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Ní Saoirse go Saoirse na mBan: There is no Freedom until Women are Free

by Clíona Ó Gallchoir on

Today’s post is on the long-awaited repeal of the amendment of Article 40.3.3 of the Irish Constitution, which was achieved in the referendum vote this past May.

The author is Clíona Ó Gallchoir, an academic in the School of English of University College Cork, Republic of Ireland. Clíona has expertise in Irish and British 18th and 19th century writing, Irish women’s writing, the writing of Maria Edgeworth, and the figure of the child in 18th century Ireland.

Clíona is also a former volunteer with VSO and has spent two years as a teacher trainer in Eritrea.

Ní Saoirse go Saoirse na mBan: There is no Freedom until Women are Free

by Clíona Ó Gallchoir

 On 25 May 2018, Irish people voted by a significant majority (over 66%) to repeal Article 40.3.3 of the Irish Constitution, otherwise known as the ‘Eighth Amendment’. This notorious amendment had been inserted in the Constitution in 1983 in order to guarantee the right to life of ‘the unborn’: foetal life at all stages from the moment of conception was described as having equal status with the life of ‘the mother’.

When it became clear that the proposal to repeal the Eighth Amendment had been overwhelmingly endorsed, the reaction among the majority of Irish women was not just one of profound relief, but also of joy and celebration. Although some had counselled that the response to a Yes vote should not be celebratory, in the end the joy of women, many of whom had campaigned on this issue for decades, could not be contained. The decision of the electorate, including 65% of the men who voted, was seen as the final, decisive rejection of a regime in which the control of women had been at the centre of how the Irish state defined itself.

The repeal of the Eighth Amendment was about much more than the decision, finally, to legislate for abortion in Ireland. It was also about an end to a shameful history in which unmarried mothers and children were institutionalized and abused so that a mythical image of Ireland as a country composed of perfect, patriarchal family units could be maintained. The facts of sex and pregnancy outside of marriage were not – in fact, could not be – acknowledged in a state in which adherence to a rigid version of Catholicism was upheld as a key marker of national identity. The inconvenient evidence that life in Ireland did not correspond to this strict ideological pattern therefore had to be hidden, and the Church and State operated in tandem to ensure that this was the case.

Pregnant girls and women were sent either to Mother and Baby Homes or to Magdalene Laundries. Women were often forcibly separated from their children, who were in some cases illegally adopted, either in Ireland or overseas, in transactions that benefitted the religious orders concerned. In other cases, children were, in their turn, institutionalized in orphanages, industrial schools, and sometimes, in a disturbing cycle, subsequently in Magdalene Laundries.

The fate of some of these children was uncovered in 2014 by Catherine Corless, a local historian living in Tuam, County Galway. Her research, originally disputed and ridiculed, found not only a shockingly high mortality rate among the babies and young children in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, but also that the remains of potentially hundreds of children had been discarded in an unmarked mass grave, on a site on which a septic tank was later located. The total figure of bodies in this mass grave is as yet unknown, but a total of 794 children died at the Home and have no recorded place of burial.

This regime of institutionalization and incarceration gradually waned as the century progressed, but the last Magdalene Laundry did not actually shut until 1996. It is not hyperbolic to say that in the twentieth century women and children in Ireland who fell outside of the narrowly defined parameters of social acceptability were subjected to a form of state violence in the service of an ethno-religious identity.

In the most private and intimate ways, women’s bodies were controlled by a medical establishment that was dominated by Catholic teaching. Contraception was banned until 1980 (after which point it continued to be relatively inaccessible). The idea of women limiting their pregnancies or planning their families was so antithetical to the establishment that for decades, women in labour in some hospitals were subjected to the practice of symphysiotomy. This discredited procedure involves the breaking of the pelvic bones in order to facilitate childbirth, because caesarean sections were seen to present too high a risk for subsequent pregnancies, and might therefore be seen as a justification for birth control. There was no concern for the fact that the procedure left many women with lifelong chronic pain. The inclusion of the Eighth Amendment to the constitution in 1983 was therefore not an isolated occurrence, but part of a long history in which Irish women were treated as disposable, as acceptable collateral damage in an atmosphere in which ideology trumped reality.

The constitutional ban on abortion was however in some ways the most extreme form of ideological falsehood, and as the years passed, the gap between reality and ‘pro-life’ rhetoric became more and more difficult to sustain. In 1992, the case of a 14-year-old rape victim, who became the subject of an injunction preventing her from travelling to the UK for an abortion, exposed the full extent of the barbarism inherent in the constitutional ban.

The response of the government at the time was to amend the amendment, giving women a constitutionally-guaranteed right to travel for abortion services, thus formalizing an extraordinary hypocrisy. It is estimated that 3,000-4,000 Irish women access abortion in the UK annually; meanwhile, however, importing and taking an abortion pill in Ireland is currently punishable by a sentence of 14 years imprisonment. The Ryanair flight to London, Liverpool or Manchester, and the illegally-imported packets of pills, taken alone at home in fear of the consequences, are the twenty-first century equivalent of the hiding of ‘fallen women’ inside the high grey walls of institutions.

Is it any wonder that Irish women wept, then sang and cheered when they realized that they no longer had to be the secret that Ireland kept about itself? They also wept for the memory of Savita Halappanavar, whose tragic death in 2012 was caused by the fact that doctors could not terminate her unviable pregnancy for as long as any foetal heartbeat was detected. By the time they realized she had developed sepsis, it was too late to save her. The Yes vote was a belated but necessary atonement for the fact that a woman who had come to Ireland to make her home and start a family had died, cruelly and unnecessarily.

This historically significant result comes at a time in which Ireland is developing a new relationship to its history, and in which some of the buried potential of Irish radicalism is being reclaimed. In contrast to the highly-conservative nature of the Irish state after independence, those involved in the campaign for Irish independence in the early twentieth century were also involved in trade unionism, in educational reform, in campaigns for women’s suffrage, in anti-imperialism more generally, and in campaigns for housing and health. Following independence, the aspirations for a nation and a state that gave a better life to all its citizens dwindled in the face of economic stagnation and political instability. The meaning of Irish independence shrank to a sterile assertion of national distinctiveness understood largely in terms of the identification of Irishness with Catholicism. As we have seen, in order to preserve the image of ‘Catholic Ireland’, women and children who did not fit its image were hidden, silenced and often brutally excluded from society.

But things are changing. In 2016, one of my neighbours in Cork city hoisted a green flag emblazoned with the words ‘The Irish Republic’: this, not the Irish tricolour, was the flag that was flown by the rebels during the Easter Rising of 1916. Around the corner, in another front garden, the ‘starry plough’ could be seen: this was the flag of the Irish Citizen Army, a republican socialist organization led by James Connolly, who was later executed for his part in the Rising. These flags represented a slightly subversive response to the the fact that the Irish political establishment had decided, initially tentatively, to celebrate the centenary of the Rising, which is traditionally seen as the foundational moment of the independent Irish state.

Since the outbreak of the Northern Ireland conflict (‘The Troubles’) in the late 1960s, celebrations of ‘physical force’ nationalism had become politically toxic, and official commemoration of 1916 was for decades extremely muted. In 2016, however, with the Northern conflict consigned to history, the government decided that it could safely lay claim to the historical tradition of Irish nationalism.

Something happened in 2016, however, that was entirely unexpected. Ordinary people and communities displayed enormous curiosity and enthusiasm for the history of the revolutionary period. Local groups organized lectures, memorial events, plays, parades and celebrations. But following nearly a decade of economic austerity and in the wake of an endless cycle of scandals about abuse and neglect of the vulnerable in church institutions, facilitated by the state, the enthusiasm of Irish citizens was not for the official version of history. The flags that were flown by my neighbours were a reminder that the Ireland that was created after independence was not the only Ireland possible – there were and there are other possible futures.

The sense of an aspiration for these new futures was already evident a year prior to the centenary celebrations, when the Constitution was amended by popular vote to guarantee marriage equality to same-sex couples. A document largely authored by the arch-conservative Eamon De Valera had been rewritten to reflect values of tolerance, equality and respect for diversity. The referendum result in 2015 was undoubtedly indicative of progress in terms of attitudes in Ireland, but it was also part of the movement to reverse the clerical control that had been imposed on Irish society since independence.

