The Glass Character: violence against women

Showing posts with label violence against women. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

A bad thing that happens to women

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

The Ghomeshi trial: tips for damaged girls

Dos and don’ts for testifying women: don’t
What the Jian Ghomeshi trial teaches us about how to be the perfect sexual assault complainant

CHRIS YOUNG / THE CANADIAN PRESS Former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi leaves a Toronto courthouse with his lawyer Marie Henein, right, following day six of his trial on Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2016.

By: Heather Mallick Columnist, Published on Wed Feb 10 2016

Wanted: an immaculate complainant for the Ghomeshi trial, and all such future trials.

It is apparent that the three women saying Jian Ghomeshi bit, punched, slapped or choked them were all faulty to some degree. Oh these ladies and their vapours, telling tales to make a name for themselves while they continued with their nasty ways, as the defence would put it.

They were eviscerated. But in a world where police did only hasty interviews with the complainants and a sweet shy Crown attorney faced knife-ish lawyers hired by a rich man, it’s time for victims of sexual attack to raise their game. Why should the public sector do all the work?

And I’m a feminist, but may I say the ladies were frightened and weak, qualities famously much valued by the monstrous regiment. A frightened weak female is not useful to our cause.

So, all women in future sexual assault trials, stop being frightened and weak.

Big up. Don’t be slender like Lucy DeCoutere, be tall, big-boned and muscled to the point where you could silence a soft fattish man by sitting on him until his little limbs waggled the way turtles’ do when you flip them onto their shells. It’s a nice image, no?

Be born into a moneyed family so that you can hire lawyers to advise and prepare, to coat you like the fine glossy sports car you are and purr along close to the road/witness stand. Be an Eaton or a Frum. Bonus: afterwards you can be a Conservative senator.

Don’t drink alcohol. Try sparkling water or fruit juices, just as enjoyable.

Be sexually immaculate, and if that’s not workable be in a fortress-like marriage with children as evidence of having done the sex, purely for the evidentiary purpose of knowing what was done to you.

Call the cops on your cellphone as soon as your attacker is out of sight. Tell no one what happened, especially your female friends. Do not consult your doctor who may draw his own conclusions. Have no medical conditions beyond a dry cough or whatever happens to tendons.

Memorize all angles, colours, shapes, makes of cars and note how many seconds passed during your attack. Helpful hint: Say “one thousand one, one thousand two,” etc. as you are overpowered.

Never get the days confused, even from a decade before. Keep a paper day-timer and a detailed diary. Do not express your feelings in your diary as they could taint your testimony. Have no inappropriate uncontrolled emotions and do not express hatred of your attacker as it could be seen in retrospect as a motive to lie.

Don’t do what the attacker wants you to do. Do the opposite. If this fails, as it will, go back in time and do everything differently, an excellent strategy as it saves on pointless regret.

Don’t contact the perpetrator or talk to him at industry parties. In fact, leave the industry.

Be the woman your parents raised you to be, nice, apologetic, at fault. I didn’t know I could disagree with men until I read a novel when I was a tween where a woman said, on a train, “I disagree.” And look at me now. I’m disagreeable! Who wants that in a woman?

Do not make jokes, especially sexual jokes. There’s nothing funny about intercoursing.

Don’t wear a bikini or any kind of outdoor minimalist garment, and if you do, do not be photographed in it. Frankly, best be a never-nude like Dr. Tobias Funke in Arrested Development who wears cut-offs under his underwear at all times. Never knowingly be naked, even in the shower or at night. Nobody wants to see your Down Theres, especially you.

Do not be online. Do not be on Twitter or Facebook, as they keep records for the rest of your life, which will not be as short as you will come to wish it. Restrict yourself to phone conversations. Whisper in restaurants.

Be silent and numb, draw no attention to yourself, be like a headless armless Greek statue in an alcove in an ill-attended area of the museum.

On March 30, Ghomeshi’s lead defence lawyer Marie Henein will be the keynote speaker at a Young Women in Law charity event at the Arcadian Court in Toronto, sponsored by an all-female legal recruiter and four major Toronto law firms. Proceeds of the evening will pay for “work with war-affected communities to help children reclaim their childhood.”

The charity was founded by 10 young women lawyers and helps such lawyers consider career paths, of which “become the men we once detested” is one.

