We all find our own way to feminism. I did not come to the Bar in the early seventies as a feminist looking for slights against women. When I started studying law I was not particularly conscious of women’s issues, except inasmuch as they were part of my general concern about what happened to working-class people when they sought justice. I was a child of the Glasgow tenements with strong class politics, which informed my way of seeing law. When the women’s movement gathered steam I was in my early twenties, I went to the meetings, read the books and carried the banners, but it was at the coal face that I really learned a deep and visceral understanding of feminism, in the cells with my clients, in community advice centres and refuges, and most of all in courtrooms. Those experiences in turn fired memories from my childhood of blighted women’s lives.
Two decades later I published Eve Was Framed, my book about women and the British justice system, and I was overwhelmed by the response. Laying out the law’s failure to provide justice for women was highly contentious, especially within the profession and among the judiciary, but many women wrote to me, confiding in me their experiences of abuse and violence, which they had never taken to the courts. Some had told people in authority but had not been believed, though most remained silent because they knew that they would be accused of lying, exaggerating or fantasising. This response to the book seemed like a victory, but you don’t need me to tell you that these concerns are exactly the same as the ones still raised by women today.
My passion to reshape the world has never subsided and, despite halting progress, I am still subject to surges of real hope. Over the last few decades the wall of silence about the abuse of women and children has been breached. Domestic violence and rape are now firmly located on the political and public agendas. And every now and again something happens which persuades me that at last we are reaching the uplands in the struggle for women’s equality. The #MeToo campaign which went viral after the Harvey Weinstein scandal rocked Hollywood in 2017 has captured a mood that has been gathering force for several years, at least since the original Me Too movement was started by Tarana Burke in 1997. It is not just about celebrities and the abuse of the casting couch. It is about much more than predatory men with power in the film industry. It is about the way women have to live their lives and the debasing wretchedness of continuing gender inequality. The new element has been the Internet and social media. It has stirred a rage that has reverberated around the world and led to a huge wave of online disclosure. It has turned the spotlight on the harassment of models in the fashion industry and then moved on to Parliament, with political heads rolling and systems put in place to deal with sexual harassment there. No workplace seems safe from the naming and shaming of men abusing their power. It has turned to Oxfam, Save the Children and the charity world with the disclosure of male workers in crisis-stricken Haiti using young desperate women for prostitution and men in the upper reaches of these organisations behaving in disrespectful ways towards women. The whole Weinstein tsunami has been described as a ‘watershed’, a seismic response to law’s failure.
The surge of confidence was growing well before the #MeToo campaign. There was the Oxford student Ione Wells who was attacked and almost raped in London. She threw off the mantle of anonymity and expressed a public refusal to be silenced and ashamed for being on the receiving end of a sexual assault. There are the incredible women from minority communities, like the Southall Black Sisters and members of the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, who challenge discriminatory asylum and immigration policies as well as cultural practices like female genital mutilation, forced marriage and ‘honour’ killing, which are violations of human rights. Or the fabulous women in the Glasgow Disability Alliance who have unveiled the extent to which women with disabilities are exposed to disproportionate sexual abuse and domestic violence. There is Laura Bates’s brilliantly inventive Everyday Sexism Project, which provides a space for sharing the ways in which offensive remarks and conduct are a persistent feature of women’s lives and are normalised. There has been the launch of the Women’s Equality Party, and the creation of the Centre for Women’s Justice by the tireless solicitor for women Harriet Wistrich. There are the students in universities who are demanding a change in the culture of entitlement they feel is enjoyed by young men. There is the growing clamour of voices in television and sport demanding that the salaries of men are published so that women doing the same jobs can see if they are getting equal pay.
It was in 2012 when the deceased celebrity entertainer Jimmy Savile was exposed as a paedophile and gross abuser of women and children that we seemed to reach a tipping point. As more cases emerged, suddenly the institutions – from the BBC to Parliament, from hospitals and schools to young offender institutions, from local authorities to universities and churches, all of which had colluded in keeping the lid on such crimes – were in retreat. Every one of these pillars of rectitude had put institutional reputation ahead of safeguarding women and children. The outrage was so deeply felt and the torrent of memories, anger and sorrow so great that a public debate raged, of a kind that had never taken place before. A public inquiry was set up by the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, in recognition of the extent of the problem. I kept hearing the same questions. How could so many predators have got away with it? Why did people do nothing? Was it because things were different then?
