 of what can sexual justice look like. I'm your chair, Dalia Gabriel, and I'm an editor at Navarra Media. The inspiration for this event really came from the fact, obviously it came from the Me Too movement, but we saw that there was this huge wave of testimonies of sexual violence in every sector, in every industry, in every area of society. For many of us who have experienced this kind of violence and harassment is something that we've spoken amongst ourselves and learned to expect in all parts of life, but it's not really been part of the public sphere in the way that it is now. So whilst this has been really inspiring to watch, we've kind of realized that there isn't really the second part, which is like, okay, now that we know about this and now that it's public, what do we do next? And it seems that that's where the movement starts to split up a little bit. There's that kind of quite carceral approach which sees prison as the answer. There's also ideas of restorative justice, but everyone's a bit unclear of what that means or there's divisions over what that could look like. So the aim of this event is really to try and begin that conversation to really push this forward beyond just confession and testimony. So, as promised, we have three incredible speakers. To begin with, we have Eleanor Penny, who is a senior editor at Navarra Media. We also have Paris Lees, who is a writer, journalist and campaigner. And we have Dr Shola Mos Chogbemimu, who is a lawyer and founder of Women in Leadership Publication and is one of the organisers of the Women's March in London. So the way it's going to work is we're going to open with some five to ten opening remarks from each of our speakers. Then we'll open up to the floor and have a more open discussion. So Eleanor, would you like to go first? You don't have an option, actually, because I'm the chair and I get to decide. Cool. Ah, can you hear me? Cool. Hi. So, I want to talk about what happens in hotel rooms. So I want to take you way, way, way back to the ffated hours of 2011 when the then head of the IMF, who was Dominique Strauss-Carn, was indicted by a grand jury in the U.S. for sexual assault and attempted rape of a maid at a suffotel hotel in New York. After pleading not guilty, his bail was set at one million, which was kind of like petty change for him. And the woman in question was Napisatu Dialu, who was a Muslim immigrant from Guinea. She was a divorced single mother to a teenage daughter. She was allegedly pursued down the hallways of this luxury hotel that she cleaned for a pittance by a man who pretty much held the purse strings of global economic markets. So if you want a vision of these monstrous mechanics of global sexual power, I don't think we need to look much further than this. Actually all charges against Strauss-Carn were eventually dropped and we're told that rape charges ruin a man's career but actually he's just made a comeback onto the political scene at the behest of Emmanuel Macron, my favourite whipping boy for neoliberalism. So the important thing here is that Dialu is not alone. The hospitality industry is rife with sexual assault and cultures of abuse and impunity. Also happens to be staffed by disproportionately migrant women of colour, often on low pay on precarious work with uncertain migration status, aka by the people who are least empowered to challenge their bosses and their clients, et cetera, whoever might be harassing or assaulting them. I mention this because I find it so interesting that the stories which sparked this recent inferno took place by the people who frequent hotel rooms rather than the people who clean them. I don't want to diminish the trauma of starlets and the actresses who came forward. Sexual violence is terrible always in all circumstances and having money doesn't necessarily cushion the immediate trauma of that. But it is important and revealing that the most effective blow in the battle of rape culture was dealt by women who were relatively in more stable social positions who weren't gambling on future incomes by coming forward. They weren't gambling on their ability to pay rent to feed their kids. There's a clear reason for this that your ability to challenge rape culture is massively inflected, not just by your gender, but by other factors of race, of class, migration status, economic power. Basically it's not just about Hollywood, it's also about Yarlswood, right? So in the wake of Me Too, we talk about changing the conversation around consent and detoxifying our deeply troubling attitudes to sex and that's absolutely true. But when we say rape and violence is about power more than it is about sex, we really need to couple that with a response which doesn't just tackle our attitudes to sex, it tackles our structures of power. It tries to rectify a power imbalance in which sexual abuse flourishes. And those conditions are conditions of social, economic and political hierarchy which make it almost impossible for women to come forward. So when we talk only about attitudes, we make sexual violence not a structural problem but a problem of individual moral failing and that doesn't imply a structural solution so that seems like immediately woefully inadequate. To my eyes it's something that can't be just solved by replacing people in power with more morally upstanding people or even just people of a different gender but by challenging those power hierarchies in and of themselves. Because by challenging it on an individual basis we end up with solutions that just aren't scalable. They might make us feel some kind of catharsis immediately but I think that catharsis is a pretty doomed dead end because we know from the revelations of me too that statistically speaking there are millions millions and millions of people committing these acts of petty violence every day and if we turn to carceral solutions and if we turn to like public flagellation as our one and only solution that just has absolutely no hope of scaling and so challenging these power dynamics demands very very concrete solutions not just for instance opening more domestic abuse refuge centres and things like