A week from today, the atrium of South Station will be filled with hundreds of shirts made by survivors of sexual violence, their families, and their loved ones. Each shirt represents the maker’s experience of rape, sexual assault, or child sexual abuse. You can see a selection of the shirts here.
The Clothesline Project is an intensely powerful display. It’s probably the most outright confrontational thing we do in terms of outreach - you can’t turn away from it. You can’t unsee it. It forces you to confront the reality of sexual violence in your community.
(I wanted to post several shirts here, scattered throughout the post! But our computers are archaic, and they aren’t letting me. I may try to add them when I get home.)
People have very different reactions to the Project. There are those who get angry at the world; there are those who get angry at us. There are those who silently weep. There are those who, feeling finally that they have permission to speak, cannot stop speaking - a torrent of words that, in some cases, have never been spoken.
That’s one of the most common reactions. As a culture, we are taught to be silent on this topic. It’s regarded as unspeakable. There are people all around you, every day, who hold this secret within them. Some of them have told family, friends. Some of them have told no one.
Imagine feeling all your life that this is unspeakable - then seeing this display, hundreds of shirts, hundreds of statements from hundreds of women and men. Giving permission to speak. Encouraging you to speak.
Sometimes it’s brief - a man studying the display from a distance, stepping up, and telling a volunteer that he was raped as a child, and thanking us for doing this, and then vanishing into the crowd. Sometimes someone comes back throughout the day, touching each shirt; sometimes people come back and bring their friends.
Sometimes people will not speak. And that’s okay, too.
The Clothesline Project is there to provoke a reaction - but the thing about emotional reactions to traumatic events is that there’s no wrong reaction. Not speaking is as valid as speaking. Choosing not to confront the images is fine, if that’s what you need.
But we hope you’ll be there.
We hope you’ll come out and look at the shirts. We hope you’ll talk to the BARCC staff and volunteers in attendance; we want to have that conversation with you.
And the people who made the shirts want you to witness them and their experiences.
I made a shirt, when I lived in Atlanta. I’d just done a candle-lighting ritual for survivors - I lit a candle for every survivor I knew, or every survivor who was directed to my blog by their friends.
I lit 236 candles that night, for women, men, and children from literally around the world.
On my shirt, I drew candles, flames. I said “I lit 236 candles, one for every survivor I know; they lit my entire house and spilled out into the street.”
I plan to make another shirt for next week’s display. And on the shirt I’ll wear for BARCC’s Walk for Change, I will be writing the names of every survivor I know; that shirt will get donated to the project, too.
Wednesday, April 7. South Station Atrium. Come and see the shirts - witness, and speak.
This year, Penny Arcade Expomade its first appearance on the east coast, and that I meant I didn't have to pony up $600 to fly out to Seattle. Hooray! Gaming: it was on.
I was a little nervous before I actually got to the convention – my only other real con experience has been Games Day in Baltimore, the corporate self-celebratory world of Games Workshop, and the Civil Liberties and Public Policy conference out at Hampshire college. Neither of these cons was anything like PAX in terms of size or population: Games Day attracts a couple of women, but by and large the hobby is so male-centric that it was hard to notice they are even present. Meanwhile, CLPP is the most open, tolerant, explicitly feminist and gender-just space I've ever been in, and I felt a little bit like I was oppressing my fellow conference goers by having facial hair. But again, CLPP has probably a thousand or so participants over the weekend, and Games Day has maybe five or six thousand. PAX saw somewhere around 50,000 people in three days, and they were all going to be celebrating video games and the geek culture.
I wanted that. I've been a gamer my whole life, and I intend to be a gamer until crazy old age makes it hard for me to mash circle on my Playstation 12 controller. I will get buried with my Street Fighter t-shirt and Fallout 3 bobblehead. I've had the same shared experiences as the other con attendees who can lustily sing the Metroid, Contra, and Mario themes. That was my childhood, too. I have that background. I was looking for opportunities to bond with people, to meet new folks that I didn't know personally, but knew shared a lot of my humor and worldview. And I found that, and it was awesome.
But I was also a little on edge - I know that geek culture has an often justified reputation for being weird about gender issues. It's got a not-so-great track record of attracting sad, lonely men and excluding women. Our most mainstream TV show is pretty much a half hour of gender-based essentialism. Even the good men of Penny Arcade have occasionally dipped into this confusion that women are some other, strange species of humanity, although they are much, much better about it than most. Geek and gaming culture, while still slightly different than the mainstream, still provides a lot of the same messages to men about what women are, and what they are for. Alex Raymond's take on these messages is pretty solid.
