Blog (thoughts and musings)

Ten years apart. Different countries. Different courts. The same message.

In 2016, the world reacted with fury when Brock Turner, a promising Stanford swimmer, received a six-month sentence after sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. The judge justified the leniency by focusing on Turner’s future, his age, and the “severe impact” prison would have on him. Turner ultimately served just three months.

The public outrage was not simply about one sentence. It was about what the sentence represented: a justice system that seemed more concerned with protecting the life chances of a young man than acknowledging the devastation inflicted on a woman whose life had been permanently altered.

Now, in 2026, here we are again.

This week in Hampshire, three teenage boys convicted of raping two girls, filming the assaults, and sharing the footage were spared custody altogether. The judge cited their youth, low intellectual capacity, ADHD diagnoses, and the need to avoid “unnecessary criminalisation”. (The Times)

Again, we are told to think about the boys’ futures.

Again, we are invited to sympathise with perpetrators because they are young, because prison may harm them, because we need to protect their ‘potential’.

Again, the violence done to girls is treated as secondary.

The victims’ statements tell the real story. One girl described feeling emotionally numb and suicidal. Another was recorded lying motionless while boys continued to assault her.

But even now, even after decades of campaigning around male violence against women and girls, even after #MeToo, even after endless public promises that rape will be treated seriously, the same cultural reflex remains embedded in our institutions: protect the boys.

The parallels with the Turner case are chilling. In both cases, public attention drifted toward the perpetrators’ prospects, families, education, mental state, and social standing. In both cases, the suffering of women and girls was somehow balanced against the inconvenience of accountability for men.

The infamous phrase from Brock Turner’s father  “20 minutes of action”  became symbolic of a culture that minimises sexual violence while centering male discomfort.

And what has changed since then?

Young men today are growing up immersed in an online ecosystem saturated with violent pornography, misogynistic influencers, sexual entitlement, and contempt for women. Girls are reporting increasing levels of harassment, coercion, choking, image-based abuse, and sexual violence in schools and social spaces. Yet when some boys act out that misogyny in the real world, the response from the justice system is still to ask whether punishment might derail their lives.

What about the girls’ lives?

What about the lifelong trauma, the fear, the mental health consequences, the collapse of trust, the interrupted education, the knowledge that your violation was filmed and shared for entertainment?

What message do these sentences send to survivors? What message do they send to boys watching online?

Certainly not that rape is a grave abuse of human dignity.

Certainly not that women and girls matter equally.

A justice system that consistently softens its response to male violence against women teaches society exactly whose futures count.

And we Women see that clearly.

The sentence in the Hampshire case should be urgently reviewed under the unduly lenient sentence scheme. These crimes involved rape, coercion, filming abuse, and the distribution of that abuse. They demanded a response that recognised the seriousness of the offences and the profound harm caused to the victims.

Instead, the court delivered another reminder that when men commit violence against women and girls, the system shows sympathy too often towards the perpetrators rather than survivors.

Enough.

Male violence against women is not a misunderstanding. It is not “boys being boys”. It is not an unfortunate mistake on the path to an otherwise promising future.

It is violence.

And until our courts treat it with the seriousness it deserves, women and girls will continue to receive the same devastating message: your suffering matters less than his potential.

Why the UK Needs the Equality Model Now

I’ve just returned from Paris, where I stood alongside hundreds of women, survivors, activists and allies marking ten years of France’s abolitionist law. It was not just a commemoration it was a glimpse of what is possible when a country decides, collectively, that women are not for sale.

What struck me most was not only the scale of the movement, but the clarity of its message: prostitution is not inevitable, and it is not neutral. It is a system rooted in inequality, sustained by demand, and experienced by women as a form of male violence.

In the UK, the conversation is shifting. The current government has acknowledged prostitution as part of the wider landscape of male violence against women and girls (MVAWG). That matters. Naming the harm is an important first step.

But naming is not enough.

The gap between recognition and action

Despite this recognition, the UK still fails to hold men accountable for creating demand. Men who attempt to buy access to women’s bodies are rarely robustly investigated or prosecuted. The burden, instead, continues to fall disproportionately on women many of whom are navigating poverty, coercion, migration, trauma, or addiction.

