Rose Hackman writes in the Guardian that a major part of the emotional labor women are forced to do is the de-escalation of incidents of harassment.

Years later, I realized the abuse was less in the act I had been subjected to, and more in my learned silence. De-escalation had been my trick, to the detriment of my agency.

A blog entry from last fall put this into words for me. It made me realise [w]hat women around me had been doing for years: de-escalating situations caused by men, with the burden of minimising incidents being placed squarely on our shoulders.

Occurrences could be as mundane as a street catcall, as infuriating as a sexist comment at work, or as troubling as an unwelcome physical touch. Occurrences also include compliments we have to decipher (just nice, or suggesting an expression of male ownership over our bodies?).

To the initial weight of having to deal with those acts of dominance is the added mental drain of having to evaluate how best to deal with it and not risk a violent backlash. De-escalating is just another form of the “emotional work” women provide with little recognition of its ongoing exertion and toll.

That time the surly guy angrily told me to smile as I was walking past his house with my mind elsewhere? It occurs to me that was an act of rebellion against that duty of de-escalation thing. I knew that at the time. There was a little pause where I debated whether to ignore him or to do what I wanted to do, which was to demand why the fuck he had said that. The normal thing to do would have been to ignore it. I’d ignored it many times, all my life. I doubtless would have ignored it that time too if he’d been “friendly” or “jokey” as opposed to aggressive and hostile. His hostility did me the favor of making the dominance unmistakable, and worth rejecting.

For Hanna Rusin, a 29-year-old fashion industry worker based in New York, gendered micro- and macro-aggressions are a “vast, vast” part of her everyday life.

She recalls, off the top of her head, scarring incidents including being stalked by a man who was her neighbor for six years and being followed home by a policeman after he asked to see her ID on the subway. She also remembers unwelcome attention growing up – comments and physical contact in private settings – but being taught to dismiss it.

“In a more intimate setting, it’s more subtle. If you say something, you’re a troublemaker,” Rusin says. “If you would go to your mother, they would just say, ‘This is how they are, they’re just drunk old men, ignore them.’ Women don’t even notice that it’s happening to them until they hear someone else talk about it. And then they are like, wait, is this what this is?”

Ignore them. Ignore it. Ignore ignore ignore. That will be easier in the moment, and nothing will ever change.

Nichole Thomas, a 26-year-old attorney, says the sexism she feels in her male-dominated law office is understated but very real. When she was at an office outing recently, she noticed every time a junior male colleague spoke, his point was uplifted and highlighted by other men, including higher-ranking men. Women did not receive the same treatment.

The way in which Thomas has decided to deal with what she is sure are expressions of sexism at work? De-escalating by taking it in her stride and not letting it affect her work performance. “I would never say anything at all to anybody. I notice it in that moment and then I forget about it. I try and not think about it every day.”

It’s everyday sexism, that happens every day, but it’s crucial to avoid thinking about it every day.

When [another woman] tries to explain the toll of such experiences to men, she says it is so exhausting she feels “it’s not even worth the effort half the time”.

“They don’t get it. It’s just not a reality for them.”

Hardikar, the health worker, adds: “There is a construct within masculinity that teaches them that they have the right to exert power over any space … It’s about demonstrating who is in charge in that space. I am sure that it’s subconscious, but it is learned and it is taught.”

And it is performed, and it is noticed or ignored, every every day.

Chris has an epiphany.

CNN reported last month:

A United Nations official is headed to the Central African Republic after reports that over 100 women, girls and boys were raped and abused — many by U.N. peacekeepers.

Jane Holl Lute, a senior U.N. official tasked with leading efforts to curb peacekeeper abuse, was en route to the country Wednesday, U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said.

Allegations of sexual abuse by foreign and local forces have plagued the Central African Republic since the United Nations sent forces to the country two years ago. But they’re still just as shocking as ever.

…

[M]ore than 100 victims said they were sexually abused by U.N. peacekeepers and non-U.N. forces, a U.N. official said Tuesday.

“Tragically, the vast majority of the victims are children,” said Edmond Mulet, the U.N. chief of staff on sexual exploitation and abuse.

There were more, and more horrifying, allegations at the end of March.

At the meeting Tuesday, Atul Khare, the U.N.’s under-secretary-general for field support, called on the countries that sent those accused to discipline them and carry out “criminal sanctions warranted under their national laws.”

Khare also said new legislation should be proposed if current law would not cover prosecution of these alleged crimes.

The United Nations has also said that implicated troops must remain confined to their camp, “except for essential operational tasks and increasing the presence of military police at affected locations.”

