Spectator journalist queries Archer's story-line

by Clare Fox

go to www.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/an-abuse-of-the-archers/

IT's been going on for months now and I must make a confession. I secretly endure a nightly battering in the privacy of my home; it’s been relentless, torturous and psychologically damaging. But before anyone rushes to rescue me or phones a government helpline, fearing I am the victim of some dastardly wife beater — I should explain that the culprit is Radio 4’s The Archers and its relentless and addictive domestic abuse storyline.
My torment was supposed to end last Sunday night, with the conclusion of Helen Titchener’s trial for stabbing her bullying, much-hated husband Rob. When the jury foreman announced not guilty, I was with the rest of the nation, roaring ‘Yes!’ And yet, straight afterwards, I came over all queasy as Rob resumed his threats… Just as Helen has been a victim of manipulation for a whole 18 months, so have we, the listeners. When will it ever stop?
Thanks to a script that denies its audience any choice about who they should sympathise with, what they should think and, even more galling for me, what political position to take, lately The Archers has started to come across like propaganda rather than drama. It no longer ends with that jaunty theme tune but the sober caveat: ‘If you’ve been affected by any of the subjects raised in the programme, details of organisations offering information and support are available…’ Certain episodes have amounted to little more than adverts for the National Domestic Violence Helpline. Ironically, of course, this was why the series was invented: to teach men returning home how to farm after the second world war. But I am less convinced of the ethics of ramming home heavily politicised messages today.
If the BBC has rules banning product placement, it is far less squeamish about policy placement, and so we have been bludgeoned into accepting the importance of new government legislation (in particular the new 2015 law against coercive control) and instructed on how to seek help, by means of Helen. The Archers seems intent on making its listeners extra vigilant about the sinister goings on behind resolutely middle-class closed doors. Drama should ring the bell of truth: it’s when it bangs a bloody loud policy drum that I get anxious.
Initially, the Helen and Rob story had me riveted. It started out with drip-drip revelations about Rob’s true, toxic nature. Too soon, though, such subtlety dwindled. I first realised things had gone awry when I mentioned to some friends that as a character, Helen had always got on my nerves, and they promptly rounded on me and accused me of victim blaming. Never mind that I am not, and never will be, a fan of ever-suffering, holier-than-thou organic types. Never mind that Helen is fictional. I was still told it was ‘dangerous’ to focus on Helen’s faults because this could deter real women from coming forward to report real-life abuse.
My friends are not alone in blurring the boundary between fact and fiction: a #FreeHelen hashtag has been trending on Twitter, while my Facebook timeline is full of people showing ‘Solidari-tea’ with real-life Helens. The BBC employed a court artist who gave us daily pictorial images of figures in a make-believe dock. The trial has also been used as a lobbying tool by NGOs looking to score political points about how ‘17 per cent of refuges have been shut since the Tories re-entered government six years ago’, together with demands that Helen’s story proves that ‘cuts that threaten women’s lives must be reversed’. Even the usually cool-headed legal profession has treated the story as faction. Nigel Pascoe, a barrister from the New Forest, offered Mrs Titchener representation in court. ‘I know we are not allowed to tout,’ he claimed. ‘But I am more than prepared to represent Helen, along with most of the criminal bar.’ Jeannie Mackie, of Doughty Street Chambers, complained that Helen’s barrister wasn’t making ‘a very good job’ of the defence. Meanwhile Rodney Warren, chairman of the Law Society’s criminal law committee, complained that the role of Helen’s solicitor has been neglected: ‘It’s been very unfortunate that the storyline has given the wrong view of the criminal justice process [and]… is a missed opportunity to demonstrate properly how the profession works.’
 What used to be a 15-minute soap opera about how to raise pigs is now being used to ridicule the police for failing to use the new law on coercive control, which Theresa May brought in when she was Home Secretary. The legislation recently hit the headlines after a Freedom of Information request revealed that eight out of 22 police forces in England and Wales haven’t charged anyone with the offence since it came into effect in December. Joan Smith, chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls panel, concluded: ‘It seems listeners of The Archers have a more sophisticated grasp of domestic abuse than some police forces.’ And as for those of us who opposed the new law (on civil liberty grounds), we will no doubt now be accused of betraying potential Helens everywhere. That’s the problem with politics via drama: it’s unaccountable, and you can’t argue back.
The Beeb proudly boasts of the impact that The Archers has had off-air — citing a 17 per cent increase in calls to the National Domestic Violence Helpline. Louiza Patikas, the actress who plays Helen, seems to have gone from thespian to missionary, declaring that she hoped her character’s acquittal would mean that more victims will come forward for help: ‘There are people who understand what you’re experiencing and millions of members of the public who are rooting for you, as the reaction to this storyline has demonstrated.’
But why should we accept that it is a good thing to invite greater scrutiny of our personal relationships by the authorities? There is something too pat and right-on about the characterisation of St Helen and the secretly satanic Rob. It feels more like an exercise in box-ticking than in dramatic depth. I realise I am putting myself in the devil’s camp when I resist joining in campaigners’ enthusiasm for the way the story has ‘instigated cultural change’ and ‘opened people’s eyes to a form of abuse they might not have been aware of before’. But I am worried it may lead millions of listeners to become gripped by the domestic equivalent of Project Fear, starting to see abuse where none exists…
The columnist Grace Dent has already insisted that ‘we all know a Helen and Rob’ and that the soap opera has ‘nailed beautifully how love can turn, in incremental steps, into dark control’. No doubt that can and does happen, but far more rarely than this ‘everyday story of domestic abuse’ implies.
Just to declare — I love The Archers. Though I came to it late in life I listen to it religiously. But it needs now to back off before it fuels a full-scale moral panic. As a nation, do we really want to be encouraged to spy on our neighbours and families for suspicious signs of smooth talkers in seemingly blissful relationships? Do we really want to be twitching our curtains and making paranoid misanthropic judgments about the private lives of others? Rob has punished us all for long enough. Bring back the non–metaphorical pigs, I say.

