Cleaner Light

playing elsewhere

2011-03-04T20:05:00.002Z

i've gone over here:

http://cleanerlight.tumblr.com/

tumblr's quick and pretty. it's suiting my scrapbooking wishes for now. it feels freer to be able to post up anything i come across that i want to refer back to, and some good debates about the kind of stuff i write about are happening there so i'll be able to discuss stuff in that format more easily.

also - i don't want to leave this blog forever, but it has fulfilled its original purpose - for me to figure out the links between domestic abuse and all the other forms of oppression that were on my mind. now those parallels seem so blindingly obvious that i don't feel the need to write that for myself so much now. though of course there is still so much to figure out about it all, and i will keep on writing.

explanation of entitlement of the day

2011-02-09T10:45:00.002Z

it's a good long while since i quoted any Jensen, and there's nothing better than a good clear description of the mechanics of entitlement - one core trait of an abuser - to get me going of a morning:

"There’s a great line by Upton Sinclair about how it’s hard to make a man [sic] understand something when his [sic] job depends on him not understanding it. I think that’s true even more for entitlement. It’s hard to make someone understand something when their entitlement, their privilege, their comforts and elegancies, their perceived ability to control and manage, depends on it.

So much nature writing, social change theory, and environmental philosophy are at best irrelevant, and more often harmful in that they do not question human supremacism (or for that matter white supremacism, or male supremacism). They often do not question imperialism, including ecological imperialism. So often I feel like so many of them still want the goodies that come from imperialism (including ecological imperialism and sexual imperialism) far more than they want for these forms of imperialism to stop. And since the violence of imperialism is structural—inherent to the process—you can’t realistically expect imperialism to stop being violent just because you call it “green” or just because you wish with all your might."

- Jensen interviewed by Mickey Z. at Press Action (square brackets in original! i'm not really that offended by the universal 'he')

people have a better understanding of power

2011-02-07T17:12:00.000Z

this article is very heartening!

"18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various "revolutions" in their own lives as part of an "exodus" from oppression, not - as previous generations did - as a "diversion into the personal". While Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: "We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power",- that's probably changed."

- BBC Newsnight: Paul Mason: Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere

Dangerous Conversations

2011-02-07T14:06:00.000Z

new & exciting 'zine project - 'Dangerous Conversations'
email: dangerousconversations(at)riseup(dot)net
deadline for contributions to issue one: March 2011

Dangerous Conversations is a project born out of the struggle to end systems of domination. Our involvement in movements described as anarchist, activist, horizontalist, and so on has been at times inspiring and at other times disillusioning and frustrating. This zine is not aimed at Anarchists
or Activists but at anyone who struggles against the many forms of domination that blight our lives: ableism, ageism, authority, capitalism, civilisation, caste and class systems, heteronormativity, islamaphobia, male privilege, speciesism, transphobia, white supremacy (and others that are
still unrecognised).

Dangerous Conversations is intended as an intervention in business as usual. We hope to collect texts and viewpoints that challenge the status quo in a way that, rather than (or perhaps as well as) provoking hostility, provoke constructive responses and discussion. We hope that, as much as possible,
the zine becomes a place to converse and to deepen affinity. By showing solidarity with others who also see the struggle as their own struggle, evenwhen we differ on the details, we can become stronger as a movement. Ours is a strength that comes through diversity and empathy for different viewpoints
rather than the imposition of dogma and distrust.

These conversations are dangerous to oppressors because they threaten their privilege. They sometimes seem dangerous to us too because they threaten our own privilege. Because of this, they are important conversations to have.

This first issue (‘What next?’) is to be a collection of different viewpoints on where this struggle should go next. We are inviting a range of contributors who we think have interesting and sometimes conflicting ideas on how we should proceed.

We hope that readers will want to respond to and involve themselves in the project by contributing to this conversation in whatever way seems appropriate. There are no guidelines for what is and isn’t appropriate way to express yourself here. Submissions for future publication, participation
in the editorial collective, criticism and ideas are all very welcome.

- via Race Revolt

...

2011-02-07T13:01:00.002Z

"most of us get it wrong. we think first you get security and then you can work for freedom. but no, that never really works out. first you get free. second, you get free. third, you get free.

security is an illusion."

- Mai'a, on the Egyptian revolution (read the whole thing!)

cuts are violence

2011-02-03T16:33:00.002Z

"Women’s Aid, Refuge and independent providers of domestic violence services – all are facing ‘inevitable’ funding cuts, ‘efficiency’ measures, amalgamation and closure. Services that support, empower and protect thousands of families and single women will shut down. Thousands of workers in our sector will lose their jobs in 2011. [...]

Abandoning survivors of abuse and other vulnerable people to the “Big Society” having bailed out banks and cosied up to corporate tax-dodgers is violence that will impact our society for generations. [...]

As survivors and supporters we are face to face with abuse on a daily basis and understand all too well how abusers operate. We have a responsibility to speak out and describe the abusive attitudes of the people behind the cuts programme, and the violence that is enacted in it. [...]

We know full well the links between abuse and homelessness, abuse and poverty, abuse and unemployment, abuse and mental illness. And we know that this cuts programme re-enacts and reinforces abusive structural social injustice. We are acutely aware that these cuts will compound this interlinked violence and make it much harder for the most vulnerable people to become free. [...]

As providers of, and workers within, gendered violence services – how can we respond to this crisis and act not merely to defend our salary structures, but as if stopping abuse in our communities is our absolute priority?

Are we going to bicker between women’s services over our share of the crumbs and step on one another to stay in business? Are we going to unite as women’s services to gain a larger share of the crumbs at the expense of perhaps asylum seekers’ services, or homeless men’s services? Or are we going to challenge the system that attempts to divide and rule us in this way? [...]

Those anti-violence services that survive or are created in this cataclysmic upheaval face a disturbing ‘race neutral’ and ‘gender neutral’ future in which existing specialist services with decades of experience are ‘streamlined’ i.e. closed, in the name of ‘efficiency’. We are facing the end of specialist “Black and Minority Ethnic” services and specialist women’s services, a future in which provision “by Black women for Black women” and “by women for women” are anachronisms, because “we’re all in this together” [...]

As survivors and supporters we know the need to look for the crux of power in each situation. We are all too familiar with abusers’ use of an ultimate threat to hold over their victim: If you leave you’ll lose your home / No one else would want you / I could kill you… We have to assess whether there is any truth in the threat, and if so what we stand to risk in our effort to be free.

What is the ultimate, most terrifying, threat that the state holds over us? No more funding. So we must reckon with this possibility and face it head on. How can we support the people around us who are experiencing domestic and sexual violence, potentially in the absence of funding? We have done it before: Women’s Aid and Rape Crisis were started by women who reached out to support one another. Before there were refuges, women offered each other their spare rooms. Faced with a decimation of services, do we need to begin this grassroots work once more? Is this idea shocking, frightening?"

- Cuts Are Violence

my wishes

2011-02-01T08:54:00.001Z

are with egypt and the people there making change and the people living through it. i'm missing mai'a, whose tumblr i read almost daily for inspiration and truth (and pictures of beautiful beds and beautiful women). and the remarkable demonstration of both that the internet can be a tool for actual revolution - and that those in power can take it away.

solidarity, not charity

2011-01-30T21:58:00.000Z

"I want interdependence and community as more than words. In order to do this, I have to practice. Awkwardly, intentionally, again and again, I have to practice. I don’t know what it means to live in ways that support art-making and creativity, that fully supports those people who show up with the medicine that opens our lives up even further. I have grown up with the same things you have, a private medical system and a culture of shame that still and again, sees illness or disability as a personal problem and any act of support or aid as charity. Transforming this means practice, daily and never ending practice. How do we show up for each other? How do we remember the things that have come before us – the people, the words, the experiences that have made us stronger and more whole?
“Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.”
Aurora Levins Morales"

- Susan Raffo and Aurora Levins Morales

eco-colonialism

2011-01-30T21:25:00.003Z

"Corporations and governments are not being lax in the face of peak oil. No way. They are busy extending their paradigms of abuse into ecosystems across the globe. Maybe it is this: that the end of cheap energy spells the end of cheap power. So cheap energy must be pursued at all costs. Those costs, of course, include land grabbing, land poisoning, destruction of communities, destruction of ecosystems:
"The results are the expansion of forest monocultures in poor countries, the occupation and degradation of territories and productive lands, the installation of industrial plants in the South, the worsening of living conditions and quality of life in occupied territories, the violation of rights, particularly serious impacts on women and excluded population groups, concentration of power in corporations which control the right to property and technologies, as well as the risk of contamination to a degree which cannot be predicted. …It is very well-known, the companies of the cellulose sector and paper install their plantations in the countries of the South, where besides having the mentioned conditions – low costs and big quantities – the environmental, social and labor legislations are lax and they allow the violation of multiple environmental rights and of the communities. …[R]esearch on new raw materials for fuels, primarily cellulosic ethanol and genetically modified trees is carried out by universities or research institutes in industrialized countries and is funded by multinationals forest and/or energy, a situation which is repeated with the development of technologies, marketing and other stages of the chain. Thus replicates and maintains the colonialist model in terms of energy, technology and economics that has characterized North-South relations.”
An added layer of disgusting interest is that this is done under the banner of saving the planet. It is renewable. It is sustainable. It is a carbon sink. All these things are, of course, untrue. The pivotal sleight of hand in this process of deception is the expansion of the definition of the word ‘forest’. More forest is a good thing, right? Everyone knows that. Except that under the definitions of various international climate agreements and accords, eucalyptus plantations are now ‘forests’. As are jatropha plantations. As are palm oil plantations. As are pine plantations. What I wish everyone did know is that these monocultures are not forests.

[...]

There are complex international carbon trading schemes to support this abuse. In Britain, taxpayer’s money goes to subsidise the building of building biomass power plants because they are classed as “renewable” energy producers. This biomass will not come from the diverse, scenic oakwoods of this privileged island. Oh no. It will come from industrial plantations.

This is all neocolonialism with an environmental twist. It is eco-colonialism."

-A Country Punk

real people stand up to end capitalist heteropatriarcy

2011-01-23T18:37:00.003Z

Women's Aid invites you, yes you! to Stop Violence Against Women and Children by buying his 'n' hers t-shirts in support of their Real Man campaign ("Real Men Stand Up To End Violence Against Women And Children"). Choose between the manly black 'Real Man' tee, or the dainty white 'I'm A Fan Of A Real Man' cap-sleeved number, no this is not some kind of poor ironic joke, this is a genuine women's charity endeavour and we would like to promote the idea that women must applaud a man - by buying a t-shirt - who wants to appear to be not-an-abusive-knobend - by buying a t-shirt - you see? and in doing so we get to prove how totally we've abandoned any semblance of feminist social critique for whatever it was worth in the first place. and, look, we're subverting masculinity by making some of the celebrities look a bit gay with like headbands and stuff, so cute! didn't you always wish those hot hunks could be yr GBF at the same time? shhh, no they're not fair trade or anything, we thought about it but it was like too expensive so like we just need to make women in the global south make t-shirts in violent conditions so that we can sell them to pay for our Important Work pushing paper and risk assessments and asking the state for more criminal justice remedies for domestic abuse because this Ends Violence Against Women And Children, obvs.

(And meanwhile Women's Aid's competitors Refuge thank - get this - British American Tobacco and Philip Morris among their corporate sponsors. Plus, depressingly, Avon&Refuge in corporate partnership seem to be the highest-profile voice protesting cuts to DV services. kill me now)

killjoys

2011-01-23T12:12:00.001Z

My friend sent me this amazing article:

"Does the feminist kill other people's joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced or negated under public signs of joy? [...]

"The angry black woman can be described as a killjoy; she may even kill feminist joy, for example, by pointing out forms of racism within feminist politics. [...]

"To speak out as a woman of color is then to confirm your position as the cause of tension; your anger is what threatens the social bond. [...]

The exposure of violence becomes the origin of violence."

Sara Ahmed, Creating Disturbance: Feminism, Happiness and Affective Differences

and there's that rare feeling again - sheer relief when somone pins down a truth that is so obscured by our culture. those who identify violence disrupt the comfort and happiness of those who are profiting from that violence. and they will consider that disruption to be violence against them, so entitled do they feel to that comfort and happiness.

kristin says

2011-01-23T11:49:00.001Z

we have to do what we came here to do, no excuses.

"Honestly, I'm so shy that I find most contact with people deeply unsettling, but songs [...] mean that I'm burning with sound, not frozen with fear. 'Cause they're my way down to where we all are.

I didn't ask to go down to where we all are, but as it turns out, I'm a member of a deeply social species in which the only truths worth speaking are the most naked."

kristin hersh, Paradoxical Undressing

walking in the opposite direction

2011-01-06T11:56:00.000Z

saw this on =Anarcha='s tumblr:

"I sometimes visualize the ongoing cycle of racism as a moving walkway at the airport. Active racist behavior is equivalent to walking fast on the conveyor belt. The person engaged in active racist behavior has identified with the ideology of White supremacy and is moving with it. Passive racist behavior is equivalent to standing still on the walkway. No overt effort is being made, but the conveyor belt moves the bystanders along to the same destination as those who are actively walking. Some of the bystanders may feel the motion of the conveyor belt, see the active racist ahead of them, and choose to turn around, unwilling to go to the same destination as the White supremacists. But unless they are walking actively in the opposite direction at a speed faster than the conveyor belt - unless they are actively antiracist - they will find themselves carried along with the others."

— Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D., Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race

standing still on the walkway: inaction/passivity in the face of racism and all abuse = being swept along with the momentum that is taking you to further success, acceptance, approval, social captial. these are a few of the priveleges we have to actively walk away from in order to fight against racism and other interlinked abuses. reminds me of the quote from mai'a that i put up before:

"stopping the abuse means stopping the abuser. and the abuser is popular. so you wont be."

robin

2011-01-06T11:33:00.001Z

one of the purposes of this blog is to have a place to put the stories that turn up in the corners of my mind, out of all the stories i've been told. this one showed up today.

in one of the support groups there was a woman who'd had many children. she shared in the group that there was no consensual sex within her marriage - she named it as rape - and no option of contraception. she told us that she loved all her children though, "so he didn't win me on that".

one of her children had died as a teenager. while this woman was grieving and distraught she would play her son's favourite song on repeat. one day she saw a robin outside and it looked like the robin was dancing and hopping along to the song. it seemed to her that the robin was her son. she put out bread for the robin and it came back the next day, and she played the song to it again. soon the woman's washing line and patio were covered in bird feeders. the robin stuck around. after a while people suggested to the woman that this was not healthy, and she agreed to see the doctor. she told the doctor that she was sure the robin was her son and the doctor put her on some medication.

...that story sticks around in my mind, with its hundreds of story buddies, asking questions.

being accountable to complicated histories

2011-01-05T21:24:00.001Z

i was so excited to read this:

"Rape has a history. Histories, actually. One of the patterns of a more local history can be seen and felt in the ways some instances of rape have the effect of mobilizing, even galvanizing people in ways that other acts of violence do not. I am not just speaking of feminists. If my dashboard is any indication, folks in my orbit have expended exponentially more outrage on the recent Julian Assange rape case, and the left’s response to it, than, for example, the human rights abuses that have spurred the prisoner-organized and coordinated strike that’s been going on in Georgia.

[...]

“If we get rid of prisons,” they’ll say, “what are we going to do with all the rapists and murderers?” When I hear this, I think that feminist descriptions of rape culture have actually not accounted for the ways in which the idea of rape—is tied up not only with a culture that punishes women for attempting to tell the truth, but with a culture that punishes, full stop. That punishes populations that include women, but also include people who are gendered differently. I think about how much we rely on the law, and ultimately, on the penal system, to define what it means to be safe. To the extent that we experience the incapacitation of the rapist—the locking of those convicted of rape—as if it were justice, overlooking conveniently the persistent evidence that more prisoners do not mean fewer instances of sexual violence.

I think about the idea of prison rape, and how rarely I see this invoked in descriptions of rape culture. I recall the “dropping the soap” joke made by a women’s studies professor in a classroom, and the uncomfortable receding of laughter once it was recognized that I wasn’t participating in it. I think about the degree to which indifference to prison rape is also an essential part of popular culture, and how rarely I hear this in feminist outrage toward rape culture. About how the condition of “prisoner” has an underrecognized resonance with the condition of “woman” to the extent to which becoming a prisoner is, to some extent, not only to become rapeable but to be seen by many as deserving of it. Rape culture tells you that you shoulda thought about that before you committed the crime. Crime as submission, before the fact, to rape culture.

I think about how rarely I see the myth of the black male rapist referenced in discussions of rape culture, and I think, at the same time, about witch hunts. I think about the systematic rape of black women categorized as the master’s use of his property. Rape culture as the protection and promotion of the sancticity of white womanhood—all of which, I suspect, did nothing to decrease the instances of rape against even those women whom it enshrined as ideal.

I wonder if the victims of prison rape are not victim enough for the feminism I see on my dashboard. I wonder if a black body swinging from a tree will be seen as the victim, or victim enough of rape culture for that kind of feminism. I wonder these things because I want to see a movement that doesn’t isolate rape from other kinds of violence, or as a violence experienced by an amorphous and undifferentiated category of “women.” Because, I suppose, I want to be part of a feminism that understands that certain uses of the idea of rape culture can actually strengthen patriarchy, and that being accountable to complicated histories is not to participate in apologism. So I have to wonder if it isn’t more than a coincidence that the feminists I am reading are not organizing in support of the strikers. I have to wonder at the sense of risk I feel in writing that I don’t think that extending the reach of an already problematic criminal justice system is a solution. I question the flinch I feel in saying that I think it lets this state, one so deeply and fundamentally complicit with rape culture, off the hook. I question my reservation in saying that I want to recognize our reliance on this very state to protect some of us from violence and to enact justice as a tragedy. In saying that I think that rape culture is actually part of a culture that relies on incarceration to solve problems. This really has so little to do with Julian Assange."

written by low end theory. (via mai'a) there is more amazingess at the start and end so again - please read the whole thing.

mushrooms are REALLY amazing

2010-12-31T10:36:00.003Z

watch this, seriously, watch it. if you ever worry about pollution and toxic waste and you know the general destruction of the ecosystem we live in. this mushroom geek guy, paul stamets, is talking about proper scientific experiments he's done that show that mushrooms can break down diesel spills - and not only grow mushrooms from the diesel, but that they then become food for birds and they rot and create soil for plants to grow in so that amazingly fast, a toxic patch of diesel can become normal healthy land again. and he's done other work about fungi defeating other kinds of toxic waste. this is TRUE.

seeing outside of the non-profit industrial complex

2010-12-30T22:39:00.006Z

so many people (including me up til recently) have wood-for-the-trees problems when it comes to charities / non-profits (and the public sector, and academia, for that matter), and the prospect of working for one. i'm so heartened to see this discussion on tumblr, at Radically Hott Off (though i'm confused about how to reference tumblr stuff properly) about the failure of non-profit orgs to actually do much to effect social change, apart from set ourselves up in nice salaried positions and then work to maintain that salary structure:

"the number one reason I hear people say that they are working at 501c3s [US term for charities / voluntary sector orgs] is because they believe in the work and they’d be doing it anyway and this way they can survive. but…isn’t there just a bit of moral —-unevenness i guess—in assuming that our neighbors, our fathers, our grocery store check out lady—don’t have the same wishes?

[...]

what happens if instead of saying *I* want a job that pays me enough to live on AND makes me feel a little less ethically violated—and say *WE* want jobs that pay us enough to live on and doesn’t kill the world? indeed makes the world a better place?

[...]

what would it look like to begin the left transition from dependency on 501c3s to a steady communication with radical on the street/community driven movements? [...]. *F*eminist orgs do absolutely NO grassroots organizing, instead focusing on “recruitment” in universities—that is: finding the next generation of women to run the orgs.

[...]

it’s like there’s no clear understanding that raped women in prisons, raped women in migrant camps, raped women in your family, raped next door neighbors, raped friends, etc are all pretty freaking powerful and can create more changes than olberman can ever dream of—if we’d work to give those women skills to organize. The right may have more money—but they have the top five percent of the money makers to recruit from. we have the entire world."

yes. it's really clear to me how much we who are working in charities/non-profits are just working to bolster the comfort of our own privilege - sleep tight at night knowing we've "done good", "tried hard" - rather than actively undermining the structures that privilege us over those we say we are trying to help.

when i quit my proper job and was handing over to my replacement, i was explaining to her some of the issues around supporting women with 'no recourse to public funds' and how totally trapped those women can be, between their abusive partner and the immigration system. her response was like a perfect summary of why i had to quit! she said: "oh wow. you'd just want to take her home, wouldn't you? i mean, i've got a spare room and... oh but you couldn't. you could never do that! ... but if she had nowhere else to go! it's so terrible! ... but obviously i know you could never do that..." and in that paid role, of handing over my old job to this new worker of course i had to shake my head along with her: "no, you could never do that."

but you know how women's aid refuges started in the 1970s - feminists had spare rooms and opened them up to strangers fleeing abuse. they squatted buildings. families shared rooms. that absence of resources is unimaginable now when compared to multi-million pound blocks of self-contained apartments that new labour helped to fund for several cities' DV provision.

except - that absence of resources is precisely what women with no recourse have now. but somehow we've forgotten how to offer our spare rooms to them, or how to squat or do whatever is necessary to protect these women. because women like us are now relatively protected by the state. sort of. well, maybe not. but hey at least we're getting paid now, eh? and god forbid we risk offending the funders.

i so love the part of the quote above that i bolded. i'd never even thought of it that way. it just highlights so perfectly the entitlement of the reasoning (that i held for many years) that we have a right to elevate ourselves into paid charity positions so that we can feel better about ourselves, as if other people without the same access to those jobs don't feel the same way. and then when we're in, we have the audacity to keep (other) survivors out, because you know, 'managing volunteers is resource-intensive', 'we don't have the funding right now to run a volunteer training programme', 'volunteers complicate risk-management' etc etc.

so - yes! that seems like an amazing central premise for organising - not that i should scramble to get a funded place inside the nice safe (and shrinking) NPIC while extending a hand from the parapet during office hours to 'help' 'them' - but that i should work for the right of all of us to be doing well-resourced, well-recompensed, non-violating, meaningful, engaged work.

