Article
Culture
Masculinity
5 min read

Russell Brand and the bystanders: how to say enough is enough

When calling out misogyny, low standards are expected of men. Tiffany Bluhm assesses the ‘Say Maaate’ campaign and explores bystander intervention. Part of the Problem with Men series.

Tiffany Bluhm is a speaker and the author of Prey Tell: Why We Silence Women Who Tell the Truth and How Everyone Can Speak Up. She speaks and writes at the intersection of justice and faith for conferences, churches, and companies.

Three young men sit on a couch. One is leering at a phone while the others look on hesitantly
The 'Say Maaate' interactive video encourages users to pick a moment to act.
Mayor of London.

 In the wake of headlines filling our news feed reporting a story, yet again, of a pop culture icon taking advantage of women, be it Russell Brand or “That 70’s Show” star, Danny Masterson, we’re quick to say “enough is enough,” but perhaps the question to ask is “how do we stop it?” What standards are we expecting of men as individuals and as a collective whole? How will they self-edit their interactions with women? What do we expect of men in the workplace, at the gym, at church, or in the public square? We know what we don’t want them to do, leverage their power, privilege, or platform at a woman’s expense, but that’s an undeniably low bar. What could they do to stop each other before their actions get out of hand? 

Before heinous stories of sexual violence are aired on the BBC or CNN, we’re holding the communal line of what we’ll accept from men. 

After learning of the ‘Say Maaate’ campaign—a public information campaign inviting male mates to call each other out when they witness misogynistic tendencies toward women without jeopardizing the friendship thus jeopardizing the influence on each other—I recognized its brilliance lies in its interception of misconduct before it gains momentum or is considered high stakes. Before heinous stories of sexual violence are aired on the BBC or CNN, we’re holding the communal line of what we’ll accept from men, be it sexist jokes or public harassment. This endeavor, which includes bystander intervention, where those within eyeshot or earshot will attempt to distract and intervene in a potentially hazardous situation when men assert unsolicited dominance or advances toward women, is so successful that it’s employed by the United States military and countless higher education universities and colleges in the States. It puts the onus not on the woman impacted during the encounter, but on those around her, to step up and intervene at the first sign of a power imbalance, ranging from a man standing too close, to a woman darting her eyes to avoid eye contact, to outright sexual and verbal harassment. 

Bystander intervention invites the bystander to disrupt the moment, and after the moment has passed, confront the antagonist with either the benefit of the doubt, “maaate,” if deserving, or a “Man, she didn’t like that, read the room.” Lastly, it beckons the bystander to check on the woman who was the recipient of unwanted harassment. Bystander intervention provides much-needed boundary reminders of what we will and won’t accept in a society where the moral arc of the universe desperately needs to bend toward justice. This practice refuses to normalize women’s subjugation or sexualization, it offers a lifeline where there hasn’t been one before, with women left to their own defences against men with no intention of respecting them.  

I feared the ramifications of speaking up against a man with more clout than I. 

Interestingly, men with power—financial, organizational, political, celebrity—perceive themselves to be more attractive, assume women want them, and sexualize interactions with women. In a world where women are often playing by men’s rules, this makes for disastrous outcomes. Far too many women fear they’ll lose access to their place of perceived or actualized power if they speak up for themselves, or other women, who’ve been maligned, even slightly, by men with power and poor intentions. In my own experience, I feared the ramifications of speaking up against a man with more clout than I. How would this affect my social and professional standing in my community? Would others perceive that I have an axe to grind when that wasn’t the case? Would they frame me as prudish? Would they assume I asked for it? Would they assume I’m trying to unnecessarily take down a “good guy.” Instead of speaking up when the stakes were small, after an off-handed comment, sexist joke, or a lingering hug, I assumed this is just how it is, boys will be boys. If I want to get by in this world, I must put up with it. 

If only the men listening would have thrown him a “maaate.”  

Research shows that this pompous approach men exhibit toward women starts on the playground in primary school, gains steam in the locker room in secondary school, cements itself in university culture, (what Americans refer to as “frat culture”) and before we know it, twentysomething men are carrying this toxic idea of what it means to engage women into adult life, and further, it’s celebrated, as was the case of Brand’s public persona. Too often harassment and misogynistic tendencies of any sort equate to validation of masculinity. In this line of thinking, the subtext is that women exist to be dominated, harassed, or taken advantage of for the sheer pleasure of men. This is the genius of bystander intervention; it swiftly reckons with the subtext of a culture hellbent on letting men get away with whatever they want and whoever they want. 

He addresses her harassers, beckoning them to examine their own lives rather than fixate on hers. 

While the Christian church is no stranger to sexual trysts or infractions by men of the cloth, the ethos of Jesus regards women as worthy not of subjugation nor sexual harassment, but respect and dignified engagement. He modeled this respect and casts a vision for women to find solace and safety in men, never harm. 