I trust the audience members will be immaculately behaved, unsullied and, above all, silent.

hmallick@thestar.ca

Please be aware, as I hope you are by now, that this is NOT my piece. I cut and paste it here because if I post a link, it will be 100% ignored, or perhaps glanced at. That's just the way it is with links: we see hundreds of them a day. Mostly it's skip, skip, skip. But I really wanted my readers - and I do have some, though not the masses that deem a blog "successful" - to read this, all the way through. Every word. Not just the first paragraph, then - skip, skip, skip.

Lately I've been Ghomeshied, and the same thing happened when all this ugliness first broke out like a disease. Then it went underground for a very long time while Ghomeshi's defense lawyer planned her military strategy.

Ghomeshi is a narcissistic thug. Even those who write off the women he attacked as "morons" and "dingbats" (including a very well-respected - OK, it was Michael Redhill, and I've included some of his comments below) have to grudgingly admit that he likely "did it".

When this all came out of the woodwork, there were vitriolic articles blaming the CBC for all this, for sucking up to Ghomeshi when they KNEW he was a son-of-a-bitch who casually hurt women. When they KNEW that he, with his smarmy, self-important style and preening body language, reeked of the worst kind of narcissism. The fact they sent him to live with his mother was telling: he's the kind of guy Mama fawned over, telling him he could do no wrong, that he was entitled to anything he wanted, up to and including destroying women's self-regard and even their credibility by pushing them into a corner where he held all the cards.

This also told us that at nearly age 50, Ghomeshi has no friends, no other relatives who are speaking to him, and has never had any sort of long-term relationship. No, he prefers to slap them around, punch them in the face, then discard them and go on to the next one.

I can't get into the why-does-she-go-back-to-him dynamic, but it should be well-known by now. Women repeatedly go back to abusive partners: it's the rare one who doesn't. This causes a great segment of society to abuse them all over again by calling them weaklings, ninnies and, yes, morons.

Heather Mallick nails it here, and says all the things I've been thinking but have been too stunned to say. Just do these few simple things and you will succeed! At what, we are still not sure.

It's hard to get through a day now and feel happy and OK about the state of things. There are people I cherish, and though I risk being labelled codependent for doing so, I live for them. Left to my own devices - no, I won't finish that, because if I'm too forthcoming I seem to lose readers.

Below is a selection of Michael Redhill's remarks. I could not include the entire Facebook conversation here because it was hundreds of words long, though I may be accused of that terrible crime of journalism, "editing". Including these comments is not an attack on him personally, but I present them here to demonstrate the kind of language and reasoning I have seen to describe both Ghomeshi and the women he damaged.

To his credit, Redhill seems to back away or even partially deny his initial insult and begins to apply the term "moron" to Lucy DeCoutere's lawyer (I very nearly called it her "defense team", though I cannot imagine why). In fact, there is a fair amount of backpedalling here, though "tear a strip off me" feels like recoiling from the unfair attacks of feminist harpies. At any rate, these are public comments from a high-profile writer, and I think I've presented them fairly. You can draw any conclusion you want from them.

The Ghomeshi trial is a joke now. Ex-Mayor Ford must be breathing a sigh of relief: there are now TWO gigantic morons at the heart of a story so tawdry it could only have happened in Toronto. One moron likes to hit women and pretends he doesn't know what consent is, and the other moron pursued him tirelessly, for years, after he beat *her*. Love letters. Who let her on the stand again? Lucy DeCoutere is going to change the subject of this trial and quite possibly torpedo any chance of justice the other accusers might be entitled to.
It's not just that he might get away with assaulting women it's that it will be the fault of this monumental dingbat.

I am NOT blaming this accuser. I'm pissed off that the people working with and for her were clearly not prepared for for Heinin's line of attack and have helped her reinforce the idea that she was somehow asking for it! What happened AFTER the alleged assault is not material in any way.

Much offense is given by my use of the word "moron," which has only served to obscure my point. My anger leads me to tar everyone with the same brush, which is intemperate of me. I would be corrected sooner in conversation while also making my point more clearly. To wit: Given what's at stake in this trial, why does the prosecution (and accuser) seem so woefully underprepared to combat the specious argument Ms. Henein has put forward with ease. Why was Ms. DeCoutere not counselled to respond that her contact w JG after the alleged incident has nothing to do with what he's accused of? She is not on trial, he is. And yet her legal representation has left her dangling. Before the trial, there was much talk about how the accusers could be dragged through the mud in this process. Did they fail to prepare? I think that's moronic.

