Sexist sentencing is best left in the Seventies
Hello, is that the Lord Chief Justice? I’ve got an urgent message. The Seventies called, and they want their shameful, sexist, jaw-droppingly retrograde sentencing back.
Our courts are showing signs of slipping into a time warp.
This week, cricketer Mustafa Bashir walked free from court, despite having forced his wife, Fakhara Karim, to drink bleach and swallow pills as he urged her to kill herself. He hit her with a cricket bat. But because she was well-educated – a graduate! – with “a network of friends”, the judge, Richard Mansell QC, wasn’t convinced she qualified as “vulnerable”. Funny, I wasn’t aware she had been the one on trial…
Then we also learnt that those men (and some women) who post revenge porn online in order to hurt and humiliate may now escape prison, unless the victim is “particularly vulnerable” or has suffered “very serious distress” from seeing explicit pictures of themselves plastered over social media.
Where rail companies once complained about “the wrong sort of leaves”, now the legal profession is struggling with “the wrong sort of victim”.
And there was me thinking that justice is blind, and the punishment is supposed to fit the crime, not be altered on the grounds of the social background, educational attainment or general knowledge of the victim.
That anyone (but usually a woman) would not be “very seriously distressed” after having her intimate pictures sent, or ordinary snaps tampered with to render them pornographic, is ridiculous.
I am genuinely struggling with the possibility that domestic violence and emotional abuse is different if the victim is middle-class.
Even The Archers’ jury cottoned on that Rob Tichener was an out-and-out monster to nicely-brought-up Helen Archer, despite the fact her family and friends couldn’t tell what was going on behind her bright, brittle carapace of coping.
Tune into Big Little Lies, the gripping HBO slow-burner starring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, and it is becoming evident that Kidman’s apparently perfect life is rotten to the core. Her character, Celeste, is photogenic and outwardly successful, the envy of all soccer moms.
But she is quietly locked into a violent relationship with her husband, played by Alexander Skarsgård. The bruises bear witness to the ongoing abuse, but at least she’s in California and won’t come up against an antediluvian British judiciary interested in dissecting her real or perceived character flaws, rather than those of the perpetrator.
Yet in real life, we have the Bashir case. His abuse included grabbing his wife by the throat in public, an assault so prolonged that a passer-by threatened to call the police, at which point Bashir desisted.
But Judge Mansell, in his “wisdom”, decided that Karim was not particularly vulnerable. When her husband then pleaded that he had been offered a professional contract by Leicestershire on condition he did not receive a custodial sentence, he was duly handed an 18-month suspended sentence. The cricket contract claim has since turned out to have been a lie…
Bearing in mind that this is the same judge who last year quashed Leicester City footballer Danny Simpson’s curfew sentence for domestic violence against the mother of his child, so he wouldn’t miss his side’s victory celebrations, I think we can all see which team Mansell is playing for.
How can any woman – or man or child – place their already damaged trust in the legal system if this sort of signal is being sent out by those in power?
Log on to the website for the National Domestic Violence Helpline and the first thing you will notice in the top right of the screen is the notice: “Warning! Cover Your Tracks!” Once you click on it, there are detailed instructions on how to prevent your abuser discovering your internet activities. It’s a chilling reminder of what it must be like to have to watch your movements, even when the abuser is absent.
The wider point is that we downgrade domestic violence at our peril. It is an invidious, largely hidden evil that destroys lives and has terrible reverberations far beyond the family.
Westminster attacker Adrian Ajao (aka Khalid Masood) was so violent towards his former wife, her relatives say, that she fled in terror after just three months of marriage. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who mowed down and murdered more than 80 people on Bastille Day in Nice last year, had a long history of domestic violence – as did Omar Mateen, who last year killed 49 people in a Florida nightclub.
It is, of course, not a crime confined to any one religion or any one class. It’s a manifestation of anger and a need to control those weaker, and – yes, Judge Mansell – more vulnerable. According to Paul Gill, a university lecturer who studies “lone-wolf ” terrorists, “having a history of violence might help neutralise the natural barriers to committing violence”.
Just one more reason to come down hard on domestic violence, before we take a wrong turn and end up back in the Seventies, when one bowling federation launched an advertising campaign with the knuckle-dragging slogan: “Have Some Fun. Beat Your Wife Tonight.”
Every woman – every person – has a right to feel safe in this country, whether walking over Westminster Bridge or doing the washing up.