This is going to sound a little weird, but Happy Sexual Assault Awareness Month! I know, huh? It sounds a little contradictory, celebrating something as taboo, disturbing & depressing as sexual assault, but hey, it is absolutely necessary to have these conversations, and there is no better time than the present moment. So let’s get to it & lets face the facts together. April is month of active consciousness raising around the realities of sexual assault, harassment, and gender based violence, and how it meets us in our communities, shared experiences, and lived realities.
The round circular table I am sitting at in the library has four chairs seated around it, surrounded by books, comics, and children's magazines. I am reminded of studies that reveal approximately one in four women will be raped over the course of their lives. If there were three other women seated at the table alongside & across from me, the odds are that one of us will have experienced a violent sexual assault at one time or another in our lives. Go figure. So why is rape such a common phenomena? Why is it allowed to persist, permeate, and destroy lives of not only the women who endure such a crime against their bodies, but schools & communities paralyzed by the inability to act to protect their children from becoming victims, or even perpetrators & predators. No one wants to believe or even imagine that their kids can become prey to such violent acts of disrespect & humanity, nor that they could enact brutal acts of inhumanity against another. What we are failing to recognize is the way that we continue to raise children & young people in what many now refer to as rape culture. This is the idea that societies are so permeated by images, dogmatic beliefs, and sexist hierarchies, that we unconsciously (or even consciously) consume ideas & behaviors justifying violence against women & rape. Yes, this shit is serious, and it deserves a great deal of consideration.
"Nearly 1 in 5 women in a national survey say they have been raped." (CDC)
"Almost 2/3 of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim." (USDOJ)
"1 in 10 women have been raped by their boyfriend or husband." (CDC)
Take for instance the 2016 election, when the United States elected an unqualified spiteful man who had used his white male hetero-centric privilege to intimidate, grope, and sexually assault women who had no more invited his advances than those who were drugged & abused by the jello man, another primetime patriarch. As a people, we have to ask why we continue to provide platforms to abusers, electing them to represent us in the highest levels of government, and why we tune into programs that protect, enable, and promote sexual predators. Its disturbing to know that we are so consumed by a willingness to let others educate & entertain our children, that we passively turn the other cheek, turn a blind eye, and look away to what we already know to be true, or at least have a deep instinctual hunch that something may be wrong. Best to listen & follow that voice that nags in the back of your mind, gnawing in the pits of your stomach. Its your Conscious & its telling you that you cannot remain silent & complicit.
"44% of sexual assault and rape victims are under the age of 18." (USDOJ)
"Half of female sexual assault victims were raped before age 18."
(White House Report Rape & SA: A Renewed Call to Action)
"Approximately 80% of female victims experienced their first rape before the age of 25." (CDC)
"1 in 6 men have experienced abusive sexual experiences before the age of 18." (1in6.org)
"28% of male victims of rape experience their first rape when they were 10 years of age or younger." (CDC)
Its not enough to recognize that there are violent people out there, waiting for an opportunity to exert their power over another through use of coercion & manipulation. Rather it takes a great deal of activism, social justice advocacy, and political organization to address systems of historical abuse. One, we have to understand the truth & realities of American history. In their campaigns to colonize the land and territories now defined as the United States of America, white male settlers engaged in violent acts of rape against Native & Indigenous Women to control their bodies, exploit the land & its natural resources, and break the spirit of those who resisted colonial occupation. This is of course part & parcel of systemic genocide, erasure of native languages & dialects, and uprooting of spiritual cultures that sustained their People for generations. It must be remembered, said, and spoken to fully understand the depths to which rape has been used as a weapon of war, and that the U.S. is in no way exempt from critique & demands to change. This recognition is fundamental because it is going to take an incredible amount of proactive work to address & dismantle social constructions of sexist legislation, sexual exploitation, and the criminalization of gender.
"Every four hours a rape is reported in the United States Armed Forces."
(Military Rape Crisis Center)
"Women in the US Military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan than killed by enemy fire." (Military Rape Crisis Center)
When I write that the criminal justice system is implicated in the culture of rape, I am referring to the court systems, police, and judges who continue to excuse violent behaviors of rapists & sexual predators, justifying their actions by placing blame & responsibility on the person who was assaulted. We call this victim-blaming, faulting survivors for their own rape, assault, or harassment by suggesting that it was something in their own behavior that invited, if not altogether welcomed, acts of violence on their body. We can recognize this line of thinking in the reprise canon of ‘well, what were you wearing’? Um… excuse me? Are you suggesting that women are asking to be raped by the clothes that we choose to put on before walking out into a world that was itching to make a meal of our bodies? Absolutely ridiculous since we can slap on an itchy potato bag with no makeup, sweat pants & a dirty torn tee, and still be catcalled by passing cars. 'Were you drinking, doing drugs, were you drunk'? 'What would you have done differently if you could go back'? Consuming alcohol is thrown around as some warped justification for personal violations of one's autonomous rights to their body, completely ignoring the fact that "partying" promoted as a cornerstone of college co-ed life. Some people just don't know how to have a good time with intellectual conversations around respect for human life & healthy sexuality.
