Welcome to Dr.Jessica Taylor's blog

The world watched whilst Britney Spears rose to fame dressed in ‘sexy schoolgirl’ uniform dancing in a school gym, singing ‘hit me baby, one more time’. They watched as she become a global phenomenon and sex symbol. They laughed as she was chased endlessly by the press. As she struggled to cope. As she shaved her head. As she struggled to keep custody of her children. As she was sectioned and medicated. As she was forced to perform in Las Vegas whilst being regularly medicated to control and subdue her. As she was locked into a conservatorship for thirteen years by her abusive father. Prior to her solo artist career, she had been a famous child star of Disney’s The Mickey Mouse Club along with Ryan Gosling, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. She regularly performed songs, and dance routines and acted. At fifteen years old, she signed a record deal. I was eight years old when ‘Hit me baby, one more time’ came out. I watched it on the TV and didn’t know she was just a child until much later, when I was an adult working in child sexual exploitation services. I looked back on the video and wondered how old she was when they sexualised her and sold her to the world. I did a quick Google search. Sixteen. I thought about her song titles and music videos. ‘I’m a Slave 4 U’ was curiously released on the same album as ‘Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman’ when she was eighteen years old. Interestingly, both produced by Pharrell Williams, the producer of ‘Blurred Lines’ with Robin Thicke – widely considered to be a misogynistic, pro-rape song about objectifying women. In ‘I’m a Slave 4 U’ and ‘Boys’ (again on the same album), she is posi- tioned as a sex-crazed woman who will do anything for men. Yet ‘Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman’ positions her as a child, coming of age, and being stuck in between childhood and adulthood. I’m not a girl (Not a girl, not yet a woman) Not yet a woman (I’m just trying to find the woman in me) All I need is time, a moment that is mine While I’m in between Between 1998 and 2001, her management released an incredible number of songs and music videos that clearly portrayed her as sexy, sultry and out of reach. Sometimes, I wonder how much of that was deliberately paedophilic and illegal. The ‘jailbait’ trope. That men knew she was a child, but she was being positioned as a sexual adult. This included being interviewed several times about whether she was a virgin, when she lost her virginity, and whether she had a boyfriend yet. My next strongest memory of Britney was in 2003, when she released ‘Everytime’. The video was harrowing. I was thirteen years old, and even I noticed that something was very wrong. She was singing about pain and trauma. The music video featured her dying of an overdose in the bath and drowning. I watched it with horror. She wanted to die. Her portrayal of suicide was calm, peaceful and final. She is shown as having an out-of-body experience in which she sees herself being pulled out of the bath by a man and rushed to hospital, whilst paparazzi scramble to take pictures of her body. Since she released her memoir, we now know that the final scene was an apology to her aborted baby with Justin Timberlake. This video still haunts me; in fact, it hurts more to watch now than it did then. Here was a very young woman, shot into global stardom, sexualised and sold as a teenage sex object, struggling to cope with the pressure, and now depicting her own death. In 2008, her mother Lynne told the press that her daughter had ‘lost her virginity’ to an eighteen-year-old man when she was just fourteen years old, and way below the age of consent. She had started drinking at thirteen years old whilst working on The Mickey Mouse Club, and had started taking drugs at fifteen years old. In her memoir, Lynne recalls finding cocaine and weed in her daughter’s bag as she was boarding a private jet around the time ‘Baby One More Time’ was released. For some, this might just look like a teenager experimenting, having fun, and pushing boundaries – but to me, it looked like a teenager who was struggling to cope with something; a theme that would continue for another couple of decades. In her book, Lynne looks back on the way she was told by managers and music producers that the only way sixteen-year-old Britney would be able to compete with stars like Mariah Carey would be to sexualise her, and frame her as a ‘Lolita’. She writes that she was told that they wanted to deliberately manage Britney as a teenage sex object, and that Lynne regrets giving up control of her daughter’s career. Less than a year after Lynne gave this interview, in 2007 Britney was filmed having a ‘public breakdown’ and shaving her hair off. A month later, after being hounded by tipped-off paparazzi, she hit a car with an umbrella. This led to global media outlets framing her as violent, psychotic, insane and a bad mother to her children. Despite everything she was going through, and previously being regarded as a national treasure, she was framed as dangerous and disordered. She was then reportedly in and out of ‘rehab’ for years, sectioned several times and placed on psychiatric medication. At the end of 2007, her father, Jamie, placed Britney under a ‘temporary conservatorship’ which lasted over thirteen years. During this time, concerns slowly mounted amongst her loyal fanbase, who believed for years that she was being exploited and controlled. They argued that she was in danger, and being treated like a prisoner. They pointed to evidence on her social media which suggested that she was trying to carefully get messages to her fanbase that she was in danger. In 2009, they created a FreeBritney website, and demanded that her conservatorship was ended. In November 2021, Britney filmed and posted a video to her fan base, and specifically thanked the FreeBritney movement for ‘saving her life’, and ‘noticing that something was wrong’. I started to become interested in Britney’s journey around four years ago, when I noticed that she always looked disconnected in her social media videos and photographs. Her communication seemed odd. Her eye contact and body language weren’t right, and I had commented that she was extremely traumatised, but likely to be taking medication of some sort. I wondered whether she, like many of the women and girls I was working with, was being subjected to the same process of pathologisation and control. In 2019, one of the attorneys in the conservatorship case claimed that Britney was so mentally ill that she was like ‘a comatose patient’ and that she couldn’t make any decisions or sign any statements because she was the equivalent of an unconscious person. I started to feel that my worries were being confirmed. How could she simultaneously be so lacking in capacity that she was the equivalent of a person in a coma, and also be performing at a residency in Las Vegas every single night? How could people around her be claiming that she was so mentally ill that she needed round-the-clock supervision and medication, but she was still well enough to perform for hours? Something wasn’t right. Whilst many laughed off the idea that she was trying to send out messages that she was being abused and controlled as a conspiracy theory, I looked through her social media for hours and found that I agreed with her fanbase. There was something about her social media. The captions seemed strange, but purposeful. Were they being written deliberately by her social media managers to make her look insane? Were they being written by a woman who had been forced to take high dosages of medication? Were they coded messages to her fans, to keep campaigning for her to be released from her conservatorship? Maybe one day we will know the full truth, but in 2020, I wrote on my own social media that I was very worried about where her life was headed, and what the conservatorship was doing to her. I looked back over the life of a girl I had grown up at the same time as, and saw nothing but trauma, fear, confusion, pressure, harassment, abuse and pathologisation. It made sense to me that she struggled so much, but like so many others, she was diagnosed as mentally ill, lost custody of her children and was positioned as disordered and psychotic. The 2021 documentary, Framing Britney Spears, was the first time I had seen an angle taken by mass media outlets (New York Times) which clearly demonstrated that Britney was being abused and exploited. I watched it with my wife and we both cried as we watched the journey of a young girl being controlled and abused, financially exploited and framed to the media as a danger to herself and her children. Not long after, her father has recently announced that he would eventually step down from the conservatorship which controls her entire life, and she has recently been allowed to drive again after over fourteen years of not being allowed to drive her own car. I sincerely hope that the world supports her no matter whether she decides to put them all, or whether she quietly disappears from public life forever. Her life story and case should serve as one of the most public examples of sexualisation, exploitation and pathologisation of women that has ever occurred. Sexy but psycho – the Disney legacy In 2014, I came across a video on YouTube which seemed to suggest that there was a link between the Disney franchise and the sexualisa- tion and then subsequent ‘breakdown’ of female child stars. It wasn’t much, but it was implied. I have been interested in this process ever since. Britney was part of that cohort, but there have been many more girls since her era. As the years have passed, I’ve watched as rising child stars such as Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato and Lindsay Lohan were taken down similar pathways of hypersexualisation and then pathologisation that were publicly discussed, but for some reason, not publicly scrutinised. Well, the girls were scrutinised, of course. Not so much scrutiny was afforded to the managers and corporations who had clearly developed a blueprint for transforming their cute child stars into pornified sex objects overnight. Sometimes it felt like they had deliberately removed their successful female child stars from the limelight for short periods of time and then relaunched them as sex siren pop stars – when they were barely seventeen years old. Miley Cyrus became famous for her starring role in Hannah Montana, in which she played a young famous popstar who has to disguise herself to enable her to live a normal life. However, by the age of fifteen, she was relaunched from actor to solo artist. Her songs were carefully constructed to be sexy, but almost acceptable – a teenager singing about her relationships or her crushes. In 2010, at seventeen years old, her management released ‘Can’t Be Tamed’, a song which describes her as crazy, sexy, wild, damaged, jagged and uncontrollable. In the video, she is dressed as a wild, exotic, sexy animal in a large cage, that rich people have paid to see. She becomes uncontrollable and difficult to tame, the rich people become frightened of her, and so the video is designed to position her as sexy, but out of control. Her clothing is ripped and shredded. Her makeup is dark. Her hair is wild. It is vital to remember that she is not only a child at this point, but is still starring in a Disney children’s programme with a viewership of millions of small children. It is therefore interesting that some critics have speculated that this could be a deliberate process that Disney use to move their young audience towards their pop stars as they age with them. This journey towards sexy, but ultimately, mentally ill, contin- ues for years in her career. By 2013, her music videos regularly showed her almost naked, taking drugs, and being encouraged to be as sexualised as possible. Huge smash hits such as ‘We Can’t Stop’ and ‘Wrecking Ball’ deliberately portrayed her as sexy, but disordered. Naked, but crying into the camera. Beautiful, but aggressive. Laughing but angry. Intoxicated. Exhausted. Messy. Wild. Uncontrollable. Sexy. I also have to wonder what the significance is of Miley crying into the camera with a shaved head in ‘Wrecking Ball’. Why, and how, was she positioned as sexy but psycho? In 2019, tabloids reported that Miley’s family were considering having her sectioned, in order to save her marriage to Liam Hemsworth. A source told the NW that ‘it was clear she was back in a dark place, and her family are telling her to face up to her demons and seek psychiatric treatment before it’s too late. If it saves her marriage, it will be a small price to pay.’ This is particularly distressing to read, considering that around that time she had come out as bisexual, and less than a year later, she came out as lesbian, and was in a relationship with a woman. The tabloids and celebrity gossip blogs continued to position her as acting out, crazy, wild, promiscuous and problematic for years. It was reported by Star that she was ‘acting out’ to ‘get attention’ from her on-off partner, Liam. Heat magazine reported that her relationship with Kaitlynn Carter was a ‘fling’ to ‘get attention’ and that she needed to be sectioned or sent to rehab for ‘social media addiction’. In 2020, NW published a criticism of Miley, claiming that she had a ‘mental breakdown’ due to jealousy about her ex moving on, and that her current partner Cody Simpson was going to have her sectioned or sent to a mental health facility. This targeting of a young woman is not unique, in fact it is a pattern which many young women have been subjected to. Selena Gomez recently announced that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, anxiety and depression having been put through the same process of sexualisation and framing as sexy, but psycho. Again, after being sent to a psychiatric hospital, she was told she was mentally ill. In 2011, after yet another career which took her from Disney child star to sex object popstar in a matter of months, an eighteen-year-old Demi Lovato was ‘sent to rehab’ and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She quickly became the poster child for many mental health organisa- tions looking to ‘raise awareness’ of bipolar disorder. In 2018, she took a near-fatal overdose. However, she gave an interesting interview in 2020, in which she stated that she had been misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, and that it seemed easier for doctors to slap a label on her anger and behaviour and tell her it was bipolar disorder. In her own words, ‘bipolar was used as a convenient excuse’ for what was really happening. Similarly to Miley Cyrus, Demi gave an interview in 2021 in which she said ‘I hooked up with a girl and was like, “I like this a lot more.” It felt right.’ She went on to say, ‘I know who I am and what I am, but I’m just waiting until a specific time to come out.’ Demi said that she would feel a ‘visceral reaction to being intimate with men’, and ‘blamed herself for ignoring red flags that she was not heterosexual’. This strikes me as important, that young girls and women who might not even be heterosexual were having their young female bodies exploited, sexualised and moulded for the male gaze by multimillion-dollar corporations – causing serious psychological trauma that would later be diagnosed in terms of psychiatric disorders. Ariana Grande was quickly sexualised as a young teenage girl, and then put through the exact same process as the others. She has spoken publicly about her depression and anxiety, and says that since the terrorist bombing of her Manchester concert in 2017, she hates performing. What is interesting about Ariana’s experiences is that rather than being labelled as bipolar or psychotic like the others, the public sympathised with her trauma from the terrorist attack, and see that as a real, tangible trauma. Instead, then, she was diagnosed with PTSD and her loyal fanbase promised to support her, even if she cancelled her tour dates. Lindsay Lohan, on the other hand, was bullied for years for her public ‘breakdown’ and drug dependency, despite disclosing domestic abuse and other traumas related to child stardom, sexualisation and pathol- ogisation. Lindsay was diagnosed with ADHD after ‘erratic behaviour’, which UCLA have argued is a misdiagnosis, leading her to be treated with Adderall. This drug is known to have similar effects to cocaine and amphetamines. However, she was also diagnosed with bipolar and alcohol dependency, which led to her living for several years on a cocktail of Dilaudid, Ambien, Adderall, Zoloft, Trazadone and Nexium. When she was twenty-four, doctors who felt she had been misdiagnosed helped to wean her off these drugs using careful tapering methods until she was completely medication-free. Her story – of yet more abuse, trauma and pathologisation – is a sobering read. A young child star who was struggling was diagnosed with several psychiatric disorders she never had, medicated for years and then publicly mocked and criticised as crazy and promiscuous: a hot mess. Throughout her childhood, Lindsay was subjected to various traumas. Despite having a complex relationship with her mum, which the tabloids have mocked for over a decade, in 2013 her mother stated to the New York Daily News that her trauma was all connected to things she witnessed and experienced in childhood. This important detail seems to have slipped past the general public, who focus on her wild nights out, legal troubles, financial issues and addiction. Despite there being a possible root of her trauma, it has been ignored for decades. Even after all of the years have passed, she has stated several times in interviews that she has been harassed and lied about. In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2016, Lindsay stated that her her mobile phone number had been shared on the internet, and several news outlets had been told that she was pregnant. But it wasn’t just the constant reports in the media. In 2016, footage surfaced which appeared to show Lindsay being assaulted on a public beach in Greece. In the video which was widely circulated, she ran from the attack to be followed, grabbed, exposed and forced away. It should be becoming painfully clear by now that what we are witnessing is a pattern of rising fame, sexualisation and then pathologisation of women and girls who are in fact being subjected to abuse, trauma and stress, and struggling to find how to cope, and who they really are in an industry which expects them to be happy, sexy, heterosexual objects of desire for men. Speaking of sexuality, Lindsay is yet another woman subjected to years of pathologisation who has had long relationships with men and women. Her relationship with DJ Samantha Ronson between 2008 and 2010 was met with scepticism, jokes and even outrage in the press. It is little wonder that she denied it and refuses to confirm whether she is bisexual or not. Sadly, I have come across several LGBT outlets who published articles and blogs blasting her for ‘bi-erasure’, ‘harming bisexual people’ and ‘denying being queer’ which seem to have very little insight into how traumatic and frightening it might be for her to talk openly about her sexuality after years of press harassment, ridicule and male violence. Whilst I have focused on Disney stars here, it would be wholly inac- curate to state that this journey is limited to their franchise. The ‘Sexy but Psycho’ blueprint has led to the abuse, harm and death of many women including Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, Kate Spade, Carrie Fisher, Anna Nicole Smith, Peaches Geldof, Bobbi Kristina Brown and Tina Turner. I know how that list might look to some, but maybe it is time we take a step back and reanalyse the lives and deaths of these women? All of them struggled with their traumas, stress, abuse or pressure of some kind. All of them were, at some point, positioned as wild, out of control, mentally ill, problematic or attention seeking. Instead of a humanistic response to what had been done to them, the public were encouraged to laugh along, gossip, harass them and speculate about their ‘breakdowns’.

