A RENNISANCE HUMANIST

Venerable Matteo Ricci, Pope Francis’s great gift to China

by Gianni Criveller *

12/14/22

The pontiff signed the decree recognising Ricci’s heroic virtues, the first stage in a process of beatification that has had a troubled history. Ricci brought the Gospel to China through the path of friendship. The communities he founded have preserved and passed on the faith, despite persecution and all sorts of hardships. Now it is possible to dream that he will become a Blessed together with his Chinese disciple and friend Xu Guangqi.

Milan (AsiaNews) – Pope Francis declared Fr Matteo Ricci venerable, making an important gift to the Church in China and all those hoping for such a result; he did it this morning, 17 December, his birthday. This means that the Church now recognises Fr Ricci’s “heroic virtues”, a key stage on the path of the Jesuit missionary’s beatification.

In an audience with Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the dicastery for the Causes of Saints, Francis authorised the proclamation of 10 new Blessed and as well 14 new Venerables, including Father Ricci.

The cause of beatification of Matteo Ricci (Macerata 1552- Beijing 1610) followed a rather turbulent route. Since he was improperly associated for centuries with the controversial affair of Chinese Rites, his reputation was seriously harmed. The Vatican first condemned Chinese ritual practices of honouring family ancestors (1742) and then reassessed the issue and allowed them (1939).

First Pope John XXIII, then all the popes who followed him spoke highly of the Jesuit missionary, in particular, John Paul II (1982 and 2001), Benedict XVI (2010) and Francis. The latter very often pointed to Ricci as the ideal missionary, one capable of inculturation, dialogue and openness to others.

Usually the causes of beatification begin in the diocese where the candidate dies. Matteo Ricci died on 11 May 1610 at the age of 57 in Beijing where he is buried, in the Jesuit cemetery that is now included in the large garden of the Beijing Administrative College, also known as the Beijing Municipal Party Committee School of the Communist Party of China. Given the Church’s particular situation in China, the cause of beatification has been assigned to the Diocese of Macerata, where the Venerable came from.

The original process of beatification began in 1982, but never reached a clear conclusion. In 2010, on the 400th anniversary of Fr Ricci's death, the time was finally ripe. Bishop Claudio Giuliodori restarted the process, appointing this writer to chair the historical commission, which was responsible for tracing the profile of the Macerata missionary, showing not only the heroic nature of his virtues, but also the reputation of holiness that has surrounded him since his death.

In 2013 the documentation was sent to Rome, where the cause continued, following the usually complex procedures. The pope's act this morning is at the same time a point of arrival and a significant step towards other goals.

In recent years, some suggested that the Vatican wanted to link Matteo Ricci’s process of beatification with that of his disciple and friend, Paul Xu Guangqi, a scientist, scholar and political leader originally from Shanghai, who was a fundamental pillar of Chinese Christianity.

The idea is very evocative: offer Catholics in China and around the world the opportunity to venerate both the foreign missionary and the one person who heeded his proclamation, making the Gospel the raison d’être of his life. At that time, Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian of Shanghai, now deceased, got me involved in the investigation for Xu’s beatification process, known as “Dr Paul” in Jesuit sources because he was an apostle among his people.

Unfortunately, the tragic events of the Church in Shanghai, where Bishop Thaddeus Ma Daqin was placed under house arrest in 2012, prevented the cause of Paul Xu from going forward. It has not yet been possible to undertake the necessary historical research and combine the two causes.

The pope’s decision to continue with Matteo Ricci is good news, as there was a risk that his cause might again be postponed indefinitely for reasons independent of the merit of the holiness of his life.

The declaration of “venerability” required the approval of the theological commission that declared his heroic virtues, as well as that of the cardinals and bishops members of the dicastery.

Fr Matteo Ricci brought the Gospel to China through the path of friendship, cultural and scientific dialogue, and accommodation. In 1595, after a series of failures that plunged him into a state of 'melancholy' (his own words), he decided to write his first book in Chinese. The title, “Friendship”, really says a lot. It was his missionary manifesto.

Friendship is in fact a Confucian virtue: the fifth of five social relations, but the only one based on freedom. The Christian humanist Ricci appreciated friendship as an evangelical and humanistic value, and it was precisely around this common value that he built a network of friends that allowed him to found Christian communities in five important cities of China.

In 1601 Ricci reached Beijing, welcomed in the Forbidden City for his scientific and cultural knowledge. He was buried in the imperial capital, the only foreigner to whom the emperor granted such a privilege. Today, Ricci is included in China in high school textbooks, remembered in the Millennium Museum, along with Marco Polo, as the only important foreigner in the country’s history.

But Ricci was above all a missionary. Like Paul of Tarsus, he suffered and gave his whole self to preach the Gospel. The communities he founded have preserved and passed on the faith and, despite persecution and all sorts of hardships, are still present among the Chinese people.

Catholics in that country know this well, which is why today is a day of joy, and one of hope for the future of the faith in the land of China.

* PIME missionary and sinologist

HINDUTVA CRITIC AND OPPONENT
Report finds Fr Stan was jailed and died because of documents planted on his computer
by Nirmala Carvalho

Arsenal Consulting found 44 documents planted via malware, which India’s National investigation agency used as “evidence” of terrorism against the Jesuit who died at 84 in July 2021 after many months in prison. His confrere, Fr Mascarenhas, told AsiaNews that the hacking began in 2014, soon after current Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office for the first time.

Mumbai (AsiaNews) – Arsenal Consulting, a Boston-based forensic firm specialising in cybercrimes, found that documents purported to show electronic correspondence between Fr Stan Swamy SJ and Maoist guerrillas were planted via malware.

The clergyman, who was known for his long commitment to tribal people and their rights in the State of Jharkhand, spent almost nine months in prison before he died at the age of 84 in a Mumbai hospital on 5 July 2021 from COVID-19, which he contracted in detention.

Fr Swamy, along with 15 other jailed defendants, was on trial for instigating violence during a protest by Dalits on 1 January 2018 in a village in Maharashtra. The defendants say that Hindu nationalists provoked the clashes.

Defence lawyers involved in the Bhima Koregaon (BK16) case hired Arsenal Consulting, which found that someone had hacked into the priest’s computer, planted 44 documents, including the so-called Maoist letters, starting in 2014 until it was seized by the authorities during a raid in the Jesuit’s home in 2019.

On the basis of those documents, India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) charged the clergyman in October 2020 and held him at the Taloja prison in Mumbai.

After making several requests for release, all turned down, Fr Swamy, who was already suffering from Parkinson's at the time of arrest, was eventually moved to a hospital in Mumbai, but by then his health was irrevocably compromised.