Everyday Life from The Archers to Danczuks!

by Les May

I GAVE up listening to ‘The Archers’ in 2002, so I have absolutely no knowledge of the ‘Trial’.  I don’t much like fictional series which take it upon themselves to tackle ‘issues’ not least because it is difficult to present any complex and controversial issue in a sufficiently nuanced way which will not leave some listener or viewer from feeling that their ‘side’ has been misrepresented.  Far from changing minds it seems more likely that it will reinforce prejudice. 

So last Tuesday I found myself wondering was it prejudice or oversight which led the ‘i’ newspaper to devote half the space of its letters column to the fictional ‘Helen’  but could not find space for a story about a real life Helen who had been involved in a ‘domestic’ which resulted in her death.  The Metro managed just over half a page on the story and the Daily Mail almost a whole page. 

Helen Nicholl hanged herself on the June 4 last year.  Not unreasonably the police arrested her husband Stephen Nicoll on suspicion of her murder. But after two interviews the Detective Chief Inspector who led the investigation released him without charge and went on to say 'I believe that Stephen Nicoll was probably of a victim of domestic violence.' 

But the picture which emerged at the coroner’s inquest was not simply one of a wife assaulting her husband, but of a woman who also tried to control her grown up daughters, assaulting one of them leading to a police investigation and becoming estranged from the other, and of a family in which during rows with their mother, her daughters referred to her as ‘council estate scum' and 'Liverpool scum'.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article for Northern Voices, ‘Danczuk, Feminism & Family Violence’, in which I referred to the work of Erin Pizzey.  Pizzey distinguished between 'genuine battered women' and 'violence-prone women'. The former she defined as 'the unwilling and innocent victim of his or her partner's violence' and the latter she defined as 'the unwilling victim of his or her own violence.'  Helen Nicholl was such a woman and in hanging herself was the victim of her own violence. But whilst she may have been the one who used physical violence towards her daughters and her husband, what for want of a better word I will call verbal violence, does not seem to have been far below the surface. 

It appears in this case that physical abuse by the mother was reciprocated by the daughters in the form of verbal abuse;  a kind of mutuality of domestic violence such as Erin Pizzey had identified. 

