The Social Cost of Saying No
On consent, prejudice and the people who stay seated.
Two nights before I was due to fly to France for a ten-day holiday, I discovered I was expected to share a king-size bed with the friend who’d invited me, not the double room I’d been expecting. She not once asked whether I’d be comfortable with this. Feeling confused and shocked, I wondered whether to back out, even though everything had been paid for and was non-refundable.
I haven’t shared a bed with anyone for years. The friend knew about my rape, and although I wasn’t suggesting for a moment that she’d do anything to me whilst I slept, the absence of any conversation about sharing a bed was alarming and added discomfort to what should’ve been a relaxing start to my long overdue holiday. A shared room on a group holiday might be expected, yet sleeping next to someone all night is an intimate arrangement which requires consent.
I explained that I wasn’t comfortable, and was met with: ‘Oh, I’m a heavy sleeper. You won’t disturb me. And I’m a woman; I’m not a threat to you. My friends share all the time.’
And there it was: a lack of awareness and consideration I hadn’t expected.
My concern wasn’t whether I’d disturb her. It was that I hadn’t been consulted about something involving my body, my personal space and where I’d be sleeping for ten nights. Yet even as I expressed my discomfort, her response centred on her comfort and her choices. I was told, ‘There are no single beds, everyone is sharing with somebody, and there are always the sofas.’ Yes, I could sleep on the sofa. But why was I expected to absorb the consequences of a decision about my own body that I’d played no part in?
The night before flying, I barely slept, and by morning I’d decided to go home and lose the money I’d invested. Fortunately, before I spoke to said friend, a separate room became available, yet the assumption, and the dismissive response when I questioned it, still shook the molecules of my soul. Consent is not a concept that belongs exclusively to sex. It also concerns privacy, personal space, physical contact, and the right to be consulted before decisions involving our bodies are made for us.
It turns out, this was the first example of a pattern that would continue throughout the holiday: I’d name a boundary or concern, its seriousness would be reduced or dismissed, and I was expected to make myself smaller so everyone else could remain comfortable.
Months earlier, I’d told my friend I wasn’t used to group holidays, that I wanted time off work, had several books to read, and needed time alone. The week before the flight, I discovered that one of the guests held anti-immigration views. I’d been assured that we’d all get on, that everyone was a ‘good person’, had different politics, and that no one would be offended if I removed myself from conversations.
Her assurance raised a question I’ve been unable to resolve for years: if someone is racist, xenophobic, hostile towards immigrants or Islamophobic, in what meaningful sense are they a good person?
Human beings are complicated. We all contain contradictions, and none of us should be reduced to the worst thing we’ve ever believed. But someone may be generous to their friends, loving toward their family and delightful company over dinner while holding deeply prejudiced beliefs about people they don’t know. Hitler is the most commonly known case in point. Being pleasant to those within our own circle is not the same as being good. If our kindness stops at the border of race, nationality or religion, is it goodness at all, or simply loyalty to those we have decided belong?
A difference of opinion is what colour to paint a room, where to eat or whether pineapple belongs anywhere near a pizza. Racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia are not harmless personal preferences. They concern whose humanity, dignity, safety and belonging we consider negotiable. ‘We’re all different’ sounds wonderfully inclusive until it is used to excuse intolerance.
There was another contradiction. In the first two days, I was introduced with apparent pride as a published author and radio host. There seemed to be a certain prestige in having invited me. But the woman behind those labels, with her boundaries, convictions, trauma, cultural knowledge and need for occasional solitude, didn’t seem to command the same respect.
I saw another version of this in the way the villa owner was discussed. There was prestige in staying in an artist’s beautiful home, yet his art was ridiculed, and one piece was described as a potential ‘vomit bowl’. The ugliness of that comment wasn’t only in what it revealed about the group’s excessive drinking, but in its contempt for the artist and the work he’d created or deliberately chosen. They wanted the status of staying in his home without respecting the whole person behind it, just as they appeared to want the published author and radio host without the woman who came with her own boundaries, convictions and voice.
