Not Being Violent is a Form of Violence Now, Apparently

Hey, Daily Sceptic reader, have you ever raped or murdered anyone? If not, then you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself! Not raping or murdering someone is, counterintuitively, now a particularly terrible form of rape or murder, it would appear, or so say certain Left-wing academics. This only applies, however, if you are the correct kind of (superficial) non-rapist or non-murderer: a white, cis, able-bodied, straight one

This site recently reported on Ilana Gritzewksy’s June appearance before the United Nations Human Rights Council. Gritzewsky was one of the Jewish women subjected to gang-rape by Hamas terrorists across Israel on October 7th 2023. She was kidnapped and held hostage by Hamas for 55 days, awakening in captivity to find her breasts exposed, and her pants pulled down; it doesn’t take a genius to work out why. Yet, testifying before the UN’s Special Rapporteur On Violence Against Women and Girls, an Oxford-educated Muslim Jordanian human rights lawyer (the full set, then) named Reem Alsalem, Gritzewsky was basically ignored. The supposed feminist Alsalem refused to even look at the self-described rape victim, possibly because this very same official had previously helped produce a report implausibly spotting “no evidence” rape took place on October 7th at all, even though it did. Objecting to such rape-based ‘crimes of noticing’ are not unique to Alsalem alone. In the wake of Rupert Lowe’s inquiry into UK-based Pakistani rape-gangs being released last month, British feminist organisation RapeCrisis.org declared that Lowe’s findings did indeed reveal an ongoing crisis across the nation – a crisis of Islamophobia. It was, complained the supposed anti-rape campaigners, “unhelpful and irresponsible” to spot that most of those doing the raping happened to be Muslims, and most of the victims white. How can it be that individuals and organisations explicitly devoted towards combatting rape and promoting women’s rights are acting in the interest of rapists now? The precise nature of the intellectual gymnastics involved can be deduced by reading an incredibly strange academic paper from Canada.

The Witch of Endo

The paper in question, called ‘”I’ve grown fearful of any rustle behind me”: defining anticipating discriminatory violence as violence’ was published in the journal Feminist Theory in 2025, co-authored by three Canadian Queer and Gender Studies academics, Celeste E. Orr, Alessia Mastorillo and Nicholas Hrynyk. Here’s a flavour of Mastorillo’s research interests:

So, they pose as being experts in experience of trauma; reading their work certainly traumatised me.

I have discussed Orr on this site previously in relation to her promotion of the wholly bogus concept of “trans time”, the notion that transgender people (and blacks, the disabled, gays, etc.) experience time differently to the rest of us, hence allowing a 56 year-old man to ‘legitimately’ self-ID as being a nine year-old schoolgirl. Orr describes herself like this: “Celeste E Orr is a white genderqueer endo disabled professor in Atlantic Canada.” The word ‘endo’ there is a piece of obscure gender-studies terminology meaning ‘born in the correct body’, i.e., Orr is a woman, born in a woman’s body. That is to say, she is a woman, but defined in needlessly politicised and faux-intellectualised terms.

Her 2025 co-authored paper is one long special-pleading exercise in redefining the concepts of various forms of violence like rape and beating every bit as much as Orr would like to redefine the concept of women. The introductory abstract bills it as creating a brand new “framework for reconceptualising what ‘counts’ as violence” in the first place, moving the definition far “beyond violence in its most traditional forms”, such as being punched, or shot, or having a penis forced inside your mouth, and instead towards the infinitely more abstract notion that: “When a group of marginalised people collectively anticipate violence, it is clear violence has already happened and is happening all around us.” In other words, if you think you’re going to get raped or murdered, and you’re from a minority, that means you already have been raped or murdered, in a collective systemic sense.

This is nothing less than an academic manifesto for spuriously labelling everyone non-black/brown/trans/gay etc. who lives in any given Western society as a rapist or murderer even if they have never actually raped or murdered anybody.

