Aware And Prepared

Self-Defense & System Failure: Tackling Violence Against Women with HASSL Part 2

• Mandi Pratt • Season 3 • Episode 20

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“Be aware of your surroundings.” “Don’t walk alone.” “Hold your keys like a weapon.” We’ve heard it all. The real problem isn’t how women move through the world—but the systems that make that world unsafe in the first place.

In this bold conversation, I continue my conversation with Amy Watson, founder of Hassl, in the UK, to talk about why telling women to “stay safe” isn’t enough—and never has been. We talk about what real prevention looks like and why involving men in this conversation isn’t optional. 

This episode will offer actionable ideas and helpful bystander info! Listen in and share the episode!

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 Hey, brave one. Welcome to the Aware and Prepared Podcast. I'm your host, Mandy Pratt, trauma-informed, resilient speaker, domestic violence victim advocate, and narcissistic abuse survivor. Here we keep it real with true crime stories and real world strategies to prevent emotional and physical harm. My guests and I share a mix of insight and survivor grit, all to help you feel safer, trust yourself more deeply.

And live with greater peace and power. Let's trade fear for freedom and step into the peace that you deserve.

 Welcome back to part two with Amy Watson from HASSL. Now that we've called out the problem, we've unpacked the burden women carry and the broken systems that fail them in regards to women's safety's. Time to talk about what real change looks like because women deserve more than just warnings and being. Concerned about their safety all the time. They deserve a world that works with them, not against them. So listen in as we dig back in to part two here with Amy Watson from HASSL.

And if you didn't hear the first part, please go back and listen to that. Listen to the prior episode where we first unpack the problem and kind of dig into some of that. It's really helpful, um, to understand this second part, so I highly encourage you to pause this one, go back to the episode before I listen to that, and then continue on with this one.

I think it, well, it's just like about.

You know, educating everyone to feel confident enough to help as well in that situation. Because you know, like, I mean, even bystander Yeah, yeah. Experiences I've had and no one's ever stepped in, not, not even women. And I know on one hand I'm not saying that, you know, but you think in a way women can potentially should be able to relate more and kind of realize what's going on more and, and that's the thing that really struck me in, I guess like my last.

Experience before, like the one that kind of, I guess triggered me to start Hassl was the fact that no one helped. And I just thought, I don't think people are inherently bad. And I also know that pretty much every woman, at least on this train, has probably got multiple experiences, at least one experience, but if not multiple of this happening to them.

I was so obviously distressed, I was obviously on my own, you know, relatively young, like it was just. Why did no one want to, to step in and help? Like we have CPR training or, you know, first day. So true. Yeah. Not even that you are, you know, in danger physically, but also mentally from the trauma.

Exactly. Afterwards and, and you never know what it can lead to. Like this is the thing as well, like. , It's not just, I think sometimes, men especially, but people don't get it when it's, you know, oh, they, or, or they were just staring and it's like, because then you're anticipating what's gonna happen next.

Exactly. It's not, it's never just that. Or maybe sometimes it is, but how do we know until it happens and, right. And it can trigger other, past instances where it went further than that or something. Yeah. Which is why I wanted to talk about, so I sat my husband down, I'm remarried now, and I, sat him down one day and I was like, Hey, so tell me

when was the last time that you went running? He's a runner. When was the last time you went running and you were afraid that you were gonna be raped? And he was like, what? And I was like, that's my point. Yeah. You never think of that. Like, that's never even a thought that passes your mind, right? Yeah. But for women, it's like, okay, so we're getting ready to run.

Okay, what time are we running? Does my, friend or somebody know where I'm going? Yeah. Do I have. Something in my hand, you know, it's like, good lord. Yeah. It's like such an effort. And so I was trying to share that with him. And then other times too, for instance, I was speaking at a conference, uh, last fall and I was walking back to the parking garage and some guy was like right behind me and I just.

I wish I would've, I couldn't at the time. It's all good. Like we're all doing the best we can, but I wish I would've turned around and said, excuse me, like, can you gimme just a little bit of personal space, like as a woman, it creeps us out when guys are like right behind us, especially in a parking garage.

Yeah. Cool. Yeah. So I wanted to kind of brainstorm with you maybe some, like a conversation that we can bring up with our brother or our dad or boyfriend or whomever. And just say, Hey, like, it's so important to me that you are an ally to Yeah. To women because we're having a really hard time and it's not our fault.

