Here's a video in which a group of (I think) sex-workers - unidentified, but seemingly a mixture of porn performers, escorts and strippers - talk eloquently about the problem they have with feminist anti-sex-work campaigns, and why they refuse to accept the victim status often accorded automatically to anyone (but especially women) working in the sex industry. It's rather good. (h/t Obo).

Towards the end, one of the featured women addresses feminist campaigners with these words:

"If the idea of sex for money seems morally repugnant to you, then you may need to come to terms with the fact that this is just your own personal bias, and in no way constitutes grounds for prohibiting consensual acts."



This perennially controversial topic is in the news again thanks to the recent release of a major new ACPO report (pdf) into the extent and nature of sex trafficking and sex-slavery in Britain. The report estimated (based on extrapolations from interviews with fewer than 250 sex workers) that there might be 2,600 "trafficked" women in Britain, a figure criticised by some campaigners for being too low and by others for including as victims of trafficking people who were fully aware that they were going to work in prostitution. In addition, the report creates a new category of those considered "vulnerable" to trafficking - migrant sex workers who, while not meeting all the criteria for being trafficked could nevertheless be accounted potential victims. This category was estimated to comprehend more than 9,000 sex workers (out of an estimated total of 17,000 migrants) , which enabled newspapers to speak of 12,000 trafficking victims, a much more satisfyingly alarmist figure.

The furtive, quasi-illegal nature of prostitution (which the report's authors consider to be exploitative by definition), the lack of a social safety-net and the dubious immigration status of many of these women are all treated as factors supporting a categorisation of "vulnerable". For most of the women concerned, there was no evidence that they were sex-slaves, abused by pimps or tricked into working unwillingly as prostitutes. Merely hailing from a country outside the EU was usually sufficient to attract the label. A much fuller assessment of the report can be read here. It is on a pro-sex work blog, it should be said, but the analysis is extremely thorough and the piece strikes me as well-balanced.

The ACPO report ("Setting the Record") certainly has its problems. It estimates, for example, that on off-street (that is, brothel-based) prostitutes in London, more than 96% are non-British. The representative sample happened to consist almost exclusively of foreign women, and I'm not personally aware of the national mix to be found in London brothels, but that figure is so out of step with the rest of the country, and with common sense, that it's worring that the report's authors were willing to accept it with very little question. Other unexpected findings were more convincingly established. The most significant was the preponderance of Chinese and other Far-Eastern (but especially Chinese) women among likely victims of sex-trafficking. The stereotype of Albanian or former Soviet sex-trafficking gangs, on the other hand, seems to have little empirical support. The problem may exist, but it is of relatively small scale - most East European sex workers are not trafficked into Britain, something that it is as well to remember in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics with its inevitable sex-trafficking scare stories.

Ultimately, a report like this has two quite separate audiences and impacts: the professionals for whom it is written, and the wider public debate. Professionals will (one hopes) read it carefully, note the caveats, and use it along with other evidence (such as the results of the Pentameter swoops, which led to surprisingly few trafficking victims being identified) to inform their actions. The public and media debate, by contrast, wil take little note of the methodological bases and detailed conclusions of Setting the Record, focussing instead on the easily absorbable (if highly problematic) figure of 12,000 "trafficked" and "vulnerable" women. Despite its objective intentions, then, the report will doubtless fuel the alarmism that has always surrounded the subject. As an example, pre-publicity for a new Channel 4 documentary on the subject asserts that 4,000 women per year are being trafficked into Britain, a figure that would seem to be based on no research (though prior to ACPO's report, the figure of 4,000 trafficking victims in total has frequently been banded about).

In this heated atmosphere, it's worth noting that the report's authors are well aware of the nuances - how, for example, the same set of facts might be interpreted differently by an outside observer and by someone actually involved in the sex industry, or by two different observers, or even by the same person at different times. They write:

All individuals and organisations involved in the prostitution sector view it from their own perspective: women involved in prostitution, customers, law enforcement officials, charity and NGO staff, women previously involved in prostitution, legislators, judges, jurors and academics all have their own particular set of experiences, biases, expectations, cultural influences and worldviews. Everyone experiences the world through their own unique cultural filter, and because the sale of sex itself is an emotive and politicised subject, when discussing human trafficking it is critical to recognise the effects of these cultural filters. Legitimate arguments on how best to minimise harm from prostitution range from toleration to legalisation to unconditional abolition. It could legitimately be argued that anyone who sells sex is by definition unacceptably exploited; conversely it could also be argued that in certain circumstances prostitution is an entirely legitimate form of employment. There exist a variety of opinions on all sides of the debate, and there seems little chance of achieving a widespread consensus.

Sadly true, but also unnecessary. To the extent that it exists (which is a matter of debate and considerable uncertainty, even after the report) sex trafficking - the coercive movement recruitment, movement and "employment" of unwilling sex-workers - is a real evil. That should go without saying. It does not have to be large-scale, or constitute a significant proportion of prostitution, to be worth prosecuting with the full might of the law. A single woman, or man, rescued from sexual slavery should be a cause of celebration. It seems, however, to be at the heart of many campaigners' assumptions that such abuses are inherent within prostitution and other parts of the sex industry as such.

