The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at ECDV

Last week, Team Own My Life were at the European Conference on Domestic Violence (ECDV) in beautiful Barcelona.  Our CEO Natalie Collins joined sisters, Beverley Gilbert, Jo Critch and Lyndsey Vaughton to deliver their hope-filled symposium, Returning to our Feminist Roots during the conference.  Here she reflects on the week:

What a week it has been!  After delivering a workshop at ECDV two years ago in Reykjavik (Iceland), I attended this conference better prepared for three packed days where even Hermione Grainger with a time-turner couldn’t make it through a fraction of the sessions offered.  Reading the programme and deciding what to attend was, in itself, a four hour job (not an exaggeration!).

After a false start travelling to the Palau de Congressos de Barcelona (when the conference was at the Palau de la Música Catalana - who knew there could be so many Palaus!), I arrived on the first day, extremely sweaty, with an almost full green exercise ring on my Apple Watch (shout out to the two Australian women who wandered round the whole of the wrong Palau with me).

What ensued for me was three frustration-filled days, punctuated by brilliant conversations, sisterhood and a lot of laughter with my conference buddy Tim and others.  Or what could be called: the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good

It was wonderful to present alongside dear sisters! Lyndsey Vaughton has almost finished her PhD, exploring women’s first disclosures to police, health or social care. Dr Beverley Gilbert runs Cohort4, a beautiful organisation bringing women long-term hope and love in and she is also a Senior Lecturer at the University of Worcester.  Jo Critch runs the wonderful Feathers Futures in Great Yarmouth, a women’s centre open to all women.  Both organisations run Own My Life with women.

Our presentations built on one another’s. Lyndsey evidenced the challenges women face in reporting abuse. Beverley and Jo shared the ways women can be meaningfully supported, through open doors, love, peer mentoring and rejecting funding which compromises feminist principles. I finished up by taking us on a trip down the yellow brick road with Dorothy, to show how we can find our heart, brain and courage, and make our way back to our feminist home.

An off-programme gathering of the World Association of Resilience Professionals (or as we named it, the 1% club) convened by the magnificent Sherry Hamby was a joy to participate in with lovely women, including some from Esker House, another Own My Life organisation.  Within the session we reflected together on the struggle to connect with others at ECDV, how this is a feature rather than a bug for these sorts of events and what we can do to be part of changing that.

My conference buddy was Tim Woodhouse.  We’d previously met on Zoom, and I’ve been keen to cheer him on in his efforts to understand domestic abuse related suicide (his research can be found HERE).  Between laughing a lot with him, the ECDV Queens who I presented alongside and the women I spent time with, the good was Very Good!

The Bad

The number of sessions at the conference dedicated to risk and death was overwhelming.  The pioneering work of Karen Ingala Smith (more than 13 years ago) to bring dignity and honour to women killed by men seems to have become a well-paid industry dominated by people who rarely work with living women.  ECDV had session upon session about domestic homicide reviews, femicide, risk assessment, risk factors, risk reduction, risk prevention, risk-tiered systems, risk management, high-risk perpetration, risk management, risky decision making, mitigating the risks, at risk, of risk, risk screening… on and on it went. This could be understandable if we were seeing less men killing women, sadly it's not. Perhaps the starkest example of this "stream of death" was a conference poster about femicide; pretty young white women posed in body bags the writing on the breasts giving off "death porn" vibes.

And it gets worse.  As my conference buddy Tim's ECDV presentation explained, his research suggests that in England around 900 women a year are dying by suicide after their partner abused them.  All that focus on death and, not only are men killing women at the same rates as they always have; the person most likely to kill a woman abused by a man is themselves. 

This is particularly important because preventing suicide will never succeed through risk assessments, death porn awareness campaigns, or any other misery-inducing efforts; if a woman wasn’t suicidal before we do the umpteenth DASH risk assessment with her, she certainly could be afterwards. 

So many women tell us that Own My Life has saved their lives.  The combination of feminist consciousness raising and self-efficacy, along with the sisterhood, joy and hope that are core features of our model are all things that I’m hopeful Tim will be able to make part of his forthcoming PhD research (I wrote THIS back in March to reflect on suicides rates for women abused by men).