Feminist campaigners seek to persuade us that because men are more likely than women to resort to violence outside the home that this is also the case within the home.  But the empirical evidence suggests that this assumption is untrue. 

About one in eight of adults, i.e. both men and women, in an intimate relationship admit to low level physical violence towards their partner.  As about 50% of inter-partner violence is reciprocal it is possible these people somehow attract each other or learn and later reciprocate the behaviour.  At higher levels of physical violence where significant injury is caused, men are about six times more likely to be the perpetrator, i.e. about one in seven cases of significant injury during a violent domestic dispute are caused by women. 

Conflict is a part of life.  We all have some desire to pursue our own self interest even in intimate relationships.  What matters Is how we resolve that conflict of interests.  Conflict becomes pathological when one or both of the parties resort to coercion, whether that coercion is applied emotionally, verbally or physically.  All too often coercion continues to be applied even after the relationship breaks down and the parties separate, though in such cases it is usually given a gloss of respectability through the courts in the form of so called ‘contact’ orders. 

As the Helen Nicholl case shows simply equating ‘domestic’ violence with ‘male’ violence is misleading and in the long run counterproductive because it offers no opportunity to think how the existing level of abuse in intimate relationships can be reduced or how conflict situations can be prevented from escalating to the point where one of the people involved suffers significant injury.  As noted above this is more likely to be the woman than the man.  Nor does it take into account that abuse can and does take place in intimate same sex relationships. 

It is perhaps understandable that feminists who see domestic violence being synonymous with male violence will ignore the empirical evidence that women are just as likely as men to resort to low level assault in conflict situations but focus entirely on escalated conflicts where the woman is injured, and ignore the work of Erin Pizzey and tragic women like Helen Nicholl who was the victim of her own violence.  To do otherwise would undermine their world view. 

But I find it inconceivable that the women who usually have so much to say about ‘male violence’ have failed to comment upon what some four weeks ago happened to Karen Danczuk as a result of the actions of her ex-husband Simon.  Are we perhaps seeing middle class snobbery at work here? 

We are already beginning to see this incident the subject of ‘spin’ seemingly intended to minimise the severity of the incident.  Whilst a month ago Karen was happy to tell the world, ‘I feared he was going to kill me’ and ‘Violent row left me paralysed with fear’ and have Simon’s behaviour described as ‘Wild MP yelled and kicked in glass door’, a recent Daily Mail article included the line that ‘Karen was taken by ambulance to a local hospital where she was treated for the cut which officers said she sustained in a fall’.  Perhaps she ‘walked into a floor’ because it must have been some fall if it required 40 stitches. 

A month ago the story was that she was standing behind a thick glass door when an enraged Simon kicked at it until it came crashing down on her knocking her to the floor. 

According to the Daily Mirror her story now is:

'What happened is, he kicked a door in and it hit me - it wasn't anything Simon physically did to me' and "I have some scars now on my hand but I didn't press charges because it wasn't an intentional act.

'Unfortunately, yes, the foot hit me but it wasn't intentional and so it doesn't seem right to press charges."  No mention here of it being a glass door or the 40 stitches for the wound in her chest and upper right breast.

And what was Danczuk’s response to all this?  He told the Sunday Times that there had been absolutely no physical violence, adding: 'Karen didn't report any violence. The police made assumptions.' 

It seems some Rochdale MPs lead charmed lives.  In 1979 Rochdale’s Alternative Paper (RAP)revealed details of then MP Cyril Smith’s antics at Cambridge House.  The lack of interest by the mainstream media meant that ‘he got away with it’.  This subtly different retelling of the story of what recently happened in Spain between the Danczuk’s and the silence of the usually very vocal feminists will lead some people once again to think ‘he got away with it’.   

I can hardly say that I am disappointed by the response of feminists to this incident between the Danczuks as I have never thought much of them anyhow. But the saddest thing about this episode is the complete lack of self-awareness on Simon Danczuk’s part. 

At the end of January this year, his website was crowing that he welcomed a £115,500 grant from Comic Relief to a local charity enabling it to run a ‘dedicated male perpetrator programme’ to tackle domestic violence in Rochdale (my emphasis). 

