Rape allegations against Jimmy Tarbuck

[Dandred]

They sure know how to pick their victims don't they ?....vulnerable working class kids..

And the upper class kids buggered at boarding schools by their piers and school masters?

 

[Pickman's model]

And the upper class kids buggered at boarding schools by their piers and school masters?

it would be exceeding painful to be buggered by a pier

a pier recently: imagine that up your jaxi

 

[Dillinger4]

piers would be worse

 

[Firky]

I always wondered what the Victorian obsession with piers was, now I know!

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

piers would be worse

He's not been done as well has he?

 

[Dillinger4]

he only fucks himself

 

[danny la rouge]

You mean the power that adults have over children?

I disagree, lots of adults have power over children and don't nonce it about.

Just as rape is about power rather than sex, so child abuse is about power rather than sex. All adults have power over all children. Not all adults abuse that power, but the abuse is possible because of the power differential.

Here's some quotes from a couple of well-known books on violence against women:

Many men in Western society learn to expect that their wishes and concerns come first, that because they are males and heads of households they have certain preogatives and rights that supersede those of women.

[...]

When a man attacks his wife he is either chastising her for challenging his authority or for failing to live up to his expectations, or attempting to discourage future unacceptable behaviour.

(Dobash & Dobash, 1980, "Violence Against Wives")

"If lynching is the ultimate racist act, rape is the ultimate sexist act. It is an act of physical and psychic oppression. [...] Like lynching, it is cowardly, and like lynching it is used to keep individual women, as well as women as a caste, in their place. And finally, as with lynching, the rape victim is blamed for provocation.

[...]

Eradicating rape requires getting rid of the power discrepancy between men and women, because abuse of power flows from unequal power".

(Russell, 1975, "The Politics of Rape").

Now, that is not to say that all men are rapists, even ones holding sexist views. It does say (and I agree) that where rape and violence occurs, it flows from social inequalities. Rape, violence against women, child abuse, are an extreme manifestation of a far wider societal attitude.

 

[Pickman's model]

All adults have power over all children.

not true.

 

[danny la rouge]

not true.

In very few cases is it not true, and only in certain interpretations of the word "power". It is true in law. It is true in social expectations.

(I substantially edited my post while you were quoting me, though. Perhaps the additions help with my meaning).

 

[8ball]

Just as rape is about power rather than sex, so child abuse is about power rather than sex.

I've heard that before but it always strikes me as a bit suspiciously neat - do you have any evidenced sources from the last 25 years?

 

[danny la rouge]

I've heard that before but it always strikes me as a bit suspiciously neat - do you have any evidenced sources from the last 25 years?

Not to hand, although there's plenty on rape in war. Sadly. It seems self-evident that it's an expression of power. You are free to disagree, of course.

 

[8ball]

Not to hand, although there's plenty on rape in war. Sadly. It seems self-evident that it's an expression of power. You are free to disagree, of course.

Just seems like a possible comforting myth, especially attractive to those who are circumspect about power generally. I don't doubt that power is tied in there and in the case of war you may have an urge to humiliate, vengefulness, all manner of fucked up shit going on in the heads of soldiers.

However, I doubt the same thing is going on in these cases as in the cases where perhaps a young man kids himself that a girl is really consenting when she is really, really drunk or perhaps decides that if she isn't quite consenting then she won't remember anyway.

 

[danny la rouge]

Here's Amnesty's Lives Blown Apart: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/a...7f-11dd-bb24-1fb85fe8fa05/act770752004en.html

Gender-based discrimination and violence are therefore not incidental to conflict, but are embedded in all aspects of warfare. Violence against women has been an integral and endemic aspect of conflict throughout history. But that does not mean violence against women in war is inevitable or intractable. Patterns of violence against women in conflict do not arise "naturally", but are ordered, condoned or tolerated as a result of political calculations.

prevalent before and during conflict is a clear incitement to violence against women. As a result, sexual violence often becomes an intentional strategy to terrorize, demean and "defeat" an entire population,

 

[danny la rouge]

However, I doubt the same thing is going on in these cases as in the cases where perhaps a young man kids himself that a girl is really consenting when she is really, really drunk or perhaps decides that if she isn't quite consenting then she won't remember anyway.

I think that's very much about him thinking his wishes supersede hers.

