Kenneth Clarke. Image from conservativeparty's Flickr photostream (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Justice Secretary Kenneth Clark has probably had better weeks than the one just gone. On Wednesday, he was pushed by David Cameron to apologise for the indelicate remarks he made on BBC Radio 5 Live regarding rape. Discussing the coalition’s plans to reduce sentences for those who plead guilty to rape from 33% to 50%, the justice secretary said,
That includes date rape, 17-year-olds having intercourse with 15-year-olds. A serious rape, with violence and an unwilling woman, the tariff is much longer than that.
Obviously taken aback by the mention of “serious rape” (as opposed to frivolous? Trivial?), presenter Victoria Derbyshire said, “rape is rape.” Clarke’s response? “No, it is not.”
Clarke’s words were indeed poorly chosen. Rape is serious, regardless of whether or not violence was involved. The point he was trying (but failed) to get at was that the Criminal Justice system treats certain rape cases with more severity than others, with punishments varying based on aggravating factors, as David Allan Green explains here.
But he did himself no favours by later appearing on Sky News citing a ”classic rape, where someone jumps out from behind a bush”. It is disconcerting that a justice minister and once-practising lawyer who has seen not a small amount of rape cases in his time, would suggest there is such a thing as a “classic” rape, never mind the fact that most rapes are not committed by a stranger in woodland but by someone the victim knows.
The fallout was immense. Ed Miliband made swift (and, perhaps, opportunistic) call during Prime Minister’s Questions for Clarke to resign. Pressure from No.10 forced Clarke to clarify and apologise for his comments. Appearing on BBC’s Question Time, he said,
All rape is serious. It’s one of the gravest crimes. My choice of words was wrong. It’s because I got bogged down in a silly exchange.
He also pledged to “choose his words more carefully in future.”
A sizeable portion of the vehement response to Clarke’s blundering comments rested on the argument that they are proof of a wider cultural mindset that routinely undermines the crime’s severity. Laurie Penny writes,
Clarke’s comments play into the weary stereotype that rape is not rape if the victim knew the rapist, or if the victim had a drink, or if the victim has consented to sex on a previous occasion, or if he or she was wearing a short skirt – that rape is only really rape when a moustache-twirling, knife-wielding ruffian assaults an unsuspecting virgin in a burqa in a backstreet.
(…)
Ken Clarke’s repulsive, reactionary comments are part of a culture that still misunderstands consent, punishes female sexual agency, and wilfully ignores the scale and prevalence of rape.
Taking into account Amnesty International’s 2005 research highlighting the UK’s ingrained blame culture, compounded by our shockingly low 6% conviction rate for rape, Penny’s argument makes sense. Yet calls for Clarke’s resignation are futile: with him as Justice Secretary or not, the ill-informed attitudes to rape that we have in the UK will continue to linger.
The added kicker of the whole event is that it could have been a useful opportunity to push forward a debate on rape and the failings of the criminal justice system, as Baroness Stern’s review last year highlighted. Perhaps now that he has apologised for his serious error, we can move on to a serious discussion.
Bob Dylan this week announced that Chinese authorities did not censor the setlists for his recent concerts in the country, negating previous (and widely syndicated) reports that claimed the songs to be performed the musician’s first-ever China gigs fell foul of the censors at the Ministry of Culture. Responding to the questionable sourcing of said reports, Shanghai Scrap’s commander-in-chief Adam Minter reminds us of the danger of reporting accepted facts and the subsequent disservice it does to credible China coverage, citing the increasingly disputable authenticity of several recent New York Times stories:
[And] that shoddy reporting, I’m pretty sure, was built upon a preconceived belief that, when in doubt in China, assume the totalitarian explanation. Now, I’m not doubting that there’s enough totalitarianism to go around, but when you start assuming it, rather than reporting it, you have a tendency to create a comic book image of China that has more in common with the Cultural Revolution than it does with contemporary reality. When the comic book treatment is warranted, then write it up (but be careful you’re not having your leg pulled, or somebody will call you on it); but when it’s not, when there’s something more subtle going on, or nothing’s going on at all, it does a real disservice to readers to just assume the worst and damage reputations – in this case, Dylan’s - in the process.