We talk a lot on this blog about rape culture, and what that means practically to those of us who are fighting for a better, more just world. At the extreme end of rape culture is actual sexual violence, but in all the space between rape and, say, irritating and stupid jokes about what "real" men or women are or do, there's a lot of room for less severe but still hurtful, traumatic, and stupid actions. The geek culture is not blameless here - depictions of men and women in a lot of video games and comic books are less than ideal, and especially for male, straight gamers and geeks, the messages we get about what women are can be problematic at best. Also, there's the nasty Nice Guy(TM) strain that runs particularly strongly in the geek community.
So here was my conundrum: I'm a gamer, and a pretty hardcore one at that (I bought Gorkamorka! No one bought that!), but I'm also a feminist and passionate about gender justice - was I going to have my guard raised all day, running from room to room trying either not to see sexism, or to constantly intervene in appropriate ways to keep socially awkward nerds from annoying women?
And the answer, very refreshingly, was no. I invited a female friend of mine to the con who has a lot of con experience, and she said it didn't feel hostile. I didn't have to jump in front of anyone, yell at anyone, project anxious masculinity at anyone - it was just awesome. PAX was much more gender-balanced than I thought it would be. While it was not 50/50, it was probably not too far off.
There were a couple of attendees in costume at PAX, both men and women, and I saw a lot of those folks getting complimented on how accurate and cool their get-ups were. A couple of the women were dressed as game characters, who are not generally known for their modest dress, but I didn't see anyone getting gropey or overstepping boundaries, which was nice!
What I did see were some awesome acts of community - the types of things that clever, intelligent people do when they care about greater ideas than their own self-interest. Penny Arcade created Child's Play a few years ago to help spread the joy and therapeutic power of video games to kids in hospitals, and it's had a tremendous effect in the geek world. Good people have powerful things to say about Child's Play, and I saw them say it, in person, to Gabe and Tycho this weekend. It would be hard to witness a more powerful public proclamation than that. I saw a guy who had just won an intel cell processor (worth probably a couple thousand dollars) give it right back to child's play, because that's what you do in this community.
I don't know if PAX is an aberration in the world of major geek cons - it might be. They had a couple of panels on women and gaming, and geek culture in general that had female panelists, so it may be that PAX got good feedback in the past about how to make the con more approachable to female gamers. I'd like to think that's the case, and that the geek community might be getting a little bit better with regards to women and gender non-conforming folks because it decided to do so. The folks I saw donating things to child's play during the con certainly got smiles, and sometimes applause, but the donations themselves were not crazy or unusual, and that's why I liked them so much - because they showed that part of being a member of this community in the first place was understanding charity, altruism, and giving.
That's the kicker, right there - if we're ever going to beat rape culture, if we're ever going make sexual assault completely intolerable in all of our communities, then basic things like respecting other people's boundaries have to become just a part of what we do. And that doesn't mean that people can't have fun with their sexuality, or play with it, or even show it off if they so choose. It doesn't mean that other folks can't appreciate the people who want to show it off, either. It does mean that respecting boundaries becomes the baseline norm. When that's the case, more people feel free to dress up, play around in costumes, join together in big herds and celebrate their shared experiences and donate to child's play, and that's awesome. That's what PAX was for me this weekend, and I can't wait for it next year.
Read More…
In November, the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner program faced a $1 million budget cut and was almost dismantled. The day was saved at the last minute, but the program is once again in danger - and we need your help.
What is SANE?
The Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) program trains and funds nurses who are contacted whenever a survivor reaches a designated hospital; it funds advocates who are on call 24 hours a day to accompany survivors to the hospital and it funds Children’s Advocacy Centers that play a special role for children who are survivors of sexual abuse. These programs play a crucial role, not only in providing compassionate services to survivors, but also in ensuring that evidence is collected and handled properly so that rapists are identified, prosecuted and convicted. It’s been around for twelve years, and serves 17 rape crisis centers and 27 hospitals across the state.
What makes a SANE different from another nurse or doctor? SANEs are specifically trained to collect evidence in a way that’s respectful to the survivor. The the wake of a rape or sexual assault, it’s important to have a medical professional who enderstands this trauma and can work with the survivor.
Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANEs) are specially trained and certified professionals skilled in performing quality forensic medical-legal exams. Should a case go to trial, the SANEs are then available to testify
SANEs are available by beeper and respond within 40-60 minutes to the designated SANE site ready to care for the victim of sexual assault
SANEs will document the account of the assault, perform necessary medical exams, testing and treatment, then collect crucial, time sensitive evidence using the Massachusetts Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit distributed by the Executive Office of Public Safety
SANEs provide medical care to survivors without interruption, therefore maintaining the chain of evidence from the exam.
