A really detailed examination of the facts concerning puberty blockers, in response to a recent 'Spinoff' article which made a series of very misleading claims:
"An implicit theme in her article is that people who take a critical stance on medical interventions such as puberty blockers and hormones for children and adolescents are critical because they are hateful or ‘phobic’. I take issue with this: just as someone might be critical of Prozac and at the same time supportive of people suffering from depression, it is possible to have compassion for people who suffer from gender dysphoria and at the same time be critical of puberty blocking drugs such as Leuprorelin. Questioning medicalisation is not in any way equivalent to hate speech or ‘transphobia’."
Four years ago I started up a blog called ‘100 years of trenches’,
partly as a response to the hyped up Anzac and WW1 centenary period (2014 –
2018). A big focus of the blog was to understand and also counter the
de-politicised version of ‘remembrance’ pushed on the public by state
authorities. The key themes of my analysis include:
Remembrance media and ceremonies tend to
promote a ‘micro focus’ on dead soldiers and trenches. Military historians
tend to provide the framing, with the details of battles, and the image of
the ‘Fallen soldier’ being central. This image summons up emotive notions
of suffering, death, heroism and sacrifice.
The idea of sacrifice which is embedded in
this image is very important, but the highly solemn and emotive framing
makes it almost impossible to question or even explore. There is a form of
romanticism involved here, in which the idea of sacrifice draws on both
religious and secular traditions. To suggest that these brave young men didn’t
die for a ‘greater and noble cause’ is to violate the moral imperative
which is hidden inside the Fallen Soldier image.
The micro-focus also makes it harder to look
at and think about the years outside the period 1914 – 1918. Questions
about the political and economic factors which led to the war are
marginalised. Connections between the imperialist state system of 1914 and
the imperialist state system of the 21st
century are not part of the mainstream media narrative. It is no accident
that we place such huge emphasis on Gallipoli; the narrative here is
palatable and poses no challenge to the legitimacy of the current military
state apparatus.
The micro-focus makes it harder to look at and
think about the impact of WW1 on other groups of people: the women who
lost fathers, sons and brothers, or had to deal with traumatised husbands
returning from the war; the people of the Middle East who are still
dealing with the consequences of the imperialist carve up of their
homelands.
Alongside the ‘micro focus’ there are
historical meta - narratives. The older versions of these tended to cast
the Germans as the vicious aggressors, battling against a much more noble
and just British Empire. The more recent and powerful versions involve
appeals to the idea of ‘national identity’. Here the idea that New Zealand
truly ‘became a nation’ through the experiences of Gallipoli and the Somme
effectively frame the meaning of those deaths. The ‘sacrifice’ no
longer serves the interest of a greater imperial power we owe allegiance
to, but rather a nebulous and untouchable set of National Values:
mateship, egalitarianism, courage and honour. The grim and shameful
political truth that these deaths served the interests of a brutal
imperial state are swept under the carpet of red poppies, Anzac biscuits
and solemn ceremonies.
The Really Big Things we should
remember if we want to truly live up to the demands of the ‘Lest We
Forget’ slogan are the structural features of our society which lead to
war: capitalism, militarism, imperialism.
The micro-focus, alongside the falsifying
historical meta narratives, prevent this sort of critical remembrance, and
tend to effectively frame war as a sort of natural event, akin to things
like volcanoes and hurricanes. Military conflict is naturalised and
depoliticised.