The 1937 Constitution was in many ways a concerted move to erase those elements of political thought that did not fit with De Valera’s conservative worldview: this was recognized and resisted by women such as Kathleen Lynn who had been active in the revolutionary period and who campaigned against the adoption of the new constitution. The campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment was thus not just a moving forward, but also a movement back, to reclaim the history of women who had imagined and worked for an Ireland that they hoped would bring equality for all.

For nearly 100 years, the idea of women’s equality in Ireland was abandoned in the interests of a particular version of Irish nationalism.  The fact that there were advanced feminist movements in Ireland in the early twentieth century was either forgotten, or dismissed as trivial. The recovery of that history was however evident in the popular campaigns with slogans in the Irish language: #TáForMná (‘Yes for Women’) trended on Twitter; people wore sweatshirts that proclaimed ‘Stand in Awe of All Mná’ (from Emmet Kirwan’s powerful poem ‘Heartbreak’); and an old slogan resurfaced: ‘Ní Saoirse go Saoirse na mBan’ (‘No Freedom Until Women Are Free’).

The Repeal Campaign can be seen as a social movement that recalls some of the radical feminist and progressive ideas of the past, and that creates a new cohort of women engaging in activism and political campaigning, many of them for the first time. Because of this, although the euphoria of the result will fade, the campaign will resonate into the future.

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Book Review: Rape Culture, Gender Violence, & Religion: Biblical Perspectives

by Johanna Stiebert on

There are perks to contributing to a book: hence, I recently received, hot off the press, my own copy of Rape Culture, Gender Violence, & Religion: Biblical Perspectives. I have since read eagerly through all chapters, with an ever-growing sense that this is a particularly timely and relevant publication.

The volume is one of three, all edited by the formidable triumvirate of Caroline Blyth, Emily Colgan and Katie B. Edwards and published by Palgrave Macmillan in the Religion and Radicalism series. The other two volumes carry the subtitles Christian Perspectives and Interdisciplinary Perspectives and I look forward to reading these next.

General Comments

The editors explain that the three volumes grew out of pressure to explore ‘the complex and multifaceted relationships between rape culture, gender violence, and religion’ in a context where such investigation was ‘well overdue and therefore urgent’ (p.v). Finding themselves inundated with responses to their general call for chapters, the one volume initially envisaged became three. It is only too clear that rape culture manifestations and gender-based violence have reached epidemic levels in many and diverse settings across the globe. Indeed, it was during the editing stages that #MeToo hit the headlines, making this visible, certainly in popular and social media of the USA and UK but also well beyond.

The three volumes, while substantial, make no pretense of being exhaustive in their analysis of either rape culture, or gender violence, or religion, or of the dynamics between all three. The Biblical Perspectives volume does not offer a definition of rape culture, or provide a thorough commentary on the rape texts of the Bible. There are other books to consult for that.[1]

While the texts that tend to spring to mind first when hearing ‘rape’ and ‘Bible’ – such as Genesis 34 (‘The Rape of Dinah’), Judges 19 (‘The Rape of the Levite’s Wife’), and 2 Samuel 13 (‘The Rape of Tamar’) – are all discussed, there is also focus on texts that are less likely to come to mind (such as Numbers 31), or that do not seem to be explicitly about rape (such as Lamentations 3, Numbers 25 and the passages on the Virgin Mary in the New Testament). The chapters in this book stimulate conversations about a complex and many-sided topic, both by informing and by calling out for social justice advocacy.

 

Advocacy runs as a thread throughout the volume. Lu Skerratt speaks of their reading lenses as ‘modes of activism’ (p.18) and ‘conduits of social justice’ (p.22); Jessica Keady states that ‘we surely have a responsibility to contest these [rape] discourses, both in the biblical texts and within our own cultural locations’ (p.79); David Tombs writes that ‘a contemporary reader is entitled, indeed obliged, to consider the events in [the biblical] tradition from these [raped] women’s perspective’ (p.126); Emma Nagouse validates Lamentations 3 as a portrayal of male rape and as the first step in redressing victim-blaming, arguing that ‘such an interpretive strategy is invaluable, if not necessary, given our location as biblical readers and interpreters within a global rape culture’ (p.154); James Harding’s investigation of ancient texts is motivated by resistance to collusion with rape culture and homophobia; Susanne Scholz calls for feminist interpreters to go beyond ‘a “cop-out” hermeneutics’ (p.181) and to embrace ‘exegetical resistance’ to the ‘marginalizing patterns of violence, including gendered violence, so pervasive in the world today’ (p.194); and Emily Colgan and Caroline Blyth insist on the ‘importance of persisting – and persisting and persisting – with … tough conversations’ (p.26). Reading this book is not a quiet or private experience – it tickles the conscience, seizes attention, inspires to activism.

I see why the book will not please everyone in biblical studies. (Unanimity of any kind would, indeed, be improbable in such a divided discipline.) First, as already stated, this is not and does not pretend to be a thorough or systematic exploration of biblical texts about rape. Instead, it is a collection centred around the Bible and gendered violence in which every chapter throws a surprise into the mix by interfacing biblical texts with things from contemporary worlds: such as films and television shows, empirical research from Indonesia, newspaper reports of a forced marriage in Wales, or Title IX. Secondly, while there is certainly close reading of biblical texts and some focus on Hebrew vocabulary, ancient translations and possible original contexts (notably, Harding’s contribution) many of the traditional preoccupations, such as with date of composition, identification of Sitz im Leben, or evidence of redaction, for instance, are played down, or absent. And thirdly, not all contributors are academics and some are academics choosing to channel creative interpretive expression (notably, Klangwisan). The result is a stimulating fizz that makes the Bible a shape-shifting text, both relevant in a complex and media-inundated now-ness and a means to illuminate disturbing realities of both past and present.

Reviewing the Chapters

The succinct introduction by the volume’s editors makes the case that the Bible, being both sacred and violent, needs to be held accountable. Undeniably, its ‘articulations of gender violence have accrued significant authority and power across space and time’ (p.2) and this authority and power apply not only to its canonical force in Jewish and Christian congregations but also to influence exerted on ‘contemporary social discourses that (implicitly or explicitly) draw upon the ideologies inherent within biblical texts to justify multiple forms of gender violence’ (p.2).

Not to probe and resist this authority, power and influence runs the risk of colluding in, perpetuating, justifying or legitimating gender-based violence. The charge that such an exercise is ‘anachronistic’ and therefore insufficient in terms of ‘epistemological rigour’ (p.4) is rejected – and I applaud this. Let me dwell briefly on the fact that the charge of ‘anachronism’ is quite common – especially when it comes to methods of biblical criticism that reveal and challenge ideologies. Such charges are made, for instance, by certain conservative theological commentators and are usually targeted at something they reject: feminism is a prominent contender. (The application of Christological interpretation to the Hebrew Bible, on the other hand, is not acknowledged as anachronism by these same commentators.) By labeling feminist interpretation of the Bible as ‘anachronistic’ and arguing that people of antiquity had no awareness of the preoccupations of modern feminism, feminism is dismissed as irrelevant and ‘unbiblical’ (and therefore as ‘not good’), while, conversely, non-feminist ideological values, including some responsible for keeping women oppressed, are promoted. This is one way of relegating domestic duties and childrearing to women (‘because that is what the Bible promotes’), and at the same time rejecting ‘feminist ideas’ about women joining the workforce and enjoying equal rights in terms of work conditions and pay. One example of very many making this this kind of argument is by husband and wife A. J. and M. E. Köstenberger[2] who characterize feminist critics as completely wrongheaded. Their publications promote the belief that the Bible advocates that men and women each have a ‘unique yet equally significant and indispensable set of roles in the family and the church’  – an example of the ‘different but equal’ fallacy. The perspective of biblical critics who resist such is that certain biblical texts provide cause for challenging gendered depictions or ideologies that are discriminatory – a challenge that feminist or gender criticism[3] is aptly equipped to make.

The contributions in this volume offer and defend engagements with biblical texts that are both critical and creative. Moreover, the contributions maintain a steady focus on the present, because there is (sadly) nothing outdated or anachronistic about gender-based violence.