It is this ideological bias, not the necessity of suppressing the sexual abuse of adults and children, that leads many self-declared feminists to inflate and exaggerate the number of victims - a strategy that might secure dramatic headlines, but which undermines the autonomy and denies the experiences (good, bad and most often indifferent) of many real women (and men), alienates the respectful and non-exploitative sex-worker clients (who are thus discouraged from reporting suspected trafficking victims to the police) and ultimately undermines the credibility of their whole cause. They should watch the video.

Sentence has finally been passed on the two ten year old boys convicted in May at the Old Bailey for the "attempted rape" of an even younger girl. The judge, Mr Justice Saunders, decided that a three-year supervision order was the most appropriate way of dealing with them. A custodial sentence would be "counterproductive". Instead he was giving them "the assistance of trained social workers to help, guide and educate you. This will also help your family come to terms with what happened." He was talking about the boys' actions; but he might equally have been talking about the legal process itself.

In effect, this was the minimum possible sentence. The judge even told the boys that he accepted "that you did not realise how serious what you were doing was.'' If that is so (and I'm sure that it is) they would seem to have lacked the mens rea necessary for a rape (or attemped rape) conviction. Why, then, were they ever put on trial? The judge's words here fatally undermine the rationale for the prosecution. I wrote at the time that "it is hard to conceive of a more striking instance of the inappropriate sexualisation of children than the spectacle of two boys of primary school age put on trial at the Old Bailey for rape." The characterisation of what went on as "sexual", I argued, was an inappropriate imposition of adult concepts onto prepubescent children. This would now seem to be the judge's view too. It makes his decision - later backed by the Court of Appeal - to put the evidence before a jury even more puzzling than it was before.

By passing a non-punitive sentence, the judge has managed to undo at least some of the damage he caused by not halting the trial when he had an opportunity to do so. But no-one and nothing can undo the damage caused by the CPS's decision to prosecute in this case. Given that all sides appear to agree that a non-custodial sentence is the correct one - indeed, it now turns out that a custodial sentence was never even contemplated - it is plain that the decision to prosecute in the Crown Court, subjecting both the accused and, even more importantly, the victim, to the rigmarole of a full Old Bailey hearing was not only wrong but entirely unnecessary. In fact criminal proceedings of any kind were never the appropriate response to the events described in this case, and were not a necessary precondition to an intervention by social services on the boys' lives. It could, and should, have been dealt with informally.

Indeed, the judge seemed to acknowledge that the trial had constituted at least as serious an act of abuse of the victim as the attack. "Everyone will sympathise with her for what she has gone through" he said. "Not only what happened to her as the victim of these offences, but also to have to give evidence about them. "

Not only for what two ten year-old boys, too young to understand the issues of sex and consent on which the crime of rape is supposed to turn, did to her, in other words. But also for what the Crown Prosecution Service, whose officials should have understood the implications and which is supposed to act in the public interest, did to her. In my view, their offence against the child victim was by far the worse. It is certainly much harder to forgive.

As I've written before and no doubt will again, Keir Starmer's CPS is an organisation in need of urgent reform.

You may remember a couple of months ago a story that the Daily Mail ran, claiming that "British shoppers are to be banned from selling eggs by the dozen" thanks to a vote in the European Parliament. Not only would the new rules "not allow both the weight and the quantity to be displayed," claimed the Mail, it would also (inevitably) result in "higher costs" which would be passed on to shoppers.

This latest example of apparent Euro-nonsense much exercised the likes of Iain Dale (who fulminated against "these crackpot regulations that serve the purpose of no one apart from the idiot that wrote them in the first place") but was treated with scepticism, even scorn, by others. A couple of days later word came that it was all a misunderstanding. The UK Office of the European Parliament put out a statement announcing, emphatically:

Selling eggs by the dozen will NOT be illegal under the terms of the amendments adopted by the European Parliament to EU food labelling proposals. Labels will still be able to indicate the number of food items in a pack, whether of eggs, bread rolls or fish fingers. To suggest that British shoppers will not be allowed to buy a dozen eggs in the future is wrong.

So that was that. The Mail declared victory (despite the fact that nothing had actually been changed) and the caravan moved on. But were things really quite so simple?

I should start by saying that I was generally sceptical of the story, not because I trust the EU not to pass otiose and ludicrous regulations, but because the claims in the Mail made little sense. Apart from anything else, it seemed incredible that it would be illegal to write the number 6 on an eggbox that plainly and obviously contained 6 eggs, as the report seemed to be suggesting. (Not to mention that fact that it is already the case that egg packet labelling includes the approximate weight in grams.) And, of course, some products - of which eggs are an obvious example - can by their nature be sold only in discrete numerical quantities. One can't, after all, subdivide eggs without creating an unnecessary mess. Nevertheless, I couldn't help feeling that there must be something strange going on, mainly because the Mail's report contained a quote from an official at the Food Standards Agency, which ran as follows:

This proposal would disallow selling by numbers. Retailers would not be allowed to put "Six eggs" on the front of the box. If it was a bag of rolls, it would say "500g" instead of six rolls. It is important that information is provided in a way that is meaningful and beneficial to consumers.

It seemed - it still does - unlikely that the FSA should have made so elementary a misreading of a proposal, especially considering how easy it was for bloggers such as John Band to debunk. I contacted the FSA, asking for a clarification and pointing out some of the problems with the story. But I didn't hear back, and in any case the whole business seemed to reach a conclusion a couple of days later, so I forgot about it.

