Indigo Jo Blogs Blog

A bridge to Ireland?

Last night BBC's File on 4 programme was dedicated to how well the government's declared intention to get people with learning disabilities out of short-term mental health care and into the community where they...

Want justice? Tell us your whole life story first

Yesterday it was reported that the police in some parts of the UK, notably London and Merseyside, demand that women reporting rape submit both medical records and an extraordinary array of electronic data to...

Show some respect

Yesterday I came across a tweet on Twitter which made some unpleasant generalisations about Muslim women and Islamic knowledge. It claimed that when men study the Shari'ah, it leads to "More ibadah > more...

Karanbir Cheema case: intention matters

Last week an inquest opened on the case of a 13-year-old boy with a severe allergy to dairy products who died in a London school playground after allegedly having cheese put down his shirt....

Who gets believed?

Recently a lot of people have been retweeting a tweet by one Amanda Brown Lierman, "political & Organizing Director for @theDemocrats" (not sure if she means the whole party or a local branch of...

Teenage boys do know rape is wrong

In the debate over whether the conservative American judge Bret Kavanaugh is fit to serve as a Supreme Court judge, an accusation has emerged that when in high school, he held down and groped...

What is a garment of liberty, really?

A couple of years ago there was a sketch on a Canadian comedy show (starts at 01:26), the Baroness Von Sketch Show, in which a woman walks into a clothing store and tries on...

On mental health care and staying connected

A few years ago I wrote a post on here (The Importance of Staying Connected) about how the Internet had changed from being a niche service which few people outside academia had access to,...

Why did I just lose 25 followers?

The other day I logged onto an unfollower tracker and discovered that I'd lost 19 followers, which is rather unusual (I often lose a few over the average week, often suspended accounts — which...

Rex Bob Lowenstein would make a bad politician

As I mentioned two posts back about the niqaab controversy, Boris Johnson found an ally in the former (and possibly future) UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who made a comment on BBC London radio to...

Why don’t they call it rape?

Yesterday some of the papers reported that, according to a report by the charity Save the Children, child migrants mostly from sub-Saharan Africa were "being sexually exploited" or in earlier versions "selling sex" in...