Chrissie Hynde's Comments Speak of a Society Still Embedded in RapeCulture - But Also Raise an Important Point

Many people - myself included - have been outraged recently by Chrissie Hynde's statements that rape is sometimes the victim's fault. The lead singer of The Pretenders remarked to the Sunday Times that the sexual assault that she experienced many years ago was "all my own doing", sparking backlash on social media from activists and victims alike.

However, it is a good idea, in this particular case, to take Hynde's comments with a pinch of salt, and to consider the mindset that they came from. Hynde's views on rape may well be what she considers to be a logical interpretation of her own experiences, which she has then applied to all similar situations, in order to be able to make sense of them. Clearly she has spent several years blaming herself for what happened to her, and coming to the conclusion that, if the assault was not the fault of the perpetrators, then something about her own actions or conduct must have triggered it: namely, the fact that she had been taking drugs. As a result, she may then have gone on to speculate that other victims of assault had invited these crimes upon themselves by making themselves 'vulnerable' through drinking alcohol, or wearing provocative clothing. After all, if the men who assaulted her were not to blame for their actions, why should it be any different for other attackers? And, so, the views which Hynde expressed in her interview may have become the only possible explanation.

But this, in turn, begs the question: what about the other people who feel this way? People who have never experienced these things, but still firmly believe that victims provoke attack by drinking heavily, wearing revealing clothing, or simply by not actively dissenting (screaming, fighting back, etc.)? In my opinion, this is simply a version of the same thought processes expressed by Hynde; many people refuse to believe that their are people in the world who are evil enough to commit crimes without a true motive. They don't want to know that there are people who will kill others without a thought, kidnap children from under their parents' noses, or rape somebody simply because they can, or because they want to feel as though they have power. Such mindsets are inherently inhuman, such people cannot possibly exist. And so excuses are invented - 'she was so drunk she didn't know what she was doing; she asked for it', 'he chose to go back with them, he must have known what was going to happen', 'they didn't fight back, so they must have wanted it, really'. These excuses make the perpeatrators seem less unfathomable in the eyes of the public: people can accept criminals as long as they are somehow able to justify their behavior - 'he just lost control, he didn't really know what he was doing'. If people can learn to recognise this harmful mindset, incidences of victim blaming can be dramatically reduced, giving victims more confidence to seek justice against their attackers, and resulting in more successful prosections of perpetrators.

Rape and sexual assault are never the fault of the victim. UK legislation clearly defines these offences as one person engaging in sexual activity with another, without the other person's consent. There is no mention of any exception based on what the victim was wearing, or how they were behaving at the time of the attack. In fact, there are no exceptions at all. They are simply crimes, and they are crimes for which the perpetrators must be punished.

P.S. All this being said, I don't advocate heavy drinking, or taking recreational drugs. Abuse of these substances has been shown to cause a number of deaths due to slips, falls, drowning and road traffic accidents, and a large percentage of sexual assaults take place when the perpetrators themselves have been drinking. Plus, I'm a musician, and I hate to think of the damage that stuff could do to my vocal cords! 

Also, I still like The Pretenders' music, even though I don't agree with Chrissie Hynde's comments.

Chrissie Hynde. Photograph: Brian Rasic/REX/Brian Rasic/REX

All Illnesses Are Not Created Equal

This week being OCD Awareness Week, I've been paying more attention than usual (if that's even possible) to how people view and talk about OCD and other mental health disorders. But what I discovered was a wider problem - a mentality that governs so many people that very few actually see it as an issue. And not everyone will think it is, but it's definitely important enough to raise.

The issue is this: the term "serious illness" has become synonymous in our society with "cancer". So great is the number of campaigns for awareness of cancer, funding for cancer research, new evidence showing that such and such a food, drink or pastime causes cancer and so on, that cancer has somehow become the only "real" illness in the eyes of the majority of people, all of whom would fervently deny holding such as view, simply because they don't realise that it's true.

