Non-violent counter-protest training and practicum

Non-violent counter-protest training and practicum
January 14, 2012
Help: Professional / Personal Development Opportunity

Non-violent counter-protest training and practicum

Our need: Nine or ten counter-protestors to support constraining the harassment behaviours of Helpers of God's Precious Infants 6 mornings a week at The Fertility Control Clinic from 7:30 – 9:30am on Wellington Parade, East Melbourne, Vic

The task: to document harassment of arriving patients, while also inhibiting it in a non-harassing way.

The context: see here for detailed description. In brief:

The Fertility Control Clinic's front gate is a frontline of the struggle over life and death rights in Melbourne. There a group of Catholic protestors meet six days a week at 7:30am to protest patients' moral rights to a legal service authorised by elected representatives of the people of Victoria three years ago. Their protest expresses their unflagging commitment to expunging this parliamentary offence against the revealed word of gods.

The challenge: to engage with the protestors at a personal level to understand their perspectives and establish relationships, and at a social level as legally misbehaving harassers of vulnerable patients; to increase your understanding and competence at dealing with your own embarrassment / shame about taking personal action in public; the protestors have been provided a rationale and action focus for our work.

Benefits for you: increased awareness of own anger triggers, control over your automatic responses and directing them into appropriate, non-violent action to reduce patient harassment; knowing you are providing a support service much appreciated by patients and clinic staff clarification of own views of life and death issues.

The commitment: one session a week for about three months in the first instance

Even if in doubt, but interested, follow Torrey up by phone or comment on this letter at the blog below. Contact is not a commitment, either way.

Hopefully,

Torrey Orton and Charles Brass
Friends of the Fertility Control Clinic
11 Wertheim St
Richmond, Vic., 3121
Australia
Mob. +61 (0) 419 362 349
Skype - torreyo
http://www.diarybyamadman.blogspot.com/

Preface to a counter protest – observations on power and perception in public places

Preface to a counter protest – observations on power and perception in public places
Torrey Orton
Nov.7, 2011


The FCC protest site is a miniature power vacuum which allows and facilitates our access. It's almost as if we did not have to intervene as such…just show up. Which is what we did… to be received with slight apprehension / wonder by the occupiers of the two lane pathway. We had no authorisation other than our interest in the daily dramas played out there. We did, though, have an encouragement from a senior FCC staffer as a jumping off point for our fronting up the first day four months ago now.

We came to do a job we did not know, which did not exist and, for whatever it turns out to be, we could easily be blamed and quite likely not congratulated (it seemed at the time). The only certainty still is we will not be paid. We really did not know what we were doing. We did know we wanted to do something to reduce patient harassment by protestors. We created the job somewhat by a default to our personal role preferences – me somewhat more combative and Charles somewhat more consultative.
The human scale of this theatre made our entrance moderately and manageably threatening to the others and us*. We talked to people immediately person to person, face-to-face (unmediated by banners and territories). Our starting place was wonder about what is going on there…how they all see the daily drama. We could see it but not interpret it without their perspectives and meanings. The personal entry level allowed close examination of all their behaviours to test the polarised interpretations (of each's perfidy in the other's eyes, of course) which leapt out first.

We started from a clear position that we side with the FCC. This became more explicit as I tended to spend all my time with the guards and Charles all his with the protestors, especially the one most open to our interest in understanding their experience. I have a workable relationship with him but not as deeply founded on hearing his views or putting mine. I did test with him the potential impact of a shaming threat I was considering if necessary to balance the patient harassment equation on the Wellington Parade footpath stage. Its potential impact was big enough.A few regular passers-by (local inhabitants mostly) inquired who I was in the play, or more sharply, what I was – 'lifer' protestor or 'choicer' FCC patient rights supporter. I eventually ported a small badge saying: "Pro-child, Pro-family, Pro-choice" on a white background. Another badge - "My Body, My choice" against a half green, half blue background - captures my personal concern about euthanasia but isn't so clearly relevant to Wellington Parade. It rests for another day.

