Escaping from the radiant sunshine and relentless din of the traffic outside, I took refuge in the British Library café, the perfect backdrop for a serious and stimulating conversation where, over a medium latte, I had the great privilege of talking to Professor Liz Kelly of London Metropolitan University, one of Britain’s foremost experts on violence against women.
Chameleon: Could you tell me a little bit about your background and the research you have been involved in?
LK: I come from a working class family in the north of England; I’m the first woman in my family to go to university and I do find it astonishing that not only did I do that, but I ended up a professor. I never had a career plan about academia and I certainly didn’t have a career plan to be successful in academia. I came to feminism because I was pregnant when I was nineteen – I got pregnant the first time I ever had sex. It was consensual, it wasn’t an issue, but I was still negotiating my way out of Catholicism, and so whilst I’d got as far as abortion was OK for other women, it certainly wasn’t OK for me, so instead of going to university at nineteen, I had my daughter. I don’t regret it now at all because I did something different at university than I would have done and I have a sister who is also a daughter. I feel very lucky that we got to spend her childhood together at a time where I wasn’t trying to do two things at once. What I did was be around her and become a feminist, and those two things were actually quite compatible. How I became a feminist was through going to a meeting of a women’s liberation group – reluctantly – I didn’t think it had anything to do with me, whereas of course, it had everything to do with me and changed my life. I have always been somebody who loves ideas and talking about ideas, but they’re never enough. I want to do something. I want to make a difference, so, within about a year, I was itching to do something with these ideas and someone came to talk about whether we might need to have provision for abused women in the small town that I lived in. It sounds ridiculous now to say this, but we didn’t know; we didn’t know whether there were any women who were experiencing that kind of violence in the town where we lived, so we had to go and ask lots of services whether they ever encountered anybody and in the end we opened the second shelter outside of London in this small town called Norwich. Since then my academic life and my activist life have always centred around issues of violence, but, from the time I did my PhD, I’ve been trying to look at violence against women as a whole, the connections between forms of violence – you can isolate them conceptually, but actually in women’s lived experience they’re not, they have histories of encounters with violence, sometimes with the same perpetrator, sometimes with different ones, and so I have worked with this idea of the continuum, that there is a continuum of kinds of violence on the conceptual level, from the normalised and almost acceptable through to the obviously criminal and lethal, but also a continuum in women’s lives, that some of us are relatively fortunate and that we only encounter the low level kinds of violence. They still teach us lessons in femininity and in the gender order. Then there are other women whose lives are suffused with brutality and who I think struggle to have a sense of personhood in the aftermath of all of that. There are obviously women who are killed, but there are also women who I think take their own lives because they can’t live with the history of what’s happened to them and its meanings and how they feel others see and treat them because of it. So I would say my intellectual and activist life is connected to these issues in a very profound way. It’s connected to all aspects of it, both the normalisation and in certain circumstances glamorisation of violence in popular culture and what that means for all of us, but particularly what it means for young women and men growing up with that cultural discourse, a very strong cultural discourse, through to working with women who have actually killed their abusive partners. For the last almost twenty years, in fact it is twenty years this year, which I find very scary, I’ve worked in a research unit, which I’m now director of, called the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit. We were the only research unit in the UK, and Europe, that looked across all forms of violence against women and also linked it to abuse in childhood. We’re still quite rare in doing that. We’ve worked on domestic violence; we’ve worked on trafficking; we’ve worked on prostitution; we’ve worked on child sexual abuse and in the last eight or ten years we have dedicated ourselves to working on rape. With the death of Sue Lees [author of Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial] there was really nobody in the UK, apart from Jennifer Temkin [author of, inter alia, Rape and the Legal Process] working in the legal field, who was actually researching rape. We carried out an analysis for Claire Short before the Labour Party won the election in 1997, in which we demonstrated that – and we didn’t know this at the time – we’d had an unbroken increase in reporting here in the UK, a slight increase in prosecutions, but a virtually static number of convictions and what that means over time is that your conviction rate falls year on year on year and part of what we’ve committed ourselves to doing is not just exposing that, but also trying to explore what’s going on and why that might be the case. We’ve had a number of pieces of research where we’ve tried to look at what we think is going on, also to look at it in terms of Europe, and we’re just about to start a project with colleagues from seven different countries in Europe where we simultaneously track a hundred cases in our own systems and see whether the same things happen at the same points in time or not – that’s exciting.
Chameleon: That sounds really interesting. You talk about low-level violence, how do you define it? Is it wolf whistling in the street when a woman walks past a group of builders?
LK: I meant low-level in the sense that it doesn’t result in a physical injury, or a physical harm. There are, however, harms connected to it which are more social and psychological. They are enactments of masculinity, a particular kind of masculinity, at women’s expense. It also includes things like the presence of pornography in the workplace, the pressure by partners to look at pornography when women don’t want to, a whole series of intimate intrusions, which don’t involve any kind of physical or sexual assault on the body.
Chameleon: Is Susan Brownmiller’s analysis in Against Our Will [Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976] of rape as a weapon to keep women in line still holds true? Or has any progress away from this been made in the meantime?
LK: I think as a piece of feminist rhetoric – and we need rhetoric – it was actually profound, challenging and remains important. As a sociologist and a researcher, I don’t think it’s sufficient to understand the motivations of men, or why some men don’t. I am increasingly thinking that in critical men’s studies what researchers ought to be doing is looking at why some men don’t buy into hegemonic masculinity, and it’s not just that they are from a subordinated group, it’s that they make conscious choices. Why do they do that? What’s the social context in which they make those choices? What I think is most important about it was what she said afterwards, the fact that some men rape, all men benefit, because all men benefit from the social control that it then exerts on women and women’s behaviour – and they benefit from the male protection myth. At a very complex, often unspoken level, women seek the protection of a male partner to stave off the supposed threat from the predatory stranger. Ironically we know that she’s actually more at risk from the male partner, which is not to say that there aren’t predatory men – there are – but what we know more and more is they’re not the stereotypical stranger. They’re quite smart, clever men, who target women in particular ways, in particular contexts and they’ll have strategies that they adapt, depending on whether they’re in a bar, or at a party, or whatever. I’m interested now in exploring those complexities of male behaviour across the entire spectrum, from the ones who eschew the powers that are invested in them to ones that exercise them as a sense of entitlement and then to the few who, one could say, have some kind of diagnosable mental health issue, who are not actually acting rationally.
Chameleon: When we talk about rape myths, the image is always of the pathological stranger, the man who commits the rape is always cast as a demon or a deviant, but that isn’t always the case, is it? A kind of background violence exists.
LK: It’s very rarely the case, which is not to say that there aren’t some men who fit that stereotype. There are. The trouble is that the media, and to an extent also popular fiction, present them as much more commonplace and every day than they actually are, because they give you the dramatic material that you want in a film or in a book. The fact that the guy next door is an everyday sexist isn’t dramatic enough. Even feminist authors, I think, find it difficult to write the everydayness of a lot of violence and I would say the fiction writers who have done so most powerfully and most consistently are actually African-American women in the US and also some Indian women writing fiction in India. I don’t understand why some of my friends are so preoccupied with reading about serial killers. There’s a very odd engagement with that by some feminists. I wonder whether that means that, inadvertently, we get caught up in some of these mythologies too, even though we know rationally that they distort. But they have a very powerful cultural resonance. Maybe it’s that they symbolically represent the kind of threat that women perceive. I think it’s interesting that we’ve moved away from cultural representations of what the majority of violence is to this extreme. I also think it’s probably a cultural response to the feminist challenge in a way. Our challenge was, sorry, no, these are everyday guys, these are our partners, our fathers, our brothers, our uncles, our work colleagues, the men we sit next to on the Tube, and I think that was a very shocking message. I think there was a point at which in the Eighties a willingness existed to engage with it on some level. Increasingly I feel we are pulling away from that recognition. Because everybody now wants to use the word paedophile. I hate that word, no feminist should ever use it because it literally means “lover of children”. I can’t think of anything more misnamed. But we should also not use it precisely because it distances people from the message we were trying to get across, that it’s not these weird deviant guys, it’s our fathers, our grandfathers, the guy next door, the music teacher, the sports coach, the religious leader. These are the men who abuse and they get away with it precisely because of their normality. The more we focus on these weird guys, I think, the less children are protected.
Chameleon: Because you’re homing in on the one who doesn’t fit in, who’s hanging around the playground, rather than, as you say, the father or the brother who’s sneaking into the bedroom at night and wreaking havoc.
LK: Absolutely, and their advantage is that they have access. Most of the reason these guys can do it and can do it often is that they have regular access and legitimised access to children or women.
Chameleon: They are invisible, whereas the “paedophile” is very visible indeed. If you look at the articles in the Daily Mail, they’re terribly hostile towards and dismissive of feminism. What a surprise! For example they would say that Brownmiller’s contentions in the past were merely that, contentions and that we’ve got equality now, so why don’t we just shut up and get on with life? How do we counteract this kind of argument?
LK: My response to that would be if we had equality, I would shut up, I would be very happy to shut up. I wish I could think that in my lifetime I would have the opportunity to shut up, but everything tells us that we don’t have equality, from the evidence from our most recent Women in Work Commission, which showed that the gender pay gap hasn’t reduced significantly for the last fifteen years, we had a fall, but then it stayed static, to the fact that we have more reported rapes than we have ever had in this country. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there are more rapes, but it certainly doesn’t mean that there are less, and if the Daily Mail is right, then there should be less. I still encounter women, both students and in other places where you can see they don’t have the same sense of entitlement, the same sense of worth as men. I still sit on the Tube and men take up three times as much space as women do.
