Afraid of the darkness

Content warning:  This is about violence against women.

Tonight as I left work someone said to me to take care, and I knew what she meant.  She meant take care because it is dark.

But it's not the dark that hurts us.  It's not the dark that killed Blessie.

It's the darkness; the hate of women, the drive to possess us, to control us.  The dehumanising of women, who are, after all, just other people, to the point where killing us, hurting us is somehow justifiable.

The vast vast majority of people who are murdered in Aotearoa New Zealand are killed by people they know.  For women the most dangerous person in their life, statistically, is a male partner.  There is no data on this, but I imagine most of those killings happen in light, artificial or natural.

Blessie didn't die because she caught the bus, she didn't die because she was out alone at night; both of those things are normal ordinary things to do, things most men can do without question, things we all should be able to do without fear and without a bad outcome.  Blessie died because someone killed her.  

We can fear the dark, and what's in the dark, but it won't keep us safe to do so.

Garth McVicar and heterosexual camouflage

Funny story.  I once camped on Garth McVicar's land after a friendly chat with him.

I'd just cycled through Te Urewera, in snow, and was feeling pretty damn intrepid.  I'd then cycled to Taupo via some beautiful backroads, and was making my way down to Napier to head home.  About two thirds of the way to Napier I was hunting for somewhere to sleep and biked down a gravel road which promised a campground at the end.  An hour later, no campsite, I was standing at the edge of the road, looking down at a beautiful river framed by stony ravine, eating handfuls of chocolate raisins.  A bloke on a tractor drove up.

Giddays exchanged, I asked him if it would be alright to just camp by the river.  Of course he said, and pointed me upriver a bit, to a better spot. 

A day later, I caught the bus back to Wellington, driven by the same man who I'd taken me up ten days earlier.  He had swapped his shift because he wanted to hear if I'd actually done the trip I'd planned, so we spent several hours talking about land and weather, places he'd fished and I'd cycled through.

I told him the story of the friendly tractor driver, and where it was. 

"Oh, that will have been Garth McVicar.  That's his land, down that road."

When I got home I did a google image search.  Turned out my friendly tractor driver was Mr Hang 'Em himself.  I felt like I'd got away with something, a radical bisexual lefty anti-racist feminist.  I was pretty sure I wasn't Mr McVicar's idea of a pleasant social companion.

And just today, turns out how right I was, because if I get married to a woman lover, Mr McVicar is worried it will lead to crime.

Garth, Garth, Garth.  Such a shame I didn't realise in time.  We could have had such a chat by my portable gas cooker about what really causes domestic violence and child abuse.  I am kinda surprised you didn't immediately recognise my crime-causing potential.  Maybe the dust and grime acted like heterosexual camouflage. 

There is no depression in New Zealand

There's a lot of talk at the moment about mental illness, and particularly about assumptions made that really bad things (like mass shootings) are carried out by people with mental illnesses.  I was part of such a discussion today, and I paused a bit, then told the small group discussing it that I have a mental illness.

I explained, after an awkward silence, that I take medication every day for depression, because I seem to have a chemical imbalance in my brain*, much in the same way that I take medication every day for asthma, because I seem to have chronic inflammation in my bronchioles.  I see a counsellor once a month to help me with tools to build my mental fitness, in much the same way that others might go to a gym for their physical fitness. It was surprisingly hard for me to talk about.

I think it's natural to assume that people only do really bad things because they are not in their right mind at the time; a "psychotic break" perhaps.  And I'm sure sometimes that is the case.  But it does seem like often it's a convenient way to Other, to dehumanise, to put the perpetrators of bad deeds at a distance from ourselves, so that we don't really have to explain or understand why. 

Via a Facebook friend I happened to stumble across this interesting blog post today, which included the timely quote:

Instead of examining what made it possible for [Anders] Breivik to unleash his barrage of racial hatred (he was vehemently against immigration by racialized bodies and supposed ‘takeover’ of Norway through this immigration’), he is excused and deemed insane, being sent to psychiatric care instead of prison. The explanation for his violence – he had a psychotic  ‘break’, a break from his normal civility and a break from an ordered society that would never breed such violence.

Never mind his high levels of planning and execution, never mind that he was actively a part of White supremacist organizations with similar views – White society is civilized and non-violent, so he must have been crazy. Madness is used here as a way of explaining away violence within White bodies and White society. It is not the norm, it is a break from it. 

And then there is this response to the Sandy Hooks shootings, and the leap to assume a role for mental illness there too, You Are Not Adam Lanza's Mother, including this:

The reality is that there is no such observed link: “after analysing a number of killers, Mullen concludes, ‘they had personality problems and were, to put it mildly, deeply troubled people.’ But he goes on to add: ‘Most perpetrators of autogenic massacres do not, however, appear to have active psychotic symptoms at the time and very few even have histories of prior contact with mental health services.’” And most people with mental illness are not violent, although they are far more likely to be victims of crime.. [their emphasis]

I don't really know how to finish this post other than to say it has been a difficult day.

