#53 

Sally Jackson from FiLiA in conversation with Jalna Hanmer

On Women’s Studies courses, the 1996 Brighton conference, The Feminist North archive and Leeds ‘managed zone’

Sally: So I'm pleased to be joined today by Jalna who has a history of working within the feminist movement and making differences and making a change. Welcome, great to talk to you.

One of the things that I think for me, your name is always associated with is the very beginning of the Women's Studies movement and the ability for women to actually be able to spend time and learn about their history and think about what being a woman meant and how it affected their lives. And that was because you were starting those courses up here in Bradford and Leeds.

Jalna: Well, I was in a very good position because I was teaching in social policy and research I think is what it was called.

But it was a social admin course at the University of Bradford. And we'd hit a point at Bradford where the government had asked universities to cut courses. So all over the country, universities had to cut courses. So in order to deal with that the University of Bradford decided they would start something new because there was just enough room to be able to do that.

So they started with, well actually they already had a course on Business Management, Business Studies, so they enlarged that and that opened the door for us to be able to say ‘and Women's Studies’ and because the Board of Studies said this involves no resources from the university, we said, no, no resources from the university, they let it go through.

 Now, the ‘we’ was Professor Sheila Allen and Professor Hilary Rose. One was in sociology and the other was in the department that I was in as well. 

So having got the authority to do that, we then set about setting up Women's Studies. It's quite odd to think about it now, but there was a time when I remember walking up Ash Grove, which was the street that the house I was working from thinking, how can I make violence against women seem like an academic subject? It was really a long, long time ago.  

Sally: It’s amazing, isn't it that that concept hadn't even been considered before then that it could be an academic area of study. 

Jalna: Yeah, that's right. So we kind of worked on how to do that and once we got Women's Studies through, then we had a basis to add our work on violence against women and girls.

I was full-time on this, so no resources meant Hilary could release me to just work on Women's Studies and other women who were interested in being involved could do optional studies. So in various other departments we had a group of women who could provide optional studies, and we started an MA in Women's Studies on that basis.

Now that worked well because there were no resource implications for the university.  

Sally: There’s a pattern here, isn't there?  

Jalna: Well, the university was run by a group of men who didn't see the point of Women's Studies. And maybe if they saw the point, they liked it even less. 

Sally: They were threatened by it.

Jalna: Yes, so that how we got started. As long as I had the backing of my department, it was fine. and then Hilary left to take a post somewhere else, and Anne Lister came and she allowed me to continue doing this because we were attracting quite a lot of students and being postgraduates, the income came to the department. So any course that could attract students was welcomed, basically. 

And so that's how we began. So then I found a way to make violence against women, an academic subject. So I thought, what do I have to do to achieve this? And of course, what you have to do is some research. So I started doing research into violence against women, and we were quite involved with the West Yorkshire Police at this point, so, and I had access to their records for which we were really very grateful that they allowed us into their files to see how they were handling violence against women.

And that then led on to their setting up an organisational system so that every division would have people working on violence against women. And West Yorkshire was the first county to do that. 

Sally: So it was a really a systemic change throughout the whole organisation rather than, you know, we often hear how some of it gets adjusted a little bit.

We'll do it this way rather than that way. But that's a huge change in the way the whole force was operating around violence against women.  

Jalna: Then, it really was, it really was a really big change and it was innovative, completely innovative. The man who was in charge of that kind of area of work was a divisional superintendent and he backed it.

They had already set up something around violence against children and also I think West Yorkshire was a leader in that as well. So having got the violence against children set up, it was fairly easy to expand into women because the police knew that there is quite a big problem. You know, if you look at, which I was able to look at, there are call outs. There are quite a lot of call outs to so-called domestics. And domestics were mostly about male attacks on women. And so we did some research and gathered some more information about this and we were just on a roll, really. 

Sally: This would've been sort of early nineties; would that be about right?

Jalna: No, I think it was before then. Let's think about this. I think it's in the eighties. Yeah. I think it was in the eighties that all this started, because then what happened, It kind of spread around the country. Other forces could see what was happening. And I think probably West Yorkshire Police might have liked that, that they were offering something new, which was actually dealing with problem that all forces have.

Sally: They were all attending these incidents, weren't they? So it was about a better way to work with that. 

Jalna: Yes, that's absolutely right. So in the end with structural places set up teams in all divisions, they had about 17 divisions when we started. Divisions always changed. The organisational structure of policing changes all the time. But at that point we had 17 divisions across West Yorkshire and they all had a group whose focus was on violence against women. And they already had groups whose focus was violence against children. And because these two are often linked, the overlap was happening. And that had also an impact on policing. They could see that. 