securing rights at work, tackling border policing, decriminalising sex work and more over wrenching the debate about protecting women away from the hands of the far right who don't really give a fuck about it honestly at the end of the day and this is why I genuinely believe better workers rights and things like universal basic income and universal basic services will do an enormous amount to rectify those power imbalances and allow women to challenge cultures in which violence flourishes. I want survivorship to be like a political category because one of the great insights of feminist theory is the idea that the person is political and of course that's totally right but we can't let the political collapse into the personal. We need to make survivorship about a political category emanating from the observation that collective trauma is part and parcel of the way people experience gender and that encapsulates billions of people on the planet cis women, trans women white women, women of colour every single woman experiences these systems and violence and like navigates them every day and we also need to recognise the feedback loop between exclusion from formal and economic power and sexual violence so not only does sexual violence flourish in hierarchy, sexual violence is actually a way of maintaining those hierarchies. Rate culture acts as like a system of domination by which women are systematically excluded from public spaces and from institutional power because they're just threatened with violence when they dare to take a little bit of power and a little bit of public oxygen just think of the language that's used against women when they get a little bit uppity or when they dare to enter parliament or to have an opinion on the internet as I'm sure everyone in this panel couldn't testify and it's kind of almost most visible when we think of how it's used in largely male spaces like in the army and in boys only public schools rape is used to practice and reinforce sexual hierarchies like as an act of domination all the boys assault younger boys, people of higher ranks assault people of lower ranks so our dominant social institutions are populated by people trained on the idea that sex is a way to test your own power and the limits of that on other people's bodies in a way sexual violence is very much a tool used to regulate women's participation in public space and in work and in domestic life so to my eye sexual violence is not only like a pandemic problem it's also like a technology of work because it very much ensures, maintains systems which keep women out of more powerful positions actually in 2016 this was made central to the Neonomanos Argentinian women's movement when like half a million women went on strike precisely against the pandemic levels of female sexual violence in Argentina and according to this uniting these different women struggles was the idea that women had essentially a categorically unsafe working condition and those are conditions that they just decided to refuse to accept and a lot of people like hand ringing about how this means like oh we can never have sex again and all these feminazis are purposefully misinterpreting like comsy comons as attempted assault which is obviously massively disingenuous but I also think that it's worth dwelling on the fact here that this movement is kind of ultimately about creating the conditions of good sex and by that I mean allowing people to embrace their sexuality in a situation where that doesn't mean encountering a system that's like freighted and menaced with the legacy of just like thousands and thousands of years of systemic sexual violence so yeah I want to decouple sex from a system of violence unless you're into that I don't know how to follow that Can I just say I'm actually really pleased that it snowed because I feel like the people that are here are like really actually want to be here and we've rooted out some people's hearts just weren't completely in it to be honest so thank you and can I also just say how refreshing it is to actually be talking about some real shit because forgive them for thinking wouldn't you that the most pressing issue affecting women in Britain in 2018 is telling trans women that they're not real women so it's really how, literally how nuts is that how much time we devote to speaking about that and it's really good to be talking about this because we know that for me personally it's good to be talking about this that trans women also suffer disproportionately from sexual harassment but I've found this really upsetting and difficult to talk about actually particularly when the Harvey Weinstein thing broke and all of these horrible stories were coming out like I just couldn't look on social media I don't know how it affected everybody else but I have experience as I think clearly it's emerging now most women have done all different sorts of ranging from just comments to real sexual violence and just finding it really difficult and I can kind of understand why it has been swept under the carpet for so long because there's a part of me that's just like I don't want to think about it it's very upsetting, please put it over there and can we just pretend it's not happening but it has been happening we all know it's been happening and we're having a conversation about it now and I think that that's fantastic and I do draw parallels it might seem like a weird kind of comparison to make but between this and the trans thing really because I kind of feel like it's like a new thing, the Me Too movement we're having this conversation now but it's like this has been happening for hundreds of years and you'd kind of think where have all these trans people come from and it's like, no people have always been there feeling like that feeling short changed by the system and the way things are but they just, you didn't hear about it and we weren't able to speak about it people have always just quietly been getting abused and feeling that they didn't have a voice and now people are actually talking about what's really going on in the world and we are here and this is how we're being treated and it's