In Part 2 of SAFER’s 4-part Policy Reform Webinar Series, Trainings Coordinator Erin Burrows explains the role of risk reduction and primary prevention in comprehensive sexual assault prevention programming on campus. Stay tuned for Parts 3 and 4 of SAFER’s Policy Reform Webinar Series!
Monthly Archives: December 2011
Survivors helping survivors
DartHeart, an organization founded by survivors of college sexual assault, offers peer support services for survivors of sexual assault and other traumas. If you are looking for someone to talk to or advice on how to be supportive of a friend, check out their materials.
International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers
International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers was on December 17th. I am sorry that I didn’t write about it before it happened, as there were events around the world that I would have loved to help advertise. Too often clients, employers, and police subject sex workers to violence, and too often little is done to stop it. Attitudes toward sex workers often partake of the same sort of victim-blaming, slut-shaming words and behaviors often faced by sexual assault survivors, as part of a larger set of cultural attitudes that seek to limit women’s equality. SAFER believes that campuses are made safer by resisting violence against sex workers, and we hope that sex workers might be made safer by promoting safer campuses – challenging deeply ingrained cultural attitudes takes work from all sides to chip away, change, and remake our culture.
Effectively supporting sex worker activism can be a complicated challenge from outside such an experience, however – it’s important for me to recognize that my position may be a relatively privileged one and is definitely one without experience in that field. I tend in such cases to look for guidance from voices who have experiences I don’t have, and experiences with sex work can vary greatly. Many people are forced into it, either through coercion or from a lack of other legitimate economic options. Others choose sex work because it provides a better economic option or because they get pleasure from it. How people entered the field may strongly shape their reactions to attempts to end violence against sex workers and to combat human trafficking.
As a case in point, Sex Work Activists, Allies and You (SWAAY), who I found through the Feministe post that tipped me off that I had missed International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, will be protesting a recent Google Foundation grant to organizations that aim to end human trafficking. While SWAAY recognizes the importance of fighting slavery and coercion, they believe that three of the funded organizations, including the lead partner, take anti-sex worker positions and encourage the criminalization of sex workers. A particular concern for them is that many organizations led by sex workers or former sex workers seem to be having more difficulty accessing funding then those that are promoting solutions from the outside.
At least one of the organizations of concern to SWAAY has partnered with GEMS, however, an organization founded by a woman who is a survivor of commercial sexual exploitation in her teenage years, and an organization whose work I really respect. GEMS does tremendous work to help survivors (largely children and adolescents) of what they term “commercial sexual exploitation” develop educational and employment opportunities and deal with the traumas associated with their lives before and after being exploited.
The complexities of navigating the rhetorics and realities of anti-trafficking work were recently highlighted in a recent, fascinating Bitch article. The author, Emi Koyama, highlights the emphasis in much anti-trafficking work and media coverage on increased policing and decreased investigation of the complex factors of poverty, racism, abuse and homophobia that inform many people’s experience of human trafficking.
While very much recognizing the validity of the concerns raised (as one tiny example, I am totally weirded out by the almost unalleviated use of “victim” in the several anti-trafficking websites I reviewed, GEMS very much excepted), I also am moved by the work that many of these organizations are doing on behalf of people, many of them children, who clearly did not make a choice to become sex workers. Sexual abuse of children is something we definitely need desperately to combat in all its forms, and I think it is very important to separate issues of children and adults in sex work.
I have a lot to learn about sex worker activism and anti-trafficking, and this post is intended to raise issues I’m thinking about, not to reach a conclusion. One point on which I definitely agree with SWAAY is the need to support more organizations led by sex-workers and former sex-workers. SAFER similarly strives to be led by students and recent graduates because we believe that personal experience is a key source of information to guide effective activism.
To take it back to where this post began, look to sex worker and former sex worker activists like GEMS, Sex Workers Outreach Project-USA (organizers of the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers), and SWAAY to learn from those who have experienced sex work how we might best work to end violence against sex workers. I hope that we can all work together to develop and promote thoughtful, judicious policies, programs, and laws that recognize and prosecute abuse, but also recognize and respect adult choices in situations where a choice was freely made. Certainly, I hope we can all agree that respecting, and not criminalizing, sex workers is the first step we all need to take.
Wisconsin slashes funding for sexual assault services
According to a student op-ed in the Badger Herald, sexual assault services in Wisconsin are being cut 42.5% in 2012. These cuts will affect programs all across the state, including the University of Wisconsin system, which has several state funded prevention and response programs.
