More Than a Scandal
How can we make sure people like Katie Meyler never again build spaces that leave girls vulnerable to abuse? To move forward, I believe my country needs to focus on three things: By localization, I mean giving support and directing resources to people doing good work at the community level who know the issues personally and what it takes to solve them. I believe we could have likely avoided the tragedy that took place at the More Than Me school if the people running it came from the same community.
Meyler is not accused of molesting these girls herself. West Point, the slum in Monrovia where she worked, is an impoverished area. I believe that if Meyler were a local, it would have been easier for parents to report Johnson and the school to the authorities. I also believe the abuse and exploitation that took place at the More Than Me school could have been prevented if we had stronger laws against rape and abuse. Our legislators must pass a comprehensive rape law now.
Along with stronger anti-rape legislation, we need to do a better job of vetting the people we allow to work with our most vulnerable girls. Aside from never conducting a thorough background check on Johnson, did anyone ever vet Meyler herself? Why was a relatively young foreigner with little experience in education allowed to set up schools for vulnerable girls? But that is not enough.
She needs to resign fully. And for those NGOs that do have sexual exploitation and abuse policies in place, we need an oversight committee that makes sure they are enforcing those policies. Another question I have been asking myself: Why did Meyler choose West Point? In November , it was revealed in the Swedish press that the husband of one of the academy members had been accused of serial sexual abuse , in assaults alleged to have taken place over more than 20 years. Jean-Claude Arnault, a French photographer and cultural entrepreneur, is married to the poet and academician Katarina Frostenson.
In addition to assault accusations against him, the pair are accused of misusing academy funding. Arnault has denied all accusations, and Frostenson has refused to comment.
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The academy is paralysed by the scandal, which was followed by a slew of resignations and expulsions. Six of The Eighteen have withdrawn from any part in its deliberations; another two were compelled to do so. The statutes say that 12 members must be present to elect any new ones, so with only 10, no important decisions can be taken and no new members elected. The vacuum has been filled with invective. Engdahl, a close friend of Arnault, has in turn called the current secretary the worst the academy has ever had.
The scandal broke when the Stockholm daily paper Dagens Nyheter published the testimonies of 18 women who said that they had been assaulted or exploited by Arnault. Even if many were anonymous, the cumulative effect was impossible to ignore. In two cases the allegations amounted to rape.
What made the matter a wider global scandal is that it seemed to reveal something rotten at the heart of the Swedish Academy: Arnault and Frostenson also profited for years from academy subsidies to an arts club they owned and ran together. In addition, Frostenson has been accused of leaking the names of literature prize winners to Arnault, with the result that large bets were placed with bookies in Paris. Soon after the scandal broke, the secretary of the academy, Sara Danius, announced that she had herself been sexually harassed by Arnault.
She called in lawyers and attempted to expel Frostenson from the academy. Arnault, meanwhile, has powerful defenders. His great friend Engdahl campaigned to have Danius expelled in turn. In the event, both women stepped down. Enough members resigned in support of Danius that the academy was left inquorate, with Engdahl in control of the rump. It seems possible that the king of Sweden , who has ultimate responsibility for the academy, will simply close the whole thing down this summer, with potentially disastrous consequences for the Nobel prize in literature.
The Nobel Foundation, which funds the prize, is refusing to keep doing so until the academy is cleaned up. The scandal has elements of a tragedy, in which people who set out to serve literature and culture discovered they were only pandering to writers and the people who hang around with them.
The pursuit of excellence in art was entangled with the pursuit of social prestige.
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The academy behaved as if the meals in its clubhouse were as much an accomplishment as the work that got people elected there. The academy had thought it stood for the culture of TS Eliot: It turns out to be much more like the culture of an ageing rock star: T he Academy was, from its inception in , an elitist institution. It was to contain the best writers and scholars in Sweden, and to guard and nourish the language.
It puts out an official list of all the recognised words in Swedish and is still working, after more than a century, on the definitive dictionary of the language.
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Members are elected for life, and inducted at a banquet with a fanfare of trumpets. Membership brings considerable financial advantages: The kind of literature it exists to nourish is kept alive largely by subsidy. With a few exceptions, its members could not make a living from writing. The books that sell in Sweden are almost always those that can be profitably translated, which means crime novels, with the occasional quirky literary breakout such as the novel Popular Music from Vittula.
