Jack Straw, Pakistani Men and White Girls

Jack Straw has made headlines with the bold claim that Pakistani men sexually target vulnerable white girls in the UK as 'easy meat' as a result of the values of their cultural heritage. In the wake of the arrests of Abid Mohammed Saddique and Mohammed Romaan Liaqat, the 'ringleaders' in a gang of Pakistani men alleged to have befriended and groomed vulnerable 12-18 year old girls in Derby. He acknowledges that it is not a problem isolated to the Pakistani community, but goes on to state that there is a specific cultural problem emanating from the Pakistani cultural heritage.

I cannot accurately say whether he is right or wrong in his claim but it seems to me as though he has turned a sex issue into a race issue - is it that the exploitation of women is somehow a more worthy point of discussion if the women are presented through a racialised lens as the white victim? Different cultural backgrounds do inevitably carry different notions of masculinity and different views of women - social attitudes about the 'proper place' of women and the correct mode of man-wife relations will sculpt active lived behaviours.

Straw said "These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they're fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically". Testosterone is here conflated with a heterosexual desire which needs to be dumped inside somebody for their own sake, before that 'fizzing and popping' explodes like a firework. The way Straw phrases it implies it is better for these men to use girls from Pakistani heritage as the outlet for their raging hormones, as though this is the proper order of things and it is only once this particular 'usage' of women affects white girls that it become exploitative and problematc.

A few days ago, Cameron stated that 'We should not be put off by cultural sensitivities or anything like that. Pursue the evidence, pursue criminality wherever it leads.'

It isn't a matter of being 'put off' by cultural sensitivities, as though the sole purpose of them is to obstruct 'normal' culture - this statement betrays a rhetoric of cultural blindness which though it may appear egalitarian, serves to reiterate the white native cultural imperative.

What about the normalised practices of gender which don't activate cultural sensitivities? Jack Straw speaks of older Pakistani men plying vulnerable white teenagers with gifts as part of their racialised grooming ritual but is it much better to locate your 'easy meat' straining to hold herself up in a bar or club?

Jon Venables

Criminal cases involving young children really rankle with me not only because I work with them but also because, to those who notice such things, they magnify and illuminate the social tensions, mores and norms which undergird our taken-for-granted, lived experience of society. In cases where young children have committed crimes or have exhibited deviant behaviours, the traditional rhetoric of childhood innocence, which serves to infantilise, de-sex and deny subjective agency to children stands in contrast to society's often heinous, punitive recourse to justice. Very often, the media become the arbiters who effectively 'decide' on the approved moral response for society to take.

To give a recent example of how fixed and concrete becomes the mediated arbiter's perception of events, think back only a week to the undeniably sad story of Raoul Moat. The hero-worship of him was absurd, I agree, but the response of David Cameron to the small outpouring of sympathy for him was symptomatic of the prescriptive nature of the media's message. The PM stated that there should be no no sympathy for the callous murderer, and that all sympathy should be for the victims. I feel sympathy for anybody with a history of mental health problems who finds themselves subject to a police manhunt, which is broadcast 24/7 to an enthralled audience desperately waiting for the next installment, forced out into the countryside and in such a position that he knew his life was over. To sympathise with his situation does not condone his actions, nor does it condemn them - sympathy, without exploding into a fireball of closeted Quakerism, is a human emotion which one feels when one can place oneself in the position of another, and realise the hurt they must be feeling.

This is important to remember throughout the rest of this post as I go on to look at the case of Jon Venables. I sympathise hugely with him, and I feel no personal discomfort in doing so, because I know that the opposition 'perpetrator/victim' is not equal to 'good/evil' as the media so frequently sculpts it. The murder of James Bulger was horrific - nobody contests that - but this absolutely does not legitimate the media free-for-all over his life, nor does it give Bulger's mother any legal grounding to comment on his every move until either one of them passes on.

Venables is a 27 year old man and the only picture to have been used of him in the media, for 17 years, is the picture that I am using for this blog - paradoxical, I know, since I am criticising the repeated use of it, but I think it will be pertinent for you, as a reader, to be able to really look at it as it is discussed. A letter in today's Guardian questioned the effects of the media's continued use of this image - So long as it is taken for granted that we, the public, have some kind of unquestionable right to look at and be fascinated by this image of Venables without even considering that its publication or transmission may be causing him further distress, we should not be so shocked at the revelation of Venables' own fascination with images of children in distress. The Independent's Melanie McDonagh refers to a Dorian Gray in reverse; Venables will age and change outwardly, but the image of him in the public mind will be always that of the boy who killed a boy.

