An interview with Johanna Kauppi, the Co-Convener (Secretary) of Not On My Campus UK (NOMC UK), a student-led and alumni-led intersectional feminist collective working to tackle all forms of domestic, sexual, and gender-based violence in higher education. Based across all four nations of the UK, NOMC UK is comprised of passionate volunteers working in solidarity with and to support student leaders, activists, victims and survivors.
Location: Stirling, Scotland, UK
Johanna Kauppi invited me to stay in her home during my visit to Scotland. It was so wonderful to be able to spend time with her for a few days while I attended the EmilyTest conference and interviewed a few others. I had connected with Kauppi and J Smith (a co-founder and previous co-convener of NOMC UK) through our involvement in Students Rise International - a collective of activists working to end sexual violence in higher education across various parts of the world. Smith and Kauppi were leaders of NOMC UK, however at the time of my visit Smith had recently moved on after three years of work and Kauppi was continuing for another year or so.
Smith was one of the co-founders of NOMC UK that stayed consistently active throughout their three years building and leading the organisation. I sadly had to cancel my trip to meet Smith a week earlier in Bristol, England, as I unfortunately had an urgent surgery and was recovering in London. However, I was so grateful to be well enough to get the train up to Scotland after a few days of rest and to learn all about anti-sexual violence activism in the UK from Kauppi and others.
As well as being the Co-Convener (Secretary) of NOMC UK, Kauppi works at a Rape Crisis Centre in Scotland and is an absolutely incredible activist. She also has experience coordinating campus activism from her time as a student at the University of Aberdeen, where she was the Co-Convenor of the student group, Consent Awareness and Sexual Education (CASE).
Not On My Campus UK
“We support other activists and groups.”
NOMC UK has a unique role within the sexual violence activism realm in the UK, as it plays a supporting role to campus-specific groups by providing guidance to them. Kauppi and her team do this by always ensuring there is an intersectional analysis and that they provide a focus on marginalised voices and experiences of sexual violence. In the UK there is a lot of transphobia and white feminism, so NOMC UK upscale and provide guidance on how people can uplift their activism in more intersectional and anti-oppressive ways.
They have formed trust with students and have reached across all four nations of the UK in doing so - a testament to their value in the space. They try to make things easier for activists on the ground by keeping connected with these groups and proactively reaching out to assist on campaigns and movements that students are leading.
“We educate activists and provide an alternative perspective to a lot of the mainstream stuff.”
The focus of NOMC UK is being trauma-informed, survivor-led and focusing on how institutional responses are affecting survivors, rather than focusing on perpetrators and punitive action, which is common in university sexual violence activism. A core part of this is educating students on how to be inclusive and accessible in their activism. They also bring groups together to do national campaigning in an effort to make these campaigns more sustainable, collaborative and inclusive.
One of Kauppi's main responsibilities is to create a resource library for students, activists, advocates and victim-survivors to utilise for their context. This bringing together of resources means that people don't need to come up with their own policies and procedures, but can use templates provided in the resource library to help them. The resource library is a place for information, knowledge and expertise to be kept in a centralised but open space. On top of this, Kauppi and her team have created a support and guidance hub for anyone to use in their own community.
Kauppi comes to this work with extensive experience, knowledge and skills, which has been supported by her having received safeguarding training, having worked in peer support in the mental health sector, and having trained and volunteered at a Rape Crisis Centre for many years before formally working there now.
“You need to set a standard that safeguards against certain things.”
One of the primary achievements Kauppi has done in her role as Secretary is to bring more order and structure to the governance of NOMC UK - a very important but often overlooked element of organising. The structure they are moving towards is focusing on the skills people have to contribute, rather than their areas of interest - and leveraging these skills to structure people's roles for the time they volunteer. This is a much more strategic, achievable and sustainable form of activism as it means that there is less responsibility on the leaders to continuously support and train volunteers who often leave before they start to implement what they have learned.
“It's so rare for people to be granted permission to let go.”