Khare said officials are working with children’s agency UNICEF to ensure services and extra funds are available to help affected communities.

He said the number of allegations is expected to rise.

They made a wilderness and called it peace.

It’s not always possible to do everything at once. You patch the leak in one place and it pops up in another.

Like trying to figure out this matter of “gender identity” for instance, and how it coheres with nondiscrimination on the basis of sex.

The Obama administration is planning to issue a sweeping directive telling every public school district in the country to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.

I’m leaning toward doing away with the whole sex segregation thing when it comes to restrooms and just having neutral rooms with floor-to-ceiling stalls. Privacy for all, and no need to fret about who is what.

Also, HB2 sucks.

But “gender identity” is a very iffy concept, and I don’t think the government should be treating it as settled fact when it is in fact hotly contested. The gov gets itself into a tangle by doing so:

A school’s obligation under federal law “to ensure nondiscrimination on the basis of sex requires schools to provide transgender students equal access to educational programs and activities even in circumstances in which other students, parents, or community members raise objections or concerns,” the letter states. “As is consistently recognized in civil rights cases, the desire to accommodate others’ discomfort cannot justify a policy that singles out and disadvantages a particular class of students.”

As soon as a child’s parent or legal guardian asserts a gender identity for the student that “differs from previous representations or records,” the letter says, the child is to be treated accordingly — without any requirement for a medical diagnosis or birth certificate to be produced.

Ok, so if a school’s obligation under federal law to ensure nondiscrimination on the basis of sex requires schools to provide transgender students equal access to educational programs and activities, then that means a student whose “gender identity” is female can play on the girls’ basketball team even if the student is a foot taller and 50 lbs heavier than the girls who don’t have any “gender identity” but are just plain old garden variety girls? Is that what the Obama administration is saying? If so is that a good plan?

Shaheen Hashmat in the New Statesman on police failures to do anything about “honour” violence.

A review carried out in 2015 by HMIC into the effectiveness of police responses to “honour”-based violence (HBV) found that only three out of the 43 forces across England and Wales are prepared in all essential areas to deal with such crimes. Ten years on from the horrific murder of Banaz Mahmod, who approached the police no less than five times before she was brutally raped, murdered and buried in a back garden in Birmingham, it’s clear that lessons still haven’t been learned.

She says the necessary expertise is no longer an issue.

Detective Sergeant Pal Singh has worked on some of the most high-profile “honour” killings in Britain to date, gaining a Metropolitan Police Service award for “Outstanding Individual Contribution to Victim Care” during HBV investigations. He is one of only a handful of people that I believe are truly able to understand the challenges we face and provide the real, practical solutions needed to tackle “honour” crime in all its forms. After spending many years bearing witness to the fatal consequences of inappropriate police responses to HBV, Singh has some important ideas on how to tackle the issue, which have yet to be acted upon.

He suggests that, to begin with, a specialist HBV unit covering the whole of London should be set up as a priority, which makes sense given that most recorded incidents take place there. Other high-risk areas include the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Lancashire and Manchester.

She points out that this would be a big improvement on reliance on “faith leaders” – who are likely to be complicit in the abuse.

Data obtained by the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO) show that despite under-reporting, there are over 2,000 cases of “honour” crime recorded by UK police forces each year, and it’s clear that these figures do not reflect the full extent of the problem.

How could they? Most victims of “honour” crime are too cowed or terrified or battered to report the crimes.

While development of a national standard of best practice is a worthwhile and important end-goal, we cannot rely solely on this in the short term, and we are certainly unable to accept the inevitability of more deaths and serious abuse as a consequence of police incompetency in the meantime. How many more people have to die before we start listening to the experts?

Shaheen Hashmat is a writer and campaigner against “honour”-based violence in all its forms, and she is the founding editor of Double Bind, an online platform featuring the voices of women with Muslim heritage working to promote secular values based on fundamental human rights for all. She tweets @tartantantrum.

A talk next week at Coventry Skeptics in the Pub: Blame the Brain: How Neurononsense joined Psychobabble to Keep Women in Their Place.

Gina Rippon

Wednesday, May 18 at 7:30PM

Twisted Barrel Ale Brewery and Tap House
Unit 5,
Fargo Village,
Far Gosford Street,
Coventry,
CV1 5ED

There is a long history of debate about biological sex differences and their part in determining gender roles, with the ‘biology is destiny’ mantra being used to legitimise imbalances in these roles. The tradition is continuing, with new brain imaging techniques being hailed as sources of evidence of the ‘essential’ differences between men and women, and the concept of ‘hardwiring’ sneaking into popular parlance as a brain-based explanation for all kinds of gender gaps.