Arsenal Consulting found that whoever hacked Fr Swamy's computer used WinSCP, a free and open-source file transfer tool for Microsoft Windows operating system to copy more than 24,000 files and folders to its server.

While the Boston-based forensic firm could not trace the identity of the hacker, it found that the same user targeted the computers of Wilson and Gandling, two other people arrested in connection with the BK16 case. The command and control servers and NetWire configurations are the same in all three hacking operations.

Arsenal Consulting’s report, which sounds like a serious indictment of the National Investigation Agency, has renewed media interest in the case.

Fr Frazer Mascarenhas SJ, a friend of Fr Swamy appointed by a court after his death as the custodian of the case, now wants his fellow Jesuit to be completely clearly even after his death.

“We are not surprised at the latest report regarding the computer of Fr Stan Swamy being compromised and files planted in it,” Fr Mascarenhas told AsiaNews.

“Fr Stan had nothing to do with such correspondence so it is only logical that such an intervention had been done by someone. What is surprising is that this happened within a few months of the change of government at the Centre and in Maharashtra, indicating deliberate long-term planning involved.”

In other words, the hacking allegedly began in 2014, a few months after the change of government in New Delhi when current Prime Minister Narendra Modi was elected for the first time.

“What the Arsenal Report also helps us to understand is why the BK16, especially 83-year-old Fr. Stan, were treated in such an inhuman way in jail.

“With no possibility of conviction since the evidence was all concocted, the human rights activists needed to be treated harshly while incarcerated [. . .], so that other activists and members of civil society would be deterred from continuing with their defence of the powerless.

“This is the reason why our court case is not only about clearing the good name of Fr Stan from this accusation but also about making an enquiry into the harsh conditions in jail which led to the deterioration of Fr Stan’s health and eventual death”.

FEMICIDE MISOGYNISTIC PATRIARCHY
Acid attacks in India are a social and legal issue
by Alessandra De Poli

The country has the highest number of such attacks worldwide. In 60 per cent of cases, victims do not report the attack because the wheels of justice turn at a snail’s pace. The reasons behind the violence are rooted in a patriarchal culture.

Milan (AsiaNews) – Two days ago, two youths on a bicycle threw acid at a 17-year-old girl hitting her in the eyes. The victim was on her way to school in Mohan Garden, southwest of Delhi, with her younger sister.

Three people were arrested in connection with the crime, one of them was a friend of the girl who sought revenge after the two had a falling-out.

Police said the acid was likely ordered online, while doctors said the extent of the burns would not be known for a few days.

Acid attacks against girls and young women are a never-ending scourge in India, which has held the world record of cases every year.

It is estimated that at least a thousand cases out of some 1,500 reported worldwide take place in India. Some 90 per cent of attacks are in developing countries, including Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Colombia.

Despite attempts by the Indian government and the Supreme Court to stem the problem, the numbers keep on rising.

Based on partial data (because about an estimated 60 per cent of cases are not reported), the number of cases rose from 80 in 2010 to 240 in 2019.

According to various studies, this increase is largely due to India’s patriarchal culture (over 80 per cent of cases involved women) and the country’s poor legal protections.

In addition, acid not only causes painful burns and permanent scarring to the victims, but also psychological trauma that will last a lifetime.

This problem also has a social and economic impact on the victims, who end up isolated, stigmatised, and hard to hire in certain lines of work.

In short, a bottle of cheap corrosive substance, which can be easily found, will ruin a woman’s life in just a few seconds.

Until 2013 India’s Penal Code had nothing specific for this type of crime, considered by the Indian Supreme Court worse than murder.

Until a few years ago, anyone convicted of such bodily harm could expect at worse a year in prison and a fine worth a thousand rupees (US$ 12).

Following the passing of the Criminal Amendment Act (CMA), offenders can now expect to get seven to 10 years in prison, while a 2015 Supreme Court ruling provides free medical care for the victim and a US$ 4,500 fine for the offender.

However, changing the penal code has proven ineffective so far, since the wheels of Indian justice are so slow.

According to a study conducted last year by researcher Vidhik Kumar, 90 per cent of acid attack cases reported in a year do not reach the trial phase until 12 months later, while the conviction rate was 2.45 per cent in 2016, 3.39 per cent in 2017 and 3.36 per cent in 2018.

Such low percentages are mainly due to slow investigations and a time-consuming justice system, a situation that discourages victims from reporting since memories fade over time, evidence withers, while legal fees for victims mount.

Under the Criminal Amendment Act, unrestricted over-the-counter sales of various corrosive substances (used mostly to clean bathrooms) are banned, while sellers are required to keep a log (registry) with information about authorised buyers.

Yet, the Delhi Commission for Women found that acids are widely available in one-litre bottles in several shops in the capital for less than one rupee (US$ 0.012), and shopkeepers often have no idea what the law says.

A cultural change is needed to address the issue. The reasons for such attacks lie with India’s patriarchal culture.

Around the world, attacks are more common in countries where the gender gap is most pronounced, but India still has a higher rate of attacks than nations with roughly the same level of gender inequality. In 76 per cent of cases, the offender is a person known to the victim.

The leading reasons for aggressions are refusal of marriage proposals or sexual advances, personal enmity, suspicion of extramarital affairs, jealousy of the victim’s beauty or success, and disputes over property with the victim’s family (often related to dowry).

Climate crisis in Africa finally exposes real cause of hunger

People harvesting beans in Djibomben village in Togo, West Africa. 

The ravages of climate change and hunger do not occur in isolation

 but are part of the system we have built. 

PHOTO | GODONG | ROBERT HARDING HERITAGE |

THE CONVERSATION
SUNDAY DECEMBER 18 2022
By William G. Moseley

In the waning hours of the year’s biggest climate change conference – COP27 – we learned of a deal to create a loss and damage fund. This is essentially a source of finance to compensate poor countries for the pain they are incurring because of climate change. An often-cited example of such suffering is the ongoing drought in the Horn of Africa region, which has put 22 million people at risk of severe hunger.

While some have heralded this agreement as long overdue climate reparations, others point out that the loss and damage fund does nothing to address the root causes of climate change – fossil fuel emissions.

Here I seek to raise a different concern: this approach glosses over the fact that the types of food production systems that the global community has fostered in Africa leave the poorest more exposed and vulnerable to climatic variability and economic shocks.

These food production systems refer to the ways people produce, store, process and distribute food, as well as the inputs into the system along the way.
Lion’s share

Related

No excuse for anyone to die of hunger in Africa

Bittersweet win for vulnerable nations at COP27

Historically, smallholder and women farmers have produced the lion’s share of food crops in Africa.

