Conversations I want to have

The following was recently published in 'Thinking Differently', the quarterly newsletter of Autism New Zealand Inc.

'Your Letters'

This is an excerpt from a letter we received from one reader, who had been married to a man with Aspergers Syndrome. She discovered he'd been sexually interfering with her 11-year old twin daughters and eventual divorced him. The letter is extensive, but she presents a valid point of view, based on her experience.
"The Law is there to protect others from those behaviours. Aspergers should not be exempt from the law or being locked up. I do believe many serial killers and rapists have Aspergers. They can be cunning and devious. Aspergers do commit crimes, probably more often than normal people. We matter too."
H---- F--- (abridged)

I'm angry and saddened that it was written, more so that Autism New Zealand saw fit to publish such an offensive letter whilst stating that it presents 'a valid point of view'. But I'm perhaps most frustrated at the way it has set the agenda, that to counteract this it feels necessary to scrabble round for statistics saying that we're not any more likely to murder or rape than "normal people". I don't want to have to come up with examples of how we're the good "Aspergers" who pay our taxes and follow the law and have never had so much as a speeding fine. Those aren't the conversations I want to have.

I don't think there's any way to usefully engage with the idea of 'serial killers'. Is regular murder not shocking enough? There really aren't enough serial killers out there for this to be a meaningful discussion. I don't believe aspies are any more likely to be rapists than the general population. If there's evidence of a statistically significant disparity, that needs to be looked at, but in a country and world with the rates of rape and associated violence that exists, along with the terrible conviction rates and limited government willingness to do anything about either, I feel there are more important things to engage in that idle speculation about who does it most.

But let's leave aside the serial killers and the rapists for a second. Let's talk about the aspies who end up in the justice system for vandalism, for theft, for getting into fights or retaliating against violence. Lets talk about those who have not done what they're accused of but can't stand up to questioning or navigate the legal system (as a teenager I admitted to shoplifting I hadn't done (fortunately avoiding a criminal charge) because security guard told me I had no choice but to admit it and I believed that, literally, and because I didn't see any way anyone would understand my compulsive need to read song lyrics anyway). If the main backbone of the conversation is that statistically most of us are law abiding, if those of us who can go round flaunting our jobs and our taxpaying and our relationships and our degrees and our mortgages and our nice clean criminal records, then we're feeling good about ourselves and changing absolutely nothing.

So instead, let's have a conversation about a world which makes things unbearable for us, and when we lash out, potentially at people or at objects, the solution is not to change the environment to prevent a reoccurance, but to punish us. Let's have a conversation about how difficult legal systems are to navigate, how atypical facial expressions or eye contact are so often assumed to mean guilt, how a neurotypical person can sometimes avoid a charge for a minor offence with a "sorry mate" whilst pedantic questioning of language and the nature of the offence is almost certainly going to lead to an arrest. Let's talk about how atypical movement or gestures or reasons for going to places is viewed as grounds for suspicion, how silence is viewed as stubbornness or lack of co-operation, how literal interpretation of questions is viewed as rudeness. Let's talk about how the effect is doubled, tripled for people already disadvantaged in our legal system.

Let's not be afraid to have a conversation about prisons. When people say we don't lock up autistic people/mentally ill people/intellectually impaired people, I always want to ask what the hell they think prisons are other than a dumping ground with disproportionate rates of all of the above. And I get why we're afraid to talk about this - we've spent so long trying to say that we're good people really, we're not scary people, we could be your neighbour. But we need to challenge the assumption that there's a perfect correlation between 'in prison' and 'bad person', or that crimes exist in some kind of vacuum as an indicator of someone's morality, rather than being socially constructed.

Yes, it is worth challenging such obvious bigotry, the inaccruate assumptions, the stereotyping and the offensive language. And then let's move on. If we're talking about Aspergers and crime, let's talk about parents who murder autistic children and are then treated with sympathy, about autistic people who have been raped and are then told their non-verbal communication is inadmissable in court. Let's talk less about how some cunning and devious aspies can apparently get away with everything (something I'd guess would have far more to with the numbers who get away with child abuse generally) and more about how the legal system fails aspies on both sides.

