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- People Just Do Something
- Bristol Unpacked
- The Debrief
- Area In Focus
People Just Do Something S2 Ep2 – Meg and Bryony from SLEEC
SPEAKERS
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins, Bryony Ball, Megan Baker, Priyanka Raval
INTRO
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Priy, you're a local journalist, so what I want to know well, noticed, have you been following the stepping up scandal at Bristol City Council?
Priyanka Raval
Which one
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
the so there's, you know, there's the stuff about the leadership course that was being run by Bristol Council and then was run by a company seemingly run by a friend of then deputy mayor Asher Craig, and then they kept re basically, after they got to about 200,000 pounds, with more scrutiny put on the procurement, they would set up a new company. And so there's been three companies set up, basically doing this program,
Priyanka Raval
a leadership course,
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
a leadership course, one of Marvin Rees's, big things he spoke about his autobiography, one of his big achievements to the leadership course, which 600,000 basically went to this professor, Christine Bamford's companies, the third one of which Asher Craig was a director on. And there's questions about whether the procurement happened properly. So I was looking into this. It turns out that Christine Bamford, who was doing the leadership course, is a crypto entrepreneur.
Priyanka Raval
Oh, my God.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Asher Craig is also the chair of this crypto company, and the crypto company is called Women Coin. Women Coin, I've got a description here. Women coin was created in 2018 as a coin with a mission to empower women around the world. The goal is to provide a means for women to come together under a single branded coin and use the coin to further the causes for women wherever it's needed. It was also described as Women Coin, the only coin that follows the UN Charter on women. Unfortunately, Women Coin is currently worth zero money. There are 48 billion, what they call women, because the coin is called Women. There's 48 billion women in the world, but there are zero in circulation. And I, you know, I thought we're talking to people who are, you know, at the kind of grassroots level, fighting for sort of liberation of women and the liberation from patriarchy, and I thought we could maybe talk about this…
Priyanka Raval
Absolutely failed attempt at women's liberation.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Hey, look …
Priyanka Raval
It’s a good segue. I suppose…
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I think the issue is that you can't put a price on women.
So you know, some people are fighting for women's liberation on the blockchain, whereas some people are doing it on the block. Who are you speaking to today, Priy?
Priyanka Raval
Oh my God, I feel like we're on like a 90s music show.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Well, you know, if people are going to call us millennial and cringe in the actual Cable newspaper, yeah, we should. We should lean in,
Priyanka Raval
Double down. In fact,
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
double down. Never back down. Double Down is the lesson of today's episode. No, it isn't that's actually the opposite of the lesson.
Priyanka Raval
Okay, go introduce us.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
So this is a podcast from the Bristol Cable it's called people just do something. It's a podcast about people on the front line of political movements, and not the blockchain. We want to expand the definition of what an activist is. With me today is Priyanka Raval and I'm Isaac Kneebone Hopkins. As you know, episodes of this podcast come out every other Friday for Cable early access members for just £10 a month. You can get that early access, or it's Mondays for general release on all good podcast players. This is the second series, so we're on a second round of six episodes, and if you love it, do something about it. Subscribe on your podcast provider that's good for the algorithms. Give it five star reviews and share on social media and talk about it and tell people about it and tell them what they could learn and how it's benefited you. You can also join the Bristol cable today at Bristol cable.org, forward slash join, and if the podcast is what made you join, then tell us when you signed up, so they know that it's worthwhile, not just for the world, but for the bottom line.
Priyanka Raval
Yes. So today, we are joined by Meg and Briony, who are the co founders of an organisation called SLEEC that stands for Survivors Leading Essential Education and Change they set up this organisation in 2019 it's survivor run as the name suggests that wants to change the way that victims of sexual assault are treated and handled by the system. It wants to offer a different kind of support. It advocates for system change and wants to tackle the roots of male violence. I actually first spoke to SLEEC last year when I was reporting on how rape was being prosecuted in Bristol, and obviously that speaks to the national picture, which is pretty dire. In fact, there have been reports by women's charities saying that the criminalisation of rape is so low that we were effectively decriminalising it. Obviously, there is a question mark around the efficacy of just imposing harsher sentences to address sexual violence. But I think what it spoke to, and what the reporting spoke to, was just how marred by patriarchal, outdated gender norms the discourse around sexual violence is, and in general, violence against women. So let's get into it. Here is Meg and Bryony, talking to us about SLEEC.
–––
INTERVIEW
Meg and Bryony, thanks so much for joining us today. How are you doing?
Bryony Ball
Yeah, okay. Thank you.
Priyanka Raval
Actually Meg, you have a hacking cough.
Megan Baker
I actually have a hacking cough when I'm sat in a puffs coat. So, you know, things could be better, but it's actually fine.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
We appreciate the sacrifice for the sake of podcast, yeah.
Priyanka Raval
So we're gonna talk to you about how you started and founded SLEEC, yeah. How did it all come about?
Bryony Ball
It came about quite naturally. I guess me and Meg met in activism in Bristol, and both working in the kind of mental health male violence crisis, like sector and had done a lot of work for many years in these services and in activism, as well as having experienced rape and sexual violence ourselves, going through like services and getting support from these services in Bristol and finding how severely problematic they were and are.
And yeah, we both quit our jobs at the same time and realised as well.
We both at the same kind of phase of being like this just isn't working. We both work very hard in lots of different organisations, from like safe houses to support organisations and left all of them and had some time off. Also was suffering from, like, secondary post traumatic stress from that work, and then from that, so both, kind of like, I never want to do this work again, and then spending some time together after actually, like resting and kind of looking after ourselves from that, realising, no, we need to make something that is just totally different from this. And my independence in these organisations that is entirely led by people with lived experience and entirely led by the people that understand like what they need most.
Priyanka Raval
And so were you both working in these services because of your lived experience?
