The dangers in politicising Grace Millane’s death

By
Martyn Bradbury
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14
5

Justice campaigner Peter Williams, does a divesting critique of the dangers of politicising Grace Millane’s death.

I blogged about this last week…

The virtue signalling outrage olympics on social media is getting gross now.

Everyone seems to want to twist the tragic death of this young visitor to our shores into their own ideological frame work.

Some men are throwing childish tantrums that this death is being used as a reflection on all men.

Some woke are claiming this is evidence of a wider narrative on patriarchy and that men are trash.

Some Women of Colour  are demanding to know if this attention would be given if the victim wasn’t white (I feel some actual sympathy towards that perspective).

And  some trans activists are trying to make this about violence against Transpeople, which is bewildering as I think there’s been very few trans murders.

In the heat of the high emotion, especially on social media platforms algorithmically fuelled on subjective outrage, everyone seems to want to politicise this death to fit their own narrow views.

So what do the facts actually tell us?

Between 2007 – 2016 there were 686 people killed by homicide in NZ and 62% of those victims were male and a third were Maori – we do have a violence problem in NZ and it’s male on male violence.

…there is a wider danger in this politicising of a murder beyond identity politics narrative setting, and it is the manipulation of anger for harsher sentences. This woke crusade is quickly becoming the Sensible Sentencing Trust in a gender neutral dress.

The truth us we don’t know what happened or how it happened, the social media lynch mob is foaming for the lynching of the accused before the trial has even found him guilty.

The loss of any human life, like the 62% of males who have died in homicides between 2007-2016, is a tragedy, but we must not allow the angry angels of our nature to over take the debate. New Zealand’s justice system is a counter productive, state sanctioned double bunked rape pen pus pit, mostly due to the manipulation the Sensible Sentencing Trust has exerted over the debate, it would be a shocking legacy to allow ourselves to be manipulated into that response again.

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14 COMMENTS

    • Absolutely the idea of a ‘man’ supporting his wife and children by being the bread winner has long gone. If people were paid properly to support their whanau they would be way less frustrated and feel better about themselves and I am absolutely certain there would be less violence in Aotearoa. Many of them know they are never going to get out of the hole they are in through absolutely no fault of their own. I am sure poverty drives violence – although I am also aware domestic violence happens in ‘well to do’ homes to. Perhaps this is about not having a ‘compliant’ partner.

      Sure sure there are some whose brain isn’t correctly wired, they are really mental health cases and should be treated as such

  2. It’s hard to imagine what mitigating circumstances there could be in this case Martyn. Can you suggest any? People are reacting to what is apparent . And only revulsion comes to mind. We don’t want people who do this in our society.
    D J S

    • We are stuck with them until we give real time to the problem of inequality and mental health. We are not prepared to.

    • There probably are few mitigating circumstances. And if that is shown to be the case society should come down like a ton of rocks on this sub-human.

      However, we still don’t know what exactly happened – was it the most malicious of murders (most likely), or was it partly unintended (manslaughter – unlikely), or have they got the wrong guy (probably very very unlikely)

      So yes, there could be mitigating circumstances – even if unlikely, the possibility has to be properly explored through a fair trial and taken into account when deciding the outcome, and if found guilty, the sentence.

  3. Nothing against grieving a young victim of an alleged murder. But the rest of this outpouring is indeed worrisome, as we don’t know the details of what actually happened. Only the trial may bring that to light, but that will not happen before next year.

    Making various allegations about this incident in order to move forward one’s own political or other causes is not appropriate, I consider.

    That may perhaps be done later, once the facts are known.

    • Yes you are right Marc.

      It is of course devastating that this young woman lost her life here.

      But I do remember the ridiculous out-pouring of grief over lady Di’s death and the comments by psychologists that in fact people were grieving over other things in their life because in a way society doesn’t condone grieving for lots of things but it was okay to grief at this time, no matter what it was actually for.

      But sometimes I think why is their no out pouring of grief and anger publicly about the gap between the rich and the poor and why so many in our community are so disenfranchised

  4. And amidst all the tears, prayers and vigils for Grace Millane, whose murder was a shocking and dreadful event, did anyone say a prayer or shed a tear or hold a vigil for the young 34 year old mother who was murdered in her home in Flatbush Otara while her child was close by? No.

    • Some will ask, where is ‘Flatbush Otara’? Is that somewhere in Africa? With all this pretended sense of ‘unity’, ‘there are a lot of divisions and disconnects within society, as I observe it daily.

  6. I support the sentiments in this article.

    I am sick of people saying why didn’t we mourn ……especially the women in south Auckland whose case is shrouded in name suppression.

    I am glad someone finally brought up male to male violence.

    The perpetrators of violent crimes homicide are most often have experienced childhood abuse and have personally disorders (anti social, narcissistic an d boarderline and substance abuse problems. They are very hard to treat.

  7. “Absolutely the idea of a ‘man’ supporting his wife and children by being the bread winner has long gone.” Dead right, Michal, but do people understand why it was possible for an average worker to support a family of four forty years ago and yet today a working couple cant buy a house without government subsidy?
    After food and water what is the next most important need in life? A place to live, of course. Just look at the homeless. This means that no matter what the cost of a house may be, you will, after providing food to the family, pay that price. If you have one income that’s what you will pay. If you have two incomes that what you will pay. This means that the price of a house is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the family’s disposable income. This also means that the entire secondary income (usually the wife’s) has been squandered on pushing up the price of the house beyond their reach.
    But how did the house price get so high? If you build no houses, if you sell off state housing stock, if you bring in tens of thousands of migrants, if you allow overseas residents to buy our land, to all of which the last government must plead guilty, how much will be the price of your house? How much money have you got?
    And where did the money go? It goes not on the price of the house which is fixed within fairly tight margins, but on the price of the land which is any number you can imagine. Since the price of the highest variable cannot be controlled, there is no such thing in the present market as affordable housing. Until we have built many more houses (increased supply) or cut out speculators or mass immigration (reduced demand) we are possibly years away from reducing house/land prices.

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