That's not to say that cancer isn't a horrible illness; it tears families apart, causes months and even years of suffering to those affected, and the only available treatments kill just as many people as they save. I lost my grandad when I was eight to a brain haemhorrage caused by chemotherapy treatment for leukaemia, so I know just how much it sucks, and I think that it's a cause which absolutely deserves the funding and awareness that it gets. The problem is that other illnesses don't get the same. There are hundreds of illnesses out there that affect just as many people as cancer does, kill more people, last longer than cancer and have far fewer treatment options, but get a fraction of the attention because cancer gets it all. People diagnosed with debilitating illnesses like lupus, multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue syndrome are told to be relieved because "at least it's not cancer". There are several types of cancer that make a person a lot less ill than a person with one of these illnesses, but apparently the fact that it's cancer makes it inherently more devastating. If a person dies young, everyone will assume that they had cancer until told otherwise. Compare box office ratings from The Fault in our Stars to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and you know which film will come out on top.

What I suppose I'm trying to say is that, although I do want a cure for cancer to be found as soon as possible, I don't want the rest of the world to have to be put on hold until that happens.

So Many Arguments, So Little Time...

This week has been... shall we say, interesting. I know this because the best day of the week turned out to be Monday.

Everything was fine until the second to last lesson on Tuesday, when our physics teacher decided to spring on us that she'd been "very disappointed" with the quality of the homework that we'd handed in to her the previous week, and, save for around four people, everyone in the class would have a detention on Friday afternoon.

Let me now take the opportunity to explain what this homework task actually was. The explanation of the assignment was vague at best - nothing more than the words "How do birds aim at fish in water? Include a diagram." Our teacher made no comment on how much she wanted us to write, the kind of information she expected us to include, or even whether we were supposed to hand draw the diagram or find one on the internet. If we didn't have our timetables to tell us when our next physics lesson was, we wouldn't have even known when we were meant to hand it in. So we basically assumed that, since she hadn't actually taught us anything in the lesson that we could use to answer this question in the way it seemed to want answering, we should go home and research the topic before writing a couple of paragraphs on it and adding a diagram. Wrong, apparently. To start with, the only (and I mean only) information that could be found on this topic was a poorly punctuated paragraph on Yahoo Answers, which said something about birds having a chemical in their brains which allowed them to calculate the refractive index of the water and determine exactly where in the water their prey actually is (because it looks like it's in a slightly different position due to the refraction of the light as it enters and leaves the water). An hour of searching using a variety of different queries returned no further information, so I wrote the information down in my own words to the best of my ability and added what looked like a reasonable diagram. I was, I admit, a little concerned at how little I had done, but when I got to school on the day of the next lesson to find that the majority of the class had experienced exactly the same difficulties and produced similar amounts of work, I thought no more of it.

So, needless to say, I was surprised (to say the least) when I was handed a 45 minute detention for what my teacher loosely defined as "insufficient homework" claiming that she wasn't convinced that I hadn't just copied it from the internet. Which, by the way, I hadn't. The way in which the teacher handled this situation made me very angry for a number of reasons:

1. She literally accused me outright of plagiarism. For goodness' sake, I can't even copy learning objectives off the board without changing them, so there was no way I was ever going to steal another person's work off the internet and claim it as my own. Granted, my work was fairly similar in places to the original source, but there are only so many ways you can rewrite the phrase "the distance between the bird's beak and the surface of the water" before it just becomes wrong.

2. She then went on to accuse me of lying. When I went up to her at the end of the lesson and explained (politely, I thought) that there was extremely limited information in any source (the task wasn't even on the GCSE specification - meaning that it actually wasn't required knowledge), she replied "I beg to differ!" And well you may, but I would expect at least a slightly more mature response from a teacher.

3. Any reasonable teacher would assume that if an entire class had a problem with a homework task that there was actually a problem with the task, or the way it was explained (or, in this case, a bit of both). What happened here? For what was literally the first piece of research homework we had been set by this teacher, she gave nearly the entire class detention. There wasn't even any logic to it either - it almost seemed like she had decided randomly who would be detained for ten minutes and who would stay for forty five. Big difference there.

