Pride Month Advocate Spotlight: Meg Stone

Interview with Meg Stone, ED of IMPACT Boston, Project Director of Ability:IMPACT, and author of The Cost of Fear: Why Most Safety Advice is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-Based Violence

Meg Stone is deeply, deeply committed to embodying and aligning with values of resistance in everything she does—and sharing the transformative power of that work with everyone in the movement to end gender-based violence and all its intersections. In her role as Executive Director of IMPACT Boston, Meg both holds multiple decades of expertise and leadership in the survivor services field while constantly building community and individual capacities to respond to harm as a hands-on educator in feminist self defense. She is also a brilliant and incredibly compelling nonfiction writer, with sharp analysis on issues of violence, LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, and more. Her voice uplifts important work of her own and community partners across the nation in her recently published book The Cost of Fear: Why Most Safety Advice is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-Based Violence.

REN: So why don't we just get started with, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and like, what are the identities or communities that are most important to you in your life at work?

MEG:

Sure. So I have been the Executive Director of IMPACT Boston since 2005. I started doing domestic violence advocacy work in 1993. I used to go to family court with survivors, so I've been around for 100 million years. I am a white, queer, nondisabled woman, and those are the identities that are the most relevant to my life. And I am the author of The Cost of Fear, which [came out] Tuesday, February 25.

Called to the Work: Meg’s First DV/SA Work as a Court Advocate

REN: How did you end up coming to the DV/SA field?

MEG: I took this class in college, and one of the guest speakers was one of the staff members at the domestic violence organization in town. I've often described how I got into the work as a kind of involuntary process, like falling asleep or falling in love. And there was something about the way she talked about domestic violence advocacy, and there was a survivor with her who talked about her experience as a survivor. And as I was listening, you know, like this was a class that had like 500,000 guest speakers, so I could have had this reaction to any number of people, but there was a way that she was talking about relationships, about advocacy, and there was something about this sort of very principled, big picture feminist analysis, with this very practical on-the-ground lens. “What does this person need right now, so that they're not homeless and they're not in danger?”

And I wish I could say I sat down and pondered my career choices and, you know, went to the career office and filled out my little resume, but I just had this, like, very unconscious, powerful call to this work. And so when I was in college, I did five internships at the domestic violence organization in town. And as a person who had not had the space to look at my own history and my own survivorship and my own family, there was something that I loved so much about sort of being enthralled in other people's emergencies, it was a way that I could connect to something that was true about me without having to acknowledge anything that was true about me. And I was the court person. Everyone hated court, except for me. I loved court. And what I loved about it was that there was this clear beginning, middle end, there was a way that I could be helpful.

And [in] the family court that I worked in, there was a floor where you would wait for the restraining order hearing, and you would be in the same room as the person you were seeking a restraining order against. And the waiting room was this long, narrow room with two sets of chairs against the two walls, so it looked kind of like a bowling alley, and survivors would be sitting there with their partners or their exes also sitting on another chair in this bowling alley. And a lot of people who have harmed their partners are incredibly charming and warm, and they're joking with the court officer, and they're thanking everybody for their hard work, and they're coming up to me and thanking me for helping their wife, but, you know, they're just so grateful that I was there. So as an advocate, I would be sort of sitting next to somebody in this bowling alley of a waiting room.

As a human, I cannot stand small talk, but as an advocate, that was my superpower. Like I could make up 100 innocuous questions about every painting on the waiting room wall. I could discuss traffic for 30 minutes, I could discuss- there was a view of the Hudson River and the Hudson bridge outside the window, and I remember like sitting with survivors and marveling at that view and discussing that view for some unrealistic amount of time, every time I was in court. Becoming part of this work and becoming part of this movement, was really this very defining experience of home. It's the work I love, it's the work that I do, and I've done.