We're Telling

2010-12-22T23:06:00.003Z

and in more good news there's a new tumblr project, We're Telling: (via Flip Flopping Joy)

"Sharing anonymous accounts of rape and sexual assault; demonstrating that rape happens, everywhere, often.

WE'RE TELLING is a new blog whereby anyone can anonymously share their own accounts of attempted or completed sexual assault or rape."

demonstrating that rape happens, everywhere, often. it's been up for a day and there's already loads of posts. it's overwhelming. so important. i love the internet sometimes. i hope it's helping. i'm sure it's helping. is it just me or is there a real feeling in the air - in all sorts of cultural - political - personal ways - of the truth coming out, of belated acknowledgement of what really is...?

writing on Safety

2010-12-22T22:48:00.001Z

aaaanyway... onwards with the celebration of radical voices that make the world make sense. this is wondrous and amazing - black queer voices on safety, security and travelling:

"Security, to us, means having the upper hand in an unsafe situation. Security, to many, means having access to the violent means that the state uses to defend itself, the police, the national guard, the private security forces that companies use to protect their wealth. For those of us, black, queer, young, radical, and grassroots, who are not often seen as part of the state’s project to reproduce itself (except when we are targeted as consumers) those sources of security are not dependable. As far as we can tell security comes from weapons. And only works if you got more, faster, bigger weapons than whoever makes you insecure. Maybe we could achieve security if our mobile home was a fortress, if we attached an alarm system with missiles, or a system that sent an electroshock through anyone who touched it. None of these things, however would make us safe. And methods like that would surely make the more low-tech partner on the trip, likely to be the first to trip the booby trap, and our comrades less safe.

We acknowledge that in a world where violence against queer and gender queer young people of color is common, security is not a light matter. We have also decided, however, that security is not enough. Our intention is for our journey to be SAFE.

Safety, to us, means being able to be comfortable in our skin, having the freedom to move, being able to sleep restfully and wake renewed and excited about the journey. Safety comes from knowing that we are held by a community that has our backs. Safety comes from knowing that all along the road there are home-spaces with comrades who will welcome us and who will answer if we call on them. Safety comes from relationships and people."

Safety: An Abolitionist Vision, at Mobile Homecoming. read read read the whole thing.

"at least you're not going through this in the community "

2010-12-17T11:31:00.003Z

-is my quote of the day from the 'professionals meeting' on a mental ward i went to today. oh my god. i really had intended to stop getting paid to be around this kind of shit, but i went back for some no-strings-attached shifts, didn't i, because it's less stressful than working somewhere unfamiliar, and before i know it i'm covering everyone's sick leave (and *everyone* is sick), including having to go outside of the office and try to look less frayed and more professional.

so, well... these wards aren't the worst places in the world these days. they are just like slightly roomier and cleaner halls of residences. there was a greenhouse with december-wizened tomato plants in the courtyard - (i really truly believe in plants&soil as a potential lifeline of mental health, so that was good). the managers and consultants seemed genuinely to be trying to take an empowering approach. only one worker at the meeting, out of about eight of us, was acting like this woman was the biggest pain in the arse ever (i really don't understand professionals who get exasperated with clients who are not actually abusing them or causing them to have to work overtime - we get paid the same either way, right? what does it matter if this woman returns to her partner "after all our hard work"? it's not like you actually care about her, evidently), and who was saying things like (repeatedly) "she needs to be boundaried". no one challenged her on it, but at least the ward manager and the consultant had the decency to wince a bit. all the rest of the staff got it when i pushed the focus of the meeting towards giving the woman as much control as possible, regardless if she ends up returning to her partner. i guess the new labour years really did do some good in funding awareness-raising around domestic violence - and less coercive practice in mental health.

that said... the woman had said how shit she felt going through christmas in the hospital while she waits for a refuge place and dealing with grieving for her relationship and harassment threats and mind games from her ex. and the worker said "at least you're not going through this in the community." which i guess is mental health service -speak for any where outside the hospital ward.

the worker who said it was the most focussed and engaged with the woman we were actually there for, and had known her the longest. and it just seemed so amazing to me that even this worker who was doing relatively awesome holistic woman-centered work couldn't imagine a better way, a better community, or a better place for this woman to be than on a locked ward.

and there was more that was wrong with the meeting. so much subtle coercion glazed with the right, 'patient-centred' words. like the consultant (who was the most patient-centred consultant i've dealt with) told her that she was "giving him [her ex partner] mixed messages by replying to his manipulative texts when the relationship is over". later the consultant gave her totally mixed messages by saying she wasn't to pick up his calls but "texting is understandable" and then implying that she wasn't to have any contact with him at all. just loads of stuff like that, subtle erasures of her equal personhood to the professionals around her who are holding all the power.

i fantasised about recording the meeting and being able to use it in some kind of training session where everyone had to identify the parts of the transcript where the woman was being silenced, put in a catch 22, pathologised and/or subject to the same framework of abuse that occurred within her relationship. highlighter pens at the ready! but the trouble is, these people (with the exception of the pain in the arse woman) are already highly trained and as right-on as it's possible for those of us working within such a coercive system to be. this was the nicest one of these meetings i've ever been to. i could continue to attend these things and fight little battles and try to defend one woman at a time in one meeting at a time, to the inadequate best of my ability. but is that not 'giving them an aspirin to lick', when the system putting these women in these situations needs to end. and the communities to replace these hierarchical institutions need to be built.

"They [many doctors within concentration camps] would hide them [sick inmates] from the selection officers who were going to kill them. They would do this to protect the inmate for that day. They would put them to bed, you know. They would actually do everything—if they were in pain, they would give them aspirin to lick. They would do what they could to help, except for the most important thing of all, which is they wouldn’t question the existence of the entire death camp itself. So they would find themselves working within the rules, however they could, to try to improve conditions marginally. And in retrospect, of course, that’s just not sufficient."

-guess who?

guilt-free

2010-12-14T20:14:00.000Z

i've been meaning to write about supermarkets, and why i've tried to stop shopping in them. i want to write more about how people - we - try to eradicate violence from different areas of our lives, and how we often look in the wrong places. well, i haven't got that post together yet, but here is a quote from a beautiful short article by someone, about shooting a deer for food. it is very well worth a read.

"It’s clear to see that a human killing a beautiful wild animal is kind of sad [...] What is unclear is how sad consuming any plant or animal as food is.

Food from the store, as a rule, kills even more beauty, destroys unimaginably more life, than a hunt like the one I described above. Its invisible killing, to the consumer at least, because its culturally accepted. [...] To actually wrap one’s head around how much suffering and loss went into their ‘guilt free’ bowl of organic whole grains with tamari and olive oil is probably not possible..."

we really need to get our shit together about trafficking

2010-12-13T13:26:00.004Z

after the refuge i worked at explicitly opened itself up to "women trafficked into the sex industry", when one of the first thus-labelled residents moved on, she set herself up as a high-class escort, with a fancy website. my colleagues, gathered around a computer, were scandalised and bitterly amused. "all that work for nothing!" "we were really taken for a ride there"... this woman had come into refuge because she was fleeing violence from pimps, my colleagues were not disputing that. but they felt that "all their efforts" had been in vain, because she "hadn't even wanted to exit prostitution".

as often happens in the office, i was too taken aback to really say anything of use. i muttered something about "don't you think it's great that she's free to make her own choices now?" to which they said "mmm", but continued to look disgusted.

i just find it crazy, though so illustrative, that schemes like this can get specialist funding to support trafficked women, while having no guiding philosophy (except, Trafficking Is Wrong), or politics, and no political or philosophical guidance for the staff doing the work. but it's illustrative because, of course, if an organisation was political, let alone holistically empowering of women who've survived trafficking, it wouldn't get funding.

and meanwhile, there's this crazy moral panic about trafficked women, through which any migrant sex worker, especially if she is 'illegal', could potentially find herself 'rescued' (which can take the form of deportation) against her will. it's really disturbing how there are so many feminist organisations latching onto the anti-trafficking thing, without simultaneously defending the right of women to migrate and do sex work. i was totally confused and distracted by these feminists for a long time, and until recently still couldn't articulate to myself why their campaigns were fucked up. the voices of migrant sex workers are so marginalised, including by well-meaning (? why do i keep using that word?) feminists, i'd kind of gone along with the deeply racist implicit conflation of all migrant sex workers as forcibly trafficked and enslaved, which also carries the assumption that this conflated group 'just can't ever speak out. they're too oppressed. or something.' i'm ashamed.

anyway, i've just read this amazing interview with Nandita Sharma, over at the Incite! blog, originally from No One Is Illegal Radio. she just cuts through the crap with such clarity:

"It is impossible to legally get into Canada as a sex worker and enter as a permanent resident. You don’t get “points” for being in the sex industry, even though there is high demand. The anti-trafficking legislation is another way to attack women’s ability to work in the sex industry, and it does so in a way that further legitimizes (and relies on) the idea that no woman should ever be engaged in sex work. Ultimately, the moral panic against sex work makes migrant women more vulnerable in the sex industry.

[...]

Ultimately, if we want to end the exploitation of women, we need to challenge capitalism, which is the basis for all of our exploitation. Whether we’re working in the sex industry, a restaurant, or in a university, we’re being exploited by those who are benefiting from our labour. So, if we want to end exploitation, we don’t give more power to the state to criminalize workers, we give more power to workers to end their exploitation. Of course, being a university professor is not demonized like sex work is. So we also need a major attitude adjustment.

[...]

Those of us who are critical of anti-trafficking rhetoric and legislation are often accused of not caring about women. We’re accused of not caring about women who are kidnapped, women who are beaten up, women who are enslaved or not paid wages, women who have their passports and other documents withheld from them so that they’re rendered immobile. In response to these accusations, the important thing to remember is that all of those crimes are already addressed in the Criminal Code of Canada. It is illegal to kidnap people, to beat them up, to rape them, to not pay them wages, to withhold their documents without their permission, etc. Why do people think new anti-trafficking legislation will make women safer when the police seem completely disinterested in enforcing Criminal Code measures that already exist to protect women? Instead of anti-trafficking legislation, we should be demanding that workers in the sex industry are protected under occupational health and safety regulations, as all workers should be."

BFP on Wikileaks

2010-12-12T18:02:00.003Z

BFP is on fire at the moment. i feel privileged to share a planet with her.

here:

"What’s important is what actions are being taken–not even so much against Assange–but against wikileaks. Against supporters of wikileaks. Even against those who have no idea who the fuck wikileaks is or what it’s done.

Because indeed–those of us who care about gender liberation must, absolutely MUST, be aware of and understand that the nation/state that *F*eminists have entrusted to mete out “justice” for violated women–is using “justice” to criminalize all of us. It is up to us to understand that this isn’t a simple case of did he do it or didn’t he or “stand in solidarity with rape victims.” This is a case of our own tools being used against us. Not against Julian Assange. Against us. Because all of us who have been there understand on some gut level–how likely is it that these women will actually receive justice? What horrific price will they have to pay (in testifying, getting their names dragged through the mud, etc) to “get justice”? At the same time, how many of our lives will be dramatically affected by the “threat” we all now present to the nation/state?"

and here:

"it is the US government that seems to have perfected the role of patriarchal duality that we have all assigned to Assange. The advocate for the dispossessed rolled into a messy soup with dirty slimy scum bag that beats his girlfriend on the side.

It is the US government that is both rapist and activist. It is the US government that we all pretend not see hear the beating on the other side of the wall–because it’s doing such good for the community!

Just as we have to wonder why it makes sense to tell soldiers or policemen that it’s ok to kill when they have a certain uniform on, but not when they’re wearing clothes bought at Target–we have to wonder why it makes sense to condemn men who rape and abuse in private, while willfully and continuously ignoring the private rape and assaults of our government in the name of the “good” it does in public.

And that’s not to say that we let the man off scott free–but rather instead to question: if our goal is to stop rapes before they happen–how do we negotiate the dissonance of the “model” of public advocate/private rapist the US reinforces continuously with the idea of “anti-gender violence citizen”?

Specifically: how will gendered violence ever end when gendered violence remains, at the core, a esteemed value of the US government that we all live under?"

...and so much more in those posts. read them!

can we get real with children

2010-12-03T12:49:00.000Z

i'm slightly heartbroken after reading this guardian article, 'a year in the life of a foster parent', because... it's something i really wanted to do. want to do. i did know it was that bad. i could tell from the stories i hear at work, the parents i meet and the social workers i meet, that it is that bad. that the system really is that much the opposite of child-centred, that social workers really are that offensive, that judges really are that clueless, that children really are that screwed-over. i knew that if i foster children that i will be powerless in a system that dumps children with me, then with someone else, and never asks them what they need. i knew i could ask them what they need, but i'd be powerless to give it to them.

i guess i'd been telling myself that i only know about the domestic violence cases, and these are only a small amount of all the reasons children are taken into foster care. i told myself that in the other cases, the right decisions might be being made.

the article includes four year old twins who have been removed from their parents due to concerns for their safety. they are placed in foster care, with regular visits to see their parents (it's not made clear whether the visits are supervised and/or overnight, etc). the twins tell the foster carer that they have been severely physically and sexually abused and that they never want to see their parents again. you might expect this to be the end of their contact with their parents, particuarly in this era of hysteria and ultra-caution around ~~childhood sexual abuse~~ paedophilia, right? i've imagined myself as a foster parent, getting disclosures like this and - of course - being able to say "those people will never do that to you again" etc etc. and being able to keep that promise. i don't know what i was thinking. the twins are interviewed and a bureaucratic, police and courts process takes many weeks. then it is decided that they are too young to make decisions about whether they see their parents, and (in a glorious and very typical example of kafkaesque contradictaryness of social care and the CPS) that they are also too traumatised to give evidence in court. therefore no court, therefore no end to their contact with their parents.

and what sticks in my head is - did anyone explain anything to the children? it seems like the foster mother really wanted to, and was traumatised by her powerlessness to protect them. but what could she actually say that was true? not "you are safe now", not "you don't have to go through that again", not "it's good that you've told me this because now i can help you"...

i know fuck all about children or parenting, but it just seems blindingly obvious that they need to be told what is happening to them, and if in doubt about what has happened to them, asking seems to be a good option. whenever i have heard about 'suspected sexual abuse' cases, asking the child concerned has not factored at all. what happens is: abuse is suspected, child is hauled in for medical examination (as if bruises/injuries have anything to do with 90% of sexual abuse!!), evidence is given to police who give it to CPS, CPS decide whether the evidence is over 50% likely to prevail in court... while this is happening (which takes up to a year) the child cannot be given counselling/therapy because it could prejudice them giving evidence in court. when that process is all over (and obviously out of the tiny number that go to court only a tiny number convict the abuser), counselling/therapy is usually conviently forgotten by social care as it is too expensive. when i have argued for play therapy for my clients' children i get the "oh you know, the waiting lists are really long", as if it's not worth getting the children onto the waiting lists at all. and if they do ever get to the top of the waiting list they get like 6 weeks!

all of which is a painful reminder that this society is not interested in protecting children from sexual abuse. and especially not in supporting children and adults who have survived sexual abuse. it's interested in busting paedophile rings, sure, but that focus is on criminalising the wrong kinds of sex, not in articulating what abuse it, and stopping it.

and my final question would be, out of the people i love who were abused by their families, how many of them would rather have gone through the social care (and courts) system, rather than staying with their families?

WHAT NOW?

2010-11-25T19:01:00.002Z

the institutions are being demolished. education, health, support for migrants, children's centres, women's aid, 'sexual assault referral centres', you name it. our world is being refreshingly blatantly rearranged in order to ensure the rich continue to get richer, faster. what do we do now? do we fight to defend these structures? in all their iniquitous, exclusionary, policing/policed and violent glory? is that really what we want?

or is it time to reimagine what education, health, support for migrants, places for children, support for survivors... could be. what could these parts of our lives look like, in our wildest dreams? in our dreams where money doesn't matter, because we aren't allowed any. (or because there isn't any anymore.)

are we going to support one another? are we? are we going to start figuring out how?

"If your experience is that your food comes from the grocery store and your water comes from the tap, you’ll defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on it. If, on the other hand, your food comes from a landbase and your water comes from a river, then you’ll defend to the death that landbase and that river, because your life depends on them."

Jensen.

all we are is a good set of hands

2010-11-18T11:52:00.002Z

ohhh. mai'a. writes with such beauty and relevance.

"this division that we make in our discourse and activism between nonviolence and violence is false. in reality our definition of violence is ‘stuff that the powers that be dont like’. and that is not a helpful paradigm for determining what tactics we should use for our survival. not only is it not helpful, it is contributing to our own demise. taking nonviolence as a fundamental dogma is an act of suicide and a support of the genocide of others.

we cannot run away from trauma, because this culture in and of itself is traumatic. our brokeness, traumatized selves, can be used by us to further destroy ourselves, or can be used as a way to let the love in and out.

[...]

something i learned from my teacher. dont call yourself a ‘healer’. no one can heal anyone else. everyone must heal themselves. all we are a ‘good set of hands’."

i, just...

2010-11-17T16:42:00.002Z

this is so upsetting. i can be tough when it comes to hearing about domestic violence(!) but reading this makes me cry.

"Woman jailed for retracting rape claims is refused appeal." from the Guardian.

she reported being raped by her husband. then, under pressure from him she retracted this. and so now she is being jailed for 'perverting the course of justice'. and since she is now in jail, her children have been put in the care of her abusive husband. against whom no charges have been upheld by the CPS, despite abuse having taken place in front of one of the children.

i am absolutely speechless. what should we do about this?

and i was struggling, one post ago, to articulate why the prison industrial complex is A Bad Thing. jesus.

finding ways not to call the police

2010-11-17T16:24:00.003Z

i'm so impressed by this. beautifully written, compassionate and thoughtful article, with homework! and a resource list too. ohhh, good work.

"...As we paced in the cold night, we moved through our questions, anger and frustration. We thought about how everyone we know—even in a community that mostly wants a world without prisons—has had different experiences with harm and violence, different experiences with police, and, most likely, has a different “threshold” at which they can imagine not calling the police..."

i'm trying to surround myself with prison abolition info at the moment, because it's still a politics that doesn't come automatically to me. i still find it hard to care what becomes of someone who has benefited from abusing. and all repeat abusers benefit. i want to see real sanctions against abuse. and prison is a sanction. but but but. at the very least i remind myself that sending abusers to jail is pretty shit for more vulnerable people there. i remember a couple of years back being taken aback when i learned about queer opposition to hate crimes legislation (e.g. here and here). but it didn't take me long to get that sending racists and homophobes to jail is not very cool for the people of colour and gays already there.

and. regardless of that it's not the answer to racism and homophobia and abuse, either. i do know. but as i say it doesn't always come naturally to me yet. and that's why i love this article for its articulation of why those of us with enough privilege still buy into the idea that the police can be a force for protection:

"...When I think of the moments in which I could possibly imagine calling the police, I think of people I love, and of things I hope they never experience. Why do we feel afraid? Sometimes we feel afraid because we have experienced harm, because we have experienced trauma. Sometimes we also feel afraid because we have bought into aspects of racism, classism, and media-perpetuated images of danger. Sometimes it’s the complex combination of all these things—imagination, memory, and prejudice..."

so the writer of this has thought through real, practical ways in which we can all challenge ourselves on when we might involve the police, and whether we can push that threshold back. and how we can be more prepared for having to make that decision in a crisis.

genius. essential reading.

quote of the day

2010-11-05T17:49:00.000Z

"Kyriarchy exists to give us tools to liberate ourselves by understanding the shifting powers of oppression. [...] It exists to radically implement our finest strategies to deconstruct our personal and political powers for the liberation of self and community. For self AND community. [...]

[I]n the spirit of feminist theology, in the spirit of radical understanding of power, I would argue with 100% confidence that the absolute LAST thing that kyriarchy strives for is individual liberation. Solely pursuing your own liberation often comes at the expense of others. That’s not liberation, that’s mainstream feminism."

Lisa Factora-Borchers, of My Ecdysis, via Flip Flopping Joy. i was relieved - in that way that i feel relief when someone does the incredible work of articulating complexities of power - when i came across Lisa's much-linked post in which she introduces explains the term. if you've also used and/or appreciated this word, be sure to read this update of how it has already been co-opted.

god i'm so naive

2010-11-05T17:21:00.000Z

the women in the group this week - almost all of whom are on probation and doing 'unpaid work' / 'community service', and many of whom have been in prison - were talking about how prison is too soft, and how prisoners should be made to do more work for free as proposed by the coalition government. this... surprised me.

sometimes i think about

2010-11-04T11:18:00.008Z

how the concept of rape within marriage did not exist in english and welsh law until 1991.