about time that we had a conversation about it and a lot of thoughts have been running through my head because I do think a lot of this stuff is really complicated actually and going back and reassessing situations that I've been in in light of hearing other people and thinking that was harassment basically I used to go meet guys for sex in toilets when I was 14 very classy and I was a pretty vulnerable LGBT kids at that time and you know I always knew it was wrong but now I look at that and even though I was consenting on a certain level by putting myself in that situation I mean what is that but abuse and so kind of going back and looking at things and kind of reframing them in my mind and you know a lot of just thinking like are we getting a bit carried away that it's all going a little bit too far and I just think it will know that it was wrong 5 years ago it was wrong 10 years ago it was wrong 20 years ago it was wrong 50 years ago and we know this because the people that have done these things have done these things to me and to other people if somebody did that to someone in their family to a woman in their family they would go mental so it's always been wrong we're not just saying that it's wrong now it has always been wrong and we knew that it was wrong deep down on some level because we know there's a right and wrong way to treat people and we feel it viscerally it's not right to sexually harass people ultimately so I think it's great we're having this conversation and I think that it does need to go somewhere obviously but I just keep thinking when is it going to stop because we are having a conversation about gender we're having a conversation about the way men and women treat each other what we want to change and I keep thinking oh it's all just going to blow it everyone's going to stop talking about it now the MPs expenses and then everyone gets upset about it and actually more stuff comes through and you see people like Harvey Weinstein getting dragged down and he's on Kevin Spacey and I agree it's about more than public scalping of people but actually you look at that you think no there is some momentum to this so where is it going to go next and I do believe that it comes down to education because at the end of the day we have urges as human beings and 500 years ago society was much more violent you're much more likely to be murdered in this country at least so things can change people can learn to control their natural urges I'm not necessarily saying that raping somebody is a natural urge but we all of us have to go through a process of learning to be civilised and control you know if we could all act with impunity there are people that I probably would have got strangled by now so I believe that it is possible to teach people to be better versions of themselves and I have to believe that and history shows us that that is true so we need to talk about boys the focus needs to be on boys because not all men but obviously a significant fucking proportion and this is the thing that we haven't really talked about when I think about the kind of abuse that I've experienced as an LGBT kid as a young gay boy as a transgender escort as a young woman all of the different permutations of it the one thing that it had in common for maybe like one instance it was men and male entitlement and people feeling that they could do certain things to me not because I was a queer kid not because I was a woman not because I was a trans person or whatever they were reading me as but because they were men essentially and I do believe that it's not to bash all men because there are lots of perfectly well behaved men but also teaching apparently there are lots of no seriously no there are they are like unicorns I really want to believe that they exist I've met a lot of bad men in my time don't just me but girls as well my friends are teaching the things that the boys in school say to the girls and they don't even know that it's like you can say no actually that's out of order don't summon a picture of your dick or whatever it may be or speak to me in that way even just something as simple as consent through the metaphor of do you want a cup of tea why aren't we taught that in schools clearly we have a problem and it just really surprised people it's Hollywood and we've got it in politics and it's everywhere and we all kind of knew it on some level but we've had that confirmed and validated now that other people have experienced this so we've got a problem we've got to do something about it for me it absolutely comes down to education and just teaching people to behave themselves a bit better so that we can all get on cheers what a lovely crowd you guys aren't saying hello back to me what's up I know it's snowing outside or it's not snowing here boys will be boys hello look at that so you hear that you hear that thing right boys will be boys and locker room talk and you all remember Trump with his you didn't use the word but grabbed them by the and one of the things that struck me when I heard that from a presidential from a presidential candidate was that you know what the problem lies in what has been acceptable practice within our society I mean a lot of what we've heard now on stage is absolutely bang on but in reality there's so much that we've allowed you know kind of like go by without anybody challenging it how many times has someone said something to you that instinctively you don't like but then you laugh it off or you have a smile on your face and you just want to call out there rather than take the opportunity to say you know what forget you don't you speak to me like that sometimes these things take time what the movement I think has done so successfully is to peel away the veil of obscurity the veil, the protection that it has given the oppressors more importantly it's made all these institutions that have protected or hidden the fact it's made them like put them out there stock naked you hear too much now I mean look everything is coming out every you know what's that saying about the truth comes out you can never keep it hidden right I mean you hear all these things like