"63% of men who admitted to campus rape/attempted rape say they committed an average of 6 rapes." (White House Report Rape & SA: A Renewed Call to Action)
"Only 3 out of every 100 rapists will ever spend a single day in prison."
(RAINN/Dept. of Justice)
This is the part & parcel of the regurgitated sexist bullshit script that white supremacist patriarchal narratives successfully force fed us so that we don’t question the origins of their power, and how they’ve controlled the female body through internalized shame & oppression. These realities seep into our minds, they inhabit our waking realities, and haunt our dreams. The fear of being raped. The terror of walking down the street and having some schmuck tell us we’re pretty & to smile, only to turn around & call us a bitch or a cunt when we rebuff pathetic advances & attempts at empty compliments.
I don’t know how many times I’ve said it, nor how many more times I will have to state the obvious — no one is entitled to Women’s time, energy, and conversation. No one is entitled to Women’s bodies unless given express, enthusiastic consent, and even then, access & consent can be withdrawn at any moment. Women have the right to bodily autonomy and to decide what goes in & out of their bodies, who may enter & to which orifices, and when to carry pregnancies, if they choose to do so. This is not up for negotiation, should never have been in the first place, and yet there is a gaggle of pale males holding Women’s rights hostage on the floors of the senate, congressional halls of state representatives, and indeed the Oval office. I’d like to say its all a joke & its not real, but to do so would be altogether suicidal, needless to say self-defeating. So I’m opening up the conversation, and I am taking it personally, because as the ol’ feminist saying goes, the Personal is Political, and it is always close to home.
"Victims of sexual assault are 3 times more likely to suffer from depression, 6 times more likely to suffer from PTSD, 13 times more likely to abuse alcohol, 26 times more likely to abuse drugs, and 4 times more likely to contemplate suicide." (WHO)
In the hours since I began composing this piece, a handful of people came to share in the space of the children’s reading room where I am writing. A woman sat down behind me, reading her daily paper, a young boy thumbing through a comic, a little girl searching the shelves for a good storybook. What kinds of messages are they consuming, reading & taking in with their eyes? What words & language will fall off their tongue in time? Now I sit with a young teenage girl flipping through a book after having delved into a trigonometry lesson with a tutor, another young woman. Think back to the beginning of this work, when I sat alone at the table with statistics & more or less abstract numbers. Those numbers quickly become people, living & breathing, with faces & identities.
"17.7 million American women have been victims of attempted or completed rape." (National Institute for Justice and Centers for Disease Control & Prevention)
"Every two minutes, somewhere in America, someone is sexually assaulted." (RAINN-Dept. of justice)
At a recent tabling event with Peace Over Violence at the California Endowment, a Woman with a baby girl in a stroller came up to talk to us about our advocacy work. She stated that she didn’t need to necessarily know this stuff because she, nor her family was violent. I looked into the wide curious eyes of her sweet niña, big, brown & beautiful, and stroked her soft cheek with a wish for her safety & protection. When approximately one in four women are assaulted, we have to ask ourselves, if its not you or me, then who is it? Are you willing to let this knowledge slide, ignore the facts & statistics, play the lottery in the hope that violent sexual assault doesn’t touch your family. Its too easy to say its not me, especially when its our sisters, our daughters, our mothers, our friends, our cousins, our sons, and our grandchildren. It takes the power of One, ourselves, to disrupt & challenge the status quo of history, the immediacy of global sexual & violence against Women.
It is our responsibility to talk about matters of consent, personal boundaries, and safe sex. It is our responsibility to raise awareness & consciousness about histories of sexual exploitation & abuse, especially when we’re living in & on occupied stolen land. It is our responsibility when judges give rapists a pass, and when a significant population of the nation votes known sexual predators into the highest office in the land. If we let it slide, then we too are complicit, and will have no other recourse to fall back upon when violence does come back around to touch us, our families, and our communities.
If you would like to learn more about Sexual Assault Awareness Month, please visit Peace Over Violence by following the links. Join the movement & get ready to gear up for Denim Day on April 26th, when we rock our jeans in support & solidarity with Survivors all around the world. Its time to stand up & say NO! Join the hashtag revolution with #DenimDay #GearUp #SAAM #ItsOnUs #NoExcuse #OffLimits #STWTS
Say it loud & say it proud:
"There is NO EXCUSE & NEVER AN INVITATION to rape!"