A great example of bystander intervention in history starts with pious religious leaders attempting to trap the counter-cultural rabbi Jesus by throwing a woman at his feet, alleging she engaged in adultery, a crime, at the time, worthy of public stoning. A clear imbalance of power, with a woman’s life as collateral for trapping Jesus, the religious leaders wondered if he might keep allegiance to the law or break from it. They made the encounter about Jesus; Jesus centered the encounter on protecting the woman who’d been dragged to the public square. Jesus first intervenes by writing in the sand as his answer to the question posed by the leaders. Her physical safety is of utmost importance as evidenced by his actions. Then, he addresses her harassers, beckoning them to examine their own lives rather than fixate on hers. Finally, he checks in with the undoubtedly traumatized woman, a mere prop in an attempt to trap a man who modeled equality and respect between the sexes. 

If bystander intervention was effective 2,000 years ago to protect and uphold women’s dignity and safety, and has modern success in the military and on university campuses, maybe there’s room for the men in our community to prevent harm before it happens? Maybe we can right cultural wrongs? Maybe before learning of Brand’s misconduct, we’ll learn of a bystander who stepped in before a sexist slur was accepted in everyday conversation or intervened when a woman was uncomfortable. Since the issue is not weak femininity but toxic masculinity, maybe men can learn to say, “Enough is enough.” 

Column
Culture
Justice
Trauma
1 min read

Do victim statements offer up drama or justice?

Recent tragic cases highlight the changing audience for impact statements.

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A classical court house with a statue on top of a dome.
The Old Bailey.

It’s a lesser-known irony of ancient history that it was Roman Emperor Tiberius who introduced Justitia to the pantheon of the gods, as the goddess of justice. Ironic in that it was Tiberius’s minion, Pontius Pilate, in remote Judea, who had history’s worst day at the office, administering Roman justice so cack-handedly on an insurgent preacher and miracle-worker from Nazareth that he sparked a chain of events on which a whole new system of (at least western) justice was founded. 

Justitia was the antecedent of Lady Justice, whose statue adorns the dome of London’s central criminal court at the Old Bailey – and many other courts besides. She invariably holds the judicial symbols of weighing scales and a sword. And she is often blindfolded, though not on the Old Bailey, despite such constitutional eminences as the shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick erroneously claiming she is. 

The blindfold, scales and sword symbolise Lady Justice’s impartiality, the primacy of evidence and the equality of all before the law. We’ve grown accustomed to the rule of law in our democracy being applied blindly and without emotion. Convicted murderers are often described as having acted in cold blood and we expect justice to be served on them in the same manner, coldly. 

It’s in that context that I want to examine one way in which Lady Justice is going a bit wrong these days. It’s not about miscarriage of justice, so much as the dispassion of it. I’m talking about the victim impact statement, introduced in the UK in 1996, which comes between conviction and sentencing. 

It was meant to be an opportunity for victims and their families to tell the court of the impact and effects of the crime committed upon them. And, in that sense, to assist the judge or other sentencing authority to deliver an appropriate degree of punishment. So it is about the impact of the crime on those most directly affected by it. 

That appears no longer to be solely – or even in some instances partly – the case. The victim statement now seems to be an opportunity for the irreparably damaged to sound off at the defendant, to vent their pain and anger and contempt for and at the wretched convict. 

Take John Hunt, the BBC correspondent who lost his wife Carol and two of their three daughters, Hannah and Louise, to a multiple murder (and rape) one day last summer. His victim statement was less about the unimaginable effect these crimes have had on him and his surviving daughter, Amy, than about the divine judgment he would wish to call down on the murderer, Louise’s former partner Kyle Clifford. 

It really served no judicial purpose. It’s impossible to conceive that anything Hunt had to say had the slightest influence over the judge’s intention to pass down whole-life terms on Clifford, which he duly did. Its sole purpose seems to have been to allow Hunt to have his day in court, as it were, and who would wish to deny him that? But that does undermine the explicit purpose of the victim statement. 

Hunt himself conceded as much at the start of his statement when he said of his victim statement:  

“I initially misunderstood its purpose. Do I really need to detail the impact  of having three quarters of my family murdered?”  

He’s right – he didn’t. But he saw it as his “final opportunity” to address his family’s murderer. There followed an excruciating and heart-rending verbal attack on the convicted prisoner, culminating with the prophecy of his despatch to hell on his “dying day”:  

“The screams of Hell, Kyle, I can hear them now. The red carpet will come out for you…” 

I can’t know if Hunt would prefer the death penalty to be available to despatch his family’s killer immediately. One suspects he probably does. I oppose it, one reason being that it can leave no room for penance and redemption. We must surely all agree that Hunt gets a free pass on that rationale, but with no more severe sentence available than that which was passed, again we must ask what the purpose of the victim statement was. 

If it is simply to wish a hellish death on the perpetrator, then again we need to ask what purpose is being served and, indeed, if it’s healthy both for the judicial process and for the victim who delivers the statement. 

The same thought arose at a pre-sentencing hearing of the recent Nottingham murderer, when the son of one of the three victims, James Coates, told the killer:  

“Valdo Calocane, you claim the voices told you to kill these innocent people. Now listen to me, kill yourself.” 

Is that about impact? I don’t think so. I fear it has more to do with theatre in a media age that is insatiable for drama. Part of the purpose of the law is to maintain a distance between those affected emotionally and those who have committed crimes against them. 

Remove that and we reduce not only some of the justice for criminals to mere spectacle, but also in some degree respect for their victims and, indeed, the quality of mercy. 

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