Both Lu Skerratt and Emma Nagouse focus on the book of Lamentations. Lamentations is a short, poetic book of the Hebrew Bible, depicting in graphic terms the brutalities attending the Fall of Jerusalem. Nagouse’s focus is concentrated on the Man of Sorrows (Lamentations 3) whom she counter-points with Jamie Fraser of the television series Outlander, with particular focus on what she identifies as the shared theme of male-male rape. Skerratt focuses on the feminine metaphor of abused Daughter Zion and on ‘shared themes, characters and discourses’ (p.15) with the novel Push and its film adaptation Precious. Skerratt co-opts the masculine imagery of Lamentations 3 alongside the feminine imagery to make a case for the book’s brutal and divinely administered misogyny (p.21). Both chapters offer examples of how modern literature and filmic adaptations illuminate and reveal affinities with biblical texts. Both chapters are open, too, about a personal and subjective filter.

Skerratt argues that for all their separation in terms of space and time both Daughter Zion and Precious are females whose bodies are inscribed with ‘multiple inequalities’ (p.24). For Skerratt there exists between them ‘a deep connection to the nuances of human life in times of great despair and crisis’ (p.27). Skerratt also maintains that through watching Precious – an unrelenting and harrowing film about all of child abuse, incest, poverty, teenage pregnancy, disability, social marginalization, racism and HIV – compassion can be extended also to the nameless women of Lamentations and others of the past and present who suffer like them (p.23). This, in turn, Skerratt advocates, will provide a rallying call for bringing about change. That this is personal for them is clear throughout Skerratt’s paper. The chapter’s opening sentence identifies Lamentations as a biblical book that affects Skerratt profoundly and they wonder openly whether the book’s emphasis on ‘the marginalized, oppressed, violated, and othered’ (p.14) is what attracts them to it.

Nagouse describes watching the Outlander episode that depicts unflinchingly Captain Jack Randall’s rape of Jamie Fraser as ‘deeply thought-provoking’ and a catalyst for considering ‘the biblical tradition with fresh eyes’ (p.144). Nagouse, moreover, feels compelled to explore and understand connections between the two due to her location as reader and interpreter ‘within a global rape culture’ (p.154). Nagouse is careful to state that she cannot know the intention of the author of Lamentations 3, including whether the purpose of the pericope is to portray suffering in terms of the experience of rape. Her exploration yields a number of astute observations, including that what the Man of Sorrows witnesses (namely the rape of women) may provide insight into what he himself has experienced (p.152) and also that suffering brutality can generate not only revulsion and horror towards the perpetrator but also a sense of dependency, even attachment (p.154).

In different ways Skerratt and Nagouse both demonstrate that reading and interpreting biblical texts, including texts of sexual violence, do not happen in a vacuum but in a richly inter-textual context. Both, moreover, have been led by the vivid and brutal imagery of Lamentations, in conjunction with representations of violence from modern media, to appropriate, explore and empathize with those who have suffered trauma outside of their own experience. Hence, Skerratt is moved ‘to stand with BME women in the United States who are disproportionally affected and stigmatized for having an HIV-positive status’ (p.22) and Nagouse compels us to listen to and to believe male victims of rape so that the cycle of trauma and re-traumatization can begin to be dismantled (p.155).

David Tombs also uses popular culture media to attempt to gain insight into ancient texts of sexual violence. Tombs explores the popular youth television series 13 Reasons Why, as well the book by Jay Asher on which it is based. (For an earlier version of his chapter, see here). The plot of both book and series centres on the character Hannah Baker who has committed suicide – or, more accurately, on the tape recordings recounting the reasons for her suicide. The biblical text with which Tombs interfaces some of these reasons – namely, Hannah’s rape by Bryce Walker, the possible collusion of Hannah’s ‘friend’ Courtney Crimsen and the inadequate response of the school guidance counselor when Hannah tries to tell him what happened – is from the David story in 2 Samuel. The story element, which cursorily recounts the fate of David’s ten concubines who are raped by Absalom in a display of his power, is not well known. While 13 Reasons Why gives extensive insight into Hannah’s interior life, the concubines’ perspective receives no mention in the biblical text (p.126). Tombs’ reading strategy is particularly deft because his dialogic approach allows the biblical text and Hannah’s experience ‘to speak to and illuminate each other… reveal[ing] how they each attest to the devastating impact of gender violence on victims’ lives and identities’ (p.119). In doing so, Tombs makes revealing insights about both Courtney Crimsen’s and King David’s complicity in tacit acts of ‘sexual “offering” motivated by… self-interest’ (p.131). Tombs also points out how important it is to name not only Hannah’s but also the concubines’ experience as rape (p.134, n.8) and to make efforts to identify and understand the perspectives of the marginal and victimized (p.126). Without such efforts, Tombs warns, churches and other religious communities might reinforce ‘the stigmatization and discrimination felt by survivors of sexual violence’ (p.127).

Interestingly, all of Skerratt, Nagouse and Tombs practise a form of appropriation in that they each use biblical texts alongside (arguably) more accessible contemporary popular media to gain insight and empathy and to speak out for persons or groups very different to themselves. In Skerratt’s case, it is HIV-positive BME women in the USA; in Nagouse’s, it is victims of male-male rape, and in Tombs’, it is young and suicidal female victims of rape. The word ‘appropriation’ has – with justification – had some bad press: such as in the sense of cultural appropriation, for instance.  In all three cases here, however, what is going on is not some form of impersonation or voyeurism but a passionate effort to resist damaging political or cultural control and domination.[4]

I will not say much about my chapter in the volume – because it always feels weird to review one’s own writing. Suffice it to say that my chapter, too, interprets select biblical texts alongside portrayals from popular culture, with particular emphasis on eroticized brother-sister relations. The chapter grew out from research for my most recent monograph on first-degree incest and the Hebrew Bible (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016)

The chapter by James Harding examines a number of biblical texts – including Judges 19–21 and Numbers 31 – in order to probe contexts of both antiquity and modernity that make homophobia and rape culture possible. Harding is a scholar I particularly admire – both for his formidable breadth of knowledge and the thoroughness of his scholarship. This chapter amply demonstrates both. Harding, as ever, proceeds cautiously, ‘always alert to the manifold risks of anachronism and trans-cultural misprision’ (p.169), and illustrates how rape culture is ‘woven into the very identities’ of both the ‘narratives… canonised and scripturalised in the Hebrew Bible’ and the ‘literary heritage of the Graeco-Roman’ world. Both, he points out, have ‘played a complex and variegated role in shaping the cultures and intellectual history of Western Europe, and, by extension, those cultures that have fallen under their spell’ (p.160).

Harding’s examination is nuanced and carefully contextualized, paying close attention also to significant items of vocabulary. He illustrates that a narrative like Judges 21 ‘invests a particular sort of rape – of virgin girls in a war of sacral revenge – with the odour of sanctity and religious obedience, and this odour of sanctity and obedience is profoundly gendered’ (p.166). Alongside identifying masculine domination of women, Harding also demonstrates ‘the ingrained homophobia of the societies implied by the texts’ (p.167). He is careful to stress that such passages as Genesis 19:1-11 and Judges 19:22-30 (where male-male rape is threatened) have ‘nothing to do with “homosexuality” or “homosexual” rape, but everything to do with an ancient form of homophobia grounded in an implicit understanding of sex as a matter of the sexually mediated power of men over women, and over other men’ (p.167). Harding ends his chapter with a question: ‘If, as readers, we are prepared to collude in [projecting our own dark lies on to others], should we not at the same time ask ourselves with honesty how our own beliefs, thoughts, and acts enable all manner of gender-based violence to thrive?’ (p.169). Harding’s acute dissection of words, literary and social settings, values and projections is powerful in its demonstration of how deeply rooted and pervasive sexual violence is.

