I spend at least two days a week talking to teenagers about healthy relationships.  Usually, I leave these meetings feeling inspired or, at the very least, optimistic that our conversation has brought us closer to ending sexual violence.

The other day, however, I had an experience that has left me feeling pretty damned despondent.  I spoke to a group of teenage girls, most of whom were in the ninth grade, about consent and being a proactive bystander.  And although our discussion produced some genuine insights, I was confronted with a harsh truth: Rape is real, not just something we talk about fighting.  And sometimes, despite our best efforts, it’s going to happen, often to the people we most want to protect.

I left this discussion, from which the young women seemed to benefit, in tears.  Not because of what they said or I said or could’ve said but didn’t say.  I cried because, for the first time in the year that I’ve been doing this work, I realized I cannot protect everyone.  Or at least, in doing prevention work, I had to accept that I cannot always see the immediate benefit of my efforts.  I’ve been misguided, to some degree, in thinking that we are going to change the world overnight.  But the belief that change is possible is what binds the community of allies and survivors together.  It’s the gas that keeps the motor running.

We must aspire to change.  And we have to let people know that rape is not inevitable.  Even when we’re at our most defeated and feel like nothing we do makes a difference, we have to remind ourselves: We are making a difference.  Sometimes it’s as simple as hearing a student take a slight step away from victim blaming—acknowledging, for example, that the way someone dresses doesn’t invite comments or physical contact.  Changes in attitudes change the culture—that we know.  And in our darkest moments, in that we must trust.

In the midst of my wallowing, a friend of mine—Rosa, a great feminist, a great advocate—reminded me that prevention isn’t just about empowering survivors and bystanders.  It’s about stopping perpetration.  And hard as we to try to call out potential violence before it actualizes, perpetration can happen despite our best efforts.  It just means that people are like the fruits in a farmers’ market—we all start out in pretty much the same way, but over time, some of us ripen and some of us rot.

Rosa sent me a link that I’d like to leave you with, a reminder that perpetration is a decision, one that shouldn’t be made and isn’t anyone’s fault but the person who makes it.

So, without further ado, here are 10 Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work.

Today we have a guest post from Gina Scaramella (our Executive Director) and Peggy Barrett (Director of Community Awareness and Prevention Services)! This post is a response to the Boston Globe’s recent article “No Crackdown on Assaults at Colleges”, which is itself a response to the Center for Public Integrity‘s ongoing research and articles regarding sexual assault on college campuses. Gina and Peggy had an excellent letter to the editor in today’s Globe, and they’ve written the following specifically for the BARCC blog.

3/1/2010

The article that appeared in Thursday’s Globe No crackdown on Assaults at Colleges was misleading in three important ways:

1. The article was structured in a way that may have unintentionally caused harm to campuses who are, in fact, among the leaders in addressing what both schools and communities have found to be an almost intractable problem in the justice system: that of acquaintance rape. Colleges and universities who are awarded these grants have made a substantial commitment to addressing sexual assault.  The grants provide a small amount of financial support as well as technical assistance to improve campus systems.  The schools are required to address the topic of sexual assault in their orientation programs for new students; to train campus police and security personnel; to develop a coordinated response to provide good services to victims; as well as improve their disciplinary system. In the Globe article, there was no comparison between campuses that did and did not have grants from the US Department of Justice (USDOJ).  Without that comparison, the article may have left the impression that these campuses were not doing as well as other campuses.  Without this comparison, we are concerned that schools or the Justice Department itself will decline making or continuing their investment in supporting sexual assault victims and holding perpetrators accountable. 

2.  The authors did not adequately explain the difference between the number of assaults reported and the number of disciplinary sanctions.  It is a victory that so many of these campuses have created a safe enough environment that victims are coming forward for help.  The “number of reports” is not the same as the requests made for disciplinary action; just as receiving medical help in the community is not the same as initiating a police report.  A less dramatic but fair comparison for judging the success of the justice boards on campuses would be between the number of complaints filed and number of disciplinary actions taken.

3.  The authors did not frame the larger societal context that we are all part of, leaving the reader with the impression that campuses are missing what is being done well elsewhere.  The problem of sanctioning perpetrators of acquaintance rape is not unique to campuses and solving it requires much more than one grant on a campus.  We have not yet truly grappled with what the evidence keeps repeating: most cases of sexual violence (about 77%) will not be properly investigated and prosecuted in our judicial boards on campuses OR by county district attorneys. Research shows that perpetrators of sexual assault often know in advance that they will assault someone - sometimes they have pre-selected a victim and have tried to gain their trust and sometimes they are looking for ways to increase the vulnerability of the targeted victim in a short period of time (for example, with alcohol).  They use the environment such as a noisy bar or party to try to camouflage their aggression.  We need to develop policy based on the evidence of how offenders commit these crimes and thoroughly investigate an alleged assailant’s behaviors instead of the current, almost exclusive focus on the victim’s. 