"Marriage gave conjugal rights to a spouse, [...] a spouse could not legally revoke consent to sexual intercourse, and if there was consent there was no rape."

the implications of this just boggle my mind. imagine signing over your body like that. so in my parents' marriage.. in all our parents' marriages... i think this is such a terrifying illustration of how the possibility of abuse is silenced, in our culture, thus creating fertile conditions for abuse. i've been thinking about how one of the most important safeguards against abuse is to acknowledge that it happens, it can happen, it probably will happen where someone has power over another. in fact it can only not happen where one person has more power, if the powerfuler (yep, i'm needing more words, help please) person works actively not not misuse their power.

so for centuries women entered into marriages, and people who loved them watched them do so, usually in the total absence of any discussion about whether they would be raped (or otherwise abused), and what they could do if they were. well i'm sure this is still the case. you could call this trust. i'd call it silencing.

it is not safe to not acknowledge the existence and possibilities of power, how it can change, and how it can be used... i was joking with another polyamorous friend recently about pre-nups. i was saying that in any situation involving serious commitment and investment of any kind between me and a group of people, or an individual - i want and need agreements about what will happen if... things change. against the silencing of the possibility (likelihood) of abuse, manipulation, and less dramatically, to create conditions that mean people can leave if they need to. this is not anti-trust, or anti-love (i'm big into trust and love!), but a safeguard against any of us screwing one another over in an unknown future, as people shift, and as power shifts.

and i was asked at a workshop about this stuff what advice i'd give to groups to safeguard against abuse and manipulation - both as in domestic abuse within a community, and lunatics trying to stir and manipulate a scene - and my answer is prenups. like, before you set up, agree what you'll do if someone behaves abusively. define abusively. research how to tell where the power lies in situations where it's not obvious. know where to go for support, know how to support each other. know that this stuff will happen, in any group of people. if you are ready, you are more likely to be able to defeat it before it destroys your group. and read "Why Misogynists Make Great Informants".

...but, marriage? really? can't you think of something more fun? less horrendous? like Mattilda says,

"Many straight people know that marriage is outdated, tacky and oppressive -- and any queer who grew up in or around marriage should remember this well. Marriage still exists as a central site of anti-woman, anti-child and anti-queer violence, and a key institution through which the wealth and property of upper class (white) families is preserved. If gay marriage proponents wanted real progress, they'd be fighting for the abolition of marriage (duh), and universal access to the services that marriage can sometimes help procure: housing, healthcare, citizenship, tax breaks, and inheritance rights."*

nah, gleeful, leaping queers are my idea of ceremony:

* It was hell whittling this incredible article down to a short quote - read the whole thing!

the abuser is popular

2010-10-31T15:04:00.000Z

"in order for you to support communities and individuals, you have to work to stop the abuse that is holding them under water. and stopping the abuse means stopping the abuser. and the abuser is popular. so you wont be."

mai'a, at Outlaw Midwives, in a post called "you have to choose a side. its a war. either you are with life, or you are with the forces of genocide". please read the whole thing!

on 'powerlessness'

2010-10-28T12:17:00.005+01:00

i used the word 'powerless' in my last post, and then wrote a massive footnote, which i think should be a post in itself!
--------------------------------
* i hope it's clear that i don't mean to say that survivors of abuse, or mums whose children have been removed , or women who've been criminalised (or two of these things or all three) are powerless. i don't want to speak for anyone. and i am so full of respect for all the ways in which people in these situations find and use their own powers, and reclaim their powers. i want to find ways to talk about 'powerlessness', while recognising it is never total.

is there a word for power-squished-ness? as in - a way to say that someone has tried to eliminate or drastically reduce another's power - and that this has not been total (unless the person is killed*) but squashed, reduced, hurt...? i like the word squashed as it suggests the ability to bounce/grow/unfurl back. does this make sense? please comment if you can think of a word that means having had your power reduced, but not permanently.

serious power-squashed-ness has to be one of the worst feelings it's possible to experience. maybe it's the worst form of psychological pain. to the extent that generally, no matter what they have been through, people will not admit to having felt it. and - this is hard to talk about - i see this resulting in some women who've been through abuse, kind of denying that their partner ultimately had control. women say 'i gave as good as i got' because this is less painful than dwelling on how squashed their power may have been, even while he sustained injuries, or was poisoned, or was deeply unhappy, or said he felt afraid, or sometimes did as he was told, or negotiated in certain instances.

of course it's not up to me what women who've been through abuse want to talk about, and how anyone understands and describes their own experiences! but in terms of understanding domestic abuse as a pattern, understanding why and how it happens in order to minimise it, i think it is so important to find ways to talk about the intricacies of the power, and how where a woman is experiencing control and violence from a partner and taking control and perpetrating violence against him: of the stories i have heard this is very rarely a case of 'she gives as good as she gets', given the context of, for example, how men are generally able to be financially and housing-wise independent of their ex/partner and child/ren, while the reverse is generally not true. or the context of how men are more likely to make realistic threats to kill a partner, and (on some level) know they are more likely to get away with doing so, while the reverse is not true. and connected to both of these things, the context of how women are likely to be living in a much higher level of fear - of serious injury, death, homelessness, being sectioned, losing contact with their children by being deemed an unfit mother and so on - than men. to me, these kinds of factors bestow so much more power to men, that it is only in exceptional circumstances that women can give as good as they get. i certainly don't believe that it's impossible, i'm just itchy for real, clear, ways to talk about this stuff. i want to find ways of talking about and honouring how people surviving abuse can be powerful, and powersquashed, at the same time.

hmm. any ideas?

* footnote to the footnote: and i don't believe that people who haven't survived, people who've died as a result of abuse were powerless, of course not.

* another footnote: by tagging this 'collusion' and 'myths and excuses' i don't mean to imply that survivors are guilty of collusion, or stupidly taken in by, or propagating, myths and excuses by talking about their powerfulness! i use the tags to find my own way around my thoughts on here. what i mean is more that we all in this culture collude with abuse when we drift along not questioning the myths and excuses about abuse that are provided by the culture, which is an abusive culture.

society supports

2010-10-28T12:17:00.003+01:00

i just read this, at Flip Flopping Joy:

"I was too wild, too out of control. And rather than find a way to *refine* my own personal style–that is, be the same big, wild, out of control person in a way that didn’t cross or step on other people’s boundaries–I tried to make myself smaller. Society *supported* me making myself smaller. Society *supported* me “controlling myself” through self abuse and shame rather than refining myself through love and consideration and compassion. Society supported me hurting myself–through the normalization of hurt. Through the normalization of hurting *me*."

and it reminded me of the last group. i was trying to guide the group through a list of reasons why abuse happens - reasons that members felt were true, as well as the myths and lies that we hear all the time. so that we could sort truths from lies, because understanding why it happens (because an abuser decides that the benefits of behaving that way outweigh other considerations) is key to being able to see it and stay away from it.

so i had a section on the flipchart(!) for 'ways that society supports abuse'. and people didn't get it. someone thought i meant, like women's aid. and i said yes women's aid support women who are abused but i mean - do you think there are ways that the way that society is set up, helps abuse to happen. and then someone said that their friends had said 'he doesn't mean it, he really loves you' - and of course that was a totally relevant comment. but what i was going for was like - when the police turn up and he says you're the crazy violent one and they arrest you because they're 'not trained' (to put it politely). but no one said stuff like that and because time was short i had to just validate the stuff they were saying rather than nitpick towards my own our-culture-is-fucked agenda. sigh.

but - how do we talk about it? is it necessary to talk about it? it's good to have that part in that exercise when i'm doing 'awareness sessions' with professionals. especially cos i get to make them feel guilty about colluding with abuse, ha, and maybe they'll think a bit harder about it. but if women who've come for a 'healthy relationships' course don't find it relevant to talk that way, well...

but it upsets me how much the women, on this course in particular, internalise the blame for the abuse, and their responses to the abuse. there may be more to it than this, but i connect this to the fact that most or all of these women are on probation, have court coming up, have had their children taken into 'care', have been criminalised. these women have had to learn to play the game of the powers that be. some of them were criminalised for their responses to the abuse they've been through. and those that came to the attention of social 'care' had their children removed for reasons connected to the abuse. and so i imagine these women have learned that if they display any anger at the way they have been treated - by individual abusers, or by social care, the criminal justice system, etc, they are knocked back much further by social care and the criminal justice system. and you can't live with that sense of injustice when you need to get your children back, or you need to act sane in a court room. you have to put it out of your mind, or drop it as just untrue.

and meanwhile individual abusers, social care and the criminal justice system, continue to propagate the notion of women being to blame for abuse, and/or choosing abusive man, and/or that an act of retaliation is at least as 'evil' as years of systematic abuse. these are the explanations offered to these women for the situations they're in. and it sure must be easier to believe that you yourself are bad, than to acknowledge the way society is engineered to make you powerless.*

one woman spoke of having called the police one time, when they arrived her partner told them she was in the shower, then she and her partner walked out of the house and past the parked police car, she with a swollen freshly-bruised face, and the police officer looked her straight in the eye and did nothing. and you know in the group i can validate that that is a terrible thing, that she was let down and betrayed (while meanwhile my cofacilitator remains expressionless, in that 'well it's just her story' way). and other women rolled their eyes in sympathy. and the woman herself said "i thought that was terrible; it was disgusting." but in that charity which has been co-opted by Probation, it's not the place to recognise and name the fact that the police help abuse to happen. everyone will have to deal with police in the coming weeks and months. the officers will be not unfriendly. it doesn't help to abhor them when you're just trying to get your children back. so these women absorb and absorb this 'normalisation of hurting themselves' and i can't figure out how much i'm colluding with this process vs how much i'm rightfully working within the boundaries of what they can cope with.

* see next post for extended footnote about my use of this word!

organisation in 'we like girls and women', shock

2010-10-24T10:32:00.001+01:00

oh my goodness. i found this while linking to the mind-bendingly awesome Young Women's Empowerment Project in my last post. at the moment i'm working in a couple of places that use the language of empowerment and so on... well i guess they've pretty much co-opted that language, and are using it for coercive purposes. and they seem to be among the more sound of voluntary sector organisations in the uk.

...so imagine being part of a project that promotes this stuff. imagine...

"What we believe
Confidentiality. Anything that is said here stays here. We use anonymous identifiers to keep records of what we do.
Harm reduction. We support young women and girls in making any decisions in their lives that they want. We don’t tell anyone what to do or who to be. We think that youth are the best at making decisions about their lives.
No requirements of youth. Any young woman or girl impacted by the sex trade/street economy can participate.
Every participant is smart and can contribute to the project immediately. We don’t think that people need to be sober or out of the trade to express their thoughts and feelings, help us out, or to learn.
Sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia intersect and deeply affect the trade and girls and women who are involved. We can’t talk about the trade without talking about these issues.
Solidarity with boys/men/transgender persons involved in the trade. This issue isn’t only about women and girls.
We like girls and women. We don’t think they are “a problem,” “hard to work with,” or “difficult.”
We are lead by women who have been there. We call the shots.
We believe people who know this life are the ones who should be around this group.
We strive to have respect for everyone. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been, where you’re at, who you are, or what your opinions may be.
People don’t need labels. We respect youth by not labeling them as problem youth, delinquents, etc.
We don’t want girls to “be saved.” We are here to support young women in making decisions about their lives.
We do not have one set of ideas. We don’t think that girls in our project should, either.
Our views about the trade are always changing. We reserve the right to change our minds when we learn new things.
We are not a social service agency. We do not provide case management.
Everyone can help make decisions.
We believe in partnerships between youth and adults, and partnership means that adults don’t make all of the decisions.
We believe that girls do not “seek out” abuse. Girls do what they need to do to survive.
Our experiences in the street economy/sex trade do not define who we are, or who we may become.
We believe that involvement in the sex trade/street economy does not suddenly become harmless based on age, sex, or gender. We believe in listening to people who are involved to find out what is happening.
Girls have their own language and understanding about the sex trade/street economy. Everyone who is living it is the expert.
Small is best. We don’t want to be a monolithic ‘agency.’ We offer different spaces, different ways of understanding, and we feel most comfortable with small arrangements."

honouring this

2010-10-24T10:12:00.001+01:00

"i can't getcha outta jail, but i can getcha outta hell..."

oh, kate bornstein. queen advocate of coping strategies. someone should put her in charge. i hope by the time i get to my sixties i have as much compassion and wisdom to give, and keep on giving. do you know about her anti-suicide book? do you know about the blog where she keeps on posting and responding to comments from suicidal young people? oh i wish i'd had those sorts of messages when i was a teenager. i wish i'd had them when i was 25.

honestly, i see her work as so important and counter-cultural. keeping the people alive who can't bear to live here. not by making them stay, but by offering them a message they have almost certainly never heard: "You can do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living. Anything. Anything at all. It can be immoral, unethical, or illegal [...] It can even be self-destructive." so that there keep on being more of us, so there are more of us to work against the culture, even if that's only by staying alive. "There's only one rule [...]: Don't be mean. That's the only rule you ever need to follow to make sure that your life is gonna get better. If you're not mean, you can do anything it takes to make your life more worth living. [...] It takes true courage to follow your outlaw identities and desires in the world. Doing that nearly always ends you up with less worldly power. But I promise: you can always do something to make your life better every single day of your freaky geeky life."

and i'd like to do another project like this but aimed at adults, people who don't consider themselves 'teens, freaks and other outlaws'. or at least come up with a good, simple way of expressing this stuff, to use in my work. does stabbing your partner when it seems like he's going to kill you count as being mean? i have a lot of these kinds of conversations with women who can never forgive themselves for fighting back, and who have been (or are in the process of being) gravely punished for keeping themselves alive.

and about how women cope with it. all the crazy stuff that people do in crazy situations - it needs to be honoured. the incredible Young Women's Empowerment Project (in Chicago) has the tagline "girls do what they have to do to survive".

how do you bring that kind of message to adult women who are already trapped, or even already criminalised for doing whatever it took to make their life more worth living?

i heart lundy bancroft

2010-10-19T23:26:00.000+01:00

guess what - he even has a blog! which unfortunately it seems he hardly ever updates. a cursory glance at the posts might make him seem a bit of a cheesey self-help merchant but i swear to you this man is an understated genius. and his analysis of abusive relationships and perpetrator mentalities applies to goddamn civilisation as a whole. i have given out hundreds of photocopies of chapter 14 (The Process of Change) and chapter 7 (The Abusive Man and Breaking Up), from Why Does He Do That and no one has ever said to me 'that's not relevant to my life'. everyone who's read it has got safer and saner. in a world dedicated to covering up for abuse and oppression, this bespectacled fellow keeps on quietly telling the truth.

on his blogger profile, his interests are 'domestic violence and sexual assault' 'child abuse and neglect' 'peak oil' 'bioregionalism' and 'over thirties baseball'.

we always hurt the ones we love the most

2010-10-19T23:03:00.001+01:00

heard that again this week.

no, we hurt the most the ones we can get away with hurting.

from correspondence

2010-10-19T22:59:00.001+01:00

"i agree that anyone has the right to be defended against accusations, of course. but i think it's really important for both sides to be differentiating the naming/questionning of bad behaviour from an implication that someone is inherently racist, abusive, evil, etc. [...]

to state the obvious, it's important to be able to have ways of talking about perceived oppressive behaviour without a) it being a character assassination and/or b) people framing it as a character assassination in a way that can divert the conversation away from the questionable behaviour and on to a character defence."

i'm sorry, you're just not ready

2010-10-06T16:05:00.001+01:00

we met with someone this week, who was interested in coming on the course. kind of interested, kind of scared. and she'd had a lot go on and was just on the cusp of wanting to deal with it, wanting to open herself up and see what was there.

and because the content of the course would be challenging her relationships with the people she currently relies on for support, she would need additional support to go alongside the course. such as counselling. but there is a huge waiting list for counselling. so really, it's not ok to invite her on to an intense, structured course which is going to break down her support system while offering no alternative. and there is no unstructured group available, even though that would be the simplest thing to offer. and there is no counselling for several months.

so the worker's automatic response to this was to say "i'll talk with her caseworker and explain that she's just not ready." aarrgh. i mean, i argued and said that it's important to make sure the woman knows that it's not that there's something wrong with her, that the lack is with the service. but this could easily be lost in translation between so many workers. and it infuriates me that the unthinking default is to place the blame, constantly and in tiny ways and turns of phrase, with the service users and not with the service. it's sending the constant low-level message that they can't do anything right. remind you of anything?

and most of all i feel so sad for this woman, who is doing the scary thing of opening up and being honest about her history and her needs, and that there is no support for her. when she is so ready. and she was even going to rearrange her work so that she could do the course. more and more 'clients' are getting jobs midway through their support and having to give up the support. because obviously the work can't be flexible. all this pressure to get off benefits just means that people don't even have time...

it's crazy that we've created this course and the course is already excluding the 'wrong type' of survivor. so i guess i'm just repeating myself and saying that it's all bollocks except for open, long-term, user-led groups.

about the magic

2010-10-05T19:10:00.002+01:00

i dreamed about one of my ex-clients last night. there was some kind of party at my mum's house and i think a few women i used to work with were there, but she was the only one i talked to properly. she seemed quite a lot more sorted and had stopped drinking. i was impressed that she had decided to come to a party despite struggling with alcohol. she is glamorous in real life, and was looking really good for the party. i don't remember much else but i do wonder what on earth my subconscious is doing with all the 'material' it's amassed over the past seven years working. i kind of imagined that i'd have this process of processing it, and that i'd have this wonderful sense of gaining perspective on it all. but it seems to be hiding, or maybe this is how it's going to trickle out.

it's so so odd, having had one-sided, intimate involvement in key changes in so many people's lives. and so so odd to think that all of those memories are still in me, although i don't consciously remember them. i sorely wish that this kind of thing, this odd, magical, privileged, disturbing, part of the job was talked about in my office, in what little training we had, or even on the smokebreaks, but... nothing. having to deal with several realities, and deal with my colleagues pretending everything is normal, makes me feel crazy (another reason i had to leave). but if they won't talk about the magic, well, i still know the magic's there.

a cultural issue

2010-10-05T18:30:00.001+01:00

i find it difficult to explain how much it means to me to come across simple, accessible, heartfelt writing that explodes oppressive myths and lies and distractions and scapegoats and 'things that people say' and replaces them with articulate truths. i read this today...

"Still, we in the West too often find it easier to perceive rape as an accepted part of an unfamiliar culture rather than as a tool of war that we could help banish. Too often, the enemy becomes all Congolese men rather than men with guns terrorizing the Congolese people. By casting the chaos and violence as “men vs. women” or dismissing the crisis as “cultural,” we do a profound injustice to Congolese men. Rather than help, we send an implicit insult: It’s a pity, but, well…it’s just who you people are. [...]

Any Congolese will tell you rape is not “traditional.” It did occur in Congo before the war, as it does everywhere. But the proliferation of sexual violence came with the war. Militias and Congolese soldiers alike now use sexual violence as a weapon. Left unchecked, sexual violence has festered in Congo’s war-ravaged east. This does not make rape cultural. It makes it easy to commit. There is a difference. [...]

“Cultural relativism legitimizes the violence and discredits the victims, because when you accept rape as cultural, you make rape inevitable,” [...]

When we blame all Congolese men for sexual violence, not only do we imply that rape is inherent to the African landscape, we avoid critical questions, particularly regarding the role that we in the West play.[...]

When we label rape in Congo “cultural,” we let ourselves off the hook. And that is a cultural issue. Ours."

Lisa Shannon, in the New York Times*, via the beautifully-named A Life Well Loved blog.

*dammit, i wanted to provide a link for you to read the whole thing but now it says subscribers only.

women in prison

2010-10-04T15:21:00.000+01:00

"Taking the most hurt people out of society and punishing them in order to teach them how to live within society is, at best, futile. Whatever else a prisoner knows, she knows everything there is to know about punishment because that is exactly what she has grown up with. Whether it is childhood sexual abuse, indifference, neglect; punishment is most familiar to her."

Chris Tchaikovsky - Former prisoner and founder of Women in Prison

disempowerment

2010-10-04T11:43:00.001+01:00

i really want to write here more, so i'm going to eke out some ramblings, until it comes more naturally again.

i'm facilitating a course about domestic abuse with a group of women. it's through an organisation who work with 'women offenders'. funny how many of my friends could be described in the same way... anyhow, it's the first piece of work i've done since leaving my casework, and i'm struggling really to find the part of myself that works. for seven years i would get dressed and drink my coffee and travel to work and then find myself at my computer, or in the hospital, with lots of work to do and a professional identity to inhabit. i spent a lot of time feeling like this persona was fraying at the edges, and trying to be both the smooth, capable, educated professional that other professionals required me to be, and the down-to-earth, real-person(?!) support worker that the women using the service needed, was one more exhausting aspect of the job.

now every couple of days i need to pull myself up into some sort of professional mode to make a phonecall to people, and i procrastinate, because that person was never real, just a necessary part of what i was doing, which i don't really do any more.

i'm also finding it difficult to focus on the tasks i need to do. i'm a bit worried about this course. i did a two hour workshop with other women using the service a few months ago. it was great, as i was an outsider coming in so i had licence to just do my workshop as always, in a way that is kind of led by the group rather than me.

but now that i've written this course, in consultation with a worker from the service, and met some of the women who'll be on the course, i'm becoming more uncomfortable with how prescriptive courses are at this service, and how disempowered the women are.

the women who came in for appointments about the course, seemed to have rock-bottom confidence, even though the appointments were in a building they use frequently. it seems to me that, although the service seemed initially to be a really good, flexible, service for marginalised women, it has now been more and more co-opted by probation and social care. it seems like a lot of women are 'required' to be there by their probation officer and/or social worker. i think this could be overcome if i was doing the kind of group i used to run in my job - just open discussion groups where women can talk about whatever is going on and support each other and be validated. but i was asked to write a course. because that's how they do things here. and i'm picking up a general attitude from well-meaning workers, that the women are problematic, because they are lost, and they can't sort out their lives, and they can't look after their children. which totally disturbs me. i've tried to make clear to the workers that my attitude is that these women 'have all the knowledge/resources' to support each other and understand domestic abuse etc etc, but i'm worried that i won't be able to single-handedly make the course an empowering experience if the attitude of the co-facilitator (out of habit more than anything) is that the women need to be taught.

and i tried to suggest that we keep the course as open and 'user-led' as possible, but the worker replied that the organisation has to be able to demonstrate to probation/social care that there is concrete content to their courses otherwise they can be written off as wishy-washy. i really disagree. i used to have to write letters to probation/solititors/social care to explain what 'work i'd done' with a particular woman. i would write a strongly-worded letter saying we'd done rigorous work on safety-planning, patterns within abuse and control, looking for the first signs of control in new relationships, confidence-building and so on and so on - because this is all true! even though i wasn't teaching them, only facilitating their discussion and doing an exercise together maybe every two weeks. and as professionals we have licence to represent our work however is appropriate - because probation/social care thank god can't actually come into the group sessions. so it's such a cop-out, or a tragic reversal of what these women need, to try and tailor courses to the fucked up demands of statutory agencies.

god, user-led groups really are the only way! everything else is just painfully wrong.

integrity is

2010-09-15T10:38:00.000+01:00

i reached for Trauma and Recovery, which i've never finished, and it had so much to tell me about my mixed feelings in my last post. a snippet for you (perhaps swap the word supporter where it says 'therapist', and definitely something else where it says 'patients'!):

"By constantly fostering the capacity for integration, in themselves and in their patients, engaged therapists deepen their own integrity. Just as basic trust is the developmental achievement of earliest life, integrity is the developmental achievement of maturity. [...]

