Oxfam training document blames women for "the root causes of sexual violence"

[ChristinaXYZ]

Original thread was deleted. Reposting according to advice received from MNHQ

The article below from the Telegraph appears to be from an Oxfam training document called Learning About Trans Rights and Inclusion

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/09/oxfam-training-guide-blames-privileged-white-women-root-causes/

An Oxfam staff training document says “privileged white women” are supporting the root causes of sexual violence by wanting "bad men" imprisoned.

So an organization that has a bunch of men raping women and children says the issue isn’t that the men are raping, the issue is that white women would dare to say something about it.

Sounds about right....

Rita, yes. That's them. I don't think they're even the only one, but I can't recall right now which other ones I've heard about. It almost seems like whenever you give men money and power and the power to distribute benefits, some of them use it this way.

Maybe if there were real consequences for their real crimes ... but that's just crazy talk.

I've been in the USA for a few years now.

There are obviously significant race issues and a history of white woman using race as a way of controlling black men. Although sometimes it seems to have been white men controlling black men while claiming they were doing on the behalf of white women.

But I still absolutely don't understand why anyone would think that meant that white woman shouldn't have the protection of the law after a sexual assault.
That by accessing the law of the land they were responsible for their own or future sexual assaults.

Victim blaming sexual assault victims is a totally unacceptable thing for anyone to do let alone a major international charity.

This is truly disgusting but sadly not a surprise. How do they not realise how bad this looks. I did not know that there has been another case of rape in Oxfam.

It is also not a surprise to see Alison Phipps who accused Southall Black Sisters of political whiteness mentioned in this. It is funny how her ideas (a Cambridge educated white professor) are being used to shut down black women who have been victims of violence and abuse.

I have thought a lot about why this is happening because it bothers me a lot. You can no longer say feminism is bad and racism is good especially if you are on the left, but that creates a problem for people who have power. That’s why people can identify as things they are not. Alison sees herself as writing from a black perspective and that is why she justifies accusing black women who disagree with her of whiteness. No one wants to say that women should be raped or feminism itself is bad but those women are doing feminism wrong we would of course support the right feminism.

This makes it possible to support perpetrators of the most vile abuse. It is classic DARVO all of it.

It is only a very privileged elite who believe this absolute bollocks.

We need the language of social justice and it is being stolen from us by nasty bullies. I wish I was clever enough to write some kind of academic article explaining how this is happening but I am not. You can see it happening everywhere politicians have been doing this to disabled people for years. They use the social model of disability to justify taking support away from us. It is empowering apparently.

The men who have done this need to be punished and they need to know they will be caught. It is a really awful case of abuse of power just like Wayne Couzins.

Sorry, LangsCleginSpace and Nice Gerbil, I seem to have become the rope in a tug of war for my privileged soul (sad attempt at joke in case that's not clear). I have actually been well aware of the problems with Oxfam for several years , I do read newspapers. I had considered the Oxfam shop as it is very close so wondered if I would have to agree to tick boxes or walkaway but on the whole it wouldn't suit me as I can't even be bothered to housekeep my own house let alone housekeep shopfuls of donated goods.

And in my own way, I am quite a one for silently boycotting people and organisations who outrage me. Trying to contribute to some of the forums here has shown me how easy it is to misrepresent yourself as more ignorant and naive than you would like. I think I had read the article when it was previously referred to on this forum. It does seem to be a justification of projected guilt. Some white women use their privilege of being listened to or believed to cause trouble for or accuse black men of crimes and now we can often see video evidence of that. Because of the racial history of the USA it can wreck lives so other white women with genuine complaints should shut up? Who or what does that help, even in theory? Some projected world where the scales are evenly balanced?

Until Covid I was volunteering as a tutor/support worker at a community centre but that had to close down. As I mentioned previously this whole identity yourself for equality, diversity and funding purpose always roused controversy as nobody likes to be coralled into categories and people had various grounds for suspicion of authority. It was usually solved by everyone agreeing to tick the boxes and shut up basically apart from a few walk outs.

Our groups were mixed sex, race,age and religion and usually unemployed for some time as qualification for being there (as was I). A lot of people had a lot of reasons for feeling unjustly treated. I do think the idea that white women needed to somehow make up for racial injustice by not pursuing their own justice when injured would have been seen as crazily unjust to (nearly) everyone. Personally it has taken all my life to stop feeling guilty about all the evils of the world. I was one of those who felt she was doing something by agonizing which is what I mean by projected guilt. Strangely it did not stop any evil. So now I am in favour of those responsible for crimes being punished, those who lie, cheat, manipulate etc being shamed. Not ever going to happen as much as it should of course.

I don't know if the world is worse or we just see it so much now. After all To KIll A Mocking Bird was published 60+ years ago and that is its central crime: abused white girl is caught out, blames an innocent black man who is lynched, girl is left with abusive family.

Ok so what is the root cause of sexual violence? Oppression?

This is a comon theme by MRA / Incels as already stated. According to their playbook, women, especially white women are the privileged ones and oppressors. I’ve already gone down a rabbit hole on Twitter on that one, eye opening. TRA’s have got on the bandwagon. Ergo as white women are the oppressors, they are are the ones oppressing.

This is sickening. Awful, awful to centre white women as the abusers and culprits of sexual violence. Such twisting of language. I also can’t read it all in one go. I’m going to come back to the links when I feel stronger.

