This is a video of an academic symposium on Youtube which was set up in response to an event Doughty Street Chambers was holding on Tony Blair . One of the contributors makes some points I find disturbing but am not sure if I'm misinterpreting as it's quite dense and difficult to follow. It's Tanya Serisier, who is a deputy dean of criminal law at Birkbeck. Her section starts at around 25.45 minutes in.
The main passage I find disturbing is below:
We live in an era of repeated sexual panics and we live in an era where regulation around sex, justified by our fear of child sexual abuse and paedophiles, have become increasingly frequent and have seen increasing forms of extra judicial regulation so not only arrests and things like that but regulatory powers forcing people to register and actually just like the figure of the terrorist providing the justification for the Iraq war the figure of the paedophile and the child sex offender has acted in a way to extend the boundaries of the criminal law and to extend the kinds of powers of the state that we will accept directed against people we see as other or deviant.
Queer theories sometimes say that the sex offender is the new homosexual, not in the terms of the equivalence in terms of the acts but in the way the sex offender has become a way of policing sexual normativity and also denying the harms and the real sources of sexual danger within our society, so putting it on a kind of demonised outsider and not looking at the harms of dominant heterosexuality, not looking at the gendered harms of everyday heterosexuality, not looking at the main sources of harms to children sexually which often come from within family, friends, relationships. We have the figure of the dangerous sexual predator who is an outsider who means that we don’t take responsibility as a society for talking about sexual justice. We have then this division between children who are cast as completely asexual and adults and we cast that line very firmly at the age of 16 and we say that what causes sexual risk and harm to children is that they are innocent and asexual but what we know is that actually when it comes to the sources of harm to the children we don’t have to cast them as outside the realm of sexual curiosity sexual interest, it’s their vulnerability, their lack of access to power, their lack of access to knowledge and legitimate standing that sees them unable to engage as full citizens in the world and that sees them as vulnerable to sexual harm and threat.
So we see this in the family, we see them in the kinds of harms that are committed by children and adolescents against each other in heterosexual settings and we also see this in the isolation that young queers and queer curious children face, they don’t have access to cultural resources to support a non heterosexual imaginary
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The speaker seems be saying fears about sexual harm to children by stranger offenders (who are more likely to be family/friends, yes) are exaggerated. Then she's saying that children are "cast as asexual" and that suppressing children's sexual curiosity and freedom isn't necessary to protect them - actually they are harmed by their lack of knowledge and inability to engage as full citizens.
I think this is nonsense - children are recognised as sexual and sexually curious (Adrian Mole anyone?) but boundaries are set on adults and children because they are vulnerable and that vulnerability is inherent in their lack of physical and mental maturity not in their lack of "access to power" and knowledge. It's not clear what she's saying but it sounds as if she wants to remove safeguards around children and is justifying that by downplaying sex offenders as a danger.
The speaker continues....
and the other side of that is what’s happened to the figure of the homosexual… in the last 20 years we’ve seen this demand on queer communities to grow up, to get married, get a mortgage and to leave behind people who can’t inhabit a very white middle class base of privilege and increasingly to leave behind trans members of our communities and we’ve seen incredible pressure put on that. We have this vision of an ideal married gay couple which is inherently exclusionary and we see that in Cameron’s support, not only for It Gets Better, but for equalising rights to marriage.
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I don't think the Tories created the demand for gay marriage, they responded to it...
The speaker continues....
The other point that we really need to make is within this new reframing of sexuality is what happens to women and to female sexuality and Naomi’s Wolf presence at the Doughty Street Panel, apart from her terrible book, reminds me that the Labour Party of Tony Blair is the Labour Party of Jess Phillips and Rosie Duffield and the Labour Party of a liberal feminism that is also the feminism of Theresa May, a carceral white feminist politics that has married gay best friends and shopping buddies but still reacts with disavowal and disgust to expressions of sexual deviance and queerness and seeks to police obscenity, that seeks to police and victimise sex workers, that refuses to support the human rights of trans people and that only defines women and girls and increasingly only defines lesbians, in terms of our vulnerability to violence rather than having any kind of sexual agency.
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This seems very simplistic. What level of "deviance" and obscenity are we supposed to embrace as feminists? Do lesbians who support Rosie Duffield not count as queer? What about black women with married gay friends who like shopping trips? Where do they fit in?
Answers on a postcard...