Accountability

For the last six weeks, in fact since I’ve come back from the Winter holidays, I’ve had a post Christmas, depths of winter, thick dark cloud over my work. I’ve not wanted to think about poverty, about violence, about trauma, I’ve wanted with every fibre of my being to lay on a sunlounger with a cocktail in one hand and a trashy book in the other. Winter is never the easiest season, but spring is coming, and without being too much of a cliche, some plants are beginning to push through.

I’ve been working with women with experience of perpetrator suicide about institutional betrayal and shame, I’ve been talking to services and women about violence and service responses, and I’ve been talking to young people and staff about education and young people where there is substance use at home (and their experiences of domestic abuse, poverty, underemployment). And let me tell you- it’s not good. Simple things like consistency, telling people what’s going to happen and when, being honest, transparent, showing up for meetings and being sensitive to trauma are simply not happening in the way they should by the services people rely on. People are made to feel small, ashamed, anxious. Services are causing harm. Deep harm. We cannot ask people to ask for help and when they do, harm them. We turn away and we fail them. This is more than money and more than staffing, there is something deep happening in our systems. We need to think about what we need to unearth before we can move forward.

I’ve been wrestling with what to do with this- where do we put this “troubled knowledge” when institutions keep letting us down? When communities fail us? Where do we put the anger and the despair? How do we move to accountability? To looking at our role in perpetuating or reducing harm?

This is all happening in the context of the Epstein files; and if we needed reminding that powerful men do not care about women and girls, there it is in black and white.

I’ve been reading about dignity enhancing services, and shame aware practice and just recently, institutional courage. Alongside this, I’ve been thinking a lot about the work within, about slowing down, and about imagination and the future, about the fact that hope is a muscle. We must strengthen it, every day, we must return to why we are doing the work of social transformation- because we believe in change. We believe in hope. That we can really hear a new world breathing.

And then.. today, a glimmer of hope. In “how to fall in love with the future”, there is a line that landed right in my heart. What if now, what if this very moment, right now, a corner was turned. I’m writing this hurriedly after seeing the news flash up about Andrew. About accountability. Because I don’t want to lose that glimmer of hope, and I don’t want you to either. Imagine, right now, if this really was a moment that meant something. Wouldn’t that be something? And what if there was another moment somewhere far away, and another one right here, and in between that, all these moments shot up like snowdrops in the frost. Wouldn’t that be something? What a thing that would be.

What else I’m up to:

My friend and colleague Megan and I are running a programme of workshops about the systems, theory and practice of participation on the 13th, 20th and 27th May online. We’ll explore what participation means, how it feels for people who participate in projects, where power sits in systems, and then turn to look at the ethics and tensions of participation in our work.  Find out more