So, um, I, I also think like, I mean. We obviously a lot of what we do is around exactly around this. And you know, one of the things that I think is quite important to raise is that I think such a big part of the problem of this, especially in terms of like that, like people not into intervening and stuff, is the fact that the, I don't wanna say the good guys, but the guys who actually, you know, would care about this.

It's hard to tell them. It's hard to, for me to go and sit with my dad and say, oh, this happened to me today. This man touched me here. You know, you don't want to, you don't wanna Right. Talk about you also don't wanna worry. People don't wanna worry their parents or their siblings or whatever it is that, you know, that's gonna happen to them.

And I think that in itself is like a really difficult conversation. Mm-hmm. And I think that's why a lot of people don't realize how much it happens because you don't want to tell. You know, you know, they would care, but also what extra worry and all that kind of stuff are you putting on them when this is just our lived reality and there's not really anything they can, you know, for us as individuals do about it.

So, that's, a really important thing. But we, we started doing these, kind of put your finger down trends. I dunno if you've seen them, but we've kind of done, I think. Our social media manager posted one today, but kind of put your fingers down. Women in Public edition. That was like the one today and it was like, if you've ever been in a carriage and a man's come and sat down right next to you, if even though there's empty seats everywhere else, or, you know, put a fingers down if you've sent someone on your location whilst you're on your way home.

Put a finger down if you've tracked your. Uber when you are in the car to make sure they're actually going right. Your redress and all this kind of stuff. And some of the men who are ambassadors have started to do those trends as well. Cool. And not put finger on to kind of demonstrate how different. It is for them.

'cause it's just things they've not had to think about. And I think they're quite good tools. Even not to, not to push hassle, but you know, to, to send to people and even do with people, you know, take that, that audio from that video or take the video and just sit there and put your fingers down together.

How many things have you you done? And how many things have I done and mm-hmm. You know, that kind of thing. 'cause it's, it is the mental load. That's the thing we don't talk about. We talk. A decent amount about the kind of aftermath in terms of, you know, support and all that kind of stuff. But mental load, day to day of just, just in case it happens or what am I doing to

prevent it from happening and right. And we are trying to talk a lot more about the mental load because it's not really talked about you know, girlhood is right. Thinking maybe I should leave a piece of hair behind in this taxi in case they need to, something happens and they, you know, wanna know, trying to find if I was in there or not, and just all these like weird things that were kind of told.

Growing up or, you know, is discussed between women, I think like we, we have, I mean it works. I say this 'cause it's, it is, um, being a global organization, frameworks with letters,

this framework that we, we kind of use called help. So it essentially is kind of like how can you address all the root causes on a individual level day to day? Like what little things can you do? So H stands for here, which is all about like making sure you make space to hear stories, especially if like women in your life be like, has that ever happened to you?

If you don't mind talking about it. 'cause I didn't think it was a problem, but apparently it's almost every woman. But you've never said that to me. Is. Has this happened to you? I'd, I'd like to kind of understand more about it and also for like privileged women to listen more to stories of, you know, women that are more disproportionately affected by these issues.

Mm-hmm. You know, disabled women and women of color and black women and you know, all these other groups that are even more affected, like making sure you listen to their experiences as well. Right. Um, that's so important. Um, the second one is E, which is Empower, and it's all about kind of essentially giving someone the. Grounds in which they feel like they had have a support environment where they could report if something happened. Sure. So essentially it's avoiding trying to make jokes about cases in front of people and stuff because as much as you might think it's never happened to women in your life, it probably has Oh yeah.

You by you joking about it, even if you don't mean it, it kind of tells them maybe they're not someone I could trust to tell this to or Right. We'd need to go and report. I don't think I would be able to count on them as someone who would support me and back me and that kind of thing, so, mm-hmm.

I think it's being so mindful of like the language. You use in that sense. Mm-hmm. Um, l is for lead, so about trying to set examples, especially for other men around you also. Mm-hmm. But also to set examples for other women and us to set examples generally for people as a whole, when, and that's kind of more on like the systemic sexism as a misogyny thing.

So things like, you know, even it can start with like kids when we say, you run like a girl or you throw like a girl. It's you know, kind of sit and having a conversation with your little boy, little girl, whatever. Why do we say that about girls and why don't we, why don't we say that about boys?

Or why do we let boys do that? And we don't let girls do that? And kind of, as I say, it's not kind of what you're talking about before. It's not that you have to have an argument with people. It almost helps more if you come at it like just as a question. Exactly. You kind of work through it together. Like, isn't it weird that we'd never say that about men?

