Media Storm - Tackling media misogyny: Cheer Up Luv and This Ends Now

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

Whether it's the Reform Party weaponising women's safety, Donald Trump diminishing domestic abuse, or worrying stats about girls' safety in schools, you don't have to look far to see that discrimination against women still exists - and is often aided by lazy, misleading, or misinformed reporting. What can we do about this? This week, Media Storm showcases the people and platforms working to end gender-based violence, buy calling out and correcting misogyny in the media. First up: an in-depth interview with Eliza Hatch. She’s the founder of Cheer Up Luv, the UK-based platform dedicated to ending gender-based violence, discrimination and bias through education, art and storytelling. Helena and Eliza chat about working in the VAWG sector, bringing men into the conversation, and the crucial point headlines are missing when they talk about young men "falling behind" women in education and academia. And after the break: hear about This Ends Now's new campaign, Take It As Read, which will help us all to challenge misogynistic and victim blaming language around male violence against women and girls. Interested in this topic? Listen to Media Storm's episodes on domestic abuse reporting, rape justice, and why 'violence against women' is a man's problem. The episode is hosted and produced by Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok ⁠⁠⁠ Support us on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi Media Stormers, it's Helena here. I'm so excited to say that today we are bringing you an interview with someone who I have admired for a long time. Before I introduce her, a couple of weeks ago we spoke on Media Storm about the Reform Party and others on the far right, weaponising feminism and women's safety to further their anti-immigration agenda. This weaponisation is just one example of misogyny making the headlines recently. Whether it's new legislation on catcalling or Donald Trump diminishing domestic abuse or further allegations about Master Chef presenter Greg Wallace, you don't have to look far to see that discrimination against women still exists, flourishes and is often aided by lazy, misleading or misinformed reporting. Now, Media Storm has

always been and will continue to be focused on solutions-based journalism, not just calling out the problem, but asking what can we do about this? Well, one way media storm can be part of the solution is to, of course, call out those headlines and articles that only continue to spread myths and stereotypes about gender-based violence, like we've done on various newswatches or deep-dive episodes. I'll link to some in the show notes. But also, we can be part of the solution by elevating people and platforms that we really think are aligned with our mission and do the tireless work to call out misogyny, educate people and work towards ending gender-based violence. So on that note, I'm thrilled to bring you an interview with Eliza Hatch.

She's the founder of Cheer Up Love. Love is spelled like LUV, like Cheer Up Love, like a man telling you to cheer up on the street. More on that later. But Cheer Up Love is a UK-based platform. dedicated to ending gender-based violence, discrimination and bias through education, art and storytelling. I've gone to Eliza's page many times on Instagram, TikTok, etc., to help me understand an issue or to break down an issue in an easy and digestible way. Plus, her Instagram is super aesthetic to look at, so that helps. I wanted to bring her on Media Storm so that we can elevate her work, hear her views on media misogyny mishaps and find out what it really takes to work every day in this space. Only a reform government will remove illegal migrants and protect

our women and girls. A wolf whistle, I wouldn't perceive it as sexual harassment, I'd be quite glad of a one. I didn't know any of these women. I didn't see these women. These women, I think they want Fame. Welcome to Media Storm, the podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Helena Wadia, and joining me today is Eliza Hatch from Cheer Up Love. Eliza, welcome to Media Storm. How are you? Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, it's really good to be here. I am doing well. I feel like it's been a bit of a. intense like a couple of weeks but I'm back into it I'm here yeah I understand that well you're here among other things to talk about cheer up love and I wonder if you can just start if you can just

tell us a bit about you and how and why cheer up love was born I started cheer up love eight years ago now in 2017 and it came about after a man walked me in the street and told me to cheer up and it the first time that that had happened. I'd been, heard that phrase many times before, whether it was smile, cheer up, you know, give us a smile, you'd look pretty if you smiled, so many kind of iterations of that phrase. And it also was not the worst form of sexual harassment I'd ever experienced as well. It was just this kind of turning moment, this, this sort of cherry on top of the cake type situation, tip of the iceberg, if you will, to all of the kind of forms of gendered comments that you can, you know, hear in

one single day. I kind of just snapped basically in that moment and just thought, you know, why is this something that we have to kind of put up with on a daily basis? These comments are so normalized and, you know, no one seems to kind of bat an eyelid when, you know, when they're said in public. So I decided to do something about it and started a photography project kind of directly confronting this issue by photographing people in the place that it happened. So standing in these locations, whether it's kind of streets, bus stops, train stations, all these like recognisable public locations where sexual harassment and street harassment happens.