Sally: Looking at the same perpetrators for both sets of crime often. 

Jalna: That's right. That's right. And I did some research on homicides hoping I could show a connection between violence against women and women's death. It wasn't straightforward because there are not very many deaths in West Yorkshire. There was something like 17 in a year. So it's quite a small number and some were obviously linked to domestic violence, but others weren't. And that, for me, was quite interesting. I thought, gosh, a woman can't know if she's going to end up dead and the most dangerous thing she can do with her life is live with a man.

So it was interesting, but kind of very strange research actually, partly because the numbers were very low, fortunately. 

One of the things we did was we looked for repeat offenders or repeat offences and then repeat offenders both. And it was a kind of core in West Yorkshire of about 134 men. And I really wanted to study those men in particular, but I could never get funding for it. It would've been so interesting. Who are these men? Because they looked like Mr. Everybody, there's nothing special about them that could be ascertained from a kind of quick look. 

Sally: And obviously repeating patterns of offending, not necessarily with the same woman, but with different women. 

Jalna: That's also true. And so what actually happened in West Yorkshire was they started keeping better statistics so they could identify repeat offenders, and that's a real help. If you're an officer called to a house and you are told this is a repeat offender because in the past, what they were told to do was you go in, calm it down and get out as fast as you can.

Now, once you know it's a repeat offender, your views on what to do could change and you could be more involved really in dealing with that person. 

So I was looking for, whether there were more arrests or not because there weren't that many arrests that occurred if a woman calls or somebody calls for help when a man is assaulting a woman. There were very few. 

 There was a minority of arrests that actually happened and police used to do things like, remember one officer telling me he couldn't really do anything because he hadn't seen anything. He'd only been told about it. There was no injury to this woman that he could ascertain. So he went out and looked at the tyres on this man's vehicle and arrested him for that.

Sally: I like that kind of policing. In the late eighties, early nineties, actually, the types of arrest-able offences were very different as well. So for instance, that was before it was against the law to rape your wife. There was no such crime so that added to it actually having to be a violent incident rather than looking at all of the other sort of psychological behaviours that might be involved. So there were less tools available for police officers to use at that time as well, weren't there.

Jalna: That's right. And there were some more changes that happened, which made it easier to arrest. But it didn't mean there was a big increase in arrest. Quite a very difficult area because the police had this view of people bound in matrimony, and it's hard to cast your mind back that far but in the 1970s, that was the view and always the view of the government was the view of anybody who was there to enforce legal matters. They don't want to interfere in marriages, 

Sally: Yes, private matters. I think things have definitely improved, but sadly not that much.

Jalna: Well, the problem is you need evidence of a crime to be able to arrest anybody. And if what you come into is just a lot of screaming children and a distressed woman, you get a verbal report, but, you know, what's the crime? I mean, you can't arrest for distressed children unless it's a rather exceptional situation, or a distressed woman, that's not kind of how it works. 

But if you knew who were repeat offenders are and you know that particular family, then you're in a much safer position to be able to do more.

Sally: I think the police are improving nowadays in that it, it used to be very much treated as individual incidents that they would attend, whereas now they're framing things much more as the pattern of behaviour over a period of time so you can build a much better picture then, evidence wise about what's actually happening within that family.

Jalna: Yes, that's right. Now, I don't know to what extent this has been followed up throughout the country, but West Yorkshire definitely sort of something new, they offered help where it wouldn't have been offered somewhere else, basically.

Sally: And, and as you say, I think a lot earlier, you can see other police forces had started to adopt that later, but certainly it took some time for others to learn the benefit of working in that way.

Jalna: That’s right. And I went a few times to the National Police Conferences where West Yorkshire would talk about what they were doing. So the word was kind of spreading around and it takes time for that to reach people who might also be interested in adopting something new. 

Sally: In London, there was a lot of work done with Ellen Pence. 

Jalna: I did know Ellen Pence. Ellen was helpful in that she raised the issue and the London Met is just such a different force from anywhere else. I mean, West Yorkshire has got 5,000 officers, so it's a big force, but the Met’s got 20,000. So to get anything firmly embedded somewhere like that is really, really difficult. I don't know really what's happening in London now. 

Sally: I think probably similarly, all the changes that different police forces have where, how it's, organized, the struggle to get long-term systemic change is difficult, but there's areas of really good practice and areas of not so great practice in. 

Jalna: Exactly. Yeah. And that's true everywhere really. 

Sally: So you talked a bit about the fact that to enable violence against women to be studied, you had to start that and do some research and I'm just thinking about some of the work that you did around violence but also around prevention? 