Louis Theroux and 'A Place for Paedophiles'

I caught last night's Louis Theroux doco (or as much as I could, around children who refused to go to bed), and found it really though-provoking. 'A Place for Paedophiles' documented Theroux's visit to Coalinga Mental Hospital in California, a place where about 500 sex offenders are incarcerated. Most have already served prison sentences, but continue to be held at Coalinga (a fortified, secure unit) because they're deemed too dangerous to release.

A treatment programme is made available to Coalinga inmates, but only 30% of them have opted to take part - perhaps because over the hospital's history, only 13 graduates of the programme have been deemed able to be safely released. The majority of the inmates will be there for their whole lives.

I don't have any philosophical objection to preventative detention, if there is no other way to keep the public safe, and if the conditions the detainee is held in are humane. But the thing about the documentary that set me pondering was the way the hospital treated the sex offenders, not by teaching them to resist and deal with their sexual attraction to children, but by trying to train this attraction out of them altogether (with varying amounts of success).

For a start, I wondered if it's actually possible to force yourself to no longer be attracted to something. That's not my experience of sexuality - but then, I don't have illegal sexual desires. Secondly, I didn't understand why therapy didn't focus on equipping offenders to choose not to offend, rather than getting rid of the urge to offend. This implies that the powers that be think of paedophilic urges as a sort of illness that can't be controlled; and if that's the case, paedophilia can't really be considered a crime. People with acceptable sexual urges are deemed to be able to control their behaviour, and are usually expected to do so (although the 'boys will be boys' defence for rape still occurs far more often than it should).

Deep philosophical questions about human sexuality aside, the thing that really struck me about this doco was the inmate who was given the OK to be released into the community. So strong was his commitment not to reoffend that he'd had himself surgically castrated. His social worker had made over 1000 applications to find him a home in the community: no one would have him. I had a great deal of pity for him - but I'm not sure I'd be willing to risk having him as my neighbour, either.

Not in my name, thanks

When the ACT party and other like-minded souls advocate harsher sentencing or a three strikes policy, they tell us it's in the name of victims. They conjure up images of the helpless and the harrowed; people we can show compassion for only by punishing their attackers with great severity.

Who are these victims? Well, they're people like me. I've experienced sexual violence, and so have a great many of the women I know. I've been injured, but I don't think of myself as pitiful or broken. I'm neither helpless nor consumed with hatred. I don't sit about yearning for Garth McVicar to avenge me. And I don't need the likes of ACT peddling sadism in my name.

When my father was a younger man, he was jumped by three guys and badly beaten. Both his legs were broken. He spent months recuperating in hospital, and neither the physical nor psychological scars fully healed, leaving him permanently damaged. I remember his bemusement a few years ago, when Rodney Hide argued that prisoners should no longer be provided with tea and coffee. As well as producing the stunning fiscal saving of $40,000 per year, this measure would teach prisoners that jail is no joyride, said Hide. 'That man's a fool', my father said, shaking his head. Like me, my father believes that making people feel worthless does very little to encourage them to abide by society's values.

It's not just that I believe harsher sentencing won't work. I believe that sentences based on a desire for revenge are fundamentally immoral. They can't be justified by public safety: they may produce the opposite. They set out to degrade the people who receive them, and offer no reparation to those who have been harmed.

Not every victim of crime agrees with me, and I understand and respect how they feel, although I can't support it. What I resent, though, is tougher sentencing campaigners using my unhappiness, or that of others in my situation, to push their own barrow. Those people don't speak for me. I can decide my own ethical stances: being assaulted didn't transform me into a redneck automaton.

I'd like to see advocates of harsher sentences come clean about their motivations. Next time you feel like dressing up your sadistic urges as sympathy for people like me, have a sit down and a nice cup of shut the hell up. This sort of 'compassion' is exactly what I don't need.

