This article over at The Sexist made me...hopeful? Not excited, but perhaps optimistic. Optimistic that, even when it seems like all of our major social institutions designed to ensure justice, or at least safety, completely fail to understand the epidemic that rape is, there are courageous survivors using different methods to bring attention to the issue. More importantly, they are bringing censure down on perpetrators.

Read the article, because the background is important. The basic gist: Chloe Rubenstein, a student at American University in D.C., saw another student getting sexually assaulted at a party. Rubenstein, a survivor herself who had not reported her own experiences in the past decided to warn her fellow students at AU by posting a facebook note that named the assailant. The message went out to almost a 1,000 other students (the article doesn't make it clear how many of them are AU students).

This post isn't about Rubenstein's individual actions per se; it's more about the promise that social networking and media have to help us push rape out of our communities. The new research about how rape and sexual assault happens (which we've referenced regularly before) and which Thomas over at the Yes Means Yes blog has very smartly dubbed "the predator theory" tells us that a striking percentage of sexual assaults and rapes are committed by a small knot of very aggressive, misogynist, and violent male offenders.

Dr. David Lisak and his team at UMass have regularly referred to this knot as "undetected" or "camouflage" rapists because they have social license to operate - the society in which they exist generally turns a blind eye to their activities, and as a result, they aren't in prison or socially isolated. I find the term "undetected" really misleading, though, because in reality, many of these perpetrators are not really undetected at all - what they are is unpunished. In the communities where they operate (say, on a college campus) they might be very well known, to a number of different people, as "that creepy guy" or "the guy who did something to my friend last year," or "that guy who beats his girlfriend." People know who perpetrators are, but because of the mainstream cultural support they have to operate, it's hard to call them on their behavior.

If we could regularly count on the institutions that provide security and safety and justice to protect us from sexual assault and to support survivors, then this small knot of dangerous perpetrators would already be either incarcerated or socially isolated so they had no opportunity to perpetrate. Unfortunately, we know we generally can't count on the police or the justice system to actually do this - there are still too many social stigmas wrapped up in rape and sexual assault for these institutions to recognize what these perpetrators are doing. Even really good police departments that have dedicated officers trained in working with survivors of sexual assault have to try to build a rape case with evidence that looks to many people in our culture like consensual sex.

Rules are changing. Police departments are much better about arresting rapists now than they were 30 years ago. Marital rape is a crime that we actually recognize now. But the long-term social change that needs to take place in these big social institutions requires way too much time and energy to serve any one individual survivor. This is where creative, community-based methods of preventing rape can step in and play a more prominent role in providing support to survivors and driving perpetrators out of individual communities.

Informal social sanctions and shared information have been the last refuge of survivors for a long time, when no support was forthcoming from police or universities or the justice system. I'm a bit enamored of social strategies to reduce rape and sexual assault, and I think that subversive, community-specific mechanisms for sharing information and removing perpetrators from a friendly environment can accomplish more for individual survivors than a whole lot of police support can. In the early 1990s, a bathroom stall at Brown University served as an anonymous reporting tool for women to expose perpetrators on campus:

in the 1990s, female Brown students, feeling ignored by the administration when reporting cases of sexual assault, began writing the names of perpetrators of rape and assault on bathroom stall walls. The so-called "Rape List" helped bring the issues of sexual assault to the attention of Brown officials, in addition to sparking a national debate on the issue.

In that particular case, the informal social sanctions helped spread vital information to other students, and also pushed Brown's administration into making some changes in it sexual assault policy because it was getting bad press for not supporting survivors. Not all informal social sanctions will have that effect, but they can certainly help individual women and men ostracize perpetrators from their social networks and prevent them from having access to victims. If I know that a certain dude is a perpetrator, and he sorta kinda floats in my social world, you can bet I won't invite him to any of my parties or gatherings, and I'll start to let other people I hang out with know that they should do the same. If all of the people in my scene do this same thing, then this guy doesn't get to spend any more time with us - he's been excised from our community. The only downside to community-based measures like this is that they are really specific - the wall at Brown didn't help women who didn't go to Brown, or even women at Brown who didn't know that this one particular bathroom stall served the purpose it did.

Using social media, though - that's a different story! It has no limit on physical location, and things like Facebook and Twitter allow us to share information much faster than we ever could before on a bathroom stall. Every community can have its own bulletin board and shared messages - a sort of virtual bathroom wall - and since most of us float in more than one community on our day-to-day basis, the information from one of those walls might start to make its way to other places. People who are known as perpetrators in one community might start to get recognized as perpetrators in other communities as well. My hope is that the more people know who these predators are, the less friends, social cover, and opportunity they will have to perpetrate in the future, even if they aren't picked up by cops and arrested.

I recognize that no social networking tool is a bastion of progressive thought or a survivor-friendly place: the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory explains this reality well enough. But the internet, and this type of community building, allows survivors to create a kind of community that was much harder to create before. Chloe Rubenstein took one very particularly direct route through these systems to point out who she thought the perpetrators in her community were. I'm not sure that her strategy would work for other survivors or allies, but I love the potential of the internet to share this kind of information. If perpetrators have no one to assault, no one gets assaulted. The internet can play a vital role in by making it easier to spread (in a safe way!) the information about who the perpetrators are in our own communities.

