Article originally published in Fightback magazine’s special issue dedicated to paid radical writing by women and gender minorities.

Anne Russell is a public health student with an ongoing interest in the politics of intimate relationships.

A welcome narrative has recently sprung up about how society needs to teach men (and others) not to rape or abuse people, rather than teaching women (and others) to avoid rape and abuse as though it’s an unchangeable fact of life. Many people are aware that this means men have to talk to other men about their abusive/predatory behaviours. However, they often baulk when it comes to actually doing this with their friends and peers, going into denial about their loved one’s behaviour and/or declaring the situation is too awkward or complicated. Dealing with cases of abuse is always a fraught and complicated process for everyone, including for those trying to be a middleman without veering into abuse apologia. The lack of coherent narratives around dealing with queer abuse or women’s abuse of men doesn’t help the overall situation. This is thus a brief, rough attempt at a guideline for how to start trying to hold one’s friends of all genders accountable for their abusive behaviour.

For the most part, abusive behaviour can only be revealed by someone talking about it, creating what many people refer to as a he-said-she-said situation. As such, many people refuse to believe those who talk about being abused, as they believe or want to believe that this information contradicts what they know of the accused person. He’s so kind to his mother, or she’s such a good feminist leader—how could they possibly have been abusive? The denial of this often extends to victim-blaming; surely the abuse must have been provoked by her short skirt or annoying behaviour. People will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid accepting the knowledge that someone they respect, care about or even love dearly has done something terrible, and needs to be told to stop doing it. In a culture that portrays Rapists and Abusers only as people who hide in bushes sporting I Hate Women T-shirts, it is hard to reach the more accurate standpoint of “people we love and admire can do really fucked up things”. Natalie Reed’s analysis of systemic misogyny makes this clearer:

There really isn’t any such thing as “sexists”, “transphobes”, “racists”, etc. There are only actions, statements and beliefs that are sexist, transphobic, racist, etc. And we’re all susceptible to them.

Likewise, sexism is not a social problem that can be located, isolated, quarantined and then eliminated. It is an emergent system of attitudes about sex and gender that derives its power from the bottom up, from all corners of our culture.

Given how common rape and domestic abuse are, the idea that only supervillains commit abuse is simply not true. But while the more accurate narrative of “people we love and admire can do really fucked up things” can be pretty depressing, it can also be a source of hope; intimately abusive people aren’t incurable psychopaths after all! The question does get more complex, though; in each case, you ask yourself, can I continue to love this person while still condemning these parts of their behaviour? What would that love look like? How do I balance it out with caring for the victims of their behaviour, and making sure those people’s needs are met?

Sometimes it’s too unsafe or emotionally hard to work on one’s abusive friends; when an acquaintance who had sexually assaulted my friend showed up at a protest I’d organised, all I could do was cry in a corner and tell a couple of other people about him. However, the Incurable-Psychopath narrative of abusive people would hold that cutting them off completely is the only ethical way to condemn their actions. If and when one is physically and emotionally safe to do so, attempting to hold abusive friends responsible is always, always a good idea. The accountability process will decide whether you want to cut them off anyway—if you want to stay friends with someone who can’t take criticism, who can’t accept responsibility, who lies to you, who promises to change and then doesn’t, and so forth. Some care may need to be taken if the person has been accused of violence or is generally prone to it—confronting them in a public place with support from other people can thus be a good safety measure.

Perhaps at this point it’d be good to list a few initial phrases you might use to confront someone about their abuse, since many people feel awkward or unsure about that step. It is important to note that every friendship is unique, and you may have varying approaches that work for different dynamics.This could include age gaps, power imbalances, cultural differences and closeness of friendships. These prompts are just to start you off, as it’s important to find your own way of communicating about abuse that will be effective within your particular friendships.