Chameleon: (Laughs) They spread their legs aggressively.
LK: Absolutely. Space invaders, as somebody calls them. I think it’s those things, things that you notice every day – if we really had equality, they wouldn’t happen. Men wouldn’t need two or three times as much space as women. They might need a little bit more if they are significantly taller, but they don’t need two or three times more.
Chameleon: If people read the Daily Mail and they start getting lulled into complacency by its constant barrage of claims that we’ve achieved equality, how can we then overcome such complacency and the denial of inequality that’s implicit in the articles?
LK: I think we should take the fact there is such a consistent and deliberate engagement as evidence of success. I don’t agree that we should just talk the language of backlash and undermining. It’s not necessary to do that if you don’t think that something is changing and you’re trying to resist change. We should see this as part of the process of change and transformation – our gender order, our patriarchy or whatever we want to call it, is changing and this change is contested. It is contested at all sorts of levels. It’s contested at the level of individual relationships, it’s contested in classrooms and it’s contested in the media. We have to be smarter about how we engage with that. The response of some women is to be really frustrated and angry that it’s happening rather than to engage with it and to make sure that there’s not just one voice. For example, can we find a journalist in the Daily Mail to whom one could feed some different information and who might develop a slightly different voice in the newspaper? You’re not going to absolutely change the political tone of a newspaper, but you can affect some of the content. I don’t do enough of this, I know I don’t, but I do think we have to find smart ways of engaging with these contested areas and we have to do more. Robin Morgan once said that if every feminist wrote a letter a day to the newspapers, or to their political representatives we would be a serious force to be reckoned with and it’s still true. If every day each of us did a small piece of activism about what moved us the most we would see different voices. Not every letter gets published, not every response or little campaign has an impact, but the more there are the more there is a sense that yes, there are these voices of resistance, but they’re not going uncontested. There is still a women’s movement. That’s how you sense that there’s a women’s movement because you sense women engaging in disputation in the public sphere. I think we got pulled into establishing organisations working at more strategic and policy levels and I’m not saying we shouldn’t have done that, we should have done it and we need to continue doing it, but we also need to do the things that seem smaller, not so significant, that actually make those who are not feminists feel that there is a feminist voice. Because otherwise they don’t hear or see it.
Chameleon: Or they get a very distorted notion of what that voice involves with phrases like “screaming sisterhood” or the image of the feminist with three moustaches and who only ever walks around in dungarees and bovver boots.
LK: Yes. I think it would be interesting to find out how far those images actually resonate with people because they are so extreme and so unlike real women whom they must encounter and they must see on some level. What is the rhetorical power of it and how long does it last? Does it last long enough to make them smile when they read that particular piece in a newspaper, but that’s all? Or does it have a deeper de-legitimising message? And how does that operate?
Chameleon: My impression is that they’re trying to undermine feminists and feminism, which I suppose could be looked on as a recognition, however implicit, of the fact that we’ve achieved something.
LK: And that we’re considered to be a threat. It always was thus. I sometimes talk to young women about the fact that we never ever were anywhere close to a majority; we were always a small minority. The question was, did you make enough noise? Did you do things that were newsworthy or challenging, and did we have a message that was interesting? But we were never, never ever I think anywhere close to a majority. You could have polls about particular issues where a majority of women would say they agreed about equal pay, they agreed about childcare, but if you asked them were they a feminist, they would say no. That’s OK. I don’t think we have to have the majority of women saying they’re feminists. We do have to have the majority of women on the same page about the direction that they want to go and the rights that they think women ought to have, as well as supporting, holding on to those rights if they’re threatened. That’s where we need the majority of women. They’re never going to be part of a movement that is so amorphous. That’s not the ambition, the ambition must be that they feel that feminist perspectives speak to them and of them.
Chameleon: We were talking about feminists being perceived as a threat. If you look at what the newspapers are printing now about abortion, using advances in medicine as an excuse to try to erode our right to terminations – to return to the backlash – it does seem like there’s a shift in the offing to try to assault the rights that we’ve managed to obtain through the work of feminist activists in the past. Do you think that’s a misreading of the situation, or do you think that there might be something to it?
LK: I think there’s always an attack on abortion and I think it’s always orchestrated by fundamentalist Christians in unholy alliances with other groups depending. I don’t think they have any chance of succeeding in a European country other than those where women still don’t have the right, such as Poland, for example, or where the right disappeared at that moment of transition. I can’t see, in any Western European country, where the right to abortion has been legislated for that it could be lost. I do think there are ways that inroads can be made into the number of weeks, the hoops that you’ve got to jump through in order to get one, how much of a right it is or how much of a bureaucratised, difficult process it’s made to be, so I think it’s possible for those groups, the Christian Right, to make it more difficult for women to achieve the right, to exercise the right and in so doing prevent some women from having an abortion, because the barriers are made so complex that women who are feeling ambivalent are deterred. Most women feel ambivalent on some levels about having an abortion. It’s not an easy decision; none of us make it without a heavy heart, so the more barriers that are placed there the more this can affect the ambivalence and shift it away from the abortion rather than towards it. So I think they can have an influence in that more subtle way. I don’t think we’re going to lose the right. Instead, the ability to exercise the right can be affected, which is a slightly different thing.
Chameleon: One of the aspects that has been highlighted in recent articles is that doctors are increasingly either invoking their conscience to refuse to perform an abortion, or they just say, “Oh well, there’s no money in it, there’s no prestige in it” or “We doctors are trying to save life, not destroy it”. The resources available for abortions could dry up.
LK: I think that’s a very convenient argument for the Right to make. I’m not sure what I think about this, because on the one hand, I think we ought to be able to require doctors to deliver the health service that they are employed to deliver. On the other hand, I would not want to go to an incredibly committed Catholic doctor and try to get him to give me an abortion, so in terms of my dignity, my integrity I don’t want to have to ask for it from that person. I think the more we move into the subtleties and complexities of the positions, the more we have to move away from absolutes and the more we have to negotiate the balance between the right that I have and that I want to exercise in a way that doesn’t stigmatise me, that doesn’t make me feel bad and what we have the right to demand of people we are paying to deliver a health service. It’s not always obvious which way to make that work. I do think that if you’re going to go into gynaecology you have to be willing to carry out this procedure. If you’re not, then don’t be a gynaecologist. There are lots of other fields of medical expertise that doctors could develop, so again we need to think in a smarter, strategic way about it. I say this because I have a father who is a fundamentalist Catholic and, although I love him very much, we do clash about issues and we have to agree to differ about them. I’m never going to change him; he’s never going to change me, so how do we reach some kind of accommodation where the things that we do share, the connections we do have aren’t destroyed by this other thing. On particular occasions sometimes they are because it’s too fraught. Maybe what we need to be focusing on is how do we let these doctors practice medicine in the ways that they are skilled to do, but don’t let them deny services to women who want them. I would say the same about contraception as well. I would say that if you’re a Catholic who doesn’t believe in contraception then you can’t practice certain kinds of medicine. There are lots of Catholics who square their conscience in their own lives, let alone in anybody else’s, in different ways and not everybody sees that as a point of doctrine, but if you do, how then do you provide appropriate health care?
Chameleon: If we turn to Sue Lees and her wonderful book Carnal Knowledge, she talks about the stranger rape myth [The reference is to the following passages from Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial, Revised Edition, London, The Women’s Press, 2002: “One explanation for the drop in the conviction rate seems to lie in the fact that a steadily increasing proportion of reported rapes do not conform to the stereotypical rape scenario of the psychopathological stranger rapist, seizing women in dark streets. A far higher proportion of the women reporting nowadays are, by contrast, raped by men they know, often in their own homes, and these are precisely the cases where it is most difficult to secure a conviction (…) Such acquaintance rapes have increasingly been termed ‘date rape’ by the media. Such a term carries the implication that such rapes are not as serious as ‘stranger rapes’, but there is no evidence to support this. There is, however, evidence that acquaintance rapes can be just as traumatic as stranger rape for the victim” (pxii).
And: “Most of the women were raped by men they knew. Of these, more than half were friends, colleagues, neighbours or casual acquaintances – men with whom they had never had consensual sex. Most assaults appear to have been carefully planned. Men approached the women in a variety of situations, but most commonly in the social setting of a pub, club or party. Many women were taken unsuspectingly to a place where the rapist would not be disturbed. With regard to the men the victim knew well or fairly well, first contact with the victim was most likely to be made in the man or woman’s home (60 per cent), or an inside public place (17 per cent), and least likely to be made on a date (3 per cent). Yet many people believe that a woman who goes to the home or flat of a man on the first date implies she is willing to have sex. Others believe that it is the woman’s fault if she gets herself into the situation where she is likely to be raped”, p11]. These myths are really very tenacious and persistent so how can we overcome the prejudices contained in the misconception that rape, “real rape” or whatever label people want to put on it, has only happened when it involves a stranger that jumps on you from the bushes? What can we do about counteracting that, because to my mind that’s the undercurrent in all of these articles in the Daily Mail when they cast aspersions on the victims. There’s a chronic problem of the justice system not believing the women: when it comes down to her word against his, it always seems to be his word that prevails.