The rape of the clock

Orr’s basic thesis about “trans-time”, also known as “crip time”, was that non-normative folx with strap-ons or callipers were being conceptually mind-raped by the prevailing cisheteronormative system of accepted chronology itself, in terms of being required to turn up for work on-time, or being expected to be 56 years old mentally whilst living within the physical body of a 56 year-old – transgenderists, blacks, wheelchair-users, autists, et al., were thereby being mercilessly gang-penetrated by oppressive white male clocks, rather than by a very similar word spelled without an ‘l’. The 2025 rape-and-violence paper expands this concept out into the idea of trans-trauma/crip-trauma, too:

This project seeks to position the anticipation of violence as one that disturbs chronological time, and, in turn, the chronology of violence. Crip- and disability-informed models of trauma better account for such non-normative temporalities of trauma and violence. … [One scholar] puts forward a ‘crip theory of trauma’ which conjugates trauma as a dynamic mode of being, rather than a fixed state/identity. Since there is not always a singular event of origin for people living under intersecting forms of oppression, trauma is always possible and is therefore always lived with.

As far as I can tell, this means that chronological time is innately oppressive to gays, blacks, etc., because, according to the standard chronological model, supposedly ‘invented’ by straight white men, things that have actually happened to you, by definition, must have occurred in the past. But not all minority persons have been attacked or raped yet, they just might be, in the hypothetical racist/transphobic future. Privileging the factual past over the imaginary future is thus, in itself, a form of repressive epistemic rape or violence: just because you claim to have been raped 10 years in the future doesn’t mean this rape isn’t a true one.

As ‘proof’ (surely a prejudicial concept in itself?), the authors cite the experiences (or non-experiences) of Vivek Shraya, “a trans woman of colour, scholar, musician and artist”, who wrote a 2018 book called I’m Afraid of Men – he’d better not look in the mirror, because he is one. Every time he walks down the street dressed as a brown woman, Shraya fears getting beaten up or punishment-raped, having “grown fearful of any rustle behind me” lest it indicate he is about to get bopped or bummed. This wholly imagined latent threat, say the authors, is a genuine act of violence nonetheless as “the threat is in the anticipation”. If you fear it’s going to happen, that means it actually has happened, at least inside your own mind.

People on the Left would normally argue that, if a young white woman sees a gang of teenage Muslims hanging around on a street corner, and crosses the road through fear of being molested, she is a racist. But if a brown transvestite passes by an elderly white man using a Zimmer frame and does the precise same thing, then such considerations no longer apply.

Of course, the elderly white pensioner, once arrested for ‘rape’ or ‘assault’ here would plead that he has never raped or assaulted anyone at all, least of all Vivek Shraya, not least because he is 97 years old. However, being part of The System™, he is deemed guilty of the crime anyway, just like all white Westerners are.

The logic of violence

“The idea that violence needs to be intentional is a long-held myth,” argues the paper. Violence is often “not intentional” here in the sense that, to concoct my own illustrative example, you, as a cisgender, heteronormative white Western male (if that’s what you are), might wake up one morning and pull on a pair of trousers. In so doing, you may think you are simply covering your underwear. But, actually, you are unintentionally reinforcing classic gender-normative modes of dress, and thereby contributing to the global tyranny, violence and even rape being perpetrated against transexuals like Vivek Shraya. You may have no conscious intention of raping or stabbing Shraya yourself personally, but nonetheless, by contributing in some tiny, pants-based way to the systemic dictatorship of gender-binary dress-codes, you are ultimately playing your part in Shraya getting raped anyhow – whether Shraya actually materially gets raped or not, or just fears that he will.

The key rhetorical sleight-of-hand here is to arbitrarily redefine acts of ostensible non-violence – like putting on your trousers – as acts of violence nonetheless, thereby to automatically reclassify every minoritarian self-pitier as being a ‘genuine’ victim, forever:

This framework for reconceptualising what ‘counts’ as violence creates space to move beyond violence in its most traditional forms (e.g. attack or assault). … Broadening the definition of violence in this way offers significant benefits in that it allows for the recognition of forms of violence that are often overlooked or dismissed because they do not conform to conventional understandings of what violence is. … [V]iolence can occur through seemingly innocuous, minute actions, ideologies and discourses. … We propose that violence does not require a clear intentional ‘actor’, and a clear ‘event’ need not have taken place.

Placing the word ‘event’ in inverted commas there gives leeway for favoured minorities to quite literally complain about things which haven’t even happened to them: imagine the difference between a transexual reporting a rape to the police and reporting a ‘rape’ to them. Will people one day be able to be convicted for fictional ‘crimes’ (more inverted commas) they haven’t committed, just so long as it’s the right person doing the accusing?