I didn't compare her to Rob Ford. I said he can feel relief because he won't be what people are gossiping about when they talk about the latest circus in this city. And I stand by my comment that she's a dingbat and a moron to have been THIS unprepared in a case she brought for the sake of being the face of the accusers in this trial! She arrived in court unaware of what Heinin was going to make her look like? I don't agree with the case Henein is building! DeCoutere and her team have handed it to her and allowed the bugaboo "she was asking for it" to enter into the conversation.

You're right. Ghomeshi had star power and people turned a blind eye to his reputation for being a sleaze. You seem to be saying his victims did too. If this is the case, did his victims effectively give him a pass because of who he was? Did they stay in touch with him because his star power eclipsed his crimes? Or did they maintain a bond with him because victims of abuse often form seemingly illogical bonds with their abusers? Is it both? It strains credulity that it would be.

Ok, I'm ready to have another strip torn off me. I think we can all agree that we are discussing a court case that is in progress. The fact that (so far) witness one and Lucy Decoutere had contact with Ghomeshi after the crimes he is accused of is NOT proof that he committed the crimes. This kind of reasoning is called "petitio principii" -- also known as begging the question. You take the conclusion of the argument and make it the premise: These women kept in touch with Ghomeshi BECAUSE he assaulted them. But we are in a court of law. An accusation has been made. We cannot presume the guilt of the defendant based on what the accusers did after the alleged assaults any more than we can presume that their contact with him was expressly a result of the alleged assault. The court of public opinion has already made its ruling: Ghomeshi is a "predator" and "criminal". We have made our "ruling" because we have reasonably concluded that many women with similar stories of assault are highly unlikely to have worked together on a huge lie and a conspiracy. I personally dismiss it and conclude that they are telling the truth. I BELIEVE that Ghomeshi is guilty, but not because I have proof. I am one small part of the emotional throb of public opinion, but it does not entitle me to draw legal conclusions that are currently being tested in court. My opinion that the case is a disaster for the plaintiffs and the lawyers who are representing them remains unchanged and I think the extent of the disaster will become clearer as the case moves forward.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Sunday, February 7, 2016

The Ghomeshi trial: this handful of slime

As the song says: I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it.

I didn't want to write a blog post commenting on the Jian Ghomeshi assault trial, and the testimony and subsequent crucifixion of one brave woman who stepped forward to point at him and cry, "J'accuse!"

Not because I'm not interested. Hardly that. It's the queasy impression I have that a great grasping hand has burrowed down into the depths of our sick misogynist culture and pulled up a vast, dripping, rotten clump of slime with hate-formed creatures writhing around in it like those nightmarish little figures from Hieronymus Bosch.

That's why.

But I've read things in the news, seen things on TV, and read posts on Facebook lately that have turned me as white as a ghost.

Now that this seething clump has been dredged from the depths(before it is pushed back down again - which is what always happens, or we would not still be in this horrible mess), the contentious issue is the fact that at least one of Ghomeshi's victims maintained contact with him after he assaulted her. Flirtatious contact, in the form of teasingly sexual emails and bikini shots sent via Instagram.

This leads to another issue poking out its slimy little head: why don't people consider that emails always leave a trail, and that "delete" means nothing when the police can easily crack the memory depths of any computer? In the case of Lucy De Coutere, that lack of awareness (obviously extending to her lawyer) led directly to disaster. It gave Ghomeshi's lawyer the opportunity to savage and humiliate her by forcing her to read these emails (now considered "incriminating" - not that SHE is on trial here!) out loud.
It didn't look good for her, and I will admit it does not sit well with me that she sent titillating photos and expressed a desire to "fuck his brains out". But I think I have a tiny inkling of what this was about.

Ghomeshi held all the cards here because he had such power in the media. His radio persona was seductive and "cool", which is highly unusual in this country. The media courted him, lionized him, and used him to do things like host the Gillers (though I can't think of one person who is less qualified) in a desperate attempt to make the Canadian image seem less stodgy and out of date, and perhaps to reduce the average age of CBC Radio listeners from, say, 73 to 37. This was in full knowledge that he was abusive, disrespectful, and a misogynist asshole, a man-boy holding sway over his own personal fiefdom. He habitually abused the system and exploited the people in it, but did that stop them from going back and sucking up to him for more favours? I mean, again and again and again?