LK: There are two things here. I want to come back to the “her word against his” question, but I suppose I want us to move away from just thinking about these issues in terms of myth to actually thinking about them in terms of how rape has been historically constructed, both legally and in terms of heterosexual ideology. It has been constructed as this narrow range of behaviour in order to protect the more coercive aspects of heterosexuality. We need to take seriously therefore the challenge that we’re actually making. This isn’t just about myths, this is actually about challenging the foundational principle and set of practices that maintain a particular kind of masculinity and maintain certain relations between men and women. That’s why they’re so tenacious, that’s why the beliefs and constructions are so tenacious, because they are at the foundation of intimate relations between men and women. Sometimes we remember this. Sometimes I talk about sexual violence as the fault line of patriarchy and that, in challenging it, we are exposing the ways in which gender relations are coercive, unpleasant and harmful to women. When we do it well, it’s very powerful and very disruptive to the gender order. Sometimes we forget that that’s what we’re doing and almost get caught up in only talking about rape in the criminal sense. I don’t excuse myself from this: there are ways in which doing particular kinds of research, or trying to influence law reform reflect that. You are on a terrain where at some level you have to work with the discourse as it is and attempt to push it further. Underneath, as feminists, our challenge is far deeper, far more profound. On some level the responses in the Daily Mail, from the Right come from a maybe even implicit understanding that that’s actually what’s going on, this is about saying we no longer support male entitlement. You do not have the right to sex, you don’t have the right to take it, you don’t have the right to buy it, sex should be negotiated, it should be communicative and it involves two parties who have the same rights and responsibilities. We’re not there yet, but that’s our challenge. It’s not an inconsiderable challenge and we need to remember that, we need to remember that it questions behaviour that men and boys are taught to take for granted, that they can just behave like that, it’s OK. We are in that sense a threat to privileging this kind of masculinist sexuality. One of the horrible paradoxes and ironies at the moment is that women are being invited to pretend that they can operate like this…
Chameleon: Raunch culture!
LK: …and I think it’s an illusion, but it’s also an invitation, “You can behave like men too, you can have sex with no consequences”. Unfortunately, to have sex in that way means something different still if you’re a woman than it does if you’re a man. I also know young women, young lesbians who want to call themselves bois [See Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs, Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, New York, Free Press, 2005, especially, From Womyn to Bois, pp118-138] and think that somehow being sexist about other women shows how cool they are. I find it a kind of paradoxical tragedy in a way. At the same time I don’t think it helps just to be outraged, I think we have to engage in critical conversations with them in the same way that we need to have critical conversations with young men about what does this mean? What kind of relationships do you want? I also want to ask what’s transformative about it?
Chameleon: It simply shores up the old order. It’s just you taking a slice of the privilege without contesting the privilege.
LK: Exactly. It’s some women wanting to claim male privilege in relationships with other women. That’s not very transformative. Business as usual. It’s just that the sex of one of the players has changed.
Chameleon: So what should we be doing? Let’s say a feminist mother has a boy and she wants to bring him up to respect women and have a different view of relations between men and women. She can be as careful and honest about trying to bring this boy up in a different way and yet we are embedded in this culture that does everything to undermine such an upbringing.
LK: I think we mustn’t be totally pessimistic because if everything were so totally determined there would be no feminists. Everything is not totally determined and we all know – we might not know very many – but we all know the odd good man here and there, so it is important to work out how they get where they do. One of the things I say at the end of talks to general audiences these days is that we’re never going to change the situation if we continue to excuse the worst of men and not expect the best. I give them an example of what I think the best is, and it’s the example of two sons, friends of mine who are now in their early twenties. Feminist mothers, lesbians, the boys had opportunities to reject conventional assumptions. It’s not been easy or without conflict, but there’s always been an engagement. Both of these young men are found by their mothers, when they come down on Sunday morning, sleeping on the sofa. They’ve got used to what it’s about now, but at first they asked what’s going on. The sons had been out in a mixed group with a young woman. They knew her, but not very well, she was getting really drunk. They didn’t trust their friends not to take advantage of her so they brought her home, she’s asleep in their room and they’re on the sofa. That’s the best [Chameleon smiles warmly in approval]. It ought not to be a shock, you ought not to smile, it ought to be ordinary, but it’s not. Once that’s the norm, then we can shut up [We both laugh]
Chameleon: Germaine Greer wrote an article in 2006 about rape [The reference is to Rape, The Independent on Sunday, 2nd April 2006: “The law of rape is anachronistic, unworkable and should be struck down. Tinkering with it has resulted in a huge expenditure of resources and effort by police forces which have little enough of either, in return for no improvement whatsoever in women’s chances of redress. The fault lies in the very concept of rape itself.
The crime of rape is not committed against the victim, but against the state, the victim is Exhibit A in the case of Regina vs the rapist. As a piece of evidence, the victim must be interrogated and tested in every possible way, because rape is considered to be so grave, second only to murder.
It is not women who have decided that rape is so heinous, but men. The only weapon that counts in rape is the penis, which is conceptualised as devastating. Yet a man can do more harm with his thumb than he can with his thin-skinned penis. But it is his penis that is to him the symbol and instrument of his potency. The notion of rape is the direct expression of male phallocentricity, which women should know better than to accept.
If you talk to raped women, they usually resent all the other insults that accompanied the rape more than the unwanted presence of a penis in the vagina. The forcing of a penis into a mouth, for example, is not rape but sexual assault, yet a victim may resent it more; likewise forcible buggery, ejaculating on to the face or breasts, and so forth. In some cases, what remains in the memory and continues to perturb years after the event are the words a rapist forced his victim to say”.
Her article continues: “There is a solution, but it is not recognised as such by feminists or legislators. That is to abolish the crime of rape altogether, and instead to expand the law of assault to include sexual assault in varying degrees of gravity; so that, for example, mutilating assaults on children would be recognised as many times graver than penetration of a grown woman”]. She thinks that rape legislation as it stands at the moment should be abolished altogether. I guess that when she wrote the piece she wasn’t aware that this had already been done in Canada.
LK: Yes, Germaine is a feminist institution here and she’s sometimes brilliant and so insightful, and sometimes she doesn’t do her homework. She’s not kept pace with what’s happened. What has happened here in terms of sexual offences legislation is actually quite interesting. We’ll come back to that later. She’s making this argument that it should be assault. This was the argument that was made in the 1970s, that somehow the fact that it was a sexual offence made it different and it shouldn’t be different, we should just say it’s a crime of violence because if we say it’s a crime of violence there wouldn’t be a focus on the woman and her behaviour. Feminists in Canada, the United States and in Australia took this very seriously and campaigned to change their law and to have it made into assault, but it was a sexual assault. It’s not the same. They carried out law reforms in which they had gradations of sexual assault in the same way that we have gradations of physical assault. What’s happened is that the stranger attacks are the ones that are prosecuted at level one and the assaults by partners and ex-partners are at level two or three.
Chameleon: It should be the other way around.
LK: This distinction between real rape and not real rape is absolutely encoded in how law operates. That would be my major argument for not doing it because if you actually look at the sociological data – a lot of which they didn’t have then – what we need to remember is that we didn’t understand the dimensions of any of this – fully – in the 1970s. We didn’t know how common all of these forms of violence are, nor did we know then that the vast majority of perpetrators are men whom we know. We didn’t know that. If you look at Susan Brownmiller’s book a lot of it, not all of it, but a lot of it has a presumption that it is a stranger. We have learned and are trying to get the rest of society to catch up with us in a way. I think Germaine’s still in the debate as it was then. If you go in that direction it just solidifies these distinctions that are actually not accurate in terms of experience. If you’re raped by somebody you know it’s more likely to be repeated. Rape isn’t a one-off event in lots of women’s lives, it’s a repeated event. Rapes by ex-partners are second only to strangers in the amount of injuries there are and in the amount of times that a weapon is used. At the level of meaning, there’s an abuse of trust, a betrayal of trust, how could somebody that you did at some point love do that to you? As you say, arguably, if we are going to start talking about seriousness and relative harm, actually it’s reversed. I don’t particularly want to do that, I want to follow what a friend of mine in Bosnia said, which is: “Rape is rape is rape”. She carried on by saying that the only difference in war is that your government wants you to talk about it. When the war’s over they want you to shut up like at every other time. I think we have to say that and I don’t want to lose the word. We decided here we didn’t want to lose sight of the fact that it was a gender-specific crime. Some people would say that we fudged it, I would say we were smart. We’d already recognised male rape in law, so in our new Sex Offences Act, which came in in 2004, rape is defined as something that is done with a penis, so it’s committed by men. They can rape women, they can rape men, they can rape girls, they can rape boys; it’s a gender-specific crime in that it is done with the penis. Some would argue that this reifies the phallus, whereas I would say that we live in a gender order where it is already reified and that’s part of the reason why it means what it means. I don’t think you change that by removing protections and meanings from law and saying, “Oh, it’s not that serious, it’s not that important”. We also created another crime called sexual assault by penetration, which has the same maximum penalty and is about using instruments or fingers, not a penis, basically. Female perpetrators could be found guilty of that offence, but more importantly I think, or as importantly, where you have a regime of sexual assaults by a particular person you can charge them with two offences. They can be charged with rape and they can be charged with sexual assault by penetration. Where a child, for example, doesn’t know whether it was a penis or not, the offender can be charged with sexual assault by penetration. I think we’ve created something quite useful in the complex issue of how charges are made and how you mount a prosecution, but we also wanted to hold onto the word rape and that it’s a gender-specific offence. I will be very happy when it’s no longer necessary to do that, but so long as sex is used as a form of masculine entitlement and power over that’s the reality that we’re in.