• Hey, can we talk? I’ve been hearing some bad things about your behaviour [towards X] and I’m really not comfortable with it.
• Hi, your creepy behaviour is making some people feel unsafe, and I think you should leave this event. It’d be good to talk more about this later; maybe we could meet up next week?
• Hey, I’m pretty uncomfortable about you having a leadership position in this organisation; the way you’ve been treating and talking about women isn’t okay.
• Mate, it’s really not cool for you to talk about trans women like that, knock it off
• What is this, I thought I signed up for “lesbian coven”, not “lechbian coven”

At this point the person could apologise and agree to start changing their behaviour. However, they could also go into denial, or become defensive and angry. Either way, it is a very good idea to call in support from one’s friends. Doing this has at least three benefits: it shows a united front against the person’s abusive behaviour, it helps keep everyone’s emotional energy up, and it helps share details and tactics. When a friend of mine told me she hadn’t harassed her ex in a long time, other friends let me know she was lying, which made me better equipped to keep confronting her.

Prioritising the victims’ needs often determines the first step in adjusting to a new sort of relationship with the abusive/predatory person in question. If that person is still a risk to their surrounding population, and/or if their victims still feel unsafe around or triggered by them, keeping them away from group events is very important. It’s a step people are often unfortunately unwilling to take, as at best it’s an awkward process, and will often be met with a lot of resistance from the abusive person and their supporters. However, many people can maintain friendships through individual hangouts like meeting up for coffee or watching films together; if your friendship isn’t intimate enough for something like that, turning that person away from a party should hardly be a major issue. As for their presence in organisations, their value to any group is questionable if, for example, they continually prey on women.

With enough social pressure, an abusive person may feel motivated to apologise and start making amends. As a friend said, a good litmus test of whether a person’s remorse is genuine is whether or not they’ll let their behaviour be named to others; whether they accept that they’ve broken trust and need to repair it. Trust takes time and continuous work to rebuild; trust that the person is truly sorry for their actions, and that they are taking steps to make sure it won’t happen again. Even then, the abused party is under no obligation to forgive them or be around them; recovery also takes time, and victims need to be able to move at their own pace.

Since abuse is a practice, not a personal identity, anyone is capable of doing it. Seeing abuse for the terrifyingly routine event that it is may help demystify the issue, and thus make dealing with it a more routine practice. While doing this is difficult in isolation, it gets easier when there are support networks to maintain it. As a friend said, politics is what we do together; everything else is just survival strategies.

Originally published in Fightback magazine’s special issue dedicated to paid writing by women and gender minorities.

Maria is a freelance writer currently living in Chicago. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a minor in Communication. She blogs about environmentally friendly tips, technological advancements, and healthy active lifestyles.

Today, as throughout all of history, women are paid less than men for performing identical tasks in the workplace. In some instances, they are almost completely barred from entering into their chosen profession. The tech industry is one such example of a space in which where both jobs and prestige are disproportionately held by men. In this field, women continue to face hurdles both securing entry-level positions and gaining the recognition they deserve once they secure a more advanced role.

A number of high-profile cases have drawn attention to tech industry gender discrimination. The best known case may be that of Ellen Pao, who worked for venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in Silicon Valley. She filed a lawsuit against her former employer, stating that she was unjustly passed over for promotions, seually harassed, and ultimately fired. Although that lawsuit was eventually dismissed, it continues to draw attention to the more important issue at hand. In another case, former Facebook employee Chia Hong filed a lawsuit against the social media giant for race and gender-based harassment. Female tech workers have repeatedly noted that they are judged for their personality rather than their work performance, which should be a red flag in ANY industry.  

Though small in number, there are several companies echoing these women’s voices for greater equality in tech specifically. An American company, PowerToFly, was launched by a pair of mothers who recognized the need for home-based opportunities for women. The company provides women with networking opportunities and online support, challenging the cultural norms that dictate a working woman’s family life. A non-profit company known as the Ada Initiative also offers support for women around the world interested in open source coding and technology. Beyond it’s efforts at home in Canada, the Ada Initiative has run six AdaCamps in four countries. This feminist tech camp opens doors for hundreds of women each year that may have otherwise stayed permanently shut.

