Women's rights general conversations - Thread 3

[Kucinghitam]

Continuation of Thread 2.

There is so much excellent information and so many active discussions on FWR that I wondered if it would be useful to have a thread to sort of "cross-fertilise" between them - airing little thoughts or vignettes that wouldn't themselves merit their own thread, to highlight other posts/threads of particular interest or to point to notable developments on fast-moving threads so that casual observers know where to look.

(For example, "the X thread has meandered onto a fascinating discussion of Y" or "Poster P's amazing analysis on thread Z might have relevance to the scenario in thread W" or "Has anybody noticed this recurring theme that keeps coming up??" or even "Random bloke asked me to smile while I was choosing onions, grr"- that sort of thing).

I heard this on the news and it sounds horrific. Multiple wounds so this was clearly a deliberate murder. Her poor family, she looks like a sweet happy girl. What on earth happened to make two other teenagers become so vicious? I don't mean what did she do, just what happened to the kids who did it, why on earth would they behave like that?!

Utterly horrific story, poor girl.

Poor child, and poor family - coping with a sudden death is always hard, but there's an extra level of horror knowing that deliberate violence was used against someone you love.

I think there's a broader conversation to be had, about whether there's recently been an escalation in violent youth culture in general (particularly knife crime): is this online-enabled contagion?

Around our way we've heard numerous incidences of knife threats in local secondary schools, my colleague's teen DC said it was quite regular to be threatened with stabbing for basically no reason. And often the school authorities would do nothing. At our nearest secondary school, a couple of months ago a friend of DDs' friend was actually stabbed in the abdomen, but (thank the stars) not a serious injury.

I find the whole thing completely distressing.

That’s very upsetting @Kucinghitam. It wasn’t so long ago Ava White was murdered over a ‘Snapchat row’, whatever that is. Horrific.

What can be done?

I know that this is not a popular opinion, but I think parents must step in. The manner in which young people are using the internet and withdrawing from real life is very frightening. Long term, real world consequences of actions don't appear to be as real as they were. Stabbing someone over something on the internet is unthinkable to a codger like me and I imagine that maybe the full consequences of taking a human life isn't as profound if you're living online as it would be if you had more flesh based interactions.

Similarly with transition. So many kids seem untroubled about loss of fertility from interventions they could or may have. Part of that is their youth, but I wonder how much is an inability to imagine a future where sex and parenting are real possibilities?

Obviously I could be way off but I do think that some kids aren't in touch with human life the way older generations were forced to be.

What happened when I posed as a teen boy on YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a35d6d7e-a8a8-11ed-9c9b-9439987f775c?shareToken=acdd78d6e026dcb0f0fef611ea9eea05

Would it be better to discuss the murder on the thread on the subject?

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4741585-brianna-ghey-has-died-warning-violent-death?page=8&reply=123862898

I do think that some kids aren't in touch with human life the way older generations

Can't remember where it was now, and whether it was a poster or a linked article, but there was a recent thread where someone was saying their late teen/young adult son (not trans or with particular body dysmorphia) talked about his 'meat body' as an annoying encumbrance. Not really part of himself but some sort of non-optional add on that had to be fed and washed, and that he'd rather not have to look after. From what they said it didn't seem to be a one-off attitude, so I think you're right that for some people virtual life has become more real than reality, and they therefore don't understand real consequences of their actions in the same way.

I guess that's something that happens as generations move on and life becomes more sanitised. I recall some years ago, people talking about children these days not knowing that meat comes from animals - they knew it in an abstract way but didn't connect the meat in the supermarket with animals in the fields and the processes between those states. I guess when most people lived an agrarian life, this wasn't an issue so maybe this is a continuation of the same process? I don't know.

I had a look on that thread and it's (a) very sad and (b) a certain amount of almost triumphant TRSOH finger-pointing. Plus, when a tragedy like this is still fresh, I don't like to speculate on the specifics.

Also, I find the broader "what the heck is happening to our young people, has the Internet turned out to be a force for evil?" conversation is probably better here as a general theme.

And lies about the funeral service and headstone “legally” having to reference her birth sex/pronouns.

Yeah. There is broader issue about compelled belief coming through which is very disturbing to me (having been raised in a religious background). I can't and won't accept that my refusal to believe whatever anyone else instructs me to believe on any subject causes a butterfly effect where damage is done to others. I don't have that power over anyone. I do not and have never wished harm on any person for any reason but I will not pretend, for example, to believe in souls to please anyone. And I don't think my parents are going to hell for failing to make me believe.

It grates when people who never knew my cousin (murdered in a gay-bashing attack more than 40 years ago) trot him out to try prove some point about homophobia (sometimes with automatically added transphobia, because they come as a package these day). Terribly hard for his immediate family, even now.

Politicising the death of this child, by people who know nothing about the background facts, is so cynical and heartless.

Testing NC

I'm a FWR regular but obviously don't want to give any personal info under my FWR username. As someone close to this I really feel any discussion of the clothing choices etc of a young woman who has just been murdered, is really upsetting. I feel it's hugely inappropriate and a very poor reflection of this thread and those posters. I realise this is my personal opinion dictated by my personal circumstances but feel that speculation or conjecture above the information publicly released is incredibly distasteful and really upsetting to loved ones. I know free speech/censorship etc but someone has linked to a specific thread so people are free to discuss there it if they choose to. Please could we refrain from discussing it here? Agree the wider topic is definitely an issue to discuss in broader terms.

This makes you look like a really heartless twat by the way so you may want to get it deleted, up to you.

My friend’s murder was politicised by the National Front - they even had to deliberately tell a half truth to paint it as racially motivated.

They did this by posting police photos of the 3/6 murderers who were black and mixed race teenage boys on their website.
They left off the mugshots of the (mixed race) girl and the two white boys.

All 6 were British and lived on the same handful of neighbouring council estates in SE London.
The real back story of the murderers was one of poverty, listlessness, lack of education and motivation and being around violent men via DV in their families and on their estates. Violence had been socialised into all of them by their environment.

My friend was in the wrong place at the wrong time, being white and from a naice middle class family was neither here nor there in why he was targeted, he just happened to be on his way home from a night out and ran into them, they tried to mug him but he didn’t have anything worth taking and it escalated in the way group behaviour (positive and negative) often does.

But it’s much easier to paint terrible, tragic crimes as one dimensional, cartoon battles and not look at all the depressing factors in what makes teenagers vulnerable to becoming criminals and also vulnerable to being victims of criminals (very often the same sorts of factors, sadly).

I completely agree @ForThisThreadFWR and asked the person to stop. It was just one poster who made several posts. Perhaps we should ask MN to take them down.

Your brother 💐

I appreciate your input, and my intent is not to be a ‘heartless twat’ (not very feminist insult!) so perhaps I should’ve phrased it better.

But I stand by wanting to understand the myriad factors of what makes teenagers, both male and female, vulnerable to grooming, to gang culture, to carrying knives, to county lines, to Only Fans, to trans ideology, to other sorts of ideology (eg Andrew Tate).

I know free speech/censorship etc but someone has linked to a specific thread so people are free to discuss there it if they choose to.

That thread has been deleted.

About time, I'm surprised it took so long. That poor family though, Mumsnet can't protect them elsewhere.

Looks like the thread has been nuked anyway. I think that's a good point about the 'meat bodies' attitude, very worrying.

I don't think there are any MN threads currently running about this tragic story, they've all been taken down. Twitter is pure batshittery, obviously.