Oxfam and Save the Children all these institutions, parliament all of the things that have been going on for decades even though centuries that we're just hearing about now and why is that because finally somebody gives a rat's ass finally society is demanding accountability we never used to do that before or everything used to be swept under the carpet before when something happened how did we deal with it how did people deal with it it was more like be quiet don't say anything or you buy them off and now that's no longer acceptable I think there's individual responsibility as well as collective responsibility so I'm looking at this from the perspective of an activist right we've all experienced something along the way some of us far more serious than others right but what are you going to do about it that's my question once the solution it starts with you it starts with me it actually starts with us so there are those who have experienced it who felt powerless and probably feel out of shame said nothing or perhaps they did say something and nobody listened to them but what about those of us that witnessed what was happening and did nothing about it we are all or they are all culpable I think it's all well and go to point fingers and go you know because we all recognize the societies we live in what you find here in the UK you find it in the US you will find it in India you will find it in Nigeria you will find it in other countries where well there might be cultural distinctions right but if there is that men entitlement right about the place of a woman and who she is but fortunately for us 100 years on because of the struggles and the fights those before us have done those who have fought so hard for our freedom and liberty at the cost because of all the sacrifices made it is so much more important now that in whichever capacity you are in you recognize that you have a duty of care not just to yourself but also to those around you to call something out when it's wrong to stand up and be a shield of protection for somebody else now we don't all have to be I don't know Martin Luther King Emmeline Pankhurst no you could be Rosa Parks just don't get up start a civil movement that way right the reality is a solution has to start from society it has to start from the people once the people have made a decision about what is acceptable practice then it will be coded in law it is not enough we can't possibly expect as much as we have standard of care for our public officials but you have to remember this public officials are just like you and I they've come from a society where certain things are acceptable so to the extent you want people in public office or you want your managers or people of privilege to behave better it actually starts going pretty much at ground zero and say we all have to behave the same because you will find I recall I was doing this drive from Ghana to Lagos in Nigeria I didn't realize how education gives you a sense of privilege I didn't realize how privileged I was because my attitude and my thinking was very well that's not right but I'm giving it to you I questioned every official well it was an eye-opener for me people it was an eye-opener for me because I realized that the customs official standing between the border standing at a border between two countries was far more powerful than me even with all the education I had it didn't matter how much I screamed about what is right and what is wrong at that moment in time he was the boss I saw women who were carrying their goods, trading goods and they were pretty much begging so that they could cross because either they didn't have a piece of paper I mean this all affects the economy so to speak and this guy was there with some people kneeling down in front of him some people standing up and he was making decisions and people palming him with money and I was disgusted because it was wrong absolutely wrong if that's wrong that's corruption how dare they blah blah blah oh my god then I was about to cross the I mean you see the relevance here I was about to cross my car got stopped and I was asked for echo us papers which the driver had and they kept asking for something else and I was like I need to see the boss I mean this is just not right and the boss comes it's not a problem and the driver shows the echo us papers you know what the boss does he takes the echo us papers and says well you can't go until you give me something oh oh lord I totally I was livid I said I demand oh my god I totally went crazy on him my husband who was with me who is much more in sync with how these things work show line in the name of god please don't just wait let me go and do this I said no we will not move we are not paying anybody any money but here I was looking at my country Nigeria in front of me and I was stuck at the border of Benin Republic think about that for a second I was probably there for a few hours until my husband went listen if these people decide to go crazy and shoot you right now the only thing people will hear are stories but that experience told me something so my husband paid them something it was a different show line on the way back to Ghana I was very oh how can I help you sir oh yes not a problem here's my passport because now I understood the game but the reality is those who have experienced any form of abuse of harassment they go through the same thing where you become conditioned it doesn't matter what you know in that moment in time you feel powerless you feel fearless and if there were not more people imagine there were more people like me at that point in time when I was shouting about this is wrong those people at the very minimum those custom officials would be coward right that's what the meat to movement has done it is said enough is enough I could not care less what this is going to cost me and a lot of activists that are behind this and those who are ready to own their stories and share their experiences it pretty much boils down to you know I've got power and I'm going to use my voice I'm going to use whatever I have to be able to say that this has to change and from the perspective