#VAWG

[stanestreet]

As a November 2024 report by the think tank the Other Half puts it, what are described as “mercy killings” are “very frequently the violent domestic homicide of elderly, infirm or disabled women by men”. Women are the majority of unpaid carers – 80 per cent, according to the King’s Fund. But, strangely, they appear much less likely than men to become “mercy killers”.

This discrepancy is impossible to separate from the wider belief in society that women are a kind of property owned by men. It is seen as a woman’s natural obligation to look after a man, but when a man has to look after a woman, it becomes an unreasonable imposition.

Hence the sympathy a man can draw on if he kills his wife while feeling overwhelmed by her needs. Mungall claimed to have seen an expression in his wife’s eyes “like an animal who needs to be put down and cannot say it” – a comparison that makes him the owner and her the pet.

Are we really supposed to believe that a man who feels that way about his wife is incapable of pressuring her into applying for a medically assisted suicide? In response to concerns from critics of the bill about this possibility, supporters of the bill have pointed to what they regard as its extensive safeguards. Simon Opher MP, a former GP and a member of the bill committee, has even said it is “judging doctors harshly to say that they will not spot coercion”.

Personally, I find Opher’s statement less reassuring and more indicative of a disturbingly blasé attitude to the possibility of abuse. In the limited window of a consultation, it is all too easy for a doctor to miss the signs. A YouGov survey for the charity SafeLives found that half of healthcare professionals felt unable to identify domestic violence. Sometimes, the doctor in question might even be actively untrustworthy: think of Harold Shipman, whose victims were predominantly elderly women.

The more common scenario, though, is the patient who, through lengthy cruelty and coercion from a partner or carer, becomes genuinely convinced that she (or sometimes he) is a burden who would be better off dead. Such a person may even refuse treatment, causing a curable disease to become terminal and placing them within the purview of the bill.

Legislators should be profoundly alert to this danger. Left unaddressed, it could place the state in the grotesque position of becoming a lawful accomplice to abusers. Yet unaddressed it remains. Of the nearly 50 individuals who gave oral evidence to the Public Bill Committee, not one was an expert in male violence or coercive control. (Jane Monckton Smith, an academic who studies femicide, was called but unable to attend; the committee did not attempt to find a substitute for her.)

From the start, the Terminally Ill Adults Bill has been a rush job – in the words of one former Labour adviser, “a quick-and-dirty policy development process that wouldn’t be close to good enough for 99 per cent of the laws made on our behalf”. If it becomes law, Labour risks turning the healthcare system into an executioner for those most in need of protection.

How the assisted dying bill could unleash male violence

[haggishlyhagging]

From Rain and Thunder, Autumn Equinox 2003 edition, way back when Afghanistan still had girls’ schools.

[nothing0fnothing]

One of the first signs something was wrong with me as a child, was I began having these "shut downs."

Basically, my parents would leave me on a task for 5, 10, 20 minutes, come back and I had done nothing, and had no memory of what I had been doing the whole time they'd been gone.

I remember sitting still and thinking, and after what felt like a few seconds, my parents were back and absolutely livid I'd done nothing.

Every time it happened, I got a beating. The first time it ever happened was the first time a beating landed any of us in hospital. I tried not to do it, but I'd get stuck, I don't know how to explain it. Honestly my best explanation is that the beatings took a toll on my developing brain, either psychologically or physiologically.

The first time it happened I was getting dressed for school in the toy room with the Wiggles on TV. I was used to taking my time getting dressed, but I was either extra spacey that day or my step father was extra rageful. He'd look round the door, see I was more watching TV than getting dressed and scream at me to hurry up. I'd jump up and get a shoe on or something and then get stuck in the TV again.

I'd think that a reasonable adult would have simply recognised that the distraction was the TV and turned it off, but he didn't do that. What he did instead was he hit me so hard I went flying across the room and split my face open on a toy.