Chameleon: It used to be the common sense view that the rapist was somebody who hadn’t had sex for a while so he was boiling over with pent-up biological drives, whereas rape has nothing whatsoever to do with that, it’s got to do with power, domination and humiliation, is that not true?
LK: I think sometimes it’s got to do with precisely that, whilst sometimes it’s just to do with a sense of entitlement. It’s certainly got nothing to do with a biological necessity in the embodied sense. It is to do with men understanding that discourse and using it to justify their behaviour, which is a very powerful element in the construction of a certain kind of masculinity. I would suspect that if we carried out a project to look at why some men think of sex as an entitlement – or not – it’s linked to the extent to which they buy into that construction of male sexuality. Men who don’t, men who are very clear that it’s in their control are looking for mutuality, they are looking for an erotics of mutuality. It doesn’t have to be bland, but it is about mutuality and negotiation. I think we would find that the extent to which men buy into that explanation and that way of thinking about sexuality is then how they come to act through this sense of necessity and entitlement. If we think of rape again as a continuum, there are obviously the ones where it’s planned, the rapists behave like a sexual terrorist in precisely the way that they scout everything out, and have decided exactly what they’re going to do, how they’re going to do it and who they’re going to target. Then you also have the partners who are avenging themselves where rape is a kind of punishment and then you’ve got men who are out on the town, they’ve decided before they went out that they were going to get their end away and they either engage in kinds of flirting with particular women, expecting that to be the outcome, or they target someone – and they do this more and more I would say – who is getting drunk. They may encourage and enable her to get drunk by buying her drinks, or they may just let her pay herself to be relatively out of it. Sometimes they wait until women leave, they follow them home, they might even offer to help them home. Sometimes they just engage with the women before they leave. That isn’t planned so systematically and if for some reason whoever they first decide might be a target appears not to be after all, there’s no obsessiveness about it, they’ll just move on and think, “OK, that didn’t work, who else?” It’s a matter of what’s available and easy where I can find someone who’s just going to let me have sex with them. They don’t think that actually what they’re doing is taking advantage and coercive. They don’t. Again, I think this is one of the paradoxes that we are having to encounter, that women are claiming the right to drink, be drunk – and I’m not saying they shouldn’t – but the paradox of it is that it then can leave you vulnerable in that you are not as in control of yourself. You may not be reading cues that you would do if you weren’t affected by alcohol and men can decide that they’re going to take advantage of that situation. There is a paradox for women in that the world has changed and we’ve changed it to mean that we have more access to public space, that we don’t think that femininity precludes us behaving in these ways, but those powerful constructs of acceptable femininity are still there. They haven’t gone away, so if something happens then they come into play and we then become responsible for what’s happened. There’s a fantastic piece of work by a Swedish researcher called Stina Jeffner – it was her PhD – unfortunately it never got published, but she did this work with young Swedish men and women where she demonstrated that actually alcohol increased men’s space for action, that being drunk meant that they had more possibilities to act, they would be excused, whereas it had precisely the opposite effect for women. It narrowed their space for action, so that if they were drunk they were considered more responsible, not less. In other words it’s not just alcohol, it’s that alcohol has gendered meanings and, unfortunately, possibly gender consequences as well. So it’s not just alcohol, it’s what alcohol means if you’re a man or if you’re a woman.
Chameleon: A double standard. So if something goes wrong and a man rapes a woman and by some miracle it actually gets as far as court, this whole ideology of males being active and females being passive comes into play, certainly for the judge and the jury I would imagine. It seems to me that the world has moved on and we have staked our claim to access to public spaces, yet the old definition of what constitutes a “respectable woman” persists and there is a class element to it as well.
LK: I think there is, I think there definitely is. There are also really complex legal issues at stake. In many European countries, for example, the definition of rape is to do with force. Actually if you’re drunk you are less likely to resist, which is what’s read as the evidence of force. How the crime is constructed in law provides this space for action for men. In England, Scotland, Ireland and Cyprus, it’s defined more in terms of consent. The problem there is that if you’re very drunk and the lawyer asks, “Well, did you or did you not give consent?” and you reply, “I can’t remember”, one of the legal strands has gone. Part of what we were trying to do when the law was reformed was to say that being intoxicated to a certain level meant that you no longer had the capacity to consent. They weren’t prepared to go with that except in instances where someone else administered the alcohol or the drugs to mean that you were incapacitated. We tried to say that that was illogical. It can’t be a matter of who gives you the intoxicant that determines whether you have the capacity to consent or not. If you don’t have the capacity here, and you consume exactly the same here, but you chose to do it, the resulting incapacity is the same. I think many lawyers operate on a formal logic basis and they don’t want to engage with what we want to talk about, the communicative model of sexuality. For us, it isn’t just about rape law, it’s about what kind of sexuality we are interested in creating, and we’re interested in creating one where you do actually communicate with the other person, and one in which you cannot presume the outcome of that communication. Part of what I find revealing and deeply, deeply disturbing is that in all these cases that have come up through the courts here there has been a huge discussion about the woman, binge-drinking and so on, but never, not once that I have seen in either the courts or in the newspapers has the question been asked as to why is it possible for a man, who has never met someone, they don’t have a relationship, this is not a date, on what basis can he presume that it’s OK to have sex with someone when she’s totally drunk and he doesn’t know her? On what basis of human communication is that acceptable? Is it not exploitation? What really disturbs me is that nobody asks that question. It’s taken as given that if a man sees a woman who’s drunk, he’s immediately going to get an erection and going to have sex with her. I think men ought to be writing in and saying “This is offensive”.
Chameleon: Yes, it’s an insult to men – it’s every bit as much an insult to them as it is a gross travesty for women.
LK: We need men who actually pick up on those silences and engage in public discourse about it and say, “Excuse me, that’s not the kind of man I want to be and I don’t think it’s OK to behave like that”.
Chameleon: So presumably you were every bit as dismayed as I was when this Sir Igor Judge said he didn’t want a grid system [the reference is to Steve Doughty’s report in the Daily Mail, 27th March 2007, Labour's rape law plans are thrown into turmoil as top judge declares…It's not always rape if a woman is drunk: “[Sir Igor] said: ‘If, through drink, or for any other reason, the complainant has temporarily lost her capacity to choose whether to have intercourse, she is not consenting. Subject to questions about the defendant’s state of mind, if the intercourse takes place, this would be rape.
‘However, where the complainant has voluntarily consumed even substantial quantities of alcohol, but nevertheless remains capable of choosing whether or not to have intercourse, and in drink agrees to do so, this would not be rape’.
The judge said it would not be right to lay down rules – ’some kind of grid system’ – that say a woman who has reached a set level of drunkenness is incapable of consent.
He added: ‘Experience shows that different individuals have a greater or lesser capacity to cope with alcohol.
‘Provisions intended to protect women from sexual assaults might very well be conflated into a system which would provide patronising interference with the right of autonomous adults to make personal decisions for themselves’”] introduced to the law about capacity to consent, deliberating on one particular case.
LK: It was the case in Wales, wasn’t it? [which gained notoriety when the prosecution dropped it, arguing that his client had been so drunk that she could not remember whether she had given consent] I think you’re always going to get reactionary judges and I also increasingly think – and I don’t want to get into accounts of despair here – but I increasingly ask the question whether adversarial legal systems are equipped to deal with sexual violence. That’s part of the reason for wanting to do this European study, to take a serious look at whether inquisitorial systems fare any better and whether they are less prone to playing on gender stereotypes and constructions of acceptable femininity. This is a very serious question that we need to explore, about whether the adversarial process rewards the playing on stereotypes and blaming women. Actually, we know it does. Jennifer Temkin has interviewed barristers twice now and basically they – the honest ones – admit they’re looking for something, anything, that will question her credibility because then they can say it’s one word against another and we can’t trust her word – they know that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Chameleon: How can they sleep at night? I certainly couldn’t!
LK: I hope they don’t! They justify it through this formal logic, that their job is to give the best defence possible to their client and that it’s the job of the prosecution to prove the case. They justify it through a formal logic rather than an ethics. Jennifer Temkin has said that maybe what we need to start doing is talking about an ethics of defence and of prosecution, an ethics of legal practice because she thinks that’s the only way to move it into a different realm. I think there is a problem about the formalism of the law and I definitely think there is a problem about adversarial systems because I do believe they reward the invocation of prejudice and stereotype. That in a way is where the role of the Daily Mail – to come back to where we began – is actually the most insidious because what it is doing is reinforcing these models of masculinity and femininity in a manner that individuals might not accept in that particular case, but it reawakens them, it makes sure they’re not abandoned, so that when they’re invoked in the court case they retain force. Somebody has done a really interesting study of how speech and rhetoric is used in courtrooms in the US. I don’t think that prosecutors pick up on these things sufficiently because what they say happens is that the defence uses a language of voluntarism all the time in relation to women…
Chameleon: Or passivity – the defendant will say “Oh, her knickers fell to the floor” rather than “I ripped her knickers off” [Here I was adapting from Susan Ehrlich’s superb Representing Rape, Language and Sexual Consent, London, Routledge, 2001, ‘My shirt came off…I gather that I took it off’ The accused’s grammar of non-agency, pp36-61, the source I was fumbling for]
LK: It’s not the defendants that do it, it’s the lawyers; the lawyers give them that construction and the defendants then say, “Yes, that’s what happened”. The agency – and again this is a horrible paradox of feminism, where we’ve wanted to invoke women’s agency, and all the agency in legal cases is focused on the woman and there’s hardly any agency in relation to the man. I think we need to start thinking that way about prostitution too. If we only think about women and we think about female agency – selling sex – you look through it through a particular lens, but if you start looking at the agency of the male buyers and at what does it mean that they feel entitled to do this, what does it mean in terms of gender relations that it’s increasingly legitimised? It’s considered cool because celebrities do it, etc. What does that mean in terms of male agency and masculinity? This is not just about women as actors, it’s actually about gender relations and it’s about what it also means in terms of the larger gender order. We get caught up in looking from only one direction.