Jalna: We needed a term that would make work on violence against women, kind of respectable. So we put our heads together and we thought, and we thought, okay, crime prevention, that is a really respectable term and it's what the police want. They want to find ways prevent crime, which makes a lot of sense. So with crime prevention, we were really able to move quite quickly and deeply into the West Yorkshire organisation of policing. 

But what we had at that point in time was a group of representatives from all of the districts that formed an overall committee, which the chief constable attended, and always spoke out, gave his views on this and that, and people who attended, could raise issues. So there was an agenda et cetera. 

So it was quite an important place to get this issue to be seen, which we were able to do. And that meant it could then spread throughout the force, because the divisions operated pretty independently.

Not totally obviously, but they had their own divisional superintendents and the issues that they focused on would depend on those offices and what people were bringing to them.

 Now, what people bring to the police is burglary. Mm-hmm. That's number one. Burglary, which is quite rare actually, and after burglary some other form of public order nuisance, is what they bring. 

They don't talk about what's going on in families. So if policing is based on what people want them to work on, it's not family matters because people didn't mention it. 

Sally: It always makes me smile when you have a public consultation about what the issues are for an area and they wonder why violence against women isn't mentioned in this big hall that everybody's gathered in to stand up in front of 200 people and say, well actually, you know, this is what I feel is important for us. And yet of course it's affecting so many of the people.

Jalna: That's absolutely right. So it took some doing to get it raised into the kind of public arena and people were quite aware of public disorder. In terms of violence against women, while that's also an issue, it's actually quite small in comparison to family violence, which is where the real issue is. And that's what was unmentionable basically. 

Sally: So, I mean, that was ground-breaking to start lifting the lid on and having those discussions and thinking about, now that we know how much of that is happening, what can we do about it? 

Jalna: Yes. So what we did was we wrote a book which sold all its copies.

An academic book, it was at that point in time, 3000 copies and they all sold, which is fairly unusual actually. That meant the ideas about what was going on in West Yorkshire got spread around to other academics because other academics got very interested in this as something they could look at.

There was already something happening in London and I think that influenced us because we'd read about what she was doing and we thought, yeah, we could do that. Let's have a look at that. 

Sally: That is one of the great things about how we get change, isn't it? Because the ideas spark other ideas and those ideas then perhaps spark activism and, and change.

And it's through that, that we managed to influence the systems. 

Jalna: You see, what was significant about West Yorkshire was the Ripper. Women were changing their behaviour because of concern. You see, in winter, it's dark at four o'clock, people get home at five, so they get off the bus, they get met, maybe, or they change their transport and get a lift with a friend or they ride a bicycle or just some other change, which makes it feel a bit safer basically. And of course one didn't know who would be next. And then there was this fear that he'd move on to children. And children were getting out of school when it was dark and often had to walk home alone, which normally would be completely safe. So parents, mothers, were extremely worried about all of this, and it wasn't always easy for them to go and get their child from school because they were working et cetera and you never knew where he was going to strike next. 

Sally: It must have just been an incredible, almost palpable sense of fear while that was happening for women in the community, both as women themselves and as mothers for their children all the time that he was at large.

Jalna: Yes. That's right. You know, when we started our research, people said, you'll never get anybody to say anything. I think we will. And what we did was we knocked on the door of seven streets, and the first woman over 18 who answered the door, we asked her a series of questions about how safe she felt, what she did to improve her safety and her life circumstances in various ways and who she was living with and all that. And that formed the basis of the book, that little piece of research.

That was what led to other women doing research in their own area because they could see that women were perfectly happy to talk about this particular matter. And the number who refused was quite small and you always expect some people to refuse. The number who had absolutely no interest in the whole thing was also extremely small, as you would expect. So it was a revealing and good piece of research really.

Sally: One of the things that that research also taught us is that, actually sometimes just ask women because they will share that information. They do know what helps to keep them safe and what actually agencies sometimes are doing that makes it less safe for them.

And you know, they are the experts of their experience and we've been very good previously, I think about knowing what was best, rather than listening and taking on board their stories and their knowledge.

Jalna: You see, what I was able to do in the end was to work out what is the central factors in this. And what it is, is that women find themselves getting into situations that they don't know how to control. And that results in a lot of fear. So it ranged from everything from an 18-year-old girl at a bus stop whom a man asked, you know, would you like to go for a drink? And she didn't know what to say, so she couldn't say yes, and she couldn't say no. So she didn't say anything. So he asked her again, thinking maybe she hadn't heard him perhaps. So it was really difficult. So it was everything from that to something that was perhaps more serious. 