And then using those locations as a stage to kind of reclaim the experience, turn a negative into a positive and really kind of kickstart a conversation around misogyny and everyday harassment. And this was sort of pre-Me 2. This was in early 2017. It felt almost taboo, like having those conversations back then, and then quickly the project kind of got picked up and swept up in the Me Too movement and then has since evolved over the past eight years into a community platform and a space where I educate on all forms, all kind of issues surrounding misogyny, everyday harassment and kind of debunking sexist myths and stuff around sexual assault. You're really, really good at it. Cheer Up Love is a platform that I return to quite a lot to see

whatever the kind of trending story is broken down. Do you think the community that formed among women around the Me Too movement, do you think that helped the platform grow successfully? Yeah, I think so. It was a combination of things, I think, that helped the platform initially grow. I think there was pre-Me2, I was really unsure if anybody wanted to tell these stories, if anyone wanted to kind of talk about them publicly. I know it was something that I spoke about with my friends, quite a lot in private,

but that was quite different to putting it on a public forum and other people kind of commenting and sharing their experiences as well. I was really unsure if anybody would want to do that. But then at the moment I started uploading the photos, uploading the stories, more and more people started to come forward, and it was like the floodgates opened. And then Me Too happened, gave, it was almost like it was permission to talk about these things and to it was like a sense of solidarity and community in coming together and also a place where people could validate each other's experiences

and say, you know, that's not okay, that shouldn't have happened because so often the responses in those scenarios like, oh, well, you know, it could have been worse or what are you complaining about or that's not that bad, it was just a compliment. And so having a space where people could actually say, no, that's not a compliment and that was actually really offensive or that went on to ruin my day or I was already having a pretty terrible day and this made it like 10 times worse.

So I think it was that sense of community coming together, solidarity, and being able to kind of share experiences in a judgment-free environment that really helped, I suppose, grow that community initially. And then I think over the years, obviously there's been a wider kind of awareness and conversation and discourse around all kind of issues related to gender equality and gender-based violence. But we've also seen tensions around,

I suppose feminist issues seems to be at boiling point at the moment, or it always seems to feel like it, but it just feels like the issues become a lot more polarised recently, even if there is wider conversation and wider awareness around the subject. So I feel like maybe more people are coming to that conversation now as looking for a place of solace or looking for a place of understanding or just respite maybe because of how polarise the conversation is at the moment. You talk about so many different aspects of gender-based violence and discrimination. I wonder how do you decide what content to put out or what the most important stories are?

Yeah, that's a big question. I think when I first started the campaign and the Instagram page, I pretty much darted from speaking just like purely around public sexual harassment and raising awareness around that. And then I guess as my awareness and understanding grew and the page grew and my I guess, education around certain, like, feminist issues and issues around intersectional feminism. So did, I feel like, my ability to touch on certain topics. And also, you know, it's like, what outrage of the day are we going to be confronted with today as a certain

amount of that as well? I don't, I'm trying to move away from being super reactionary, but sometimes you just can't help but react to some of the, you know, news stories that we see. Yeah, totally. Also, I can imagine it's quite difficult to find which stories to hone in on, especially when there are people in power like Donald Trump, whose profile is built on misogyny and division. You know, like this is a man who's been credibly accused of sexual assault and was caught on tape bragging about sexual assault. Yeah.

And, you know, even recently, Trump was giving a speech about using federal power in the US. And he was doing his usual thing, you know, including. falsely, claiming that his measures had succeeded in completely eradicating crime from the District of Washington. Anyway, at one point in his speech, Trump expressed frustration that domestic violence incidents

that happen behind closed doors, and that's a quote, are counted as part of citywide crime totals. He said... And much lesser things, things that take place in the home, they call crime. You know, they'll do anything they can to find something. if a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime, see?

