Tag Archives: Domestic violence

Violence against the marginalised: it’s not just a gendered thing

CN for domestic violence and sexual violence mentions, discussions of structural violence, particularly ableism, and its role in violence

I was preparing some training on disability access and inclusion recently and I looked up the statistics on disabled people’s experiences of crime. The following graphs show the ONS statistics on domestic abuse and sexual assault.

[image: graph of domestic abuse statistics showing disabled people are at higher risk than women as a group]

[image: graph of sexual assault statistics showing disabled people are at higher risk than women as a group]

The very blatant story these graphs show us is that disability is a stronger factor in being targeted for violence than being a woman. Now, if we look at the various stats for assault of LGBT+ people, we see the same thing – LGBT+ people, regardless of gender, experience higher levels of victimisation across the board than women as a group, and trans people’s experiences are particularly high.

So, the question is, why do we say, “violence against women and girls” rather than “violence against marginalised people” and what does this do to our understanding of the mechanisms behind victimisation?

How “gender critical” ideology has warped the conversation to serve patriarchy

Feminism talks about structures of power created to give a group advantages. Intersectional feminism talks about how these oppressive structures interlock with one another so that misogyny and classism and racism and ableism etc are not separable – it leads to the overarching concept of kyriarchy.

“Gender Critical” ideology has, I think it’s clear, flourished because mainstream non-feminist influences promoted it over other feminists. This was evident within the domestic violence sector that I used to work in, where funding went towards gender essentialist models of male violence and female passivity (discussed here), and with the publications and mainstream successes of writers who promoted this ideology. The establishment may pretend to disapprove, but it will gleefully facilitate.

And the reason this ideology serves patriarchy so well is because it erases the idea of built power structures that can be dismantled in favour of the idea of male supremacy as a biological inheritance. Men are imagined as fundamentally and biologically predisposed towards dominance and violence, sexual or otherwise. Inherent to this message is the idea that it’s not patriarchal power we need to be afraid of, but rather the dangerous, marginalised stranger lurking behind the bushes. Women need protection, it says, not equality, and safe, legally segregated spaces, not a level playing field.

Women don’t experience less violence in society from men because segregated toilets (etc) exist and because they are legally separate and can be excluded from the kinds of schools that breed many of our politicians and judiciary. But it makes a nice story in preservation of the status quo.

Let’s not learn our trans politics from transphobes

In making misogyny the “one true oppression” we bow to the erasure of built oppressive structures and reinforce biological essentialism – buying into the notion that there are fundamental differences between men and women that cause inequality, rather than simply power relations.

Meanwhile, here’s the rub: a lot of us in this community are disabled, and all of us are LGBT+, and actually, these two axes of oppression are much more salient in predicting the amount of violence we experience. Transmisogyny ensures an extra helping of many types of violence, because it adds in another dimension of oppression us TME folks don’t experience. Equally racism adds a dimension white people don’t experience, and so on.

Where our discourse goes awry is when we omit to notice that all trans people are experiencing levels of violence greater than those of cis women. It took me a long time to realise this – the inordinate amounts of violence I’ve face in my life are statistically more likely to be related to me being disabled, bi, trans or autistic than to having been assigned or perceived female. Transphobia, queerphobia and the victimisation of disability are incredibly strong forces in all our lives. Ageism, racism and classism are also much greater predictors of violence than is often acknowledged.

I think this is what has partly given rise to the “transandrophobia” debate and the unnecessary need for AFAB trans folks to talk about their (dubious) “female socialisation”. The narrative of female victimisation is so powerful we completely lose sight of belonging to groups that are far more likely to be attacked than cishet, able white (etc) women.

Where’s the discourse on violence against disabled people? LGBT+ people? POC? Young people? And so forth.