Integrity is the capacity to affirm the value of life in the face of death, to be reconciled with the finite limits of one's own life and the tragic limitations of the human condition, and to accept these realities without despair. Integrity is the foundation upon which trust in relationships is originally formed, and upon which shattered trust may be restored. The interlocking of integrity and trust in caretaking relationships completes the cycle of generations and regenerates the sense of human community which trauma destroys."

what will you do with your wellness?

2010-09-15T09:38:00.001+01:00

well it wasn't all that dramatic really, quitting work, i'll be going back as an occasional fill-in worker, and i did this for the first time yesterday. mmph. it's weird, seeing the job after 10 weeks away.

it seemed so hectic, although i only saw two 'clients'. one was the ideal, heartwarming, afternoon session. she had had some support from us before, she was now ready to leave. she had her information, she had her plan. we talked it through, though she had it all sorted and didn't need me to validate it. i wished her luck and off she went. i sighed inside, feeling lucky to be able to come back and get paid to do this, thinking ah... this is a nice job.

the second was a woman i've talked to before on the phone. things are better for her now than then. she has been through extreme and prolonged abuse and is very traumatised. in some ways she's kind of 'difficult to work with' because of the trauma. if she's not happy with the service she goes on about it. she's trying to get her needs met after a childhood, and a decade in adulthood, of having her needs obliterated. when she first came yesterday, and was angry about the service, i was alarmed for my safety for about the third time in all the years i've worked for the service. i realised i'd forgotten to unlock the other door to the room that i'm supposed to use to get out if necessary - the same thing had happened once before and i'd been trapped in the same room with an angry client shouting in my face.

but she soon calmed down and i realised i'd overreacted, i guess i'm out of practice having been away. she stayed and talked for ages. she mentioned that another service in the town had just been in touch again, many months after their first phonecall, and she'd had to tell her story all over again, to yet another professional. i remembered, though i didn't feel i should tell the woman, that the service had said they couldn't visit her until they had done their risk assessment, due to this woman having mental health issues. and i thought how totally the other service would be freaking out now, as she's standing up in room with only one unlocked door, being angry, and i'm a lone worker. the other service would not only have unlocked the damn door, they would send two workers at once, and they haven't even agreed to meet the woman yet due to feeling she's a risk to them and need to do some massive form over the phone to see whether she's too crazy. and in the mean time who works with these crazy women? they are 'crazy' because that's what happens when you are abused, abuse is a crazy thing to happen. it's so important to work with the crazy women! and very few people are really very mad if you listen and try to see where they're coming from and what they need. anyway, i'm glad my service hasn't got itself together yet to the extent that it excludes 'crazy' women. i mean, if i told my manager about this session, she'd want to 'put in place measures for workers' protection' but she's not got around to it, thank goodness.

i really enjoyed the session and i felt good that the woman was staying and finding it useful and that i had the knowledge to refer her to services and groups and books and other things that can help her. she didn't want to access mental health services for PTSD in case she was misdiagnosed and pathologised and i thought this was very wise. i feel desperate for women i work with who are so traumatised to access support for this but it is now impossible without sending them for a general mental health assessment - this freaks me out for exactly the reason this woman was wary of it. people act all kinds of crazy following trauma, and can then get diagnosed with all kinds of disorders, when maybe all they need is acknowledgement that they've been abused, support to safely remember what's happened, for the opposite of the traumatising things to start happening (for example, for their needs to start being met), and support to understand their 'crazy' symptoms as normal and natural responses to abuse so they are less overwhelming. (hey, read especially Judith Herman and perhaps also Dorothy Rowe if yr interested in this stuff)

so yeah and then last night after work i didn't know what to do with myself. i was carrying trauma, already, after only one proper session at work. i feel better this morning, writing, and maybe if i could make myself debrief religiously every time i might not get fucked up. dammit, i love this work. and i know i have a lot to give. but last night i was fighting with myself thinking it's fucking you up, you're traumatised by proxy. and then i was thinking well the understandable thing to do would be to stop doing this work. but then it really does feel like it's my role in life, it's what i do, it's what i'm good at, it's what i've studied and am fascinated by, i can't stop now. and anyway, what right do i have to hole myself up away from trauma? as someone who has been through no seriously traumatising experiences, and a very low amount of the regular, in-society traumas, who carries a huge amount of non-traumatised privilege, i am protecting myself from trauma at the expense of more traumatised people, because i can, and this is as unacceptable as protecting any other kind of privilege.

if i open up my energy to people and support them in the healthiest possible way (which i'm committed to figuring out) then this goes a tiny way to redistributing trauma. i haven't seen this talked about before but it's very imporant to me. we challenge our right to comfort at others' expense, but often defend our decision to turn one's back on trauma and traumatised people - i haven't seen a discussion of privilege in the discourse around supporting. of course i'm not arguing that i should go out and try to get myself mentally scarred for the sake of it. no, what i mean is - if i can be useful with the extra energy that i don't have to spend dealing with nightmares, flashbacks, anger, panic attacks and so on, then i should be! what am i going to do with my wellness? how can i use my wellness most usefully, and maximise it, in order to maximise the wellness of others?

so much to tell you

2010-09-07T12:13:00.000+01:00

well, i quit my job! cue much identity-crisising as it's what i've done for my entire adult life, etc. but i'm starting to pull myself together a bit and remember that i still have lots to offer outside the world of employment. i'm on my way back from a workshop i travelled to, talking about power and control in queer relationships and communties. new folded flipchart paper in my bag to geek out over when i get home, caffeinated ideas of doing a massive info-sharing website, and thinking of ways to make money to live while doing work that is closer to my real values. exciting...

and wanting to ease back into blogging, i miss how it helps my brain. feels a bit awkward starting again, so here's a random relevant good and bad thing i've become aware of lately:

these folks are amazing: Stop Violence Everyday / STorytelling and Organizing Project. Especially check out the audio clips, totally inspiring community responses to abuse and manipulation.

bad thing? i dunno, look at this that i read today:

"Nicholas Sarkozy has pledged to press ahead with legislation to strip immigrants who attack police of their French nationality. [...]

He reiterated his determination to implement the sanctions, which he first threatened after three days of riots in the southern city of Grenoble which were sparked when police shot dead a suspected armed robber in July.

The Elysée Palace said the president would implement the measures "as soon as possible". The punishment would apply to foreign-born criminals who had obtained French nationality in the last 10 years and who "endanger the life of a person in charge of public security, in particular the police and gendarmes".

The proposals have been vehemently criticised by the opposition and some legal experts who say they are contrary to the constitution that states all French citizens are equal before the law regardless of race, creed or origin. [...]

Critics accuse Sarkozy, who also faces international criticism over the expulsion of almost 1,000 Roma last month, of playing to extreme rightwing voters by linking violent crime and immigration."

which is from this Guardian article. because i'm just warming back up to blogging, and drawing the links again, and there is so much between the lines of that article about what happens to people who retaliate against their oppressors. and hey, since i'm still warming up i'm allowed to be repetitive and bring in Jensen once again:

"Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims."

sommerpause

2010-09-07T09:44:00.000+01:00

poppy

2010-06-15T23:17:00.006+01:00

hehe. now i've started doing this i'm seeing particularly awesome weeds everywhere. don't miss the next exciting installment!

do you get why it makes total sense (to me) in terms of this blog and it's not just escapism? i will write about it soon when i've got time.

two women

2010-06-15T23:10:00.000+01:00

so. this morning at group. among the women.

one is an 'overstayer', ie she came to the uk on a visa which has now expired. she spends her life in fear of a knock on the door. her husband knows full well he has ultimate control - he doesn't even have to beat her, not necessary - he simply doesn't give her food, or money. when she is forced to ask - then he beats her. social services don't have to help her, only her children. so he provides adequate stuff for the children. social services, when asked to pay for accommodation for mum and children, refuse, and offer either to remove the children or fly mum with or without her children, to her country of origin. this woman can't tear herself away from that horrible programme on sky, UK Border Force or whatever it's called, the programme all about the knocks on the doors and how brutally effective our immigration system can be.

another woman is a UK citizen, and originally from another country. her ex-partner beat her badly, she pressed charges and he is now in jail for a couple of months. this woman doesn't feel confident enough to make phonecalls, and she asks me to call the Border Agency Reporting Centre to find out what will happen to him when he finishes his sentence. she wants to report that he is in the country illegally, and she has tried to do so before, during the months of court hearings when she received threats from him that he would kill her and her family. the border agency tell me to call the jail. the jail need to see my letterhead. i am glad to give up for the day, feeling queasy in this advocacy role. the border agency man suggests that there is no reason why he would be intercepted by immigration on his release from jail; a failed asylum seeker would be removed, but this man has no legal status; he will be treated like any other person at the end of their sentence, the jail and immigration are not connected. this woman feels suicidal at the idea of her ex-partner being released and coming straight round to her house as he's always said he would.

Too Much

2010-06-15T23:09:00.002+01:00

there's a wonderful new post from Tyrone at Enough, 'On Crisis and Community'. i love Tyrone's description of neighbours working together on two occasions when people were attacked:

"I have felt so much gratitude since then, for my little group of neighbors who shared my inclination and willingness to act – not by calling the police, but by putting on our bathrobes in the middle of the night and knocking on our neighbor’s door together, prepared to help."

i love the Enough project, their honesty and the links they make...

"The questions I have – how do we balance immediate safety with long-term survival and transformation; how do we stop violence when the roots are unimaginably deep;

[...]

I want too much. I want solutions that transform violence, at the roots, for everybody. I want us all to believe in transformation – not only our small, fierce transformative justice collaboratives, but my neighbors. I want there to be reason for us to believe. I want the words, the strength to begin these conversations and see them through, in all of my communities"

weed of the week

2010-06-14T16:50:00.001+01:00

these sweet peas are here every year, overflowing from a shitty bit of wasteland that i get to walk past often

everything that is wrong with the world

2010-06-10T10:58:00.000+01:00

i shouldn't share this as it's not going to help you through your day to know this, but somehow i can't help it. i've just posted some of mai'a's inspiring writing, now i'm going to ruin such optimism. if you're feeling overwhelmed with Wrong, as everyone i speak to seems to be right now, just scroll on down to the next post for some kickassness instead.

"Immigration Agents Target Oil Spill Cleanup Workers

A Louisiana sheriff has admitted that his office requested federal immigration officials to search for undocumented workers among those cleaning up BP’s oil spill. In a statement to the magazine ColorLines, St. Bernard Parish Sheriff Jack Stephens said he was concerned about “illegal aliens” and “criminals” coming into the area “under the guise of doing legitimate work.” Last week, the journalism project Feet in Two Worlds revealed that immigration officials had visited two oil spill command centers to check the documents of workers."

From Democracy Now!

mai'a on safer spaces

2010-06-10T10:29:00.005+01:00

many things that mai'a writes float around my head and become such important reference points for me, and i want to find ways to share my thoughts about them, link to them here and talk with my friends about them, but mostly their significance and relevance is still filtering slowly through my brain.

i love nothing better than a systematic analysis of what needs to happen for abuse not to happen, and i'll be coming back to this one. here are some snippets:

"life is not safe. people hurt each other. we have a choice. to either support our own and others’ abusive behaviour or words, or to nurture respectful relations.

safety is an illusion. what is real is what we do. do we act out fear? or do we act out respect?

[...]

4. intentions. your intentions matter. yes. to you. and they should. to you. the rest of us. dont give a fuck.

[...]

if you are fucking up a lot, like over and over again, and hurting people, then i got to wonder:

a. either you really do intend to hurt people or,

b. dont care if you hurt people or,

c. are not able to see that your intentions and your effects are not lining up very well..."

read the whole thing, really, you should

still ending child detention

2010-06-10T09:56:00.000+01:00

- this time by sending the children back to where they fled from.

"The UK Border Agency is to set up a £4m "reintegration centre" in Afganistan so that it can start deporting unaccompanied child asylum seekers to Kabul from Britain, the Guardian can disclose.

The terms of the official tender* for the centre show that immigration officials initially hope to forcibly return 12 boys a month aged under 18 to Afghanistan and provide "reintegration assistance" for 120 adults a month.

Home Office figures show there are more than 4,200 unaccompanied child asylum seekers in Britain, with most being supported in local authority social services homes. Those from Afghanistan are the largest group. Of the 400 minors claiming asylum in the first three months of this year, almost half were Afghans.

A decision to start deporting Afghan child asylum seekers who arrive in Britain alone would amount to a major shift in policy. Up until now, child protection issues and an undertaking that failed child asylum seekers would be returned only if adequate reception and care arrangements were in place for them on arrival have blocked returns.

The British plans form part of a wider European move to plan the return of unaccompanied migrant children to Afghanistan. Norway has also announced plans to open a reception centre in Kabul. Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands are also reported to be preparing to return Afghan children to Kabul."

* meaning that private companies now have the opportunity to bid for the contract to do this work, for profit. nice.

more on the world cup

2010-06-08T16:51:00.003+01:00

awesome analysis yet again from Cara Kulwicki at the Curvature, this time of a world-cup DV campaign.

"Firstly, I have to say that while incidents of domestic violence rose by 30% last World Cup, I doubt that domestic violence itself rose in hugely meaningful terms. I imagine that what was seen was not a rise in men abusing their women partners, but a great surge in men abusing their women partners all at once. I imagine that virtually all of the perpetrators were already perpetrators (or would have soon become perpetrators) — they just all decided to commit their assaults around the same time, for a change. The World Cup didn’t make them do it. And so I think that centering a campaign around the World Cup as though it’s a cause is somewhat misguided."

check out the whole article, she's a genius.

i liked this

2010-06-08T16:43:00.000+01:00

(and it couldn't be more relevant to me right now)

"I'm extremely sensitive as to whether the work I'm doing is actually accomplishing anything. And the feeling I get when I'm working futilely feels a lot like burnout, discouragement, frustration, and so on. I've felt this sensation often enough to know that it doesn't mean I need to take two weeks off and then come back and do the same damn useless job. Nor does it mean I need to collapse into a sobbing heap of self-pity. None of those do any good. It ususally just means I need to change my approach so that I accomplish something in the real physical world.

Useful work and tangible accomplishments make burnout go away quickly."

Jensen, Endgame.

light switch

2010-06-06T12:54:00.001+01:00

couldn't write

2010-06-06T12:14:00.004+01:00

i'm trying to lift myself back into writing.
this isn't burnout, i've sorted out my working situation so i work the right amount now. no, this is horror and grief.
all of the why am i doing this when people are being killed actually trying to counteract abuse, oppression, imprisonment, starvation. (they are going again: many of the surviving activists are going to try again to reach gaza by boat. this blows my mind and, for some reason, makes me cry more)
have you followed what's happened, in the raid on the flotilla and afterwards? i've been focussing on that rather than the oil spill because a mind can only take so much, plus it more directly relates to what i'm trying to understand.
all my friends say they're going a little mad. but we say things to one another to keep each other on track. and then we take each other swimming in waterfalls (3 waterfalls! in four days this weekend, i am lucky)

meanwhile, a fucking counsellor totally screwed over some of my 'clients', making them believe they were to blame for the abuse, pathologising them, and partially undoing about a year of my work in a group. meanwhile my friends continue to wrangle with controlling people in their personal lives (my personal life is for now free of these types, touch wood). meanwhile i despair of ever getting together a concise analysis of ALL THIS STUFF that people can understand and apply to help undermine the power of abusers and oppressors. but stopping writing isn't going to help, is it.

meanwhile, i found out this thing. have you heard of plants called 'nitrogen fixers?' they are plants like beans, peas, clover and things. i knew that they were nitrogen fixers and that this is a good thing. but what i didn't know was that they get the nitrogen out of the air. ideas about land being regenerated are one of the things keeping me sane these days and someday when i'm less sad maybe i can write about how this all links in to ideas of community healing etc, and i have a friend who has written about these links and other people do too. but anyway, if you have a rubbish bit of land which has been stripped of nutrients for one reason or another, i knew that nitrogen fixing plants were one of the things needed to help it sort itself out. but i thought that these plants just somehow made existing nitrogen in the soil usable for other plants. but no! they get it out of the air and make it usable for other plants and creatures! these things help me so much because they show that land just does what it needs to heal. 'wasteland' fills up with 'weeds' and these weeds are bringing to that soil what it needs. and then they die down and rot and the soil becomes richer and other plants can grow. i might write about this stuff more, especially in times of desperation, i'm all for spreading information that might help other people stay saner too.

ending child detention

2010-05-29T10:46:00.004+01:00

things i've had my head in the sand about, #1/1000 000. i haven't written about any Yarl's Wood or other detention centre stuff as i'm at a loss to explain why i'm not chained to the gate, or Doing Something in some way, about it.

so the new government has pledged to end detention of children subject to immigration control. it was pointed out to me at a workshop by Black Women's Rape Action Project & Women Against Rape about yarl's wood at the anarchafeminist conference in manchester, that this of course means that children will be released from detention, often into the 'care' system, while mothers continue to be imprisoned.

splitting up families in this way is, of course, horrifying, especially in the guise of a 'doing good' election promise. however an alternative way to 'end child detention' was used in scotland, where they had pledged to end the practice immediately, and therefore needed to get those kids across the border asap:

"Sehar [Shebaz] and her baby girl were incarcerated in Dungavel on the same day that the new coalition government told us that child detention would end – and end immediately in Scotland – whereupon Sehar was summarily removed from Scottish soil and driven down to Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre to be locked up there instead. [...]

Sehar was instrumental in ensuring that the letter to Nick Clegg http://www.paih.org/letter-yarlswood-to-nickclegg.pdf was seen by the outside world. She was then swiftly separated from the other families and prevented from communicating with anyone else." (from a statement by Positive Action in Housing)

Then, on the 22nd may, Sehar and her daughter were deported, flown to Pakistan.

"Sehar is the victim of well-documented domestic violence here in the UK. Her escape from her husband is extremely likely to incur retributive violence soon after she sets foot in Pakistan. Her life and her baby’s life are at risk.

Damian Green, immigration minister, has refused to give Sehar compassionate leave to remain despite receiving copies of police reports and letters from Blackburn Women’s Aid supporting her claims of domestic violence."

last week a Pakistani 'service user' told me she'd heard that Sehar had already been killed. this woman has also told me several rumours that turned out not to be true, but that's not to say this isn't true.

Positive Action in Housing's statement continues:

"We are now concerned about the remaining eleven Yarl’s Wood families, four of whom are on hunger strike. We also remain concerned about exactly what the new government means when they say they will end child detention. Will families be able to claim asylum without fear of being separated and children being taken into care while parents are locked up? After the latest debacle about ending child detention, we have to be cautious about exactly what the politicians mean when they come out and say these things. At present, it means Scottish asylum families being driven straight away hundreds of miles away form their communities and sources of support to the controversial Yarl’s Wood facility which even the Chief Inspector of Prisons has branded as unsuitable for children. Let us not forget that UKBA themselves admitted that FAMILIES DO NOT ABSCOND.

In the spirit of the new government’s commitment to end child detention, Positive Action in Housing is calling on the government to release with immediate effect all remaining Yarls Wood families back to their communities so that their children can return to a normal life and schools and so that the asylum claims of their parents can be properly investigated in a humane and civilised way – this is the least recompense we could give as a society for the inhumane way we have treated these families."

eleven families. i mean, it just doesn't make sense to me even according to the obscene logic of the home office. why put a tiny number of people, so unsystematically, through such hell (not that i think the 250+ other people at yarl's wood should be there either..)? perhaps they are testing whether they can get away with it. i read an offhand comment by a guardian journalist who had spoken with women in yarl's wood that the phonecalls are cut off every few minutes as a matter of procedure. so that it's that much harder for them to keep in touch with lawyers, supporters, family (their children, once they are separated!).. i just...

football

2010-05-27T21:53:00.003+01:00

from a press-release thing to do with the White Ribbon Campaign (UK group trying to get men to take responsibility for stopping DV):

"Home Office figures show that in the World Cup in 2006, domestic violence cases reported to the police increased by up to 31 percent. These figures revealed a surge of reported cases on each of England's five games in the tournament."

i was working the local helpline back in 2006 and it was unbelievable. sooo busy. overexcitable, pissed-up men feeling entitled to... it doesn't bear thinking about.

anyhow, i much enjoyed this, from the same press release:

"To pin the White ribbon on the chest is like taking on the responsibility of captain, but in the more important game, that of life." Paulo Maldini (former Italy and AC Milan captain).

shining the cold light of evolutionary psychology

2010-05-24T23:01:00.002+01:00

oh fuck off.

no, he's doing it because it brings him rewards, and because he can.

and refering your adult daughter for a mental health assessment to cure her of her abusive marriage? jesus christ, that's terrifying.

