So many politicians strive to make the personal the political in their quest to explain how their own life story relates to what they want to do. The hope is that in humanising themselves they become more likeable; the reality is more often realised in clunky cliches than powerful stories. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is something of a rarity in cheerily poking fun at himself for labouring his status as the “son of a bus driver”.
One of Rishi Sunak’s favourite points of reference is his daughters. Back in July 2022, he said that “as a father of two girls” he wanted them to feel safe walking at night. Last November, the prime minister told voters he had taken safety for granted and wanted his daughters to be able to walk to school safely. In April, he wrote that “as a father, women’s rights are important to me”.
And last week he posted on social media in relation to the fatal shooting of a nine-year-old girl in Liverpool: “As a father of two daughters, I shared the nation’s shock and grief at Olivia Pratt-Korbel’s murder.” That last one is odd. The murder of a child is universally accepted as abhorrent. No one needs to draw on experience as a parent to understand that. And so it contributes to a sense that Sunak might be drawing on fatherhood as a vote-winning ploy, not a genuine explanation of why things matter to him.
But Sunak came in for criticism long before this latest stumble – as have other men who have cited the fact that they are fathers when talking about violence against women, for example in the context of #MeToo. Men should not need to reference their relationships with their daughters, the argument goes, when talking about women’s safety and sex equality. They should care about these objectives innately, and to invoke fatherhood is to patronise and devalue women.
Sure, it can be done crudely, and used as a cover for a man’s own failures on this front. But I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with men – politicians or otherwise – talking about equality through the lens of their daughters’ lives. Moreover, calling them out over it is likely to be counter-productive, because outside the world of Twitter bubbles it’s probably how some men come to hold more enlightened views on the subject.
A 2019 analysis of UK longitudinal data found that fathers become less likely to support traditional gender norms if they have daughters, but only when they hit school age. These effects did not hold for mothers of daughters. The researchers also found that having school-age daughters is associated with families being less likely to adopt a traditional male-breadwinner model, where a father works and the mother stays home.
This doesn’t surprise me. Having daughters clearly isn’t a magic wand that transforms chauvinist pigs into equality campaigners. But parenting well is an exercise in extreme empathy if ever there were one, and the intensely unconditional nature of parental love could force someone to see the world through someone else’s eyes in a way other relationships don’t.
One might prefer for all men to come of age understanding the dynamics of patriarchy, but that’s not where we are, and if a man’s route to shunning sexism comes through his daughters, that’s something to be celebrated rather than mocked.
This isn’t a one-way street: having sons can shift a mother’s perspective too. I remember an event in 2018, a few months after the Harvey Weinstein revelations broke. One brave woman put her hand up and said she was worried for her sons and where #MeToo and the entreaty that we must believe women to the exclusion of any other accounts might take us. I have to confess that, in my anger at society’s failure to tackle sexual harassment, I wasn’t ready to hear her point.
I’ve since reflected on what she said and now I think the fact she was a mother took her to a similar conclusion, but more quickly than me. Today, I’d accept that consent isn’t always as black and white as it would ideally be; that there could conceivably be situations between young people where a woman has not given consent for a sexual act but a man thinks she has.
I had a fascinating conversation recently with a defence barrister about why the rape conviction rate was so low; she said that one under-discussed factor was that, to secure a rape conviction, prosecutors have to prove to a jury not only that a complainant did not consent but that the defendant did not have a reasonable belief that the complainant was consenting. In other words, the law allows for a situation in which a woman did not consent but a man could have reasonably believed that she did (that “reasonably” is critical), and juries can believe a woman’s account, sympathise with her, yet still not convict a defendant of rape.
I’ve since spoken to other female friends who have confessed that they worry about their teenage sons clumsily reading a situation wrongly, maybe where there’s lots of alcohol involved, with huge consequences. A lot of sexual assault is caused by men intentionally causing harm. And of course the answer is not to disbelieve women. But there is a grey zone and we need to educate boys and girls about what consent – a culturally understood as well as legally defined phenomenon that is about context and non-verbal as well as verbal cues – means, to help prevent sexual assault happening in the first place. To pretend that consent is simple is to fail young people of both sexes; to leave a vacuum is to allow it to be filled with damaging messages from porn culture.
It does not undermine the fact that women and girls suffer so much violence at the hands of some men to acknowledge that there are different and difficult things that men and women have to negotiate. I suspect that some of the aversion to fathers using their daughters as a reference point in conversations about equality is powered by the human tendency to sort the world into fixed tribes of goodies and baddies. How dare a man not get it until then?
But parenting a child can help men and women see the world in a way that builds empathy for members of the opposite sex, and that’s something we should welcome.
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
