 a'r dda i fi'n gwybod at rhai o'r ddwyliadau ar gyfer y dyfodol. Rwy'n gwybod a'r ddwyliadau ar y ddwyloedd ar gyfer y dyfodol. Felly, oherwydd, mae'n ddweud yn ddechrau'r cymdeithasol a'i gweithio'r ddweud. Rydw i'n gwybod i'r gweithio'r gweithio. Yn y ddweud, rydw i ddweud. Rydw i'n gweithio'r gweithio, ddweud o'r ddweud. Rydw i'n gweithio'r gweithio ar gyfer y dyfodol. The other thing is, after the show, we've got to talk back with Laura Bates who's the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project. That will happen straight after the show, so it'll be about 15 to 20 minutes where we'll be talking about her project, and then I'll open it up to the world and also to you live audience here. So do enjoy the show and I look forward to getting your comments. Thank you very much. Cwyr! Cwyr! Mae'r ddweud â'r 17th dyma yw rhaid i gael. Rwy'n gwybod i'n mynd i ddweud, ond rwy'n gweithio'n gydag i ddweud. Y bwrdd am y ddweud y gallwn i ddim yn gallu i'w ddweud. Mae'n ddweud i'n ddweud i ddweud. Y gallwn i'n ddweud y bwrdd am y ddweud. Rwy'n gofyn i'r cyffredig ymlaen. Ac mae eu ei ddweud i'w gweithio'n gwybod. A'r dda'r ddweud. Mae'r gwaith yma wedi'i arddangos y gweithio ar y llwytaeth, felly gallwch i ddim yn rhan i'n eu glas. Mae'r lwg yn fwy o ddweud. Mae'n fyddai. Ac rwy'n gweithio yn dechrau'r llwytaeth, felly rydw i'n credu i ddim yn ymddangos arno. Mae'r cyfrwyr yn y trafnol yn gyflasol, felly rydw i ddim yn ei dweud. Llywodraeth o'r Nesaf, dwi'n ffordd i'n gweithio ar y drafnod. Nesaf? Roedden nhw'n credu am yr hunain, gyda? I will pay for college, train you with whatever job you want and you get to travel. And all I had to do was sign up for six years. I wanted to do something I was proud of. I imagined telling my grandchildren about something I'd done to protect the country. It was the year after 9-11, I think a lot of people felt that way. So I told the recruiter that I wanted to sign up. You're going to have to get your mom to sign that because you're only 17? I haven't seen my mom in months, but I called her and I told her. If you want to join, forge my name, I don't care. So I forged your name, right there under the recruiter's nose. We do it all the time. Don't worry about it. Well, I got my $3,000 out, it's spread out over four years. And they take the taxes out. The army never paid for me to go to any college that I wanted to go to. Oh, and it turns out you can't sign up for six years. It's got to be eight. So I'm in until I'm like, my time in Iraq is a complete day. I work nights and we were shot at every night. Mortars were coming in and mortars is deaf. Oh, and when they say that only men are allowed on the front line, that is the biggest crock of shit. I was a tank gunner. But when I say that I was in the war, nobody listens. Nobody believes that I was a soldier. And you know why? Blessed are those who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times. When I was a freshman in high school, I vowed I'd never be in the army. I wanted to go to college, you know, but my parents are real religious. Clara, you don't need to go to college. You can do God's work better in the army. It's strange because she and my dad went to college, but they told me I didn't need to go. I was working as a cook in Bible camp in the summers, and I saw how I could make kids happy doing that. So I thought maybe mama was right. Maybe serving food in the army would give me a mission to spread the word of God. So she took me to the recruitment office. I was just 16 then. They gave me the test that shows what kind of jobs you can do in the military. My score suggested that I could be a nurse. I wasn't sure about that. All I'd ever wanted to be was a teacher. But then the recruiter started calling my house all the time. And one day this recruiter came to my home. He was three years old of me. A model, a picture guy, you know, blonde, blue-eyed, so handsome in his uniform. He told me I could be a chaplain's assistant. And that appealed to me because it was religious. And he was one of those perfect guys, you know? So I joined the reserves. Mama signed the waiver because I wasn't 17 yet. It was 2004 by then, but mama and me weren't worried about the war. We knew you could die just as easily across in the street. It's all in God's plan when you die, whether you go to war or not. My name is Teres. Sergeant DeWalt Johnson to you. I'm 37 years old and the mother of four kids. Two boys and two girls. My home is in Georgia now, but I grew up in D.C. My life was pretty drastic. My stepfather was a drunk, beat up on my mom all the time. Beat up on me and my brothers and sisters too, but he saved the worst of it for her. He hit her with a hammer. He operated her legs, broke her skull. One time, he stabbed her 13 times with a long kitchen knife. Till the knife sank in so deep, he couldn't pull it out again. She only survived because she was so fat. By the time I was 13, I went to fight it back. I laid it out flat with a baseball bat once. It was, I've got to kill this guy or he is going to kill my mom. As soon as I could, I moved out. Started living with my boyfriend. He's my husband now, a gentleman and a sweet haunt. I've known him since I was nine. By the time I was 19, we had two kids and I was working two jobs. One at McDonald's and the other selling tour tickets down at Union Station. One day this recruiter comes up to me. Have you ever thought about signing up? The army will pay for college, training whatever job you want and you get to travel. I got interested because I'd always wanted to travel. So I joined the army reserves and that enabled us to get out of DC. DC is such a poison place to me. I mean all you've got there is a bunch of drugs and killing. Three of my brothers were shot to death there for no reason. My son was shot in the feet in a drive-by when he was just five years old playing in the yard. It's because of the military that my four kids live like they do. We have a nice house and they go to good schools. So I liked being in the army and they sent me to Iraq. I've been a small rural town in Wisconsin. It's only about 2,000 people so pretty much everybody knows everybody. There were two types of people in my town, the people who left and the people who stayed. My way of getting out was to join the Army National Guard when I was 17. A lot of people from my high school were in the military so it didn't seem like any big deal but my parents weren't happy about it. I come from a very political household. My dad was an elected official and were Democrats. So I had to really argue with them to get them to sign and let me join. Anna, we just want to make sure you know what you're getting into. But I was stubborn. I thought I wanted to give something back to society, do something for my country. But really it was a rebellion. When I joined the military I got an overwhelmingly good response from my community. If I went downtown or to the supermarket in my uniform, people were proud of me. It made me feel like I belonged. After all I was pre-911, we all thought differently then. In August 2001 I shipped out to do my training at Fort Jackson and Zero Day. The day you meet your drill instructor turned out to be September 11th. We just finished taking the oath when the sergeant said something about a plane hitting towers. But I couldn't really hear. People were running to the barracks, getting hysterical. The sergeant was saying, we're going to war! But I just thought it was part of the training. It took me a couple hours to realize it was real. After that there were rumors that training would speed up and we'd be sent over. But it didn't happen. Training just went on as normal. We stuck bayonets and command shake targets, sang songs about blood and killing. And didn't bat an eye, because we were already desensitized. Because we stuck a bayonet into a dummy on the assault force either. It's because our best friends sitting next to us in the cab and we don't want them to die. I'm 27 and third generation Air Force. My grandfather and father were at Fort's offices and all my life I wanted to be just like him. I joined the Air Force reserves after high school and put myself through school during my listening. I got married too and had a baby girl. My daughter was only two years old when I was deployed. That was March 2003. Right as the US was going into Iraq. I had to leave her with my husband. We were divorced then. It was so hard to leave my little girl. I kept worrying about would she be fed right, would she be able to sleep okay. It really hurt to hear her little voice on the phone. I was on active duty for a little over eight years in the Air Force. I was a public affairs specialist. That means combat correspondent and a photographer. I loved my job. I am Santiago Flores, 46 years old, and retired after 22 years in the Army. I was a drill surgeon. We taught other people how to be a drill surgeon. So I was a drill surgeon personality. I used to tell my folders, Native Americans. It's the idea of being a warrior. Being a provider and a protector. It's something we find great honor and pride in. Nowadays it is hard to find things that bring honor to your family for natives. Til I was 10, we never lived in one place long enough for me to finish out of grade school. My dad kept moving to find one job or another, but also because he was trying to run away from his drinking. You know, drinking is a problem for native people? Well, it was no different for my family. Finally, he bought a house and we stayed put. My dad's a supervisor in a bakery and my mom's a bank teller. I didn't have any ambition after high school, so I joined the Army Military Police, became specialist, silly against us. I did it for the money and the challenge and the discipline. My parents didn't have much of an opinion of me listening. That's what I wanted to do. So mom signed the papers because I was only 17. And then 9-11 happened and I was mobilized to Iraq. 9-11 made a lot of people proud of being in military, including me. I was scared. I was glad that I was in an organization that was going to do something about this. I never thought much about the war in Iraq at first. There wasn't really my place to get involved with something that I didn't know anything about. The thing that worried me was that I was going to be away from home for a whole year. I made me notice three weeks before I