That last one is incredibly important for a potential criminal case.
Why do we need SANE? Why can’t the regular ER staff do this?
Technically, they can. But SANEs have a familiarity with the evidence collection kit (rape kit) that most staff don’t. A SANE knows the kit and can concentrate on the care. The average intern or resident who gets pulled in may be trying to figure out the kit in the process of collecting the evidence, which can leave them focused on the kit and not the survivor, and can lead to missed steps. And remember the chain of evidence issue? If a resident or nurse is in and out of the room, as tends to happen, we don’t have that.
In addition, residents and interns often leave Massachusetts after graduate and are thus not readily available to testify.
That testifying part? That’s important. Since 1998, there has been a range of 95-100% successful prosecution rate in Massachusetts when a SANE has collected evidence and testified in court.
95-100%.
That’s huge.
Again from Mass.Gov:
SANEs have testified and provided quality forensic evidence in 54 sexual assault trials of which, 51 have resulted in conviction. Evidence collection along with SANE testimony were important elements in achieving convictions in all of the cases.
In FY’02 through FY’04 evidence submitted to the Boston and State Police Crime Lab revealed that overall, SANEs are collecting better evidence than non-SANE providers
Massachusetts DAs anecdotally report alleged perpetrators are more likely to plead guilty before trial when the prosecution presents evidence collected by SANEs, saving enormous prosecution costs.
Ongoing developments in the science of evidence collection, e.g. DNA testing, require a higher level of expertise and consistency in the collection of evidence for sexual assault cases.
Why is SANE facing budget cuts?
Because everything is. It’s a tough economy. We absolutely acknowledge that. However, rates of violent crime - including rape - go up in times of economic crisis. Now more than ever, we can’t afford to lose SANE!
What can we do?
* Read this page to familiarize yourself with the program and see why it’s so good and so necessary.
* Call your representatives, senators, and Governor Patrick to tell them why SANE shouldn’t be cut.
* If you’re on Facebook, join the “Support SANE” group! (You can also become a Fan of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center!)
Our executive director will be using the Facebook group and mailing list to keep people apprised of what they can do to save the SANE program.
In conclusion
If the budget stands with this $1 million cut, we will lose SANE. That is unacceptable.
And you can help us keep it from happening. This is something you can do. It doesn’t require a week of training or a yearlong volunteer commitment, just a few phone calls and some spreading of information - hit Twitter with this. Make it your Facebook status message. Tell your friends why it’s important. Get them to call, too.
This is an issue that affects our whole community. Let’s step up.
I used to hang around with this dude in college, way before I had discovered feminism or gender justice as a concept, who I thought even then had seriously messed up views about women. We did a radio show together for a while and on good nights, we'd hang out at one of the school grills and joke about how much sex we weren't having. On more than a couple of those evenings though, he would say something about just wanting to find a "stupid freshman girl" that he could use and degrade. He actually used the phrases degrade and violate when telling that joke, and it always made me uncomfortable as hell but I never knew what to say to him about it.
This friend later got into serious trouble for assaulting (not sexually) a female student who annoyed him, and in one of our last radio shows together before he drifted out of my friend group, I had to cut off his mic because he verbally assaulted one of our female interns (who was also a friend). He had serious anger issues, and everyone walked on tiptoes around him to try not to set him off.
I don't know if this old contact was ever a sexual abuser. But I do know that I was a bystander: someone who knew him well and had some affect on his behavior, I never called him on any of the things he did or said. I might have had the opportunity to prevent him from assaulting that other student, and I didn't do it.
I wish I had the vocabulary then that I do now. I wish I had someone like the awesome video blogger Jay Smooth to break it down. He put out a video in July of 2008 during the Presidential Campaign about how to talk to people about racist comments they make, and I thought it was so applicable to the work we do at BARCC that I wanted to repost it here. His video is about being a good bystander in the most basic way we can.
The research we have about rape perpetration tells us that the majority of assaults are committed by a small number of rapists, and this knot of people (mostly male), attack more than once. Depending on the study, this group is responsible for an average of somewhere around six or seven rapes. They were also responsible for a really high number of non-sexual assaults, domestic abuse, and other aggressive crime (this longish and scholarly paper describes a lot of these issues in further depth).