But the field is littered with many problems. Some are the product of ill-informed popular science writing ( neurotrash)  based on the misunderstanding or misrepresentation of what brain imaging can tell us. Some, unfortunately involve poor science, with scientists using outdated and disproved stereotypes to design and interpret their research (neurosexism).

These problems obscure or ignore the ‘neuronews’, the breakthroughs in our understanding of how plastic and permeable our brains are, and how the concept of ‘hard-wiring’ should be condemned to the dustbin of neurohistory.

This talk aims to offer ways of rooting out the neurotrash, stamping out the neurosexism and making way for neuronews.

Gina Rippon is Professor of Cognitive NeuroImaging in the Aston Brain Centre at Aston University. She has a background in psychology and physiology and uses brain imaging techniques such as Magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the relationship between patterns of brain activation and human sensory, cognitive and affective processes. Most recently her work has been in the field of developmental disorders such as autism.  She has served as President of the British Psychophysiology Society (now the British Association of Cognitive Neuroscience).

She also writes and speaks on the use of neuroimaging techniques In the study of sex/gender differences, recently featured in the BBC  Horizon programme “Is your Brain Male or Female?”.  She is additionally involved in activities around the public communication of science, particularly in challenging the misuse of neuroscience to support gender stereotypes, and in work to correct the under-representation of women in STEM subjects. She has recently been appointed as an Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association.

I wish I could go to that.

To the surprise of no one, Saudi Arabia uses armored vehicles against its own people, the Globe and Mail reports.

Footage analyzed by The Globe and Mail shows Saudi Arabia using armoured vehicles against minority Shia Muslim dissidents in the Mideast country’s Eastern Province, raising serious questions about Riyadh’s tendency to use these military goods against its own citizens.

Copies of the videos, which date from 2012 and 2015, were supplied by Saudi human-rights activists who want Canada to suspend shipments of combat vehicles to Riyadh in a $15-billion deal between Canada and the ruling House of Saud.

The Trudeau government in April approved export permits for the bulk of these vehicle shipments in what Ottawa calls the largest advanced manufacturing export contract in Canadian history. The vehicles, made in London, Ont., are expected to ship over four years, and will have machine guns and anti-tank cannons.

Ok…why? Why do Canada and the US and the UK help Saudi Arabia arm itself? It’s not because of “shared values.”

The combat vehicles in the videos are not Canadian-made, but they demonstrate the regime’s inclination to use such military assets against its own people in a region that is very difficult for Canada to monitor. It also casts doubt on the Liberal government’s assurances that the massive arms sale to Saudi Arabia presents no risks for the country’s civilians.

Ali Adubisi, director of the Berlin-based European-Saudi Organization for Human Rights, says Saudi authorities have deployed armoured vehicles against Shia civilians in Eastern Province more than 15 times since 2011.

He says this should be reason enough to strike Saudi Arabia from Canada’s list of arms buyers.

The Saudi government is not a friend.

Another one:

A Sufi Muslim leader has been found hacked to death in Bangladesh in a suspected Islamist killing, police said Saturday, two weeks after the Islamic State group claimed the murder of a liberal professor in the same northwestern district.

Mohammad Shahidullah, 65, had been missing since leaving home on Friday morning before villagers last night found his body in a pool of blood in a mango grove in Rajshahi.

This time it’s a religious person rather than an atheist person, but if it is another Islamist killing, it’s pretty much the same thing – religious fanatics hacking to death anyone who isn’t a religious fanatic in exactly the way they are.

It comes amid a troubling rise in violence against religious minorities, liberal activists and foreigners in Bangladesh, with six murders since the start of last month alone.”He was not a famous Sufi. But there could be a possibility that he was killed by Islamist militants,” Rajshahi district police chief Nisharul Arif told AFP.

The police officer said the killing of the self-proclaimed Sufi master was “similar” to other recent hacking deaths of religious minorities carried out by attackers with machetes or cleavers.

Religious minorities, you see – in other words not the correct kind of believer, and not a fanatic in the True Orthodox Narrow way approved by the machete-wielders.

Sufi Islam is a mystical form of Islam popular in rural Bangladesh but considered deviant by many of the country’s majority Sunni Muslims.

They include the Saudi Arabia-inspired Salafis and Wahabis, who are gaining strength in the country.

Suspected Islamists have been blamed for or claimed dozens of murders of atheist bloggers, liberal voices and religious minorities in recent years including Sufi, Shiite and Ahmadi Muslims, Hindus, Christians and foreigners.