had to go. My parents don't deal with things emotionally, so I figured out my stuff. And I left. When I was 13, my dad brings home this white guy to work for a fixing car, George. This was 1973 and George was just back from Vietnam. He had one leg shorter than the other and he'd spent a whole year in hospital with his wounds. And people said he'd raped girls in Vietnam. I didn't like him at all. But he started being nice to me. Took me to drive a movie, gave me a joint to smoke and something to drink. And then he raped me. And I got pregnant from that rape. My dad was furious. I thought it was all my fault. Didn't care that I was only 13. So he makes me get in the car and we go looking for George. We find him pretty quick. Get in the fucking car! My dad said. He was six feet tall and people did what he said. So George gets in. Dad drives us back to the house, sits down at the kitchen table, pulls out a gun, sets on the table in front of us. And he tells George, yeah, five minutes and two choices. Either marry my daughter or die. And all I could think was, if my dad sheds George, he's going to go to prison. All of us are going to be without a dad. My mom's going to be without a husband. It'll be my fault. So I told George and Mary and my other son his product of that rape. I love him, but he knows the story. And she has pretty little money. And he hates having a big mommy because he sees no honour in that. For the next few years, I'm living with George and he is beating the crap out of me and I am turning to drink just like the rest of my family. And when I'm 16, I get pregnant again. Bird control. Nobody told me about that. And I get so much stronger in my life at that point. Who would have thought about that anyway? Finally, at one point, I just can't take it anymore. So I decide to kill George and dump him in Lake Tahoe. But he's such a big guy. I can't figure out how I'm going to get his body there. I'm going to have to put him on a boat alive and kill him. He's a really strong guy, so I'm thinking, okay, that's not going to work. But by the time I'm 20, George is landed in jail again for attacking me. Then I'm divorced at last. So, there I am living in a one bedroom cockroach infested apartment with two kids and I'm on welfare. So I'm thinking, what am I going to do? That's when I decide to join the army. Oh, if you got like one boyfriend if they don't like you. So you can't win. In Iraq in the beginning, I was considered a hoe because I was nice to people. When I found out what they were saying about me, I became a bitch. I wasn't mean. I just changed so that nobody thought I was being flirty. I changed the way that I walked and the way that I talked. Everything. Nobody over there even knew who I was because I was always putting on an act. A lot of the men didn't want us there. One guy told me that the only reason military send female soldiers is to provide eye candy for the guys. To keep them sane. In Vietnam, they had prostitutes. But they don't have those in Iraq. So they have women soldiers instead. It was July 2003 by the time I got to Iraq. We were in Fawb Spiker, which used to be an Iraqi air base and there were huge pictures of Saddam Hussein everywhere. It was spooky. Soldiers would pose next to them and take pictures like tourists. I was attached to an army engineering unit and our job was to build bases and roads, fixed bridges, so we cleaned up the rubble and all kinds of disgusting stuff in the building so we could move in. Excrement, rags, bits of military equipment. We prepared the base, built runways, used strap metal to make our own armor because we had no armored vehicles. We built a basketball court for ourselves but we were doing nothing to help the Iraqi people. I was petroleum supply specialist. That means I pumped gas. My job was to drive around the base, refueling dump trucks, rollers, scrapers, wait for a couple hours and do it again. When it was busy, it was really busy and when it was slow, there was absolutely nothing to do. So I wrote a lot of letters, took pictures, threw rocks into a box. My unit was a real good old boys club though and I was one of only 19 women out of 141 people. The leadership didn't trust women to do a good job at anything. They were always hovering over you, waiting for you to screw up. Soon you feel like you couldn't do anything right. And the guys at cases of porn, which they'd look at, out of the open, they were always calling out things like Hey Peterford! I like your tits in that t-shirt. It happened so much you got them. Finally, after a couple months, I started to go out on missions to rebuild schools. That was the best part of my time there. Then I began to convoy to other bases. I was driving a 2300 gallon diesel truck and because it was taking occasional gunfire, it could have burst into flames any moment. It was a bomb on wheels. The Iraqi people were pretty hostile to us by that time. When we went into a town, we were always looking at faces and hands trying to guess their move. If they're staring at you, not in fear, but because they hate you, you know you're not wanted. We were told the kids could be dangerous too. They could be a decoy or be carrying a bomb. So if they run in front of the convoy, you're supposed to run them over. I've been a daycare teacher before I got deployed and one of the guys on my team who knew this about me said Ed and I have been talking. If a kid came in front of the convoy, we don't know if he'd be able to run him over. I had to tell him I don't know if I could either. But then our first day out, a boy threw a rock at our vehicle. It made a crack like a bullet and I knew then that if I had to hit a kid and kill him, I would. Not to save my life, but to save all the soldiers who might die. That was really hard to come to terms with. You feel so dirty. By the time I was deployed to Iraq in 2005, I was 35 years old and I'd been in the army for 14 years. So when I was on the plane to Kuwait, and the young soldiers around me were making all kinds of dumbass jokes about going to Iraq, I gave them a piece of my mind. Hey, I don't know what this means to you, but to me, this isn't a game. I have four kids at home who will have no understanding if I'm killed. Back when I was training at Fort Bragg, I knew things were going to get bad when I saw how my command was acting. Instead of the leadership saying we need to work together to bring these soldiers back safe and sound. Too many people wanted to be chief and not enough wanted to do the work. And they were training us like we were going to fight in a jungle, not the desert. I kept us lying in the grass and taking cover behind jungle plants. There ain't no jungle in Iraq. Then I had this dream. I'm in a truck and it gets hit. The vehicle blows up. And all I see is a big ball of fire above me. My sight goes black for a minute and when it comes back, I'm descending from the clouds to my mom's house. My mom is there and she's going berserk because the news has gone to her that I got killed. And that's what hurt me the most. The next morning, they ordered me out of the firing range to practice shooting with live rounds, but I couldn't shake that dream. I get my weapon and when I look up, the first sergeant and the commander are there and I'm thinking these morons are going to get me killed. And all of a sudden, this anger just comes over me and I can see myself shooting both those morons dead. Sergeant, I can't go to the range today. Somebody needs to take this weapon off of me, please. No, sir. And I throw my weapon at my Kevlar on the ground and I walk off. And then I call my uncle who's a bishop and I tell him about my dream. He says it's a warning about my leaders being so weak. So I decide I've got to speak to them. So I go to the first sergeant. We've been here now for about four or five weeks, sir. And for some reason, the senior enlisted still have not gotten it together. Now, none of these soldiers are going to tell you this to your face, but I will. We don't believe that you are able to lead a horse to water. He didn't like that. He slapped me with an article 15 for attempting to destroy government property. That was when I threw my M16 in my helmet on the ground. And then he tried to send me for a mental eval. Sir, I've been in the Army 14 years, sir, and I have never been sent for a mental eval. Just talk to me, sir, when there's a problem. I know when I get tense, my brows kind of frown up, but it really doesn't mean anything. I'm not as fierce as I look. So I thought that was the end of that. Two weeks later, we were deployed. When we flew into Kuwait, there was nothing to do for six weeks when we had a birthday there. Otherwise, we just sat around and played cards. And then finally, in June 03, we convoyed to Baghdad in the green zone. Our mission was to reinstall the police force, guard it from the looters, fix it up, weed out the good police from the bad. Some were taking bribes, raping, beating the prisoners. We weren't allowed them to do that anymore. Some were part of the insurgency. Later, we moved to this different base where we were sleeping in tents with sandbags around them. We didn't have any protection for mortar there. This tent just down the road from us got hit. My friend Sandra had just left the latrine. When it got watered, she turned around. First five months, the routine was the same every day. You get up, load the trucks with equipment, go through inspections, meet with a squad about where we're going to go. Then I'd have breakfast and climb into a humbie with the two guys who made up my team and we convoyed through Baghdad to a police station. 