White women are also unfortunately good at co-opting the victimisation of women of colour to exaggerate their own marginalisation. Meanwhile, sometimes very privileged white middle class able women can put themselves into positions of power in queer spaces with zero ability to reflect on the ways in which they hold structural power. The apparent narrative is that “woman” is the big brand oppression and no other oppression comes close.

You cannot split our community down the middle

For me, quite aside from the fact gender isn’t a binary and gendered oppression isn’t either, trans spaces need a very vibrant awareness of intersectionality and an ability to not be blinkered to any oppressive structures. While current toxic mainstream discourse has focussed on trans women, additionally endangering them, in community spaces what we see is a much more mixed picture, in terms of who especially needs our care.

The community isn’t divided neatly by AGAB into winners and losers – there are trans women who’ve never experienced violence, and trans men who have. This isn’t because “men are oppressed too” and it certainly isn’t because trans women hold structural power over trans men, but because our identities are complex and our experiences multi-determined. If you’ve experienced violence, you probably have less in common with someone of your AGAB who hasn’t than another trans person, AGAB irrelevant, who has. If you’re living on the breadline, that’s a social factor more salient in terms of the risks you face than which label you claim.

This doesn’t mean TME folks don’t need to reflect on and unlearn transmisogyny. It does mean that transmisogyny isn’t the only oppressive structure that exists. It’s the job of all of us to reflect on the ways in which we hold privilege as well as the ways we don’t, and be mindful of which intersections are relevent in any given conversation.

I remember once making a transphobic feminist implode by pointing out that Margaret Thatcher could and did oppress working class men, gay men and men of colour, and none of that meant that misogyny isn’t real, nor was MT exempt from it. In a conversation where gendered oppression was the One True Real Oppression, this statement was too much for said transphobe.

Of course, if we’d specifically been having a conversation about misogyny, that would have been a derail, but we weren’t, we were talking about the fact that women can be oppressive and hold power.

If we simply understood queerphobia and transphobia as Huge and Deadly forms of oppression in their own right trans men would have the framework to articulate their struggles more coherently and we as a community could hold together instead of letting ourselves be split by what are essentially outside narratives.

Equally, while the term transmisogyny is entirely justified because of the specific and prevalent phenomenon it describes, the deadly combination of being young and trans is often missed and neglected, as is the risk our young people of all AGAB are at because of the current transphobic discourse that specifically targets young people. And the way the prevalence of neurodiversity in our community is used to undermine autistic trans people is also a glaring issue. And the way ableism and fatphobia create lethal barriers to trans healthcare (and the ways barriers to healthcare create barriers to safety). And the multiple systemic barriers and risk of violence trans people of colour experience. Structural violence takes many forms, and it all matters. There doesn’t need to be a competition on this, we can care about all oppression and want to dismantle it in all its forms.

Trans men who’ve faced violence, discrimination and abuse don’t need to (and shouldn’t) insert themselves into a conversation about trans women’s experiences, they can have their own conversation on its own merits, in other words.

Right now in the UK if you don’t have the means to self-fund your transition you face 5 year waits for healthcare and that could prove fatal, and expose you to increased violence, so anyone already transitioned or with access to private healthcare carries enormous privileges in our community. I own that privilege as someone who faced a one, not five-year wait.

We all have value and many of us are in poor shape

There are many ways in which our marginalisations can put our safety at risk. They’re all violences. In community, we don’t need to figure out which of these violences is the most important because they’re bad enough, all of them are. We can and should value and care about everyone in this community and the violences thay face. The LGBT+ community has played the “we’ll send the bus back for the rest of you later” game and it doesn’t work out for anyone.

If the stats shown above tell us anything it’s that unlearning ableism is every bit as imperative as unlearning sexism. There are no lesser oppressions, no unimportant causes. And if that’s true, as a community we have a responsibility to show up for each other, work at dismantling all these structures, and building community across difference, not assumptions of sameness.