The chapter by Yael Klangwisan is strikingly original and, like Harding’s, haunting – though in a different way. Whereas Harding’s method is one of going deep down into the text, peeling back its layers and turning its words and depictions this way and that, Klangwisan uses the biblical text as her starting point to build up a new imagining. She begins by citing the short text of focus: Numbers 25:8, 14-15, describing how Phinehas the priest impales Zimri and Cozbi. This may not be the first text that springs to mind when picking up a book on ‘rape culture and the Bible’ but it is certainly a text about violence and sex. Klangwisan follows scholar Helena Zlotnick Sivan in interpreting Phinehas’s actions ‘as a rape that delegitimizes Cozbi’s relationship with Zimri “to a level of arbitrary passion”’ (p.113, n.3). She also describes the spear as ‘like an iron phallus’ (p.109). Klangwisan puts herself firmly into the chapter, following the quoted biblical text with a statement of immediacy: ‘I’ll be honest with you. I want to save them’ (p.103). In this way, the distance between biblical text, the chapter’s author and the reader is broken down. Next, Klangwisan vividly evokes the events of the text, weaving through, like a commentary, the voices of Roland Barthes and Hélène Cixous. The chapter makes the reader imagine the ‘miasma of horror’ (p.109) described in the text – something they may not have done at the outset when casting eyes across a short few biblical verses. Re-read with Klangwisan’s illumination, the text becomes ‘a violation of a kind of love that might have, had it lived, overcome cultural difference’ and the names of Zimri and Cozbi become ‘like a gift at the end of this text’ (p.109). Like Tombs but using a different strategy, Klangwisan insists on validating and not shrouding that a terrible and violent act has been committed. Also like Tombs, she insists on us imagining the scene and probing its multiple perspectives and its characters’ motivations. I am looking forward to using this chapter by Klangwisan in the classroom, as a way to make biblical texts – which can strike modern readers as remote and inaccessible – more immediate and more vivid.

The chapters by Julie Kelso and Susanne Scholz both offer surveys on topics pertinent to rape culture, sexual violence and the Bible. Kelso [5] focuses on the important work on the relationship between biblical texts and violence against women by Andrea Dworkin. As Kelso points out, Dworkin’s contribution has been unfairly sidelined, as well as misrepresented and maligned as ‘sex-negative’. In no small part, Kelso illustrates, this has been because she is an outspoken woman. Dworkin’s articulation that sexual intercourse plays a significant role in male-dominated and male-supremacist societies through its contribution to women’s ‘erosion of the self and the compliant acceptance of lower status’ (p.84) is not easy to hear. As Kelso makes clear, Dworkin has never said all intercourse is rape – for all the claims to the contrary in mainstream media and cyberspace (p.84). Moreover, a number of men (Kelso quotes Leo Tolstoy as one example) have also argued that intercourse ‘makes exploiters of men and slaves of women’ (p.91) – but they (tellingly) are not consequently labeled ‘sex-negative’. Kelso’s bleak conclusion is that Dworkin’s call to recognize certain biblical texts (such as Genesis 2:4-4:1 and the Leviticus sexuality laws) as a means to institutionalize and sacralize intercourse for the purpose of male domination remains relevant, even urgent (p.98). Kelso is absolutely right that Dworkin’s work on the interpretation of biblical texts has receded into the remote peripheries of biblical studies. Kelso’s case for redressing this situation and depicting accurately what Dworkin does and does not say is persuasive.

Scholz’s chapter begins with the statement issued by the US Office for Civil Rights in April 2011, which explains that under Title IX of the US Education Amendments it is an obligation to eliminate sexual harassment and sexual violence. This leads to her personal observation that academia demonstrates ‘general reticence’ in the face of sexual violence (p.181). Scholz next turns to biblical scholarship, which she criticizes for being ‘consistently in the position of catching up with socio-cultural, political, and intellectual developments’ (p.190). Scholz calls for going beyond a ‘“cop-out” hermeneutics’ (p.181), such as by better connecting ‘gender, race, and class to explain the pervasiveness of rape’ (p.184). Alongside this rallying call to action (and such calls are something of a hallmark of this volume), Scholz also provides a succinct summary of feminist theories on rape, beginning with Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Women, Men, and Rape (1975), before providing a survey of feminist scholarship on biblical rape texts. Confirming her statement about a ‘catch-up’ tendency, Scholz points out that the first feminist exegetical study on sexual violence in the Bible did not appear until 1984: namely, Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. From here, Scholz follows the trickle onwards to the work of J. Cheryl Exum (‘Raped by the Pen’, in Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives, 1993) and Renita J. Weems (Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets, 1995), towards the flood of studies since 2000, which includes alongside Scholz’s own works, those of Gerlinde Baumann, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Cheryl Anderson, Mary Anna Bader, Hilary B. Lipka, Joy A. Schroeder, Carleen Mandolfo, Frank M. Yamada and Caroline Blyth.

Scholz also calls out for more boldness, such as for greater emphasis on socially located readings of the Bible. Especially when it comes to a topic like sexual violence, what she characterizes as adherence to ‘principles of a scientific-empiricist epistemology’ (p.190) can have the effect of minimizing and obfuscating ‘the violent and coercive nature of rape’ (p.192). Scholz adds that such happens particularly prominently among white feminist interpreters (p.191). Coming back to the Title IX statement, Scholz also demands greater boldness on the meta-level – that is, for more in-depth attention to method and methodology in the discipline of feminist biblical studies, including in terms of understanding biblical rape texts ‘as sites of struggle over meaning-making, authorization, and power’ (p.193). Both Kelso and Scholz bring attention back to the process and to the responsibility of doing feminist interpretation of biblical rape texts. As such they complement well the volume’s chapters that engage in such processes.

Teguh Wijaya Mulya and Jessica M. Keady both respond to biblical texts in the light of direct encounters with contemporary expressions of sexual violence. Wijaya Mulya recounts how his queering reflections on the virgin/whore binary were set in motion during an interview with young Indonesian Christians to find out more about understandings of sexual violence. One 18-year-old male participant he quotes describes how as a young teenager he groped a young woman as a ‘prank’, which he self-designated as ‘naughty’. This act of harassment is not only mitigated but also justified by him, with the statement that the girl was a ‘cheap girl’ – that is, a girl presumed no longer to be a virgin (p.52). From here, Wijaya Mulya expounds how tenuous the binary of virgin/whore is, citing not only hybrid counter-examples such as Ezili, who is portrayed as both promiscuous/flamboyant, and as Black Madonna (p.58), merging whore and virgin imagery, but also the presence of Mary in a genealogy of sexualized women (Matthew 1). In a number of ways, as Wijaya Mulya illustrates, ‘virgin’ and ‘whore’ are not poles apart but have overlapping characteristics, including a shared focus on sexuality. Moreover, not only the whore or ‘cheap girl’ is vulnerable to sexual violence, but so is the virgin: hence, the source of Mary’s pregnancy ‘conveys nuances of attacking, overtaking, overshadowing, and enveloping’. Wijaya Mulyah expands on this as follows: ‘[Mary] is essentially told that something will do some thing to her, with the result that she will get pregnant. Most importantly, the angel does not ask for her consent’ (p.57). Like other authors in the volume, Wijaya Mulyah hopes his analysis will have positive ramifications in lived life. His wish is for resistance to ‘normalization of sexual violence in this context and elsewhere’, so that through demonstrating ‘that the notion of violence as a “logical consequence” for women located by others in the “whore” category becomes both unintelligible and unacceptable’ (p.62).

Lamentably, Wijaya Mulyah’s contribution is the only one in the volume focused on New Testament (rather than Hebrew Bible) texts. As Meredith Warren and others writing for the Shiloh Project blog have demonstrated, the New Testament is far from immune from the taint of rape culture.

Keady’s examination of biblical and contemporary conceptions of gendered violence and purity discourses uses Genesis 34 as its pivot. (For Keady’s earlier and shorter version, see here.) Keady defends the dominant feminist position that Genesis 34 recounts Shechem’s rape of Dinah, refuting the minority of scholars who argue that there is no evidence of either coercion or violence (p.75). Keady also maintains that some of the disturbing subtexts in both the biblical text itself (e.g. the notion that the rape defiles and cheapens Dinah, p.77) and in interpretations of Genesis 34 (e.g. that Shechem’s soul is drawn to Dinah and that he speaks tenderly to her suggests a romance and refutes that this is a narrative of rape, p.75–76) persist into the present.