His exact words were:  'Domestic violence is a serious problem in every community and I have seen from my weekly surgeries what a devastating impact it can have on families’. and “I am delighted they have received this funding which will be used to tackle domestic violence by challenging the perpetrators on their behaviour giving them the support the need to reform.' 

Now contrary to Mr D.  I do consider kicking in a glass door is an act of violence and especially so if we are to believe Karen’s original story together with the need for hospital treatment.  A few inches higher and the glass which caused the injuries to Karen’s chest and upper right breast could have severed a major blood vessel.  A bit of contrition (and a quiet prayer of thanks for a narrow escape from potentially much more serious injury) would seem to be in order here. 

As a well known MP, Simon could have used this experience to draw attention to what can happen in a domestic situation when a row is allowed to escalate into violence, even when that violence is not deliberately directed at a partner, and the importance of making sure that disagreements do not reach this stage.  He failed to do so which in my view makes him doubly culpable. 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3785630/Dentist-hung-emotionally-abused-children-husband.html 

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/danczuk-feminism-family-violence.html 

http://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/george94.htm

http://www.fact.on.ca/Info/dom/martinfi.pdf

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/the-humbug-of-professional-feminism.html

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1646861/karen-danczuk-says-shes-scarred-for-life-after-mp-hubby-simon-kicked-in-glass-door-during-crazed-bust-up-on-family-holiday/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3790555/Karen-Danczuk-s-forgiven-ex-husband-Simon-sake-children.html 

http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/karen-danczuk-reveals-wants-ex-8848431

http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/files/PHDCN/wave-1-instruments/13583-ctsp.pdf

http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/files/PHDCN/wave-2-instruments/13642-pas.pdf

http://www.simondanczuk.com/simon_danczuk_welcomes_charity_cash_for_domestic_violence_scheme

The Archers: Domestic Dramas North & South

THIS week, the Telegraph's media correspondent Patrick Foster reported: 

'Rape charities have called for the arrest of Rob Titchener, the bullying husband in the long-running Archers domestic abuse plot, after his wife revealed that he had raped her "over and over again".
'Polly Neate, the chief executive of Women's Aid, said it would be "an insult to abuse survivors everywhere" if Rob, who was stabbed by his wife, Helen, as she tried to leave him, was not arrested after Tuesday's explosive episode.'

Giving evidence earlier this week, Rob's wife Helen, who stands accused of his attempted murder told the court:  'He was determined to have a baby. I told him I wasn't ready but he wouldn't listen. The first time he plied me with wine he held me down by my wrists. I told myself, he was my husband, it should be fine, but it wasn't fine, was it.'

As the trial proceeds this week the emotionally charged program has been an unfolding drama of a high level of  abuse by a middle-class husband Rob Titchener against his rather unworldly wife, Helen, in Ambridge somewhere in the Midlands. 

But giving evidence for the first time, Helen said: "He was determined to have a baby. I told him I wasn't ready but he wouldn't listen. The first time he plied me with wine he held me down by my wrists. I told myself, he was my husband, it should be fine, but it wasn't fine, was it."

Meanwhile, today the Express reported that 'After Helen revealed that her abusive husband repeatedly raped her, pleading that she stabbed him in self-defence, her lawyer Anna made a shock breakthrough.  During tonight’s instalment of the BBC Radio 4 soap, the frustrated lawyer - who has pleaded with Jess for so long to make a stance - finally delivered the good news. 

Catching Helen’s family outside the courtroom following the third day of the torturous trial, Anna beamed: “Good I’ve caught you - now, don’t get too excited by this, but Rob’s ex-wife Jessica has come forward.”  As Tom and Pat celebrated, Anne interrupted: “I can’t really say what she’s going to say, but it’s significant; She’s given a statement”.'

In the light of all this nail-biting media drama which is keeping the nation on tenterhooks one wonders what Rochdale MP, Simon Danczuk, is thinking as he awaits the outcome of a police investigation into allegations that he too transgressed while married to Sonia Rossington.   www.dailymail.co.uk/.../My-years-abuse-sex-text-MP-Disgraced-Danczu...

