Is he saying he does not support protection for the vulnerable and
those unfairly discriminated against?
If the Tories stand for “fair play” then why is Tory-controlled
Brentwood council defying new government directives asking councils to
identify land that travellers can buy at no cost to the council taxpayer?
Mr Howard and his colleagues created the present problems when they scrapped
the duty on councils to provide sites. Yet
special rules are put in place to help the vulnerable and give respect to
minorities, such as the rule that permits Sikhs to dispense with crash
helmets. On Sunday the Conservatives took out
advertisements in a number of newspapers in which Michael Howard
inaccurately accused Gypsies and travellers of bending the rules and there
being “one rule for travellers and another for everyone else”. Sometimes this is not even a case of girls acting on
misguided love but because they believe this is what they should be doing. As one friend who was sexually coerced told me, “Maybe I’m just
uptight; isn’t this what everyone else is doing?”
Until we address the way our culture presents sex and relationships to young
girls, I’m afraid we will continue to see figures like these.
ELODIE HARPER
London NW3
Tories exploit hysteria against travellers
Sir: Your front page (21 March) asks “Are these Britain’s most demonised
people?” The past weeks have witnessed some of the most distasteful and
inaccurate media reporting of recent times, led by The Sun’s “Stamp
on the Camps” campaign. I cannot name one girl of my
acquaintance (myself included) who has not at some point put up with
bullying behaviour or given into sexual demands they secretly didn’t want
rather than lose a man.
The implied message is that to take part in mainstream culture you have
to have a man.
The result is that girls find their self-image depends on sexual relationships
and they become increasingly prepared to take a man at any price, violence
being the extreme end of the scale. You
cannot open a girls’ or women’s magazine without finding myriad surveys on
what clothes men find attractive, how to get a date, what sex tips to use
etc. On all sides in
film, commercials and magazines we are fed the message that finding and
keeping a man is the ultimate goal and the ultimate status of cool. While this obviously needs to be addressed, I am surprised that nobody has
focused on the more startling fact that the majority of teenage girls who
accept being hit by their partners (over two thirds) have never had
experience of abuse before.
As a young woman in my early twenties I have been concerned since my teenage
years by my peer group’s distressing lack of self-esteem.
The reason young women tolerate abusive relationships
The reason young women tolerate abusive relationships
Sir: Like many people I was saddened to read about the levels of violent abuse
teenage girls suffer at the hands of their boyfriends (“One in five
girls hit by boyfriend”, 21 March) but perhaps unlike other readers I
was not surprised.
Most of the media attention has focused on the correlation between girls who
witness or suffer abuse at home and go on to suffer abuse from boyfriends. It’s all very unBritish, Mr Clarke, all these big plans and constitutional rewritings. I am not sure you would pass a British entry test if you took it right now, and I was asking the questions.
More from Miles Kington. Not just tinkering, but taking out big working bits like habeas corpus.