Sally: Yeah. And women are negotiating those things every day, aren't they? That kind of, how do I be polite enough so that he's not offended and is aggressive to me but clear enough that that's not something that I want to do. And assertive enough to make him feel no, there's, there's no point in taking this further. And that that fine line that women try to tread is almost an impossible ask, isn't it to get it right. 

Jalna: Well, it's very difficult if you're very young I think. If you have a bit more experience, it's possibly a bit easier. And then of course we have in Leeds, that open space, that park. And of course, what men would do, they were exposing themselves all the time in that area, which was between a lot of housing where students lived and the university.

Young women found it really difficult to deal with because apparently, what these men want is just to get the woman worried or excited or the shock factor. Shocked. So it's so kind of weird, isn't it? It I found it quite, it's fascinating actually, I think what makes these men want to expose themselves like that. I never got an answer to that because I never studied it, but I think it's such an interesting topic and presumably it's happening in the same space now. 

Sally: I would think probably most likely somewhere. And, and if not there somewhere else. 

Jalna: Exactly.

Sally: Before we stop sort of talking about some of the different types of research, I wanted to chat a little bit about the Feminist Archive North, because it's so important that we can find these pieces of work and interrogate them again and look at them. And can you tell me a little bit about the archive and what's happening there? 

Jalna: The archive, I kept all my records, so the core of the archive are the records that I had kept and then other women gave me things. So that core expanded with other donors. And I think we have about 33 donors or something like that. Quite large. 

The donations are really about different things, different areas of involvement. Some are international, some are national, some are local. We're based at Leeds University in special collections. And we meet every Thursday where we work on our collections and answer emails because we do get queries all the time.

Special collections also respond directly to people who contact them and make this material available. I think we've got the only collection. Bristol has their collection which started in the eighties, early eighties as well. And that's at the university.

We have ours, which is local material as well as a lot of other stuff. And Glasgow has got a good archive so I think Edinburgh too will have something. I think that's about it. We've been donating things to Nottingham because Nottingham are trying to set up. They were setting it up in their Women's Centre, so if we get duplicates, we give them to Nottingham. 

Sally: There's such a, as you say, a diversity of knowledge there, isn't there the different studies that were related to feminist issues that have been collected as part of that, whereas part of those, all of the archives. 

Jalna: That's right. So there are issues from organisations. We've got a number of organisational studies. So when an organisation closes, we've been given full collections of that organisation. And then we have information from organisations that are still ongoing as well and then we have individual collections. for example, Helen John, who was at Greenham, we've got all Helen's papers. 

Sally: That’s a treasure trove isn't it? 

Jalna: That's right, that's right. So individuals, what else have we got?  conferences, pamphlets, lots of pamphlets. 

Sally: It's interesting when last year the conference was in Manchester. And so, we were fortunate enough to have several visits with the working class movement library. And I think some of the really poignant information they had there was the pamphlets that had been handwritten and then copied on the old Gestetner and looking at them, you can see the woman who was writing that and preparing for the meeting and getting everything done. It's kind of like a touchable piece of history, isn't it to have those collated.

Jalna: Yes. We've actually, in our collection, we've got a copy of one of those from an old Gestetner because we thought this is such an interesting, the old technology That nobody who's young now will know anything about or what it looked like. So we saved some of that as well but it was how information was spread around at the time, and what you do is, you print off a lot of something, take it to the Women's Liberation Movement Conference and sell it for 10p or something like that which would pay for the paper and some ink. And if you had any costs relating to using the Gestetner, that would also be covered.

I used to go to the meetings and I'd go around all of the places where these papers were laid out, take one of each and take it back, put it in the collection.

Sally: Brilliant and so just sort of thinking, moving forward, again, one of the really important things about the work that you've done is the academic work has led to practical changes and improvements in services for women that are experiencing violence from men and some of the work, some of that included the work with the Leeds Interagency Project.

Jalna: Yes, that's right, we've got a really big collection on Leeds Interagency Project and so we've kept everything that we were involved in, which was over a number of years. It must be a decade or something. I can't remember how many years now, but it’s quite a big collection.

The Leeds Interagency Project was quite innovative it was the first of that type of organisation I think set up in the country. And we got some money through a grant programme that ran for several years and that enabled us to really keep track of everything that they were working on and publishing and that's something that I don't think anyone has asked to see. 

Sally: That’s amazing that that's not been requested. 

Jalna: I don't think so. And I think it's because nobody knows what it is really. They don't understand it's importance.

Sally: It's a piece of work that really needs to be done. 

Jalna: Yes. Someone needs to, well, we've kind of always known that someone needs to write something about all of our collections. We have done that, actually it's on the special collections website. We have done this, but it's hard to make it more widely known how this developed really. 