12 hours later, the next slot comes, release you. You go home, put everything away, sleep, and do it all over again the next day. Now, being the lowest ranking soldier in my team, I was the gunner. That meant that when we were driving, I was sticking out of the rooftop of the humbie when my 50-gallon machine got in this little gum turret. Now, in the turret, you're exposed from name tag up. I didn't have any shields. Luckily, in the beginning, we mostly got waves and good feedback. We had like 20 or 40 little kids running after us, dancing for us. Some of the women did run away, but later, people got hostile. People stare at you, give you dirty looks, give you a finger. Some tell you to go home, throw a rock at you, and guys expose themselves because of you. Now, as a soldier, the hostility doesn't bother me, but as a woman, it bothers me a lot. I hate it when guys do that. It's rocky or not. I think it's sick and disgusting. And some of our own soldiers were a problem too. They make flirty or sexual comments, stare at you. That was the thing I couldn't stand. You go into the chow hall, there's a bunch of guys that just stop eating and stare at you. Every time you bend over, somebody's going to say something. It just got to the point with me where I was afraid of walking past certain people because I didn't want to hear their comments. Really, where's you down? I said I loved my job, and I did. Right from my time at food camp up until I got out, I was surprised all the time. People used to call me Air Force Barbie. I couldn't go anywhere without being watched by a million eyes. I had a senior non-commissioned officer constantly quizzed me about my sex life. Show up at my barracks at odd hours of the night and ask me personal questions that no supervisor should have the right to ask. I had a colonel sexually harassed me in ways I'm too embarrassed to explain. These are the people who had complete control over my life when I worked, when I ate, when I slept, when I could talk or not talk, rest or not rest. These are the people who I was supposed to obey no matter what. One time my sergeant came and sat with me in the chow hall and said, I feel like I'm an official the way all these men's eyes are born into your back. That's why my life is like I said. Well, finally I went to my leadership and explained the situation. I was told to write an email for a memo for record every time that officer said or did anything that made me feel uncomfortable. Well, I did that for months until I had a binder just full of those memos. I took it straight to senior leadership. Did that officer get that? No. He went on to make E9, which is the highest enlist of rank in the armed forces. Why am I complaining? It was only words and gestures right, but it should never have happened. I was a hard worker who loved her service in country. This is not what I deserved. But like so many other females in the military, I put up with it for the good of my family, my beliefs in my country. Well, after my first deployment, I decided the constant harassment was all just a part of being a female in the military. And I made the decision not to tell anyone anymore about my problems. Excuse my language, but I decided to be a bitch. Bitch! I just got to Iraq in November 2005. I was still hoping to do God's work among my fellow soldiers. I was there for a year and in the beginning I was attached to a company out of Alaska. My platoon had 60 men and one lone female. Me. I was also the youngest, still 17. Because I was the only female there, men would forget in front of me all the time and say these terrible derogatory things about women. I had to hear these things every day. I'd have to say, hey! Then they'd look at me all surprised and say, oh, we don't mean you. One of the guys I thought was my friend tried to rape me. Two of my sergeants wouldn't stop making passes at me. Everybody's supposed to have a battle buddy in the army. Females are supposed to have one to go to the latrines with or to showers. That's so they don't get raped by the men on their own side. But because I was the only female there, I didn't have a battle buddy. My battle buddy was my gun and my knife. We drove up into Iraq on a convoy in April. We saw how the people were living. It was so sad. We saw kids on the sides of roads using hand signals to beg for food and water. Kids barefoot and dirty. We saw how they lived in makeshift mud houses held together with pieces of clothing or plastic. It makes us realize how blessed we are. Seeing those kids, though, made me miss my own kids real bad. My youngest now. He don't beat around the bush. So on Mother's Day he sent me an email that said, Mommy, love you, happy Mother's Day. Wish you were here. Hope you don't get killed in Iraq. We were based at camp Atta in the South, but it wasn't long before they sent me on a convoy to camp Ataconda, which is 50 miles north of Baghdad. Ataconda got mortar so much. The soldiers called it Mortaritaville. Our trucks had no armor, nothing. And we weren't even authorized to be out on that road, but they sent us on out anyway. And at night, too, it was a suicide mission. I'm driving the middle gun truck when an IED goes off right under the truck in front of me. I was so loud it scared to live in shit out of me. My heart was pumping so fast it was going to jump right out of my chest. But I showed none of what I was feeling to my soldiers. Two days later, the commanders ordered us out into formation. Well, I expected some kind of apology, but they were blabbering on about nothing, setting up the internet, how we're violating dress codes by wearing the wrong t-shirt for PT. Dude, I've been fired at. I don't want to hear about no goddamn t-shirt. Then they said, Anybody got me a thing to say? These soldiers were young and trained not to question their seniors. So I raised my hand. First Sergeant, did you all forget about the incident two days ago? Do you realize that none of your soldiers have any confidence in the leadership now? Don't you give a damn about us? First Sergeant gives me this look like he wants to kill me, but he don't say nothing. See, when you have a female of that type of attitude in the military, it does not go over well with a lot of men. I was deployed to Iraq in 2004, when I was 42 years old and a staff sergeant with 19 years of service under my belt. I was so proud of what I did in the military that when my two sons grew up, I encouraged them to join too. One's in the army, the other's the Marine. And by the time I got sent to Iraq, it can be seven grandchildren. I was based at Camp Cedar II, a convoy pit stop about 185 miles southeast of Baghdad. I was put to work with a lieutenant in charge of organizing the movement and repairs of all the vehicles. They were so messed up, they didn't know how many soldiers they had. You could be missing for a week and nobody would know. So I thought, okay, they don't know what they're doing any better than I do. And I started organizing the whole thing myself. But we were under command of his female major, a white woman who hated anyone who wasn't white and male. She replaced every soldier of color with a white soldier, and she made the soldiers of color train the white people who would take over their jobs. She destroyed the careers of many soldiers of color doing that. But if you said anything, you'd be punished. One of the first things she did when we got to Iraq was she made me and the other female non-commissioned officers move into the same tents as the privates. We literally had that much space between our books. Now, you do not move a higher-ranking soldier in with a lower ranking. It makes you lose your power base because it's their territory. The major knew this. Soon, the privates are refusing to obey our orders. This one girl, Benson, she had a canopy over her bed with pink blankets and I thought, what the fuck? But when I tell her to move her bed over her foot for me, she goes into this itty bitty little voice like a baby. I don't care what you say. I'm not moving side your floor. But I got worried about what my young soldiers were going through out there on the roads in Iraq. One was this young female sergeant who trained as a driver, but they made her into a gunner because there was a shortage of military police to do the job. That's how a lot of women end up in combat in this war. Well, she and her team were out on the road one day and they were attacked with mortars and grenades. So the sergeant fires back with her machine gun and kills a bunch of civilians. When she gets back, she's all excited, shouting about what happened. Then runs up, tomorrow's going to be a different story. Then, I realized that combat stress team hasn't turned up. Now they're supposed to come help soldiers like this who've been in battle. But nobody bothered to come. Go to bed, it'll be fine. Sure enough, the next morning this soldier and her team were a mess. One's lying in her bunk in the fetal position and the others are sobbing because, well, they killed all these innocent people. Then Benson, the girl with pink blankets. She was driving a large truck in a convoy. Now, over there you drive on the opposite side of the road a lot to avoid IEDs and you drive fast. So this car was coming towards them, but nobody had time to get out of the way. So the car ends up driving right underneath the truck. Killed four children and both the parents. There was blood and body parts all over the place. So when she gets back to camp, she's in shock. I guess she thought I was still mad at her because she just stood there and didn't say anything. So I hugged her. She started crying at only 20 years old. They shouldn't debrief these girls. They should have had a combat stress person there, but they didn't. Nobody was taking care of these kids so you can imagine the condition they were in when they got back home. And I know it's not getting any better. In October 03 I was sent up to Bakurba, just northeast of Baghdad. We stayed in camp at Warforce. One night we were in the wreck building. I was doing my email when the whole building shook. There was this high-pitched squealing sound at a flat and it went black. Everybody stared at each other a second, then dropped to the ground. 