Over the past 60 years, global decision makers, big philanthropy, business interests and large swathes of the scientific community have focused on increased food production, trade, and energy intensive farming methods as the best way to address global and African hunger.

This approach to addressing hunger has failed to address food insecurity on the continent.

The idea that the solution is to produce more dates back to the colonial period. It’s bad for the global environment, highly vulnerable to climate and energy shocks, and does not feed the poorest of the poor.

I approach this topic as a nature-society geographer who has spent his career studying agricultural development approaches and food systems in west and southern Africa. Through this work, I have come to see agroecology as more accessible to the poorest.
Favoured solution

Each time there has been a global food crisis, variations on the formula of increased agricultural production, trade and energy intensive farming methods have been the favoured solution.

These include the first Green Revolution of the 1960s-1970s, commodity production and trade in the 1980s-1990s, the New Green Revolution for Africa and public-private partnerships in the 2000s-2010s.

We now understand that food security has six dimensions, of which only one is addressed by food production.

Looking at all six dimensions reveals the complex drivers of hunger, namely:

●Food availability – local production and net imports

●Access – the ability of households to acquire food that is available

●Utilisation – the cooking, water and sanitation facilities needed to prepare healthy food

●Stability of food prices and supplies over time

●Sustainability – the ability to produce food without undermining the resource base

●Agency – people’s ability to control their food systems, from production to consumption.

So, how did we get here?

Certain countries and businesses profit from productionist approaches to addressing hunger. These include, for example, Monsanto, which developed the herbicide Round-Up. Or the four companies (Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus) that control 70-90 per cent of the global grain trade.

The productionist focus is also engrained in the agricultural sciences. Tropical agronomy, now known as “development agronomy”, was central to the colonial enterprise in Africa.
Transform local food systems

The main objective for colonial powers was to transform local food systems. This pushed many African households away from subsistence farming and the production of food for local markets.

Instead, they moved towards the cultivation of commodity crops needed to fuel European economic expansion, such as cotton in Mali, coffee in Kenya, and cacao in Côte d’Ivoire.

While forced labour was employed in some instances, head taxes became the preferred strategy in many cases for facilitating commodity crop production. Forced to pay such taxes in cash or face jail time, African farmers begrudgingly started to produce cash crops, or went to work on nearby plantations.
Loss of risk management practices

Accompanying the transition to commodity crop production was a gradual loss of risk management practices like storage of surplus grain. Many farmers and herders in Africa have had to deal with highly variable rainfall patterns for centuries. This makes them some of the foremost experts on climate change adaptation.

Farmers would also plant a diverse range of crops with different rainfall requirements. Herders moved across large areas in search of the best pastures.

In the name of progress, colonial regimes often encouraged herders to be less mobile throughout East Africa. They also pushed farmers via taxation policies to store less grain in order to maximise commodity crop production. This opened up farmers to the full, deadly force of extended droughts, a situation that is well documented in northern Nigeria.
Problematic approaches

Many problematic approaches have continued in the post-colonial period.

Various international and national policies and programmes have encouraged African farmers to produce more crops, using imported seeds, pesticides and fertilisers in the name of development or hunger alleviation. African farmers may be producing more, but are left exposed to the ravages of variable climatic conditions.

Agroecologists can offer a different way forward. They seek to understand the ecological interactions between different crops, crops and the soil and atmosphere, and crops and insect communities. They seek to maintain soil fertility, minimise predation from pests and grow more crops without using chemical inputs.

Agroecologists often collaborate with and learn from farmers who have developed such practices over time and are in tune with local ecologies.

This combination of experiential knowledge and formal science training makes agroecology a more decolonial science. It is also more accessible to the poor because there’s no need to buy expensive inputs or risk becoming indebted when crops fail.
Less expensive

The fact that agroecological farming is less expensive has not been lost on the business community. They would lose out substantially if conventional farming approaches were no longer associated with hunger alleviation.

Furthermore, those in the agricultural sciences who have supported productionist approaches to hunger alleviation also see agroecology as a threat as it could lead to a decline of prestige and research funding.

There are signs that the global community may be on the cusp of a major shift in thinking with regard to food systems, climate change and hunger.

A global food crisis has led some to question why previous solutions have not worked. We also now have an emerging, more decolonial science of agroecology that is increasingly accepted within the UN system. It’s backed by a powerful social movement that refused to back down when corporate agricultural interests tried to hijack the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit.

In some cases, there are also large institutional donors experimenting with agroecological approaches, something almost unheard of a decade ago.

Lastly, there is a new set of leaders within some African governments who understand what agroecology offers.

The ravages of climate change and hunger do not occur in isolation but are part of the system we have built. That means we can build something different. The current crisis lays bare this problem and the right combination of new ideas, resources and political will can solve it.

Deconstructing the ‘Jewess’: an Exploration of Gendered Antisemitism

By Hannah Rose

6th December 2022

GNET  In 16 Days, Insights

This Insight is part of GNET’s Gender and Online Violent Extremism series in partnership with Monash Gender, Peace and Security Centre. This series aligns with the UN’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gendered Violence (25 November-10 December).

Fat, bloodthirsty, and wicked. The adjectives ascribed to ‘Jewesses’ on far-right social media forums give some insight into the denotation intended by the term. The use of specific terminology reflects a wider stream of misogynistic antisemitic rhetoric, which does not merely manifest in the targeting of Jewish women, but in itself constitutes the source of specific tropes and imaginings of the role of masculinity and femininity in anti-Jewish sentiments.

This Insight will seek to provide an overview of the specific phenomena of gendered antisemitism. Even in its contemporary manifestations, antisemitism remains rooted in historical context, redressing many of the same tropes popularised centuries ago. Gendered antisemitism is twofold: it embodies unique tropes about Jewish women and targets them with misogyny. Moving from ideological imaginings to practical manifestations, this Insight will subsequently analyse the scale of the problem, cutting through often contradictory literature. It concludes that while literature disagrees on the scale of the targeting of Jewish women, the central themes of gendered antisemitism which first arose centuries ago continue to underpin broad conspiracy theories today.

From Jewess to JAP: the Language and Tropes of Gendered Antisemitism

Evelyn Torton Beck articulates the intersection of “the familiar anti-Semitic figure of the Jew as controlling and insatiably greedy, always wanting more, combining with the misogynist stereotype of the insatiable woman, the woman who is infinitely orgasmic, who will destroy men with her desire.” Creating a stereotype of a “Jewish American Princess”, is, according to Beck, merely the transplant of “traditional antisemitic tropes onto a female form: she is materialistic, money-grabbing, manipulative, shallow, crafty and ostentatious”

Mirroring the wider construction of femininity in traditionalist spaces, gendered antisemitism particularly demonises sexual promiscuity and liberation. It weaves misogynistic narratives into existing antisemitic tropes, forming the building blocks of far-reaching conspiracy theories in often contradictory ways.