Generally, though, these perpetrators are not arrested, in prison, or suffering any substantial penalties for their actions. Dr. David Lisak over at UMass, who is doing a lot of the pioneering research on perpetration, uses the term "undetected rapists" to label this group not because they operate completely unnoticed, but because there is no major social focus on them and they aren't imprisoned. They aren't in prison, or outcast, because surrounding them is a very, very large swathe of the general population that doesn't notice them. I think of the relation between perpetrators and the rest of society like two concentric circles - the perpetrators in the middle in a really small, but nasty circle, and the rest of the population surrounding them. The part of the larger circle that's closest to the perpetration circle are folks who share a lot of the same anger at women and hyper-masculine beliefs; the major difference is that they just aren't rapists.
Unfortunately, it's hardly unusual for groups of guys, especially angry guys, to make comments about women that are, when taken at face value, about violence and control. I sat and listened to this college friend of mine say some abusive madness and I never once stepped in to tell him he needed to cut it out, because it was normal stuff for me to hear at that time. While I hope I didn't make a lot of stupid comments myself, it was not at all unusual for me at age 19 or 20 to be surrounded by dudes who talked about women as if they were obstacles to sex. I didn't step in with my fellow DJ until it got to the point that I thought he was going to get the FCC on my head for on-air sexual abuse.
In Shira's post a couple of weeks ago, she said, "The only way to keep from being raped is to never be in the presence of a rapist, and unfortunately, they don't wear signs." Thing is, in a lot of cases, they sort of do. Thomas, who I linked to last week, lays it out:
Guys with rigid views of gender roles and an axe to grind against women in general are overrepresented among rapists. That won't come as a surprise to most readers here, I expect. But it is important confirmation. Guys who seem to hate women...do. If they sound like they don't like or respect women and see women as impediments to be overcome...they're telling the truth. That's what they think, and they will abuse if they think they can get away with it. Emphasis mine.
Hating women is such a normal thing for our culture though, that this is harder to see than it should be. An angry young man making a statement about how he hates them bitches? Not the most noteworthy story of the year.
When places like BARCC think about preventing sexual violence in the first place, we think about where we can have the most impact. A bystander is someone who hangs out in the bigger of those two concentric circles, who isn't a perpetrator, but might know one. Focusing a ton of energy on changing the mindset of rapists is incredibly difficult, both because institutions like BARCC can't easily reach them, and also because they already have deeply formed opinions about sexual violence and aren't interested in modifying them. The people who surround them, though - they might be a different story. People who were in the position that I was in with this friend of mine, back in the day, for example.
The basic idea is to train those bystanders to make the social cover rapists use to stay undetected less effective. When doing misogynist things is less acceptable, then misogyny becomes less acceptable. Likewise, when doing things that support rape culture becomes less acceptable, rape becomes less acceptable - and much less hidden.
Which is why I loved Jay Smooth's vblog above (coming full circle now, I swear!): although he's talking about racism, his advice is directly applicable in the world of rape-prevention. Most of the people I talk to through BARCC or even in my own life about sexual violence aren't rapists. When they buy into rape culture (which is the dominant culture, by the way), it doesn't really help my cause to tell them that they are rapists or that they are bad, evil people. What is worth doing, though, and what does help expose rape culture, is telling them why what they actually DID was a problem. This way, I'm not threatening anyone's identity, I'm not accusing them of things that I can't prove, and I'm also not letting them off the hook easily. If someone had told me to call this friend out on the things he said and did, either he would have stopped doing them in order to keep me as his friend, or (more likely) he just wouldn't have had any friends.
And here's the bottom line: if we think of rape and sexual assault like a public health crisis, and look at the same things we do for potential epidemics, we should try to cut off the vectors for infection. If that core knot of rapists is so obvious to the rest of society because we've been having great "what you DID was sexist" conversations with everyone else, and people gradually stop doing things that support rape culture, then no one will want to have any contact with those perpetrators. If no one has contact with those perpetrators, they can't rape anyone.
This is of course a simplistic understanding of very large, very powerful social messages that come our direction, and most of my particular understanding of it is focused on a male-as-perpetrator model. Because my understanding is more narrow, a couple of other great articles and opinions about bystanders:
Cara has a great post over at the Curvature about how important this bystander work is, and an interesting study about perpetrators.
And my good friend Cuppy von der Cake on how community can play a real role in changing our social spaces.
Just a heads up—this blog details some violent events that may be triggering.
Number 799 East 3rd Street in South Boston is a few blocks from my apartment. I pass it on a daily basis. The house there is distinctive for a couple of reasons. One, it’s a short single-family amid an imposing row of triple deckers. And two, it’s the sight of unparalleled horror in a neighbor marked by the legacy of two of Boston’s most ruthless crime bosses—James “Whitey” Bulger and Stevie Flemmi.
