16 August 2000

Child sex attacks 'merit vengeance': Feminist author says she admires woman who shot paedophile Special report: the Edinburgh festival 2000 by Fiachra Gibbons, Wednesday August 16, 2000

The feminist writer Andrea Dworkin last night entered the Sarah Payne debate by declaring that the victims of child sex abuse have the right to kill paedophiles.

Ms Dworkin, a rape victim herself and former prostitute whose seminal and controversial books Women Hating and Pornography have turned her into the bogey woman of the right, said: "The women have to have the right to avenge crimes on their children. A woman in California shot a paedophile who abused her son; she walked into the court and killed him there and then.

"I loved that woman. It is our duty as women to find ways of supporting her and others like her. I have no problem with killing paedophiles."

Dworkin said women and children were not protected by the law as it stood from "men who rape, rape, rape" and would themselves have to take the law into their own hands if justice was ever to be done. Because "men abuse prostitutes and rape women" laws had to be written which would allow women to "defend a larger space around them. Women should get guns and should be allowed to use them to defend themselves."

Dworkin claimed that women had to learn from the experience of other "oppressed peoples" and carve out a homeland for themselves like the Jews in Israel where they could be "safe from men".

The outspoken feminist said that men had to "identify more with their mothers" if the world was ever to improve. Her comments were in contrast to those made on the same platform the previous day by the veteran American novelist Norman Mailer, who insisted that if "men were to have a hope in the next century they need to rediscover the warrior inside them". Mailer said the American male had been castrated by corporate culture.

Dworkin, who has been ill of late and was pushed to the stage in a wheelchair, said the mass rape of women by men throughout history had been overlooked and played down just as it had been in Auschwitz.

"The Nazis liked to present their wholesale raping of Jewish women as 'affairs' camp guards had with Jewish women, contrary to the Nuremberg laws which did not allow such racial defilement. The men were supposedly moved by the Jewish women's great beauty into breaking the law."

She said of The Merchant of Venice: "I don't know whether it should be performed at all or whether it should be rewritten, but we need to look at it."

Dworkin was speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival about her latest volume, Scapegoat, which maintains that the Jewish oppression of the Palestinians came about through the need for Jewish men to adopt a "tough guy" persona after the humiliation and horror of the Holocaust.

Describing herself as a pacifist who has "reluctantly come to accept the need for violence in certain situations when women have no other choice," she said her ideal women's homeland would not be a perfect Utopia because "not all women are good and not all men are bad - the difference is that men rape, and women need protection from that."

Dworkin, who recently revealed in the Guardian that she had been drugged in a hotel room and raped again, said she was saddened by the reaction of some women who doubted her. "If the Holocaust can be denied even today, how can a woman who has been raped be believed?"

She said there were no easy answers to the problem of paedophilia, but it was time for women to actively protect their children from men. Nor would she condemn the "mob rule" on the Paulsgrove estate in Portsmouth.

"I am not completely up to date about what is happening in Portsmouth. But I understand people's anger.

"I feel sorry for the women and children in the families who have been driven out of the estate, but often in these cases the men have been involved in incest on their children."

Women who were turning away from feminism were misguided and would eventually see the folly of embracing the post-feminist willingness to allow "men to be lads."

"To those women I say would there be women's refuges if it wasn't for feminism? Where would the rape crisis centres be?"

Dworkin's comments came as several women last night walked out of The Barbaric Comedies, a centrepiece of the international festival, because of prolonged rape scenes in Frank McGuinness's abridged version of the Spanish theatrical epic.

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