Stop Whistling, Start Listening

The London riots and women

So, so much has been written about the London riots and what might have caused them so I don’t want to go over old ground. I have had some thoughts about women and the riots - who we took note of, how they were talked about and their link to the causes.

The most notable is probably the latter. It’s struck me that much of the rhetoric from the Conservatives and papers like the Daily Mail has placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of single mothers. One of the primary components of ‘Broken Britain’ is, to quote David Cameron directly, ‘children without fathers’. But no-one seems to think that the missing fathers are the problem. It’s the women who are left behind, doing what they can, raising ‘feral children’. The solution is apparently to evict them (as Wandsworth council has threatened) or cut off their benefits, rather than, perhaps, pursue the fathers for child support to help the mothers raise their children. 

On the flipside, throughout the riots I lost track of the number of comments after articles or retweeted jokes about the need to send in the rioters’ mothers and they’d sort it all out. They may be raising feral children, but apparently they actually are capable of going into the middle of blazing Croydon and just send them all home. Bit of a disconnect there I think.

Of course, one of the most shared and viewed moments from the riots was of Hackney Woman. This clip was filmed as a local resident in Hackney, later named as Pauline Pearce, took on local youths asking them what they were thinking and what were they trying to achieve by attacking people’s homes and livelihoods.

Another interesting thing that stood out for me in relation to the reaction of women involved with the riots came on the Catch a Looter tumblog. I believe the site is gone now and redirects to a Facebook page, but while many of the original comments I saw are gone some new ones still make my point. Many of the photos haven’t inspired comments at all but one had stood out from the start - an image of tweets from @itsBARBZbabe where she brags about the stuff she got while looting. The comments are pretty full-on focusing on how fat she is and her appearance in general. There’s real venom there. Similarly the press jumped on the images of a woman who tried on trainers before stealing them. The single comment remaining on the Catch A Looter page just calls her a ‘scumbag bitch’. The comments on photos of the male rioters mostly call them dickheads or idiots but there seems to be lacking the aggression or the focus on their appearance. Not a situation most women I know are unfamiliar with. 

There’s no real summary to this post as to say more is just to add to the noise surround the discussions of the riots but these are the general thoughts I had while wading through the media aftermath.