Arriving at Empowered Self Defense Work and IMPACT Boston

MEG: [I’ve done] different types of advocacy work over the years, but I had a very similar pull to self defense work. I remember I worked nights in a shelter. I did so much other work, and I felt really good about what I did. I felt really important, and what I wanted to bring to this work was [how] each of us could embody the world that we are looking to create, because like inside of me is resistance to violence and resistance to harm. And inside of me is that agency that we want for everybody. And inside of me is the capacity to prevent sexual violence.

Two Types of Self Defense Work: Safety Through Compliance vs. Safety Through Resistance

So what gets really complex when it comes to self defense is that there are two very different and usually opposing philosophical approaches to self defense, and the difference between them is very poorly understood. So I've you know, there's a domestic violence advocate in Texas, and she wrote a blog post called “Why We Don't Teach Self Defense.” And as a person who has devoted more than two decades of my life to teaching self defense, I 100% agreed with all of her objections to self defense, because the type of self defense that she experienced was, in a way, a form of coercive control.

So in my book, I define the two different approaches to safety or self defense, as safety through compliance and safety through resistance. Now, safety through compliance is very tied to policing, oftentimes, martial artists who have a very kind of hierarchical, “the leader is always right” culture. And what I mean by safety through compliance is this unsupported and non factual belief system that we will be safer if we follow very rigid rules and very un-nuanced directives:

• “don't walk alone at night.” You know, hello, it's New England. It's winter. If you have a job, you have to walk alone at night, unless your co-worker is going to escort you to the subway after work.

• “don't wear a ponytail. An attacker could grab it.”

• “Don't park next to a white van.”

You know, don't do any number of things. What is so concerning about safety through compliance is that it promises primarily women and primarily cis white women, safety in exchange for restricting their lives, and it perpetuates stigma. So in safety through compliance, there's always, you know, street smart or be smart. But what safety through compliance means by smart is not critical thinking, analyzing all of the things that are often associated with smartness. Smart is achieved by following. What is so insidious about this is that these directives that try and tell us that our everyday routines are dangerous–that stopping at the grocery store and parking too far from the entrance and returning to our cars if a van happens to pull in next to us, you know, framing these sort of mundane decisions as dangerous–is it’s a way of scaring us into diminishing ourselves.

We are faced with any number of questionably legal executive orders and some very you know, harmful laws. But if we can perpetuate safety through compliance, then we don't have to, for example, deny women the ability to get a credit card or use the law because safety through compliance scares us into diminishing ourselves.

How Safety through Compliance is Weaponized to Threaten and Allege False Claims Against Organizers and Activists

A lot of the people that I interviewed for my book are organizers and activists being threatened or intimidated, not just like “I disagree with your belief,” but “You better not speak at that school board meeting, because you don't know what I'm going to do to you.”The level of threat from Drag Story Hour organizers who were targeted by white supremacists, to local school board activists that are targeted by Proud Boys and other folks. There was an organizer in a rural part of Pennsylvania that I interviewed for my book, and [while she was in a drugstore], someone from Moms for Liberty was in the drugstore yelling to everyone in the drugstore that the organizer was a pedophile. And the reason that [they yelled] she was a “pedophile” is because she was trying to fight a book ban in her local school. And the most heartbreaking part of the interview is when she described to me getting in her car and having to explain to her 11 year old daughter what a pedophile is and why those people were calling her mom a pedophile.

Now, as a survivor advocate, I don't need to tell you that this false and unsubstantiated threat of child sexual abuse is used against trans people and against any number of marginalized folks. So safety through compliance has no evidence. Self defense programs have outcomes like “people enjoyed the class,” or “people felt more aware of their surroundings, stuff like that. But there's no outcome that is related to any reduction of any type of violence.

Safety Through Resistance Emerges Out of Traditions of Feminism and Black Liberation

So what I advocate and what, a huge tradition of feminism and a huge tradition of Black liberation has advanced over the last 40 or 50 years. I call it safety through resistance, and that's basically the opposite of safety through compliance. So we don't make ourselves safer by becoming smaller and following rigid rules that apply to strangers and usually stigmatized strangers, we make ourselves safer by developing the practical skills to interrupt coercive control and abuse of power, and that can be a dating partner or acquaintance who is touching me in a way that I don't want.