Such stereotypes can take multiple directions. On the one hand, Jewish women are essentialised as undesirable and hyper-masculine. Antisemitic theories emerging in the 19th century began to emphasise the femininity of Jewish men, and the masculinity of Jewish women. As such, according to Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Jews were seen to challenge the desired familial framework, where the Jewish woman was seen as dominant over her feminised husband.

On the other hand, Jewish women are over-sexualised and painted as the embodiment of sexual greed – a sexual parasite draining their hosts. Where Jews are seen as money-grabbing and ostentatious, Jewish women are typified as materialistic and trivial, only interested in looks and clothes; a symbol of the decadent and powerful elite. The essentialised Jewish woman is the embodiment of globalised capitalism, leeching off others, exhibiting both laziness and greed; the misogynist imagining of the parasite symbology. Schüler-Springorum summarises the “erotically threatening fantasy” of the ‘Jewess’ as “an exotic temptress who inspired male fantasies”. She articulates how, with the rise of racial antisemitism in the early 20th century, the threat of sin from the ’Jewess’ was emphasised, and “the Jewish woman became the veritable incarnation of the femme fatale”. Therefore, as traditionalism combined with nationalism to demonise sexual promiscuity, Judaism was co-demonised.

These tropes can still be seen in the roots of contemporary gendered antisemitic constructions. Karin Stogner notes that “due to the intermediate position regarding gender and sexuality attributed to them, Jews were seen as an essential threat to the unity of the cultural community, which is still inseparably linked to the heteronormative order today”. Blyth Crawford investigates this linkage between antisemitism and familialism in neofascist militant accelerationist discourse, concluding that feminism is seen as a Jewish plot to lower white birthrates and therefore control or eliminate white people. Expansive conspiracy theories about ‘The Great Replacement’, rest on alleged Jewish control of the ‘gay agenda’ or attempts to undermine the white nuclear family unit, and are therefore rooted in gendered antisemitic tropes of the manipulative ‘Jewess’.

In the extreme-right imagining, Jewish women are both debauched and desired; a temptation and a taboo; promiscuous and parasitic.

Measuring Gendered Antisemitism: A Brief Literature Review

Quantitative measures of gendered antisemitism produce mixed results. The Fundamental Rights Agency’s survey on the experiences of European Jews, the largest survey of its kind, was analysed by Mie Astrup Jensen using gender identity as the independent variable. Ultimately, it concluded that Jewish men were more likely than women to experience antisemitic discrimination, including physical attacks, offensive or threatening comments, offensive gestures in public or online harassment. The data was adjusted for multiple factors, including the increased visibility of religious Jewish men in public, given the overtly identifiable traditions which govern Jewish male dress and appearance more than women’s, including peyot, facial hair, hats and clothing. Jensen comments that both her literature review and data analysis led to the same conclusion that men are more likely to experience antisemitic discrimination.

The Jewish Policy Research’s 2014 survey also registered lower levels of antisemitic abuse against Jewish women than men. Equally, research for the Antisemitism Policy Trust and the Community Security Trust by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz analysing 9000 Stormfront threads found that Jewish women entertainers were mentioned less than men.

One place where antisemitism was found to target women more than men was the political arena. The same FRA survey which served as data for Jensen’s gender analysis also concludes that political life is one of the main places where antisemitism is reported, particularly in the UK. On the Stormfront threads analysed by Stephens-Davidowitz, the most mentions were of Luciana Berger and Margaret Hodge, former and current Labour MPs who experienced abuse for their opposition to antisemitism in the Labour Party. He notes the overlap of sexist and antisemitic attitudes towards the politicians, with heightened negativity about their appearances, exemplified by insults such as “equine-faced Zionist”. Berger and Hodge have previously both spoken about the soaring levels of antisemitism they and other Jewish women in parliament experienced, including four convictions for abuse of Berger.

Specifically speaking to the increasing divergence of white supremacist and manosphere online communities, Media Matters recorded a 180% increase in posts containing both misogynistic and antisemitic language on 4chan between 2015 and 2017. This suggests an overall growth of online abuse of women but does not measure whether this increase is proportionate to that experienced by Jewish men.

As such, literature attempting to quantitively measure the levels of gendered antisemitism, and the intersection between misogyny and antisemitism, generates mixed findings. There is likely to be some divergence in results where there is a difference in arena or type of incident being recorded, particularly given the lack of uniformity in how online antisemitism is measured, and equally a lack of consensus on what exactly constitutes antisemitism. This review is therefore indicative of a patchy field of literature, with only sporadic, rather than methodological, analysis. Currently, little definitive and authoritative literature on the topic exists, and as such, much remains unknown.

Conclusions

Where sexism is often ingrained into the contemporary psyche, antisemitic discourse is no different. Ranging from the unconscious targeting of Jewish women, the torrents of abuse experienced by female Jewish politicians, to the overtly misogynistic intersections of extreme-right antisemitism, gendered antisemitism is diverse in its manifestations.

Gendered antisemitism may be particularly tricky to survey quantitively, both due to the coded and often covert nature of all forms of antisemitism, and what the Antisemitism Policy Trust theorise as a “less challenged” form of hatred due to its relation to wider structural sexism. If, as has already been explored, gendered antisemitism is not just antisemitism targeted at women, but a specific worldview which underpins much of wider antisemitic discourse, its contribution to conspiratorial, extreme-right and even mainstream thinking is arguably immeasurable.

It is also pertinent to address a perception gap between Jewish men and women in JPR’s survey, where the women surveyed reported higher concerns over rising levels of antisemitic abuse. Where the bottom line of the Jewish community’s safety is not just statistical, but threat perceptions and feelings of security, the intersection of misogyny and antisemitism must be addressed by victim-centred threat reduction measures.

Despite recent attempts to reclaim the term, the ‘Jewess’ remains a shadowy figure seen through a gendered lens, hated by many, and understood by few. Much more must be learned about the diversity of intersections between gender and antisemitism in order to definitively understand the issue, and therefore combat it.

Hannah Rose
More by Hannah Rose

The Cissexist Assemblages of Content Moderation

By Rae Jereza

12th December 2022

GNET  In 16 Days, Insights

This Insight is part of GNET’s Gender and Online Violent Extremism series in partnership with Monash Gender, Peace and Security Centre. This series aligns with the UN’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gendered Violence (25 November-10 December).