Over the past year I have devoted a lot of my energy into understanding
and writing about a completely different topic, the theory and politics of
transgenderism. Yet I have repeatedly found myself pondering over some of the
strangely common rhetorical strategies employed by both fervent conservative
nationalists and transactivists. In the comments section under my first blog piece (where I examined the logic behind the vilification of radical feminists
who questioned the notion of gender identity) is this wee gem of insight and
wisdom:
In just about any exchange between transactivists and critics, you will
find people highlighting the central importance of the oppression of trans
people. The most frequently cited victims are trans identified males (always
referred to as transwomen), and particularly ‘transwomen of colour’. There arecountlessarticles and stories about the murder of
transwomen, and theTransgender Day of Remembrance which is
held every year internationally on November 20th specifically
commemorates the deaths of trans people through violence or suicide. After
reading a few of these articles, I came away feeling quite dissatisfied. The
causes of the murders are invariably ascribed very simply to ‘transphobia’,
without much elaboration or insight. The most interesting thing I came upon was
this graph of murders by region in a Pink News article:
Why are there so many more murders of trans identifying people in
Central and South America? The article makes no attempt to answer this
question, so you are left wondering. In online debates I have frequently
observed radical feminists point to the fact that a very large number of these
deaths are caused by violent punters. The context of sexual violence within the
practice of prostitution probably has a large bearing on this issue, but these
sorts of interpretations do not seem to be popular. As Julie Bindel hashighlighted recently, transactivists tend to side
with people who endorse a ‘sex work is work’ framing of prostitution.
Criticising prostitution in any way is off limits in the same way as
questioning gender identity is.
Rather than acquiring critical understanding of the causes and nature of
“transphobic” violence, the image of the murdered transwoman is typically
foregrounded as a rhetorical strategy to frame and influence debate about broader issues.
Here are a couple of examples from ‘socialist’ (socialist identified?)
supporters of trans identity ideology:
In the early
hours of Tuesday 22 August Kiwi Herring, a 30 year old trans woman and mother
of three, was shot dead by police in St Louis, US. Police had been called after
Kiwi had allegedly stabbed her neighbour. After an altercation during which one
police officer received a “minor injury”, the police opened fire.
The following
day around 100 supporters held a vigil in her honour and marched into the road,
blocking a junction. A man drove into the protest, knocking over three people —
though none was seriously hurt. One witness reported that he was giving them
the finger as he accelerated through the crowd.
Kiwi is the 18th
known trans person killed this year. Like her, the majority are black women.
Kiwi’s family report that her neighbour was transphobic and had been harassing
her for some time.
I start here
because in any discussion about trans rights it is crucial to begin with a
recognition of the reality of trans oppression. The events described above tell
a story of structural racism and transphobia, experienced at the hands of the
state and of bigoted individuals.
Thearticle goes on to argue women in the UK
have nothing at all to fear from the proposed legal changes of the Gender
Recognition Act, and concludes a series of shoddy arguments with the claim that
“there is no evidence that trans rights will harm women, and there is every
evidence that lack of trans rights does harm trans people”. There isplentiful evidence that gender
identity - based access laws such as the proposed GRA will harm women, but the
article does not engage with these arguments in good faith. By foregrounding
the image of the murdered transwomen, and suggesting (indirectly in this case,
but the implication is clear) that opponents to the proposed legislation are
somehow complicit with this violence, the author does not even need to try very
hard to make her case. The manipulative and emotive appeal to a uniquely
vulnerable and oppressed group does most of the work. Leftists are suckers for
that sort of jazz. Fighting oppression is what they (supposedly) do.
A second
example, unfortunately more typical in its heated and frenzied tone, is the
text of a petition for the removal of an article from the UK based site
Socialist Resistance. I don’t know that much about the site or the
organisation, but this article (Feminism and transgender
- why is there is a debate?) was considered so blasphemous
that even Marxist luminaries such as Richard Seymour signed the petition for
its removal. I also don’t know what it said, because it was in fact removed.
But we can glean some idea of how evil the article was by reading thepetition text , which opens with the familiar
Image of the Oppressed Transwoman:
‘I’ve been to prison and I’ve been raped by men — straight men!’ In
these words at her speech to the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally,
Sylvia Rivera outlined the conditions still faced by trans women today. Trans
women suffer primarily at the hands of men, yet much of the feminist movement
passes over this patriarchal violence in silence. A fixated minority within the
movement is uncontent even with this, and actively contributes to the villainization
of their trans sisters.
The petition
concludes with the claim that although it is men who are responsible for
transphobic violence, women who question in any way the broader issues of
transgenderism are also complicit in the rape and murder of transwomen:
Trans women’s lives are not a matter to be deliberated. Their existence
is not an ‘issue’ that it is helpful for leftist sects to publicly discuss and
to take ‘positions’ on. Without support from those with more social weight, the
rape and murder of trans women simply trying to walk the streets, and subsist
by the limited means available to them, will continue.