Sally: We’re still struggling today to have effective partnership working, but some of the things that the Interagency Project did was set up some of those standards about either what makes something work or some of the barriers that can prevent you from working well with different agencies. So there's really important learning there. 

Jalna:  That's right. So that's move to looking at interagency work was one piece of research that I was involved in and trying to find ways to improve that. 

I haven't thought about that research for a long time, so I'm kind of a blank. 

Well, it was something, it was a development of the interim relation between agencies and how they did or did not work together. 

Sally: One of the things that was successful with the Leeds Interagency Project was previously people had kind of framed violence against women as either a police issue or a women's sector issue. They didn't see the relevance of other agencies, housing, health, et cetera. And I think that was the first time that we really started to ask of other areas. So what are you doing about violence against women? Other than the police or the women's sector.

Jalna: You see, it was that piece of knowledge that came, I don't know where it came from, but they said you went to 32 agencies before you found anybody that was going to offer you any help at all. Now I've never been able to track down where that statistic came from, but it's also true that I'm sure, I don't know if it's 32 or not, but I'm sure the women move through a number of agencies until they could find someone that would offer them some help.

You’ve got to be pretty persevering, don't you? 32 agencies!

Sally: The impact of being at the point where you are asking for help and all the courage that that takes and then that not to be successful and that you know that agency not to be helpful to you or to say it's not their department or whatever.

It astounds me that women do come back and try again and try again because its just soul destroying, isn't it, to be turned away at that time of need. 

Jalna: If you are in a really desperate situation, you keep trying and that's where I guess that 32 comes from. 

There were a lot of women that were involved with men who were quite dangerous really and who knew that the police wouldn't do anything about them.

Sally: We're still hearing today of women who have called the police several times and said he's going to kill me only to then be murdered. So, you know, here we are in, in 2019 with still that not being taken seriously enough by the authorities. 

Jalna: Yes. Well, it's easy to not know which are more serious than others. And if you don't have a setup, which is very focused on that issue: is this a really vulnerable person? to what extent is that person vulnerable and what's the most appropriate way to intervene? it's quite difficult. You need a really good organisation behind you to be able to do that. And that is the start of keeping good records. If you don't keep good records, you are lost before you even begin. 

Sally: Yes, to look up the history.

 So, again, sort of thinking about how we disseminate this information, so all the learning that's happening, you were involved in setting up the Women's Conference in Brighton in 1996, which I think was probably one of the first big feminist gatherings like kind of like Grandma to FiLiA maybe. 

Jalna: Yes. Well, that's right. We decided we wanted an international conference, so we sent out information about holding this conference all around the world. Any organisation we could find that might have an interest in this. And we had some money to do this. I've forgotten where it came from now, but we did have some money because it is costly to do that. 

And so it was the first international conference on violence against women in the world. So we chose Brighton because Brighton was free. It was a long way for Bradford, but it was free so we knew and it had the right good facilities as well.

So we wrote to everyone who was important at that point in time, in terms of violence against women and asked them to come and to do sessions. And most of them said, yes, so it was a big ask because while we did have some money for a few people, we didn't have money for everyone for sure.

And we expected people like the Americans, they could pay for it because they were relatively rich. Maybe not all individuals, but you know what I mean. And I remember we were trying to get somebody from a South Pacific, not Australia, but the islands. Yeah. And we had money, we got two women from … .. so we could pay their fair and make sure they had accommodation and food. And in fact on the first day there were women who were saying, we don't have any money for food. So we did a whip around and somebody had the job of handing out money to women who applied for it. It was really a pretty shoestring kind of effort. 

Sally: That's amazing because there's two things that strike me about that. It was so important that even though women didn't have money for food, they turned up. And equally, the sisters that were there all just shared what they could to support everyone so that they could have something to eat and it’s beautiful.  

Jalna: Yeah, it really is. So I put my sister who'd come over from California, I put her on the American desk because I knew the Americans would complain. So she dealt with things like, ‘the pillows are too hard’ But because I had her she knew who she was dealing with and she'd be able to deal with this, that pillows are just hard in England. They don't have goose down pillows here very often. And not in hotels that we were in. 

Sally: It does make me smile because I'm thinking sometimes some of the feedback that we get at FiLiA which we obviously always take really, really seriously and learn from but sometimes some of the things like the pillows being too hard, we do kind of think, we're trying here some things we can't change.  

Jalna: No, that's absolutely right. I felt I was really lucky to have my sister to head that that one up because she actually understood everybody who was complaining and about what they were complaining about. 

