Chris Trotter
Left, right, and centre.
I lived alone at the top of what had once been a private school for girls. The place was huge and access to my higgledy-piggledy attic flat required the ascent of at least three staircases. Even in daylight, “Archerfield” was a daunting proposition. After dark, it was downright scary.
There was a telephone in the flat, but as the 1981 editor of the student newspaper, Critic, I made a point of not giving out my number to all-and-sundry. It wasn’t listed in the Dunedin phonebook, or, at least, not under my name.
As the Springbok Tour progressed through the country, political passions boiled over, violence flared in the streets, and I was glad so few people knew how to get hold of me.
Until the night, about halfway through the tour, when, sitting alone at the top of Archerfield’s brooding bulk, fully absorbed in planning the next issue of the paper, I was startled by the ringing of the phone.
“Did you think we couldn’t find you, Trotter? Big mistake. We know where you live. We’ve got your number. Do you know what that means, you filthy fucking communist?”
“Who is this?”
“It means you’re a dead man.”
Click.
Death threats work. That call left me trembling with fear. Where was the caller? Was he out there in the dark, looking up at the flat from Maitland Street? Was he alone? Was he serious? What should I do? Call the police? What if the caller was a cop? Is that how he got my number?
The questions go round and round in your head. Your stomach twists itself into knots. You look at the lock on the front door. One good kick, you tell yourself, that’s all it would take. You open the door quietly and peer down the stairs into the yawning darkness. Your hands won’t stop shaking.
Eventually, after several hours of rampant paranoia, another part of your brain kicks in. If he was serious about killing you, it calmly informs your terrified self, then you’d already be dead. Sure, he’s gone to some trouble to get your number, but threatening you is all he’s going to do. The thought of you lying here, sleepless and terrified in your dusty bedroom at the top of the stairs, is enough. For a little while, he can tell himself that he’s the one with the power.
* * * * *
A research paper entitled “Misogyny, Racism, and Threats To Our Families”, published recently in Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, makes it very clear that death threats are still being deployed against those who symbolise cultural challenge and political change – specifically, women elected to represent their fellow citizens in central and local government.
Curiously, at least in its public explication, the paper’s focus is upon what the threatened women identify as the perpetrators’ motivating ideologies, rather than the psychological and sociological factors driving their behaviour.
I say ‘curiously’ because it would seem to go without saying that persons abusing and threatening women MPs and city councillors, especially women MPs and city councillors of colour, are giving voice to powerfully misogynistic and racist impulses. Such attacks are hardly going to come from individuals who respect women, Māori, and other ethnic minorities – are they?
Misogyny and racism are not, however, the whole story, or even the most important aspect of the story. In much the same way, the antisemitism of the Hamas perpetrators of the 7 October 2023 pogrom contributes very little to a deeper understanding of that terrible event. Of course Hamas are antisemitic!
Of course online threats against female politicians reveal the misogyny and racism of the people making them!
Of more assistance than detailed accounts of the abuse, threats, and even the actual use of violence, against the 11 participants in the University of Otago Department of Psychological Medicine’s study, would be some assessment of the sociocultural factors responsible for triggering the perpetrators’ actions.
Some reference is made to these societal triggers in the body of the report, most usefully in the following passage:
Increasing female representation is often cited as a key step in tackling the harassment of female politicians. However, at the time of this study, New Zealand parliament had just marked the majority of parliamentarians being women for the first time in its history. Harassment of female MPs in response to increasing female representation has been viewed as a misogynistic expression of ‘aggrieved entitlement’. This occurs when a dominant group believes a marginalised group will attain the same privileges they have, leading to anger and backlash against the marginalised group.
Sadly, any exploration of the ‘aggrieved entitlement’ thesis – as a possible underlying cause of political harassment – is missing from the news media’s coverage of the report. The journalistic focus is, instead, and overwhelmingly, on the women’s experiences, as well as the malign ideologies of their harassers.
This preoccupation with the indisputably horrible impact of death threats and other forms of abuse on the people receiving them, and with the ideological motivations of the perpetrators, obscures the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from such attacks: that they are admissions of weakness, not demonstrations of strength.
Just as the death threats issued to anti-tour activists in 1981 were the product of the fears aroused in New Zealanders psychically bonded to a ‘rugby, racism and beer’ culture, they no longer felt equal to defending, not even with the assistance of ‘batons and barbed wire’, the attacks on politically engaged women (because women MPs are by no means the only ones to come under vicious attack from the aggrieved misogynists of both the right and the left) arise out of the rage and grief of men no longer able to convince themselves that their unconstrained ability to call the societal shots will be preserved; or that their ancient and ‘natural’ entitlements vis-à-vis women can be saved. What goes for gender among these frightened and angry men, goes double for ethnicity.
Nothing else in the way of political insights drives down the fear and hurt occasioned by death threats and other forms of abuse like the comforting thought that these experiences, though painful, are proof positive that those on the receiving end, the men and women advancing the cause of right and justice, are winning the fight.
The same cannot be said for their tormenters. The thrill of inflicting suffering on their enemies may serve to mask political reality, but only for a moment. All the misogynist and racist vituperation in the world cannot alter the fact that the bad guys are losing.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