There may have been a sense that it was some kind of dubious honour for women if he was interested in them, at least until he tired of them in a few weeks or months. (Ghomeshi has never been known to have any sort of lasting relationship with women, except perhaps his mother.) This does not mean all these women were stupid or weak. They may have been sucked in, but media were ALSO sucked in and seduced by Ghomeshi on a much larger, public scale, and it went on unabated for years and years.

But tell me this. Who ended up taking the fall?

Personally, I believe women are bewildered, embarrassed and frightened by being abused and will sometimes downplay it, even contacting the abuser to try to somehow make it right. Yes, it's a form of denial. But if it is, then the CBC was in PROFOUND denial in a situation with similar dynamics.

There's even more to this as the oozing clump rises and drips in front of my eyes. As is often the case, Ghomeshi may well have attracted vulnerable women who grew up with abuse as the norm. But this is considered an old saw now, and if you dare say it, someone will dig up a case where it "wasn't like that", demolishing your theory. Not that there is any emotional baggage/misogyny/discrediting of women there. But we don't necessarily know what we think we know. People are not always going to reveal their childhood wounds to the world. Does anyone - I mean anyone do that, unless they have no personal boundaries whatsoever?

My God, the tangled, visceral mess this is dredging up - do we really want to look? When it triggers belligerent name-calling rather than an attempt to understand an extremely complex, often-baffling situation, it just makes my gut sink. One very well-respected writer slathered the same abuse on Ghomeshi and DeCoutere, dismissing them both in a Facebook post as "morons". He seemed to feel it was perfectly all right so long as they were equally slagged and savaged. Quite a number of the responses to his post were supportive, and I don't know how many "likes" it got because if I look at it one more time, I will likely gag.

There is always the question, when a woman is with an abusive partner, "Why doesn't she just leave?" First, there is no "just" about it. Women are most likely to be murdered by their partners when they leave. Abusive men get women on a yoyo string and keep yanking them around, sometimes for years. This does not mean these women are ninnies, have no will of their own, or are making stuff up just to damage someone's reputation for fun and profit.

Lucy Coutere got up there to try to stop this bastard. It probably won't work. She left herself open to considerable contempt because she exposed at least some of the complicated, contradictory dynamics of abuse to a culture that simply does not want to know. Will this change anything? Why do I feel like we're sinking here? My suspicion and my dread is that we are going not forwards but backwards in our disgraceful treatment of women, and I see nothing on the horizon that tells me it will ever be any different.

POST-BLOG THOUGHTS. This is almost a separate post, but I decided to run them together because, folks, I am tired today. I'm dealing with unknown health issues and a change of doctor, and maybe yet another round of tests, which is why you're getting so many gifs lately, and comments about news items. But this I had to write about. It's my response to a breathtakingly abusive Facebook post that I discovered in that diseased, slimy clump I just wrote about. I don't know why I'm not running this asshole's comments with his real name on them, except that his tone scared the hell out of me and I don't want him coming after me.

This was not just a rant but an eruption of some corrosive substance that was so frightening, I didn't want it making contact with my skin. His remarks were loosely based on the Ghomeshi trial - or maybe it was just an excuse to air his toxic views on women in general. He went into great depth about various types of mental illness and how they affected females. But this wasn't about mental illness. At all. It was about hate. He believed such women were inherently evil and almost gleefully destructive, deliberately wreaking havoc on the legal system to get their kicks. He painted a picture of savage harpies flying through the air like Valkyries, living for the barbaric pleasure of destroying other human beings. (This somehow was all tied in with Lucy DeCoutere and the "irreparable damage" she is doing to an innocent man with her obviously concocted accusations.) It was, incredibly, from someone IN the system who has dealt with mentally disturbed women for years. Looking him up on his Facebook page while holding my nose, I discovered he is a psychotherapist whose specialty is dealing with the "criminally insane", a term that should have been drop-kicked into the nearest sewer decades ago.

