What Kind of Feminist Wants Rapists in Britain?

The curious case of feminist journalist Mary Harper offers more proof, if it were needed, that feminism is about ideological purity rather than the wellbeing of any actual woman or man.

There has been anger in Britain recently over a gruesome chemical attack by an Afghani sex offender who was allowed to claim asylum in the country even after a conviction for sexual assault. In the midst of renewed debate about Britain’s asylum process, BBC journalist Mary Harper’s advocacy for foreign criminals has come under scrutiny, and as a result, she has lost her position as Africa editor with the state broadcaster.   

Over the past decade, Mary Harper has testified as an expert witness on behalf of various violent Somali refugees in order that their criminal convictions—including for drug dealing, assault, and sexual assault—not result in deportation.  A substantial number of the cases (seven of the 13 for which she testified since 2013) “resulted in the refugee being permitted to remain in the UK.”

Of particular interest has been her testimony on behalf of four Somali sex offenders, in which she argued that the convicted criminals could face difficult adjustments and potential reprisal in their homeland, according to the Daily Mail. One of the cases involved a 29-year-old man (known only as AMW due to a court order protecting his identity), who was jailed after repeatedly sexually assaulting his 17 year old disabled girlfriend at a party. Harper’s defense of AMW included the argument that as a sexual offender and someone who does not speak Somali well, AMW would likely not be able to “survive” if deported. (Despite the judge disagreeing with Harper and ordering deportation, the man remains in the UK.)

Harper also testified, on more than one occasion, on behalf of convicted gang rapist Yaqub Ahmed, now in his mid-30s, who fought for five years against being forced to leave Britain, at a cost to British taxpayers of around one million British pounds. Harper warned in court that Ahmed (who was eventually sent back) would struggle to find a job in Mogadishu for lack of skills and “could be targeted by terror group Al Shabaab” because of his rape conviction. In another case, she warned that a man with 39 convictions for 80 crimes over 17 years “would be shunned by his clan if he returned to Somalia.”

Opinions on the worth of Harper’s expert evidence have varied, with some judges and politicians portraying it as exaggerated, speculative, and at times outright inaccurate (in one case, she is said to have attributed information to a terrorist source that actually came from an office cleaner). Having grown up partly in Kenya—her father was an economics professor in Africa—and spent years as an adult living for periods in Somalia, Harper may well have a deeper allegiance to that war-torn country than to her native Britain. She is divorced and has two grown children.

What is particularly notable about Harper’s years-long defense of Somali sex-criminals is the apparent clash with her feminist convictions. Harper is, as her Twitter output demonstrates, an advocate for women’s rights in Africa, including their right to live free of rape and to establish professional and business opportunities. Her advocacy often explicitly excludes boys and men even when a humanitarian perspective would seem to invite gender neutrality. A tweet on February 23, 2012, “Somalia Women want a voice,” included a picture of a sign, apparently in the country, reading “Let Women Lead; And Waste Less Time.” Here is the typically strident anti-male viewpoint.

And there are many more along the same lines. A June 30, 2012 tweet approved of award-winning Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s assertion that “We should not raise our daughters to aspire to marriage.” No, of course not: down with the family! Other tweets echoed Michelle Obama’s concern for girls abducted by Boko Haram in 2014 (but not for boys murdered or used as child soldiers by Boko Haram), quoted the Ethiopian Prime Minister’s absurd contention that “Women are less corrupt than men,” recommended an article on the role of women in terror group al Shabaab, praised Somali women who establish farms, and supported a BBC Charity Dinner for “marginalized women and girls.”

As is now the standard practice of elite feminists in journalism, academia, aid work, government, and the arts, Harper paints a picture of a world run by women for women on the assumption that women are simply better than men at pretty near everything. Men are not presented as worthy of compassion, and are mainly associated with violence and corruption. 

So why, in a case in which male sex-criminals pose a threat to women in their communities is Harper far more concerned for the perpetrators’ safety than for that of their actual and potential victims? What kind of feminism is this?