Now it was as though people had been waiting for permission to talk about their experiences and a flood of historic abuse and discrimination was laid bare. I thought then that maybe we were turning a corner.
The scandals of Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Manchester, Newcastle and other cities were revealed, where girls, some as young as 13 and 14, were groomed and used for sex by gangs of men largely from ethnic minorities. The girls were white and usually from disadvantaged backgrounds, often in care homes. They would be staying out late, easily preyed upon in the night-time world of takeaway joints and minicabs. Plied with drink and drugs, given gifts of money or trinkets, they would be raped or coerced into sexual activity by men sometimes old enough to be their fathers. Yet they were treated by the authorities as girls making a lifestyle choice and the men avoided prosecution because the police did not think the girls or their families were credible witnesses. Again the question was asked. How could this have gone on without police action or intervention by social services? There were attempts to suggest this was culturally specific, as though it is only men from certain cultures who commit such crimes, when in fact these particular manifestations are just further examples of how ‘pass-around’ girls are a common feature of male gang networks. Many young Asian girls, like young white girls, suffer sexual abuse and, as we know, it is most commonly at the hands of people from their own family or community. A culture of impunity means serial abuse of women and girls has gone uninvestigated and unpunished for all my professional life. There is nothing racially or religiously inherent in male abuse. Yes, the police and social services were anxious in these cases not to be accused of racist conduct by pursuing Pakistanis or other ethnic minority men. The tabloids bleated about political correctness being the root cause of this systemic failure to pursue the offenders, and no doubt the police’s past record of discrimination towards minority communities means they are now being trained not to repeat history, but these cases are not just about sensitivity to potential allegations of racism or worries about feeding racial bigotry. Lord Ken MacDonald QC, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, described the male offenders as the ones who were racist because their victims were white girls. Yet it was the vulnerability and apparent availability of the girls that made them easy prey rather than the colour of their skin or the fact that they were non-Muslims. At the core of these shameful episodes were the deep-seated attitudes about which I have written endlessly. Some women and girls are deemed unworthy of protection; some females are seen as fair game. Slut-shaming, shoulder-shrugging and victim-blaming are nothing new when women are sexually molested. And it happens to Muslim women, brown-skinned women and black women too. The police forces and social service departments that were involved had to examine their consciences and their practices in a way that had not happened before. Was this in fact the tipping point?
I think, too, about reading and watching the coverage not so long ago about the great athlete Oscar Pistorius, who shot his girlfriend in a fit of rage, or the footballer Ched Evans, who was acquitted on a retrial of rape, having been given the heads-up by a friend that there was a young woman available for sex who just happened to be very drunk, or the politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who walked away from a sexual assault allegation on an immigrant hotel worker claiming it was consensual, only to be later exposed as a man with an unquenchable appetite for aggressive sex with strangers. All these men were able to rally huge public support. I think of John Warboys, the taxi driver who was responsible for the assault of legions of women but was considered suitable for release by the Parole Board after nine years. Then there is Donald Trump, who boasted on tape that he liked to ‘grab women by the pussy’ and admitted he could do so without any consequences because of his power and fame; who also said that he thought women who had abortions deserved ‘some form of punishment’. He then went on to become president of the United States, supported by swathes of men but also a large number of women who think he speaks for them. I read and watch female journalists, paid assassins, turn on women who speak out about the ways in which lecherous men grope them, or I hear senior women at the Bar say that young women who complain of roaming hands should not consider a career in law if they cannot deal with it, and then I wonder how long it will take before there is equality. For millennia women have been made to feel shame. They have been told that what happens to them is their fault and it is they who are blamed for their failures, their shortcomings, their conduct. That is the power of patriarchy. Male dominance is maintained by this stuff. Women are made to feel soiled. They absorb feelings of guilt. The voice in their heads is mouthing cultural norms created by men and sold to women. ‘It must have been something about me that made him do that to me.’
While women are increasingly vocal and are refusing to be muzzled about the violence and abuse they experience, the extent of such crimes is not in decline. Two women a week are killed by a spouse or partner. The police receive one phone call per minute concerning domestic violence. Every seven minutes a woman is raped. New technology has brought the proliferation of pornography on a scale that is alarming and contagious. Boys and men are watching and sharing imagery on their phones in which intimacy is wholly debased and women treated as objects. They then act out what they see in their contact with women, thinking this is what good sex is like. The trafficking of women and children is being carried out on an industrial scale across the world and barely a town or city in the United Kingdom has escaped its reach. The truth is that a lot has happened but not enough has changed.