Seeing patent harassment from both points of view is an essential achievement for our intervention. It cannot be read from a book or even watched in a video of a harassment event. It takes at least a minimum of two different and independent viewpoints to establish a video fact, as it does a judicially respectable one, and hence a successfully prosecutable one. Further, the most important meaning, that of the patients, has to be inferred much of the time. To enquire directly as they pass through the two lane pathway would only intensify whatever negative pressure they already feel from being watched / harassed.Harassment by protestors and guards of each other across the same pathway is driven by unrequited righteousness on both sides. The "lifers" have the Word in their hearts, justifying anything that comes to mind in seeming contradiction to their perceptions of its meanings. The security services have historical injuries of the Word's church school renditions from which they are still recovering and the daily animosity of the protestors…injuries easily re-primed by the "Lifers" persistent patter ("Please save your little baby", "You'll be a good mother", etc.).

All this becomes more instructive when contrasted with two recent massed protest events – (1) the monthly Saturday appearances of large numbers and varieties of prayer protestors who set up across Wellington Parade for an hour from 10:30 to 11:30am approx. and (2) the Victorian Parliament steps launch of the 40 days of protest against abortion on Oct. 14, 2011. Such events are dominated by loud voices and large posters / banners. They are totally speaking at, not with, events. The boundaries on the launch day were marked by "scuffles". On the monthlies they are policed across 20 meters of streetscape by two bunches of Vic Police, one assigned to each side of the street. Little crosses the street but air and hard looks.The more recent ejection of Occupy Melbourne protestors shows how quickly things in larger scales can move from dominance to violence, even though early violence inducing initiatives may be the products of very small numbers of protestors and police provoking each other.

We, Charles and I, are a small force in numbers and proven persistence – the real denomination of interpersonal power and engine of virtue. The protestors' forces are both larger in the street and proportionally massive in the background (members of active "lifer" organisations, catholic and otherwise). And, their persistence quotient is seriously impressive (18 years at this site for one leading player, who is also present five mornings a week minimum). So, unless we can achieve a systemic shift in the rules of the daily theatre we will be worn down by their moral dominance in effort. They will still be here in a year, or five. I haven't got that long.If we were to move to active intervention against the protestors – turning the threatened threat to their self-esteem into an action program which made it so uncomfortable for them they would retreat – it would be fun but hard to do without causing as much new trouble as the old it was meant to punish. Patients would be in danger of being harassed by our anti-harassment campaign. Not a good look or touch!


*While at the same time much less threatening to me; I have a distinct aversion to potential shaming, and a thin skin for deflecting anything I can construe as an allegation deserving my shame; on reflection here, however, I think my aversion is more to being posted on the other side of an imaginary fence of inclusion…but then being on the inside is shameful in some things, such as being in the community of "lifer" protestors. Being a lone member of a non-existent group alerts my aversive side just fine.

Back to the Anger (3) – where does a homeless anger go to rest??

Back to the Anger (3) – where does a homeless anger go to rest??
Torrey Orton
August 26, 2011


A year ago just about now I was worrying my engagement with my anger. It's better engaged now than then. One part of that story is yet to be written tales of searching over the last two months for ways to interrupt Catholic anti-abortionists' harassment of patients at the foundational abortion provider in Melbourne. There are a lot of angry people on that stage and I am not trying to add to them, but the atmosphere is penetrating. My just being there reportedly reduces the harassment, while the anger just perks along in the undergrowth.


There's a short, nicely written, psychological treatment of anger here. It makes sense in every respect except the one I'm concerned about now – namely, that there are times and places when there is nothing we can do about the sources of our anger; when our anger's natural home is inaccessible, and so irremediable. We psychs can't tell us what to do in that case, other than "cognitive restructuring", relaxation, meditation, acceptance and such; that is, suck it in. The article mentioned above tells us that to do so may be unsustainable, if the threatening forces continue. But this is the fate of many people these days (though perhaps no more so than throughout human history).