And thus, I went home absolutely fuming to my parents, who promptly phoned the school and were told by the head of science that she would sort it out. So when, the next day, our physics teacher didn't even so much as mention the homework issue for the entire lesson, we were fuming. The entire class refused to answer her questions, and she didn't even bat an eyelid. Confused, I went to talk to the head of science, who said that we would all need to come and talk to her at the end of the day. Hoping we were finally getting somewhere, I left the situation alone.

But when the end of the day finally came around, the answer we got was not what we were expecting. We were told that the point of the homework was not to go away and look up the question on the internet, but to use our existing knowledge to come up with an answer. Firstly, I need to mention that this was the first time we had been told anything even remotely similar to this. Well, to be "fair" we weren't actually told anything. All we got was a question written on a whiteboard, with the added instruction to include a diagram. Secondly, why then did the teacher tell me that I was wrong when I first told her that there was no information on the internet? If I wasn't supposed to be using the internet at all. why tell me that I would find what I needed on there? We were then told that our teacher was very worried that she had negatively affected the relationship she had with us. Well, much as I'm sorry that she's been brought distress by this situation, I have very little sympathy for her. She did not behave as any reasonable teacher would in these circumstances, and when confronted by a myriad of angry phone calls and emails from parents, she told us that we had misunderstood what she had told us to do. Which is a pretty mean feat when you're not told anything. Finally, we were told that the science department would "let us off" and that we could all go home. By this time, I'll add, the people who had been lucky enough to get ten minute detentions in the first place had already been there longer than they would have been if they'd done nothing.

And so much as I want to let this go and move on now, I can't. And I'll tell you why:

1. The teachers completely misunderstood why it was we were complaining. They had assumed that we were simply annoyed at having to stay behind after school, when in actual fact it was because close to an entire class of hard-working students had been punished in a completely unreasonable manner which was not in line with any school policy. Effectively, the rules didn't exist until somebody decided we had broken them.

2. They still put the blame on us, changing their own version of events several times in the process. Because apparently I'm supposed to be able to understand that a couple of sentences written on a whiteboard actually means that the answers are all on the invisible internet, but I'm not allowed to look at them, because I should already know the answer. Ha.

3. Then there's the matter of how all this affects me mentally. As I've already mentioned, this was the first piece of homework that we'd been set by a teacher we'd never had before, who expected us to know what all of her expectations were despite never having communicated them to us. When we did what was, in her opinion, wrong, we were immediately given unreasonable sanctions, and when we tried to give our opinions on why these were unreasonable, we were not listened to, but blackmailed and gaslighted until we thought we had. So now, how am I supposed to have any confidence in my work? How can I ever be sure that what I'm doing is what has actually been asked for, when nobody seems to know what's been asked for until much later? How am I supposed to believe that I will be supported and listened to if I have a problem with the work, when my opinions were effectively used against me and a number of my friends? Obviously I don't expect my teacher to have taken any of this into account - we are all only human, after all - but I can't just put things behind me like some people can, and I know I'm not the only one to feel this way.

So, while I feel terrible for being angry (although I probably shouldn't), and I hope my future experiences of physics will be more positive, I and many others, including my parents, friends and even other teachers, still think it was ridiculous that this incident was allowed to go as far as it did.

And on a side note, I would be interested to see how the situation would have played out if Ofsted hadn't sent out parent satisfaction surveys at the same time that all of this was happening. :P

Yet Another Example of Terrible Media

I don't think there's a single person in the country who hasn't heard about the tragic death of the actor Robin Williams - and the exposure of this story is highlighting some key issues in the way the media handles the reporting of suicide.