Patriarchy is a virus that lives deep in the body politic. We have to become more confident in naming it as one of the main blights on all our lives. For men and women both. Patriarchy is a system – a dynamic web – of ideas and relationships, a set of beliefs and a set of values. It explains the world to us from our earliest years and it informs us in the subtlest of ways as to what is good and attractive and what is bad and distasteful. We are all taught that men are rational and women emotional; the system then assigns more worth to reason than to emotion. Patriarchy tells us that the world is a dangerous place and men must be our protectors while at the same time being our greatest threat. This societal system is sustained by everyday sexism but is more than sexism. It embraces misogyny but it relies on more than misogyny. It produces inequality but its consequences run deeper than gender inequality.
As a belief system, patriarchy is very appealing to men but also to a lot of women because for some women it brings rewards. Even feminists have shied away from talk of patriarchy because it seems old hat, or like hostility towards men – all men. I avoided using the word when I wrote Eve Was Framed in 1992 because I thought this book will never be read if it is seen to come from a place of hostile ideology. That anxiety about how we will be perceived is what actually sustains patriarchy and enables it to survive.
Patriarchy while expressing admiration for femininity actually holds it in contempt.
All around us admiration is expressed for women who show outward signs of ‘good mothering’ and other indicators of ‘real’ feminine qualities, but masculinity is privileged over all forms of femininity (as well as over despised forms of masculinity). Margaret Thatcher was admired for being ‘the only man in the room’ according to a supporter because Conservative men look for masculinised forms of authority even in women. On this front, Theresa May was initially admired as a ‘bloody difficult woman’, but whenever she turns into ‘poor Theresa May’ her power seeps away. Her challenge of Putin over the poisoning of Russians on British soil lent her new potency in this male-skewed assessment. Admirers of the authoritarian leader take comfort from being foot soldiers, so long as they play this role to someone who displays powerful male qualities.
Our culture continues to harbour misogyny. Men are still being conditioned from an early age to feel a sense of superiority over women and to objectify them. They are often not even aware of it; it is so deeply encoded. ‘Power is coded male’, as Mary Beard the classics scholar has so eloquently pronounced. Boys around the world grow up being taught, in subtle ways, that women are less important and exist to satisfy men. And when grown, these boys are the folk who largely people our police forces, our prosecutorial services and our legislative systems. The simple fact is that men still dominate every pillar of power, from Parliament and the courts to the economy and the media. They crowd out the voices of women systematically, even on issues directly affecting women. Of course, the majority of men in the public arena denounce violence against women when required, but even the good guys, and there are many, rarely challenge degrading jokes, debasing images or sleazy comments which are the quotidian expression of the very stuff that feeds violence too. It is all part of a continuum. The culture of masculinity is so deeply ingrained in our hegemony that women also buy into it. It is all around us. At some level, everyday violence against women and objectification of women are tolerated because they are seen as an expression of manhood. Women are often held responsible. We ‘make’ men do it. We incite it by how we look and dress and by our very sexual being, by our wicked tongues and our devious ways. What does it mean when the Christian evangelical Mike Pence, vice president of the United States, says in the 21st century that he will not meet a woman alone, even if she is a leading politician or adviser? What is it he thinks Angela Merkel is going to do to him? Is it because he fears his own sexual appetites, or is he concerned that a false allegation might be made by her, or that it might give rise to scandal? What is the message he gives to the world in saying this?
Over the years I have learned that every surge for real change meets with a backlash. It is happening now. Currently the call is that the #MeToo campaign has gone too far. Men are being falsely accused and are given no recourse to justice, we are told. Well, it is true that we are not seeing much due process. Naming and shaming on the Internet is wild justice and can cause serious unfairness I have no doubt, but if we want to talk about failures of justice, I think women can make a far greater claim. The #MeToo campaign is very much a response to law’s failure. If women had confidence in the justice system and men really feared the shame and consequence of misconduct, we would not be seeing a resort to anonymous accusations, a few of which may be overstated or invalid. The other challenge is that the public shaming of men, particularly anonymously, is disproportionate when they have merely groped or talked dirty and this should not be compared to rape and other grievous assaults. Of course, there is no equivalence between gang rape and having your behind felt at a club or a cock pressed against you on the Tube, but it is all part of the soup in which inequality is suspended. Women of my generation learned survival mechanisms, avoidance techniques, self-safeguarding. We ran round tables, we walked off briskly. We pretended constant comments on our bodies meant nothing to us and hid our hurt. We survived pressure to have sex with men we were not interested in by saying we had to be up at dawn or had our periods. Why should women have to do this? Why should our daughters endure this behaviour and just put it down to a woman’s lot in life?