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Content warning for discussion of abuse and rape Whether you are reading this as someone who has been subjected to abuse, whether you know someone who has or you are a professional who supports people who have – you might notice some ‘positive thinking’ phrases in here that you use to reframe the abuse. This blog explores some of those phrases and then discusses why we shouldn’t use them, and the problems they create for people who have been subjected to all forms of abuse. The positive thinking phrases I will discuss in this blog are: ‘It made you stronger’ ‘You had something positive from it’ ‘It made you who you are today’ ‘Everything happens for a reason’ ‘You get back what you give’ ‘Positivity attracts positive people’ ‘We can’t change what happened, but we can change how we feel/respond to it’ Whilst some of these sound brilliant, they can harm us in ways we don’t realise. Especially if we begin to believe some of the connotations of these phrases and their underlying beliefs – which are often linked to victim blaming. So let’s jump right in with the worst of them all. ‘It made you stronger’ Most people who have been subjected to abuse have heard or read this one countless times. Maybe you had been telling someone what you have been through, and suddenly, some well meaning friend or therapist tells you that the abuser, or the rapist or your abusive parent ‘made you stronger’. It’s always meant well. But the thing is, being raped or abused or harmed or beaten up or gaslit every day didn’t make us stronger – it did the opposite. It really hurt us. It felt like it destroyed us. It broke us down into pieces. For some of us, this phrase puts an awful lot of pressure on us to be some kick-ass strong survivor type person. To be able to brush it off and keep going. To pretend that none of it impacts us anymore, because it made us stronger. Right? No, the abuser or rapist, the abuse and the rape did not make us stronger at all – but if we did feel stronger these days, we did that ourselves. Don’t ever give credit to an abuser for making someone else stronger. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that being raped or abused MADE you or anyone else stronger. Instead, if you or someone else feels that they are getting stronger after living through trauma, that’s something they did for themselves. Don’t attribute that to the offender, or the offence. ‘You got something positive from it’ This one is quite specific, and relates to the way that women and girls who have children with abusers are told that they should be thankful that they got something positive from the rape or abuse (their children). I would go even further and say that I’ve heard some people say things like ‘well think about it, if you hadn’t been raped/trafficked/abused, you wouldn’t have your kids, would you?’ Or even ‘Well, you wouldn’t want to change what you’ve been through, because then you would never have had your kids!’ I just want to say this: Women, you do not have to feel thankful that you had children with a rapist or an abuser. You can love your kids and still wish you were never subjected to trauma and abuse that changed your life. You do not have to associate these things, or hold them as equivalents. And to people who say this to others: I know you mean well, but this really does induce a lot of guilt when women are trying to talk about the abuse and trauma they have been subjected to. Yes, they might have ‘got two wonderful kids out of it’ (in your perspective), but she lived through hell. Her kids are not a consolation prize or a reward for putting up with being raped and abused. Don’t use this one, it’s just never a good idea to go down this line of reasoning with a woman. I would extend this, however, to any argument that someone makes that a woman, man, boy or girl ‘took something positive’ from being abused or harmed. It’s just not okay to reframe their suffering and oppression as something positive, or a gift of some kind. ‘It made you who you are today’ So much shit is said with good intentions, and here is another common example. Whether you’ve said this to someone who has been subjected to abuse, or whether you say it to yourself – the abuse did not make you who you are today. This one redefines your entire life, your entire being – as a product of the abuse and the choices of the abuser. Being raped or abused or oppressed did not make you who you are today. You are not defined by the crimes of another. ‘Everything happens for a reason’ This one is related more to theories such as Belief in a Just World, in which people who say these kinds of things tend to believe that things happen for a reason (because you are a good person, because you are a bad person, because you deserve it etc). However, being told that ‘everything happens for a reason’ strikes me as a mixture between not knowing what else to say, trying to say something meaningful and reframing the abuse or rape as predestined to happen for some sort of cosmic reason. I mean, if you wanted to be picky, I could say, yes, the rape and abuse did happen for a reason, the reason is that the abuser is a nasty fucking lowlife who made an active choice to harm others instead of looking at themselves. That’s the reason. But it has nothing to do with your life, or your journey. It didn’t happen to you to teach you a lesson, or to help you, or to make you grow as a person, or to make you stronger, or to mould or shape or define you. I would actually argue that there is no evidence that ‘everything happens for a reason’, anyway. Especially not in the cosmic sense. Most things that happen to us or are done to us are random, and often could not be predicted or stopped. The world is a zillion possibilities all zooming around, colliding, missing, synchronising at once. The reality is that you could drive to work today and bump into the car in front. Or you could get a text message from an old friend that changes your life. Or you could fall over and break your knee. Or you could stay home and see an advert on the TV that makes you consider stopping smoking. Or your partner could tell you they are no longer happy. Or your kid could get a cold. Or your tire could be flat when you go outside. So many things happen in a day. And yet, we often tell ourselves that they mean something, that they all happen for a special, magical reason. We are best to avoid this kind of thinking, especially when thinking about rape and abuse. The only reason it happened was because the abuser chose to harm another human. The rest is just magical thinking that we use to give meaning to experiences we try to make sense of. The issue with this one, is that it can lead us to believe that the rape or abuse was supposed to happen to us, for some sort of reason. It then undoubtedly leads to ‘why me?’ questions, which often turn into victim blaming and self blame. ‘You get back what you give’ I really hate this one. Especially when used in the context of abuse. Simply put: no you don’t. The entire dynamic of being abused is that you DON’T get back what you give. Often, victims of abuse and oppression are putting everything into a relationship or situation and are not even afforded basic human respect. Abuse has nothing to do with what the victim ‘puts in’ or ‘gives’. Abuse is always about the offender and what they are choosing to do to other humans. My main issue with this one is that it assumes that you ‘get back’ what you ‘give’ – for example, if you don’t work hard in a relationship or situation then you will be treated like shit. It implies that you have been abused because you didn’t ‘give’ enough in the relationship or situation. Nope. No. Ugh. This is not appropriate at all when discussing abuse. It reminds me very much of the people who say that you only get treated how you allow others to treat you, which is also bollocks. ‘Positivity attracts positive people’ I’ve seen this one being used in domestic abuse, usually towards women, and it bothers me a lot. This obsession with meaningless, empty Instagram quotes is impacting the quality of the advice we give to women subjected to abuse. This one annoys me because it suggests that if you are a positive person who believes in positive thinking and positive action, you will only attract positive people into your life, and you will not be abused or harmed by them. It’s essentially victim blaming. It’s suggesting that the person attracted someone ‘negative’ into their life by not being positive enough. Almost as if, happy positive people will not be targeted by abusers or oppressors, because their positivity is some sort of force field that only attracts good people and repels bad ones. It’s bollocks, basically. And it puts a lot of pressure on people who have been subjected to abuse and harm to be more positive in order to ‘attract the right people’. It’s a really nasty, insidious one. Don’t say it to people who have been subjected to abuse, and even more importantly, don’t feel that you ‘attracted’ the wrong ‘type’ of people into your life by being a certain way. It feeds self blame, but sounds like positive thinking. Same as many of the others, really. ‘We can’t change what happened, but we can change how we feel/respond to it’ The final one is this interesting rhetoric which probably has its roots in cognitive therapy traditions, this idea that you can simply change the way you think about your abuse or rape or childhood trauma. The problem with this one when used in abuse and trauma is that we are essentially saying to victims of serious crime and oppression that they can just choose to think differently about what was done to them, and stop being sad, anxious, scared, angry, traumatised etc. This isn’t realistic and it minimises the real impact of those crimes on the person. It also puts pressure on the person to respond ‘better’ than they are already doing. It’s a message of, ‘Yes, this did happen to you, but you could be dealing with it better if you just thought positively’. It’s not fair to expect this of anyone, and it comes across as shaming people who are trying to cope with trauma and the impact of abuse. I remember once having this discussion with a senior clinical psychologist and we did eventually come to the conclusion that it borders on gaslighting by professionals to tell a traumatised person to think differently or respond differently to the abuse or trauma. I feel exactly the same way about this phrase used in positive thinking. Final thought Lots of phrases we use in positive thinking and in supporting people subjected to abuse and trauma sound good, mean well, but are having detrimental and harmful impacts on them, including inducing guilt, shame and blame.

Laura interviews Jaimi and I about ITIM, NPD, BPD, ADHD and allll the disorders. Let’s talk.

It only happens to naïve women and the women with low self-esteem. It only happens to women who wear revealing clothes and have no self-respect. It only happens to young women and girls. It only happens to women who were abused in childhood. It only happens to poor, disadvantaged women, the uneducated and disempowered women. It only happens in developing countries. Women lie about male violence. Women use disclosures and reports as revenge against their exes. Women exaggerate how common male violence is. Women ask for it and want to be treated like objects by men. Women say no when they really mean yes. This list could take up my entire blog, and psychologists, feminists and activists have been trying to draw our attention to the way women and girls are perceived and portrayed since the 1960s. The most important thing to note about all these harmful myths about women subjected to male violence is that they serve one main purpose: to erase the offender from their own crimes and decisions. Instead, the focus is switched back to the woman and everything about her comes under scrutiny. Whether it is her body shape or her sexuality, her character and behaviour is highly likely to be criticised and blamed for being subjected to male violence. These widely embedded views impact our justice system, mental health systems, education provisions and social care services. My research on this topic showed that views which seek to blame women and girls for male violence committed against them has reached so many different levels and corners of society that we have a real problem on our hands. Male violence against women is minimised, ignored, glorified, sexualised and excused. Women are positioned as mentally ill, liars and seductresses who lead men on, or cause them to commit acts of violence. These views need urgent change. We need to completely transform the way we think and talk about women and girls subjected to male violence. To that end, I want to talk to you about what I believe to be the 5 most harmful views about women and girls which need to be transformed, and I want to tell you what I have been doing for the last 11 years to try to transform these views, to varying levels of success. The five beliefs I will discuss are: 1. The abuse, exploitation and murder of women and girls is rare; 2. Women and girls are asking for it; 3. Women and girls should take responsibility to protect themselves from male violence; 4. Women and girls exaggerate or lie about abuse and violence; 5. Women and girls are respected and supported when they disclose their experiences. In 2014, after a long day managing a rape and domestic abuse centre, I nipped to my local shop to get some bread. The woman who always served me on the counter noticed that I looked particularly tired and troubled. She asked me if I was okay, and I responded that I had had a difficult day at work. She asked the question I often dread being asked in public, ‘What is it that you do then?’ I tried to dodge the question by saying that I managed a charity, but she probed and eventually I told her that I worked in a rape and domestic abuse centre in our town. The woman gave me the most extraordinary look. It wasn’tsadness, or pity, or shock – it looked like confusion. She laughed. And then she said the words: “Well! You mustn’t be very busy then, must you?” I stared at her, thinking of the 357-strong waiting list we had for counselling and support services. “What do you mean?” I replied. “Well, you know, all that rape and abuse stuff, it doesn’t happen around here does it? You can’t be very busy…” And that was when I realised she was being serious. She genuinely believed that my job must be very quiet because rape and abuse of women and girls was so rare. I nodded at her, and let her continue her shift thinking that I ran this empty, quiet, unneeded rape centre in a town where the abuse of women and girls never happens. Where me and my counsellors just sit around and play dominoes for want of something to do. It reminded me, after several years immersed in this type of work, that there were people out there who genuinely believed that the abuse and rape of women and girls was a rare occurrence in the world. Instead of being rare, male violence against women is actually very common. 30-50% of women have been victims of domestic violence by male partners and ex partners (CSEW, 2017) and 1 in 4 girls will be sexually abused in the UK before the age of 12 (NSPCC, 2017). 1 in 5 women will be raped or experience an attempted rape and 1 in 3 women will be subjected to physical sexual violence in her lifespan according to the CDC (2015). This week, the UN and ONS released data stating that 97% of 1000 women have been harassed. Further, 3 women per week were killed by men in the UK in 2019, representing a 14-year high. 66% of those women were killed by their partners and exes in their own homes, with others being killed by male family members, acquaintances, and strangers (Femicide Census, 2020). Every year, millions of women and girls are trafficked across the world for sex and estimates suggest that between 60 and 100 million women are missing from the global population due to sex-selective abortion, female infanticide and deliberate neglect of female newborn babies (Watts and Zimmerman, 2002). In my own study which will be published this summer, we collected data about women’s experiences of male violence from 4636 women and found using a new methodology that 78% of women were sexually assaulted at least once in childhood, and 46% of all women were sexually assaulted more than 3 times. 92% of women reported that they were catcalled in the street in childhood by men. Only 6% of the women had ever reported any crimes committed against them in childhood to the police. In adulthood, out of 4636 women, 83% reported that they had been sexually assaulted with 52% of women reporting that they had been sexually assaulted more than 3 times. The reality is that in studies and meta-analyses across the world, violence committed against women and girls by men is actually very common. And what about belief that women and girls are asking for it? Research has now spanned several decades (from as far back as the 1960s) to explore why we are so likely to believe in rape myths such as that women and girls ‘ask for it’. Back in the 1960s, around 50% of the public believed that women and girls ask to be raped by the way they act or the way they dress. But have we really made any progress? In 2017, The Fawcett Society surveyed over 8000 people in the British public and found that 34% of women and 36% of men believed that women are always partially or totally to blame for rape. My own research found that victim blaming of women and girls depends on the way we perceive the woman or girl, and on the type of offence they were subjected to. There were certain types of offences against women and girls which caused high levels of victim blaming, for example, when it came to questions where I asked men and women about ‘asking for it’, 58% of the general public sample assigned at least some blame to the woman. The third harmful belief that needs total transformation is that women and girls should do more to protect themselves from male violence. This might be the one that annoys me the most, especially as entire industries have popped up to exploit this belief. Now we have anti-rape knickers, anti-rape trousers and anti-rape bras (I cannot explain to you how those work, I’ve been trying to figure it out, but I got nowhere). There are even anti-rape jewellery companies now, who have essentially designed and sold little rings with a blade that pops out in case women are attacked by men, and anti-rape necklaces with a blade that pops out, and I’m pretty sure they are illegal. Add that to the rape self-defence classes and the rape alarms, pepper spray and relentless advice to women and girls not to use the tube, use headphones, wear their hair in a ponytail, use taxis, walk home alone, jog in the park, walk in the dark, eat, sleep or breathe without protecting themselves from male violence – and we have a real culture of placing the responsibility on women and girls instead of on male offenders. In my own study, 80% of participants assigned blame to the women who had been subjected to male violence where I described the woman as unable to say no or trapped in a situation or assault that she could not escape. I included offences against women which used manipulation, blackmail and intimidation. These features appear to have elicited high levels of blame from the participant group with over 75% of items resulting in high victim blaming of women. The issue appears to be about the woman’s agency and lack of power in the sexual offence, which increased the amount she was blamed; because she did not ‘assert herself’ or stop the offences, she was blamed by the participants. The belief here presents many problems, and puts us on a pathway to individualising male violence, not into the individual offender, but into the individual woman or girl. Instead of stopping offenders from abusing, oppressing, assaulting and murdering women and girls, we are giving strong public messages that women and girls should make changes to their lives, appearances, experiences and social lives in order to avoid men who want to hurt them. In 2017, I interviewed a woman who had been raped multiple times. She told me that she wished people talked about the rape of women in the same way they talked about terrorism. I asked her what she meant, and she told me that when women are raped, they condemn the woman, but when terrorists commit acts of violence, they condemn the terrorist. I thought about that conversation for months. I couldn’t get it out of my head. She was right. When innocent women are targeted and attacked by violent offenders, we tell women ‘don’t go there, don’t do that, don’t put yourself at risk’. But when innocent people are targeted by a terrorist attack, we make clear, public statements that our lives will not change, we will not live in fear, we will not change our behaviours or characters, and that we will challenge, condemn and convict terrorist offenders. There is a clear difference. It often makes me wonder why any woman would want to live in a world like this. A world in which male violence is seen as so acceptable and so normalised that they should have to walk down the street with their keys poking between their fingers or pretending to be on the phone to try to protect themselves from male violence. A world in which women and girls are chatted up by men and boys, and no matter how many times she says no, it is taken as ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’. A world in which women and girls have learned that the only way to stop a man or boy harassing them is to say they have a boyfriend, because the fact that she is already owned by another male is the only thing that might protect her from another violent male. Think about the state of that world for our women and girls. We need urgent transformation. We need urgent change. As if we needed more bad news, what about the fourth harmful belief – that women and girls exaggerate or lie about abuse and violence committed against them? Similar to some of the other beliefs about women and girls, the belief that they lie about being subjected to