Bryony Ball
Well, I'm, yeah. I mean, I can speak from myself.
I always wanted to work with people, so I always wanted to work, I guess, yeah, in these kind of systems. And then I started using them around the same I started working within them. A little bit later I started working in them. And I think, yeah, I think my lived experience was what drove me to want to then work within these sort of services or charities. But then quite soon into that, realised that it wasn't what I had kind of assumed that it would be, that we're here giving support, and that it's really accessible and really easy, and this is like a caring environment. It's actually the same as running a business. Charities are like running businesses, and so they adhere to certain narratives and rules and structures and policies that are really rigid in terms of the kind of humanness that you need when giving support.
Then once I was actually in this work and realised that you actually can't really talk about your lived experience, because you take on the role of professional. So there's a severing, then of your experience to how you show up within the organisation and how it structures itself. I quite quickly realised that I was like, Yes, this doesn't quite align with the way I see things.
I was also working in education as well for a long time, which is basically like working in social services now.
Priyanka Raval
And can I ask a bit more about that? Of like, what? What is it like for people trying to access these services? You say they're inadequate. But like, Can you talk us through, like, why… you're smiling like you're about to go off, and please do go off…
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Also as you ask the question. George is like, you can swear swear
Bryony Ball
This is the part that's such a big question, because I think there's so many things that are wrong with the way they're set up. And I think it goes from so many levels. I think the way that we fund organisations is wrong in the way that funders ask for people to structure their organisations in a certain way that they can kind of prove that people are like vulnerable and broken and like these oppressed, like victim people, and you've got to kind of prove that they are like this, and then you're gonna support them in this very limited, linear way to then being like healed 10 out of 10, fully well rounded, strong, empowered individuals.
The narratives are, like, very toxic and also, yeah, very limited, we have to be either like this broken, kind of faceless figure, or generally, it's just like me and Meg are always talking about. The beginning is it's always just hands. It's pictures of hands, or you see hands and like the back of people's heads and shadows, or somebody at a window looking out into the rain, that's your only identity. Or is like somebody that is very like a victim, like seeing the criminal justice system has to be like this kind of young, white, safe, heterosexual, innocent, very distressed, very broken and non sector being and that's that feeds into the, I think, charity sector, and how we're also kind of meant to present, and in how, when you're offered support, if you actually behave or present it in the way it's any different to that, they don't really understand that, because they're actually kind of operating under that… like, I know Meg, had an experience where she was treated like she's basically, well, she's loud and like, speaks in a way that isn't like, Oh, I'm really fragile and broken and yeah, like was offered less support because they had an assumption that, oh, well, you're not really experiencing trauma because you're not presenting in a way, how I expect trauma to look.
Priyanka Raval
What do they think healed looks like?
Megan Baker
Oh, that you're, you know, you go off skipping into rainbows and sunsets with a full time job and a loving partner, and you're married and or and you never think about it ever again, and everything's fine.
And it's like they I think what I found in those services was there's a really there's a real culture of fear, of what Bryony is talking about, of stepping outside of a narrative that's deeply entrenched within our media and within our society.
But I think it the way in which charity services uphold this fixed narrative that Bryony was saying. I don't think they can necessarily cater to people that present in different ways. But even more than that, they there's no funding for specialist services. You know, all specialist services for POC folks or trans folks, or even like looking at it through the lens of being working class, there is such limited support now that it means that unless you fit this demographic, or unless you fit this narrative, the experience you might have might be very different.
Bryony Ball
It's very much this kind of white savior complex, of like, the people that coming into the organisation are those that need saving. We're here to save you. We know what's best for you. And there's nothing really on the outside of that. And like Meg was saying in terms of, like, multiple kind of experiences and oppressions, which is the majority of people that experience sexual violence don't just have this one identity. They've got multiple things intersecting with it, like neurodiversity, for example, there's like, nothing that actually caters to people that are neurodiverse, which is, like a huge amount of people like more than I think people think that just cannot work with the way that the support is offered. So then they're completely ostracised and not there's no support for them.
Priyanka Raval
Yeah, it does feel like and I really felt like this when I was doing some reporting into how rape is prosecuted and how that goes through the criminal justice system. And it was like baffling to me how outdated some of the views that still pervade that area, like the rape myths that are bound in terms of how victims should behave, or, you know, what their actions immediately after an event are and how that, you know, determines their credibility.
But I was thinking that it seems like your experience of accessing the services, working in services like seeing how this, how that misinterprets what a victim should look like, what the journey through trauma should look like, and what success looks like, and that all of this amounts to being really disempowering. Was it like a radicalising moment? Was it in this period of rest where you like actually what we need to do is flip it on its head and be survivor-led.
Bryony Ball
I think there were two things I think that really gave us a lot of like rage, which was that stood out for us personally in our own experiences of being supported by support services, or just services in general, which was one, was this identity of how a survivor is portrayed, and how that is a massive barrier to so many people.
So it started with being like, we want to, like, offer this alternative narrative because we're not seeing it anywhere. And started with an Instagram account of like, taking just pictures of ourselves that were like, not what you would see, just us, like in all states, from on the beach, in bikinis, in different scenarios, but like, having a great time, being sad, being happy, going through all different emotions, and that being like, Okay, this is like, fuller picture of what a survivor could look like, and also like just building a narrative of like, this is what support services present to us, and this is what we could look like. And there's so many different versions of that.
And the other thing was, it was that and starting this mutual aid fund to support survivors that was very specifically set up to be a kind of redistribution of funds that anyone could apply to without having to answer any of these questions, without having to say, what like, what you've experience, because our experience of accessing any kind of support, or even like financial support as people that didn't have money when we were going through trauma, you're met with this kind of like, countless forms where you have to prove yourself.
