The Subtleties of Anti-Rape Campaigns

By Meghann McCluskey, CCASA Blogger

For those of us on the front lines in the fight to end sexual violence, prevention efforts that target offenders often offer a breath of fresh air. The This Is Not an Invitation to Rape Me initiative, for example, exposes the absurd rationale behind common rape “excuses.” Then there’s the Don’t Be That Guy campaign: a project that suggests – shockingly enough – that “just because she’s drinking doesn’t mean she wants sex.” There’s also this video that cycled through the blogosphere awhile back, promoting the painfully simple notion that caring for someone in a vulnerable position is a sensible alternative to violating them. Examples like these serve to humanize potential victims of rape and place responsibility for sexual assault where it belongs – squarely on the shoulders of would-be perpetrators. Instead of telling women and girls what to do to avoid being assaulted, these campaigns encourage men to get smart, get serious, and tap into both compassion and common sense to ensure their participation in consensual sex. Good stuff, right? But what to make of enterprises like this one that also send the “don’t rape” message yet offer significantly different motivations for doing so?

 

Have sex with someone who hasn’t said yes to it, and the next place you enter could be prison.

My initial reaction to this message was one of exasperation. If the primary incentive to not rape is to avoid prison, how will our society ever learn to respect women? More accurately: Have sex with someone who hasn’t said yes to it, and you are robbing them of their humanity. But then I paused. I breathed. I reasoned: We’re sadly a long way off from worldwide equality and respect, so perhaps campaigns like this one offer an important band-aid solution to our country’s sexual assault epidemic while others continue the long-term work of uprooting the underlying causes of sexual violence. To borrow an old social work analogy, it’s like pulling drowning people from a river one by one while others move upstream to keep them from jumping in.

Philosophically, I tend to side with harm reduction models. If a campaign like this stops just one potential rapist from raping just one person, I fully believe in its value. But what if ads like this don’t actually prevent rape at all, but instead make perpetrators more adept at evading the consequences of their crimes? Have sex with someone who hasn’t said yes to it, and the next place you enter could be prison. Fair enough. You could go to prison for having sex with someone who hasn’t said yes to it, but will you? Statistics suggest that this is a slim possibility, what with 97% of rapists in the U.S. never spending a day in jail [1]. And we already know that perpetrators often intentionally target vulnerable populations – individuals who lack the social credibility required for successful prosecution. Could it be that messages like this actually encourage offenders to seek out victims with little likelihood of being believed if they report a rape? And what about the photographic content of this ad? Just because a woman’s wearing only underwear in no way gives someone license to rape her, but the use of a headless female image with an emphasis on her genital area seems to promote the idea of objectification (which leads to violence) while ostensibly communicating an anti-violent message. I also find the ad’s reference to “entering” to be, well, just plain offensive.

Last but not least, this campaign makes the age-old error of conflating sex and rape – a common societal malapropism that effectively minimizes the seriousness of sexually violent crimes. Have sex with someone who hasn’t said yes to it, and you aren’t having sex with them at all – you’re raping them. The distinction is crucial to the movement to end sexual violence. 

[1] (U.S. Department of Justice. National Crime Victimization Survey. 2010; FBI, Uniform Crime Reports: 2010; National Center for Policy Analysis, Crime and Punishment in America, 1999; Department of Justice, Felony Defendants in Large Urban Counties: average of 2002-2006). 

The Garcia Gene

By an Anonymous Survivor in Denver

There was always a saying in my family; “You’re a Garcia you have the Garcia temper!” If someone managed to cause a scene, like always, I would simply hear; “It’s that Garcia gene you have.” All the misery we all seemed to live in was caused by the same thing, “All the Garcias are exactly the same.” This is how I grew up; believing there was something inherently wrong with me. I would look at my family and see for myself that we were not “normal.” I saw the men in my family drink almost daily. I saw how the women and children had to endure constant yelling and live under such suffocating and controlling households. Yet, no one ever named things or why they happened, it was just how things were and it was our fault for being Garcias. 

As I began to grow up, I began to exhibit the symptoms of the predicted curse; I was always angry, I began to drink at an early age, and I began to have seasons of depression and sadness. Overall, I felt like I was an okay person, but this was at the forefront of my life, as if I had a ball and chain always slowing me down and haunting me everywhere I went. Then I began to learn from the world around me that indeed we were not normal and most importantly I realized that I did not want to live that way. I realized that there were names to all these symptoms like alcoholism, verbal and physical abuse, domestic violence and the one I found at the pit of darkness: incest and sexual abuse.

