29 Jan 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, Music, News and features, United Kingdom, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
This article first appeared in Volume 53, Issue 4 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.
In January 2019, there was a landmark case in British legal history – it was the first time someone received a prison sentence for performing a song.
The perpetrators were Brixton duo Skengdo x AM, one of the brightest acts of the burgeoning UK drill scene. They had already been put under surveillance by the police after they and two other members of rap group 410 were handed a gang injunction in 2018. This was in response to a song they released depicting clashes with members of rival crews. Three young men from those crews were killed that year, but there was no evidence that members of 410 were involved. The Metropolitan Police still classified 410 as a gang, and the injunction prevented them from entering the “rival” SE11 London postcode area, and from performing songs with lyrics that mentioned rival crews.
But at a concert in December 2018, Skengdo x AM broke the injunction. The pair performed one of their more popular songs, Attempted 1.0, which contained lyrics that were regarded by police as inciting violence. Officers discovered videos of the performance online – and in January 2019 the pair were given nine-month prison sentences suspended for two years.
In a statement, the Met said that the injunction was breached when “they performed drill music that incited and encouraged violence against rival gang members and then posted it on social media”. But it was their fans that shared videos, not them. Shereener Browne, a former barrister for Garden Court Chambers, has spent years working on cases involving young people alleged to be involved in gang or criminal activity. She was shocked by this case, particularly given the pair hadn’t posted online themselves.
“So here, they got an order for not doing anything, and then got an order saying that they were in breach of that order for something that they didn’t do! Head blown,” she told Index. “So we’re just… tearing up Magna Carta – every principle of criminal law is up for grabs. And if it was happening to any other group? We would be marching.”
This is a case that Index on Censorship commented on at the time – and it is not the only instance of UK police trying to control the work of drill artists. One notable case was that of Digga D. In 2018, Digga D (full name Rhys Herbert) was convicted of conspiring to commit violent disorder and ultimately sentenced to a year behind bars. He was also given a criminal behaviour order (CBO) which, alongside having his movements tracked, meant he was required to notify police within 24 hours of uploading music or videos online. Additionally, the lyrics of his songs had to be verified and authorised by the police to ensure that they did not incite violence. If they did, he could be sent back to prison. These restrictions meant that police essentially had control over his work, and this will continue until 2025. Digga D is one of the most influential drill artists on the scene, but even he is forced to censor his work under police surveillance.
The Met has been scrutinising drill musicians for a while. In 2019, it launched a targeted initiative titled Project Alpha which scoured social media platforms for potential signs of gang activity in posts and videos by young, usually Black, people. As revealed by The Guardian, the force monitors the activity of young people – primarily young men aged 15 to 21 – online, which it says aims to fight serious violence, identify offenders and assist in removing videos that glorify stabbings and shootings. In many cases, Big Tech is complying, and this policy has led to hundreds of drill music videos being removed from platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
In a Freedom of Information application on Project Alpha, it was revealed that the Met made 682 requests to remove drill songs from streaming platforms between 1 January 2021 and 31 October 2023, with most requests made to YouTube. Another FOI request found that on YouTube specifically, 654 requests for removal were made between September 2020 and January 2022, and 635 of them were granted.
Browne believes that the claimed attempt to tackle gang violence has become a concerted effort to silence drill artists, and young Black men in particular. It amounts to systemic racism, she told Index, with the evidence for this being that other genres of music are not censored or surveilled in the same way.
“It creates a culture of fear amongst mainly young, Black men, and it makes them feel even more disenfranchised, marginalised and silenced,” she said. “Because if you see your heroes – and I think to a lot of these young men, the drill and rap artists that break through are seen as their heroes – being silenced in that way, it’s going to make you angry and frustrated.
“There’s this demonisation of an entire generation of young Black people, and it’s crushing their self-esteem.”
The moral panic surrounding drill music means it has become common practice for lyrics to be used in court as evidence of criminal activity amongst drill artists. Rapping about crime and violence is often seen as an admission of guilt rather than musical storytelling, and even listening to drill music can be taken as a precursor to violent behaviour.