In the past five weeks, two gay activists, a liberal professor, an atheist activist and a Hindu tailor who allegedly made derogatory remarks about the Prophet Mohammed were hacked to death.

I think one of Salman Rushdie’s grandfathers was a Sufi mystic, as well as a wonderful human being.

The machete-wielders are not wonderful human beings.

Yesterday on Fresh Air Nancy Fishman, a project director at the Vera Institute, told us about the mess that is the jail system in the US. I knew bits and pieces of what she said but not all of them and not the totality they make.

According to a report by the Vera Institute for Justice, there are more than 3,000 local jails in America, holding more than 730,000 people on any given day. Nancy Fishman, a project director at the Vera Institute, tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that jails “have impacted a huge number of Americans … many more than are impacted by state prisons.”

The Vera Institute’s report documents that there are almost 12 million admissions to local jails each year, representing about 9 million people. Most of those jailed, she says, are being held for low-level offenses, such as drug misdemeanors, traffic offenses or nonviolent property crimes. And, she adds, the majority are poor.

Because if they’re not poor, they can make bail. The people there are mostly being held pre-trial. Their poverty can end up trapping them there, because they get charged fees – yes, charged fees for being in jail pre-trial – and they can end up with big debts.

FISHMAN: Well, I think that, you know, the one thing that we know about people in jail versus people who get, for example, arrested or stopped by the police who don’t end up in jail is that the people who are in jail don’t have the money to pay bail. So most of the folks passing through jail, most of the admissions to jail, are for low-level offenses. They’re not for serious and violent offenses.

There are people in jail who are being held for more serious crimes. But the vast majority are for nonviolent, property, sometimes drug misdemeanors, local-level violations. People end up in jail, primarily- and stay in jail primarily because they don’t have the money to pay bail.

GROSS: Let’s talk about the function bail is supposed to serve.

FISHMAN: Sure.

GROSS: So yeah, what is that function?

FISHMAN: The irony of bail is that its initial purpose was to make it possible for people to get out of jail – right? – that you couldn’t be held in jail without a finding of guilt or prior to a finding of guilt without having an opportunity to get out. But the irony is that now bail really functions to hold people in. And in places where bail is – in a lot of jurisdictions, it’s mandatory that bail be set. But if they don’t want you to get out, they set, you know, multimillion-dollar bail.

But the challenge is this means that if you have money to pay bail, you can get out no matter how dangerous you are. Whereas, if you’re poor and all you’ve committed is a traffic violation, which is one of the biggest drivers, frankly, of jail admissions in most places, you’re going to sit in jail because $500 is a lot of money to you. And I think that that’s one of the great travesties, frankly, of jail admissions right now, is that we have people sitting in jail for long periods simply because they can’t afford to pay.

GROSS: And does that create a kind of spiral of debt?

FISHMAN: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of places, particularly in some of the smaller jurisdictions, there’s a huge network or a huge burden, frankly, of fines and fees that are associated with a jail stay or with any passage through the court system. This is something that’s relatively new and has grown and grown in a lot of places.

So people, in addition to having to pay bail, they also – they’re assessed a cost for their housing. So it’s as if they’re in a hotel, so there’s a daily rate that they are responsible for. They will have to pay the cost of any lab tests associated with their case. They will have to pay the cost of drug testing.

If they apply for a public defender, a lot of places actually have a fee. You have to actually pay money to apply for a public defender who you get because you can’t afford to be represented. There are other costs. People get referred into programs – drug treatment programs – or they’re required to be drug tested when they’re out. They have to pay for those.

They will often have to pay for the cost of probation supervision. And so you’re talking about people who often come in in fragile economic situations and end up that much worse by the time they get out.

GROSS: Well, while you’re paying your room and board at the jail, you’re also having to pay your mortgage or your rent.

FISHMAN: Right.

GROSS: So your expenses have just gone up because you’re being incarcerated. You said a lot of these fees are fairly new. How new and what is the rationale behind charging people basically for room and board while they’re being incarcerated?

FISHMAN: There’s been tremendous growth over the past 40-45 years in the size of our criminal justice system – particular growth in the number of jails and the size of the jails. We’ve seen a fourfold increase in the jail population for the past 45 years, and along with that have been the construction of new and bigger jails.

And the reality is a lot of the communities that have built these jails don’t have the funds to support them. They’re not supported by state tax revenue, by federal tax revenue. They’re supported by local community budgets, and a lot of these places are not wealthy. They don’t have a lot of money to cover it. And so the solution has been to try to get that money from the people who pass through the system. But the challenge is most of the people who are passing through that system don’t have the money either.

