1. JC (2010-2011)

I first met Stephen around 2010, through an activist group focused on climate change, and we became friendly quite quickly. In 2011, Stephen was involved in the inception of another activist group – and through Stephen’s invitation, I became involved.

After a year or so of working together, in a group meeting, Stephen had a proposal for an action idea. The majority of the group were not in favour of the action. I can’t remember the exact reason, I don’t think there were serious concerns with the politics of the action, just that most of us didn’t consider it to be a strategic action to take in that moment. The group operated by a ‘consensus decision making process’, and therefore there was a decision not to go ahead with the action.

Stephen then went ahead and organised the action anyway. He gathered people not involved in the group to help him  and used our official social media channels to organise it – and so it looked very clearly as if it had been organised in the name of the group. 

Many of the people in the group, including myself, were upset with Stephen. He had disregarded our feelings and opinions, and had gone against our agreed process for decision making – he had breached our trust. 

When some of us expressed our upset and anger about what he had done, he threatened to take control of the group’s communications – our social media, and the website. Stephen had built the website and had designed applications that we used for our social media, and so it was very easy for him to take control of these.

We called a meeting to address the situation, which Stephen did attend. In the meeting, about 15 or 20 people each took a turn to express their upset and anger with what Stephen had done. Stephen did not seem to have much of a reaction to this (though this of course is just my perception), and, if I remember rightly, he did give an apology, but not one that I felt was very sincere. He also made a comment that he knew information about all of us, which felt to me as a kind of threat – given that we were quite a high profile group involved in civil disobedience. 

He then stopped attending the group’s meetings, and started putting his time and energy into another activist project that he had just set up. 

Previous to the incident described above, a number of the women had raised issues with the patriarchal dynamics in the group. It was raised that men including Stephen, were taking roles as charismatic leaders, and that these men were dominating the running of the group. This played out through ideas and opinions being brought confidently, often bringing fleshed out proposals to the group (rather than collaboratively coming up with ideas), and having the entitlement to act on ideas - such as by talking to people outside of meetings, and building web apps – without first going to the rest of the group; as well as talking over some of the women and people who were less confident; and pushing group discussions along at a pace that did not allow much space for others’ input.

Over that first year or so of working together, me and Stephen had become friends. From this incident, I lost respect for Stephen, and we have had hardly any contact since then.

JC (2010-2011)