In the 1980’s I was working in the City and found myself steeped in a very male work culture. Today people would call it toxic but in those days it was just the norm. Myself and the few other young women who worked there were not the norm and there were plenty of reminders of that! In a trading environment you had to deal with comments on how you dressed and worse on a daily basis.
There was annual investment analyst dinner held at the Grosvenor House and the first year I went my boss took me to one side. “Be careful this evening, he said, and do not get into a lift with a man on your own, even if you know him”. I thought this a bit over the top but by 10.30 pm I understood his warning. There were about 500 men and fewer than 40 women at this dinner and many of the men were very, very drunk. I took myself off to the ladies cloakroom and saw a man I knew and thought to be a rather old-fashioned gentleman in the corridor. I was shocked when he lurched towards me in a very leery fashion and I dodged out of the way, went to the loo and then decided to go home. I have never forgotten it. If he could behave like that when under the influence of alcohol, I thought, any man could.
When I returned to the City ten years later to do some research into gendered cultures, I needed the help of men. How men behaved and what they did when women were not around was impossible for me as a female researcher to find out. “I don’t think women have any idea of how men talk about them when they are not present”, one man told me. This reminded me of what Germaine Greer said in her seminal book, The Female Eunuch, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them”.
Perhaps my experience, age and research has given me more of an insight into men’s behaviour than most women, but for those of us who love our fathers, have brothers, sons and male partners some of it is still upsetting and uncomfortable to acknowledge. We collude with the more comfortable narrative that only very few bad men say and do unspeakable things to women and children, until we are confronted with evidence of the opposite. And even then we will try to find a reason why it’s not the norm.
Every so often a case emerges which disrupts this narrative and reveals an ugly truth – that perhaps a very large number of men may indeed think so little of women that they could sexually violate them. Today of course the case is of the Frenchman Dominique Pelicot who over many years drugged his wife, Gisele, unconscious before raping her and then inviting other men via a website to do the same. So far nearly one hundred men are thought to have done so, with fifty of them on trial as well.
If it had just been Monsieur Pelicot, who we hear had been an exemplary father and husband, we could have just explained it as a split personality, that underneath he was a monster akin to the horrendous Josef Fritz. Fritz kept his daughter Elisabeth locked in a cellar from when she was 18 until she reached the age of 42. Trapped underground and enslaved, she was raped thousands of times by her own father and gave birth to seven of his children.
But in the Pelicot case a large number of other men were involved. Only three refused to rape the unconscious Gisele Pelicot but even they didn’t report it. This all happened over several years in a tiny village in Provence. Were all these men also monsters? Did they all have split personalities as some psychologists are suggesting is the case with Dominique Pelicot? We know that they included civil servants, ambulance workers, soldiers, prison guards, nurses, a journalist, a municipal councillor, and truck drivers. All ordinary men, most of whom are husbands and fathers. What are we to make of this? There isn’t really an escape route via a comfortable narrative here although I have heard one man blame it on French culture saying that it couldn’t happen here in the UK. But very few men are saying anything about it all and I wish they would.
I suggest the Cleveland child abuse scandal was another such disruptive case. For those who aren’t old enough to remember it, over the course of a few months in 1987, 121 children were removed from their families in Cleveland ,Yorkshire ( then a county) because of concerns of sexual abuse highlighted through medical examinations and wider assessment. However the public could not tolerate the truth that so many men, fathers even, really did sexually abuse their children, including babies in the family setting. There was outcry and media hysteria with blame thrown instead at the professionals and in particular the pediatrician, Dr Marietta Higgs, who diagnosed a lot of the abuse. An inquiry was set up by the government and published a report in 1988.
The Inquiry made no assessment of whether or not the children were sexually abused, though clearly this would have been helpful. Writer Beatrix Campbell subsequently uncovered evidence, through documents now released in the National Archive, that indicate most of the children were sexually abused, and that the diagnosis by medical professionals was correct. Furthermore, her book, Secrets and Silence: Uncovering the legacy of the Cleveland child sexual abuse scandal, reveals that documents that would have confirmed this reality were amended, diluted and in some cases disappeared and this, at best lack of transparency, or at worst deliberate cover-up, has had lasting impacts.
I relate this as an example of the lengths we will go to as a society to avoid facing the uncomfortable truth about men’s sexual behaviour.
Another case is surely the Rotherham child abuse scandal, where we know that groups of men passed round as many as 1400 troubled girls some as young as thirteen and raped them multiple times over a period of several years. There and in other northern towns professionals knew about the abuse, but chose to sacrifice the girls rather than accuse a Pakistani group of men which they felt would upset community relations. Indeed the fact that in this case the men were mostly of Pakistani origin enabled the narrative of ‘other men’ to continue.
The reluctance to acknowledge the scale and extent of male violence and sexual abuse is because it is too unsettling. We live and work with men, among men. Many of us love men. As women we just try to avoid being a victim, yet we know that few women will have been lucky enough to come into adulthood without some unpleasant experience of sexual harassment or abuse.
In 2015 a study undertaken at a US university found that out of a small sample (too small to generalise) one third of the young male students would use coercive force to have sex with a woman if they could be sure they wouldn’t be caught.
A more recent UK study (2021)– and a more statistically robust one – found that over 10% of male students admitted to rape or sexual assault of a woman in the past two years, which is pretty horrifying.
We have come a long way since I was a young broker in the City. Women in the UK have so more equality in the workplace and there is now plenty of public discourse around women’s rights. Yet we know from history that women’s progress is often followed by backlash. We cannot even pretend that we live in an equal society whilst so many men are still violent and abusive towards us. Men, please get talking about this. We need you to.