And so what we see is that people get assessed fines and fees – all of these fines and fees – they can’t pay them. And that can end up driving them back into jail, which only increases the pressure on the jail system and the justice system overall and makes it more costly. So it’s ultimately kind of a vicious circle.

And even if they get out, they still have that debt.

The US punishes people harshly for being poor.

This is a bit of gender-enforcement that I hadn’t heard of before – “gender reveal” ceremonies. Say what?

Slate writer Jessica Winter has a toddler, and stranger’s get worked up about her Gender Status.

“Why do you dress her like a boy?” demanded a man in the jewelry section of H&M while my kid—in a red sweatshirt, jeans, and gray-and-purple sneakers—rummaged through a pile of tassled earrings. The man was trying to be polite, but he also seemed affronted by his own confusion—and affronted by me, I suppose, for causing his confusion. “She looks like a boy!” he insisted, repeatedly. The only response I could think of was the shrugging one I gave: “She looks like herself.”

Girls and women have been routinely wearing jeans and sweatshirts for decades, yet still some people think those are clothes for males only?

I offer this anecdote partly as a disclosure that I’m not the intended audience for gender-reveal announcements. This is a genre of prenatal celebration that reached a spectacular apotheosis last week when a Florida couple went viral for firing a rifle at a target packed with explosives and colored chalk, sending up a plume of powder intended to reveal the baby’s sex—blue for boy, in this case. The phenomenon more typically takes form as a gender-reveal party, where the festive theme might be Guns or Glitter? or Rifles or Ruffles? or, because big sticks can take many forms, Baseball or Bows?

On the one hand, decades of feminism; on the other hand, a level of frantic anxiety about Female or Male that is rising to panic levels.

The centerpiece of a gender-reveal party is, of course, a gender-reveal cake, which involves slipping a piece of paper to a trusted baker who will then drop the right food coloring in the batter; at the appointed moment, celebrants cut the cake to find out if it’s blue or pink, i.e., Pistols or Pearls? Gender-reveal cakes can be cute, imaginative, even beautiful, as this PopSugar slideshow attests. Another parenting site, the Stir,has a slideshow of “15 Outrageously Inappropriate Gender-Reveal Cakes,” although if you spend enough time in the gender-reveal universe, these creations might strike you not as outrageous so much as just aggressively direct about the zero-sum nature of the gender binary. Stick or No Stick is the exemplum of the bunch, making barely submerged subtext into carrot-shaped text: A boy has a something, and a girl has a nothing. A boy has a gun, and a girl has a hole. A boy does, and a girl is done to. A boy is an active actor with useful equipment, and a girl is a void with embellishments. It would sound so tiresomely gender studies 101 if these weren’t actual people having actual children right here on my Pinterest boards in 2016.

Ah well that explains it; I don’t do Pinterest so that’s why I’m not aware of this bizarro trend.

A gender reveal will tell a future baby’s loved ones precisely nothing about what is actually important about her first months and years on Earth: her temperament, her response to food, the ease with which she sleeps and self-soothes and explores her expanding world.

And also about her later months and years on earth. Gender is not personality. Sex is not personality. “Gender” just isn’t all that interesting.

This again. A woman has the unmitigated temerity to have a job as political editor for the BBC – a job that had previously always belonged to a man. Someone draws up a petition to get her fired, and – surprise surprise! – it attracts the usual torrents of sexist abuse. In other news, some grass grew today.

The majority of those signing and supporting the petition expressed concerns about what they saw as biased reporting of the Labour party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn by Kuenssberg. However, some supporters on social media used abusive and sexist language in calling for the BBC’s first female political editor to go.

Of course they did. It is not possible for people to disagree with a woman in public without the torrents of sexist abuse appearing. (Then of course petitioning to get her fired goes a bit beyond disagreeing with her.)

Prior to the petition being taken down, former Independent on Sunday political editor Jane Merrick told the Guardian that Kuenssberg had faced an extra layer of sexist criticism. “She has been called a whore and a bitch on Twitter,” said Merrick. “Nick Robinson used to be accused of Tory bias but he never experienced this level of nastiness.”

“Of course, not all Corbyn supporters are sexist – far from it – but there is a core of hard-left misogyny that comes out against women when Corbyn is under pressure – such as the abuse against Stella Creasy and Jess Phillips. Jeremy Corbyn said back in September he wanted a ‘kinder politics’ so he should condemn these vile attacks against a respected and experienced journalist.”

I don’t think it’s hard-left misogyny, it’s just misogyny. It’s everywhere. It’s considered hip and funny to trash women, so lots and lots of people do it.

Laura Bates knows this.