For one example of evidence Keady refers to a recent case brought before the court in Cardiff (2015) concerning a man who raped a woman and then forced her to marry him. As Keady points out, not only the man’s method of coercion (he threatened to release camera footage of the rape victim naked in the shower with a view to destroying her prospects of marriage, because she was ‘damaged goods’) but also both the judge’s summing up and the journalist’s recounting of events demonstrate what Keady characterizes as a persistent form of ‘purity culture ideology’. This ideology includes the projection of an impression that the woman, no longer a virgin, ‘is reduced to something less valuable, an impure, damaged body that “no one would want”’ (p.70).

For Keady, to ignore or downplay problematic, such as misogynistic, discourses of the Bible risks re-encoding oppression in the present. Whereas Klangwisan, through imaginative enhancement, demonstrates this by not letting the sparseness of a violent biblical text get away with its violence, Keady, like Harding, makes clear that what is toxic and present in the ancient text has not gone away and must be fervently resisted.

The final chapter of the volume is by two of its editors, Emily Colgan and Caroline Blyth. I particularly like this chapter, on teaching in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, because it reminds me that biblical gender violence is a topic of conversation for a diverse range of public spaces, including the classroom. The chapter is concise and manages to distil a great number of important points in very few pages. Colgan and Blyth point out that while there are shocking texts in the Bible and while this may surprise even students of faith who consider themselves well versed in Scripture, it is important to engage critically with these texts. While I, probably like Colgan and Blyth too, have been accused in student evaluations of dwelling too much on texts that are ‘controversial’, ‘overtly sexual’, or ‘graphic’ (as if I had put them there myself for some nefarious Christian-dissing purpose), discussing such texts is not about an ‘intention to shock or antagonize… or to provide… the classroom with the equivalent of clickbait’ (p.202). Instead, we teach these texts because they are in the Bible, part of a canonized whole.

As Colgan and Blyth point out, the Bible (or religion framed more widely) may not be the sole or greatest cause of gender violence in either Aotearoa New Zealand or elsewhere but it is a text that ‘both supports and perpetuates violence’ and to ignore this is ‘to contribute to the harm experienced by countless victims’ (p.203). Colgan and Blyth point not only to the problems in the texts, which ‘continue to have power in contemporary communities to sustain rape-supportive discourses’ but also to the difficulties of discussing such texts critically and with integrity in a classroom that may well include either or both persons ‘affected personally by gender violence’ (p.203) and persons ‘who participate in the social structures that sustain gender violence’ (p.204). They raise a set of complex questions: ‘How do we critique rape culture and gender violence, when these are recognized by some of our students as being so closely aligned with their own cultural identities? How do we challenge the unacceptable violence of patriarchy and misogyny while still being sensitive to our students’ investment in their cultural traditions? To what extent can we invite students to critique the traditional underpinnings of their own cultures, particularly when we ourselves do not belong to these cultures?’ (p.205).

By raising these matters Colgan and Blyth throw into relief both the enduring relevance and influence of biblical texts and the important and difficult task of interpreting them in the complex and diverse and globalized contemporary world. This volume provides impetus, motivation, tools and strategies for getting started on this endeavour. I hope this volume gets the big and diverse circulation, engaged readership and active responsiveness to the call for more ‘tough conversations’ (p.10) it so thoroughly deserves.

Postscript

In numerous ways this volume shows that a Bible scholar’s interpretation is shaped by encounters and experiences in life. Who we are, what and whom we experience become enmeshed in reading, interacting, idea-shaping, researching. The films and television we watch (Skerratt, Stiebert, Tombs, Nagouse) infiltrate our interpretation, as do the people we interview (Wijaya Mulya), the students we teach (Colgan, Blyth), the newspaper articles on court cases or Title IX we scan (maybe on the bus to work) (Keady, Scholz), or the casual prejudices we encounter, such as when male-male rape is characterized as ‘homosexual’ (Harding). Our imagination, shaped by the various exchanges and transactions of life, flow into our reading of biblical texts (Klangwisan) and influence the way we reflect on interpretations, and interpretations of interpretations (!) of the past (Kelso, Scholz). As Scholz argues, especially with a topic such as sexual violence, any notion of critical distance is not only difficult but also potentially highly problematic – hence, the passionate and often explicitly personal level of engagement in this volume.

This past year I have been based in Bamberg, a University town in a part of Bavaria that prefers to distinguish itself as a distinct region called Franconia. It has been a joy to immerse myself in a new academic context and I was delighted to accept an invitation to present my most recent work in the form of an open lecture. The topic – Potiphar’s wife’s harassment of Joseph and her false allegation of rape – is relevant to the Shiloh Project and I have reported on it here. My talk took a close look at Genesis 39 and at how it has been interpreted, both in biblical scholarship and in film and visual art. It also examined how the stereotypes of oversexed ‘foreign’ women, of untrustworthy women crying rape, either for attention, or because they don’t get their way, and of the man as sexual object being ipso facto feminized, play out in the current climate of #MeToo.

While talking, I kept noticing a man sitting near the front who looked very disgruntled. He made some exasperated noises and leafed energetically in his Bible, so that I could not help but be aware of him. When it came to time for questions, the man spoke up. He didn’t really ask a question. Instead he stated that my approach was not responsible, because I was not reading the story in its historical setting. I countered by saying first, that the precise historical context is difficult to salvage, not least because the story has probably been edited over and modified throughout a considerable space of time and secondly, that while an ancient text, the story continues to be read and sought out in present time and that the contemporary interpretive context has bearing on how Genesis 39 is read.

Afterwards I learned that the disgruntled questioner was none other than Professor Doktor Klaus Bieberstein, the University’s Professor for Old Testament Studies whom I had not met before. (I have been working while here on the Bible in Africa Studies series, ‘BiAS’, which is led by Joachim Kügler, Chair of New Testament Studies.) I felt unhappy about the lack of an opportunity to talk a little further with the Professor – there was no opportunity after the lecture – so I sent him an email and we arranged to meet for coffee.

Professor Bieberstein was very happy to talk about his research and considerable range of expertise. He has worked on creation stories, on theodicy and on the impact of archaeology on interpretation of Joshua. What really lit up his somewhat stern face, however, was when he spoke of his research focused on Jerusalem and of the student trip he leads there most years. I began to warm to him a little as he spoke of his visits there and of the many sources he has consulted to get a sense of how Jerusalem was, is and has been remembered through time.

But then we turned to the topic of my work and my lecture. Professor Bieberstein made clear that he considers my work to be part of an undesirable tendency to interpret biblical texts without historical rootedness or awareness. I pointed out that I am trained in biblical languages and in the history of interpretation, that I consider such training valuable. I tried to express that I consider the study of the Bible a discipline with many rooms and approaches and that I respect his methods and scholarship. I also tried to convey that there is scope and value in approaches that emphasize the relevance and resonance of the Bible in the present. Professor Bieberstein did not express any openness to or accommodation of such approaches. So, the coffee meeting did not end on a particularly cheery note. I said goodbye – courteously enough, I hope, and walked away quite sure I would not hear back from the Professor. Indeed, I have not. I did find it a shame that in a smallish town with two Hebrew Bible academics in it we could not get along better. But my feeling was that respect did not flow in two directions: I was able to admire and see value in his work but he could not in mine. So be it.

 

The reason I mention this encounter is that it makes clear to me that there is quite likely to be not just among students (as Colgan and Blyth identify, p.205) but also among biblical scholars some resistance and even refusal to engage with this volume. Not everyone will consider all or any of the contributions serious and edifying scholarship. Their loss.

 

 

[1] For a clear discussion of rape culture, one good source is the first two chapters (‘Rape Culture: The Evolution of a Concept’ and ‘The Mainstreaming of Rape Culture’) in Nickie D. Phillips’ monograph Beyond Blurred Lines: Rape Culture in Popular Media (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). For a book-length examination of rape in the Hebrew Bible, see Susanne Scholz’s Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible (Fortress Press, 2010).

[2] Their book God’s Design for Man and Woman: A Biblical-Theological Survey (Crossway Books, 2014) offers plenty of evidence for this stance.

[3] Neither feminist nor gender criticism is univocal but both draw attention to and resist gender-based discrimination and prejudice. For a nuanced and full discussion on both and on the distinctions between them, as well as for an application of robust gender criticism to biblical texts, see Deryn Guest, Beyond Feminist Biblical Studies (Phoenix, 2012).