To this day, mentioning either Bulger or Flemmi’s name to Southie old-timers can elicit contemptuous glares, eyes daring you to justify who exactly you think you are for presuming to know what happened here not so long ago.
But who I am—who we are, for that matter—is a proud Bostonian willing to acknowledge the collective shame of living in a city, a country, a world where sexual violence seeps off the streets like steam after a midsummer rainstorm.
In the early-1980s, Bulger and Flemmi were at the height of their power. They’d cornered the market on petty gambling and loansharking and had begun moving into drug trafficking. Their reputations as the most ruthless figures in Boston’s underworld preceded them, rendering them virtually untouchable. By all accounts, they were more respected than the politicians—including Whitey’s brother Billy, who served as president of the Massachusetts State Senate at the time—running Beacon Hill. As a result, the two men spent the better part of three decades getting away with murder, literally.
Stevie Flemmi was, at best, a man with uncomfortable taste in dating partners. At worst, he was a pedophile. But anyway you swing it, he was a violent misogynist who raped and murdered at will. Two of his victims, Debra Davis and Debra Hussey, were 26 when Flemmi killed them. And both were teenagers when their relationships with the nearly-fifty-year-old Flemmi began.
In September 1981, Flemmi killed Debra Davis, whom he’d dated since she was 19 years old. The reason for the murder? She wanted to raise a family, something Flemmi already had (more on that in a moment…) and wasn’t willing to give her. When Davis decided to leave Flemmi, he killed her, mutilated her body and buried her near the Neponset River. Flemmi most likely killed Davis at his mother’s house in South Boston, which, it should be noted, was directly next door to Senate President Billy Bulger’s house.
Three years later, Flemmi, with the help of Whitey, murdered another one of his girlfriends. This time the victim was Debra Hussey. Hussey was the daughter of Flemmi’s common-law wife, Marion, and he first raped his stepdaughter when she was fifteen years old. By the time she was 26, Hussey had become a prostitute and drug addict (perhaps using the same drugs that her stepfather was trafficking into Southie). She decided to sever her relationship with Flemmi and disclose to her mother the decade of abuse to which she’d been subjected. However, Flemmi wouldn’t allow that. So, as with Davis, he took Hussey to his parents’ house, where Whitey Bulger strangled her. Then, the two men took her across the street, to 799 East 3rd, where they, with the help of another gang member, mutilated her body and buried the mangled corpse in the basement.
Flemmi was not the only perpetrator at the top of Boston’s underworld. Whitey Bulger, depending on which sources you consult, was allegedly a pedophile. In his book “The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century,” Howie Carr (an unapologetic homophobe whom I don’t love quoting) asserts that, not only was the elder Bulger a gay prostitute, he was also a pedophile. Carr relays Whitey’s m.o. as described by one of the crime boss’s underlings, stating that “Whitey employed them same techniques on young males as the pedophile priests of the archdioceses of Boston. After seducing them, he would take the boys out for an ice cream cone.”
Whitey apparently also used the still-running Boston Athletic Club, located in a South Boston industrial park between Summer and First Streets, as a hub for sexual exploitation. According to Carr, Bulger “put in a two-way mirror that enabled him and his friends to enjoy a full-length view of the women’s locker room.” Carr further quotes one South Boston hood as saying that some of Bulger’s associates “surreptitiously watched through the two-way mirror as Whitey raped a fifteen-year-old girl.”
Today, perhaps to a lesser degree than in their heyday, Whitey Bulger and Stevie Flemmi maintain some level of folk-hero status in my neighborhood. They’re not quite Robin Hoods, but neither are they the Benedict Arnolds they deserve to be. They were drug traffickers. They were murderers. They were rapists. They were pedophiles. They were bad. Bad men. Bad for Boston. Bad for the world. And everywhere I go, whether I’m walking to the beach or running to catch the bus, I’m confronted with some relic of the atrocities they perpetrated.
My neighbors don’t want to talk about the crimes Bulger and Flemmi committed. Especially not the sex crimes—it offends not only their image of the past but also their largely Irish-Catholic sensibilities. They prefer to live in the bubble. But bubbles burst. And when they do, they leave residue on everyone whose power of denial superseded their logic and compassion. I live trying to learn from the past. But it’s tough to learn from something few people even are willing to admit ever happened.
The Clothesline Project is an intensely powerful display. It’s probably the most outright confrontational thing we do in terms of outreach - you can’t turn away from it. You can’t unsee it. It forces you to confront the reality of sexual violence in your community.
