Posts by Lucy Telfar Barnard
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Kumara Republic,
No longer the Andrew Fagan I listened to as a youngster.
Dunno about that. Some school friends and I went to a Mockers concert at Massey in 1988. There was a bunch of drunken students at the back who started singing loudly “Nah nah na na, nah nah na na, hey hey hey, take your clothes off”, over the top of the end of a song. Andrew Fagan said “I should warn you, I have an enormous penis.” I found that pretty gross.
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I'm unspeakably furious. I was quite prepared to give the police the benefit of the doubt and think maybe they were just taking their time to get the case together. But once again, despite their years and years of promising and swearing that they treat the sexual assaulted better now, properly now, that complainants are safe... This shit.
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In my (sample of one, and over twenty years ago) experience, getting a prosecution case together takes time. As I recall, it was at least a year from when I reported the paedophilia until he was arrested. That time was spent collecting statements from the other young women involved and preparing the case. Although I was furious and frustrated over the wait at the time, in hindsight it was sensible. The police had everything prepared at the moment they arrested him, and executed a search warrant at the same time (so they could also gather up all his “amateur photography”). Having the case so well prepared at the time of arrest I think meant it was immediately clear that there was no point in trying any other plea than guilty. Though of course with the way the courts work etc. it was still another year before the final court appearance and sentencing.
So, I don’t know if things are still managed in the same way, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all that with a more difficult case, with no voluntary witnesses, it could easily take two years and longer to bring an investigation to the point of arrest. From that point of view, the police may well have asked themselves whether shutting down the facebook page would have stopped the activity, or merely inhibited their ability to collect evidence. In making that decision, they would appear to have been unaware that the presence of the facebook page would be making things worse for the raped.
Nevertheless, I’m still not absolutely certain that their decision wasn’t the right one. Successfully prosecuting rape is difficult. Given the possibility of the jury having the same ideas about duplicitous jailbait that are common enough, as seen above, in even relatively liberal discourse, the police would want as much evidence as possible to either a) convince the perpetrators to plead guilty immediately; or, should they not, b) mount a water-tight prosecution.
While I wouldn’t pretend for a second to know how the victims in this case feel, nor do I know what I’d say if I were one of them, and the police had come to me and said “We can have the facebook page shut down now, and then you won’t have to live with the knowledge that it’s out there, but it will be much harder for us to gather enough evidence to send them to jail. What would you like us to do?” And I’m not even sure that the police should make the raped make that decision.
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Sooo... the police say charges could be laid if someone else witnessed it. Where are the calls for some member of the group to be "brave enough" to come forward and testify against his friends?
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Tom Semmens,
When my childhood commune’s paedophile was discovered, the mother and uncle of one of the girls went round to his house and beat him hard. I heard they broke his glasses and knocked out a tooth. The daughter of the woman who did the beating was not happy about it at the time. I don’t know how she feels about it now. Certainly if her mother had been arrested, it would not have made things better for anyone. So don’t assume that it’s what your child would want, or will want to remember some years from now.
The paedophile was also banished from the commune. And yet after he left, he went on to assault and rape other girls in other locations. So don’t kid yourself that beating someone up is going to stop them from doing the same thing again.
At the time (early 80s) the commune decided not to go to the police, on the basis that they were concerned about what sort of treatment the girls would receive in the justice system.
For me, through the twelve years it took me to become “brave enough” (though at the time it felt like “weak enough”, but that’s a different point) to report the abuse to the police, and even after the paedophile had been sent to prison for four years, that beating felt like the closest thing I got to justice. But it only felt that way because the other sources of justice were delayed and unsatisfactory. Going round and beating up the perpetrator might relieve your anger, but it doesn’t solve either of the three real problems: If you really care for your children, then (as Emma recommends) look after your child’s needs. If you have the energy, (as James Butler recommends) advocate for better justice system treatment of such cases. and third, support programmes that reduce the likelihood of such offending occurring in the first place, whether by empowering the would-be victims, or by preventing people becoming offenders.
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I’d never heard of Slender until this morning, when one of my children said the reason their light was on at 11pm last night, well past their bedtime, was because they’d been playing Slender yesterday and they were scared. Then they had to tell me what Slender was. And now you mention it too. Must be a thing.
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I have another weird memory from 1984, though I can't remember whether before or after. I went to Queen St to see Supergirl (the only reason I know it was 1984...). When I came out of the film, half of Queen St was cordoned off due to a bomb threat. I remember seeing a squad of police marching down the street outside the Civic.
Later that afternoon the Auckland Star put out an early edition with photos of the police, and I think some wild theorising about who might be behind the bomb threat. But by the second edition, as far as I recall, it got only a few inches, and there was little or nothing about it on the TV news that night. I couldn't understand. At 13, the sight of police marching in an otherwise empty street was apocalyptic and shocking, and I expected it to be a huge deal, but then... nothing. -
Hard News: Local interest, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Um, I'm a little confused.
Alasdair Thompson's blog says "In 2011 I was the subject of an international media furore for saying that some women’s productivity and income is affected by difficult menstruation; a truth I was internationally pilloried for speaking about."
To me that still sounds like a refusal to acknowledge or accept what he did wrong.
He may have had a road to Damascus conversion to Christianity, but it doesn't sound like his reading of feminist literature has been internalised in quite the same way. If his 2011 statements had been in any way supportive of women adversely affected by dysmenorrhea, there wouldn't have been a problem. Instead he implied that women in general deserved to be paid less than men because of "monthly sick problems". He also stated that women take more sick leave than men, without any actual data to back him up. While he claimed even then that he supported equal pay, I've yet to see him acknowledge that views such as those he expressed in 2011 are part of the problem, not part of the solution. -
Indeed. If some guy wrote something like that about my daughter, I'd want to turn up on his doorstep and politely ask him to explain himself. I hear that's meant to work quite well with internet trolls.
Of course he wouldn't be worth the time and etc. etc. But I'd still like to know how he'd respond. If he was just as offensive in the flesh, that would provide a kind of closure, because then I'd know that he was just a really offensive person, and could forget about it. And if he was suddenly sheepish and apologetic, then that would show he was a coward as well, and then I could forget about him with contempt.
Somehow I think it would be one of those two responses rather than anything else.Oh, also,
And he’s been good for 4 pages of interactivity here on what may otherwise have been a slow-blog day.
That's a pretty pathetic sort of excuse. Y'know, if Russell decided to write a blog defending domestic violence, noone would try to suggest the position wasn't all bad because it gave us chat fodder.
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Hard News: Jonesing, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Does that make it ok for me to say “Don’t be a cunt?”
Well, if I was being one it might.
But I remember now. The appropriate response is:
Oh, was that a joke? I don’t get it. Can you please explain it for me?