Women's rights and Feminism

By Sofie Buckland

To write this article, I decided to go and buy some lads’ mags; they’ve become a byword for sexism and I wanted to see for myself quite how bad they are. I wasn’t disappointed — both the notoriously crude cheaper weeklies like Nuts and Zoo, and the glossier monthly “lifestyle” magazines like FHM and Loaded are plastered from cover to cover with a representation of women that could have walked out of a Carry On film. We’re all either the butt of sexist jokes or reduced to a perfect tanned and toned figure.

When I was first active in feminist politics in the 80s and 90s, we did a lot of campaigning to change the Police's treatment of domestic violence victims. We complained about the Police's habit of dismissing violence as "just a domestic", of belittling the women who suffered it and indulging the men who meted it out. All this campaigning paid off - women won the right to be interviewed by specially-trained female officers, new judicial procedures enabled women to give evidence in a more sensitive way, and the Police changed their attitude and now take domestic violence more seriously.

Or do they? The horrific case of Wendy Billing suggests otherwise.

Prostitution and prejudice

Steve Cohen looks at the suprising history in Prostitution and Prejudice, The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery 1870-1939 by Edward Bristow, (Clarendon Press)

The issue of sex work has recently been dominant in both the popular press and also in feminist and left circles. One reason for this was the murder of five women in Ipswich. Another is because of government legislation introduced to outlaw trafficking generally and trafficking for sexual exploitation in particular.