Writer Hannah Sleznikow calls out the dangerously short-sighted and infuriating message these cuts send:
This radical slash in funding represents negligent legislating on the part of our state representatives, for it demonstrates a failure to recognize what is in the best interest of the people of Wisconsin. Sexual assault is an issue that adversely affects society as a whole. By not coping with it effectively via funding for essential services to help victims and prevent future occurrences, our state representatives are sending a troubling message that sexual assault is not a matter of utmost concern in Wisconsin.
Since SAFER is a not-for-profit, I’ll avoid commenting on other aspects of the Wisconsin political scene, but thank you, Hannah (apparently, Hannah is the current name of choice for emerging leaders in defending people’s right to be safe from sexual assault), for alerting us all to this latest outrageous budget cutting exercise.
Boston University Takes It Seriously
Coach Jack Parker of Boston University’s hockey team takes sexual assault very seriously. The team’s star center was kicked off the team yesterday and had his scholarship revoked after he was arrested for drunkenly breaking into a woman’s dorm room and forcibly kissing and groping her. According to the Boston Globe, Parker had previously tried to convince the student to get help for his alcohol problem, and warned him that another drinking incident would lead to his dismissal (this was apparently the first time that sexual assault allegations were involved).
I can’t say enough about how impressed I am with Coach Parker and BU. Everything the coach and the university had to say is right on point – their concern is how to best help the survivor and they are clearly committed to conveying a zero tolerance policy for sexual assault. They also make clear that the player’s drinking is a problem because it lowered his internal barriers that might otherwise have kept him from assaulting someone – there was no attempt to blame the victim or move the focus off his unacceptable behavior in any way.
Maybe what I appreciated most was Coach Parker’s ability to put winning on the ice in its relative context:
“My team is very upset,’’ said Parker. “He’s a real good teammate, he’s friends with an awful lot of these guys. He’s well liked. He’s so important to the team from a winning and losing point of view. He’s been our leading goal scorer, he’s been our first-line center, our best penalty killer, a power-play guy, he gets all kinds of ice time.
“All that pales in comparison to the other stuff that’s going on. The way he is gone makes it even worse because now it’s a big hole in the soul of the team, so to speak. We might not recover from that. That type of stuff is all trivial compared to the stuff he’s going to have to recover from and the girl’s going to have to recover from.’’
In an month when we’ve learned more than we could imagine about just how far some colleges will go to protect their sports programs, major kudos to Coach Parker and BU.
Winter Break Challenge: Policy Reform Mini-Webinar!
To get the Winter Break Challenge rolling, SAFER’s Training Coordinator, Erin Burrows, guides student activists through the steps of policy reform in a series of awesome webinars! First up: Deconstructing “Tone and Definition” in your school’s policy. You can find links to shortened and extended versions below. Enjoy!
SHORTENED VERSION
EXTENDED VERSION
Survey Affirms Prevalence of Rape in the U.S.
A major (more than 16,000 participants) study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institute of Justice and the Department of Defense found that almost 1 in 5 American women and 1 in 71 American men have experience a rape or attempted rape in their lifetime, and that the annual number of rapes in the U.S. is estimated at more than 1 million. While these results are not a surprise, and correspond with results found in other studies, it is still valuable to have this level of data gathered in such a thorough, careful study.
You can find the report and the associated press releases on the CDC’s website. I’m adding a link to the sidebar too (under Sexual Assault Statistical Information) so you can find it again when you carefully need to explain to someone for the 300th time that rape is a huge problem in the U.S. and just because no one has told him (or her, but this conversation often happens with hims) about their experiences doesn’t mean that it is not happening.
Take a look too at what the report has to say about the consequences of surviving an assault:
A vast majority of women who said they had been victims of sexual violence, rape or stalking reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, as did about one-third of the men.
Women who had experienced such violence were also more likely to report having asthma, diabetes or irritable bowel syndrome than women who had not. Both men and women who had been assaulted were more likely to report frequent headaches, chronic pain, difficulty sleeping, limitations on activity, and poor physical and mental health.
“We’ve seen this association with chronic health conditions in smaller studies before,” said Lisa James, director of health for Futures Without Violence, a national nonprofit group based in San Francisco that advocates for programs to end violence against women and girls.
“People who grow up with violence adopt coping strategies that can lead to poor health outcomes,” she said. “We know that women in abusive relationships are at increased risk for smoking, for example.”
So maybe now we can start talking a little more seriously about preventing this major public health menace?
h/t to Jezebel, and a major shout-out to the Jezebel commentors, who did a really lovely job of politely but firmly telling the first person to deny these statistics based on his experience just why he was wrong.
Calling all college anti-violence organizers: Help us reach 300 published policies!
