i have been getting my hands dirty with a lot of sexual violence prevention work lately and i have got my issues with the lot of it. being that it is something that i hold near and dear to me, i have a very hard time verbalizing what the hell i am trying to say but i think the what i am trying to say does have merit. i do have some core beliefs when it comes to sexual violence and i will list them out here and they will be discussed further at different times throughout this blog. if you can educate me in a factual and non-demeaning way, you can do so in the comments section.
sexual violence is NOT caused by gentrification.
alcohol and substance abuse is not a cause or an excuse. it does however lower inhibitions but the difference is a PRESENCE of a sexual violator.
the community does not have all the answers, the violator does.
sexual violence occurs because we live in a male dominated society and men take from females and other men.
sexual violence is about power and control.
i am reading a book right now that studies incarcerated rapists in the 70’s and although i expect that this book will present many limitations, it also offers a few key views that i don’t feel are often shown to much of the work done in sexual violence prevention. i know that the attempt is already there, but through our words, we still do many of the things we try not to. often the “feminist tendency to focus on women’s experience of rape [does] not go far enough to challenge the prevailing assumption that sexual violence is the result of an individual, idiosyncratic disease.” (Diana Scully)
also, i feel like focusing on women and the community at large does not “constitute enough of a threat to the sexually violent male world in which we live because women are not the clue to men’s sexual violence . in fact, focusing on women can lead to blaming the victim and to perceiving rape as women’s, rather than men’s, problem.” (Diana Scully) -Understanding Sexual Violence
we talk about working with men and boys, we talk about education and we talk about making valuable and systematic changes but do we really? do we not just fall back in to old stereotypes of who is doing it and why and where? work back into asking women what they can do to help? plan events like bake sales and craft fairs? invite more women to do the work that we should all be doing? speak to large groups of women about the injustice rather than ask large groups of men who violate us in subway cars and with their sex organs why they do it?
i want a fucking riot.
if we all really thought about it… really really thought about it and listened to the people that were doing it, we would know that it wasnt because we were moving into the “wrong” neighborhood. i refuse to believe that.