[4] For a succinct and subtle examination of appropriation I recommend Adriaan van Klinken, ‘Response: The Politics of Appropriation’, in J. Stiebert and M. W. Dube (eds), The Bible, Centres and Margins: Dialogues between Postcolonial African and British Biblical Scholars (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2018), pp.147–51.

[5] An earlier and longer version of Kelso’s chapter is ‘The Institution of Intercourse: Andrea Dworkin on the Biblical Foundations of Violence Against Women’, The Bible and Critical Theory 12/2 (2016): 24–40. This paper is available online here.

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Germaine Greer: from feminist firebrand to professional troll

by Katie Edwards on

Former celebrated feminist turned public polemicist Germaine Greer is no stranger to controversy. In fact, the author seems to court the headlines, especially when promoting a forthcoming book.

You may remember when Greer made transphobic comments in the run-up to the publication of her 1999 book The Whole Woman. She’s reiterated these opinions many times in the years since. And then in 2003, she claimed she’d be accused of paedophilia while promoting The Beautiful Boy – her lavishly illustrated book about “why boys have always been the world’s pin-ups”.

Now Greer is preparing for the publication of her latest book, On Rape – with a series of troubling observations on #MeToo and sexual (non-)violence.

Professional provocateur?

Greer started her promotional campaign earlier this year when she opined that the rise in representations of sexual violence on TV was due to women’s enjoyment of watching other women being sexually assaulted and that women fantasised about being subjected to sexual violence.

She followed this up with comments on the #MeToo movement, which include her claims that women raped by Harvey Weinstein were “career rapees” who “spread their legs” to get movie roles.

In an interview with Fairfax Media in Australia, Greer said:

What makes it different is when the man has economic power, as Harvey Weinstein has … if you spread your legs because he said ‘be nice to me and I’ll give you a job in a movie’ then I’m afraid that’s tantamount to consent, and it’s too late now to start whingeing about that.

Courting controversy

Greer’s comments to promote the publication of On Rape, then, are merely the latest in a long line of dubious claims from the seemingly publicity hungry academic.

Speaking at the 2018 Hay literary festival, Greer attracted criticism by calling for more lenient sentences for rapists. Despite contemporary movements lobbying for a long overdue overhaul of how survivors of rape can access justice, Greer suggests that 200 hours of community service – or an “R” tattoo on the hand, arm or cheek – may be more appropriate punishment for rapists.

While acknowledging the considerable obstacles rape survivors face in navigating the criminal justice system (the consequences of which are abysmal conviction rates of rapists which, arguably, contribute to more rapes), Greer suggests that accepting a drastically reduced sentence for rape would result in more convictions.

Greer recounts her own experience of rape – but seems to imply that she hasn’t experienced any long-term damage as a consequence of the assault. The leap from her own emotional reaction to sexual violence (to which she is, of course, entitled) to her cavalier response to others’ experience of sexual violence is troubling.

Misunderstanding sexual violence

Greer also draws a bizarre distinction between violent and non-violent rape, which demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of sexual assault. She comments: “We are told that it is a sexually violent crime … Every time a man rolls over on his exhausted wife and insists on enjoying his conjugal rights he is raping her.” She’s right: penetration without consent is always rape – but to suggest that it isn’t “violent” is a mistake and dangerously misrepresents the real experiences of many survivors of sexual assault and rape.

It is surprising, too, that even some of the criticisms of Greer’s position concede that rape isn’t always violent. For instance, in her response to Greer’s comments, Suzanne Moore said: “Greer is correct to say not all rape is violent, but all rape surely involves the threat of violence.” The idea that rape can be a “non-violent” act seems to be a widely held myth in rape culture. The non-consensual penetration of a human body is an inherently violent violation.

With astonishing flippancy and no appeal to evidence, Greer went on to tell the audience at Hay: “Most rapes don’t involve any injury whatsoever. We are told it’s one of the most violent crimes in the world – bull.” As if the lack of visible evidence of external physical violence diminishes the damage caused by rape. While it’s true that other kinds of physical violence may be perpetrated alongside rape, the absence of visible evidence of punches, kicks or bites does not negate the violence of the act of rape.

Greer’s comments echo those of other public figures such as Richard Dawkins, Kenneth Clarke, Judy Finnegan and NYPD officer Peter Rose, who have assumed a “hierarchy of rape” – the idea that some rapes are “worse” than others (although Clarke and Finnegan later apologised) and only victims who display the external marks of physical violence are worthy of serious concern.

Trivialising sexual violence

When trivialisation and disbelief lie at the heart of a rape culture, the impact of comments such as these from those who identify as feminists cannot be underestimated. They provide a platform to the myths that create environments where sex crimes become normalised.

And despite lamenting the role of women in rape trials as little more than “bits of evidence”, Greer locates rapists at the centre of the narrative. By describing rape as “just lazy, just careless, insensitive”, she privileges the experiences of men over women. She presents rape as something men do (exclusively in a heterosexual context), rather than something survivors are forced to endure.

The ConversationGreer’s comments on sexual violence are glib, ill-informed and potentially dangerous. Let’s hope she’s put more thought into the content of her forthcoming book.

Katie Edwards, Director SIIBS, University of Sheffield and Emma Nagouse, PhD Candidate in Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Interview with Saima Afzal: Founder of SAS RIGHTS

by Johanna Stiebert on

Today in our occasional series on lesser-known organizations working to combat gender-based violence and rape culture we speak to Saima Afzal (MBE). Saima leads on training and research through her initiative called ‘Saima Afzal Solutions’ and has founded a Community Interest Company (CIC) related to this called SAS RIGHTS.

Before we turn to Saima’s many achievements in the arena of activism, let us congratulate her on her recent political victory in the Blackburn with Darwen (Lancashire) council district in the May local UK elections! Although Blackburn has one of the largest Asian populations of any council district, it has taken Saima multiple tries on the ballot and numerous battles both within and outside of the Blackburn Asian community to win. But Saima does not shy away from a fight

Background

Saima was born in Pakistan and moved to the UK with her parents when she was 4 years old. She is the eldest of 11 children, 9 girls and 2 boys. Saima was victim to a forced ‘marriage’ (banned under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014). She refuses to recognize the union, because she never said ‘yes’. She declares she has never had a husband, only an abuser and that she will only ever marry for love, as is her right under all of Sharia, UK law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Saima has come up against many challenges, prejudices and barriers and this has fuelled her commitment to campaign for the rights of those who are oppressed and stigmatized by persistent social injustices in today’s UK.

Saima has worked extensively in community development for the past 15 years – particularly in relation to religion, gender and South Asian cultures of the UK. She has led projects to confront and challenge both domestic abuse and forced marriage, and has conducted research in the areas of drug and substance misuse, child sexual exploitation in South Asian communities, sexuality in Islam, childcare support and provision for South Asian women, and (mis)use of stop and search powers by police officers against members of minority communities – to name but a few.

Saima served for over 10 years as an Independent member of the Lancashire Police Authority. Her key contribution in this role focused on effective engagement with minority communities and the issues that affect them, such as: hate crime, use of stop and search powers, forced marriage, ‘honour’-based violence (more about the inverted commas in a moment!), and female genital mutilation, among others. In the course of this Saima developed a concept she calls ‘Parallel Engagement’ (to resist what she considers a dominant model of ‘Hierarchical Engagement’) and taught this to police officers. Saima also served as an Executive Board Member for the Association of Police Authorities in the capacity of national lead for Equality, Diversity & Human Rights (2007–12).

Between 2012–14 Saima served as an Assistant Commissioner for Policing in Lancashire, leading on the key portfolio area of supporting victims of crime. In 2015 Saima was appointed by the West Yorkshire Police Commission to lead on the Victims & BAME (= British English Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) Project. Additionally, Saima is recognized as a national safeguarding/public protection expert adviser on the National Crime Agency database, with specialization in dealing with cases involving forced marriages, ‘honour’-based abuse, trafficking, child sexual exploitation and other safeguarding crimes affecting BAME communities. She has served as an expert witness in court and spoken on such topics in numerous public media outlets.

Saima is an active human rights campaigner, seeking protection, as well as platforms of opportunity for members of marginalized communities. Saima was recognized for her prolific and dedicated work when she received the MBE for her Services to Policing and Community Relations in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list (June 2010).