Introduction

In recent weeks, there has been a mass re-platforming of anti-trans accounts on Twitter. The direct actions of Elon Musk – a white cis man and self-proclaimed ‘free speech’ absolutist whose wealth stems from colonialism – have already led to direct shifts in content moderation towards dangerous anti-trans rhetoric. Such developments are dangerous and life-threatening as they encourage violent attacks against LGBTQ communities. The shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, which left five dead and nineteen injured, and the threats received by children’s hospitals that provide gender-affirming care are only a few recent examples of anti-LGBTQ ideologies mobilised as violent action. Such attacks are part of a two-year campaign by far-right influencers to demonise LGBTQ people, casting us as a threat to children and, ultimately, the white nuclear family [1].

Yet, gendered moderation policies are not limited to more explicitly violent assertions of the cisnormative heteropatriarchy. In an article examining how content moderation processes reinforce normative gender roles, Ysabel Gerrard and Helen Thornham introduce the concept of “sexist assemblages”: the shifting elements of content moderation that reproduce gender norms on social media. Echoing – and explicitly referencing – the work of Safiya Umoja Noble on representations of Black women and girls on Google, Gerrard and Thornham show how white femininities are “stabilised” through hashtags, recommender systems, and community guidelines among many other elements. They conclude by calling for research that pinpoints “other elements of the assemblage” to get at the links between content moderation and the social world. This Insight builds on the notion of sexist assemblages to think through and situate this moment of increased violence against trans people online and offline in the US.

Cissexist Assemblages Online

Instances of anti-trans violence are alarming and worthy of our attention and intervention. However, there is a tendency to talk about anti-trans acts in presentist ways and frame them as extreme exceptions in an otherwise progressive society [2]. I argue that addressing this violence – indeed preventing it from happening again in the future – rests on revealing and destabilising mundane cisnormativity, which provides what Cynthia Miller-Idriss calls “the fertile ground” for supremacist ideologies and affective investments to “thrive.” Doing so entails examining content moderation as a set of strategies that go beyond content removal: as an assemblage of competing practices, interests, and concerns – what I have called “the ecology of content moderation” – that reproduces cisnormativity on platforms. These cissexist assemblages may not always entail anti-LGBTQ slurs or narratives, and they often do not involve explicit calls to violence against LGBTQ communities. Nevertheless, they contribute to “cisgendering reality”:

…erasing, othering, and punishing non-cisgender existence and experience throughout mainstream social institutions, interactional patterns, and structural arrangements in ways that allow people to accept a world without non-cisgender people (emphasis mine).

Cissexist assemblages are therefore the practices within mainstream content moderation that reinforce a view of the world devoid of trans and non-binary people.

LGBTQ users, organisations, and their advocates have long documented elements of mainstream platforms’ cissexist assemblages. In 2019, the Salty Algorithmic Bias Research Collective published a report describing how Facebook’s (now Meta) content moderation practices affect LGBTQ Instagram users. Based on a pool of 118 respondents who “identified as LGBTQIA+, people of color, plus sized, and sex workers or educators,” the research collective found users from these marginalised communities had their profiles deleted or disabled with little to no explanation. For instance, users reported that posts advertising products for women and non-binary people have been removed, while products for “erectile dysfunction” remain on the platform. Kendra Albert and Oliver Haimson have also drawn attention to the practice of removing trans and non-binary crowdfunding campaigns from Instagram on the grounds that they constitute violations of Meta’s nudity and sexual solicitation policies. In a letter to Meta’s Oversight Board published in 2022, Albert and Haimson discuss the various ways in which trans and non-binary people’s posts are moderated through a “cisgender gaze” that shapes algorithmic moderation. These practices prevent trans and non-binary people from “participating in the public sphere” and make it difficult for them to access funds for gender-affirming care in a context where healthcare is increasingly inaccessible. Furthermore, they reinforce the notion that trans and non-binary people’s bodies are inherently lascivious and their very existence hypersexual in ways that easily feed into – and enable – abhorrent far-right narratives that cast trans people as “groomers” and “pedophiles.”

How might we challenge content moderation’s cissexist assemblages “stabilised” and made apparent through removing content posted by trans and non-binary people? Grindr’s whitepaper, titled “Best Practices for Gender-Inclusive Content Moderation,” presents some helpful strategies to counter cissexist assemblages. For instance, the authors’ suggestion to have “gender-free photo rules” dovetails with Albert and Haimson’s suggestion that Meta reworks their nudity and sexual solicitation policies “to eliminate the engines of disproportionate harm, rather than attempting to create exceptions for transgender users and their content.” Doing so will not eliminate the broader societal tendency to hypersexualise LGBTQ people’s bodies, but it is a step towards humanising LGBTQ people, at least online. The authors’ suggestion that platforms provide “inclusive gender options,” “include pronouns,” be cautious with open text fields, and more are also welcome steps in the right direction. In terms of moderation policies, the authors recommend including statements that explicitly welcome trans and non-binary people and disallow discrimination on platforms. They also suggest that companies clearly state rationales for their moderation decisions, express what they do allow on the platform, and train their moderation teams in gender-inclusive ways of moderating.

These are a good start but are also limited in the sense that they narrowly address social media’s cissexist assemblages. For example, the range of algorithmic harms trans and non-binary people experience goes beyond how images are moderated. As Thiago Dias Oliva, Dennys Marcelo Antonialli, and Alessandra Gomes have noted, algorithmic moderation can result in the flagging of LGBTQ speech genres as harmful. There is thus a need to consider a broader range of semiotic objects produced by users. Moreover, companies should consider how cisnormativity shapes how these objects are interpreted by both AI and human content moderators.

Additionally, the whitepaper does not address the fact that major social media companies like Twitter and Meta generate revenue through hosting advertisers. While trust and safety professionals might truly be working towards – and believe in – platforms where marginalised peoples are included, content policies and moderation practices are constrained by what kinds of content advertisers are comfortable with. This structure impacts not only users but also the underpaid, overworked third-party content moderators who social media companies rely on to keep their platforms friendly for advertisers. The pressure to remove ‘objectionable’ content on platforms falls on third-party vendors who subject workers to extreme conditions in the name of pleasing clients. As I have written about elsewhere, this means that content moderators essentially perform unpaid affective labour to maintain the profitability of large social media platforms. I have also shown that even when Meta’s content moderators believe in social justice and can identify coded speech against people of colour, productivity metrics discipline them into aligning with policies they disagree with. Although the specific study I am referencing does not refer to instances of cissexism and anti-trans rhetoric, it is reasonable to assume that all the knowledge in the world is useless in situations where one is essentially coerced into mobilising policies one finds politically problematic or harmful.