I found talking to Kauppi so refreshing, particularly her perspective on people entering and exiting groups like NOMC UK and The STOP Campaign. We spoke about the pressure people feel to remain involved when they are seeking to move on and how there is always something to hook them back, subsequently leading to burnout and decision fatigue. This is especially for people involved in executive positions as they are responsible for leading initiatives and people. I relate to this strongly as I have found it difficult to leave The STOP Campaign as I have been unable to bring people into my position as leader of the organisation (due to lack of interest in a role with so much responsibility and a large time-commitment).
In recognition of these struggles, Kauppi spoke about how she always respects the boundaries of others when they decide to leave NOMC UK and thanks them for their time. Granting people permission to let go in a way that doesn't create guilt is so important in volunteer spaces which deal with such traumatic, distressing and personal subject matter - like sexual assault. However this does look different for founders/involved leaders who have been around since the beginning. Kauppi's advice to me was to ensure my exit from The STOP Campaign was through a gradual process so that it is achievable for people stepping up to slowly start to get more involved. This is why I have had a gradual process of 12-18 months of leaving The STOP Campaign - continuing to lead while also preparing others to take over one project/task at a time.
A similarity between NOMC UK and The STOP Campaign (and all volunteer organisations in this space) is that people come and go regularly. While both of our groups share this reality, we have also both been focused on creating more systems so that handovers can be more streamlined in future.
“We always encourage people to think from a survivor’s perspective.”
Kauppi and her team are survivor-focused, and always seek to start conversations from the perspective of the needs and wants of individual survivors, rather than always focusing on punishment of perpetrators. For example, when there may be a call for a perpetrator to be removed from a campus, their perspective is that they will advocate for what will create safety for the survivor and in line with what the survivor wants. This continual focus on the survivor is done in a way that is about questioning how they can ensure survivors feel safe again, have access to the support they need to recover, and to regain a quality of life. People always forget survivors, but NOMC UK never will.
“We want people to be able to live their lives and feel safe and happy again.”
NOMC UK's rejection of a punitive focus flips the narrative to be about safety and happiness for people who have experienced harm. Kauppi poses a really interesting question that may help others better understand their focus and motivations for advocating against sexual violence on campus:
“Are you doing this work because you’re angry at someone or because you care for someone?”
For me, I am certainly angry at institutional leaders and I care for students and their human right to an education free from violence.
Consent Education
Kauppi and I spoke at length about consent education in higher education and the role it plays in addressing sexual violence. Kauppi's perspective demonstrated her commitment to remaining focused on the safety and wellbeing of survivors in thinking about the impact consent education may have. For example, she spoke about how a function of consent education is to help people understand their own experiences, their boundaries, how to communicate them and their rights to protect that. While it can be scary for people to realise that someone understands consent and still chooses to violate people on purpose, this is exactly what sexual violence is - intentional acts. For those who use sexual violence, they don't care about consent or the rights of the person they are harming.
“People assume sexual violence is from ignorance, but its intentional.”
This is why consent needs to go beyond the classroom and we instead need to all work together to build a culture of consent. A culture where consent is normalised in all aspects, not just sexual activity. A central part of this is dismantling blame and shame - a central element to consent education, and respecting people's decisions to engage in sexual activity or not.
However, Kauppi also reflected on circumstances where all the attention is put onto consent education as the solution to sexual violence. This is an issue because it perceives sexual violence to be about a miscommunication between two people, and therefore an interpersonal problem. But sexual violence is actually structural as well as interpersonal. Sexual violence occurs amongst power imbalances socially and societally. I share this view as I have witnessed this narrative happen in Australia as an unintended consequence of the consent education in school activism and subsequent reforms.
The bottom line is that the biggest danger is not walking down the street at night, but it's within our homes. Those who are perpetrating these acts of violence are our partners, family and friends most of the time, and they are doing it intentionally. Building a consent culture acknowledges this as true and seeks to change this narrative so that consent is more the norm than violence is. While it may feel like we have a long way to go (which we do), we have also made so much progress in the lives of individuals and systemically through reform. Kauppi and NOMC UK play such an integral role in keeping campus sexual violence at the fore of public discussion, as well as bringing together student activists from across the four nations to collectively advocate for change through an intersectional lens.
Thank you Johanna Kauppi for your generosity in hosting me in your beautiful home. I will certainly be returning to Scotland for another trip as I was not there for long enough!
In solidarity,
Camille Schloeffel
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