They’ve come for the tiger.
It may have delighted generations of children, but The Tiger Who Came To Tea reinforces gender inequality which causes violence against women and girls, a campaigner said yesterday.
Rachel Adamson, of Zero Tolerance, a charity working to end men’s violence against women, said Judith Kerr’s 1968 classic was ‘problematic’ because of its ‘old fashioned’ portrayal of women and family dynamics.
The book sees an uninvited tiger join a young girl and her mother for tea before eating all the food in the house, drinking everything, running the taps dry and leaving.
The girl’s father then comes home and takes her and her mother to a cafe.
Miss Adamson did not call for the book to be banned but said it could be used to ‘raise a conversation’ in nurseries.
She told BBC Radio Scotland: ‘We know that gender stereotypes are harmful and they reinforce gender inequality, and that gender inequality is the cause of violence against women and girls, such as domestic abuse, rape and sexual harassment.’
Adamson questioned the tiger’s gender and why he was not female or gender neutral.
Um… would this campaigner against violence inflicted on women and girls, whose organisation specifically defends its focus on men’s violence against women really want to see a children’s book in which the enormous, physically dominant predator who blags its way into a space which a woman and a girl had thought their own and abuses their hospitality was female or transgender?
Sigh. As the Mail article points out, Judith Kerr knew a thing or two about prejudice leading to violence. Her father was a well known German Jewish writer who had to flee with his family when the Nazis came to power and put a price on his head. They only just escaped. She wrote a lightly fictionalised account of her family’s story in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. Nonetheless, she always resisted attempts to claim that the tiger was a metaphor for Nazism. It was just a big hungry but affable tiger who ate all the buns and drank all the water in the tap.
Concerned that the Mail might be less than fair to Ms Adamson or the charity she represents, I went to the website of “Zero Tolerance” at https://www.zerotolerance.org.uk/ and looked up the organisation’s Annual Report to see how it describes itself in its own words.
The financial information is right at the end, on page 44. As I anticipated it is one of those charities.
Of its total income of £217,778, a mighty £2,125 came from donations and £2000 from the STV Children’s Appeal. That is 1.9% of its total funding.
By far the biggest source of funds is £176,770 from the Scottish Government Equality and Diversity Budget (Violence Against Women and Girls). That is 81% of its total funding.
At £36,120, the next biggest source of funding is something called the CORRA Foundation. This seems to be the successor organisation to the Lloyds TSB Foundation, which was wound up when Lloyds separated from TSB in the wake of the financial crisis some years ago. In other words it is a big bank saying “We must Do Some Good. Philpott, see to it.” In the old days Philpott would have given the sinecure to his sister who wore a twinset and pearls. Now he gives it to his sister who has blue hair and pronouns. The Corra Foundation’s website says that it has distributed almost £193 million since 1985 “to help improve the lives of individuals and communities experiencing disadvantage all across Scotland and in countries around the world.”
With the tiger’s share of their money coming from government and much of the rest from corporate “charities” that are almost as remote as government, bodies like “Zero Tolerance” do not have to do anything so vulgar as deal with poor people, sorry “individuals experiencing disadvantage”.
Zero Tolerance’s expenses, which slightly exceed its income, relate almost entirely to paying its employees, giving them offices in Edinburgh to sit in and “professional web and IT”. A mere £11,116 is for Events, which I will not, of course, mention, blessed be the regulations. The rest is printing and publicity.
So, apart from tweeting 363 times and gaining 912 new followers on Twitter and 362 new followers on Facebook (as detailed on page 40) what do these Zero Tolerance bods actually do?
Some of their activities might actually do some good, in an indirect fashion. They sponsored someone to write a set of five short plays on domestic violence against women. They had an exhibition of photographs on the same theme.
However the report soon leaves behind the worthy but depressing type of work that it was originally formed to do, and moves on to stopping domestic violence by means of a “Gender Equal Play Project Group”. One can understand that; I am sure lecturing nursery staff on what old books they must no longer let the children look at unsupervised is a lot less emotionally draining. Presumably the Gender Equal Play Project Group was the origin of the policy of zero tolerance for anthropomorphic tigers. Do not think that the great task consists only of condemning books; Zero Tolerance also approve books. Here is their “Book List for improving gender equality and diversity”.
But mostly it follows the same pattern of astroturfing as Christopher Snowdon wrote about in his 2013 report Euro-puppets: The European Commission’s remaking of civil society. It’s a neat trick: a government or similar body pays people to lobby it to do something it wanted to do anyway. The government can then make a great show of acceding to grassroots “demand”, that is, pretending to be a servant when it is actually the master. The “charity workers” can pose as tribunes of the people without the troublesome necessity of going door to door in Glasgow like those nasty politicians do. Everybody wins, except the taxpayer.
The staff of Zero Tolerance earn the salaries the Scottish Government pay them by playing the role of people who protest against the Scottish Government for not being radical enough on matters of gender. Or, as they describe it on page 35, “Influencing Government, Local Councils, and Public Bodies”. It is nice to see the Oxford comma.
“We responded to the Gender Reform Act consultation stating our position that self-determination for trans people supports prevention of violence against women, and continued to visibly promote our trans inclusive position. We met with the Cabinet Secretary for Social Security and Older People regarding the reforms. We also strengthened our partnerships with Stonewall Scotland, LGBT Youth Scotland, and the Scottish Trans Alliance”
In other news, yesterday’s Times reports that ‘Simon Callow, the actor and veteran gay rights campaigner, has condemned the “strange turn to the tyrannical” taken by Stonewall on self-identification for transgender people’:
Callow, who was involved in the anti-government protests that led to the foundation of Stonewall in 1989, said an “extraordinarily unproductive militancy” now surrounded its position. This uncompromising mood risked infringing women’s rights and could put pressure on young gay people to transition, he said, and it was a sign of the times that he felt nervous about the reaction he would stir up, simply for expressing his views.
“I shouldn’t have to fear in that way,” he said. “This is just tyranny and that’s what we’ve fought against all our lives, people saying, ‘this cannot be discussed’.
On the subject of declining to discuss topics that are very much worthy of discussion, Zero Tolerance’s FAQ page includes this gem:
Doesn’t this mean forcing children to be something they are not?
No. Biological differences aside, there is no scientific reason that girls and boys should prefer different things. The stereotypes we impose upon children stem from a patriarchal society – we should challenge these stereotypes.
Honestly, speaking as a woman who has had many typically “male” interests since childhood, I have no desire to impose any grown-up mandated pattern on children when they play. But that “aside” in “Biological differences aside, there is no scientific reason that girls and boys should prefer different things” takes almost as many liberties as did the tiger. The biological differences so confidently swept aside are the the very thing at issue.
Sure, aside from the obvious difference in reproductive organs, greater female interest in faces that can be demonstrated in the responses of babies who are one day old, the evolution of sexual dimorphism in the bodies, brains and behaviour of an enormous range of animal species including humans, and that whole tedious business of maleness or femaleness being marked in some way by the chromosomes in the nucleus of every cell in the human body, there is no scientific reason to expect that girls and boys should – on average – prefer different things.