of what's going to be the next step where do we go to from here and how can we ensure that this doesn't die down this doesn't become another flash in the pan oh my god do you remember the era of meat to movement do you remember the era of the times of movement oh yeah yeah I was there did you hear oh that what time is it you know that was really good music we have to take it from there or else what's going to happen is that those the cynics and the skeptics will go well we knew it wasn't going to matter much and that starts actually from our generation I was saying when I came in that all of you make me feel really young just look at you you all look so young it's wonderful and it starts from your generation what are we going to do about it and what we're going to do about it is start by using our feet by using our mouths by using our hands use your right to vote to bring about change thank you thank you so much that was incredible I'm now going to throw it over to you guys if anyone has any questions and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take them two or three at a time then pass it over to the panel and then come back ask us anything we've got no shame no shame why has my mic been taken away from any questions so we've got one over here so I'm so Eleanor you were talking about that legislation has to come about sort of as a following to the Me Too movement or some sort of more material thing it can't be just a public scorn and you said for example more funding for domestic violence refuges and shelters I'm actually doing a project at UNI right now and we're looking at how funding for domestic refuges being completely slashed basically it's being it's losing the ring fence it's not being ring fence anymore it's going to be part of a bigger thing and depending on local authorities on probably men making the decisions they're the ones who will locate the funds if they want or not or give it to older elderly people which fine but we're not going to see an increase in domestic shelters basically so I'm just writing the space and we're before and we're very idealistic we hope it'll get out of not only our grades our teacher is going to see it but hopefully we'll be able to pitch it elsewhere but you were saying Shola we should get out and vote but what do we do in this case I just don't know what do we do what can really happen with domestic shelters I do think we need them but my project that's sort of my question thank you for that question Hi I just wanted to say that sometimes it really helps to look at it through the same problem through a different lens so I would ask for example I would ask myself if the world were a place where I don't know 99% of serial killers were women and one in six children had been abused at the time they become a teenager by a woman and 99% of sexual violence was committed by women how would the world be dealing with that today and I think we need to ask that question to find our answers and then is there one more or okay so how about we'll start those are two quite big questions so we've got what do we do about the closure of domestic shelters and we've got what if the roles were reversed excellent now the closure of the domestic violence centers the first thing you've done is you've identified the problem and in identifying the problem you've also found that you are passionate about the fact that it's going to close right and you don't think it's right because you're like well if that closes then how does that impact all these women and what exactly kind of safe haven are we creating for them what's the alternative right so I would say to you given the point that I made about voting I would say to you that for your local for your MP for instance find out what his views are or her views are on that issue sorry I'm already awake it's a really distressing noise to wake up to I really hate ducks now so sorry so I would say find out from your Member of Parliament from the government while they are going through the process of voting demand race questions just like this in fact do more than race questions I would say it's all well and good identifying the issue that everybody already knows come up with a solution and then challenge them on it the MP that gives you the right answer the most persuasive and most reasonable answer that's the person you should vote for and then you make sure you call them up on it if you vote for them and they get in make sure that MP is well aware that he's got a constituent that is watching him but that is how it starts the only way we can help drive things so from a place of power through your MP and maybe your corporations the corporations you work with or maybe the piece of work that you're going to do for your school perhaps you could write an article that is published somewhere or somewhere that will make it even amplify the issue and demand a call for action for change on it but you can use your skill set to actually continue to drive that conversation and if nobody is listening you keep knocking on the door if they are not listening you start to hammer the door down until they pay attention right? I was just going to say about the lady the question at the back now that is some serious statistics because that's what we have right now with men correct? No one talks about it of everything that's happening and I'm talking mass shootings in high schools everything across the board wars is men why are we not putting it on their table I mean if you think about it just for a second though if we lived in an alternate universe where women were the sexual harassers and the murderers and all of that it would actually mean women were the ones in power and men would be the ones having the men's march and they would be the ones still marching they would be the ones demanding rights for votes right? and we'll probably get back to this somebody just like you would be asking the same question why don't we just start by let's just level set and say the most important thing here is as Paris pointed out before and being a woman of faith love your neighbour as you love yourself treat the next person as you want to be