Art Not Evidence is a campaign group fighting against the criminalisation of drill. Founded a year ago, it has collaborated with musicians and human rights organisations to battle against the use of lyrics – and creative expression more broadly – to unfairly implicate people in criminal charges when there is a lack of real evidence. Co-founder Elli Brazzill works in the music industry and has spent time at a major record label with some of the biggest names in music. She noticed how the police began to interfere with the work of drill artists signed to the label.
“I started to see the disparities between the way different artists are treated, and what I referred to as a correlation between the growing popularity of certain rap and drill artists and an increase in police interference and surveillance,” she told Index. One artist who was signed after serving a prison sentence was at risk of further criminal punishment for simply posting online about Black Lives Matter, she claimed.
In founding Art Not Evidence, Brazzill hopes that she can help change presumptions around drill music, from a violent and dangerous genre to a form of therapy and creative expression. “What all the other genres are awarded, and rap and drill music are not, is artistic licence,” she said. “Which is why it comes up in court as autobiographical, as literal, as a confession, as a premeditation to crime.”
Music can be a therapeutic tool. According to the charity Youth Music, which conducted a survey of 16 to 24-year-olds last year, nearly three quarters found that listening to, reading or writing musical lyrics enabled them to “process difficult feelings and emotions”, whilst half said it helped to reduce feelings of isolation or loneliness. “That is what these kids need, especially if you’re in a community where you don’t talk about things,” said Brazzill. “I’m 28 now, and I still struggle to talk about my emotions! When you’re 15, all you can do is let it out like this. I’m pretty sure every artist would say that that is what it is for them.”
Censoring drill music only further ostracises an already-marginalised group, Browne believes. “It’s a group of young men who have fallen through the cracks – very often excluded from schools, put into pupil referral units… they’re not doing their A-levels, they’re not going to university,” she said.
“There are very, very few legitimate ways for them to raise themselves [and] lift themselves out of poverty, and this is one of the few ways that they can do that. That’s why it’s even more cruel for the state to try to shut down those avenues of escape.”
Her point is valid. If these young Black people cannot tell the stories and realities of their lives, and they are instead silenced because their retelling is deemed “too violent” or “glorifies gang culture”, we are depriving them of a crucial outlet, erasing a core element of modern-day British culture and exacerbating the cycle of poverty and crime. And inevitably, this can only lead to prison sentences for some young people. Brazzill recalled the poignant words of one drill artist from a recent podcast interview: “You are really angry, and you don’t want us to make the music talking about our life. But you don’t care if we’ll just go back and have to do The Life.”
29 Nov 2024 | News and features, Venezuela
As thoughts turn to the festive season, Americans will have the chance to ponder what the New Year and a Donald Trump presidency will mean. But this is not the only significant election in the continent to have happened this year.
This weekend Venezuelans will take to the streets to demonstrate against President Nicolás Maduro’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat in elections on 28 July. The opposition candidate, 75-year-old Edmundo González Urrutia, has pledged to return to the country from exile in Spain to take office on 10 January 2025, ten days before the Trump inauguration. His victory has been recognised by the international community, including the White House.
International human rights groups have raised concerns about the increasing authoritarianism of the Maduro government with widespread surveillance of its citizens and arbitrary detention of political opponents. According to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country as of May 2024, which accounts for roughly 20% of the entire population.
González, who has never stood for office before, took the place of the original opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado, when she was banned from standing by the government and forced into hiding. Machado now faces charges from the Venezuelan federal prosecutor, which accuses her of supporting American sanctions against her country.
Machado has joined fellow opposition figure Magalli Meda in calling for protestors around the world to paint their hands red as a symbol of the suffering of the Venezuelan people as they take to the streets around the world. The UN reported that at least 23 protesters were killed at anti-government demonstrations in the weeks after the election and approximately 2,400 were arrested.
Despite the desperate situation for Venezuela as it sinks further into economic crisis and international isolation, this year’s elections have provided a model of democratic activism. Voters were shocked when the government announced that Maduro had gained a convenient 51 per cent of the vote but failed to provide numbers. This in a country whose election system was described by the Carter Center, set up by the former US President Jimmy Carter, as “the best in the world”.