So now I can't claim 100%. What's your initial reaction to that story? Yeah, I can't say I'm very surprised because I find that domestic abuse is always deprioritized and it's always, no matter what country you're in, I feel like it's always seen as a lesser of crime. And this, I think, is echoed in the UK as well when I was absolutely shocked and I think it's absolutely abhorrent that we have laws in this country in the UK where if you commit a femicide, if a femicide happens inside the home, and a weapon was used from that scene,

it was from, you know, whether it was a kitchen knife or something that was found in the home, it counts as a lesser crime than if a weapon was taken to that scene because of intent. you are less likely to serve longer kind of jail sentences than if that crime happened outside of the home purely because of really outdated laws and really outdated perceptions of, yeah, I guess crime. It's exactly the same as what Donald Trump was saying, really. These perceptions, they run really deep

and they also run deep in our kind of justice, criminal justice systems as well. And it's an outdated and quite disturbing view on one of the largest issues of crime. I guess affecting over half the population in both the UK and the US. I think a lot of people listening may not know about that law, may not know about that rule. And partly maybe that reason is that the media don't do an amazing job often when reporting on instance of domestic violence or gender-based violence.

I wonder what are the biggest mishaps that you see the media fall into when reporting on stories that involve gender-based violence. Yeah, I think one of the most common traps the media falls into is the, I guess, like narrative and wording around headlines, whether it's to do with victims of sexual assault, rape, femicides. It's always like a disembodied person has commit the crime, and it's always something has passively happened to this victim. And in a lot of these cases, the victim is a woman.

So it would be, you know, woman was raped or woman was attacked or there was this terrible headline a few months ago about a dog walker who was killed. And, you know, it made it sound like the dog walker was killed by a dog on the walk. But the headline completely missed out the fact that it was a man who had killed a woman who happened to be walking her dog. But it was framed as if, yeah, a dog walker had just, you know, dropped down dead or was attacked by like a stray dog or something. And, you know, so often in the framing of these headlines, the perpetrator is completely missing, is completely invisible. And so it kind of creates a sense that these instances of violence against women are just happening in a vacuum. And even if, as I say that, I say violence against women, a lot of people will say that we should now call it men's violence against women, because the framing of that term and the acronym Vogue, completely, Vogue, which stands for violence against women and girls, completely misses out the perpetrator of that violence, which is mostly men. Yeah, there's a complete lack of accountability often within the

media. People don't centre the perpetrators controlling actions and rather they frame the killing as something that often happens after in these cases a woman's action. So they'll be like husband killed ex-wife after a row as if that's a perfectly reasonable reason to kill your wife. and language is something that you call out on your page a lot. A story that you put out recently, which actually I think does have to do with language as well, was we've seen kind of over the last few months this like flurry of headlines about a so-called crisis

that young men are falling behind women in education and academic fields. And you kind of picked up on this trend and posted a reel about it. Can you tell me about this story first? What is this story? It's a story that actually has been doing the rounds in many, many different newspapers in Forbes, in New York Times. There was an article that was doing the rounds in the New York Times

that was titled, it's not just a feeling data shows that boys and young men are falling behind, which is a trending topic, a trending conversation, which also links to like the male loneliness epidemic and this whole idea that men and boys are falling behind which often has the undertones of its women's progression and women's equality has gone too far feminism has gone too far which means that young men can't find their place in the world anymore and aren't finding it really difficult because you know young girls and women are doing really well in academic fields and in school and in education and boys are just

finding it hard to find their place in the world. And the framing of these articles, the framing of the data specifically is really harmful, I think, because it leaves out a huge chunk of the discussion as to why men and boys might be falling behind in certain areas, but there are other areas which are kind of, I think, misleadingly left out and left open to interpretation if you don't include that data. An example of this is women and girls have excelled in STEM, in fields like science and technology, and men and boys haven't entered into those fields or are finding it kind of harder to compete in those fields with women. There is data to show this. However, the data that is not reported on and is very rarely makes the headlines of the fact that basically there's no

movement in the other direction. So men and boys are not moving to go to those traditionally female-dominated fields and traditionally, I guess, like feminine roles such as kind of caring roles, hospitality, the care sector, education sector, primary and secondary education as teachers. And there's a huge, huge need for men to fill these roles, especially to have kind of male role models and teachers in schools, but that is very, very rarely reported on because I guess it's seen as women's work and women's work as we know is often like undervalued. And you know what's so interesting about this is because I saw an article just after A level results day this year and the headline was boys lead girls in top A level grades for the

