Chris Lloyd - "White Ribbon Day - In My Own Words"
In addition to being a White Ribbon Ambassador, Chris Lloyd is a Senior Lecturer in Law in the School of Law at Oxford Brookes University. Chris researches into, publishes on, and teaches Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, with a particular focus on sexual offences viewed through the lens of post-structural and feminist theory. He has published in journals such as Law Text Culture, the Australian Feminist Law Journal, Social and Legal Studies, Information & Communications Technology Law, and Feminist Legal Studies.
Institutional Profile | Research
I am a lucky, happy, and contented, married man. I am married to my best friend, life-partner, and soulmate. I conduct research into, publish on, and teach Criminal Law, amongst other things, for a living. In my classes, as with all Law Schools in the UK, the demographic is about 65/35 young women to young men. These conditions combined, along with many others, influence my thoughts on how important White Ribbon’s aims and goals are. As the feminist philosopher Catherine Malabou has convincingly argued, ‘you cannot separate the philosophy from the autobiography.’
In her superb 2019 book, Criminal Law and the Man Problem, Ngaire Naffine writes the following: ‘We have observed in our men of criminal law a sustained and intriguing absence of concern not only about the effects of self-interest (and the strong possibility of consequent male bias) on the making of criminal legal rules about men’s relations with women – about status conditions, justifications, exemptions etc – but also a lack of concern about the appearance of bias.’ She shows how the positions of men as law-makers, law-practitioners, and law-teachers, have ensured that their embodied relationships with women flow asymmetrically and disproportionately into the legal world, thus constructing women as subordinate, less-than-male, passive sexual objects. This historical development is not accidental: it has been deliberate and calculated in order to ‘make law[s] which benefitted themselves to the cost of women. The husband’s right to rape was not in the interests of women.’
Naffine goes onto argue that the role which needs to be occupied by the modern men of criminal law – and I would argue all men who wish to end male violence against women – is one of critical self-reflection. For it is men, and only men, who have to ask themselves, as Naffine explains, whether or not to enact violence against women: ‘The choice, the decision, for the man to make implicitly guided by or at least informed by the law, is whether or not to rape.’ This decision lies with no-one other than men themselves. It is, as she convincingly argues, a question of asking about ‘the man problem of criminal law, what makes men more criminal than women, [and] why they (men) may need regulating in certain male-specific ways.’ Without this self-reflective stance the practitioners of violence against women will not cease. Why not? Because their forefathers built the world into which they have been born, a world in which their violence against women is expected, welcomed, and diffused into a system designed and built to harbour that violence against women.
I politicise my classroom. I feminise my classroom. I intentionally take the stance of the critically self-reflective man who stands against the violence towards women which only I can embody.