In conversation with Baroness Helena Kennedy QC

‘The route women have to take to success is often not up the carpeted staircase, but out the window and up the drain pipe’, so says Baroness Helena Kennedy QC one of britain’s most distinguished lawyers who has spent her professional life giving voice to those who have least power in the system. Born into a close working class family in the glasgow tenements, through sheer grit she fought, charmed and begged her way through the male white bastions of the legal profession ,to become one of our best champions of human rights, civil liberties and women’s issues.

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When Kamala Harris reigned in Mike Pence during the Vice President debate when she refused to be interrupted by repeating the line “I’m speaking” four times - many women nodded in respect and, I suspect, weary recognition.

Baroness Kennedy, QC and Peer of the Realm, is as uncompromising as ever in her conversation with Debbie, as she calls out why we all, men and women, urgently need to ignite better conversations about male privilege and entitlement.

She calls the me too movement a “a brick through the window of the court system” which highlighted that it wasn’t working to protect its citizens. And whilst progress has been made, she says we must all keep working, calling out, and challenging at all levels for a better, fairer and safer system for all.

In the international court systems she says she sees the horrendous physical results of an entitled male attitude at its most terrible. But she recognises that closer to home, women face all kinds of abuse both within relationships and on our streets. And in the boardrooms, which can still be the preserve of a “certain kind of male privilege”, women can still struggle to lead and be accepted especially in some of the most elite professions such as law and medicine.

Shame, the pros and cons of the outsider status, and how to be a diplomatic disrupter are all covered in this fascinating conversation. She ends by reminding us of the chilling words by novelist Margaret Atwood “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”