‘Honour’-Based Abuse (HBA) and Community Coercion Control (CCC)

Honour-Based Abuse (HBA) or Honour Based Violence (HBV) is defined as a crime or an incident, which has, or which may have been committed to protect or defend the honour of a family or community.

Honour is an abstract concept and refers to an individual’s or group’s perceived quality of worthiness and respectability affecting both social standing and self-evaluation of an individual or institution such as a family, school, regiment or even nation. Certain groups – in both antiquity and modernity – are sometimes designated as honour cultures (or, sometimes, honour-shame cultures), because group or kin identity is particularly strongly developed and manifests in distinctive ways.

Saima is uncomfortable with the associations of the designations ‘honour’ or ‘honour killing’, which sometimes have a restrictive conception in view. Some media examples, for instance, tend to imply that HBA is pretty much entirely an ‘Asian problem’. Saima believes the situation is more nuanced and that all kinds of communities – including but not only Asian ones – exert damaging coercion and control. The model she has developed is called a model of Community Coercion Control (CCC) [see below, too]. In this model ‘community’ can refer to different and diverse set-ups in a case-by-case way. It emphasizes that coercive control (including as exerted by religious communities) encompasses a wide range of acts and behaviours designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent, such as by isolating them from sources of support, or exploiting their resources and capacities, or by regulating their everyday behaviours, and thereby depriving them of the capacity for independence, or resistance, or escape. In its most severe forms coercive behaviour involves acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation used to harm, punish or frighten. Occasionally, CCC transpires in murder. Identifying and understanding the various patterns and mechanisms of CCC is the first step, according to Saima, for facilitating help and support for vulnerable persons. Intervention and facilitating help and support are other important dimensions of Saima’s work.

As ever, please help us to promote SAS and SAS RIGHTS. Saima has self-funded very many of her initiatives. She endeavours to attract funding to develop SAS and SAS RIGHTS and to pay for the expenses of volunteers who offer their energy and support. Towards obtaining such funding, Saima offers training, workshops, bespoke research and report writing, participation in relevant research grants, as well as consultancy, in a range of areas relevant to the Shiloh Project. You can find out more, or contact Saima, on:

[email protected]

www.sasolutions.info

Twitter: @saimaafzalmbe

Interview with Saima Afzal.

Tell us about your NGO and your own role!

I founded and now lead ‘Saima Afzal Solutions’ (SAS, active since 2011) and Community Interest Company (CIC) ‘SAS RIGHTS’ (since 2016). A CIC offers me more flexibility for the many different things I want to do to improve life for vulnerable and marginalized people in UK communities. Very often these vulnerable and marginalized people I support are women, often women from UK South Asian communities. This is because as a British woman of Pakistani heritage myself and as someone who lived and escaped from a forced ‘marriage’ and who continues to live in and now represents in local government a Lancashire community with a large South Asian contingent, such work just keeps finding me. Also, this work is not ‘just a job’ but my vocation and my life. When I see inequality in any form – be it Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia… – I want to find ways to confront, resist and detoxify it.

My work for SAS is aimed at offering training (e.g to address religio-cultural and belief-based conflicts and public protection situations), subject matter expert advice, peer review, academic research and leading seminars, or lectures. Through the CIC I can diversify the work I undertake with SAS to include also such activities as peer mentoring, community engagement aimed at confidence and resilience building, collaboration with likeminded organizations and the development of materials to inform and raise awareness about matters central to SAS.

The Shiloh Project explores the intersections between, on the one hand, rape culture, and, on the other, religion. On some of our subsidiary projects we work together with third-sector organizations (including NGO’s and FBO’s). We also want to raise awareness and address and resist rape culture manifestations and gender-based violence directly. We’re interested to hear your answers to the following:

How do you see religion having impact on the setting where you are working – and how do you perceive that impact? Tell us about some of your encounters.

Religion and its manifold ways of exerting impact are everywhere in the settings I tend to work in!

Many of the vulnerable and marginalized persons I deal with are from Muslim, Hindu, or Sikh communities, as well as from Catholics of the Roma and Traveler communities. Religion infuses virtually all the manifold situations I encounter in the course of my work – including those involving violence, abuse and microaggressions. Sometimes it is hard to identify or explain precisely how – but religion is wrapped up with it. I don’t reject ‘religion’. My own parents are devout and I consider myself spiritual. I have seen religion create or contribute to problems and I’ve seen it be part of the solution.

I have a personal passion that drives my work in its various capacities, not least due to my own experience of forced ‘marriage’, rape and being denied equality of human rights.

From what I have seen, religious mantras, or distorted and ill-interpreted variants of them, are widely utilized as a vehicle to control people – women in particular Still today, despite the changes in the law of 1991, when rape within marriage was criminalized on the statute books, many women from religious backgrounds, including some Christian and Muslim ones, believe it is their husbands’ right to demand sex as part of their conjugal ‘rights’ enshrined in the contract of marriage. The notion of consent in each sexual encounter is often not considered, due to an assumption that consent is conferred once and for all in the marriage ceremony.

Religious mantras also often serve the agendas of those who disseminate them. Some that have damaging outworkings for women are used by men to retain and legitimate male control and female inequality. When these are in the name of Islam they do Islam an injustice and also provide fodder for far-right groups to fuel Islamophobic and therewith yet more toxic agendas. Too often I am trapped between toxic representatives of both the Muslim and of the right-wing extremist communities. I am blamed for being ‘deficiently Muslim’ and exposing Muslim communities to charges of misogyny and inequality (which do sometimes hold legitimacy) and on the other, I am charged with feeding Islamophobic discourse (which is never my purpose). Shining a critical light on how Islam is interpreted and subverted does not mean a rejection of Islam. It means using Islam for justice and good not for oppression and injustice.

I often work within predominantly British Asian Muslim communities with strong orthodox values relating to the roles of men and women. These roles are, in my experience, too often restrictively binary, as well as prescriptive, with particularly damaging consequences for women’s freedoms but also for the freedoms of men who do not conform to orthodox norms. Non-adherence to the allocated roles often attracts reprisals, and harsh punishments are enacted on both men and women for any perceived deviation from religious and other cultural norms.

The work I do often involves a clash between religious values and human rights. Matters of equality or of safeguarding legislative standards that are expected to be adhered to in the UK sometimes come into tension with certain values held by religio-cultural communities. This can be sensitive and tricky territory.

Crimes relating to forced marriage (FM), rape, female genital mutilation (FGM) or ‘honour’ based abuse (HBA) are actually not rare in the UK and I have often been involved in them as an adviser in policing and safeguarding contexts. Increasingly, too, issues such as South Asian gang activity and grooming and child sexual exploitation are emerging in the wider public domain. Religion, being so intricately entwined in British Asian communities and cultures, is always a presence. Sometimes it is drawn on to provide perpetrators with justification for their actions. Sometimes it removes and sometimes it instills inhibitors for the facilitation of crimes against vulnerable persons. It’s complicated. Religion fills many roles in these various situations.

I seek to educate women, men and young people across communities, to highlight the particular issues that affect or maybe disadvantage them and to ensure that appropriate support is made available.

Often I am viewed as a trouble-maker, or as unnecessarily antagonistic by faith leaders and influencers. But in my defense, I am not opposed to ‘religion’ or ‘faith’. I only challenge individuals when their words or actions threaten or violate others’ safety or rights to equality and human dignity.

The sensitive and often controversial nature of my work, whereby I, for example, seek to support women in sexually abusive and exploitative marriages in challenging claims to conjugal ‘rights’ that violate their bodies and humanity, often gets me into conflicts with members of their family or more extended community. My work in the area of prevention, education and empowerment has been viewed as ‘corruptive’, even heretical, or as ‘inciting divorce’ and family disharmony, including by some faith or community leaders. This comes with the territory.

I often have to conduct my work discreetly or when a crisis situation has arisen. Statutory institutions are often afraid to tread heavily on what are considered ‘religious sensitivities’ and there is resistance to and fear of offending faith and community leaders. As a woman of colour, raised in a British Asian, Muslim majority community, I am both inside and on the edge of the communities I represent and that can be an advantage, or disadvantage – and religiously loaded, too.

