The BARCC Walk for Change was held Sunday, May 11, and it was wonderful - we had over 1,300 walkers and cleared our goal of $125,000! Thank you so much for walking with us and/or sponsoring us! If you didn’t, well, there’s always next year. :)

One of the things I love most about the Walk is the sense of community. As a Community Awareness and Prevention Services (CAPS) volunteer, I’m hyperaware of the role of communities in ending sexual violence. The work that I do within my community is some of my favorite work with BARCC; I love tablings and workshops, but there’s a special joy in rolling up your sleeves and really getting to work enacting social change where you live.

My Walk team last year was two people. (Two awesome people!) This year, I had seventeen.

This, to me, speaks of the strength of our community. These seventeen people come from several different social circles, many different professions; one even came here from Vermont. :) They are teenagers, sysadmins, roboticists, students, rock stars, and so much more. They are not rape crisis counselors - they’re just people in my community who believe in BARCC’s mission, turned out in support, and raised thousands of dollars.

This is the goal. Not just the thousands of dollars! The goal is social change, and how we get there is ongoing community involvement. One person giving speeches is great, yes. But when everyone that one person talks to takes that message with them, and they now know what to do if a friend tells them they’ve been sexually assaulted, or they’re able to talk to their kids about respecting boundaries, or they step in when they’re not sure if a situation they witness is okay with everyone involved -

Well, then you’ve got a revolution.

And that’s what we need. We need tremendous sweeping changes in the way our culture views and treats sexual violence. And that can be really daunting - these are not changes that a single person can make. These are not changes that will be accomplished in our lifetime. So it’s easy to say “That’s too much for me,” to get overwhelmed with the enormity of the changes that need to happen. Yes. Absolutely. This is too much for one person. But when we work together, it’s not too much at all.

We are making steps all the time.

In the case of the Walk, literally. :)

Because you start with one person, and that person brings their friends, and they bring their friends, and then you have a river of over a thousand people walking. And our committment is strengthened by this, make no mistake. Some of our work can be very solitary. Actually being surrounded by all of these wonderful people who care like we do - it’s the fuel that keeps us going, keeps us fighting. Keeps us making these steps, these incremental gains.

And these incremental gains are absolutely necessary. This is too big a job to do all at once. But every day we’re laying the groundwork that we’ll build on the next day and the day after that. And mobilizing our communities is at the absolute core of this work. Dave and I cannot be everywhere at once! Trust us! We have tried! What we want is for our communities to pick up on this work and do what they can, too.

And they’re doing it.

Viva la revolution. :)

If you want to join us in a more active capacity, we’d love to have you. Check out our volunteer positions and apply!

And check out the photos from the Walk for Change, by Carlton SooHoo, RichO’s Photography, and Kate McElwee!

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New Haven could be a rough place when I was a kid. For a city of its size, New Haven was a more dangerous town than New York, proportionally. When I was growing up there, it wasn't unusual to hear about friends or classmates getting mugged. I got jacked a couple of times in high school. On one particularly memorable occasion, I got jumped by the same dude twice in one day, right in front of the main doors to school itself. I don't really know why the dude jumped me - he already had my bus pass.

Most of the times that I dealt with getting mugged, my friends and family and social networks were supportive and helpful. Sometimes, though, I was met with derision or a shrug and that wonderful silencing line: "You should have known better." I should have known better than to be walking around that neighborhood late at night. I should have known better than to wear my nice watch. I should have known better than to be talking on my cell-phone. I should have known better than to ride my bike by myself. If I understood my town, I would have known that I was putting myself at danger by doing these things.

All three of us who blog for BARCC have written in this space about risk-reduction and the problems of using it in a sexual violence prevention sphere. I don't intend to rehash some of those old points, but a conversation the BARCC outreach team had on Monday put into really clear words for me about the difference between victim-blaming in something like a mugging, and in rape or sexual assault.

Even when I was in a situation where a classmate or acquaintance blamed me for getting mugged, I don't recall any situation where they didn't believe me that it happened. If I had gone to the cops in New Haven after losing (yet another) one of my bikes, they might have been surly or rude or even a bit dismissive if they thought I was being a stupid kid acting like an idiot, but they probably wouldn't have doubted that my bike actually did get stolen in the first place. The police don't usually look for a mugging suspect and then ask him or her if she actually did rob someone.

