I love to use my commute to and from work to as a time to finish books I’ve been meaning to read. Last week I finally finished Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman, MD and the Afterword possessed some very good points that addressed something I’ve always wondered. For some reason, speaking out against sexual violence is a very political act; before I knew better I thought it’d be a cause that everyone (minus sexual assaulters) automatically would rally behind – boy was I wrong.

Herman herself shares the resistance she has noticed in the field when professionals have tried to advocate that the trauma from violence (especially rape) is legitimate and serious, many have been quick to dismiss or doubt the facts. She states “…the study of psychological trauma is an inherently political enterprise because it calls attention to the experience of oppressed people,” which makes a lot of sense to me. SAFER has already have touched upon the issue of intersectionality of oppressions a number times, but I do not think it cannot be emphasized enough how oppression and sexual violence are never mutually exclusive.

People (especially those in power) oft feel uncomfortable to talk about issues of privilege and oppression, so I guess I can see why many admin members at universities (or politicians or any other people in power) may be reluctant to talk about rape and why they have been dismal at addressing it correctly. No one wants to admit (or believe) that they are actively participating in the oppression of others and that their decisions not only are ruining the lives of individuals, but hurting society as a whole (well if you believe we all deserve equality).

Since I first learned about the existence of Amnesty International in high school and the concept of human rights, I knew it was a cause to which I wanted to dedicate my life. It is shocking that there are so many facets of injustice that all play into the concept of human rights. Herman suggests a way to help overcome the stigma against survivors of traumatic events. She says “…only an ongoing connection with a  global political movement for human rights could ultimately sustain our ability to speak about unspeakable things.”

We are constantly told that rape and domestic violence is a “private” thing and shouldn’t be shared publicly (CPI’s report shows how multiple schools illegally told survivors they could not tell anyone about adjudication proceedings), but that’s how we allow rape to happen at alarming rates around the world. Not only is rape minimalized, but so is sexual harassment and groping. They all are very serious, but many defend people who commit the heinous acts or dismiss those who try to increase awareness. For example, The Sexist has started a series on groping which has been controversial to some; one site encouraged visitors to submit false sexual harassment stories to http://stopstreetharassment.com/. Many are quick to call some “crazy feminists who can’t take a joke and need to get laid,” but truly these activists are doing their small part to fight for human rights globally – even if what they specifically do does not reach out on a international scale.

Rape is internationally recognized as a violation of human rights. So when a feminist is involved in fighting or alleviating sexual violence and its aftermath, they are also a part of the human rights cause.

via Rapedattufts.info

I’m not a fan of beauty pageants, for reasons that I don’t really think I need to go into here. But I AM a fan of folks who are have the strength and bravery to speak up about about their own experiences with sexual violence, and definitely fans of those who find new platforms from which to speak on the issue, potentially widening the audience engaged in sexual assault awareness and prevention.

So despite my cynicism and displeasure with the Miss America pageant and it’s pageant peers, I’ve gotta give it up for Miss Nevada, Christina Keegan, who will use Sunday’s Miss America pageant to talk about sexual violence. The Miss America Organization requires pageant contestants to “choose an issue about which she cares deeply and that is of relevance to our country. Once chosen, Miss America and the state titleholders use their stature to address community service organizations, business and civic leaders, the media and others about their platform issues.” Keegan’s platform will be “Strength Over Silence: Rape Education and Recovery.” Awesome.

Keegan’s platform choice grew out of her own experience with sexual assault: she was raped while studying abroad in Spain during college. A companion she was out with drugged her and then raped her when she was unconscious. She tells a very familiar story—of feeling responsible, of not wanting to tell.

“This was somebody I had gone to school with, who I trusted, someone I had spent the last four weeks getting to know,” she says. Yet the person who committed the act went free. Keegan, pained, confused and emotionally scarred, did not want to make it known she had been harmed in such a way. She didn’t want those close to her, especially her family, to see her as “dirty.”

“Like most victims, I blamed it on myself,” she says. “I must have said something, worn something, done something to make him think it was OK. Maybe he even thought that I wanted it. I placed that blame on myself and thought, maybe if I don’t talk about it, if I just deny that it ever happened, it will be as if it never happened. So, I felt that way for six months.”

