White Ribbon UK is proud to have the support of Workie Ticket Theatre Company for White Ribbon Day 2022.

Simon Philips, Community Engagement Officer for the Leeds Jewish Housing Association and Director of Interfaith for the Leeds Jewish Representative Council, introduces the concept Shalom Bayit, meaning ‘Peaceful Home’ and signifying completeness, wholeness, and fulfillment, central to marriage and family life in Judaism.

I ask myself, “Why didn’t I notice that stuff?”.  The answer is, of course, because it’s in my culture. And it’s in deep. It’s the “norm” and it’s “acceptable”, even now in 2020.

It’s hard to find any silver lining in the Covid-19 pandemic which is affecting so many people in the UK and the rest of the world, but one glimmer might be that it’s shaking up our ’normal’ view of the world; encouraging us to reflect on many things that we’d prefer not to think about and bringing home the reality that we live in a very fragile and interdependent world.

Once you have been given an awareness of the gendered nature of violence in society – in the sense that the vast majority of it is enacted by men – it is something which is difficult to unsee. It starts to become clear that different cases and different forms of violence are actually frequently interconnected, even if they may take place in very different contexts. Newspaper headline after headline starts to tell a specific story, and it is not one of ‘isolated incidents’. They tell a story of attempts to assert, or reclaim, masculine power and control – be that against women, other men, children, animals, the environment…even against ourselves, in terms of the range of self-destructive behaviours that our inability to meet unattainable standards of masculinity can feed into.

In addition to being a White Ribbon Ambassador, Chris Lloyd is a Senior Lecturer in Law in the School of Law at Oxford Brookes University. Chris researches into, publishes on, and teaches Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, with a particular focus on sexual offences viewed through the lens of post-structural and feminist theory. He has published in journals such as Law Text Culture, the Australian Feminist Law Journal, Social and Legal Studies, Information & Communications Technology Law, and Feminist Legal Studies.

Institutional Profile | Research

Steve Garrett is a Cardiff (Wales)-based social entrepreneur, writer, poet and musician (aka ‘Stainless Steve’) who has a long-standing interest in men’s issues. He runs a men’s group in Cardiff; and, as well as being a White Ribbon Ambassador, is involved with the Good Lad Initiative https://www.goodladinitiative.com.