 

[8ball]

I think that's very much about him thinking his wishes supersede hers.

Yeah, it's an abuse of power, and always is, by definition. I'm less convinced, however, by the idea that it is all about power. Robbery, for example, is an abuse of power (and I don't deny it can be done purely for a power buzz), but more often the reason is that the robber wants the phone/wallet etc.

I'm not a criminologist or psychologist or anything and I haven't even read into the subject - it just strikes me as one of those equations that is a bit too neat.

 

[danny la rouge]

Yeah, it's an abuse of power, and always is, by definition. I'm less convinced, however, by the idea that it is all about power.

It's an expression of power. There's obviously biology involved.

 

[Pickman's model]

taffboy gwyrdd i see you're not all bad

 

[Citizen66]

What does that say about society? Obviously it wasn't only stars. And obliviously this isn't a new phenomena. Do some humans have predisposition to noncing around? The Greeks were quite good at it with young boys...



You mean the power that adults have over children?

I disagree, lots of adults have power over children and don't nonce it about.

Or, are you talking about power in society?

I disagree again, child molestation isn't reserved to those to have power in society.


So what do you mean by "power corrupts" in this context?

Corruption doesn't equate child molestation, does it? However that is one way it could manifest itself. Look at how prolific Savile seems to have been. And your own example of the Greeks. Why use that example if you now disagree with what I'm saying?

 

[andysays]

I haven't singled out any particular piece of black humour on this thread, and said explicitly that it can be an appropriate response to tragedy.

That doesn't mean it can be used a cover for 'joking' with impunity. People who have been victims of abuse disagree on the boundaries, for a myriad of reasons. People who have not and who rarely have to think about the possibility that it might happen to them would do well to shut the fuck up and listen, rather than hysterically justifying their position before they've even considered whether what they find hilarious might make them look like a bit of a rapist enabling cunt to others.

You're really lucky to have been given the power to see into people's minds, their hearts, their very souls after reading just a few lines of text on a computer screen.

In the hands of the wrong person, it could be a terrible burden and something which could be horribly misused, but thankfully we can trust you to use it only for good...

 

[ymu]

The thing is, to what extent is it a general responsibility not to hurt the feelings of someone in that situation, and to what extent do such people need to be able to take responsibility for their own feelings?

Some jokes about abuse are pretty much guaranteed to offend everyone; others may well be offensive/hurtful to some who have been abused; and others will only be offensive to a minority of people. Where do we draw the line?

I think that the jokes being made on this thread have fairly obviously been made to achieve a polemical point - in other words, it's not just a bunch of mouthbreathers cracking oh-so-funny abuse jokes, but people attempting to make a point, perhaps in response to your reactions.

I do believe that humour does have its role to play in this, because I think that it is important to make sure the subject doesn't continue to be taboo, and if jokes are part of the process of opening up debate, then they have their place. There are abuse jokes that would offend me, but I haven't seen any of those here yet: it would seem that your own threshold is a little lower, and that's perfectly OK.

What isn't wise, though, is to challenge those jokes merely by saying they shouldn't be made. If people don't want to offend you, then they will need to know that you are offended; but they themselves may be offended by the implication that, just because you're offended by them, they shouldn't make them. So it comes down to a fairly simple choice, in my view: if we're offended by what someone has said, we need to make that clear, but we have to stop there. If they are not ignorantly making them, they will hear what you say, and take what they consider to be appropriate action; if, on the other hand, they are making them with the specific intention of causing offence, then what you say isn't going to make a lot of difference, and may even encourage it to happen more.

First bolded bit: The line is drawn at zero risk of normalising abuse and thus enabling fucked-up psyches to do it.

Second bolded bit: if you look at what has actually happened on threads where I have noted offence being taken, or where a comment has been taken personally by someone when it was not directed at them, I do stop after a brief exchange (which I usually start by being polite) unless the thread has already been trashed and is worthless already.

That doesn't stop the hysterical reactions echoing for weeks in waves after wave of wounded pride and nor does it stop people telling me to ask nicely because they also ignored the polite phase. You need to think very carefully about what neutrality means in a situation where oppression is being challenged, and what kinds of challenges that produces.