This contradiction sits at the heart of our current approach: we recognise prostitution as harmful, yet tolerate the very behaviour that drives it.

France and other countries adopting the Equality Model have taken a different path.

What the Equality Model does differently

The Equality Model (sometimes called the Nordic Model or Survivor Model) is built on a simple but transformative principle: those who are exploited should be supported, and those who exploit should be held to account.

In practice, that means:

• Decriminalising women in prostitution

• Providing meaningful, funded exit support

• Criminalising the purchase of sex

• Targeting pimps and traffickers

• Investing in long-term cultural change

In Paris, I heard directly from women whose lives had been transformed by this approach. One survivor described how access to exit services gave her and her daughter something previously out of reach: stability, safety, and a future. Housing, employment and  independence, these are not abstract ideals, but tangible outcomes of political will.

This is what it looks like when policy aligns with reality.

Culture change is possible

Perhaps most striking was the level of public support for the law in France now reported at over 90%. That kind of cultural shift doesn’t happen overnight. It is the result of sustained political leadership, survivor advocacy, and a refusal to accept that exploitation is inevitable.

It also challenges a persistent myth in the UK: that tackling demand is unrealistic or unenforceable.

And yet, countries like Sweden and France show us that it is both possible and effective. Where demand is addressed, trafficking decreases. Where women are supported, exits become viable. Where the law sends a clear signal, attitudes begin to change.

Listening to survivors

Throughout my time in Paris, one message came through again and again: change happened because survivors were heard.

Not as symbols. Not as statistics. But as experts.

They spoke not of “choice,” but of constraint. Not of empowerment, but of survival. They challenged the idea that prostitution can ever be separated from the inequalities - economic, racial, global that shape it.

If we are serious about addressing MVAWG in the UK, we must be serious about listening to those voices.

A call to act

The UK stands at a crossroads.

We can continue with a fragmented approach that acknowledges harm while enabling it. Or we can choose a model grounded in accountability, support, and equality.

The Equality Model is not a silver bullet. It requires investment, enforcement, and political courage. It demands that we confront uncomfortable truths about demand, entitlement, and the normalisation of buying sex.

But it also offers something else: a pathway out.

A pathway where women are supported to leave prostitution when they want to.
A pathway where men are no longer entitled to purchase access to women’s bodies.
A pathway where we align our laws with our stated commitment to ending male violence against women and girls.

As our French sisters told us at the close of the conference: we did it—and you can too.

The question is no longer whether change is possible.

It’s whether we are willing to demand it.

5th February 2026

When Powerful Men Matter More Than Women’s Safety

Again and again, we are told that the abuse of women by powerful men is an aberration. An unfortunate exception. A shock. A scandal.
And yet the pattern is so consistent that denial has become absurd.

Jeffrey Epstein did not “slip through the cracks.”
Andrew Windsor was not “unaware.”

These men were protected not despite what they did to women, but because of what they represented to the systems around them: money, influence, access, status, continuity.

What their stories expose is not just individual corruption, but a deeper social truth: in a patriarchal society, men’s value is measured by power, and women’s value is negotiable.

Power Is a Shield.

Violence against women is not punished consistently. It is filtered through a hierarchy of worth.

When an ordinary man harms a woman, the system may, (sometimes not often enough) respond.
When a powerful man harms a woman, the system asks a different question:

What would it cost us to hold him accountable?

If the answer is too much politically, economically, reputationally  then women’s testimony becomes inconvenient, destabilising, even dangerous.

This is why Epstein was protected for years.
This is why his victims were dismissed as unreliable, greedy, or complicit.
This is why powerful institutions closed ranks.

Power is a continuum, so its not just royalty or billionaires protected but business leaders, community leaders, and police officers.

Andrea Dworkin was clear that violence against women must be understood not as isolated wrongdoing, but as a structural feature of male dominance. In Letters from a War Zone, she situates men’s violence within a broader political economy that depends on women’s disposability:

“We see a major trade in women. We see the torture of women as a form of entertainment. We see women treated as things, as commodities. And this is the foundation of male power.”
Andrea Dworkin.