Conclusion

Making sense of violent supremacist acts should entail examining the ways that seemingly mundane social interactions and structures enable supremacist violence. The US is a country that runs on the violent oppression, killing, and everyday exploitation of people of colour, LGBTQ people, workers, and disabled people both domestically and overseas. People with power, disproportionately made up of abled and wealthy white cis Christian men, have always been invested in maintaining white cis Christian capitalist hegemony. Social media companies, like all large organisations driven by profit, are ultimately invested in maintaining this status quo regardless of how progressive their policies look on paper and how dedicated their employees are to social justice. This is evident in social media’s cissexist (racist and Western-centric) assemblages, which comprise mundane moderation practices that reproduce the very same gendered tropes on which more explicit anti-trans rhetoric and violence are predicated. As is the case with many forms of far-right activity, we must attend to the ways in which the so-called mainstream enables and fuels the very same oppressive logic.

My gratitude to Maureen Kosse, who gave me feedback on the key ideas of this piece. I would also like to thank the Anthro Writing Group, and Rine Vieth in particular, for their company during the writing process.

[1] And, of course, such tropes are not new: the right has long used children as a foil to cast their enemies as dangerous and perpetuated the dangerous myth that trans women are “predators.”

[2] Scholars such as Jemima Pierre, Antonia Vaughan, Maureen Kosse, Meredith Pruden, Hanah Stiverson, Catherine Tebaldi, Jennifer Delfino, Britt Halvorson, Joshua Reno, Aaron Winter, Aurelien Mondon and many more have made similar arguments about race and racism and gender. Their insights have allowed me to develop this orientation towards far-right actors and the mainstream.

Rae Jereza
More by Rae Jereza

Research as Resistance: A Target-Centred Approach to Studying Anti-Queer and Trans Violence

By Anna Meier

8th December 2022

GNET 

There is a numbness that comes with studying extremely violent events for over a decade. I am a scholar of terrorism and white supremacy, and sometimes my work involves weeks on end of doing nothing but reading accounts of violence. You might call the numbness I adopt an act of self-preservation: I cannot carry on with my work if I am constantly breaking down, and so I inure myself to brutality. I pay attention, then, to events that shake me out of that stasis. The 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre was one: every year since, on June 12, I’ve lit a candle and mourned. The November 19–20 Club Q massacre, in which five queer and trans people and allies were taken from us, has been another.

As a queer woman, and given the importance of chosen community for queer people rejected by their families, I react differently to these attacks. This is a community to which I belong, and one in which I have found acceptance and celebration, and it is under threat. I start with my personal reaction to Club Q because it is a reminder that the phenomena we study as scholars of terrorism and extremism are indeed personal. They are personal to the loved ones of victims, and they are personal to the larger communities sent a message through these singular acts. The incentives for scientific abstraction, not to mention the aforementioned onslaught of awfulness that we encounter, can distance us from this reality in ways that can not only do unintended harm to victims but also act as a significant hindrance to making sense of the things we are trying to understand.

In this Insight, I use the Club Q shooting to illustrate the importance of what I term target-centred approaches in terrorism and extremism studies. Calls to foreground the experiences of people of colour, queer and trans people, and other marginalised communities who bear the brunt of political violence are not new. Indeed, they constitute key approaches in Black studies, queer and gender studies, and other fields with which terrorism and extremism studies do not usually engage. My intention is thus not to reinvent the wheel but rather to highlight how centring the targets of violence shifts our research questions, our research outcomes, and our research goals toward justice and liberation. Gaining insight from marginalised communities is easier than ever in the digital age, and so I further emphasise the utility of online platforms in learning about and from targeted groups. Online spaces allow researchers to easily track perpetrators’ rhetoric over time, but they can also shed light on resistance to violence and efforts to heal.

‘Research’ is About Real People and Their Safety

The first reorientation that comes from a target-centred approach to terrorism and extremism research is the reminder that at the end of the day, violence is done to real people. Targeted communities process grief and organise resistance with anger, sadness, hope, and fire. As tempting as it may be to sideline this aspect of violence in the name of conducting ‘objective’ research, doing so places the safety of queer and trans people on the back burner in the name of another policy analysis. This serves no one.

With few exceptions, mainstream coverage of and responses to the Club Q shooting focused on the facts of the event, possible motives for the shooter, and the broader context of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and hate in the United States. Once the victims’ names emerged, brief profiles appeared in some publications. In queer online spaces, however, the discussion was quite different. Queer people celebrated all aspects of the victims’ lives, normalising their queer- and transness rather than exceptionalising and essentialising their identities. Local artists insisted on beauty in the aftermath of violence. Across the country, queer communities mourned by uplifting the dead and survived by resisting the impulse to hide. In doing so, they highlighted the human aspect of violence

Taking a target-centred approach requires starting in the spaces and with the people targeted. This does not mean appropriating their reactions or intruding where one is not wanted, but it does mean observing responses those communities choose to make public online and off. Doing so can shift our research from numb, distanced work towards empathetic work interested in the common aim of keeping vulnerable communities safe. This end goal also urges researchers to move beyond typical counterterrorism and counter-extremism responses of policing and surveillance to prioritise care and liberation beyond the bounds of traditional security.

Targeted Communities Understand Violence Best

The second shift engendered by a target-centred approach moves us toward valuing local, on-the-ground sources of knowledge. The people with the deepest wells of knowledge about anti-queer and trans violence—and those doing the most significant research on these topics—are not always at universities or research institutes. Traditional academic training often dismisses such perspectives as ‘too close to the case’ or insufficiently rigorous, to the detriment of both academic research and policies aimed at queer and trans safety.

In the aftermath of Club Q, trans activists such as Erin Reed and Alejandra Caraballo collected and amplified information from the queer community in Colorado Springs in real-time—and, crucially, contextualised that information within years of experience being in and part of queer spaces. Reed’s weekly ‘Anti-Trans Watch’ on her Substack catalogues anti-trans bills and pro-trans protections across the United States, placing acts like the Club Q massacre against a backdrop of rapidly legislated anti-trans hate. Caraballo drew links between queer and trans hate and the far right’s broader antisemitism and tracked far-right commentators’ praise of the shooting. Queer and trans people were also the first to notice that mainstream media had misidentified a trans woman at Club Q as a drag queen.