A woman imprisoned

A woman who gives birth alone, and then abandons the baby is a woman who is out of options. A woman who does this on a plane, on her way to take up low-paying migrant work, is out of options and resources. Whatever your political analysis of the woman who gave birth in a plane last month, it does not take much empathy to understand that her situation was not one of her own choosing, and that what she did was an act of desperation and powerlessness.

I had wanted to write something, but hadn't known what to write. A polemic seems almost grotesque when you think what she has been through. But then I heard on National Radio, that she had been remanded in custody.*

She has been in prison for ten days now, and was arrested six days after she gave birth. I know I'm a radical when it comes to prison, and so what I have to say about how much people don't belong in prison sounds slightly hollow. But I don't understand what possible good comes from locking this woman up under any logic at all.

I believe that Karolaine Maika's situation, and her incarceration are a feminist issue, and that feminist solidarity is most important when it comes to women who are most marginalised by society. I would encourage feminists to to support Karolaine Maika in jail. The most simple thing you could do is write to her:

Karolaine Maika
C/O Auckland Region Womens Corrections Facility
Private Bag 76908
South Auckland Mail Centre
Manukau 2240

You can send phones cards and money to people in prison with your letter. Money goes into the prison account, and can be used to buy things from the prison shop once a week. Phone cards are useful as a way of contacting people outside of prison, and are sometimes used as trade for other items. If you send either of these things, then mention them in the letter to make sure they get to her (if you want to do more, then leave a comment on the thread - if there's one thing I'm not short on it's information on how to support people in prison).

Mostly when I talk about feminism I talk about collective resistance. But I think support plays an important role in feminism as well. It doesn't take much to write a letter.

Acting irrationally

In a counter to last year's repeal of section 59 of the Crimes Act, the ACT party's John Boscawen is introducing a private bill to ensure 'it is no longer a crime for parents or guardians to use reasonable force to correct children'. Boscawen claimed that the repeal 'simply criminalised law-abiding parents and removed their freedom' (although his media release didn't give any instance of a law-abiding parent being convicted for the light smacking he advocates).

Under all the heated rhetoric the smacking debate has unleashed, pro-smackers seem to reason as follows: kids aren't fully mature or rational, you can't always reason with them, so you should be able to hit them instead to make them behave. I don't agree with this (for example, most people don't think it's OK to hit an elderly person with dementia, who also is not fully rational) but at least I can see the logic.

Yet, I seem to remember that, during the 90s, ACT went to the polls with a policy of lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 12. So a few years ago, ACT thought of children as calculating, rational and culpable creatures that needed to be called to account in the dock. Now, they're dumb things that need to be hit so they can learn.

Another inconsistent idea about young people appears in ACT's current law and order policy, which advocates 'more secure, more humane, cheaper prisons. Young taggers don't progress to worse crimes'. Leaving aside the contradictory comments ACT has made about prison safety, we now have a view that young people can be influenced into bad deeds if we don't keep them safe. Clearly, this implies a duty of care towards young people, including a responsibility to keep them safe from violence. Welfare dependence should be ended because 'it is wrong to impose rules that make it rational for adolescents and adults to behave in ways that destroy their future' - now we're somewhere between young people (and adult beneficiaries) as calculating abusers of the system, and hapless victims of a callous welfare regime.

Despite a recent press release release condemning the actions of two toy-gun wielding private schoolboys, much of ACT's policy isn't aimed at young people at all. It's aimed at young poor people. ACT policy wants to comfort middle-aged people on the North Shore, hiding behind their Venetian blinds for fear that young brown hooligans are roaming the streets. It's a desire to control the hordes, dressed up with inconsistent arguments that veer between the outright punitive and faux paternalism. Much as they might protest otherwise, no member of the ACT caucus would be comfortable seeing their child in the same prison van in which Liam Ashley's short life was ended. And should an ACT MP's child end up in jail, I've got a feeling that MP would be less glib about prison rape.