first time in seven years. But then what followed, you know, there wasn't the same scaremongering that followed this revelation, you know, there wasn't any, oh my God, lost girls, girls are being left behind, boy success at girls' expense, you know, we've gone too far, have boys' rights gone too far? And I thought that was so telling in how we describe these jobs and these roles that are so typically seen as women led. Yeah, no, exactly. It's all around the framing of this issue. As you say, there's not a huge outcry in the media in the right-wing press when boys are suddenly doing better in their A-levels than girls. But as soon as it's the other way around, then it's, oh, we know feminism has gone too far and, you know, boys are falling behind and what are we going to do about, you know, boys' education and it becomes a kind of crisis conversation. It's something which I, it's especially as well, looking at the male loneliness epidemic, I'm kind of some quotation marks for that because it's something which is spoken about quite a lot.

What isn't spoken about a lot is the fact that girls, especially young girls in the UK, have reported extremely low mental health. And there's a mental health crisis which is happening with young girls, which is, you know, rarely ever makes the headlines. King's College did a report on recently and found that specifically in London, girls' mental health is at, like, you know, all-time low. And, yeah, these stories very rarely get the same airtime. and it's something which I think contributes to this wider narrative

that feminism is doing a disservice to men and I just don't think that is representative of the real issue at all. How frustrating is it for you as somebody who dissects misogyny and media misogyny on a daily basis to see articles like that about this, you know, so-called crisis, male loneliness epidemic or lost boys crisis and then see the misrepresentative reporting. I find it really disheartening because as soon as this misinformation gets into the media,

it's disseminated really quickly and people pick it up and then those ideas, you know, take hold quite easily and quite quickly. Even my grandma had a conversation with me and was like, oh, you know, there's now there's more female doctors than male doctors, you know, there's like a huge crisis with not being enough men doctors. And I was like, what is the data here? you know like what are we actually looking at and then they looked into it and there was a new story that came out that said that there's more female doctors than male doctors for the first

time in the UK but the percentage point of that was 0.04%. So in the UK there are 164,4,4 women doctors. Male doctors there's 164,195 so it's a difference of 245 people which is 0.04% And that was a headline that, like, now there's more women doctors than men. And I'm like, what is the other side of this story? The other side of the story is that, like, female health is incredibly under-researched. And we actually desperately need more women doctors and more women in this field and more women looking into, like, you know, helping kind of move women's health along. We really, really need this. So why is this being painted as a negative thing? So it's stuff like that which I find incredibly annoying because it gets the wrong side of the conversation

out there. A hundred percent speaking about men. You know, Media Storm have done so many episodes on misogyny, the media and gender-based violence and we've had some incredible guests, you know, like some brilliant, brilliant women who have spoken to us about their personal experiences and their stories. And then a couple of series ago, we realized that actually a key missing voice in the conversation is actually men. And I don't say that often, but do you think that men are missing in this conversation on how to stop misogyny? Yeah, I do. I think it's been that way for as long as I've been in this sector, which has been about eight years now. And yeah, the entire kind of finance against women and gender equality sector is one which is

dominated predominantly by women and it often feels like women are the ones who are doing this work speaking about it the loudest and are the kind of yeah majority in in those rooms and online as well like I like to have a look at my following the percentage of like men and women who follow me and it does vary sometimes it's like 99.9% women and then like 0.1% men or something and then sometimes it's like 80% 20% but usually it's up in the the 90s and that for some that for me I just think is really telling I think we've got to the point now where the vogue sector everybody is very much on the same page that we need men to be a part of this conversation too we need men to be our allies and to speak you know kind of loudly about

this issue if we're going to make any headway and make any change we need to make it less taboo for men to talk about this we need to make it less like you have to kind of be be brave and be like you're making a statement it should be normal to be an ally it should be normal to speak up for the rights of others. And it should be normal to call out kind of inappropriate behaviour and call out men's violence and not to feel attacked

