Zero Tolerance — It’s always time for prevention

Zero Tolerance interns Saffron Roberts and Heather Farley write about what their organisation is doing for 16 Days of Activism. They give us an insight into the importance of doing primary prevention work to eliminate violence against women and girls.

Who are we?

We are Zero Tolerance’s two Project Support Interns: Saffron is a Gender and Culture MScR student at the University of Edinburgh, and Heather is a Gender, Peace and Security MSc student at the London School of Economics.

Who are Zero Tolerance, and what do they do?

Zero Tolerance are a primary prevention violence against women and girls organisation. Primary prevention works to eradicate violence against women and girls by tackling its root cause: gender inequality. It works as a long-term strategy to prevent violence before it has the chance of happening. It does this by challenging attitudes, values and structures that sustain inequality and violence. Our Time for Prevention animation aims to explain the importance of primary prevention in eradicating violence against women and girls.

Zero Tolerance’s work around primary prevention focuses on challenging attitudes and structures, on various levels. We work with children and young people through our You Can Be campaign and our Under Pressure training. Though gendered perspectives are essential in education, we also recognise that primary prevention means so much more than just education, and a range of activities must take place on many different levels of society, with many different audiences, in order for primary prevention to work. The importance of this work is reinforced by the stark results reported by the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration and the charity Barnardo’s Scotland, who found that cases of child sexual exploitation (CSE) were found in 27 of the 32 local authorities across Scotland. Thus, when educating young people, we must remain committed to education of prevention whilst avoiding placing all of the onus onto them to eradicate violence against women and girls, and maintaining awareness that this is something they may already have been exposed to.

To compliment the educational angle, we also work to influence national policy and strategy, for example through policy consultations, such as our recent response to the National Advisory Council of Women and Girls’ survey on creating an intersectional gender architecture, to ensure a gendered perspective is mainstreamed at all levels of society.

Whilst education impacts the young people of society, and policy work impacts the ‘high level’ governmental structures, our work with the media aims to address how mainstream media outlets often contribute to wider gender inequality. Our work involves collaboration and consultation striving towards a more gender equal Scottish media. It is our aim that reporting of violence against women is more representative, conscientious, and responsible, encouraged and enforced through our IPSO recommended guidelines.

Zero Tolerance’s wider work provides an important contribution to primary prevention of violence against women and girls through working closely with various sectors. This is exemplified in our early years work; this campaigning recently involved a collaboration with storyteller Mara Menzies during Book Week Scotland. Together we produced six stereotype-free stories in the form of podcasts. All of these stories are available on our website here. Our campaigning in the early years continues with our You Can Be campaign in nursery settings. If you are interested in getting involved, sign-ups for nurseries and practitioners can be found here.

What are we doing during the 16 Days?

During this year’s 16 Days of Activism, we are running a variety of online engagement events, including blogs from our previous Write to End VAW bursary winners, the long-anticipated Violence Unseen Reimagined campaign, our live Write to End VAW in conversation event with the Rosey Project for media workers and journalism students on the 9th December, alongside many other exciting things. Check out our social media pages for more events, information, and resources.

The work that we are doing during the 16 Days of activism is just a snapshot of the impactful work that Zero Tolerance, and other feminist organisations in Scotland, are doing to reduce gender inequality, and thus violence against women and girls. Through activities like gaining more nursery sign-ups for our stereotype-free Early Years campaign, providing feminist responses to government consultations, and having our media guidelines recommended by IPSO, we are contributing to promoting gender equality within society.

So what do we do, as interns?

Our position at Zero Tolerance allows both of us to support the rest of the team in various capacities. We often write blogs for campaigns such as the 16 Days of Activism, we support other team members with research, policy consultations, and media work. For example, recently Saffron featured on Engender’s #OnTheEngender podcast to talk about the reporting of domestic abuse in the media, using the results of her media monitoring research.

We both have very keen interests in intersectionality, and thus working in primary prevention of violence against all women is something we are extremely passionate about. The two of us strongly believe that to eliminate violence against women, we must also recognise the importance of eradicating other forms of inequality and oppression.

This led both of us to explore interesting, if unexplored, areas of VAWG prevention in our personal projects. Saffron focused on finding out about the way young people learn about sex, while Heather focused on increasing understanding of Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans women’s experiences of gender based violence, in order to better inform Zero Tolerance’s work going forward. Both sets of data will be ready for publishing in 2021, so if either of these projects pique your interest, watch this space for more information.

The two of us feel so privileged to be able to contribute to this kind of impactful work that aims to end gender inequality, because a world without gender inequality is a world without violence against women and girls, and it’s one we want to live in.