20 seconds later another bomb came in. I grabbed somebody's shirt. Take me to the bunker. We got outside. There was no bunker. Another mortar dropped 50 meters away. Shrapnel was flying over our heads. This girl was lying on the ground screaming. I know what's coming out of that. Inside the building was calling. Medic! Medic! I ran back inside. I had workers and two American soldiers. I started working on them. It was black in there and all I had was this tiny blue flashlight to see. Blood was all over the place. This female was lying on the ground covered in it and this guy called Sergeant Hill was helping her. This blood on hers is another hit. He said, no, I think some of it's mine. I got it too, but she's worse. I found someone else to help her and then I lifted his arm. And there was all this blood. He was much worse than her, but he didn't realize because he was in shock. We packed all the wounded into the hungry. I was holding back this guy's blood with my hand. Another mortar dropped. We had no flatjackets, no kevlar, nothing. So we threw our bodies on top of the patients. The mortar stopped long enough for us to drive the wounded to the hospital. As soon as I got there, I saw a nurse and yelled, this is Sergeant Hill, he's 32, he's O positive, he needs blood now. How do you know? Because I'm covered in blood and none of it's mine. The only thing that helped me survive my time in Iraq was my boyfriend Steven. I could not have got through without him. We met the night that I arrived at Fort Dix, New Jersey for my AIT. We started talking immediately. He said, give me your number. And then later he texted me saying, what's good? We started going our way. Steven's black, but he looks kind of Dominican. Real cute, six foot big muscular guy from New York. Now you're not allowed to fraternize in the army, which means have a relationship, but everybody did. And because he was a surgeon and I was a specialist, nobody could know about us. Everybody knew. Then I got pregnant by him. So I couldn't deploy when he did and the rest of my team did. I had to stay behind Fort Dix, the strangers. Then after three months I had a miscarriage. It made me feel really empty and sad. I really loved Steven. I really wanted to have his baby. They gave me one month to recover and then they said you go into Iraq, which made me really mad because one month is not enough time to get over losing a baby. But in February 2005 they sent me to Fobb Spiker. They put me in this little chew, which is a trailer that sleeps two people, but you got to share it with three. The night I arrived it was so tight in there. I had to squeeze my way into it. I didn't end up getting along with the girl on my right, but the girl on my left, she was a friend from before. She was so excited to see me because last she heard I was pregnant. The first thing I did was I put on my favorite perfume and I went to look for Steven. Now we hadn't seen each other for four months and last he heard I was coming but he didn't know when. So I knocked on his door and his roomie answered and said that he didn't know where he was. And then I remembered the time difference when it was midnight for him. It was three o'clock for me and that's when we would talk online. So I thought I know where he is. So I ran over to the recreational building and sure enough there he was sitting at a corner computer with his back to me. Now I didn't go off to him right away. Instead I sat at the computer and I walked online. Sure enough there he was. So I wrote I'm in QA, but it's really cool that I'm on your time zone. And then he wrote it's weird. I can smell you. I must really miss you because I can smell your perfume. So then I wrote turn around. And he turned around and he just started laughing. In each police station that we fix up in Baghdad we go through the day searching people coming into the station and switching guard positions. I searched mostly women. Guys are not allowed to do that in Iraq. And you're there like 12 hours every day standing or sitting. It is hot. You can't move. And you have to watch everybody all the time. But you get used to it. The part that I couldn't stand. My squad leader was a pervert. He was old, like 35 or 40. He used to point out these little Iraqi girls and say disgusting sexual stuff about them all the time. These girls are like 12 or 13 years old. But the worst was my team leader. He made passes at me at first. He stopped. But then he tried to have revenge by controlling everything I did. I had to eat with him. He wouldn't let me eat with my friends. I had to clean my weapon with him. He wouldn't let me talk to anybody. So I'd stay up in my hungry turret all day long just to get away from him alone every day. People would know because they'd come up to me and say, Man, your life sucks! When I asked to get switched, they wouldn't do it. And that really made me hate my time there. It got to that I didn't trust anybody in my company anymore after a few months. I didn't trust anybody at all. Still don't. During my first few months in Iraq, my sergeant assaulted and harassed me so often that I couldn't take it anymore. So I decided to report him. But when I turned him in... The one common factor in all these problems is you. Don't see this as a punishment, but we're going to have you transferred. Then that same sergeant got promoted right away. I didn't get my promotion for six months. They transferred me from Mosul to Rawa. Rawa was nothing but a tent camp on the Syrian border covered in sand. The camp had Marines, Navy, Air Force and Army. There were over 1500 men in the camp and less than 18 women. So it wasn't any better than the first platoon I was in. I was fresh meat to the hungry men there. I was less scared of the motor rams that came in every day than I were of the men who shared my food. I would never drink late in the day, even though it was so hot. Because the portagons were so far away, it was dangerous. So I'd go for 16 hours in 140 degree heat and not drink. I just ate skittles to keep my mouth from being too dry. I collapsed from dehydration so often I had IV tract lines from all the times they had to rehydrate me. They made me cook because I was female. Though I wanted to do other jobs too. So I was cooking 1500 meals three times a day. I worked from four in the morning till nine at night the next day. I was exhausted all the time. One day somebody wrote my name on a portagon saying I'd have sex with a lot of people. Only they put it in much worse words than that. But when I wasn't working I went to chapel and then I went to bed. That was all I did. Work, chapel, bed. Work, chapel, bed. It was so untrue but I couldn't prove it. I couldn't defend myself. Nobody there wanted to believe me. Nobody was on my side. I always tried to stay cheerful. Be nice to everyone. Back in boot camp I was known as Sunshine. But within a few months I went from cheerful and smiling to bursting into tears all the time. I couldn't even smile anymore. I called mama crying and told her what they were doing to me. If you were treading the path of righteousness none of this would be happening. I was working at the entrance of spider. We saw a convoy being hit all the time. Highway 1 ran right past our base. We called it the highway of death because so many people got killed there by IEDs and murders. One night this convoy got hit. It was like this huge flash in the night and then they drove to us with their wounded. This civilian he got out of his car and started throwing up because his brother who was sat next to him had been shot in the throat. I was out in the tank on the road just looking at him. We radioed for an ambulance but they had to go through all these clearance and shit so by the time it arrived it was too late. The guy who was shot was already dead. I never really thought about dying that much when I was in Iraq. I figured everything happens for a reason and we're going to die someday so I was never really afraid of dying. What I was afraid of though was losing a limb or scarring my face or tripping because walking is really hard. It's hot and you've got all this heavy equipment which weighs nearly half your weight if you're small like me. I was worried about our equipment too. We had these flag jackets from Vietnam and everybody said they're no good against AK-47s which is what the Iraqis are shooting. Our radios were old and broken and our ambulances rattled and shook. I cannot imagine travelling in one of those when you're wounded. I mean I got to work with Stephen that way because he was the team leader. The sunrises and sunsets were beautiful. I'm with the guys on my team most of the time. A couple of things they did bothered me. Stephen went home for two weeks on R&R and when he was gone they hit on me all the time. When he got back they made up all these stories about me in the hope that we would break up and they would get a chance with me. Oh and if we were attacked they would make me stay at the back of the tank and they'd be like Hooker we don't want anything to happen to you. Gender. When they took it to the next level we had to guard out on the road. Nobody wants to guard out on the road. The soldier that's out on the road is known as the sacrifice soldier because you're the first to be hit if anything happens. For a while they put me out there every night. They didn't want to hear me say I'm a soldier. I'm a soldier just like you and you. It was to Afghanistan in 2006 with the army 10th melon division. Now by this time I'm a sergeant with use of sexual harassment out of my belt. So I decided this time it was going to be different. This time I decided to put up a wall. Now my wall became thicker and thicker. You know normally I'm a very bubbly person but all that disappeared behind the wall. To this day I don't know if I've ever regained that part of myself. But you have to put up a front and act like one of the boys. Even if it means losing who you are. You become very cold when you don't show your emotions. And you don't let anyone in because if you do they would walk all over you. A stick. The harassment was worse than it had ever been. A few months into my deployment I was directed to full knock-out duty. Now I smoke like a chimney when I was in Afghanistan and this night was no exception. So after a few hours I put my weapon in my radio in the guard shack and walked 20 feet to the closest smoke deck. You don't ever leave your weapon unattended in the combat zone. I had a momentary lapse. Thought I would be okay 20 feet from my weapon. I was wrong. I'd just taken a few drags in my cigarette when somebody grabbed me in a chokeholding. Dragged me behind some power generators. All I could see was a man much larger than me in a US armed forces uniform. I struggled with all my strength to get free while he dragged me to his spot. I tried my hardest to fight him often. I got in a few kicks. Well I waited until my ship was over and then did what every law and order show says to. Don't take a shower but straight to the authorities. I thought they would listen to me. They told me if I filed a claim that I'd been raped. I'd also be charged with dereliction of duty for leaving my weapon unattended in the combat zone. That could get me court-martialed. Could end my career. So I shut up. SHUT