I've now finally had my reply. And the tone of it suggests that there might, after all, be a story here - just not quite the story originally reported.

Here's what Ruth Hodgson from the FSA's Food Labelling Branch told me:

The reports were suggesting that products traditionally sold by the number of units present in the pack such as eggs or bread rolls could no longer be sold in this way and would be sold by the weight or volume.

I would like to emphaise that the reports were premature, as negotiations on this proposal are ongoing. It is clear that the proposed new regulation would allow the number of units present in a pack to be provided in addition to the weight or volume of the product. However, consumers are used to buying some products such as eggs by number present in the pack and we want this practice to continue.The current proposal is unclear as to whether this is the case and we will continue to press for clarity in the negotiations.

On the one hand, then, it's perfectly clear - the proposed new regulation would allow the eggbox to carry the legend "6 eggs". No surprises there - and no explanation as to why the quote in the Mail from the FSA was so misleading. But if there's no doubt as to what the regulation means, why is it also "unclear" that under the new rules consumers would still be able to buy products by number? The FSA statement just makes no sense whatever.

It was easy enough to dismiss the Mail's story as absurd anti-EU scaremongering by the usual suspects - and the speedy clarification seemed to vindicate the usual Mailophobes. But there was nevertheless a story here - and an important one - demonstrated by that original FSA quote (which the email to me did not attempt to disown) and even by this new statement. One of the commonest complaints about the British attitude towards EU rules and directives is the manner in which our own regulators not only to fail to foresee the implications of certain harmonisation measures but then proceed to over-implement them with an almost perverse delight, interpreting their meaning in the most draconian fashion possible. And, needless to say, putting all the blame onto "Brussels bureaucrats".

Read that FSA statement again. What Ruth Hodgson appears to be telling me is that although the meaning of the proposal is perfectly clear to any normal person (including FSA personnel), it still isn't clear enough for their official purposes, and that therefore if it is possible to read absurdity into it (not being allowed to write "6 eggs" on a box of 6 eggs, for example) then that is what the FSA will probably do, just to be on the safe side. This sort of lunacy is not the fault of Brussels, and it is not the fault of the Daily Mail, but it probably accounts for the majority of the justified irritation that people find with the application of EU rules.

There was a man on Radio 4 this morning talking about crop circles. Michael Glickman, his name was. An architect, he was plugging a book about the phenomenon subtitled "The Bones of God". Richard Coles listened patiently - as a vicar, he's used to humouring obsessives, I'll guess - to Glickman's empassioned insistence that crop circles cannot be the work of mere human beings. Glickman has been studying the "phenomenon" for 21 years, during which time he had been "swimming in waters of absolute denial, scepticism, refusal to look."

Coles suggested that the more elaborate formations might be "an artwork, some would say a hoax." Glickman responded by recalling his first experience of visiting one:

"I've been an architect, I've worked in engineering... I used to pride myself on knowing how everything was made. I entered this one and realised immediately that it was beyond human agency, something I've become more certain about as the years have gone by."

Glickman considered that the elaboration and elegance of some crop designs could be rivalled only by "twelve lace-making Belgian nuns" - an interesting benchmark, since I assume he doesn't consider Belgian nuns hail from a far-off galaxy. Coles put it to him that the increased complexity and perfection of form, as the years went by, might be the result of "a group of artists working on their art," but Glickman was having none of it. The designs were "simply breathtaking" and he wondered who these "enormously secret, enormously gifted" artists might possibly be. Known man-made creations, by contrast, were "crummy".

We are to believe that these enormous events... appear apparently in moments, flawlessly, without ever a correction or amendment. The fact that we have no explanation does not entitle us to cast the phenomenon aside as simply a joke, which is how the media and the pubic have treated it for so long.

True, there is no "evidence" available, he admitted. "But then we live in an era of scientism, the rules of which simply won't encompass a whole series of phenomena which are simply brushed aside, one of which is the crop circle."

The hoax claimants say they simply stomp it down with a board... but the detail of the true crop circle is breathtaking, the surge, the flow, is simply of a scale that is unimaginable by a simple stomping down, [the patterns are] so varied, so particular, so meticulous that it is simply unimaginable that it is done by humans.

What the crop circles are telling me is that there is somewhere an intelligence superior to our own, further evolved than our own, and it seems to be gently pushing love letters under the door... not landing metallic craft on the White House lawn but dealing more gently, more lovingly with mankind.

How nice.

Needless to say, I have no doubt that all crop circles, however intricate in design, that actually appear in fields, are made by human beings. I'm not entirely convinced that all apparent crop circles truly exist - some might be computer-generated, if only because using CGI takes a lot less effort than stomping around a field. Neverthess, any formation that can be designed and plotted out can in principle be reproduced on a field of wheat. All that is required is desire to do it, patience, and mastery of a few basic skills.

It is quite puzzling that these artists are happy to work so hard anonymously, with their sole reward the possibility of seeing their creations filling some vacant space in the Daily Mail, but I don't doubt their existence on that basis. It's possibly a fun way of spending a summer evening. If anything needs explaining, it's not the circle makers' motivation but rather the selective incredulity of people like Glickman. Beautiful as they are, there's nothing inherently mysterious about a crop circle. At the end of the day, it's just a pattern in a field.

