The Feministing crew is currently in the third year of their speaking tour, Feministing: Offline and Unfiltered. They travel to colleges and community centers, bringing you their own snarky, passionate brand of feminism in person. And now is a great time to begin setting up a spring event for your campus!

The keynote panel features a group of our award-winning Editors, and Contributors are joining the Feministing crew on the tour this year as well. They cover a range of hot topics, tailoring our talks to your community’s particular interests, followed by a lengthy Q&A. They invite a student panelist from your campus to bring a local perspective as well. They can also conduct interactive workshops on blogging and online activism for student or community groups. Yep, you can learn all their blogging tricks of the trade direct from the Feministing crew. They see spreading the word about the activist potential of blogging and educating people about the tools to make it happen as central to our mission. They can also come speak to classes individually, have dinner with students, or just meet and hang as part of their visit.

Spring is a great time to bring Feministing to your school. Annual events like VDay and Women’s History Month are great for bringing your community’s attention to feminist issues. Now is the time to make it happen. If your school is a little less busy in January, it’s a particularly good moment to focus on organizing before classes eat all your time again.

Feministing works with a number of different budgets to suit a variety of groups’ needs. If you’re interested in bringing Feministing to your center, campus or organization,  (tpaperny[at]gmail[dot]com) for more information on fees and availability. We hope to see you this spring!

Much has been written and posted about the alleged rape of a teen girl in Steubenville OH by multiple assailants (see Holly Kearl at the AAUW, Jezebel, Alex Goddard, New York Times ) and the assailants’ talk about the rape in a video leaked by Anonymous (TRIGGER WARNING).

I wish I could say I was shocked by the crime, the alleged perpetrators, the video, or the resulting vociferous protesting on both sides, but I’m not. Go to the emergency room with rape victims often enough and very little will shock you anymore.

The gross and disgusting video had tiny glimmers of hope within it. That actually did surprise me; more than the vile, inhumane garbage being spewed by the main character in the video.

If you can stomach listening to the video, you will hear a couple voices in the background saying things along the line of “That’s rape; you raped her” and “What if that was your sister?”.

Bystander intervention is the most promising approach to sexual violence prevention at the moment, and the owners of these voices were certainly modeling some of what is taught in bystander intervention programs.

The problem is, they were actual bystanders: standing by while a child was raped. Verbal intervention is appropriate for racist/homophobic/sexist jokes or street harassment. When someone is being or has been physically assaulted, bystanders have to do more than stand by. I applaud the courage of the boys who spoke up, but there were at least three more action steps they needed to take. One, call 911. Two, check the girl to make sure she was breathing and in a place protected from further assault. Three, call the girl’s parents and their own.

I know I am asking this of children, but we are all familiar with the cases of children having the wherewithal to call 911 when a parent was unconscious.The alleged perpetrators and victim in this case are children. Adults need to held accountable for their role in this. We can’t only wring our hands and decry our culture without looking in the mirror and asking what we as parents have failed to provide: supervision, boundaries, ethical guidance, empathic behavior models, healthy sexuality education, accountability. It’s easy and popular to blame parents (see how Newtown, CT does not count Adam Lanza’s mother among the dead), and as a parent I am sensitive to knee-jerk labeling of people as bad parents. Parents alone cannot control all of their children’s choices. But the behavior of our children does come back to us. There’s a reason we cringe when our children misbehave in public. We know everyone watching blames us. And in the case of this notorious video, maybe they should. And we should cringe, and we should do something about it. We teach our children what to do in case of fire, injury, even active shooters. We can teach them how to intervene even in the most difficult of social situations, an active rape.