In fact, it is not unusual for women from a heavily feminized society like Britain to find themselves attracted to men who are hyper-masculine, even violently hyper-masculine. The internet is full of confessions by feminists about their preference for the bravado, sexual aggressiveness, and capacity for violence of non-feminine men; one can also find serious research explaining why. Mary Harper’s story adds religious and racial elements to the equation. Harper has written two books about Somalia, the most recent, published in 2019, focusing on the terror group al Shabaab. Al Shabaab is a Sunni Muslim jihadist group with links to al Qaeda and other violent Islamists. It has ruled and terrorized parts of Somalia since around 2006 and has engineered bombings that killed large numbers of civilians. Harper’s Everything You Have Told Me Is True: The Many Faces of Al Shabaab is based on interviews with jihadist leaders as well as with those affected by their violence.

Coincidentally, the book touches briefly on the subject of Somalis deported from western countries, showing where Harper’s sympathies lie. “Somalis who have lived overseas since early childhood and fall into a life of crime are also at risk of being forcibly returned to Somalia,” she writes. Note the use of a passive verb phrase to suggest that criminality is not a choice. “Somalis have reacted with horror to the idea that people ‘who learned to be criminals abroad’ are being put on planes and dumped on Somali soil. They fear they will bring new forms of criminality and anti-social behavior to Somalia.” The concerns of non-Somalis who must live with violent migrants in their midst seem not to merit attention.

As was revealed in a 2019 Times interview article (“The BBC’s Mary Harper”) that coincided with the book’s publication, Harper claims to have had an unusually close relationship with jihadis. In fact, as the subtitle of the article denotes, she describes herself as having been relentlessly “stalked” by the terror members. Al Shabaab leaders not only follow her comings and goings when she is in Somalia, but also phone and email her in England, sometimes dozens of times per day. When her phone rings, according to the highly sympathetic article, “her heart sinks. She feels physically sick, because she can predict what is coming.” She will hear the voice of a violent man who claims to know her well.

Whether Harper has ever asked the al Shabaab spokesmen not to contact her is never made clear in the article: it seems unlikely. On the phone, al Shabaab alternate between boasts about their bloody attacks and expressions of alleged concern for Harper’s safety and spiritual wellbeing. “Please take care, Mary,” and “Have you been thinking about your religion, Mary?” Sometimes they even seem to tease her. One contact allegedly claimed that “One reason my accent is so good and my vocabulary so wide is that for years I have paid close attention to the BBC. That is why I feel I almost know you, Mary. I have been listening to your BBC reports for years.”

Harper emerges in the article as a brave and selfless journalist who has put herself in terrifying situations, and continues to suffer, to get at the truth. She can’t not take a call from al Shabaab, we’re told, because, in Harper’s own words, “That would mean that part of the jigsaw of what’s happening wouldn’t be there.” In other words, she is committed above all to informing her readers about Somalia. Whether it is really necessary for al Shabaab to have her personal cell number—whether she could not have a separate phone for work-related calls—is not broached.

The article assures us that “25 years of adhering to the BBC’s notion of balance mean that Harper’s tone is never inflammatory, never overtly condemnatory.” But the tone of her quoted words is not neutral but markedly self-absorbed, even a little self-congratulatory. “They get angry on the phone, irritated with me, but they do still talk to me,” she notes. Harper claims to find it disturbing “[t]hat somebody who is ringing to tell me the latest catalogue of horrors that they’ve inflicted on people can also be, at the same time, someone who shows a personal concern for me. I find it chilling.” Or is that thrilling? It seems that Harper wants readers to know how much these violent men care about her. Has she been taken in by a clever ploy? The possibility of personal interest is bolstered by a variety of publicly available photographs that show Harper smiling rather proprietarily with Somali men, some armed.