Keegan eventually began to speak about her assault, and has seen the value of doing so. She notes that it’s something people don’t talk about, which perpetuates a cycle of silence and allows violence to persist.

[E]veryone is touched by rape, too. It’s just that nobody talks about rape. It’s not something convenient, that we can put a pink ribbon on for once a year, like with breast-cancer awareness. No one does that for sexual education. … This has to do with sex and violence, and nobody wants to talk about sex and violence. It’s something we keep at arm’s length.”

Before being assaulted herself, Keegan says she felt “invincible” and had scant knowledge about, or training for, being attacked.

“I thought, ‘This will not happen to me,’ ” she recalls. “Being a 19-year-old girl, I thought, I can outwit my attacker. I’ll outrun him. Well, I was unconscious at the time I was raped.”…

Keegan has spoken to schoolchildren. She has appeared in front of active military personnel. No one is disqualified form hearing the message…

“I’ve had e-mails letters,” she says. “I’ve had people come up to me and tell me their stories, and say to me, ‘I’ve been a victim of sexual assault, and I’ve held that story in my heart for 20 years now and never told anybody.”

So I’m rooting for Miss Nevada (I guess?) this year. Because if she can get more people to speak up about their own experiences with assault, and inspire people to get active on the topic, more power to her.

Sheesh I hate the bro’s club. I want nothing to do with it. However, I am constantly being invited into the club. I get the invitations in the classrooms, at parties, etc and now since post-grad I get them at the office. Guys come up to me making sexist jokes, or making sly comments about women as they walk by, or asking which girl at the bar I want like I can choose and they are not and should not be an active agent.  They say this because they assume I am in the club. To these remarks I usually respond with showing them my “F” card (feminist card) or just show no interest (cold shoulder) when I am not feeling so confrontational.

So what is this Bro club I speak of? It is the contract that men are expected to sign that one drawn up by our patriarchal society and we should abide by it from the day we are born until we die.  This club is of men that have accomplished nothing more than being conceived with the Y chromosome but feel that gives them inherent superiority over others, one that they should exploit. In the contract, bros always come before hoes, any and all women are hoes. And in this club we constantly have to prove to our fellow bros that we abide by this contract by asserting this definition of masculinity (the WRONG one!) by showing them how disrespectful we are to women or how we are so “non-feminine.”

And I say screw that.

More men need to bring honor and respect to our gender. We need to challenge the few that are giving us a bad name. It takes great courage to speak up in front of men who are speaking sexist or homophobic words. It may not be mainstream yet but there are many men out there who keep their F cards hidden and are eager to join us in conversation and we are going to get there.

I will keep showing my F card as much as possible. I hope that one day I will be approached by instead members of the brotherhood.  This club will be different, it will supports each other, talk about personal issues, realize the value of being an engaged father, raise women up as equals, etc. We need to turn these bro clubs into brotherhoods to end this contract once and for all so our children will never feel they need to sign it.

Suggested Reading: Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power by Shira Tarrant

The Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP) is an awesome organization out of Chicago that “is one of the only harm-reduction youth-run organizations that works specifically with girls and young women, including trans girls and women, between the ages of 12-23 who are currently or formerly involved in the sex trade and street economies.” Reps from YWEP will be in New York at the CUNY Grad Center this week to present the findings from their youth-led research report. See the below announcement for more information, and an explanation of what makes this work totally amazing and unique.

The Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP) is coming to the Grad Center next Friday to present their participatory action research project on resistance and resilience: “Girls Do What They Have To Do To Survive: Illuminating Methods used by Girls in the Sex Trade and Street Economy to Fight Back and Heal.” The presentation will be at:

CUNY Grad Center, Room 203-205
Friday, Jan. 29th @ 3pm
FREE, but space is limited, so you must RSVP to:

YWEP, based in Chicago, is one of the only harm-reduction youth-run organizations that works specifically with girls and young women, including trans girls and women, between the ages of 12-23 who are currently or formerly involved in the sex trade and street economies.

The research was entirely designed, conducted and analyzed by the youth staff and youth participants of YWEP.

You can download the research report on YWEP’s website: www.ywep.org

From the Youth Activist Summary of the Research Report:

This research is for US. It’s for YOU and for all girls, including
transgender girls, and young women, including trans women, involved in the sex trade and street economy.