'evolutionary psychologist' (how can you argue with that, after all?) empowers mother to take control of her daughter, as the solution to the fact she is controlled. aaargh

economic necessity

2010-05-21T12:06:00.001+01:00

BFP writing about reality tv shows set in Detroit (and a whole lot more):

"Whole industries *exist* because we believe the racist tropes about black led urban warfare. It makes sense to us as viewers that a majority black city *needs* tankers and massive arsenals to deal with rampant uncontrollable crime.

[...]

And so industries build up around that response (reality television cop shows)–whereby not only does a militarized response to violence *make sense*–but becomes *economically* necessary . *Violence* becomes economically necessary.

And in the end–Racism (and sexism, heteropatriarchy, nationalism, etc) all become economically necessary. That is, we must continue to believe that the best way to deal with raving black criminals is with paramilitary–and we must continue to believe that there is such a thing as a raving black criminal. How could reality shows like these exist otherwise?

Violence and militarized responses to violence will pay for more than one child’s college education and make more than one person’s house payment–and as such, *racism* (and sexism, heteropatriarchy, nationalism, etc) will pay for more than one child’s college education and make more than one person’s house payment.

In city where foreclosures are rampant and 40 % of the people are unemployed–what would *you* choose? Getting paid to be on a show about violent (black) Detroit, or sitting in a crowded room with social justice community organizers doing a skill share?"

love, again

2010-05-14T19:00:00.030+01:00

i finished reading the first half of Endgame. i was folding down the page-corners each time he wrote something relevant to this blog, and now the whole damn thing is folded. my 'jensen' tag stands to get embarassingly large, but what can you do? this guy is doing all my work for me - so much of the stuff i wanted to do with this blog about linking up abuses and oppressions and looking for the universal truths and functions of it, reading this book has saved me years. *and* in volume two, my friend who is half a book ahead of me tells me, he talks to lundy bancroft!! like, i was getting all ready to tie jensen in with bancroft on this blog and then dreaming of emailing jensen to tell him how he's so nearly there but just needs to talk to this perpetrators-expert dude bancroft, but they're way ahead of me. oh to be a geeking-out fly on the wall. sigh.

anyhow, what was playing on my mind, as i read the last few pages, was to do with love. i've written before a bit about how love and passion are policed, pathologised, occasionally criminalised, including by 'well meaning' social workers and the like (do i need to keep on with the well-meaning disclaimer? can i start saying something less polite soon?). the weight of this was brought back to me as i was finishing up volume one and came across paragraphs like this:

"...Everything the culture taught me: how to submit, how not to make waves, how to fear authority, how to fear perceiving my submission as submission, how to fear my feelings, how to fear perceiving the killing of those I love [he's not just talking about people] as the killing of those I love (or perhaps I should say the killing of those I would love had I not been taught to fear love too), how to fear stopping by any means necessary those who are killing those I love..."

this all struck home with me, hard, how much i fear taking action against abuse, oppression, destruction, how the state of fear is infinitely more comfortable, and how i deal with that by loving less. numbing, depression, caring less, shutting down my love to only those closest to me, or only those things and people i can immediately see. and then - what does it mean? how can i love those closest to me without loving the other people, the other things?

"we are only free, when we are supporting the freedom of others"

(my biggest internet crush of the moment is all for Mai'a)

which is one side of things. but also, how hard is it to love in the face of that policing and pathologising? i was thinking - the women i work with often love with their all (others are numb and shut-down, but that's a different story, and a reason why there can't be a one-size fits all approach to DV work right). but the social workers - they can't afford to love, and empathise. they can't really know what it is, or how could they do that work? i wonder what their definition of love must be, and what it's got to do with (their own) 'good' families and ownership and 'security' and hoarding. they are probably really having no fun. i mean, i don't have a lot of time for the oppressors-as-wounded worldview but then sometimes -. what can you say?

i was also thinking about how i have to hide from my colleagues and people 'in the sector' (!) just how much i love my job, or rather, my work. it's not ok to be passionate about it. the management could pathologise me as 'driven' and starting looking for 'boundary issues' i might have. i was too driven when i was twenty, but i work damn hard on my boundaries and have figured them out over the years, at least within the framework of the voluntary sector (if i ever start doing the grassroots work i dream of, i think those must be somehow different boundaries to figure out).

i made some personal mistakes along the way, though i'm pretty sure my 'clients' were not impacted. like for example she didn't know it, but i did fall in love with one woman, not in that way, but in the example she showed me of mothering and of courage and awesomeness. when things went wrong for her i cried and cried - but of course she doesn't know this. then she made things right for herself. i 'should' have had stronger boundaries and not empathised so much. i got in a mess for a weekend. my managers never found out either, thank god. and.. well, what's wrong with caring that much, once in a while?

well, it was agonising... when you (allow yourself to) love something, pain is going to be part of it. so - i allow myself to love some things - a certain amount, and then draw lines, and exclude some things, and love some things abstractly. like the gulf of mexico. women i work who are eligible for benefits in the uk or who have enough income have more choices and options open to them if they are being abused. it's safe enough to empathise with their troubles, to try and figure it out with them. the gulf of mexico, on the other hand... and women with no recourse to public funds. many agencies switch off on hearing those words. it's too much, a stretch of empathy too far. i won't switch off. but i know there is something happening to my heart as the situation becomes bleaker for my longest-term 'client' with no recourse. i can feel myself starting to shut down as i can't bear to think of all the implications of her lack of options. it's safer not to love or care 'too much', to be A Professional. which, of course, entails not fighting as hard for what she needs. which is why we have all been professionalised - offered privileges in return for leaving behind the people we were trying to work with. at risk of losing these privileges, we then fear caring, loving and fighting.

No. it's becoming so clear how much it being not-ok-to-love is so much a part of how oppression functions. this kind of work has to be driven by love, and feeling and acknowledging pain has to be part of it. as supporters, we have to find ways of supporting each other in this.

i love the groups, the women's support groups, i love the many moments every week where i can see amazing change happening, i love the women i work with. i want the crushing structures that make people feel mental for feeling highs and lows, or who lock people away and/or take away their children for loving, to end. and even more, i want the systems to end that make it impossible, too frightening, to love people (and places, and seabirds). and, jensen would say, what am i going to do about it?

green cure

2010-04-30T12:03:00.019+01:00

"Ask the colonial ghosts what they took" (Rae Spoon) this seems a distant memory now... i had this idea i'd move to the countryside eventually. and as i got more burnt out it seemed more and more appealing. green fields, ragged walls, high places. i'd lived in such a place for a year in my early twenties after my first burnout and it had healed me at the time. i holed myself away, ignored my neighbours, commuted to work and soaked up the greenness until i could cope with returning to the city. recovered, i ran back to the city, to the queer discos, for the rest of my young adulthood. "You're dancing on air". and again, moving out of depression three-to-two years ago, along with worrying about, you know, climate change and that, it seemed very appealing to go back to the green, further up a hill this time, and stay there with a garden and a well and some close friends.

as i rebuilt my sense of being able to live i became more aware aware of my responsibility not to use my wealth and geographical mobility privilege to hole myself up somewhere and i started to face the need to be involved. still, though, 'wild places' were my solace from work and the city. buttercup fields, woods, moorlands, high treeless places. i would go and sit in them and feel saner. i'd go and visit my friend and look out of his window and feel untangled. i'd go for long, slow, talking walks and be able to breathe. then.. then what happened? gradually i was brought to realise that these places are not really so wild. i hate to be called a city kid as i had a semi-rural childhood, yet my parents did not have a connection to the land. they were an englishman and a scotswoman, feeling entitled to buy and set up home in wales. does it make it less colonial that my mother is a (lowland) scot? "Churches built from bones". there are paths through woods in mid-wales where i could show you every tree – in several areas because my dad has moved several times – but this is not a connection to the land, not living in and with the land. i have next to no connection to the place i want to live now; the connections i have are to other incomers. so i am a city kid, and it is not a neutral decision to decide to go and bathe my wounds from My Difficult Job in the landscape that surrounds this city that i work in, nor to decide to move permanently into that landscape. as part of my recovery from last winter's exhausted blankness, i was incredibly moved to be pointed towards a book called North Enough: AIDS and Other Clear-Cuts, by Jan Zita Grover (via Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, via A Country Punk). I like the book, but nothing in it shook me as much as first reading Sandilands' summary of it in the opening of her article Unnatural Passions?: Notes Toward a Queer Ecology:

"“I did not move to Minnesota for the north woods,” [Grover] writes. “I had only the vaguest idea of what the term meant when I first saw them in early spring, the birch, aspen, and tamarack skinned of their needles and leaves. I thought they looked diseased.” Given that Grover had been a front-line AIDS worker in the 1980s in a city violently decimated by the disease, it is hardly surprising that she saw sickness everywhere. “I moved there,” she writes, “to try to leave behind – or at least, at a remoter distance – the plague that had consumed my life for the past six years.” [...]

The idea that one might find natural wholeness in this hard, boreal landscape was shattered at the sight of its large, multiple clear-cuts and the thin “idiot strips” of trees along the highways that foolishly attempt to conceal the scars to the landscape caused by the softwood pulp and paper industry. The post-contact history of the north woods reveals a region repeatedly marked by human greed and error: Farming was next to impossible on the thin, acid soil, and attempts to drain the ever-present swampland in the 1920s resulted only in crippling debt. Logging, the only commercial option left for the region, proceeded virtually without restraint: No paradise found, here. As Grover writes, “the Upper Midwest is a mosaic of such local disasters, once-intact, living systems plundered in ignorance, greed, and unbounded hopefulness.”"

I read North Enough in a day, stunned and overwhelmed following a between-winter-and-spring trip to the Lake District.

my friend and i had walked all day in Langstrath, talking about the land, agriculture and the soil. in the morning as we entered the valley i saw timeless beauty, a turquoise river, mountains on a new scale, wilderness. in the evening as we left the valley i saw overgrazing, treelessness, erosion, the soil blowing and washing away. i saw sheep inhabiting a vast emptiness, fed on imported feed made of GM soya and random shit as the thin grass alone can't sustain them, their single farmer collecting european subsidies while hundreds of people could live on this land if they were allowed to cultivate it.

"The story of any civilization is the story of the rise of city-states, which means it is the story of the funneling of resources toward these centers (in order to sustain them and cause them to grow), which means it is the story of an increasing region of unsustainability surrounded by an increasingly exploited countryside." (Jensen)

how incredible, really, that although this landscape has been degraded and impoverished by the violent process of civilization, those of us who are made rich enough within this system are then encouraged to travel as tourists to this landscape which is sold to us as Natural Beauty. brought up to believe all this, i fell for it (head over heels). i have been a city kid, all my resources trucked in for me, the cost of that invisible to me. "Cover your eyes with both hands." now i’m stunned, wondering what to do. Sandilands continues:

"Exactly in their ecological defilement, however, these wounded landscapes ended up teaching her. “Instead of ready-made solutions,” Grover writes that the north woods:

offered me an unanticipated challenge, a spiritual discipline: to appreciate them, I needed to learn how to see their scars, defacement, and artificiality, and then beyond those to their strengths – their historicity, the difficult beauties that underlay their deformity.

In this landscape, she came to understand that her challenge was not to leave AIDS behind, but to recognize and accept the impact it had had. In fact, the lasting resonances of AIDS allowed her to meet the challenge of coming to love the north woods not in spite, but because, of their wounds [...].

Grover’s metaphoric connection between “AIDS and other clear-cuts” is both painful and beautiful. She describes, for example, changing the dressing on a dying friend’s leg macerated by Kaposi’s Sarcoma: “It did not look like a leg. It looked like freshly-turned soil, dark and ruptured.” But Grover finds in the unlikely and horrific space of her friend’s dying a real appreciation for the plenitude of living. She can see in a festering wound the terrifying beauty of flesh turning to soil, and she can also thus see in a clear-cut both the ravages of capitalist extraction and the vivacity of jack pines, aspens, and poplars."

i identified with Grover's description of her grief and burnout (and her volunteer work was so much harder than my voluntary sector paid job that thankfully rarely involves the physicality of disease and death!), her ability and determination to face the awfulness and do the work, and then her need after six years, to leave. but. seeing the landscapes around me as abused is not a metaphor. i'm just beginning to understand how damaged the land is in many of my most loved places. i can't escape abuse and violence, and especially not by perpetuating the colonisation of the land around me. my friend writes:

"Things to do:
Identify the trauma of the land, i.e. listen to it

Walking up the track to Pant Glas Uchaf yesterday with my mother, I was trying, in stilted phrases, to tell her how the land made me feel, or more specifically how that landscape made me feel. I said to her that it had a sadness in it, that it made me feel sad, that it was sad. She asked why, and I said that things were missing from the land, she asked what, and the words that came to me were Soil, Vitality, and later, Complexity. Listening (or Projecting? It’s hard to know, but I want to give myself the benefit of the doubt) to that Gwynedd land, it doesn’t say much, only gives out sighs of tiredness, a thin, watery tiredness like it has been sucked of substance and body and is existing, ticking along, with less life than it is used to. It’s not being destroyed violently (can land ever be destroyed?), it doesn’t scream in agony… its sounds are more of shock. All sheep lands feel that way to me, in fact most British farmland – like the big dramatic insults have been done, and now it is slowly being sucked of life, little by little because there is such a tiny amount left."

so. i've been emailing the National Parks Authority, ha. (i actually did, but -) far more importantly and constructively, i've been talking with my friends. i've been starting to learn about how the land can become enriched. after hard days at work i've been planting things in plastic tubs in my concrete, shaded city yard and dreaming of a real garden. i'm just starting to find out about how people can live on the land in ways that support and don't just take from it. and i wonder how this kind of work can be balanced with and compliment the anti-abuse work that seems to be my vocation. it's dawning on me that living in a rural place and finding solace in the landscape needn't be the opposite of my current work, as i used to think. it could be, if i allowed myself to run off and be a hermit tending my garden and ignoring the rest of the world. but i don't want to run up a hill and isolate myself in order to 'recover,' 'feel better', even with a handful of likeminded people. in the end, i don't think i would feel better, as i'd know i'd turned my back on the work i'm supposed to do. i want to work in a genuine way for my home and community, to counteract the trauma of the land as part of making my home and my food. the sanity and integrity that could come with that could provide me with a stronger base from which to work against abuse in my communities. all of this work is about healing, regeneration, working to re-establish interdependence between people and the land which is surely the only way to live sanely.

"Land tells you a lot when it is left alone. Here, on this small and immense island, it doesn’t change and spring into Vitality and Complexity overnight: it takes longer, it is slow, way slower than I have seen elsewhere, like it is starting from a lower baseline. All the same it does spring and change. Land cannot be destroyed.

I watch a field who is temporarily free from nibbling teeth and curling tongues, and I see the rank grasses and the brambles, the gorse and tangling tormentil. If I look closely a birch will be nudging up through heather, or ash seedlings will be growing like hair. It is on its way, this field.

I guess the question is how do you live with the spring and change, in a relationship with it. How do you, how do all of us, live with the surging, roiling potential vitalities of the land..." (A Country Punk)

until recently i thought it was acceptable to work in the city and take my pain and tiredness to the country to rest. now this option has been removed. there is no green cure. for my burnout, my future-fear, for my grief at finding myself in this culture, for my grief faced with the trauma of people and of the landscape. instead, thre is my love and commitment to people and the land which brings the need to find ways to keep working, in the healthiest possible way, which is what i'm trying to do.

"That’s what we’re trying to do, isn’t it?, all of us who desire and work toward social and economic justice, all of us who are trying to create or sustain ways of being in the world that are not about dominance and exploitation and violence? [...] Finding, creating, sustaining different versions of love and commitment is part of how we are resisting cultures of violence and domination, part of how we are surviving." (Hoffman)

understanding that control and abuse extends to the land, and that supporting people towards wellness needs to include supporting each other to build communities and relationships with the land - it's just all part of the same thing, isn't it, the same work to do.

friendship, solidarity and reality checks

2010-04-27T22:08:00.003+01:00

a friend of mine is dealing with a controlling person at the moment and they have asked me if it's ok to keep in touch with me about their attempts to challenge this person's problematic behaviour.

i leapt at the chance (partly because i'm such a geek and am always keen to try and analyse new examples of control in my quest to articulate the universal elements! but mainly - ) because i remembered how sanity-saving it was for me when i was dealing with accusations from a manipulative person, to forward our emails to two friends who could vouch that i was not the one being unreasonable and who were able to be objective when the person wrote things that they knew would strike a chord and made me want to rescue the friendship by allowing them to set the terms. replies from my real friends reminding me "omg they're such a nutjob!!" were the reality checks that got me through.

we cannot deal with control / manipulation / abuse alone, in isolation. anyone who suggests we should is, in my opinion, dodge. because isolation silences us, and is therefore a key ingredient of abuse.

obviously, the controlling people concerned would entirely freak out (and be likely to whip out the big guns, manipulation-wise) if they knew their actions were being witnessed, shared and analysed in this way, as this completely undermines their methods: isolation, as a tool for silencing, is central to the operation of any control. this is because if someone shares with their community the methods someone used to manipulate them, and the community believes them and decides that such behaviour is unacceptable, then the controlling person will have to either:

1) stop being controlling
2) leave the community
3) develop less detectable methods of control

and the more adept we all get in all our communities at identifying controlling behaviours, the more that 1) will be the only option left for everyone.

sorted. how hard can it be? :)

responsibility and recovery

2010-04-26T18:40:00.002+01:00

funnily enough after my post last night that touched on this, i met someone else today who was considering warning her ex's new dates about his abusive behaviour. she suggested this, then said "but i guess i've got to look after myself first" and kind of waited for my response (it's odd, working with people who have been controlled and who have come to you expecting help, you have so much power to influence them in the early stages before they rebuild their sense of self, and i am so often asked 'what should i do?' and have to find ways to try to minimise the power and turn the question back round..). i was in work-mode, despite my posting last night, and said something about her being responsible for herself first, once again offering individualism as my 'expert' solution to her situation.

goddamn! now i think the best response when a client wants to warn and help other women, would be to encourage her to focus on her own healing and rebuilding as a first step and allow herself to come back to the besmirching of his name (ha) later. i read this article recently about pathologising survivors of DV as "in the experience" and have been questioning how much i do this, and need to write a lot more about this but unfortunately i had to give the book back to the library too soon.

am i being condescending to survivors i work with by suggesting they are "too in the experience" within days of ending the relationship to be supportive to other women? perhaps. i don't know. i really tend to think there needs to be a couple of months at least of real serious focus on one's own healing before it's a good idea to try and heal your community. i have met women who are driven by fury to help other women who themselves can't get a night's sleep for terror as they've never healed.

having written about the extreme of individualism last night i guess i'm writing here about the other extreme of giving to your group over and above giving to yourself. i feel weird writing about all this as someone who hasn't experienced relationship abuse, but i really need to get my head round it as a supporter.

it starts

2010-04-26T18:11:00.002+01:00

i'm thrilled because two ex-clients who don't know each other, in the space of one week, have asked me for advice to set up their own grassroots groups. no one's ever mentioned doing this before. i swear, there must be something in the ether. maybe it's the astrology, ha.