The report is all the more astonishing given the context. Staff have been whistleblowing about the conduct of Oxfam staff who have been involved in sexual exploitation of vulnerable women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Oxfam have been accused of harrassing the whistleblowers and delaying the investigation and this is the report they put out. We can imagine the sex of the whistleblowers and the accused in this scenario can’t we?

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/oxfam-sexual-exploitation-congo-b1826068.html%3famp

I'm not clever enough to fully understand these issues but this is astonishing

I think, having listened to her speak at length on this, she means all feminism. She hates the first wave feminists with a passion, seems to regard second wave feminists as the cause of all black people's woes and opposes almost everything feminism has achieved.

Ironic. Without the achievements of feminism she wouldn't be in academia, spouting off about the evils of feminism.

"I'm pretty sure she doesn't believe a word and is just trolling for academic attention."

I suspect you're bang on the money there. Pity she cares so little about the women who are harmed by it.

Surely Alison Phipps is spectacularly missing the point about women's trauma and anger - this is the main reason feminism exists rather than some sort of annoying by-product, and any one who is fortunate enough that their feminism doesn't come out of trauma should STFU about it and listen to those of us who have had our lives ruined. This is one of the things that enrages me about identity politics, for many of us the defining thing of our lives has been abuse and violence as a child or adult, with enduring mental and physical health problems as a result, yet this is invisible in the hierarchy of oppression and we're expected to put everyone else (men) first and not demand anything ourselves.

@StealthPolarBear

I'm not clever enough to fully understand these issues but this is astonishing

On the contrary, I think you are clever enough to understand the issues and that is why you find it astonishing.

If academics can't present their argument clearly then that is because there isn't an argument.

I think @NiceGerbil you’ve hit the nail on the head in terms of the motivation behind this. It’s to discredit women who are likely to oppose transgender ideology.

If I didn’t know more about the wider picture and the pervasiveness of queer theory I’d think this was paranoia. But then, if I didn’t know that I’d be wondering what on earth all the stuff about sexual violence and white feminism was doing in a document about diversity and inclusion of trans people.

@Clymene
Putting it kindly, Alison Phipps appears to have the worst case of internalised misogyny I've ever seen
I agree with everything you say in your post. I’m completely baffled by people like Alison Phipps. She seems to have too much time on her hands and has to justify her existence by coming up with increasingly potty theories. It would be laughable were it not so dangerous.

I wonder how much these academics step back and think "well this is an interesting theory/pontification/thought experiment but what would it mean if applied ti my day to day life?"

Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy in behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore. It doesn't matter who the individual women are. They all have the same vulnerability to rape, to battery, as children to incest. Poorer women have more vulnerability to prostitution, which is basically a form of sexual exploitation that is intolerable in an egalitarian society, which is the society we are fighting for.

Andrea Dworkin

I find this talk of punishment and 'bad men' a real misrepresentation. Of course women often feel righteous anger at our collective and individual treatment by society and individuals but many of us also absolutely understand that most harmful people have been harmed themselves in some way. That doesn't mean we allow them to continue to harm.

If there is something wrong with our justice system such than men who have not committed any crimes are systematically sentenced and imprisoned for violence against women, that should be rectified. Current statistics would suggest otherwise though.

I can see an abuser and feel sorry for everything he went through to get him where he is at the same time as wanting his wife and children protected from him. On an individual level, it is called having boundaries, and, frankly, it is straight out of the abuser's handbook to appeal to pity, their victim's better nature, and so on as a last resort. I am perfectly capable of looking a rapist in the eye, understanding that his behaviour is likely driven by deep seated trauma, and still being glad he has been convicted. That's exactly what I did when I played my part in a jury. I felt huge sadness that any human could end up that way but that doesn't mean he should have been allowed to continue to destroy women's lives.

So an organization that has a bunch of men raping women and children says the issue isn’t that the men are raping, the issue is that white women would dare to say something about it.

Yup. In a nutshell. Like others here, I’ll be looking for a non-misogynist charity to donate to, on
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4184062-Feminist-goals-and-organisations-which-are-working-towards-them

Does this mean that the aid workers who hired prostituted women in Haiti were actually empowering them rather than exploiting them?

I’m completely baffled by people like Alison Phipps.

Her motivation is to maintain her role in grievance studies and to put down competitors. That's the basic thing behind a whole lot of this. At some point you do have to be cynical - looking at the actual "academic" stuff, there's nothing there - it's flim-flam, and exactly what sort of flim-flam you get depends on what the producer requires.

James Lindsay's next episode of the New Discourses podcast goes into this (already listened to it as a Patreon subscriber, but not public yet) - "Why you can be transgender but not transracial".

He spends quite a while going through the "theoretical" justifications, but in essence the reality boils down to "what keeps the grift going" versus "how many people can the grift sustain".

Phipps sort of grievance nonsense can only survive in a queer theory-dominated academy. Actual feminism and material reality are at odds with that, so they need to be kept down.

Absolutely. They were facilitating them using what assets they had to gain resources for themselves / their families.

Wtaf. Oxfam will not be getting a single penny from me ever again. Not even my local charity shop.

Hi - I ditched my Oxfam tenner a month a while ago for these reasons and more. Now I give it to the Katosi Women Development Trust which seems happy to accept support from this Privileged White Feminist and haven't gone down the road of blaming us for all the world's ills yet! Check them out here and good luck, Jo

www.katosi-uk.org

I am dumbfounded that Oxfam thought this was a good route to go down. Well done to whoever has blown the whistle on this shit show.

If looks as though Oxfam, while under investigation for abuse in Haiti, was simultaneously circulating dogma that justifies abuse.