The Local and Personal Are Political

Trigger warning: gender-based violence is mentioned throughout the episode.

This is a conversation with Chuck Derry, co-founder of the Gender Violence Institute and the Minnesota Men’s Action Network: Alliance to Prevent Sexual and Domestic Violence.

Chuck has worked to end men’s violence against women since 1983. From  1983 to 1993, he worked with male offenders at the St. Cloud  Intervention Project in St. Cloud, MN, and was the men’s program  coordinator for six of those years. In 1994, he co-founded the Gender  Violence Institute in Clearwater, Minnesota and through that  organization provides training and technical assistance nationally and  internationally on the dynamics of domestic violence, criminal justice  system reform, effective coordinated community responses to domestic  violence, law enforcement investigations, and rehabilitative programs  for men who batter.

I wanted to talk to Chuck after reading his very interesting essay ‘psychologising oppression‘  in which he argues against the belief that men who are violent are  “losing control” or about to “explode”. He instead argues that men who  are violent do so because it is beneficial to them, and thus argues that  this is what society should instead be tackling and facing.

In some ways this is an episode addressing men, especially cis men  who benefit from patriarchal structures even if they’re often unaware of  it. It is an exploration of the privileges that come with simply being a  cis man in society, and especially a cis straight man, and how even men  who consider themselves allies, the so-called ‘good guys’, need to also  question why so many of us do not actively work to end gender-based  violence, structural inequalities and patriarchal oppression more  broadly.

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Music by Tarabeat.