Hollywood’s Awards Season Fascination with Rape and Sexual Abuse

by Winnie M Li  Content warning: includes references to rape and sexual abuse A few months ago at the Golden Globes, Isabelle Huppert won a Golden Globe for playing a rape survivor, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson won for playing a rapist-murderer. While subsequent awards shows haven’t panned out the same way, both actors continue to be lauded… Read More

Theo and the distinctly sexual flavour of French racism

by Guilaine Kinouani  Content warning: contains detailed descriptions of sexual abuse On 2 February, a 22-year-old black French man named Theo was allegedly violently raped with a police truncheon, gang assaulted and racially abused by four French police officers in the Parisian suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois. So severe were the anal injuries sustained by Theo that… Read More

The grass is always bloodier: what will it take for us to acknowledge violence against black people in Europe?

by Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert  Content warning: detailed description of rape On Thursday 2nd February, police officers were in Aulnay-sous-Bois, on the outskirts of Paris, conducting identification checks, the sort that poor black and brown youths are all too familiar with. In the process one of the kids was brutally slapped by an officer. At that… Read More

“I don’t want a label, I am not ashamed. I was attacked.”

by Amna Iqbal The difference between noise and sound; the former numbs your senses and the latter makes you listen. ‘Rape’ – The word is noise. Cloaked in the din of a media screaming match, the word has been stripped off the anguish, the trauma, the physical and mental scars that it engenders. And here lies… Read More