UP! Soon after I got to Iraq they made me convoy commander. All those convoys were 25 trucks long. And I was in charge of making sure that every one of those soldiers and drivers did the mission and got back in one piece. One time I was in the lead gun truck going through a crowded street with this young guy up in the gunner's sheet. Now he hasn't been out on the road before. He'd been in the office doing paperwork for so long he was getting called Professor Stapler. Now we got traffic coming at us and civilians all over the place. And then this car comes toward us too close for comfort. But the minute it's my gunner's first time you don't know what to do. So I tell him, fire a warning shot, he doesn't shoot. So I tap him. If you fucking shoot that weapon, okay? You do know how to shoot, right? The vehicle is getting closer and closer but the moron still doesn't shoot so I hit him hard. My gunner panics, he's only 19. He grabs his head and yells, oh my god. Look, it's not your fault. I don't think you shot nobody but we've still got a lot of shit coming out as you hear me. So I need you to focus right now and pay attention. But his face is red and he doesn't feel like he is matured from a boy to a man. See, a lot of young soldiers feel that way. Women too. They think I'm not some wimpy female because of the job I did in Iraq. The longer we were in Baghdad, the worse it got. It got so that you knew something was going to happen every day. You just didn't know what. One day we were driving to this police station in Najif when suddenly this IED blow right next to my home V truck. And I must have passed out because when I woke up I was by myself in the truck and my ears were ringing. And my whole body hurt. First aid, some IV and field dressing. I had shrapnel. That's little bits of metal in my arm and in my face. And my ear drums were ruptured. Went to the hospital and they cleaned me up. They gave me painkillers but I couldn't work for a month because I was deaf. I hung out on bass. Watched a lot of movies. And I slept. My body hurt so bad. But it didn't faze me to be wounded like that. I was like, okay, I'm alive. In fact I was kind of pissed that I didn't get it worse. I really hated it out there. And the shrapnel is still in there. They only take it out if it's really big. They took it out of my face. You can see the scars but it's not hideous. My hearing is not as good as it used to be. My friend Michelle Whitmer, she was in our platoon. She got hit too in an ambush. Shot in the armpit. It hit an artery. She was 20 years old. She died instead. My tour in Iraq was a real high opener for me. My biggest enemy out there was my own company. Officers would brief us by saying, it's Indian country out there. Go get them. I found that very shocking. If this was Indian country, perhaps I'm on the wrong side. But when I was over there a lot of young people would come and ask me for help, especially soldiers of color. And I would stand up for them against their command. After all I was old enough to be their mom. But got me into lots of trouble with my command. I was banned from my unit. I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone. And then they sent me to another base. Scania. That's where they send soldiers to punish him. Scania is on a major highway. It gets mortared the whole time I was at Scania. Hardly ever wrote home, even to my sons. I didn't even think about home. It's because you've become hollow like a robot. You get up, you do your job, you hear people complain. You talk about this, you talk about that, but you don't look inside. My sister sent me a medicine box with my prayer stuff. So I'd sit at night, smoke a cigarette, offer my prayers, and I'd watch the moon. That brought me some peace. That and the songs I would hear the Iraqi men singing in the morning at Camp Scania, the prayer songs. The songs would echo. Oh my God, it was so beautiful. Angels. I'd wake up peaceful because of those songs. I think they saved me from myself. Because there were times I thought I was going insane. What the fuck am I doing here? Why am I not just kelling on a plane and going home? What am I doing on this base? It's a concentration camp. When I started talking to the Iraqis, they were done the way. The young ones would come up to me and say, you're Indian from India? And I would say, no. Then finally one of them goes back after seeing the movie Dancing with Wolves, and he goes, you're red Indian. And I said, yes, I'm a red Indian. And he goes, Native American? And I'm like, so I was invited to have a meal with them at the market they had just outside the base. The same kind of rice my people cook. The same kind of bread and chicken we make this kind of bread. Tell me about your people and your religion. I want to know about your women. I want to know what you think about this war. I found out so many of their traditions are the same. With mine, the significance of the moon, our tobacco ceremonies, the way we use sage and their clan systems. How people marry in and out of clans. I'm fake doing here. Why am I doing this to these people? I started to see how we were changing their clan system, their council system. It's been there for thousands of years. I started to see how imposing democracy means has not democracy anymore. And I started to think this war is a genocide. If it wasn't, we'd have things in place to help the women, to help the children, to help the civilians. We'd rather they die. We're going out for lunch. Let's see when they come back. Congratulations. This is my number one. I've been growing up. They love to spray. They just spray everywhere they go. They think they're anantha. They do it from wrist down to head. What every girl hates in the army is you meet a guy and you get close, but you never really know what kind of guy he's going to be on the outside. Because people can present themselves however they want over there. And who was really in love with her boyfriend in Iraq. When they got home, she took a plane to go visit him and she waited at the airport for him to pick her up. He never came. He threw the airport. Nobody was there saying welcome back or nothing. I didn't really believe that I was back from Iraq until I saw my grandpa and my aunt. My aunt gave me a hug. Now I never cried only when Grammy died. Because coming home is hard like being a ghost. It's like you die and you're coming back to life and you've got to whistle your way back in because everyone is head to head just without you. And I came back a different person. Not as easy going. I can't stand loud noise and I don't like being around a lot of people. And I lost how to dance. I think I'm so in tune with Mark Chang that I've got to be really drunk to dance. I started getting depressed. That's never happened to me before. I've always been able to deal with things because being in the army and Iraq and losing the baby and Grammy it's just all got too much. And it made me really angry the way that I was being treated as a female veteran because we don't get the same respect as men. We have to really fight for it. Telling people about seeing death and being shot at because I know that nobody believes me. Everyone assumes that I just did office work. To be with Stephen and go to school and to get away from my family. And then I got pregnant by him again. Now he is a really sweet guy but he's different from before. He's from the hood. He has whoever he had before he had me. I don't know if he has them now. So it looks like I'm raising this baby by myself. I've never spoken to my family about my time in Iraq. They've asked me but I always say it was hot. I don't want to tell them anything because I don't want to feel sorry for myself. And the people close to you they wouldn't understand anyhow. You can't hate them for not understanding. But a lot of the time you do. If you ask the majority of soldiers do you know what our purpose is in Iraq? They couldn't tell you. Some might give you some political bullshit to justify it or say because we wear the uniform we're supposed to not speak bad about it. But most soldiers would say that they don't see the point. If you think about this area here as the place the military built for us soldiers you got showers and running water a toilet you can flush you got trailers, beds, mattresses, air conditioners washers and dryers. Big generators running all night. You got Taco Bells subways. You got good food, lobster, shrimp, steak. And we're not paying the Iraqis any property taxes or anything at all for all our luxuries. But over here on the outskirts you've got Iraqi families living in huts. No electricity, no running water, who are starving. And you tell us when we go outside these gates and there's a kid on the side of the road asking for water we're not supposed to give it to them? We've got warehouses full of water. But I can't give one body of this kid out here who don't have any because we bomb the shit out of their water supply and everything else too. The US government isn't going to stand for anyone coming in and telling us how to run things like that. But we think it's fine to go over there and westernize them. Because people have been living this way for centuries. Now I may not agree with their way but that's their country. And who's to say that our way is the right way? You know what we are? We're just bullies. Bullies. That's what we are. When I came home from Iraq I kept everything myself. I thought I was going to be okay. I went straight back to school. I worked hard. But by a year later I was tense all the time. I was snippy to my friends, hostile. I stopped hanging out. I did homework every night for hours. And I wasn't sleeping well either. I didn't get any help though. I thought my problem was hormones or something. Girl things. Maybe that's because those post-traumatic stress videos they show you never represent women. I don't act like a guy who mess ptfd. I don't get into a car and drive any miles an hour and push things. So I didn't even recognize that there was anything wrong until my boyfriend said he needs to get some help. So I did. Some people ask me what the best part of being in the army was for me. Is it my drive to succeed now or all the friendships that I made? I can't think of a best part. Every day there was a bad day. By the time I got home in April 2004, after 11 months in Iraq, I was really a mess. I