Glickman has a website. Has it not occurred to him that the technology that enables him to disseminate his views about crop circles to a wider public is many orders of magnitude more complex and hard to understand than his pet obsession could ever be? Glickman ascribes crop circles to a "superior intelligence" on the basis that he finds their intricacy baffling. But what of his mobile phone? Is that not infinitely more amazing than any crop circle? Yet neither he nor any other "crop circle researcher" imagines that an iPhone is extraterrestrial in origin. How can something so extraordinary be taken for granted, while something as rudimentary as a crop circle is seen as beyond human capacity?

The only solution I can offer to this rarely-posed riddle is that it is the very simplicity of the crop circle that makes it seem preternaturally impressive to people like Glickman. For the same reason, in the era of the Apollo moonshot there were many people who, following the lead of Erich von Daniken, found it impossible to believe the ancient Egyptians capable of building the pyramids of Giza. A pyramid is basically just a pile of rocks. You can imagine building one - or, rather, you can imagine trying to do it and failing miserably. Similarly, you can imagine stomping around in a field late at night, trying to create a crop circle, and producing only an embarrassing mess. In both cases, the technology is so basic that the beauty or size of the results can seem to some people superhuman, simply because it would be beyond them. Whereas the technology hidden inside an iPhone is so far advanced that most people simply wouldn't know how to start failing to build one.

It's still odd, though. I can tap out enough of a tune on a piano for my mind to boggle at the skill exhibited by Andras Schiff or Michiko Uchida. How can a human hand, I ask myself, create such sounds, such emotion, just by tapping the black and white keys? It is certainly way beyond the capacity of most human beings. Concert pianists are not alien beings, though. Would Michael Glickman consider their skill inferior to that demonstrated by a maker of crop circles?

I'm grateful (this once, at least) to Damian Thompson for pointing to the official PopeTour UK commemorative CD. Damian isn't impressed. "My heart sank when I saw that the papal visit team had released two tracks from the official "Pilgrim Journey" CD that comes with the (expensive) tickets for papal events. But nothing could have prepared me for the awful reality."

One of the newly-released tracks which you can listen to on the Papal Visit website, Urban Pilgrim (Reprise), is a piece of ambient chill-out music that clearly belongs in a nightclub. It's not exactly bad, just inappropriate. It would sound reasonable if you were spaced out on Ecstasy, but I doubt that is quite what the Catholic Church has in mind. The second, Deus Tuus Deum Meus, is rather more contemplative and consists of a seminarian crooning some words taken from one of the gospels with a pared-down piano accompaniment. I can imagine him on Britain's Got Talent, though I doubt he'd last very long.

Damian Thompson thinks the music is "crap" which "proves that the Church in England and Wales is still in the grip of philistines." I suppose it depends what you're looking for in a Papal souvenir CD. "I'm not suggesting that visitors to papal events should be given a CD of Renaissance polyphony," he writes. But why not? And would his suggestion of "good Christian rock music" be any better? I doubt it. There is no musical abomination worse than "Christian rock", for the perfectly good reason that rock music is Satanic. And I mean that approvingly. Rock music is about blackness and sensuality; it is the music of sexual excess, of drink-sodden abandonment; of damnation. At least if it's any good it is. It belongs to the Devil, and if the Devil has all the best tunes that's just bad luck on the Christians.

Renaissance polyphony, leavened by a bit of Bach and Mozart and perhaps some of 19th century French religious pap (Panis Angelicus, Gounod's Ave Maria, that kind of thing), would be just the ticket. It would be much more in keeping with Ratzinger's own style and tastes, and it would give papal groupies something they might find themselves listening to more than once. The church should be celebrating its great musical heritage not undermining it, either with pseudo-acid house or ersatz rock.

As a branding exercise, it's doomed. They clearly want to package as trendy and modern someone who mentally has never left the 17th century. But if you like Pope Benedict XVI or find his message credible, then almost certainly you're not the sort of person who will relate to Urban Pilgrim (Reprise). They would have done better repackaging Monty Python's Every Sperm is Sacred. At least that would accurately reflect Ratzinger's core message.

Pity the poor Lib Dems. In office, but not in power, they have traded their souls for ministerial baubles. Unable to shape government policy, they provide the human shield for the harshness of Cameron's and Osborne's measures, whose image they soften by their reassuring presence but whose substance they cannot disguise. As a result, they have lost their raison d'etre and, with it, increasing numbers of their supporters.

At any rate, that's fast becoming the received wisdom. A poll in today's Independent tells the usual story of steady decline, with the party down to 16%, their lowest share since before the election campaign. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are holding firm on 39% - up since the election, and enough (possibly) to have given them an absolute majority. Labour, though, are treading water on 33%. Other recent polls have told a slightly different story - one putting Labour on 38% with the Lib Dems down to 12. Precise details, however, probably matter less at this stage than perception, and the narrative is now clear - grassroots activists, we are told, are deserting in droves. Some are heading for for Labour, which is fast reasserting its self-defined role as the natural home of anyone "on the centre-left", a category to which many Lib Dems tell themselves they belong. There is talk of splits, of that faction of the party that finds government so congenial eventually being absorbed by the Conservatives, as the National Liberals once were.