or to feel as if you are in some way kind of hating on men or something by contributing to that discussion because I think that's often how it's framed. You know, there are some amazing men out there who I follow and who I work with who are doing this, you know, this work around positive masculinity and, you know, talking about, yeah,

alternative forms of masculinity and, you know, standing up for your community, but also, you know, calling out bad behavior and being an ally to women and minorities. It's an issue which is predominantly kind of about them and it should be all of our responsibility to tackle this issue, but especially, you know, men's, and that shouldn't be any kind of reflection on, you know, them and that person. I think when he's, like, decenter ourselves from these conversations and de-center our, yeah, like, kind of move away from it being an attack on, on you personally and, you know, more of like, how can I contribute to a wider discussion around this problem that isn't,

you know, it's not about me specifically. It's about everyone. How do you think that we can go about doing that? Have you learned anything from those men that you were talking to who work in this sector, from your time in this sector? How do we approach men to be involved in this conversation? It needs to be done in a way where you're really bringing men into the conversation and empowering them to feel like they have a voice and they have something to say. Because the way that it's, I'm not saying, I'm not pointing fingers, but the way it's been done before framing the issue is like toxic masculinity and like men are trash and like, you know, while some of those things may be true, it doesn't necessarily get everyone on board with, with kind of being an ally and helping to kind of tackle the issue. And it's quite a, it is quite a touchy subject because a lot of people and especially maybe a lot of women might find that, you know, why should. we have to like hold men's hands through this why should we have to always make everything palatable

and easy for men when it's not been easy for us and we're the ones who are on the front line constantly trying to like um you know hold everyone's hand through this and especially like guide men through this why can't they just like be an ally to us and understand what we're going through for just like a point of empathy but from my experience I think it is more helpful to always approach these conversations with empathy from both sides and to always show them that this is something which happens to them as well. You know, sexual harassment happens to everybody. It predominantly happens to women and girls, but it does happen to men too. And whenever I go into schools and talk about this issue with young boys, a really helpful way of framing the conversation around it is

to be like, you know, have you ever thought about some of the things that happen between your, you know, your mates and your kind of groups of friends like pantsing. There's this thing where boys go around like put your pants down or like, you know, rating each other or like people making comments about your height or, you know, we talk about these kind of things in a way where it's relatable for boys as well. Obviously, it's not necessarily the same. We're not saying it's the same thing as, you know, forms of sexual harassment that women and girls experience, but we're putting it in a context for them where it's like, oh, okay, this is something that I can understand. It's about consent. It's about boundaries. It's about respect and like making

it about issues which are more kind of human and universal so you can kind of get someone on board with the message rather than being like we're putting you in two camps, you're the abuser and you're the victim because that doesn't seem to progress the conversation forward in like a helpful or like really meaningful way. You just spoke there about going into schools and giving workshops and this is the thing like you Eliza is cheer up love like you have obviously a big platform and a following and break down news stories, et cetera, but there's also this kind of on-the-ground grassroots work. And yeah, I wonder if you can just tell us a bit more about that, especially your work in

schools. Yeah, definitely. So I think in all forms of activism, it needs to have like a multi-pronged approach. I think it's really important to talk about these things online, to have these conversations and create communities, you know, on social media, so you can, you know, feel less alone, I feel like a sense of solidarity with other people and also just, yeah, for it to be a kind of informal way of having these conversations. I think there is a real important, you know, social media has a really important place for that. But it needs to happen in the real world as well. And that's why I do my work facilitating, going into schools. I do lots of talks. I do workshops. I go in as, I guess, like, cheer up love and talk about kind of using photography for

activism and doing art for activism workshops and showing how, you know, you can tackle not just issues around sexual harassment, gender-based violence, but any issue that you feel kind of passionately about, whether that's like around climate change or anti-racism, like whatever it is, you can use art as a tool for kind of, for protests and for, you know, channeling your anger in a positive way. So I do lots of workshops around that in schools, but I also do facilitating with a group called Our Streets Now, I go into kind of school environments and talk about sexual harassment, talk about masculinity, consent, and around kind of building positive relationships and things like that. And those are incredibly rewarding sessions. They are, you know, really difficult.

