Young Farmers revelations are shocking and must be stopped

But they’ve been shot in the foot by their own this week as the lid was blown off what goes on among Young Farmers, with stomach-turning headlines about sexual assault being commonplace in their social events.

Women in farming then spoke out about misogyny, harassment and sexism being widespread in the industry, enflaming an already critical situation and any empathy withered.

Accounts of young farmers habitually treating women as sex objects, groping, grabbing, pulling up skirts, pulling down tops, verbal and sexual abuse in a revolting boorish heavy drinking and casual sex culture and revelling in it were sickening.

Women who object are labelled frigid and boring.

They also spoke of non-consensual recording and sharing of sexual acts.

What the hell is going on in this parallel universe of farming? Living by a different set of rules to the rest of us, clearly.

Sexual assault is a crime. Because farmers believe they are different and turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour and totally unacceptable conduct in a civilised society must be called out and stopped.

It takes a lot to be shocked and outraged today, but these accounts achieved both.

There’s much talk about rural isolation. It is no excuse for this type of behaviour going unchecked. It needs serious investigation now, a zero-tolerance policy publicly declared and previous offenders called to account by the women who have previously been too afraid to speak up.

When Farmers Weekly says farming has a problem and men in farming did not appear to be held accountable for their actions compared with other parts of society because they believe they are different there needs to be urgent action.  

The catalyst was 5500 young farmers gathering at Blackpool for the Young Farmers Community DIY AGM conference. They wore, and were selling, polo shirts with slogans too sickening to detail in a family newspaper.

Suffice to say the slogans would outrage public decency and humanity. The young farmers were happy to wear them in front of the general public and, doubtless considered them hilarious wit.

Outrage against them was “woke” and it was just farming “banter”, which made a bad situation even worse.

Abi Kay, Farmers Weekly deputy editor, told how women have shared their experiences about events being all “Sex, drugs, alcohol.”

Young women learned to expect that they will be grabbed and groped there. It has become part and parcel of the culture, she said.
 
“The kind of incidents that were described to me as commonplace are, in fact, classed as sexual assault, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.” Quite.

“Worse still, several of the women said while they would have an issue with this behaviour outside young farmers’ events, they did not see it as problematic at these events, because they had a ‘different set of rules’,” she said.

She told The Telegraph that farming had to get a grip on this problem,” she says. 

“With regard to this event in Blackpool, the T-shirt slogans were completely over the line. 

“Some promoted overt sexual violence, talking about women being scared or choked, but others were just completely sexually explicit.”

Farmers are forever pleading tough lives – working from before dawn to after dusk in all weathers, every day, financially stretched and battered, remote and isolated.

But none of the above qualifies them to treat women like sex toys, making the Vikings look like gentle respectful souls.

The National Federation of Young Farmers’ Clubs, which has 23,000 members around the UK, promises to support young people in agriculture and the countryside and also helps them “enjoy a dynamic social life”.

It says this behaviour is unacceptable and all reported cases are treated extremely seriously.

But the point is that females don’t report because they believe it’s just how it is.

I hope women do feel strong enough now to report offences, retrospectively too, and this horror will be a turning point for organisations that should be a force for good, not an excuse and facility for abuse.

Same old, same old
Marriage rates are plummeting, apart from eternal optimists and hopeless romantics like Rupert Murdoch.

At 93, he’s just run through his wedding vows again for marriage number five in his Californian vineyard.

It prompted the old joke, what does 67-year-old Russian molecular biologist Elena Zhukova see in a 93-year-old media tycoon worth £16 billion? 

Murdoch is her third husband and her second billionaire spouse. Money isn’t the issue here.

What fascinates me is what the serial married wear. The same outfit time and time again.

The white dress, the flowers, the same vows for the third and fifth time? It feels like an am-dram performance where people play parts.

The only change this time – the groom wore trainers with his suit.

However rich a man is, a new pair of feet at 93 cannot be bought.

Nature is so relaxing
Life can be stressful. Nature can wash stress away.

On an evening sail on Wednesday, as the sun set over beautiful Barton Broad, I saw an otter swimming to its young, heard a cuckoo, watched a heron in flight, a swan couple with their six cygnets and jumping fish.

Blissful natural perfection soothed the maelstrom of life – and election.

How lucky we are to have moments like this on our doorsteps.