I had a slow and painful awakening when I decided that I had to face the fact that I had been incredibly mistreated, and worst of all, I had been sexually abused as a child. I decided to get help and found that being a Garcia was not a curse. I saw that I was not doomed to become an aggressive and abusive person. One day a couple weeks ago as I sat in my women’s therapy group I had a sudden and life changing realization: being a Garcia didn’t mean we were bad people. It meant we were full of pain, we had trauma passed down from generation to generation and there had been immense suffering. That day I went home and I cried and cried, because I felt sad for the things I had to endure. I also cried for them, because it made me sad that they were and are still suffering. I decided begin a healing journey, because I knew that I could not continue to carry all this pain with me. 

I began to untangle the messy web of suffering from all its complex angles. There was so much abuse and trauma brought on by so many things like migration, poverty, racism, isolation, violence and the generational trauma of the ones before us. My eyes and heart slowly became aware of some of the reasons why people do some of the horrible things they do. Of course becoming aware of other people’s suffering did not excuse the abuse they made me endure. It did not take away the pain of losing my innocence and childhood and I know that some of the anger will always be there. 

I can say that in this part of my healing journey I do not feel rage against my family and the people that sexually abused me. Part of me feels a heavy sadness, because I know that someone or something caused them so much pain that in return they transferred that pain on to me. I feel sadness, because I don’t believe that my parents held me as a new born baby and thought they would inflict me so much pain. I don’t believe people are born monsters. There is hope for healing, and I see that in the transformation I see in myself. As I began to take care of myself and go to therapy, the ball and chain that had haunted me the first 22 years of my life began to feel lighter and lighter. I see that I was given the opportunity and privilege to learn to heal and to find the peace in my life. My heart understands that this healing journey may take all my life, and I have accepted that. One day I hope to reach out to my family and show them that things are not just the way things are and that being a Garcia is not a curse but may be an opportunity to grow and heal. That is why on my path to healing I decided to not carry that ball and chain of abuse of trauma, but instead carry with me the generations that have passed and never had the chance to heal. I carry with me future generations so that they can see that being a Garcia can be a beautiful thing; that our name can stand for healing, strength and love.

Raising Awareness is About Creating Safe Space for Conversation

By Jenn Doe, CCASA Guest Blogger

I’m a student on the Auraria campus and work part-time as a Violence Prevention Educator for the Phoenix Center at Auraria (PCA), a campus office providing services to victims and survivors of interpersonal violence. The PCA plays an active role in planning and facilitating events around Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM). For the last two years, I have had the opportunity to work on the planning committee for SAAM as a an employee of the PCA and the president of Students Against Interpersonal Violence (SAIV).

Aside from events with big name keynote speakers, we plaster the campus with t-shirts and posters to make sure that the issue of sexual violence is both seen and heard. A few weeks ago, I was in the office planning an upcoming workshop with a colleague when a woman came through the door and identified herself as a rape survivor. She wasn’t there seeking services, but rather to tell us that she was triggered by the displays.

We didn’t know quite how to respond, so we offered advocacy and counseling resources, but she explained that she really just needed to tell someone how she felt. With tears pouring down her face and anger in her voice, she offered a line of reasoning that I’m getting all too used to hearing; we have services to keep people safe and we’ve been raising awareness for decades, but change isn’t coming and people are still getting raped. I couldn’t argue, and I could relate to how she felt. She thanked us for listening, wiped her tears away, and walked out the door.

In that moment, I asked myself if we should tone it down. Was our message too strong, too in-your-face? Were we hurting people? I know that isn’t the intention of raising awareness, but sometimes it does happen. We didn’t mean to trigger anyone, but when we did, she found in our office a safe space to share her feelings with compassionate people who would listen and understand. We helped her move on with her day.

Denim Day is an internationally recognized call to action, spurred by the story of one rape survivor in Italy, whose perpetrator appealed his conviction and got it overturned by a judge who stated, “because the victim wore very, very tight jeans, she had to help him remove them, and by removing the jeans it was no longer rape but consensual sex” (http://denimdayusa.org/about/history/). Infuriated by this decision, the women of parliament wore jeans to work in protest, generating a necessary conversation about sexual assault and victim blaming that has continued publicly through events around the world.