And as much as we all want to change the world so that [that person] has learned about consent in the moment of sexual coercion, I am alone, so I want to have a skill to embody the resistance that we are all working toward. Or it can mean looking at the ways in which elite sports or the Catholic Church [and other organizations] have enabled widespread sexual abuse by basically shutting down any type of resistance. So resistance is speaking up, challenging authority, advocating for ourselves, recognizing coercive control in people that are close to us and people in power. And what is so important about safety through resistance is that it connects individual skills and individual safety to social and political change.

The Data on Safety Through Resistance

MEG:

Self defense programs that have a explicit and clear political analysis of gender inequity have been shown by research to reduce sexual violence. And I think that's a sort of that's an important reality for the advocacy community, because, like, I agree with everyone who doesn't think women should have to learn self defense, or doesn't think queer people should have to learn self defense, but there is no job in any Jane Doe member organization [domestic violence and sexual assault survivor services] that should have to exist, and so I don't think self defense is any different than medical advocates, legal advocates and anything else that we do. And what actually is effective is the kind of training and education that shifts our understanding to the power inequities that underlie or cause sexual violence. And if we already have that understanding, and we have that awareness, [we] take that awareness and connect it to concrete skills that we can use in the moment.

How feminist self defense became Meg’s life work in social change

REN: [I’m thinking about] this book that came out in 2024, which is What It Takes To Heal, by Prentis Hemphill. The whole book is really about the role of somatics and the role of healing in movement work and in political work, and really tying these ways that we have internalized systems of power or like systems of compliance, literally in the ways that we move. Prentis talks about how they would step out of the way [and then how] in middle school, a much more non compliant teenage girl [said] “you don't have to do that.” And so they decide to just stand there instead, and how that makes such a huge difference. So I'm curious [about] the relationship of somatics with like, self defense work?

And can you tell me again about how you came to self defense work in the first place. And what stood out? I know you mentioned that the courts were a huge passion at first, but how did you end up deciding, “Oh, this is where I want to focus my energy.”

MEG:

I loved the feeling. I had a friend who was volunteering for impact, so eventually I took a class. But what made me, you know, devote, you know, the good part of my life to it is how

deeply embodied the experience of my own power felt. And the introduction to my book is called scared and powerful. And what I loved so much about feminist self defense; [it’s] not you know, “don't walk alone at night, otherwise you're dumb.” Feminist Self Defense is this reality that I could access my power, the power of my voice and the power of my body, when I felt scared, because anybody who is challenging systemic power of any kind is doing something scary or risky, and if we respond to our fear by becoming immobilized, then the folks who are powerful remain powerful. And if you know this is true on the micro level of talking to your friend about their abusive behavior, you're doing bystander intervention work.

And it's true in the political world, you know, look at the first chapter of On Tyranny being “don't obey in advance,” I feel like that really, that is very connected. So the ability to embody our beliefs and embody our beliefs under stress, and to do–under stress–actions that are consistent with our values, is so important to social change.

How feminist self defense helps us build habits under stress

In 2022 I was able to interview Amy Arnstein, who's a neurobiologist at Yale University, and a lot of her research has been about how stress affects the human brain. So they basically put folks in brain scans, induce stress in them, and look at what happens. And basically what happens in the brain when we are under stress is our neocortex, or our cerebral cortex, the part that thinks, reasons, and makes decisions, is the most compromised.