You have to literally answer all these questions and open up your entire like, life financial situation to prove, yeah, I'm fucked. I can't support myself. Here's my bank statements, here's all of these details to access the tiniest amounts of support or funds. So they were kind of the two things that we were like, This is fucked, and we want to start something that is an alternative… to this, like, support in exchange for, like, something,
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I think you've sort of covered a lot of it, but just so we can kind of really pin it down for people, is sort of defining mutual aid in opposition to charity. I guess it might be a term that you first heard of, obviously, around COVID, lots of people had their mutual aid WhatsApp groups. My streets want to sort of turn into a neighborhood watch, unfortunately, which I think has lost some of his radical credentials, yeah, I know. But like, yeah. How do you define mutual aid and like, and how is that sort of meaningfully different to sort of charity or donations?
Megan Baker
I think it's the idea, well, first of all, I think it's coming from the perspective that if one person in our community is hurting, then actually we're all hurting, then that might seem like quite an alien concept, because we're really disconnected now. But it's the idea that when one of us needs support, we are giving that support without any conditions.
What you often see within the charities system, or the way it's structured, is you have a set group of people that are deciding how that support is distributed, what that looks like, how it's shaped, how it presents, how it's given out, how it's to be experienced. Whereas mutual aid is saying I need support, and then it's someone else saying, Well, this is what I have to give in, whether that's my energy, my time, physical resources, and this is how I'm going to give. This is for you.
It's really funny, because when we started out, we had a lot of people that would be like, but how are you going to prove that people aren't scamming you? And we were like, well, we won't, we won't be able to do that. You know that that's the way we're working. Is a trust basis. And I would argue that if someone is scamming I'm doing quotation marks, a tiny little mutual aid fund, then I would suggest that they're probably in financial difficulty themselves, or in some place of potential trauma, or maybe even just the hardship of living in this world. You know, it's not for us to pass judgement on that.
Priyanka Raval
That's so telling as a reaction, because it really does feel in this arena that it's always like victims credibility, which is like the first response.
Megan Baker
it's this fear that you could potentially give something and that person isn't deserving of it. That's what it comes down to. Actually, apart from the millionaires and the pricks in power, like, I would argue that there's a… most people are in need of something, and it's modeling a way of distributing resources and money when our government is not doing that. Like this is the whole point. It's like the systems we have do not work. Mutual Aid has existed for hundreds of years. You know, it's rooted in the black community. It's rooted in queer, trans communities, like the idea that we rally around each other and we show up and we give support that's not conditional. You don't have to prove, like Bryony said, you don't have to prove this deservability to it. I take your word that you need my support and tear right now, and if I can provide that to you, I will.
Bryony Ball
And also that the way that funds is redistributed, we're doing it in a very small way, because we're giving out funds of like, £20 for something that like can help in any way that you decide. But how it works is we get donations from people, and then we. Just redistribute them out.
It's not for us to decide who can access that and who can't. That's also how mutual aid should work. We're just trying to find and source funds and then redistributing those, those funds as a community, as a collective, to support each other.
Priyanka Raval
So you start out in 2019 as an Instagram page, you do a mutual aid Support Fund, which I'm guessing you crowd funded.
Megan Baker
No, we put in our own money to begin with. Okay, both put in 100 quid because we were just starting out. So we were just, yeah, actually, I think, I think, I think, if I'm super sly about this, I think there was some money from another project that I was, there was like 100 quid left on that project, analysis. And that was and that was unrestricted, so we took that and put it in there, and then we put in our own money. But then we just had a call out, yeah, on Instagram, we're doing, if you can donate, donate.
I think that's a real difference between setting up a charity or setting up some more kind of legit thing than just mutual aid or community response, which is often and as someone who's set up a project before, you know you have this idea, but you you try and put everything in place before you launch it. I want a logo, I want a website. I want an email address. It's just we, like you were saying in COVID, you just saw things springing up, you know, there's no, there's no time to be like, you know, let's, let's have a group of trustees before we start. It's no, people are needing care now. And I think that was our response. We were like, We could spend a couple of months trying to get the logo right and like our approach correct. Or we could just put money in and go, Hey, there's some money. Here's how you apply. And once we did that, you know, it was pretty much instantaneously that we not only had people applying, but we also have people donating.
Priyanka Raval
Apart from the mutual aid fund, what other services do you do? You hold groups for survivors as well?
Megan Baker
So we have an online support space that we got funding for last year. So we piloted 12 months, and that was an online space that was facilitated by Mahayla, who's another person within SLEEC that was a space for people to determine what the support space looks like. Because when I was going through support services, I was signed up to a peer support group, and oh, my God, the problems within this peer support group, like, when I look back now, I was like, it's actually a joke. Oh, but one of the main things was how it was so highly controlled and dictated. Also, it was led by an IDVA, they are called an independent sexual violence advisor, which I think is the most hilarious name ever. But they were a professional, so it already creates that kind of weird dynamic. There was lots of rules. So you weren't allowed to talk about the assault or the form of violence itself, out of fear of triggering other people. So, and I get that to a degree, but… the main kind of thing is that you're there to gain support, so you weren't allowed to talk about that. You weren't allowed to swear… every week, they had a set theme that you had to everyone had to talk about. So it would be like flashbacks and nightmares, and they'd like, well, I didn't get flashbacks with nightmares. And they're like, Yeah, but this is the theme, you know, it was so rigid. So we were like, Okay, well, if we ever set up a peer support space, it's about giving people the agency to determine what that looks like, so that… we secured funding for that again, and alongside that money to run workshops that look at care and support in more expansive ways. So we have our School of care and liberation and disruption, and that’s workshops and offerings that are always for free. So all the stuff we offer is for free. Most mostly, there will be an acknowledgement, if not. But around survivor support, everything is free. And again, that goes back to us alleviating costs, financial barriers for people accessing support.
Priyanka Raval
How does that run?
