Twitter Reacts to Barbara Hewson

Barbara Hewson, a barrister, published an article in Spiked Magazine yesterday.  Here it is: if you haven't read it, I suggest you do, rather than relying on media reports about it or what people are saying about it.

Criticism

My views on the article is that it raises a couple of valid points, that are put badly.  One line that suggests abuse victims are to blame for putting themselves in compromising positions is particularly objectionable - another is the belittling of Stuart Hall's offences towards a 9 year old.  The piece is offensive to all sorts of people who battle against rape culture and I understand their outrage.  This is about the best article I've read explaining (in Zoe Stavri's typically passionate terms) why it's so objectionable.  Do please read it, and if you have time this good piece by Peter Tatchell with his very measured, sensible reaction.

[Addendum: Just to make it crystal clear this blog post is not a critique of Hewson's piece.  It's about the reaction the piece received on Twitter.  How shit it was or wasn't, as opposed to the quantity and type of abuse she received as a result of it, are two completely separate issues.  I thought that blindingly obvious, but clearly not from comments I've received.]

Age of Consent

Many people on Twitter have reacted most strongly, however, not to the apparent victim blaming (the aspect of the article that deserves the most attention) but to the final suggestion in the piece that the age of consent be reduced to 13.  This element, that was somewhat bizarrely just thrown in at the very end, is what all of the main stream media focused on in their headlines and formed the basis for almost all of the personal attacks I go on to detail.

Hewson's article raises the suggestion of lowering the age of consent without bothering to explain the (actually quite obvious) implicit missing link: she is talking about consensual sexual acts.  That's why it's called the age of consent.  Currently, as Tatchell explains, two 15 year olds who have sex together are criminalised under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 if they have consensual sex. They can be put on the Sex Offenders Register, alongside rapists.  That is to me, quite simply wrong.

I'm assuming Hewson is suggesting that by removing currently criminalised consensual acts from the equation, the police and courts will have more resources to follow up on cases of non-consensual acts: sexual abuse, assault, and rape of children.  These are inherently far more serious and deserving of attention than consensual acts.  That is true, but it's a shame the article does not spell that out.  Instead it clumsily at least appears to suggest there will be fewer cases of child abuse if the age of consent is shoved down to 13.  That cannot be what any right-minded person thinks. 

Here's a map of Europe showing ages of consent.  The blue colours reflect countries where it's 13, 14 or 15.  You're welcome to disagree and say the age should be 16, and below that age children should not be having sex.  But do not suggest the proposition that the age be lowered below 16 is some outrageous, unthinkable suggestion or a "paedophile's charter".  It's not.  These "blue" countries include the more socially conservative, Catholic nations of Poland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy.  Those countries have not set about legalising sex with pre-pubescent children.  It's about deciding where an appropriate age is, and views differ on that even with our closest neighbours.

Don't also think that criminalising teenagers prevents them having sex.  The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles has found that 14 is now the average age of first sexual experience for both gay and straight young people in the UK.  Children are becoming physically mature earlier and are having sex earlier.  You might not like the idea of 14 year olds having sex (I don't think it's great and was 20 when I first slept with someone), but many are - and criminalising them seems to have remarkably little effect on their activities if that's the average age.

Teenage Pregnancy

Nor does criminalising kids having sex together prevent teenage pregnancies.  The factors which cause high teenage pregnancy rates are a lot more complex than the age of consent.  I've set out some figures taken from here:

(Births per 1000 teenage women aged 15-19)

Netherlands 7.7 (age of consent 12/16)
Spain 7.5 (age of consent 13)
Italy 6.6 (age of consent 14)
Denmark 8.8 (age of consent 15)
UK 29.6 (age of consent 16)
USA 55.6 (age of consent 16-18)

The USA teenage birth rate, the country with the highest age of consent in this group, is more than seven times that of Spain where the age of consent is 13.  It also seven times greater than that of Netherlands where the general age of consent is 16, but they will not prosecute two adolescents with a (maximum) 4 year age difference.  That means for example a 17 year old can legally have sex with a 13 year old, but a 25 year old cannot with a 15 year old.  Make that a 3 year age gap and I think it a perfectly sensible policy.  Dutch law categorically does not say adults can have sex with children, which is how I'm sure the likes of the Daily Mail would wish to categorise it, yet in practice it has an age of consent in certain circumstances of 12.  Call them as a bunch of paedos if you will... but you're a fool in my book.

