Stop the ugly victim blaming

For the record, I made several appearances on the ABC’s panel show The Drum some years ago for which I fully apologise to all and sundry now. It was an error of judgment and I knew it even while I was doing it. A written statement of regret is being prepared. For those who demand more, the cheque is in the mail. Soon. Soonish. In the fullness of time.

Like many panel shows, The Drum is little more than street-corner junk opinion dressed up as expertise, featuring desperate stacks-on-the-mill attempts to make the most tortured and bizarre explanations of the bleeding obvious.

I didn’t watch the show last night. Indeed, I never do – but thanks to the magic of social media I was able to glean part of it and I can report that little or nothing has changed.

Unsurprisingly, there was a great deal of hand-wringing and furrowing of brows over the Harvey Weinstein scandal currently enveloping Hollywood. As expected, there were some takes on the program that were laughably glib.

One panellist, Gray Connolly, took a deep breath before launching into a scattergun hypothesis that amounted to spreading the guilt and shame around in a thin layer, apportioning less blame to the offender, the gelatinous sex creep Harvey Weinstein, than to just about everyone else, including possibly you and me.

“The most dangerous people in society are not your evil people. They are the bystanders. They are the people who do not do anything, do not say anything but let these sort of, erm, power mad, ah, maniacs sort of wreak their havoc on people and say nothing,” Connolly said.

Connolly is a lawyer. A barrister, in fact, the last time I looked. He may well be a very good one. If you’re ever in a spot of bother, you might do well to engage his services and suggest he gives his “culture of the bystander” speech a run.

“My client wishes to plead guilty to all charges, m’lud, but our submission is society is to blame.”

If all goes well, the beak could let you off while ordering everyone else in the courtroom, including himself, into handcuffs to be led away.

One lawyer of my acquaintance was a criminal barrister who had taken silk. He used to joke that he couldn’t help his friends if they ever got divorced as family law was beneath his vast jurisprudential skills but if marital friction did escalate and one did murder one’s spouse, he was the first person to call. So much for ethics and the law.

The case of Harvey Weinstein has put much of the commentariat into a deep, addled confusion. The net has been cast wide in the search for culprits and people considered deserving of the gnarled index finger of blame.

Meryl Streep has been put in the frame although there is not a skerrick of evidence to show she knew of Weinstein’s behaviour. Fellow actors Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie say they were subject to indignities at the hands of the Hollywood mogul and they, too, have faced media interrogation as to why they did not come forward earlier.

Ignoring the ugliness of victim-blaming for a moment, the answer is fairly obvious.

Weinstein, a morbidly obese pile of predatory flesh with hair sprouting out in all the wrong places, was powerful and could destroy them.

Some of Hollywood’s biggest male names have been bandied about and what they are supposed to have done lies somewhere between ignorance and callous disregard for Weinstein’s victims. While this may be appalling, there is no parallel between what they did or did not do and what Weinstein is alleged to have done over the past three decades.

As we speak, The New York Times is compiling a list of Hollywood’s A-grade actors, men who are yet to have made statements to the media. The suggestion is their failure to condemn Weinstein should be shaped into an endorsement by omission and thus some measure of complicity is attached by measure of vague association.

Weinstein, whose mug brings to mind a phrase often used by the late Bill Leak, “You get the face you deserve,” is facing allegations of serious criminality that in our legal lexicon includes acts of gross indecency, sexual assault and rape.

The truly desperate among the commentariat have sought to politicise the issue. The Left does these things, the Right is as pure as driven snow or vice versa is how the arguments have gone. Not everything is subject to the nebulous rules of an imaginary linear expression of political opinion. In fact, in life and in crime and its rare moments of punishment, very little does.

If we have learned anything from Weinstein and Co., it is only a reminder that power and the abuse of it is the root cause of predatory sexual behaviour from male to female, and from adult to child for that matter.

Earlier in the week I was witness to a discussion between two middle-aged professional women, one in media, the other in advertising, while they catalogued the sexual abuse, harassment and humiliation they had been subjected to in their working lives. I say witness because it pays to sit quietly and listen at these times.

The accounts were staggering both in extent and gravity and told stories of jobs lost, resignations made, opportunities withdrawn and of unacceptable behaviour reluctantly accepted.

Some say that some good may come of Weinstein’s exposure and that victims and witnesses might now be emboldened to come forward. I am not convinced. Whether it is media, politics or the corner-store mixed business, the same power structure is in place defining the powerful and the vulnerable and that structure is rarely broken. Even if it were, its replacement would merely reinstate a new division between those who have power and those without it.

Let’s not fall for the nonsense that predators like Weinstein are only partly to blame. As difficult as it might be for victims and witnesses, the only way forward is to lay the blame and the consequences squarely on the shoulders of the offender, bearing in mind the fundamental principle of law enforcement, not to mention logic, is that if the offender is removed, the offending comes to a halt.

But then, what would that leave them to babble about on The Drum?

This column was first published in The Australian on October 13, 2017.