treated a really basic human decency to know what you guys think obviously I think the questions are connected because I've got every sympathy trying to secure funding and I do think it's really important that shelters have the money and obviously women's services are being disproportionately affected by the cuts but it's so frustrating to me because it just feels like firefighting this stuff and really I guess what this movement that we're discussing is about the wider issues of why women need to go to refuges which is what you're all saying is that women in that refuge and really we need to be having a conversation about how do we stop men raping people and hurting women and it's so difficult because I don't want to sound like I'm bashing and I can't say that I'm not all men because I know that there are nice men of course I do and I don't want to sit here and sound like a victim but I have been treated by men my entire life like it's just a fact like that is my experience and we do need to put the focus on to men I agree I really do agree I don't really know what more to say to be honest can men just fucking behave themselves if we flip it though there are a number of women who are more and more getting empowered right for the longest time we've been waiting for men to behave themselves and they've not done so so it's time for us to rise up and take charge be it individually in your home at your workplace on the high street anywhere we need I think there has to be that you know this thing with us women because I'm not all women at this way so I'm not trying to generalize but there's that thing culturally where women almost people say oh by nature are quieter and they're calmer and you know they're more conservative clearly they haven't met me but it's so important that given what we are seeing and what we are hearing that's one of the powerful things about the Me Too movement women and men you're not alone because sometimes as a victim you think you're the only one going through this so you don't want to talk about it or you feel ashamed about it but I think if we flip it if the boys don't want to take it then we need to just we need to take hold of the reins you need to take the hold of the reins of your life and call things out yeah I kind of agree with the sort of like frustration of the second questioner and the responses on the panel because it's just apparently these things get categorized as like women's issues which means that like this is being done to you and now you're expected to fix it which is always fun and I feel like I have things that I would rather be doing like you know maybe I want to lie in at some point in the next decade maybe about the deeper point here about interrogating what masculinity is and how it functions as like a system that legitimates violence and because as Shola pointed out in her beginning remarks there is this kind of naturalization this impulse towards categorizing people who are born with a certain configuration of genitals or chromosomes have this natural teleology towards violence which is just profoundly profoundly untrue and I think profoundly insulting to men because what it says is that yes sure thing you're in charge of the vast majority of the economy and politics and that kind of thing but nonetheless you can't be trusted to engage some kind of critical faculties and some kind of empathy there's this incredible contradiction at the heart of the ideology by which we justify continued male power and I also think we need to think about it genuinely as something which damages boys and men as well because that profound lack of empathy that profound alienation from what is a deeply human impulse towards caring for one another is part of the reason that boys do violence to themselves and to one another as well as to women it's a profoundly traumatic thing being socialized as a man I kind of feel sorry for people when I hear a lot of men genuinely I think expressing confusion in the wake of me too and all that but I thought that was fine I thought that was just flirting I thought that was just what sex was being completely completely unequipped with the ability to think about say flirting is like building empathy rather than a certain dominance thinking about their relationships with people not about competition but about co-operation that makes me sad for them at the times I don't occasionally want to strangle them but it also brings me back to something you said earlier Paris about we know it's wrong we know assault is wrong sure when we call it sexual assault there are very few people who would say sexual assault is fine because that's been thoroughly discredited but that wasn't always the case the idea of sexual assault was quite a new terminology that's allowed women to articulate their experiences and I think because of this profoundly traumatic process of male socialization a lot of men genuinely don't know it's wrong I think a lot of this is about it's hazy I think a lot of it is not wanting to examine your own behaviors because you might find something there that you don't like so that we put all of our problems onto these few bogeymen oh it's just Harvey Weinstein the people in parliament which means you don't have to examine your own actions and the actions of your mates which is pretty convenient but there is an extent to which as you say this is where education comes in there is an extent to which people don't know how to identify and how to root out toxic behaviors in their own lives and that goes for women as well because a lot of women just have to go on a feeling of just kind of a lot of people just call it the ick just the feeling of this un-reconstructed discomfort with a certain situation because we don't talk about this we don't have the language to express actually that feeling of I don't know about this is pointing to a profound system of global violence and that's a problem and we should do something about this so I'm not sure that we do all know what it's wrong, I think we're kind of still trying to figure it out which is what the Me Too movement is is wonderful for this kind of public discussion on the