Another
variant of the image is that of trans identified children, who commit suicide
because they are prevented from accessing ‘life saving’ puberty blockers and/or
synthetic hormones. Again the emotive and victim focused framing which acts as
a prohibition against critical perspectives, the sketchy.evidence for such suicides notwithstanding. In this case the threat of suicide is leveraged into debates precisely in order to smear opponents to the medicalisation of gender as 'bigots' or 'transphobes'. The untouchable image of a child experiencing unendurable suffering due to dysphoria works hand in glove with the essentialist notion of a fixed immutable gender essence trapped in the 'wrong' body. Of course the contexts are radically distinct, but the psychological and rhetorical functions of an heroic young member of the New Zealand Division, sacrificing himself for the good of his country and Democracy appear quite similar. An image of a suffering innocent on the one hand (the young soldier, the gender dysphoric child) alongside a falsifying ideology which insists on the necessity of 'sacrifice' or 'treatment'.
Going back
to consider and compare the trans issue with my analysis of remembrance
ideology, it is notable that my ‘100 years of trenches’ blog generated very
little debate within the leftist circles who read it. No one faulted me for not
placing the suffering and death of thousands of soldiers at the centre of my
account. No one had any problem distinguishing between the people caught up in
the cogs of imperialist aggression and the political and economic structures
governing that same aggression. No one pointed out that as somebody who has
never fought in a real battle and witnessed the terrible human cost of war, I
had no right to question or explore the idea of sacrifice.
The
conclusion from these observations is that ‘trans oppression’ functions the same
way that the concept of ‘sacrifice’ does in sanitising war narratives: both
tactics foreground pain, suffering and death and insist upon a very particular
type of compassion. This is a compassion that must not doubt or question, a
compassion which dare not examine the holy necessity of the Cause served by the
victim.
San Francisco City Hall lit up with pink and blue, TDOR 2017
Trans murder
is a case in point: it is not at all clear that ‘transphobia’ is a helpful way
of framing our understanding of the phenomenon, and there is clear and
compelling empirical evidence that trans people are no more likely to be
murdered than other people in the general population. I make this point notto dismiss or understate the real oppression suffered by trans
identified people, but rather to highlight how a very particular sort of
‘victim framing’ can distort and falsify our perception of reality. It is not
that hard to identify a parallel distortion in our Gallipoli remembrance
narratives: the 2700 odd New Zealanders who died are vastly outnumbered by the
80,000 Ottoman soldiers killed by an invading imperial force.
If we accept
that the violence endemic to prostitution has a lot to do with the murder of a
particular subset of the trans population, then the case becomes even more
compelling. In a video documenting the Transgender Day or Remembrance in Amsterdam 2017, the
opening scene pans across a crowd holding red umbrellas chanting ‘sex work is
work! Sex work is work!’:
One of the speakers pays a tribute to “fallen trans
warriors” who are “at war with people and systems that put people in little
boxes”. The framing of the deaths as caused by a nebulous and loosely defined
societal prejudice, rather than a very specific form of male
violence, acts as a falsifying meta
narrative. It is very hard to challenge this because of the emotive focus on
death and suffering: questioning the victim framing is tantamount to complicity
with the prejudice targeted by the performative rituals of the ceremony. Just
as ‘fighting for democracy’ acts as a falsifying meta narrative justifying the
deaths of soldiers, the ‘sex work is work’ slogan falsifies and distorts the
true nature of the very deaths the Transgender Day or Remembrance is designed
to honour.
If we accept
the socialist idea that imperialist war serves the interests of the ruling
classes, and that remembrance ceremonies such as Anzac day tend to reinforce
and propagate a patriotic nationalism which serves state interests rather than
those of human liberation, then the parallels I have sketched also help to
explain the way feminist concerns are marginalised, distorted and opposed by
trans ideology. In focusing on the suffering experienced by trans people,
remembrance practices like the Transgender Day of Remembrance (and the
associated rhetorical strategies identified above) reinforce and propagate a
set of notions around sex and gender which serve patriarchal interests.