We do this culturally all the time. We quote writers whose politics we would silence and display art while ridiculing the artist. We invite interesting people into our spaces and then take offence when they bring their values, experiences and inconvenient truths with them. We want what their identity contributes to our image, but not what their humanity requires of us.
There is nothing abstract about these subjects for me. My father-in-law was a refugee, my ex-husband held a refugee document for many years at the beginning of our relationship, and my sons are Arab. Many of my family and friends are Muslim. I’ve lived in countries across the world, including four particularly significant years in Egypt during the Uprising. My life’s work centres on human rights, cultural cohesion and the ways people and institutions cause harm while insisting they are doing nothing wrong.
So I began to wonder, ‘why have I been invited?’ Had I been invited as my whole self, or only as the published author and radio host whose achievements made for an interesting introduction? Was I welcome only for as long as the woman behind those labels remained sociable and silent about my views?
On the second day, familiar political soundbites surfaced in conversation: comments about ‘being black and arriving on boats’, and more anti-immigration and anti-Muslim remarks. Human beings escaping conflict, poverty and genocide were reduced to threats to culture, inconveniences or material for jokes. None of it was carefully researched. They were the ‘rage bait’ headlines of certain political parties and mainstream media, repeated as fact.
When challenged, prejudice often performs a curious disappearing act. Racism becomes ‘concern’. Xenophobia becomes ‘common sense’. Islamophobia becomes ‘asking questions’. Dehumanisation becomes ‘just my opinion’. Anyone who refuses the new label is accused of being intolerant of other people’s views.
This made me wonder whether people who insist they’re not racist understand what racism is, particularly when they’ve neither experienced it nor listened properly to those who have. Can we declare ourselves free from racism if we believe our intentions matter more than the impact of our words, or if we only recognise its most blatant and deliberate forms?
Some of the most common expressions of racism, sexual harassment and sexual violence are also the most subtle. Racism may appear as ‘I don’t see colour’ or ‘we’re all just human’. Sexual harassment may begin with a sexualised joke, an unwanted comment about somebody’s body or a touch dismissed as accidental. Each incident can be explained away as humour, friendliness or misunderstanding, and the person affected is accused of oversensitivity for recognising the pattern. Yet these apparently minor acts test whether boundaries will be defended, whether witnesses will intervene and how much prejudice or entitlement the surrounding group is prepared to normalise.
When I challenged the remarks, I was told that Britain is ‘the most tolerant nation’. I replied, ‘Tolerance is not acceptance, and there is a vast distinction between the two.’ The woman who invited me chastised me as if I were a child: ‘We’re not to discuss politics because this is a birthday celebration.’ But racist jokes are allowed? Interesting.
Tolerance says: I disapprove of your presence, but I will permit it. Acceptance recognises that another person’s humanity and belonging are not ours to grant in the first place. And a claim of exceptional British tolerance is a hollow comparison from someone who’s never lived and integrated anywhere else, especially when it’s made in the same breath as entire groups of people are treated with suspicion.
By the second day I was really sick, had made great friends with the high thread count Egyptian cotton bedding and various rolls of toilet tissue. On the third, we went to a vineyard for a group dinner where more friends joined us. After the racist jokes, the anti-immigration comments and the instruction that politics must not be discussed, I quietly removed myself and ate alone. I believed that withdrawing was preferable to creating an argument during somebody else’s celebration, and it kept me from making anyone else sick.
Yet my decision was treated as an insult. The woman who had assured me that nobody would mind if I needed time alone said she was ‘really disappointed’, that her friends had welcomed me and that she couldn’t understand why I’d chosen to eat by myself.
When we step away from a prejudiced conversation, we make visible what everyone else is willing to sit through. Our empty chair becomes a form of dissent. We haven’t demanded that anybody follow us, yet our departure disturbs the comfortable fiction that nothing unacceptable is happening.
It is easier, then, to make the person who leaves the problem:
Why is she avoiding us?
Why is she making things awkward?
Why can’t she accept that people have different opinions?
Why can’t we all just get along?
The irony of those questions is not lost on me, and they are telling of how attention shifts from what was said to the person who refused to sit quietly while it was being said.