 

[ymu]

What you're talking about isn't a normalising process, though. It's generally a process of self-management that enables the individual to get a handle on transgressive ideas. In the UK our male Victorian predecessors rarely spoke or joked about such things, yet their capacity for having sex with children was, by most accounts, rapacious.
As for your first question, "what does enable...?", that'd be people turning the other cheek. Those people who, when another dead or abused child is found, say "I knew something was going on!", but sadly never stirred their arses to report it.

I agree that people should stir their arses to report it. I am arguing that they should also stir their arses to stamp out transgressive behaviour where it looks more like a risk factor than an attempt to get to grips with the dark side. Noncery is not a binary nor a lifelong condition: there is a point at which behaviour is clearly unacceptable before it has ruined any lives.

"Turning the other cheek" is a poor choice of phrase. That is what the targets of this behaviour (including some men and virtually all women and children) have been forced to do forever. We'd like the criminal justice system to start taking its responsibilities seriously. There is no point reporting it when that will lead to no action other than further humiliation and abuse at the hands of clueless cunts who don't think it matters because they perceive it as unlikely to happen to them and they don't live with the threat on a daily basis. Their mates think it's funny and so do they.

 

[ymu]

I wasn't suggesting that you are a journalist, I was stating that it's a standard of behaviour I'd expect from them, not from you.


minority pursuits. If they were as prevalent as you're impying, we'd be awash with street crime, our roads would be in gridlock because people were abandoning their cars in order to ruck at the slightest opportunity, and pubs would be utter no-go zones, even the "grandad" pubs.



Aggression and dominance are socially-constructed categories. You appear to be implying that they're natural/biological/genetic traits as opposed to potentials that only play out in accordance to social stimuli. They only tend to be developed traits in people with disorders of the mind and/or of the brain.


And there will be male and female perpetrators too.

I can't go to the local shops after dark here because of the number of 'friendly' men. It's scary as fuck for my partner too but at least they're only asking him to find them a street girl not trying to fuck him.

HTH

 

[ymu]

Here's Amnesty's Lives Blown Apart: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/a...7f-11dd-bb24-1fb85fe8fa05/act770752004en.html

An important add-on to that is that men may be more prevalent as victims of rape during war (and certainly in prison). The figures are unknowable but rape of men may be more common overall because of this:

The rape of men

"In Africa no man is allowed to be vulnerable," says RLP's gender officer Salome Atim. "You have to be masculine, strong. You should never break down or cry. A man must be a leader and provide for the whole family. When he fails to reach that set standard, society perceives that there is something wrong."

Often, she says, wives who discover their husbands have been raped decide to leave them. "They ask me: 'So now how am I going to live with him? As what? Is this still a husband? Is it a wife?' They ask, 'If he can be raped, who is protecting me?' There's one family I have been working closely with in which the husband has been raped twice. When his wife discovered this, she went home, packed her belongings, picked up their child and left. Of course that brought down this man's heart."

Back at RLP I'm told about the other ways in which their clients have been made to suffer. Men aren't simply raped, they are forced to penetrate holes in banana trees that run with acidic sap, to sit with their genitals over a fire, to drag rocks tied to their penis, to give oral sex to queues of soldiers, to be penetrated with screwdrivers and sticks. Atim has now seen so many male survivors that, frequently, she can spot them the moment they sit down. "They tend to lean forward and will often sit on one buttock," she tells me. "When they cough, they grab their lower regions. At times, they will stand up and there's blood on the chair. And they often have some kind of smell."

Because there has been so little research into the rape of men during war, it's not possible to say with any certainty why it happens or even how common it is – although a rare 2010 survey, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 22% of men and 30% of women in Eastern Congo reported conflict-related sexual violence. As for Atim, she says: "Our staff are overwhelmed by the cases we've got, but in terms of actual numbers? This is the tip of the iceberg."

Later on I speak with Dr Angella Ntinda, who treats referrals from the RLP. She tells me:

"Eight out of 10 patients from RLP will be talking about some sort of sexual abuse."

"Eight out of 10 men?" I clarify.

"No. Men and women," she says.
http://www.urban75.net/forums/threa...nst-jimmy-tarbuck.309982/reply?quote=12216517
"What about men?"

"I think all the men."

I am aghast.

"All of them?" I say.

"Yes," she says. "All the men."

They may also suffer more, not having been brought up to expect it. Fucked up.

