Diversity in Mountain Rescue

It was a while ago I attended an online meeting about diversity in mountain rescue. Or, more precisely, diversifying pathways into mountain rescue. One of the men in the team had alerted me to this event, and it sounded interesting. So I signed up! And it happened shortly before Monique came to visit, so my attention was pulled into other directions.

For those who missed this; cave rescue falls under the umbrella of mountain rescue, so this was also applicable to the likes of me. And I saw one or two other people from cave rescue in the audience. There were also representatives of the army and the fire service and suchlike.

It started with a talk by an army bloke. He told an anecdote of hearing some unacceptable language, and not really knowing what to do with it. In the end he did nothing. And he figured that that was the standard response. But by now he had, he said, a queer child and a trans child, and he had started to wonder if these would have felt okay in a situation like that. Or if they even would feel safe? And he had realised that a lot of attitudes that are tolerated shouldn't be. And he recognised some of these attitudes in mountain rescue as well. And he wasn't happy with that.

He also provided the best soundbites of the evening, one of which was taken from a speech by David Morrison, a big cheese in the Australian army, who had been addressing misogynist behaviour in the army ranks. He said: the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. 

Of the other one I don't remember the provenance, but that was: if you have to explain it's banter, it's fucking not banter. 

I think both of these are useful to keep in mind. And admittedly, and fortunately, I haven't encountered "banter" in cave rescue, but I know that several members of the team will indeed "explain" something is banter, and walk past it. So it is something of which it would be good if all members of our team, just like those of any mountain rescue team, would keep in mind. 

There were also testimonies that were taken directly from mountain rescue. People assuming that if a car has a mountain rescue sticker on it, the man in that car will be the mountain rescuer. Assumptions that a woman on the hills would be a casualty carer. Women hesitating to join because of the macho image of mountain rescue. People being rescued and then saying "thanks guys". The situation in mountain rescue doesn't seem to be too bad; they seem to have a higher percentage of women than you get in a typical cave rescue team. But there clearly still is a lot of work to do.

Is this all about women? No, of course not. It was pointed out that quite a lot of mountain rescue teams are very white and cisgender and straight and full of able-bodied people. And I suppose on the disability side you will never get proper representation, because some disabilities just don't combine well with mountain rescue, but plenty do. And more diversity in general would be good.

So what were the suggestions of doing something about this? Everyone in the team should mind their language. And everybody else’s language, too. If you go recruit new members, don't go to where only a limited number of demographies is represented. (We don't recruit, by the way; people find us.) Make sure your marketing materials have a reasonable level of diversity. If you do outreach, try to do that in teams that are not a monoculture.

Some of this clearly doesn't apply to us, but it was still useful to hear! Our team hasn't heard it yet; in theory, there was a good opportunity at a committee meeting we had, but we were overrunning, so I said I would just write a little report. And that was what prompted me to also write a blog post. I suppose it will be our next committee meeting where this actually gets discussed. I hope it helps!