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It’s time to talk about an unpopular topic - namely, prison rape. In a way, this is the last frontier; people who would never dream of making any other kind of rape joke feel totally fine laughing and saying “don’t drop the soap!” People who wouldn’t dream of advocating any other sort of rape will openly say “I hope he gets raped in prison.”

Because the addendum to that - sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken - is “...so he knows what it feels like.” The assumption is that the people who get raped in prison are exclusively rapists and child molesters.

To show you why giving prison rape a pass appalls me so much, I’ll give you some examples of who gets raped in prison. Hint: generally not rapists.

* When Rodney Hulin was sixteen he set a dumpster on fire, causing about $500 worth of damage. He was 5’2”, he weighed 125 pounds, and he was sentenced to eight years in adult prison. Almost immediately after arriving he was raped by another inmate, as was confirmed by a medical examiner’s finding that his rectum was torn. His mother’s testimony to the commission describes how he wrote to the authorities asking to be moved to a safer place, and how his request was denied. The beatings and rapes continued. He wrote another letter, saying he was afraid “I might die at any minute. Please sir, help me.” Officials told him that his case did not meet the “emergency grievance criteria.” His mother called the warden, who told her that Rodney needed to “grow up.” “This happens every day,” he said, “learn to deal with it. It’s no big deal.” Less than three months after entering prison, Hulin hanged himself in his cell.

* Keith DeBlasio was sent to a minimum-security federal prison in West Virginia for fraud, but transferred to a higher-security facility in Michigan after complaining about corrections officials. There he was placed in a dormitory holding 150 inmates that had dozens of places that could not be observed and only one officer on duty at a time. A gang leader who had just served three days in segregation for brutally assaulting another inmate was made DeBlasio’s bunkmate; according to DeBlasio’s testimony before the commission, he raped DeBlasio “more times than I can even count” while fellow gang members stood watch. DeBlasio contracted HIV as a result.

* “I’ve been raped, physically beaten, extorted, pimped out/sold, intimidated, manipulated, threatened, humiliated, [and] harassed by both officers and inmates” writes transgender prisoner Meagan Calvillo of her experiences in various California prisons since 1999. Calvillo’s description is not unusual. Outside of prison, transgender people are among the most marginalized in the United States; inside it, they confound a system that’s ill-prepared to serve them, or even to decide where to put them.

You can read more stories here, here, and here.

So who’s actually getting raped? Generally nonviolent offenders. Usually younger people on their first offense. Disproportionally huge numbers of transgendered people.

And who’s raping them?

Who do you think?

By creating a culture where we give prison rape a pass, we are creating a culture where rapists can continue to get away with rape. Where even when they’re convicted, they’re put somewhere where they get to commit rape over and over, this time with the indifference of everyone in authority. Sometimes with the encouragement of authority. Sometimes with the assistance of authority.

And if you’re okay with prison rape, that “everyone” letting the rapist get away with this? That would include you.

Cara at the Curvature has a great post about the problem of hoping that rapists will be raped. She also points out what you can do to help end it.

I’ve lost friends over my insistence that “I hope he gets raped in prison” is not an okay thing to wish or say. For the reasons above and in all of those posts. But even more:

Either you believe rape is okay or you don’t.

Either you believe that rape is sometimes warranted, is a legitimate form of justice - or you don’t.

Rape is not a grey area. Rape is wrong. That means all rape is wrong. We don’t need to end rape and rape culture just a little bit. Or mostly. Or almost-all. We need to end it period.

Because as long as people think that rape is sometimes justifiable, it’s going to keep happening.

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I got a disclosure this weekend from a friend on the way to a party. I wasn't expecting it at all. I had made a quick off-handed joke about my work at BARCC during our walk over to the bar, and next thing I knew, I was hearing some intensely personal stories. Thankfully, BARCC has trained me well for situations like these, and I have a decent toolset for working with a survivor who chooses to disclose to me. I hope I have done well by anyone who has decided to tell me about their rape.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but the number of disclosures I got from friends and acquaintances after I started volunteering with BARCC shocked me when I first started training. It was as if volunteering for BARCC had flipped a switch on how friends and family viewed me: now that I had made a public commitment (well, public in my case - I'm not usually that quiet about being involved with BARCC) to a rape crisis center, I was a safe listener. I got stamped with the BARCC brand-name, and that made me accessible to survivors in a way that I must not have been beforehand. Friends I'd known for years disclosed to me during my training. Co-workers disclosed to me. The difference of two months, from when I started training to when I ended it, felt to me like the world had opened up a hellmouth a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and poured sexual pain and trauma at me that I had never seen before. I went from thinking I knew basically no one who was a survivor to knowing a lot of survivors. In the years since my training, the trend has generally continued. As I add new people to my social world, I can usually guarantee that once the knowledge trickles down through the group that I volunteer with BARCC, someone will disclose to me.