How Medicine Treats Disabled Trans People

Podcast On Trans Issues

How Covid-19 Is Affecting The Transgender Community…

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An extract from a talk I did for the University of Nottingham for Transgender Day of Visibility (31/3/20), detailing some of the extra complications that exist for the trans community around this pandemic.

Please note, I use certain language in this video that is ingrained but not ideal – It’s interesting how when we’re tired and stressed we use less skilful words, for example:

Trans people being on a “journey” is an unhelpful cliché.
Most trans people who were assigned female at birth would prefer to refer to their upper body with the word “chest”.
Gender incongruence has superseded the term gender dysphoria, according to the World Health Organisation, and is generally preferred in-community, although not by everyone.

Thinking intersectionally about abuse

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It feels as if there is a big conversation happening currently about abuse and sexual violence, one that is going beyond the single narrative of violence by men towards women. For LGBT+ people, and particularly trans people, who whatever their gender are disproportionately abused, this is very important. I write about this, in response to the #MeToo viral campaign, in my latest article in The Queerness.

The danger of opening out the discussion and realising that people are abused, not just women, is that we can erase much of the good work that feminism has done in highlighting structural inequalities that particularly affect women, and enable abuse. The Harvey Weinstein saga and others like it has not happened in a gender neutral context, and it’s dangerous to pretend it has. With that in mind, I responded to an article in BACP Therapy Today that to me went backwards rather than forwards, erasing the good feminist work that’s been done around abuse that highlights the abuser’s power as an essential ingredient for abuse to happen.

My letter is shared in full here:

It was at once heartening and disappointing to read Phil Mitchell’s piece about men’s experience of abuse in Boys can be victims too, October issue.

It is very important that we raise awareness of male victimhood and also female perpetration, however it’s sad that when this happens it so often comes with a side attack on feminist approaches to violence. As someone who has worked in this field for a long time, I wish to develop the feminist model, but not throw it out. There are very good reasons for including power analysis in our appreciation of abuse. What is limiting is a non-intersectional appreciation where the power differential between men and women is noted, but other power differentials are ignored. Mitchell’s approach seems to be, rather than note the other power differentials that exist, to attempt to erase misogyny.

Mitchell states “what is common to all victims of CSE is not their age, ethnicity, disability, or sexual orientation, but their powerless and vulnerability” and yet we know that powerlessness and vulnerability can be caused by those very things Mitchell lists. We know looked after children are more vulnerable to abuse, children in general are more vulnerable than adults, disabled and neurodiverse people more vulnerable than able/neurotypical, etc.

Particularly absent from the discussion, despite referring to gay clients, is the established research data that LGBT+ children experience higher levels of abuse than their straight counterparts. Around 50% of trans people, whether men, women or non-binary, experience childhood sexual abuse. In a society that stigmatises and marginalises gender non-conformity, and disbelieves or rejects the narratives of LGBT+ kids, it’s not hard to imagine the reasons why predators target them.

Finally, Mitchell makes a bold and unsubstantiated claim, that the skewed figures suggesting women experience higher levels of abuse are false. And yet, this imbalance holds over a number of different studies and methodologies, including anonymous self-reporting. As a practitioner, I can assure Mitchell that women also under-report, and that 15 year old girls also cling to the idea that having adult “boyfriends” is something special, and conceal the abusive nature of the relationship from themselves and others.

The myth that women and girls find it easy to speak up about abuse is particularly problematic. Of the women clients I have worked with, a tiny handful have spoken up and still less have been supported and believed. Having worked with both male, female and non-binary clients, I can confirm that much of what Mitchell reports is by no means specific to male victims, although of course there will be specific social narratives and dynamics in play for all diverse groups of people, and certainly dismantling our ideas around male power, invulnerability and masculinity is a feminist issue that ultimately will assist male victims.

Abuse is a multi-determined phenomenon and I agree we should take all victimisation equally seriously, as a disadvantage in and of itself that can lead to future inequalities. However, that does not excuse us from noting the many power differentials that enable abuse to happen, including misogyny. If we are not aware of these power differentials, how may we ensure they do not replicate themselves in the therapy room?