So under stress, we default to our habits. And for a lot of us, our habits are what kept us safe in an abusive home or abusive partnership, or our race, gender, disability, socialization. So what empowerment self defense does, and particularly the IMPACT methodology that is so focused on simulating unsafe situations and practicing resistance, is it helps us build habits under stress, so that like when I'm in a situation with somebody who is a threat to me, my hands come in front of my body like this. I say, “stop and leave me alone” before I consciously realize what I've just done. One of my amazing collaborators tells a story of how learning self defense gave her what she needed to leave her abusive partner.

And I don't want to diminish the politics of self defense law and how it so often goes against people of color, queer and trans people. A survivor like that is a huge part of my book. There’s a whole chapter about how self defense law is applied in ways that are very racist and ableist and transphobic. But the capacity to access our power and resist under stress is very fortifying, and that, you know, that is why I do this work.

REN:

Amazing. I used to be a youth worker, and so I’m always thinking about what we can teach that we won’t have to unlearn in the future. And to me, that's so so much at the core of that kind of habit formation of like, here's all of these habits that it's kind of like adding a new option to the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and whatever you know that actually feels aligned, or like with agency.

MEG:

And it’s about [having] the presence of mind so that you are choosing fight, flight, resist deescalate, fawn. You know, fawn might keep you safer than any other response. [Empowerment self defense supports us so that] what we are doing in a moment of threat and intimidation is consistent with our values, and not just because we are overwhelmed with the biology of being a human being.

How gender socialization impacts our responses to harm

REN:

Does IMPACT Boston or the world of self defense have any kind of work around that kind of habit formation that it does with people who cause harm or people who are bystanders, and while understanding that oftentimes survivors continue to be bystanders or might become people who cause harm?

MEG:

If we are in the world, we are working with people who cause harm, and we just don't know it. Empowerment self defense is more suited to the bystander skill. People work with people who cause harm and do very different types of work. You know, we've done some de escalation work, not necessarily with people who cause harm, but with people who have been socialized to respond to fear by becoming more aggressive, most often teen boys, but not exclusively so in that, you know that's not people who I'm not equating that with people who cause harm, but what I do want to acknowledge is that the gender socialization that everyone gets undermines our safety. So if your gender socialization is you are not enough of a man if you don't fight, then you could be criminalized. You could get hurt. You could hurt somebody else. You could kill somebody else.

So being able to be baited, you know, be bullied, and respond with de escalation. Respond with, “I don't want to fight. Hey, look, I'm going to take a step back. I don't want to fight, and then letting someone call you a pussy, a fag, whatever they're going to call you, because you're not man enough to punch them in the face. Look, I don't want to fight.”

Bystander work can be implemented to interrupt many different instances of harm

We do a lot of bystander work, everything from I need to have a conversation with my friend who is disregarding their partner’s sexual boundaries, and I want to say that it's not okay with me if somebody on the subway is experiencing hate speech, and I want to support them.

What IMPACT and feminist self defense, or empowerment self defense, offers to bystander intervention is a couple of things:

First, the skill set to keep ourselves safe in the moment that we are intervening. So if I'm teaching teenagers to interrupt their friends who are trying to get one person to go upstairs when that person is intoxicated, what if the person I'm intervening with comes after me? I'm going to be more effective if I have the skills to say “Hey, hey, stop,” if I can sort of diffuse that situation in the moment.

Second, the experience of being powerful and effective in the face of our own physiological stress response helps bystanders, even when their bodily safety is not at risk. So if I'm a bystander, I have to say, “You know what powerful, revered leader of my religious community, I really don't like the way you hugged that kid, and it concerns me” because I have to be able to be powerful and be clear in the face of my own, you know, heart racing, sweating, you know, shaking, nervous reaction that any person would have In a situation where they are challenging power.

The Structure of Meg’s Book The Cost of Fear

REN:

Absolutely. Can you tell me a little bit about now, like how your book is broken down?

MEG: Can I go get it?

REN: Absolutely! Please do.

MEG:

This is my book. It's called The Cost of Fear: why most safety advice is sexist, and how we can stop gender based violence. And in this current day, I want to just acknowledge that my definition of gender based violence is very gender inclusive and explicitly trans and non binary inclusive. So you know.

