Saturday 6 October 2018

How will the #MeToo movement be affected by the Kavanaugh affair?

The #MeToo movement has been expanding almost daily since the revelations and allegations relating to Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer. Women everywhere have been coming forward either to reveal their own experiences of being sexually mistreated by men or just to make public their views about the man/woman relationship in general. What has been most alarming is that so many women claim to have been sexually assaulted. There must be some horrifying statistics around somewhere which show how frequent these experiences are. It's a staggering indictment of the way some men treat women. So what will happen now after the Brett Kavanaugh debacle? He of course denied ever having sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when they were teenagers at a house party, and under the basic tenets of the law, anyone accused of a crime is innocent until proven guilty. The FBI found no way of corroborating Professor Blasey Ford's allegation, so Judge Kavanaugh remains a presumed innocent and he will duly take his place on the bench of the US Supreme Court unless something extraordinarily unexpected happens in the Senate vote later today. For Christine Ford this must be a huge blow to her position as the woman who dared to speak out in public - actually to the whole world - about a traumatic incident she insists happened 36 years ago when she was only 15. Does she now try to withdraw from all the publicity and retrieve the life she was leading before the Kavanaugh issue broke or will she align herself firmly to the #MeToo cause and become one of its most quoted supporters? There will be plenty of friends, perhaps the same ones who urged her to speak out, who will want her to become a #MeToo champion. For the #MeToo movement itself I'm sure they would love to wrap their arms around her and bring her on board. She may well decide, however, for her own sanity and for her family's safety, against that. Either way, the Kavanaugh "victory" in overcoming the immense publicity over the sexual assault allegations and taking one of the most powerful legal roles in the US has to be a serious blow to the #MeToo cause. So many men have been exposed as sexual harrassers and have lost their jobs as a result, but this one man has survived. Will it, as a consequence, deter other women from coming forward if they have allegations to make against powerful men in American society? I think, despite the Blasey Ford experience, the momentum for the #MeToo movement is too strong for it to die just because one highly publicised case has ended in favour of the man, not the woman. It might even spur more women to come forward.

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