There’s a great quote from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure about scarecrows and the law:
We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape, till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror.
The irony, of course, being that this character later exploits the legal system for his own gain. The law is supposed to protect us, but strict adherence to its rules often leads to unjust outcomes. A dilemma. Ahhh, I love a dilemma.
When studying law, I read criminal judgments for fun (I know). I was fascinated by how often judges’ personal values tainted their findings – and how this so often related to marginalised members of the community. It was an obvious problem. And not just a ‘we know better now’ problem either – this is one we’ve seen the fallout of over and over – just consider the sexual assault and domestic violence cases you’ve read about in the last twelve months.
Huge strides have been made across countless civil rights movements. But our judicial systems have their very foundations in historical patriarchy and they keep failing us. They are designed by and for the most powerful, then tweaked and implemented by bureaucracy – like me. I’ve been one of the bureaucratic bad guys. As an international lawyer and public servant, I discovered from the inside just how clogged our ‘protective’ machinery really is.
Now I might be an author but I’m no Shakespeare. So, while Will got poetic, I got literal with a community scarecrow competition and a dead conservative judge in my novel, Neighbourhood Watch.
This was my answer to showing how the kind of disappointments I was seeing behind the scenes bled into the intimate, domestic world we all actually live in. Because the law is rarely about adhering to rules, and justice certainly isn’t. Instead, the answers are buried in backchannels, trade-offs, and preferencing one devil over another. And in our ordinary world of nosy neighbours, familial expectations and ungovernable pets, how anyone deals with this systemic perversity is always an interesting story.
These stories are best told by voices marginalised by the system. I chose women’s. In all our different forms, experiences, cultures, and ways of being – I’ve always enjoyed seeing how women outmanoeuvre those things that don’t work for us. We can be extraordinarily creative and formidable. What can I say? I love women.
So, Neighbourhood Watch is a snapshot of this world we live in, and three different women who need to make it work in circumstances set against them. There’s no tragedy without comedy, nor darkness without light – so while the scarecrows began symbolically, they’re also scarecrows. . .
The Rossmoyne Street scarecrow competition helped set me on a wonderful path of community absurdity, secrets and family. And while the law gets abused as a roost for what it’s supposed to keep away, now we have three more women knocking birds off their perch.
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