So the book is broken down into three parts. The first part is called ‘What holds us back,’ and that's really about how this idea of compliance making us safer has actually made us profoundly unsafe. So one of the most defining moments I've had in my life is part of [that] section. It was almost 20 years ago, and I was working at IMPACT [Boston].

How compliance as a culture breeds abuse

We got a call from a mom who had a level of fear and a level of urgency about getting a self defense class that was over and above anything I had seen before. She wanted the soonest date. She, you know, canceled any number of after school activities to get this group of middle school age kids available for this class. And I showed up. The class was, you know- she rented out a hall in her church. I showed up, and as soon as I got there, she pulled me into a stairwell, and she said, “I've been checking the internet, and they let a sex offender move into our town, so we need this class.” And here I am in about 2006 or seven in a stairwell of a Catholic church. And this is very shortly after the Boston Globe had just shed light on how widespread child sexual abuse was in the church, and it was possible for this mom to connect a lot of fear and anger toward this stranger [and] whatever it was she got from this institution that has probably enabled more child sexual abuse than any other was still compelling to her, and she felt connected to the institution, but the way that she could address her concerns about child sexual abuse was[by] putting [that fear] on a stranger who was on a registry, and for me as a teacher, I felt like her fear and her anger as a mom was so sacred that I couldn't challenge it. I was so grateful to be seen as, you know, doing something good that I didn't speak up. I didn't say, “What about sexual abuse within an institution?”

So [the chapter] really talks about how compliance breeds abuse, and it really looks at how toxic levels of compliance and sort of organizations or institutions where any challenge to leadership is shut down and punished really just creates a space where abuse can thrive.

Addressing the big picture in our private situations: structural harm and intimate violence

And then the next section is called ‘What Works,’ and it looks at what is effective, how what the research show about what is effective at reducing or preventing interpersonal abuse and violence, and the work that we do on prevention is just so much harder than a lot of other work. Because, like, you can't go in your bedroom and secretly drive drunk after you've lauded the designated driver campaign. But you can say that sexual abuse is bad and then go sexually assault your partner. So how we use public health, how we use evidence, what is going on, how we connect social and structural change to prevention of very private, very intimate harm, is really sort of the focus of the ‘What Works’ chapter.

And then the final section is called ‘What moves us forward.’ And the three chapters in the ‘What moves us forward’ section are called resisting racism, strengthening activism, and embracing resistance. And ‘resisting racism’ talks a lot about the amazing activism of groups like Survived and Punished that are working around survivors who have been criminalized, strengthening activism. There's a group in California called the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, or MCTF, that has done a lot of activism around wage theft in the janitorial industry, and they've really expanded their work to address sexual assault and self defense. And they teach self defense in Spanish to janitorial workers as a part of helping. It’s like “know your rights” and embody your rights is the way that I would put it easily.

Concrete safety advice and resistance

And then the last chapter, ‘embracing resistance’ really starts with organizations that have come back from sexual abuse crises, that have done more than you know, get a PR company to write a cool statement. And what you know, the main part of the chapter is about a theater organization that's founder was a serial sexual abuser, and after they removed him, they really had to reimagine who they were. A lot of what they have done organizationally to prevent abuse is actually creating organizational policies, practices and culture that welcomes resistance, that welcomes people's boundaries, that that creates space for self advocacy, and they have a policy around intimacy on stage that has a line in it that says no boundary of yours will get in the way of us telling this story. And it really sort of says to actors like, you are not a puppet. You are a human.

And “if you do not want to make out with this co star on stage, we will find another way to tell the story.” So and then it ends with some actual practical strategies. Because the reason why, “don't wear a ponytail and clutch your keys and pretend you're talking to your fake boyfriend when you're walking through a parking lot.” Like, the reason why that has an endless shelf life on the internet is because it's concrete, it's specific, it's clear. So what I try to do is give some concrete, specific, clear strategies that are not, you know, a subtle form of coercive control. You know, communicate a boundary. Pay attention to how the person reacts, you know, stuff like that. Because you can, you can give concrete strategies without telling people like, “Oh, you must do this, otherwise it's your fault if you are harmed.”

