Last week, the High Court of England and Wales ruled against a mother's appeal against a decision not allowing her to change the surname of her child. The child bears the surname of the father. The father raped and abused the mother, and threatened the child, the mother, and the child's grandparents. The child, who is 5, has not seen the father since late 2021, 4 years ago.
The initial trial judge ruled that changing the child's surname would “constitute a further rupture in the link she has to her father in a way that is not justified or proportionate” (!) and that the surname "is a part of her identity and provides an important connection to her father and paternal heritage." The court refused to overturn this, arguing "no real prospect of success" in challenging the decision.
What about the connection to the mother and her maternal heritage? The mother who is actually involved in raising her? The mother with whom she has an actual ongoing relationship and against whom no abuse is alleged? Rather than an abusive man she last saw as an infant?
Charlotte Proudman, who represented the mother, said, "This is abusive, state-sanctioned harm. You are forcing a child to bear or to continue to retain the father’s surname, the man who raped her mother. That is abuse facilitated by the court."
“In what world would a child want to have the name of a man who raped and abused the mother? How is that upholding important identity and links? It’s really harmful. It just shows that a rapist’s rights are more important than [the] victim and a child’s right to freedom.”
(Article in the Times on this, archived here)
Yes, it's very important to girls to maintain their identity as the product of rape. This has no negative impact on their psychological health whatsoever.
The expected experience of a woman (not being able to pass your surname onto your children) is considered irreparable harm and betrayal if done to a man.
i think a lot of younger teenagers who are against sex-based sports leagues haven't really grasped the strength difference yet. it's not a comfortable thing to understand, and its very tempting to deny it as long as you can.
Also, if they start questioning the difference in strength and bodies regarding sports then they also have to start questioning the difference in strength and bodies when it comes to dating and marriages and they're not ready to question the problems of hetero partnerships.
I always wonder if the people who refuse to acknowledge the strength gap between men and women are also in denial about rates of domestic violence? Do they know that DV is a mostly male-on-female issue? Because I knew that instinctively by the time I was in middle school, if not earlier.
And if they do--do they not wonder why women are so ill equipped to defend themselves when their male partners physically abuse them if male and female bodies are exactly the same?
Same with rape. Do they not wonder why women don't just easily fight off their male rapists, if they're just as strong as men? Do they think rape victims just didn't try hard enough?
In fact, why do they think men were able to oppress women at all? How do they think men established patriarichal rule at all if not with physical force? Do they think men are smarter than women? Or that women just wanted to be subjugated?
Idk I suppose the younger teenagers maybe haven't thought that deeply about this. But I've seen hundreds of adults making the same arguments for why women's sports shouldn't exist too and I always wonder what their explanation for these things are.
they don't consider this a problem because many of them genuinely believe that women and men abuse each other at similar rates. Despite this not being backed up by police, shelter or medical statistics, it has removed the need for critical thought, so they continue to spout it. Any time I put my foot down, I am told that my statistics are inaccurate and based on "a system where men cannot talk openly about the abuse they suffer".
There is no evidence for this, but the imaginary ranks of abused men are apparently a good enough argument.
reminds me of a dateline episode i was listening to - they were trying to talk about a young girl who had been prostituted as a teenager, and despite her being a minor they still said that she was a "sex worker"
it's not *destigmatizing* to use language that actively harms victims. "work" implies that it's a choice, that it's a necessary thing happening to these girls/women that society just needs to accept. it completely erases the reality of what happens to women stuck in prostitution and how devastating and destructive it is to their lives
It’s language that intentionally covers up and sanitizes the ugliness and the cruelty and the abuse and the crimes. It’s a thought-terminating cliché, designed to be an easily repeatable slogan that makes you stop thinking critically and examining the subject further.
If you’re trying to talk about trafficked girls and your audience has someone in it who has been conditioned to believe the only morally upright and correct way to refer to any position in the sex trade is specifically as a “sex worker”, then they’re going to get up in arms about you referring to them as prostitutes or sex slaves, and you’re going to get derailed every time before you ever manage get to your point
That person is never going to hear about the child sex slaves, either because they interrupted the person trying to tell them about them to correct them on the terminology or because they were so steamed about it they stopped listening and labeled them a swerf, as if that actually means anything at all
Meanwhile they’re literally serving pimps and traffickers agendas with the language they’re choosing to use, simply because they like the sound of it better
lmao look at this Bad Woman being mocked and humiliated by liberal men. thank god that i, a Morally Good Woman with Correct Opinions, will never be in her place!
Men can not be rehabilitated, as psychologist Rebecca Myers found out after many years of hard work.
Rebecca Myers has dedicated her life to trying to change the most brutal of Britain’s serial rapists and abusers. When people hear that, they always want her to reveal the “worst” thing she has heard.
