Julie Bindel
Julie Bindel is an English radical feminist writer. She co-founded Justice for Women, which helps women who have been prosecuted for assaulting or killing violent male partners.
A former visiting researcher at the University of Lincoln, and former assistant director of the Research Centre on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations at Leeds Metropolitan University, much of Bindel's work concerns male violence against women and children, particularly with regard to prostitution, stalking, religious fundamentalism, and human trafficking.
Bindel has written or co-written over 30 book chapters and five books, including Straight Expectations and The Pimping of Prostitution. She is also the editor, with her partner Harriet Wistrich, of The Map of My Life: The Story of Emma Humphreys. She has written regularly for The Guardian, the New Statesman, The Spectator, The Sunday Telegraph magazine, and Standpoint.
Early life
Bindel and her two brothers grew up on a council estate in Darlington, north east England, after moving there from a terraced house that had coal fires and no indoor toilet. She is of mixed Catholic and Jewish heritage. She attended Branksome Comprehensive School from 1973 to 1978, leaving a year early without anyone noticing, she wrote. She came out as a lesbian in 1977 when she was 15. While growing up, Bindel wrote in 2009, the thought of heterosexual conformity was totally unappealing.Police, women and murderers at large
When she was 17, Bindel moved to Leeds and joined the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, which was campaigning against pornography. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was still at large; mainly in the Leeds and Bradford area from 1975 to 1980, he is known to have murdered 13 women, some working as prostitutes, and attacked seven more, leaving them for dead. It was Bindel's anger about the Sutcliffe murders that drove her to campaign to end sexual violence against women. She wrote in 2005 that the police investigation only became focused when the first "non-prostitute" was murdered. She was also angered by the police's assertions that prostitutes were the killer's target, although from May 1978 none of the victims had fitted that profile, and by police advice that women stay indoors.Bindel describes being followed home one night in November 1980 by a man of medium height with a dark beard and wiry hair. She ran into a pub to escape from him and reported what had happened to the police, who either asked her to complete a photofit or dismissed her account because her pursuer had a Yorkshire accent. One officer, because her accent resembled the north-eastern man, later found to be a hoaxer, made light of Bindel's evidence by claiming she "was just trying to cover up for my dad". The following day or following week the body of Sutcliffe's final victim, a 20-year-old student, Jacqueline Hill, was found less than from where the man had followed Bindel. When Sutcliffe's photograph was published after his arrest the following year, Bindel realised the photofit she had assisted in compiling looked almost exactly like him as well as resembling the version provided by Marilyn Moore, one of Sutcliffe's victims who survived.
Bindel took part in feminist protests against the killings, including flyposting fake police posters in Leeds advising men to stay off the streets:
During late 2006 when the perpetrator of the Ipswich serial murders was still active, Bindel again found the police were advising women to "stay off the streets. If you are out alone at night, you are putting yourself in danger".
Research and activism
Academic positions
Bindel has served as the assistant director of the Research Centre on Violence, Abuse and Gender Relations at Leeds Metropolitan University, researcher at the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University, Visiting Journalist at Brunel University London, and Visiting Researcher at the University of Lincoln.Justice for Women
Bindel's research into violence against women in domestic and personal relationships has been a central feature of her work. Together with her partner, Harriet Wistrich, a solicitor, and Hilary McCollum, Bindel co-founded Justice for Women, a feminist law-reform group that campaigns against laws that discriminate against women in cases involving male violence against partners. E. Jane Dickson wrote in The Independent in 1995 that the group was being run by Bindel, Wistrich and their dog, Peggy, out of their North London home; Peggy did "her bit for the cause by snarling like Cerberus at the approach of a male footfall".JFW was created in 1991, initially as the Free Sara Thornton campaign, to secure the release of Sara Thornton, who had been convicted the previous year of murdering her violent husband. JFW was launched in solidarity with Southall Black Sisters, who were campaigning for the release of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, convicted in 1989 of murdering her husband.
One of JFW's earliest cases was that of Emma Humphreys. Humphreys had been convicted of murder after killing her violent pimp boyfriend in 1985 when she was 17. In September 1992, she wrote to JFW from prison asking for help. With their support she successfully appealed the conviction, claiming long-term provocation, a significant decision at the time. News reports from 7 July 1995 show Humphreys, Bindel and Wistrich holding hands on the steps of the Old Bailey after the judges ordered that Humphreys be released.
