Fourteen days after the first revalation of the rape and sexual violence scandal that has shaken Ljubljana’s cultural community, the Left party (Levica) has finally responded to what has been going on. With a tweet on the social network. They, too, have realised, just like Nika Kovač, director of the leftist non-governmental organisation the Institute of the 8th of March (Inštitut 8. marec), that there is clearly a serious problem of sexual harassment present in the cultural sphere. But unlike Kovač, who tried to silence the victims of sexual violence by offering them bribes in between the lines (by covering their legal costs), members of the Left party bizarrely concluded that rape is the result of poor and precarious work conditions. In other words, poor young female artists are prostituting themselves to rich male artists. This is a blatant attempt to blame capitalism for sexual harassment rather than the alleged perpetrator who actually sexually harassed the young girls – and the Left party’s whole message has obvious sexist connotations.
“It is clear that the cultural sector has a serious sexual harassment problem. The latter is exacerbated by poor and precarious working conditions, in which it often happens that this situation is what makes it easier for perpetrators to abuse victims. Such behaviour must be condemned in the clearest and strongest terms,” the Left party wrote on social media. For a party full of extremists, who usually pride themselves on working for women’s equality, as if this is not an important value of all political parties, the above statement lets their blatant sexism show. How else can we explain that it is girls who are forced into submissive sexual practices by the bad conditions in their field?
The tweet, which was published by the Left party, conveys the message that women are inherently weak beings and that it is this weakness, exacerbated by their poverty and the apparently good provisioning of male artists, that is the fatal cocktail that leads to sexual abuse. Not youthful inexperience, which can be attributed to both sexes, and sexual predation, combined with the illegal intoxication with illegal substances. No, according to the gospel of the Left party, it is women’s weakness and capitalism that are to blame!
The Left party: it is all the right’s fault!
And, of course, the gospel of the Left would not be complete if they did not point their finger at the right for at least a little while in this whole affair. “The abuse of a sensitive issue for the settling of the political score and the shifting of attention away from a serious social problem is one of the most despicable things that the right has done recently,” they wrote. This is clearly a highly hypocritical piece of writing. The media, which the extremists in question described as “right-wing,” are the only ones willing to write about this issue at all, while the various left-wing parties, institutes, and media outlets, such as 24ur and the likes, would prefer to just keep quiet about the whole thing. Just like they kept quiet when the abuse of girls took place in their own backyard, but they did nothing about it.
That was most likely so because they themselves were involved in the abuses, in one way or another.
Andrej Žitnik