In New
Zealand during the first world war people with German surnames were persecuted:
they lost their jobs, had their houses set on fire and were openly
discriminated against. This discrimination was carried out with a fervent sense
of righteousness: God and Right was on the side of the British Empire. Irish
nationalists, Maori who followed the lead of Te Puea Herangi, anarchists,
socialists and pacifists all faced massive state sanctioned censure and
persecution for their ‘disloyal’ anti war stance. In New Zealand today, and
throughout the first world western nations, it is not hard to identify social
groups facing censure, marginalisation and abuse because of tensions felt
between them and the dictates of trans ideology. The middle agedwomen who have their lives
up-ended by their trans identifying husbands, theparents of teenagers with gender
dysphoria, thelesbian women who
experience pressure to form relationships with men and feminist women who fight
to preserve female only spaces are some of the
notable examples. The thoughtless righteousness and moralistic fervour with
which these acts of censure and abuse are carried out appear largely driven by
the ideological framework I have attempted to sketch here: a sentimental and
quasi romantic image of trans oppression, together with a set of dogmas (‘transwomen
are women’, ‘sex work is work’) which legitimate these acts. Although the
differences in context, scale and setting are very considerable, the silencing and
stifling of dissent during WW1 era New Zealand society has very
real resonances and similarities with current day gender politics.
What are the
structural realities we should attend to if we wish to understand and address
the different types of harm and suffering connected with gender identity? If we
reject the focus on trans oppression as a framing tactic, and the associated
dogmas, then we avoid the cost of the moral blackmail and are able to
critically examine things like:
If we don’t
reject the trans oppression focus with its silencing dogmas, then the notion of
‘gender identity’ becomes something like the idea of war as an inevitable
feature of human destiny. Gender becomes, rather than an oppressive and
profitable result of patriarchal injustice, another essential, naturalised
inevitability. If we can’t connect the dots between things like big
pharmaceutical companies, cultural misogyny and neoliberal identity politics
the consequence is a ‘naturalisation’ of gender. Gender, and in particular the
mysterious notion of ‘gender identity’, becomes a sacrosanct topic out of the
reach of critical discussion. The acceptance of war and gender as necessary features of society is a conservative stance: being radical means taking seriously
the Marxist commitment to the ruthless critique of all existing social structures.
With the recent events in Syria I
have been quite active on social media, commenting on articles and posting
links on various pages. One of the facebook groups I follow is an anti war
group named Auckland Peace Action. Although I do not live in Auckland, I have
participated in an event organised by this group – the 2016 protest against the
weapons conference in Auckland. I have quite a lot in common with the values
and beliefs of this group, and I am heartily supportive of their anti war activism.
The upcoming Peace Action event ‘Picnic for Peace’, an alternative to the
mainstream Anzac commemorations, is something I wish I could participate in. I
hope that the fact I have written multiple blogs about this
will convince readers, and hopefully Peace Action members and supporters, that
I passionately share the same critical anti war views.
Not long after posting comments on
the Auckland Peace Action facebook, I received this comment from one of the
page administrators:
I'm glad you appreciate my comments on
Syria. This is a complex and divisive subject which attracts a lot of heated
debate within the left. I strongly believe that people in the anti war movement
and the left more generally need to have these sorts of debate. When the issues
are complex and multifaceted and the potential outcomes important and a matter
of life and death, we need to have open debate. When people's emotions and
ideological presuppositions are challenged and subjected to scrutiny because of
this sort of debate, we need to continue to have this sort of debate. We should
not demonise or make slurs against our opponents to short cut or dismiss their
arguments, we need to engage (passionately and respectfully) in that debate.
This sort of approach is absolutely necessary for a strong, thoughtful and open
minded left to develop and grow.
The exact same approach should apply when it comes to discussing the ideas and
politics of trans issues. I believe that Renee Gerlich and Charlie Montague
have engaged in good faith, and I fully support them. I have contributed to
this debate also, and I stand by every word I have said on the topic. I resent
strongly the insinuation here that Renee, Charlie and I are 'transphobic'
because we contest notions such as gender identity. Having said that, I fully
support your right to speak against our views - I welcome any debate or
discussion if it is made in good faith.