We need to widen the feminist dialogue, not dismiss it. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality gives us the framework to understand that power dynamics are not single issue and that gender is just one factor within a complex web of structural inequalities that exist in society. Through this lens, we can look at female perpetration, male victimhood, and the disproportionate burden of abuse that falls on the LGBT+ community and other minority groups.

As a pro-intersectional feminist, the work I do with people who have endured abuse and oppression will always be informed by an understanding of power dynamics, and an awareness of the complex nature of these. This takes a great deal of self-reflection and exploring of unconscious biases, but the therapist who does not want to see these structures cannot possibly work safely with their effects.

Follow Sam on Twitter (@Sam_R_Hope)

Gender Segregation – For your own good?

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I am reposting this from April 8 because it isn’t showing up in the sidebar.

TW for discussion of violence and abuse, including sexual abuse

A long time ago, I was vulnerably housed, living in a hostel in a city down South. Next door to me lived a couple, a really tall older man and a young adult man who had dwarfism. I’m going to call the smaller guy Paul, although his real name has disappeared from my head. I’ll never forget his story, though.

People have always told me their life stories – I guess I have that kind of face. Paul’s was pretty tragic – a childhood of terrible neglect and physical, emotional and sexual abuse. It was hard to hear – the worst thing I’d ever heard at the time, which given the things I’d heard and experienced is saying a lot.

Paul’s companion was his “saviour” – someone who showed him love he had never known, but it soon became clear that this older man had a temper and was violent – sometimes I was called into the aftermath of blood, bruises, tears and apologies. They clearly loved each other, but I could see that what Paul had now was only good compared to the horror of his past – he was still being abused, and he was terribly vulnerable.

A journey towards separatism

Forward fast a few years and I’d pretty much become a lesbian separatist – I’d come out the other side of therapy for my own abuse from cis men, and I’d figured out the safest kind of world is a world without men in it, at least for me (okay, I admit that later I learned women weren’t as safe to be with as I’d hoped, but that’s another story for another time). Back then I worked for women-only domestic violence services, and I firmly believed they need to stay women-only (note: for me, that always included trans women).

But then the UK funding climate changed and the service I worked for started to work with men, amid resistance from myself and other workers.

[Image: a crying woman cowers in front of a man's clenched fist]

But that work with male survivors changed me. It turns out there are other Pauls in the world, that male/female is not the only axis of oppression that exists. I discovered that sometimes women really do abuse vulnerable men, that as well as being a man, someone can be queer or elderly or young or disabled or little or a person of colour or economically vulnerable. And most importantly, I discovered that despite the power imbalance, women and men are not fundamentally different and our experiences of abuse and trauma are not fundamentally different. I discovered gender as a continuum, and human experience as a continuum, and began to free myself from the simplistic, convenient, and binary models I had clung to.

Back then, we would say “yeah, but men should set up their own services, women shouldn’t have to look after men, it isn’t their job”, and that works so well as an argument when I think of this group of people “men” with the attached picture I have of someone able and white and well-muscled. But it sounds callous, if I’m honest, when I think of someone like Paul. Really? Not the job of an able, middle class professional being paid by taxpayers money to care about a vulnerable, homeless abuse survivor with dwarfism? That sounds a little different, doesn’t it?

I’m not suggesting that Paul didn’t have male privilege, far from it. I am simply suggesting male privilege is not the only privilege there is, and that he lacked many others.

At the same time, I felt uneasy – a service with “women” in the title helping men was a bit like Cadbury’s making gravy. The whole thing needed a bit of a rethink. Because “domestic violence” had become synonymous with women, and heterosexual women at that, it had coalesced around one particular form of oppression – sexism. Ageism, ableism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, biphobia, classism and poverty (etc) were not getting a look-in or being treated as equally serious oppressions.