The holiday season is upon us, which means it’s time for SAFER and V-Day’s second annual Winter Break Challenge. We know what student activists are against. Now we want to know what you’re for.
This winter break, SAFER and V-Day are asking you to participate in the Campus Accountability Project (CAP) to hold your school accountable for preventing and responding to sexual violence on your campus. Register at safercampus.org and submit your school’s sexual assault policy to the CAP database using an easy, step-by-step policy review form. CAP helps you identify the gaps in your school’s policy and inspires concrete ideas for action on your campus.
Currently, the CAP database houses 233 policies in an online, public and searchable database, which details what colleges and universities are doing to prevent, reduce and respond to sexual violence. The database publicly recognizes the successes of some schools’ sexual assault policies while also highlighting flaws. For the Winter Break Challenge, SAFER and V-Day are asking current students and recent alums to submit their schools into the CAP database to reach a goal of 300 published policies. Soon we’ll be able to look at all of the schools in the database and report back on trends across the country—your participation is key part of this national conversation.
Over the course of the next two months, SAFER will be releasing a series of training videos providing an overview of analysis and addressing the components of a comprehensive sexual assault policy: tone and definitions; primary prevention and risk reduction; crisis intervention and long-term survivor services; and finally, reporting, disciplinary procedures and oversight. The videos will provide suggestions for concrete improvement to your school’s policy to strengthen prevention efforts and improve the experiences of survivors on campus.
You can help kick-start real change on campuses nationwide by encouraging your friends and fellow activists to submit to CAP. For those whose schools are already in the database, share the love by posting the Facebook event, pass along the Why Policy video, and engage with us across social media platforms.
All too often students fall through the cracks of their campus bureaucracy. Policy analysis is the first step to building an effective movement for change on campus. It’s time to hold your school accountable. Join us by supporting all students who demand the safer campuses they deserve.
UVM Update
The fraternity whose member circulated a survey asking who each respondent would rape has been suspended, and investigations by both the university and the national body of the fraternity are underway. Kudos to the UVM students who drew attention to this outrage, and to the university and the national fraternity for starting prompt investigations. The Burlington Free Press has more, and you can check out what FED UP Vermont is doing to challenge rape culture at UVM (including their already partially successful petition to have the fraternity involved held responsible) on their Facebook page.
Disgusting UVM Fraternity Questionnaire Sparks Outrage
Today finds me crawling out of blog hibernation to point ya’ll to the latest installment of “College Boys Just Want to Have Fun…By Demeaning Women and Making Jokes About Rape.” Today’s episode takes place at the University of Vermont, where a puzzling and revolting survey was recently distributed to the brothers of Sigma Phi Epsilon. We were sent a copy of the questionnaire, which mostly consists of benign questions like name, birthday, major, amount of time with SigEp and favorite SigEp memories, hobbies, future goals, etc. It’s actually kind of nerdy and cute, until you get to the final three “personal questions.”
1. Where in public would I want to have sex?
2. Who’s my favorite artist?
3. If I could rape someone, who would it be?
We come across a lot of gross stuff at SAFER, but the contrast here makes this particularly jarring and offensive. It’s not the usual litany of purposefully offensive garbage; it’s a seemingly legit, “normal” survey with this one horrifying nuggets thrown in at the end. The normalization of the question—the nonchalance—is so…disturbing.
As often happens with these kind of “frat shenanigans,” the survey made it into the hands of other folks on campus, who were understandably upset and are taking action. This petition was started last night by “Feminists from UVM” and is already up to 375 signatures. This is what they have to say:
This egregious expression of rape culture is only the most recent example of systemic sexism at UVM. The past year alone has witnessed rape, multiple sexual assaults, and anti-abortion chalking in public spaces. While the university administration has laid off long-time Women’s and Gender Studies faculty and supported sexist institutions like Sigma Phi Epsilon, it has refused to take concerted action to combat sexism and rape culture. We demand that instead of diverting resources into vast salaries for its administrators, UVM should launch an aggressive campaign against sexism and rape culture, and it should expand institutions such as Women’s and Gender Studies and the Women’s Center at UVM. Furthermore, UVM must immediately disband Sigma Phi Epsilon. An institution that discusses who it wants to rape has no place at UVM or in the Burlington community.
Sign the UVM petition and look for updates over at FedUp Vermont, a local grassroots feminist organization. The story hasn’t hit the news yet (campus or otherwise) so there is no word on whether the school will take any action or if the men of Sigma Phi Epsilon have anything to say for themselves, but we’ll let you know if they do. Something tells me this was supposed to “funny.” Ha. Ha. Ha.