Thread by @Vanessa_Kisuule

In the midst of current events, I want to offer some thoughts on gendered violence. Please know that 1) I'm not afraid of different opinions & multiple things can be true at once. 2) I'm not interested in being ‘right’, I'm interested in things getting better for all of us.

We must think carefully about what we want when we ask men to step up and do the work. We must accept they will be coming with the reprehensible things they have done and still do. We cannot ignore these acts but we also cannot insist that people are forever stained by them.

If we're waiting for only the most exemplary of men to step forward, we will wait forever. They don’t exist. Is it useful to ask people to hold their transgressions out for the world and demand they continually self flagellate? Shame is not a useful or humane self corrective.

How do we hold space for this: that s/o can have done terrible things w/o fully acknowledging the repercussions and yet that same person can offer ideas and rhetoric that are useful and galvanising? With difficulty, but I think its not only possible but potentially liberating.

Do I believe that some men are cynically positioning themselves as oracles of social justice? Yes. But does this cynicism serve me or the fight to mitigate gendered violence? Not really. The opportunistic gestures of a clout chaser can still have a genuinely positive impact.

I don’t want this to be read as a minimising of the pain survivors endure. It’s not my place to police people’s trauma response or chastise people for their rage. Anger and resentment are totally natural and understandable responses to the cruelty so many women suffer.

But after years of thinking around this issue (which stems from a lifelong investment in curtailing violence rather than legislating its after effects) I don’t see a transformative way out of this that doesn’t involve a whole heap of grace and patience.

I don’t think its fair or useful to put the onus on survivors to reach past their trauma to empathise with perpetrators. Their time is best spent healing in whatever way is pertinent to them. But those of us who have the capacity can and should do this more uncomfortable work.

Story time: a few years ago I ran a workshop in a facility for sex offenders.

My 1st instinct when asked to do so was to refuse. As a woman, life long feminist & volunteer for a sex workers charity where the service users face some of the most horrific abuse you could possibly imagine, I know all too well the damage caused by these perpetrators.

The resistance was so large & wild in my heart, yet there was an insistent voice telling me to say yes. Who knows what steered it: morbid curiosity, the creative and moral challenge, a desire to put a face to what for me has always been a faceless monster? So off I went.

I did what I always do in workshops. We read poems, I set exercises, they shared their work. They were polite, warm, enthusiastic. Some of them wrote genuinely moving poems. It was one of the most profoundly unsettling and formative experiences of my life.

What constitutes a sex offence is v broad so not all of them will have been violent perpetrators. That said, I can only assume that some of the men in that room did unspeakable things, things I once believed made a person unworthy of living amongst other humans, or living at all.

What I was confronted with is the harsh, strange and beautiful mess of the human condition & the multitudes we possess. The stark fact that any of us, given a certain cocktail of circumstances, might be an abuser or the abused. It’s rare that the former is not also the latter.

Abuse is so widespread that despite its horrors, we must acknowledge it’s not the sole preserve of the 'monstrous'. It is all of us. When we name that, we spend less energy denying or obfuscating our various roles in the cycle of violence and more energy breaking it apart.

Men must speak to other men and hold each other accountable, absolutely. This doesn’t happen anywhere near as much as it should. But we must be in communication with each other all the while. We must connect the dots. We can’t reduce each other to concepts and allegories.

Knowing why people do what they do, especially when those acts are harmful, is paramount. It doesn’t excuse, it contextualises. It arms us with the tools to pull out this malignant growth from the root, rather than dooming ourselves to hack away at leaves that always grow back.

If I were a boy raised in a society as poisonous as this one, I can't sit here and tell you I wouldn't be a bit of a dickhead or even a predator. Personal responsibility only goes so far. We are creatures of osmosis - we learn how to be by observing the world around us.

Once we understand this as an issue of collective responsibility, maybe we’ll stop atomising this issue, stop making hackneyed examples of isolated people and incidents whilst the issue at large goes largely untouched.

I think those of us who can should lead with love, which does not preclude consequences, responsibility or due justice. No more looking outwards - we are the source of both the pain & the solution. The govt cannot do the job of a community. We are eachother's custodians & mirrors

Thank you for reading. This conversation, and this work, is collaborative. If you want to, please offer your thoughts. If it gets too bonkers I may mute the thread or delete it entirely, but I am going to trust that illuminating things may come of opening up this conversation X

And fellas: I am still so mad and disappointed by you, lol. BUT. I spent my whole youth angry which not only ate me up, it solved nothing. I insist in your humanity as strongly as I insist on mine which means I can and will demand that you do better & expect more of yourselves.