For the rest of the holiday I limited my contact and rested when I needed to, avoiding conversations I would not legitimise through my participation. Having lost my voice and struggling to breathe, I had no desire to debate the humanity of immigrants, Muslims, refugees or Palestinians.
On the final evening, two women cornered me while a third stood by and silently watched. One said she simply wanted to ‘find out what was going on’ and why I’d said certain things about them and avoided them. I’d already told the woman who invited me that I’d discuss what had happened once everyone was home and emotions were no longer amplified inside a shared villa. That boundary wasn’t respected either. The questioning continued while I was still unwell and had been reduced to tears.
One of the women said she wanted to ‘have this out’ so that she ‘didn’t make the same mistake again’ with someone like me. Then, while insisting that the views I’d heard were not racist or xenophobic, she said: ‘For your information, it’s all the immigrants coming into this country that are raping all the young girls.’
She knew I’d been raped. She knew about my ongoing court case. In that context, I could only understand her reference as an attempt to recruit me into her xenophobia, as though my own experience should make me agree that immigrants arriving by boat were the threat.
It did the exact opposite.
Using sexual violence to inflame hostility towards immigrants does not honour women and girls who have been raped. It exploits us. It takes our trauma and turns it into political currency. Rape is not made more serious when the rapist is an immigrant, nor less serious when he is British, white, wealthy, familiar or sitting at the family table. Men do not become rapists because they cross a border, or because of their religion or skin colour.
If concern for raped women and girls appears only when their suffering can be weaponised against a racial, religious or immigrant population, then the concern is not truly for those women and girls. Their pain has simply been borrowed to justify somebody else’s prejudice. For a woman to use my rape in that way, while other women stood silently watching me being cornered, was not solidarity. It was an insult to me and to every woman and young girl whose sexual trauma has been used for a purpose other than protecting her.
I want to be clear that not everyone on the holiday expressed racist, xenophobic or Islamophobic views, and I’m not interested in accusing people of things they didn’t say. But those who didn’t express them didn’t shut them down either. Nobody said that immigrants are not collectively rapists, or that refugees, Muslims and Palestinians shouldn’t be turned into jokes. Nobody stood beside me when my withdrawal became the subject of a confrontation.
It felt like bullying, although they didn’t see it that way. Again, the pattern was the same. My boundary was less important than their desire for answers. My illness was less important than their entitled sense of offence. My experience of what had been said was less important than their need to establish that they were not racist. The strange thing about being confronted by people determined to prove that nothing racist had occurred was hearing a xenophobic statement offered as part of the defence.
This is where the holiday stopped being merely a difficult personal experience and became something larger. I kept returning to the instruction that the conversation must stop because it was a birthday celebration.
Why should a birthday matter more than protecting somebody from abuse? When did celebration become a moral exemption, a period during which prejudice, humiliation or intimidation must not be named because naming it might spoil the mood?
There is an important distinction between the legal offence of coercive control and the wider ways people use social pressure to control others. Under the law in England and Wales, controlling or coercive behaviour is understood as a repeated or continuous pattern within an intimate or family relationship which has a serious effect on the victim. The behaviour may include isolation, humiliation and control over sleep, finances, relationships, movement and other parts of everyday life. The cumulative pattern is important because individual incidents can look innocent when viewed alone, and Crown Prosecution Service guidance is explicit about examining the wider pattern rather than isolated moments.[1]
Saying ‘this is a birthday celebration’ is not, by itself, the criminal offence of coercive control. But it can operate as social control with a coercive effect. It dictates which truths may be spoken, when, and whose emotions must be suppressed to preserve the occasion. It means we have collectively decided that maintaining the atmosphere matters more than addressing what is happening to you.
The birthday itself becomes a silencing device.
Once I began thinking about that, I couldn’t stop, much like my nose wouldn’t stop running.
If somebody makes a racist remark at a birthday dinner, should we stay silent because there is a cake waiting?
If a man humiliates his wife at the table, do we keep raising our glasses because we don’t want to embarrass him?