couldn't sleep for more than 50 minutes at a time. I'd be awake for two hours in between. I got angry easily, agitated. I had nightmares about the mortar attacks. Flashback. On the years eve they had fireworks in our town square. And as soon as I heard the booms, I fell to my knees. Every time I opened my eyes, the faces in front of me would fade away and I'd be wrth to that night we were attacked. I was trying hysterically. My friends didn't know what to do. And I had nothing to talk about. All my friends' conversations were about movies I hadn't seen or a fashion I didn't know about. Anything I talked about turned morbid very quick. Little kids in Iraq, dead, mortar attacked. That everyone would get quiet and no one would know what to say. I remember this girl talking about how she wanted some designer purse and I said, yeah I know what you mean. One time in Iraq these kids wanted some food and I felt really bad because we didn't have enough to give them. I hate it when you can't get what you want. Everyone just sat there. They felt like assholes. I felt like an asshole. I was so out of place after I got home. I couldn't feel comfortable in my skin and I couldn't talk about it to anyone. I didn't know other soldiers were going through the same thing so I thought I was crazy. My back and head were injured too. I'm 80% disabled now because my back is so messed up from banging around in the humvee. No shock absorbers hitting my head on the ceiling and compressing my spine. I couldn't stop worrying about that guy in the mortar attack. Sergeant Hill and whether he'd lost his arm and could I have done something more. I tried to get a medical discharge from the army to pay for my benefits but they made it so difficult. I gave up. I couldn't get tuition. They promised me for a long time either. For a long time I couldn't even get to a clinic for my medication or therapy because all the V8 clinics were so far away. I work with veterans now so I know a lot of soldiers go through this which helps. It's important for vets to reach out to each other so you don't feel alone and cramming like I do. I still think a lot about why we went to war. Was Saddam a bad person who needed to be removed from power? Yes? Was he the reason for us going in there? Not really. It's not the guys sitting in their air conditioned offices at the Pentagon who are feeling the aftermath of it. It's the mother and father who are getting their child sent home in a box. It's the innocent people of Iraq who have been killed and raped and had their villages turned upside down. I really do love some of those people of Iraq. I don't know how to help them. Some of those kids were so beautiful. They only wanted attention and food still. I knew if I had to kill a kid to save my buddies, I would. How could anybody love anyone who has such horrible thoughts? When I came home from Afghanistan, I didn't talk to anyone without rape. I felt it was on my own phone. It took me six months to even tell my mother why I had to leave the Air Force. I could never go back. Military had the way of making females believe they brought this upon themselves. Yes, I made some bad decisions, but the guilt lies with the predator, not me. There's an unwritten code of silence when it comes to sexual assault in the military. But if this happened to me and nobody knew about it, I just know what's happening to other females as well. It makes me so mad when I think about the fact that I'll let them get to me and lift the military. I was so proud of being third generation. I had dreams of becoming a high-ranking officer one day like my father and my grandfather. Time I came home, I felt like I had messed everything up. I'd let my mom and dad down. I'd let everyone down. I hated myself. September 30, 2006. That was the day it was all going to end. No more shame would be brought to my family, it would be over. Take the tip of a blade to the middle of your forearm. Touch the top of the main vein. Press the home steels through your skin. Drag it down so there's no room for mistakes. One shot, one kill. That's what they teach in the army. See the thick blood running bright red? For a moment it seemed that that gash would bring relief. I was ready to cut the other arm when my phone rang. It was mama. She felt God pushing her to call. She wanted to tell me how proud of me she was because for women, when I got back home I couldn't deal with those women anymore. To me, everything they talked about was petty. I didn't want to hear a lost connection with my mother, brothers, my sons, my boyfriend, everybody. I came back so angry and I didn't know why. Nobody could stand me. I couldn't stand myself. It's really hard to admit you have PTSD. It feels weak because the military teaches you to suck it up and drive on. After I'd been home for a while, my former husband George died. He'd rape me and beat me up, but I went to his funeral anyway. Maybe just to make sure he was dead. But another part of me that cried, not because he was my husband, but because he was a Vietnam vet who got lost. He didn't come back from war, the same. He always talked about raping girls in Vietnam. So what he did to me wasn't any different from what he was used to. So whose fault is it? I don't know. But I don't think he was born that kind of person. I think the military made him like that and forgave him. After I'd been home from Iraq for about half a year, I wouldn't even dress up, wouldn't wear makeup, didn't care. Couldn't concentrate, couldn't sleep, couldn't work. And I became paranoid thinking people were following me and breaking into my house. And I was afraid to take sleeping pills because that would make me vulnerable if somebody attacked me. And I was throwing the army to get off welfare. Here I was after 22 years in the military on welfare. Again, not the only soldier going through this. My friend who had served with in Iraq came home a year ago. They found her dead in her home. She'd been dead for two days, had PTSD and depression so bad, and she couldn't tell anybody because there was nobody to tell. So she killed herself. Isn't over when you come home. One thing I really can't stand is for people to come and say... Thank you, sir. Are you thanking me for participating in a genocide? Is that what you want? Because I am not protecting anybody's country. I am taking somebody's. Now even though I never pulled the trigger, I feel that I participated in a genocide. I feel very responsible and that's a hard thing to do with a lie. And I feel very ashamed that I didn't see it sooner and stand up against it. I was a trail sergeant. My job was to teach other people's children. People asked me how could I as a spiritual person teach? How as a mother could I send my own sons to war? I asked myself that. I thought into the whole thing. I thought it was the behind-the-scenes thing to do with myself. One of the social media successes of 2012. So welcome, Laura, if you'd like to join me, I'll open it up to all of you in the audience, but maybe we might get some Twitter comments or whatever. Laura, one of the first questions that everybody would like to say, what is the everyday sexism project and why did you come about starting it? Well, the project is really simple. It started out as a website. I started it in 2012 after about a week and a half during which, by sheer coincidence, I just had a bunch of experiences that happened to all four very close together. So I was walking home one night and a guy started shouting at me out of his car window and the traffic was at a crawl so the guy in the next car heard and thought it would be funny to try and shout something worse and they kind of started escalating and I put my head down, walked home and didn't think anything more of it. Then a few nights later I was on my way home quite late at night on the bus on the phone to my mum and the guy next to me started groping his way up my leg into my crotch so I stood up and moved away from him and because I was on the phone to my mum I said what was happening out loud. I said I'm on the bus and his guy just groped me and everybody on the bus heard and everybody looked out the window. No one stepped into help, no one said anything and I had a real sense of shame and embarrassment but I felt directed at me, why are you bringing this up, just deal with it. Then a few nights later I was walking down the street actually it was daytime and there was a truck being unloaded of some scaffolding and as I walked past one guy and turned to the other within a metre of me and just said look at the tits on that not even heard just that and I was really really close to them and again the thing that really struck me was just how normal it was there was no sense that I might say anything back that I wouldn't just accept it that it was kind of embarrassing and the thing that really hit me after these incidents was it made me realise if they hadn't all happened in the same week I probably wouldn't have thought twice about any one of them because it was normal and I was used to it and it just made me start thinking why is it normal, why am I so used to this and also can it be just me because I think we often think I must have done something wrong I must just be unlucky I'm overreacting I'm just talking to other women and girls I'm just going to say in the play a lot of the women feel that they're alone that's one of the themes running through they think they're the only ones that they're to blame and it's quite interesting to hear the parallel in the civilian world the same sort of things that you felt Yeah and I think also similar things about feeling like if you speak out either fearing that you won't be believed or thinking that even if you are it won't take you seriously because you have yourself a lot of the project entries so when I started talking to other women and girls I was really shocked by the number of stories they had, it was every woman I spoke to and it was on my way to meet you just now this happens I spoke to women in the workplace who said that the guys in their office would routinely go to strip clubs at lunchtime and entertain clients there so they would miss out on certain deals I spoke to a woman who said that in her workplace when new women were coming in to be interviewed for positions in the office they would print out their pictures and rate them out of 10 across the room and just like