While there have been some reporters - the BBC, for example - who have reported the story responsibly, there have been others (which I will not name in order to avoid directing traffic to them) whose coverage has been frankly shocking. Several headlines this morning gave bold and graphic details about the methods that Williams used to take his life, as well as speculating on the reasons that drove him to do it, in both instances completely ignoring guidelines set out by charities such as The Samaritans and Mind (both of whom have addressed these issues and promised to contact the companies responsible for these sensationalist reports). This kind of journalism is incredibly inappropriate, and there are two main reasons why:

Firstly, it's very disrespectful to the Williams family for the media to be intruding so much into their private lives, particularly at what is undoubtedly a very difficult time for them. Not only have they lost someone that they love, but they have to now face countless newspapers and online journals telling the world exactly what he did, and why they think he did it. How can you even begin to guess the thoughts of someone you never even knew?

And secondly, giving intricate details about a suicide - particularly that of a celebrity - is very dangerous. These tabloids and websites may think that they were pleasing their readers by providing exclusive details about the story, what they have effectively done is told every single person who reads the report how they can successfully end their lives, and these journalists have absolutely no idea who will use this information. The Samaritans have already identified that the risk of copycat suicides is very high, so printing it on the front page of a newspaper in big, bold lettering is like handing someone a loaded gun. Even people who don't read that particular paper are going to see it, and once one company has published the details, others go on to do the same. And these newspapers have gone into ridiculous amounts of detail about Williams' death, from the exact materials he used right down to the position he was in when he was found. If journalists think that's a responsible way to handle an already sensitive story, then I'd hate to see an article that they find unacceptable!

You can find The Samaritans' website by clicking here, and Mind's by clicking here.

It's Been A While...

It's been a while since I last posted anything on here! I suppose this is really just a post to say that I will be posting some more things soon, probably within the next week or so. So I'll post something proper then!

Mental Health Awareness Week 2014 | Anxiety

As you probably already know, this week is Mental Health Awareness Week (although I'll admit that I didn't have any idea that this even existed until people started tweeting about it on Monday), and the focus for this year is on anxiety. And since I've already shared my own experiences of living with anxiety (part of my series of posts during OCD Awareness Week last October), I thought that I'd share some of my coping strategies and tips instead. These may not work for everyone, but these are the things that I've found to be the most helpful in my recovery so far:

Strategy no. 1: Read.

Some people hate reading, but for me it's a chance to escape from reality for a while, while also learning new things and developing my own writing skills (an opinion that I know is shared by my cousin!). It's always a good way to relax, and if necessary can give you an excuse to escape from some social situations (for example, going to your school's library at break times instead of the canteen). Books that I've enjoyed recently include: Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult*, My Secret Sister by Helen Edwards*, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi* and The Way I See It by Melissa Sue Anderson.

* Possible triggers.

Strategy no. 2: Art and Crafts.

I've never been very good at drawing or painting, but I recently took up crochet, which I have found very enjoyable so far (although I only actually started it to see if it was as hard as a couple of girls made it look on TV - it wasn't). It's a fun way to relieve stress and be creative, and you can make a lot of fun and wacky things that you wouldn't be able to find in shops, such as this cat hat, which I found on WikiHow the other day.

Strategy no. 3: Puzzles.

Puzzles are a good way of occupying your full attention, which can be great for helping anxious thoughts to subside. I particularly like logic puzzles, but there are plenty of different types to choose from.

Strategy no. 4: Hobbies.

By far the best way I've found of relieving anxiety (and helping to keep it under control) is to find something that you love and stick at it. For me, this would be music. And you don't just have to have it as a thing on the side like most people do, I went a bit crazy with mine! I now play five different instruments (although I'm only really any good at one or two of them) and am in two different orchestras, so if you find something that you really enjoy, you can totally go to town with it. Have fun!

I hope that my little summary will be helpful to some people, but even if it's not, thanks for reading!

Search Results For...

I couldn't resist sharing my latest Pinterest search criteria, which I typed in for fun while researching Wales for a graphics product:

It literally translates as "St. Mary's Church in the hollow of the white hazel next to the rapid worlpool of St. Tysilio of the red cave." (according to Wikipedia) and is definitely the longest word I know how to spell (and pronounce, for that matter)!