Sigh. It's enough to make you want to lightly smack some consistency into the ACT party.

Small things irk me

Have you ever been angry at bread?

That's how I feel every time I see the 'Has New Zealand gone soft?' ad which is currently screening. It's the one showing a children's party where a kid on a tricycle wears a helmet, a fire extinguisher is on hand near the birthday cake, the pinata yields carrot sticks, and the kids play 'cowboys and native indigenous Americans'.

It seems this strange ad is trying to act as some sort of rallying point for disgruntled rednecks. I don't appreciate the homophobic/sexist undertones of 'going soft'. I really don't understand why using a patronising, inaccurate and potentially offensive racial term shows strength of character. (To me, it suggests a lack of the most basic maturity, respect and courtesy.) And I know people have different, valid arguments about whether we let our kids take enough risks - but whatever your view, I think the issue is important enough to warrant some thoughtful debate.

Just when I thought this ad couldn't irk me more, I discovered the website it promotes. Supposedly promoting bread, this website polls punters on whether bullrush should be allowed at schools again, and - wait for it - whether criminals should have fewer rights. All this on a bright, bubbly website, which looks like it's designed to appeal to kids. What the hell? If the ad could perhaps be dismissed as a dumb joke, the website borders on sinister.

This ad/website promotion irks me in so many uncomfortable ways that I can't quite put a finger on all of them. In the same week that a 23 year old prisoner was beaten to death by other inmates, the website glibly puts treatment of criminals in the same basket of social issues as carrot sticks. It encourages an anti-intellectual, mocking response to a bunch of serious questions, and dismisses people who care about stuff like child safety as somehow pathetic or weak.

In fact, 'Has New Zealand gone soft?' looks like braindead, macho posturing to me. I'd like to say more about it, but I have to go cast some racial slurs as I play bullrush in a stridently heterosexual way. While eating bread.

Reasonable Opinions

Act's law and order spokesperson on double bunking in prisons:

"Who cares if inmates don't want to be 'cooped up' together for long periods of time? These criminals have lost the right to have their comforts considered," Mr Garrett said. [...]

The fact is: if you don't want to be assaulted - or worse - by a cellmate, avoid prison by not committing a crime,"

My view - that prison should be abolished - is incomprehensible. If any MP expressed that view it would be news for weeks, but none of them would, because no one would.

David Garret's view is acceptable enough that it is just quoted in a news story on double bunking, not the subject of a news story.

I keep writing things, and deleting them; they don't capture the gutteral scream of despair that I'm trying to convey. I find analysing public discourse on prisons so upsetting that I do it in very small doses.

So I will move to a slightly different angle. References, jokes, and evil press releases about prison rape, are not quarantined from the way we understand rape. They are part of that understanding, and reinforce it. I'm sure you could write a lot about that; I'm sure people have. All I want to say is that any expression that anyone, anywhere, ever, deserves to be raped reinforces the idea that some people are rapeable.

Quick hit: Fritzl expecting life imprisonment

Stuff today carries this report from Reuters:

Josef Fritzl, a 73-year-old Austrian who locked his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, expects to spend the rest of his life in jail, his lawyer said.

Fritzl goes on trial in a provincial court on March 16 for the murder of a child who died shortly after being born in the cellar, as well as five other charges including incest.

"He is 73 years old. The (length of) the sentence is of no importance to him," Fritzl's lawyer Rudolf Mayer told Austrian state news agency APA, adding that his client expected to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Fritzl has not appealed the charges.

He will plead guilty to the charges of deprivation of liberty, rape, incest and coercion but will contest the murder charge, Mayer said.

Josef Fritzl is not a "Sex Monster," Mayer said, referring to media headlines, and "loved (Elisabeth) in his own way."

Click through for the whole article.

