'A female with a record like this ...represents all that is rotten in society nowadays'

[JaneS]

That's the comment from the judge who sentenced the girl in this article.

It's appalling, isn't it? I can't be the only one of us to think he should never have said that?

www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jan/22/poster-girl-booze-britain-interview

What about depression, dittany? In the article, she did approach doctors and the article implies that their response - that it wasn't classic depression - felt like a brush-off.

I don't deny there may be reasons for her situation that she (as is her right) doesn't want to share. But I do believe it could also be just as she says, that she can't pinpoint a reason other than her reactions to alcohol.

I think that to say there must be a negative reason for her situation, is to buy into the idea that women are natural paragons of virtue, and any who slip from that ideal are therefore so much the worse than men.

(I am just feeling my way through this reaction of mine, so sorry if it's poorly expressed.)

There doesn't necessarily need to be anything behind her behaviour - did she say when she started self-harming? That could have been in response to her drinking, rather than a separate issue.

Marian Keyes, in her autobiographical bits, said pretty much the same about her first drink - it made her feel different and she liked the feeling.

There could also be a genetic factor - the Aboriginal people in Australia nearly all have a problem with alcohol when they start drinking it - they don't process it well and it causes massive problems within their commnunity. There are other races (can't remember which at 4am!) that have similar low-tolerance and processing issues with alcohol - it's not beyond the bounds of belief that this girl has too.

I think the judge is up there with Judge Pickles for his statement - ridiculous to blame one woman for, or suggest that she is the worst offender in the current situation re. alcohol abuse in Britain.

it's not a case of self-medicating, there genuinely are problems with alcohol processing in their biochemistry.

No one's ignoring their suffering - far from it these days.

Self-harming to the extent this girl seems to have engaged in is usually a reaction to something pretty severe eg arms cut to ribbons, and jumping off buildings. And when it's a 'respectable' family people don't like to think that it might be sexual abuse, though sexual abuse does happen in respectable families and the pressure on the victim to keep quiet about it is more intense.
THough, OK, sometimes some people really are just 'wired wrong' and develop all sorts of problems. I have (for goodness knows what reason) several friends with some history of self harm and the root cause has not been sexual abuse (yes, they would have told me if it had been) though there's usually been an external trigger of some sort in the beginning such as bullying, or loss of some kind.
We don't know what's wrong with this poor girl but that there is something wrong with her rather than her just being a Bad Lot is blatantly obvious.

But the 'something wrong' could be to do with alcohol, not prior to it.

I don't think the point about biochemical processing works, though. She clearly processes alcohol, at some level, pretty efficiently. That doesn't mean it hasn't done her harm.

Alcohol is pretty powerful stuff.

But what her history is is irrelevant to the feminist issue, isn't it? The point is, why did the judge feel that it was so much worse for a woman to behave like this than for a man to, that it was worth commenting on?

It makes no difference if she just loved being drunk and getting angry; or if she was doing it because she was in desperate emotional pain. She still shouldn't have been held up as a symbol of all that is wrong with our country, when a man wouldn't have been.

I only skimmed the article and was similarly at the judges comment.

I think her history is irrelevant to the judge's decision to portray a woman in her situation as especially blameworthy. But I don't think it's irrelevant when we're looking at how people judge women.

Plenty of people (not in this thread, in RL), seem to think that if a woman does something like this, it can only be because there is something horrible in her past that she's not admitting to. It's the 'What went wrong with such a nice girl?' story. She's not allowed to be in control of her own story any more.

I'm not sure it's always a sexist thing - I'm sure some men are judged the same way. But it seems to be more common for society to think women are naturally virtuous and lovely, then get 'spoilt' by their experiences so that they do bad things.

Ah, I see...sorry. Thought we were still on 'being angry with the judge'!

Fair point ... I like to multitask! (badly)

lrd - if she were just being a violent, horrendous drunk, then i think yes, suggesting that there must be some sort of abuse history to provoke such behaviour would just be the soft version of the judge's sexism - but self-harm and suicide attempts do suggest some sort of past trauma, surely?
i know that alcohol is a depressant and that there's a possibility it caused her mental health issues on its own, but surely there's at least an equal likelihood that it's not her physiological reaction to alcohol but psychologically damaging life experiences which caused her behaviour?

judge a dinosaur, though, clearly.

Maybe so, stripy. I am not sure, but I can imagine alcohol would cause those issues myself, but I don't know.