When someone says something rather than going, oh, you shouldn't say that. Which is very easy to do and I completely understand 'cause I get angry too. Um, but it doesn't really help. People obviously normally don't then wanna have a conversation with you about it, right?

So they always helps to like ask questions and almost. Phrase it as if you're working through that together and being like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Great. And then you can kind of help people come to better conclusions by doing that. And, and that's a good way, like say a meeting room and something happens, it is a quite a good way that you can set an example to other people of how you can like.

Call out this behavior and without necessarily, like you said, having to confront people in like a aggressive way. Mm-hmm. Um, and then pause is the last one, which is essentially obviously poor public space design. Like you can't do much about that as an individual, but it's more like being aware of how you are in a public space.

Like you said, if you are walking directly behind someone, even if I'm walking directly behind someone, it's still like, should I just cross the road? Because. Especially if it's a woman in front of me, I immediately think she's probably panicking that I should hear footsteps right behind her 'cause I know what that feels like and if it's of no effort for me, why wouldn't I just Sure.

Right. You know, it's like being aware of your surroundings and, and you know, there might not be behavior that. You might not intentionally be doing anything wrong, but it's being aware, you know, if, if you need to ask someone directions, don't go and approach a girl who stood by herself in the dark because you, you might have completely innocent intentions.

Right. You know what she's thinking in her brain and probably panic. Yeah. Is trying to like pause when you are in situations and just be like, how can I. Make this public space safer. Exactly. It's really good things that you can just do on an individual level. Right. And yeah, like if you have jumper cables, like here in the US we drive a lot, especially in California.

Yeah, yeah. You know, if you, if you need cables, like don't ask the woman who pulls up the gas station, ask the guy instead, you know? Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, especially when you're on your own and things like that, because you do, and I think sometimes because men will. To do things like that because they just don't even realize that that will be the thought that's necessarily going through our minds.

It's not, you know, again, necessarily outta malicious intent, but the more. You can make people aware of this mental load that we carry. Yeah. And not just aftermath. Totally. The more that, the more that you can, you know, just as a human being who has empathy, can just do your little bit, you know, like what we say with the, the environment and stuff.

Like everyone just does their little bit. Mm-hmm. It does make a difference, we're working on like public awareness obviously, but also working a lot with like partnerships and organizational changes and that's where I think like really significant change is gonna come in.

But it doesn't mean that on an individual level. Even within your own family or your own friendship group or your workplace, you can't do those little things. Hopefully don't take too much effort, but could really make a difference, so, right. Yeah. And thinking too, how you were saying how it's like a kind of a difficult conversation to have.

Just thinking of like, and speaking, if I were to speak with my dad about it. I would probably maybe bring it up like, Hey, you know, that whole me Too movement. Like, do you understand about what that is? Or like what have you heard about that? And be curious, like you said. Yeah, absolutely.

Part of what we're doing is developing, free online resources that are. Again, not like they're not legal support and things, they're around how to talk to people about these issues. How to speak to children about it from, as a parent, you know, how to topics that, how to, as a man talk to your own group of friends about it without wanting to start, you know, this is what we, we talk about quite a lot, the men's focus group and stuff.

It's, it's, you know, and also I think one of the things I think is really important as well is to which. I know a lot of women don't necessarily like when I say it, but it's to give men grace. And I know it's really hard because all the feminine rage inside you doesn't wanna do that. 'cause we've never been given that, that grace.

But it's like I would rather someone tries than be, than they need to be. Perfect. Yeah. And I don't want someone to not try at the fear of not being perfect. Exactly. We have a discussions about quite a lot in the men's group is that sometimes they wanna comment on women's posts to back them, but then they also don't want them to be.

To think it's like, or that they're taking over or that they're trying to say that they know more about it. They're just trying to provide. Solidarity essentially. We we're trying to, you know, create resources on that as well. And like you said, resources on how to have these kind of conversations that than being aggressive and, if people have those tools, it opens 'em up a lot more to be confident in having those conversations rather than us just like sweeping it under the rug and never talking about it again.

Mm-hmm. Um, the fear of retaliation or whatever. So that's one of the things that is in the, in the process right now, actually. So, yeah. Cool. I love it. So how can people follow you and find out about all of that? Yeah, so, our website is just has.uk, that's it. H-A-S-S-L. , It's hassle but without an E on. And it's essentially stands for Harassment Awareness and safe space leaders. But it also refers to like the hassle of experiencing harassment, of reporting, harass. And then we kind of always say like, the end goal would be to have a hassle-free world in both, meanings in, you know, my end goal is essentially that my company doesn't need to exist.

