Why Are You Not Talking About It?
On Thursday evening, I tell my husband it isn’t working. Not our relationship, just the first paragraph of what I’ve written this week. I feel like I’m skirting round the issue or easing gently into it or not saying it out loud. It would be good to start again but I don’t have time. So, I lead with the second paragraph instead.
On Wednesday, I realised I was watching The One Show, and I don’t mean to offend anyone who loves its chit-chats on the sofa and its topical features and its reporters out and about around the country bringing us “the stories that have got Britain talking” but it makes me feel like I’ve given up. Have I nothing better to do at 7pm. But here I was, ten minutes in, in some kind of stupor, listening to Richard Osman promote his latest book, the first in a new series of not The Thursday Murder Club, and former Eastenders actress Jo Joyner promote her new Channel 5 drama The Wives which also has Tamzin Outhwaite in it, and I was pleased about this because I remembered her saying there weren’t enough parts for women over fifty and now she’d got one. And then I caught myself on and switched off before the update on the cruise passengers whose bookings had been cancelled because of a P&O policy change on the storage of mobility devices. And I remembered Mrs Harper, the principal of my daughters’ primary school, saying they’d be completely exhausted during the first two weeks of term and to bear with them. It’s a shock to the system, she said, and I reckoned not realising I was watching The One Show was something to do with dealing with being in full-time September and a whole lot of things returning I hadn’t missed.
On Tuesday, I went to a Presbytery meeting. And I should explain that a Presbytery is not just the house of a parish priest, it’s also the name for a gathering of elders and ministers1 who represent the congregations in a particular area. Presbytery is where business matters are discussed and like any governance, its main purpose is to protect the reputation of an institution. And because it was September and there were many matters to discuss, it lasted more than three hours and I could only conclude that God must love paperwork because there was much documenting of what was being done on his behalf and soon, we’d need an entire forest solely for the efforts of the Presbyterian Church. But as well as working our way through a lengthy agenda, there was a scolding, aka a sermon, on not doing enough. We should be out there mixing and evangelising and having ‘non-believers’ round for meals and getting them to come to church but what was it we were asking them to believe in, was it our example? And it was like the NI Education Minister’s plan to spend £250k on lockable phone pouches to prevent pupils using their devices during the school day because it distracted them from learning when not having a classroom or being hungry because of budget cuts was likely to distract them a lot more. And I wondered had anyone been watching the news recently because I had, and it was full of rotten stuff. Yet there was an overwhelming temptation to just switch it off and numb myself with Richard Osman and Channel 5 and the Autumn schedules and Only Murders In the Building and entering my church bubble where it was unlikely there would be a discussion about Rebecca Cheptegei and Gisèle Pélicot and the silencing of the Afghan women2 and the series of systemic failures which had led to the deaths of seventy-two people at Grenfell. And I felt this was a priority, maybe even bigger than getting people to come to church, to not look away from this but instead to look straight at it and establish what it was telling us and how we’d got here and what we could do about it.
“Grenfell - and this report - is a shock to our system,” said Graham Tomlin3. Of the companies involved in the renovation of Grenfell Tower, he added, “They took care of themselves and their own. They lost sight of the people their work affected. They did not take care of their neighbour”. Alongside loving God, loving your neighbour is one of the basic commandments we have been given, he said, something we are to do every day of our lives. “The Grenfell story is an object lesson in what happens when these commandments are superseded by other imperatives, such as to increase market share, to beat the competition or to safeguard the reputation of our own organisation”.
And I decided I’d add my first paragraph in here because I’d probably written it for a reason.
On Thursday morning, I experienced what can only be described as a moment of terror. It was early, not long after 8am. I was somewhere between asleep and awake. When this incident occurred, my knees were pressed against some shoulder rests, my hands gripping two things which may or may not have been handles and I was using all the strength I possessed in my upper body to keep a heavy carriage attached by one spring in place. My hands started to slip. Any more loss of grip and I’d shoot backwards off the reformer, out through the window and across the carpark and this should give some sense of how my mind works when it switches its anxiety on - exercise session to disaster movie. “Help,” I squeaked. “Can you help me?” I said a bit louder as I glanced at the fresh faces of the other two class participants who thankfully weren’t in any danger here wearing their sports bras and exposing their stomachs and wondering what this old woman was doing. “Rescue me,” I yelled although that may have been inside my head. “I’ve got you,” said the instructor as she held the carriage or maybe me, while I slowly returned everything to a safe position.
And I explained to my husband that when I go to church, no one is talking about what’s happening to women out there even though it’s relentless and I wasn’t picking on the church, it was just that it had its fingers in a lot of other pies and the experiences of 50% of the population seemed important and it existed to serve a broken world and it would be nice to feel that somewhere had got us and if I wanted to get involved in fighting for the rights of women, it wouldn’t be something I could do there. And why wasn’t he talking to me about it? But he hadn’t watched the news, and he didn’t know anything about the French court case and the supposedly loving husband who had been drugging his wife for a decade and using social media to invite strangers to come into their bedroom and rape her while he filmed it. He didn’t know either about the Ugandan athlete who had been doused with gasoline and set on fire by her ex-boyfriend. He hadn’t watched the BBC report about the Taliban law banning women from speaking in public. “If we can’t speak, why live?”, they said. And I read an article by Caroline Criado Perez4, author of Invisible Women, about the evidence that is emerging in the French court case, and she said that the women she knows are not fixating on the extreme nature of the crime, they are fixating on why they are talking about it and men are not. “And to these men, I have a question: why are you not talking about it? Does this story not disturb you as much as it disturbs us?” she said.
And is it that we are talking about it because it is one of us and they aren’t talking about it because it isn’t one of them?
Or is it because a woman usually has to start the conversation?
I’d love to hear your thoughts…
I am neither btw.
Consuming the news 'square on' is challenging and your post resonates. How to effect positive change though, that's the question.
Thank you for talking about this. I've often appreciated the way you reflect on things, but this haqs moved me to comment. Our local churches would regain so much of my respect if I thought they cared about housing justice or the epidemic of domestic violence here.
I left a DV situation for substandard social housing, where my neighbours - mostly disabled and older people - and I are lied to, gaslighted, and treated as troublemakers if we complain. It's been a traumatic slide from one abuse setting to another. I've struggled to work as a result. Our housing association wins awards: like most abusers, those in charge know the value of a good public face.
NI's institutions should (but won't) learn from Grenfell. When you're in social housing or on benefits, you become abstract: people imagine our "cushy life" at their expense: not the rats or mould or the absent insulation or the inadequate fire safety infrastructure. Our wellbeing and safety lack a compelling monetary value, and any spend on us is begrudged.
A while ago I shared my situation with a friend. He's great: active in church, inspiring in his human rights work, and I've learnt a lot from him. Turned out he knew the head of my housing association. So his reaction was "surely not, he's a lovely man". That shut me up. Every abuser is "lovely" to someone, whether their harms are direct or via their systemic power. Middle class (and not all of it male) solidarity is as harmful as sectarianism here, and often they combine.
My friend is the "average" voter our leaders imagine when they slash the funding to victim-survivor services. Politicians picture bright, upright churchgoers tutting over public spending on people like me, and they make more cuts. Everyone's got this fantasy that if abused women "just left" we'd be safe; that we acticely choose danger by staying, but there's no safe place to go unless multiple systems function with integrity: systems being deliberately broken.