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I've just edited this, a few minutes after publication, to take out the picture and reference to some of the work the Mental Health Foundation is doing because I don't want to confuse things by writing about them in the same post.  Hope that makes sense.




*  This is my experience of mental illness, and it won't necessarily reflect how others with mental illnesses see their own experience.

Conversations I want to have

The following was recently published in 'Thinking Differently', the quarterly newsletter of Autism New Zealand Inc.

'Your Letters'

This is an excerpt from a letter we received from one reader, who had been married to a man with Aspergers Syndrome. She discovered he'd been sexually interfering with her 11-year old twin daughters and eventual divorced him. The letter is extensive, but she presents a valid point of view, based on her experience.
"The Law is there to protect others from those behaviours. Aspergers should not be exempt from the law or being locked up. I do believe many serial killers and rapists have Aspergers. They can be cunning and devious. Aspergers do commit crimes, probably more often than normal people. We matter too."
H---- F--- (abridged)

I'm angry and saddened that it was written, more so that Autism New Zealand saw fit to publish such an offensive letter whilst stating that it presents 'a valid point of view'. But I'm perhaps most frustrated at the way it has set the agenda, that to counteract this it feels necessary to scrabble round for statistics saying that we're not any more likely to murder or rape than "normal people". I don't want to have to come up with examples of how we're the good "Aspergers" who pay our taxes and follow the law and have never had so much as a speeding fine. Those aren't the conversations I want to have.

I don't think there's any way to usefully engage with the idea of 'serial killers'. Is regular murder not shocking enough? There really aren't enough serial killers out there for this to be a meaningful discussion. I don't believe aspies are any more likely to be rapists than the general population. If there's evidence of a statistically significant disparity, that needs to be looked at, but in a country and world with the rates of rape and associated violence that exists, along with the terrible conviction rates and limited government willingness to do anything about either, I feel there are more important things to engage in that idle speculation about who does it most.

But let's leave aside the serial killers and the rapists for a second. Let's talk about the aspies who end up in the justice system for vandalism, for theft, for getting into fights or retaliating against violence. Lets talk about those who have not done what they're accused of but can't stand up to questioning or navigate the legal system (as a teenager I admitted to shoplifting I hadn't done (fortunately avoiding a criminal charge) because security guard told me I had no choice but to admit it and I believed that, literally, and because I didn't see any way anyone would understand my compulsive need to read song lyrics anyway). If the main backbone of the conversation is that statistically most of us are law abiding, if those of us who can go round flaunting our jobs and our taxpaying and our relationships and our degrees and our mortgages and our nice clean criminal records, then we're feeling good about ourselves and changing absolutely nothing.

So instead, let's have a conversation about a world which makes things unbearable for us, and when we lash out, potentially at people or at objects, the solution is not to change the environment to prevent a reoccurance, but to punish us. Let's have a conversation about how difficult legal systems are to navigate, how atypical facial expressions or eye contact are so often assumed to mean guilt, how a neurotypical person can sometimes avoid a charge for a minor offence with a "sorry mate" whilst pedantic questioning of language and the nature of the offence is almost certainly going to lead to an arrest. Let's talk about how atypical movement or gestures or reasons for going to places is viewed as grounds for suspicion, how silence is viewed as stubbornness or lack of co-operation, how literal interpretation of questions is viewed as rudeness. Let's talk about how the effect is doubled, tripled for people already disadvantaged in our legal system.

Let's not be afraid to have a conversation about prisons. When people say we don't lock up autistic people/mentally ill people/intellectually impaired people, I always want to ask what the hell they think prisons are other than a dumping ground with disproportionate rates of all of the above. And I get why we're afraid to talk about this - we've spent so long trying to say that we're good people really, we're not scary people, we could be your neighbour. But we need to challenge the assumption that there's a perfect correlation between 'in prison' and 'bad person', or that crimes exist in some kind of vacuum as an indicator of someone's morality, rather than being socially constructed.

Yes, it is worth challenging such obvious bigotry, the inaccruate assumptions, the stereotyping and the offensive language. And then let's move on. If we're talking about Aspergers and crime, let's talk about parents who murder autistic children and are then treated with sympathy, about autistic people who have been raped and are then told their non-verbal communication is inadmissable in court. Let's talk less about how some cunning and devious aspies can apparently get away with everything (something I'd guess would have far more to with the numbers who get away with child abuse generally) and more about how the legal system fails aspies on both sides.