Violence against political women is on the rise and risks alienating women from public life, argues Jess Phillips
‘If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the second amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day’.
This is the moment that Donald Trump incited gun-toting ‘second amendment people’ to harm Hillary Clinton. The casual nature of comments about violence against women in political life is becoming all too common. I am not sure this has always been the way, but I am certain it is a trend that is here to stay.
The murder of my friend Jo Cox by a far-right activist was an act of hate. Much has been made of the political nature of the crime. Only a few commentators at the time pointed to the fact that an enormous part of the reason her life was taken, was in my opinion, because of her gender. It might be completely unconscious, but a woman who has power, a woman who was brave enough to speak against far-right hatred, is such an insult to the status quo according to those who sought to destroy what she stood for.
As someone who has spent her life working in the field of violence against women and girls, I can tell you categorically that violence against women is exclusively about power and control. Men who beat their wives do not have anger management issues. They do not lamp the bus driver on the way to work. They do not throw hot coffee in the faces of their boss when things do not go their way. They exert their power where they can, like cowards. Contrary to most people’s beliefs, women are most at risk from violence when they begin to take back control. When a woman escapes from a violent man, the risk of retribution, because of the loss of control of the perpetrator, massively increases. If you do not believe me, have a read of every domestic homicide review written in the United Kingdom. You will see that when a woman leaves, takes control away from him, she becomes a walking target.
Women exerting control and having power in the political sphere is no different. For many people, women having power makes them feel insignificant and that creates the space for violence.
In March this year I travelled to the United Nations in New York. I was asked by the National Democratic Institute to speak at the launch of the #NotTheCost Call to Action. The event was hosted by secretary of state Madeleine Albright to raise the issue of violence faced by women in politics. I felt a bit of a fraud sitting among mayors, senators, deputy presidents from Kosovo, Peru, Sri Lanka, Uganda and many more. Each woman stood on the platform and talked about the violence they had faced in their ascension to political life. Stories of being held at gunpoint, threatened with kidnap. Stories of how women were expected to perform sexual favours in order to progress, shamed if they didn’t and if they did.
I know that all over the world and in the UK male politicians have paid the ultimate price in their political struggles. I need look no further than Northern Ireland to know it is not only for women that politics can be dangerous. However, I think there is a distinction between political men who face threats because of their politics and political women who face threats because they are women. The latter, it seems, is on the rise.
Trump’s throwaway comments should not be thrown away. They should be seen as incitement to violence. Recently a lovely man came to my offices. He is not a well man, and we have tried to put in place for him the mental health services that could help him. He said to me, ‘I got you wrong.’ When I asked him why, he responded, ‘I read loads of stuff about you on the internet, pages and pages about how you hate men and you don’t care if we are sick. I wanted to come in here and give you a talking-to.’ Trump’s words and the misogyny you can read against me on the internet – faceless hatred which skips from rape to the imagining of my sons’ deaths as if writing nothing more sinister than a shopping list – reaches people. It reaches people who might already have a reason to be angry at the world. These words might be delivered with flippancy but when they are received they can become dangerous.
The internet has heightened the risk to women in public life, although throughout the years female MPs have suffered security threats. Harriet Harman perhaps did not have to put up with the daily sexist vitriol that social media provides, in the 1980s and 1990s, but she did have men protesting on the roof of her family home. That would scare me, even if they did wear silly costumes. Over the years she will have had to dig deep to fight for things that she knew would bring violence her way. This is not new and perhaps her work to get more women into politics means there are just more people to attack now, and hundreds of ways to reach them.
The UK has a female prime minister now. I do not like that she is a Tory, but I know for girls in the UK the fact that she is a woman will chip away at the wall that stops women realising their potential. As more female leaders rise (no thanks to Labour at the moment) we would hope to see more women inspired to take the first step into political life. Sadly those women are equally bombarded with the cautionary tales of abuse they could get. I spend nearly all my spare time trying to encourage women to give politics a go. Unless fools like Trump are stopped, and the casual chatter about assaulting women MPs ceases, I fear I may well be wasting my time. For now I continue to believe, against near crushing odds, in the Labour party at least, that the pay-off of having women in power is worth it.
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Jess Phillips is member of parliament for Birmingham Yardley