Thread on child sexual exploitation and 'grooming gangs'.

I have long since maintained that where girls and sexual violence through prostitution is concerned state and non-state agencies either turned a blind eye or worse still criminalised the victims. For me, it is very important to remember that child sexual exploitation is not something disconnected from prostitution. We call it CSE and grooming gangs but in substance, form, effect it is no different than the violent prostitution of highly vulnerable females except these females are under the age of 18.

A thread about femicide - apologies for it being broken up but I need to include links and evidence.

@FemicideCensus @K_IngalaSmith and Guardian published the names and details of adult victims of femicide in 2024 here:

theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-int…

It is sobering reading and will not include all female victims so the number of 80 is likely to grow meaning that in the end it is likely to be more deaths in fewer days (now, 1 female is murdered by a male every 3 days in UK). What stood out for me was the age profile. Far more much older women than I thought. So, I did a little digging around.

I went to the homicide Index (you can find it here):

ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulati…

This thread is for @sally_hines. It deals with a few matters of *fact* where prisons are concerned. Sally is quick to counter facts about male violence with a couple of well-worn sexist troupes.

When we talk about the risk of sexual violence posed to female prisoners when we place trans identifying males in a female prison estate, the response comes in one of two forms:

1. Why aren't we talking about the hideousness of sexual violence in prison rather than drawing on transphobic stereotype of a trans woman is a sexual predator?

2. Sexual violence is a huge problem in prisons, especially male prisons and such violence is one of the reasons trans identifying male people need to be placed in the female estate.

So, let's look at the evidence and what it says. Some facts about the trans prisoner population drawn from a Parliamentary Question answered on 23rd December 2024:

Of the 245 transgender prisoners on 31st March 2024 (census date) whose sex at birth is male, 151 committed one or more contact or noncontact sexual offences. That is 62% of the male transgender identifying population.

The comparison population is *not* transgender people in general, but males in prison. The percentage of males in prison who committed one or more sexual offences (contact and non contact) is closer to 18% - and has remained steady for several years.

THREAD: In a rare moment, I am going to defend @sally_hines, even if only obliquely.

1/ There has been criticism of Sally getting these grants.

I do not agree with many of the criticisms because they misunderstand the mechanics of financial accountability re ESRC grants. The money goes to the university. Some universities top slice a bit and give them to the researcher in a research account that can only be spent on research activities. The bulk of the grant though is administered according to quite strict rules. 2/ Every university likes its Profs to get grants - hence Sally will often have a pop at me for not having grants. That's fine. Personally I have never thought that the ability to get grants measures the worth of an academic. And, for some us of, the research we do does not require a lot of money. The work I do does not, at the moment, require grant income.

NEWSFLASH

The Open University has today published the report it commissioned following my tribunal.



@SexMattersOrg @akuareindorf @MForstater @WomensRightsNet @ProfAliceS @AFAF_freespeech @EdinUniAFAF @ComAcFreedom @bindelj ounews.co/around-ou/univ…
Let's remember back a year ago, when on the morning of the tribunal they published this:



Note para stating that they "will be at forefront of where discussion goes next" wonkhe.com/blogs/balancin…

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1/ The issue I have with arguments like this one is that they do not stand up to scrutiny and they fly in the face of the evidence, the law and the facts.

So, @SamFowles let's go through your argument and evidence.

https://twitter.com/SamFowles/status/1835298409638494285

2/ What is this GC movement you are so keen to dismiss? Women who believe that sex is immutable. FYI, believing this is not transphobic unless you think that GC beliefs are inherently transphobic. If so, you find yourself in the company of unlawful harassers as the ...

Thread on what I am calling, for the moment, the 'geography' of rape and sexual violence.

1/ Last year, along with @WomensRightsNet, I published a report called "When we are at our most vulnerable" in which we reported, after an FOI to all police constabularies, a shocking... 2/ level of sexual violence in hospitals and health care settings.

womensrights.network/hospital-report

A bittersweet congratulations to Roz Adams and her legal team (esp Naomi Cunningham from @legalfeminist and @SexMattersOrg).

For those that do not remember: Roz was run out of Edinburgh Rape Crisis after fighting for the rights of a rape victim to have a woman provide .. 1/ ...counselling services. This is a significant win, not just for Roz whose claim has been thoroughly vindicated but also for rape victims who deserve better than to get caught up in a set of politics in which women's needs are...2/

A short story of feminist fractures:

Once upon a time (November 2011), there was an academic (me) who started a research centre at Durham University. It was the Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexualities. Back then, it was terribly fashionable to 'queer' everything. The Centre was a broad church that accommodated old skool feminists like me and queer theorists. It was also a flag Centre to accommodate lesbians, gays and bisexuals (you know - the old skool queers) as Durham had no LGB much less LGBTQi network.

In rebuttal:

I see that several academics who are either in law, sociology or criminology are dismissing the recent GC employment tribunal wins. They claim these are "petty" small pay outs, just advisory, etc. etc.

So, by way of rebuttal I thought I would pull together a few facts (or as we like to say in academia, evidence).

