14 hours ago
Is nothing private any more?
A few years ago, when I taught at university, a student who lived with their parents told me they had argued with their mother about what they described as 'queer identity'. The student had secretly recorded the argument and wondered what I thought about them using it for a piece of writing. I think their assumption was that because I'm a journalist I would embrace the idea. I did not.
How did the UK become a place where young people think it's permissible to record a relative at home and make that recording public? Why has privacy been so easily discarded, and why have people welcomed its demise so they can control the behaviour of others?
My assumption was that Strangers and Intimates would focus on recent decades and technology – with the erasure of privacy stemming from people having the means of surveillance to counter behaviour they think should be punished. But Tiffany Jenkins goes deeper than that, telling the story from the Reformation onwards, examining why people intruded on privacy long before the internet age, and why others fought for it:
The fact is, we are all different in private. We may not be our best selves when we shut the door. We misspeak, we think the unthinkable, we let off steam, we rant and we rave, and we say and do stupid things. Privacy conceals harmful behaviour and impedes accountability, and yet we all require that place away from public view.
That tension, between wanting to be left unchecked to behave as feels human vs the desire of society to protect people from harmful behaviour and accountability, is what drives Jenkins's book.
In early 17th-century England, courts punished behaviour such as adultery, sex outside marriage, drinking in alehouses during church service and dancing on the Sabbath. They 'relied upon members of the community to police each other', Jenkins writes. As well as religious control, she tackles the impact of feminism, the more recent hawking of our private lives – Prince Harry and Big Brother get a mention – and the clampdown on freedoms. The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 makes it illegal to say something even at home that could stir up hatred against people with protected characteristics:
This is a historic change. Since the 17th century, it has been accepted that there is a crucial distinction between what a person says or thinks in private and their public speech, a demarcation between private life and public life. Only totalitarian governments ignored that.
Jenkins takes care to remind us why privacy has been invaded, from a law against incest introduced in the 1600s to the killing of seven-year-old Marie Colwell in 1973 by her stepfather and the increased intervention that followed. But she also mentions the 'removal of 121 children from their parents in Cleveland in 1987, based on later disproved allegations of sexual and Satanic abuse'. So there is a line – but where to draw it?
It has been misjudged many times, whether by a student recording a parent, Boris Johnson's neighbours revealing his quarrel with his partner over spilled wine (an example Jenkins refers to), or those online warriors who expose private messages with 'got receipts' chutzpah but show no awareness of the broader damage they are doing for a petty win. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, before email. Letters were private. Even when I started using email, at university and then work in the early 2000s, it was regarded as private. It was only when an infamous email (I won't mention the name, for privacy's sake) went viral that we realised the risk. Now we know emails are not private, so we're careful – the same as we are in all our messages and in our behaviour. We are always being monitored, so act accordingly.
Towards the end of Strangers and Intimates Jenkins writes:
The divide between public and private… has dissolved. The two realms have become indistinguishable, leading to confusion about the rules governing each and preventing the realisation of their respective benefits.
For years it felt shocking that so many turned against free expression, and it seemed impossible that the tide could turn back again. But that tide has shifted a bit. Maybe the erosion of privacy could also be reversed, so we can behave in the more human way, as we once did. This book might be a start.