One is planning a general domestic violence group in case we lose our funding (the standard three years are nearly up) and one a group for women whose children have been removed temporarily or permanently by 'social care'. hurrah! the fall of the voluntary sector begins. i haven't properly started discussions with these women yet and don't know what they're planning but it sounds like it might involve not needing paid workers and general DIY amazingness. yes!

tired ramble about counselling and individualism

2010-04-25T20:06:00.033+01:00

the other bit of this issue of make/shift that's got my head most buzzing is a discussion between Tyrone of Enough and Tiny of POOR Magazine. at one point they're talking about Tiny's challenge to privileged people to consider 'moving home' to care for their communities and families of origin. she says:

"Now, I know this gets really touchy with folks. Especially folks who've had a lot of years of therapy. No, seriously - I want to call that out. In dominant culture, the support is not given for staying and caregiving. The support is given to leave, cut ties, and become independent. That's really embedded in western psychotherapy, in Freudian and Jungian theory. And let's be real about white folks - that's a lot of where their knowledge comes from, especially folks with privilege."

this statement sent me scribbling to myself urgently for an hour, before i could read any further. when i did read further i realised that Tiny then explains "I pose it as a challenge partly for shock value [...] because I want people to rethink this paradigm that pathologizes staying with and caretaking for family of origin". well it certainly worked on me. this challenge sent my brain off in all sorts of directions.

as a white person with a heap of privileges i've had seven or eight counselling sessions, the most recent three being last winter when i was verging on burnout and begged the sessions from work. i found it incredibly helpful to have this considerate stranger paid to concentrate on 'my issues'. i talked about work-stress, losing friendships and about some family stuff. it was remarkable to have my experience centred completely. but i was aware that i could only tell her so much. i was gradually realising that my entire worldview is becoming too - i don't know, radical? - to discuss with the nice lady counsellor. my feelings and reactions to the world would be pathologised if i was open about them. a large part of the reason i was feeling mental during the winter was due to trying to get a grip on my integrity and start to acknowledge more what i know and believe and to orient my life more to be true to that. and let's face it, reading derrick jensen is not compatible with continuing sanely in paid employment and an urban lifestyle... it all involved a lot of mourning, for lost friendships and other major emotional upheavals of the past year, and for the comfort of the old worldview i'd allowed myself, the illusion of safety that i'd enjoyed and the societal myths i'd fallen for. the latter parts were not stuff that the nice lady wanted to hear.

the previous counselling sessions i'd had, with the same nice lady but two years earlier, had been when a woman i'd supported at work had been killed. when i tried to explain some of my anguish to do with this woman's death, and other work situations, to the counsellor she was supportive up to a point but at pains to remind me that this woman "made her own choices" etc etc. there was no room for me to talk about the greater forces in our lives over and above individual choice*, and just how much knowing about these forces and their effects affect my mental health!

so that quote from Tiny finally crystallised my discomfort with counselling for myself (as much as i would use it again, in the absence of amazing holistic peer co-counselling type stuff, until i can help make that happen in my community). it just seems that the only solutions and balms on offer in that counselling room are individualist, and that is not going to help me now. if work had been able to keep paying i could have had lots more sessions - concentrating on how hard done by i am... this is just not the sort of support i want any more. i do have things i need to figure out, i do have sad stuff that has happened, i do have a weird family - but it's not the end of the world. i need to balance and counter my need for a certain amount of healing with the simple fact that i'm staggeringly unscathed and cocooned compared to most people on earth. Tiny's quote crystallised my realisation that the support-work industrial complex, if you will, including the likes of my job and counselling, usually bolsters this over-focus on the individual. this is not the support i want or need any more. the support i do need is to figure out ways in which life and living are ok while acknowledging injustice and the reality of abuse and oppression and the necessity and life-affirmingness of working against it in communities. i am so lucky to have so many incredible friends, and occasionally we do talk about some of this stuff, though i think i need to be braver to start these conversations more often, and to ask for support. i also realise this is precisely why amazing people like Activist Trauma Support exist, and things like co-counselling, which i need to find out more about.

the quote also made me realise how much i use the same techniques to make my 'clients' feel better - prioritising their individual needs. like i said the other day about supporting women towards independence and almost never interdependence. the example that most obviously springs to mind is that my clients know they will be left alone when their ex finds a new partner he can successfully control. one or two women i've worked with over the years have contacted the new partner to warn them. the others have breathed a sigh of relief and moved on with their lives. i'm not saying either action is 'right' or 'wrong', only that it's so painfully obvious how charity domestic violence work is - not even a sticking plaster these days, more of a conveyor belt operating within the system. have we all forgotten how we used to want our jobs to become redundant? i want to be working with women to end domestic abuse, not just 'rescuing' survivors one by one in this 'you're alright mate' style.

i hope that all this rambling makes some sense in the context of Tiny's quote. i do not believe in the slightest that anyone should have to stay and care for anyone who has abused them: in fact i'm not offended by the idea of serial abusers being abandoned as i said in my post about forgiveness. but i am very uncomfortable with support work that bolsters the structures of privilege and comfort, for example by bringing a few of the lucky ones to join 'us' in individualist 'safety,' and saying that those who don't make it have simply "made their choices".

* i hope it's clear that i do not ever wish to deny the agency of survivors of abuse, nor those who don't survive - of course there are always individual choices - it's just that i don't wish to make myself feel better by pretending that's all there is.

my lovely new make/shift

2010-04-22T14:21:00.003+01:00

there is so much in this magazine, every time. i really do recommend subscribing and supporting them. this time there is this incredible article by Courtney Desiree Morris about perpetrators of gender violence within activist groups and how they do much of the same work as FBI informant infiltrators:

"We might think of these misogynists as inadvertent agents of the state. Regardless of whether they are actual informants or not, the work that they do supports the state's ongoing campaign of terror against social movements and the people who create them. When queer organisers are humiliated and their political struggles sidelined, that is part of an ongoing state project of violence against radicals. When women are knowingly given STIs, physically abused, dismissed in meetings, pushed aside, and forced out of radical organizing spaces while our allies defend known misogynists, organizers collude in the state's efforts to destroy us."

wow wow. and there is so much else in the magazine that i want to respond to here, soon as possible.

volcano

2010-04-22T13:41:00.000+01:00

I've just seen this on an email list.

Subject: Irish women need CASH, not ASH! – Urgent ASN Appeal

Whether it’s a shortage of mange tout at the supermarket or a friend
stranded abroad, we’ve all been affected by the cloud of ash from Iceland.
But imagine if you had only a few weeks to navigate your way to England for
a safe and legal abortion.

This week, we’ve heard from a number of women who were due to have travel to
the UK this week for terminations, including a very young teen who is
extremely close to the 24 week time limit for abortions in the UK. She had
to miss her appointment earlier this week and is now coming next week by
ferry and train – a roundtrip journey of more than 24 hours. Her mother
solely supports her and her siblings with a part time job and now has to
cover costs of £2,300 (procedure + money lost on cancelled flights + last
minute ferry and train tickets).

Due to these extraordinary and extremely difficult circumstances, ASN has
made a pledge to fund this young woman £500, much more than we usually
commit to a single case. This is less than half of the costs she is facing.
We would like to *help more*. If you would like to help cover more costs for
her and women like her, please pledge to make a donation today.

You can do this by donating via PayPal (
http://www.abortionsupport.org.uk/donate/), writing a cheque (email
info@abortionsupport.org.uk for our postal address), or by making an online
transfer (HSBC/Abortion Support Network/Sort Code: 40-11-18/Account Number:
64409302).

Please mark the donation “Iceland”.

Thank you in advance for any amount you can give – your donation will make a
real difference to this family or to one of the other women who have had to
re-purchase tickets to travel to England.

With best regards,

Mara

Mara Clarke
Abortion Support Network
+44 (0) 7897 611 593
mara@abortionsupport.org.uk

Abortion Support Network (ASN) is an all-volunteer organisation that
provides accommodation and financial assistance to women forced to travel
from Ireland and pay privately for abortions in England. The cost ranges
between £400 and £2000 depending on circumstance and stage of pregnancy.
While other organisations campaign for law reform, ASN is the only group on
record providing women travelling for abortions with the thing they need the
most: money. www.abortionsupport.org.uk

not defeated

2010-04-22T13:38:00.001+01:00

hmm been unable to channel any rage or articulation lately, hence no blogging. been feeling mostly defeated by it all. but i am going to attempt to drag myself up and at least get a bit angry. as futile as it may be to try and pull out slim threads of Everything That Is Too Much, it was making me feel better and i need to do it some more. and there is some cool stuff that has helped keep me afloat that i want to write about.

onwards.

caffeinated rant about forgiveness and sanctions

2010-03-28T10:47:00.009+01:00

i was thinking about this last night and got into a bit of a dark place(!) so i'm trying to write about it on a sunny morning in the hope this will bring out a more balanced result.

i was thinking about forgiveness, and how i don't understand it.

a wonderful witchy woman once told me that cancerians like me carry the stories, and with them the grudges, of the community, and never forgive. at the risk of losing any fragile credibility by confessing my weakness for astrology, this made a lot of sense to me, and i wonder if that's what i'm doing here, and in my work - carrying, trying to release and honour, remember and link together, the secret stories of my community. i don't feel that i choose not to forgive: i just don't understand the concept.

someone once asked me if this means i think people are as bad as their worst actions, and this threw me. i think i do think that, and i'm not sure why i think it, rather than that people are, for instance, as good as their best actions. really, am i just talking nonsense? am i just incredibly judgemental? i think i really need to explore what i think about forgiveness in order to get anywhere in terms of understanding what i think about sanctions, or 'punishment' against abusive behaviour. here goes.

if someone is mean to me or someone else, i try to put myself in their shoes and think about why they did that. and of course there are a million reasons why people are sometimes mean but not in a way where they are systematically putting their own interests first; they've been mean but they weren't trying to get ahead by trampling on others. in this case, to me there is nothing to forgive: they just made a mistake, did something mean, and hopefully understand why they should try not to do it again.

but then there are a lot of times when people are mean in ways that constitute systematically putting their own interests first, trying to get ahead by trampling on others. if someone screws someone else over in this way they are acting as if they believe, consciously or otherwise, that they are entitled to do so. therefore they believe on some level that the other person is less human. to me, this attitude is intolerable. just entirely unacceptable. again, there's nothing to forgive: either someone, when challenged, starts to do the hard work of uprooting their sense of entitlement (as Bancroft would say) and learning not to oppress others, or they don't - because they don't wish to give up the benefits of oppressing, including the comfort of that elevated position.

so i fervently believe that communities need to come up with sanctions that strongly persuade people to do that uprooting.

which reminds me of a quote i've been meaning to link to here for ages, from Mai'a, again, in this post about communities supporting abusers, at Flip Flopping Joy:

"society tells us that being called a rapist or an abuser is like one of the worst things to be called. that it is a stigma that would haunt a man for the rest of his life. but for the most part. it doesnt. men shrug off that label, like a silk scarf slipping off the shoulders."

and the same, so often, if someone is called out for trying to get ahead using racism, for example, in a community. the manipulator may feel uncomfortable for a while as they are challenged and shunned perhaps, but in time things get back to normal. water under the bridge. no one wants to carry on being hostile for too long. i mean, great, if someone has put the work into the uprooting and is no longer prepared to act that way. but if not: no. i have no compassion for someone who would continue, is continuing, to do that (though most likely in more subtle ways so as not to get called out again). and yes, weirdly, i feel some kind of personal responsibility for remembering, carrying that story. why would we forgive that? it makes no sense to me.

except it does. to me, it's forgiveness that keeps the entire kyriarchy turning. we get screwed over, and it's easier to believe that someone did not, or did not intend to, dehumanise us - too frightening and overwhelming to think that that person was systematically trying to get ahead and was prepared to trample us in doing so.

for example, very few fathers end up alone in old age, no matter what they have put the family through. do i want people who've been oppressive all their lives to end up abandoned at the end of their lives? not necessarily. but where is the sanction? how do we, as communities, condemn that behaviour and give abusers something to lose?

i am fully aware that carrying around resentment (meaning, literally, re-feeling) is not at all healthy. i'm glad that forgiveness can be such a powerful way for many survivors of abuse to find freedom. it's not up to me if individual abusers are forgiven by those they have abused, and it is so often a positive thing for the survivor. i mean that as communities, to forgive is to miss the point entirely, and to forget is to collude.

people who oppress operate on the understanding that, at the end of the day, the community will absorb it, work around it. artists and writers who are known to have been abusive in their personal lives are loved and celebrated. overlooking abuse is collusion. 'forgetting' is collusion. forgiveness is a complex distraction and, i believe, colludes.

ah, got it. i feel much better for working that out!

knowledge is power, etc

2010-03-26T15:24:00.002Z

i'm completely in love with the lilith plan and Mai'a's amazing fact-finding missions. i am speechless with impressedness.

and also i had a good root around in Scarleteen recently, so good! it's aimed at teenagers but is full of sound info for anyone of any age, and i got a (turns out) well-needed update of the extremely patchy info i got from Just Seventeen magazine back in the day. they sure hadn't told me what i need to know now. it still almost makes me cry to see accessible sex ed for young people where queer is normal.

...and on comfort

2010-03-25T13:28:00.001Z

i've just read this heartbreakingly eloquent piece by melissa mcewan at Shakesville (via The Curvature). to disrupt and uproot this stuff - abuse, oppression - we have to confront the ways in which our comfort oppresses. what is it maintained at the expense of? (and, for me personally, to what extent to i allow people their comfort at the expense of my dignity?)

"I never know when I might next get knocked off-kilter with something that puts me in the position, once again, of choosing between my dignity and the serenity of our relationship.

Swallow shit, or ruin the entire afternoon?

[...]

This, then, is the terrible bargain we have regretfully struck: Men are allowed the easy comfort of their unexamined privilege, but my regard will always be shot through with a steely, anxious bolt of caution.

A shitty bargain all around, really. But there it is.

There are men who will read this post and think, huffily, dismissively, that a person of color could write a post very much like this one about white people, about me. That's absolutely right. So could a lesbian, a gay man, a bisexual, an asexual. So could a trans or intersex person (which hardly makes a comprehensive list). I'm okay with that. I don't feel hated. I feel mistrusted—and I understand it; I respect it. It means, for me, I must be vigilant, must make myself trustworthy. Every day."

medieval

2010-03-25T12:06:00.008Z

mmph. so. i need to debrief this for sure. this week was a really quiet week. i only had a handful of support sessions and phonecalls. it was also after a week's holiday, so i'm at my strongest, for now. but i spoke to someone who had had a hysterectomy that she didn't want or particularly need. in my opinion, the operation was coerced. absolutely not in a direct way, but that's what makes it worse! she was 'just' hassled about it for years by her husband, who then booked it for her. all the women i work with make/have made choices 'for a quiet life' that result in slipping further into abuse and control - because an abuser will always take as much control as they can.

before the operation she told me she definitely wouldn't have it done, although her husband had booked it, he could do what he liked, it was ridiculous, not going to happen. but now it's happened she's brushing over it, no big deal. and of course, you'd have to brush over it. how could i admit to myself that i'd had a major operation against my will, 'to keep him quiet'? i wouldn't unless i was ready to have some kind of breakdown. that would involve admitting to myself what a complex-ly fucked up situation i was in and require me to make changes that feel too hard. instead, i'd tell myself i was happy enough with it, look at the positives, and carry on. exactly what she's doing.

and meanwhile, she has this boiling rage just below the surface that seeps out at unpredictable times and that her husband uses to further pathologise her. this guy is well into PMT as the source of everything that's wrong with the relationship, rather than his abuse and control. the solution? cut out her womb! just like in the olden days.

this person is an example of someone who's been a 'client' for a couple of years and who fits a certain pattern that i'm finding it difficult to deal with at the moment. because of our ongoing discussions she is well aware of 'the theory' and can talk about how unreasonable her partner is. but she is not ready to make any change or take a break to get some mental space. and i can't figure out if i should be guiding her more to feel rather than think about his behaviour as abusive, i don't know if that's too intrusive - i mean it usually happens automatically - that people will relate on an emotional level to the work we do about identifying patterns of abuse - but where, occastionally, people block that, and only relate to it intellectually - i'm not sure how much to push it, how much it's in any way wise or acceptable to start digging around in their psyches!

i mean. it's fine. it's none of my business how, when and if women i work with choose to make change, 'move forward' and so on. if i was advising a less experienced supporter i'd just be saying 'you need to sort out your own expectations, it's not about what change your client makes, it's about giving them back as much control as possible, you are doing everything right' etc etc.

but it's just. i'm finding it unbearably sad and infuriating that she is spending years of her life drowning her rage and whatever dreams she may have for another kind of life, that she's had a major operation with all kinds of dodgy side-effects (80% chance of vaginal prolapse within 20 years anyone?), while her partner gets to just carry right on with whatever he wants to do, seldom challenged, seldom disrupted... such is the way of the world. comfort is possibly the most significant reward for abusive and oppressive behaviour, i think i should be blogging about that more.

the woman told the surgeon that she didn't really want the operation but her husband thought she should. the surgeon said 'well if you have x and y symptoms then i do recommend you have it done but make sure you're doing it for yourself'. nice one. shitness of medical professionals at dealing with abuse is too vast to go into here. such is the way of the world. nice comfortable surgeon.

Adoptees of Color statement on Haiti

2010-03-21T09:46:00.002Z

This statement pressed so many buttons for me in terms of 'rescuing,' and ownership of, vulnerable people, ideas of good families and bad families, colonial abuse...

"We uphold that Haitian children have a right to a family and a history that is their own and that Haitians themselves have a right to determine what happens to their own children. We resist the racist, colonialist mentality that positions the Western nuclear family as superior to other conceptions of family, and we seek to challenge those who abuse the phrase “Every child deserves a family” to rethink how this phrase is used to justify the removal of children from Haiti for the fulfillment of their own needs and desires. Western and Northern desire for ownership of Haitian children directly contributes to the destruction of existing family and community structures in Haiti. This individualistic desire is supported by the historical and global anti-African sentiment which negates the validity of black mothers and fathers and condones the separation of black children from their families, cultures, and countries of origin."

Read the whole thing at Adoptees of Color Roundtable. I found the statement through Truthandhealingproject.

woah

2010-03-20T20:50:00.008Z

have just come across Eminism.org, and a post with the stunning title: We need to abolish, not "re-evaluate," domestic violence shelters. So good to read the kind of critique of DV organisations that i've been craving (though I have read a related piece, Disloyal to Feminism: Abuse of Survivors within the Domestic Violence Shelter System, by Koyama in the incredible Incite! anthology, Color of Violence which you totally need to read if you are interested in this stuff). In the linked blog post she says:

"There will always be a need for safe haven, but I don’t feel that our domestic violence shelters provides it. I think that we need to be deeply suspicious of the coupling of housing, supervision, and emotional support: while social services in general tend to be paternalistic, the concentration of various competing interests and roles into one entity (the agency) as we often see in domestic violence shelters breeds abuse."

It's kind of mindbending to me to see this stated in so many words, but i can't disagree. In the refuge part of the service i work for, the same workers are supposed to give emotional support as collect rent. When i arrived seven years ago they were called 'refuge workers' and their main role was advocacy - helping with forms and phonecalls, supporting women to deal with social services etc, plus emotional support. now they are called 'housing support workers' and 'property management' is part of their job description. they have to cap the gas and do maintenance checks and chase rent. there are a million more forms to fill in now so of course they don't have anything like the same amount of time for supporting women practically and emotionally. they have to spend a lot of time writing warning letters to residents who are in arrears, and the support and advocacy role just cannot work when the same person is the property manager. i wonder how many people reading this would be shocked by this change in roles. to us within the organisation it now seems normal.

i agree with Koyama that there was no golden age of refuge provision where they were accessible spaces. i am sure that those early, radically feminist refuges were insitutions that were massively inaccessible and unsafe for women of colour and disabled women, if they were admitted at all (hence groups like Imkaan* setting up refuges for women of colour). Koyama tells horror stories in Disloyal to Feminism about conditions and professional practice in the USA (i really want to talk more about that article in another post) and i hope i'm not being totally naive to say i think things are a bit better here. i know that 'Supporting People', while it is Wrong in so many ways, has dragged reluctant and sulking refuges towards implementing equal opportunities stuff and 'consulting service users' and so on. we have been dragged out of our white-feminist, ableist past however the process that has forced this change is government co-optation and the abandonment of activism or even much analysing/critiquing of policy. plus refuges are still often unsafe and inaccessible for LGBTQ women in the UK; Supporting People seems to have missed that one!

Koyama continues:

"In my opinion, the best solution to this problem is to decouple housing: employ housing first approach to help survivors find an apartment in the community first, with long-term rent assistance of course, and then deal with other issues. People might argue that some women desperately need support and supervision to be available 24/7, but anyone who have worked at our shelters know that such women are first to be evicted from shelters because of the difficulty of complying with all the rules and living in a crowded shared housing setting, because shelters are not designed to adequately support women with such needs. Perhaps we could adopt disability rights movement’s principle of independent living here: survivors should be assisted in the least restrictive environment each individual can handle, which to most survivors and their children would be their own apartment."

Well, in the UK there is a steady move towards survivors living in their own self-contained unit, the old hostel-style shared facilities are viewed as old-fashioned and unsuitable and are being phased out around the country. It doesn't seem to be too hard for orgs to get grants to make over the accommodation. And increasing numbers of refuges now have 24/7 staff support so e.g. you have a block of apartments with staff and security on site.

And 'Supporting People' has also massively raised standards around services being accessible for women 'with complex support needs' - what Koyama describes about these women being refused admission or evicted certainly was happening here five or more years back. back then i was a helpline worker and i'd hear outrageous responses from refuges when i called round trying to find 'bedspace': one that sticks in my mind is when somewhere wouldn't take a woman because she was on antidepressants. i think they thought that meant she was mad and thus a liability. anyhow, you don't hear that kind of thing anymore. if a bedspace is empty and a woman is not admitted, the reason for the decision must now be put in writing. Supporting People will audit it all and withhold funding if refuges are found to be discriminating. it is no longer very difficult to find bedspace for a woman/family who uses drugs/alcohol or who has mental health issues. racism and ableism will still exist, of course, within refuges, and organisations and their workers will find other less blatant ways of discriminating. but it is getting so much harder to get away with and residents have much more recourse to appeal and complain if they are oppressed by the organisation.

i completely agree though that survivors should be offered "the least restrictive environment they can handle", and that this will be different for every woman/family. but the much better provision for women 'with complex needs' has come hand in hand with much closer surveillance, e.g. taking the national insurance number of every resident (and moving towards taking such details of everyone who even calls asking for space). depends what we mean by 'restrictive' i suppose.

*tried to put a link here but their website has disappeared? does anyone know if something's happened to Imkaan?

basics

2010-03-20T19:42:00.001Z

someone in a group this week said to another member: "what would you say to your best friend? you've got to be a best friend to yourself." something i've heard several times and forgotten. i want to fix it in my head to make it a habit for myself, and to remind people around me. like i say, often anti-abuse work is not very complicated. we can all support each other in basic and fundamental ways. if your friend is struggling with their relationship, it could be that a good meal or a walk in the sunshine is as much of a support as anything else you can do. and simple reminders to them to look after themselves, that they are worth being nurtured and valued, are more precious than just about anything else. and while we're at it, as supporters we could start taking a bit of our own advice.

