Index on Censorship: Women who Censor
Edited by Judith Vidal-Hall

£8.99, pp194

Index on Censorship is the bi-monthly magazine devoted to protecting and promoting freedom of expression; former Channel 4 boss Michael Grade has just become its new chair. Fittingly, the current issue of Index has a provocative cover: a red-lipsticked mouth stitched up. This is a collection of writing that attempts to unpick the angry knot of disagreements among women (a premise taboo enough in itself) – over sex, violence, abortion, veil-wearing, female circumcision, and censorship as self-protection. It’s a bold venture, if not exactly ‘a good read’.

Lynne Segal makes a powerful case for ‘sweet reason’, or why pornography, however vile, should not be censored. Judith Levine paints a bleak, somewhat over-emotive picture of the regressive fallout from pro-life activism in the US, where there is ‘a near-total public silence’ on ‘the A-word’. Irena Maryniak - we are not told anything about her - reports on how domestic violence (‘the culture of giving the wife something to think about’) has proliferated in underemployed eastern Europe. Most abused women say nothing, though, because of ‘the weakness of their position in law, their fragile sense of personal dignity and anxiety for themselves and their children’.

But it’s the personal stuff that sticks: an anonymous girl’s account of her genital mutilation ceremony; more surprisingly, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown buckling in the middle of a blazing piece on the plight of young British Asian women forced into arranged marriages ‘with grim determination’ by their mothers: ‘As the only Asian woman columnist in the mainstream press, I get calls from a huge number of distressed girls. They ask me for help I cannot give them and it breaks me up.’