The intimacy and lack of condemnation are especially noteworthy given Harper’s role as an outsider, a white woman known for her feminist and progressivist views who is not at all shy (or concerned with “balance”) when it comes to condemning white men for their alleged violence. When the men in question are white Europeans, Harper is often scathing. Her tweets rush to judgement on, for example, the misogynistic history of Italian colonialism, the crass ignorance shown by a white man in Barcelona toward an immigrant black woman, and the alleged racist slurs used by white Britons towards an African woman in a British pub. There aren’t many white men using terrorism to impose a violent religious ideology anywhere in the west, but Harper seizes energetically on any signs of white male truculence. Having examined her Twitter account and read her book on al Shabaab, I could find no evidence of Harper writing non-judgmentally of white men, particularly of white men who advocate what the BBC would call extremist (i.e. traditional) views; and none of those men, one suspects, would be inclined to pester her with phone calls testifying to their protective interest. 

It is difficult not to conclude that Mary Harper is gratified by the unusual male attention of al Shabaab, and attracted to some Somali men’s violence.  

White women’s preference for foreign men has a significant history in feminist ideology and advocacy. In 1979, feminist leaders Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, writing about their campaign against female genital mutilation (FGM) in Africa (“The International Crime of Genital Mutilation”), were careful to distance themselves from the white colonial missionaries who had, earlier in the century, tried to stop the practice in Nigeria. Their stated empathy was with the anti-colonial Nigerian men who wished to maintain their native traditions, including FGM. Twenty years later, the same reflex anti-western standpoint was articulated by feminist academic Sherene Razack in her book Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms, in which she argued that white imperialism and colonialism were the primary drivers of brown and black women’s suffering. Any white feminist who had mistakenly assumed that western societies treated women better than some other societies was complicit, or so the charge went, with white supremacism.  

Uneasily aware of their alleged race privilege, white feminists thus sought to consolidate moral legitimacy by joining with brown and black peoples in condemning white men and the west as the origin of world evil.  

According to the now-widespread framework, Mary Harper’s defense of violent Somali men is not only a potential expression of sublimated erotic interest; it is also an act of ideological exculpation for being white. Britain, as a former colonial power, should not be allowed to escape violence from criminal migrants because Britain visited such violence upon the peoples it colonized. Mary Harper’s defense of the right of rapists to stay in the country that offered them asylum is justifiable as an act of resistance against supposed white supremacism.

A number of conclusions can be drawn from this story.

The most obvious is that intersectional feminist ideology is not about protecting and assisting actual human beings. It is certainly not about protecting women and girls from rapists. As Harper’s actions show, that is at best a secondary consideration.

It is also not about helping rapists or about advocating in general for brown, black, or Muslim men. Outside of her courtroom testimonies and self-preoccupied writings about al Shabaab, Harper has shown no interest in men’s needs or experiences as men, men’s suffering in poor and war-torn countries, or the rape of men as a strategy of war.  

Intersectional feminism is also not about “equality”: on its surface, it promotes female leadership and female power. In actuality, however, it touts solutions in which power will be taken away from men and women in their local communities and nations, to be concentrated in the hands of powerful corporations, NGOs, and other transnational bodies. The case of Britain, in which mass immigration, deracination, and the nullification of family life, native customs, and traditional culture have proceeded without the consent of the governed, is a good case in point.

It may be that Mary Harper is attracted to Somalia and its people precisely because it is nothing like Britain today. Despite its serious problems of violence and dysfunction, it still has a fierce patriotism and is unapologetic about its culture and identity. It has not accepted the necessity of abandoning the traditional institutions and values that provided meaning to men and women in the past.

Harper’s insistence on the right of asylum for convicted criminals who show contempt for British culture and law is a part of the great elite project that seeks to erase distinctive national identities through family breakdown, social atomization, and community disharmony. As a divorced woman anchored in no home place and advocating for people who, in the main, find her values and manner of life alien, she embodies the lonely, destructive incoherence of the intersectional feminist vision.