me so many of them made a point of saying until you asked me I've never told anyone any of these stories because it's just normal and so I set the website up as a means of providing a platform for them because when I try to speak up when I try to talk about sexism I think this is sexism, I think this is some things going on people said no there's no such thing as sexism and more women are equal now, there's no problem it's very simply an effort to bridge the gap between the idea that we've achieved equality and the reality of what women and girls were dealing with often on a daily basis but that people didn't necessarily know about because it was so normal that people weren't speaking up Well one of the things that I did this play as a reading in 2013 it's an American place about the American military and female soldiers and when I did it in 2013 I wanted to gauge English reactions to it and see whether it was worth taking it forward as a producer it's also important to see whether you'd get an audience and one of the things that happened was that I had a chat from the military who came up to me afterwards and I actually happened to know him slightly I'd been introduced to him and he said Parle, I'm just going to say one thing couldn't happen in the UK military and I had nothing to say it in 2013 there was nothing out there and unfortunately in 2014 there was an inquest for this young soldier Corporal Anne-Marie Elements who committed suicide in 2011 she was a Royal Military Police and she alleged rape by two of her fellow soldiers and she went to her commander and they just they just dismissed it because they said it's not a problem and it was so that happened in 2000 and she took her own life she got so depressed that she took her own life and the family then got in touch with Liberty and wanted representation so they reopened the inquest in 2014 and the coroner in that case said yes the army were culpable and it was bullying and sexual harassment and not only was it men but it was also women and it was bullying her so the fact that she'd spoken out and said that she'd been raped caused a big problem and so it's a universal problem in the military so what I'm going to ask Laura is that what you found has the project widened Yes hugely so the entry started coming in it was just a tiny website and I didn't have any way of promoting it or advertising it so I really thought it would give you 60 testimonies from people in my community area and perhaps people I knew and what actually happened was that entries just started to pour in and it just started to snowball and just as you said it started to be that entries were coming in from women all over the world from women of different backgrounds different sexual orientations different races and ethnicities different gender identities we started getting stories that came in so quickly that three years later it's just three years since we started the project we've had 100,000 stories from people all over the world and they've ranged enormously from street harassment and kind of day to day minor normalised sexism to huge numbers of stories from girls at school, girls of 10 or 11 when they start experiencing these things girls at university women in the workplace experiencing enormous amounts of discrimination and also people reporting sexual abuse and rape so it's widened very quickly into this kind of massive grassroots collection of people's experiences right so that's one of the parallels between the play in everyday sexism doing this play it's brought up the fact that it may be when there's women in the military in the universal problem what do you think what has it revealed apart from the fact has there been any change and how do you feel that we can go forward with this project well the first thing that became really clear I think from the project entries was the connections between the more serious things that we're often allowed to talk about and allowed to consider problems and the minor things that we're told to brush off don't make a fuss about and it really struck me watching the play tonight that there was a case of that that there are certain things where you think if somebody speaks up about that you say don't make a fuss until it's the really really serious stuff but what became so clear from the project entries that actually if we say that some of these things are okay if we say it's not that big a deal to comment on a woman's breath on the street it's not that big a deal to make a sexist comment in the classroom then we're opening the door to the idea of women as second class citizens and we're creating a status quo a normalisation of that idea which I think also is at the root of some of the bigger problems so I think the first thing that it really showed was how important it is to be able to talk about and tackle these things even if they seem apparently minor but in terms of where it's going next and moving forward what's been really exciting is that we have definitely seen a shift in the kind of entries that we're receiving and that now that the project's become so well known we're still receiving people's experiences of discrimination and harassment and sexual abuse but we're also receiving stories from people writing and saying this has changed things for me I've been able to speak out about sexual violence for the first time I've been able to report discrimination in my workplace for the first time because it's made me feel that I'm not alone and I think what that shows is really the power of this kind of story sharing exercise to break these kind of illusions about the fact that it doesn't happen to empower other people to think they've been brave enough to speak out and say perhaps I can too OK well what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up the debate and put it out to the floor Do you have any questions for Laura at all? Does anybody have any? Oh, is there some tricky comments? How do you think it won't work for six of them in the military? Well, the answer to that is that actually we already get quite a lot of entries that come from women in the military which is really interesting Oh right, right and one thing that we've been able to do so far with aspects like that is that we've been able to take the stories that we've received online, offline into the real world and use them to create concrete change So, for example, we took the stories that we've received that were just from women on public transport on buses and tubes which amounted to about 2,000 entries and we took them to the British Transport Police and worked with them to actually use those stories of what people were going through to retrain their officers to then deal with sexual offenses and that campaign we then went back to social media and were able to spread the word that we'd spoken to the police and they were taking it seriously and then what happened was that it raised the reporting of sexual offenses on public transport by 26% 26%? Yeah, so I hope that that's the kind of thing that we might be able to do in similar ways with specific professions like, for example, people who work in the military as we get more of these stories to be able to put them together So that it's not an isolated voice? So one of the dramatic devices that I, as a director, put into the play was the voice of a soldier and that's a representation of all the women who don't feel brave enough to come and speak who don't have the voice and suffer in silence and I thought it was really important to put that in because the other voices said what they wanted to at the time of the play but there were many soldiers who probably didn't have the opportunity or didn't feel brave enough or have the courage or perhaps even want to admit that something that terrible had happened to them and maybe the army was the only life they knew or had so that was one of the things I did but when we were chatting how do you feel about the teenage population who is quite young and being brought up with social media from age zero now do you think the pressures are much more than before? I definitely think there's something new there I think it's very difficult to compare over time for me because I haven't been working in this field for long enough but what I can definitely say is that there is a lot that young people are dealing with of ways that this particular problem manifests itself in new ways for example we hear a huge number of entries from young people about porn and the impact it has on that a 13 year old girl wrote in and said my name is Nicola I'm 13 years old and I'm so scared to have sex I cry nearly every night because I've seen a video on a boys mobile phone at school and I didn't realise that when you have sex the woman has to be hurting and crying so I think because a lot of the porn that is out there is particularly about women being hurt and women crying you see the impact because we don't have sex in relationships education that teaches kids in a very simple age appropriate way about sexual consent and healthy relationships and so they assume that what they see online is what sex has to be like and I think that's very scary for boys as well we had another story that came from a girl who was 17 and she'd had sex with her boyfriend for the first time and halfway through he started trying to choke her and she pushed him away and he broke down in tears and relieved and said is that not what you were expecting and this is really something that comes up a lot these aren't isolated incidents I was in a school a few weeks ago where they'd had a rape case involving a 14 year old boy and one of the teachers had said to him why didn't you stop when she was crying and he looked straight back at her and said because it's normal for girls to cry during sex so I think there's certainly a real problem there that we are going to have to start facing sooner or later about the online world the way that women are portrayed and the fact that we're not taking the steps that we need to to offset that with support and guidance for young people in schools about things like consent and healthy relationships Does anybody have a question in your audience here at all? Do you like Thomas Law or anything? Yeah I was wondering just on the stopper Do you think that schools have a role to play in this kind of thing and how do you think yours will fit in with it? I definitely