Humphreys died three years later of a drug overdose. Bindel, Wistrich and Humphreys had become friends, and it was Bindel and Wistrich who found her dead in bed at her home. They co-edited a book based on her notes about her life, The Map of My Life: The Story of Emma Humphreys. They also award the annual Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize to women and groups that raise awareness about violence against women and children.
In 2008, an issue Bindel had campaigned on for over a decade became the focus of government legislation. JFW and Southall Black Sisters had sought to change a law that protected men and penalised women. If men murdered a partner in the heat of the moment, an appeal to provocation was admissible in mitigation. Such an appeal was not practical for women trapped in violent relationships, because murders carried out in the context of ongoing subjection to violence tended not to occur in the heat of the moment, but would often be calculated to provide an escape from violence. The campaign to change the law sought to resist the mitigation that men could appeal to when partners were murdered, and allow the sustained violence to which women could be subjected to act as a mitigating factor. Harriet Harman, Minister for Women and Equality, was of a similar mind on this issue, and legislation was proposed that would change the law to this effect.
Prostitution
Bindel has been researching and campaigning against prostitution since the 1970s and has written regularly about it since 1998. While working at Leeds Metropolitan University in the 1990s, she coordinated the Kerb Crawlers Re-education Programme, a John school in the city. An abolitionist, she argues strongly against efforts to decriminalise the sex trade as part of promoting sex workers' rights. Her position is that it is "inherently abusive, and a cause and a consequence of women's inequality ... a one-sided exploitative exchange rooted in male power". For her book The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth, she interviewed 250 people in nearly 40 countries, visited brothels, and spoke to prostitutes, pimps and the police.She has been commissioned several times to write reports about the sex trade for charities and local authorities. While working for the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University, she co-authored a report in 2003 on prostitution in Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Sweden. In 2004, she produced a report for Glasgow City Council on lap dancing in the UK. In 2008, she co-wrote Big Brothel, a report commissioned by the POPPY Project, which examined 921 brothels in London's 33 boroughs. They wrote that 85 percent of the brothels were in residential areas—nearly two-thirds in apartments and one-fifth in houses: "Wherever you are in the city, the likelihood is that buying and selling women is going on under your nose."
Bindel and Atkins recruited male acquaintances to telephone the brothels for them, asking what was on offer. They telephoned only the ones advertised in local newspapers; Bindel estimated that
the brothels made £86M to £209.5M a year from the services thus advertised. Penetrative sex was available from £15 to £250, with an average price of £62, and two percent of the brothels offered unprotected penetrative sex for an extra £10 to £200. Many of the women were from Southern or Eastern Europe and Asia. One brothel offered what they said was "a Greek girl who is very, very young". Bindel wrote about the findings in her Guardian column:
The Big Brothel report was criticised by 27 academics and other researchers involved in research into prostitution, who complained that the study had been conducted without ethical approval or acknowledgement of existing sources, and had been co-written by a researcher with anti-prostitution views. The POPPY Project responded that the report was one they had produced independently, that they were not an academic institution, and that it was important to provide a counterbalance to the positive focus on the sex industry found in the media.
Opinion journalism and interviews
Overview
Bindel writes for The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph magazine, the New Statesman, Truthdig and Standpoint, and is often interviewed by the BBC and Sky News. She began writing for newspapers in November 1998, while she was working at Leeds Metropolitan University, when The Independent published her article about the Leeds Kerb Crawlers Re-education Programme.In 2001, she was given an occasional column in The Guardian, with more frequent contributions from 2003, after she wrote a longer piece about female sex tourism in Jamaica. Topics have included child abuse, cyberstalking, the failure to prosecute sex offenders and the consequences of that failure, and biological theories about what drives sex offenders. She has also covered gender-neutral toilets, "Why I hate vegetarians", Barbie and Ken—"a 1950s pre-feminist monstrosity, resplendent in her passivity" and "a drippy, pathetic man who appeared to have no penis"—and Arsenal football club—"I went to bed with a smile on my face. Why? The most arrogant team in England was given its comeuppance."