The efforts of Reed and Caraballo, along with countless other queer and trans experts, underscore that single instances of violence are never really singular within the broader spectrum of far-right hate. Moreover, queer and trans ‘insiders’ had the knowledge necessary to counter media narratives that disseminated transphobic tropes, however unintentional, about trans women simply being cross-dressers. A target-centred approach turns first to targeted communities for expertise and trusts their perspectives as authoritative, thereby gaining a more accurate and comprehensive picture of violence and its dynamics.

Violence is More than Spectacular Attacks

Finally, a target-centred approach reminds us that single attacks are always embedded in larger social environments. Those environments can, on any given day, be far more violent than individual attacks, even if not in immediately physical ways. Combating anti-queer and anti-trans violence will be unsuccessful if pursued in a vacuum, and turning to targets illuminates the full range of institutions, rhetoric, and policy enabling more extreme acts of violence.

Work by queer and trans researchers and allies draws attention not only to shootings and assaults but also to larger acts of intimidation. Monthly demonstrations in the United States against queer and trans people have more than quadrupled in the last four years, as Erica Chenoweth’s and Jay Ulfelder’s Counting Crowds project demonstrates starkly. Likewise, observations by trans leaders emphasise the permissive environment for violence created by legislation targeting bathrooms, children’s sports, and gender-affirming care. Commenting on a proposed bill in Montana that would remove all legal recognition of trans people, Representative-elect trans woman Zooey Zephyr noted, “ … when you try to deny our very existences, you partake in & encourage that violence.”

Looking outside of traditional terrorism studies for perspectives on political violence, especially perspectives from targeted communities, suggests that over-emphasising only the most spectacular attacks misses the forest for the trees. A more holistic picture of the threat environment shifts attention to other parts of politics deeply intertwined with violence and reactions to it—and prescribes, in turn, a more holistic policy response. By looking at online platforms as places of community care and resistance instead of simply sources of information on bad actors, we allow hope and healing into research spaces as important components of our own research practices. In effect, then, a target-centred approach does more than simply flesh out academic and practitioner understandings of anti-queer and anti-trans violence. It also demands a pivot to solutions focused on broader societal justice, celebration, and liberation for all marginalised communities.


Anna Meier
More by Anna Meier

Debate over Thailand’s minimum wage rages

12 December 2022

Author: Wannaphong Durongkaveroj, Ramkhamhaeng University

From 1 October 2022, Thailand’s daily minimum wage has increased throughout the country by 5–8 per cent. The new daily minimum wage ranges from 328 baht (US$9.45) to 354 baht (US$10.2). This has raised concerns about the effect higher wages may have on Thailand’s economic recovery as the world continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Minimum wage policies have long been a controversial issue among policymakers, businesses and scholars. While they guarantee minimum income for workers, they also increase the cost of employing low-wage workers, which in some cases can increase unemployment. Empirical studies on the impact of minimum wages suggest mixed results. Negative impacts on employment have been found in developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Analysis is more complicated for developing countries due to the size of their informal economies and substantial non-compliance with minimum wage laws. There are several studies on the effects of the minimum wage in developing countries such as Indonesia and Brazil, but research on the effects of minimum wages in Thailand is scarce. One study found that Thailand’s minimum wage hike in 2013 had little impact on aggregate employment.

In 2011, the newly-elected government led by Yingluck Shinawatra announced a harmonised minimum wage rate nationwide known as ‘the 300 baht (US$8.64) minimum daily wage’ scheme. This was Thailand’s largest hike in the minimum wage since the country’s first minimum wage legislation was passed in 1973. This also was the first time since 1972 that all provinces had the same minimum wage, irrespective of the cost of living and other socioeconomic characteristics.

Unlike other policies such as the universal health care system and pension, many occupations and economic activities are not covered by the minimum wage law, such as government officers, state enterprise employees, domestic workers, maritime workers and agricultural workers.

Minimum wage legislation applies regardless of age, education, nationality, race or sex but varies by location. One of the primary mandates of the minimum wage law is to protect newly-hired workers. Employers are expected to pay workers who have more than one year of experience more than the minimum wage because they accumulate skills and have higher productivity.

The minimum wage reform in 2013 increased average daily earnings, consumption expenditure per capita, income per capita and the number of paid days of employment. But poor households are less likely to reap gains from this reform due to non-compliance with minimum wage laws in the large informal sector of Thailand’s economy.

Thailand is home to about 2.6 million migrants, primarily from Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. Migrant workers are concentrated in manufacturing, fishing, construction and domestic work sectors. These jobs are categorised as dirty, dangerous and difficult. Most migrant workers in Thailand earn wages equal to the minimum wages set by the government but the increased minimum wage may not result in a large inflow of migrants, given the slow economic recovery from the ongoing pandemic.

Thailand’s economy is powered by international trade and export dynamism over the last three decades has been driven by global value chains. Relative cost advantage driven by lower labour costs is a key factor that helped increase Thailand’s participation in global value chains.

While an increase in the minimum age could put pressure on business costs, wages are not the only important factor for attracting more investment into Thailand. Due to large sunk costs involved in investing abroad and the need to secure parts and components elsewhere, relocation takes time and money. The COVID-19 pandemic may accelerate the process of production relocating away from China as a consequence of higher labour costs in China.

The 2022 minimum wage increase is smaller than the 2013 reform in terms of changes to the daily wage. It also does not guarantee favourable outcomes for workers, especially low-paid, low-income earners because the economic conditions are fundamentally different. In the early 2010s, Thailand’s economy grew by about 2.7 to 7 per cent per year and the unemployment rate was slightly above 0.5 per cent.

Disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Thailand’s economy is expected to grow by 2.9 per cent in 2022 and 4.2 per cent in 2023. This is relatively low compared to other countries in the region including Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia, which are expected to grow by 5–7 per cent in 2023. Thailand’s unemployment rate in 2021 was 1.4 per cent — the highest in two decades. This has exacerbated challenges caused by its shrinking working population due to its ageing society, the large size of its informal economy and high income inequality.

The Thai economy has been hit hard by the pandemic. Low-paid, informal workers are paying a high price. In this uncertain environment, it remains unclear whether this is the right time for Thailand to increase the minimum wage given it may put more pressure on small- and medium-sized enterprises. The debate on Thailand’s minimum wage continues to rage on the road to economic recovery from the pandemic.

Wannaphong Durongkaveroj is Assistant Professor of Economics at Ramkhamhaeng University. This is an abridged version of an article originally published by the author in Asian-Pacific Economic Literature.

UK

Survey shows stark reality of why civil servants feel they have to strike

With strategic, targeted strikes being organised by PCS across the civil service, our cost-of-living survey shows how many of our members feel they have no option but to take action after years of low pay increases and spiralling costs.