parameters of sex and power on the domestic refuges question like I get your frustration right we've been through Christ, eight, seven eight years of austerity and it wasn't really great before that but I think it's worth dwelling on the fact that we didn't always have domestic refuges right and we didn't always have things like child support which was also bound up with the same issue of like empowering women in the home giving them some economic independence from potentially abusive husbands et cetera these were all gains of a feminist movement who went hang on a second we can just start organising this and they did, this wasn't something that was given by the state this was something that women started doing collectively like off of their own backs like with their own pool resources and energies that got institutionalised and I think there are a lot of good elements to that but I think we kind of forget that these things weren't granted by the state and we don't have to wait for the state to do that, of course we should be absolutely assured like demanding that our politicians fund it more because it's so simple just give us more money like the infrastructure is kind of there already just fund it more but we don't need to wait for Corwin to get in or whatever we can start doing that now we can start building those infrastructures of solidarity because we've already done it once and those people are still alive the people who started those initiatives yeah I think that's really powerful and also the idea that it's not just that men don't know it's also that women actually don't know how to expect good respectful behaviour for men as well but one thing that kind of came out of the discussion that I thought was really interesting and it's something that while obviously I'm like very supportive of the Me Too movement something that has kind of troubled me a little bit and you kind of touched on it in your talk Eleanor was this idea that sometimes we're still fixed in this idea of there has to be a perfect victim and a perfect perpetrator and this idea that you know effect victim if you don't ask for it and the women that don't ask for it are often you know wealthy white women whereas if you are a sex worker for example imagine you know how difficult it is for any woman to be believed it's even more difficult to be believed if you are a sex worker and you've experienced violence at work or outside of work or if you are queer if you are a woman of colour if you are a woman who's undocumented and so is affected by policies like the hostile environment and I feel like that element hasn't really been included as much similarly in terms of the perfect perpetrator you know we have number 45 President of the United States who was elected on a platform of protecting the nation from Mexican rapists but himself is an alleged rapist and has admitted to sexual assault so I'm interested to hear what the panel thinks about kind of how can we move past those kind of perfect like what are the limitations of those kind of parameters and how can we have this movement in a way that doesn't reinforce this see she didn't ask for it at all or you know some men are allowed our abusers and other men can do the same things but they're not abusers well I think that it really cuts to the heart of kind of what I was saying we're not really wanting to talk about this because I think that when we start examining this stuff we have to examine the people in our lives and the people that we love and it's easier isn't it if we can just think that it is just one or two bad eggs like 1% of the population are rapists and pedophiles or whatever and I see this also with men who pay for sex and so on I don't necessarily think that that has to be abusive I think sex work should be legal but it doesn't necessarily mean that I think that the guys that pay for sex are wonderful but you know a lot of my female friends are really shocked by the stories that I would tell them guys would come and see me and they'd be on the phone to their wife saying yeah just come and pick the kids up I'm just seeing a man about a dog or something do you know what I mean and it's really upsetting to me because I like to think that the men in my life aren't complicit in this stuff you know but the fact of the matter is that it is it's people in this room it'll be your dads your uncles, your brothers, your best friend from school that the statistics tell us that's the case and that's really difficult so I think in terms of having the perfect victim yeah I find that really problematic as well and I understand where it comes from but I personally really hate the term survivor and I get it but I find it quite patronising and infantilising because you know I don't actually and I know that people do die from sexual violence but for me personally I don't feel that my life was really in danger at any point so it isn't this kind of really extreme example of I always think of the big bad wolf and the little red riding hood going through the forest in reality it's not, it's normal people it's the guy that you sit next to at work right and it's complicated all of this stuff and I think that's why it's so difficult to talk about and so good that we are talking about it now because it's happening every day in every every situation and it's horrible I don't want to think about I don't want to think that that's what the men in my life are but I don't know how useful that is really I'm a cute child I don't understand how we can expect to have any form of perfection in an imperfect world you can't have a perfect victim when the experience they've been through is imperfect when it is clear that there are no parameters no limitations no protection there is no perfection we live in an imperfect world with imperfect people doing imperfect things that is the bottom line personally for me I think that the world has moved on from certain standards and certain ways of thinking only because the new degeneration we are in now we are kind of you know we are so much cooler about certain things so much more chilled out about certain things right and we also call things out back