Violence is tolerated not because it is invisible, but because it is useful. It keeps women cautious, compliant, and expendable, especially when the men involved are deemed “too important” to lose.

The Sacrifice of Women to Preserve Male Power

Dworkin insisted that women are not merely harmed under patriarchy; they are traded.

“Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children..”
Andrea Dworkin,

This is not because all men are individually violent, but because the system itself is structured to absorb women’s suffering while protecting men’s status.

When women accuse powerful men, they are not simply naming abuse. They are threatening networks of male loyalty, institutional reputation, and economic interest. The response is therefore swift and predictable: disbelief, minimisation, character assassination.

Women are expected to carry the cost and quietly.

The Myth of the Indispensable Man

We are often told that these men are “monsters,” as if their violence places them outside society rather than at its centre.

But monsters are feared.
These men were celebrated.

They were invited into palaces, parliaments, and boardrooms.
They were consulted, defended, protected.

Germaine Greer dismantled this mythology decades ago, particularly the fantasy of male exceptionalism  the belief that some men are simply too valuable to be held accountable.

She wrote:

“Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”
Germaine Greer.

This is a confronting statement, but a clarifying one. What Greer exposes is not personal animosity, but structural contempt a system in which women’s pain is tolerated, even normalised, in service of male power and male solidarity.

When a woman threatens a powerful man’s position, she is treated not as a victim, but as a problem.

Why Women Will Never Be Safe Until We Are Valued as Equals

This is the truth we keep circling but rarely name: women’s safety is impossible in a society that does not value women equally.

Not symbolically.
Not rhetorically.
Materially.

As long as:

• men’s reputations matter more than women’s bodies

• men’s futures matter more than women’s trauma

• men’s power matters more than women’s truth

violence against women will be managed, minimised, and explained away, not prevented.

We can change laws.
We can introduce safeguarding policies.
We can issue apologies after the fact.

But unless we confront the underlying value system one that treats women as collateral damage in the preservation of male dominance women will continue to be unsafe, particularly around the most powerful men.

Belief Is Not Enough, Power Must Be Redistributed

We are told to “believe women.”
But belief without consequence is meaningless.

What women need is not sympathy, but structural courage: the willingness to lose powerful men in order to protect women.

Until society is prepared to say:

No man is so valuable that women must be harmed to keep him

then nothing fundamental will change.

This is not a failure of awareness or a lack of evidence.
It is a question of priorities.

And until women are valued as fully human not expendable, not negotiable, not sacrificial the violence will continue to be predictable, systemic, and defended.

What This Means, And Why This Work Matters

Ending violence against women is not about better optics, stronger statements, or reputational risk management. It is about changing what and who we value.

My work with organisations, institutions, and partnerships starts from this premise: violence against women is sustained not only by individual perpetrators, but by cultures that prioritise male power, comfort, and status over women’s safety and dignity.

If we are serious about prevention, we must be willing to interrogate:

• how male entitlement is reproduced and protected

• how women’s harm is minimised to preserve influence and hierarchy

• and how institutions repeatedly choose powerful men over vulnerable women

Until we are prepared to challenge the systems that excuse, enable, and reward men’s abuse, women will continue to pay the price.

📩 Let’s talk — sally@sallyJconsulting.co.uk

21st September 2025

Why the VAWG Sector Must Be Explicitly Anti-Racist and Challenge Supremacist Ideologies

Last week, I attended the CWASU Summer School, an excellent and intensive course exploring supremacist movements in the UK and their implications for women’s rights. The sessions examined far-right networks, fundamentalist movements, the rise of the Manosphere and Incel ideology, and the ways these intersect with male violence against women and girls. What follows are my reflections on why we must be explicitly anti-racist and committed to challenging supremacist ideologies in all their forms

The VAWG sector has long been at the forefront of tackling violence, abuse, and exploitation. But in today’s climate where supremacist movements are emboldened, misogyny is mainstreaming through digital spaces, and far-right ideologies are intertwining with other forms of fundamentalism, our sector faces a pivotal choice. We can either limit our focus to the symptoms of male violence, or we can confront its deeper roots in racist, patriarchal, and supremacist ideologies.