Megan Baker
So well, Bryony is more being the one curating that as a program
Bryony Ball
That was set up based on the not being enough different types of support available to people other than again, this mainstream support that's out there. We have that, or we have like alternative therapy, or we have, like different activities that might be good for supporters, but they're still in the kind of capitalist, very like white middle class wellbeing world that is wildly inaccessible to most people, as well as inappropriate. And so we wanted to have something that was a program of activities and things that people might have asked for specifically, or have… yeah, something that they need for their recovery or joy. So the program, at the moment, is just being launched, but we've got, I think maybe, 12 different workshops over the next eight months, workshops like mini courses offerings, and some of them are for different specific experiences or identities. So some might be just specifically for trans survivors or specifically to people that experience certain specific things or neurodiversities, and they're all led by different people, and they're very… We haven't asked if everybody uses the term survivor, because it's, again, we have this kind of issue with a word survivor, but everyone has experienced male violence and sexual violence in that, that wider lived experience, and it's yeah things from like powerful medicine making to using kink as a vessel for grief, to different types of, like spiritual practices to different types of, like body movements, for like trauma, of all these different beautiful workshops, from amazing to so I'm really excited are going to be part of SLEEC and that's going to be something that's continued. This is so this is an online program, but hopefully we're gonna have more in person ones, and get a funding for that to kind of continue and be bigger.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
So I was gonna it was just so one of the things that have that you kind of expanded out to, as well as I was working with, like men and having sort of men's groups and stuff. So I was wondering if we could sort of talk about that for a bit, basically, I guess one of the things I wanted to ask first was so you sort of used the term standard of like male violence. And I was wondering how, what were we defining male violence as?
Megan Baker
Oooh hoo hoo! Sorry, that was such a Dad that was literally my inner dad slash outer Dad. Come away. No. Violence, my favorite subject, oh, defining male violence. I mean, in its basic form, it's violence that is perpetrated by men and that can be to any demographic or any gender, so as in, who's experiencing it. So we often, well, when we're talking we're talking about the lens of male violence against women, girls and marginalised genders, but we understand and work within the remit that male violence impacts everyone, including men, at times, specifically men. But we speak from the lens in which we experience, which is being women. So when we're working with men, we're looking at it through the perspective of male violence towards women and marginalised genders…
Priyanka Raval
Not just sexual violence. Then… or is that, like a false division?
Megan Baker
When we started out SLEEC, it was very much sexual violence, because that was the experience that we were talking from. And then, I think, through our own personal and personal learning and growth over the years as individuals, as women, and recognising that actually our whole life has been shaped and framed by male violence, as I would argue, every person has…
But as we kind of evolved and grew, what we were seeing is the main demographic of people that was enacting sexual violence or enacting domestic violence and abuse is men, and that isn't when we talk about that. That isn't to in any way alienate people that experience sexual violence from the same sex, for example, within queer relationships. But what we see as an epidemic is men perpetrating harm and violence. So we have to address that in its entity, that it is so male violence intersects with sexual violence as sexual violence intersects with male violence. We use male violence as, I guess, the broader term here of what we're talking about. You know, it's like the majority of people that are sexually assaulting people is men. So we have to address that, and we have to acknowledge that, and we have to include that within the conversation. So we started working with men in 2021 and to be honest, originally, how we used to frame this in the conversations. We used to say, and I'll be really transparent, we used to go, Well, it came off the back of the Sarah Everard case, why we launched this course. So that case hit UK media, and suddenly there was this galvanisation of men and people who wanted to learn and engage. But if I'm really honest, this had been years of leading up to this, like years and years of working in the sector, but also just talking to people about their experiences of male violence and how much male violence had shaped each other and our world and our experiences. And then it coincided with a tiny little blip in UK media where misogyny and male violence was suddenly in the conversation. There was a there was a discourse going on, and we had wanted to run some sort of space or have conversations with men, or curate something, a learning program where we were working directly with men, and because we predominantly always done survivor support, which was predominantly working like with women and friends, suddenly seeing that actually the conversation really needs to shift now, and we really need to be including men within this work meant that we launched our emergency men's learning course, and We called it an emergency because it is an emergency, and that was online because that was in the pandemic.
And at the time, it was a four week course every Wednesday, so two and a half hours for men to come and learn, basically. And when we would feed back to people after the course, the first one we ever did, and understanding what their perception was before they came on the course, and then after the Course was they thought that there was going to be two women that was basically like, you’re shit, and this is what you need to do, rather than, which is told off, yeah, which is a separate course I want to run another time, but, but it was, it was a space where It was a it was structured, but it was also really open for men to ask the questions that if they were to ask them in their day to day lives, potentially might get them canceled, which actually doesn't happen, by the way, but but also could be problematic, could be harmful as well. We were facilitating a space where men could go. And be really honest and be like, I don't get it, or I'm confused, or I don't feel like I can say this anymore, or what can I do? Or I feel overwhelmed. But it was also structured. We had really set things that we wanted people and men to come away with, which is a deeper understanding of how rape culture shows up, structurally, socially, culturally, personally. We also wanted you to understand how the criminal justice system works, how the police system works. We wanted to dismantle the narrative around perpetrators, how they're often framed as these big, scary men that hide in dark alleyways, or they're always just like it's a fist in a pair of jeans, which is a really classist narrative of what perpetrators look like as well. There were so many things that we wanted to bring into that that actually it was beyond just looking, like, you can just come on this course, and now you know everything. It was, this is the beginning part of a journey for you in unpacking your relationship to patriarchy, to masculinity, to male violence, to sexism, how that shows up within yourself, and how you might perpetrate that and those around you.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I think that, yeah, the thing about male violence, I think that's really interesting, and that I imagine I quite confidently say that most perpetrators are going to have been people who are, you know, probably victims of male violence, usually in the family, which is something that then shapes your ideas of your masculinity as well, as well as your ideas around gender roles, particularly in heterosexual relationships. I guess one of the things I was thinking of with the men's groups, is that I sort of think of people that I know who I don't think are necessarily perpetrators, but definitely people who are kind of quite wedded to very traditional ideas of gender roles and relationships and especially now, with the way internet works, and they'll pick up things like, you know, you'll be speaking someone, oh yeah, what's this Andrew Tate video? You're like, Come on, mate. And, but I guess my question is, is that? So those are people I know who I kind of keep these relationships with and try and be non-judgemental, so that when they come to me with an Andrew Tate video, I can go, yeah, that's, that's too far, isn't it? Mate, come on. You know, vote for the Tories. All right, sure, it's bad, but whatever, so people like that, who I think could benefit from these sorts of discussions. If I ask them to go to one of these groups, they're gonna, they're gonna think it's not for them. So is it, how is it preaching to the choir?
