The group working on this article was formed from a ‘process’ or ‘community’ group who have been working collectively to address the issues laid out in the open letter. We began meeting once every two weeks beginning in September 2015 and have been meeting for about two years to work through these as a group. Later in the process we made the decision to begin thinking about functioning in an open facing way so that the left could benefit from what we believe are some of the useful conversations we have been having to help ourselves deal with what happened in our circles. We think this article, which won’t be all encompassing, could be one contribution to the much needed discourse on sexual violence on the left.

What follows are our responses to the three questions which are outlined in the original letter which was distributed to us. These provided a focus for our discussions. It was to the benefit of the process that the original questions posed to us by the support group provided such a good lens for exploring the issue of sexual violence. As such, the clarity of these questions made our task relatively simple and straightforward.

>> What factors prevent victims from sharing their experience, asking for support, or leaving the threatening situation they are in?

>> What factors in the social and political context support abusive and exploitative behaviour?

>> What structures need to be built up in order to prevent future incidents of sexualised violence and to support and empower people who were sexually violated?

>> Limiting factors

>> Challenging the assumptions that protect perpetrators

What factors prevent victims from sharing their experience, asking for support, or leaving the threatening situation they are in?

This question is asked over and over. A large degree of blame goes onto the victims of ongoing domestic and sexual violence. If only you had acted differently you could have prevented being targeted. Yet, we know, for most victims of abuse there are very material reasons why they don’t and, at times, simply cannot leave. There is a fear of not being believed or taken seriously, even by close friends. The worry of having their experiences misrepresented by others; feeling a loss of control over those experiences, which can exacerbate those feelings of loss of control and autonomy due to rape and/or sexual violence and prevent victims from ‘rocking the boat’.

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What factors in the social and political context support abusive and exploitive behaviour?

When considering the factors which contribute to the reproduction of abusive and exploitative behaviour we are confronted with a near staggering complexity. Sexual violence or sexualised violence is at once a deeply personal yet also depressingly ubiquitous experience. In response to the open letter we have discussed the structural and contextual factors for this particular case which sparked this process and, indeed, this article, but we must also understand what happened as specific to our own lives, friendships, alliances and group. As such, we have broken up our reasoning in terms of macro-scale, middle-scale and micro-scale factors.

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What structures need to be built up in order to prevent future incidents of sexualised violence and to support and empower people who were sexually violated?

In terms of the practice of those involved in the process, the main way in which the learning could reasonably be implemented on a wider level is through the political organisations we went on to be involved in. This includes extra-parliamentary left wing groups, campaigns, smaller base unions and other forms of organising. In many ways it is simpler to adopt and influence policies within democratic and left-oriented organisations which are relatively small rather than within larger structures such as larger trade unions, the university itself, workplace, Labour Party etc. where there is less political unity and commitment to non-state-led interventions into sexual violence. This is partially due to less legal constraints but is also an issue of the politics of these institutions.

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Limiting factors

As a group responding to an incidence of sexual violence we were limited throughout the process by issues of trust, the priorities and division of labour around the distribution of care and support work, as well as geographical and organisational constraints.

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Challenging the assumptions that protect perpetrators

The following text was written in the first few months of the process as a response to concerns being raised around the perpetrator’s need for support. We added it in here, as we believe that the arguments brought about for the need to sympathise with the perpetrator are commonly used to disarm attempts at holding them accountable for their actions.

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