1. There has been a significant drop in the number of people making claims in the Employment Tribunal, but even still each year for the last 15 years there has been circa 100K or more claims made: 2. Discrimination on belief grounds is a tiny fraction of the overall claims - the majority of which are for breach of contract, race, disability or sex discrimination. Belief discrimination cases total circa 1-3% of all ET claims with the percentage falling.

Short tweet thread - some reflections on the judgement and the last two weeks

In some parts of the X/twitter, I have been accused of making the judgement all about me. Well, yes. And no. The judgement is all about me and my former employer and OU employees.

But it is also about what many of us inside academia (and outside) have been suffering. Since @MForstater a ridiculous narrative started that one can hold GC beliefs but not express them. The focus since Forstater has been on helping employers and organisations understand that they cannot discriminate against someone who holds GC beliefs. Understandably, because until Maya won the EAT, our beliefs were thought to be equivalent to nazism. The legal wins since Forstater have been racking up. But there was one piece of the puzzle that had yet to be settled in a court - what are the parameters within which those who oppose us can make their protestations known. What is the lawful expression of opposition and what is not?

have received the Tribunal’s judgment in my case against the OU today: I won! The Tribunal found that I was discriminated against and harassed because of my gender critical beliefs, and that I was constructively dismissed. The Tribunal found (inter alia!) that I was compared to a racist uncle. My colleagues orchestrated a hostile public campaign against me and gender critical research network with over 360 signing a public letter calling on the OU to close down my research group.

Criminology thread. Tagging a few interested ppl. Please RT.

@bindelj @jk_rowling @ShonaghDillon @bsc_wccjn @K_IngalaSmith @centreWJ @polblonde @MForstater @runthinkwrite @MLInstitute @DeathoftheLeftt @JeanHatchet

1/ In the name of justice for women, a huge body of research… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2/ Yet, because so few women appear in the criminal justice system as offenders, policy, practice, prison regimes and programmes for rehab are based on ‘notional men’.

This became the bedrock of ‘gender-responsive’ CJ policy.

Dear Professor Phipps

Thank you for submitting your paper (genderate.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/phipps…) to Online Journal of the Analysis of Contemporary Social and Political Movements. I will not be sending the paper out for peer review as it does not meet the requisite standard. This paper is receiving a desk reject for the following reasons.

The paper is peppered with problematic assertions about GC feminism that lack evidence and at times these read as though they are the musing of a fevered mind. Specifically:

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Is it hypocritical to write about threats to academic freedom whilst denying it to others?

A cautionary tale about conceptual imperialism, political dogmatism & asserting The Truth

TLDR: stopping the @AHFdoco is only defensible if one thinks trans theory is The Truth.

https://twitter.com/drsarahliu/status/1651599682894741506

I agree with much of what @DrSarahLiu says *in principle*. Academic freedom is under threat by bad faith actors world over. Look at Bolsonaro when he was elected. He shut down much of what sociology depts studied.

RANT THREAD ALERT 👿

1/ Doing some background work for Saturday's forthcoming event with @project_lesbian.

Started where I always start with a good old fashioned literature search (made so easy these days by google scholar).

tickettailor.com/events/thelesb… 2/ Kept thinking about how things have changed. 25 years ago there was a (relatively) rich literature - academic, grey, activist, cultural, books, videos.. the lot. All speaking to the experiences of lesbians.

1. Prisons are not like anywhere else. Women in prison cannot remove themselves from the company of a person that makes them feel uncomfortable. They have no control over who they associate with. 2. Prison staff have no control over who the courts send to prison and thus have no control over the types of risks and issues they have to manage. Criminal justice professionals have no control over who they have to 'assess' or the tools, criteria and guidance they are given...

1/ Mini-thread on reading criminal statistics and their relevance to Scottish betrayal of women in prison, the 1823 Goal Act and the UN Rules for the Treatment of Women in Prison

ohchr.org/en/instruments… 2/ There are two schools of criminological thought refered to as (i) 'left realist' and (ii) 'ultra-realist'. Both start from the assumption that we must take seriously crime and its effects - rather than explain everything away as effect of bad state n oppression.

Thank you for your submission to the Online Journal of Social Critique. The editor board have rejected your submission on the following grounds:

https://twitter.com/christapeterso/status/1605830455890087936

You have made the error of universalising from the particular. Many people find it difficult to realise that your own subjective experience of the world is not a safe basis on which to make generalisations. In your case, you homogenise 'gender critical academics'

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Dear @Daragh_Murray @livesrunning @edajones16
Thank you for submitting your report to the Open Journal Of Legal Analysis. I'm afraid that the decision of the editorial board is to reject it. It does not meet the standards of academic publishing for the following reasons: 1. The paper is, presentationally, very poor with numerous typographical errors and infelicities of expression. May we kindly suggest that next time you proof read your paper prior to submission. Our readers are not there to provide copy editing services.

1/ A mini thread in the bleeding obvious: Stonewall's lobbying started an attempt to redefine the category 'women' in a way that ended up being antithetical to much feminist thinking and politics, especially those versions concerned with male violence, safeguarding & justice. 2/ Yesterday we saw in Mermaids v LGB Alliance a contest over the meaning of the word lesbian.

Not gay.

Lesbian.