Chameleon: If we talk about the moral panic surrounding women and binge-drinking, would you agree that what lies behind this bout of anxiety about women’s drinking habits is a struggle over traditional definitions of “appropriate” feminine behaviour? Is it an attempt to control women’s behaviour?
LK: I think that’s one dimension of it. Another dimension of it is women’s ambivalence about heterosexual relationships and about trying to do femininity differently; drinking is not called Dutch courage for no reason. We all know this, it does act as a kind of relaxant, it enables you to have slightly more confidence. All the research data tells us that a proportion of young women are having sex when they’re drunk that they do regret afterwards. The public lie is that they all then go and report it as rape to the police – no, they don’t. If they did, we’d have a hundred thousand, a million complaints. We don’t: we have thirteen thousand complaints. The amount of unpleasant sex that women experience massively exceeds that, so no they don’t do that. Despite all the suggestions to the contrary, they do have ambivalent sexual encounters that are made both more possible and more forgettable by drinking. There are complicated things going on and young women are trying to re-negotiate, position themselves differently in public and in heterosexual relationships. It’s not simple and it’s not without contradiction. Sometimes alcohol can be a way to paper over the cracks. One of the things I’ve learned as I’ve got older is that when the Right picks something up, there’s normally some grain of truth, or resonance that it’s important for us to understand and engage with. It wouldn’t work as political rhetoric if it didn’t connect to something. It’s actually trying to work out what it connects to and how we might understand that differently, how we might have a different take on what we think is going on, but it’s not that nothing’s going on.
Chameleon: In The Guardian [3rd April 2007] I recently read an article about the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs report saying that women shouldn’t go to pubs and parties on their own. Would it be way too much of an exaggeration to get the feeling at least that this is tantamount to imposing a curfew on women?
LK: There’s a danger of over-interpreting some of this because we have this 24-hour media now where they just try to say something different and they fall back on clichés. That’s not to say we shouldn’t object to it and we shouldn’t expose the illogic of it and the stupidity of it, but I also think we shouldn’t necessarily read it as some kind of coordinated campaign against women. Mostly it’s bogus as well, because most women don’t go to parties on their own. If it wasn’t the case that sometimes you didn’t leave with the same people you came with then you wouldn’t be having a social life anyway – why bother going in the first place if something interesting isn’t going to happen? Everybody knows that from their own lives and one of the things that really irritates me about all of this is when you have journalists writing these things when you know that they will have gone to a party themselves with someone and not left with them. Also I know that many lawyers who defend rapists – and these days, the clients seem to prefer to have female barristers defending them – you know that these lawyers will have got really drunk, staggeringly drunk themselves. You can be in parts of London on a Friday evening and the pubs and wine bars are full of lawyers from particular firms and they get off their face. Something could happen. Their privilege is that they earn enough money to be able to afford a taxi home. None of us know whether in this particular encounter we’re going to be safe or not. They use these tactics against women when actually on some level – I don’t know how they square this – they know that they could have been in that situation themselves.
Chameleon: Going back to the continuum of violence, the argument that women shouldn’t go to parties on their own conveniently overlooks the fact that women constantly modify their behaviour because of the endemic threat of violence. We’re acculturated to believe that there is endemic violence, that we constantly run the risk of it, that we shouldn’t walk home after dark or go home via a safe route and not along the abandoned canal tow path. Women are continually modifying their behaviour aren’t they?
LK: Yes and no! Some young women – and I’ve done it myself at certain periods in my life- have just reacted by saying “No, I refuse to do this, I refuse to be controlled, I want to do this!” I think there are also women who do incredibly risky things because it’s a way of dealing with and challenging their own fear, or maybe their own history of violence. We do different things at different times. For me it has to do with how I’m feeling at the time, if I’m feeling really tired, if I’m preoccupied. I used to live somewhere in London that felt a bit risky and I had about a fifteen minute walk from the Tube station to the flat I stayed in. If I was coming home late and I was feeling preoccupied and I was feeling a bit jumpy, I would get in a cab. Lots of evenings I wouldn’t because I felt OK. My partner teaches self-defence and she says that men can and do read our body language – we read each other’s body language, we know this. That’s not to blame women, but it is to say we monitor our own context, our own sense of well-being, our own sense of safety and I think we adapt – I certainly do and I’m sure lots of other women do too. We adapt to how we are at any particular point in time as well as to the context that we’re in. If it’s a context that you know really well you can read it relatively easily. A lot of sexual assaults seem to happen when women are away or on holiday and it’s actually to do with not being able to read that situation and not having your safety mechanisms able to operate on an almost unconscious level. I suspect predatory men read that too.
Chameleon: I just resent the fact that we feel we have to modify our behaviour just to be able to live a semi-normal life.
LK: Indeed.
Chameleon: Free from the threat of violence, free from the feeling that violence is imminently about to be visited upon you.
LK: Some women would say that we can choose not to. Not everybody has that freedom in the same way. I can’t do that, I’ve lived my life working on these issues, I have stories. Certainly when I did my PhD and I interviewed women who lived in the same small town and rural areas that I lived in street names, place names actually had stories attached to them of violence that women had experienced in those places. These were just the few that I knew about, so I can’t ignore it, but I’m not totally controlled by it either. I refuse to be totally controlled by it, but I also can’t pretend that I am not aware of the realities. I think the more you realise that it’s in the everydayness of life that these things happen the less I feel troubled by being in the public sphere, although if I hear steps behind me I am alert to paying attention to who it is. It then becomes about where do you live? Who do you live with? Who do you share your life with? These other kinds of questions. Whom do you choose to trust with certain kinds of intimacies? There are not that many men in my life to whom I feel able to offer that kind of trust. That’s one of the costs and it’s a cost to men. That’s one of the challenges for men of good faith, if they really want to have strong relationships with women and with feminists they are going to have to take responsibility for changing this context.
Chameleon: Why should it always have to be women who have to modify their behaviour, why shouldn’t men have to, frankly, since they are the ones who commit these crimes in most cases?
LK: I think some of them do modify their behaviour, but they are a very small minority, so you’re not that likely to encounter them on your way home [laughs]
Chameleon: Let’s talk a little bit about “date rape” [The following passage from Sue Lees is illuminating: “Another misconception is that so-called ‘date rapes’ are often conceptualised as occurring as a result of men misreading the woman’s signals or not realising that she was not consenting, or that women have sex consensually and then regret it the night after and cry rape. We know that some men claim to misread signals even when the woman has said ‘no’, or in clearly premeditated cases where the rapist has locked the door. Some rapists have a distorted belief system – and even following conviction are in denial, continuing to maintain that the woman wanted it, just in the way that some paedophiles believe children wanted it”, pxii]
LK: Another concept that we should not use, we should get rid of. It comes out of a particular survey carried out in the US by Mary Koss in the late 80s, which was with US women college students, who reported quite a lot of coercive sexuality, including with men with whom they were somehow involved on some level. It doesn’t translate, though, across to other contexts. We tracked 3,500 cases for a piece of work called A Gap or a Chasm? which examines attrition in reported rape cases in England and Wales and I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of cases which were in the context of a date. That wasn’t what acquaintance rapes were; they were much more about men targeting women in bars or at parties. They hadn’t met before that evening, so it was not a date. We started to talk about them and code them as what’s called “Stranger Two”. Stranger One is a total stranger, whilst Stranger Two is someone whom you met within 24 hours of the rape happening. It’s one of those funny little things that you think of as an achievement as a feminist that the Metropolitan Police now use that coding in their data as well. It’s much more accurate. These are not people you know and there wasn’t any presumption of intimacy either – I don’t think there should be even on a date, but that is how that phrase is read, you have a date with someone because of some kind of erotic interest and you want to see whether it’s shared or not. That’s not true of these situations and calling them date rapes means that people misunderstand – it’s not the misreading by men of signals, but our misreading of what was going on through the term “date rape”. I would encourage us to not use it. Get rid of it! There’s a woman called Aileen McColgan who wrote a little book called Taking the Date out of Rape and we should indeed do this.