The petition, which accused Kuenssberg of biased reporting against the Labour party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn, attracted abusive and sexist language among some of those supporting it, according to 38 Degrees executive director David Babbs.

While some have tried to argue that the problem is nonexistent, you don’t have to look very far to find evidence of abusive and misogynistic messages being directed at, or about, Kuenssberg.

Posts calling Kuenssberg a bitch, a whore and a slag are not hard to spot on social media. Others refer to her as a cow and a cunt. Some people write that they’d like to kill her. One post included a picture of a scene from Return of the Jedi with Kuenssberg’s face Photoshopped on to that of Princess Leia in the famous gold-bikini scene and David Cameron’s face superimposed on Jabba the Hutt. It describes her as “Cameron’s slave girl”.

She’s a woman. Women are there to be degraded and demonized. Everybody hates women.

The situation calls to mind the recent phenomenon of so-called “Bernie Bros”, which saw some grassroots activists using graphic and abusive misogyny and sexist online memes to attack Hillary Clinton (although this too was vociferously denied by Sanders supporters).

Not to mention the apparent Republican candidate.

This is a problem commonly attributed to the left, but nobody has the monopoly on misogyny – it is sadly too widespread for that. Whether sexism rears its head in the political conversations of stuffy and elite male-only club-rooms or in the feverish urgency of social media crusades and online petitions, the result is often the same: built-in methods to tackle systemic gender inequality don’t figure highly in the resulting campaigns and movements. You don’t have to be deliberately or directly sexist yourself to be part of the problem by attempting to diminish it.

Yes but it’s only women. Everybody hates women.

Let’s hark back to May 2011, to a Comment is Free piece by Evan Harris on the religious exemptions to the Equalities Act.

The Guardian has reported on those questioning the wisdom of contracting religious groups to deliver key public services. The government’s “big society” initiative – it still seems too unfocused to call it policy – has, as one of its aims, the transfer of the delivery of some public services to voluntary sector providers on a greater scale than is currently the case.

It was envisaged by both this and the previous government that faith groups would be some of the new providers. It seems unjustified to argue against religious organisations providing public services, as it is discriminatory to single out those with a religious ethos for a prohibition on service provision.

Well, no, not if the goal is to keep religion and the state separate. Public services are by definition a state matter; those “with a religious ethos” can provide services via private organizations. It’s fine for religious groups to offer services; it’s not so fine for them to offer public services, i.e. ones funded by taxes.

However, some religious organisations present extra challenges when being considered for the delivery of public services and it would be naive, foolish or perverse to ignore these.

First, they have a special exemption in equality law to discriminate against their employees narrowly on grounds of gender and sexual orientation (for priesthood and leadership roles) and more widely on the basis of religious belief. These exemptions are provided for in the European directive that underpins our anti-discrimination laws in this area. The problem is that the exemptions given in UK law by the last Labour government in the 2003 regulations and then in the 2010 Equality Act are far wider than provided for in the directive.

One of these exemptions is found in schedule 9, paragraph 3 of the 2010 Equality Act, allowing religious organisations to discriminate on the basis of religion in employment, in certain jobs and contexts. The last government faced infraction proceedings from the European Union for failing, unlike all the Catholic Mediterranean states, to properly limit these exemptions.

Like for instance to people doing the actual religious work – clerics, in short. Cooks and cleaners and secretaries shouldn’t have to be orthodox believers to keep their jobs.

What is even more worrying is that staff of an existing secular provider – who make the beds in a hostel, or assist people with benefit claims – will face a faith test when the service and their employment contracts are transferred to a new provider that has a religious ethos. During the passage of the Equality Act, Liberal Democrats (that’s me and Lynne Featherstone, now the equality minister) proposed an amendment that specified that religious tests were not to be permitted when delivering public services. This was vigorously opposed by religious leaders and the government. It was silently opposed by the Tories.

Evan Harris doesn’t say anything about council-run school buses being able to refuse to pick up students who don’t belong to the correct religion. Apparently he didn’t see that one coming.

The British Humanist Association reports something I find completely astonishing.

A pupil in Telford has been told that he cannot ride a council-run bus to school along with his classmates because ‘he’s not Catholic’, it has been reported. The bus serves the Holy Trinity Academy in Priorslee, which was opened in 2015 jointly by the local Roman Catholic and Anglican dioceses, and despite the bus being operated by Telford and Wrekin Council, it is not open to children at the school who are either not religious or belong to a minority religion.

What on earth? The boy attends the school and the bus is run by the council (i.e. it’s public) but he can’t ride on it because he’s not Catholic? That’s grotesque – and punitive and cruel.