To do the latter, we must make a clear and explicit commitment: the VAWG sector must be anti-racist and actively challenge supremacist ideology.

Supremacy as a Unifying Thread

Whether we are talking about far-right nationalism, Islamist fundamentalism, Christian or Sikh fundamentalism, or the Manosphere, the common thread is supremacy. Supremacy is the belief in dominance and hierarchy of one race, one religion, one sex, one nation, or one way of being. These ideologies construct power through the subjugation of others, and women and girls are always among the first targets.

When the VAWG sector fails to name and challenge supremacy, we risk tackling only the violence at the surface while leaving intact the ideologies that fuel it.

Why Anti-Racism is Non-Negotiable

Racism is not just an “adjacent” issue to sex-based violence. It is a structuring force of violence. We see this in:

• Far-right movements in the UK that mobilise around racial hatred, while domestic abuse is rife among their ranks.

• Islamist fundamentalist networks that impose gender apartheid while weaponising racist narratives of victimhood.

• Christian and Sikh fundamentalist groups that police women’s bodies, while often colluding with nationalist projects.

If we do not take an explicitly anti-racist stance, we leave space for racist logics to creep into policy and practice. For example, the UK government’s Prevent strategy has too often securitised Muslim communities in ways that stigmatise rather than protect. The result? Women’s real safety is sidelined while racism is reinforced.

Linking Private and Public Violence

One of the most important insights from research on radicalisation is the continuum between private and public violence. The same dynamics of control, entitlement, and domination that underpin domestic abuse also drive supremacist politics. The statistic that two in five men arrested in the 2024 UK riots had prior reports for domestic abuse is a stark reminder: violence against women is not separate from extremist violence; it is entangled with it.

By being explicitly anti-racist, the VAWG sector can hold governments, institutions, and communities accountable for addressing the root causes of both private and public forms of supremacy.

The Manosphere and Mainstreaming of Supremacy

The Manosphere illustrates how supremacist ideology mutates and spreads. Online spaces that begin with complaints about dating or “men’s rights” quickly spiral into racialised conspiracy theories, anti-feminist vitriol, and violent fantasies. Andrew Tate’s global influence shows how easily misogyny, racism, and authoritarianism converge.

If our sector does not challenge supremacist ideology as a whole, we risk underestimating the threat of these movements and their impact and influence on young men and boys, and by extension, on women and girls.

Towards an Ethically Grounded Response

Being explicitly anti-racist in the VAWG sector means:

• Naming supremacy as a root cause of sex-based violence.

• Resisting securitised approaches that weaponise women’s safety to justify racist practices.

• Standing in solidarity with migrant women, and women in minoritised communities whose safety is often treated as expendable.

• Building prevention work that recognises the continuum of violence across the private and public sphere.

• Refusing co-option by political projects, left or right, that undermine women’s rights in the name of nationalism, religion, or security.

Conclusion

The VAWG sector cannot afford to treat anti-racism and anti-supremacy as optional extras. They are core to our mission. Supremacist ideologies whether far-right, fundamentalist, or rooted in male grievance pose a direct threat to women’s safety, freedom, and equality.

To protect women and girls, we must challenge not only the acts of violence but also the racist, patriarchal ideologies that sustain them. An explicitly anti-racist, anti-supremacist stance is not just political clarity, it is a matter of survival.

📩 Let’s talk — sally@sallyJconsulting.co.uk

9th September 2025

Beyond Awareness: Turning Feminist Values into Everyday Practice

In our sector, it’s common to hear organisations declare their commitment to feminist values.
They appear in strategies, sit proudly on websites, and are spoken about in meetings.

But here’s the truth:
Awareness isn’t enough. Statements alone don’t change women’s lives.

If we are to end male violence against women, feminist principles cannot sit on the sidelines as abstract ideals.
They must guide the everyday, the decisions we make, the services we design, the funding we provide, and the systems we hold accountable.

The trap of values without action

Too often, feminist principles remain aspirations rather than actions.
They’re admired but not applied.