It is interesting that people resort to slurs when they engage in topics close
to their hearts. When discussing Syria, I am sometimes tempted to throw around
words like 'islamophobic' and 'racist' when engaged in debates with people who
have pro Assad positions. I resist this urge, and do my best to stick to
discussing the issue without making attacks on the supposed moral integrity of
my opponent.
So, strangely enough, I find that I have friends in my social media circle who
I strongly agree with regarding gender, but strongly disagree with when it
comes to Syria. There are no doubt other heated issues where we have some
commonalities and some differences. As an adult who cares about the ability of
people with different opinions to communicate, discuss and develop arguments
and ideas, I find it extremely concerning that you appear willing to cut me off
because I disagree with you on trans issues. I hope you think carefully on this
issue and change your mind about this infantile and regressive stance.
I also sent the admin a query about whether or not they were speaking as
an individual, or if they represented the official views of Auckland Peace
Action. They have not responded to my query, and when I tried to post up my recent blog article on Syria to the Auckland Peace Action page, it appears to
have been blocked. My comments under other people’s posts are still visible
however, and I am happy to give Auckland Peace Action the benefit of the doubt
here. I’m quite happy not to post anything on the Auckland Peace Action page
which relates to my gender critical views, but I would like to retain the
ability to communicate on this platform about anti war related topics, such as
Syria.
My question therefore: does Auckland Peace Action support the right for
me to speak to them and others who visit their facebook page about things I
agree with them about, even though there are other topics (which I promise to remain
silent about while on their platform) which we disagree on?
This is my first ever post on
Syria. There are other people out there who know a lot more than I do, who I
would seriously recommend readers of this blog to look up for themselves if
they want to go deeper: Yassin Al Haj Saleh ,
Leila
Al Shami , Michael
Karadjis and Louis
Proyect are the people who have shaped my views the
most.
What I have seen in conversations
and social media posts lately has surprised me. Many people who I respect for their
intelligence, critical sensibilities and leftist political orientation have
expressed doubt about the reality and/or origin of the recent chemical attacks
of April 7 in Douma. This has led to me posting the same things again and again
on my social media feed, and I am getting a bit sick and tired of the effort of
repeated copy-pasting. So here are the five main reasons I think that the
chemical attacks were real events caused by the Assad regime:
Reason #1: Assad had good reason to use chemical weapons because Jaysh al Islam fighters had refused to
surrender and after the chemical massacre they were forced
to surrender in ten hours . Before the chemical attack, Assad
had attacked Douma for 2 days, and could not advance because of Jaysh al Islam
resistance. Of course Assad would have taken Douma even without the chemical
attack, but probably at the cost of heavy losses . In this way, Assad took Douma
without a fight.
Reason #2: Assad has used chemical weapons dozens of
times in the past without facing any significant consequences for doing so. In
2013 Obama came close to doing something, but drew back in spite of solid evidence that
Assad had indeed crossed over his so called ‘red line’. Last year Trump made a
minor, token strike against Assad’s forces in retaliation for the Khan Shaykhun
sarin attack. (Again, the evidence
is solid ). It is notable that these two examples are not the only times
that Assad has deployed chemical weapons, they are just the most famous ones.
There is convincing
evidence that Assad has used chemical weapons dozens
of times over the course of the past seven years. Assad
was taking a gamble for sure, but it wasn’t completely stupid or foolhardy.
Past experience indicates that while chemical attacks might provoke a great
deal of media heat and noise, they do not lead to significant intervention.
Reason #3: There is solid and believable open source
video evidence for the attacks. The single most reliable source here is the
British blogger Elliot Higgins, who runs a site called Bellingcat. Please, go
to his site and watch
the videos. Watch them a couple of times. Listen to the voices of the
people who discover the dead bodies with white foam coming out of their mouths
and noses. Look at the outdoor scenes which show the devastation wrought by
months and years of barrel bombs. Try to imagine that this evidence is somehow
faked, or that the people died of some other cause. (There are literally
hundreds of Russian media sources which will help you do this by the way, but I
want you to watch the videos and really think carefully about the idea that
they are ‘staged’)
Reason #4: The idea that the rebels had a serious and
credible motive for ‘faking’ the attacks is highly questionable. Chemical
attacks against them have failed to provoke any serious or consequential
intervention by other forces in the past, so why should they go to great lengths
to fake such attacks now in order to attract such intervention?