Certainly the alacrity with which Lib Dem ministers have embraced Conservative cost-cutting has surprised many. They can't have been listening too closely to Vince Cable's utterances before the election. The Indie records the despair of people like former MP Sandra Gidley, who thinks that "it's difficult to see where the Liberal Democrats have had an influence" on what looks to many people like a Conservative government. Yet Lib Dem fingerprints are all over the government's policies, and not always in a good way: from the future blackouts adumbrated by Chris Huhne's deep green energy policy, through the surprising return of the graduate tax (a truly terrible idea) to, of course, the coming referendum on electoral reform. Other Lib Dem policies (or at any rate themes) on things such as localism, civil liberties and transparent government were adopted/stolen by the Tories long before the election.

The most interesting finding is that 73% of those questioned in the Independent poll had little or no idea what the Lib Dems stood for. This, though, was an increase of just 8% - in other words, before the Coalition was formed a two-thirds of voters had no idea what they stood for. Presumably, the increase is made up largely of those who thought they knew what the Lib Dems stood for - and have been proved wrong. Put like that, it sounds bad, but not standing for anything in particular has long been the Lib Dems' biggest draw. Of course, they do stand for things - proportional representation, mostly, and the EU - but few of their voters (as opposed to their members) supported them on this basis. Their unique selling point has long been that they were the alternative party, the anti-politics party, the home of the protest vote. Much of their appeal was calibrated on the basis that they would never get into power, but wouldn't it be nice if they did.

Being in government necessarily poses problems to such a party. Partly, they have to do things that any government would have to do, but are unpopular - like, in this case, spending cuts. They are no longer the party to vote for if you don't like the government but don't like "the other lot" much better, either. They can no longer pretend to the public that they are not as other politicians. At long last, they are an honest party. They have to be seen to stand for things. Thus we have a paradox. A party that, by necessity, now has to do something ought to present a public image more concrete than when it could avoid being pinned down. Yet, judging by this poll, it has even less public definition than before.

Perhaps that's why it still has so much support. For, in truth, that figure of 16% in the latest poll isn't particularly bad. It's close to the long-term average for the party. LD support tends to peak during election campaigns when they become the natural choice of the undecided voter. It's only during election campaigns, after all, that the full awfulness of party politics in this country becomes apparent to those who are not generally interested in politics.

Those who think, like many Lib Dems, that future elections (without, or even with, AV) represent mortal peril for the party realise the importance of its negative anti-politics appeal. It has become a commonplace to predict near annihilation for Nick Clegg's MPs (and perhaps for Clegg himself, since he failed to secure a loan to Sheffield Forgemasters in his own constituency). People who like the government will vote Conservative, the theory goes, while those who disapprove of the government will vote Labour. Quite possibly. It will certainly be difficult for them to repeat their usual vote-catching trick. But subsisting on the fringes of national politics, retaining a core of support and a cadre of MPs at the price of never actually sitting in government, does not represent a noble attachment to principle. Rather, it is the ultimate form of political cynicism. Even if the Lib Dems are destroyed at the next election, they will have done more in government than they did in the eighty preceding years in opposition. And near-calamity will present its own opportunities. It won't be long before they start looking like the anti-politics party once again.

Dr Priya Gopal

Feminists have long argued that invoking the condition of women to justify occupation is a cynical ploy, and the Time cover already stands accused of it. Interestingly, the WikiLeaks documents reveal CIA advice to use the plight of Afghan women as "pressure points", an emotive way to rally flagging public support for the war...

While there exists a colonial tradition of relegating the non-west to the past of the west - and some suggest leaving it to rot in hopelessness - the trendier option involves incorporating Afghans into modernity by teaching them to live in a globalised present. In non-fiction bestsellers such as Deborah Rodriguez's Kabul Beauty School, an American woman teaches Afghan women the intricacies of hair colour, sexiness, and resisting oppression. "To all appearances, there is no sex life in Afghanistan," writes Rodriguez, obsessed - like Seierstad - with the nuptial habits of Afghans. Sex and the City in the Middle East may have tanked as a movie, but as ideology it has displaced meaningful global feminism.

Acceptable Afghan-American voices such as Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner) and Awista Ayub (Kabul Girls Soccer Club) reiterate the notion that suburban America can "infuse" Afghans with freedom. Formulaic narratives are populated by tireless Western humanitarians, sex-crazed polygamous paedophiles (most Afghan men) and burqa-clad "child-women" who are broken in body and spirit or have just enough doughtiness to be scripted into a triumphal Hollywood narrative.

Dr Karen Woo

The access that a doctor or healthcare professional has to a community is unlike that available to a journalist; the trust and conversations are different. The insight is through the lens of birth and death, of loss and disability, and reflects every aspect of the consequences of conflict on individuals and on their community. The loss of nearly all elements of the infrastructure of a country; security, governance, education, transport, clean water, sanitation and power, are all visible in the health of the people.

The body of the documentary will focus on key players whose commitment to providing healthcare and a sustainable offering go largely unsung, these people are both foreign nationals working in Afghanistan and Afghan men and women who a working to make a change. The context will be set by the women and men who are able to tell of their experiences giving first hand narration to the viewer. The predominant focus is on women as this is where the most disturbing and tragic scenarios are played out, occurring through ignorance, poverty and cultural and religious restrictions. The characters; both the patients and the care givers, give us their human stories and link us to the real people and families of Afghanistan. This perspective gives substantial reason to continue to invest in humanitarian aid and development.

