SO exciting! Keep ‘em coming!

So I’m signing off as a blogger today, thanks for a great year and a half! I’m not leaving SAFER (how could I leave SAFER?!?), but I’ve run out of hours in the week between starting a new job and managing a very exciting new project for SAFER. Stay tuned for a big announcement soon, but it involves a fabulous partner and reaching out to more than 700 campuses to stir up some major changes!

Student activists and supporters at Carleton University in Ottawa have raised great questions about their university’s response to a lawsuit alleging negligence on the part of the university in preventing a late night rape in a science lab. You can read the details here, but essentially the university is saying, “she should have been doing more to keep herself safe and she shouldn’t have been in the lab that late without telling the campus police where she was.” The university’s lawyers are saying that they have an obligation to defend against the charges by whatever means necessary, but a lot of people aren’t buying it.

“The way we look at it, it’s a reflection of our society’s values. This is their position,” [Concillia Muonde, public education co-ordinator for the Sexual Assault Support Centre] said in a telephone interview Friday.

“That’s what they believe, and that’s what they’re using as a defence. We don’t see it as separate.”

“It perpetuates the myth that women are responsible for experiencing sexual assault,” she said. “And the argument that women should call in to say that this is where they are … it’s really suggesting that women should have a curfew. That if you’re in a certain place at a certain time, then anything that happens to you is well-deserved, and that’s not right.”

Universities have an obligation not to spend money frivolously, absolutely, but the woman’s claims seem pretty reasonable to me – why weren’t the buildings secure if students were expected to work late at night (and I can tell you as a grad student that you are expected to work late at night)? Moreover, they can certainly defend themselves without blaming the victim – unless, of course, they weren’t doing enough to make the campus safe in the first place and that’s the only defense they have left.

I was riding in a cab the other night when this PSA came on the little tv in the back.

The nurse is Karen Carroll, who I interviewed a few weeks ago. From interviewing her, I know that this message works for New York because New York has funds to help rape victims pay for both forensic exams and medical care. Not every state is as good (although see some good news out of North Carolina), and it is heartbreaking to think about how many people experience this emergency but are afraid of the cost of an ER visit.

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to post, I fell and broke my arm a little over a week ago, and typing one-handed is not fun. Not to do any gratuitous product placements, but my new voice recognition software is so cool! (Dragon NaturallySpeaking if you’re curious.) So I thought I might take it for a little spin, and do a short post about one of my favorite obsessions – strengthening the connections between the antiviolence and reproductive rights movements.

I stopped by the Repro Health Happy Hour tonight, which always fills me with joy! It’s so important that those of us whose interests and causes overlap to take the time to meet each other, to talk, to listen, and to learn. It’s so easy to get involved in your own projects and forget how many other facets there are to what you do.

Part of why I admire the Repro Health Happy Hour so much is because it’s such a simple idea and so easy to organize and yet it has the potential to create so much strength within our movement. For those of you who are not New Yorkers or who, like me until not too long ago, don’t yet know about the happy hour, it is a monthly event organized by two women who are passionate about reproductive justice. It is not affiliated with any organization and it’s open to anyone who’s interested in these issues whether or not you actually work in the field. There is no charge and they move the location every month to try to make it as available as possible to as many people as possible. The idea here is simply to meet and talk with people who share your interests and your commitment and see what kind of connections are made.

This idea is very easily adapted to a college campus, particularly if you have the patience to let it run for a few months without worrying too much if you get more than four or five people who show up. This sort of event needs a little bit of time to build, but it’s a great way to introduce the campus choice group to the campus anti-rape group to the radical black women’s group to the law students for reproductive justice group. It’s key, of course, to remember to be welcoming of everyone who comes by, and not let the happy hour or social hour or coffee break or whatever you choose to call it devolve into a clique or just another club meeting!

I think it’s particularly important for people like me whose formal affiliation, if you can call a volunteer Board of Directors a formal affiliation, is with the antiviolence movement, to attend events under the Reproductive Health or Reproductive Rights or Reproductive Justice framework.* Because our movements are deeply interconnected at their philosophical base — they are about who controls women’s sexuality, about the need for women to control their own sexuality. Too often we, like much of the progressive movement, develop a narrow focus on our area of expertise, and we lose both the richness to be gained in learning from others and the strength to be found in uniting with others.