Bryony Ball
The first thing I want to say is that I think so many men think it is not for them. So I'm sure you think that, and my brother would think that my male friends would think that they'd be like, Oh, it's these men that are like, on the verge of not getting it. It's for them. Everybody thinks it's not for them. but one of the things I think I found so interesting is that the men that we work with are always so keen to disassociate with, I'm not one of them. I'm not that guy. I'm or when they're talking about their friends, they're like, he's not, he's he's not one of those. He's not, he's not like a wrong ‘un, he's not a bad guy.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
You've got me bang to rights there to be fair,
Bryony Ball
It's like we've got this, like, good guy and this bad guy. We've got like a rapist and someone doesn't cause harm, or we've got like, somebody that feels like they're a feminist and they're a good guy, but my friend might be like, Oh, they might like Andrew Tate, or they might say things that are a bit misogynistic and and we even separate ourselves from them. Oh, but I'm not like him. But actually, we all need to do this kind of work, or we all need to understand that we live under rape culture and patriarchy, and we're also participating in ways that we don't even know.
We need to actually look at the behavior that's happening and also our relationship to how we are included in this, not separating ourselves from this and how we all cause harm, rather than I need to clear my name, because I think that's one of the main things that men want to do, is I need to clear my name, and I'm not part of this, or I'm going to do work so that I'm one of the good ones, or to work to be one of the good ones. And I think when…
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I'm just scratching my face to make sure my big suffragette tattoo…
Bryony Ball
I think that's one of the things when I I think that's one of the things when I talk to men, to get them to understand the space. I think that's in person. That's how I try and get people to come to the space be like, it's not for me. Saying you need to come to this space doesn't mean I think you're a rapist.It's, yeah, getting men to come is fucking hard. It's not something that is easy. Yeah,
Megan Baker
I think people think we have a queue of men lining up. It is work, day in, day out, trying to get men. Because what Bryony is saying, is so true, and so spot on, in terms of, there's a real disconnect that men have and and I think a lot of… when I was having a conversation with one of my male friends about this, and he said, Do you think that that men who would sign up for your course, do you feel like they potentially are scared that by signing up to this course, they're admitting to being harmful. And I was like, probably because there's this deep fear of ownership of our behaviour and of accountability, because we live in a very punitive world, but we also live in a very unaccountable world.
So what tends to happen, and this is often the conversations within the space when we have these courses with men, is… and I think every person can relate to this. You'll have a social circle, and one of their mates maybe sexually assaults another friend. What tends to happen is everyone will ostracise themselves from that man, so the man gets kicked out of the group, and it's this real deep severance of, as long as I'm not in proximity to the harm I can't be harmful. But what that actually does is you've just ostracised someone who hasn't been given any support or understanding or acknowledgement of what they've done for them to most likely to go on to perpetrate that someone somewhere else because of, you know, feelings of like anger or rejection, which we know are two things that really fuel male violence we often have. The majority, or demographic of men are men who think that they know loads of shit. They come on and they like I've read Bell Hooks. I paint my nails, you know I have he/they pronouns, I’bve got a suffragette tattoo. And then not to toot our own trumpet, but we blow their fucking minds, because what we're also doing is offering learning in a way that is not classroom based. It's not if you get this wrong, you're cast out. It's not graded. It's, there's humour, there's joy, there's laughter, there's connection, there's real interpersonal relationships. There's something as well about men talking about their fear of other men. You know, that doesn't really happen very often, the fear of other men, the grief of existing as a man. You know, the first question that we have as a free writing question. And it goes, What does it feel like to be a man, you know? And then we give them a couple of minutes to free write, and then we get them to feed back. And some people talk about uncomfortable, powerful, strong, scared, but a lot of people go, I don't know. I don't know what it feels like to be a man, which is baffling, yeah, because if you ask me what it feels like to be a woman, I'll write you a dissertation. So if I don't know what it feels like to be me, then how am I going to know what it feels like to be someone else? And there is a massive empathy gap in men, and what we really need is men to connect to their own understanding of themselves, to then be able to understand other people's experiences. So we actually start there. You know, it's not your shit. It's what does it feel like to be a man, and what is your relationship to patriarchy, and how has that impacted you?
Bryony Ball
Also how you see yourself. So I think that's a huge part in this learning is this massive gap between in our experience of the men that we've worked with, how men perceive themselves and how they actually are. There's our giant gap between, yeah, how they want to be perceived by others, how they perceive themselves and how they behave. And that's something that is one of the biggest problems that we find.
George Colwey
I think we’re seeing this happen in real time!
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Yeah I'm worried I'm gonna have to answer this question in the outro…
Priyanka Raval
Oh, yes. It also feels like two sides of the same coin, right? If there are so many, just as there are so many misconceptions of what a victim is, there are also so many misconceptions of who a perpetrator is and what a perpetrator is. And I remember when I was reporting on the rape trial last year. The source told me something which is, like, always really stuck with me, where she said, all the guys I know will say, No, I don't, I don't know anyone who's a rapist, but all my girlfriends will say, I know someone who has been affected by sexual violence. So what accounts for the gap? But I was thinking, you know that what you're saying in terms of the way these men's group run and the way that you do it, it helps me to understand this term of, like, collective liberation. I know that you use a lot in your messaging, is that part of it is here is how the system affects everybody, and it's not playing into this binary of, like, victims, bad guys.