The Curvature does it again

2010-03-18T21:22:00.002Z

Just feel the need to say again that if you are interested in the kinds of stuff i blog about but want to read incredibly well-articulated and in-depth analysis you really should be reading The Curvature. I get this feeling of relief from reading Cara's bang-on myth-smashing every single time. This stuff is so misunderstood, so fogged in mainstream discourse, and she just cuts through the crap. Incredible. Recent posts include:

Critics Suggest Link Between Priest Celibacy and Sexual Abuse:

"Placing responsibility for rape on the celibacy rule by nature removes part of the responsibility from the perpetrator. It also buys into and perpetuates the age old myth that rape is about sex. That rapists rape because they’re just so damn horny. That they can’t help themselves, what with all of their sexual attraction to their victims. To say that rapist priests commit rape because they’ve gone so long without being able to engage in consensual sex is to say that sex is synonymously related to rape. It is to suggest that one is a replacement for the other. It is to suggest that rape makes a more sensible breakage of one’s vows that consensual activity. And it is to suggest that rapists are compelled by something other than their desire to inflict harm.

[...]

To claim as fact that such abuse is “homosexual” is to blatantly stigmatize BTLG people. The rape of a male person by another man is no more “gay” than a rape of a woman by a man is “straight.” Rape is violence, not sex. And violence doesn’t have a sexual orientation."

And In Earthquake's Aftermath, Haiti Experiences Rise in Sexual Violence, which includes the so-often obscured fact:

"In order to abuse people, rapists first abuse circumstance. This story is not about what Haitians do in a time of crisis. This story is about what rapists do in a time of crisis."

in/ter/dependence and safety

2010-03-17T12:24:00.005Z

I don't really know how to write about these emerging thoughts. I'm questionning so much of what i've spent my entire young-adult life doing, the work that has driven me all this time. Writing here for six months has helped sift through a lot of old habits and beliefs and to note down the new ideas that are coming into my life. Things have been becoming gradually clearer.

Most recently, as i'm reading/hearing/realising/admitting so much about the culture in which i live and how what i know about abuse and violence translates from personal relationships to a political scale, i'm acutely aware of the work i do that encourages ('empowers') women to emerge from the isolation of an abusive relationship into the 'freedom of wider society'. Freedom and independence in the wider society.

Basically, my work-role 'expects' women to leave a situation that may be secure, albeit very controlled. This could be co-dependence, but that is at least more secure than independence, no? Yet i'm 'expecting', and encouraging, her to give all that up to move into a society where it is very hard to be independent and be secure, even more so as a woman. Any 'independence' is at best temporary, right? As we will all need help from other people as we get older. And can you achieve independence in a way that doesn't oppress others? The more i think about independence the more false and illusory it seems, and the more i begin to understand why the women i work with find it terrifying.

I'm almost always not supporting women into a place of interdependence. I can only think of a handful of examples over the years of women i've worked with who moved into a community on escaping the abuse: all South Asian women who had families who supported and nurtured them and took them in on leaving the relationship.

I don't want to be independent, thanks all the same: that sounds near-impossible, precarious and lonely. I want to live in a community, a network, giving and taking care and work and nurture and sustenance. When i'm supporting women to leave abusive situations i want to be able to offer them more than this dream that i don't even believe in, of this 'independent, successful woman who doesn't need anyone'. Narratives of Independent Women involve finding a marker of success or ambition to work towards. Ok so i would always discuss this with women i work with in terms of 'finding success on your own terms', but how hard is it for all of us to escape mainstream, capitalist, definitions of success? Success as an Independent Woman involves 'not needing anyone'. How can we not need anyone? If we manage it then how long will it last? And what then?

This post at Enough had a big effect on me when i read it some months ago. It resonated enormously with how my class background has led me to understand Safety, described some of the pain, contradictions and compromise within my family and was one of the first places i'd encountered the idea of interdependence. I want to quote it here now to link it to these ideas of safety and in/ter/dependence of women leaving abuse:

"Safety is something we are told we can achieve by isolating ourselves and hoarding lots of resources. POOR calls this the cult of independence, and more than anything it is what comes to mind when I try to describe how I think capitalism hurts all of us, even if we’re profiting from it. [...]

I think about a friend, raised professional middle class with the solid safety net of well-off parents, and about the fear that creeps into her voice when she talks about saving for retirement – the unwillingness to consider that anyone will help her, the certainty that she is a failure if anyone does, the feeling that no matter how much money she saves from her large professional salary, it can never be enough. [...]

I think about this book I read called Invisible Privilege, by Paula Rothenberg. It’s a memoir about growing up wealthy [...] Rothenberg describes her aging father, no longer able to care for himself, isolated from community but able to afford constant professional care, watched over at the end of his life by a rotating crew of nurses rather than by people who love him.

I think about my own dad, an introvert like me, living alone in a fancy condo with all his physical needs met, needing nothing from anyone, taking care of himself, for now – and I think of my grandmother, who now lives in an assisted-living facility hundreds of miles from her home. When she moved there, away from the house she loved [...] I wanted to organize my aunts and uncles and cousins, all her children and grandchildren, to go there to help them move and offer love and support – but it came too close to touching my grandmother’s worst fear, which is to feel that she is a burden.

We’ve learned the lessons of capitalism, and on some level we believe them: if you can’t take care of yourself, if you’re poor or disabled or targeted by the state, it’s because you’re weak, because you somehow failed. If you can’t take care of yourself you will be let go, you will be alone, you are no longer valuable, you no longer exist [...]

What does it look like to make that leap, if it is a leap, to defining security as interdependence, and to put our resources into creating that rather than into a retirement fund?"

What does it look like to make the leap from defining safety as a woman living alone, working productively, bringing up her children, with panic buttons installed by the police, to finding ways to provide safety in community for someone who is coming out of abuse and isolation?

"don't waste the pretty"

2010-03-04T22:31:00.006Z

i decided to read He's Just Not That Into You. oh my, it's terrible, for the most part. i guess you could've just told me that, i really didn't need to go find out for myself. i'm not going to waste time here describing its hideously normal, fashionable, for-the-modern-woman sexism and so on. but i do want to say what i like about it! bear with me...

i saw it in a charity shop and was suddenly intrigued - because, most importantly, my work is talking about relationships. and control and manipulation in relationships is so normal, outside of those that will ever be defined as abusive. so i wanted to look at how 'normal' relationships are talked about in the mainstream, shiny-happy self-help world, and if books like this have anything to say about control and manipulation.

well, this one does. and it's by far the best part of the book. at the start of the chapter entitled "He's just not that into you if he's a selfish jerk, a bully..." (unfortunately the end of that sentence is "or a really big freak" but let's overlook that(?!) for now) it says:

" 'He's got so much good in him. He really does. I just wish he wouldn't tell me to shut up all the time.' Yeah, that's a problem. Try not to ignore it."

i'm impressed by this book's inclusion of abuse-awareness by stealth. i mean, if someone has read this far through the book (it's the last chapter) in quest of relationship advice then they must be pretty vulnerable really - if they've taken seriously the ten preceding chapters of the male lead-author's icky joshing-bossy tone then i would say that they might well be at risk of being dominated in a relationship! however the tone actually gets a bit less icky and much more compassionate in this final chapter.

the writer uses three examples of abuse but doesn't name them as such at first. First there's a boyfriend who is cold and neglectful and 'trying to change,': "You've got to be kidding me... He may think he loves you, and maybe he does. But he's really bad at it..." Then it gets more impressive with the advice to a woman whose partner yells at her and then apologises:

"There is no reason to yell at anyone ever, unless you are screaming 'LOOK OUT FOR THAT BUS!'... And it's not temporary. People who yell are people who think they are entitled to yell... Don't wait for Mr Hyde to turn back into Dr. Jekyll."

I'm sorry, but shoehorning entitlement-to-abuse issues into a 'trashy' self-help book that's supposed to be anti-feminist?! Plus, 'like Jekyll & Hyde' is a phrase i hear many times a week by women accessing support for the first time (along with 'walking on eggshells') so i even wonder if that is inserted deliberately to give readers a chance to recognise their situation as abuse. i have to say i'm impressed.

Then there's an example of a boyfriend who is 'perfect' in private but makes fun of her a little in front of her friends: "He sounds perfect, if you like bad people... Which Ivy League school has a program in public belittlement? Because that's what this guy majored in if he thinks that insulting you in front of your friends is going to make him seem anything other than an idiot." And finally, one who is 'supportive' in her weightloss by telling her what she can and can't eat:

"This guy doesn't sound like your personal trainer, he sounds like your personal bully... He knows that you feel bad about yourself and leaps to take advantage of that... It's time to use your quads and hamstrings - to run away from him and never come back."

Erm, acknowledgement that men take advantage of, i.e. benefit from abuse - a fact that is overlooked in almost all anti-domestic violence work and books that i've found...?! I no longer care about the preceding ten anti-feminist chapters. this is cool. then he gets to the point:

"There's lots of behaviour that can be considered abusive that doesn't include being beaten about the head and neck. That includes getting yelled at, being publicly humiliated, or being made to feel fat and unattractive. It's hard to feel worthy of love when someone is going out of their way to make you feel worthless. Being told to get out of these relationships may not work for you. Knowing that you're better than these relationships is the place to start. You are better than these relationships."

Anti-abuse work doesn't have to be more complicated than this. there certainly are a lot of dodgy things about this book, but it seems to me infinitely less harmful than almost all the self-help books that are actually about domestic violence - there are so many horrific ones out there that pathologise and disempower the women readers they are aimed at while diverting responsibility from the perpetrators. HJNTIY on the other hand has straightforward messages for women who are questionning whether to stay with someone who treats them badly:

"You want to believe that you are better than all the crap you've been taking from all these men all these years. Well you are. You are an excellent, foxy human being worthy of love, and the only way you can pursue that idea is by honoring yourself. At the very least that means ridding your world of dudes who are not worthy and setting a standard of excellence in your daily life. Let's start with this statistic: You are delicious."

Maybe i'm a fool, but reading that almost made me teary, thinking of how much women i work with just need to hear something that directly compassionate and them-centred. i think it's cool.

speaking the overwhelm

2010-02-28T17:59:00.001Z

Joan Kelly on serial rapist-murderers, hatred and 'protecting' girls. not a cheery read but i get so much from the way joan writes from the gut, linking it all together. she writes the kinds of thoughts and feelings that i can't articulate because i can't bear to dwell on them, and i'm grateful to her for that.

relapse and rewards

2010-02-25T17:48:00.001Z

i have been very skeptical about ideas that say abuse is an addiction. you can find a lot of 'science' that will tell you that abused women are 'addicted' to the violent relationship, to the abuser, even to endorphins or something, that are released after a beating. this is all, in my opinion, total bience (my friend's term for the application of bollocks to science). not least because domestic violence has precious little to do with beatings anyway, for goodness sake, physical violence being an optional extra following psychological abuse and control that form the basis.

there are also lots of ideas to do with an abuser being 'addicted' to his own endorphin rush, or to the thrill of power, or to his negative behaviours in some other way. i am very suspicious of these explanations as they serve to take away responsibility for his actions. most explanations of domestic abuse are desperate to look for any reason to avoid making men responsible for their own actions.

however, recently i was describing a case that i found particularly upsetting to a counsellor. in this case a perpetrator had gone further towards 'Changing' than anyone else i've ever known through work. he said all the right things and was on best behaviour for months. then it got too hard and he gave it up. for some reason i'd got emotionally involved in this case and felt devastated, as, of course, did his partner. anyhow the counsellor said something about how his abusive behaviour was like an addiction and his return to it was like a relapse.

at first i cringed, thinking stop talking in cliches, DV is not addiction. but then that started to make a bit of sense. how we are 'addicted' to behaviours that we know are bad for us, they can be comforting when we start to feel too much out on a limb.

there's no point pretending that giving up abusive behaviour, its rewards and its habits, is not an intensely challenging and scary thing to do. you are also going against a culture that supports and rewards male entitlement and that denies and minimises abuse. i do not for one minute condone or excuse his return to abuse. he had all the resources this culture can throw at a perpetrator who is trying to change, supporting him in his effort. but in some ways, he was on his own. i watched him challenge social workers who placed blame on other factors, saying "no, no, you have to remember, i chose to abuse her, it wasn't the fault of anything else".

and at some point it felt too hard. he gave up, 'relapsed', perhaps. i'm sure there are loads of theories around this in terms of substance use, i don't know much about it. he retreated into behaviours that he knew were bad for him and those around him because it felt easier, familiar, comforting.

i retreat to certain behaviours that i know are bad for me: smoking, drinking, overeating, when i can't face the hard work of dealing responsibly with my feelings. it feels comforting and familiar. it makes sense to me that if you are used to being in control and abusing then this behaviour will feel good to retreat to when not-doing it gets too hard.

but. in the past those behaviours were not bad for him. they used to get him exactly what he wanted, at the expense of his partner. and it was worth seeing if that could happen again. there are so many more rewards to abusing than to purely self-destructive bad behaviours. my misuse of alcohol, cigarettes and food only makes me ill. if i was prepared to bully other people instead or as well when i was feeling rubbish then i might get some results that i experience as positive. such as people doing what i want and not challenging me because they're scared to. so part of the decision to 'relapse' into abusive behaviour involves wanting to see whether you can get away with that old behaviour - maybe it might get some of the same results as before. i wish i had been able to articulate to the counsellor how abuse is functional to the perpetrator, how oppressing others makes your life easier. there are short and long-term gains far exceeding, for example, the relief of having a cigarette.

right? i'm aware that i'm rambling away with next to no knowledge of substance use and models used to explain it. if anyone knows that stuff i'd be really interested to hear.

years of your life

2010-02-25T11:52:00.004Z

speaking of burnout, what's really dragging on me at the moment is the gradual realisation of the real slowness of this work. i know that it takes women on average seven years to leave an abusive relationship and i've not even (quite) done this job for that long. and i have seen so many successes and amazing new starts and people finding their choices and options and confidence and starting to live life on their own terms, not those of their ex/partner. and i'm fully, acutely aware that whether i'm doing my job well has sod all to do with whether women i'm supporting 'leave', and i'm happy with that:

"One of the biggest mistakes made by people who wish to help an abused woman is to measure success by whether or not she leaves her abusive partner... A better measure of success for the person helping is how well you have respected the woman's right to run her own life - which the abusive man does not do - and how well you have helped her to think of strategies to increase her safety."

Lundy Bancroft.

but.

there are now a fair few people that i've been supporting for two, three years or more. a few of them have started recently for the first time to extricate themselves from abusive situations. others, of course, haven't. and, just very recently, i've started to feel frustrated. i was shocked to find myself irritated one week, while supporting a couple of people. i was a bit grossed out at myself: it's such a fundamental principle of the work, the 'unconditional positive regard' and not something i'd ever even had to think about before. but i found myself preoccupied with the phrase wasting years of your life. speaking with someone who, after two years of contact with the service, will not admit to herself that her partner has any kind of agenda to control or trap her and thus will not take any action to pre-empt him or protect herself. i'm pretty ashamed to admit i felt irritated with her.

within a couple of days i realised that i'm not irritated with the women i support, that was just my brain's defence against something harder. and as soon as i realised this my irritation (rage, actually) started being turned where it belonged. i can't stand that women i speak to every week, who are working so hard and so consciously, fighting every day to build their self-esteem and strength, are knocked back and re-trapped by all the other, stronger messages coming at them: give it up, you're not worth it, you can't do it, you'll end up alone, know your place, it's not safe, no one else will protect you. the culture colludes with what the perpetrator has told her. the perpetrator will have studied which social messages weigh heaviest on his partner and used these as his most powerful lever to make leaving him seem too scary - perhaps it's you're not beautiful enough for anyone to care, perhaps it's single motherhood is harmful to children, perhaps it's uppity women get killed. these messages play on all of us and take so very much energy to fight in our own minds for those of us who are not in an abusive relationship. how do you fight all this at the same time as practical obstacles to leaving and the fact that leaving massively increases the likelihood of you being seriously injured or killed?

yeah, so i'm not mad at the women, at all. i'm just almost unbearably sad and angry that these individuals who i've come to know and care about, and millions like them, are trapped not only by their controlling, abusive partners, but moreso and worse, by their controlling, abusive and neglectful culture.

the side of silence

2010-02-25T11:10:00.004Z

Cara at The Curvature keeps on writing amazing things...

"When you say that abuse has nothing to do with you, what you’re actually saying is that abuse has everything to do with you. By deciding to turn away from abuse, to not comment, to not stand up against it, to say that you want to stay out of it, you are taking a side. The side of silence is the side of the abuser. The side of apathy is the side of abuse."

Read the whole post.

tired.

2010-02-22T18:36:00.004Z

argh. back to work after a little time off and i can feel the unhealthy symptoms in me already. this is fucked up! it's like i can get on a roll when i'm working hard for weeks on end and don't notice so much but returning after (not enough) time off feels awful.

is there a healthy way to do this work? is the idea of there being certain people whose role it is to support survivors of domestic abuse just inherently fucked up?

i can feel that this is doing some damage, that i'm slowly burning out, that when i finally grind to a halt i'm going to need to do some work on myself to unpick what it's done to my mind and habits and by extension my health. i don't have the same energy for the work at all any more, and as soon as i started to admit this to myself the tiredness came on worse. we can ask for a few counselling sessions when things really get a bit much (clinical/therapeutic supervision really needs to be part of our work, but it ain't) and i did so recently. the counsellor pointed out to me that when i started doing this i was six years younger and full of youthful (and naive) feminist drive which has almost run dry. she said that every woman i'd supported had "taken a little bit" of energy from me and, obviously, not given it back. hmm. a strange model, a strange thing to do. is there any other way?

yes, communities should have this knowledge. it's not rocket science. i have got a really good understanding of this stuff after six years but to believe in 'experts' in this field, especially non-survivor 'experts' like myself, is pretty Wrong. to return to the quote that i started this blog with:

"I am not proposing that sexual violence and domestic violence will no longer exist. i am proposing that we create a world where so many people are walking around with the skills and knowledge to support someone that there is no longer a need for anonymous hotlines..."

Rebecca Farr of CARA, in The Revolution Starts at Home zine produced by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence.

and what's more, and bearing in mind that voluntary sector DV work is emphatically not activism, it is nonetheless supposedly about creating change:

"The 'activist' is a specialist or an expert in social change - yet the harder we cling to this role and notion of what we are, the more we actually impede the change we desire. A real revolution will involve the breaking out of all preconceived roles and the destruction of all specialism - the reclamation of our lives. The seizing control over our own destinies which is the act of revolution will involve the creation of new selves and new forms of interaction and community. 'Experts' in anything can only hinder this."

From Give Up Activism zine.

precious

2010-02-18T11:17:00.007Z

i've just watched the film Precious.

(this is full of spoilers..)

"For precious girls everywhere" said the dedication at the end. acknowledging the millions of young women who have been abused. a shout-out to say: i know you are everywhere, we know this isn't just fiction. i thought that was a really important part of the film: i feel the film really honours abuse survivors, shows a lot of compassion in many big and small ways: i felt there were half-hidden messages in the film to survivors. it wasn't a film about abuse, the way so many are: fiction that exploits abuse as a device, while forgetting/choosing not to believe that it is such a common lived experience, that survivors will be watching. this film kept that fact at the forefront the whole time: i thought it acknowledged and honoured the experience of family abuse, and the experience of having survived it.

i felt relief at how it had a good shot at trying to tell the truth of abuse: its degrading inaneness (Precious' mother making her eat the dinner and then cook it over again: this was a realistic example of abuse that is non-violent and difficult and humiliating to describe) as well as its brutality and cruelty, and that it can combine with other bullying, and with bad luck.so many films show abuse in terms of cliches and 'nasty' incidents that in no way do justice to the banal horror of domestic violence.

the film also portrayed the difficulty of telling the experience of abuse (Precious at first mutters the facts to the social worker person and then takes it back), and the consequences of telling, so the viewer is invited to think about how near-impossible it is to tell such things, let alone to professionals. it also had a good go at showing the ineptness and sickening cheque-wielding too-much-power of professionals.

later the film showed Precious being believed and supported by her teacher and classmates after telling them, which i felt was a whisper to survivors: tell the truth, it will bring you freedom and friendship. this was a feel-good moment for me: a part in the movie that felt too-good-to-be-true, but that gave the character a break, a relief from the harshness of the rest.

immediately after the film, though, i was was riled, feeling that the film had followed so many discourses of abuse in blaming someone other than the perpetrator and the structures of oppression around all of the characters. like so many discourses, i thought, it blames the mother, ignoring her own abuse and curtailed choices at the hands of Precious' father. the mother is judged by the white social worker type near the end, for having "allowed the abuse to happen", and media discussion of the film seems to have leapt to demonise the dysfunctional, abusive, black single mother. nowhere in the film is the abusive father actually blamed for the abuse, or the mother's own situation described as abuse. this film handles child abuse so well in so many ways, yet manages ultimately to make it a woman's fault??

while i realise it happens in social care offices and law courts everywhere, to me it absolutely beggars belief that any viewer (or social worker character) could blame a female character for the fact that her male partner abused their three year old child on a pillow next to her. the man is responsible for his actions. a man is responsible for his actions. right? no one else. and he was also in control of that situation. what if the mother had fought him? what if she had run away as soon as possible? these may not have been realistic choices. i am not saying the mother bears no responsiblity at all for this 'failure to protect' (as it would be called in uk law), and the mother is wholly responsible for her own physical and emotional abuse of Precious, but the pain of her situation as a mother must be acknowledged, and i initially thought that the film brushed over this, painting the mother as the primary abuser, as if it was too painful for this survivor-focussed film to also look at the ways in which the mother was also surviving. the father wasn't given a voice in the film, to sound as outrageous as the mother does, as defensive, as much living in a self-justifying fantasy world. it bothers me that the mum is given so much space in the film to be crazy and hateful, while the father is only glimpsed in a flashback, and somehow escapes responsibility in the eyes of the social worker type who passes judgement, and thus potentially in the judgement of the viewer.

i don't necessarily think that the mother was portrayed as a monster in the film, she was human and realistic according to descriptions of abusive mothers i've heard, rather she was portrayed in a way that was too easy for reviewers/journalists to demonise in the absence of anyone else being judged in the film. i hope that blaming the older generation of women for the abuse of this generation is not the only way forward. i hope that some people can look at the bad choices mothers made and allow that their choices were so often so much more limited than those of fathers. setting daughters against mothers is the ultimate divide-and-rule and reviewers of this film seem to have fallen for this tactic. abusers are responsible for their abuse. Precious' mother is responsible for her own abuse of Precious but not her partner's. only he is responsible for that.

what didn't sink in til later, though, was the fact that Precious herself rejects the social worker's judgement at the end, standing up to tell her "you can't handle any of this", takes her children and leaves smiling. i think now that this is an acknowledgement of the complexities that can't be spelled out and fixed in a two hour film, that the social worker and her judgement are useless. Precious has to leave her mother and step away from the toxic pain of her family but we don't know who, if anyone, she blames. Precious has the last word.

abuse, oppression, addiction and community responsibility

2010-02-13T11:00:00.007Z

Meanwhile, a psychiatrist type who actually has wise, caring, link-making words to say: talking about abuse and addiction on Democracy Now:

DR. GABOR MATÉ: The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, but according to all studies in the States, as well, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. And the commonality is childhood abuse. In other words, these people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development, they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. And that’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

[...]