in the day perhaps there would have been ooh did she have a child out of wedlock that kind of thing and now when you hear a comment like that I don't know maybe from your grandmother probably you go okay grandma you need to chill do you want a cuppa the world has moved on what I will say is this I think it starts from each one of us individually calling out the imperfections calling out being the devil's advocate so if someone comes to you and says oh did you hear Sarah went through this but you know what on campus she was kind of like the national cake everybody had a piece of her she may have been a national cake out of consent but that doesn't give anybody any right to have access to this national cake without her consent but we know how people think even amongst us in this very room you know that if you were aware of a Sarah who didn't mind you know she was a party girl and you hear something happen so are you not the first thing you're going to think about subconsciously even though you may not voice it out is exactly what somebody else is voicing out the only difference the only difference is you might not care about it you might not think to yourself that that should matter because you're going to hear about it so I would say dealing with issues like that we should probably be more conscious about ensuring that look let us take a look at what has happened here let us give protection where protection should be given I don't want to hear personally when you know people may comment but you know whether it's about someone being LGBT and some people have their old fashioned thinking about what's right what's wrong or perhaps people call certain things out because they don't have the same views I think it's really far more important that again like I mentioned earlier treat people like you want to be treated and if you are in a position of power or in a position to make decisions concerning things like this what really comes to ask your opinion set them straight I think it starts with that right yeah I totally agree with what's been said and yeah I guess this language of perfection is kind of perversely interesting because like perfect means if you are a perfect victim that means that you were assaulted in such a way that it troubled my view of the world right which is obviously very limited because like it's likely that your view of the world is shaped by ideologies that are designed to protect male impurity impurity impunity male impurity that was Freudian this is being recorded hi mum and obviously that precisely if you're feeling uncomfortable that like I'm not sure I'm not sure this victim was like quite assaulted in a way that I feel comfortable with good good you should feel uncomfortable because as has been pointed out we're all continually having to unlearn all of this like the ideology rape culture that we've been marinating in since birth and I'm really glad that the whole Trump thing was brought up because I think it's a really sort of neat encapsulation of a lot of the dynamics of how the conversation around sexual violence and particularly combating sexual violence has really been territorialised in a lot of the mainstream media by the right and the far right like the only time in which we contemplate that maybe sexual violence is something that we should do something about is when the Daily Mail it goes on like a fear mongering rampage about like Muslim rape gangs or whatever exactly suddenly everyone cares suddenly like Rod Lidl is really really concerned about protecting women as long as it's something that a stick you can use to bash transwomen it's so clear the profound disingenuity there but this obviously shouldn't just be pointed out that it's it's not a way to protect any women from sexual violence like we should point out that it never was about protecting women what it's about is protecting essentially a property right of the like white men perceived they have over the bodies of all women particularly like white women and so actually I take that back all women and I think this is what is important in unpacking Trump's statements about quote unquote Mexican rapists because it's not actually in conflict with his statements about grabbing women by the pussy that's the same world view it's a world view in which he as a powerful white man has complete impunity to do whatever he likes with women's bodies because they are objects their property he can use and dispose of completely freely but that property relationship is purely one of white men so when Mexicans are seen to be a threat to that property it's not seen as a violation of someone's rights it's seen as the equivalent of theft or breaking a window it's part of the same world picture he's actually not contradicting himself for once and this we need to pay a lot of attention to how we only talk about sexual violence as it's experienced and framed by white women particularly white citizens because as Shola pointed out discussions about morality of sexual behaviour completely collapse before the untrammeled power of border guards and of policemen they don't have to care about individual women's rights what in that power relationship makes them absolutely nothing I think yes while it's important to educate people about that to make sure that whilst we still have those structures they're not totally populated by the worst most venal people possible is something that we should examine to talk about how those power hierarchies in and of themselves foster those mentalities of total impunity I think there is something inherent to the position of the border guard inherent to the position of the cell guard of the prison guard of the policemen that means that people feel like they can behave however on without consequences because you know what they're not idiots they can at the moment that's actually a reality right okay so it's approaching 9 o'clock which unfortunately is the end of our discussion which is really sad but could we have another round of applause for our panellists so get a drink before you leave it's really cold out there so maybe a whiskey or a bourbon or something and see you at the next IRL