The idea for me is to build a broad-based movement for a culture of respectful sex — sex without violence, sex with autonomy for both partners, sex unrestrained by traditional gender norms that now seem to squeeze both men and women into boxes they don’t want to be in, sex with care for your partner (no matter how long or short that relationship might be). To really do that we need to be talking about sex ed and contraception and an end to rape, as well as the economic and racial oppressions or privileges that intersect with our sex lives, and although we accomplish a lot separately, sometimes we need to come together — even if it’s just for the camaraderie of a shared beer and a shared smile over our willingness to tackle this huge challenge!

*One of the major goals of the women who rethought the reproductive rights movement and created the reproductive justice framework was to create this kind of cross-issue, broad-based movement. SAFER is proud to call itself a reproductive justice organization and to be part of Third Wave’s national reproductive justice network. You can read more about the history and philosophy of reproductive justice here.

Just came across this list from the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation. It brings together a range of films from the last decade or so that deal with sex trafficking, forced prostitution, and the pornography industry. The list includes both fiction and documentary (heavier on the documentary) and is a great resource if you’re thinking about an awareness raising screening for your campus.

Karen Carroll, Associate Director of the Bronx Sexual Assault Response Team, was kind enough to talk with me last week about the basics of sexual assault forensic exams. You can listen and/or download part 1 here and part 2 here. (The podcast is not that long, under 30 minutes total, but for some reason our server refused to upload it as one file even though it let us upload the previous ones. No explanation. If it ever gets its act together, I’ll replace the two files with one file.)

Carroll helped dispel some of my CSI/NCIS fueled uncertainties about whether sexual assault forensic exams always produce evidence—they don’t—and how fast they provide that evidence—depends on the state and it’s current backlog at the labs, but it won’t be tomorrow like on TV.

She also made a recommendation, which I heartily endorse, that colleges and universities have a sexual assault response team, composed of campus police, medical professionals, student services administrators, counselors, etc., that meet regularly to keep up-to-date on sexual assault crisis responses on campus. Evidence collection and analysis techniques change, and everyone needs to be aware of both the best practices and how to correctly interpret any results. She mentions Montclair State University as one school with such a team in place, and you can get a good sense of how such a program works from their website. She also offers a helpful reality check on the possibility of getting nurses trained to perform sexual assault forensic exams on staff or on call at campus health centers. At the end of the day it seems like it is more a question of will then insurmountable cost—not that that surprises me in the slightest.

On a positive note for New Yorkers, it turns out the New York City offers better crisis services and evidence processing than many other places in the country—no L.A. backlogs here—but there is always more to do to make sure that everyone has access to the best possible services. Carroll collaborates with the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, which runs an extensive set of programs to increase access to highly-trained, survivor-sensitive crisis services across the city; check them out.

I hope this interview will answer a lot of your questions—if more pop up for you, leave them in the comments and I’ll see if we can get answers for them! Thanks again to Karen Carroll, and I hope you all enjoy what she has to say.

The Supreme Court has taken the US public school system one tiny step back from the brink of total insanity by deciding that a school principal was wrong to order a 13 year old strip searched (down to her underwear and then made to move around and shake out her bra and panties) on an unsubstantiated accusation that she might have – duh, duh – prescription strength ibuprofen. Shockingly, several lower courts have ruled that this was, in fact, legal, and Judge Clarence Thomas even agreed.

I mention this on this blog because (a) it is nice to see even this tiny (and the decision, at least from early reports, is the opposite of sweeping) bit of respect granted to the importance of bodily autonomy and privacy for children. When we say over and over “your body is your own,” but then “but any adult with even a smidgen of authority or cause can make you do something that makes you feel exposed and embarrassed,” we help set children, and the adults those children become, up to be afraid to report abuse. and (b) I used this case, and the early word that the Supreme Court was likely to uphold the school’s behavior, as an example in a discussion with one of the other SAFER members about how limited high schoolers’ rights to protest their administration were in relation to those of college students (which is one of the major reasons SAFER does not work directly with high school students). This decision going the right way certainly doesn’t change all the other ways in which that is true, but it does keep a tiny dividing line between high school and prison when it comes to personal bodily autonomy.

(Not that I don’t think prisoners should have the right to personal bodily autonomy, see Sarah’s links on prison rape below and check out Just Detention International for more.)