The difference between thinking I didn't know any survivors, and then finding out I actually knew many survivors was a major turning point in my understanding of sexual violence as an issue. When I first got involved in BARCC, I did so mostly out of a sense that sexual violence was a big patriarchal form of oppression, and that by joining BARCC, I'd be fighting a grand and very abstract evil. Sure, I knew about some of the basic statistics; I had read that one in four women would experience sexual assault, but like a lot of folks who don't work in the world of violence prevention regularly, I almost...didn't believe it. I had almost no context for it. A quarter of my friends or family were survivors of assault? That couldn't possibly be true. I wasn't even sure a quarter of the people I knew breathed air on a regular basis - it was just way too big a number to be true. If it WAS true, if a quarter of my friends were survivors, how was the whole damn world not screaming about this? How was I not drowning in despair about this? That was the difference between being a safe ally and friend and being just a friend. I wasn't aware of how many survivors I knew. I couldn't be.

Katha Pollitt, one of my favorite writers, described this duality between how prominent sexual violence IS versus how prominent many of us THINK it is in her rebuttal to Katie Roiphe's 1994 book The Morning After: Fear, Sex, and Feminism. Roiphe's book was a critical look at rape-prevention culture in the early '90s, and was written very much from the perspective of the type of person I used to be - someone who cared about sexual violence, but thought that all the numbers and stats just had to reflect some sort of doctored data. Roiphe insisted that women must have been redefining bad sex as rape, because if they were all experiencing this trauma, she would know about it as their friend, right? Pollitt wrote:

ONE in five, one in eight- what if it's "only" one in ten or twelve? Social science isn't physics. Exact numbers are important, and elusive, but surely what is significant here is that lots of different studies, with different agendas, sample populations, and methods, tend in the same direction. Rather than grapple with these inconvenient data, Roiphe retreats to her own impressions: "If I was really standing in the middle of an epidemic, a crisis, if 25 per cent of my female friends were really being raped, wouldn't I know about it?" (emphasis mine)

I didn't know, before I started volunteering with BARCC, just how many of the important people in my life had been affected by rape. They didn't tell me. This was a wise calculation on the part of my friends. Even if I was a close friend of theirs, if they didn't have real firm proof that I was going to be a safe person to disclose to - that I would believe them, not mock them, not judge them, and listen - they wouldn't disclose. Many of them had plenty of evidence from their past of trying to trust close friends or partners with a disclosure, and not getting the support they needed. So they stopped talking about their rapes. They stopped telling anyone. Disbelief is the way culture tells us we're supposed to treat disclosures about rape; most survivors learn real fast that if they want to disclose, they need to find someone who can ignore or shrug off that social training.

And this is where I think the capital "o" Oppression comes back into the picture. Most people won't hear a lot of disclosures. They won't volunteer for a rape crisis center, and they won't find out, personally, that a quarter of their friends have experienced sexual assault. Keeping rape survivors quiet by shaming them, by disbelieving them, by making reporting incredibly difficult to do logistically serves the purpose of making it harder for most people to understand how endemic sexual violence is to our culture. Doing these things - shaming, disbelieving, throwing up roadblocks to disclosing - these aren't the actions of a shadowy group of old white men in a secret room running the Patriarchy(TM) - this is something that most of us will do at some point without meaning to. I know I have made stupid sexist jokes, or rape jokes, or used the word rape carelessly while playing Borderlands in the past, and each one of those things told the survivors in my life that I wasn't safe for a disclosure. Did these actions oppress all of womenkind, or all survivors? No, probably not, but what it did do up until I started working with BARCC and became a lot more cognizant of my behavior was keep my friends who were survivors from talking to me. I wouldn't understand the affect that rape has had on my world until I stopped acting like someone who didn't care about it.

My friend who disclosed to me this weekend wasn't looking for a lot of support; she just wanted me to know that this was an experience she had. It was another disclosure in what is becoming a depressingly long list of friends who have been affected by rape. I need more friends who can be allies to them. I've only got two ears, and I can't be everywhere in my social group. I can't be the only one in my peer group who is safe; I'm terrified I'm going to not be present when someone needs me, or I'm not going to have the emotional energy to get a disclosure, and I'm going to mess up a survivor's healing. I can't continue being the only person in a group that knows who the survivors are; I can't be the only one who tries to make environments safe for possible survivors who I maybe haven't heard from yet. And I can't fight back against the system alone that keeps silencing survivors.

While I'm glad that I have the opportunity to serve as a safe ally, and I treasure that trust and work very hard to maintain it with my peers, what I really want is for everyone to be a safe ally. I want everyone to know how epidemic sexual violence is, how it affects all of us every damn day, whether we're survivors or not. I want survivors to be able to tell their stories whenever they need to, to be able to scream it, with the full anger it deserves, at the whole world without being shamed, ignored, or unheard. I want the silence and the stigma and the fear and the shame to go away, to leave survivors forever, because the day that happens is the day I won't have to hear any more disclosures. I won't have to hear any more of my friends tell me they were raped or groped or assaulted. We'll be able to yell it at the rest of the world and make it change, because everyone will be able to see how sick and ridiculous it is that rape is so prominent and we'll all agree that the world must change for us to stay sane.

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