(Speaking of the NYT, the Hidden Harmonies China Blog has also refuted its recent ‘Jasmine becomes contraband in China’ story. Worth a read.)
Poster of Ai Weiwei. Image from Akbar2's Flickr photostream (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying this week defended the arrest of dissident artist Ai Weiwei, whose whereabouts remain unknown after he was detained at Beijing Capital airport in April. Fu said,
There are rules and laws in China that need to be applied just like here. And individuals, maybe they are your friends, maybe they agree with you more than others, but that should not make (them) … above the law.
She concluded,
It is very condescending for the Europeans to come in to tell China that some people are beyond the law.
The Telegraph’s Peter Foster disagrees. He writes that growing foreign concerns are instead “about the real fear of where China is heading”:
China is going to shake the world over the next 50 years – for good or ill – and the shape of the Chinese state is therefore of concern to us all. China can bluster all it likes, it can posture and ignore the criticisms, but modern China does not exist in isolation.
It has emerged as a rising power precisely because it has engaged with the world, signing up to a host of international agreements on trade and politics that imply certain norms of behaviour. The benefits of rejoining the world community can’t come, as Chinese foreign policy mandarins say, with “no strings attached”.
Ai, who built the 2008 Olympics Bird’s Nest stadium and whose sculptures of the twelve Chinese zodiac heads are currently on display at Somerset House in London, has long been an outspoken critic of the ruling Communist Party. In 2008, he led an investigation to collect the names of students killed in the Sichuan earthquake as a result of the government’s poor construction of schools.
His art is inseparable from such activism: at a show in Munich, his Remembering installation was filled entirely with 9,000 children’s backpacks which spelled out the words of a grieving Sichuan mother: “She lived happily for seven years in this world.”
Ai has faced growing pressure from the authorities in recent months. He was placed under house arrest last November for pledging to host a party to commemorate the demolition of his Shanghai studio, and in December was prevented from leaving the country amid fears he would attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo.
Ai’s arrest on 3rd April occurred in the midst of an increased crackdown on potential dissent in China. This followed online calls (which, it must be remembered, originated outside China) for a “jasmine revolution”, inspired by the Arab Spring during which regimes in Tunisia and Egypt were toppled. For a time, Xinhua reported that Ai was being investigated for “economic crimes”.
Tens of people, many of whom are human rights lawyers, remain detained or missing as part of this deepening repression. The crackdown is indicative of of the Communist Party’s fear – and acute awareness – that aggrieved members of Chinese society are becoming more widespread, from unemployed university graduates to migrant workers, from truckers in Shanghai through to those disillusioned by food safety scandals. By targeting the country’s most outspoken activists, the CCP is attempting to contain such grievances.
China has argued before that the West’s rallying cries for the release of dissidents undermines the rule of law in the People’s Republic. It called the awarding of the Nobel Peace prize to Liu Xiaobo, who co-authored pro-democracy document Charter 08, a “political farce” that insulted China’s judicial system. Yet if Ai’s detention, with its unknown whys and wheres, symbolises anything, it is the very lawlessness of the state.
It could be said that Ai’s message of freedom perhaps carries more weight and garners more followers in the West than in China: the rhetoric of human rights is centred within a small intellectual circle, lower on the priority list for a larger portion of a nation whose personal wealth has increased while memories of abject poverty remain fresh.
That does not mean his arrest has no ramifications on Chinese society: on the contrary, it illustrates a worrying development, in which the rule of law is growing ever more shady, compounded by a leadership that is dealing with its paranoia of social discord with an increasingly repressive hand. As a result, the prospect of political change that is due to follow economic reforms seems further away on the horizon.