The British Humanist Association (BHA) has once again called on the exemptions in the Equality Act 2010 allowing for discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief in the provision of school transport to be scrapped.

Speaking about the situation, the father of the boy involved stated that the ‘the bus stops two minutes from the front door’, ‘but he was told that because he’s not Catholic, even though he goes to the school, he can’t use it’. A spokesperson for Telford and Wrekin Council said ‘Transport assistance is offered to pupils who are baptised Catholics and pupils whose families are faithful and regular worshippers in a Church of England Parish Church or other Christian affiliated churches if they live over the three-mile distance criteria for secondary aged pupils.’

Remarkably, discrimination of this kind is entirely legal, as the provision of school transport by local authorities is exempted from equalities legislation. The BHA has previously raised concerns about this exemption with the Department for Education, stating in their response to a 2014 consultation on the issue that ‘Providing one group of parents extra choice over others is unfair, and the nature of the discretionary spending likely causes religious and ethnic segregation’.

That’s just bonkers. It’s especially baffling since UK officialdom just loves to talk about community and cohesion, not to mention community cohesion – do they think this exemption is good for community cohesion? No doubt it unites the Christians against everyone else, but what about the community cohesion of the people of Telford, and the UK in general?

More broadly, why is it the business of government to reward people for being “faithful and regular worshippers”?

It’s an exemption too many.

Jesus and Mo last week:

The Patreon.

Julie Bindel on the reality of what prostitution does to women:

It seems that everyone has an opinion on prostitution, but few know very much about it. That is certainly what I found in researching my book on the global sex trade. Mythology, rather than informed opinion, rules.

I am told on a regular basis that criminalising any aspect of the sex trade will “force it underground” – something that does not happen for the simple reason that the punters need to find it. I hide my despair at hearing, for the millionth time, that if men cannot access paid sex they will be forced to find a woman to rape, which is tantamount to arguing that men have no control over their sexual behaviour. And I am informed that decriminalisation will result in almost zero violence towards ‘sex workers’ because it is the police who carry out the vast majority of rapes. Sometimes, those who come out with this rubbish describe themselves as current or former sex workers. The unpalatable truth is that not everyone that earns a living selling sex is expert in what might be the best way to legislate or manage the sex industry. Self-interest and, all too often, self-delusion trumps sense and logic.

The discussion these days is over the Nordic model versus full decriminalization. Several European countries are considering adopting the Nordic model.

“But you are denying sex workers their agency! Sex workers want rights not rescue. It is a choice. The only harm to sex workers is perpetrated by abolitionists and the police. The New Zealand model is the way forward. If you criminalise the client, the sex worker is criminalised by default.”

Those are the standard retorts.

In recent years, despite the increasing numbers of women coming out as ‘survivors’ of the sex trade, the dominant discourse is one of prostitution being about ‘choice’ and ‘agency’ for the women involved. The only human rights abuse in the sex trade, according to the liberals, libertarians and many of those who profit from selling sex, is when men are denied the right to  purchase sex.  The renting of women’s orifices for sexual release is not, on the other hand, considered a violation. The women selling sex, according to this logic, are the victims of pearl-clutching moralists who wish to take away their right to earn a living, rather than of sexual servitude.

The war that rages between feminists such as myself, who seek to abolish the sex trade, and those who see prostitution as a valid choice, is fuelled by the widely held belief that feminist abolitionists wish to ‘rescue fallen women’ and demonise the men who pay for sex.

Which is not unrelated to the widely held belief that feminists in general are prudish humorless boring killjoys.

The battle is currently being fought in the home affairs select committee inquiry on prostitution. Yesterday, Paris Lees and Brooke Magnanti gave evidence to the committee. Both women have sold sex in the past. Both are rabidly opposed to the Nordic model, and, during their evidence, refused to acknowledge the harms of the sex trade. When asked if she had ever witnessed or experienced violence during her time in prostitution, Lees replied: “No, I’ve never been raped – I’m a sex worker, not trafficked”. It’s as though only trafficked women are ever abused by pimps or punters.  I have interviewed 40 sex trade survivors for my book and over 100 previously for other research.  Every single one had suffered multiple rapes. Rape endemic in prostitution is universally documented.

It would be very surprising if it were otherwise. Once it’s for sale, it’s also for taking.

It is a commonly-held assumption that decriminalisation reduces stigma towards the women involved. However, as the same report states: “This appears to have changed little post-decriminalisation. Stigmatisation plays a key role in non-reporting of incidents”.