Bryony Ball
I think, yeah, I think in terms of the conversations that we have about accountability, it's very present in that that's what we're seeing, is one of the main reasons why there is this massive gap. All the women that we know have been harmed, but all the men we know apparently haven't harmed. And it's like the numbers just don't add up. But like I was saying about sexual violence and not being able to kind of see yourself in that identity, I think the same is to be said with men in in that if we say, Oh, actually, maybe I have caused harm, maybe I didn't understand the boundaries, maybe that was sexual assault, then they feel like they're going to be branded as this rapist forever, and that is their entire identity, and they can never come back from that, because we live in a society that is saying that we need to change that so that men can, men can realise they can be accountable, and they did something that was harmful, and that is their behavior, and that is separate, and that can change, and they can come back from that, if they can be accountable to that that behavior, and then they can learn that isn't who they are. But I think that's the, that's part of this kind of liberation work, in terms of, like all liberating ourselves from these identities and these structures that say that we are a defined certain thing by somebody else.
Priyanka Raval
I think it's impressive, though, the emotional labour that that takes on your part, I often don't find I often find that I don't have the patience to have these kind of conversations, because it's too, I don't know painful. Somehow…
Megan Baker
I've stopped because this is now more my work. I'm going on a whole journey in my personal life of decentering men so and by when I say decentering men, I mean that in the way in which my life isn't shaped or defined by men's actions, or my conditioning to get them to be responsible for their behavior, or to get them to be better men, and actually by decentering men, it allows me to show up to men more consensually in my personal life. So there's a choice there, rather than naturally, because I've been conditioned as a woman to take on the ownership and the labour of getting a Man to understand his actions, behavior, the impact of that and then grow I've chosen. And it's an ongoing, continual process. It's a practice of decentering that so that I can actually show up for men stronger and better, the ones in my life and the ones that I haven't met yet, but I've done that in my personal life so that in my work life, if you like, within the context of SLEEC doing this work, I can be more present. But I think that's really telling of how much labour it takes, that I have to do this in my personal life in order to be able to do this in a work capacity, and we're not getting paid enough to do it. We're totally honest. Definitely, we're not getting paid enough, you know, and not to make it about capitalism, but, you know, there's bills to pay.
Priyanka Raval
It's it's interesting that often in the discourse, when we see the rise of influencers like Andrew Tate and the whole kind of scary evolution of the manosphere and all of all its various faces and shades, is that sometimes people say that as we become more progressive, this is alienating young men, and so the backlash is that they go to these more uber masculine figures. in order to retain a sense of self. I mean, isn't that a bit of an irony, like the way that you are framing it? Is this idea of collective liberation, like bringing everybody together and empowering and lifting everybody up together. But it it's strange that I feel like in the media discourse or cultural discourse is often that's actually the thing that's radicalising men to be more, I don't know, double down on the toxic masculinity because they feel, I guess, accused and guilty, and they're the bad guys, but they don't really understand why, and they don't know their place, or they've been asked to talk about feelings, and it's uncomfortable, and they don't know why, and you know that it's all a bit too jarring, and it's having the the adverse effect.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
You're also not told how to be a man. Part of the sort of increase of… this sort of pseudo progressiveness around masculinity, is that now the role of husband, breadwinner that's gone, your dad doesn't tell you how to be that kind of man. He doesn't really give you an alternative, and you're kind of then left to sort of try and patch it together using YouTube videos in the same way I was speaking before about how people use YouTube videos to learn DIY, because, like your dad used to teach you that, yeah, and we have to learn it for DIY. And now lots of men have to learn it for, how to be a man. And the people offering that are usually wrong uns,
Priyanka Raval
Or like, pick up artists and things like that.
Bryony Ball
I think that's why it's important in the work around this that we not only say how to kind of deconstruct toxic aspects of masculinity, but also to have something that we can work towards as an idea of what positive masculinity can look like. So I think that's something that's so missing in these conversations. And we do a lot of work with Lewis Wedlock, who does a lot around this, and he talks about, like, the magnificence of masculinity and like supporting men to find their magnificence in a way that is like positive and beautiful, rather than being about these kind of toxic aspects and about power and about control. And I don't know many people doing that work. I mean, Lewis is the only person that I'm aware of doing that work, and us in these spaces, and I think that's why there's a lot of negativity in work with men around kind of accountability and and unpacking male violence, because often it’s not done like this, and that's why there's such a backlash.
Megan Baker
I also think that there is a level of responsibility we have as adults to our young people, and that, you know, adult supremacy is a real thing that we never speak about. It's real. We've all experienced it when we were younger. We can still experience it as young, youngish people now from older people, but we also uphold that as a form of supremacy, where we basically don't listen to our young people. And a way, we're really scared of talking to young people about sex, about consent, about boundaries, about harm, about mental health, about violence, these really real things that they are either about already experiencing, or will experience. And so in a way, we've done the generation that's coming up a disservice by not having these broader conversations.