So. Not only is the Ghomeshi trial dragging out a truly incredible amount of hidden misogyny, it's jacking the cover off a jaw-dropping ignorance of what it is to suffer a mental illness. These are my NOT-dispassionate thoughts in response:

"Have you heard of 'mental illness', or do you think it's just a form of evil or a choice women make to be perverse? Humanity still has incredible fear and loathing of mental illness and writes it off as a willful, even gleeful form of violence and destruction that people COULD "help"/change if they just pulled themselves together (with, of course, no resources to do so). Maybe, at one point, when they were little children, someone loved these women, but it's even more likely that they were horribly damaged. So at some point, did they decide it would be a kick to "go bad"? I am NOT saying, well then, let them go ahead and kill people, be destructive, etc. Society does need to be protected from those who are so sick they can't control themselves, or are not aware of what they are doing, or perhaps (like my brother, who died tragically from the effects of schizophrenia) are hearing voices telling them to kill people. My brother wasn't evil, at all, but he was constantly being "told" to do evil things by those voices. He virtually never acted on it, and now I wonder how he ever had the strength of mind to do that, probably far beyond what most "normal" people have. The feeling is, well, these women should just control themselves, or (something you hear all the time now, which always puts the onus on the sufferer) "reach out for help". Hmmm, WHAT help, I wonder? The kind YOU are offering? Might they not have better prospects for survival in the vastly more compassionate throes of their disease?"

POST-POST. I usually think of "something after the something". Last night I went to Caitlin's dance recital, and I can't begin to tell you what joy it gave me, not to mention how terrific 12-year-old Caitlin has become in four genres of dance: jazz, tap, hiphop and musical theatre. I say "become" because this kid has worked so incredibly hard, completely overcoming the self-consciousness that used to cause her to take sneak-peeks at the other kids. Now she's bold, sassy and full of pizzazz.

But that's not what I have to say right now.

There was a puzzling number by another group. I forget the name of it: something like "One Person's Craziness is Another Person's Real", and it consisted of six teenaged girls writhing around on the floor in straightjackets.

At various times during the spooky, haunted-house-like music, they stood up and "made crazy" in the way we still think of as crazy, pulling faces, jumping and thrashing around. This wasn't just silly or stupid, it was disturbing, and it made me angry. It was playing with the trappings of "madness" (one of my least-favorite terms) in order to entertain an audience. A cheap trick, because craziness is still so vastly entertaining, particularly at the institutional level where a human being's worth seems to equal that of a block of wood. If we wish to write off or dismiss anyone in our culture, we accuse them of being a "whack job" (and no one stops to think how dehumanizing it is to be referred to as a "job").

I couldn't figure out if this thing was supposed to be funny, because at the end they all rushed off the stage into the audience and made everybody laugh. I didn't. I know that I have been, at various times, accused of having no sense of humour because I object to all this. It just isn't real to people, and that's the whole trouble: they don't get why it is a problem. (Is there someone in the room? . . . No? Didn't think so.)

OK, I hated it, but isn't one of the purposes of art to disturb and unsettle? Last year a group did a strangely haunting dance routine called Gates of Auschwitz. This was set in - Auschwitz - and featured guards and captive Jews. But it was done in a surprisingly spare, restrained way, not playing down the horror so much as implying it in stark, minimalist fashion. I liked it, partly because it was provocative and daring and performed with a great deal of sensitivity.

The girls in the straightjackets were just. . . girls in straightjackets. Loonies, wackos, nutbars, and all those names we hear every day when we want to write someone off as less than human. And the funny thing is that no one bats an eyelash, because whack jobs are, apparently, always fair game.

(Speller's note. I am aware that the proper spelling is "straitjacket", but I am a little tired of being "corrected" when I spell things properly. Accurate spelling has gone the way of the dodo. So I hereby surrender to the WRONG spelling, just to save myself grief.)

Another word for mentally ill

Afflicted with or exhibiting irrationality and mental unsoundness: brainsick, crazy, daft, demented, disordered, distraught, dotty, insane, lunatic, mad, maniac, maniacal, moonstruck, off, touched, unbalanced, unsound, wrong. (Informal) bonkers, cracked, daffy, gaga, loony. (Slang) bananas, batty, buggy, cuckoo, fruity, loco, nuts, nutty, screwy, wacky. (Chiefly British) crackers. (Law) non compos mentis. Idioms: around the bend, crazy as a loon, mad as a hatter, not all there, nutty as a fruitcake, off (or out of) one's head, off one's rocker, of unsound mind, out of one's mind, sick in the head, stark raving mad. See sane