Go on, they say, as though it’s an episode of The Killing or CSI. Myers, who is a forensic psychologist working with deviant criminals, will give away a few things, such as the fact that she can’t look at a table knife casually left in the butter over breakfast after her prison housed a man who stabbed his girlfriend in the bath and left the knife behind, stuck in. Or that the theme tune to Coronation Street gives her chills. One of her first cases was a man who went on a three-year raping spree, breaking into the homes of single women while wearing an animal mask. On one occasion he hid behind the sofa of his next victim in his terrifying costume as she, oblivious and happy, watched her favourite soap opera.
The actual worst thing? She won’t tell me that — she is scared it will contaminate me too. “I have never told a soul, and never will.” That’s her job, to suffer so that others don’t, to save other women.
One of the worst things she has heard wasn’t exactly a crime. It was after a lifetime of getting into the heads of these men through a gruelling and expensive rehabilitation programme for sex offenders that thousands of male prisoners in this country undertook over a two-decade period, at a taxpayer cost of an estimated £100 million. She personally started working with the Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP) when she was 22, soon after she joined one of Britain’s most notorious prisons, known for the number of inmates convicted for sexual or violent offences. She worked with them, including the mask-wearing rapist, out of idealism and trust.
Then, in 2017, after Myers had spent 16 years on the front line of the SOTP, the results of a national evaluation came in. The SOTP didn’t work. It was abruptly abandoned. She had spent so long attempting to change people who had done horrible things, and when they were released they went out and did them again at just the same rate as the men who hadn’t attempted any change.
“It was gutting,” Myers, now 49, says to me. “Just shocking. A massive disappointment to so many people that had invested decades of their lives, totally and utterly driven by wanting to stop these people from doing it again.”
The worst thing she has heard was not a murder. It was this news that seemed to kill hope. The costs, emotional and financial, hadn’t been worth it. Her memoir Inside Job gives the reader an authentic account of what it is like to work with maximum-security prisoners, including when a headless pigeon is lobbed at her from one of the cells (ripped off with the man’s teeth?), splattering her shoes with blood. “Whore!” the prisoner shouts as Myers stares at the pigeon’s still-flapping body, its spinal cord protruding. “Slut!”
She will never know who did it, whether it was because she gave them an unfavourable parole recommendation or it was just a man who hates women. “There are plenty of them about.”
When I meet Myers over Zoom I can tell how she holds her own as one of the few women in such a hostile environment. She speaks in the North Yorkshire accent of her home town with seriousness and common sense. She began in prisons months after graduating from a psychology degree. She was, she describes, “slim and blonde”, and understandably naive. She was given a tour of the prison officers’ quarters, with pictures of topless women on the walls, their breasts covered with NSPCC stickers.
Sinister disembodied eyes press against each cell’s viewing holes as she passes. “I wish I had not worn a skirt,” she writes, and she never made that mistake again, switching for ever to work in a baggy outfit of loose trousers and poloneck covered up by a jacket, even in summer. “My face and hands are the only flesh I allow them to see.” Her psychological armour in prison is represented by her perfect nail polish, which she wears to see me too.
We agree that it seems strange, with hindsight, to think that such a young woman was the right fit for the job. Myers explains that forensic psychologists are not usually like Robbie Coltrane in Cracker — in the UK 80 per cent of them are female. In the 1990s money flooded into prison rehabilitation programmes with a surge of Blairite optimism. Britain’s sex offender rehab became an international flagship, she says. In practice, that meant an “influx of fresh young female psychologists straight out of university entering the prison to deliver programmes”.
“It’s an interesting notion isn’t it?” Myers says, pondering. “The damage is done to women yet it is mostly women trying to fix it.”
The Silence of the Lambs, featuring Jodie Foster as a student psychologist at the FBI Academy trying to outsmart Hannibal Lecter was how some of Myers’ friends conceived of her job. “It was the cool thing at the time,” she tells me. “But now I completely steer away from anything of that nature. I find crime on TV distasteful. I worry about it being glamorised. It’s as far from glamorous as you can get.
“Clarice Starling I am not,” she writes in her book. “Real-life serial killers are far less exciting and more stubborn and smelly than those portrayed in the films.”
Almost immediately she was left alone with them in unguarded rooms. “In terms of how things are portrayed on television, that is one of the biggest misconceptions,” she says. “That the men would be handcuffed, that there would be officers there. There simply weren’t. You were left on your own. I was surprised at the time.”
Was that because it was considered low risk? “I don’t think it’s low risk. In the book I describe a hostage situation with a female prison officer.”
This hostage-taking goes on for 12 hours, the “decent, kind-hearted” woman held at knifepoint in a cell by a man who had been a serial rapist of elderly women in their homes. Myers is rushed to the scene in the middle of the night and helps to assess the man as highly unlikely to surrender. The officers charge in when he begins an assault on the prison officer. “So it’s not low risk,” she says. “You never turn your back. But I didn’t question it, I just followed the culture.”