This is exactly what we do to survivors of rape and sexual assault. For those few who are willing to bring reports to the authorities, they may simply be turned away and ignored (major trigger warning). Friends and family may ignore the survivor, or be ashamed of them. Authorities may actually ask the perpetrator if he or she raped in the first place.

Getting mugged sucks; no doubt about it. As a culture, though, we agree that getting mugged, while it may be more likely to happen to folks who are clueless about urban life, is not the fault of the victim. No one can mug him or herself. We need to apply the same logic to sexual violence. There are unending excuses in our culture for perpetrators - she was a tease, she was asking for it, it was consensual, they were both drunk, it was miscommunication - even though we know most of those excuses have nothing to do with the way sexual violence actually happens.

If, when I got mugged, I had to convince all of my friends that what happened was really a mugging, that what was taken from me did in fact belong to me in the first place and it was really kind of a big deal, and if after that if I wanted any kind of justice I needed to fight through a law enforcement system that was disinclined to listen to me and actively encouraged to dismiss me because proving a mugging is pretty hard in the first place - I mean did anyone even see it? - and even if they found a suspect they needed to get his or her side of the story and that held more weight than mine because who listens to a stupid mugging victim anyway, everyone knows that people who walk in those neighborhoods or have watches on or phones get mugged and if I had "known better," it wouldn't have happened in the first place... then I might just barely start to understand what a survivor of sexual violence faces in our culture right now.

This is rape culture.

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Here's an example of excellent, grassroots, media-supported social messaging: bowling team names. I'm in a seasonal bowling league with some good friends from college, and here's what I've noticed about bowling team names (and to an extent, bar trivia team names too) - they are all required, by John Locke's social contract, to be terrible puns. All of them. Pretty much without exception.

So in my league, we've got my team (Split Happens), the reigning champs, Living on a Spare, and so on - a long line of glorious, terrible bowling puns. When my team captain first sent out her email to get our ideas for team names, she didn't explicitly tell us that we had to pick something that was a miserable bowling pun - all of us just knew we were supposed to do that. There was enough support in the social atmosphere for us to have learned through osmosis that this is the convention in bowling leagues.

Where did we get this information? Probably a bunch of different places: A couple of major media products, like The Big Lebowski, Kingpin, and a few other bowling-focused large-budget comedies I saw as a kid made it clear that for those who are not bowling professionals, bowling as a social activity has a certain lack of seriousness that accepts puns. A few episodes of the Simpsons here and there, a few episodes of other major TV shows, and the words and conversations of my parents and adult relations when they took me bowling when I was a kid made me aware that this was the naming convention in bowling leagues.

This led me to wonder - how is that the world that I float in on a day-to-day basis is able to educate me quite firmly about the social conventions of something so trivial, like a bowling league, but it is unable to create a coherent message about consent in sexuality? Obviously, there are less social power dynamics at play in a bowling league than in our overall messages about sexuality, so that's one reason at least that our messages aren't as easily shaped, but it seems ridiculous to me. I didn't have bowling social education in middle school (I had a couple of gym classes where we tried to learn how to score bowling, but I was never very good at it). I did have sex ed, though, and we NEVER talked about consent. We saw a lot of charts of fallopian tubes, but got very little on consent.

Probably one of the major reasons I knew about bowling team naming conventions was the overall spread of media that mention it. No TV show or movie is entirely focused on the specific social interactions of bowling leagues, and the naming of teams therein, but there are enough jokes spread around enough different TV shows that the ideas start to filter down. If I see a joke in 20 different movies about bowling team names, bowling team shirts, and how people act in a bowling league, and those 20 jokes are all pretty consistent in tone and content even though the movies aren't, I'm going to start thinking that there is an overall social convention that I might want to follow when I join my own bowling league. Violence prevention doesn't get that type of media support - I'd be hard pressed to name five movies or TV shows that have a really progressive take on sex and consent. Rape prevention activists don't get a whole lot of support from mainstream media, and we're not making a lot of our own media in the meantime (although we're certainly working on it!). I'm talking social media here, not news reports and blog posts - both of those are great, but when my friends get together on the weekends to have fun and hang out, we don't quote our favorite blog posts (well, not most of the time, anyway). We toss jokes back and forth from our favorite TV shows, movies, and sometimes viral videos, if they are funny enough. Those are the interactions that create community, and one of the biggest tools in our violence-prevention arsenal in the future is going to be the ability to create our own social media that will allow us to start creating a viable alternative social space for people to make jokes, have fun, and share common experiences and loves that aren't sexist and that don't support rape culture.

If we can teach each other how to name bowling teams without ever actually having to bowl, I don't see why we can't make consent in sex just as basic.

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One of the things I do with BARCC is leading workshops in schools. We led a “respecting boundaries” workshop in a local high school recently; one of the activities in this workshop is an examination of where we get our ideas of what sexual assault looks like, who the perpetrator is, where it happens, et cetera. We make a list of how people visualize rape, and then we ask where that idea comes from. Nine times out of ten these days, people say “Law and Order: SVU”. But this time, that was immediately followed by one of the kids saying “Actually - I really like that show. Is that… okay?”

Which I found to be a very interesting question! So did the other kids in the room, who’d apparently been harboring similar thoughts; there was a chorus of agreement, and one tentative “Is there something wrong with us that we like that?”

I paused, then presented my idea: “A lot of people like that show; I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s possible that people are drawn to it because there’s actual justice there, right in that hour - they catch the perpetrator and close the case. It’s not that you like that there’s sexual assault, it’s that you like getting closure.”

There was another round of agreement, and an enthusiastic “They always get ‘em!”

I talk about rape and sexual assault in media a lot. I actually lead panels about it at science fiction conventions - but there I’m mostly talking about how it gets used as a throwaway plot device to traumatize a (usually female) character and is portrayed sensationalistically and unrealistically. I have a whole speech about that! But this is not that speech. Because one of my gripes regarding rape being used as that shorthand is that it isn’t integral to the plot or character, and on shows like SVU, it absolutely is.

Let’s have another example! Because this is certainly not limited to TV.

Everyone knows about my association with BARCC; as I said in my “that girl at the party” post, I’m the person who ends up in rape-culture conversations at parties. So every so often, I get people realizing that something they like is kinda about rape, and apologizing to me for liking it. Which is not necessary, as I do not have to vet the contents of your iPod! It’s not my job, and I don’t have time! :)

But every so often, someone will be playing, say, “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga. Probably singing along. It’s really catchy. And suddenly they’ll look at me with this mortified expression and say “...oh. This - this song is kinda a date rape song, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Well, specifically about alcohol-facilitated sexual assault.” I’m technical like that. It’s never specified in the song whether Lady Gaga knows this guy, but it’s totally blatant that she’s far too drunk to be able to consent, and he absolutely intends to take advantage of that. (Interestingly enough, Gaga did a sequel to “Just Dance”; it’s called “Monster”, and it makes the assault explicit. “I wanna just dance but he took me home instead/uh-oh, there was a monster in my bed.”)

“I just like the beat.”

“Well, it’s fun to dance to.” It is.

The fact that something talks about rape doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to like it. As a matter of fact, if it provokes that reaction in you, causes you to think about the issue - that’s a good thing! Absolutely let’s engage in conversation about intoxication and lack of consent!

A friend mentioned something similar on Facebook yesterday; he’d been singing “Sex Type Thing” by Stone Temple Pilots and realized that, hey, a) this song is totally about rape, and b) one of his friends who happens to be a rape crisis counselor (not me) was in the room. He seemed rather mortified. Personally, I always took “Sex Type Thing” to be a pretty strong statement against rape; STP really highlights the monstrousness of the perpetrator’s thought process, throwing the horror and lack of regard for other people into a relief too sharp to ignore. I don’t think it glorifies rape at all.

But I love that it sparks that thought process and that conversation.

And we need that thought and that conversation. We’re saturated with rape culture. We’re soaking in it! So examining specific aspects of it is a very good thing. Explore it. Talk about it. Take it apart and see how it works. The more we dissect it, the better we understand it.

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When you talk about rape -
when you run the scalpel down your scar,
when you peel away your armor,
when you stand and say,
this happened,
this happens every day,
this is happening right now -

When you say
this is the culture that lets this happen,
this is the broken world,
this is a thousand eyes turned away,
because to see and not take action is monstrous,
but there is no crime if you just. don’t. see -

When you see, when you speak,
when you listen -

When it is known that you will listen -

The world opens itself
like the Nile flooding.

When those with matching scars
hear your voice
they find their own.

When you listen,
they will come to you;
they will fill you with their songs,
haltingly from disused throats,
growing stronger in chorus.

When you sit quietly,
when you are open,
your sisters and brothers
connect, spin out from you,
fractals across the world,
each a link to others.

When you speak,
and when you listen,
they are not alone.

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