Like that's, yeah. A weird end goal, but that is my end goal. So that's the, the name of where that comes from. We post all this content on socials and that it is really useful for like conversation starters and just even to send through to people.

We have very high engagement and, and send rates and stuff like that. Yeah. You guys have, you guys have made a lot of progress since you, you've only been around for a short time, but you have Yeah, and it's all organic as well. We don't spend any money in our marketing, so it's, that's so cool.

Content that is. People can relate to. And you know, we get messages every day either from women saying like, this is like the comfort I've needed, that someone's actually standing up and like talking about this. And it made me, it's made me realize my own internal like bias. Or we get messages from men all the time being like.

Thank you for doing this and making us aware and also inviting us into the conversation. We get them constantly, which is, you know, amazing. And to me, like this is such an early stage of like what is planned and what we're working on. So, yeah, the, the possibility hopefully is endless.

Um, but yeah, so if you go on the website, there's essentially a page that's like get involved. There's about 12 different ways that you can get involved in some capacity. Um, do have an ambassador program, which I think we're at two, I wanna say 2,300 nearly ambassadors across the world.

150 countries, which is great. So they're helping shape and build things that we're working on. And you know, the whole point is that it's as initiatives are as representative as, I say, transcend culture and. Cultural context and all that kind of stuff, and that they work universally.

And so it's kind of like a huge focus group essentially. Yeah. But you know, you also work on other things. You can contribute your skills. We have younger people on there, say like university students and things, and then we also have people who, you know, work in. Policy or charity or policing or law, hr, like all different, you know?

Awesome. So we have all five profession groups within that, that you can join Uhhuh if you've got any relevant skills to contribute that you'd like to contribute to hassle. So, yeah. You can also go and follow those on socials, which is just HASSLofficial on all accounts. So H-A-S-S-L and then official.

I'll make sure to link to everything in the show notes so people can find it easy. Um, and I know that you guys have merchandise. Yeah. And then you also do workplace trainings. Yeah. So the pages on both of those, um mm-hmm. Yeah, so workplace training obviously, um, is one of our revenue streams.

It's essentially, so employers fund it so that public don't pay for things, um, because I'm, I've always said that we're gonna keep everything free of use to the general public, so this is how we do it through partnering with either employers or we also are working on partnerships as well with. All different kinds of brands, um, to create co-branded initiatives and products and all this kind of stuff.

So that's essentially where the main source of funding comes from right now. And then, yeah, we also have merch, which is supplementary, I guess, but also it is supposed to be an awareness raising tool. It's designed to be minimalist and neutral so that you don't get. Uh, harassed whilst you're wearing it.

Um, you know, to try and make it like you, if you know what it is, you know, but it is not burn the patriarchy. Kind of like spread across the front where yeah, you might get harassed in the process. It's also designed to be, everything's designed to be unisex. Um, so it's for everyone. I was say the other day, I think we've actually had more men purchase.

Than women, which is a great sign. It's working to an extent. So, we have over 50 products I think now. Um, but everything's designed to be, as I say, neutral, minimalist. And they all have like little phrases on that are kind of, yes. Typical responses that you would like. So we've got like, it's a no from me, literally not interested.

And they'll just like, they're on like the cuff of the jumper and stuff, but they're kind of to encourage people to take photos in places where these things happen and start to raise awareness and spread the word and get people to ask what, what it is and and things like that. And yeah, from the feedback we've had so far, it's definitely, definitely doing that.

So. Awesome. Yeah. You can go and perch purchase some mer. We ship all over the world, so, yeah. Cool. Unless, unless you're in a war to country, then unfortunately no. But apart from that, yeah, pretty much everywhere. Cool. Well, thank you so much for being here with us.

We appreciate your time and very much appreciate what you're doing. No, thank you so much for having me. It's been lovely. You're welcome.

 Thanks for being here on the Aware and Prepared Podcast. Don't forget to hit, follow that little plus sign in your app in the top right, ensures you never miss an episode. Curious how tuned in your intuition really is. Take the free quiz at aware and prepared. Life and get your score. See how sharp your inner guide is.

Remember, you are worthy of a safe and peaceful life. Talk to you next week.