The Ugly

The ECDV venue was moved at last minute due to allegations made by multiple people against Ramon Flecha, a 78-year-old professor at Barcelona University who founded a research centre CREA in 1991 and four years later supported a female student, Lídia Puigvert, who had been sexually harassed by her professor.

Fast-forward 30+ years, and it turns out Professor Flecha had been accused twice previously by women (in 2004 and 2016).  The most recent allegations from 11 people "describe sexual, humiliating, and intimidating behavior that is not only intolerable and contrary to the University's code of ethics, but, if confirmed, could be criminal". CREA were ECDV’s Spanish conference partners and outrageously have been supportive of Ramon Flecha and tried to smear his accusers.  Most of the news articles and blogs about the situation are in Spanish, and although some contributors withdrew from attending as a result of the situation many of us arrived at ECDV unaware that some of those in attendance are supportive of Professor Fletcha and continue to malign the brave women who have accused him.

The irony of Lídia Puigvert delivering an ECDV keynote speech on consent after sharing a post explaining away students cleaning and cooking in Ramon Flecha's home and another post saying that those making allegations are "enjoying" destroying him. Another ECDV keynote speaker, Cristina Pulido, has confidently declared that the 11 people (and apparently the various others from 2004 and 2016) are liars conducting a smear campaign against Ramon Flecha.

ECDV has sadly ended up in the middle of all this, with those in support of Flecha making public statements giving themselves much greater power in ECDV than they really had, with those seeking justice for the women who have accused him of misusing his power then seeing ECDV as a key battleground in their efforts to bring accountability to this thrice accused professor and his supporters.

At a conference like this, with so many ways to intellectualise the issues, abusers and those they harm can become specimens to investigate.  But abusers walk amongst us, and so do those who support them.  They’re in our workplaces, families and communities.  It turns out they could also be on our organising committees and delivering our keynotes.  My hope is that as the practical demands of this conference end, those involved in decision making can put time and energy into reflecting on how things could be better in the future.

In conclusion

Starting my time at ECDV by arriving at the wrong venue is perhaps a parable for the conference itself. ECDV organisers, and those attending, do so with a huge commitment to making women's lives better, but somewhere along the way it seems we may have ended up in the wrong place.

As I stood back and reflected on the massive programme (hundreds and hundreds of presentations and posters), and considered the dominance of risk and femicide within the programme, I was reminded of THIS scene from the Deathly Hallows.  The heroes, Hermione, Ron and Harry have broken into Bellatrix le Strange's vault.  As they try to find a sword stored in the vault, they discover that she has placed a Gemino Curse on the vault; every time they touch a treasure it multiplies, over and over again, until there is a flood of treasure which threatens to crush them.  In the same way, it seems that in responding to different aspects of men’s violence (for instance trying to stop men killing women) the Gemino Curse afflicts us and we risk being crushed by the things that are indeed treasures which can positively impact women's lives. 

There is so much that we need to change! And so few answers on how we change it. As I chatted with different people, I repeatedly said that it seemed the conference needed a quota of joy; a requirement that at least 30% of presentations be wholly focussed on how we’re making women’s lives better.  And a requirement that at least 5 minutes of every presentation is dedicated to how the ideas or research are (or could) make women’s lives better.

I spoke within my presentation about the place of JOY in our work.

During the conference I really appreciated chatting with brilliant women like Sherry Hamby, Davina James-Hanman, and Deb Cartwright, who between them have around a century of experience making women’s lives better!  I was keen to learn from them about where things went wrong, how we have lost so much of the heart of the work, and what we can do to rediscover it.  I am convinced that by learning from the past (Davina’s chapter HERE helps with that) and spending more of our time in hope, joy and strength (Sherry Hamby’s Resilience Portfolio HERE is an important resource in this) we really can get to where we always wanted to be.

From the beginning, this work was established with one guiding question: how do we make women’s lives better?  Let’s hope that ECDV can be a place where we can get some answers to that!

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