What bugs me about this case is how there has been so little about how and why it happened. Yes we can just dismiss Fritzl as a monster, put him in jail then turn away, but that doesn't actually help to stop more crimes of this type in the future.

Oriwa Kemp

Nia Glassie's life and death should not be measured by the length of the prison sentences handed out to those against her. I've made that argument in general, and I make it now, in particular.

She doesn't come back, whether the collective jail time is the minimum of 42 years, or a much larger maximum, her life doesn't get any better.

I don't believe, I don't imagine anyone can believe, that the sentances will act as a deterrant. Whatever the cause of Nia Glassie's death it certainly wasn't

In 17 and a half years (a little less for time served) Michael and Wiremu Curtis will become eligible for parole, they won't even be forty yet. They'll get out. They will probably get partners, their partners may have kids. Prison, years of being controlled and brutalised, won't have made them any less violent and so they will probably beat up their partners, and their partners' kids.*

Murdering a child is horrific, I have actually been able to read very little about the case, because when I get to "clothes dryer" my brain turns off. But prison isn't a line that ends it all. It is part of a system that perpetuates it all.

None of that was what I meant to say, when I decided to write about the sentencing. What I wanted to write about was the sentences given to Oriwa Kemp.

Oriwa Kemp was 17 when she was in a relationship with Michael Curtis, and he was beating her up.

I started this series at least partly in response to feminists who get outraged at short jail terms. I wanted to explore what jail is and what it does, and why I think supporting it, even in that limited sense was not part of women's liberation.** I haven't really done that yet (although I hope to).

But Oriwa Kemp, who has already been in jail for over a year, and has more time to serve, who is in jail because of a relationship where she was being abused, her story should stand as a warning to any feminist who upholds the jail system.

* None of this is inevitable. I don't want to dismiss the possibility of change. But change is much more likely outside of prison as inside it.

** I also wanted to explore the wafer-thinness between my line of supporting convictions, and will hopefully still do that too.

An Experiment

So I haven't posted much. That much is obvious. I think of posts occasionally. My friend texted me 'if we can't trust celebrities to fight the class war, who can we trust?' and it'd make a great title for a post about the Screen Actors Guild negotiations.* I have ideas about the politics of Battlestar Galactica and The Wire that I'd like to write. I still have a draft somewhere about the evils of National's legislation to introduce mandatory standards testing. These ideas never make it onto the blog.

But a fear of being trivial had never stopped me before. This blog, after all, has more posts on 'Joss' than 'colonialism'. There must be other reasons I am not writing.

My posting slowed down considerably after the raids of October the 15th 2007. It's changed the focus of my politics, and I haven't quite known how to deal with that. One of the things I have managed to write about has been prison. Most of the posts I've started and not finished over the last year, have been around the parole of Brad Shipton, Bob Schollum and Peter McNamara. I am no longer satisfied with the pat answers I would have given 18 months ago. I would have said "I wanted Clint Rickards convicted" because I wanted Louise Nicholas to be believed, which isn't inconsistent with believing in the abolition of prisons. I maintained two sets of politics on parallel tracks, and wasn't particularly interested in exploring the blurry space between them. But now I want to write about that space constantly, it crowds out everything else I might be interested in. But I never start because the task seems too huge.

I also think there's an even deeper problem. After three years I've written out most of what I think. There are people who see the first role of their blogs as organising tools, or soapboxes. I've done both of these things, but I don't see that as the purpose of this blog. I write to explore and clarify what I think. And after 3 years I've done that with most blog-sized thoughts in my head. So I can't get in the habit of writing, because I don't have the right sized things to say.

I don't want to stop writing so I've decided to try and experiment, which addresses both these problems. Starting tomorrow everyday for at least two weeks, I'm going to write a post about the intersection between my ideas about violence against women and the ideas about prison at my blog. I'll particularly be trying to write about what I don't know, and don't understand. I'll probably cross post some, but not all those posts here.