Chameleon: What about Katie Roiphe’s position in The Morning After? [London, Hamish Hamilton, 1994]
LK: Again, you see, I think this is an interesting issue about research and feminist analysis, because part of what she’s taking issue with, but doing in a very populist way, is drawn from Nigel Gilbert – her book is based on his work even though she doesn’t say so – which comes back to this survey Mary Koss carried out. Part of what they’re taking issue with is that Mary Koss defined as rape incidents that women didn’t define as such. What they neglect to tell us is that the analytical definition that Mary Koss used was the one in the law, so this isn’t even feminists talking about the continuum and saying, “Well, there’s rape and there’s coercive sex and there’s pressurised sex”, which is what I did in my PhD, because I was working with how women defined what happened to them. I was working with the experiential definitions that women use, which is not the same as a legal definition, which is also not the same as an analytical definition that you might use in study. You can use all of those legitimately, they all have a relevance, but to pretend, as Katie Roiphe and Nigel Gilbert do, that the only really valid definition is the experiential one, and because women minimise and don’t label sex that they didn’t want as rape then it’s not, when actually, in terms of the letter of the law, it is. What bothers me about it is I think they are disingenuous in the arguing with these cases. It’s not to deny that there is an issue here about definitions, which definition and why do so many women not call what happens to them rape? It’s a valid issue. We need to talk about it and we need to debate it. It is also valid to talk about under what conditions in research should you define something that someone hasn’t labelled as rape themselves as rape in the research? What does it mean to do that? Absolutely fine question, that’s different from saying these are advocacy numbers, feminists are making it up, they’re drawing the lines to include behaviour that isn’t problematic. That’s not what is happening, but that is the impression that is given. One of the things that I really try to do – we’ve just started an MA in women and child abuse; I don’t think there is one anywhere else in Europe – one of the things we are trying to do is to enable students, many of whom work in women’s services, are activists, to understand the complexity of numbers, what it means to say it this way and what it means to say it that way. Sometimes we can use statistics as advocacy numbers. For example, in our very first piece of research in the unit looking at child sexual abuse we found that one in two young women reported some form of intimate intrusion before reaching the age of eighteen. That did not mean they were all sexually abused by their fathers. It was flashing, it was being pressured to have sex by a boyfriend, a whole range of things and a much, much smaller number of them, I would say probably one in sixty, one in seventy, reported ongoing abuse by an adult male family member. We quote these figures, one in two, one in four, one in whatever as if it means serious ongoing abuse always and it doesn’t. It’s exactly the same with domestic violence figures. Yes, one in two, one in three, one in four in whatever survey in different countries have had an incident at some point in their lives. That’s not the same as the pattern of coercive control, which is what I mean by domestic violence. There are complicated issues about what these measurements mean and we need to be more accurate and more careful when we invoke them, being clear that we do so in an accurate and not an inaccurate way. The figures do say something accurate, but we sometimes stretch that to mean something that it doesn’t.
Chameleon: Or our opponents, let’s say, or the media will pick up on a statistic, if you say, sixty per cent of young women under the age of eighteen have suffered a form of abuse it might be reported on in a way that distorts it. What I’m driving at is that it is not necessarily the fault of the researcher that the media latches on to a figure and takes it out of context to try to discredit the argument behind the figure.
LK: I think that can happen. It’s less likely to happen if we are more careful about how we use the figures, so I wouldn’t say “abuse”, for example because I think people understand abuse in a particular way. If you say “intimate intrusion”, it’s not a term that is commonly used and that has a common understanding. When people hear the word abuse they do think it’s somebody they know and that it takes place more than once. It’s not flashing, for example. Unless we’ve got the space to explain what it is we mean…
Chameleon: The media don’t always give us the space, though, does it?
LK: No, that’s true, but I think we also don’t always want to make the explanation because it’s not such a strong case. Again it’s complicated [laughs]. If they’re picking up on something, it’s powerful and it’s having a resonance it is because something is going on. People do say, “Well, if it’s one in two, why haven’t half my friends told me stories about being raped by their fathers?” Of course, half your friends aren’t going to because it isn’t one in two that are raped by their fathers. There’s a way in which we need to think about how we sometimes invoke statistics, which ends up having the opposite effect. It’s not raising awareness; it’s actually undermining our message because what people think is, “Well, that doesn’t make sense to me, so it can’t be true”. The rejection isn’t just a gesture of bad faith; it’s sometimes that how they understand it isn’t true. For me, it’s a responsibility on us to endeavour – you can’t always do it, but to endeavour not to overclaim and to be clear about what it is that these figures do and don’t mean so that we’re not unintentionally creating a resistance to the message.
Chameleon: What are the worst defects of today’s rape legislation and how can they be remedied?
LK: I don’t think it’s the legislation that’s the problem. Had you asked me that question five years ago, I would have had problems with the legislation. I actually think we reworked our legislation in quite an interesting way and created a whole raft of offences. We removed all the offences that were only homosexual offences, for example. We’ve got a series of offences that are offences against children. We’ve got sexual exploitation offences. We’ve got certain kinds of protection for people with disabilities where they haven’t got capacity to consent. We’ve got offences that are about breach of trust where you are exploiting your position as a worker or a carer. I haven’t seen an evaluation of the legislation yet, but I don’t think the problem lies with the legislation. The problem is with implementation and these narrow understandings of what rape is and isn’t. The problem is that police – not all, but in the majority of cases – start from what we call a culture of scepticism. They’re looking for anything that gives them a reason to not believe, which is not how they approach investigating other crimes. You approach investigating a crime in such a way that, until you have reason to believe otherwise, you think that it has happened and you look for the evidence that supports the account of the complainant. That’s not what happens in rape cases. If we’re talking about myths, one of the massive myths is that a much higher proportion of rape complaints are false compared to other crimes. Why would any woman or man report that they had been sexually assaulted, undergo a forensic medical examination and be treated in the way that too many are treated? I know that it happens, but it mainly happens because of mental health problems. In reality, the majority of complaints are about something that has happened. Whether it qualifies as rape under the law is for the police and the prosecutors and, ultimately, the court to determine. The vast majority of these reports are about something that has happened. We have interviewed police officers who say – and these are specialists who are supposed to be trained – where they say a third, fifty per cent and one even said seventy-five per cent of complaints are false. How can they possibly be carrying out a proper investigation if that’s the place that they begin from? That’s the first thing and the second thing is that because this concept of real rape is so powerful, the whole way in which investigations and evidence is thought about is through a stranger rape model. That’s not how this case is going to play out today, certainly under our new legislation and with DNA. Alice Vachss was a prosecutor in the US and says there are three defences for rape: it didn’t happen, it wasn’t me, she wanted it. DNA and all sorts of other technical advancements mean it’s much less likely that you can say it didn’t happen or it wasn’t me, so basically your defence is she wanted it, she consented. I don’t think that the whole investigative process and how you think about collecting evidence and presenting the case in court is understood through the lens of it’s going to be a consent defence. I would say – and we’ve been saying for a while – that actually they need to rethink the whole way they do this, start again from the very beginning. They know how to do it when you’re talking about a stranger, they know how to do that, but the majority of cases don’t involve a stranger. So start again and think about the whole process that she knows the person and/or they’re going to plead consent. What evidence, then, are you looking for? How are you going to present the case as the prosecution in the court that gives credibility to her account? If all they’re thinking about all the way through is what discredits her they’re never ever going to arrive at a position where they know how to present the story in court that is to her credit. I think it’s about starting at the beginning and rethinking investigation and prosecution. It’s not so much about the legislation; it’s about those processes that enable the legislation to function.
Chameleon: Presumably what you’ve been talking about, the fact that the police almost instinctively disbelieve what the woman says is one of the reasons why the conviction rate is so low.
LK: It’s not instinctive – there’s a book by a woman called Patricia Yancey Martin from the US called Rape Work in which she talks about how institutions almost require that their staff adopt this sceptical attitude and that you need to change it at the institutional level if there’s going to be a different approach. What’s different about women’s services is that, institutionally, they absolutely don’t require scepticism; they almost require the opposite, which is why women experience them so differently – because they enter into a culture of belief. It ought to be possible to create a culture of belief in the police and medicine, which is only suspended when they have strong reasons to do so. We’re talking about ways in which institutions reproduce this scepticism. It’s not about the individuals and their attitudes only, or even especially. It’s actually about how institutions require or reproduce those orientations. That’s what we need to change. We need to change the institutional cultures that support or require this way of doing things.
Chameleon: That brings us back to the feedback loop, as it were, of assumptions within the culture in the broader sense, for example the 2005 Amnesty International survey [One third of the people polled believed that the woman was partly or wholly responsible for being raped is she had behaved flirtatiously. Yvonne Roberts responded in an article in The Independent on Sunday (27th November 2005), Asking for it. Why do so many women think rape is a woman's fault?: “The truth about rape, of course, is that whether women ‘ask’ for it or not, it happens. The ‘justice gap’ is widening. In the 1970s, a third of reported rapes resulted in a conviction. Now, more women are reporting sexual assault, including rape, but the conviction rate has dropped dramatically. In 2003, 11,867 rapes were reported; 1,649 went to trial and only 629 resulted in a conviction. However, there is cause for optimism. The little reported aspect of the Amnesty International survey is that the majority of the public believe only one person is to blame for rape – the rapist”] on rape where so many, dismayingly many, of the respondents still believe that it was the woman’s fault, that she was to blame. I read an eye-catching phrase in a newspaper article somewhere: “Alcohol is the new short skirt”.
LK: It was Julie Bindel who wrote that. She’s good at those.
Chameleon: How can we tackle this persistent attitude that women are somehow “asking for it” no matter what they do?