The documentary aims to counterbalance the British media's bias toward reporting only the live conflict, to provide a deeper level of information and understanding of the complex situation which is the current Afghanistan. It aims to reflect the human spirit of survival and to remind of, or explain the relatively developed Afghanistan of the 1970s as a way of visualising a possible future of peace and stability.

I wouldn't wish to suggest that Priya Gopal is personally responsible for the deaths of Karen Woo and her colleagues. Indeed, it's not yet clear whether they were murdered by the Taliban, who have claimed responsibility, or by opportunistic bandits. But arguments like hers - or those of the Canadian academic Melanie Butler, who claimed that the leading Canadian women's group campaigning to improve the lives of their Afghan sisters was little better than a front for Western imperialism - set the context in which aid workers can be viewed as legitimate targets. Armchair intellectualising about the semiotics of magazine covers may seem smart in the rarefied atmosphere of a Cambridge college or the editorial office of the Guardian. But they are easily picked up by the murderous ideologues of the Taliban of Al Qaeda. Indeed, Al Qaeda has in the past proved itself adept at using the language of Western liberal scholarship in its own propaganda.

Gopal wrote, in her now notorious article, that Aisha, the mutilated Afghan teenager, "ultimately fills a symbolic void where there should be ideas for real change." She was able to decrythe "bankrupt version of modernity" that "has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators." Karen Woo - a product of that bankrupt modernity - was offering the Afghans considerably more than bikini waxes. Those minded to reason like Gopal should perhaps be reflecting today on the life of someone who was very far from being a symbolic void, who left a comfortable and well-paid job to improve the lives of the women and children of Afghanistan, and whose work stands as the best answer to the cynicism that sees a magazine cover as no more than a tool of US foreign policy.

I've previously covered the disturbing case of Andrew Holland, the Wrexham man charged under the newish offence of possessing "extreme pornography" for two short videoclips - one of which featured an animated tiger, the other a painful-looking but entirely consensual sex-act (or at any rate what was assumed to be a sex-act). The case attracted some national publicity to begin with on account of the bizarre nature of the first clip. When that charge was dropped - the clip's soundtrack, which referenced an old Frosties commercial, proved it to be a joke rather than in any sense "pornographic" - the press lost interest. Andrew Holland, for his part, seemed to believe that his nightmare was over. It wasn't. The CPS persisted in its prosecution of the second charge, based on a single 6-second clip which they divided into several different images, to be charged individually. Yesterday, just as the trial was due to begin, the CPS offered no evidence and he was formally cleared.

But it was a close-run thing. Holland was originally advised by local solicitors that he had no defence - even though he had received the clip (which was sent to his mobile phone) unsolicited and apparently as a joke - and he pleaded guilty. He then was shocked to be told by the judge at the initial hearing that he could go to prison. That, and the interest his case had provoked from campaign groups Backlash and CAAN, persuaded him to apply to have his guilty plea vacated. This was granted in May. Backlash, whose regular legal adviser Myles Jackman had taken on the case, noted at the time that "had he not contacted Backlash in the first place he would have been sentenced for an offence which he may have been misadvised that he did not have a defence for." And the case only came to their attention thanks to the newsworthiness of the initial "tiger-sex" angle. If the CPS had merely charged him with possession of the second clip - which is said to involve painful-looking but superficial injury to male genitalia - he would almost certainly have pleaded guilty and been sentenced with little publicity.

As it is, Backlash assembled a team of experts prepared to testify that the clip was not in fact pornographic but (like the tiger clip) intended as a sick joke. Faced with possible embarrassment, the CPS decided to throw in the towel. But this concession raises serious questions - not just about the decision to prosecute in this case, but about the application of this newish law more widely. As Jane Fae reports in the Register:

The significance of this case is that it is the first extreme porn case to have been defended. In almost all previous cases, defendants had also been charged with a number of more serious offences, and it is possible that their legal advisers felt that it was not worth defending the lesser charges. There is also some evidence, from our own database of extreme porn cases, that lawyers, unfamiliar with the detail of this new law, are advising defendants to plead guilty inappropriately.

As longer-standing readers may recall, the law - the infamous section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 - was brought in in response to a campaign led by the mother of murder victim Jane Longhurst. The murderer, Graham Coutts, was claimed at the trial to have been "addicted" to extreme porn featuring rape and violence against women. The extent to which exposure to this kind of material provokes real-world violence has long been a contested issue - familiar from the 1980s moral panics surrounding "video nasties" or more recent but eerily similar rows about computer games.

The law, though, does not single out "addicts" who show a demonstrable obsession with disturbing material. The most troubling aspect of the law is how anyone in possession of even a single rather nebulously defined "extreme" image is potentially caught by it, however the image came into their possession.

The government seems to have envisaged that s.63 would only be used in cases where someone's extreme porn habit raised serious cause for concern. It is however very widely drafted. Campaigners against s.63 feared, not only that it would target consumers of consensual fetish porn, but that it was wide open to abuse. That it would give the police a handy weapon to use against anyone who comes to their attention, for whatever reason, and who just happens to have dodgy material on their mobile phone or computer. Given the viral nature of much "inappropriate" material, this could potentially criminalise a lot of quite ordinary people.