The journalist Melanie Phillips took the actress Uma Thurman to task for joining the bands of women outing Weinstein rather late in the day, getting her fame in first. She described what she saw as complicity by women in sexual behaviour to advance their own careers and could not see how any self-respecting woman would ever work for a man who was disgusting in his conduct towards her. The answer according to Phillips is to walk away, refuse to be a victim, get another career, find another job. But women up and down the land are working for men who disrespect them because they feel they have little choice, not because they choose victimhood. Sometimes the job is too precious for financial reasons and sometimes the desire to succeed in the career you love leads women into dark places. They are left with self-disgust, shame and anger. That is what powerlessness does to people. Blaming the women is the recourse of those who have control and little humanity. Feeling disempowered has been too common an experience for many women. Melanie Phillips failed to understand that the #MeToo campaign is about women having had enough and actually refusing to be victims. They are involved in a form of civil disobedience and it should be seen as an alarm call.
The backlash against the new wave of feminism has seen the usual media suspects jump on the revelation that the police failed to disclose social media evidence from the electronic devices of complainants in a number of rape cases, which led to the cases being dropped. The headlines claimed that women were being exposed through their emails, their Snapchat photographs and their Tinder accounts as liars. The old claim that many women make up allegations of rape is on the front burner once again. No one is mentioning that there is also a failure by the prosecution to ask for the social media of the male accused, disclosing his use of hard porn and texts, exposing poisonous attitudes to women.
So here I am again, 25 years on, deeply frustrated that a new book on gender inequality and the law appears to be so urgently needed. Many things have improved. Undoubtedly. At the very least we have many more women in the law and on the Bench. But too many new challenges have arisen. In Misjustice I want to look again at the British justice system as it is experienced by women – whether as defendants, victims or practitioners – cataloguing the persistence of misogyny and stereotypes, and all the inequality that still exists, examining the continuing failures and the intersectionality of discrimination which multiplies the effects of gender discrimination when coupled with racism and class disadvantage and contempt for any person who is different. I think we have to look at the persistence of shame and the shaming of women. Women have an instinctive sense of shame when they are violated. It is a learned behaviour. Shame is a component of punishment for criminal behaviour, so why should women suffer shaming or experience shame when they have been at the receiving end of shameful behaviour by men? I want to suggest solutions for change whenever I see them, without undermining the principles which must underpin justice. But the bigger aim in this project is to move the current debate on.
We have had the huge, powerful and necessary outpouring, the sharing of stories and redrawing of boundaries, but what comes next? The lessons which have been learned have to be formalised and entrenched into society. There has to be systemic change in our places of work and all our institutions. But this is about more than tweaking the law, creating grievance procedures, strengthening human resource systems and changing governance structures. All of this must be done, but the bigger project is about creating deep cultural change which involves us all, men and women. Men and boys have to be helped to see how our cultures disfigure relationships and inflict deep wounds on them too. We must challenge the toxic masculinity that proliferates on the Internet, fostering violence and abuse. In its most extreme form this produces movements like Incel – involuntary celibates – which feed hatred against women amongst men who feel their old sexual and gender entitlements are being withdrawn. Their rage is leading to the aping of terrorist outrages, as we saw in Canada in May 2018 when a crowd was mown down with a vehicle.
The sham demands of a pernicious masculinity that from childhood shackles men to roles and behaviours which are damaging to them as well as us have to be exposed. Men are shamed into denying their own emotional needs and taught to cover vulnerability with bravado and toughness. Men who were abused as children by parents, carers, sports coaches, teachers and priests have also had to bury their pain for years. Those who have had the courage to name their abusers and testify against them have had to unearth buried layers of confusion and pain because those experiences upturned their own ideas of appropriate masculinity. Change has to embrace the way men too are encumbered and undermined by the burdens of expectation.