They are exhausting sometimes. And they are incredibly rewarding. They are definitely some some of the key moments where I feel like, okay, what I'm doing right now is potentially actually having a real impact and having a difference because it's really hard to measure that online sometimes. I mean, you know, yes, your post might get 100,000 views and tons of comments and someone might come up to me like, oh, I saw this post and something and I sent it to a friend and they agreed or whatever. And then you think, oh, okay, there is, you know, there's a lot of eyeballs on that, but then how many conversations does that kind of translate into? You know, is that going to be something which is seen for a day and then forgotten tomorrow?

And then when you're going into schools, it's slightly different because the impact, you know, maybe you're spending a whole day with a class, maybe you're spending a couple hours with them. And maybe you're coming back to that class six months or a year later and you're having those conversations again. And you're seeing like how much, you know, you're getting to actually talk to people and find out how much they remembered and how much they learned from those conversations. And they're coming to them with their ideas and with, you know, the things. that they're kind of interested and passionate about, all the things that they're scared about, all the things that they're worried about, the things that are kind of bothering them in school and with their peers and with their friends. And so those are the moments where you think,

okay, this is where the real work happens. And that's why I have so much respect for teachers because they just have, you know, one of the hardest jobs, I think, is having to go into schools every single day and, you know, not just teach and make sure everyone's okay, but there's also like this huge never-ending list of things. which they're also having to cover. It's hard. It's challenging. You know, it's challenging stuff. So, yeah, I have huge respect for teachers.

Yeah, teachers are incredible. If there are any teachers listening, where can they get in touch about bringing one of these workshops maybe into their schools? My work specifically, you can find out the comfortable talks and the workshops that I offer on my website. That's cheerup love.com. I also work with an organisation called Our Streets Now,

and we go into schools and facilitate workshops around sexual harassment. And then there are other other organisations which are doing really incredible work in this area such as beyond equality. They go into schools, talk to groups of boys specifically and do lots of work around positive masculinity. And then there's split banana as well, bold voices. These are just a couple of, yeah, organisations who are doing really, really important work that needs funding and needs supporting and is, yeah, something which we need a lot more of, I think. There's always stories to be told.

There's always, you know, injustices that I see happening around me. There's always things that are making me angry, passionate. I feel like as long as there are issues that are affecting, you know, women and girls, people have marginalized genders. As long as we are still kind of, you know, fighting against those injustices, then I feel like there will be work to be done. all book lovers. The Toronto International Festival of Authors brings you a world of stories all in one place. Discover five days of readings, talks, workshops and more, with over 100 authors from around the world, including Rachel Maddow, Ketourou Isaku and Kieran Desai. The Toronto International Festival of Authors, October 29th to November 2nd. Details and tickets at festivalofauthors.ca.

original series Murdoch Death and the Family dives into secrets, deception, murder, and the fall of a powerful dynasty. Inspired by shocking actual events and drawing from the hit podcast, this series brings the drama to the screen like never before. Starring Academy Award winner Patricia Arquette and Jason Clark. Watch the Hulu original series Murdoch Death in the Family, streaming October 15th on Disney Plus. Welcome back to Media Storm. To carry on highlighting solutions to media misogyny, I wanted to draw your attention to a new campaign, launched this month by not-for-profit organization This Ends Now. Their aim is to prevent gender-based inequality by reframing the conversation around feminism.

They do this by engaging in policy work, developing training and public awareness campaigns. Their new campaign, Take It as Red, will help us all to challenge misogynistic and victim blaming language around male violence against women and girls. I spoke to Holly from This Ends Now to tell us more about the campaign. Hi Holly, thank you for joining us. So just to start, tell us what is the Take It as Red campaign? Of course. So the Take It as Red campaign is this ends now's newest campaign, which challenges the misogynistic and victim-blaming language that we so often see

when the media and also the police press releases report on it. instances of male violence against women and girls. I know that you've spoken about this on the podcast before, but so often these headlines will shift blame onto the victim survivor other than the man who ultimately chose to commit the violence. So that could be, why was she wearing a short skirt? Why was she in a bad part of town? Why was she drunk? It implies that it's her fault and not the fault of the man who chose to commit the violence. So with Take It is Red, we are challenging those narratives by asking people to commit to challenge misogynistic language whenever they encounter it and to be more conscious of the language that we all use in our every

