Poverty exists. Shooting the UN messenger won’t erase that fact | Nesrine Malik
When the then UN special rapporteur on violence against women, Rashida Manjoo, visited the UK in April 2014, she had strong words of condemnation for the country’s institutional misogyny and sexist popular culture. She projected what many were familiar and frustrated with: the old boys’ network, the pervasive sexualisation of women, the black hole of human rights that women in detention were thrown into. But nothing happened. Instead the headlines bastardised an observation she made on how overt the UK’s sexist culture was, into “UN special rapporteur says UK most sexist country in the world”.
Media debates erected straw men, asking if the UK really was worse than Somalia or Saudi Arabia. Edwina Currie asked why Manjoo couldn’t “go to a country where women can’t drive cars, or have maternity leave? There are plenty of countries where women face serious problems.’’ One Daily Telegraph blogger argued that, not only is all well, the country is in fact, a “gynocracy” because we’ve had a queen since 1952. Politicians were glad of the misquoted soundbite, and the media was happy to go with it. What was completely missed was that, after a two-week investigation touring prisons and detention centres, and a 4,000-word report, Manjoo raised the alarm, pointing to the disproportionate impact of funding cuts on the provision of services to women and girls at risk of violence. She spelled it out: “Current reforms to the funding and benefits system continue to adversely impact women’s ability to address safety and other relevant issues.”
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