In this context, readers of this newsletter would be advised to listen to the latest episode of the This American Life podcast, which includes a report on Venezuela by Nancy Updike. A transcript is also available.
Updike tells the story of the movement, led by citizens, to document the country’s entire voting record, precisely in case that Maduro’s ruling party tried to fix the vote. The movement was called Seiscientos Kah, which means 600k, and was so named because of the number of volunteers needed to make the checks. The organiser is now in hiding.
Every voting machine in Venezuela prints out a tally of votes for each candidate on election day. Each candidate is allowed a witness at every one of the 30,000 machines stationed around the country. 600k was set up as a giant relay race with the witnesses at the start and activists collecting the results and taking them to monitoring centres at secret locations. Here, using a laptop, a scanner, and a portable generator, the results were then uploaded to a website and the original copies taken to a separate secret location.
This extraordinary process meant that when polling closed, opposition supporters across the country uploaded videos of people reading out the results, which had come directly from the voting machines.
The situation in Venezuela remains grim. Updike quotes from a UN report on the protests against Maduro after the election. Those charged with terrorism and incitement to hatred included: “opposition political leaders, individuals who simply participated in the protests, persons who sympathised with the opposition or criticised the government, journalists who covered the protests, lawyers for those detained, human rights defenders, and members of the academic community”.
A statement from a member of the UN fact-finding mission said that many of those detained: “were subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, as well as sexual violence, which was perpetrated against women and girls, but also against men”.
Maduro has called the actions of the 600k movement a “coup”. In fact, it may provide a blueprint for the fight against election-rigging by authoritarian governments around the world.
19 Aug 2024 | Burkina Faso, Canada, China, Germany, India, Iran, Magazine Contents, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Volume 53.02 Summer 2024
Contents
14 Feb 2024 | Asia and Pacific, China, News and features
It was in 2015, during my internship at one of China’s most prominent digital media publications, that I had my first close encounter with censorship. Every so often the editor-in-chief would repost a message to our online chat group coming from someone whose username was “The Person is Present” (“人在呢”). They were from the Cyberspace Administration, which is the national internet regulator and censor of China. The message was always an instruction such as “Look up and delete all related reportage on the topic of A, report by 6PM.” The username, together with the requests they made, created an Orwellian atmosphere that even at my level as just an intern was chilling. All I could think was: “Big Brother is watching you.”
That same year, “the Feminist Five”, a group of feminist activists, were arrested for planning to protest against sexual harassment on public transport just before International Women’s Day. Today even more feminists have been targeted, including Index 2022 award winner Sophia Huang Xueqin, who has been in jail for years now for her journalism and activism. Many of those who protested and were later arrested during the White Paper Revolution were also connected to the feminist movement. But not all discussions around women’s rights were or are silenced.
“To be honest, in today’s China, it’s difficult to discuss other topics in detail, but the topic of feminism can be discussed to some extent,” the journalist Qing Wang said in one episode of her podcast The Weirdo. Books about feminism by authors such as the Japanese feminist Chizuko Ueno have become bestsellers in China, even though the publishing sector censors other subjects. Feminist conversations with Chinese characteristics, which oppose the display of female sexuality and eroticism, as exemplified in the discussions around K-pop star Lisa’s Crazy Horse cabaret performance, are allowed to flourish rather than being censored because they essentially align with the ruling patriarchal and traditional Confucius values.
The most recent incident that sparked a widespread debate on feminism in the Mandarin-speaking world was a unique eulogy article written by Dr Lang Chen, the wife of assistant professor Xiaohong Xu at the University of Michigan, in which she delineated the gender dynamic in an intellectual household. The single article went viral online and reached more than 100,000 readers this January.
General feminist topics such as period poverty and gender-based healthcare inequalities are also essentially allowed. The latter discussion has even led to positive change. For example, in September 2022, after a woman’s complaint about the unavailability of sanitary towels on bullet trains became a trending topic on Weibo, the bullet trains started selling period products.