If this works, then I've got some other ideas that I might write about for a concentrated . I'll try and write out some of my ideas that are longer than a single blog post. And maybe in between these concentrated bursts I'll write that post about the Screen Actors Guild.

* I sometimes have some strange text message conversations. Particularly when I'm watching a new television show. You'd be amazed at how much political analysis of a TV you can get into 140 characters, or perhaps my messages don't make any sense.

The very definition of a perverse outcome

Something I find really frustrating about about Garth McVicar and other advocates of tougher sentencing is that they present justice as an either/or issue. Either you're 'on the side' of the victims, or on the side of the criminals. If you raise concerns about the treatment of criminals, it shows your lack of empathy for those affected by crime. Obviously, this is a false dichotomy: we can and should care about both.

There are humane reasons to be concerned about how our society treats criminals; and, as today's Dom Post article makes clear, there are also some very practical ones. National's 'tough on crime' policies are set to have a host of perverse outcomes which no one has really considered. Crowding of prisons means inmates may have to share cells - a situation which leads to increased violence and bullying, requiring more prison staff to keep order.

To those like Garth McVicar, violence inflicted on inmates isn't a problem. Once you enter the prison walls, you're fair game - any abuse or degradation dealt out to you serves you right. More crime - the likely outcome of tougher sentencing - doesn't matter when it takes place amongst people who don't matter.

Leaving aside the ethical dimension of this, increased violence amongst prisoners may produce a range of flow-on problems. The need for more prisons and staff requires more state spending. More importantly, it's hard to imagine that taking people already disconnected from mainstream society - as shown by their anti-social behaviour - then brutalising them is going to make them feel more committed to playing a positive role in the community. And what will an upsurge in prison violence do to recidivism?

Maybe our new government needs to learn something from the short life of Liam Ashley, the seventeen-year-old child beaten to death in a prison van. He didn't live long enough to learn the lesson that tougher sentencing is supposed to teach.

Brad Shipton is a rapist

I find it hard to write about the parole report on Brad Shipton, or the media's coverage over the last few days.

"Should Brad Shipton be in jail?" "Do I want Brad Shipton to be in jail?" "Am I glad that he's going to remain in jail?" I can't answer those questions, haven't been able to months now. I keep on meaning to explore my ambivalance here, but I don't.

On top of that, I'm deeply suspicious of Brad Shipton's attitude towards the parole board. The way he treated women shows him to be a deeply manipulative person, who cares nothing about anyone else's feelings and will stop at nothing to get what he wants. Bob Schollum was denied bail, at least in part, because the parole board decided that a rapist who claimed that rape was consensual, was a danger to rape again. To see Brad Shipton's contrition in front of the parole board as anything other than a cynical ploy to try and get released, requires far more faith in Brad Shipton's integrity than is warranted on the evidence.

But I still want to talk about the parole board decision (which is available in full here and worth reading, because the Sunday Star Times article on it bore almost no relationship to the report), because it reveals quite a bit about judicial thinking about rape.

Some of it is really good. The most quoted part of the report says:

He said he was sorry for what the victim went through and later went further and said that he had ruined her life. He acknowledged he should not have put her in that position and he should not have taken his colleague Mr Schollum along with him. He acknowledged that she was possibly intimidated by them. He confirmed that he did not ask the complainant if it was okay to have sex with her or for more than one person to have sex with her, and that wearing the police uniform was despicable. He said looking back on his whole life, which he has reflected on since being in prison, has been full of disgraceful, disgusting behaviour.

In the Board’s unanimous opinion, what he described of the event was, in our view, one of rape.

I think they have laid this out very clearly; that even in his own version of events, it is clear that not only did she not consent, but that there were so many factors that made it impossible for her to give meaningful consent anyway.