We have to ask: what is equality? What does it look like? What kind of equality do we want? And how might the law help in achieving it? These seem to me to be the most urgent questions we now face.
Equality certainly means getting more women into positions of power in all aspects of life – not just in a tokenist way, but creating genuine parity. It means more than improving numbers, however. Many of us have become successful in male worlds because we have learned to do jobs in the way men expect. Some of us can even outdo them at their own game. Having women learn to exercise power just as men do is not going to achieve real equality. Can we envisage a world where each of us is valued for who we are, for our individual human qualities, rather than our gender or race or caste or class? Valued not because we have learned to ape male rationality but because we have other kinds of intelligence and skills to bring to the table too? A world where we are all respected simply because of our common humanity? Equality means true and consensual sexual relations. It means working together without fear or expectation of exploitation of any kind. To re-engineer our systems we have to survey the landscape of law and recognise where it fails and why.
One of the great legal advances in the last 20 years has been the embrace of human rights into our domestic law. The European Convention of Human Rights was actually drafted by British lawyers in 1950, despite it being traduced as a foreign invention. The Human Rights Act of 1998 introduced the Articles of the European Convention into the legal system of England and Wales. The Scotland Act of 1998 secured the same rights for the Scots and the Good Friday Agreement did likewise for the Northern Irish. The positive impact on the lives of UK citizens has been immeasurable. The main point of human rights principles is to create a template of values to work alongside the legal systems of different nations to protect the human needs of individuals. Where there were gaps in the protections afforded by domestic law, the courts have at their disposal potential remedies based on principle.
Women have benefitted hugely from the Human Rights Act because so many of its articles provide a corrective to the areas where the law has failed women. The right to life in the Human Rights Act was used in 2010 to secure the reopening of the inquest into the death of Naomi Bryant who was killed by Anthony Rice. The new inquest showed that the authorities had known he was a serial sex offender but had released him on licence without appropriate supervision when he was a clear risk to girls and women. The right to respect for family and private life was used to prevent the children of a domestic violence victim being taken into care by social services, who insisted she had made herself voluntarily homeless. Her violent husband pursued her relentlessly wherever she resettled, yet his behaviour was to mean the loss of her children and the children’s loss of their mother. The Act was used to expose cruel and inhumane treatment, otherwise described as substandard care, of the elderly in Stafford Hospital. It was used to challenge failures in the Rotherham abuse scandal. It was used to reopen the investigation into the suicide of Private Cheryl James and the toxic and ‘sexualised’ atmosphere at Deepcut Army Barracks where she was training. The list goes on; but few women know the incredible uses they can make of these rights in pursuit of justice and equality – rights which some in power wish to take away.
Gender equality is within our grasp and law is one of the mechanisms that can be used to secure it. However, it requires persistence and constant review.
We live in a social system in which men hold primary power. They predominate in roles of political leadership and having Margaret Thatcher or Theresa May in charge has not augured a new world order, whatever we are told. Men hold all the main positions of moral authority, have social privilege and control of most property. Men still hold the reins over women and children in very many family homes. They control nearly every avenue of power, especially within mainstream institutions. If only they realised how much better it would be for them too if it were all changed, if the rules of the game altered. Imagine a world where it is taken for granted that men and women share power and no one is subject to another’s dominion. Imagine we have equal legal rights to spend real time with our families, where there really is equal pay, where the pressures of the long-hours culture are removed, where pay in the caring professions was made so rewarding that it did not invariably fall to women to look after the elderly, the disabled or children in nurseries, nor that teaching in primary schools was a female role.
Sadly, there are still too many in the law who believe that the law is an objective set of rules, that law is neutral. The point of Eve Was Framed was to show that this claim of neutrality was bogus. Law was male because it was made by men, or with a male template, and only when law-making was reconsidered could law become just. But reforming the law with some legislative changes and the appointment of more women will not of itself resolve the deeply embedded problems with the law. There has to be a serious acknowledgement that legal cultures are premised on notions within society which are themselves excluding rather than including. There has to be a demolition job on the structural engineering of society.
