OPINION
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Green Party co-leader James Shaw were both in the news last week talking about the abuse of women MPs.
The context was the resignation of Shaw’s former colleague Golriz Ghahraman, who faces charges of shoplifting. Luxon told journalists, unequivocally, that for women in politics, “gendered abuse is a lot worse”.
Shaw said: “Parliament is a stressful place for anybody, but Ghahraman has been subject to continuous threats of sexual violence, physical violence and death threats”.
We can all understand these words. We know what they mean. But if we really understood what it’s like to live with those threats, coming at us “continuously”, wouldn’t there be a national outcry?
Or are we kind of okay with it? Do we think it’s her fault for sticking her head above the parapet, or maybe just bad luck?
It isn’t bad luck, and sticking her head up is part of her job. We expect our politicians to tell us what they think.
I get some horrible abuse thrown my way from time to time, but it’s nothing compared to what women MPs have to put up with. Especially, it seems, if they are brown. Women journalists get it too, most commonly if they dare to write about sexual abuse.
I’ve seen some of the rape threats, the promises to kill in truly dreadful ways. It’s easy to find when you go looking.
True, it’s not all horrible. Suggesting it’s time someone was dragged off to the knacker’s yard, say, is not as brutal as telling her she deserves to have the skin flayed from her body.
Or is it? When the abuse is constant, after a while it hardly matters if it’s “low level” or “just a figure of speech” or “funny”. It’s all part of the threatening world.
Ghahraman, like others, has spoken out in the past about this. But unlike some of her critics, she has not spent her life complaining about it.
That’s not surprising. Women don’t complain. Not often, not publicly.
Why risk the abuse that might follow? Why risk being thought less of?
When male MPs fail us, they are “idiots” with “bad judgment”.
But women know they get accused of those things and something more. They are “not mentally strong enough” to be a politician. It’s a “weakness” often referred to as “don’t have the balls”.
Is this because, as men know well, testicles are a good place to store your mental capacities?
Some social media warriors seem to believe brown women are particularly “weak” in this regard. It’s proof they’re unfit for public office, they say, and definitely not evidence that the pressure they are required to live with is unbearable.
Another reason women don’t complain about abuse so much: they may doubt anything will be done about it.
And beyond all that, to complain is to let the abusers think they’ve won. Because if the abuse drives women out of politics, or if the trauma becomes too much and they behave badly, well, the bastards are right: they have won.
All this has a social context. Most of the time, men take it for granted our personal freedom is not under threat. We sail through our days, not even thinking about it. For many women, the awareness of physical and emotional risks may rarely go away.
When people speak about a culture war, this is one of the deepest and most horrifying parts of it. Women are hated. Not by all men, obviously. Not by most men. Of course not. Perhaps not even by many men. But it’s there: insidious, forceful, dangerous. And tolerated.
The hatred isn’t casual or lacking purpose. It’s intended to undermine women who stray into the world of men. It feeds on the way we condition ourselves: women, to be silent; men, to believe it can’t really be happening, or isn’t that serious, because it isn’t happening to us.
Barbie, the movie, puts it much better than I can.
By the way, women on the left in politics are not the only targets. Judith Collins and others have spoken about the gendered vileness they have to put up with too, especially from some people who think of themselves as progressive.
Actually, it’s not even as simple as men = good, women = bad. Only certain types of men are allowed. Manly men.
Chris Hipkins failed the test as prime minister and Simeon Brown is failing it now as Transport Minister. Both, according to the abuse, look too young.
Politics, eh. Only macho men need apply.
This is not to say Ghahraman shouldn’t be accountable for any crime she may have committed. That’s as true for her as it is for everyone.
But as Shaun Robinson from the Mental Health Foundation has pointed out, empathy and accountability are not opposites. In fact, they work pretty well together.
Our justice system is underpinned by the idea. The court of public opinion, not quite so much.
For some people, asking for empathy with accountability undermines the primal desire to punish. It confuses the narrative that the way to deal with crime is to lock up the bad guys and throw away the key.
You’d think everyone would want a world with less fear of physical and mental abuse. But some people don’t want that, because it would mean the world has to change. They don’t want that.
So the juggernaut rolls on. There are people whose entire purpose seems to be to frustrate the democratic process. They maintain whatever pressure they can on their supposed “enemies”: not just front-line politicians, but party members, public servants, sometimes journalists.
Thames Coromandel Mayor Len Salt has revealed how sick of it he is. In an email last year he told one man who was harassing the council “almost daily” to “go f**k yourself”.
On this occasion, the man had been demanding to know where council officials lived. A very nasty threat lurks in that demand.
Salt said he understood the man was a self-declared “sovereign citizen”, or “SovCit”. These are people who reject the authority of governments and therefore do not believe they are subject to the laws of the land.
It isn’t funny. SovCits were prominent in the mob that invaded the United States Capitol building in Washington on January 6, 2021, wanting to lynch then-Vice President Mike Pence and other lawmakers.
SovCits were also prominent in the protest in Parliament grounds a year later, where MPs were “convicted” of “crimes against humanity” and demands were made that Jacinda Ardern be given a “Nuremburg-style” trial and hanged.
The New Zealand Combined Threat Assessment Group (CTAG) and the police’s Security Intelligence and Threats Group took notice. “There is a realistic possibility,” they said, “that [someone] inspired by SovCit rhetoric will commit a spontaneous act of extremist violence in New Zealand.”
When politicians receive threats of violence, they don’t know if they’re from people having a laugh, or people planning to kill them, or people who might get “spontaneously” violent. Shaw, remember, was bashed at a bus stop in 2019.
But whether those threats are sinister or stupid, the cumulative effect is to normalise fear.
This is the context in which Ghahraman acknowledged last week that she was not well and was seeking help.
We don’t all share the responsibility for this. It’s not us stoking that fear. Not all of us.
But we are responsible when we let it pass. SovCits believe their views are legitimate. Many of the people who make violent jokes about women do too.
When we let it pass, we let them believe they are right.
None of this means we shouldn’t have political debates or that those debates shouldn’t include criticism of politicians. Ideas need to be contested, bad policy (however you define it) should be opposed and people in public life must be held to account.
But it would be nice to have a code of behaviour. Some rules for good in a bad world. So how about this:
1. Don’t gender your criticism.
2. Don’t call anyone cockroaches, vermin or animals of any kind. They’re people.
3. Don’t talk about killing or harming others. Even as a joke.
4. Call out bad behaviour. Maybe do it with humour.
All of those things amount to one thing: don’t help to normalise violence.
I know, I’m not holding my breath. But I do think it’s how we should behave.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
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