Because actually what needs to happen is we need to equip ourselves with tools to be able to have these conversations and be able to be accountable. I always know if I speak to a young person, naming it and being like, I'm probably going to fuck up with what I'm saying, or I'm probably going to get it wrong, or you can hold me accountable. You're shifting the power dynamics then. A lot of young men are still being conditioned to believe that they have this innate birth right to women to the world, and then they're actually coming up against the fact that that's a) changing. Or b) there's other intersections within that, whether that's race, whether that's class, whether that's disability, whether that's religion, whether that's so many different intersecting things that men can experience. So how are we also acknowledging that confusion and that sense of but I'm supposed to be able to do whatever I want, but I'm coming up against these ideals, or I'm coming up against these structures, there needs to be a conversation about that.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I think you're spot on with the idea of, like having, like being willing to have these awkward conversations. It's something we come like, we come up to a lot in this sort of show. And I think like something that often can be avoided in sort of mainstream, kind of sort of progressive narratives, the willingness and the difficulty of and the preparation for awkward and difficult conversations where you are going to have awkward silences and be challenged is, I think, really kind of an inspiring, kind of, you know, approach and inspiring things to push to people, because I think it's what we need to be willing to do.
Priyanka Raval
We can have an awkward conversation after this! I'm really looking forward to it. It strikes me in the in the course of this conversation, is that despite the fact that you are articulating the problem, well, you know, we've really clearly spelled out all the different systemic reasons why we have the problem of male violence, but your theory of change underlying everything that you do seems to be that that will come from the grassroots, from conversations, from culture shifts, from education, but what you're not saying – or correct me if I'm wrong, what you're not saying is it needs to be policy change or legislation change, or, you know, criminal justice changes, which is usually the thing that people point to as the things that will help bring about change. But do you feel like maybe it's… maybe it goes in a different order that you change the perceptions first and then those things or…?
Bryony Ball
I think if, if the attitudes don't change, then the structures, whatever structures we've set up, even if we're dismantling the structures that exist in setting up new ones, if we have the same attitudes, then they're just going to be the same structures, or they're going to have similarities. It's the attitudes and the way that we look at things and treat things that is the foundation to actually shift in how we approach all of this. Because I think we can change policies, we can change laws. But if the laws that are in place aren't working already, and they're not protecting people, and they're not holding people accountable, then what is the point in putting more structures and more policies and more legislations in place that are going to do the same thing?
Megan Baker
Can I just say as well, sorry to go there and to make it abstract and radical, but also our government, or any government in the world. But let's just say the UK Government profits off of punishment. So it makes a hell of a lot of money from people being in the wrong, people committing crime. It's probably one of the main streams of income that we have in our capitalist society is prisons and people committing harm. It costs billions and billions of UK taxpayers’ a year to… have domestic violence. I saw a statistic years ago, and it was like it cost the UK like £56million a year, or something ridiculous like that. Don't quote me on that. That's probably not right at all, but it was something crazy like that. But the reality is, is that our government makes a huge amount of profit off of keeping a system and a hierarchy in place. So this is why it's always so baffling when you see new labour cuts or new Tory cuts to social services, the investment into communities, which is actually part of how you stop and break the cycle of harm in the first place, is you eradicate financial and social security. Yeah, eradicate poverty, and you'll see a vast decrease in crime. Doing quotation marks there, but no one wants to have that conversation. So what we do instead is we have these conversations about legislation and policies in these really palatable ways in which we're slightly shifting the culture, but we're not really, because until the government stops making profit off of incarcerating people and having crime as a profitable structure, the legislation stuff, the policy change, doesn't actually amount to that much. And like Bryonys is saying, unless you change the Attitude, which then, in turn, starts to get people to understand that harm is something that has always existed, and we can find alternative ways to hold each other accountable. I also want to quickly say that I think a lot of people think that when we say abolish prisons and abolish the police, that we're saying that people who cause, I hate to put harm on a hierarchy, but like extreme harm – I’m doing quotation marks again, there are some people that cannot be in society, right? They actually cannot be in society because they are going to cause too much harm to themselves or other people. But doesn't then mean we need to put them in a facility in a six by 12 cell with no sunlight – we can actually create institutions that are caring and human and accountable. You know, we can actually invest money into that, and then we can find other ways in which we hold each other accountable. So I think people think that it's this radical thing where we would just have a free for all, but it's not. It's just a real simple thing of redistributing the funds
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
We're almost certainly getting… we’re well over the end. So I will move us to the final question, which was, what is one thing people can just do, on listening to this, to sort of go out and start making improvements to their communities, to their lives, to their friends, to the world, to the country, whatever, whatever that you think, you can kind of call on people to get stuck in with…
Bryony Ball
Can I plug us? Yeah, if you're a man, then come to our monthly online learning and action space, because we have an online space that is every month, and you can come and any thoughts or feelings you have around any of these issues, and listen to the conversations in that space, and that's a really simple thing that you can do as an action. And we would love to see more men in that space.
Megan Baker
I would also say if, if you're a man, or also if you're anyone, start conversations. Tune in to your neighbor or people that you love, people that you know, have conversations at work around how does patriarchy impact you? What is patriarchy? Do you even know what patriarchy is? Do you want to figure that out together, because we use these words, but unless you understand how they show up in yourself, it's really inaccessible. What does masculinity mean to you just starting to have these conversations and normalising that, and also, if you are someone that's got excess financial resources, donate to our resilience fund, because we always need that, and we really appreciate it when people choose to distribute their funds in that way.
Bryony Ball
One other thing that I think for all people of any background, or gender, I think there's, if you're doing this work, I think start by seeing not separating yourself from harm that's being caused – be like, how am I part of this and how am I causing harm? Because we all are. There's nobody that is separate from that. So how am I participating in and causing harm as part of these structures? Because if we can't recognise in ourselves. We can't have conversations with other people that are
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Cool. Yeah. We can. So we can link to the men's group and the and to the donation thing in the show notes, and people can email in and tell us what, what harm they've been causing. No, this, yes, no, this is this be really, really great. I know we really appreciate all your time. I think there's going to be, I mean, lots to think about. I'm slightly dreading how our outro is going to go… I think we've gone full Joe Rogan, but it's been very different indeed.
—
Priyanka Raval
So Isaac, how do you feel as a man?
