Club Friday Q&A: Journalist Nana aba Duncan on How We Talk About Abuse
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Courtesy of Nana aba Duncan
Award-winning journalist, co-founder of podcast production company Media Girlfriends, Carty Chair in Journalism, Diversity and Inclusion Studies at Carleton University’s School of Journalism—Nana aba Duncan has a lot on her plate, but when the chance came up to host a podcast for the Canadian Women’s Foundation about Signal to Help, the org’s campaign around supporting women experiencing gender-based violence, she made time. “I actually think that it's always time to talk about gender-based violence; I don't think there's a better time to talk about it depending on the the year or the day,” she says. “It's just always time to talk about it.” This week, we’re chatting about why it’s so important to talk about gender-based violence, misconceptions around who experiences abuse and what you can actually do if someone you love is in an abusive relationship.
When did you start Media Girlfriends?
Media Girlfriends started in 2016 as a podcast on women working in Canadian media. I was going to my friends, or people that I knew, and because a lot of my friends are women of colour, women who want to have children, women who will not have children, women who are queer, women who also are into politics and that kind of thing, I think we represented a corner of the journalism industry that hadn't really been as public at that point. It was just a side project, but there was some love there—my colleagues at CBC would stop me in the hallways and say, “Oh, I listened to that episode with Nam!” And I was like, “Oh, my God, you're listening? What?!”
At one point, I started a Twitter chat group with some of the women that I had interviewed, and we became our own personal board of directors. We started to hang out. We rented a cottage together. When we were at the cottage, people would have ideas about Media Girlfriends and I would be there with my paper and pen, writing down these ideas. Eventually, the ideas started to happen. It grew to include events, which started because of an idea from Hannah [Sung]. We launched an annual $30,000 scholarship that started as an idea from Jen Hollett. So it just grew.
We were always thinking that we should be making things together, but we didn’t know what we should do. Garvia and Hannah were in the freelance space, both [doing] podcasting, so we talked for a while about becoming a company, which I was very scared about because I didn’t want to work with my friends and then not be friends with them anymore. I remember feeling very stressed about the concept. But my friends were like, it’s gonna be fine! And then Historica Canada was looking for a podcast production company to make a Black History podcast and video series and someone sent that link to me, Garvia [Bailey] and Hannah and we were like, this is it. And that’s how we became a production company.
And how did you get involved with the Canadian Women’s Foundation?
Andrea Gunraj is the Vice President, Public Engagement at the Canadian Women's Foundation and she knew about Media Girlfriends. She became one of our many supporters when we all came together as a podcast production company, so when they had this idea to do a podcast about Signal for Help, I think we were one of the first first groups that came to mind.
Why did they want to make this podcast?
Signal for Help is a campaign by the Canadian Women's Foundation that started during the pandemic. It started with the hand signal (you tuck your thumb into your palm and cover it with fingers), which recently won a Governor General’s Innovation Award, but they were thinking about continuing with that initiative. Because It's not just about the signal. It's also about how you equip regular people like you and me who might encounter loved ones, friends, workmates, people around us who are experiencing gender-based violence. They have a number of ways that they are helping people, including their mini course, which is an interactive learning tool with actual scenarios that takes about an hour to complete. So, a podcast was just another way to spread the information and educate Canadians on how to respond to someone when they signal for help.
Why is the topic of gender-based violence is so important and timely right now? I think the fact that the Signal for Help campaign started in the pandemic is part of that, right?
Yes. The original idea for Signal for Help started during the pandemic because people were concerned about women and trans or non-binary people in domestic situations that could be made worse because they were at home with their abusers. But in terms of the timeliness, I actually think that it's always time to talk about gender-based violence; I don't think there's a better time to talk about it depending on the the year or the day. It's just always time to talk about it.
But I will say, what I like about this podcast is that it is really giving us something to do. I think we can hear about the terrible numbers and think, ‘Oh, that’s terrible.’ We can know that Indigenous women are 3.5 times more likely to experience some form of spousal violence than non-Indigenous women, and that Indigenous women make up 1.2% of Ontario's population but account for 6% of female homicide victims. But Signal for Help gives you something to do.
What are some of the things you learned while making the podcast?
One thing that I learned to is to fix your face. So when somebody tells you that something is happening to them, fix your face. You might have an idea of what a person who's being abused looks like, but what if a friend of yours who was very, very quote-unquote ‘successful,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘has it all together’ tells you that she's been abused by her boyfriend or husband? How are you going to react? Are you going to say, “Are you kidding me?!” No, that's not what you do. You fix your face, and you say, “Thank you for telling me. I'm here to talk more about it.” Another thing that I learned is from Yasmin and Taghreed in episode 4. They have a program that's focused on Muslim newcomer women, and one of the things that they talked about was, don’t ask for details, ask how you can help.
And, if there's somebody who you're worried about and you want to check in on them, text them something like, “Hey, we haven't talked in a while. Do you want to go for a coffee?” You're not going to say, “Hey, I'm worried about you. The last time we talked you said…” It's better to say, “Let's meet” and then have a conversation with them in private. Another thing is, if you call them and you say ask if it’s a good time to talk and they hesitate, say, ”Oh, you know what, I'm getting another call. I gotta go, I'll talk to you later.” Boom, put the phone down and send a text saying, “Let’s chat later.” That way, if somebody's in the room or monitoring their phone, you’re not putting them in further danger.