This research study was created by girls, collected by girls, and
analyzed by girls. We did this because this is OUR LIVES. Who knows us better than us? We did this to prove that we care–that we are capable of resisting violence in a multitude of ways. We take care of ourselves and heal in whatever way feels best for us—whether society approves of it or not.

This research study honors all of the ways we fight back (resistance) and our healing (resilience) methods. We proved that we do face violence but we are not purely victims. We are survivors. We can take care of ourselves and we know what we need.

This research is a response to all of those researchers, doctors,
government officials, social workers, therapists, journalists, foster care workers and every other adult who said we were too messed up or that we needed to be saved from ourselves. The next time someone tells you that you don’t know what’s best for you, look towards our tool kit for inspiration. We wrote the tool kit with the intent of giving you ideas about how girls have survived this life—not to tell you what to do.

We did this. We did the research. And now we are sharing it with you so that you know that girls do what they have to do to survive.

This is an issue that has been weighing on me for a while now, but with the recent increase in the buzz around Facebook with its change in privacy settings I feel like this could be a great time to bring this up.  A few weeks ago Sarah posted about “Online Privacy and Safety, Online and in Court,” but my post will be about something online impacting one’s “real life” — just in a much more private setting. The Gawker post touches on the issue of stalkers as one of the many negative aspects of the ever-changing minimum privacy in social media. One person is quoted saying

“I have been dealing with a deranged, threatening stalker… There is no way of keeping your Friend list private… I have been obsessively reading about this topic [overall Facebook privacy]… To say I’m outraged is an understatement.”

This reminds me of a time when a high school classmate a few years ago had to message all of us warning not to friend her ex, against whom she had a restraining order, who was friending her friends to try to get to her. So having your friends list available is a legitimate threat to some people.

However, the features that particularly bother me is the “Friend Suggestions” on Facebook as well as the “People You May Know” on LinkedIn. These are features that you cannot completely opt out of, which I think is a HUGE problem. I personally explicitly avoid LinkedIn completely and Facebook (save for SAFER, internship stuff, and *coughfarmvillecough*) because I DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM SUGGESTING ME TO FRIEND MY RAPIST.

Fortunately Facebook generally doesn’t repeat suggestions once you reject them and they dont suggest people you’ve already blocked. However, what about survivors that haven’t already blocked them? Didn’t think to block them? Doesn’t feel comfortable enough to type in their name to block them?

I highly recommend reading the Facebook Help page about Friend Suggestions. I think it reveals a lot about Friend Suggestions that the average user may not know. The Consumerist talks about how Facebook get the Suggestions. For example, even if you dont update your email list to their Friend Finder (they save all the emails even if the people isn’t on Facebook at the time), they still make Suggestions to YOU based on the uploads your friends DID make.

My biggest beef is with LinkedIn, however. “People You May Know” is NOT something you can change AT ALL. Even people you turn down POP UP AGAIN LATER. I already had to turn down “linking” with my perp. I don’t want to do it again. I don’t want to see what he’s doing and I don’t want to see where he lives. Now I am annoyed that I have to avoid the site like the plague because I don’t want to have a panic attack by being welcomed with the face, name, and occupation of someone who attacked me. Other people have asked for ways to opt out of it. I even asked linkedin. Unsurprisingly there was no response.

Most sexual violence is done by people who know each other. This means that they often will be in the same network on facebook and/or have a lot of mutual friends and other factors that would lead to LinkedIn and Facebook to suggest a perpetrator (or past victim) for friending. While I think the idea of suggesting people is great, I don’t think it should be mandatory. Even worse, my concerns were completely ignored when I asked LinkedIn about this.

There already have been posts about exes being suggested and how it’s “awkward” all over the internet. I think we should bring more attention that there can be more than just “awkward” consequences for people getting suggestions to friend the wrong people. Triggers can be serious things and it sucks that some people have to hide even on a site that can be great tool to reach out to friends .

To contact Facebook about this you can use this page and email ,  , . Apparently Facebook chooses to ignore people until there is a number of people contacting them over multiple venues.

Trying to find a way to contact LinkedIn was ridiculously difficult. To contact LinkedIn call (650) 687-3600 or 402-452-2320, message their Senior Product Manager, email customer_service@linkedin.com.

Social networking is about the people and providing service. They should at least give the common courtesy to listen and respond to legitimate concerns.