Supporting women’s involvement, investment, and leadership in tech careers is crucial, and this is particularly evident in the “green” tech sector. While there are several big names making corrective action – Lisa P. Jackson, for example, who works for Apple as vice president of Environmental Initiatives, is a former American EPA administrator with a strong track record in sustainability efforts – we are still sorely lacking a diverse representation of sex and race in cleantech decision making. Many people are unaware of the renewable energy options available to them; and while resources like this and this aim to inform, it’s in no one’s best interest to have only a fraction of the world’s voices represented in finding cleaner, “greener” solutions. Other inspirational women of note, such as Nawal Al-Hosany, the director of both the Zayed Future energy prize and sustainability at Masdar, and Sandrine Dixson Decleve, who directs the Prince of Wales’s EU Corporate Leaders Group to promote eco-friendly policies in Brussels, cannot stand alone in making a change.

The problem is not a new one. Historically, the entire tech field has been dominated by men, and it will take more than a several years and a few fresh faces to make up for decades of inaction and missed opportunities. At major research universities, men hold a staggering 86 percent of all computer science undergraduate degrees. And to add insult to injury, the percent of women holding degrees in computer science actually dropped from 37 percent to 18 percent between 1985 and 2010.

As the success of green technology is vital to the preservation of our resources and our planet, the current state of ongoing gender bias has to go. When half of the population is denied access to one of the most powerful industries, responsible for shaping the lives of all the world’s inhabitants, there is more than enough justification for alarm. Technology, when used at its best, can span boundaries of race, class, and gender. Bright minds, male and female, are needed to both recognize and harness its potential to push for better “green” ideas. Climate change does not discriminate – a diversification of both educational programs and the green tech workforce is what the Earth and all future generations deserve.

Article originally published in Fightback magazine’s special issue dedicated to paid writing by women and gender minorities.

By Kim McBreen.

Talking and thinking critically about our experiences, goals and strategies are important parts of organising.  All of our activism must be consistent with our long term goals, but there are often contradictions.  This article will look at examples of short term approaches moving us further from our long term goals, and alternative paths suggested by US group INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence.  Focusing on the experiences of women of colour exposes many contradictions in common approaches, allowing more holistic strategies for dismantling oppression.  

Organising against violence
Whether it is patriarchy, the criminal justice system, colonisation or poverty, oppression is violence.  And these oppressions interact.  When we treat oppressions separately, we ignore that their interactions make some populations far more vulnerable to violence, and we risk contributing to that violence.  For example, when organisations working against family violence lobby the State to bring in harsher punishments, they ignore the combination of patriarchy, white supremacy and classism within the criminal justice system.  The result entrenches existing power structures and actually increases violence against those most vulnerable by increasing their exposure to the State.  Where organisations working against prisons focus on the experience of men in the criminal justice system, they ignore the different experiences of marginalised genders in that system, as well as the need for real community safety and accountability.  Again this only entrenches existing structures of power.  Such organising is both unappealing and dangerous to those who know most about oppression.  

US prison abolition group Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence argue that anti-violence and prison abolition movements must come together to fight all violence:

“activists/ movements that address state violence often work in isolation from activists/ movements that address domestic and sexual violence.  The result is that women of color, who suffer disproportionately from both state and interpersonal violence have become marginalized within these movements.  It is critical that we develop responses to gender violence that do not depend on a sexist, racist, classist, and homophobic criminal justice system.  It is also important that we develop strategies that challenge the criminal justice system and that also provide safety for survivors of sexual and domestic violence.  To live violence free lives, we must develop holistic strategies for addressing violence that speak to the intersection of all forms of oppression” (INCITE & Critical Resistance 2001).