I want to go back to what you were saying about how a friend who’s seemingly so together might actually be in an abusive relationship. I think the first time I wrote about abuse was a few years ago, after Quavo and Saweetie broke up and a video of a physical altercation between them went viral. I remember talking to one of my students at the time, who told me how many of her friends had been in abusive relationships and that they had all been talking about this. I think I'm very lucky in that I've never experienced abuse, but also, none of my friends have ever told me that they have experienced abuse. So, I was stunned to hear this young woman in her very early 20s tell me that basically her entire friend group had.
One of the things that Eternity Martis talks about in the first episode is how we don't pay a lot of attention to the folks who are not married and young, between 18 and 24. And I think that speaks to what you're talking about; some of those people are in abusive relationships, but where do they go? It’s not that there isn't help for them, but there isn't a lot of focus on them, and that has a lot of implications for girls, and trans and non-binary people who are going to university for the first time and having to deal with those relationships. Her relationship started in high school and followed her to university.
I think we have these ideas of what counts as abuse, and who gets abused, and that makes it difficult to see that young people are being abused, or to imagine what that abuse might look like.
One of the things that came up was the importance of language, and actually naming something for what it is. One of the women that we speak to, Bernadette, lived with a man who was abusing her for over 20 years and then ended up in working in the court system to help other women who had been abused. Something that she talks about is that you've got to name something. If somebody says, “Yeah, he doesn't really like me to go out with this kind of person,” then one appropriate response could be, “It sounds like he's isolating you.”
Eternity talks about how, after one terrible night with her boyfriend, someone came to the dorm while she was cleaning up, and she describes this night that she had, and the person just looks at her and goes, “That's abuse.” And the way the person looked at her, it really made her understand that this was an abusive relationship. Even though she knew subconsciously, right? But for someone to actually use the words to say it, for her was quite real.
And Yasmin and Taghreed talked about how they had to start with the discussion of what social norms were, and in talking about what social norms were, they were able to ease into what behaviour is good and what behaviour is bad, even though it might be part of a social norm. So, they were able to show these people that [what they were experiencing] was abuse. That is the word for what’s happening to them, and there's emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, financial abuse—there's different kinds of abuses. And, I don't think it's specific to those women in their culture communities, because it happens everywhere. It’s that sometimes we don't know. Sometimes somebody has to tell you.
I mean, yeah. Because all of those messages that someone who hasn't been abused is internalizing are also being internalized by people who are being abused, right? And it's complicated because this person who you love and who professes to love you is also hurting you. There's so much there.
Yeah. I think one of the biggest things for me is that like, it could be anyone. And that's regardless of gender, as well. It really can be anyone. The number one thing that I heard was, listen. So many of these women talked about how somebody just dismissed them when they first tried to talk about being abused. It just didn't feel like they were listened to. So that's the very least we can give a person. Just say, “I'm listening if you want to talk.”
And one thing that I want to make really clear, and I think it's important for me to say, is that while I am the one talking about this because I'm the host, I'm also anybody listening, you know what I mean? Because honestly, I've learned some things because I've talked to these to these women, but I am still not 100% confident that I would be able to give a friend what they need, because you have to actually put those things into practice.
Can you tell me about how you approached producing this podcast? How did you make sure the process was trauma-informed?
We talked about taking a trauma-informed approach from the outset with Canadian Women's Foundation, and they gave us a document on trauma-informed approaches when dealing with people who are experiencing or have experienced gender-based violence. We each took that Signal for Help mini course, as well. And then, my own practice is that I talk about just acknowledging that you have feelings as a journalist. So, when I was having a conversation with one person, there was a moment during the interview that I wanted to fall apart and wanted to cry. But I remembered that I'm a journalist, and while it's okay to cry, this is not the moment because if I cry, then it turns around to become about me and that's not what this is about. It's about her. But she was describing a moment that should not fucking happen to anybody. So after I got off the call, I got a hug from somebody and then I went down to the river in my coat and wept for three minutes. And then I came back upstairs,watched Drag Race for 10 minutes, and I went back to work. I sent a message to everyone on the team and I said, “This is what just happened,and it was really, really hard. But I acknowledged it, I cried, I took care of myself. And I want you all to do that, too.”
How did you make sure that you were also creating safe spaces for your interview subjects?
We did an initial call-out through the connections that Canadian Women's Foundation already have with some of the programs that it funds. We wanted what we call survivor activists. In journalism, you want somebody fresh or somebody hasn’t done a lot of interviews, but here we were like, no, we want somebody who has already told their story, because we know that they will be able to handle having to relive some of the terrible moments that they've gone through. That was a very conscious decision.
The idea of choosing a ‘fresh’ source is really interesting. When I think about the training that I received as a journalist, it was often about maintaining particular power dynamics, which doesn't help you build trust or help you get the best interview. So there actually is a journalistic reason to think about your sources like this. But it’s also very human, especially when you're asking people to talk about their most awful experiences.
One of the things that we talk about at Media Girlfriends is that we are going to treat people like humans, and we don't see that as unjournalistic at all. Especially when we're talking about groups of people that are marginalized or typically uncared for, I think that it's actually quite journalistic to remain in your rigour and to be human at the same time.
Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you wanted to mention?
I want to reiterate that I am not an expert. That comes from two places—one is being a woman of colour who's being asked to sit in an expert position and being asked questions. I think it's very common for us to feel like ‘Well, I don't know everything.’ But the other side is, it's actually really important for anyone who's listening to this podcast to know that anything I learned is something that everybody can learn.
To learn more about the Signal to Help campaign and listen to the podcast, visit the Canadian Women’s Foundation website. Be sure to check out Media Girlfriends’ website, Twitter and Instagram. And, follow Nana aba on Twitter and Instagram.
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