Another time I remember it happening I was only slightly older than the Wiggles incident (also known as the rocking horse or the unicorn incident as those were the objects I was hit off of and tore my face on respectively.) I had been left for a few moments to pick cereal. In my memory I was looking at cereal options for a few seconds, father shows up and scares the shit out of me. He didn't get straight answers because he was purposefully putting fear into me while asking vague questions. Eventually he loses his temper and just starts bashing my head off of the furniture. My mother came downstairs and noticed I'd set the table for breakfast and had done my morning hygiene routine.

So what actually happened was I started deciding cereal, abandoned that task, set the table with cereal bowls and cutlery, took the milk out of the fridge and set it on the table for everyone, then went into the bathroom, brushed my teeth and washed my face leaving the toothbrush and the face cloth to dry and then combed my hair, leaving the brush in the sink because I couldn't reach the shelf I'd taken it off of. I'd even made a (bad) attempt at rebraiding my hair so my mummy wouldn't have to do it for me. Then I went back into the kitchen to pick for sure what cereal I wanted.

Totally a scenario he could have put together himself if he wasn't desperate to just start beating me, but OK.

[radicalfacts]

radical facts - short feminist facts

#anti sex industry

Sex Trafficking Worldwide

Globally, 4.8 million victims get trafficked for the sex industry every year.

This category includes any adults who involuntarily participate in the sex industry and children experiencing commercial sexual exploitation. 3.8 million victims were adults, and 1 million were children. Globally, 99% of victims were women and girls.

(Data sourced via traffickinginstitute.org)

[radicalfacts]

radical facts - short feminist facts

#patriarchy

Forced Marriage & Child Brides

Forced marriage is still a very prevalent violation of human rights worldwide, especially for women and girls. 88% of victims were women and girls.

37% of victims were under 18 at the time of the marriage. Of these, 44% were under 15 at the time of the marriage.

Each year, 12 million girls under 18 are getting married off. Most of these scenarios consist of the girl getting married off to a much older - adult - man.

The UN report (linked below) states that globally, in 2021, nearly 1 in 5 women aged 20-24 were married before turning 18.

(UN - Report "Gender Snapshot 2022"; general report on women's rights & equality worldwide)

[haggishlyhagging]

All technology is not automatically progress. Regulating a technology does not ensure that a technology will be used in a progressive way. Regulation does not address the international trafficking potential for fetal tissue or the casting of women in the role of human incubators. There can be no exploitation of fetuses or children without a prior exploitation of women, from whence fetuses and children come.

The situation of women and children is very much connected; this is a biological but, more significantly, a political fact. Both women and children share in the same kinds of sexual abuse, and increasingly both become commodities on the international reproductive market. Both are subject increasingly to medical experimentation. New reproductive arrangements, such as surrogacy, are increasing the traffic in women and children across national borders. Women are the breeders; children are the product bred. We have here the international harvesting of women and children.

Many U.S. Americans recognize the horrors of the child organ and illegal adoption trade. Yet they approve of legislation legalizing and/or regulating surrogate contracts, without seeing any connection between the former and the latter. Surrogacy is the acceptable face of reproductive trafficking, yet there is little distinction between a domestic and an intercountry market in women and children. What we call surrogacy in the West is a variant on baby selling abroad. One is soft-core exploitation, the other hard-core. One is glossy, the other graphic. The only distinction is that in surrogacy, the father buys his own genetic child and thereby confers legitimacy on surrogate arrangements because the child is recognized as "his."

The reproductive trafficking in women and children contains all the worst elements of human rights violations. It involves the purchase and sale of human beings, coercion, the uprooting of women and children frequently from their countries of origin and from their culture, sometimes the torture of both, often the medical violation of both, and, more often than we know, the death of both. The reproductive exploitation of women and children, along with their sexual exploitation, is an act of total denigration of human beings. Until we recognize such sexual, reproductive, and medical practices as violations of human rights and abolish the overall structure of this international trafficking in women and children, nothing will change.

-Janice G. Raymond, Women as Wombs