but you can’t fucking “walk me home”, that’s not happening, not ever.  That feels way more dangerous to me than being alone.  But having said that, street violence against women by strangers does of course happen.  It’s happened to women I know.

So I get it, that people want to walk me home.  And I don’t blame them for their fear, I’m not angry at them, especially not right now.  But I hate it, I hate it, I can’t fucking stand it.  It’s not that I think it’s condescending, especially not from other women — it’s not condescending to recognise that many women fear for their safety walking home alone at night.  And it’s not an attempt to assert my independence, not exactly. 

It’s just that — I don’t know.  What is violence?  Politically speaking, isn’t it the ability to force your will on people, to make them modify their behaviour without giving them anything in return?  Or the power backing that ability up, if that’s a meaningful distinction.  Even in law, an attacker might never lay hands on you, but it’s considered assault if you have reasonable fear that they could have. I don’t mean that modifying your behaviour because you fear violence is comparable, on the individual level, to actually experiencing that violence.  I don’t agree with the rhetoric that we are “all survivors”.  There’s a distinction here that’s important, between structural violence and specific violent acts.  but I also think they are both ultimately, politically, structurally, violent. 

so when I do whatever I would do in a world without violence against women, it doesn’t feel like a gesture asserting my independence, a fuck-you-don’t-talk-down-to-me thing.  it feels like the only thing I can do.  this is a little bit different to a “don’t blame the victim/potential victim” position, although of course I also think that.  I mean it feels like a rational choice.  it feels like if I made any other choice, if I curtailed my movement to avoid violence — I would already be a victim of violence.  to do whatever the fuck I was going to do doesn’t make me feel like I’m walking into danger.  it feels like self-defense.

[picture redacted because it’s awful, click through to see]

januarydaze:

trigger warning: rape, sexual violence, misogyny++

Hey Melbourians, here’s the poster for an event that was going to be held at Richmond’s Station 59 next Wednesday night: “There’s nothing funny about rape - a comedy debate”. 8 male ‘comedians’ battle it out between themselves to determine if rape is, after all, funny, as adjudicated by another man.

I almost threw up when I saw the (vile) poster.

Read about it on facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Station-59/6429215677?fref=ts

Looks like the event has just been cancelled - although word is that the event is just looking for a new venue. On the facebook event the manager of Station 59 claims it was done “without his knowledge”, although he knew that the night was booked out and all 9 comedians were coming.

Keep your eyes out.

Station 59 is: 59 Church st, Richmond, Melbourne. 94278797

this shit is why I can’t with comedy.  here’s a report in the melbourne times online.

Anonymous asked: The details you speak of about Ben not revealing his infection with HPV are completely spirious. HPV is a virus that is pervasive in human populations. Each person is bathed in HPV. You could scrape your skin and find hundreds present. The fact is everyone is infected with these virus and over 80% of sexually active women (and men) will be infected with a high risk strain. There is no way a man could (or would) be tested or know of the particular strains he is infected with.

context (is a poster campaign publicly naming Sydney-based rapist Benjamin McCullagh-Dennis). 

I know this.  A number of other people have addressed this directly; my understanding is that the people involved in Rape Is Real have since chosen to de-emphasise Ben’s HPV. 

I am always concerned by misinformation around STIs.  I just didn’t think that in this context, and given the way it was framed, going HAM on that issue was worth distracting from outing a repeat sexual predator who has gotten away with this shit for years.  I can’t fucking believe that this is your biggest concern here.  You’re making out like this is some schoolyard gossip about boy germs.  Check your priorities. 

Anonymous asked: Do you have any thoughts on Assange reportedly receiving an Aboriginal Passport?

I loathe Assange and I’m not impressed that he’s received the passport.  At the same time, it’s not for me as a non-Indigenous person to police who is given one.  We also can’t forget the context of him actually being Australian.  My understanding is that it’s not to be taken as a special mark of favour, but as a generic requirement that all non-Indigenous Australians or visitors to Australia would, ideally, have to meet.  It does make me feel pretty skeptical of the specific individuals behind it, but it’s still an interesting project, and I think any project centred on race relations between Indigenous people and migrants to Australia should be highlighted and discussed, even if I disagree with particular aspects of its application, or even find it entirely worthless (I don’t, but someone easily could). 

How do you know for sure whether the rape allegations are true or not though?

He and his legal team have admitted that shit went down the way the women involved said it did.  Their defense case is grounded in an argument that it doesn’t count as rape. 

Even if that weren’t the case, I would be highly, highly suspicious of any high-profile male activist transforming his political project into a pressure group helping him avoid trial for rape. 

julian assange: “there is unity in the oppression; there must be unity in the reponse”

oh please

you know what a really effective way is to divide the left?

rape women

like, that is a fairly divisive thing to do, no? 

if assange actually gave a shit about having a unified left he would accept the consequences of his actions and pass on the Wikileaks torch to a less grotesque human rather than transforming his political group into Rape Apologism, The Legal Fund

see also: Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements at INCITE! blog