The private or hidden nature of some of the crimes I work with sometimes results in a denial of their existence and as such funds and resources can be hard to come by. These would, however, allow me to undertake invaluable, even life-saving, research, as well as to provide consistent and sustained engagement with women, men and children to explain the rights that religion can offer regarding gender-based violence and abuse.

The current HBA definition [see above!], in my view, is restrictive and also creates unconscious bias that the issues mentioned, such as FM or rape in marriage, are exclusively a South Asian and/or minority community phenomenon. I have developed an alternative model entitled ‘Community Coercion and Control’. This model seeks to be more nuanced and to facilitate more practitioner flexibility. It can be applied to any set of values and beliefs, across faith, nationality and ethnicity spectrums and as such helps remove the association bias that may have become unwittingly embedded within the current statutory definitions.

I use my CCC model in the reports that I am required to produce when assisting police forces in prosecuting cases that involve religious and/or cultural dynamics.

How do you understand ‘rape culture’ and do you think it can be resisted or detoxified? How does the term apply to the setting where you are working?

Rape culture operates wherever sex is used as a means to oppress and coerce. It is also about contexts where rape is not called by its name, or where sexual violence and exploitation are otherwise trivialized or not resisted. Rape culture is not only about rape itself (though I know that rape is not rare and happens also in my own community) but also about the many things that create an environment where sexually oppressive attitudes thrive and go unchallenged.

Religious communities, too, need to be detoxified. In these communities, sexual rights and varieties of expression, what is legal and what is not, need to be explained and discussed. But this can only occur when all individuals are empowered and given a voice and after community-based punishments and reprisals (which may be coercive and hard to pinpoint) are removed.

Misogyny, for instance, needs to be tackled at the lower levels of microaggression and not just in situations of crisis when the damage has been done. Crisis doesn’t just happen. It is often preceded by many far less visible or invasive factors, including the systemic factors that breed in settings where inequality and alienation are rife. Effective and open communication, hearing from and listening to all members of the community, nurturing empathy and long-term education are important for tackling misogyny – which feeds rape culture.

How does your project encounter or address gender-based violence and inequality?

In a number of ways, some of which I have already touched on. Often this begins with opening networks of communication, or doing research in affected communities. This might be with children in social care, for example, or in families or communities where crime cases have taken place and which the National Crime Agency sometimes refers to me.

My work through SAS and SAS RIGHTS seeks to address gender-based violence, abuse and inequality, including the complex things that give rise to them, by taking part in research, through engagement, education and awareness-raising projects. Detoxifying religion is part of this, too, as are empowerment of individuals and the creation of opportunities.

In relation to individual cases, my work seeks to, in partnership with the relevant statutory organization, facilitate civil protection or, in crisis and criminal cases, the prosecution of offenders.

How could those interested find out more about your CIC? How can people contribute and where will their money go?

I welcome hearing from individuals and representatives of likeminded organizations. SAS and its community-based arm SAS RIGHTS are there both for training or taking initiative in activism and for collaboration with those who share our ideals.

My email is [email protected] and my Twitter handle, @saimaafzalmbe. You can also consult or refer others to the SAS website: www.sasolutions.info

SAS and SAS RIGHTS is how I channel my experience and expertise. As with other CIC’s all profits go towards social betterment and benefiting vulnerable persons and communities. This includes a range of things, such as the production of films and other resources that raise awareness, running workshops for vulnerable persons to develop empowerment or recognize and realize opportunities, or peer mentoring.

What kinds of posts would you like to see on The Shiloh Project blog and what kinds of resources that come into our orbit would be of value to you?

I’d like to see more about research days or conferences, so persons with different expertise who care about the intersections of religion and rape culture can form networks or collaborate and share strategies and opportunities for research and project funding opportunities.

I’d also like to see the findings of such events publicized on the Shiloh Project blog.

A regular newsletter would be great, as well as posting about international opportunities for collaboration and exchanges.

 Thank you, Saima!

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Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse

by David Tombs on

Katie Edwards and David Tombs’ recent article in The Conversation (23 March 2018) draws on the earlier article David Tombs, ‘Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse’, Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 53 (Autumn 1999), pp. 89-109, available at Otago University Research Archive.

The article shows how reports of torture in Latin America reveal the role of state terror and prevalence of sexual abuse, and how these might help towards a closer reading of crucifixion.

Earlier this month Professor Linda Woodhead (University of Lancaster) wrote a comment piece for The Telegraph building on the work in The Conversation article. Read Woodhead’s piece here.

On March 31st 2018, CNN included David Tombs’ research in an article on Easter as a ‘#MeToo moment’. Read the CNN piece here.

On 5th April, the original article by Edwards and Tombs was translated into Indonesian.

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Professor Gerald West at The University of Auckland: ‘Building Biblical Interpretive Resilience and Resistance in the Context of Gender Violence’

by Katie Edwards on

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The Guardian Comment is Free: Jesus, Silence and the Rotherham Abuse Scandal

by Johanna Stiebert on

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Shiloh co-lead Katie Edwards has a powerful opinion piece in The Guardian of 21 March 2018. A longer version features in her Lent Talk for BBC Radio 4 (8.45pm) on the same day. A shorter version was repeated in Radio’s 4 Pick of the Day on Sunday 25th March 2018.

This piece gets to the heart of some of the topics central to the Shiloh Project: namely, how biblical texts can be used, usually very selectively – in this case highlighting the silent Jesus of Matthew to the exclusion of the vocal Jesus of John – in modern contexts – in this example Rotherham, which was at this time one of many locations throughout the UK where girls and women were being groomed for sexual abuse and exploitation and silenced when they tried again and again to report their abusers – with toxic effect.

The role of religion and the Bible is complex and ambiguous, as this personal account makes painfully clear.

See the advance review from The Times for details:

 

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DEADLINE EXTENSION- call for papers

by Emma Nagouse on

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Many of our members (including our conference organising team) have been on strike over the last month as part of the UCU (University and College Union) industrial action over USS pensions. Over 60 universities in the UK are involved. Members of UCU continue to be on action short of a strike.

We are extending the call for papers deadline for our Religion and Rape Culture conference to 5pm March 29th.

See updated call for papers:

We are thrilled to announce our keynote speakers will be Professor Cheryl Exum and
Professor Rhiannon Graybill.

The Shiloh Project is a joint initiative set up by staff from the Universities of Sheffield, Leeds and Auckland (NZ) researching religion and rape culture. We are proud to announce a one day interdisciplinary conference exploring and showcasing research into the phenomenon of rape culture, both throughout history and within contemporary societies across the globe. In particular, we aim to investigate the complex and at times contentious relationships that exist between rape culture and religion, considering the various ways religion can both participate in and contest rape culture discourses and practices.

We are also interested in the multiple social identities that invariably intersect with rape culture, including gender, disabilities, sexuality, race and class. The Shiloh Project specialises in the field of Biblical Studies, but we also strongly encourage proposals relating to rape culture alongside other religious traditions, and issues relating to rape culture more broadly.

This conference is open to researchers at any level of study, and from any discipline. We invite submissions of abstracts no more than 300 words long and a short bio no later than 5pm March 29th. Please indicate whether your submission is for a poster or a presentation. We particularly welcome abstracts on the following topics:

Gender violence and the Bible
Gender, class and rape culture
Visual representations of biblical gender violence
Representations of rape culture in the media and popular culture
Teaching traumatic texts
Methods of reading for resistance and/or liberation
Sexual violence in schools and Higher Education
Religion, rape culture and the gothic/horror genre
Spiritualities and transphobia
Familial relations and the Bible

For more information, or to submit an abstract, email [email protected]

@ProjShiloh

This event is supported by AHRC and WRoCAH.

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Booking and CFP for Religion and Rape Culture Conference, 6th July 2018

by Katie Edwards on

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Booking is now open for our Religion and Rape Culture Conference. Places are limited so book your ticket fast!

Please note that we have small travel bursaries to contribute to travel costs for UK students who wish to attend the conference. These bursaries will be awarded on a needs basis, and speakers/those with poster submissions will also be prioritised.

The deadline for submission of proposals for our Religion and Rape Culture Conference is fast approaching! Get your proposals in by 19th March 2018. See the CFP below for more details.

Email [email protected] for more information.

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