Incidentally, just because the law allows it, does not mean that all Dutch kids are all having sex at 12.  Thanks to their sensible, liberal education policies, they have proper, detailed sex education and are taught to make the choice to have sex when they feel full ready and want to.  The average age of a Dutch girl having sex is apparently 17.5, and it is higher for a boy.  That is the true meaning of consent to me, not some arbitrary rule in law that says a couple of 15 years and 11 months are criminals for having sex together, but an immature adolescent can be pressurised into having sex on her 16th birthday without realising fully what she is doing and that's "okay".  Note that the UK teenage birth rate is four times higher than the Netherlands' one.

So - Hewson's article, which put forward her (poorly unexplained) view that the age of consent should be 13 is not exactly as insane as the baying mob is suggesting and is concentrating almost exclusively on. You might disagree with her, strongly perhaps; but let's be clear, she wasn't suggesting the law should be changed to allow babies to be raped, which anyone might think from the reaction below.

Twitter Shows its Worse Side

So, that little explanation of my personal views on this out of the way, let's turn to how Twitter reacted to Hewson's article.  There were some high profile people like Stavvers and Fleetstreetfox who set out sensible counter-arguments in blogs and articles, and plenty of people who registered their disagreement in strong, but reasonable terms in tweets.

And then there were the others.  They didn't engage as a criticism of her views so much as form a pack-like abuse attack on her. The most relatively benign were the calls for her to be "sacked by her employers" (a bit pointless as barristers are self-employed).  It then went through repeated calling her a paedophile herself, demands for her to be lynched, through to being cut up and having her organs removed.  Sure the latter is almost certainly not a credible threat, but how can anyone think that, let alone type it and then send it someone else?  This is for expressing an opinion.  Disagree with her, strongly, but how does this make you a better person than you think she is?

Apart from the non-gender specific abuse, the special misogyny that is reserved for women who voice their opinion was of course in evidence.  When Hewson tweeted that she had received a rape threat, plenty of people said they did not believe her.  When victims of sexual abuse come forward, many people say that should be believed, but that they are discouraged from speaking up because the system is set up to disbelieve them.  Yet in this case, a woman is not to be believed, because being a "paedo defender" she is somehow bound to be a liar.  If a rape threat didn't come up in a tweet search, ever consider that it may have been deleted or the threat was received via another medium such as email?  I believe she received this threat, particularly given the other abuse she received.

I was also attacked for pointing out that tweets at her were misogynistic.  I'd like to know how calling her an "old hag", a "witch", a "whore", a "sick, crazy bitch", a "paedo loving slag" and a "cunt" and the apparent threat to rape her do not fall into that category, but hey.

If you've got a stomach for it, here we go then - I think this lot should be recorded just as reminder of how grotesque people on this medium can be:

 

[always good when someone misuses "your" when calling someone else a cretin]

[Hung up from a lamp post AND shot? Isn't that tricky to do?]

 

Charming stuff, eh?  A little reminder here.  Victims of abuse may have been rightly upset by reading Hewson's piece.  They no doubt feel it contributes to the deeply ingrained culture that encourages rape and abuse, and does not take their experiences seriously.  I would hope Hewson did not write it to target anyone individually and have no reason to think she did.  She was voicing an opinion, not matter how misconceived you might think it is.

Each one of these abusive tweets is, by contrast, deliberately addressed to her, with the knowledge that she will read them.  That isn't recklessly nasty: it's deliberately and utterly vile.