The women in the sex trade I met on a recent research visit to New Zealand told me the law has not helped them at all. The street-based women said the police are still abusive arseholes, and those in brothels said that as a result of decriminalisation the pimps now have more power and legal rights than the women.

The Nordic model is not perfect. But at least it is visionary and progressive in that it sends out a clear message that women are not commodities to be bought and sold, and that men will not simultaneously combust if they can’t get their rocks off with women they have to pay in order to get their consent. The commonly held and deeply depressing view that demand for prostitution can never be eliminated is as absurd as arguing that the working classes belong in the gutter.

Or that women belong in the kitchen.

The BBC asks: Is it legal to force women to wear high heels at work?

If it is it certainly shouldn’t be. High heels are a form of foot-binding, and forced foot-binding should never be legal. People should be strongly discouraged from binding their own feet, and entirely forbidden to bind or demand the binding of anyone else’s.

A 27-year-old woman working for a City firm in London says she was sent home for refusing to wear high heels. But is this legal, fair or healthy?

Nicola Thorp says she was laughed at when she told her bosses that she didn’t want to wear high heels on her first day as a corporate receptionist.

“I was expected to do a nine-hour shift on my feet escorting clients to meeting rooms. I said I just won’t be able to do that in heels,” she told the BBC.

She was wearing flats, and they told her to go buy heels or else go home without pay. She refused and was sent away without pay.

Now Thorp has set up a petition to the government, demanding “women have the option to wear flat formal shoes at work”. It has picked up more than 7,000 signatures. The petition says the law as it stands is “outdated and sexist”.

UK employers can dismiss staff who fail to live up to “reasonable” dress code demands, says employment law firm Thompsons, as long as they’ve been given enough time to buy the right shoes and clothes. They can set up different codes for men and women, as long as there’s an “equivalent level of smartness”.

“Reasonable” – such a flexible word, so different for the employer versus the worker. No doubt it seems very reasonable to a boss to tell a worker to wear crippling shoes, but it doesn’t necessarily seem reasonable to the worker.

Then there are health concerns. “From the point of view of the foot high heels are a disaster,” said Tony Redmond, a biomechanics expert at Leeds University. “The joints of the feet can be damaged by wearing high heels, and this can cause some forms of arthritis.”

He also warned that regularly wearing heels increases the mechanical wear and tear around the knee joints, which might increase the risk of osteoarthritis. It also puts people with weak lower backs at risk of slipped vertebrae.

Plus they’re narrow and pointy, in keeping with the whole fragile, dainty theme, and that’s bad for the whole front half of the foot.

The College of Podiatry has warned employers not to make women wear high heels at work because they can cause bunions, back problems, ankle sprains and tight calves. It has been worked out that it takes an average of one hour, six minutes and 48 seconds for them to start hurting.

The really nasty ones hurt as soon as you put them on.

Photos of the bloodied feet of a waitress in Canada – who worked a full shift in high heels, part of the company’s dress code – have been shared more than 10,000 times on Facebook.

Last year, the Israeli airline El Al established a rule that all female cabin crew had to wear high heels until all passengers were seated.

Simon Pratt, Managing Director at Portico, said Thorp had reported to work with “inappropriate footwear”, saying she had “previously signed the appearance guidelines.” He adds that such guidelines were “common practice within the service sector” but the company were now reviewing them. PwC says it’s in discussions about Portico’s policies. The incident involving Thorp happened last December. She started the petition this week.

It has received more than 20,000 signatures, meaning the government must give a comment. If it gets 100,000, there’s a chance MPs could debate in Parliament whether women should have to wear high heels at work.

What does foot-binding do? It disables women. It makes women less able to run away.

From My Stealthy Freedom:

Her name is Gabriella. She is only two years old. She is a British citizen and went to Iran to visit her grandparents, but her passport was confiscated by the Islamic Republic of Iran after she attempted to return to the UK.

Her mother, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a 37-year-old project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the news agency’s charitable arm, was arrested in early April in Tehran by members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard at Imam Khomeini airport, where she and her daughter, Gabriella, were about to board a flight back to the UK.

So our question is the following: why has the Islamic republic confiscated a two year-old girl’s passport? Why is she banned from leaving Iran and joining her father in the UK while her mother is in solitary confinement in Iran? Isn’t this some kind of hostage-taking? Isn’t this child abuse?

“It is now nearly two months since I saw or held my little girl. I cannot get her back: her passport is confiscated, I have no visa, and I have been advised not to try and go to Iran,” Richard Ratcliffe, Gabriella’s father said.

My Stealthy Freedom campaign advises you all to please share our new hashtag : ‪#‎FreeGabriella‬