While I was impressed with the parole board's analysis, I think the analysis of the psychologist was deeply problematic:

Suffice to say that that report outlines the details of the offence and Mr Shipton’s infidelities and involvement in group sex. At the time of writing the report, the psychologist was told by Mr Shipton that he denied the offence and that he had not accepted the jury decision. He thought his behaviour was immoral and unacceptable but not illegal. He told the psychologist that he had a bad jury and biased Judge and that he was very bitter and angry following the Court decision. He was able to identify risks in the future such as a situation of indulging in promiscuous behaviour and not being faithful to his partner would be risky for him.

To me, what is so worrying about this, is that the psychologist appears to have accepted Brad Shipton's rationalisation that the problem was infidelity and group sex, and not lack of consent. But Brad Shipton clearly can't identify consent, so he's as much risk to a partner, as he is if he's having sex with other people. In fact, when asked in the dock, how he knew that the woman he raped consented he replied "the same way you know with your wife." That a psychologist report doesn't just not challenge, but goes along with, a moral view that condemns group sex and unfaithfulness, rather than centreing on consent, shows the very limited understanding our justice system has about rape.*

The report also indicates that Brad Shipton wasn't eligible for intervention programmes. I don't see prison as a way of eliminating rape, but it is clear that they're not even trying.

*Lets all curl up and die of not surprisedness

Tiny, tiny babies

I want to be really clear that I was relieved when I heard that Chris Kahui was found not guilty.* I've no idea who killed the Kahui twins,** it may have been Chris. But iff someone had gone to jail for their murder that wouldn't have made that person any less likely to be violent towards children in the future, and it won't stop another caregiver of a small child doing violence under stress. It might have served as punishment, but whoever killed two babies of their own family is punishing themselves already. All that's left is vengeance, and no-one has a right to claim vengeance in those babies names.

I do have a point I want to make, now that I've made it clear that I am not calling for a different verdict. From the very beginning, the defence painted Macsyna King as guilty, and they emphasised again and again what a bad mother she was. They talked of her going out with her sister, leaving Chris Kahui alone with the twins. This is from the summing up:

The twins were not victims of a one-off assault but had historic injuries, and it was "suspicious" their mother was not aware of these.

The Crown had accused Kahui's defence of blackening Ms King's reputation, but Mrs Smith said Ms King, through abandoning her other children and her drug use, had done that all by herself.

I don't think this defence would have been used or useful if the genders had been reversed. If hypothetical-Macsyna had been standing trial for their murder, then she would have not been able to use the fact that hypothetical-Chris had gone out partying all night, abandoned previous chidren and not noticed previous injuries to portray him as guilty. What is almost unforgivable in a mother, is almost acceptable in a father.

* I want to remind people that Chris Kahui spent several months in jail, while he was unable to get bail. During this time he was in physical danger, and so was kept in segregation, which would have meant 23 hour lock-down. The prominence, and swiftness, of the 'not guilty' verdict, doesn't seem to have led to a discussion about how he has already been punished.

** That is, which person inflicted the injuries. Because capitalism and colonialism played a large part in those babies deaths.

What’s a mother to do?

When my partner and I first moved in together we infected each other with two particularly virulent and long lasting maladies. I caught Coronation Street off him and, for his sins, he now suffers a strange spasm most week nights from 7pm, for half an hour or so. We have sat in front of the goggle-box through Mike Barlow’s decline, Huia Samuels’s explosive end, Sarah Platt’s aborted wedding, and Chris Warner’s return. Neither of us go in for Home and Away, Neighbours or Eastenders, but Coro and Shortie are our guilty pleasures.

