I don’t know if I would have noticed this had it not been for Lauredhel’s post all that time ago (and the various follow-ups), but I’m listening to a BBC piece about kidnapping, and I noticed something interesting.
Cut for possible triggers…
One of the people interviewed was a woman who had headed up a unit in the Metropolitan Police which dealt with abductions. I assume she was referring to domestic abductions when she said that only a small proportion of abductees are killed.
She said (these are not verbatim):
Abductees rarely die.
They die because of a botched abduction.
They die because of a botched rescue attempt.
They die because they might be able to identify their kidnappers.
And each time, I thought: NO. They die because they are killed.
They may rarely be killed. They may be killed for one of the reasons she gave. But the reason they die is because they are killed.
The interesting thing for me about this was that my reaction was instantaneous, visceral, even. It was so obviously wrong. I think this may have happened even without Lauredhel’s post about the passive voice used when writing about women – I think about language a lot, I am used to using it carefully and I care when it is used badly.
And yet. I don’t think I have quite the same instinctive reaction when women are pushed to the background by the use of passive voice. Don’t get me wrong: I agree with Lauredhel’s post completely, and do what I can to try to avoid the use of passive voice in inappropriate circumstances. But my reaction against that use of passive voice is learnt, to a far greater extent than my reaction against the use of passive voice in this instance.
That is, perhaps, my ingrained sexism, the sexism that we all have to fight against.
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