On April 11, 2010, BARCC will hold its fifth annual Walk for Change. It’s one of our biggest fundraisers, and it’s a great opportunity to come out and see what we’re all about!

I’m walking because BARCC is an amazing organization committed to helping survivors of rape and sexual assault and effecting social change to dismantle rape culture.

I don’t just give my survivor speech - though that’s powerful in itself! The survivor speech is followed by a Q&A which is often the first time people in the audience have felt able to ask questions of a rape survivor. This can be tremendously valuable not just for the audiences of high school or college kids, but for audiences like police, emergency physicians, nurses, first responders - people who see the survivor in those first raw horrible hours and need to know how best to do their jobs, and have questions that can often only be answered by us. The Survivor Speakers Bureau kicks ass. We are fearsomely brave women who eviscerate ourselves so that others can learn, and can help survivors.

But I also love my work in community education and prevention. I love manning a table at street fairs and getting people to talk about a subject that’s so often taboo. I love helping people make their Clothesline Project shirts. I love running workshops on building and maintaining healthy boundaries, helping people figure out how best to respond to a disclosure of rape or sexual assault, and dissecting why people do and say the things they do, and how they can help change our culture. (I love the high school workshops; the kids talk to me with my middle-school height and my Docs and silly t-shirts.)

This is such important work.

You have heard the statistics. Per a Department of Justice survey in 2000, 1 in 6 women and 1 in 33 men reported experiencing an attempted or completed rape at some time in their lives. In Massachusetts alone, 4,418 adolescents and adults are sexually assaulted each year - that’s 12 people each day and one every two hours. BARCC covers the biggest population center of Massachusetts, and its coverage area stretches quite a bit - is why it’s the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.

So 12 people a day. And if they call a rape crisis center - we’re who they call.

If you call BARCC after a sexual assault, we will have someone meet you at the hospital and stay with you through your exam, through talking to the police. We will give you up to a dozen sessions of in-person counseling, free of charge. We can get you into group therapy. We can talk you through the night. We are deeply, deeply committed to being there for you, and for your loved ones - because this doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and we know it. We have resources for your partner, your roommate, your mom.

We are on the street, helping communities develop their own programs. We’re in your schools. We’re everywhere. We are ~100 fiercely committed volunteers, working with a staff of dozens to change our world.

These programs, dear reader, cost money. BARCC is fortunate in its volunteers! But all of the materials we give out at those street fairs cost money. It costs money to run the office itself.

We’re doing amazing work.

We need your help.

So register today, and walk with BARCC! Start a team of friends, family, colleagues - or just walk by yourself. If you can’t come do the walk with us, sponsor one of our walkers!

Help us change the world.

Dave, Tommy, and I will be sharing blog duties; we felt that we ought to give you fair warning about what we’re like! So here’s a bit about who we are and why we’re blogging.

DAVE
I got into the entirety of the world of gender justice really after my first job out of college - I worked for a soulless corporate beast that destroyed my ability to think clearly or grow hair regularly.  I made it just over a year at that place before I got fired, in the fall of 2006.  I found myself puttering around, applying for a million other positions, and trying to occupy my time so I didn’t get insanely bored.  I had always been interested in gender issues through school, but didn’t have either the vocabulary to talk about it, or the knowledge of where to go to learn more.

After a while, I learned the Boston Public Library was a pretty cool place to hang out while job searching - I could send out five or six applications, log my incredible job-finding failure, and tidy up my records and still have most of the day free to read something interesting.  I sort of stumbled across Susan Brownmiller’s book Femininity, and that’s when feminism got its claws in me.  A whole book about how gender norms are crap?  Be still my beating heart!

I think I read every book I could find in the BPL’s sociology section, and that started to lead me to look for places online and in Boston that had that same level of critical analysis.  Feminism has been, for me, the most well-thought out criticism I’ve seen of the culture in which I live, and I really crave that type of critical thought and analysis.  In late 2006, I read Naomi Wolff’s Promiscuities, and she challenges the reader at one point to get active if they want to consider themselves feminists and just people.  After I put the book down, I went online and searched for rape crisis centers in Boston.  Good thing that BARCC has a straight-forward name!

Why the blog action?

My time with BARCC has been righteous so far, but one of the things I constantly lament is our inability to do even more - there’s a practical limit to the time, energy, and funding that any one organization has.  Creating media that challenges the dominant culture, that connects people who may not otherwise have connected with BARCC, and helping to push the acceptable boundaries for gender behavior - these seem like awesome things, that awesome people do.  Since I generally consider myself to be an awesome person, I figured I should do them.