In the s, the idea that the academy was the pinnacle of Swedish culture came under attack, at the same time as the wider belief that European — and particularly Swedish — culture represented the peak of human achievement was looking rather unconvincing. To the academy, this was a slowly growing but existential threat. However, as the world of literature expanded to include Latin America, Africa, India, Japan and China, this aspiration began to look unrealistic.
The academy had been established to embody and to strengthen the claim that Swedish was one of the great languages of European civilisation, as worthy of respect as any other. In the academy put this belief to the test by choosing two of its own members, the poets Harry Martinson and Eyvind Johnson, for the prize — a choice that was greeted with a storm of derision. Four years later, Martinson killed himself. This criticism seems unduly harsh: Martinson is a much better poet than, for example, Bob Dylan, who was awarded the prize in But the dismissive reaction was a warning of things to come.
She arranged not to have to travel to the weekly meals in Stockholm because this would disrupt her work too much. She left in after a very public row when the academy failed even to discuss a motion in support of Salman Rushdie, after a fatwa was issued against him. Two other members also tried to resign over the Rushdie affair.
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They, like Ekman, were told that the statutes made no provision for anyone to leave before death. So, like her, they simply cut off all contact with the academy. The members could have chosen to try to make a difference in the world. Instead, they turned inwards, cleaving to the belief in their own self-importance and in their perfect right to secrecy. When I was last in Stockholm, in May, none of the academicians I approached would talk at all, and few people would talk on record. And no one, I think, wants to be seen washing dirty linen in the foreign press.
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But I was told again and again that the academy was run by small cliques, and that the story could not be understood outside of the personal relations of the people within it. E kman was one of the few Academicians whose novels sold in any quantity in Sweden. The split between popular and elite writing was widening throughout the s and it shows up very clearly in the saga of two writers, only one of whom would become important to the academy. One had started a literary magazine when he was 17 and still in school. At the age of 24, Larsson published a novel full of meaningless sex and alienation called The Autists — and became a critical sensation.
So great was his success that the other Stig Larsson changed the spelling of his name to Stieg. He was working for years in almost complete obscurity on a novel called Men Who Hate Women, while earning his living on small left-wing magazines. Kris was a small but very fashionable magazine, a war cry against the earnest worthiness of much of Swedish literature then, which was full of noble proletarians and earnest worries about socialism.
Kris preached Derrida, and the importance of French and German literature over supposedly provincial American writers. Stig Larsson got to interview Foucault. This was all happening at a time when Swedish popular culture was rushing in the other direction, ignoring European influences, and indeed languages, and embracing the English language, commercial television, hamburgers, credit cards, celebrity and golf.
The insurgent elitism of Kris magazine made a stark contrast not just with popular culture, but with the stiff, unfashionable elitism of the Swedish Academy in the early s. In a narrow, Swedish context, the Academy was radically opposed to the egalitarian ideals of the Social Democrats who had governed the country for 44 years. At one stage there were fewer Social Democrat members of the academy than Catholics — and Catholics in Sweden were then a tiny minority. In what must be seen as an effort at renewal, the academy turned to a new generation. The young feminist poet Katarina Frostenson was elected in She entered the academy — as all members do — with a ceremony at a formal banquet.
With her French husband, the cultural entrepreneur Jean-Claude Arnault, she ran Forum, a basement club in Stockholm dedicated to high culture — poetry readings and classical music in an atmosphere charged with high seriousness and erotic intensity. The relationship was particularly incestuous because Forum, like the rest of Swedish high culture, is dependent on subsidy, and some of that came from the academy.
According to an article in Dagens Nyheter, the academy said Frostenson did not declare that she owned half the club it was helping to subsidise.
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Larsson himself was unelectable, having developed a notorious amphetamine habit; he was living the life of a literary rock star to the full. So he took her to her parents, being as polite as he possibly could, for it had suddenly occurred to him that he might be reported to the police. Engdahl and the literary critic Anders Olsson had edited Kris magazine with Larsson, but unlike him their bad-boy poses were purely literary.
He was on the board of the Royal Opera and of the Nobel Foundation.