More than 100,000 PCS members in 214 government departments and other public bodies voted to take strike action over a 10% pay rise, pensions justice, job security and no cuts to redundancy terms. Many of them feel the government has treated them with contempt by offering them a pay rise of just 2% while inflation continues to rocket.

With inflation at a 40-year high, we know many PCS members are struggling as prices rocket. For our members in the civil service, the situation has worsened in recent years. Pay restraint over the last decade alone means members are missing out on at least £2,800 a year. Civil servants were offered a miserly 2% earlier in the year which PCS rejected with inflation at over 9% and having made a pay claim of 10%.

When we surveyed members about the cost-of-living crisis over the summer the results were stark. More than 12,000 people responded to the survey, which asked members how the cost-of-living crisis is impacting on their ability to live day to day.

The results of the survey are stark. 85% of members say the cost-of-living crisis has affected their physical or mental health.
52% of members have worried about losing their home as bills and inflation rocket.
40% of members have said they have had to use credit to pay for essential shopping
37% of survey respondents said they are looking for a job outside the civil service, considering a career change for the good of their health.
35% say they have skipped meals because they had no food
18% of members have admitted to missing work because they can’t afford transport or fuel to get there.
9% have claimed benefits because of low pay
8% said they have used a foodbank.

If you would like to support our strikers, you can donate to our fighting fund.

Opinion: The Block and the future of crypto media

Cas Piancey• Dec 12, 2022


It’s been a weird month for everyone in the cryptocurrency industry, to say the least. Crypto journalists have had it particularly tricky.

A CoinDesk article put its parent organization, Digital Currency Group, into a bit of a bind; the mainstream media seemed to whitewash Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) at first blush; and now it comes to light that The Block’s former CEO, Mike McCaffrey, borrowed money from SBF to buy the controlling interest in the company.

Not to mention, a crippling crypto bear market has impacted readership, ad revenue, and other parts of every media company’s business practices.

It’s hard to take it all in — but here’s why I’m still bullish on my favorite journalists in the cryptocurrency industry.

The revolution will be broadcast

What should give everyone hope in an honest and fair media is CoinDesk’s reporting on Alameda Research. Ian Allison was seemingly able to report a story that ultimately did significant damage to the parent company of CoinDesk without facing repercussions or editorial censorship. This is amazing.

While people will scoff that this is, of course, a journalist’s job and the role of an owner of a media outlet, it’s also clear that if DCG had opted to censor its journalists, the story likely wouldn’t have come to light at all.

It’s also worth pointing out that while many mainstream media outlets initially got it wrong in their reporting, they’ve almost all pivoted to portraying Sam Bankman-Fried as a negligent, careless, and undisciplined CEO of FTX. Others are outright suggesting he’s a fraud.

From every outlet reporting on it, the understanding appears to be that the entirety of the team at The Block was unaware of McCaffrey’s dealings with SBF. I believe them — the caveat being I consider a few to be good friends of mine. And that’s, unfortunately, a huge caveat.

But the reality remains the same: Frank Chaparro did an interview with SBF last week and was visibly frustrated throughout. Larry Cermak reported on his boss’ investment — wittingly or unwittingly — and The Block’s reporting seems to be fair and objective.

Again, this is a win for journalism. But a reasonable and important question is on everyone’s mind in crypto media: can we survive an extended crypto winter?

Read more: Opinion: Bitfinex goes full fascist

The future of crypto media

It’s a hard question to reckon with, at least for someone who’s devoted the last five years of their life to the industry.

The only answer I can give is, “Maybe, but if we are sinking with the ship, it’s our responsibility.”

I hope that crypto media won’t go through a life-threatening credit squeeze. I hope that through the brilliant reporting from individuals from every outlet, the importance of freedom is obvious.

But I also know that for now, it means a drying up of ad revenue and smaller conferences. Perhaps soon, we’ll see less people reading crypto news. That’s a hard pill to swallow.

What is clear to me is that every cryptocurrency media outlet, whether doing fine or struggling to make ends meet, has talented and brilliant journalists, willing to sacrifice anything — seemingly their jobs! — to report the truth.

I’ve never been more hopeful about crypto media than I am right now, and you should be, too.

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

UK

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

FCA fines Metro Bank £10m for incorrect investor information

by BestAdvice
12 December 2022

The FCA has fined Metro Bank PLC £10,002,300 for breaching the Listing Rules by publishing incorrect information to investors.

The FCA has also decided to fine Metro Bank’s former chief executive Craig Donaldson and former chief financial officer David Arden £223,100 and £134,600, respectively, for being knowingly concerned in Metro Bank’s breach.

Metro Bank has not referred the FCA’s decision to the Upper Tribunal. The two individuals have referred their respective Decision Notices to the Upper Tribunal where they will each present their case. Any findings in the individuals’ Decision Notices are therefore provisional and reflect the FCA’s belief as to what occurred and how it considers their behaviour should be characterised.

The Upper Tribunal will determine whether to uphold the FCA’s decisions against the two individuals or not and whether there are any other actions that should be taken by the FCA. The Upper Tribunal’s decision will be made public on its website following a hearing. Accordingly, the action outlined in the individuals’ Decision Notices will have no effect pending the determination of the cases by the Upper Tribunal.

As part of its quarterly financial results, Metro Bank regularly reported to the market on its prudential position, including the Risk Weighted Assets (RWA) on which its regulatory capital requirements are based. Metro Bank published incorrect information concerning its RWA figure in its third quarter trading update (the October Announcement) on 24 October 2018.

Metro Bank was aware at the time that this figure was wrong and failed to qualify it or explain in the October Announcement that it was subject to an ongoing review and would require a substantial correction. Metro Bank also failed to consider, and to seek legal advice on, whether the incorrect RWA figure ought to be qualified or explained in the October Announcement. As a result, Metro Bank failed to take reasonable care to ensure that the October Announcement was not false and misleading and did not omit relevant information.

The FCA considers that Donaldson and r Arden were knowingly concerned in Metro Bank’s breach of the Listing Rules. They were aware that the RWA figure in the October Announcement was wrong and would require substantial correction. Despite this, they failed to consider whether the figure ought to be qualified or explained and failed to seek legal advice on this question. When the correct RWA figure was announced in January 2019, it contributed to a 39% fall in Metro Bank’s share price.

Mark Steward, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said: “Listed firms must ensure that the information they are disclosing to the market is right. This is what investors are entitled to receive.

“The UK’s Listing Rules impose high standards on issuers and their officers which Metro Bank, Mr Donaldson and Mr Arden failed to meet in this case.”