So, and then we had more women in a group who dealt with more complaints and there were always complaints you see that something or other wasn't right. That was an important aspect of keeping everything under control because it got pretty dicey at points. It wasn't that easy to keep total control. We had women trying to storm the platform, for example, we had to keep them from doing. That was tricky.  

Sally: It's interesting, isn't it because being the first conference around violence against women, that idea of discussing some really difficult personal issues to some of the women that are there in a huge environment with lots of other people around and et cetera, hadn't been done before. And that experience of how to handle that and how to support people through that. You were learning it as you were doing it. 

Jalna: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And there were about 1500 at Brighton. It's a big group. There were people who applied to come who weren't interested in coming, this is particularly true in countries like Nigeria, who simply wanted to be able to come to England. So they'd come, register and get lost. We'd never see them again because we were open to both men and women, and particularly the men, I think these disappearing Nigerians because once they were here, they could just get lost. The authorities would never find them and they knew that.

So there were a lot of different things going on. 

Sally: Sadly, violence against women is such a wide field, the different types of violence that men do to women: Were there themes that came out of the conferences ‘this is the issue of the time, this is the important one that we need to be concentrating on’

Jalna:  I don't remember that. There probably were, it’s a long time ago.  

Sally: And it may be that there were, it was just that there were so many issues to be dealing with as such.

Jalna: I think the family of violence definitely surfaced as a really important area and it had had difficulties surfacing in the past because people, women didn't want to talk about family problems. So I think that that was something that was very important. 

I think issues like prostitution hadn't really come up before either. And that did give a voice to women, one of whom I see quite regularly still, who does work on that form of violence against women. 

My sister gave a paper on something to do with the US government. And her room was raided and the paper was stolen. She was a bit annoyed about that. So we thought, okay, we don't know who's in this room but what we do know is there are people watching and we don't know who they are so we'll just carry on with our proposed program and kind of see where it goes.

One speaker said, I know they're going to kill me, but she was brave enough to stand up and they introduced her at the platform. My son Lawrence and somebody else had walkie-talkies. So they had their walkie-talkies and they were surveying the whole place all the time upon the various levels that Brighton has, it’s a very big venue. And so they were circling around looking for people who might kill this woman.

Sally: It's crazy, isn't it? The risks that women have to take just to be heard. 

Jalna: Yes. In fact, I can tell you she died in bed, so all was well in the end. But she didn't know that and she was quite frightened really. So it was a brave, brave decision to make. 

And the worst bit for me was women, one woman in particular, tried to storm the platform to grab control of the microphone. It was quite heated. 

Sally: A lot of passion, it shows how important it was. 

Jalna: Yes. Probably. And the title of it was Violence, Abuse and Women's Citizenship, because we wanted to link it to citizenship. What kind of a citizen are you if you can't be protected from violence? We wanted to draw that out and really make that important to show why violence is important because if you are a citizen of the country, you have a right to be safe and you have a right for people whose job it is to make you safe and to do their job. 

Sally: And that is just as pertinent today as, as it was then, isn't it? You're still fighting. 

Jalna: Exactly. 

Sally: You mentioned prostitution and obviously you coming up here to Leeds, that's a huge issue. And I know you've been involved locally in trying to work and support women who have exited the sex trade and looking at preventing the managed zone, as it's so called, currently in Holbeck.

Can you talk a little bit about the work you've done around that?

Jalna: Well, I'm not quite sure how all this began, but I started going to meetings at the Holbeck residence who were extremely upset at street prostitution in their area and wanted it stopped. 

The West Yorkshire Police have put a few personnel in to try to keep the women and their pimps off the residential areas. And they identified an area that was mainly businesses of various sorts, industrial and industrial area, actually, where the street prostitution scene was. And they wanted to keep it down there. And that proved to be quite difficult. Also the drug scene, because where you have prostitution, you have drugs, lots of them, the sale of them, and people then come for drugs and the women and maybe one or the other, but you know, maybe both. And they fit together really well, prostitution and drug sales.

So we were trying to help out by giving publicity really to what was happening in Holbeck and trying to support the people who wanted this brought to an end. There were a lot of complaints: children going to school, used condoms and the school’s playing field, playground, needles here and there and everywhere. I assume it still is quite a difficult situation, really difficult to control. 

What will happen now, I think, Leeds is developing that area. So that means the scene will shift to somewhere else. 

There haven't been any meetings for quite a while that I know about. Usually I would be on that invitation list if there were. So I don't know. I really don't know what West Yorkshire Police and Leeds City Council are going to do about this. But I think what they're trying to do is just keep it under control a bit, because that's all they can do.

I mean, they're not prepared to go after the drug scene. I can't see any effort towards that. And they're not really prepared either to put resources into helping women exit, which is the other thing that's needed. 