male violence is a tale as old as time. As old in fact, as The Bible. There are several examples of women being positioned as lying about rape in The Bible, but two clear examples include a story of a woman who lies about being raped by a male servant who is then punished for crimes he never committed, as a warning to women that they will be held responsible for the harm of men who they lie about. The second example comes from the Old Testament, which suggested that women who are raped outside of city walls should be punished for leaving the city walls, and women who are raped inside of city walls should be punished for lying about it, as the argument is that if they were truly raped inside of city walls, everyone would have heard her screaming for help and would have rescued her. Whilst these examples come from texts that are hundreds, maybe thousands of years old, not much has really changed here in 2021. There is still a strong belief that women lie about being raped and abused by men, with research showing that 38% of soap storylines about rape depict a woman lying about being raped (APA, 2007). The media has a huge role to play in this. Despite false rape allegations being very rare (around 2% according to Lonsway et al., 2007), the media tends to overreport on cases where there are accusations of false rape allegations and this influences the public to believe that women and girls often lie about being raped. In 1980, Burt found that half of men and women from a community sample believed that women lie about being raped and almost thirty years later, Kahlor and Morrison (2007) found that participants believed that an average of 19% of sexual assault and rape reports by women were false. The final harmful belief that needs urgent change, is that we have made progress. Professionals, academics and members of the public say this to me frequently. They tell me how much better it is for women and girls now, and that women and girls are believed, respected and supported when they report male violence. I have lost count of the times I have been told, “It’s not like that anymore!” when I have been criticising our national and international responses to the abuse and oppression of women and girls. It’s as if we decided that if we tell ourselves enough times that things are better, our practice has improved and that we’ve made huge progress, it will become true. But it isn’t becoming true at all. Women and girls are still faced with serious barriers to justice around the world. Whether it’s the rape clause in tax credits, the police being able to mine your mobile phone data and social media accounts when you report abuse, the lowest conviction rate for rape the UK has ever seen, the messages from police telling women and girls that they should keep themselves safer or the victim blaming of little girls who have been trafficked, raped and drugged by gangs of men – where is the progress? Research has shown that when women and girls do report their abuses and rapes to the police, over 73% of them blame themselves after being questioned (Campbell et al., 2009). When women and girls tell their families that they have been abused by men, 78% of them experience their loved ones turning against them (Reyea and Ullman, 2015). The reporting rate of rape and sexual violence reduces every year according to the Crime Survey England and Wales. This final point brings me to what I’ve been doing for many years now, attempting to cause cultural, systemic and psychological change in our professional and public spheres. I’m just like thousands of other women; I’ve had enough of this. I have worked in the criminal justice system, rape centres, domestic abuse support, child sexual exploitation and anti-human trafficking and these portrayals of women and girls need to be changed urgently. My work, along with the work of many other dedicated activists, female leaders and academics have consistently and robustly challenged victim blaming, rape myths and misogyny in our social systems. But transformation isn’t easy. It is especially difficult, when people do not see the need for change, or believe that what they are doing is righteous or justified. I have worked with organisations who blame girls for being raped, and tell me that the girls brought it on themselves, and need ‘a good shock to the system’. I have worked with police sergeants who have told me that 12 year old rape and trafficking victims are ‘easy’ and ‘slags’. I have worked with youth hostel managers who have told me that when girls lie about their age to get social media accounts, they deserve to be raped. I have dealt with cover up after cover up. I have challenged professionals who thought that showing videos of girls being raped to teenage girls would make them ‘protect themselves from sexual exploitation’. I have worked with police teams who tell women that it will be their fault if their rapist attacks another woman, if they do not give good evidence in court for prosecution. I have worked with professionals who believe that women who have been abused and raped should not be allowed to have their own children. Transformation is hard work. It requires critical reflection, humility, an examination of your own biases and of the cultures and systems you exist within. It means that you have to work through your own stuff – and work out how much of it you are projecting on to others. Sometimes, it means acknowledging that you have worked or lived in a way which has harmed women and girls in profound ways, and that you need to do something to take responsibility for that. The same is true of systems. It means that organisations, governments, authorities, charities and companies must examine their own role in the way they have portrayed and treated women and girls when they have been subjected to male violence. They must explore their own strategies, policies, staff training, measurement tools, organisational cultures and belief systems. I have been challenging some of the most powerful structures in our country for years about this, and it causes a range of responses. One of the first things I had to do to be able to effectively challenge is resign from my job, something I never expected to have to do. As soon as I started to challenge the wrongdoing and unethical treatment of women and girls, people came after my job and started to write to my employers. I was very lucky that my employer stood by me, but I knew from that day on, that I had to go it alone. I figured that they couldn’t come after my job, if I was self-employed. Who would give me the P45? With that out of the way, I could concentrate on working with willing (and unwilling) professionals and organisations to explore their practice, challenge their beliefs about women and girls and encourage them to reframe everything they do. No small ask. To finish this blog, I want to tell you two more stories. One of them highlights how resistant we are to changing the way we think and talk about women and girls subjected to male violence, and the next shows how capable of transformation we really are, when we just take a step back and think. In 2018, I had been working on a contract for 18 months with an authority who had approached me to retrain and rewrite their materials about the sexual abuse and exploitation of girls in the UK. My job was to rewrite and then deliver the materials to 600 professionals who worked every day with girls who were sexually abused, trafficked and exploited. I had been doing this every month for 18 months when one of my professional students approached me. “Have you seen the email that went around?” He sort of stumbled over his words in a lowered voice and looked over his shoulder. I hadn’t seen an email. “They’ve sent an email out to everyone saying to ignore your training and materials, because they are causing too much challenge.” I was shocked. We had spent months causing serious organisational change, which had included empowering hundreds of social workers to challenge the victim blaming and abuse of girls they were working with. “They said that too many of us were challenging decisions about the girls, and that everyone kept citing your work and your training. They have sent an email to say that we are to ignore everything we learn today, and that they are going to be stopping your training.” He was right, and that is exactly what they did. They never replied to my calls or emails to explain why they had chosen to stop systemic change, and to tell their professionals to ignore their new skills and knowledge. The woman I had worked closely with at the authority resigned soon after, and told me that she couldn’t continue to work there knowing what they had done. The issue here was that the authority had not planned for the way successful systemic change causes complete cultural change – and when they had got exactly what they had asked for, they were not ready for hundreds of educated, critical thinkers making better decisions and challenging poor practice. Instead of empowering transformation, they shut it down. By contrast, while I was writing this blog, a woman from an organisation I worked with recently called me. She called for a catch up and as we were finishing the conversation, she rushed to add something. “By the way, the team you worked with on their misogyny towards the girls they are working with went away from your sessions and realised that they were wrong. They apologised to all of the girls and took responsibility.” I was gobsmacked. This team had been controlling what girls wore, and telling them that wearing vest tops, shorts or skirts was ‘asking for it’ and ‘dressing inappropriately’. I challenged them and they were not at all comfortable with needing to change. They were certainly not ready for change. One of them even made a comment that they would prefer the advice of a male academic than me. To hear that they had not only apologised to the girls but had removed all clothing rules and empowered the girls to wear whatever they wanted, was such a sweet shock – and a reminder that transformation is possible, and it is within our reach. So, what can we all do to cause transformation? Be braver. Think critically about the world around us, and why so many of our systems seek to blame women. Acknowledge the reality of male violence against women, and talk about it. Challenge the messages and beliefs which place responsibility on women and girls for the violence of men who harm them. Hold systems to account, and challenge them to be better. Believe women, support women and stand up for their rights. Transformation is possible – but more importantly, it is absolutely vital.

I have noticed an alarming pattern recently. More and more professionals, speakers and influencers are latching on to the theory that childhood trauma is the reason that men commit acts of violence such as domestic abuse, sexual abuse and rape. This is not a new phenomenon. We have been excusing male violence for millennia. We have normalised it, minimised it; we’ve even glorified it in film, literature and song. Male violence has been smothered in righteousness, justice and honour. Men killing each other, colonising countries, going to war with each other, raping and abusing women and children, and enslaving entire populations, is a huge part of our global history. What I am noticing now, is the academic movement towards explaining or excusing male violence (especially towards women and children) by arguing that the offender had a difficult or traumatic childhood. In this blog, I am going to set out the key arguments as to why this is false, and why this is happening. My main arguments will be that: 1. Childhood trauma does not cause adult offending 2. Childhood trauma is used differently against men and women 3 . ACEs frameworks have been debunked and should not be used to explain male violence offending 4. This is all another elaborate excuse to sympathise with male abusers and force women to take responsibility for men’s responses and actions Okay. Are we sitting comfortably? If so, let’s begin. Childhood trauma does not cause adult offending This has to be the most obvious counter argument to those who claim that men commit violent acts because of their terrible childhoods. Childhood trauma does not cause adult offending at all. Arguably, if it did, the majority of all adult violent offenders would be women. Globally, girls are subjected to much more childhood trauma than boys are. This includes forced marriage, FGM, forced pregnancies, abortions, rape, corrective rape, sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, sex trafficking and exploitation to name but a few of the misogynistic oppressions of girls. If childhood trauma really does cause violent offending in later life, why, according to the FBI (2019) are 97% of all violent offenders male? And why, according to the MOJ, are 96% of all sexual abusers and 99% of all murderers male? Where are all the angry, wronged, misunderstood female victims-turned-murderers and abusers? They seem to be missing. Something just doesn’t stack up, does it? More broadly, there is no evidence that being abused in childhood means that you will go on to abuse others in adulthood. What is interesting about this, is that some studies that have tried to explore this have found that less than 1% of victims of abuse go on to abuse others, but when we ask men in prison why they abuse others, over 55% of them say it was because they were abused as children (MOJ, 2014). This is particularly true for domestic abuse perpetrators, who have a tendency to report that they were abused in childhood or witnessed domestic abuse of their mothers. Whilst I am not necessarily disputing this, and I believe that loads (if not all) of those men were subjected to abuse in childhood, I do not accept it as a reason for why they made a choice in free will to then go on to abuse another human (statistically, a woman or girl). The fact that they were abused in childhood, or had other serious traumas to cope with, is not a reason or explanation for their crimes against women and girls. The moment you start introducing their childhood as a reason, you completely diminish their capacity, choice and agency – which the majority of these offenders have in abundance. You know how to tell that they are making free choices to abuse women and girls, and that their childhood has nothing to do with it? Because they don’t rape, abuse, traffic and control men. They know not to lash out at their boss. They don’t abuse their brothers. They don’t rape their best mate at the pub. They don’t groom their colleague. They don’t threaten to kill their Dad. They deliberately abuse and control women and girls. It’s a choice. It’s always a choice. It’s a conscious decision to bully and abuse someone specific, isn’t it? The same men who tell their wives and girlfriends that they ‘can’t help it’ and ‘just lose it’ and ‘see red’, sure seem able to keep their jobs and friendships, where everyone thinks butter wouldn’t melt. Why is this important? Because it means that the same men claiming they have no control actually have immense control over when they offend and who against. Childhood trauma is used differently against men and women This is important. Childhood trauma is used to excuse men and incriminate women. Women reading this who have ever tried to report to the police or have ended up in family court will know exactly what I’m talking about. Men use childhood trauma to excuse, minimise, frame and contextualise their abusive behaviours. Their lawyers and police officers explain that he can’t help it, because of the way he was brought up. That he’s traumatised and needs help for his childhood traumas. That he’s struggling and needs understanding and time. Women will tell you, when their childhood traumas are brought up in an official context, it is not for a good reason. It’s not to excuse them or reframe them as in need of forgiveness or mercy. Fuck, no. Women know that their childhood is brought up for one reason, and one reason only: To frame them as mentally unstable. Childhood traumas are the ultimate get out of jail free card for men, and are a one way ticket to a psychiatric evaluation and a family assessment for women. You see, women’s childhood trauma is used to beat them with, and men’s childhood trauma is used to excuse them and exonerate them. This is arguably linked to the hypermisogynistic society we inhabit, which ignores and trivialises women’s suffering and traumas, and reframes it all as personality disorders and hysteria. Lots of academic work has been conducted to explore topics related to this. One study from 2018 showed that when women are having cardiac symptoms in emergency departments, they are left on average 4 hours longer without treatment or examination than men with the exact same symptoms. The researchers interviewed doctors and concluded that it was because even the most skilled doctors working in emergency departments were influenced by misogynistic myths that women over exaggerate their pain and physical symptoms. This leads to men’s suffering and pain being taken much more seriously than that of women, and leads to many more women dying of heart attacks than men. This effect simply spreads out across many different experiences of womanhood, and includes the way we position women’s childhood traumas as exaggerated attention seeking and mental health issues, whereas men’s childhood traumas are validated and considered to be impacting their behaviour and decision making. ACEs frameworks have been debunked and should not be used to explain male violence I have written blogs and delivered several talks, YouTube videos and webinars about the ACEs framework being made up bullshit so I will save you from reading it again. If you have no idea what ACEs are, watch this video and then come back: https://youtu.be/yE-pncpeGw4 Okay, so for those of you who know that ACEs were a very simple set of questions used for population level epidemiology research, that the original authors have literally begged people to stop using in trauma and mental health… I’ve noticed that some professionals, speakers and academics have started to talk publicly about certain so-called ‘ACE scores’ causing men to become domestic violence perpetrators, rapists and even paedophiles. This worries me greatly, not least because the ACE framework has no validity in the first place, but because there is an undercurrent there of excusing or explaining male violence using childhood adversity. We have to be absolutely clear on this, as psychologists, social workers, prison officers, police officers, policy makers and academics: Childhood trauma and adverse life experiences do not cause you to commit rape and abuse. Millions of people who have devastating childhoods will never harm anyone as long as they live. There is no causal relationship between childhood trauma, ACEs and offending (no matter how hard the DFE and Department for Health try to make daft cartoons about this made up relationship). We talk so much about being ‘trauma-informed’ and ‘strengths-based’ and believing in ‘resilience’ and ‘capacity for change’. And yet, here we are being encouraged to simply blame the childhoods of violent male offenders who could seemingly keep their violence to themselves at all other times except for when raping their girlfriend, or abusing their child. We are giving them yet another excuse. We will never cause social change if we just keep piling up excuses for male violence at the feet of violent men. This is all another elaborate excuse to sympathise with male abusers and force women to take responsibility for men’s responses and actions. Where this ultimately leads us, is back to blaming women and girls for the violence of men. If every time a man rapes or abuses or kills a woman or girl, we look back to his childhood and then suggest that he committed those crimes because of how awful his childhood was, we remove his agency and culpability. What follows, is an expectation on women and girls to help, support and understand these ‘troubled’ men, and not to hold them responsible for their own violent choices and actions. Instead of prosecuting them, holding them accountable and speaking out about male violence, our society shrinks back to sympathising with and supporting male violence as if it is the natural way of the world, that men cannot help themselves. Their victims (mainly women and girls) are then framed as responsible not only for male violence, but for helping men to be better men. The narratives around this are already pretty embedded, and women and girls often feel a sense of duty to ‘help’ violent and abusive men to be better, or get help. Even women escaping serious danger from violent exes and family members often feel guilty for not ‘helping them enough’. I’ve worked with hundreds of women who, when they finally leave abusive and violent men, are told by those men that they ‘need help’ and ‘will seek counselling’ and ‘need their support’. Women are conditioned to believe that this is true, and that their role is to selflessly support a violent man whilst he figures out the most basic tenet of a mutual relationship: don’t hurt others. Men often position themselves in the patriarchy as the ones with the agency, the brains, the power, the strength, the money, the opportunities, the ideas and the choices. And yet, when it comes to their offending against women and girls, we infantilise them as if they are small, malleable 2 year olds who watched a cartoon and then copied it with no understanding of context or content. When will we finally stop listening to men’s excuses about their violence? “I was stressed I was jealous I was abused as a child I had a traumatic life I was made redundant I was tired I was depressed” So? That doesn’t give them a licence to commit violent crimes, and pretend they had no agency or choice. We need to stop discussing their childhoods and their past traumas as reasons or contributing factors in their violent crimes. Every single time male offenders choose to rape, abuse or murder, they make an active and considered decision, that you cannot blame on their childhood.

