Working Against Violence, Exploitation and Sexism
Using the skills of educators and expertise of our sister organisations to transform lives in every classroom.
what WAVES means
Working
At first, the W felt like it should stand for Women.
Women’s rights is central to the work we are doing and, day to day, women take responsibility for a great deal that happens around us.
Although much of what we are challenging in the WAVES Project is our shared experience as women, it is not only on the shoulders of women to solve.
Women are already doing the work, and by making it about the work rather about the women, we leave the doors open for all genders to be part of the work.
Against
It looks like a filler letter at first. It just makes the acronym work, but it is integral to the work.
If we don't place ourselves in opposition to the Violence, Exploitation and Sexism that we see, then we are allowing those behaviours to persist.
Where we are apathetic or try to be apolitical we allow it to continue. Advocacy groups are invaluable and awareness is essential, but this project seeks to actively work against V, E and S. By pushing back against the entitlement, micro-aggression, degrading and gaslighting behaviour delivered to us by social media, we can start to act to fix the problem.
Violence
What do we actually mean by violence? It's more than just physical aggression it's also the threat of danger.
From UN Women "... physical, mental or sexual harm or suffering, threats of such acts, coercion and other deprivations of liberty" so it is physical harm, but not only physical harm. Also threats of harm, coercion and the removal of somebody's liberty also count as violence.
As well as a global human rights violation, it is a "major public and clinical health problem" with the World Health Organisation quoting globally almost 30% of women experiencing violence from a partner at some point in their lives.
Exploitation
This has its roots in simple power dynamics but involves some transaction. Where people are exploited, someone is seeking to achieve financial, sexual or personal gain and the victim may lose their dignity or autonomy.
Safeguarding in education training covers extreme cases such as county lines, child sexual exploitation (CSE), criminal exploitation and modern slavery, however these don't happen to a person overnight, there are steps before which might be identified and the exploitation prevented.
Sexism
Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination based on a person's sex or gender.
How sexism is presented will depend on the age, experience and environment of every person, but a system built around women having less power and rights is deeply ingrained.
For this reason, sexism is the most important of the 3. Without the imbalance of power, exploitation is not possible as it relies on institutional, structural, societal rules. These rules are often unspoken and implicit, unnoticed but universally understood. They are taken for granted and so by definition, hard to see and therefore hard to fix.
Without sexism, violence would be directed equally across the gender spectrum. We know that women are routinely killed by male partners whereas the opposite is rare. We know that trans and non-binary people experience many times more violence than men or women.
Gender based violence and exploitation is deeply rooted in the power dynamics of sexism, often in trivial seeming ways, and starting early in life.