This seems to be what happened to Holland. And another case this week shows just how fortunate he has been. The Sunderland Echo reports the conviction of 23-year old Michael Nelson after a similar-sounding clip was found on his mobile "after he was arrested and taken to Gill Bridge police station". There's no information about why he was originally arrested - it could have been entirely unconnected. The clip in question sounds very similar to that in the Wrexham case - it "showed a man's genitals being mutilated" (which might simply be journo-speak for pierced) and had been sent to his phone, unsolicited. He told the police that the images were "going about the streets". It might even have been the very same clip. Lacking decent legal advice, however, he now has a criminal record and was sentenced to 200 hours community service. And yet no other disturbing images were found in his possession, he had no previous criminal record, he didn't attempt to pass the clip to anyone else and his solicitor told the court that it was "not the kind of matter he was seeking or gets any gratification from."

District Judge Roger Elsey, passing sentence, said that "there is no doubt that this was a revolting and perverted piece of video and there is no reasonable explanation for this being on your mobile for the time it was." He would have passed a jail sentence, he added, had the defendant passed it on. Nelson's own solicitor, meanwhile, said in mitigation(!) that "I can't imagine why you would want to watch this, unless you were the particular type of person that found some gratification in it." Presumably he meant sexual gratification, yet no evidence was produced for any sexual motivation, which the defendant plausibly denied. Yet despite this, because the police stumbled up a tasteless clip on a mobile phone, Michael Nelson stands convicted of a sex offence. To quote Backlash, "It is unclear who benefits from the costs of prosecuting and punishing this man. This case also has nothing to do with the original intent of the legislation, which was to prevent harm to women." I would go further. On the facts as described by the Echo, it strikes me as a clear abuse of prosecutorial process.

Many people thought s.63 was a bad law - unnecessary and illiberal - to begin with, of course, but these two cases raise a wider problem. Jack of Kent, or David Allen Green as he is professionally known, defines "Bad Law" in the criminal context as "when either criminal liability is used in an inappropriate way, or when charging and prosecution decisions (which effectively mean whether there will be a conviction in many cases) are made on a misconceived basis." Or you could say that Bad Law happens when the authorities forget the public interest rationale of a particular offence and treat it merely as a mechanism for getting a conviction. Two cases in which DAG has played a prominent advisory role were those of Paul Clarke, who was found guilty of possessing a shotgun which he had handed in to the police (at one point he was facing an automatic five year prison sentence, though thankfully the judge was able to find "exceptional circumstances") and the ongoing case of Paul Chambers, whose Twitter joke about Nottingham airport led to his conviction for communicating a "bomb hoax".

In both cases, the letter of the law was used as a pretext for bringing charges despite the lack of any real public interest in doing so. Part of the problem may lie in the narrow way in which "public interest" is defined by the Crown Prosecution Service. CPS guidelines assume that once the evidence is strong enough to suggest a likelihood of conviction, a prosecution will always be in the public interest unless there are "clear" reasons suggesting otherwise. "A prosecution will usually take place unless the prosecutor is sure that there are public interest factors tending against prosecution which outweigh those tending in favour" says the latest edition of the CPS code (pdf). I guess that because they are dealing with criminal cases day in, day out, CPS lawyers easily overlook the devastating effect that prosecution often has on an individual's life.

Nevertheless there are factors specified in the code that ought to have weighed against the decision to prosecute a man for possessing a single short clip which he had not solicited, which he did not pass on, and which only came to the police's attention when they arrested him on apparently unrelated grounds. For example, Section 4.17 (e), where "the loss or harm

This is how Time magazine's cover story begins:

The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight, demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running away from her husband's house. Her in-laws treated her like a slave, Aisha pleaded. They beat her. If she hadn't run away, she would have died. Her judge, a local Taliban commander, was unmoved. Aisha's brother-in-law held her down while her husband pulled out a knife. First he sliced off her ears. Then he started on her nose.

I'm not going to reproduce, here, the photograph of the mutilated victim of this horrifying attack, which Time magazine used to adorn its cover to deliberately emotive effect. You may have seen it. You can see it if you follow the link to the story. I can barely bring myself to look at it. It ought to have the same effect on the world as the image of nine-year-old Kim Phuc Phan fleeing from an American napalm attack on her village in 1972, or as those of starving, pot-bellied Ethiopian orphans in 1984. It is an image that, try as you might, you can never banish from your mind, that you wish you had never seen but know, nevertheless, that it should be seen by everyone. It fills me with rage and despair. It makes me want to do back to those men what they did to her.

Suffice it to say that this is one woman who has a good reason to wear a burka.

Not everyone is equally affected, though, I now discover. Priyamvada Gopal, an English lecturer at Cambridge University and specialist in post-colonial literature, is as unmoved as the Taliban commander. Or rather, she is moved to anger and indignation, but not by the barbarous treatment meted out to a young girl at the hands of those who ought to have protected and cherished her, but at the temerity of Time magazine in using it to draw attention to the condition of women in Afghanistan - and thus, implicitly, in support of continued Western intervention.