We are concerned and outraged that perpetrators are not being held accountable for these crimes.  However, this article tried to create a simple linear “get grant, get report, get rid of perpetrator” look at the issue that we feel was inaccurate and misleading.  It is our societal adherence to old myths and antiquated systems on campus and off that lead to tragic complicity in the prevalence of sexual violence on campus and everywhere.  We can and should do better; but a misleading article provides no help in getting us there.

Gina Scaramella, Executive Director
Peggy Barrett, Director of Community Awareness and Prevention Services
Boston Area Rape Crisis Center

I have an awesome friend and mentor who works with me in my men’s group, and he’s the kind of person who knows everyone in Boston, and a few weeks ago I was running a new outreach idea by him, based on the essay “What It Feels Like When It Finally Comes: Surviving Incest in Real Life” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in Yes Means Yes.  I wanted to put together some form of website of radical healing options for rape survivors in the Boston area because her essay was about the power of non-traditional modes of healing, and I thought it would benefit more survivors if there was a place to go at any hour to find an aggregation of healing resources that were underground and hard to find normally.  Not all survivors can access things like BARCC’s hotline and the more opportunities survivors had to find healing communities and tools that work for their needs, the better, right?

It’s a good thing that I had the chance to speak with him before I got too gung-ho about this idea, because he helped tamp down my latent “good guyism,” something I imagine a lot of men struggle with while working in gender justice or anti-oppression work.  He gave me a very gentle good guy warning and that’s helping me think about my role moving forward.

When I first started doing anti-oppression volunteering, I really wanted to be considered “the good guy:” the one non-racist white guy in the room, the one non-sexist guy in the room, the one non-homophobic straight guy in the room, the guy who “got it.” I also wanted to be known as that guy.  I wanted other people to talk about how I was the one guy who got it.  I wanted the status.  The problem is, this desire made it really, really hard for me to be a good ally or to do powerful, meaningful work in this world. 

Being an ally is important, especially in the world of rape and sexual assault prevention - we simply can’t change all of society, social messaging, gender relations, and violence without a good chunk of male-identified people on board.  But being an ally also means being accountable.  When I screw up and say or do something sexist, or when I act in a way that is traditionally dominant in a space where that is not welcome, I need to be able to apologize, to step back, and to make amends for that behavior.  When I was going through my intense “good guy” period, doing this was hard: how could I get called out for misogyny?  I’m the good guy!  I’ve read Femininity and Against Our Wills!  I read feminist blogs!  I’m totally right there with you, women of the world, in your fight against gender injustice…except when I’m not, because my privilege let me say or do something stupid.

I need to recognize, as I continue to do this work, that I am reaching over a vast gulf of privilege, and that this gulf has real and powerful affects on the way people think about their place in the gender-justice movement (or any progressive social movement, really).  I can read as many blogs as I want, take part in as many marches as I want, and go to as many trainings as I want, and still not understand the true affects of gender injustice and sexism because most of it isn’t targeted at me.  Society doesn’t tell me that I’m vulnerable to rape; society doesn’t tell me I have to shave and wax and pluck myself into madness to find a sexual partner; society doesn’t condescend to me when I work.

The real danger with the good guy mindset is that it gets real easy to make my feminism cosmetic only; to make it a button I wear at NOW meetings or an interesting piece of conversational material I can pull out at a party when I want an otherwise uninterested woman to think I’m cool, different, and “not like those other guys.”  Seriously, though, “I’m a feminist!” isn’t a pick-up line.

If I want to be a real ally, and do real work to change society, I need to bring the ideas of gender justice home with me, actively try to live them, and even then I still need to recognize that I’m not going to understand the lived realities of a lot of the people fighting for the same justice that I am.  Not every progressive community is my community just because I’m a “good guy.” My volunteering for BARCC does not give me an all-access pass to every gender-justice group in Boston, or even in my neighborhood, and thinking it does is another form a privilege.

My men’s group friend had a ton of good ideas for me on my project, but the most important one was that my vision may not be the best mechanism for accomplishing what I wanted to do.  An online tool to share healing resources amongst survivors would be accessible to anyone.  It might draw abusers or rapists.  It might draw legal attention to communities that work with undocumented workers.  It would make me feel good that I had done something, that I could point to an artifact that I had created that had CAUSED JUSTICE TO BE DONE, except that it wouldn’t necessarily help survivors.  What would I really have accomplished in this scenario, aside from having something to attribute to myself?

My friend has an awesome new slogan: “We want progress, not change.” I really like it, and I think it’s going to become a motto of mine also.  If I actually want to change the world and make it more equitable for more people, instead of wanting a pat on the back and a nice sticker on my wall, then I need to work for progress instead of just change.