When women of my generation first began to turn the spotlight on the treatment of women by law and in the law, we argued for law reform. We still need that, but what became increasingly clear is that law reform of itself is not the answer. Law is often part of the problem. We argued for equality but treating as equal those who are unequal does not produce equality. Equality is not about treating people the same. The European Court of Human Rights has said that equality is treating people who are in the same situation the same way, and treating people who are differently situated differently. Our Supreme Court used this distinction to decide that the bedroom tax (additional rent applied to council properties where there are more bedrooms than people registered at the address) would not apply to people with a disability or illness who needed overnight carers.
The problem is that too few administrators and employers and even courts understand this difference. We have to start talking about substantive equality, real equality, which acknowledges the historic or physical imbalances between men and women in our society, rather than formal equality. When the army first accepted women recruits to all regiments it thought equality would mean reacting to everyone as though they were the same. It then recognised that the stride and different physical capacities of a woman meant that the same timings for fitness runs could not be expected of men and women. Equality required making appropriate adjustments on objective assessments of capabilities. Real equality means treating ‘as equals’ – taking account of the context of our lives and the ways in which women can be deeply disadvantaged. The fact that only women can get pregnant is a special factor linked to gender, and dismissals for pregnancy must not be compared with a man being sick long term. Nor does equality mean reaching for the sentencing manual and doling out the same sentence for a man and a woman if the sentencing guidelines allow for no discretion or appreciation of women’s reality. It does not mean expecting higher sexual morality from women than from men. It does not mean judging women on their clothing, their drunkenness, their skills as a parent, when none of those judgements are applied to males. It means recognising that for the most part women do low-paid work, that women give birth, that women do most of the caring within families, that women do not enjoy equal advancement within the workplace, that women’s experiences from childhood may involve discrimination, that many women live in fear of violence and abuse from adolescence in a way that men do not. It does not assume that women who have consented to sex with many men will be content to have sex with any man. Doing justice requires lawyers and judges to understand the world in which we live. The evidence of continuing inequality is manifest in the cases that are recounted in this book. In order to construct a better vision of equality we have to become fully aware of the system’s failings. It is important to emphasise that a new vision will not be achieved by purchasing justice for women at the cost of justice for men.
In the family courts, there have been enormous improvements for women, but sometimes the victories achieved have bizarre consequences because the wrongs they are seeking to redress are not fully understood by those who are asked to put the changes into practice. After a great deal of campaigning and pushing at the boundaries of legal precedent, a breakthrough took place in the eighties and nineties in relation to the distribution of assets after the breakdown of marriage. It was successfully argued that wives and partners who stay at home to care for children or who sacrifice their own careers to contribute to the success of their man should be appropriately compensated in any settlement, receiving not only a division of current assets but also a portion of future earnings and pension entitlements. The same principle should clearly apply where a male partner assumes the domestic role. However, in the spirit of gender equality the courts now interpret this to mean that when a couple divorces after their children are grown and both have had careers, if the woman earns more and has better prospects for the future she has to fork out to her husband even if she still took the greater role in childcare. There is also a failure to acknowledge that where both partners work, mothers still usually bear the responsibility of organising childcare and most of the domestic scene. Unfortunately, the struggles for equity in marriage and divorce are undermined by the highly publicised media reports of the few women who fortune-hunt for huge divorce settlements after short marriages to rich men.
Securing justice is not easy and nor should it be. It is obtained by giving a fair and unbiased appraisal of each person and situation, without relying on preconceived notions, whether the defendant is black or white, male or female, straight, trans or gay. Justice recognises the tension between the ideal of equality and the reality of people’s lives. There are those who claim that the true classical symbol of Justice has her wearing a blindfold of impartiality but maybe that is why law fails. I have always preferred the image of Justice as an all-seeing goddess, as she appears above the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, alert and aware of humanity in all its forms, taking everything into account, and thereby aiming for a higher ideal.
The law mirrors society with all its imperfections and it therefore reflects the subordination and lesser status of women, even today. But holding up a mirror can never be its sole function. The law affects as well as reflects, and all of those involved in the administration of justice have a special obligation to reject society’s irrational prejudices. The law is symbolic, playing an important role in the internalising of ideas about what is right and natural. If the men of law say scantily dressed women or ones who are drunk or ones who hook up with guys on Tinder have been authors of their own misfortune, they reinforce that view in the man on the street. The law constructs beliefs about the roles of men and women in the home and at work which feed back into generally held attitudes about women.
True justice is about more than refereeing between two sides. It is about breathing life into the rules so that no side is at a disadvantage because of sex or race or any of the other impediments which deny justice.