Sorry it has been a little quiet on the blog the last few days – and probably will continue to be so. There’s some school work swamped-ness involved, but also some serious the-election-is-coming-up-in-a-week-ness.

I’ve gotten involved this year with some New York State Senate races, and my eyes have been totally opened to the importance of local elections. I know we’re all focused on the presidential race, which is as it should be, but try to take a moment out to learn about your state senators and assembly members, your city council member and your school board representative. These people control a lot more of your life than you may realize – everything from what kind of sex ed is taught to whether bus fares are going to go up to whether the dry cleaner that is polluting your air gets shut down to whether rape victims have to pay for their own rape kits or whether rape kits even get tested.

I fully admit that until this year, I could not have named any of my state or local representatives, and didn’t think it mattered all that much. Then I started volunteering at Pro-Choice NY, and found out that New York has a Republican majority, anti-choice majority State Senate. Pretty unlikely when you consider how Democratic and pro-choice the state is overall. The problem is lots of people like myself, who don’t know who the local candidates are, and don’t want to vote for people they don’t know anything about. So the incumbent gets re-elected, term after term, and gradually they cease to really represent their district. The point is not to urge you to vote Democratic or pro-choice, although if you’re a pro-choice New Yorker, you can find out about your state and local races here, but to urge you to read up on your state and local candidates and vote for those offices.

As for me? Turns out my state and local officials are awesome! I feel really well represented and will be campaigning hard over the weekend up in Rochester for some folks who don’t feel like their State Senator represents them at all. I hope all of you have a chance to look up your state and local elections before you go to the polls in a week and I’ll look forward to being back to blogging after (fingers crossed!) a big celebration party or two.

Recently, there have been some interesting federal policy developments in addressing sexual assault and violence against women, one of which is especially salient to Nora’s post about the LAPD from earlier today. Thanks to the national Younger Women’s Task Force for sending out information on some of these updates in observation of October as Domestic Violence Awareness Month, one of which I have posted below. Important questions about this policy change, known as the Debbie Smith Act, include how, if at all, it will impact young people and students on college campuses; and whether or not it is sustainable through local and national elections, with the growing concerns over the economy and the federal budget.

Reauthorization of the Debbie Smith Act:

In 1989, Debbie Smith was raped by an unknown attacker who kidnapped her, robbed her, and sexually assaulted her near her home. Although she underwent an examination and a rape kit was completed as a result, Debbie waited six years for her assailant to be identified due to an enormous backlog of DNA evidence waiting to be processed in her state. Originally passed in 2004, The Debbie Smith Act injected greatly needed federal funding into law enforcement bodies in order to reverse the trend of major back-logging in DNA testing in pending sexual assault cases. According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network ), prosecutors feel that DNA is the single most effective tool they have in bringing perpetrators of sexual assault and sex crimes to justice. Advocates hope that the reauthorization of funding at the federal level through the Debbie Smith Reauthorization Act of 2008, which was passed by Congress in September and became law in October, will allow law enforcement to solve more cases of sexual assault quickly and efficiently, and prevent future cases from occurring.

We’ve written about problems with rape kits going untested before, but this news out of L.A. is just incredible. Not only is LAPD sitting on a backlog of 7,000 rape kits because the city won’t give them the money to hire the people they need to test them, but they failed to do the paperwork that would have extended the statute of limitations on more than 200 kits!

If you’re a citizen of L.A., get on the phone and start protesting – demand that more of your tax money go to testing evidence, because having “more officers on the street” is useless if the evidence they gather is never used to solve the crime.

If you live elsewhere, do some research and figure out how your city and state are doing in terms of getting kits tested in a timely fashion. It’s a problem all over the country, sadly, and it’s allowing rapists to wander at large and assault again and causing survivors to wait for years for a closure that may never come.

Thanks to Sarah M for alerting me to the Jezebel post on this ridiculousness.

There’s an amazing thread over at Shakesville right now about the ways that women limit their activities to protect themselves from street harassment and sexual assault. Go take a look when you have a chance (trigger warning).

When I was working as an anti-violence educator, one of the exercises I did with mixed-gender groups was to have the men and women make lists of the things they do on a daily basis to prevent sexual assault. The men would routinely come up with nothing, while the women could fill a piece of butcher paper in about two minutes. The comment thread looks a lot like that exercise.

I recently posted about the fact that Elmhurst College is now providing security escorts for Muslim students, just so they can walk around their own campus. I think about the negotiations those students must be going through in their minds every time they leave their dorm rooms… Worrying about whether they’ll be bothering the security escort. Worrying that they’re being paranoid. Worrying that it won’t be safe to go to the bathroom. I imagine it’s very similar to the internal arguments women have with ourselves about whether it’s safe to go to the corner deli late at night.

In ways that are totally disappeared by the dominant culture, people dealing with identity-based oppressions have to make all kinds of dignity-destroying decisions in the smallest spaces of our lives, just to avoid violence. Whether we avoid going out at night because we fear the police profiling us, a sexual assault, a queer bashing, or an anti-Muslim hate crime, the result is the same. Our mobility is limited, and our claim to public space and freedom of movement is taken from us.

I wish we could all take a walk alone.