Events, queer boy, events…

The paper’s authors even identify a new form of prejudice to go alongside racism and sexism called “eventism”, i.e., the unjustifiable social ‘prejudice’ many people hold against completely made-up accusations. If you have just been ‘stabbed’ (again, note the inverted commas), for instance, but are unable to point to any visible wound as evidence, because the ‘stabbing’ never really occurred at all, then never fear, just consider the following:

What makes the violence of anticipated violence – or the everyness of fearing violence – hard to articulate or recognise is that there is no clear wound. “How do you express pain”, validate pain or recognise pain, “when you can’t even locate the wound?” [asks one scholar]. We hope that recognising anticipating discriminatory violence as violence in and of itself helps us locate this wound in a more concrete manner.

If only Henry Nowak had known about such a useful concept before he died.

Then again, as a white male, according to this point of view, an incredibly privileged individual like Henry himself held all the societal levers of epistemic power, and thus possessed the immoral ability to define what rape and violence were in the first place – e.g. being stabbed in the guts by a Sikh. This ability to define rape and violence as actually being rape and violence is, according to the classic trauma-studies school of thought, just another kind of mental rape and violence upon behalf of powerful white fascists like Henry:

Violence is tricky to define, in part because it relies on a perceived expert to tell us the ‘truth’ of violence: what violence looks like, how it manifests and what the consequences of violence are. The ‘truth’ around violence is that it is bound up with cultural capital, privilege and status. As a regime of knowledge that requires legibility and boundary making (what is and is not violence), violence is at its core a manifestation of power. It is power that can be weaponised and exerted physically, financially, verbally, ideologically, culturally and so on. The denial of violence is also a form of violence.

So, if I tell a gay person he hasn’t just been raped, because he hasn’t, then that means I’ve just raped him. Or something. The whole thing makes very little logical sense, probably because it’s not supposed to. It’s all just a bizarre means of attempted social control via acts of sheer mental, moral and verbal absurdism, the Brotherhood of Marx crossed with the Marx Brothers.

Crime fiction

As usual, it’s all very two-tier. Whilst for minority groups, fictional ‘crimes’ are always real, for majority groups, factual crimes (no inverted commas) committed by minority groups are always fictional – such concepts, if applied practically, would cause a new Henry Nowak scandal every day.

Orr et al.’s paper specifically mocks the “unwarranted fear that trans women are invading women’s bathrooms and will inevitably sexually assault cis girls and women” as being “nonsense”, even though there are cases on record of this exact thing having happened. Furthermore, when marginalised groups fantasise about (or actually perform) acts of violence upon their alleged ‘oppressors’ this cannot be considered to be violent at all, only liberatory. The example given is the song ‘Cop Killer’, with lyrics by black rapper Ice-T, in which he imagines doing just what it says on the tin, like human Ronseal:

I’m a cop killer, better you than me

Cop killer, fuck police brutality

Cop killer, I know your family’s grieving, fuck ‘em

Cop killer, but tonight we get even.

Die, die, die pig, die

Fuck the police

Fuck the police

Fuck the police

Fuck the police

If a white policeman released a rap song called ‘N***** Killa’, this would be an act of actual murder. If Ice-T actually shot a white policeman, however, this would not be violence at all, presumably, because he is the oppressed, and the cop the oppressor. It is all so absurd it all sounds kind of funny. But then you recall the cases with which I opened this piece, and begin to understand why it is that, supposedly, Israelis can never be raped by Hamas terrorists, or white girls never be raped by Pakistani Muslims – because Jews and whites are always and forever the powerful guilty, and terrorists and Muslims always and forever the downtrodden victims. Reconsidered in these inverted terms, Ilana Gritzewksy kidnapped Hamas, and all those white children in Rotherham and Telford gang-raped their adult Pakistani taxi-drivers. 

In their paper, the authors specifically complain about having to live under a “sanist regime” in the West, which privileges logical ideas over outright mentally disturbed ones like their own. So, this is literally a call to make our entire civilisation become psychotic. The ordinary, reality-based community of the West clearly does not want this kind of madness, and has never given its consent for any of it to occur: but it gets it forced brutally onto it anyway. Of all people on Earth, you’d presume that Left-wing Gender Studies scholars, feminists and anti-rape campaigners would be the last ones to think that the word ‘no’ really means ‘yes’, but evidently not.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books.