…a homeless anger
Here's one of these people, a long term friend and colleague who has not found a job in more than a year, and not for lack of trying. He's basically too old (late 50's) for the real job market. The imaginary one would suit him fine, but it doesn't hire or pay. He's basically too competent for younger managers and bureaucrats to stand. He's not a natural to anger; too little so in my view, but then there's taste, sensitivity, temperament….and he is angry now. Deeply, richly, almost unbearably. And like many other placid folks, he doesn't like to talk about his anger.


Systemically forced indifference
But, he's seriously tired of being interviewed by recruiters 30-40 years his junior who often don't know the tasks they are recruiting for, can't speak openly/transparently/honestly (choose your forward moving spin) about which type of process they are involved in (e.g. making up apparent candidate numbers for already filled positions advertised by legal or political requirement, etc.), and are seem more concerned with meeting their performance target numbers than people.


He's not surprised by this because he knows the recruiting trade and its demands on practitioners, but as a present object of the trade its shortcomings are a repeated caustic abrasion of his self-respect. And, yes, he's complained, suggested, proposed – all manner of efforts to improve their "customer service". It seems impervious to improvement. The players (recruiters) themselves are mostly powerless to influence the market dynamics driving them and their organisations, though one calls him for advice about system improvement options.


Unsystematic but persistent failure
But, he's seriously tired, also, of being the second cab off the job candidate rank he usually heads at first glance. There's a river's worth of D words for the effect: depressing and degrading and demeaning and degenerating and….. thankyou but no-thankyou calls from the less able or incompetent are teeth-grindingly outrageous.


And the government funded, not-for-profit, intermediaries facilitating his attempts in exchange for the dole are but another cog. Same coat of pretence to perform cut from the same material of personal and organisational incompetence. This is the arena of long term unemployment. My friend is still a vital statistic in the rate reported to us almost daily in proof of how well Australia is doing compared to our Anglo relatives. And, he knows that he is not statistically unusual: older = unemployable by dint of no 'economic' need for his services. Being a statistical mean is neither reassuring nor redeeming; it just provides a middle of the road place to be run over by fate.


Exposure of what to who?

Exposure therapy is the "evidence-based" treatment of choice to reduce fear of bad personal fates of many kinds. Exposure is a standard treatment for traumatic events which assault the self with recurrent images (recalls) and effects (anxiety symptoms). It is reliably effective. But it is less reliable if there is no visible cause (someone declaring you unsuitable for employment by right of disability, for instance, or being disabled in an objectively ascertainable way – loss of limbs, brain function, etc.; age cannot be mentioned of course, so it's not addressable). With such losses a start can be made on a life which embraces the loss as the from-this-point-forth condition of one's humanity. That is exposure to oneself. But/and, who would he "expose" himself to so that the fear of his daily deepening fate would be reduced?


Lacking an identifiable source of an apparent but unacknowledged disability (being over some age barrier beyond which is housed 'old') the threat cannot be reduced and the anger continues to be reinforced daily. So, too, with no job today, yesterday and likely tomorrow, day after day. This brings him close to existential despair – the expectation that there is no hope. For some this may produce resignation, for others outrage. Death is the imagined outcome of both, differing only in who is imagined dying: oneself or the nameless, faceless others. He said that it is "a struggle to believe" that continued efforts to job seek can make a difference, the moments of believing just fending off the pull of depressions expression of expected and unavoidable failure.


This is not a mental health disorder, it's a biopsychosocial one!! In other words it's down to the individual but the individual is not responsible for it, except to deal with it. A year ago I proposed here that,

"Disregard makes investment in emotions unrewarding to their owners, but it doesn't reduce their energising sources. Often it intensifies them, or the owners' perception of them, which does just as well for outrage production."

I was wrong in the long term. For some, at some times, under some personal conditions the weight of others' disregard generates one's own self-disregard in return. Unfortunately this is not terribly instructive to the others whose regard is needed. They do not feel the absence of ones regard for them or oneself. It doesn't show up in normal metrics of governance and well-being. Living nothingness. No home.


So this is his fate so far – to be refused a place to deploy his existing capabilities, through no fault of his own, by nameless two-faced forces speaking from one mouth 'you should work to be whole' and out of the other 'consume to be complete'. No home.