Two of the big issues I struggle with while I do this work are, first, what exactly does it mean to “do this work?”  How am I actually going to affect the world through either my time with BARCC or this blog; and second, what is the appropriate place for someone with as much social privilege as I have in a movement for gender justice?  I’m male identified and conform pretty strongly to what society expects me to look and act like, most of the time - how much of the gender justice world do I need to do outside my own self, and how much do I need to do inside?

SHIRA
I moved to Boston in 2006, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to have a day job - at least not at first. Health issues. So I knew I’d actually have time to volunteer at the local rape crisis center, something I’d wanted to do for years.

It was the health issues that kept me from doing what I’d originally wanted to do with BARCC, actually; I was interested in medical advocacy, but I knew that I couldn’t guarantee my ability to be functional for hours on end on any given shift, not when my condition was varying wildly. So I signed on to be a Survivor Speaker, and then joined CAPS. One of my friends has referred to my outreach work, especially at tablings, as “being professionally sparkly”. :) That, I can do no matter what! And thankfully the health stuff has improved over the years - enabling me to now work at BARCC!

I’ve been blogging for eight years. My non-BARCC blog is fairly unfocused, a blend of my fiction and poetry, pictures of my cats, silly stories, and random musings - but I began, more and more, to talk about rape and sexual assault, because every time I did, the response was tremendous. Having this blog where that was not unspeakable became a very powerful thing, for me and for my readers. Almost every time I post something about rape, I get new people popping up who’d never spoken about it before and were intensely relieved to find a place where this discussion would happen.

I’ve been nudging for BARCC to get a blog for a while! If I posted everything I have to say about rape and sexual assault in my own blog, it would end up being almost *nothing* but that. No room for cat pictures or talking about my daughter’s school play! :) So I’m thrilled to have a place dedicated to just this.

(I will post cat pictures only upon request, I promise.)

TOMMY
My friend, who’s a hotline volunteer here, referred me to BARCC.  I had expressed interest in working with teenagers.  In exactly what capacity I wasn’t sure, other than knowing I wanted to provide kids with some of the tools and respect I wish I’d been given when I was their age.

My background is pretty common around these parts: I was born at the former St. Margaret’s in Dorchester, raised in the Irish Catholic tradition, and graduated from a Boston Public high school.  To say that my family and immediate community didn’t talk about sex outside of abstinence would be a gross understatement.  Health education—and more to the point, sexual health education—was not a priority.  It wasn’t until I got to college that I developed any sort of vocabulary to define what I was seeing and experiencing.

Binge drinking was a big part of my college’s culture.  I saw a lot of things that made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t articulate what was wrong with what was happening.  Really, it was in my therapist’s office where I was first able to assign words to the things I had seen.

I got involved with BARCC because rape sucks.  It’s a fight that must be fought and can be won.  Working in schools with teenagers has proven to me that prevention is effective.  It’s amazing to see the change in students over the course of a semester.  And it all comes down to talking, dissecting values and retraining our focus.

In my free time, I blog quite often.  But mostly, my personal stuff is personal and only loosely connected to the larger culture.  Blogging for BARCC is an opportunity to marry my advocacy work with my writing, something I’ve been wanting to do for a while.  I’m grateful for this opportunity to represent my views through such a progressive, compassionate organization.

Hello, and welcome to the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center’s brand-new blog!

The Boston Area Rape Crisis Center - BARCC - is the second-oldest rape crisis center in the country, and one of the largest. We cover the entire greater Boston area - including every college in Boston and its suburbs! Suffice to say we’re very busy.

Like most other rape crisis centers, BARCC has a 24-hour hotline; like many others, we have medical advocates to accompany survivors to the hospital. We’ll be speaking more in-depth about those in the posts to come. But BARCC does have one branch that’s not as usual for crisis centers - we also do community outreach. BARCC isn’t just reactive - we’re proactive. We’re there for the survivors and their families and friends in the moment of crisis, but we’re also actively working on social change.

This blog is very much meant to be an instrument of social change. In it, we’ll talk about cases in the news, about the various services BARCC provides, about how books and movies handle depictions of rape and sexual assault - but a good part of our focus will be on what you can actually do. We’ll talk about how to handle it when a friend tells you they were raped. We’ll talk about how to build and maintain boundaries that feel right for you. We’ll talk about what you can do and say in your everyday life to dismantle rape culture and make your community a safer and more comfortable place to be.

So stay tuned! The blog updates on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Coming up in the next few weeks: BARCC’s book club, profiles of staff and programs, information about the Walk for Change, and so much more. But first, on Wednesday - meet the bloggers!