think schools have a role to play and I realise that schools are already very kind of overburdened so I think that if they can be supported in putting this stuff into place it's just so important because it's one of the only ways we can guarantee that everybody gets that teaching and I think that's completely crucial I think there are different ways it can manifest itself so the way that the project does that and works in that sense at the moment is partly that we use the stories we get from young people to go into schools and to deliver workshops and talks around healthy relationships and online porn and sexual consent using those stories as a jumping off point but we also have a play which is very similar in style to this one of a baiting style play which has been created by a theatre company who are going to use that and it directly takes the words from the project entries and they go into schools touring around the country to use it as a jumping off point for just opening up these issues because so many of the schools we go into afterwards girls will come out and say things that have happened and it just opens the door for them to feel able to talk about it and for boys as well we hear from boys who are being bullied in school for wanting to take art or drama GCSE because it's considered too girly that kind of thing and so I think there are lots of ways that you can open up these conversations and I think the project has a role to play Anybody else? Yeah Do you now confront that type of person that you're talking about when you first started the project and they say what sort of thing do you say? Yes If I feel safe I do I think it's so important to say that it's never about saying that there's any one right or wrong response we should be stopping it from happening at first place not mandating any kind of response and I would never want someone to feel that if they didn't respond it was then somehow their fault but there have been really great responses that we've had people writing in that have been really successful and one of them is reporting the stuff after it happens and I always feel like you say something in the moment but as very often happens it's someone in a van or someone on a building site or it's someone standing in a shop door way and in any of those cases you can contact a company afterwards safely and report what's happened to their supervisor and we've had a lot of really great feedback from people who've done that and it's been taken very seriously and they've received the message from someone in a position of power over them that it's not acceptable so that kind of thing I think is really really powerful what about that there was a girl just the other week who reported builders and the response to the media I thought was rather harsh on her would you like to make a comment on the response to the media when a young woman who was constantly harassed in the end actually reported the builders to the company and the sort of the media attitude towards her report it was such a classic example I think about attitudes towards these kinds of things you probably saw it it was the case of Poppy Smart who was 23 years old and every day on her walk to work every day for a month she was shouted at and harassed from this particular building site the same set of builders they whistled at her they shouted derogatory comments at her and on one occasion they came out to the street and physically blocked her path so after a month of it going on every day the building company to report it and also contacted the police and it got into the local and then the national media and the press pretty much universally had it on their front pages as girl calls the police over a wolf whistle like that was how they portrayed it and you had these massive things on talk shows they were debating should wolf whistling be made illegal and isn't it disgusting that these women are trying to and it was just amazing and for me that was just so indicative of our attitudes that we want to put the victim on trial in just the same way that we see obviously in these cases in the military we want to ask what was she doing what was she wearing what did she think she was doing speaking up about it and it's so indicative of the problem that we still have this enormous lens on blaming the victim we act as if it's inevitable as if it's just something that men do which is so insulting to the vast majority of men who wouldn't dream of it and it's a real problem because if you read that on the front page of the paper and you think I'm not going to come forward yes I thought I was particularly poignant because you know she's a very young woman and she had such a backlash on just simply reporting it to the building company anybody else, does anybody else who'd like to yes hello hello I was wondering a lot of the discussion you had so far has been about sexual persecution of one kind or another in the military what lies at the root of a lot of this harassment is lack of respect for women as human beings so in the play and in some of the social activists stuff do you address respecting women as equals for their brains and their accomplishments and not just about always being about them being sexualized over sexualized yes definitely I think it's all just so caught up in all these different things and you're right I think one of the big factors that comes into play with that particular problem is the media and the presentation of women as sex objects as very over sexualized things like page 3 and it's very difficult to fight back against that because you're told it's not a big deal you're often told it's a compliment the argument with page 3 was it's just a bit of harmless fun but it creates that idea just as you say about the idea that women are other non-human beings and I think that central concept in dehumanizing is key to so much of what we see whether it's an advert that uses a piece of a woman's body to sell a burger without even being able to see her face or whether it's an online website that talks about women as sluts and slags and milks and planks and hoes and wenchers and clunge and gatch all of these words that we have for women that don't involve their names or there's currently a lot of websites which target students particularly which describe women using a number out of 10 you know so last night I was banging a solid 6 out of 10 and this happened so yeah I really felt that and I also felt another thing that really struck me in the play that we see hugely in our entries as well is the combination of different forms of prejudice so a lot of the stories that we get are not just from women who are experiencing sexism they are women who are experiencing sexism intermingled and combined with homophobia or racism or transphobia or ageism or disabilism and I think we think of these as separate problems but that's not how people experience them you don't experience homophobia one day and sexism the next it's a disabled woman who's told to do a pole dance around her walking stick or it's a black woman who's in a job interview and the interviewer starts talking about how spicy and exotic she is or it's an Asian woman who's with her boyfriend and someone shouts at him in the street or a trans woman who's attacked in a public bathroom or a woman who's out with her partner and finds that people will pursue them saying can I join in or I've got something that will turn you straight or older women who again and again use the word invisible in their project entries and that's been such a powerful thing that's come out of these project entries that these things can't be neatly categorised into separate boxes and so the solution also has to be intersectional we have to look at tackling them in ways that take into account these intersections and I think that was really powerful that that came through in the play as well I'm going to take one of the entries from Amy and it says every day sexism is the most important when we female the male should sound the alarm and sleep as well so she's talking about it but it's really important being the military in the English military women represent 10% it's only 10% of the military is female in the American military it's 17% so it's a minority so after doing a lot of research on the play and looking at the lives of these women my personal viewpoint is that it's got to happen for both men and women it cannot just be the women who speak out loudly they should speak out loudly however the men need to be on board in order for change to occur definitely I think we need that desperately it's something that affects men as well and that's something the project entry makes so clear but also it's something that we can't tackle without everyone on board and it's in everybody's interests on a micro and a macro level we know that companies with greater diversity on boards perform better we know that countries where women are more empowered integrate greater stability and we know that men are ridiculed in the office and they want to take parental leave or congratulated for babysitting their own children and I think it's really exciting actually that the vast majority of men have responded so positively to the project and have said this is shock me because it's over my head I want to get on board but there's also a minority and it's funny actually with this behind me I'm so conscious of it and I turn now I'm constantly worried that there's going to be something horrific up there because my experience of any kind of public event is that usually I'll get home to three or four rape threats or death threats Oh really and that's there? Well I've actually said I've told them to delete them so like no if there was any trolls out there I'm afraid they don't have a chance with PMJ production so don't worry about it so I think on that note I'm actually going to conclude the debate because I'm sure you want to have a drink so I'd like to thank Laura Bates for coming and being here with us for the lonely soul of my mother-in-law by Alan Benedict I'd like to thank all of you for coming to the Coppic Theatre we really appreciate it we appreciate the sport I'd like to thank all the actors who are sitting over there can you watch this online wherever you may be I'd love to hear from you thank you very much every day section Laura is quite happy to sign your copy of the film thank you very much