If we know he controls her money, restricts her friendships or monitors her movements, do we pretend not to notice because confronting him might ruin the evening?
If he verbally abuses her in front of us, at what point do we stop the celebration?
If the birthday boy has just raped his daughter upstairs, does his birthday still matter more than protecting her?
The last question is deliberately shocking. It should be.
We tend to imagine that we would act when confronted with the most extreme abuse. We imagine ourselves courageous and decisive. We would intervene, call the police, believe the victim and refuse to sit beside the abuser and eat cake. But abuse rarely begins in a social environment where every smaller violation has been challenged. It survives in cultures that have taught people not to make a fuss, not to embarrass the family, not to spoil special occasions and not to challenge socially powerful people without incontrovertible proof. It survives where reputation is protected more vigorously than safety, where anger, withdrawal and distress are treated as evidence that the victim is unstable or difficult, and where charm is confused with goodness and friends insist, ‘But he’s always been lovely to me.’
Courage does not suddenly appear when the abuse becomes sufficiently monstrous. It is like any muscle; it is strengthened through use. We exercise it when we challenge the racist remark and refuse to laugh at the dehumanising joke. We exercise it when we ask whether somebody agreed to the arrangement being made for them, when we stand beside the person everyone else is isolating, or check in on the person who is isolating themselves. We exercise it when we walk away from a conversation that requires our silent participation and say, ‘This is not acceptable’, even when doing so disrupts the birthday, the wedding, the holiday, the family Christmas or the organisation’s carefully protected reputation and brand.
If we continually choose comfort over courage in the smaller moments, why are we so certain we will behave differently when the danger becomes greater?
This applies to every form of abuse.
Sexual abuse becomes a misunderstanding or a private matter.
Emotional abuse becomes a difficult relationship.
Psychological abuse becomes oversensitivity, drama or instability.
Spiritual abuse becomes religious guidance, tradition or moral correction.
Financial abuse becomes somebody being better with money and therefore entitled to control it all.
Coercive behaviour becomes keeping the peace or knowing what is best.
Group intimidation becomes clearing the air.
And silencing resistance becomes protecting the occasion.
Abuse is not always hidden from view. Sometimes it is hidden by the language we use.
The same impulse has been on public display recently. During a COS runway show at New York Fashion Week on 13 September 2026, Steven Kolb, then president and chief executive of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, physically restrained PETA activists protesting the brand’s use of wool. Video showed him wrestling one activist to the ground and covering her mouth with his hand. The image could hardly have been more literal: a powerful man using his body to restrain a woman and his hand to silence her because her protest had disrupted an elite event. Kolb later acknowledged there was no justification for it, took leave and resigned, as reported by Reuters.[2]
Around the same time, Macklemore was removed from the remaining dates of Ed Sheeran’s tour after calling for a free Palestine. This was no unforeseen interruption; the two had been friends for more than a decade, and Macklemore’s advocacy was already public. Sheeran said promoters made the final decision after venue owners objected, including Robert Kraft, the Zionist billionaire owner of Gillette Stadium.[3] Sheeran said he had never wanted his music to be political, yet he publicly supported Ukraine and performed at the Concert for Ukraine in 2022. That was political too. It was simply politically safe.
All four remaining support acts and Sheeran’s backing musicians withdrew in solidarity, accepting that resistance might cost them money, access and opportunity. Sheeran continued without them and cried onstage while describing himself as abandoned. His emotion may have been genuine, but it felt more like ‘white tears’: the way a powerful person’s distress at facing consequences can pull attention away from the people enduring the original harm. Macklemore was clearer: neither he nor Sheeran was the victim. The victims are the Palestinian people, and other nations suffering from a lack of freedom. The other artists walked away and refused to let their silence be mistaken for consent. That is the muscle of resistance in action.[3]
These are not equivalent to what happened in a holiday villa, and I have no interest in a false comparison between physical restraint and a hostile group confrontation. The connection is the social mechanism. Someone disrupts a comfortable performance by naming harm; attention moves away from the substance, the person protesting becomes the disruption, and silencing them becomes more urgent than hearing them. On the runway, the performance was fashion. On the tour, it was commercial unity. In the villa, it was friendship and group harmony. In abusive families, it may be respectability. In businesses, charities, religious communities and public institutions, it may be integrity, profit and brand reputation.