Now I don't quite know why there are two organisations to deal with women, one is Basis and the other's, the Joanna project. And they both have about seven or eight paid workers who go down and talk to the women, give them coffee and tea and if they have any issues that they would like being dealt with, they'll help them with those. But they don't push it. They don't say, would you like to exit? Never. The woman has to say: ‘I want to get out of this’ Which of course, they don't do because they can't. 

Sally: It may well be that because of the situation that woman's in at that time, she's not even seeing it as an option until someone suggests it. The thought of leaving hasn't occurred to her, how she might be able to do that unless somebody says, would you like some support, some help to do it. 

Jalna: Basically, no, they're largely not English women, although there will be some English women, they're Romanians and Bulgarians. They don't speak English so communicating with them is pretty impossible. They are controlled by pimps and the police weren't doing anything about the pimps.  

Sally: And the reason the police aren't doing anything about the pimps is because it's in this so-called managed area. 

Jalna: Yes. 

Sally: So there’s no criminalisation of the women or anybody else around prostitution. 

Jalna: It's managed in the sense there's supposed to be an hourly time, I think it's 8:00 PM in the evening till six o'clock in the morning and then it’s supposed to stop. So if women are seen loitering after 6:00 AM the police can move them on. By and large, they don't arrest anybody. They do occasionally arrest somebody, it's not a thing, never arrest anyone and I think they know everyone.

But you know because I did all this work with policing I feel I understand this. What the police want is to know what's going on and if you know what's going on, you can watch it. If it gets out of hand, you can do something about it. But it's best to not have a goal where you try to eliminate it, because you won't be able to do that. It'll come back somewhere else, which is not in anybody's interest.

Sally: So in essence, the women are collateral damage in that analogy. 

Jalna: Yeah. 

Sally: Society is saying that's acceptable. In that circumstance, society is saying it's acceptable for those women.

Jalna: What happens, were they to arrest one of these women, deport her back home, her pimp will simply send her somewhere else. Maybe London, maybe some other country. Arresting and returning women to their native country won't necessarily help at all. And there's been no research into this. It's one of those areas one would love to be able to research, but I think you'd need to know the languages to be able to do this effectively because by and large they don't speak English. 

Sally: It's interesting that you were saying with the times that, so if women are on the streets at certain times, then they might still be asked to move on because it's not within the allocated time. But there doesn't seem to be anything in there around actually dealing with the demand and dealing with the men that are there to try and buy women. 

Jalna: Absolutely nothing. And they're coming from the Midlands, it’s not like, they're just a pool of local men who come down to Holbeck. They're coming from big distances because they know it's a free for all and they're not going to be arrested. They're not going to be exposed like their name go in a newspaper or something.

As long as they know they're safe from their family or their bosses, or their work colleagues find out about what they're up to, they're okay. 

Sally: There's no deterrent at all. 

Jalna: No, none. 

Sally: It's a very crazy world that that's something that locally here, the state has signed up to and seeing it as a way forward. 

Jalna: For a year we ran a programme called The John School and the men who got arrested were offered an option. You could either go to the magistrate’s court and get fined or you could go to the John school, which was a day-long meeting. So I think most men chose the John school because there'd be no report then of what they'd been up to. If they went to the magistrate’s court, it might end up in the papers or in some way that maybe their family and work colleagues could find out about.

So the John School ran once a month for 12 months and we had a whole group of speakers who talked about different aspects and why it's wrong to be a man who is seeking women who've been prostituted. So I don't know if it affected, if any of them in terms of what they subsequently did, but it was punishment to go to the John School. Definitely punishment. 

Sally: I bet, yeah. A bit of an awakening call to, whether they change their behaviour but at least they had the information to be really cognizant of the damage they were doing.

Jalna: That's right. Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Sally: I mean, that kind of like moves me into thinking about the number of years you've been working around these issues and particularly violence against women, but feminism more generally.

 What are the things that kind of still make you bang your head against the wall and think, why haven't we sorted that yet? the frustrations that are as strong today as they ever were. 

Jalna: Well, I think pretty well everything.

 I want to talk about when I lived in London which was back in the seventies, Brussels was organising a really big European conference and we were asked to bring three issues. So we had a group of kind of local women in London and we decided we'd go for violence against women, abortion, which was a really big topic at that point in time, and welfare issues. And these were chosen by groups up and down the country as something of interest. 

This was very important because from Britain, we brought violence against women. It wasn't really being discussed in Europe at that point in time. Paris had found rape. That was the first issue for them was about rape. For us, it was about family violence basically. And so we had this really big conference, 1500 probably. It was huge. And though these issues got spread around Europe, it was a really good meeting that was one of the best conferences I think I've ever gone to in terms of how far we were able to disseminate ideas. And that was the beginning of something new.