Unfortunately, my profession, the medical profession, puts all the emphasis on genetics rather than on the environment, which, of course, is a simple explanation. It also takes everybody off the hook.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, it takes people off the hook?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, if people’s behaviors and dysfunctions are regulated, controlled and determined by genes, we don’t have to look at child welfare policies, we don’t have to look at the kind of support that we give to pregnant women, we don’t have to look at the kind of non-support that we give to families... And so, if it’s all caused by genetics, we don’t have to look at those social policies; we don’t have to look at our politics that disadvantage certain minority groups, so cause them more stress, cause them more pain, in other words, more predisposition for addictions; we don’t have to look at economic inequalities. If it’s all genes, it’s all—we’re all innocent, and society doesn’t have to take a hard look at its own attitudes and policies.

[...]

If people who become severe addicts, as shown by all the studies, were for the most part abused children, then we realize that the war on drugs is actually waged against people that were abused from the moment they were born, or from an early age on. In other words, we’re punishing people for having been abused.

And...this incredible post by BFP at Flip Flopping Joy, more to the point:

As I’ve worked through this [sugar] addiction, I’ve kept asking myself over and over again. Why do we expect individual responses to what are ultimately the vestiges of (slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, nationalism, heteroviolence, etc)?

What is addiction, but a reaction to racism, to sexism, to heteroviolence, etc?

[...]

Is it possible to take better care of yourself when living under such extraordinary violence? Is it possible to survive alone under the burden of structural violence?

~The personal is political~

...and so much more, in that post...

I want to write lots more about addiction, forms of "self-harm", responses to abuse and oppression... Today though I only seem to be able to scrap-book other people's thoughts here.

gender policing

2010-02-13T10:19:00.002Z

ah, refreshing to wake up to a good bit of swearing. Queers Against Obama has something to say about proposed changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and its 'classification' of transgender people, check it out.

on gossip

2010-02-07T12:53:00.013Z

my friend and i were talking about a 'healthy level of gossip'. we felt that a community in which there is zero gossip is unhealthy. people need to be able to talk to one another about each other to avoid the 'divide-and-rule' tactic of isolation used by all controlling people. outside of the context of countering abuse and control, people also talk about one another out of care. my friend and i were comparing notes on someone who had cut off contact. i wasn't sure if the person was being rude or if i had upset them, but by speaking to my friend i realised the person was having other difficulties and i should keep trying to contact them.

i remember when someone who had been emotionally abusive to another person in my community within a relationship, plus controlling of things within our community organising, left for another city. we talked about whether to warn the equivalent communities in the city where they were going to end up. at the time we decided not to. we felt it was unfair to deny someone the chance of a new start, unfair to slur their name before they'd even arrived.

when that person arrived in the new city they enacted the same patterns of control over methods of community organising, but on a larger scale. i have no idea whether the person also continued to be abusive in relationships. in later conversations we felt that we should have warned people in the new city so that they could have seen the early signs and prevented the person from gaining so much control. when, further down the line, i was talking with people in the new city about this person's behaviour, some also identified patterns of control, while others said things like 'they've been perfectly alright with me. i don't want to hear anything. i'll make up my own mind'.

i think as part of a community i'm responsible for more than just how someone is with me. i think it perpetuates abuse and control to ignore what other people say about their experiences of someone. in a domestic abuse context, the most powerful abusers are those who are the most charming to the outside world, as the victim is all the more likely to be disbelieved if they tell the truth. in any context, successfully controlling people will display reasonable behaviour most of the time, and ensure the silencing of anyone who has seen the twisted behaviour.

i find that the people most anti-'gossip' are those who are afraid of people comparing notes on their behaviour. someone in my community feels entitled to send cleverly worded emails to others, requesting them to "work on your behaviour" and proceeding to list life-advice in the form of apparently-caring-and-concerned questions that are in fact stunningly manipulative (example below). i perceive this to be a very subtle but immensely controlling thing to do. i have been called out by this person, who chooses to interpret my talking about their behaviour with others in our community as malicious gossip. i fervently disagree. and i see this calling-out as an attempt to silence and isolate me as someone who understands this behaviour as controlling. furthermore i think it is essential to talk with people around you about difficulties you are having, including receiving an angry-but-'compassionately-concerned' email requesting you to "work on your behaviour", and when i received one, i did so. when it turns out that other people have also received such emails, and been put in a position by the sender that they cannot talk about it to others, it becomes all the more important to break the silence.

it was receiving one particularly charming question in a list of 'compassionately-concerned'-questions-to-consider that led me to decide i could have no more to do with this person despite our shared history of community organising and friendships: "Do you have a tendency to turn around challenging situations so that you are the victim?".

what do you think? do you think i'm overreacting? i see this as an incredibly manipulative thing to write. it is impossible to challenge this statement in any way without confirming it. in objecting to that question, either by replying to the person's email, or here in blogging about it, i am portraying myself at the victim: and their 'insightful' point is proven. also, like many tactics of control/abuse, it is almost indescribably subtle. it is very difficult to object to, and perhaps anyone reading this will think i'm overreacting.

this person demanded a response to their email and made it clear that it would be incredibly offensive and disrespectful not to reply. i.e. here on in i must operate on their terms. so the only option left open to me is to agree, to go "oh wow, thank you for that insight, i do really need to think carefully about my behaviour and my tendency to manipulate things to play the victim". at the time i started writing a reply similar to that. partly because so many things in the email did strike chords (talking about our shared history), to the extent that i wanted to engage, and almost missed the manipulation. also, i knew that in doing anything other than agreeing with this person would cause difficulties for some mutual friends who would be asked (indirectly, subtly) to take sides. so even after realising the sheer unacceptableness of that statement and the premise of the entire email correspondence, i still wanted to reply in a way that would placate the person and maintain some possibility of a relationship between us. the more i thought about it though, i realised that i cannot operate on the terms of someone who thinks it's acceptable to use such techniques of control.

so that relationship has ended. the person let me know that my disengaging is disrespectful and regretful.
any relationship ending means losses and it has hurt. but i couldn't see any other way out. and it has been a massive lesson in the use of 'divide-and-rule' and how incredibly difficult it is to counter and resist those tactics. i am interested in anyone else's thoughts on dealing with controlling people in communities: problems you've had and especially if you've managed to overcome it more successfully. i'd be really happy to publish some guest posts here (on any relevant topic in fact).

cosy opposition

2010-02-04T13:17:00.002Z

i was writing the other day about a social work manager's use of assumed shared racism to distract from the fact that she was trying to deport a mother experiencing domestic violence. i have just read exactly what i was trying to say:

"“We” ostensibly embraces all true-born, good-hearted native folk, rich and poor, in thrilling yet cosy opposition to the alien menace. Even the humblest citizen may join this noble project. Or face the consequences. Such is the magic of populist politics, and the road to fascism."

The quote is from a remarkable article that my friend alerted me to: Too Many of Whom and Too Much of What by the folks at No One is Illegal. i love them, just feel relief at reading bang up to date, well-researched analysis of what is happening in UK political discourse at the moment. please read it.

reproductive coercion

2010-02-04T11:13:00.001Z

Just wanted to alert you to a marvellous post by Cara at The Curvature: Reproductive Coercion is Sexual Violence.

protecting whom?

2010-02-04T10:55:00.005Z

This has blown my mind recently:

"Law enforcement approaches to violence against women MAY deter some acts of violence in the short term. However, as an overall strategy for ending violence, criminalization has not worked. In fact, the overall impact of mandatory arrests laws for domestic violence have led to decreases in the number of battered women who kill their partners in self-defense, but they have not led to a decrease in the number of batterers who kill their partners. Thus, the law protects batterers more than it protects survivors."

From Incite! Critical Resistance Statement

I don't know the details of 'mandatory arrest laws' in the US and don't have time to research it just now. I'm irritated at how much more easily i'm finding analysis/critiques of US domestic abuse legislation as opposed to stuff from over here. I really want to know what impact the new legislation in the UK has had - and whether it's keeping men safer over and above keeping women safer!

on big love

2010-01-28T11:26:00.004Z

you can't talk about domestic violence without talking about relationships ending. you can't support people in the throes of considering ending an abusive relationship without having some idea of your own feelings about relationships: what are they, in your life? what are they for? what works for you and what doesn't? what will you compromise on? what would cause you to end the relationship immediately and walk away with nothing and never look back? if your partner hit you? today, for the first time? really? i don't believe you.

hmm i have so so much to say about all this but i think it will have to be split into several posts rather than an epic coffee-fuelled mess of a rant.

i just wanted to reflect on sitting around tables in child protection meetings, or on the phone with (fucking) social workers (spit)* and other beige professionals, looking/sounding appalled not so much by the actual physical violence as by the undignified intensity of the relationship being discussed. as if these people have never really loved, you know? i mean these are people who apparently can sleep soundly in their beds having taken children away from their mothers who want to leave the violence (see previous post), so there is definitely something missing from their hearts. but yeah, anyway - it does seem like there are lots of people who don't love with their all, who just look baffled, accusing and scared when confronted with a woman who loves in that all-consuming way and don't give me all that 'it's not love it's need' bollocks. yes it is need, and i am very anti need, anti dependency in relationships. but it is love too. it really is.

it maddens me that these women are made to feel wrong and/or crazy in terms of the intensity of their feelings. there's nothing wrong with loving with everything you have - as much as i fervently believe we should all figure out ways of being interdependent rather than dependent - we are not born with the knowledge of how to do this and our culture does not support or even suggest that. our culture pressurises us to find The One and if you're someone with an open heart who loves with their all, you can end up in a mess if that one then manipulates and controls you. but it doesn't mean you're wrong to love!

i think part of supporting, and what you're not going to hear on a 'how to do DV work' training course, is acknowledging the depth of that love, the passion, and slowly starting to unpick how the need is woven through it, how the need was created, and what else the person has in their lives - people, resources, and strengths, to lessen the need on the One. if you approach the whole thing by invalidating the real love, you aren't going to get anywhere, in fact you're very likely to leave the survivor with the (possibly correct) idea that the perpetrator is the only person who understands.

*possibly had too much coffee this morning

Social Care quote of the day

2010-01-26T21:13:00.008Z

ok so lots of women come to the UK on a visa or residence permit, often dependent on / sponsored by their husband. in most cases they have no recourse to public funds even if they are allowed to work, or they have to have been working for several years before being able to claim. 'no recourse to public funds' means you are not allowed to claim most benefits in the UK, including housing benefit, which is what pays for a refuge/hostel space for homeless people who can claim it.

if a woman flees domestic violence but has no recourse to public funds she is basically screwed. if she has no children, no one has to help her unless she has major additional problems such as a severe disability so that she is a 'vulnerable adult' and adult social care should help (however even if this is the case things are incredibly unpleasant, bureaucratic and fairly hopeless, let's not pretend that the system is falling over itself to support disabled migrants). if she doesn't have major 'additional needs' she basically can choose between the abusive relationship or destitution.

if she has children then 'children and young people's social care' (what used to just be called 'social services') have a duty to support the children under the Children's Act. however they have no duty towards the mother. usually they accommodate the mum and children for a few days while they consult their legal team and then offer a plane ticket to the mother's country of origin. if the woman refuses this, (perhaps because she cannot support her children in that country, has no family support, and/or knows they are likely to die of diseases that don't exist in the uk, as in recent cases i've worked with) 'social care' will remove the children (into 'care') thus 'discharging their duty' and leaving the woman with the same choice as above: abuse or destitution.

these are the choices open to people with valid visas, who are legally here. those who have overstayed a visa, or whose husbands/families etc have denied them knowledge of their legal status are obviously in an even scarier position.

i met one woman who approached social care for help, was offered a plane ticket, refused, had her child removed, ended up sleeping in her neighbour's garage, turned to alcohol and then was allowed even less contact with her child.

anyhow, a social care manager was particularly charming the other day when she said, to my colleague trying to get them to fund safe accommodation for a bit longer instead of forced repatriation of a mum with cancer and her children who had spent over half a decade in the uk, one of whom was born here (doesn't make you 'british' any more though, oh no, not unless at least one of your parents was also born here. seriously.): "we have concerns that she may not be the person she claims to be in her passport". in fact she had no grounds whatsoever for such concerns, but just felt it was a good idea to throw that in there, to put us on the backfoot and to play on what she assumed would be our horror that someone may be abusing the immigration system. i mean. i just don't know what to do with stuff like this. i'm speechless and tired and and furious and don't know what to do. it's like there's a shared vocabulary, shared culture where we're all supposed to join together in watching out for those coming to steal from 'us' and that any amount of cruelty justifies guarding against the possiblity that a foreigner might get something for free.

erm. i am nowhere near being able to articulate this stuff yet, especially not on a tuesday night after work. but. in case you were in any doubt. the immigration system in the uk is made of racism. it screws over abused women, among others, with the spectacular efficiency of a labyrinthine system that no one seems to understand. a lot of people in the 'caring professions' are gatekeeping, colluding with those in power to eject vulnerable, 'unproductive' people even faster than the law can do so. enough for tonight. tired.

campaign to abolish no recourse to public funds for women who have experienced abuse . or take it that bit further.

pushed to adventure

2010-01-21T18:07:00.002Z

hehe, i re-found this just recently, and it seemed like a response to the amazing derrick jensen article, Beyond Hope, that i linked to the other week.

"but i think hope is like a crush. not the resigned hope, like - i hope things get better-- but the hope that feels like suspended disbelief. where spaces open up and everything is possible again, and you're pushed to adventure, pushed out of your regular boxes, pushed to show off, to be the person you want to be the most, working hard to show your best sides, your secret scars, your hidden dreams.

hope is like a crush, making things as beautiful as possible even knowing you'll get hurt.

it won't sustain you, not like the hard work of love will, but it pushes you beyond what you thought you were capable of.

i am not optimistic, but hope, yes, hope."

cindy crabb, in Doris zine, #26

working with the system

2010-01-19T20:50:00.004Z

"One of the scariest manifestations of modern capitalism is the system's ability to co-opt experiences, practices, even culture, and to then re-create and repackage them within a careerist, profit-driven (even in "non-profits" [voluntary sector]), and competitive logic. The non-profit system... supports the professionalization of activism rather than a model of everyday activism. For many of us, activism has become something you do as a career. When organisers from other countries see that activists are paid to do work in the United States, it makes them wonder. It took my father (who is very familiar with grassroots struggles) a few years to understand the work that I was doing. "Your job as a community organiser; what does that mean, it's your employment? Who is paying you to do this work? And why?" And since many of us are being paid by foundations allied with corporate interests, my father also said, "Clearly, they are paying you to keep you from really challenging the system, to make sure that you are accounted for."

When we focus on organizing as a part of everyday life, the process becomes as important as the final product. In many cases, foundation funders and the non-profit culture expect groups to achieve a campaign goal in a relatively short period of time. They are not interested in funding the much slower work of base building which takes years and years to do. Consequently, non-profits become short-term goal orientated, even if they did not begin that way. Many also become focused on "smoke and mirrors" organising, in which you do something that looks good for a photo op but has no real people power behind it."

Paula X. Rojas, from Are the Cops in our Heads and Hearts? in The Revolution will not be Funded, edited by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence.

This is so relevant to the three-year periods of funding that have been the status quo under New Labour. they just won't fund an existing project (in the name of 'encouraging innovation,' yeah right) - everything just lasts for three years. it's insane. or calculated. especially in the domestic violence field where everyone knows it takes women on average seven years to leave, three years is pointless and leaves women hanging, distraught, i've spoken to them when their services grind to a halt...

i would be so interested in hearing/reading critiques of the UK domestic violence voluntary sector and the ways in which its funding is messed up, if anyone can articulate this or point me in the right direction... i heard an amazing speech from Amrit Wilson, the chair of Imkaan, an umbrella body for Asian women's refuges, at the Transnational Feminisms Conference in Manchester. she had so much to say, but i haven't found anything written down, or anyone to talk to yet (i wish Amrit would be my friend, but i think she's busy).

i mean, it's becoming increasingly painfully obvious to me that we need to restart at a grassroots level according to the needs of our own local areas rather than wait for ever-more coercive state funding. Rape Crisis centres' funding is being cut with heartbreaking regularity so as to make them almost non-existent now, (far too feminist, and overtly challenging and sceptical of the state; gotta go) and they are slowly being replaced with one-stop type centres (Sexual Assault Referral Centres/SARCs ; check out the difference between RC's website talking to "you, if you need support" and the Home Office SARC page: "victims receive an integrated service," gross.) which have streamlined the whole process, supposedly to make it easier for survivors (true, you can be examined medically, interviewed and counselled in one place), but this also has the effect of meaning the police are always in the building. and although survivors do have the right to use these centres without reporting to the police, i'd be interested to know how many 'monitoring details' they have to hand over. Supporting People, the central government body that funds accommodation and housing-related support for vulnerable people, including many/most refuges for women fleeing domestic violence, has moved from just needing age/ethnic origin/blah blah a few years ago to now requiring national insurance numbers for all people passing through those services. so everyone is tracked! amazing isn't it.

and yeah. why are we doing this work as a job? why am i? why am i getting paid to be a sticking plaster on a wound, and working far more with than against forces that cause violence in the first place? i'm really not sure. but i will figure out what else to do.

personality disorder

2010-01-15T23:15:00.004Z

a woman was telling me this week that her partner has Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder. this is why he behaves as he does. great big "hmmm".

i am hugely sceptical of the diagnosis of personality disorders anyway, having spent time with so many awesome not-very-mental people who've had such a label slapped on them. it horrifies me what that does to someone; how we all defer to medical experts. so many people, especially women, especially queers, who've been through abuse and display normal responses to the twisted, conflicting realities of abuse, who were never asked about it, who were medicated and sent away with that label, who believe the label is what they are and always will be.

"The authors of the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual] sought to extend the territory psychiatrists controlled. Just as various European countries built up their overseas empires in the nineteenth century, so psychiatrists in the twentieth century claimed jurisdiction over every aspect of human behaviour... They wanted to be experts on every aspect of behaviour which manifests or causes mental distress. So they invented personality disorders."

from Dorothy Rowe's incredible self-help book, Beyond Fear

and the diagnosis of personality disorders are used, like a great many things, to oppress survivors of abuse and to buttress the privilege of abusers.

our culture is always seeking new 'explanations' for why abuse happens, why rape happens, Why Men Are Violent. to make it even harder for us to sift through the lies, excuses, silencing, apologism, victim-blaming and so on to get to the real reasons (you get more power; no one stops you). personality disorders, infinitely malleable to fit the patient at hand, have become another tool for apologist psychiatry. the poor man is a victim of a mental illness. his behaviour makes no sense (ignoring the rewards he gets from his abuse combined with the lack of sanctions against it). result: the perpetrator does not have to take responsibility for his abuse. he has a label which he can wear indefinitely, explaining and justifying his behaviour. he can't help it. he is a victim, deserving of care. he can carry right on.

"[Abusers'] value system is unhealthy, not their psychology. Much of what appears to be crazy behaviour in an abuser actually works well for him... The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders... includes no condition that fits abusive men well. Some clinicians will stretch one of the definitions to apply it to an abusive client - "intermittent explosive disorder," for example - so that insurance will cover his therapy. However, this diagnosis is erroneous if it is made solely on the basis of his abusive behaviour; a man whose destructive behaviours are confined primarily or entirely to intimate relationships is an abuser, not a psychiatric patient."

from far and away the best book on domestic abuse, Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft. please read it.

zizek

2010-01-15T22:24:00.000Z

argh! he hates trans people! (p28 of Violence) and binary gender is "the 'transcendental' difference that grounds human identity itself", apparently. for fucks sake.