In June 2021, ITV Loose Women ran a poll which caused significant debate and discussion: Should schoolgirls as young as four years old wear ‘modesty shorts’ under their skirts and school dresses to ‘protect’ them? Feelings were mixed, with the poll resulting in shifting outcomes of between 50-60% of respondents in agreement. I voted ‘no’ in the poll, and want to outline my reasons for disagreeing with the idea that little girls (or teen girls) should be wearing shorts under their skirts or dresses to ‘protect them’. My main reasons for this are as follows: 1. This makes little girls responsible for male violence, harassment and assault 2. This encourages the conservative view that girls should cover up if they don’t want to be harassed or assaulted 3. What happens if they don’t wear the modesty shorts? 4. Boys need to be held responsible for their behaviours, girls should not have to wear extra layers of clothing to protect them from misogyny and abuse This makes little girls responsible for male violence, harassment and assault The most pressing argument for me is the way that this idea will position girls as responsible for male violence. Research from NSPCC in 2016, Barnardo’s in 2014 and the Women Equalities Committee in 2016 have repeatedly demonstrated that little girls are regularly sexually harassed and assaulted at school by boys. This includes lifting up their skirts, pulling down their skirts and underwear, touching them inappropriately, pinging their bra straps, pushing them over, calling them sexist slurs, coercing them to send or receive nudes and harassing them about their bodies and relationships. What this speaks to, is a much larger issue of misogyny and male violence which is perpetrated and accepted from a very early age (often, this begins in primary schools). Reports show that teachers often ignore the minimise boys’ behaviours and call it ‘banter’ or ‘boys being typical boys’. Previously, this has led to schools banning school skirts and even banning girls from showing their collarbones – due to their bodies not just ‘distracting the boys from their education’ – but also distracting male teaching staff. I wrote about this in my book ‘Why Women are Blamed for Everything’, and I’ll repeat my message: If male staff members have the entitlement and confidence to report that they are distracted by little girls bodies and clothing, sack them immediately. That is not a normal way to look at children. Ever. Encouraging or asking infant girls to wear shorts under their skirts is just banning skirts by stealth. Rather than banning the skirts or dresses, schools simply suggest that girls should be wearing shorts under their clothing to protect them. This has actually been happening for over a decade in UK schools. I remember talking to teen girls about it about 8-10 years ago, and they all had the same reason for wearing the shorts: to protect them from the boys. The schools didn’t encourage it, but the girls had felt so endangered by boys assaults and harassment that they had not only started wearing shorts but had created a culture in which girls who didn’t wear shorts were shamed as sluts who wanted to have their skirts lifted. More on that later. Ultimately, all of this means that the shorts are a symbol of victim blaming and female responsibility for male abuse and offending. Girls are never responsible for the assaults, abuse and harassment of boys and men – and yet, here we are, advising girls to cover up. This encourages the conservative view that girls should cover up if they don’t want to be harassed or assaulted The conservative view of women is that they should be modest, submissive, obedient and should only show themselves to their male partner. Anything else is ‘asking for it’. It might seem like ‘common sense’ to ask the girls to wear shorts, but all it is really reinforcing is that to protect yourself as a girl, you should be covering your body and wearing multiple layers. This has the added effect of teaching very young girls and boys that girls who value themselves and want to protect themselves will wear the shorts, and the girls who don’t (or can’t) must be asking for it. Be wary of any initiative which encourages girls to change their appearance, behaviour or lifestyle to ‘protect’ themselves from male violence (which you will notice, is never explicitly mentioned). What happens if they don’t wear the modesty shorts? So the next stage of this misogynistic idea, is what happens when a girl can’t or won’t wear the shorts? What happens if she is sexually assaulted by a boy? Further, what happens when the sexual harassment and assaults continue despite the shorts? Let’s work through these issues one by one. Will a girl who does not or cannot wear the shorts be seen as a slut? Asking for it? Wanting the attention? Not protecting herself enough? Taking risks? To blame for anything that boys do to her? “You should have been wearing your shorts,” they might say. ‘They’ being the teachers, parents, police or maybe even a defence barrister in a trial. And what happens when inevitably, the shorts solve precisely fuck all? What happens when boys continue to sexually harass and assault girls at schools, even with their magical protective shorts on? What then? Overalls? Turtlenecks? Sleeping bags? It’s as if people deliberately ignore the reality that the majority of all sexual assaults and rapes are committed against women and girls wearing their everyday clothes (jeans, jumpers, coats, pyjamas, sportswear). Clothing doesn’t cause sexual harassment, assaults and rapes of girls. It never has and it never will. Women are abused and assaulted even when fully covered. Babies are assaulted and abused. The reason for male violence has absolutely nothing to do with clothing, clothing has only ever been an excuse, perpetuated by misogynists and bystanders. So if clothing isn’t the cause, and the shorts are not the solution, what happens when the abuse and harassment of girls continues? Where will the blame shift next and why does it never shift to the perpetrators? Boys need to be held responsible for their behaviours, girls should not have to wear extra layers of clothing to protect them from misogyny and abuse The answer to the shorts debacle is to stop ignoring male violence towards girls in education settings, to stop allowing misogynistic ideals into our schools, colleges and universities and for everyone to grow a backbone and stand up for girls. They wouldn’t need to wear shorts if they weren’t going to school in an environment of sexualisation, objectification and hatred of girls. This issue has been going on for over a decade (and broadly, much, much longer) and we have made zero progress. Every time feminists and women speak out about this, it’s met with ridicule and silence. The misogyny and objectification of women has slowly seeped into every single part of women and girls lives, younger and younger, bit by bit, until now we are having national debates and polls about whether four year old girls should be wearing ‘modesty shorts’ to school. In all of those years, no one has been able to do anything significant about male violence, or boys attitudes towards girls. Schools have not taken a strong position on misogyny and have instead watched as sexual assaults and rapes on school and university campuses have increased year on year. These girls are the women of our future. They are our future thinkers, leaders, scientists, writers, inventors, sports stars, carers and mothers. Is this what we want to teach them? Is this really our message? ‘Cover up Dear, or you’ll get sexually assaulted by the boys at school.’ Really? About the author: Dr Jessica Taylor Dr Jessica Taylor (PhD, FRSA) is a Chartered Psychologist specialising in the victim blaming of women subjected to male violence and the pathologisation of women's mental health. She is the Director of VictimFocus, an international consultancy and research organisation dedicated to changing systemic victim blaming and misogyny in government, policing, law, medicine and social care services. She is the Sunday Times Best Selling Author of 'Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women's Trauma Against Them' and 'Why Women are Blamed For Everything.

Everyone who works with women who have been subjected to domestic abuse, or children who have been subjected to sexual abuse, will know how volatile, unpredictable and misogynistic our family court system can be. I am going to use this space to explore some of the most common narratives and problems that arise for women and girls in the family courts, and I encourage all professionals working in this field to consider what will be presented here. It won’t be comfortable reading, and I fully expect people to try to tell me that these cases aren’t real, and this isn’t happening. Each year, thousands of women write to me about their terrifying experiences of the family court system. Despite every woman being an individual, and residing everywhere from Essex to Sydney, the story is the same. And if I have learned anything from working with and for women in need in the last ten years, it’s to watch out for patterns, especially when they span countries, languages and cultures. As it happens, the way women and girls are pathologised in the family court systems is one of those patterns, and one that worries me greatly. I am, thankfully, not the only person to notice this or to be fighting against this, and recently the UK family court system has been lobbied to commit to reform and exploration of its practices. Campaigns by feminist activists such as #thecourtsaid have repeatedly highlighted the dangerous and abusive decisions of the family courts. In this blog, I will highlight the most common issues that women are facing and how they are used to create an adversarial, misogynistic system that disbelieves, gaslights and destroys women step by step. Believe me when I say that this is starting to look like a blueprint. I have been talking with women from around the world recently, and their cases are almost identical. The tactics and language used are the same. The injustices are the same and the risks to children are the same. I hope by writing this, that more women will become aware of how common this is, and process the trauma, guilt and blame of these distressing court cases. Women who report abuse are quickly reframed as crazy, jealous exes Every single report I have read so far has either directly or indirectly described mum as emotionally unstable, jealous of new partners, delusional or has issues with the ex that they seem to be taking out by manipulating the court process or by coaching their children. Reports seem to read that when women start new relationships after divorce or relationship breakdown, they are unstable and promiscuous, but when the male ex starts a new relationship, it’s taken as evidence that he is stable and settled down. Often, women face an assumption that they are in the family court system because they are angry that their abusive ex has a new partner. Every woman I’ve spoken with so far has barely even mentioned the new partner, and indeed in some cases, I couldn’t even tell you if there was one. And yet, the way they are being portrayed is that they can’t let go of their ex, and that the court case is a waste of everyone’s time, because she cannot accept the end of the relationship. What is interesting about this, is that in all of the cases I have discussed this year with women, the woman actually ended the relationship and left due to abuse. Some went to refuges, some went to family, some found other accommodation. All of them left because they realised they were being abused, or because their children disclosed sexual abuse. None of them want to be with their ex, but it’s amazing how credible male ex boyfriends and husbands seem to be, when they accuse the woman of being ‘jealous’ that he’s moved on. Mud sticks, and professionals around her soon begin to make comments or write reports which include these inaccurate assumptions. This is particularly dangerous where children have disclosed abuse, and then the family court hearings become more and more focused on mum’s ‘agenda’ and ‘motivation’ instead of what the children have said. No one seems to be taking young girls seriously when they disclose sexual abuse The way that young girls are being dismissed by professionals ranging from social workers to paediatricians is worrying me greatly, and is the motivation behind this blog post. The first thing that seems to happen is that the girl discloses randomly, during play or non-related conversation about something that a (usually) male family member has done to her. Language is usually infantile and mixed up. This is completely normal. The girl describes the abuse in a way that would be clear to any experienced professional that there is something seriously wrong. Examples include: ⁃ Daddy pokes me in my privates and my bum ⁃ Daddy checks my vagina all the time ⁃ Daddy takes pictures of my bum ⁃ I don’t like it when the yoghurt comes out of dad’s wee thing As you can see, these real examples clearly show that the child is not coached or influenced. Some children draw pictures of their abuse or of male genitals. Some children write stories or poems about abuse and rape. In addition to these clear signs of abuse, we also see girls with injuries and genital irritation such as scratches, marks, itching, soreness and spots. Even when this is happening, mothers are being told that it’s normal and that there is no need for tests or examinations. This completely ignores all of our evidence base in child sexual abuse, which clearly states that these disclosures plus any kind of physical symptoms in small children are clear signs of sexual abuse. So why are these signs and disclosures from girls being ignored in the family courts? Why are professionals suggesting that girls are making this up, or don’t know what they are talking about? Why are we so sure that she isn’t being abused, that we will continue contact with sexually abusive parents and ignore her disclosures? This is the opposite of all of our safeguarding evidence and policies. What is the point of having these policies and child safeguarding legislation if we then ignore it during hearings and investigations? Character assassination is par for the course; and no one seems to care Reports and hearings often become obsessed with the character assassination of the mother – and become less and less focussed on the well-being and disclosures of the children. This is something I’ve noticed more and more over the last few years, and now seems commonplace. Even where children have disclosed and reported to the police, the reports become about the fact that mum was abused as a child or is on benefits. It has absolutely nothing to do with the abuse of the children, any yet the mum of the children finds herself defending her life choices, childhood, personality and background whilst trying to get everyone to re-focus on the disclosures made by the children. When this happens, the hearings start to become an adversarial process about which parent is ‘telling the truth’, and which is ‘credible’ – rather than addressing the fact that a child has repeatedly described sexual abuse. There’s a lot of dodgy psychiatry and psychology going on, It concerns me how many women are diagnosed or labelled with disorders and psychiatric conditions after meeting a psychologist for 2 hours during an assessment. I have read several reports in which women have been labelled, accused and diagnosed after one short interview, whilst they were under severe stress and worrying about their child being abused. Despite this, these reports are taken seriously and can be used to make important decisions. As an example, one woman had reported that her child was disclosing abuse by dad, and so they were all assessed. On the psychometrics and assessment, the mum and dad scored the same, but mum was diagnosed and labelled, whereas dad received a glowing report. Interestingly, I noticed that on one subscale created to detect social desirable responding (where people ‘fake good’), the Dad (who was accused of sexually abusing children) scored much higher than the mum, but mum was accused of faking good with the psychologist and Dad was described as friendly and stable. It was as if the scales were being completely ignored whilst the psychologist wrote a biased report based purely on their own opinion. When this was challenged, mum was accused of being delusional and emotionally unstable. The more mum protested, the more it was used against her to ‘prove’ she was unstable. In short, mum was trapped. The more she criticised the report, the more she was pathologised using shitty psychology and psychiatry. This example seems to be common, and I’ve come across