Reason #5: The explanations and theories put forward by
the armies of Assad apologists are massively unconvincing. The most prominent
example here is that of Robert Fisk, who paints
a picture of a vast underground network of tunnels and
caves beneath Douma. The rebels lead a ‘troglodyte’ like existence deep
underground, and Fisk meets up with a doctor lurking in one of these subterranean
lairs. He doesn’t actually come out and say
it, of course – Fisk is way too clever for that. He merely quotes the
doctor’s story and asks us to ‘consider’ it. Well, OK then, let’s consider it:
“I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred
metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was
a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at
night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to
come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive
here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White
Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over
each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are
people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”
If you didn’t watch the videos I mentioned above, go back and
watch them. See if you can spot any underground tunnels or caverns. I couldn’t.
Maybe the ‘cellars and basements’ are deep enough underground for dust clouds
to suck all the oxygen out from them? Maybe the devious rebels carried the bodies from deep underground
caves and tunnels and placed them in
the building shown in the videos? And then cleverly applied make up to make it
look like they were all frothing at the mouth? Again, there are armies of
Putin-bot trolls out there with sophisticated versions of all this shit, so you
can go for life here if you want to. I don’t.
**
(Regarding Fisk’s noxious Douma article, I would also like to
point out Louis Proyect’s devastating take down
. Idrees Ahmed’s article
analysing Fisk’s rhetorical techniques and fabrications is also very
worthwhile.)
**
None of this means, of course, that we should back Trump and May
in their response to the chemical attacks. But if you want to fight for both
peace for the Middle East region and justice for the Syrian people who have
endured seven years of relentless murder, it pays to base your activism on
truth rather than fiction.
A week ago I wrote a blog
called Child
Murder about the homicide rates for children under 5 over the
past decade. It was written in quite a hurry, just before I went away on
holiday for Easter. When I wrote it I did not think that I would end up
devoting much more time on this topic, but after a bit more reading and
reflection I have found that I am dissatisfied with what I wrote and have a
number of unanswered questions I have yet to resolve. Instead of editing the
old piece, I have decided to let it stand and write a new blog.
The initial motivation for
this was to highlight the extreme discrepancy between the murder rates for the
trans identified demographic (a miniscule number) and that of Under 5s (a very
big number, significantly larger than the national average). I also wanted to
draw attention to the different political emphasis surrounding the two types of
murder. In the case of Zena Campbell, the Wellington Town Hall is lit up with
the blue and pink colours of the Trans Pride flag and Green MPs make righteous
statements at candlelit vigils. In the case of the death of
Moko Rangitoheriri, rallies
around the entire country demanding harsher sentences and ‘Justice for
Moko’. For the liberal left in New Zealand, taking part in public spectacles
highlighting the murder of trans people are an easy way to gain virtue credits
from a Wellington centred, Spinoff
reading, Green party voting middle class demographic. For the conservative right
in New Zealand, taking part in public spectacles highlighting the murder of
young children is an easy opportunity to push a number of Outrage Buttons: the
offenders are typically Maori, unemployed, unmarried and drink alcohol. They
get off on manslaughter charges, so we need to tighten up the justice system
and make sure they get long sentences for murder.
As I demonstrated in my earlier
blogthe sections of the regressive left who push
the ‘trans people have higher murder rates’ narrative do not have facts on
their side. This is true not just for New Zealand, but for many other countries
including the UK, the US, and Canada. While I despise the racist,
beneficiary bashing, drug and alcohol scapegoating politics of the conservative
right, a statistical analysis of child murder rates over the past 20 – 30 years
has led me to realise that they really do have the facts on their side: the
murder rate for the Under 5 years old demographic increased markedly over the
period, and now far exceeds the murder rate for the general population. In this
piece I will focus mostly on the historical statistics comparing the murder
rate of the general population to that of the under 5 years old demographic. I
will conclude with some links to other studies and some broader remarks and
speculations, but my main intention here is just to highlight and explore the
most obviously relevant statistics. Without pretending to have the ‘answers’
that the left needs in order to articulate a strong and credible narrative
around these deaths that would serve a progressive (rather than conservative)
agenda, my hunch is that such a narrative would involve careful scrutiny of the
historical record.