Gopal accuses the magazine of "condensing Afghan reality into simplistic morality tales", and then links the story of Aisha's mutilation to the world of humdrum, unthinking (but non-violent) misogyny depicted in Asne Seirstad's The Bookseller of Kabul as an example of how the Afghans have been "silenced and further disempowered by being reduced to objects of western chastisement". She ends with a bizarre rant about the state of western democracies, where "modernity is now about dismantling welfare systems, increasing inequality (disproportionately disenfranchising women in the process), and subsidising corporate profits" and which "has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators".

In short, while she concedes that "misogynist violence is unacceptable", it is clearly rather less unacceptable than the desire of well-meaning westerners to do something about it. For this self-professed feminist, what really matters is exposing the double-standards of the west and the "formulaic narratives" of those who dare to suggest that women might just have more life-opportunities in countries where they do not face being killed or disfigured for disobeying the orders of men who believe that they own them.

"The mutilated Afghan woman" she writes, "ultimately fills a symbolic void where there should be ideas for real change." But there is nothing symbolic about Aisha's devastated face, or the barbarous "honour" system that destroyed it, and the only void is the one at the heart of the Gopal's moral universe. For her (and she is regrettably not unique among liberal academics, even supposed feminists) even the matchless barbarity captured in Time's cover image is no more than a convenient pretext for lambasting the West. She is right, perhaps, to draw attention to Time's unfortunate caption - What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan - for Aisha suffered despite the presence of Nato forces. It is certainly possible to draw different conclusions from the photograph - about the futility of the Western intervention, about how, despite the expressed (and not entirely unsuccessful) aim of improving the condition of women in Afghanistan, any difference that can be made is necessarily small-scale and not worth the price in lives and money. But that does not make the photograph itself, or the decision to publish it, merely a piece of cynical manipulation. For it is primarily the record of an unspeakable crime, one that has gone, and will go, entirely unpunished, a crime to which Gopal remains studiedly indifferent.

"Misogynist violence is unacceptable, but.." she writes.

But what? But if a woman misbehaves she has it coming to her? But it's preferable to American and European do-gooders condescending towards other cultures? But it can provide a good jumping-off point for a controversial and thought-provoking piece of analysis for the Guardian's website? But if you're clever, middle-class and have a lectureship at the University of Cambridge it's something you can be ironic and post-modern about? I wonder if Priya Gopal would view the subject with quite such equanimity if someone she knew had been the victim of such horrendous abuse. I rather doubt it.

Gopal calls herself a feminist, but she'd rather defend the fake-medieval social system of a tribal backwater than admit that the United States can ever be right about anything. She calls herself a feminist but displays almost total lack of empathy with other women - not just Aisha, but millions of others whose lives are circumscribed by rigid religious and cultural norms that demand they submit in everything to men. She calls herself a feminist but can write things like this:

Based on her stay in the eponymous protagonist's home, Seierstad's memoir uses offensive commercial language to describe ordinary marital negotiations and refers to female characters as "the burka".

Buy "ordinary marital negotiations" - though you'd hardly realise it - Gopal is referring to the custom of buying and selling women (willing or otherwise) as though they were cattle. By "offensive commercial language" she means calling money money, rather than adopting some politically-correct euphemism to disguise what is really going on. Yes, of course trading in women (and often little girls) is "ordinary" throughout much of Afghanistan, but since when did a cultural practice have to be rare in order to justify opposition?

Stung apparently by criticism by some commenters, Gopal came back to clarify her position without, I think, managing to banish the impression of moral lop-sidedness. She denies being culturally relativist (don't they all?) and declares - belatedly - that "what happened to Aisha was indefensible and violence of this sort, whether from the Taliban or drunken husbands, must be condemned and resisted at every turn." (The culturally relativising remark about "drunken husbands" would make more sense, of course, if drunken husbands who mutilated their wives went unpunished by the law.) But she can still write:

What I question in my article is whether there is real solidarity for Aisha and her sisters as opposed to reducing them, like the Taliban also do, to objects for position-taking and grandstanding. (Yes, Time is paying for reconstructive surgery, by the way, and are careful to say they obtained consent to show her picture. How free this consent is when money is attached, is a different matter.)

She really doesn't get it if she thinks that Time magazine - using Aisha's fate to draw attention to the routine ill-treatment of Afghan women as well as helping to give Aisha herself a new face - is treating her in the same way as the Taliban did, "reducing" her to an object. I mean, she really doesn't get it. So let me spell it out for her benefit. Aisha is both an individual who has suffered a heartbreaking brutalisation, and a symbol of a culture in profound moral breakdown. By drawing attention to her plight in the most visceral way possible - by printing the photograph - the journalists can both tell her story (thus giving her the humanity and dignity denied her by her own community) and, through her, illustrate the dilemma currently facing Western policy-makers.

Of course it's emotive, intended to arouse anger in whoever sees it. Anger is no substitute for rational analysis, but without the anger, rationality can lead only to a cynical, or at best self-interested, conclusion. Anger is the best, indeed the only, response to such an image. Bringing such evils to the world's attention is in the finest traditions of journalism - indeed, in an age of where most of what passes for news coverage consists of fake celebrity spin and recycled press releases, Time's feature shows that traditonal reporting still, thankfully, has a place.

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