similar cases over and over again. It worries me how little time is used to ‘assess’ the family, and the kind of comments that seem to be acceptable. I’ve read some reports that are nothing short of libel, based on absolutely nothing and are difficult to get overturned or corrected. Conversely, I’ve read reports about Dad, whom the child has disclosed is sexually abusing them, in which they are described as nothing short of a saint among men. It’s very disconcerting reading the reports about a family, in which a fellow professional has written such a biased report, and the disclosures of the child have been almost completely dismissed. Further, judges have been found to make awful comments, including one who argued that a woman whose daughter had disclosed repeated sexual abuse by her dad, was accused over being overprotective of her daughter because she had historical miscarriages over a decade earlier. It raises the question of who regulates and manages these hearings and processes, and what rights do women have to challenge and change inaccurate, misogynistic and biased comments, judgments and reports. Parental alienation seems to be the trump card for abusive men Not just confined to the depths of MRA twitter and Facebook groups, parental alienation is now being used frequently in cases where children have disclosed abuse. Even in cases where children have clearly described sexual abuse by dad, the dad is able to argue that the mother is committed parental alienation by stopping the child from seeing him. This is extremely problematic, especially as most people would agree that if a child has disclosed sexual abuse, the safest thing we can do is keep the child away from the potential abuser to instantly reduce the risk to the child. However, I have now spoken to several women who have been threatened with action, or accused of parental alienation, for stating that they will not allow their children to have unsupervised contact with a parent who the child is saying, has sexually assaulted or raped them. Most of the women I spoke to were terrified of the accusation of parental alienation, and in cases where this had been used against mum, it often worked – and Dad was granted access even when the child was disclosing sexual assaults. It is clear that real parental alienation does happen in some cases – but choosing to stop contact when a child spontaneously discloses serious sexual abuse is surely common sense, and not an act of parental alienation. One woman I spoke to was threatened by a judge that if she didn’t support contact with her ex husband, (who had convictions for DV and the child was reporting had sexually abused her), that he would award full custody to Dad as a way to punish/control her. Sadly, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this, either. Something is seriously wrong with our system. Evidence is not being gathered correctly or quickly enough when children are at risk from abuse As if there were not enough issues already, one of the things that has really started to worry me over the last few years is how long children are being left after a series of serious disclosures without any interviews, examinations or referrals. We already know that on average, children disclose 7 times before someone takes it seriously (according to an NSPCC, 2014 study). However, I keep coming across cases in which children have disclosed sexual abuse and have even told adults that their genitals hurt – and no one has seen them for weeks, sometimes over a month. Further than that, some children who disclose recent rape or sexual abuse have not been referred for tests or examination for several weeks, sometimes as long as two months, by which time all DNA evidence would be gone, and some injuries would arguably have healed. This is counter to all of our knowledge and practice wisdom in child sexual abuse, and yet, it seems common when it comes to family court cases. I have also come across poor practice in which children have disclosed serious sexual abuse, and the way we have dealt with it is to send uniformed officers into their houses, or taken children to police station evidence suites where the child has instantly stopped talking and has refused to speak about anything. Rather than us acknowledging that our process has scared the child, we have then suggested that the child has not been abused or there is ‘no evidence’. Even where parents have attempted to record their child’s disclosures in the moment, evidence is being ignored. Professionals are telling mums that they cannot do anything to protect children as young as 3 years old unless the child gives a full and specific disclosure of the sexual offences, which is also incorrect and does not align with safeguarding practice. Decades of research evidence is being totally ignored What this all amounts to, is that thousands of papers, reports and theories are being actively ignored in cases where women and girls disclose abuse. Whether it’s evidence and theories about how to support children to disclose, or evidence based lists of symptoms and signs of sexual abuse – so much is being ignored. Research clearly gives us lists of things to look out for in children who might be being sexually abused, and despite many of these signs being present in these cases, children are being ignored. Research also defines the different ways in which small children attempt to disclose abuse that they don’t understand, which ranges from verbal disclosures through to behavioural disclosures – and yet I have never read a report which includes this evidence base. Research on offenders seems to be being ignored too. Men with previous convictions for sexual abuse or accessing child sexual abuse imagery have been given unsupervised access to children because professionals have argued that his own children are not at risk. An example of this from around 2015 includes a man who had several convictions for sexual abuse of children online, and accessing child abuse imagery. A social worker approached me for advice because she was so concerned about his three children. Safeguarding concerns had been raised about the three small children, the youngest of which was 2 years old. Dad was known to download and hoard sexually abusive images of infants. It baffled the social worker that the judge had argued that Dad was not a risk to his own children, but only to children on the Internet! The judge had suggested that the children have locks on their bedroom doors and be given education about keeping themselves safe. Dad was given unsupervised access to the children. I do think, having written this story out, that you need literally zero knowledge of safeguarding or sex offender research to know that this was a stupid decision which put the children at significant risk of sexual offences. What is the point of academics, students. authorities and professionals conducting decades of research if we ignore all of it in real world application? Final thoughts I’m sorry that this blog is so negative and so concerning. I acknowledge that many professionals will feel wholly uncomfortable with such a critical view of family court systems around the world. It is not to say that all cases are like the ones discussed here, but it is my opinion that even one case this poor is a failure to protect children from abuse. One case is too many cases. It is not acceptable for anyone to respond to this blog by suggesting that these cases are worst case scenarios, rare and therefore irrelevant. I am not hugely involved in this field (I am not a caseholder, I am not a lawyer, I am not a social worker), and yet I can give hundreds of real examples of this kind of practice towards women and girls in the family courts. I wrote this blog for one main reason: Women need to know that their case was not a one-off. They need to know that they are not to blame, and that they are one of thousands of women who have been labelled and gaslit in the family court system. So many women contact me to talk about their cases and experiences, and they have no idea that this happens to other women, too. We need to raise awareness of the way women and girls are being treated – and then we need to work together to reform the family courts. About the author: Dr Jessica Taylor Dr Jessica Taylor (PhD, FRSA) is a Chartered Psychologist specialising in the victim blaming of women subjected to male violence and the pathologisation of women's mental health. She is the Director of VictimFocus, an international consultancy and research organisation dedicated to changing systemic victim blaming and misogyny in government, policing, law, medicine and social care services. She is the Sunday Times Best Selling Author of 'Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women's Trauma Against Them' and 'Why Women are Blamed For Everything.

One of the biggest lies we’ve ever been fed is that women and girls have an innate vulnerability which causes sex offenders, domestic violence offenders and child abusers to spot them and target them. I write this blog to dispel this powerful myth, and to reassure millions of women and girls that it wasn’t their ‘vulnerability’ which led to them being beaten up, abused, raped or harmed. I want to make this argument in six points: The vulnerability myth is based on some very old, and very shit science We like to deny our own vulnerability by calling other people ‘vulnerable’ We teach children that only ‘vulnerable’ kids get abused and harmed We have an oversimplified understanding of abusers and offenders We don’t know how to tackle the global epidemic of male violence Vulnerability does not lead to other humans committing crime The message which I hope to convey is that ‘vulnerability’ is not the cause or the source of the abuse that women and girls are subjected to. Further, we have leant on this explanation so heavily that services, programmes, interventions and policies are based upon it, despite it being incorrect. The vulnerability myth is based on some very old, and very shit science Calling women and girls ‘vulnerable’ is so commonplace now, you might not even notice it. You might not notice that when a woman or girl is abused, someone will point out her ‘vulnerabilities’. You might not notice that the conversation often becomes about her background, her personality, her childhood or her understanding. The truth is that this process of seeking and assessing ‘vulnerabilities’ of women and girls who have been abused and harmed is deeply embedded into social care, psychology, mental health, counselling, policing, legislation, education, law and justice. To understand how we got to a place where we pick apart the woman or girl and lay out her ‘vulnerabilities’ as reasons for being raped, trafficked, abused or traumatised – we have to look at some of the old theories which have continued to influence our thinking. One such theory is almost 80 years old, and comes from positivist victimology. Key theorists in victimology and criminology as far back as 1948 argued that only certain types of people became victims of crime and often brought it upon themselves. Hans Von Hentig wrote in Time Magazine (1948): ‘Certain characteristics of law-abiding citizens arouse a counter reaction in the criminal. The inexperienced businessman, for example, invites embezzlement; the nagging wife is flirting with murder; the alcoholic is a natural for robbery. Thus, the victim becomes the tempter.’ As you can see from this example, it is theorised that victims ‘tempt’ and ‘arouse’ criminals to commit crimes by being vulnerable, inexperienced – or… a woman. Spoiler alert: There is a lot of misogyny in vulnerability theories and research. Later victimology theorists such as Benjamin Mendelsohn and Stephen Schafer also suggested that victims caused crime by being weak, vulnerable, female, old, disabled or young. All three theorists suggested that victims precipitate crime by provoking offenders. Whilst this sounds somewhat outdated, these perspectives are alive and well. Many theories within psychology and criminology still rely on the assumption that women subjected to sexual and domestic violence either brought the offence on themselves, should have done something to protect themselves, should have behaved in a different way or that their vulnerabilities led to the offender targeting and attacking them. Victim precipitation theory and research suggests that victims precipitate a crime by their behaviour, vulnerability, character or even the way they walk. This research is still ongoing, and only recently I spoke to an academic who was conducting research into which women were ‘vulnerable’ to being raped by their gait and style of walking. The argument goes that if a woman or girl walks in a way which is not confident or assertive, she gives off some sort of signal to offenders that she is vulnerable and would therefore be a good target for rape or abuse. Walking isn’t the only thing which academics have suggested to be a vulnerability in women and girls – everything from their appearance to their childhood has been explored in the literature for decades. There are thousands of articles and studies which seek to name the ‘vulnerability factors’ of women and girls, with the aim of reducing them by changing something about that woman or girl. Interestingly, the same cannot be said for men who are raped and abused, they are not generally discussed as if they were ‘vulnerable’ to offenders or ‘giving off signals’ to be raped or abused. It’s as if we see rape as a violent crime when committed against men, but as natural process of taking of an opportunity of a weak person, when rape is committed against women. The reason that I reject this research and these theories entirely is simple: none of it is true, and if you look hard enough for correlations, you’ll find them no matter what they are. If I looked hard enough, I bet I could find a correlation between which vegetables women eat and being subjected to violence or abuse by men. The reality is that violence against women and girls is so common, that you can often find correlations that don’t really exist, purely based on how common one of the variables is. I, and thousands of other professionals, have been working with abused women and girls for decades. Those of us who have done these jobs know that we come across women and girls from every background imaginable. I’ve never seen a particular personality, character, appearance, walk or background that has formed any sort of pattern in the women I have supported. I’ve supported everyone from female MPs to child victims of trafficking. I’ve worked with lawyers and police officers who were being raped and abused by their husbands at home. I’ve worked with social workers who work in safeguarding teams every day and live in fear of their partners. I’ve worked with women who were experts in martial arts who were raped and beaten up by men. I’ve discussed experiences of abuse and rape with women in the military and women who are now veterans. Equally, I’ve worked with women who have been in care since they were toddlers. I’ve supported girls who have been trafficked around the country. I’ve worked with girls who have never known a safe place to live and have struggled to get a decent meal. I can’t think of any ‘vulnerability’ that any of these women or girls had in common. They were a mixture of confident, nervous, strong, terrified, healthy, unwell, believed, ignored, extrovert, introvert, popular, lonely, religious, atheist, old, young, poor, rich, supported and isolated women and girls. The only thing they had in common was that they were females in a patriarchy, and that means that statistically, they are at constant risk from male violence. We like to deny our own vulnerability by calling other women ‘vulnerable’ You might be wondering why we go to such efforts to name the vulnerability in the woman or girl. My work, and the work of many others, explores the concept of ‘denial of personal vulnerability’. Simply put, this means that we are all vulnerable at some level, but we like to pretend we are not. We are vulnerable not because of innate characteristics or behaviours, but purely due to how common abuse and rape is. At any given time, any of us could be attacked, assaulted, abused, threatened, groomed or even murdered. But to think in such terms would leave most of us anxious and terrified to live a normal life, so we instead tell ourselves that it would never happen to us, because we are not ‘vulnerable’ like those other women and girls who are raped and abused. We tell ourselves that we would never be that stupid, never be that trusting, never drink that much, never date that guy, never go to that place. We tell ourselves that we would ‘see the signs’. We tell ourselves that the first time he laid his hands on us, we would be out of the door. It’s all bullshit, of course. But we like to redirect our own feelings of personal vulnerability by pointing the finger at victims and then picking out their ‘vulnerabilities’. We then say ‘ahhh, that’s why she was raped, well, I would never do that, I would never let that happen to me.’ It’s a defence mechanism. A coping strategy for living in a patriarchy. We blame and name other women and girls as ‘vulnerable’ so we don’t ever have to face the fact that it could happen to us. This is true even when academics write papers about ‘vulnerabilities’ of women and girls subjected to male violence. The difference is, they get to dress it up with big words, theories and titles so that we all nod and agree. It must be the vulnerabilities of the victims! Of course! We teach children that only ‘vulnerable’ kids get abused and harmed We invest a huge amount of time and effort into convincing each other that only the vulnerable will be abused, raped and harmed. This starts early, as early as primary school. Children are taught in PSHE, assemblies and workshops that only the vulnerable children will be abused or groomed. Resources from everywhere from NSPCC to Barnardo’s have endorsed the myth that only the vulnerable children will be abused, and that if we remove their ‘vulnerabilities’ they will be safe from sex offenders and child abusers. It’s again, all total rubbish. But that doesn’t stop us from showing children videos, resources and sessions which encourage them to identify the ‘vulnerability’ of the child who is raped and abused. It also doesn’t stop us from constructing entire vulnerability assessments in professional practice which erroneously attempt to identify which vulnerabilities of the child caused the abuse, so we can ‘solve’ them. A common example of this is when professionals conclude that a girl has been exploited or raped because she didn’t ‘have enough education about consent and healthy relationships’. This leads to plans around the child which suggest that increasing her knowledge of consent and abuse will protect her from the sex offender who is exploiting her, because once she has more knowledge, she will use the knowledge to defend herself and protect herself better. This completely ignores the fact that even the most educated professionals who work in abuse every day, are still just as likely to be abused as anyone else. There has been no research which suggests that knowledge of abuse is protective. It is educative at best. This is because power dynamics and the choice to commit violent crime against women and girls has literally fuck all to do with the victim and has everything to do with the motivation and personal choices of the offender. If we are to tackle this myth, we need to look at why we embed it from such an early age in girls and boys around the world. We have an oversimplified understanding of abusers and offenders One of them main issues we have is that whilst we like to scream ‘monster’ and ‘pervert’ and ‘paedo’ at offenders, we don’t actually get taught anything about these men. This leads to serious misunderstandings about offenders who commit domestic and sexual violence offences. One such misunderstanding is that offenders carefully seek out and then deliberately target the most vulnerable women and girls in society. This is very easily disproved, especially as direct qualitative research with sex offenders and domestic violence offenders shows that men who commit these crimes target their victims for hundreds of reasons, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with vulnerability. In interviews, sex offenders have said that they targeted girls because they liked their hair, their tights, their body shape and their smile. Sex offenders report targeting children because they are confident and happy. Some talk about their specific sexual fantasies. Some only target girls of certain ages and ethnicities. Some sex offenders report not caring who their victims are at all, and will rape and abuse any child they can. When it comes to online sex offending, there is plenty of evidence that sex offenders target children and adults randomly, based on whoever responds first and in a way they want. This means they can literally use a scattergun approach to attack and groom hundreds of victims per day, and never know anything about their so-called ‘vulnerabilities’. In chat logs of sex offenders abusing children which were analysed by Kloess et al. (2017), most offenders never even asked for details about the child. They were not seeking vulnerabilities to exploit. They were targeting hundreds of different kids. They had very little in common. With the abuse and grooming of adult women, the same can be said. It is seen as ‘common knowledge’ that abusers target vulnerable women – and yet, many offenders actually target assertive and confident women who spend the rest of their lives wondering how that man managed to grind them down and destroy their sense of self. The reality is, for lots of misogynists, destroying confident and healthy women is part of the fun. It’s part of the kick they get out of belittling and humiliating her. Why would an offender always target vulnerable women, when they enjoy breaking down women and controlling them? The vulnerability theory is just myth. It suggests that offenders don’t target or abuse ‘strong’ women, and that if you are a strong woman, it shouldn’t ever happen to you. This is particularly true for Black women who are generally positioned as strong, aggressive matriarchs due to racism. So it’s even harder for Black women to be seen as victims of abuse and male violence, because we assume they are all ‘strong, assertive’ women who would never be targeted by abusers. There has been much written about this phenomenon, and it deserves a lot more attention. Especially as it exposes so fluently, the stereotypes we use to build the ‘perfect victim’, and what happens when you as a woman, sit outside of that perfect victim stereotype. If you are not seen as vulnerable or weak, you can often be positioned as a liar or a malicious ex. It’s almost as if we believe that all victims of male violence must be inherently vulnerable women and girls, and they are not vulnerable, they are not real victims. We don’t know how to tackle the global epidemic of male violence This is probably fairly obvious, but we don’t actually know how to (and there is very little appetite for) challenge and end global, systemic male violence. We did get to a point where we started to take notice of the fact that 97-99% of all violent crime is committed by men globally, and that we had to do something about the way men and boys were being socialised and brought up to regard fighting, violence, sexual power, competition and bullying as masculine traits to aim for. However, more recently, we have seemingly gone backwards. When we talk about male violence or male crime stats, we are shouted down and told we are misandrists and man-hating feminist bitches, (ironic, but okay). It seems that if we cannot even publicly address decades of solid evidence and statistics, we definitely cannot work towards tackling male violence yet. As much as I would love to see that for the good of our entire species, you can lead a horse to water but you cannot force it to drink. Everyone knows the reality of violent crime, but many are reluctant to do anything with it. We’ve now moved away from holding men responsible (again) and gone back towards positivist theories of victim precipitation and vulnerability. Vulnerability in one humandoes not lead to other humans committing crime My final message has to be the clearest. It does not matter how vulnerable a woman or girl is, it never ever ‘causes’ another human with free will to choose to abuse, rape or kill them. Absolutely nothing inside that victim has any power or effect on the choice-making of an offender. They are capable and competent adults who make active choices to harm women and girls for one reason: Because they want to. You don’t need any other theories. Offenders do it, ultimately, because they want to. That’s why they are able to keep their cool with their boss, or their best mate, or some dickhead they play footy with – but ‘lose their cool’ with their girlfriend at home or abuse little girls. This isn’t about vulnerability of the woman or girl, it’s about a choice that is made by a misogynistic, violent offender who wants to abuse and harm women and girls (and in some cases, children in general rather than just girls). Let me explain something to everyone reading this blog: If vulnerabilities lead to some sort of human arousal or temptation in us to exploit or abuse or kill weaker humans, we would all do it (or at least the majority of us). And yet, not only do the majority of humans not commit these crimes, but women hardly commit any. Globally, women are only responsible for around 2% of violent crime. So does this mean that victim precipitation theory only applies to male offenders and female victims? If the vulnerability theories were real, that would mean that if you came across a drunk woman, accidentally separated from her friends and lost in the high street, you would think ‘she’s vulnerable and alone, I could do something to her right now!’ But you don’t, do you? Most of us have never had a thought like that in our lives. You might instead see her and think ‘shit, she’s alone, is she okay?’ Or you might approach her and ask her if she’s safe, and where her friends are. You might ring an ambulance or police if needed. You might help her back to somewhere safe like a taxi rank or a bar where her friends were. That’s because you made a CHOICE . 100 people could walk past her and the majority would see all of her so-called ‘vulnerabilities’ and either try to help her or not stop at all. And yet a handful may stop and make a choice to harm her, rape her, rob her or kill her. Her ‘vulnerabilities’ had nothing to do with it. It is all about the active choice making of the offender. It is ALWAYS the choice of the offender. Vulnerability of women is just a myth used to distract us from the real cause of male violence: men. About the author: Dr Jessica Taylor Dr Jessica Taylor (PhD, FRSA) is a Chartered Psychologist specialising in the victim blaming of women subjected to male violence and the pathologisation of women's mental health. She is the Director of VictimFocus, an international consultancy and research organisation dedicated to changing systemic victim blaming and misogyny in government, policing, law, medicine and social care services. She is the Sunday Times Best Selling Author of 'Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women's Trauma Against Them' and 'Why Women are Blamed For Everything. 

In the most predictable turn yet, Amber Heard was ‘diagnosed’ with Borderline Personality Disorder and Histrionic Personality Disorder after two meetings with a psychologist hired by her ex-husband. I couldn’t have rolled my eyes any harder if I tried. There are several reasons why these snap diagnoses should be immediately discounted, not just for Amber, but for thousands of other women currently going through the same process. It is vital that everyone understands that these diagnoses are not proven medical conditions, they are highly contested, controversial psychiatric labels. They are often introduced into family law, private law, and even criminal law cases where a woman is reporting domestic or sexual abuse. Most people believe that psychiatric categories such as personality disorders are scientifically proven, that they can be reliably diagnosed and tested, and that psychologists in these cases are objective assessors of a mental disorder. Unfortunately, none of these beliefs are accurate. Borderline personality disorder is widely known in psychology and critical psychiatry as a ‘junk diagnosis’ - and I haven’t heard anyone use the term ‘histrionic personality disorder’ unironically in years, given that it is seen as a debunked disorder. Both ‘disorders’ originate from the concept of ‘hysteria’. Whilst you might have heard this word before as ‘laughing hysterically’ or even ‘mass hysteria’, the original term meant female insanity. Hysteria was theorised to be a physical illness of the uterus detaching from its usual place, floating around the body of the woman, and attacking her brain and organs, making her insane and disobedient. It was also known as ‘wandering womb syndrome’. The main ‘treatment’ for hysteria was to force women to marry men, get pregnant, and conform to the heterosexual feminine role. When this didn’t work, thousands of women were subjected to mass womb extractions, induced comas, lifelong incarceration and even injections of malaria to ‘cure’ their mental illness. One of the most common groups of women being ‘diagnosed’ with hysteria were those who reported being abused and beaten by their husbands (you might start to see where I’m going with this). Later, in the early 20th century, hysteria was reframed as a mental illness of women. Histrionic personality disorder was borne out of the ‘hysteria’ diagnosis, which could only be given to women. The words ‘hysterical woman’ in the DSM-II in 1968 were changed to ‘histrionic woman’ in DSM-III in 1980, after top psychiatrists theorised that ‘histrionic women were labile, egocentric, seductive, frigid, and childish’. Hysteria and histrionic personality disorder became known as the ‘wastebasket of mental health’, with many influential scholars rejecting their existence. Women could be diagnosed with these terms for not smiling enough, not giving men enough sex, being lesbian or bisexual, being too assertive, too opinionated, leaving their husbands, or even reading too many books. It is outrageous that in 2022, a psychologist would testify on the stand that a woman has ‘histrionic personality disorder’ considering the wealth of evidence that it is nothing more than a made up, misogynistic label to beat women with. And as controversial as this may become, the same arguments can be made for BPD. Yet another junk diagnosis thrown at women, with bisexual women more likely to be diagnosed, women at least seven times more likely to be diagnosed than men, and women being significantly more likely to be diagnosed during and after abuse. Borderline Personality Disorder was borne from Histrionic Personality Disorder, which is why Dr Curry states she found ‘both’ in Amber Heard. She didn’t truly find both, (not least because neither exist) but they are just overlapping constructs in the DSM, one borne from the other. Contrary to the testimony of Dr Curry, who also suggested that BPD and HPD have a genetic basis, there has never been any proof of genetic basis of any personality disorders, and so this is categorically false. No gene has been found for any mental health disorder, and the American Psychiatric Association agree that at the current time, we do not know the relationship between biology and psychiatric disorder. Diagnosing a woman with BPD or HPD is the go-to tactic of a legal team intent on discrediting a woman. I see it every single day. Thousands of women are going through the same thing as Amber as we speak. Even further, and as we are seeing clearly in this trial, the mental health of the man is used to position him as vulnerable and victimised, whilst the mental health of the woman is used to position her as deviant and dangerous. The disorder double standard is one of the oldest tricks in the book. The point of these deliberate diagnoses is to humiliate and discredit the woman as much as possible, to introduce the idea that nothing she says is permissible or accurate because she has these personality disorders. You only must look at how these diagnoses have been used against multiple high-profile women to silence and control them for years to see what they are really for. The legal team used personality disorder to discredit Amber because they believe it positions her as insane and unbelievable. That’s the crux of this. It’s not a medical diagnosis, it a political label, and a well-known tactical move in a larger game of chess. And this tactic demonstrates that we have never truly moved on from recasting abused women as insane, deviant and disordered. About the author: Dr Jessica Taylor Dr Jessica Taylor (PhD, FRSA) is a Chartered Psychologist specialising in the victim blaming of women subjected to male violence and the pathologisation of women's mental health. She is the Director of VictimFocus, an international consultancy and research organisation dedicated to changing systemic victim blaming and misogyny in government, policing, law, medicine and social care services. She is the Sunday Times Best Selling Author of 'Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women's Trauma Against Them' and 'Why Women are Blamed For Everything.