Our communities desperately need strategies that make all of us safer, but our work to dismantle one oppression must not strengthen another.  By bringing our understanding of oppressions together to see how they re-enforce each other, we are better able to tear them all down.  Uniting anti-violence and prison abolition organisations has resulted in a new approach based on building community accountability, and has created a new movement.  There have been several books, huge conferences, and now many organisations tackle violence in a holistic way based on this work.  
Organising against white supremacy
Andrea Smith (2006 and 2010) looked at ways that white supremacy pits communities of colour against each other, giving them a stake in racism.  She identifies three pillars supporting white supremacy in the US:

1. Capitalism depends on the logic of slavery.  Slavery commodified Black people.  “[T]he capitalist system ultimately commodifies all workers: one’s own person becomes a commodity that one must sell in the labour market while the profits of one’s work are taken by somebody else. . . . [T]he logic of slavery applies a racial hierarchy to this system. . . . Anti-blackness enables people who are not black to accept their lot in life because they can feel that at least they are not at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy—at least they are not property” (Smith 2010).
2. Colonisation depends on the logic of genocide, requiring Indigenous peoples to disappear.  “[N]on-Native peoples then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous—land, resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture” (Smith 2006).  Dying is the ultimate disappearance, but Indigenous people are also made invisible when they are not recognised as ‘really Māori’ because they don’t look or behave how we expect.    
3. In the West, war depends on the logic of orientalism—specific peoples, nations and religions are framed as a constant threat.  Our borders must be protected.  New Zealand supports imperialist wars and frames ‘asian immigration’ as dangerous.  Both direct our attention from ongoing colonisation and other state violence.  

“What keeps us trapped within our particular pillars of white supremacy is that we are seduced by the prospect of being able to participate in the other pillars” (Smith 2010).  This has implications for how we organise against specific forms of white supremacy, such as colonisation, anti-immigration, and other anti-asian, -Māori or -Pasifika racism.  With limited knowledge of others’ experiences, we risk gaining small victories for one group, while entrenching white supremacy overall.  We need relationships and accountability to other communities—solidarity that allows us to “check our aspiration against the aspirations of other communities to ensure our model of liberation does not become the model of oppression for others” (Smith 2006).

Models for Organising

Liberalism has become so normalised, we often find ourselves fighting for a less awful system, rather than for a world we actually want.  There are many ways that our energy is diverted away from dismantling oppression and towards making cosmetic changes to oppression.  

A common pathway for activists is from organising on an issue, to developing an organisation or programme providing a much needed service, that then becomes increasingly dependent on external funding and state support, and therefore respectability.  State funding is dangerous, but so too is support from large philanthropic trusts: “While the [prison industrial complex] overtly represses dissent, the [non-profit industrial complex] manages and controls dissent by incorporating it into the state apparatus” (Smith 2009).  Funders have influenced the direction of movements using grants, leadership courses and career pathways to lure activists into service delivery rather than movement building, and to change the focus of organisations from structural change to individual relief, from revolutionary to reformist goals.  It becomes harder to fight the structures of power when we depend on their money.  

For example, when we see children going to school hungry, a service model would focus on how to get the money to feed the children.  This is a simple solution, but by positioning ourselves outside the community, we risk framing children as the problem and the State as the solution, whereas State and capitalist violence are the actual problems.  A revolutionary model recognises these communities as experts on poverty and State violence.  Who better to dismantle oppression?  We need solutions that meet our immediate needs, and that also move us towards that goal.  This requires community mobilisation.  

“To radically change society, we must build mass movements that can topple systems of domination, such as capitalism.  However, the [non-profit industrial complex] encourages us to think of social justice as a career. . . . However, a mass movement requires the involvement of millions of people, most of whom cannot get paid.  By trying to do grassroots organizing through this careerist model, we are essentially asking a few people to work more than full-time to make up for the work that needs to be done by millions” (Smith 2009).  The service provider model has taken power away from collective organising, and invested that power with funders and service providers.  

Each of these three examples has led to new ways of organising.  Together, they show that those most oppressed have the most effective strategies for dismantling oppression, and that the more we reflect and talk together about our experiences and dreams for the future, the sooner we’ll get it done.

(For further reading, see The Color of Violence, The Revolution Starts at Home, and The Revolution Will Not be Funded, all published by South End Press)