20 APRIL 2022: UPDATED VERSION SOON (SO DON'T PURCHASE YET)

The woman in the photo on the cover, that's Ms Janice Morris. Water, eggs and flour were thrown at her and over her. It's also me, the author of this book. I too was attacked while sitting on a bench in England. Water, sand and stones were pelted at me while I was reading and annotating a report for the Dutch version of Forensics for Dummies, wanting to grab a bit of sunshine without having to walk all the way to the Costa Coffee at the West Quay shopping mall in Southampton. Two stones hit my head. I counted myself lucky that I had not been working on my laptop at the time.

My bench stood in Woolston, Southampton, Janice's bench in Bury St Edmunds. Janice is English, but I am Dutch. Why were we attacked and why are so many white English adults okay with this? Why was Bijan Ebrahimi, a young and gentle and attractive Iranian man, targeted relentlessly by neighbours, city council staff and police officers? Why are so many people a witness to workplace bullying at the office, but don't they step up and does nobody else either?

A few years after my bench attack, as I was walking along London Road/Kingston Road in Portsmouth on a Sunday afternoon, two young men greeted me from a window right above me, near Kingston Crescent. When I return the greeting and said "good afternoon", they emptied a bucket with liquid over me. I pretended nothing had happened and continued walking, but when I got home, I took a shower and washed my hair because the liquid could have been urine, for example.

This kind of stuff had been going on in Portsmouth for years and continued. I got angrier and angrier. I wrote this book to get rid of some of my anger. While writing, I noticed that women who are in their mid-to-late forties and living independently seem to get targeted quite often in England. It also happened to Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, for example. She is French. English police tends to side with the attackers. Why? What is behind this cruelty? What drives this?

Ask yourself, if an independent professional like me, an intelligent, very capable and highly educated white Dutchwoman from Amsterdam without disabilities gets powerlessly abused in England and has no recourse, then what does that mean for people in England who aren't white or who do have a so-called disability? What does this mean for autistic children, for example? What does it mean for the millions and millions of Brits who've been stuck in poverty all their lives and whose agency gets taken away all the time because they aren't considered fully-fledged humans in the UK?

The book also discusses two cases of staff being set on fire at work as if this were the most normal thing in the world to do. Prints of newspaper articles about each of these young men are on the door of my wardrobe, to remind me that the phenomenon of cruelty is rampant in England and does not just concern women or the over-45s or foreigners. It also serves as a sad acknowledgment of a life full of potential cut short far too soon.

WARNING: This book surely contains trauma triggers for some people and I certainly do not mince my words in this book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angelina Souren has served as board member for the Environmental Chemistry (and Toxicology) Section of the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society, member of board and committees for a Dutch foundation for women in science and technology and as associate editor of the international newsletter of the US-based Geochemical Society.

Souren's a feminist. She's been self-employed since 1997, when she was still living in Amsterdam. As of the end of 2004, she's been based in Britain, on England's south coast. She has previously lived and worked in the United States and has done fieldwork in countries like Spain and Sweden.

Also available as Kindle ebook.