A concerned student at Harvard sent us a link to a worrying article—”Harvard Sexual Assault Office To Close for July.” Apparently, someone at Harvard thinks that closing down the sexual assault crisis and prevention program for a month is a good way to save money. It’s not clear who that someone is, as the director of University Health Services couldn’t say how much money it would save and admitted that the service is used during the summer, so you get the impression that he’s not in favor of the closing. The Dean of Students for Harvard Summer School is unhappy, the Director of the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response is unhappy, the students are unhappy—seems to me that someone should be standing up to explain why the closing is a good idea or Harvard should be making a different budget choice based on how many people are clearly not behind this one.

The argument, made halfheartedly by the Health Services Director, and probably with more vigor by budgeting administrative types, is that the gaps in the service won’t be that noticeable or that drastic because there aren’t that many people who use them over the summer anyway and they can be covered by other services like the student health clinic or Boston’s rape crisis center. There’s several responses to this, including:

Getting students to come forward to tell someone they have been assaulted is difficult, and it really only happens when the assaulted student feels like she or he can trust the person he or she is telling. And that’s the most important reason not to shut down, even for a month. It has, I’m sure, taken years of hard work to make sure that students at Harvard know to go to the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response if they need help and to establish enough student trust in the office that people do go. This closing raises confusion and creates distrust (if Harvard really cared about my safety, they wouldn’t choose this office to close…), and in doing so risks all the efforts of the office to create a culture of reporting and survivor support.

This is actually old news, but I was mired in dissertation land when it came across the wires, so I never got to blog about it. It’s also a great teaser for my upcoming podcast with Karen Carroll, Associate Director of the Bronx Sexual Assault Response Team, an expert on sexual assault forensic exams (colloquially, and it turns out not entirely correctly, known as rape kits).

In the October issue of the American Journal of Emergency Medicine (I know the blurb says November, but I checked and the blurb is off), a study was published revealing that external genital injuries were more likely to be detected on women with light color skin than dark color skin. There’s a certain amount of “no, duh” to this, as most of us probably have some experiential knowledge that it is harder to see bruises on our dark-skinned friends than on our light-skinned ones, but there are several important implications to the study.

The study found that detection differences correlated most strongly with the skin tone of the volunteer (the exams were conducted on women who had had consensual sex) not the race or ethnicity of that volunteer. This is an important finding, as it suggests that a genuine physical difference, not examiner bias, was the primary driver of the difference in reporting. This matters because the remedy is different in the two cases—this data suggests that additional training on correctly detecting signs of sexual assault on dark skinned women is probably needed for most forensic examiners (and next week you can hear Carroll speak to her sense of the importance of examiners having a strong familiarity with a wide range of skin tones).

This data of course doesn’t mean that in real world cases the combination of racism and genuine physical differences (compounded by examiner unfamiliarity with the detection of signs of sexual assault on people with darker skins) couldn’t lead to many, many cases where signs of sexual assault were overlooked and survivors were accused of lying and denied redress through the criminal justice system. Non-white women have historically had a much more difficult time prosecuting their rapists (for many reasons beyond forensic exams, obviously), and one reason to widely advertise this study is to give people with darker skin tones an authoritative piece of data to wave in a prosecutor’s face and say “just because my exam didn’t show anything doesn’t mean I wasn’t assaulted.” One piece of data is far from enough to overcome real prejudice, but it might be helpful in overcoming ignorance.

The other thing that really stood out to me—even in the easiest-to-see cases of light-skinned women, external genital injuries were visible only 68% of the time (granted these were volunteers who had had consensual sex, but there are automatic, unconscious physical responses of lubrication, etc. that kick in in most assault cases as well). You’ll hear Carroll say this next week as well: many sexual assaults produce few or no visible injuries. Just because the exam doesn’t show anything doesn’t mean an assault didn’t occur.

What’s the upshot for a college campus? (1) Your administration should make sure that the sexual assault examiners available to students—be it through student health services, the local emergency room, or the local rape crisis center—are fully trained in evaluating survivors of all skin colors. (2) Anyone charged with interpreting sexual assault forensic exams as part of a judicial process—Dean of Students, judicial board member, campus police officer—should be fully trained in the limitations of such exams, including the possibility that survivors with darker skin tones will not exhibit as many visible signs of sexual assault.