The book follows closely her first treatment group of sex offenders, including the masked rapist she names “Wayne” in the book. She is not allowed to name the prison for legal reasons, and she blurs identifying details for the sake of the victims’ families. When she first reads through Wayne’s crimes she has to vomit in the toilets. In person, though, he presents as a polite, even endearing man who likes custard creams dunked in his tea. This is a hard lesson society is still learning: sex offenders are husbands, dads, people holding down respectable jobs. Even police officers, as the Sarah Everard case showed.
Each psychologist was paired with a prison officer or two for the treatment programme, which took groups of nine men through more than 200 hours of therapy that lasted up to a year. In a twist that makes her book seem even more like a Jed Mercurio TV drama, a young Myers falls in love with the prison officer she is paired with on her first treatment programme. It’s an ill-advised romance that begins and ends in the dark hours they spend debriefing each other on what they have heard about the rape and torture of women.
It’s wrong to say the treatment had no effect, because it certainly affected the staff. Myers is covert about her personal life, but she has two children and is often talked out of overprotective parenting by her husband, who does not work in the same world. “He says: ‘It’s fine, they’re going to be OK.’ ”
A serial killer once made a joke to her about picnic blankets, how they are useful to roll up bodies. She is for ever sent into high alert by lone male picnickers. The two male prison officers she worked with are mentally scarred too. One stopped being able to give his little daughter a bath. The other, then her boyfriend, couldn’t drive past a lone woman on the street without fretting over her safety. The pair would wake up together after “murder dreams”.
One core aspect of the SOTP was trying to awaken empathy with victims, to the extent of asking the perpetrators to re-enact their crimes from the victim’s point of view. They’d use pens in place of penises, and flick water instead of urine, blood or semen. It sounds like highly risky territory. Indeed, in that first group Myers is aware that one of the criminals is becoming sexually aroused by the re-enactment.
“They were very powerful, but I think they also had the potential to be shaming, difficult and potentially dangerous,” Myers says of the exercises. “We started to see from the research that an increase in victim empathy didn’t necessarily decrease recidivism.” She spent more than 200 hours with one man who was in jail after a rape and hammer attack. He told her all the right things, and she marked him down as a success. Later she saw the man on the news, convicted of a rape and hammer attack.
“I don’t know what the answer is to stopping male violence. I wish I did,” she says.
It is a minority of released sex offenders who reoffend, but each one feels like too many. The sex offender rehabilitation schemes that replaced the SOTP have yet to be evaluated. Myers is no longer involved in frontline treatment. This gets us to the question that hangs over this book. Does she despair? Why not just give up?
“No, because we can’t just do nothing. We don’t have the death penalty, we release people. We’ve got to carry on.
“I know the research showed what it showed, but I like to believe that I have averted crimes. I have to believe that over the last 25 years I have made a difference. I have to believe that or I couldn’t keep doing it.”
That gives meaning to your life? She sets her face with determination.
“Absolutely. I do believe that people can change,” she says. She can never know a woman she saved from being attacked, she says. It could be me, it could be her even, but she hopes they exist, and this hope is the best thing about her job — which, by the way, is a question few ask. “I can’t think of anything more worthwhile.”
Inside Job: Treating Murderers and Sex Offenders. The Life of a Prison Psychologist by Dr Rebecca Myers is published by HarperCollins, £8.99
has anybody else noticed how weird it is that psychology courses assume all of their students are 100% neurotypical and cannot possibly be diagnosed with any of the disorders they describe and by "weird" i mean extremely telling of the way the mentally ill are categorized as the other
The same way that education courses assume that everyone who is a teacher or wants to be one is 100% non-disabled and would NEVER understand what it’s like to be a special education student. And then, in the professional world, the same adults who work as special education teachers and admin aggressively bully and shame disabled/neurodiverse adults out of the industry for being too “difficult” to work with.
Sorry but I will no longer get mad at female celebrities unless they’ve done something that I know for sure would get a man in an equal amount of trouble. Popular culture is nothing less than the public arena for female humiliation and I’m not participating anymore.
Here are just a FEW of the things I am not going to be mad at female celebrities about! <3
- Being rich
- Being out of touch
- Dating someone who I would not date
- Being rude
- Saying something a little stupid
- Not being properly media trained or behaving badly in an interview
- Making a bad album, having a bad performance, no longer being at her creative peak, or generally just not being my personal cup of tea in terms of artistry
- Aging
- Getting plastic surgery
- Being in a feud with a different celebrity who I happen to like better than her
- Seeming like someone I wouldn’t personally want to hang out with
- Having bad taste
Show me a male artist who has gotten an equal amount of vitriol and dehumanizing insults for these things and I’ll take it off the list❤️❤️
baratheonpilled
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