The Fear Factory: Bullying in Britain

Three weeks ago 14 year old Hannah Smith hanged herself at home in Leicestershire after months of bullying. Users of the social-networking website Ask.fm. called Hannah a “ugly f****” , urging her to cut herself, “drink bleach” and “get cancer”.

Last July, Daniel Perry, 17, died after jumping from the Forth Road Bridge in Scotland. He’d been targeted by blackmailers on Skype who demanded payment after telling him they had film of a sexual indiscretion with a teenage girl. He died after pleading: “What can I do to stop you showing this to my family?”.

In 2011, Londoner Chevonea Kendall-Bryan, just 13, also fell to her death, in her case 60 feet from her bedroom window. A month before she died, she’d reported rape by two boys.  Mobile phone footage and a video of the alleged assaults were passed around her school. She died in view of one of her abusers. She’d begged him to delete the mobile footage and texted a friend: “he wants me to jump”.

Last year, in Hove, Poppy Freeman, 12, was forced to leave 2 local schools after death threats were posted on Facebook.  She survived, but said: “I started writing notes about how I wanted to kill myself. I felt so horrible and alone.”

Poppy Freeman’s father set up Cybersmile, a Brighton-based charity which campaigns to make cyber bullying illegal. He feels police and schools “simply do not do enough” to support victims. I’m sure he is right and hope Poppy and he have been heartened by recent increased media and police awareness of abuse on twitter.

However, I worry that too exclusive a focus on cyber-bullying and the mechanics of website management – both of which fascinate the media – diverts attention from the grubby reality that all forms of bullying remain widespread. It’s true that the internet allows anonymity to abusers while giving them unprecedented access to victims, but it’s bullying that is the problem.

Child-suicide following bullying is nothing new. In 2008, Belinda Allen, a West Sussex schoolgirl of 14, hanged herself from a tree after she was verbally bullied by classmates. A year earlier, 11 year old Ben Vodden, a student at the same school, hanged himself after bullying on the school bus. In fact, at least 20 child victims kill themselves each year.

The humiliation of cyber-bullying is often the final straw for victims who have experienced other abuse and, typically, have not been protected by adults. Prior to her death, Chevonea Kendall-Bryan endured 3 years of physical, emotional and sexual bullying at the hands of 11 boys, which she and others had reported. Teachers dismissed the abuse as “kids being cruel” and she herself was called a “narcissistic attention seeker”.

Chevonea started to self-harm in class and tried to take an overdose there. She was made to sign an “anti-bullying contract” with 6 of her tormentors, implying equal responsibility for bullying.

Such victim-blaming is far from rare. The so-called ‘no blame’ approach which provides the framework for many schools’ anti-bullying policies provides no effective protection to victims. Nor is it uncommon for victims to be forced into humiliating apologies and ‘contracts’ which take no account of their powerlessness or the way these may be used to re-enforce bullies’ control.

As adults, we need to ask what is it about our society as a whole that encourages cruelty and bullying. We need to acknowledge that it infects every aspect of our lives, not just our schools.

Why expect teachers to stamp out bullying, when bullying has poisoned our society to such an extent that at many school gates and in many workplaces and neighbourhoods, people know no other way of bonding as friends (at least while sober) than by sharing in the vilification of others.

It’s pointless to plan anti-bullying strategies for schools, as if they were the site of the problem, when so many children return each day to homes in which mothers suffer domestic and sexual violence and children endure abuse. Why bother telling children not to hurt each other, when so many adult TV programme involve sexual or other violence and verbal abuse – and where the appeal of low budget reality programmes rests on adults insulting, ridiculing or humiliating each other.

Why should children stop bullying when political leaders attend Parliament to hurl abuse at each other and politicians and journalists mock opponents for their physical characteristics – their weight, gender, breasts, blindness, adenoidal voices or speech impediments.

Our culture has become a theatre of cruelty – a fear factory. I long for political leaders with the courage to acknowledge this – and the vision to do something about it.

Jean Calder.

This article was published in the Brighton & Hove Independent 23.8.13.

The Bombing of Syria

The House of Commons has recently voted decisively against participating in the proposed US attack on Syria. I thank God for that. I was convinced that such an attack could only make matters worse.

