Constructive criticism vs potshots
They say if accounts are being created to attack you, you are doing something right
As I have heavily documented, I tweeted about a vigil and my life was upended. I never had any intention to become an activist and as such, my learning curve has been pretty huge. My heart has been in the right place, but I have had some amazingly bad missteps. At the beginning of the Reclaim These Streets movement, I had an idea about physically reclaiming your street with a video; which led to many women immediately pointing out how stupid and dangerous that was. I also took credit for things other women had been working on for years in my excitement and ignorance of their graft. I hope that in the two years I’ve been working as an advocate; I have learned to take a beat. To not tweet things immediately whilst enraged and alert media to things that the victim may not want the papers to cover; and also to not assume that things are always exactly as they seem or that sarcasm reads well on twitter. The last one, I still need reminding of constantly.
What I have definitely learned is that there is a huge difference between the people that give you the benefit of the doubt and think that you have misspoken or could know more about a topic and those that are just trying to tear you down to discredit or embarrass you.
When Samsung premiered an ad for their headphones about “night owls” and showed a young woman setting her alarm for 2 am to run through the city streets with headphones in and have a little flirt with a man on a bike behind her; it was in the wake of Ashling Murphy being killed while jogging and my own experiences with men interfering with me whilst running in Camden. I proclaimed the ad “tone deaf.” Someone that read my commentary wrote in to Reclaim These Streets about the myriad of ways that deafness was associated with ignorance and why he felt my comments were disparaging. I took in his feedback, heard him, listened and adjusted my language to discontinue using that phrase. I also had to let him know that I had done an interview with the Press Association using the phrase and that the next day it would be on hundreds of websites and in newspapers.
I appreciated his approach and felt badly that there was no way to take back the interview on the wire. I tweeted about the exchange and have used it as an example of when I learned from someone’s experience and how it costs me nothing to change my language and it is always evolving.
Now compare that to this last week when the main route of attacking my work and advocacy has been that I have used the term “child porn.” Clearly, the training that some law enforcement has had has been that ‘child pornography’ should never be used and that child sexual abuse material is the terminology that should be used. I was not aware. And the tweets attacking me were in no way trying to let me adjust or learn, they were just about tearing me down and discrediting me. Clutching at pearls that I was not aware that the colloquial term is considered problematic is disingenuous.
Through my own research I have found this article from the NPCC about why language matters: https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/news/why-language-matters/child-sexual-abuse-material.
To imply that I was supportive of child sexual abuse material is ridiculous and continues the themes of the police and law enforcement twitter bods trying to attack critics rather than address the problems in their own back yard. These are also accounts that are created to attack me and other women that are critical of misogyny in the police thought to be using female avatars to seem more personable and less obvious. This account also attacked Dr Rebecca Tidy and others.
No one is ever going to take criticism from someone publicly calling them epithets or making fun of them. I am open to constantly evolving my language and learning from critiques; but the glee and the “gotcha” element from police is embarrassing and quite frankly doesn’t make the point you think it does.
If only the training the police are meant to recieve on racism, sexism and homophobia landed as well. A girl can but hope.