#augh it's 2am kiss kiss goodnight

[kerryweaverlesbian]

Ghostwatch (1992) is about rape culture/domestic abuse and the media's complicity in it. Btw. Discussion of domestic violence, SA and CSA below.

It's literally about a family of women who will not be believed about what they're going through no matter what their evidence. Case closed thanks for reading. Okay but seriously:

Haunting is SA/Domestic Violence

The signs of the haunting are: items of monetary value being destroyed (making it harder to afford to leave even if they weren't already in council housing - they can't afford a new home); children having unexplained marks; disturbed sleep; children talking about being asked to do things they don't want do (such as drown the "bad bunny"); children having someone in their room at night that they dont want in there; inappropriate writing found in school books; literally feeling the sense of being touched all over. These can be signs of abuse.

The site of the most horror, the glory hole, is where Suzanne and Kimmy's father (and Pam's husband) spent a lot of time. When Kimmy peaked in there, that's when she saw Mr Pipes.

Multiple phone-in accounts of the supernatural take place in the viewer's homes.

Dr Pascoe says that Suzanne would be easily victimised by a poltergeist because she's from a "broken home". If there's already family upheaval, it can be very easy for the warning signs of abuse to slip through the cracks.

All but two of the people most willing to take the paranormal seriously were women. Of the men, one was a victim of it himself and opted to obscure his face before talking about it due to fear of ridicule (whose trauma revolves around an unpleasant gloopy liquid being put on him without his consent) and the other was an occultist who didn't take the story of this particular family seriously enough to do the whole shebang, instead merely prayed with them. I'm not saying that only/almost exclusively women get sexually assaulted, or that women do believe each other more frequently - because we don't- but I am saying that the 90s would.

Media complicity

Initially, the reporting on the paranormal in Ghostwatch is lighthearted but aims to entertain the idea that the Early family are being honest. They have Dr Pascoe in the studio, they send a team to investigate, they do believe that something is going on, if not a haunting.

However. Over time, the cracks in the media's willingness to believe women starts to show.

They bring on an "expert" (who says merely that 'this could all be fake', not getting into any specifics of how or why, who openly insults Dr Pascoe and then she is tone-policed when she responds to his criticism - "did he upset you?" "[clearly upset but knows she's being goaded on live tv] no!").

Pam shows how print media responded to her, using her as a spectacle to keep eyes on their product - which is also what the BBC is doing in-universe. (Ironically, having so many eyes is what ultimately dooms the broadcast!)

And then, of course, Suzanne is caught hitting the pipes. Immediately, with one piece of evidence against them and regardless of the other evidence, Michael Parkinson gleefully (from, I suspect in part relief that he doesn't have to believe this could happen) starts disregarding everything else Dr Pascoe has to say. Why should we believe her? We have one piece of evidence to the contrary.

He hangs up the phone when she gives advice. He (more openly) devalues her contributions as false. He interrupts her saying that they don't want to give people nightmares. He's indulging, while maintaining his professional façade, in the high of catching someone out.

Suzanne is caught and discredited on the basis of her recreating the events of the haunting - aka the abuse. Dr Pascoe says this is part of the pattern, and she's not wrong. Children can do this as victims of abuse. Suzanne not wanting to talk about these actions - the writing in her schoolbooks, hitting the pipes - is taken as a sign of her guilt. In-fiction, had Suzanne believed that she would be taken seriously regardless of whether something happened specifically that night, she likely wouldn't have taken that action. But the BBC themselves staged a joke on Sarah earlier that night with Suzanne as a co-conspirator, having Craig jump out at her, implicitly mocking them. She knew she wouldn't be taken seriously if nothing happened. She needed there to be spectacle because otherwise they would be condemned just like her mum was by print media.

The BBC turns on this family, just as media outlets and public opinion can and will turn on victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault if they are 'revealed' to not be perfect victims. If they hold something back that they're embarrassed about, they're a liar, if they ever tried to protect themselves, they're just as bad, if they tried to communicate their distress in a way that isn't palatable or immediately understandable they're denied safe housing and ridiculed.

Even after seeing more ghostly events after the Suzanne reveal, and even with the phones ringing off the hook with more people who relate to these events, Parkinson is perfectly happy to accept that the girls and the reporter team are now happily playing board games again. He stops investigating. He's decided who the guilty party is, and his condescending correspondent is in agreement.

We cut back to Craig Charles, and he's having a laugh with the other (male) paranormal invesigator about how nothing is happening. How silly it would be if ghosts were real! "Where would I hold the microphone!" While being followed by two kids, out alone past the watershed - after Parkinson calls out a distressed mother for her kids watching tv after the watershed. Who's looking out for them? Certainly not Craig.

And then. After the problem is willfully ignored. It gets worse. After being ridiculed on the trusted news channel BBC 1, paranormal activity goes on the rise.

"It's in the machine", Dr Pascoe says, and again, she's not wrong. At the end of the film, Parkinson is literally, physically used by the ghost to spread its message. The callous disregard for women's safety, the downplaying of victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, the lack of respect for the reality that some people have to live in - part of it is down to the media's portrayals of the people that bring these cases forward. The stigma perpetuated by the machine empowers abusers to continue and to escalate their behaviours.

In real life, one should definitely be skeptical of someone telling you that ghosts are real, especially someone with dubious, unsubstantiated evidence and who's trying to sell a book about it. However, in the film Ghostwatch, the paranormal IS objectively real and it is an effective metaphor for how victims can be mistreated by the media. If the BBC had believed the Early family outright - or at least treated them with a greater deal of respect than camping inside their house and making jokes at their expense - the problem would not have spread.