James Bulger is the perfect victim. There is absolutely no way in which a two year old child can be held responsible, in any way, for what happened. He was too young to have put himself in a vulnerable position, too young to have provoked any response from his killers and too young to have, in even a minor way, a 'blemished character'. Having such a completely innocent victim enables the demonisation of his killers, regardless of whether they were also children. The purity of the victim allowed the story to be easily mediated as good versus evil - Biblical, Koranic, universal - and who questions why the Devil does bad things? Nobody. He does evil because he is the Devil, and he is the Devil because he does evil.

The media scale and publicity of the murder of James Bulger, and the immense (mediated) public response to it means that Jon Venables, as soon as he and Robert Thompson led the toddler out of the shopping centre, ceased to exist. Jon Venables ceased to be a person and became real only when he fulfilled the personage attributed to him.

Now; think how many times you have seen the image of Jon Venables. As you flick through channels, as you walk past newsagents. Imagine now that you are Jon Venables, out of prison for the first time in 11 years, aged 21 having served your sentence. Nobody can know who you are, regardless of how remorseful you may or may not be, as the vigilante sentiments run so deep that you will be forever at risk. Imagine being 21 and being perpetually condemned for what you did as a 10 year old.

This might appear an irresponsible comment, but it is no wonder he went on to sexually fetishise the suffering of children: he has been forced into remaining the 10 year old murderer, he cannot move on and the public will not let him. Ours is not that sort of society.

When Venables and Thompson were tried in 1993 for the murder, in an adult court (this was illegal, was it not? Lawyers?), the judge, Mr Justice Morland, pronounced that the boys had committed "an act of unparalleled evil and barbarity" - as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes in today's Independent, this is one of the most irresponsible statement ever to come from the mouth of a judge. And this was fuelled by the political pressure, with Prime Minister John Major's harrowing statement that we need to 'condemn a little more, and understand a little less'.

Condemn a little more... Demonisation may sate the bloodlust of the masses but it leads to further marginalisation and further transgressions, as can be seen as Venables returns to prison this week facing child porn charges. It begs the question of what our media is doing, what they hope to achieve, by continuing to shape the reporting of crimes such as those of Jon Venables within a moral framework of 'good versus evil'. I'm reminded of W.I. Thomas's sociological dictum - if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. How much are the media to blame?

Well done Scotland for freeing Lockerbie bomber

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted for the Lockerbie bombings has been released from prison in Scotland on compassionate grounds. He has not completed his life sentence but has prostate cancer which is set to kill him within the next months.

America disagrees with this compassionate release because they have a warped concept of justice and punishment - compassion does not come easily to the mass American conscience. Scotland's decision has been opposed publicly by Obama and byHillary Clinton and these two represent the upper echelons of the Democrats, the liberal ones in America.

For the Americans, the purpose of punishment isn't as much to prevent further crime or to punish the individual who has committed the crime, as it is to satisfy the insatiable bloodlust of their paleoconservative populace. It is of no consequence to them whether a criminal 'sees the error of his ways' or straightens up and changes his behaviour - what matters is how much this criminal should be made to suffer, how many liberties can be taken away and how to ensure that everyone is aware of it. What sort of mindset are we breeding where we imprison and kill people people, essentially out of respect for their victims' families? Fuck rehabilation; they'd rather see a stoning.

al-Meghrahi is dying of cancer and I cannot see what the Americans seek to achieve by letting him die in prison. Contrary to popular belief, and to common practice, prisons aren't supposed to kill people - certainly not prisons in Scotland. It would have been very spineless to allow him to die in prison in order to 'send out a message' that terrorism is bad - that would have shown a disregard for his humanity and isn't this 'lack of humanity' what al-Meghrahi is being punished for?

'Time for change' seems a fleeting memory now - Obama's not that different after all is he. I applaud the Scottish government for making this compassionate decision, and especially for them to stay true to it under intense scrutiny from the mob across the pond. The Lockerbie bomber is a bad man but if we are to deny him human treatment, we are opening the door to greater evils within the mainstream of society. If the US can't see that through their sullied patriotic tears, it really is their problem and the decline of their global cultural hegemony ought to be welcomed with open arms.