The current water cooler conversation at Soap Watchers Anonymous, at least in our shaky isles, is Tracy Barlow’s murder trial. For those unfamiliar with the plot line here’s a quick summary:

1. Charlie is an emotionally abusive arsehole who almost ruins the life of the very nice Shelley.
2. Sometime after Shelley leaves Charlie at the altar, he and long-time Coro troublemaker Tracy start a relationship that could be made for the cliché “they deserve each other.”
3. The two nasties basically play games with each other, until Charlie has an affair and Tracy breaks it off in outrage.
4. Surprisingly, Tracy quickly goes back to Charlie. In fact, she has decided to exact her revenge by the long-winded route of creating the (mostly false) impression that he is abusing her and eventually killing him. Her intention all along is to plead not guilty on the grounds of self-defence, by virtue of being a battered spouse.
5. Tracy puts her plan into action, manipulating her neighbour Clare and her mother Deidre, amongst other unwitting Coro St residents, to create witnesses to Charlie’s supposed abuse.
6. Eventually Tracy tries to goad Charlie into physically attacking her so that she can kill him in the process of a fight. When he refuses to rise to the bait she scones him one with a statuette anyway. After some suspense he dies and she is arrested for murder.
7. Tracy sets about giving herself the best possible chance of getting away with it through a sex-for-eye-witness-testimony deal with the Teen From Hell David. She also guilts her parents into funding an expensive legal team, including a lawyer who specializes in helping abused women to escape their violent partners.
8. Deirdre, Tracy’s mother, works it all out and confronts her daughter, who rather remorselessly confesses all.

This last happens a few days before Deirdre is due to testify as the final witness in Tracy’s defence case, backing up her daughter’s accusations of abuse by Charlie. As a woman who has done jail time herself, Deirdre cannot stand the thought of losing her daughter to prison. She also knows that if she doesn’t lie on the stand she will lose her anyway, as Tracy will excise her mother from her life, and take Deirdre’s grand daughter away too.

As a mum, Deirdre feels extreme guilt for her part in raising a daughter who could murder, and also has a parent’s natural inclination to want to do anything to save her child. Plus, Charlie was genuinely a horrible abusive man, although his manipulation wasn’t particularly effective on the woman who actually killed him. All up it’s a twisted situation, fraught with moral dilemna.

What would you do in Deirdre’s brogues? Would you do anything to save your child from many years in prison? If your offspring committed a heinous crime, and you knew all about it, would you shop them? And is Coro St being irresponsible by promulgating the idea that a woman would make up a serious case of abuse to get away with murder?

Thoughts, dear readers, in comments, or if you prefer to write a post on your own blog about this matter please do share a link.

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(Cross Posted at Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty)

Josie Bullock was working as a probation officer in a Maori-focused anti-violence programme. During the poroporoaki, she was asked to follow tikanga and sit behind the men. She refused to do so, and was given a formal warning for unprofessional conduct. She spoke about the incident to the media and was then dismissed.

Her case has come up for another round of media commentary, because the human rights tribunal has just found that she was discriminated against, and the warning was invalid, but offered no compensation.*

The media have quite loved this case, it's got many airings on Nine to Noon. Media and legal commentators get excited as discussing this as a case of conflicting rights, and attempting to cast the rights of Maori (who are invariably men) with the rights of women (who are equally invariably white).

There are other ways we could look at what happened. We could start with the prison system, where the programme was being run. A system that imprisons Maori at a rate far higher than Pakeha. Maori make up an even higher percentage of remand prisoners than they do sentenced prisoners, which shows that Maori are refused bail at a higher rate than Pakeha.

We could look at the women who support the men inside the prison system. We could look at how their work is rendered impossible and invisible. We could look at the effect that imprisonment has on those left outside.

We could look at the ways in which society condones and supports men's power over women, and men's violence against women.

For me, that means my starting point is that I'm fighting for a world without prisons, and without abusive men.

The effect of the media's narrow focus in cases like this, is to imply that there's a scarcity of rights and that if you want your rights you may need to trample over other people's.

It's vital that those of us who want more, those who are fighting for liberation rather than rights, reject this idea. Colonialism and misogyny are interlocking systems. We won't be able to dismantle one while the other remains in tact (and won't be able to dismantle either while capitalism is sitting there).



* This was a cowardly piece of shit ruling from the human rights commission. To state that an unfair warning wasn't the reason for dismissal, but the way someone dealt with the unfair warning was, is bosses nonsense, and shows the limits of legal redress.