Disclaimer: I give permission for this article to be used in training courses and education, as long as my name is clearly referenced as the author. This article contains important information that can be used to influence practice, so please do use it where you can. Content Warning: Contains discussion of grooming techniques and tactics Over the past 10 years or so, there has been increasing interest in teaching children and women to ‘spot the signs’ of grooming. This article will explain why this approach doesn’t work, and why grooming should be reframed as a common, normal human behaviour that we all engage in. I know, sounds horrible doesn’t it? But if you take the time to read this article, you will see grooming in a completely different way, not only in your own life but in the lives of others you care about or work with. My key points will be: 1. We have defined ‘grooming’ to be too narrow 2. Grooming happens constantly, to all of us, and by all of us 3. Professionals are expert groomers 4. Victims of abuse need to know that grooming is common and constant 5. Grooming is hard to ‘spot’ because we are all socialised to accept grooming in everyday life – it is unfair to expect women and children to be able to do this Okay. Let’s get into this. 1) We have defined ‘grooming’ to be too narrow When I say ‘grooming’, I know what image that conjures up for most people. They think, sexual abuse. They think CSE. They think gangs of men abusing girls. They think of kids being groomed online. They think of women being manipulated into abuse. When I say ‘grooming’, they think of a slow, careful, manipulative process in which a sex offender learns more and more about their victim, builds a relationship with them, asks them questions and then sexually abuses or attacks them. The Oxford Dictionary defines grooming as ‘the action by a paedophile of preparing a child for a meeting, especially via an Internet chat room, with the intention of committing a sexual offence.’ The NSPCC defines it as, ‘when someone builds a relationship, trust and emotional connection with a child or young person so they can manipulate, exploit and abuse them. Children and young people who are groomed can be sexually abused, exploited or trafficked.’ The truth is, these narrow stereotypes of grooming are blinding us all from seeing the reality of how broad grooming really is. Grooming is not specific to sexual offences at all. It’s not even specific to crime. You can be groomed into a cult. You can be groomed into terrorism. You can be groomed into political ideology. You can be groomed into domestic abuse. You can be groomed into bullying culture. You can be groomed into taking drugs or drinking. You can be groomed into religion. You can be groomed into changing your worldview or believing conspiracy theories. You can be groomed into thinking you are mentally ill. You can be groomed into eating disorders and body dysmorphia. You can be groomed into hating yourself. You can be groomed to be racist, homophobic, misogynistic or xenophobic. As you can see, the process of grooming is about the manipulation, persuasion and control of humans. It is not specific to sexual offences at all. By narrowly defining it, we have put our own blinkers on. We ignore the way grooming is utilised all around us. We then start to believe that grooming only happens to the most vulnerable, and that we can teach them how to spot the signs and how to stop it happening to them. But it rarely works. 2. Grooming happens constantly, to all of us, and by all of us Some of you may be surprised to learn that you have been groomed. Statistically, many of us have been abused, so we will have been groomed by an abuser. However, the rest of us have been groomed in other ways that we have not noticed or understood. Further, most of us have groomed another person into doing something we wanted them to do. To understand why grooming is so hard to spot, you have to take a huge step back and look at grooming in society on a daily basis. As I go through this section, try to reframe your definition of grooming using my definition: ‘Something that someone does to someone else to convince, persuade, manipulate or control them into doing something that they want them to do (either positively or negatively).’ Grooming has been used to manipulate you every single day since you were born. You were groomed into behaving and thinking the way you do. Your social norms, beliefs, attitudes and world views were all given to you by adults with an agenda. Your parents, carers and families taught you their beliefs and behaviours. They taught you they were normal. Even if they weren’t. Then you went to nursery or school, where the staff team groomed you into some very strange human behaviours such as going into a building where all children are dressed exactly the same way as you, sitting on the floor in silence, sitting with your legs crossed for no reason, putting your finger on your lips to show you are quiet, putting your hand up before speaking, responding to bells and buzzers to move or eat or take a break. None of these are normal, natural human behaviours. We did not evolve to respond to bells or buzzers. We did not evolve to sit cross legged with 29 other kids dressed in the same clothes, with fingers on our lips, listening to one person explain punctuation marks. We do not actually have to raise our hand before we can physically speak. You don’t actually have to ask for permission to go to the toilet, you could have just stood up and walked out when they refused you permission to go to pee or change your sanitary pad. But you didn’t, did you? None of these ‘rules’ are real. They are norms, beliefs and behaviours that we are groomed to accept and take part in, using positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. You were groomed for your entire childhood, by everyone around you. No one escaped this process. You are groomed into buying things you don’t even need by marketing, advertisements and product placement. You are groomed into wanting to look a certain way by fashion and pop culture. You are groomed into dieting at certain times of the year. You are groomed into buying certain stereotypical products at certain times of the year or for certain special days. You are groomed into believing that you can become rich and successful if you just ‘work harder’. You are groomed to believe that governments, authorities and big companies care about you and your family. You are groomed into upgrading your mobile phone when there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. There is constant pressure to groom you in society – to market, to profit, to manipulate, to control, to silence, to persuade, to abuse you. This is why you can’t spot the signs of grooming. Because it is happening to you 24/7. Because society is built on grooming and groomers. Even you have groomed someone, at some point. If you have kids, you’ve definitely done a lot of grooming. If you are religious and encourage others to believe in your faith, you’ve groomed people. If you ever persuaded someone to do something you wanted them to do (positive or negative), you groomed them. If you have sold products to people that they didn’t really need, you groomed them. If you ever convinced someone to join a club, go to do something, change something about themselves or engage in something new, you groomed them to do so. Grooming is a common human behaviour. It is not only sex offenders who can build a rapport, persuade, manipulate and coerce someone into doing something. Most of us are capable of it. Most of us do it every day. If you’re in a long term relationship (or have been), consider what you did or what your partner did to ‘groom’ you. Did they buy you gifts? Flatter you? Pay attention to you? Ask you questions about yourself? Tell you that you are special? Tell you that they would never want anyone else? Did they listen to you and centre you? Did they sacrifice things for you? Did they help you or were they there for you at times of trouble? Did they tell you they would never hurt you? Yes, they did. Did you do any of these things as part of your relationship building? Yes. Of course you did. You both successfully convinced another human that you are their best option as a partner, and that you are trustworthy, safe, loving and that the relationship is worth investing in, exclusively. 3) Professionals are expert groomers It’s not just us who are capable of grooming and need to acknowledge what we do and why it’s so difficult to spot. Professionals are expert groomers. (Note: Whenever I say this in a speech or in training, professionals look with absolute horror and disgust at me. A couple have walked out. Some people sit with their arms crossed, glaring at me. This concept makes everyone uncomfortable. I’m aware of that. Keep reading.) Social workers, police officers, counsellors, psychologists, care staff, teachers etc. We are all expert groomers. We literally go to work to groom humans into doing things we want them to do. The social worker grooms families into doing something. The police officer grooms victims into doing something. The counsellor grooms their client into trusting them to disclose their worries. The care staff groom the child or adult into letting them bathe them, care for them and live with them. Professionals are skilled manipulators. We call it ‘building rapport’. All professionals who I know, call it by that name. They say ‘Well, we firstly focus on ‘building rapport because none of this works if you don’t have good rapport with the person.’ And I say, ‘How do you do that?’ They reply, ‘We build their trust in us. We ask them questions about themselves, find out about them. We tell them we are here to help them. We remind them that we care about them. We tell them they can trust us. We offer them help when they need it most. We build their self esteem by paying them compliments and using positive reinforcement. We take them places they like to go. We treat the kids to Macdonald’s…’ And at that point I say, ‘So, you groom them, then?’ To which I usually get either a nervous laugh or a look of utter horror. I spend significant amounts of my time showing professionals and leaders that their ‘rapport building’ process is the same process that a perpetrator uses to abuse and groom victims. All of those things that professionals tell me they do to ‘build rapport’ are used to ‘groom’ victims into abuse, rape, trafficking, exploitation, extremism, bullying, racism, cults, belief systems. It’s all the same shit. I’ve spoken to professionals who also accept that they manipulate families into doing things that they don’t want to do (for example, pressuring victims to engage in a criminal prosecution process or threatening action if a mum doesn’t report her husband for domestic abuse). These are all forms of grooming. Why is it important for professionals to acknowledge what they are doing? Because we trigger our clients. We mirror the perps. We make our clients feel unsafe. We cause them to back away from us. And then we flip it on them, and say ‘they are too hard to work with’ or ‘they won’t engage’ or ‘they won’t trust any of us’. Sound familiar, fellow professionals? Of course it does, this is par for the course. Professionals moaning that their ‘rapport building’ didn’t work, or that they have spent months ‘building rapport’ with a child or family and they still won’t disclose or report. Like that’s a bad thing. The truth is, lots of victims of grooming and abuse begin to feel unsafe when professionals use similar tactics to ‘build rapport’ with them. They trigger, they disengage, but they don’t know why. They might say things like, ‘What’s in it for you? Why are you being so nice to me? Why do you keep pretending you care about us? What do you get out of this?’ This is actually massive progress for that person. They can feel you grooming them. They don’t like it. They are questioning your motives and agenda. They are wondering why you are putting so much effort into building rapport with them. I teach professionals that you should start to see this as positive. This is a person beginning to process what grooming feels like – and beginning to critically analyse grooming behaviours. They don’t trust you, because you mirror the abuser. They haven’t figured that out yet, because grooming is so socially embedded and normalised, that they will rarely pinpoint exactly what is making them uncomfortable. But that’s what is happening there. The brain remembers the feeling. Remembers the betrayal and the manipulation. Which brings me to my next point. 4. Victims of abuse need to know that grooming is common and constant No matter who they are, or what age they are, people who have been subjected to any form of abuse or oppression – need to know what I’ve just taught you about grooming in society. They need to know that they are subjected to grooming at all levels of society, at all times, by all people. They need to understand that grooming makes the world go round. Why? I have one main reason for arguing this point: Because it reduces self-blame. You see, we have created a disgusting narrative that victims of abuse ‘should have seen the signs’. We create national campaigns and we issue guidance about ‘how to spot the signs of grooming’. We do this, even to 5 year old kids. We create ‘programmes of work’ with children, adolescents and adult victims about ‘keeping themselves safe by learning to spot the signs of grooming and exiting the abuse’. What a load of shit. How is this possible in a world in which grooming is a 24/7 experience? It causes feelings of self blame, because in effect, we are blaming victims for not spotting the signs of grooming and not ‘protecting themselves’ from it. Many victims of abuse question themselves and ask, ‘How didn’t I spot it? Why didn’t I know? How could I be so stupid?’ You’re not stupid, you’re normal. Not even professionals can spot groomers. Not even the police. None of us can. We miss millions of them every year, even when the evidence is staring us in the face. Professionals are no better at spotting the signs of grooming than the general public are, hence why professionals are just as likely to be in abusive relationships as anyone else. They are literally going to work, telling victims to ‘spot the signs’ and then going home to an abusive partner who subjects them to abuse every day and they can’t see it themselves. That’s normal. We have professionals within our own teams who are abusing clients – and can we see it? Nope. When it comes out we all say, ‘Oh my word! What a shock. We would never have suspected them!’ Uhuh, so we can’t spot it, but we think 10 year old Kacy can, if she just does this worksheet and watches this video. Got it. Further, even if you can see that you are being groomed, that doesn’t mean you have the power to escape, does it? We have to have this conversation with everyone, because people need to know that it was never their fault that they couldn’t ‘spot the signs’ of grooming. No one can. It’s a myth. 5) Grooming is hard to ‘spot’ because we are all socialised to accept grooming in everyday life – it is unfair to expect children and women to be able to do this My final point is about the huge injustice in expecting people (mainly women and children) to be able to spot the signs of grooming and then exit that process as if there is no power dynamic. As this article has shown, grooming is embedded into the fabric of society. It’s not just common, it’s integral to several systems of control, marketing and authority. We are all groomed to do things (things we might want, and things we might not want). We are groomed to do things that are not in our best interests. We are groomed to spend our money on things we don’t need. We are groomed into relationships. We are groomed into power structures. We are groomed into belief systems and world views. We are groomed into behaviours and norms that make no sense or have no purpose. It is wholly unfair to expect anyone to be able to spot grooming for abuse, when it simply mirrors every other grooming process in the world. We are placing standards on to people that we can’t even live up to. I can’t spot the signs of abusers in my life and I’ve been doing this for 11 years. Anyone who claims to be able to ‘spot an offender’ is a liar, and has a dangerous level of self-confidence. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve have feelings about some perps and I turned out to be right, but there is no way it was anything more than chance. Statistically, we are all surrounded by abusers. We probably each know 10-20 abusers. You’ll probably never know who most of them are. Every time I’ve got one right, I’ve probably missed others. That why I try to educate as many people as possible about the realities of grooming, and the myth that we can spot the signs. And if we can’t spot the signs, why are we going into schools telling children to spot the signs? Why are we telling women and girls to spot the signs of a rapist or abuser? Why are we ‘teaching’ kids that that should have spotted the signs? We should never expect victims of abuse and grooming to know what is happening to them, or expect them to be able to escape. I believe that what I am saying about grooming should be taught and shared everywhere. We need to change the conversation about grooming – and look at it as a huge social behaviour that is exploited and used by many types of abusers and manipulators. Narrowly defining it as grooming kids online for sexual abuse is missing the point by a country mile. We can’t tackle something if we can’t even see the scale of it.

Is it that time again? Time to shake the field up again? Seems so. Diagnosing women and girls with personality disorders after they have been abused, traumatised, trafficked, raped, neglected or harmed – is disgraceful practice. It needs to end. We all need to lobby, campaign, influence and convince decision makers and leaders to reject personality disorders as quack science. Yet, when I say this to social workers, nurses, family support workers, police officers and teachers – they look at me like I’ve grown two heads. It’s the look of, ‘But, diagnosing them helps them, doesn’t it? We can get them the help they need if we can just get them the diagnosis. Right?’ You see, many professionals I teach or work with, have never even considered the trauma-informed approach to working with women and girls who have been traumatised. They have been taught traditionally, medically and oppressively. They don’t subscribe to the medical model because they have chosen it as their ideological approach – they subscribe to it because they had no idea there was an alternative. To their credit, many of them listen intently as I explain the origins of psychiatry, the theories and models, the lack of evidence and the abuse of psychiatric diagnoses that has oppressed classes and groups for decades. Similarly, many of them realise that their practice has been misinformed or misled. Some of them have a feeling of confirmation when they attend my training – a feeling that they had never truly subscribed to the medical model of working with women and girls subjected to abuse, but they didn’t know the language, the theories or the evidence to back themselves up. They didn’t know how to fight against it. As the years have passed, I have incorporated more and more trauma-informed, anti-psychiatry approaches into my work, training, research and speeches. The impact has been incredible. So many professionals are now able to see that diagnosing girls and women with personality disorders and psychosis after they have been abused is not only harmful, but will impact them for the rest of their lives. And as I have said, this is not completely down to me – because so many frontline practitioners already felt very uncomfortable with our practice, anyway. However, because so much mental health and abuse training is medical-model-dominant, they have never been taught an alternative explanation. We need to provide alternative narratives to practitioners and we need to do it now. My top 4 messages for frontline practitioners working with women and girls 1) Learn the oppressive history of psychiatry The medical model of mental health is so dominant that it is communicated as ‘the’ explanation of emotional and mental life. Many of us have been taught that mental health issues are genetic, neuropsychological/ physiological, developmental or a combination of all. We are taught that medications can ‘balance people out’ or ‘help them prepare for therapy’. We are taught that some people need to be locked up and sedated for their own safety. As of September 2019, 7.3 million British adults (1 in 6 adults) are taking antidepressants and a further 3.9 million British adults are taking anxiety medications such as benzodiazepines, Z drugs and gabapentinoids. But this monopoly on our mental life didn’t happen overnight. Long before we started talking about ‘mental health’, we punished, killed, sacrificed, outcast and abused people who did not conform to our social norms of behaviour or character. Many feminists and historians now suggest that the death of up to 100,000 women who were murdered for being ‘witches’ between 1450 and 1750 were often women who were non-conforming, disabled, ill, intelligent, opinionated or had been abused and traumatised. In the European Middle Ages, mental health started to become mixed with religion. When someone was not conforming or was traumatised, it was proposed that they were possessed by demons or satan. Most ‘treatments’ for mental health included religious ceremonies, exorcisms, torture or death of the person. In some cases, it was argued that the only way a demon could be stopped, would be to kill the ‘host’ person. As time passed, mental health was proposed to be caused by imbalances of fluids in the body and brain. Excess bodily fluids such as bile, blood or choler were said to cause ‘hysteria’, ‘melancholia’ or ‘mania’. However, the religious approach to mental health continued for a long time. Quakers set up many asylums and developed religious conversion treatments to ‘cure’ mental health issues. Lieberman (2015) puts it well, ‘The mentally ill were considered social deviants or moral misfits suffering divine punishment for some inexcusable transgression.’ Asylums multiplied across America and Europe during the 1700s and 1800s, and professionals from all different backgrounds became interested in working with the ‘mentally ill’. Asylums became sites of experimental research, surgery, treatment, torture and death of patients – on which the ‘science’ of psychiatry was built. Psychiatric experiments, tortures and surgeries included everything from holding patients under freezing cold water until they ‘calmed down’ (read: passed out or drowned) to deliberately ‘releasing humors’ from the patient by bleeding them, blistering them, starving them or purging them. In 1927, Wagner-Jauregg won the Nobel Prize for ‘proving’ you could treat schizophrenia by injecting malaria-infected blood into people with the diagnosis. By 1941, insulin shock therapy was rife. In this ‘treatment’ for ‘mental illness’, people were injected with extremely high doses of insulin to cause seizures and coma, claiming that when they came around, they would be cured of madness. By the 1940s, electroconvulsive shock therapy (ECT) and frontal lobotomies were common. Whilst frontal lobotomies stopped being used by the 1980s (although this did mean that over 100,000 people were subjected to them), ECT is still used today. In fact, it is making something of a comeback – and now being used to ‘treat’ autism in some clinics in North America. I have personally worked with children who have been subjected to ECT in the Midlands in the UK, after they were abused and raped. One girl I worked with in 2013 was completely wiped out by ECT sessions on the NHS, so much so that she used to come to my sessions and fall fast asleep on the sofa for hours, and then wake up confused and upset. She was being given ECT sessions for ‘depression’ because she had been sexually abused. By 1955, psychiatric medications were a fairly common way of ‘treating’ madness. But it wasn’t for many more decades that we stopped using language like ‘hysteria’, ‘madness’, ‘retardation’ and ‘mental illness’. However, despite this seemingly positive shift in language, we are still using some of the same treatments, misconceptions and oppressive practices we have used throughout history. We have moved towards the term ‘mental health’ which we now equate with ‘physical health’ – but we still use oppressive, dangerous and abusive practices to ‘treat’ the natural, normal distress of traumatised people. The language got nicer but the practice, well, it didn’t really evolve. Throughout these years, the groups most significantly affected were Black people. Psychiatry is notoriously white, elitist and racist. Always has been. Still is. Racism was embedded into theory, practice and research. Psychiatrists believed that Black people had smaller brains than white people, were ‘naturally’ better at hard labour and slavery, were less psychologically developed and were more aggressive, emotionally unstable and violent. These beliefs still have an enormous impact on mental health practice, in which people still believe that Black people are more likely to have ‘mental health issues’, more likely to have ‘schizophrenia’ and are more likely to be violent or commit crime. My questions to practitioners are: Did you know all of this? Did you know that our modern psychiatric system is built on all this suffering, death, murder, oppression, racism, abuse and torture? Have you really researched the history of the treatments and medications your clients are being prescribed? Do you really understand and believe the labels your clients are being given? 2) Borderline personality disorder (or EUPD) is misogynistic twaddle Along with the racism and classism in the psychiatric systems, there is the harrowing misogyny. In 2019, women and girls are 7 times more likely to be diagnosed with BPD or EUPD than boys and men showing the same symptoms. Again, the origins of this oppression hark back to hundreds of years ago. From the 18th century, ‘hysteria’ was classed as a women’s disease, linked to femininity and the female form. ‘Hysteria is the woman’s natural state’ (Laycock, 1840) and ‘A hysterical girl is a vampire who sucks the blood of the healthy people around her’ (Mitchell, 1885: 266). Much of the BPD or EUPD diagnosis is based on gender role stereotypes and sexism. Women and girls are ideally polite, nice, happy, content, quiet, have no opinions or ambitions and live to serve others. ‘Difficult women’ are frequently diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (Ussher, 2013). The typical borderline patient has been described as a ‘demanding, angry, aggressive woman’, who is labelled as ‘mentally disordered’ (Jimenez, 1997: 162, 163) for behaving in a way that is perfectly acceptable in a man. Research found that men’s sadness and anger was considered to be related to situational factors – such as ‘having a bad day’ – whereas sad or angry women were judged as ‘too emotional’ (Barrett and Bliss-Moreau, 2009). Indeed, I always make the point of telling frontline practitioners that the diagnostic criteria from DSM II for ‘hysteria’ and the diagnostic criteria from DSM V for ‘borderline personality disorder’ are very similar. Hysteria has been described as the ‘wastebasket of mental health’ and BPD has been described as a ‘catch-all diagnosis’. They are essentially the same diagnosis. They are both targeting women and girls. They are both built around gender role stereotypes. They both oppress traumatised and abused women. Where hysteria (or ‘wandering womb syndrome’) was said to be caused by women’s hormones and biology – BPD is said to be a disordered personality. Both innate, internal causes which need to be medicated, treated and dealt with. The ‘symptoms’ or ‘diagnostic criteria’ of BPD are: Fear of abandonment Unstable or short relationships Unclear or shifting/changing self-image Impulsive, self-destructive behaviours Self-harm Mood swings lasting minutes or hours Feelings of emptiness Intense anger Feeling suspicious, paranoid or disassociating Most people would agree with me when I say the following three things: Anyone who is traumatised by abuse or exploitation would hit enough of these criteria to be diagnosed with a personality disorder Most people at pretty much any point of major stress, would exhibit these behaviours as a normal response to distress and change These feelings are completely justified in traumatised and abused people – and therefore do not constitute a disorder or abnormality. These responses are normal. We need to think much more critically about how many of the girls and women on our caseloads are being told that their responses are abnormal and are caused by personality disorders, rather than caused by the people who abused, oppressed, scared and harmed them. Why would we want to collude with the victim blaming and encouragement of self-blame of women and girls like this? My questions for frontline practitioners working with women and girls are: Did you know that BPD and EUPD were so closely related to hysteria and women’s ‘madness’? Have you not ever wondered why so many of the teenage girls and young women you work with are being diagnosed with personality disorders after traumatic life experiences? Have you ever considered how a woman or girl is ever supposed to move forward if she has been told that her personality is disordered? 3) Psychiatric diagnosis will stay on her file for a long time Many of our systems in the UK require a psychiatric diagnosis in order to get a service for the woman or girl we are working with. This means that girls might be diagnosed with a mental health issue before they are allowed access to a mental health service or counselling service. It may mean that a woman has to be diagnosed with a disorder before she is allowed to be referred to a service that can help her. Psychiatric diagnosis has become the gatekeeper of therapeutic services. So much so, that even counsellors and psychotherapists are colluding with the psychiatric diagnosis of their own clients. Many practitioners are told that the best thing you can do for the girl is to get her the diagnoses she ‘needs’ so they can access funding, support or services. This is very short-sighted. One of the things that many practitioners are not warned about, is how long those psychiatric diagnoses will impact the girl (soon to be an adult woman in a completely different set of services). When teenage girls who have been sexually exploited, raped or abused get two or three psychiatric diagnoses, are medicated with antidepressants or mood stabilisers and are then kept on those drugs or treatments for the rest of their childhoods – what do you think is going to happen to them when they reach adulthood? They will be miraculously cured, have their diagnoses removed and live a healthy, normal life? For most of those girls, their diagnoses will impact them for a long time. They may be refused access to services, refused access to education, housing, occupations, college courses and volunteering opportunities. They may be told they are ‘too unstable’ to be involved in projects or to start therapies. They may even be flagged as having personality disorders to their local police force, ambulance crews, fire service and GP surgeries. Many professionals I teach are unaware that the psychiatric diagnosis can be passed to emergency services who then use that information out of context to label the woman or girl as ‘high risk’. This may mean that ambulance crews are told they have mental health issues before they attend an address. It may even mean that they call for the police to support them. Further, it may mean that a GP is less likely to believe their symptoms or illnesses because they have been flagged as having a personality disorder. These issues are serious and long-term. I have personally worked with and met many women and girls affected by this discrimination. My questions for frontline practitioners are: Did you know this happened to women and girls? Would you still encourage them to get psychiatric diagnoses, if you knew this would define them for the years to come? Wouldn’t it be better to support the girl/woman with the trauma and to talk to them about what it means rather than encouraging them to get a psychiatric label? 4) Do everything you can to reject deficit models of working The final thing I always teach practitioners to do, is to reject the deficit model of working with women and girls – or any humans to be honest. The deficit model, like the psychiatric model, is dominant in all our practice with children and adults. We have been taught that the pasts of girls can predict the futures of women. Professionals are taught to assess the past of the girls to enable them to predict their future – whether they will be abused again, whether they are at risk of CSE, whether they will be criminally exploited, whether they will end up ill, in prison, self-harm or suicidal. Whilst it might be tempting to have some sort of algorithm that could predict the outcomes of women and girls, I prefer to teach practitioners that women and girls can overcome and work through everything and anything (with the right humanistic support). I prefer to teach them to work from a strengths-based model; to see all women and girls as whole humans with an entire future ahead of them. A future that is not defined by what someone else put them through. Instead of seeing women and girls as traumatised, doomed or broken – I want practitioners to acknowledge their trauma, work in a trauma-informed way, but to see them as capable, intelligent, powerful humans with potential, skills, coping mechanisms and many values to give to the world. Moving away from a deficit model means not only rejecting the diagnosis of women and girls as mad, mentally ill or hysterical – but rejecting the way we try to quantify, categorise and predict the future of oppressed and abused women and girls. My question to practitioners: Wouldn’t you rather see women and girls as potential lawyers, activists, musicians, scientists, teachers and artists than believing the deficit model that these women and girls will amount to nothing? Around half of our own workforce were abused in childhood (Eaton and Holmes, 2017). If the deficit model was correct, how did we all get into these jobs? Wouldn’t most of us be completely ineffective? If we believe the deficit model to be correct, why do any of us bother doing our jobs at all? Aren’t we all in this line of work because we believe that every human has the capacity to process their trauma and go on to live a fulfilling life after abuse? Reject psychiatry for the good of the women and girls you work with For these reasons and so many more that I teach and write about, we must reject the psychiatric diagnosis of women and girls subjected to traumas. In fact, reject all psychiatric diagnosis. The evidence base for psychiatry is shameful, elitist, oppressive and dodgy as fuck. How this profession has continued to tout itself as a real science is beyond me. How millions of people are prescribed more and more drugs for human distress whilst we leave them in abuse, poverty, oppression and trauma disgusts me. We can change practice and theory. We can refuse to diagnose women and girls with psychiatric conditions. We can challenge the concepts of personality disorders used to oppress and label women and girls who have been abused. We can stop referring people subjected to abuse into medical model services that will tell her she is mad and needs treatment. We can stop supporting deficit models of working in which we use numbers, calculations or assessments to predict the outcomes of women and girls who have been abused. We can commit to research, read about and learn about the way psychiatry oppresses populations of people. We can learn about new models of trauma and mental health support such as the PTMF (Power, Threat, Meaning Framework). I will leave you with this thought: As the outspoken, difficult woman of the 16th century was castigated as a witch, and the same woman in the 19th century a hysteric, in the late 20th and 21st century, she is described as ‘borderline’ or as having premenstrual dysphoria disorder. – Ussher, 2013 In conclusion: Same shit, different era. About the author: Dr Jessica Taylor Dr Jessica Taylor (PhD, FRSA) is a Chartered Psychologist specialising in the victim blaming of women subjected to male violence and the pathologisation of women's mental health. She is the Director of VictimFocus, an international consultancy and research organisation dedicated to changing systemic victim blaming and misogyny in government, policing, law, medicine and social care services. She is the Sunday Times Best Selling Author of 'Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women's Trauma Against Them' and 'Why Women are Blamed For Everything.

Dr Jessica Taylor's statement on the Depp v Heard trial. A brief statement by Dr Jessica Taylor on the 'diagnosis' of Amber Heard. Watch this space for a longer article soon... I have been watching the progress of the Depp V Heard Trial, and in particular, the testimony of Dr Curry who, yesterday, ‘diagnosed’ Amber Heard with two personality disorders: Borderline Personality Disorder and Histrionic Personality Disorder. I was not surprised at all to see this happen, as it was predictable and lazy. Thousands of women just like Amber, who call out the abuse of their male partners and ex partners, will be ordered to have psychiatric evaluations which more often than not, diagnose her with a personality disorder in order to discredit her testimony. Like Amber, most women go into that evaluation voluntarily because they believe they will be listened to, only to find that they have been recast as mentally ill, attention seeking, borderline and histrionic. I was particularly shocked to see the un-ironic use of the word ‘histrionic’ considering the word stems from the old debunked 19th Century diagnosis of ‘hysteria’, meaning that the female uterus causes women to be insane. I think it pertinent that people understand that Borderline Personality Disorder is not a widely accepted medical disorder, but a highly contested label, seven times more likely in women and girls, and significantly more likely in women and girls who have been abused. Further, all current evidence suggests that Borderline Personality Disorder is a ‘junk diagnosis’ with little evidence base, and overlaps heavily with symptoms of chronic trauma and distress, which is present in abuse cases like these. I believe this label has been used knowingly and deliberately weaponised against Amber Heard, just as it is against many women testifying against their mail abusers in court. About the author: Dr Jessica Taylor Dr Jessica Taylor (PhD, FRSA) is a Chartered Psychologist specialising in the victim blaming of women subjected to male violence and the pathologisation of women's mental health. She is the Director of VictimFocus, an international consultancy and research organisation dedicated to changing systemic victim blaming and misogyny in government, policing, law, medicine and social care services. She is the Sunday Times Best Selling Author of 'Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women's Trauma Against Them' and 'Why Women are Blamed For Everything.

Our response to the new National Framework for Delivery on Policing Violence Against Women and Girls. VictimFocus wholeheartedly welcomes the new Framework for Delivery on Policing Violence Against Women And Girls launched today by DCC Maggie Blyth, National Police Chief’s Council’s lead for Violence Against Women and Girls. We are pleased to see the report’s acknowledgement of the scale of the problem and its ambitious and far reaching aims. If the recommendations in this report can be followed, this has the potential to be a game-changing moment for the police: an opportunity to radically transform the way they deal with violence against women and girls (VAWG) and tackle sexism and misogyny in their own ranks. The report demands “a fundamental shift in culture", requiring all forces to make fighting VAWG a strategic priority. Given that 15% of all police recorded crime is related to domestic abuse and that the miniscule conviction rate for sexual violence-related offences has long needed major improvement, this is of course welcome news. Misogyny within police forces recognised There would be little hope of the police earning the trust of survivors of VAWG, however, without getting their own house in order, and so it’s good to see that the authors of the report have not shied away from confronting abuse committed by police or misogyny within the police itself. All police forces are being asked to now commit to addressing VAWG and misogyny within their own force, and to demonstrate that they are dealing effectively with police-perpetrated abuse and allegations against them, including domestic violence, sexual violence or other VAWG. The report demands no less than a wholesale change in culture in which misogynist, sexist and sexualised behaviour will no longer be tolerated, but whistleblown. The report calls on male officers and staff to be "upstanders, not bystanders". We are pleased, also, to see that the report recognises the need to listen to women within the police and to work with VAWG and women’s sector organisations with experience and expertise. So, is it really possible to challenge sexism and misogyny within policing? Misogyny exists throughout society and tackling it within any organisation or institution is a challenge. However, although it certainly is a mammoth task with no overnight fix, this work is necessary, overdue and change IS possible Our advice to all the police forces undertaking this vital work is to treat 2022 as just the beginning: for such a radical transformation to work, it will require a commitment to years of systemic change. The police will need to work on implementing a trauma-informed approach at every level of policing, leadership, policy, investigation, victim work, VAWG and recruitment. The report’s recommendations are sound. It’s down to the individual police forces, now, to put them into practice. This kind of radical change is welcome and long overdue. We hope 2022 will be the start of that change and that we can build on the work we’re already doing with PCCs and police forces and offer our support to help make these ground-breaking recommendations a reality. About VictimFocus We offer organisations - including the police - help with: Training and e-learning Mentoring Consultancy Internal research Policy change Assessment and audit Evaluation and co-production Attitudinal measurements Resources To discuss your ideas or request more information: email Dr Jessica Taylor: jessica@victimfocus.org.uk About the author: Dr Jessica Taylor Dr Jessica Taylor (PhD, FRSA) is a Chartered Psychologist specialising in the victim blaming of women subjected to male violence and the pathologisation of women's mental health. She is the Director of VictimFocus, an international consultancy and research organisation dedicated to changing systemic victim blaming and misogyny in government, policing, law, medicine and social care services. She is the Sunday Times Best Selling Author of 'Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women's Trauma Against Them' and 'Why Women are Blamed For Everything.