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins 1:11:46
Oh, God,
Priyanka Raval
you knew I was going to ask that. Yeah,
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I did. I knew the second it came up. Well, you know, we were speaking before we recorded about how, you know…
Priyanka Raval
Listeners, he’s squirming!
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I'm really squirming. It's been a lot of squirming today… you know, as someone who grew up in, you know, outside of big cities, like there is a certain type of masculinity, and it's never been a net type of masculinity I necessarily fitted in with. I think now I kind of people kind of maybe down, you know, a man with a beard who goes to the gym all the time and likes, likes drinking and but it wasn't really for me. And so I definitely growing up, trying to find a version of masculinity that was like, something that I could kind of get on board with. And you kind of, you know,
Priyanka Raval
he's squirming. what was it? What was it about masculinity that didn't, didn't appeal to you growing up, you
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins 1:12:37
know, I was a little, little chubby kid with glasses, who was not very athletic and didn't like football or watching sports and liked books and playing video games, in a time when that was much weirder, and, you know, was, you know, asthmatic as well. You know, had a lot of things where, like, that kind of, you know, that normal, where I'm from, that normal, you know, pre made a bingo card, which I'm really hitting all the boxes off, though. You know, masculinity built around being really good at rugby and being a big lad who could get off of loads of girls was not necessarily something that I could achieve. And I think as a sort of young man, and that's what you sort of try and build these ideas masculinity around. Sort of, I was, I was, like an emo or a scene kid. I mean, you could have, like, long hair, we straightened our hair. I also, you know, was talking before about who I was, someone like Russell Brand, I found as a very pre cancelation. Pre cancelation, this black when he was left wing. Well, maybe not, but like, well, he told us he was left wing. But you know that he presented a type of masculine, a heterosexual masculinity, that was, like, long hair, tight trousers, a bit literary, yeah, use long words. Still get off with loads of girls
Priyanka Raval 1:13:48
The metrosexual is that?
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins 1:13:50
I'm like, slightly too young for the metrosexual. But yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah. It was about, I mean, when I first got tattoos and I my nan was like, Well, you've got because of David Beckham, it was like, it's not, I don't really need, I don't really care about David Beckham. But the and the problem with that is that actually turns out, lots of my kind of male heroes had some, had some issues, but also that you like, it isn't really enough like and you do end up just sort of, I think, gravitating towards these more old fashioned styles of of, you know, I like that. I can make things and can build things, and I like that. I as a kid especially, was like, the one thing I could latch onto was I was much better at drinking than most people, yeah. And so suddenly your masculinity is around these very kind of toxic behaviors. Of, I can drink most people under the table, and that gets you some kudos, even amongst kind of rugby lads. And I, you know, it's something that I still study, you know, it still makes me very uncomfortable, yes, especially because I think it does get down to the very emotional you have to, you know, you have to open up. And that's a bit of wisdom. Because…
Priyanka Raval 1:15:00
Are you choking on the word emotion?
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins 1:15:03
I don't really like to talk about my feelings.
Priyanka Raval 1:15:06
I mean, I have, I have noticed, you know, my original question was, how does it feel to be a man? Yeah, you've given me a very compelling narrative of your life story. Totally devoid of any feelings!
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins 1:15:20
Well, you know, very tight jeans, hurts the balls, that feels uncomfortable…
Priyanka Raval
Ballache is not an emotion!
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I'm feeling it. But…
Priyanka Raval
It was really interesting when Meg was talking about the men's groups, and I wondered if your initial knee jerk reaction was, I probably wouldn't need to go to that honestly.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
I wouldn't go to it. I just think it would be my personal idea of hell. I did one to go to a… I once got, we once had a non violent communication training session at my co operative. And I was like, I'm not going if it's hippie shit. Yeah. And they're like, it won't be. It won't be. And then I got there, and the guy immediately was like, hi, man. My name is Brian, but my Buddhist name is… he was like a posh white guy. They fucking tricked me! And then immediately I it gets my back up. I kind of, I start playing up. I become a naughty school boy again. Because I think that is, I think, and the same with the jokes, I think that you kind of get put into the positions where you're a bit like, Oh God, I'm in dicey territory here. And my go to is you know, respond to that with humour. And then I did that, and this guy was basically, like, do you have issues with your father? I was like, Well, yes, I do. That's not the fucking point. And, and I I basically, so, no, I wouldn't go because I think I would ruin it for everyone, and I think I'd have a terrible time. But I'm glad it exists, and I do think maybe it would be beneficial, and maybe that is something I should consider trying to get over.
Priyanka Raval
One of the main points that Meg and Briony were trying to say is that we need to show it like one of the ways to demoralise these kind of conversations and bring them out into the open is like, show the spectrum of how we're all complicit in this system, and then it becomes less accusatory. And probably the points where people feel uncomfortable is exactly the points that change needs to happen.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
Yeah, or like, 10 pints deep with your mate at 1am going, so, right, bro, we can. So I felt like this, we've got options.
Priyanka Raval
George is doing the helicopter, which means that we've got finish up. All right. I'm sure we'll take this debate offline.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
The patriarchy has intervened. The podcast is over, but, yeah, no, it's been really interesting, and I hope people can learn a lot from it, and don't let my my humour and emotional stuntedness distract them from the overall message.
Priyanka Raval
Okay, this has been People Just Do Something with Meg and Bryony, I've been Priyanka Raval. I'm joined by Isaac Kneebone Hopkins, and if you like the show, please give us the money to keep it alive. Go to the Bristol cable.org forward slash join. If you give £10 or more a month, you'll get early access to this podcast.
Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins
And don't worry, fellas, we'll get some proper geezers on soon to maintain the balance!
Priyanka Raval
Email us silly comments and questions to content at the Bristol cable.org. This has been produced by the Bristol Cable and our illustrious producer, George Colwey.
Priyanka Raval
See you next time. Bye.
ENDS
Transcribed by https://otter.ai