In an exciting twist, we have three people blogathonning for BARCC this year! We are pulling an all-nighter for great justice, posting to our blogs every half hour for 24 hours. This is all going to get unintentionally hilarious. Probably earlier than you think.

* I’m blogging here, and have a fantastic auction going on here that you should check out. I’ll be posting spontaneous flash fiction and poetry inspired by the auction items; many of the stories and poems will draw on my novel in progress, Cicatrix, which deals with sexual violence and recovery.

* Fellow CAPS volunteer Jennifer is blogging here! She’ll be posting spontaneous flash fanfic - list of fandoms will be posted on her blog.

* Adrianne Brennan is blogging here. Her posts will include her thoughts on writing, never-before posted excerpts of her works, and answers to any questions you pose to her beforehand.

We are not just doing Blogathon because it’s fun - we’re doing it for BARCC. We are doing this goofy but incredibly arduous thing because we believe strongly in BARCC’s mission.

So sponsor us! Click to donate; you can put “blogathon” or “blogathon” + a blogger’s name or whatever you like in the comments field. Then please e-mail your receipt to the blogger you’re sponsoring so we can keep a running total. There will be a prize drawing! There will be silly incentives for every thousand dollars we raise for BARCC! It will be ridiculously awesome. Read along, comment, and sponsor!

Blogathon kicks off at 9am tomorrow. Party time!

On Saturday, July 31, I am doing a Blogathon to raise money for BARCC!

This will be my eighth Blogathon, and the fourth year I’d raising money for BARCC. Blogathon is completely exhausting, yet totally worth it, as you’ll see below. Yes, I’m taking the lazy way out and just reposting the announcement from my personal blog; I’m saving my writerly energy for Saturday!

I’ll be posting short fiction and poetry, composed spontaneously, every half hour for 24 hours. That’s 49 pieces of story, automatic for the people. I’m also running an auction of wonderful stuff donated by wonderful people; each post will have a link to an auction item, and the story therein will be inspired by said auction item. (Auction will run July 26-August 2.) Yeah. Other people just post “I am so tired” for hours. I do Blogathon backwards and in heels. Because it wasn’t hard enough?

Once again, my chosen charity is BARCC. BARCC is the second oldest rape crisis center in the country, and one of the biggest, with a staff of 20 and a volunteer corps of 120+ who put in hours equivalent to 19 additional staff members. We have a 24-hour hotline and medical advocacy program (medical advocates go to the hospital with survivors for evidence collection), a community awareness/public education/outreach program (which is really unique and ever-expanding), legal advocacy, legislative advocacy (we helped change the law on restraining orders recently so you can get one if you’re not in an intimate relationship with your stalker, go us!), case management, and counseling (up to twelve sessions).

BARCC provides all of this and more completely free of charge.

And we are able to do so partly because of you.

This will be my fourth year doing Blogathon for BARCC. Over the past three Blogathons, we raised over $11,000 for BARCC.

You have paid for 880 hotline calls, or 147 emergency room accompaniments, or 165 counseling sessions, or the complete training of 11 volunteers.

You did that.

Let’s do it again.

My goal this year is $5,000. That’s 400 hotline calls, 67 ER accompaniments, 75 counseling sessions. That’s hundreds of people you can help.

Click here to sponsor me; e-mail me your receipt so I can keep a running total. Go bid on nifty stuff. And spread the word.

If we’re ever going to convince the world that rape is an important issue, we’re going to need people to see how epidemic it is.  One of the more practical ways to do that is to remove as many obstacles to survivors who want to report a rape or assault to the justice system.  Right now, the American justice system can be an intimidating and re-traumatizing place for survivors.  Some of the barriers to reporting rape will be pretty hard to break down, simply because the police and the criminal justice system are not omniscient: to prosecute a potential perpetrator, they do need evidence.  Rape and sex are two worlds apart, but the physical evidence left after either of them often looks the same, especially if the perpetrator didn’t use excessive violence.  The difficulties police face in this, purely physical evidence realm, is going to take new and creative solutions to fix.

But there’s a whole other category of obstacles that survivors face to reporting assaults to the criminal justice system: attitude and philosophy.  If survivors are viewed as hysterical women with an agenda, police are less likely to actively pursue their case.  If there’s a shortage of SANE nurses and rape kits don’t get processed, prosecutors are less likely to pursue a case.  If police just don’t want to deal with rape survivors, because those cases are tough and take a lot of time and are stressful, they are less likely to pursue a case.

This type of issue is not endemic to rape as a crime the same way that physical evidence might be in certain types of rape situations.  There is nothing intrinsic to rape that requires the justice system to judge survivors, re-traumatize them, and drop cases.  There are ways to remove those obstacles, like training special sexual assault police units (which Boston has, thankfully), fully funding SANE programs, and keeping survivors regularly updated on the progress of their cases.

I’m happy today, because I’ve gotten some good news recently about progress in exactly this area.  Amnesty International just sent me a press release about the passage of the Tribal Law and Order Act as an amendment to H.R. 725.  This is good news!  Native American women and Native Alaskan women face a disproportionate number of rapes and sexual assaults, and until this act (which Obama still has to sign into law), survivors faced a ridiculous number of bureaucratic obstacles to reporting their assaults or getting necessary services like rape kits.  The hope is this new law will reduce a great number of those obstacles that are based on jurisdictional problems, and allow survivors in those communities much quicker access to the justice system. 

Likewise, in DC, the police department is undertaking a review of its rape and sexual assault policies.  Go read the article - it’s an impressive case of the police union actively working to protect survivors and inform the public more openly about sexual assaults.  This is the type of institutional review I’d like to see happen more often, and represents a strong push towards eliminating those obstacles for survivors that we can easily remove.

As I wrote about last week, the more survivors that can come forward and speak about their assaults, whether personally or through the medium of a police report, the harder and harder it becomes for the rest of society to view rape as a side-issue, one for women and maybe gay men to deal with in their spare time.  If every survivor filed a report, every police office in this country would be completely overwhelmed and we might see this for what it is: a public health crisis spiraled wildly out of control.  Maybe then we’d put the type of resources behind ending rape and sexual assault that it needs and deserved.

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Since this is a positive news day, though, enjoy some fun music!  The Stills, “I’m With You” (h/t to Master Rhinehart for this).

So Roman Polanski - who, let’s remember, raped a child - has been released.

It’s taken me about a week to get around to writing this. Because, frankly, everything about this makes me want to punch people in the face. Not you - I’m sure you’re a lovely person. But Polanski and his supporters. Also… it’s a big story. There’s a lot to cover here - more than one can reasonably cover in a mere blog post. Someone ought to write a book. So it’s also a matter of picking a point small enough to discuss.

As you can imagine, I’ve been reading up on this case rather a lot. It was on author Andrew Vachss’s website that I noticed something of particular interest - Vachss has compiled early media coverage of the case.

In the earliest article on record, it’s referred to as rape.

I was struck by this, because in all of the modern articles, the media infuriatingly refers to this as a “sex case”. Indeed, as early as one year after the rape, the media had already shifted to saying things like “sexual intercourse”. But that first article, from the Washington Post, says flat-out “Polish film director Roman Polanski, widower of murdered actress Sharon Tate, was free on bond today on charges of luring a 13-year-old girl to the home of Jack Nicholson under the pretext of photographing her, then drugging and raping her….In addition to the rape charges, Polanski also was booked on suspicion of sodomy, child molestation and furnishing dangerous drugs to a minor.”

This shouldn’t have made me stop in my tracks. This shouldn’t be rare, this actual telling of the facts of the case. And if you doubt that those are the facts of the case, you should read the testimony (trigger warning on that, of course).

No matter what Whoopi Goldberg says, this is rape.

Call it what it is.

Harriet J has a great idea here for a little culture jamming:

Here is one way you can fight rape culture. If you have just watched a movie with a rape scene:

  1. Go to the Wikipedia page
  2. Note the scene’s description
  3. Note that it likely does not use the word “rape,” but probably instead says “have sex,” “seduces,” or “love scene.”
  4. Revise the description of the scene and use the word “rape”
  5. Go back in 6 months and return it to “rape,” as a rape apologist or rapist has by now has revised it back to “love scene”
  6. Repeat

You can do this with news articles, too, and I hope you will. When you see articles about Polanski, comment on them. If they’re calling it “sex” tell them they have the wrong word - the word they’re looking for is rape. If they actually say rape, thank them. Make this visible. Make them call it what it is.

Why don’t we talk about rape more?  Why is this subject such a taboo one?  When I think about the obstacles to getting survivors the support they need after an assault, or getting the appropriate resources in place to prevent rape from happening, the biggest one in my head is the assumption that rape isn’t…that big a deal.  Either it doesn’t happen as often as “those crazy feminists” say, or it’s just not that important.  I mean, c’mon - if it were really important, we’d hear more about it, right?

This is on my mind because of a tabling event I did this weekend with BARCC.  We were providing information at an ethnic fair and as is normal for my experience at tabling events, virtually no one wanted to talk to us.  My fellow volunteers and I talked about a couple of the obstacles that might be keeping people away from the table - we didn’t look like members of the community in which the fair was taking place, we had limited language skills for the population we were serving (although I don’t know how anyone would know that by looking at us), and we don’t really have any fun things to give away (compared to the Boston Public Health Commission, anyway, which has TONS of cool stuff).  We talked a little bit about the particular obstacles that exist in minority communities to talking about or reporting rape - Dr. Katherine Morrison at Curry College has done some awesome research about those obstacles, specifically for African-American women - but one of my fellows made a great point.  He said something along the lines of, “it doesn’t matter what culture or community we’re talking about.  No one talks about rape.”

He’s right.  While public health specialists have written many books and articles about appropriate ways to discuss rape and sexual assault in minority communities, it’s not like mainstream, white American culture is particularly open about it.  It’s not like there’s any magical community where rape is discussed regularly with the type of urgency and honesty that its prevalence demands, except maybe the insides of a rape crisis center.  So I’ve decided to ask why we don’t talk about rape.  I’d like you all to chime in on the conversation.  Here are my theories:

1. Rape is tightly wound up in sex, obviously.  Our culture isn’t too open about sex in general, and talking about rape often requires talking about sex and how the two are different.  Considering that we live in a country where a good chunk of the population doesn’t get any comprehensive sexual education and doesn’t really know how conception works, it’s not super-surprising that people aren’t OK talking about about violence that seems to share so many things in common with sex.
2. Rape is scary to talk about.  Even in our best rape prevention literature and workshops, talking about rape can make ME feel paranoid.  It’s not helpful, most of the time, to tell young women and men that every man they meet is a potential predator and could assault them at any minute, but…with the social camouflage that perpetrators have to operate, and with the casual misogyny that exists in mainstream culture, it’s true that most people have a difficult time telling who the predators are.
 
3. For straight men (or at least for me), there was a slightly different aspect of this paranoia: the realization that I, as a man, was a symbol of potential abuse, trauma, and misery to roughly half of the human population.  No, not all or even most women assume that I’m a rapist, but as a social symbol, as a man, I’ve had to learn that one of the things my body and form and gender identity represents to the rest of the world is violence.  That was chilling to realize, when it finally hit home.
 
4. Entrenched interests actively work to prevent us from talking about it.  Thomas, I think, coined the phrase “the pro-rape lobby,” and I think that’s a pretty apt description of the forces I see at work here.  This “lobby” is a group of people who have vested interest in gender relations remaining the way they are: imbalanced and unjust.  There is a tremendous amount of power and money in keeping the system the way it is now; talking about rape would shake those foundations a lot.  Using that article that Thomas wrote above as an example: how much money do the Steelers stand to lose if Roethlisberger doesn’t play for them?  How much do they stand to lose if they don’t make it to the Super Bowl?  How many people care about the welfare of a survivor when weighed against all that power and cash?

This is where I think a lot of the stigma of talking about rape comes from - the entrenched power enforcing it.  I don’t believe that there’s any inherent shame in being assault by another person.  Why should there be?  But survivors regularly tell BARCC that they feel ashamed of being assaulted, they feel stupid, they feel like “they should have known better” or similar things.  People don’t come to those conclusions from nothing; they come to those conclusions because a large segment of the population regularly tells us that it is our fault for being assaulted, that we are stupid for “letting” someone attack us.  Shame and fear and silence are not inherent to rape as a social phenomenon; they exist because we as a culture have made them part of experiencing rape.  Survivors in the past who have tried to speak up, and speak up powerfully and publicly, met with powerful social forces that were designed to prevent them quiet.

This is a place where I think allies have a tremendous responsibility, but also a tremendous opportunity, to change our cultural dialogue.  Survivors face about a million and one obstacles to speaking out about their experience, and many of those obstacles are dangerous to a survivor’s livelihood or personal safety.  It is both unreasonable and unfair to expect survivors to want to speak out about their rapes, but allies can help to shield those that do from the consequences they might face (whether it’s the hazards of the criminal justice system, loss of job or hostility from family members and other friends who knew the perpetrator). 

Allies can also try to open up the cultural dialogue about rape overall, and to target that pro-rape lobby directly where possible.  One of my pastimes is reading about other social movements to see where they come from and how they achieved their objectives.  One that comes to mind specifically in regards to silencing is the LGBT movement’s fight to get the rest of the world to recognize the dangers of HIV/AIDS.  The history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) I found to be fascinating and instructive, and with quite a few parallels to the work BARCC is doing.  ACT UP needed to push the rest of the country to understand that AIDS was a real thing, a massive problem; that the mainstream media sources were spreading lazy or incorrect information about it; and that politicians and decision-makers were waiting far too long to take action to stop its spread.  Activists who went on to be active with ACT UP also created the now iconic slogan “silence = death.”

This is what I think we need to see to push back against the pro-rape lobby.  We need to both provide survivors with the space to speak and the support and tools necessary to shield them from the social forces that want to keep them quiet, and continue to press the dialogue outside of just survivor experiences.  The more we talk about rape, the less power shame and fear have, and the less reasonable it becomes to keep the entrenched gender system in line the way it is.