Thread by @ninafunnell

NOW Australia - the brain fart of Tracey Spicer - has announced it is closing, having never actually established the Triage system which Spicer & Co collected over $120,000 of public donations to fund.

There were some good ppl involved but this was a /1

now.org.au

.... always going to be a failed initiative from the beginning. Put simply, you can't magically triage people to services which either don't exist, or which are already stretched beyond capacity. Something Spicer would have known had they properly consulted the sector b4 launch/2

...Instead, Spicer launched to much fanfare in the media using celeb ambassadors (oh & where was their due diligence?), social media tiles, t-shirt merchandise... & even a specially recorded sound-track for the occasion. Meanwhile, the sector stood around scratching it's head /3

...Wondering who on earth was supposed to pick up the phone calls & respond to legal needs of sexual harassment victims, when they can't even support every rape victim.... And it's not like this wasn't raised with Spicer. On launch day, I wrote to Spicer asking a bunch of qs /4

Bc there didn't appear to be any strategy (beyond convincing people to separate themselves from their money) I wrote: "this NOW stuff is really problematic. You haven't linked to a single resource for survivors. It reads as peak-white-feminism cashing in on #MeToo" /5

I then added "There's absolutely no support for survivors [because there were no hotlines etc on their website], and more than that, it's not clear what the quarter of a million will be used for..." /6

"There are already expert services that do that [ie. that provide counselling & legal advice]... are you directing the funds to them or proposing to invent a new service?, it's not clear..." /7

"I've got to be honest, you've left yourself wide open for an absolute take down.Especially since your citation links don't actually connect to research- just back to the donation page." /8

"It's great that someone with your profile wants to take on this issue, but I think you need to consult a lot more before launching a website like this- it really is wildly problematic."/9

"Sorry to be harsh- but it's better you hear it privately from me before someone publicly calls out the website. If you want to chat about it let me know."

Then I signed off with my details.

Next minute, Spicer copies in 12 new people - 11 of whom I don't even know... /10

(because #stackson ) and I'm told (among other things) "I always find it incredibly disappointing when feminists criticise other women working voluntarily to try to make the world a better place."... /11

... Then I notice they begin to make changes to the website... the citation links (which only linked back to the 'donate now' button) are updated. So I decide to be... more helpful. Specifically, I begin pointing out various spelling errors and copy-editing mistakes /12

And naturally, I make sure to CC in all 11 new friends of mine. That interlude aside, NOW Australia did eventually make at least one sound decision in hiring a good interim director. She did what should have happened at the beginning: she properly consulted the sector. /13

&low & behold there was virtually no support for the brain-fart triage model. So - with that in mind - they abandoned that plan. Which was a sound decision. Its not my story to tell what happened next with Spicer & NOW (that belongs to them... but chryst on bike its a doozy)./14

Spicer, meanwhile focuses on other projects, like her ABC series where she allowed a camera crew to film the names, faces and disclosures of sexual abuse and DV victims, without their consent. / 15 news.com.au/national/unpro…

When that was revealed, Spicer tried to distance herself claiming she was merely a "participant" in the documentary. SERIOUSLY? You were the custodian of these people's stories. Spicer, u had NO RIGHT to show a single person those disclosures, whether they... /16

... were holding a camera or not! Not a single set of eyes should have seen them without express consent. But u showed them to a camera crew, and they ended up in a doco. You still collected the Sydney Peace Prize for contributions to #MeToo. /17

... I'm still baffled as to what was actually achieved. 2000 women supposedly told their stories, but how many were ever broken? That's an enormous amount of emotional labor to invite survivors to perform, only to sit on it /18

In fact even the stories in the ABC doco 'Silent No More' were almost all recycled stories which had been told by other journalists. It begs the question... with 2000 disclosures to choose from, why recycle other journos work? /19

And what happened to those disclosures? Even if defamation makes it difficult to publish, why not produce a report... crunch some stats, draw out common themes, analyse the issues, use some pull quotes for christ sake... it's not that hard... /20

It's such a missed opportunity. Spicer spent so much time promoting herself as the "spearhead" of #MeToo .... and yet so few of the stories ever materialised... It's disappointing. And I don't think there's any better summation of the entire catastrophe than this image.../21

... It was painted by a survivor in the earlier days of NOW and is meant to show Spicer as the spearhead of #MeToo. But what I see is something very different.... /22

... I see a white woman who has literally centered herself in the foreground, while all the other survivors remain nameless and faceless. And what better analogy than that... /23

Well, at last this sad, pathetic chapter is coming to an end... I know there were a lot of other women who put a lot of effort into NOW and did so generously and with best of intentions, and for them I'm very sorry. /24

I just hope we all learn from this. Collectivist movements which become overshadowed by ambitious careerists who centre their own profile won't ever be sustainable. Celebrity driven 'fundraisers' without substance r not only a waste of time, they are - IMO- unethical. /25

The #MeToo movement was never 'owned' by anyone. No one should treat survivor stories like they're Pokemon ("quick, gotta catch em'all!"). That will only ever lead to a bottleneck in how those stories come out... / 26

We don't know what happened to those women or their stories. We DO know that Spicer is resuscitating her career with a new project: a bookclub. /27

The think that makes me most sad in all of this for those survivors who never heard back, for those who thought their story would be told (only to have Spicer go quiet), for those whose privacy was breached... the barriers to speaking up again just became that much higher /28

And do you know who benefits from that?

Perpetrators.

And that's the saddest thing of all. /fin.