Fear and Sharia

There are few things so ‘ex’ as an unsuccessful ex-candidate for parliamentary selection. Once the winning candidate is selected, the election campaign proper begins. The pretender must quietly withdraw, being of no further interest.

 Anne Marie Waters, the National Secular Society council member and lesbian feminist who stood against Purna Sen in Labour’s selection for Brighton Pavilion, was the loser in the recent battle and has disappeared from political view – though she has close personal ties to the city and I guess may attend Pride.

 Waters’ experience of the battle must have been bruising. She was defeated overwhelmingly by the local candidate. As a member of the organisation One Law for All she was also subject to scrutiny about her views on sharia law which some thought “islamophobic”.  Local newspapers, including this one, highlighted her anti-sharia stance and her views on religion and immigration. They juxtaposed information about Purna Sen’s background as a childhood immigrant from India and highlighted the fact that Waters’ views about Sharia – the moral and religious code that governs the lives of many orthodox Muslims – had received unwanted endorsement from the English Defence League (EDL).  

There had been an earlier on-line campaign against Waters, which influenced local newspaper coverage and opinion. Andy Newman, writing online for the organisations Socialist Unity and Left Futures, referred to Waters as “the worst possible potential Labour PPC” for Brighton, an “anti-islam extremist” with “bigoted anti-religious views”, claiming the Brighton party was “on the edge of an abyss”. Newman linked her with the EDL and asserted that she had said that “religiously observant Muslims should leave the UK.” Newman also criticised her for writing to object to the planned visit to the UK of the former Pope, failing to mention that the letter was co-signed by almost sixty other prominent journalists, academics and thinkers.

I have done some online research and can find nothing to support the suggestion of a link to the EDL  nor any call for observant Muslims to leave the country. Waters is evidently a secularist, with strong and critical views about religion – not uncommon these days amongst people of Irish catholic background. She is blunt, undiplomatic and perhaps rash, but not, I think, islamophobic. Islamophobia by definition  implies unfair discrimination, whereas Waters demands that Muslims – and people of other faiths and none – have exactly the same rights and obligations.

Waters is blamed for being a vocal opponent of sharia law, but she has that in common with many progressive muslims who seek the protection of universal law. The muslim journalist Yasmin Alibhai Brown spoke in 2010 at a conference of One Law for All about her deep concern about the intrusion of religious bigotry into political discourse and the specific danger sharia poses to the rights of women and children. 

Alibhai Brown writes passionately about the increasing influence of what Geoffrey Robertson QC once called the “indelibly sexist legal regime of sharia law”. When the former Archbishop of Canterbury controversially suggested that sharia courts might be acceptable to assist with “family problems”, Alibhai Brown responded with rage, saying “Many will be sent back to bastard husbands or flinty-eyed mullahs will take their children away. In Bradford and Halifax, they may be forbidden to drive or work where men are employed. Adultery will be punished. I don’t think we will have public stonings but violence of some sort will be meted out (it already is) with lawmakers’ backing.”

Dr Shaaz Mahboob, like Alibhai Brown a member of British Muslims for Secular Democracy, has warned “Any introduction of sharia law would almost certainly lead to the curtailment of women’s rights in cases such as inheritance, reducing their share to less than half of what a male heir would expect. Similarly the testimony of a woman would be valued at half of that of a man in a sharia court. Modern forensic evidence, DNA technology and CCTV footage would be deemed inadmissible, should a case of alleged adultery be under trial; instead, the court would have to rely solely on the testimony of four credible male witnesses.” 

Anne Marie Waters may be blunt, but is nothing in comparison to Taj Hargey, a historian and Islamic theologian, who runs the Muslim Education Centre in Oxford. He wrote: “Sharia is nothing but a human concoction of medieval religious opinion, largely archaic and outmoded and irrelevant to life today. Most sharia contradicts the letter and spirit of the Koran….”

As a person of faith from a Christian tradition, I want to live in a just secular state in which human rights are protected. Sharia law, in common with other religious law, undermines the principle of universal justice and poses specific dangers for women, homosexuals and children. 

I oppose it with every breath in my body. I want elected representatives in Parliament who, on my behalf, will do the same. 

Published in Brighton and Hove Independent 2nd August 2013