 

[ymu]

Just seems like a possible comforting myth, especially attractive to those who are circumspect about power generally. I don't doubt that power is tied in there and in the case of war you may have an urge to humiliate, vengefulness, all manner of fucked up shit going on in the heads of soldiers.

However, I doubt the same thing is going on in these cases as in the cases where perhaps a young man kids himself that a girl is really consenting when she is really, really drunk or perhaps decides that if she isn't quite consenting then she won't remember anyway.

Of course that last example is about power. The physical power to do what he wants when she is helpless to resist.

It's not the same as having an army of rapists to send in but it is an abuse of power. If he didn't believe, deep down, that that power was his right to abuse he'd do what every normal bloke does and go to sleep hoping for some action in the morning.

 

[danny la rouge]

An important add-on to that is that men may be more prevalent as victims of rape during war (and certainly in prison).

Interesting link, thanks. I vaguely remember the report, but I don't think I read that version of it. Maybe I heard it on the radio. (I'd have liked your post, but that seemed inappropriate, iykwim).

 

[ymu]

It sickens me that there are so many men who abuse their power in this way. It is pretty clear that the (powerful) human male is the single most dangerous thing threatening most people's lives today.
It's endemic and it comes up time and time again, rapes, sexual misconduct, abuse of power, wealth gain, war.....
It seems that the human male is still inherently controlled by genetic programming of millions of years of evolution designed to make them fight each other for a female.
It seems Intelligence means nothing..........

This is wrong-headed. You're saying that men are hard-wired to have violent sexual urges and cannot be expected to control them.

I suspect the truth is that 1-2% of all men and women are fucked up by nature and we will never be safe from them. All we can do (with current knowledge) is keep an eye on them and lock them up at the first possible opportunity. Psychopaths etc.

But the total number of people who have committed abuse is 10-20%, maybe up to a quarter of all adults by the time they pop their clogs. Most only once, very few with a large number of repeated offences. (source)

The prevalence of rape - and especially the number of errors made by young men who are later horrified at what they once did - is proportional to the amount of macho prickery going on in a culture. It won't stop until men stop being taught that acting like a macho prick is an appropriate reaction when they can't think of anything better to do or say.

 

[8ball]

It's not the same as having an army of rapists to send in but it is an abuse of power.

I think I need to zero in a bit on what you/danny/other people mean when you say rape is about power, because I'm not saying it isn't always an abuse of power. I'm with you 100% on that.

I might be misinterpreting what is meant when people say it is about power, though. That seems to be saying to me that the buzz of power and domination is the main motivating factor.

From a crim. psych. perspective I was wondering what the evidence was in terms of what is going on in people's heads when they commit these crimes, hence my question to danny because he is good on questions of evidence and I imagine there is a load of research out there, none of which I'm familiar with.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

From a crim. psych. perspective I was wondering what the evidence was in terms of what is going on in people's heads when they commit these crimes, hence my question to danny because he is good on questions of evidence and I imagine there is a load of research out there, none of which I'm familiar with.

I think that's a very good question. I'd like to know, too. It would have to involve asking the rapists themselves, while of course remaining very cautious about how much insight they have into themselves.

 

[Pickman's model]

I think that's a very good question. I'd like to know, too. It would have to involve asking the rapists themselves, while of course remaining very cautious about how much insight they have into themselves.

why? are all rapists thick & unaware?

 

[danny la rouge]

I think I need to zero in a bit on what you/danny/other people mean when you say rape is about power, because I'm not saying it isn't always an abuse of power. I'm with you 100% on that.

OK. It's about countering the assumption that rape is all about sex. There's a view still about that women at some level want/deserve rape. That women can be asking for rape by dressing a certain way, for example. This suggests that it's an unavoidable outcome, that there are natural forces men can't control if women have a certain type of skirt. That rape is to be expected in certain circumstances. That rape and sex are largely interchangeable terms, or at least overlap to a large degree. For example in the first episode of the execrable sitcom Vicious, Frances de la Tour's character goes on about how she wants to be raped by the new tenant upstairs. (No, not a 70s sitcom, a modern one airing for the first time now).

To the extent that penetration takes place, and the rapist might get gratification, there is "sex". That is the means by which the power is asserted. It is about power because abuse of power flows from unequal power. If there isn't a power discrepancy, then the person with the greater power couldn't abuse that power. If you carry out an act (any act) upon another's person against their wishes, you are saying "my wishes matter more than yours".