The person who speaks threatens that performance because they expose the distance between how the group sees itself and what it is willing to tolerate.
This is why bystanders matter. They are not merely part of the scenery. Their silence communicates approval: it tells the person remarking that it is socially permissible, and tells the person objecting that they are alone. It allows resistance to be portrayed as disproportionate. It protects the speaker’s place within the group while making the dissenter’s membership conditional upon their silence, and it teaches everyone watching that belonging depends on not making other people uncomfortable with the truth.
One person may supply the words, but the group supplies permission.
That doesn’t mean every silent person is equally culpable. Some are frightened, vulnerable or at genuine risk themselves. Survival is not complicity, and nobody should be casually condemned for failing to confront an abuser when doing so could place them in danger.
But that wasn’t the dynamic I witnessed. I watched people with the social power to object choose to protect the atmosphere. I watched the group’s discomfort with my resistance become more important than the prejudice that had caused it. I watched those who hadn’t made the original remarks stand with the people offended by my withdrawal rather than with the person who withdrew. Their silence was not neutral, because it did not affect everyone equally. This is how abuse becomes cultural rather than merely individual: the abuser acts, but an entire ecosystem protects the action. The minimiser softens the language, the host protects the occasion, the loyal friend defends the person, the sceptic demands a standard of proof which can never be met, the peacemaker urges everyone to move on, and the bystander says nothing. And the person naming what happened becomes the problem.
And me being me, I’ve spent a great deal of time asking how I ended up here. Why didn’t I see this woman clearly? Are some people exceptionally skilled at concealing who they are, or do I assume greater humanity in others than their choices justify? Did I mistake shared hobbies and experiences for moral compatibility? Was I invited as a more convenient version of me who would smile, remain agreeable and keep the peace? Why would someone who knows my work, what I stand for, and knows my sons are Arab and many of my friends are Muslim believe I would quietly accept racism, xenophobia or Islamophobia? There is no neat answer. People can be warm and prejudiced, generous and cowardly. They can object privately while remaining publicly silent, and sincerely consider themselves good because they judge goodness by how they treat the people closest to them rather than by what they tolerate being done to others. But private goodness is of very little use to the person left standing alone, or those who are tolerated.
We often speak about abuse as though it happens behind locked doors, entirely concealed from the people who would stop it if only they knew. Sometimes that’s true. But sometimes people know. They hear the remark, see the humiliation, notice the fear and watch somebody’s choices being controlled. They witness a person being isolated, questioned, bullied, or silenced. They sense that something is wrong, but persuade themselves it isn’t serious enough, isn’t their business or isn’t the right moment. There is always another birthday, another holiday, another family gathering, another reputation or comfortable fiction that apparently must be protected first.
Silence may feel peaceful to the person remaining silent, but it is rarely experienced as peace by the person abandoned inside it.
Courage is not proved when we imagine ourselves confronting a monster. It is built in the ordinary moments when somebody crosses a boundary, dehumanises another person or tries to silence dissent, and we decide that our comfort, morality, friendships and our celebrations will not be purchased with somebody else’s dignity.
When prejudice or abuse speaks, and everybody else remains seated, silence doesn’t sit somewhere safely in the middle.
It always takes a side.
Endnotes
- Crown Prosecution Service, Controlling or Coercive Behaviour in an Intimate or Family Relationship: https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/controlling-or-coercive-behaviour-intimate-or-family-relationship
- Reuters, “US fashion council CEO Kolb resigns after clash with runway show protesters”, 19 September 2026: https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/us-fashion-council-ceo-kolb-resigns-after-clash-with-runway-show-protesters-2026-09-19/ and The Guardian, 17 September 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2026/sep/17/peta-new-york-fashion-week-steven-kolb
- The Guardian, 15 September 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/15/ed-sheeran-macklemore-palestine-openers-finneas