Perhaps this is because women’s organising does benefit from potentially having the weight of half the world’s population behind it. Women are not a minority, and maybe that’s an advantage they have over other oppressed groups. It’s helped them be the only oppressed group that’s consistently able to create publicly funded separate spaces.

Some time later still, I went to work for a mixed gender sexual abuse survivors service, and some of my feminist friends were angry with me – they did not believe there was such thing as a genuine male abuse survivor, they honestly thought that men could only be perpetrators. I was shocked, but I also understood – in a world where separatism had created a bubble in which we never heard about male survivors, it was easy to disbelieve their existence. What we saw more often was male perpetrators manipulating and abusing by playing the victim, a common story.

But by now my eyes had been painfully opened – male survivors do exist, male survivors of abuse by women exist. Even though the power structure between men and women is very unequal, on an individual level there are variations, and other power structures at play. For example, boys under 7 sexually assaulted by female relatives and then labelled as “seducers” based on their maleness have their child/adult power inequality erased.

My own history and the work I did was raising complex questions about gender, trauma and abuse that I needed to explore. I went and did an MA with a particular focus on gender and trauma. That journey led to me coming out as a non-binary transgender person, but it also opened my eyes to the many layers in the stories we tell ourselves about violence against women.

“For your own good”

Gender segregation – in domestic violence services, prisons, toilets, and other women only spaces is supposedly for women’s own good. We have to keep women and men separate because it’s thought impossible to expect the same standard of non-violence from men as from women. This constant threat of violence and micro-aggressions is part of what keeps women oppressed, even to the point where feminists argue for single-sex education so girls can “do better” despite the fact our country is ruled by an ex-boys’ school elite. Gender segregation keeps women out of power and yet it’s still seen to be in their interests.

When I wrote my dissertation, I came across evidence that feminist domestic violence services, in the US at least, were being controlled by an external, ultra-conservative agenda – the message to services, in summary, appeared to be “if you want funding for your shelters, then you must present and perpetuate the ‘women as powerless victims’ narrative” – any hint that women’s position in society is negotiable, changeable, evolving and conditional is erased to create a fixed condition of women as a static underclass. The reality, that some women are strong, violent, unassailable, powerful, has ironically become as unpalatable to the people defending these vital services as it has to the conservatives, and so we feminists working for an end to domestic violence found ourselves shoring up the very thing we wanted to dismantle. In order to support women in the world the way it is, we have given the way the world is an increasing solidity and sense of permanence.

All those years I spent in women’s spaces, I fought for their preservation. Even whilst knowing in my heart that gender isn’t a binary. Whilst knowing that I carried the male gaze and male socialisation into those spaces. That I identified as woman in some ways and man in others. That I myself was capable of both victimhood and violence (I was prone to physically lashing out as a youngster, something that’s hard for me to own up to).

It’s hard not to end up with more questions than answers when trying to think of ways forward. I will continue to stick up for women’s spaces, whilst hoping we evolve away from them. I hope that segregated spaces were a necessary part of the journey, but not where we’re going to end up. I want a world not of assimilation, of “not seeing gender” but of inclusion and anti-oppression, where there is an awareness of inequality and people’s vulnerability, and an empathy for difference in all spaces. This becomes increasingly necessary as we realise that many of the smaller minority groups will never have the resources or traction to create their own safe spaces. And as Audre Lorde famously said, we do not live single-issue lives, so our separation into neat, easy to delineate categories is more problematic than at first appears.

More than anything, though, I would love to see an end to the way we construct and reinforce toxic masculinity. I fear that in this neoliberal world, it may be in some people’s interests to maintain male violence and its function of domination, control and security. It is not mindless – it serves a purpose in keeping our country economically strong and our race in a superior position. Subverting that role in whatever way we can, and that includes breaking down the myths that separate us, is tough, complicated but important work.

Gender Segregation – “For your own good”?