Domestic Tiffs in Ambridge & Rochdale

Rochdale's Liberals 'Lend Credibility to Spurious Tabloid Tales'

AS the residents of Ambridge in the Archers on  Radio Four grapple with the domestic conflicts of Rob and Helen; in Rochdale last week the former Labour Councillor Martin Burke reminded us of the domestic difficulties in the private life of Simon Danczuk MP for Rochdale in his letter to the Rochdale Observer.  In this letter on the 6th, April, the now Mr. Martin Burke put up an heroic defence of Simon Danczuk, in which he suggested that the Liberal Democrat Councillor Andy Kelly had 'claimed recent publicity surrounding Mr. Danczuk's private life is to blame all of Rochdale's ills'.  
The situation in Ambridge between Helen and Rob may well border on the melodramatic with Rob in hospital with a collapsed lung and a severed bowel, but the situation in Rochdale with what the Mail on Sunday journalist, David Rose, entitled 'The dark side of the Danczuk's' and other aspects of curious behavior involving the honourable Member for Rochdale, has reduced politics in the town to the realm of Comic Opera. 
Martin Burke's letter supporting Simon Danczuk in the Rochdale Observer merely reinforces the image of comedy:  For the a feature article in the Mail on Sunday last July by David Rose headlined 'The dark side of the Danczuk's:  A Spanish family holiday suddenly abandoned'  Martin Burke is alleged to have confirmed that his daughter Karen had 'appeared to be bruised on her return' from a holiday in Spain in 2008 with her then partner Mr. Simon Danczuk, who was at that time the Labour candidate in the Rochdale constituency. 
On the 12th, July 2015, David Rose wrote in the Mail on Sunday:

'Today, The Mail on Sunday can reveal disturbing new details of this incident – and of contemporary statements about it drawn up for a secretive Labour Party inquiry. These alleged that although he was apparently provoked, Mr Danczuk not only abandoned but physically assaulted his partner.'  
What was the evidence for this? 
Simon Danczuk himself has always denied that the tiff became violent and that he assaulted his then partner, Karen Burke, the daughter of Martin Burke.  
The story in last July's Mail on Sunday reveals the evidence of one witness:

'Martin Burke yesterday confirmed to me that Karen appeared to be bruised on her return. Her mother, Sue, told me the same. ‘I’m only sorry I didn’t take photos,’ she said. ‘On the phone, she told me he’d attacked her. Yet the day after she got home, she was going on about how it was lies.'

Can this be the same Martin Burke who is now condemning the Liberal Democrat, Andy Kelly for 'vilifying Mr Danczuk'? 
No wonder Les May in his letter below responding to Martin Burke's letter is expressing bewilderment.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3157459/Disturbing-questions-Simon-Danczuk-crusades-against-abuse.html#ixzz45XQ86Afy

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This link may be worth including in any preamble that you write.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3157459/Disturbing-questions-Simon-Danczuk-crusades-against-abuse.html

Letter to the editor of the Rochdale Observer (9th, April 2016):

Dear Editor,

As a lifelong Labour voter it pains me to have to point out that Andy

Kelly seems more in tune with what people think about Mr Danczuk's

behaviour since he became the town's MP than Martin Burke appears to be.

As for the 'spurious tabloid tales' which Mr Burke refers to he should

note that it is not Mr Kelly who was suspended by his party for

'inappropriate' texts sent to a young woman; it is not Mr Kelly who has

been told to pay back £11,000 of parliamentary expenses he claimed but

was not entitled to; it is not Mr Kelly who financially benefited from

one of those 'tabloid tales'. Need I go on?

And if Mr Kelly is taking advantage of Mr Danczuk's fall from grace

should we be surprised? After all throughout the summer of 2014 we were

regularly treated to attempts to smear the Lib-Dems with regard to the

thirty five year old story of Cyril Smith's antics at Cambridge House,

until it was pointed out that at the time Smith was a member of the

Labour party and that the late Mr Roger Chadwick had gone on record as

saying that he told the Labour agent about Smith's behaviour at the

time.

Had Mr Burke not felt the urge to respond, Mr Kelly's comments would

have been forgotten. Now they have been given a new lease of life. Or

was that the idea all along?

 

Les May