A photo from a Twitter post from Rotorua, June 2016 with the hashtag #sensiblesentencingtrust
Wellington City Council building lit up with the pink and blue colours of the Trans Pride flag to commemorate the death of Zena Campbell, March 2018
As something of an amateur
statistician, one thing I have learned is that searching for data on the
internet is nowhere near as easy as you would assume. A very simple table of
values showing the homicide rate per 100,000 people for New Zealand over the
past 60 odd years does
exist – but the data is not exactly the same as that found in
other sources (for example here or
here here or here
).There appear to be at least three different ways of measuring homicide:
sometimes it includes only murder, sometimes it includes manslaughter, and for
the even more broad ANZSOC (an Australian classification system) it includes attempts at murder. All three
definitions arrive at distinct sets of data, and this makes comparison with
rates of child murder quite difficult. The issue of ‘murder vs manslaughter’ is
not just a political hot potato, it is also a statistically important question
which potentially distorts and confuses the data. I have now looked at dozens
of academic and government studies alongside several New Zealand media articles
form the past decade, and there are clearly inconsistent standards being
applied. For example, if you look at the figures for child homicide in this
Stuff article from 2015 and compare it to those from a Police
report for the 2007 – 2014 period, the differences
are quite notable. Even though the graph from the Stuff
article is for the 0 -14 age bracket (which should give data
points equal to or higher than the 0 – 5 age bracket), some of the numbers are
higher (2009: 16 vs 12) and some of the numbers are lower (2007: 7 vs 10).
Despite considerable effort, I
could not find a single data source for a long historical period (1978 – 2015)
which I could use to compare the general population homicide rate with the
Under 5s rate. In the graphs which follow, I have used a variety of different
sources to cobble together the data needed for a long term view. If anyone out
there reading this can point to data sources which would provide a more robust
and consistent approach, please let me know. Till then I will simply note my
sources and acknowledge the limitations of this data.
SOURCES:
·For the overall homicide rate for the 1949
– 2014 period, I have used this data set
provided by Statistics New Zealand and the Police Annual Report via the Te Ara
Encyclopedia website
·For the average rate of under 5 homicide for
the 1978 – 1987 period (approximately 1.7 per 100,000) I have used ‘Homicide
in New Zealand: an increasing public health problem’ , an academic paper by Janet L. Fanslow, David
J. Chalmers and John D. Langley
·For the period between 1986 and 2005, I
have used the five yearly averages stated in this
2008 MSD report
This graph shows the general population
murder rate for the entire period from 1949 to 2014. Through comparing the
numbers with other sources, it seems that this data is based on a narrow
(murder only, not manslaughter) definition of ‘homicide’. So it should be noted
that the rates are lower than they appear in other sources. Also, I have
supplemented the data for the years 2010 – 2014 from the Police report (using
murder stats only). The overlapping years (2008, 2009) give close but not
identical figures.
The most notable feature is
the gradual increase over the 1970s and early 1980s, followed by the sharp
increase during the peak years between 1985 and 1992. These years exactly
coincide with the neoliberal economic reforms of the fourth Labour government
and the subsequent effects of Ruth Richardson’s “Mother of all Budgets” in
1991. This correspondence between economic policy and the rise in crime is
given detailed and rigorous attention in the academic paper ‘Unemployment
and crime: New evidence for an old question’ (Papps
& Winkelmann 1999). The authors show that “there is some evidence of
significant effects of unemployment on crime, both for total crime and for some
subcategories of crime.”
