Breaking of Silence

Credit: Alamy

Like many socioholics, I’ve been virtually glued to my social media feeds over the past few hours, both appalled at and unable to turn away from the steady drip of new #MeToo posts and comments, and behind them, sometimes the stories, told with admirable, no-frills candour, and sometimes the bare hashtag itself, speaking of lifetimes full of normalised, regular harassment and assault. Women I don’t know, and women I do: friends, girlfriends, school friends, colleagues, mothers, sisters.

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Stand Down, Media. Are You There, Joe Average?

Rapes. Murders. Police shootings of blacks. Miscarriages of justice. Incitement of racism, of misogyny, of religious bigotry, of homophobic discrimination, all fuelling ethnic, sectarian, and gender tensions, which in turn stimulate the aforementioned incitement. Children killing children. Porn-addled priests.

20 Minutes of Action: Reflections on Rape Culture

“Rape”, by Malangatana (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Far be it from me to detract from the awareness the term ‘rape culture’ provides, or from the justified outrage it expresses, but the scandalous proceedings following the sexual assault of an unconscious 23-year-old by former Stanford University student, Brock Turner, lend themselves to reflection in more ways than one.

Convicted of several felonies and facing a maximum of 14 years’ imprisonment, one might wonder, for example, how it is that in the interest of ensuring a fair and balanced trial, no one thought to point out the potential conflict of interest in having a