For example:

• An organisation may say it is “survivor-centred” while still designing services around existing institutional structures instead of survivors’ lived realities.

• Commissioners may claim to value “equity” but continue to funnel resources away from specialist women’s organisations, especially those led by and for Black and minoritised women.

• Multi-agency work may “recognise perpetrators” in theory but still put the onus on survivors to manage their own safety.

This isn’t about bad intent, but about the dangerous gap between what we say and what we do.

What feminist practice looks like in action

1. Decision-making

• Survivors’ voices must not just be heard but shape the agenda from the start.

• Every choice should be tested against a simple feminist question:
  Does this increase women’s safety and hold men who use violence accountable?

2. Service design

• Services should dismantle barriers for women, not expect them to adapt to broken systems.

• Intersectionality must be non-negotiable. Violence is never experienced in isolation from racism, ableism, homophobia, classism, or immigration status.

3. Commissioning

• Funding must recognise the expertise of women’s services, especially grassroots and minoritised organisations.

• Contracts should enable collaboration and stability, not pit services against each other in endless competition.

Embedding feminist values in daily work

Feminist principles should live and breathe in the everyday:

• Language that never excuses or minimises men’s violence, and never blames women.

• Policies that protect staff who may themselves be survivors of abuse.

• Partnership spaces that reflect on power and privilege, not just tick off agenda items.

• Accountability that focuses on perpetrators, not on the coping strategies of women.

This is what it means to live the values we claim to hold.

Feminist + collaborative = systemic change

Feminist practice alone can be radical but isolating.
Collaboration alone can be efficient but shallow.

Together, they can transform systems:

• Power is shared more equally.

• Survivors’ needs shape not only services but entire systems.

• Men who use violence face coordinated, consistent consequences.

Awareness is only the beginning.
Practice is where change happens.

If your organisation wants to move beyond words and embed feminist principles into decision-making, service design, and commissioning, I can help.

📩 Let’s talk — sally@SallyJconsulting.co.uk

18th August 2025

Collaboration that Delivers: How Partnerships Can Truly Hold Perpetrators to Account

In our sector, we talk a lot about collaboration. Multi-agency meetings, partnership boards, memorandums of understanding — all designed to bring organisations together around a shared goal: ending male violence against women.

But here’s the truth: too often, these structures exist without real follow-through. We meet, we talk, we share updates… and yet survivors still face barriers to support, and perpetrators remain unchallenged.

If we are serious about ending male violence against women, we need collaboration that delivers — partnerships that are bold, accountable, and relentlessly focused on outcomes.

Why “good meetings” aren’t enough

I’ve been in countless partnership settings where everyone is dedicated and hard-working, but the structure doesn’t demand follow-through. Actions are noted but not tracked. Perpetrators’ behaviour is discussed but not directly addressed. Survivors’ safety plans are agreed but not consistently monitored.

Collaboration without accountability risks becoming performative, it feels good, but it doesn’t shift the ground beneath us.

The three essentials of collaboration that delivers

1. Shared, measurable goals
Every partner should know exactly what “success” looks like,  not just in broad terms like “reduce harm” but in measurable outcomes: increased survivor safety scores, reduced repeat offending, improved arrest-to-charge ratios.

2. Accountability mechanisms
If an action is agreed, it needs a named lead, a deadline, and a process for follow-up. Without this, actions evaporate. Accountability isn’t about blame, it’s about ensuring commitments turn into change.

3. Perpetrator focus
Too often, the system orbits around survivors’ responses to violence, not the behaviour of the perpetrator. Effective partnerships keep the focus firmly where it belongs: on the person causing harm.

What this looks like in practice

When partnerships operate with impact:

• Survivors see consistent, joined-up support.

• Perpetrators face a clear, coordinated response.

• Organisations trust each other to deliver, because commitments are met.

It’s not about being adversarial, it’s about being purposeful.

The work to end male violence against women is too important for “polite” partnerships. We need collaboration that challenges, questions, and delivers.

If your organisation or partnership wants to strengthen its approach, I can help you build the structures, relationships, and processes that make accountability unavoidable.

📩 Let’s talk — sally@sallyJconsulting.co.uk