I think it may be to do with her personality. I think this is significant

"Hall admits she is difficult to get to know. If even she doesn't understand herself, how can others? Both Davis and Hall's friend Sarah Hales describe her as "closed"."

"She looks anything but mad sat in front of me dressed in a black top with smart brown hair swept to the side, polite, seemingly shy and a little nervy. Occasionally, she shakes and twitches as she talks."

I think the drink is a release for her. Her personality changes and she becomes more open. I think she will grow out of it, as she devlops more confidence with age.

My twopenneth (sorry this might be a bit rambly).

There was a program about alcohol recently that was very interesting. In one part of it they had given monkeys free access to alcohol or water. Can't remember the exact figures but it was something like 10% tried it once and never again, 80% went and had some occasionally, and the remaining 10% kept going back and back and back and wouldn't stop until something external stopped them (the alcohol was removed, they were too pissed to get any more).

I don't think it's a stretch to say that could be pretty similar to humans - when I look at people I know some dont' drink at all, or if they "have to" eg a wedding toast they obviously don't really want to, most people like a drink but don't tend to go overboard. Then you have the people who will just drink and drink and drink until they fall down/the pub shuts/they get arrested/whatever. You can spot them by the look in their eye when alcohol is mentioned - they look excited. Many of these people regain some self control but it's a fine line - if anyone is going to get pissed and end up in a right state it's them.

I really do believe that some people just respond to chemical stimulants in a massive way, that their pleasure centres light up like a christmas tree and they've got no "off switch".

So that's one thing.

The other thing is that drinking excessively and constantly making a complete twat of yourself can lead to feelings of self-loathing - the whole thing can become a vicious circle. Most people don't like themselves very much when they wake up with a steaming hangover and remember all sorts of godawful things they did the night before.

Of course they may be something in the background. But I think it is a mistake to assume that there must be.

So really I agree with LRD that saying that she must have been abused to behave like this may well be a sexist approach in itself. Because nice girls don't do this - she is a nice girl - so there must be something wrong.

I'm going completely off-topic here, but the thing with the monkeys is interesting - where was the programme? (This is one of the times I miss having a TV - I don't see the same things you all do!).

as luck would have it I googled BBC alcohol monkeys and up it came!

My figures were way off - with the monkeys 25% didn't like it, 50% could take it or leave it and 25% couldn't get enough.

Sorry for hijack everyone.

Ahh, thanks. Very interesting!

Sorry for hijack too.

at the extreme end of this spectrum, in Iran women have virtually no rights and yet are criminally responsible at the age of nine (for boys it's fifteen)

A nine year old girl can hit someone, for example, and being held to the same standards as a fully grown man...and yet boy isn't

Fucking hell

thumbwitch, I watched an interview with Marion Keyes. she came from a dysfunctional family, there's no doubt about that. She said her mother expects her and her siblings to come to dinner on the same night every week and refuses to accept their adult status.
It sounded incredibly stifling. That would send anyone to drink, let alone someone with a creative streak (or do creative streaks come from pain?- the chicken and the egg)

I agree with dittany about aborigine's. Asians (DH included) are missing an enzyme that helps process alcohol, so they get drunk very easily (I'm talking a grown man getting pissed on half a shandy)

BUt because the Japanese have never suffered any of the cultural obliteration, deaths, forced sterilization and wrenching babies and children away from their mothers for forced adoption by whites like the aborigines have, there is no epidemic of alcoholism here. None at all.

sorry for consecutive posting

LOL at this ISNT "You can spot them by the look in their eye when alcohol is mentioned - they look excited."

That's me! I'm practically teetotal and have been since I had the kids because I am a menace when I'm drunk

I thought it was just a very sad, and intrusive (although not sure if maybe the fact that she is in the other papers, so at least she is getting to put her side out there is an excuse) account of someone with clear mental health issues.

at the idea that she must have suffered sexual abuse. That is part of the stigma of mental health issues- people saying you MUST have been abused to get that illness.

It's akin to seeing someone with lung cancer and saying they MUST be a smoker - logically wrong.

it's not that ButterPieify, it's that mental health problems in women are often passed off by the system as being something to do with women being inherently faulty as people. The Victorians were ace at this.
So ignoring a person's environment, particularly a woman's (in the case of PND, for example) is a particularly patriarchal way to regard mental health problems

There is an appalling lack of research into the environmental factors of most mental illnesses. The pharmaceutical industries make a mint out of saying that people have just got faulty brains and that's the end of that