REN:

Wow. I love, I love hearing you talk about all this. Because I think that so much of what I'm getting out of what you're pulling through in the book are these things that we kind of already know within working with or advocating for survivors. Like hey, here's all of these different places where coercive control happens in interpersonal relationships, but also how it happens on a structural level, or in the culture of an organization or even of an institution. I’m really especially like resonating with the part of compliance, like how we talk about how abuse thrives in silence. But I think like that takes it a step further in terms of being like abuse also thrives when we continue to comply.

MEG:

There's a reason the Catholic Church has a sexual abuse crisis, and the Unitarian Church doesn't. If your faith community structurally supports questioning authority and sharing power. It is much harder for somebody to repeatedly and serially sexually abuse. And I just want to say, any organization, any community, can have a sexual abuse incident, and what you do in response to that sexual incident, abuse incident is who you are. However, there's a difference between an incident in , the Olympic culture, or the Catholic culture, or the US military, like there, there are widespread sexual abuse crises in organizations that demand toxic levels of compliance and punish everything else.

The origins of the book The Cost of Fear

REN:

Okay, I have one last question for you, which is just like, how did this book come about?

MEG:

I’ll tell you the story, but it's very long and very windy, and I'm trying to write a personal essay about it. So I was in a writing group when I was 27 and the teacher of the writing group would give us these different prompts.

And so one of the writing prompts was he gave us a deck of cards and told us to build card houses. And as I was building my card house, it fell. And then I started writing about when I used to work nights in a shelter, and it was about kind of like I was sort of helping other survivors when I could not acknowledge my own history.

And so I wrote this memoir about my early years of domestic violence work, and it was like, it was like, that relationship that's not working, that you don't leave because it's comfortable. And I spent 10 years on it. I couldn't get a publisher. I couldn't, you know, and then finally, the brilliant author, Alex Marzano-Lesnevic, who wrote The Fact of a Body, which is an awesome book. I applied to be in their memoir class, and they read my draft, and they were like, “Meg, you are a non fiction writer. You are not a memoirist.” And what they said is, like, this book really comes alive when you're talking about the issue, and when you're, like, interrogating and exploring yourself, it's like, it's not as alive.

And so I was like, “Okay, I'm a non fiction writer, blah, blah, blah.” So then I took a lot of classes, and I wrote a lot of, like, not so great non fiction book ideas, and then Trump was elected in 2016 and I had this idea, like, I'm going to write a book about abuse survivors who voted for Trump. So I interviewed several survivors who voted for Trump. I wrote a book proposal, and from that, I got an agent, and my agent tried to sell it, and thankfully, no one bought it, because I'm really glad that that book never saw the light of day. I wrote a piece about my experience that was published in Huffington Post in 2020 so everything that I wanted to say got said, and sort of this, these gymnastics that I was doing, trying to, like, sit with survivors who voted for Trump did not have to be the book thing.

And so my agent is amazing, and she did not drop me when my book did not sell, but she did send me back to the drawing board for a good long time. And then I gave her my first draft, and she liked it. And then I gave her my second draft, and she's like, “nope, go in the wrong direction. This isn't working. “And then my amazing friend, Molly Singer, who is like a non profit consultant-y person and a queen of flip charts just sat with me for I don't know how long. Many different meetings and helped me hone what I was saying. Because,I've been talking about these issues for like, 10 million years, and if you wake me up in the middle of the night and say, “Tell me about feminist self defense,” I will do it. But it wasn't organized. So then I got a book proposal. My agent was happy with it, and thankfully, Beacon Press acquired it, and my editor and the whole team is amazing.