Now for the comparison between
the general rate and the murder rate for under 5s. This graph uses the same
data from the time series above from 1978 onwards, and average rates for
different periods (visible as straight lines) for the under 5 subpopulation:
I was unable to find detailed
data for child homicide rates for all of the period except 2007 – 2014. The
numbers are small and very volatile, so it is worth graphing the murder rates
for individual years to get a sense of the variability of the data:
(According to this UNICEF report , the trend continued in 2015 with 11 murders
of under 5 year olds)
REMARKS
The first thing which I found
notable is the fact that high rates of child murder have a long history,
predating the murders of Chris and Cru Kahui in 2006 by decades. In the
Fanslow, Chalmers and Langley study of the 1978 – 1987 period noted above, the
overall murder rate for the period is calculated to be 1.6 per 100,000, little
different from the under 5 rate of about 1.7 per 100,000. My graph does not
properly reflect this very close match between the general rate and the child
rate, probably because of the data integrity issues described above. The
similarity between the overall murder rate and that of the under 5 demographic
is also commented on in the paper ‘Death
and serious injury from assault of children aged under 5 years in Aotearoa New
Zealand: A review of international literature and recent findings’ , a 2009 publication commissioned by the Office
of Children’s Commissioner:
Lawrence
cites Christoffel, Lui and Stamler (1981) who suggest that rates of death from
assault for children aged 1-4 years closely correlate with deaths at all ages. Similarly,
Fiala and LaFree (1988) argue that rates of violence for children and adults
are similar.
The references given refer to
both local and international studies: this is a worldwide phenomenon, not an
issue unique to New Zealand. A 2006
report by the Child Poverty Action Group draws
attention to the similarities between New Zealand and other colonial states
with marginalised indigenous populations:
If
child abuse were a “Maori” problem, we would expect to see it only within Maori
families. However, it occurs in communities the world over. Family violence,
sexual abuse of women and children, high levels of drug and alcohol abuse,
poverty and high levels of crime occur in other highly stressed communities.
Aboriginal communities, Native American communities in Canada and the US, and
African-American communities in the US are all grappling with these problems.
At present Australia is going through the same soul-searching as New Zealand in
respect of its Aboriginal people. The same arguments for and against government
intervention in Aboriginal families and communities are being aired, and the
same lack of consensus is evident. Child abuse is not, therefore, a function of
race or genetics, but rather a function of whatever those communities have in
common.
Yet something drastic, seismic
and horrendous happens in the period between the late 80s and early 90s. The
following table, also from the 2006 CPAG report, shows that this transformation
particularly affected the Maori community:
This very clear historical
shift is notably absent from all of the sensationalistic media attention devoted
to cases such as the Kahui twins and Moko. It is also largely absent from most
of the government reports on the issue, which tend to focus on data from narrow
time periods (for example, this
MSD study which limits itself to
2002 – 2006).
The second, and most
staggeringly awful thing about these graphs is the change that happens over the
first decade and a half of this century: while the general murder rate slowly
falls back to around 1 per 100,000, the rate for under fives increases. The average rate for the
period between 2007 and 2014 is around 2.6 per 100,000, more than double the rate for the general population. To be sure,
there are statistical reasons we need to keep in mind when looking at data sets
this small and volatile. A rigorous statistical study would need to address
these issues, and this sort of thing is way beyond the scope of this blog. The
thing that strikes me is that wretched and small minded conclusions insinuated
by sensationalistic media reports and conservative groups like the Sensible Sentencing
Trust are very clearly not the only viable forms of analysis. A politically
conscious and historical study of the data which related the tragic increases
in child murder to the devastation wrought by the neoliberal reforms of the ’84
– ’92 period would serve the interests of the left, not the right.
I’ll conclude this sketch of a
possible project with an hypothesis. The continuing high levels of child murder
throughout the period between 2005 and 2016 have another thing in common: the
perpetrators – almost always family members, and often mothers or fathers – are
typically young. These perpetrators would have been born sometime in the
period, say, between 1985 and 1997 or so. I haven’t looked at the stats yet but
I’m guessing the families they came from had all the frequently remarked upon
signs of deprivation and domestic violence. There’s a story to be told about
drugs and alcohol and single parent families for sure, but there is another
story too which recognises history: these little children probably never
watched the 6 O’Clock news when they were toddlers, but if they had done so
they would have heard the arrogant tones of Roger Douglas and the harsh metallic
voice of Ruth Richardson. Those voices never told them what to do or controlled
their actions directly, but the social shockwaves generated by their decisions
continue to kill.