 So we had to bring three women, one for each area. So the violence against women was easy because I was working in that area in London, so we had somebody from that abortion, somebody knew somebody. And then the welfare benefits part of it was, again, I think somebody knew somebody. 

 I remember going down to some group and talking to them about participating in this conference and they decided they'd do it.

So we took our three issues. Everybody else took their three issues. It was a really important conference in terms of spreading stuff around.

Sally: I'm just wondering how that's filtered out over the years, all of those connections and et cetera, that's really magical. 

That's a really positive note to bring us back to FiLiA and the magic that happens when women gather and that sharing of information. 

So just to finish, if you had a young feminist come to speak to you and say, so why is this important? what should I be doing? What would you want to say to a young woman today?

Jalna: Well, she needs to join a group and to find a group that's working on those issues. If there isn't one locally, there will be in London. I don't know if there is a group in Leeds or not, but if there weren't a group we'd have to talk to her about starting a group and how you do that. And how do you find other women who might be interested in working on that issue now?

We have had conferences up here where we've tried to spread that information around and get more women working on some of these issues. 

I don't really know what the current situation is. It's been a while since we've had the last one. 

But I mean, there has been a better response from the police and from the council, except in this area of the so-called managed zone. So that's the issue for today. 

Now what the residents want, they want to end it. ‘I don't want this on my patch,’ ‘I don't care where it goes, but I don't want it on my patch’ you know? Which is very understandable. ‘I don't want my children walking to school to see this’ you know, which is also very understandable.

I think what's really needed, which we don't have, is a really strong exiting service. Now there is money, the council's putting money into Basis. Quite a lot of money, I think. And Basis also gets money from other foundations. The Joanna Project, which is another religious organisation, also gets money from other sources.

Neither of them are really working on exiting. I mean, they'll help a woman if she says, I want to exit, but if she doesn't, they're not going to suggest it. Which I find really weird actually. I think, what are you here for? You know, just to go down on the street and have a cup of coffee with women and talk to them and you know, what’s all this about?

Maybe it's partly about they don't speak English, and so they don't have the language to be able to communicate with the women. And they know if they identify her for the police who will send her back home, she'll simply be reintroduced somewhere else.

Sally: It is, I think inextricably linked, isn't it, the whole way that the police deal with prostitution in Leeds and outside, around the country and the whole immigration issue as well, because sadly, it's an easy way for police to be able to deal with that problem there and then, to look at it from an immigration focus rather than a supporting woman focus. 

Jalna: Yes, that's right. That's absolutely right. And they're on strong grounds there because people don't like immigration.  

Sally: It’s a sad state of affairs, isn't it, it's women's lives.

Jalna: I sit around thinking, listen, you were all immigrants at some point you may not remember the point at which you were an immigrant, but you were an immigrant. But you have completely forgotten now because you've always been here. 

Sally: I think you are absolutely right about the exiting strategies, but there is some work around immigration that we need to do at the same time, don't we? So that I think, yes we are looking at a woman who needs support and a service rather than which country she's come from or exactly how she got here, because there’s a good chance that that wasn't her choice in the first place in any cases, isn't it? 

Jalna: Exactly. Or she was misled. 

Sally: She thought she was coming to waitress or something. 

Jalna: Yeah. Now I don't know to what extent women are still coming in from these countries because I haven't talked to people in Holbeck for some time now.

It's kind of a depressing scene actually, because it'll just keep rolling over all the time. If there are men who want to exploit women and they're women who can be deceived in one way or another to come along with these men, this will just carry on.

Sally: And especially if we are not putting any resources into stopping the men from behaving that way or supporting the women to be able to escape from it, it's a crazy situation. 

So you are right actually, we've talked about something that's got quite heavy and I'd like us to finish on something really positive.

So I think, from all that you've learned going forward, what's the next thing that you want to see happen in the near future that you think would make a real difference for women? 

Jalna: Well, if one's thinking about Holbeck, it would be exiting services. And that means not just, you find her a flat to go somewhere too. You have to keep in touch with her forever and a day basically, because she needs support. She doesn't know anybody in this country. The only people she knows are on the street. Her pimp is going to be around and about trying to bring her back, so to help her start a new life is really quite involved and requires a lot of full-time work.

Sally: And long term. 

Jalna: Yeah, exactly. So I suppose that's what I'd like to see. 

Sally: That sounds like a really positive way to end. 

Jalna, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak to you. Thank you so much for giving us your time. 

Jalna: It's a pleasure.