#METOO

I was walking home with my husband a few weeks back, when he asked why I don’t walk across the bridge, why do I now walk the longer way home. I responded to him, with what I saw as an obvious response ‘well encase I get attacked or.... raped’ his response ‘oh I have never had to think of that’. His response was so natural and normal and I responded, ‘of course you don’t’.

It sat with me though, something festered about it and I realised, that’s his male privilege right there, imagine going 33 years through life without once having to think of the fear of possible rape or sexual assault.

Since being a young girl, it’s been part of my safety awareness, I remember walking to brownies with my cousin and being followed, since being a young girl I have had safety running through my brain every day. It comes every night I walk home in the dark, every time I do something alone, everytime a male walks too close on the street and I realised that festering I was feeling came down to that, right there, how easy it must be to be a male in this society.

So then it came to the #MeToo campaign, I saw it, I questioned it and suddenly I realised how could I not be part of it. I campaign in my own way, on my own issues, and I felt with this one, how could I go to work every day working with vulnerable young women and not stand in solidarity and share my experience as a woman. Isn’t that how change is made, by talking and sharing about problems such as this. It's choice though, isn’t it, it’s not how everyone choses to share but it’s also that people don’t recognise what sexual assault is, they don’t realise that a grope in a night club or flashing of a genitals is assault, isn’t that just what men do, isn’t that banter? I have heard this so many times, from friends, from myself, from the young people I work with, it’s so sad that’s the culture we come to believe  this behaviour is okay and as women we just have to accept it.

I have sat with many male and female friends and discussed what sexual violence is, how women end up in situations with no choice. I have discussed strip clubs till I am blue in the face, and tried to explain has that women chose to be there, and even if she has what is that choice about, do you feel a women wants to stand in a club with men trying to grab a feel.  I talk and talk and attempt to share as much as i can, as if it changes one person’s thoughts, lets them think in a different way, isn’t that enough.

I am not an expert, I work in this area, I have carried out a lot of training in this area but mostly I am a woman who has had her body used in a way that didn't feel good, who has felt it was the only way to feel love, who has been broken to the point of no self-worth, emotionally and at times physically. I made a choice to engage in the choices I did but I also felt if it wasn’t for my body and what it could give I wouldn’t get back what I thought I needed at that time.

As a young women and a women the body is a constant battle ground, we battle enough without the expectations males put on us. I hear many times in the counselling space how women have come to hate their bodies due to the violence placed on them through sexual assault. What I also hear is the blaming of self – I shouldn’t have worn make up, I shouldn’t have walked that way home, I should have known. We live in a society where women are blamed, women need to make themselves safer, but why – oh yeah just to make sure that males doesn’t sexually assault us. How about we change that and men stop thinking it’s banter and stop being ignorant but realise where not here to be groped, where not here for your amusement, where here as an equal and the minute you make it banter we stop being that and we become an object and in being that object your assaulting us in more ways than you can imagine.

So the #MeToo campaign, let it be ours, stop with the other # from men, how do you make a difference but letting us women share what we need too, see the impact and that it happens to so many of us. Let our voices roar and hopefully someone out there will listen and start to make that change.

Empowering thinking.

I use this blog as a way to express my thinking that’s going on inside me and a way to document changes that have been occurring in my life, 2013 was a great year of change in terms of my career life, the year was started by gaining a counselling placement at a women’s based service in SE London, my role would be the volunteer counsellor and I would be working with women exiting street prostitution, I was offered a 3hr a week space at the service and started my year working with 3 women every week, the placement work was incredible and I was so pleased to work with such incredible women with story's of strength and courage but also sadness and pain. I volunteered for 8 months before decided to end my time here and that came about due to an incident with another worker where I was horrified by her behaviour towards me and her unprofessionalism. 

Sadly the incident I encountered with the women is one that I have encountered many times with other women, going back to my school years to obviously present day. It really set me off on a spiral of trying to understand the behaviours of women, something I have being doing anyway over the past four years when looking at my own life journey with myself and how I have acted and behaved. My journey of my own understanding started when I moved to London and met beard, he has strengthened me in ways I can’t even describe but not only that he has made me unearth a part of me I wasn't even aware of that part of me that believes in things at a deeper level and not just on a surface level, the biggest of that is how important I am as a women in today’s world – my feminist beliefs have really grew in me and made me open my eyes to the way women are treated in society and the objectification of the female form. 

With this I decided to apply for a course with an amazing organisation called Women and Girls network http://www.wgn.org.uk/about-us who are a women based service who believe in women healing women they work with women and girls who have been affected by all gender forms of violence and offer a range of therapeutic services from counselling to body work. The course I completed with them was Counselling and Therapeutic Interventions for working with women affected by gender based violence. Like my Counselling the course has given me greater insight into the impact women face in society and has definitely been of great learning curve for me as a professional. Today I finished writing my essay around feminist theory and empowerment models and similar to how I work already the main focus of the work is to empower the client to see the strength they have in themselves. When writing my essay today some of the key messages in feminist theory is around the women understanding the wider context in which they live and not holding the problem as an individual problem but a wider societal one. The three main components are around the women developing these beliefs in her as they have made taken away from her by her abuser and society. Whilst writing and studying the same message kept coming across that society and media impact on how women are treated and it just makes me frustrated that in 2014 were still fighting for gender based violence to be taken seriously and recognise its not the women’s fault but the male who is carrying out the violence. 
The empowerment model of therapy used is a beautiful model it just saddens me we need specific empowerment models when really why don’t humans empower each other, wouldn’t the world be a nicer place to live?