I have attended and helped organize such events, and even though it is a difficult conversation to have, it is critical that we work to create spaces that are safe for survivors to tell their stories free from blame or judgment. Last year’s Denim Day Fashion Show in Denver was one of the most inspiring displays of courage, compassion and community that I have witnessed. Survivors came together to celebrate their beauty while sharing stories of pain, strength and resilience. For many of them, this was the first time they had shared their stories publicly.

On campus last year, we brought sociologist and author Michael Kimmel to speak about men and masculinity and how they relate to sexual assault. After a march led by local athletes and the Auraria community, his keynote presentation
served as a call to action for men to get involved in the conversation and to hold themselves and each other accountable for their actions.

As a survivor of marital rape, I have minimized my victimization in comparison to the experience of
others, thus inhibiting my own ability to find peace and healing. Through involvement with awareness-raising efforts like Denim Day, I have seen empathy in action and realized that I am far from alone. I have found solidarity in those around me, renewing my hope that if we work together and keep having the difficult conversations, we can impact the lives of survivors and in time, we will see change.

Denim Day may not solve the problem of sexual violence, but creates space for us all to consider our role in prevention and it starts a critical dialogue about how to create a shift in the rape culture that exists around us. I encourage you to learn more about what is happening during the 4th week of April on your campuses and in your communities and find a way to join the awareness efforts.

Note from CCASA: This year is our 1st Annual Colorado Denim Day!  We hope you will visit our website www.ColoradoDenim Day.org to learn more and wear jeans on Wednesday, April 24th!  Wearing jeans on Denim Day is a visible way to take a stand against sexual violence. 

Jenn Doe is working toward a Masters of Public Administration degree at CU Denver’s School of Public Affairs. She has a concentration in Domestic Violence and a background in marketing and design. She hopes to use her creative skills within the public sector to raise awareness and inspire action to end interpersonal violence.

Let's Talk About It! Colorado Communities Coming Together

By Dan Church, CCASA Blogger

Over the past year I have noticed an odd social occurrence in relation to my job. Perhaps I’m out with some friends of a friend, catching relatives up on what I’ve been up to, or chatting with a stranger in line, but wherever you are you can generally count on the question of “what do you do” coming up. As an employee of a rape crisis center, this generally elicits a response along the lines of “oh, wow” followed by on occasional “that must be really depressing” and an awkward silence.

I understand why this is a natural place for people to go. I am not a puppy photographer or beer taste-tester or rainbow importer. Sexual assault doesn’t bring happy thoughts to anyone’s mind, and we’ve had plenty of news and media to thoroughly remind us of that. We pushed through a painful election season where rape was used as everyone’s special-interest tool only to be left with a congress that did not reauthorize funding of the Violence Against Women Act. Every day we receive news updates on the systemic injustices around rape in India and on sexual assault cover ups in U.S. high schools. In our own state, we have found a 10 year-old child sexually assaulted and murdered by a 17 year-old Colorado child. Compounded by the shootings, natural disasters and daily hardships so much of Colorado has faced, things are depressing, and overwhelming, and infuriating. Even talking about sexual assault can feel exhausting.

The reality though is that this is only part of the picture of working against sexual violence. The parts you don’t hear about include the passing of Colorado legislation to help sexual assault survivors with disabilities receive justice and one case where it has already been successfully been implemented. You probably haven’t heard about the police officers, nurses, prosecutors, military personnel, and advocates who collaborate all over our state to make sure survivors receive the best care possible. You definitely have not heard about any of the countless survivors who have called a hotline and been reminded of their own strength and courage by individuals who care enough to be there. All over this state, people are coming together to change our communities for the better. That is what doing this work is really about. It is not depressing. It is inspiring and fulfilling, and there is so much that can be done.

My challenge to anyone who would read this would be to get involved with the goodness that is taking place in your community around these issues. Whether you are looking for serious ways to get involved in this work or just a few simple ways to do something for your community, there are countless things that can do real good.  Email your congressperson in support of victim-friendly legislation, attend a local screening of a documentary around rape culture, use social media to spread positive articles that dispel rape myths and support victims, or contact your local rape crisis center to find out how you can join in the work they are already doing.  These things aren’t time and energy consuming, but can mean real help for survivors and real change in our communities. Above all, talk about what you are doing and why you are doing it. The more we talk about all of the things our communities are doing to fight sexual assault, the more everyone else will too. This is the year for our communities to come together and that isn’t anything depressing about that.