As shown in the Baidu Index, searching for the word “nvquan” (feminism) surged to a historical high at the time of the 2022 Tangshan restaurant attack, in which four women were savagely beaten by a group of men after rejecting their unwanted advances. However, the censorship machine soon turned the narrative from gender-based violence and femicide towards gang violence. Any efforts to approach the incident from a feminist angle on social media such as Weibo and WeChat was subject to the accusation of “inciting conflict between genders” and therefore scrubbed by the censors. For example, an article from the account Philosophia哲学社, which discussed the incident under the title “The Tangshan Barbecue Restaurant Incident Is Exactly An Issue of Gender”, was promptly removed from the WeChat platform. All the while other discussions asserting the idea that it was not a gender issue but rather a matter of human safety were allowed to spread.
Another illustration of where it starts to move into murkier waters is the well-known case of Zhou Xiaoxuan (better known as Xianzi) accusing Zhu Jun, a host from the state broadcaster CCTV, of sexual harassment. This case did spark widespread feminist discussions and helped launch the #MeToo movement in China. But the #MeToo term itself was promptly banned on social media (which led to a series of other terms to try and bypass the censors), Xianzi was suspended from Weibo and the court case ruled against her, symbolising a setback for China’s feminist movement.
The Chinese-US novelist Geling Yan was also silenced on Chinese social media because she voiced her anger in 2022 about the Xuzhou chained woman incident, where a woman was trafficked before being chained to a wall for years, continuously raped and gave birth to eight children. Yan called Xi Jinping “a human trafficker” in one interview. Directing her anger to the top was not appreciated. Her essays were removed from social media, she was blocked and her name was even removed from a Zhang Yimou film based on one of her novels.
So how can we make sense of the fact that some discussion of feminism is allowed while some discussion is not? Essentially feminist debate faces censorship once it starts to attract public attention, challenge the ruling power and has the potential to move to offline collective action. As one activist and member of the civic group BCome, who acted in the feminist theatre play Our Vaginas, OurSelves, has said:
“The censorship machine is most concerned with the potential of offline gathering and organised collective action. As made evident in ‘the Xuzhou chained woman incident’, Wuyi was just an ordinary netizen who had no previous activist records, and she got arrested only because she took the action of going to the actual place and investigating the incident herself.”
Due to the action-oriented nature of her work, the actor-turned-activist suffered from constant harassment from state security agents, and her phone which was registered in China, was traced and tapped.
This also helps explain the swift action around Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, who accused a top Chinese official of sexual harassment. Shuai has largely disappeared from the public space since she spoke out. While what she did didn’t necessarily fit into the box of collective action, like the Feminist Five’s actions, Peng still went after a top official. As this Index article highlights, China has space for people to accuse low-level officials but not those at the top and Peng learnt the hard way.
Another issue that feminists now face is China’s low birthrate, which fell for the seventh year in a row in 2023. Fear is that censorship of feminism will increase as an growing number of Chinese feminists now hold negative views on marriage and childbearing. This is especially true for those identified as “radical feminists”, who are strongly against heteronormative marriage and childbearing. Many believe this was the reason behind the overnight crackdown on eight radical feminist groups in 2021 on Douban, with the officially stated reason being that they “consisted of extremism and radical political ideology”.
One episode of the critically acclaimed feminist podcast Seahorse planet, which discussed resisting the tradition of unconditionally obeying one’s parents, was similarly censored as filial piety is seen as the bedrock of the Chinese patriarchal order – which demands an increasing birthrate. On the flipside you have labels like “leftover women”, a negative term that gained traction from 2006 to essentially try and shame women into getting married, which continues to be used on one form or another. Ultimately it’s expedient for the government to pressure Chinese women into having children and they’ll ramp up rhetoric that helps that, while curtailing conversations advocating the opposite.
So is the topic of feminism free to discuss in China? Yes, so long as it’s not oriented towards collective-action, it leaves the ruling power of the party-state untouched and doesn’t threaten the birthrate, which doesn’t really leave much to discuss at all, except perhaps sanitary pads and lipstick.