LK: In no one way. There’s no one way to do this as it is about culture change. It is about changing the discursive construction of everything – not just rape, but femininity and heterosexuality. They’re all connected. I wish I could say – and this is one of the irritating things about being an academic – there never is a simple answer any more because you see how everything is connected to everything else and if you make an inroad here, the something else over here will prevent it from being as effective as it might have been. I just think that we’re here for the long haul and it is about feminists engaging on every level. It matters that popular culture is re-sexualised. It matters that what Angela McRobbie calls the “new sexual contract” – her argument is that, in return for a recognition of equality in the worlds of work and education, there’s been a re-sexualisation and re-subordination of women in the more private, intimate sphere. Then you’ve got Ariel Levy’s raunch culture idea, so we have to engage in critique on that level whilst, simultaneously, trying to change the institutions and the laws, taking educational programmes into schools and youth clubs and at the same time inviting men of good faith to lend their voices too, recognising that at particular points, in certain historical contexts you make progress and then it feels like it’s either halted or you’ve moved back a little bit, or sideways. This isn’t a linear process – it would be a lot easier if it was! [Laughs] It is a bit like shifting sands that we’re having to negotiate. I suppose the most important thing is that there continue to be groups of women who call themselves feminists and who commit themselves to trying to make the world better for women. When I say that I mean I don’t think it’s OK to call yourself a feminist and that just be about your own personal achievement. However much it’s important for women to achieve things, that to me isn’t sufficient to be a feminist, for which you need to be interested in the lot of all women and be doing something to bring about change on that more social level. And to be reflective about women who have less privilege and fewer options than you. And how their situation can sometimes even be made worse by some of the ways that privileged women operate and argue their case. I think there are ways we can be, for example, judgemental of young women that have all sorts of class and maybe also race prejudice in them. That’s not to say there isn’t a conversation to be had about what does it mean that young women dress in particular ways, behave in particular ways in public, accommodate this re-sexualisation. Many conversations and engagements are needed, but in a way that respects that they’re trying to manage contradictions in the same way that others of us do in different contexts.
Chameleon: Let’s move back to the media. Do you think that a programme like The Verdict was a valuable exercise leading to serious debate or did it simply indulge in empty sensationalism, reinforcing already entrenched negative attitudes towards rape victims?
LK: We actually had two TV programmes: one called Consent [Channel Four] that was more like a real jury and The Verdict, which was obviously celebrities. I actually think the programme Consent was very interesting in the sense that we’re not allowed to do research on juries in this country. We’ve got one piece of research by a woman called Vanessa Munro, which has been simulating jury deliberations, but we imagine that we know that these prejudices are circulating. What the programme did was evidentially show us that was absolutely what was happening. It showed us that they brought all their prejudices into the room, they brought all their ideas about acceptable femininity and ways that men are excused bad behaviour and a lot of it wasn’t to do with the facts of the case. It exposed the kind of delusions that the higher echelons of the British judiciary operate under in terms of how they eulogise the jury and the common sense of the jury. I don’t think that was a bad thing and I suspect that we’ll read various student dissertations where they use it as source material. OK, fine. The Verdict, however, was, I think, much more cynical. It wasn’t, I don’t think, a serious attempt at exploration. It was one of these things that happens in TV: somebody leaked the fact that the other channel was going to do this, so they thought, “We’ll trump them, we’ll do it better, we’ll have celebrities”. These are people who perform for the camera. These are people who have agents. These agents know if they adopt X position, it’s going to get reported in newspapers, so I have no sense of how authentic their responses were at all. How much of it was a particular deliberate and constructed performance? We don’t know. I don’t think then that’s as useful, because you don’t know whether what you’ve got is celebrity acting or engagement with this particular account. What I think is interesting in both cases was the extent to which female jurors felt that they couldn’t find the man guilty, but knew that harm had been done and felt totally conflicted by the decision that they reached. I’ll tell you the reason why I thought the Consent programme was particularly good was that at the end, when they reached the verdict of not guilty, as the credits rolled, you were shown the scenario acted out as the woman had recounted it, not how he had recounted it. What it showed you was: this happened, it happened in the way she said it happened, but he was found not guilty. I thought it was a powerful message, a very powerful message. I’m not of the opinion that there should be no fictional representation of these things, but as with what we talked about earlier concerning how lawyers operate, there needs to be a certain ethics about it and I do think one of them made a serious attempt to be ethical and the other did not have that at the foundation of what they were doing. They were making reality TV, celebrity TV. They were not using the medium of television to explore a complicated, serious issue. However, that’s not to say I expect all TV programmes to do things right, but I expect them to make a serious attempt and an ethical attempt. One programme did that and one didn’t.
Chameleon: Now that we have the Internet and you can download every variety of humanly, or inhumanly imaginable, pornography in endless quantities, do you think that the ready availability of pornography has an impact on the number of rapes by fostering a rape mentality?
LK: I don’t know whether it does that or not. I am fairly certain that it has a very bad effect on already damaged men. They can use it to fuel obsessions and hatreds. They are a small number. I think, much more insidiously, it has an impact on what men think heterosexual sex is and how they understand women and women’s engagement with sex. To me, that’s not just about the number of sexual offences we’ve got, it’s about the quality of sexual engagement and encounters between women and men. I think it gives men a weird sense of women’s sexuality; I think it gives them a weird sense of men’s sexuality. I’m not any longer convinced that this is just a reinforcement of one kind of masculinity. I think it can actually make a lot of men feel uneasy and insecure, but they’re not allowed to talk about it. There’s no space to talk about that. So, for example, slightly to one side of this, you have all those Internet sites where they can rate women they’ve paid for sex. The men who try to post on those sites who are ambivalent and who are saying “I’m not sure I really liked it; I thought it would make me feel like this – it didn’t” are discouraged from posting again. These communities of men who are interested in the sex industry, in paying for sex and pornography don’t want other men saying “We’re not sure about this; this feels unsatisfactory”. We are just doing a project at the moment where we’re talking to men who pay for sex. We didn’t expect to have so many of them phoning up to confess, to say how bad they feel about it and how uneasy they feel about it. It doesn’t fit in with a particular feminist construction of predatory men, but actually these men are interesting because there’s a possibility for change there, if we engage in a particular way. I feel the same about porn on the Internet. What bothers me is that, certainly in this country, we have very poor sex education in schools; young people don’t get it as a right, so some might get nothing. Most of what they get is what we call “plumbing and prevention”, it’s not about relationships, it’s not about complexities, it’s not about contradictions and that’s what most of them want to talk about. And so where are they going for sex education? Porn on the net. I think the implications of that are huge for both young men and young women. I don’t know whether what we’re doing is producing a generation of young people for whom sex is solely performance and technicality, something you should do and want and perform at all times and then what kind of sexualities we’re going to be confronting. So for me, I’m much more interested and concerned about its broader cultural meanings and consequences than whether in a particular instance it’s implicated in a sexual assault or not.
Chameleon: Do you think that pornography creates a kind of “background tolerance” of rape through portraying women as “ever ready”, like the battery.
LK: I think certain kinds of pornography legitimise rape and certain kinds of it eroticise rape and if men get caught up in orchestrating their own sexual desires and sexual practices through that, then that’s very problematic, clearly. A significant proportion of it purports to be consensual – fair enough, but what about the representation? Whether it was consensual in the making of it is a different point from the representation depicting consensuality and it’s a particular kind of consensuality, which is about these women who can’t get enough. It’s also about these men who are constantly ready and able and well-endowed. I increasingly am not convinced – I never really was, but I’m not convinced by this argument that, well, it’s just fantasy and everybody knows it’s fantasy because you can see that in the guys who pay for sex. On one level they know that they’re paying for a performance, but on another level they believe it – they’re paying to believe that they’re good at doing sex. They’re paying to believe that they give pleasure, but if you push them a little bit about it, they go, “Well, maybe, but I really think she had a good time”. This idea that we make clear distinctions between fantasy and reality doesn’t work because you’re paying for a fantasy that then allows you to construct your sense of self in a more positive way than before you made that payment. It’s has material consequences in the way you think about yourself, how you perceive yourself to be. How do these men then engage where payment is not an issue, where you have to be a human being, where you have to negotiate, you have to confront the fact that maybe the person isn’t going to find it pleasurable that just because you’re doing something doesn’t mean that somebody else likes it. That’s the complicated part and I think a lot of men find it quite difficult. There’s that horrible thing, chilling, in Pornified by Pamela Paul [New York, Henry Holt, 2005] where some of the young men whom she interviewed are very clear that they’ve become quite obsessive about accessing porn and not certain about it, but some of them are actually saying they prefer sex – and they call it sex, they don’t call it masturbation – through porn than with a real person because they can just get their relief and they don’t have to engage on a communicative or an emotional level. Women have always said that men are less emotionally literate – and that’s putting it nicely – but there is a real possibility that what porn does is reinforce this emotional illiteracy.
Chameleon: They just feel that they couldn’t be bothered with the complications of involvement with a flesh and blood human being rather than this classic, surgically enhanced fantasy creature that bears no relation to the saggy boobs and stretch marks most women are.
LK: And most women are complicated and they’re sometimes bad-tempered, irritable and have expectations of certain kinds of baseline behaviour. There is the question of how it is implicated in particular kinds of sexual assault and there’s no doubt that it is in certain instances, but this deeper implication in the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity is in many ways more significant and possibly even, at a cultural level, more dangerous.
Chameleon: When men purchase the pornography or the sex, as you very rightly said, they’re trying to purchase the ability to overcome their own anxieties or sense of inadequacy, whereas for the women who see these images of media perfection with celebrities, it doesn’t even have to be porn stars, they might feel inadequate, driving them to the surgeons in droves, or to Weight Watchers. Men can overcome their inadequacies whereas women are made to feel more inadequate.
