Teaching Moments

I swore I would never be in front of a classroom...

On Monday, I travelled to Leeds Beckett University to deliver my (now annual) lecture to final year events management students. It was my third time meeting (soon to be Doctor) Michelle Lanham’s students.

The first time I delivered the lecture, it was October of 2021 and I had only just started feeling comfortable calling myself an activist. It also happened to be the night before “Girls Night In” when female students were boycotting nightlife to protest the slew of spiking incidents and the lack of response from police and the government to student’s outrage. It was the very first time I was in front of a group of students, and it was not lost on me that I always bragged that I was the only one of my friends from home who wasn’t an educator, that I was absolutely not following in my mom’s footsteps.

It was an emotional lecture and later, Michelle emailed me a message that I printed out and had to hand every time I felt like I was wasting my time or screaming into the void. It was tangible proof that the younger women I met and spoke to were compelled to act.

And then last year when I went back, my story and the story of Reclaim These Streets had dramatically moved on. Cressida Dick was no longer at the helm of the Metropolitan Police. We had beaten the Met in High Court which ruled that they had violated our human right to protest. My experience as an activist and a woman in the public eye had moved on in many ways, including quite a bit of abuse and being involved in studies about online hate.

It also included being the victim of impersonation and having a fake only fans account made of me which was sent to my father. What being the victim and subject of the news rather than the commentator was like. And how I was able to translate what happened to me into a petition with 80,000 signees as well as a meeting with the head of women’s safety at Instagram. How I have learned to use the platform I have been given to amplify the voices of women of colour that are not given the attention that I am. The responsibility I have to victims and the weight of that responsibility, as well as the toll that the work takes on my mental health as well as the women I am inspired by and have had the privilege to meet and work with.

And once again, the responses from the students were immediate and effusive. The discussions were intense, interesting and nuanced. And theses are the students that will be running events all over the country for the next fifteen years. The questions about only having women on security or how you decide what companies you want to work for or if drug testing at festivals is good for women’s safety were all worth their own debates.

Finding out how many of their dissertations were inspired by my lecture keeps me going for another six months of banging my head against walls within the Met with seemingly no impact.

I love how much work Michelle does to get people like me in front of her kids. It reminds me of the lengths my mom would go to for her kids. The care, the audacity, and the belief in her students is brilliant. Not to mention that Michelle came armed with a puppy care package for me this year.

After Leeds Beckett, I was invited to University of East London’s criminology course, and back to Penn State, my alma mater where I spoke to a class on Cultural Aspects of the Media. And every time, the reactions are not what I am expecting. The questions inevitably give me a new way of thinking about how and why I campaign for women’s safety and police reform.

Obviously, when Michelle invited me back this year, I was keen to return. Updating the presentation reminds me of how much has actually happened in the past two and a half years. Testifying to the Casey Review, the horrors of David Carrick, applying for the London Policing Board, my TEDx, fighting a whistleblowing charity for not appreciating female whistleblowers, and not accepting Mark Rowley’s paltry PR attempts at reform.

The students at Leeds Beckett remind me of how many routes there are to progress. Everything I do won’t be a tsunami of coverage or result in heads rolling; but every student that is compelled to question how they can make the attendee of their events moving forward safer gets more women home safe.

I received this on Monday as I travelled back to London and know that my mom would have been knowingly smirking at my declarative statements about never being an educator.