'IN ENGLAND'S GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND'
article by Beatrix Campbell
(extract)
"The Challenor case is an arrow to the heart of Britain’s twisted sexual politics.
Somewhere in England there is a girl who was raped, tortured and electrocuted by a well-known local Green Party figure in Coventry, David Challenor. During the criminal trial his victim described his rituals in which he dressed as a little girl or a baby in a nappy, at a house used as an official Green Party address, in 2015. For anyone, this case is cruel and cautionary – for Greens it is a huge political crisis.
We know that nothing is more important than community respect and validation for the survivors of sexual crime. This girl didn’t get it. Her lonely journey to the criminal court was vindicated – at the end of August the perpetrator, David Challenor, received a 22-year-sentence.
But the child was unsupported by the people who mattered most, her intimate community, the Challenors - David, his wife Tina and Aimee Challenor. All three were well-known Green Party activists. It was the abuser they supported, not his accuser.
The police interviewed members of the family in October 2015, including Aimee Challenor, then a teenager about to transition from a boy, Ashton, to a girl, who was about to become an ambitious young trans activist. By 2017 Aimee Challenor was Green Party equalities spokesperson and a party candidate, and this year pitched into the party’s recent deputy leadership election.
The sins of the father are not the sins of the son or daughter. Yet Aimee Challenor’s trajectory as a political trans activist and synchronises with the police investigation into David Challenor. Twice she appointed her father to be as election agent - there are no criteria regulating agents, according to the Electoral Commission – and she insists that despite the criminal charges she was ‘building bridges’ and attempting reconciliation with her father.
The party leadership was not informed until David Challenor was sentenced in August. A couple of senior individuals in the Green Party knew, however, but didn’t pass it on. David Challenor was a volunteer for Coventry Pride, who took swift action when he was charged in 2016 and barred him . Members are now asking whether there was anything else Aimee Challenor didn’t disclose.
The scandal has scalded Green Party leaders. An inquiry has been launched, David Challenor has been expelled. When mutiny among party members forced Aimee’s suspension in early September, she quit, accused the party of transphobia and blocked Caroline Lucas on Twitter as a trans exclusionary radical feminist.
But the Greens need to do more than lament the guile and cruelty of David Challenor and the party’s misfortune in being gulled by the Challenors. The party’s initial official statements about the scandal pathetically paid more attention to Aimee Challenor’s need for support than the vindicated – but traduced – child.
Conducive context
The party should ask itself whether the party’s hard-line pro-trans policies and associated bullying provided what sexual violence scholar Prof Liz Kelly calls a ‘conducive context’ that shielded the Challenors from scrutiny." (continues)
www.byline.com/column/85/article/2300