Confessions of an EDI Trainer — Episode 3: The Question I'll Never Forget

Note: This post contains reference to a deeply inappropriate question asked during a training session. It is included because the moment — and how it was handled — speaks directly to the realities of delivering EDI training on sensitive topics.

It was sometime in the early 2000's and I was delivering a session on Islam as part of a wider EDI programme. I'd got the room really engaged and there was lots of genuine curiosity, good questions and real listening. Just how I like it.

Then a very senior NHS manager put her hand up.

She asked whether it was true that in Islam, when a man's wife is menstruating, he is permitted to have sexual relations with his children.

The room froze.

Now consider what that moment feels like from where I am standing.

I am the trainer....a practising Muslim.....stood in front of a room full of professionals. And I have just been asked one of the most offensive, disturbing questions I have ever heard in a learning environment.

I paused. I took a breath. And then I asked her, calmly and clearly:

"Do you honestly believe that to be true?"

She went red. It was clear the question had landed and that she was beginning to understand the weight of what she had just asked.

Why I am glad she asked it

Here is the thing. I do not have an issue with people asking questions like this because those questions come from somewhere. Someone has said it or written it or passed it on as fact. And the person sitting in front of me wants to know whether it is true.

In some ways, I felt proud that she trusted the space enough to ask it out loud rather than carry it around unchallenged.

A disrespectful question, asked in a respectful environment, is still an opportunity.

I let the silence sit just long enough for the question to echo back to her. Then I answered.

"No. It is not true. Absolutely not."

And I used that moment to talk about what Islam actually teaches about sexual relations....clearly, factually, and without flinching because the alternative is to leave a dangerous belief sitting in a room full of NHS managers.

What this taught me

Some people do not know what they do not know. They have absorbed something from a conversation, from the internet or from a headline and it has settled in their mind as fact. They are not necessarily malicious. They are just uninformed.

There are occassions, however, when they know exactly what they are saying. They are testing the trainer. Testing the room and maybe seeing what they can get away with.

As an EDI trainer, it is your responsibility to hold the room.....to set the tone. You model the respect you want others to show even when, or especially when, that is difficult.

I walked out of that session knowing I had done that. And I have carried it with me ever since.