day as we believe that if as individuals we all make these small changes, that eventually what we're going to do is build a society where it's no longer acceptable or normalised for these headlines to be everywhere. Absolutely. Tell us how did the campaign start? How did it come about? This Ends Now was actually founded in 2022 by Sydney McAllister and Nikki Owen after there were a string of really bad instances of male violence against women and girls in Stroud, which is where they lived, and the police press releases and the media were just really victim blaming in their narratives. So this ins now was formed and it was originated around the concept that words matter, which is exactly this, why the language that we use shapes how society sees male violence against women and girls. As part of this work, this ends now collaborated with the Gloucestershire Constabulary and the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner in Gloucestershire to create the first of its kind Words Matter Reporting Guidelines,

which is aimed at police external communicators to not victim-blaming and not be misogynistic in the way that they report on these instances. And something that we are asked all the time is why we worked with the police. We know that in an era of fast-paced journalism, getting headlines out time and time again, And often media outlets pick up the headlines directly from police external communications. So we went to the source with them. And yeah, take it as read, felt like the natural progression from that to get everybody involved,

not just institutions. This may sound like a silly question, but why is it so important? Some people might say, well, those headlines, they're just what we read? What about the actual work that's being done to tackle violence against women and girls? Yeah, of course. So it's a really interesting question. And I think, firstly, words matter. Language isn't neutral.

The way that we use words and the way that we use language helps society understand issues and therefore how they respond to these issues. So you'll notice that we say male violence against women and girls instead of violence against women and girls. Because the statistics don't lie, we know that. There is an epidemic of male violence happening. And if we can't name it what it is,

how can we possibly begin to solve it? But we get a lot of comments on our social media. for context, we have a usual red pen campaign. So what we do is we take a red pen on social media and correct headlines, which are problematic. And we get so many comments all the time from people saying things like, I'd never noticed how a victim blaming the press is. I'd never thought about it in this way before. And for each sort of like person that begins to notice it and see how prevalent and insidious it is, it's raising awareness and it's calling the problem what it is. the words that we use articulate how we see the world and ultimately the more normalized it is through

the headlines the more accepted it is it just becomes part of everyday life there was an actual headline years ago woman murdered after drinking six yager bombs in half an hour on night out that has nothing to do with the fact that a man chose to kill her the more we see this the more normalized it becomes the more accepted it is so to actually create a culture in which we're not victim-vaming and we're not being misogynistic and we are fighting to prevent male violence against women and girls and ultimately to end it, we need to stop it being normalised. We need people to see it as the insidious epidemic that it is. The campaign has just begun. What are your hopes for the future of the campaign? People can pledge via our social

media and via our website. So that's really getting individuals to, you know, take accountability to be more conscious of the language they use and to call it out when they encounter it. When people take the pledge, they'll receive our brand new free resource, which is a set of language primers. So these are really handy tools to help people feel confident and equipped to be able to have these sometimes very difficult conversations, whether that's at the pub with your friends, a colleague says something misogynistic or family members or even in headlines. So these resources will really help people to feel confident and equipped to do that. But then we are going to do community events. And ultimately, the end goal is,

to really make policy action. We really, really want the government to be calling it male violence against women and girls. It's incredible that they've called it an epidemic and that they're taking the steps that they are, but we just don't believe that you can effectively tackle it if you're not naming the problem. Well, finally, if people want to get involved,

if people want to know more about the campaign, how can people help and where can they go? Our Instagram is, This Ends Now underscore underscore. So if you go to there and click the link in our bio, then it will take you through to the webpage to pledge or just go to www.com.com.uk and it's on our website, even though taking a pledge might seem like a small action to start with. We really believe that if everybody commits to this, that we can create real change and ultimately end victim blaming a misogyny and create a nicer environment

for victims and survivors. Thank you for listening. If you want to support Media Storm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month. The link is in the show notes. and a special shout-outs to everyone in our Patreon community already. We appreciate you so much. And if you enjoyed this episode, please send it to someone. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow a podcast, so please do tell your friends. You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal, at Helen Awadier, and follow the show at MediaStorm Pod.

MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helena Wardia and Matilda Mallinson. The music is by Samfire. I don't know.