What about the “bad guys”?
My first experience doing social impact design was in a small village in Honduras. After talking to the coffee farming community, we noticed that farmers were losing out on value because of greedy middlemen who were acting like loan sharks. We thought, “Let’s cut out this middleman,” and recommended ideas of a community-purchased truck and community-run shop for agricultural inputs like fertilizer and pesticides.
After we concluded the project, I began to question if the solution was complete.
“What about the middleman?” I thought.
“What will happen to him? Will he now be unable to provide for his family? Will he just find another community to take advantage of?”
But those questions were left unanswered.
5 years later, my work had taken me from rural farmers in Honduras to rural women in Uganda. These women were experiencing abuse from their partners and we wanted a better, more human-centered solution to help women be safe.
We began our research by listening to the voices and experiences of women. Abuse would be a sensitive topic to discuss, so we had been prepared with ethical reviews and trained on response protocols. We asked questions, like, “What happens when there is a conflict at home? Who do you call for help?” and the women honoured us with their stories.
Then, we held multiple rounds of interviews and tests with prototypes that were designed to help women with opportunities to prevent or escape an abusive situation at home.
The women showed us mild appreciation for our safety planning guides and calming techniques, but what we heard over and over again was,
“This is nice… but what about our husbands? Can you please talk to them and tell them to stop the beatings?”
Talking to men wasn’t part of the original plan. After all, they were the “perpetrators”. It was important to be survivor-centered and accountable to women, and there was also a risk in asking challenging questions to abusive men.
But we had to listen. So we asked our advisors if we could talk to men, and they agreed.
It was refreshing to peer behind unopened doors of a man’s thoughts; to ask questions like, “What were your thoughts before, during, and after you beat your wife? How did it make you feel?”
We learned that men believed violence was inherently wrong and often felt bad about it. However, violence was also justified by a woman’s defiant, disrespectful or unfaithful behaviour. We had heard the same from some women. “If a woman wrongs her husband and he beats her, how can I feel bad for her?”
In one particular men’s focus group, we probed deeper into the issue of justified violence.
“Suppose your wife cheats on you with another man. How would you react?”
“Of course, she would need a beating,” said 5 out of 6 of the men.
The last man challenged the others and said, “No, I would never hit my wife, even if she cheated on me.”
All the other men laughed in disbelief. “How could you refrain from hitting your wife?”
How could you refrain…? My mind raced, sorting though hundreds of hours of research. With those words, like the last piece of the puzzle, I finally had an understanding.
Self-esteem and the identity of being a “respected man” were intertwined, and it was extra damaging when a man’s respect was tied to the way his wife treated him. If she did something that made him feel bad or look bad, he would preserve his self-esteem and respect by beating it out of her.
With that in mind, I decided to go off script and propose a different perspective.
“What if it was true that your respect comes only from you, not from how others treat you? What if the respect you have isn’t about how your wife treats you, but about how you respond to her?”
The men sat there quietly and thoughtfully.
Eventually one man spoke up, “Then, I would agree with him,” referring to the one who refused to hit his wife, “Then, there is no reason to beat her.” The others nodded in agreement.
We turned the insights from this eye-opening conversation into new content for an existing couples counseling program. Our local community leaders would teach men and women about the true source of respect and how to manage negative emotions without violence to earn this respect.
The content tested positively and was a huge pivot from our original women’s safety content; a pivot that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t spoken directly to men.
In social impact work, it can be easy to simplify issues into the “good guys” and the “bad guys”, the powerful and powerless, the perpetrators and the victims.
“If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”*
To build whole solutions, we have to approach the whole system and we have to see whole humans.
Looking back, I wish we had done something with those “greedy” middlemen in Honduras. I wish we had the wisdom to approach them with the same compassion and desire to understand their values, beliefs, and needs as we had done with the farmers. Maybe there was a way the middlemen could have been included in the solution. Maybe there was a way the middlemen and farmers could have resolved their differences.
But enough with wishful thinking.
In our fight for social justice and social change, let us also care for the people behind the brokenness they cause, knowing that “every one of us is more complex and beautiful than our worst actions and harshest judgments.”**
* Greg Lukianoff , The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
** Dean Spade, Toward an Ethics of Activism
For additional reading: Perpetrators Are People Too