LK: You would say that they can overcome their inadequacies – I would say that’s debateable. It might be that they have a way of appeasing the sense of being inadequate, and who’s to that shopping doesn’t do the same thing for women. That this particular consumer, celebrity culture of the moment is producing extremely insecure femininities and masculinities, neither of which are particularly healthy, neither of which are about any kind of human dignity and, when combined, are not a recipe for engaged heterosexual relations. I think there’s a group of men who use the sex industry in a totally consumerist way and they just bolster their sense of entitlement, privilege and power, but it doesn’t have that effect on all of them. It isn’t uni-dimensional, it’s multi-dimensional and we need to show more interest than we have done in those dimensions.
Chameleon: I’ve noticed an alarming trend whereby women who fail to get their attackers prosecuted in court are subsequently taken to court themselves by the men who raped them and are sometimes being sent to prison for false accusation. How do you react to this?
LK: There are layers to this. There aren’t very many where the case goes to court and that happens. If the case goes to court and there’s an acquittal and the accused wants to do something, they will normally go through civil courts, through damages, suing for libel or whatever. We’ve had a couple of cases like that and there have been a couple of sexual harassment cases that have gone through the civil courts initially. What’s happened in terms of rape cases has been when a case has been dropped because it’s a false accusation that the police have prosecuted for wasting police time. There’s another charge – I can’t remember precisely what it is – that’s slightly more serious as well. There have been a few cases like that. The danger is to think it’s happening all the time. I actually think that probably any such case is reported in the media and the misreading is that there are lots of other ones behind. What’s more significant is that if you have made a previous allegation that didn’t result in a conviction, if you report a subsequent sexual assault that previous allegation will be seen as going to your discredit, so the fact that we have this massive attrition rate, that only one in forty cases now results in a conviction – we’ve got a 5.3% conviction rate – means that we’re creating a generation of women whose subsequent complaints will be discounted. That’s much more significant, but it’s not so obvious. We’ve seen it because we’ve gone and looked in the files and we’ve asked police to tell us why they’ve dropped cases at particular points in time. This information has come out and you can see that it has a significant impact, but that’s more invisible than these high profile cases, although there are many more where that happens than are prosecuted for wasting police time.
Chameleon: You talked earlier about the glamorisation of violence in our culture. I agree that such a glamorisation is taking place – it’s amazing to see some of the films that are released now. They are so stylised that when a woman is punched she doesn’t develop a bruise, her lip doesn’t split and gush with blood. On the one hand, there are lots of women who think that something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Kill Bill, both of which could be said to glamorise violence, tries to do away with the myth that women are wimps, or that women are not resilient – some women look on these fictions as a kind of empowerment. So how should we be looking at the phenomenon of the glamorisation of violence? It is quite nuanced, isn’t it?
LK: There isn’t one answer you see because I do think – I know from myself that I can see representations of women being strong, fighting back, being able to win a fight with a man can involve a sense of enjoying that representation. To me that’s not the same as empowerment. I can enjoy that representation, I can enjoy it as a challenge to the traditional ways women are represented – I can even enjoy the aesthetic of the choreography of the violence. I enjoy it because I know it’s not real, I know it’s a fiction, which gives me permission to engage with it in a particular way. We’re all doing that to some extent. Underneath this is a different issue, one that has frustrated me for a very long time, which is a conflation of victimisation, victim and passivity. Women are victimised, so are people with disabilities, lesbians and gay men, people from ethnic minorities – and those aren’t mutually exclusive categories – victimisation happens. What it means, how you respond to it, whether you take it on as an identity are entirely different questions and are different again from whether you are accorded the status of victim by the justice system. If you are not accorded the status of victim by the justice system you have no right to redress or justice. You see this most clearly in relation to women who are trafficked. If they are not given the status of victim they then become a criminal, who can be deported with no rights, nothing. It can be hugely important and significant, even to the point of being a matter of life and death, whether you are accorded the status of victim. That has nothing to do with how you process what’s happened to you in terms of your own identity. We don’t even use any more “victim” or “survivor”, we talk about “women who have been raped”, “men who have been raped” because that leaves open what kind of identity they may or may not choose. I think some of this happened through a therapeutic turn in the Nineties that was then attributed by people like Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia to feminism. It wasn’t feminism, or it wasn’t in any activist feminist way – there was a kind of populist feminism that they are also a part of in a different dimension – with all of these self-help books about the journey from victim to survivor. If you look at the research that’s been done on sexual violence, violence against women, but particularly if you look at the service providers, the ones who provide support, a lot of them didn’t – some of them do now – use those words in that way. We saw them as being two sides of the same coin. That being victimised didn’t mean you had no agency. Women resist, physically or in their minds, holding a part of them somewhere, where they think “You’re not having this bit of me”. They resist and fight back by deciding to report, or deciding to tell their friendship group what this person’s done, to expose them. There are all sorts of ways. It does, though, narrow, constrain your space for action at that particular point in time, which is one of the harms of it, that actually you don’t have the possibility to prevent it. It happened. For me, the interventions that we make should be about expanding that space for action again. It’s not that there’s no agency, but it’s that agency is constrained by violence. I find this invocation of victim and victimhood really unhelpful and also entirely inaccurate in terms of what actually happens when women confront violence. You talked about how we manage our fear by doing or not doing certain things. Those are forms of agency. We might resent the fact we have to do them and we might engage in discussion about whether that’s the most appropriate or useful thing to be doing, but it is action. Women who live with domestic violence are managing that situation all the time and a proportion of them are so damaged and so diminished by this intimate domination that their space for action is hardly anything. Those are the women who it’s really difficult to work with because they are terrified of doing anything as everything they’ve ever tried to do didn’t work. It doesn’t mean they were passive and didn’t do anything. It means they live with a nasty bastard controlling man who used every strategy they ever tried to develop as a reason to further abuse. Not all of them are like that, but with some of them, the sophistication of how they undermine every strategy women ever try is actually quite frightening.
Chameleon: It’s cold-blooded, isn’t it?
LK: Yes and I find them more frightening, more disturbing than the ones who use physical assault.
Chameleon: It’s the ruthlessness, the calculatedness of their behaviour, isn’t it?
LK: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think there’s a whole way in which we as feminists need to revisit these concepts. If I were to point to something I’d do differently I think I wouldn’t abandon the concept of victim like we did. I think I would want to fill it with other meanings, so that it wasn’t seen as a contradiction to agency, but that it limits your agency in particular ways, but it doesn’t mean that you have none. It doesn’t mean that you’re passive and helpless. It means that your space for action has been constrained by the behaviour of another person. I think we have to acknowledge that for women who want to seek justice and want to use the criminal justice system as a means to obtain justice, being accorded the status of victim is very significant and important. It’s a recognition that they’ve been harmed and it’s a route to certain rights.
Chameleon: Some progress has been made, however.
LK: Yes. There is a coalition that we have recently developed here in the UK, the End Violence Against Women Coalition. It’s the first time that all the organisations that work around violence, across the different forms of violence, have come together, groups working on domestic violence, on sexual violence, on FGM, forced marriage, trafficking and prostitution. We are actually part of a network, but more than that, we’re also in a formal alliance with Amnesty International, the Trade Union Congress and the very big women’s organisation called the Women’s Institute. We are committed to trying to get our government to have a coordinated strategic response to violence against women. We have a number of action plans on different forms, but none of them are gendered, they don’t talk about violence against women, they talk about rape, or domestic violence and they’re not linked up, they’re strands of work that are separated. We don’t have a plan of action on violence against women in this country. We don’t have really a commitment to want to do that despite having signed the Beijing Platform for Action. Within that we also want there to be a much greater emphasis on prevention and we want there to be a commitment to increasing service provision, especially protecting the women-only services. I think this is a really interesting development – it’s not without its tensions and difficulties, but it has given us a voice and a strategic position. One of the things that we’ve decided to do is to audit the government every year on whether it’s moving in the directions we’re saying we think we should be moving in. We’ve produced this report called Making the Grade and we’ve done two so far. As a result of the second one our prosecutors have said that they want to develop a violence against women strategy. The police in London have said that they want to, so we’re seeing some departments get the message and say, “Yes, we understand what you’re saying, we want to do better”. The other thing that I think is worth mentioning is that we’ve just had this law come into force called the Gender Equality Duty. We’re about to move to a single equality body and that will mean that we no longer have a specific equality body for women, or for race, or for disability. One of the things that was very clear was that there is a statutory responsibility around race and around disability, but not around gender. What the law states is that every body, at national and at local level – everything from a government ministry to a school – has to have a gender equality scheme, which has to be about how they are going to eliminate gender discrimination and harassment in their institution and they also have to carry out a gender equality audit of any big change in policy, all new law. This is the first time you’ve ever had a legal requirement, so part of what EVAW has been trying to do is to say you must put violence against women in there because one of the things that the duty says is that you should address the most serious inequalities and forms of discrimination in the first instance, so we’re saying, actually violence is one of the most serious. Everybody has to publish their gender equality scheme by Monday [30th April 2007] and then these have to be monitored and rewritten again in three years’ time. I think this is a really interesting approach to trying to put gender and women back on policy agendas, because we have been relatively invisible for a while. It was a very smart move by the women in the Equal Opportunities Commission to agree to enter into a single equality body, but only if we have a gender duty in the same way that we have these other duties.
Chameleon: Thank you so much!
Essential Links:
The End Violence Against Women Coalition
The Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit
