Just days since a massive campaign was launched by a coalition of more than 40 groups and individuals, advertisers have already begun to act swiftly about seeing their ads adjacent to images depicting rape and violence against women on Facebook. Indeed, the response has inspired hope that the demands in the Open Letter to Facebook may just be met.

For those who missed it, organizers of the campaign are asking Facebook to take action about gender-based violent imagery and pages that proliferate on the site, while its moderators act quickly to remove similarly graphic and hurtful content that is racist or homophobic. Examples of these pages include Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus and Violently Raping Your Friends Just for Laughs. This is not new. Back in November 2011, I wrote about several pages on Facebook, including It’s Not Rape if you Yell Surprise and Kicking Sluts in the Vagina Because it’s Funny Watching Your Foot Disappear. When you combine this with tolerance, or even implied approval, of photo memes that depict violence against women with taglines like, “This bitch didn’t know when to shut up,” it adds up to a long history of a corporate culture that is a willing participant in spreading gender-based hate speech and rape culture.

As the coalition explains in an official statement:

Specifically, the group demands that the social media giant take three specific actions:

1. Recognize speech that trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women as hate speech and make a commitment that Facebook will not tolerate this content.
2. Train Facebook’s content moderators to recognize and remove gender-based hate speech.
3. Train moderators to understand how online harassment differently affects women and men, in part due to the real-world pandemic of violence against women.

The message to Facebook is accompanied by a massive social media campaign, calling on advertisers such as Dove and American Express to pull their advertising from Facebook until they can be assured it won’t appear next to content that promotes rape or domestic violence.

And so far, several advertisers are not just listening, but reacting to the campaign. Half-a-dozen companies, including Candyopolis and Nissan UK, have pulled their ads after receiving campaign information released on May 21. At least as many companies have responded and have said they are looking into the situation, one of which being American Express. Unfortunately, a few companies including Dove, VistaPrint, and Audible, have declined to take action.

It’s time for Facebook to change and we’re glad to see that so many advertisers agree! (You can get updates on where companies stand on the Women, Action & the Media campaign page.)

We at Feminism 2.0 are proud to have signed on to this campaign (as well as this author, as The Sin City Siren) and we want to thank the campaign organizers for their diligence and hard work to launch and follow through with this seminal campaign, which may just change the landscape of Facebook and social media.

Follow the latest on the facebook campaign here and by using the hashtag #FBrape on twitter.

Image by Geoff Livingston, via Creative Commons.

*Trigger warning*

Starting on May 21, a coalition of more than two dozen organizations — including Led by Women, Action & the Media, The Everyday Sexism Project, and author Soraya Chemaly — are calling on Facebook to end its complicit approval of memes and pages that promote violence against women and gender-based hate speech.

As the coalition explains in an official statement released today:

Specifically, the group demands that the social media giant take three specific actions:

1. Recognize speech that trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women as hate speech and make a commitment that Facebook will not tolerate this content.
2. Train Facebook’s content moderators to recognize and remove gender-based hate speech.
3. Train moderators to understand how online harassment differently affects women and men, in part due to the real-world pandemic of violence against women.

The message to Facebook is accompanied by a massive social media campaign, calling on advertisers such as Dove and American Express to pull their advertising from Facebook until they can be assured it won’t appear next to content that promotes rape or domestic violence.

Examples of these pages include Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus and Violently Raping Your Friends Just for Laughs. This is not new. Back in November 2011, I wrote about several pages on Facebook, including It’s Not Rape if you Yell Surprise and Kicking Sluts in the Vagina Because it’s Funny Watching Your Foot Disappear. When you combine this with tolerance, or even implied approval, of photo memes that depict violence against women with taglines like, “This bitch didn’t know when to shut up,” it adds up to a long history of a corporate culture that is a willing participant in spreading gender-based hate speech and rape culture.

Indeed, the ubiquitous nature and incredible cultural power of Facebook has been leveraged as a unique tool for rape culture and to promote violence against women. Last month, Retaeh Parsons killed herself after more than a year of cyber bullying following her sexual assault in 2011. Her very attackers posted photos of the incident on Facebook and proceeded to use that evidence to mock and harass her for months on end until, finally, she could take no more and ended her life. And she is not the only one.

That alone would be enough. The very fact that the power of social media sites — Facebook being nearly the king of the hill, so to speak — can be harnessed for such malevolence is a testament to its power to harm. So, when a brand like Facebook allows the “humor” sites like What’s 10 Inches and Gets Girls to Have Sex With Me? My Knife to proliferate, there is a very real consequence to that act.

And let’s be clear. For all its hand-wringing and cries of First Amendment rights, Facebook has a history of acting to remove anti-Semetic, Islamophobic, and homophobic speech. Facebook is a public forum, yes. But it is governed by the same rules and laws that prohibit me from walking into a crowded movie theater and shouting, “Fire!” when there is none. We have Freedom of Speech, but speech is not free.

Further evidence to the misogynistic culture that Facebook is either willfully or indirectly complicit in is the fact that the company has a long history of removing another kind of page and photo memes: That of breast-feeding women. It’s a curious thing that the Facebook will protect the rights of misogynists who want to promote rape culture but not the rights of women who want to promote a biological act which feeds infants.

This is a fight we can win. Facebook is not too big to listen, just ask the UFC. Two years ago, I joined a coalition of organizations to take on the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) to get them to enact a code of conduct to address rape jokes and homophobic speech that fighters were proliferating on social media. There was a lot of resistance from UFC CEO Dana White, until advertisers like the US Marines started pulling their ads and support for the organization until they cleaned up their act. Earlier this year, the UFC enacted a code of conduct, and used it to suspend a fighter for transphobic comments. If a brand like the UFC, which has built itself partially on a kind of hyper-masculinity that tends to dovetail into rape culture, can change its ways, so can Facebook.

In an open letter to Facebook, feminist coalition partners said the following:

In a world in which hundreds of thousands of women are assaulted daily and where intimate partner violence remains one of the leading causes of death for women around the world, it is not possible to sit on the fence. We call on Facebook to make the only responsible decision and take swift, clear action on this issue.

It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Be a part of the solution, Facebook.

Photo by Chase Carter via Creative Commons

Read here  the open letter to Facebook

Last year, Savita Halappanavar, an Indian woman being treated in a hospital in Ireland, was denied a life saving abortion because of the country’s strict Catholic code of conduct.  She died. The world was outraged as it came face to face with the horrifying truth that when religion guides your government, the death toll rises. Now we are again facing a situation in which a woman is being killed by her nonviable fetus, and the country in question adheres to strict standards that do not consider women’s lives a priority.

22 year old Beatriz – already a mother of one –  is suffering from lupus and kidney disease, conditions made even more dangerous by her nonviable pregnancy. The fetus she has been carrying for 4 1/2 months has no brain and only a partial skull. It has virtually no chance of survival. The fetus is also killing Beatriz.

But in El Salvador, all abortions are illegal. There are no exceptions, no extenuating circumstances, no options. If Beatriz’s doctors were to perform an abortion anyway, they could all face years in prison. For Beatriz herself, it could be even worse. After enduring these harrowing conditions and the trauma of such an abortion, she could be penalized by up to 50 years in jail.

A Catholic Country
Religion has always played a huge role in the inflexibility of the pro-life stance, declaring a life to begin at conception and that nothing and no one should kill that child for any reason. But when I think of El Salvador, I think not just of the iron grip of these strict Catholic teachings. I think also of the doctrine that grew out of the understanding of a few brave priests, who determined that in order to serve their people, they needed to interpret the Bible from a place of solidarity with the poor. This is liberation theology.

Liberation theology grew out of the desperate poverty, fear, and injustice imposed on the El Salvadoran people after centuries of colonial domination and then decades of military dictatorship, followed by civil war that disproportionately punished the indigenous and the poor. Traditional Catholic teachings said that the poor’s only hope for salvation was through obedience and acceptance. But Jesuit teachings and those priests who worked among the people knew that such doctrine could not and would not ring true with a population so marginalized and so terrorized. Instead,  they joined with the workers and the poor to fight back against structural hegemony that threatened the very lives and livelihoods of the country’s people.

How is this relevant? Financial hardship, lack of access to comprehensive sexual education, and no health care make poor women disproportionately affected by the need for reproductive health and abortion services worldwide. Once again, we see the institutional privilege of the church overwhelming impacting poor people – in this case, women – by devaluing their lives and their very humanity in order to preserve ancient customs and power structures that support the Catholic Church’s influence on the El Salvadoran government.

And so what is interesting about Beatriz’s story is that the same Catholic doctrines that are preventing her from receiving this life saving medical procedures are the ones that have traditionally oppressed the people of El Salvador. These teachings aren’t about compassion or justice. They are – as they have always been – about propping up the control of the Church and sacrificing the lives of the poor in order to do so.  Beatriz needs an intervention of liberation theology to save her life.

Woman, Criminal, Felon
The hospital where Beatriz is being treated has petitioned the Supreme Court to allow their doctors to perform this life-saving abortion, but months later, they’ve received no response.  This isn’t surprising considering not just the grip of the church on public life, but also how very brutally strict the anti abortion laws are in El Salvador. In 2006, the New York Times published an article called “Pro-Life Nation” that speaks of horrifying methods of control over women’s bodies and criminal prosecution for anything that seems to consider the word abortion. Doctors are required by law to report to the authorities if they see a patient whom they suspect of having had an abortion. And then there’s this:

In the event that the woman’s illegal abortion went badly and the doctors have to perform a hysterectomy, then the uterus is sent to the Forensic Institute, where the government’s doctors analyze it and retain custody of her uterus as evidence against her.”

During the course of an investigation, a woman’s body is literally considered a crime scene. This is all even before a woman (and her doctors and anyone associated with the “crime”) is put through the trauma of a trial and convicted. Because believe it or not, it can get worse. In El Salvador, longer sentences are considered more prestigious ”wins” for the prosecutor, and so we’ve seen an increase in the number of late term abortions being classified as aggravated homicides.  Aggravated homicide can carry penalties of up to 50 years in prison.

How the Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Movements Can Work Together to Save Beatrice

Working with our allies over at RHRealityCheck and Care2, I started a petition to the government of El Salvador to allow these doctors to perform this abortion and save Beatriz’s life.  As of now, the petition has over 21,000 signatures from outraged men and women all over the world who are in shock and disbelief that our global community is allowing this to happen yet again.  But what’s struck me though is not just the outpouring of support for this woman, but the support that is coming from people who self-identify as pro-life.  Read the petition and its signatures here  and you’ll see what I mean.

Two years ago, I wrote a blog post for Fem2.0 about finding common ground with the pro-life community. About how I’d be more willing to work with them if the movement itself wasn’t almost entirely rooted in punishing women for having sex. That’s what it means when you are anti sexual education, anti birth control, etc.  Of course, there are rays of hope.  All Our Lives is an inspired organization that should really get more attention than it does.  From their mission statement: 

Are you pro-birth control? Pro-sex education? Pro-LGBT rights? Pro-every-life, before and after birth? Welcome to All Our Lives! All Our Lives defends women’s right to voluntarily make all non-violent choices about sexuality and reproduction. We defend a woman’s right to choose her own sexual partners without shame or coercion or discrimination, to have no sexual partners at all if she so desires, to choose to attempt conception or to prevent it by the methods that work best for her, to raise any children she might bear in safety and with dignity, and to be free of dominance and violence. We promote a sexual ethic that combines freedom with responsibility toward not only one’s self and one’s partner, but also toward any children who might be conceived.

These are the kinds of people who are also standing behind Beatriz.  Who are calling on the government to have compassion and concern for this woman, to save her life. In this, when the fetus is nonviable and is responsible – like a parasite – for killing the mother, in this we can all surely stand together.  Because there is nothing pro-life about allowing Beatriz to die.

Gaining Support
The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights have called on the government of El Salvador to save Beatriz’s life.  Both El Salvador’s Minister of Health and Attorney General for Human Rights support allowing an exception to save Beatriz’ life, yet still  the Supreme Court has delayed making this literally life and death decision. Now this impoverished young mother has entered early stage renal failure as her pregnancy steadily destroys her kidneys.

The UN is behind her, El Salvadoran government officials are behind her, even pro-life advocates in the United States are behind her. It’s imperative that we keep up the pressure and demand they save her life. I don’t know about you, but I can’t allow another Savita Halappanavar to die. We can save Beatriz – we must save Beatriz.

We may only have days. Please, share this story and sign the petition: bit.ly/savebeatriz.

Beatriz hasn’t given up hope yet – we shouldn’t either.

Photo Credit: Vernon Shaw via Creative Commons

By now, all of us are aware of the tragic circumstances of Rehtaeh Parsons’ rape, torment, and suicide. I don’t need to provide the details of what happened to her. To be honest, and perhaps selfishly so, I know I can’t bear to write about it.

Because this isn’t the first time we have written about the suffering of a young girl, victimized by the very rape culture we are subjected to daily. We do this on what seems like a weekly basis: another teenage girl, another heartbreaking story, another sad ending.

So as we have done in the past – with Amanda Todd in British Columbia – and as we do now with Audrie Pott in California, we grieve. We grieve for the life of a girl who never really had a chance to live. We pain for her family; bewildered by what they had to go through and offering them our sympathy. We take comfort that now, maybe….just maybe… justice will prevail. That, for Rehtaeh, the Canadian system will do as it is supposed to do.

Rehtaeh Parsons died Sunday, nearly 18 months after an alleged rape by four high school boys. (Facebook)

I live where, sadly, Rehtaeh used to lived. Not in Nova Scotia per say, but in New Brunswick – its neighboring province. We, including Prince Edward Island, make up the Maritime Provinces of Canada; full of kind and compassionate people, surrounded by wild and unscathed beauty, with a population of only about 2 million.

But despite all the raw grandeur and the tight-knit communities of our region remains a very stark reality: a situation like Rehtaeh’s is not uncommon.

1 in 4 North American women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. But in the Maritimes, the rates of violence are higher than the already staggering average – violence against women is among the highest in the country and resources to help are frighteningly limited.

In Fredericton, New Brunswick, where I currently live, I have an 88% higher chance  of being sexually assaulted than in the rest of the country. Third highest in the country. The first? Saint John, New Brunswick (an approximate 1.5 hour drive from Fredericton), where women have a 132% higher than average chance of being sexually assault.

Yet, knowing that less than 1 in 10 sexual assaults that occur in Canada are actually reported, lower than any other violent crime, how many more acts of sexual violence are occurring in the Maritimes – my home – without us knowing? How many more women around me are suffering in silence?

The terrifying question remains: How worse off are we?

Because this is what the culture of rape is all about: isolating women, victimizing women, shaming women. It tells us that, for things to get better, we must change. It tells us that the growing rates of sexual assault are our fault.

Just as Rehtaeh continues to be blamed in the form of posters for support of the boys who assaulted her, all women are blamed for the sexual violence that is committed against us.

But the reality is it is society who is to blame.

• Society tells us that we are increasingly guilty of making false rape accusations, although research proves it’s a rarity.
• Society tells us that if a man is guilty of rape he will be held responsible, although statistics show us that sexual assault is the least likely of all violent crimes in Canada to result in a conviction.
• Society tells us that the police will find evidence if an assault takes place, although the justice system shows us that the prevalence of ‘unfounding’ in sexual assault cases, a finding of ‘a crime not committed’ by police, is highly variable across Canadian regions. In fact, such rates have been criticized for lack of consistency.

And society limits our sources of support.

• The only Planned Parenthood in the Province of New Brunswick closed its doors in 2006.
• The New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women was abolished by the provincial government in 2011.
• Funding to the capital city’s sexual health services was severely cut in 2011.
• Abortion services are also limited: no surgical abortions can take place on Prince Edward Island and the Morgentaler clinic, the Maritime’s only public abortion clinic, is not deemed ‘medically necessary’ and therefore not provincially funded.

In fact, rather than making services more accessible, and rather than providing funding to the limited services that are already available to us, New Brunswick politicians suggest creating ‘women only’ parking spots. It’s laughable, except that the neglect of women throughout the Maritime provinces is no laughing matter.

We are, as Alexandra at Feministing so poignantly said, “in a state of emergency”. The Maritime Provinces have been stuck in this ‘state’ for quite some time, and I for one have had enough.

I am tired of being scared in my home, and I am tired of being blamed for feeling the way I do.

What we have learned from this horrible situation is that to achieve justice for all of us – whether we live in the Maritimes, throughout Canada, or anywhere else in the world –we must get angry, we must demand change as did after hearing about Rehtaeh.

So, to the men and women of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island: be concerned, get angry, start acting. It’s time for change. Please – start conversations in your communities, form rallies, write letters. It’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Let’s make the most of it.

For assistance in the Maritime Provinces:

In New Brunswick

• Fredericton Sexual Assault Crisis Centre
• Let’s Talk about It Campaign

In Nova Scotia

• Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women
• Nova Scotia Domestic Violence Resource Centre
• Halifax Sexual Health (formerly Planned Parenthood)
• Avalon Sexual Assault Centre
• Antigonish Women’s Centre

In Prince Edward Island

• PEI Rape and Sexual Assault Centre
• PEI Advisory Council on the Status of Women

Note: A) This post contains strong language and graphic descriptions. B) This is long, because this topic is complicated and difficult and cannot be reduced to 800 words. C) There is not “overkilling” this topic.

There is a photograph being shared in Facebook of a woman cowering in a corner, eyes downcast, as large man standing in the foreground swings his fist at her head. The caption reads, “Women deserve equal rights. And lefts.”

AT&T, American Express, Cubesmart and Ancestry.com are among the page’s sponsors today.

This image has been reported to Facebook repeatedly. Their response is: “Thanks for your report. We reviewed the photo you reported, but found it doesn’t violate Facebook’s Community Standard on hate speech, which includes posts or photos that attack a person based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or medical condition.”

The “joke” isn’t offensive.  What is offensive is fact that the infliction of pain on girls and women –pain inflicted because they are female – is entertaining and acceptable. As with rape humor, domestic violence humor reduces girls and women to their body parts and communicates that we are violable for other people’s purposes and entertainment.  Helpless and full of shame. At the same times, this content perpetuates harmful stereotypes about what makes men “real” – violence, control, infliction of pain on others, lack of empathy, never weak or helpless.  This is our culture of cruelty and domination.  Its how we teach boys and girls to be.  Not Facebook’s problem, I know.

But, imagine a photograph of a gay or African American man standing under a tree with noose hanging from a branch and some white guys standing nearby laughing with the caption, “Hanging out!” Because I don’t know how this is different.

A few months ago, a Facebook spokesperson explained that, “Having the freedom to debate serious issues like this is how we fight prejudice.” Maybe this images and others like it are biting social satire? An entrée into incisive debate about a controversial social problem.  Here are parts of the debate (let’s call it, “When is raping, beating and brutalizing girls and women funny?”) over this image taken from more than 300 comments (photo has more than 5,000 likes).

• “I don’t care what anyone says if a woman deserves to be hit than hit her. there a difference from being a beater and slapping a bitch when she needs it. there probably wouldn’t be some many loud mouth bitches or sluts if they got slapped up when needed.and keep in mind I’m a woman saying this.

• “And same goes for a man.sometimes people need to be hit.”

• “It’s a joke. Everyone knows beating up a wife/husband is wrong.”

• “Stop with this shit Women already have more rights then men so stfu.”

• “Feminism at this point is the fat kid who wamts both cake and pie and can choose one so they cry and whine till they get both. Its to support women to the equal status as men yet they treat guys as unequal. Want to be equal then treat both sides the same.”

• “im not a girl… but they deserve = rights.. if i known that guy id kick hes ass…”

• “Equal rights are equal rights, bitches can’t be picky about what they want and don’t want for them.”

• “Not the worst thing I’ve seen on the internet. Pretty silly tho. Domestic violence happens to men too, and pretending it’s just a female problem furthers the stigma men have in speaking out against the violence they experience. So for all the guys who are like “Hyurr durr, this is funny, feminists can gtfo”, remember: you are entitled to equal rights, lefts, and up-one-side-down-the-others, too.”

• “Dont hit women. Ignore them. Its a lot worse then hitting them.”

• “You know… not all women are whores, I mean you’ve got to know that because abusing women or children is not right!”

• “You ‘feminists’ need to pull your heads out of your asses and accept that you deserve a beating if you fucking provoked it, stop acting like such victims all the fucking time.”

• “IF YOU’VE EVER BEEN IN AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP and you are reading this: Don’t worry, you are not alone in believing that this is false and horrible. If Facebook had a “DISLIKE” button, there would be far more dislikes than likes. Abuse is always wrong. Demand better of yourself and others. Love, forgive, and don’t accept violent behavior in others.”

What is interesting is that rape and beating women up is controversial, normalized and “debatable,” in a way that targeted violence against other marginalized and minority groups no longer is to most “reasonable” people. That’s why I keep making the point that this isn’t about censorship or law, but about norms. Pro and anti comments were fairly equally split between self-identified male and female commenters.  That’s why I keep making the point that this isn’t a battle of men versus women, but worldviews.

People are so inured to images, tv shows, movies, music, memes and advertising that use violence against women for entertainment that most people don’t even think about it as real. And while maybe 12 celebrities today can make pointed rape jokes in ways that reveal the horror of rape’s reality or the ugliness and pain of living with daily domestic violence, most people can’t. Instead, content like this usually mocks victims and glorifies abusers and violence in general. Facebook makes no such distinction.  So here, as elsewhere, violence against women and girls becomes a fiction, a fantasy, something they watch as they rack up points in a game, enjoy a drink or eat dinner.  This isn’t “offensive,” it’s an atrocity.  While we do everything possible to hunt down two violent young men terrorizing a city, we willfully ignore the daily violence that people are subjected to in their own homes every day in acts of individual terrorism.

The only way to tear this culture down is to object to it every time you encounter it.

Facebook moderators contact authorities about real instances of violence and crime every day.   As others and I have written before, “Not real” content depicting rape and the physical abuse of girls and women is often categorized by Facebook as [Humor] and frequently surfaces in the news. For example, a recent photograph of a man carrying a limp girl with the caption, “ Rohyphnol: When Traditional Dating Methods Just Aren’t Cutting it!” or the page “I Love the Rape Van.” Facebook has a detailed and thorough process for handling complaints about this sort of material and is on the record saying that it is not in the business of defining and changing culture, or interested in policing free speech. This is false. Facebook does both of these things simply through the process of reviewing and editing pages created and by having a reporting structure for complains. The company has actually been lauded for its approach in other situations.

Of course, it may simply be that objectionable pages and content appear in Facebook in proportion to the rate of their production by users.  The point remains however:  Facebook has terms, conditions and guidelines.  By default that makes Facebook and arbiter and interpreter of norms whether it cares to be or not.

Last week I wrote a piece in the Guardian, Facebook’s Big Misogyny Problem, about what has been happening to the administrators of a page called Rapebook, and an Everyday Sexism Project initiative to raise advertisers’ awareness that their ads are showing up in Facebook on pages featuring violence against women. What happened after Rapebook perfectly illustrates why it was created in the first place.

“At first, people started posting pictures of women and young girls being raped or beat up and commenting on the page saying things like, “I will skull-fuck your children,” explains Trista Hendren, one of the page’s founding administrators, who became the target violent threats and daily graphic abuse on the site.

Within days of its creation, the site was the target of trolls, Facebook users themselves, posting crude commentary, links to violent pornography and rape, Facebook pages depicting rape, including of babies, rape “humor,” malicious software links, and rape and death threats (for example, “ fuck that. hit that hoe,” and “Domestic violence is a 2 way street you hypocritical cunt.”) Personal information was shared online. Hendren’s picture was used to create rape memes.  After months of working closely with Facebook, to mixed results, Hendren stopped using Facebook and Rapebook admins have shut the page down.  She is now working with the FBI.  This is not about “debate.” It is about silencing. Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher and professor of law at University of Chicago, squarely identifies similar incidences as gender-based hate crimes.

As I wrote last week, a common retort to all of this is, “This is the Internet. It’s offensive. If you don’t like it, leave.”  But, Facebook is NOT “the Internet.” That’s why it fascinates me – because it illustrates how norms work and how they can be challenged. Facebook has principles and community standards that create a reasonable expectation in users that it will enforce rules it itself has established in an unbiased manner.

In summary, what I said last week is this:

First, Facebook’s guidelines prohibit hate speech review process that does not recognize sex-based hate speech and its case-by-case approach cannot assess how an overall hostile environment (treating rape and violence against women literally as a joke or ignoring content that is viscerally threatening and desensitizing) is threatening, unsafe and harmful to users (male and female).

Second, girls and women, acculturated to a world where one in three women will be sexually assaulted (in the US, that number is one in five; for men, one in 77), cannot separate this reality from their online experiences. Domestic violence and homicide statistics reflect a similar epidemic.  This dynamic is reflected online, where more than 75% of targeted online abuse is aimed at women. Women experience and assess safety differently from men and Facebook’s policies do not take this into account.

Third, users employing sex-based hate language and images manipulate Facebook’s system and lack of introspection regarding sexist norms. Over and over images and language reducing girls and women to their body parts, their appearances, their pornographic and rape potential are deemed not credibly harmful and threatening, when studies demonstrate repeatedly that they are. In addition, almost all of the content related to rape and domestic violence jokes features women as victims, which perpetuate rape myths and deny the reality of male victims of abuse.

Fourth, what people like Hendren are protesting is not the result of easily mocked “hurt feelings” or “offensiveness,” but systemically tolerated hate, degradation, objectification and marginalization of girls and women, behind which loiters actual violence.  Minimizing their concerns (i.e. “they’re only trolls, it’s not a credible threat”) is a symptom of the very problem they are challenging. Threats provoke anxiety and change behavior – which makes them credible.

Fifth, it’s important to note that people who supported Rapebook’s efforts were unwilling to publicly show their support in Facebook, for fear of similar targeting and abuse. Hendren’s leaving Facebook, Rapebook’s closing and the hesitancy of people to support them publicly are actual losses of free speech for these users (overwhelmingly women) as the result of bullying, harassment and misogyny. Women and their male allies who are are disproportionately negatively harmed.

A new Facebook page was recently created, Sheryl Sandberg Lean-In And Remove Misogyny from FB. This page, like Rapebook, is an example of individual women doing exactly what Sandberg prescribes in her new book, Lean-In, but encountering overwhelming systemic obstacles and biased norms that prevent them from succeeding. It is not Sheryl Sandberg’s job to purge the world of misogyny or to singlehandedly equalize cultural norms being employed at Facebook. However, she is at the center of a perfect storm: In addition to being Facebook’s COO, and the author of Lean In, a corporate-power-feminist manifesto, Sandberg is on the board of VDAY. V-Day’s intent, ending violence against girls and women globally, is seriously undermined by Facebook’s unbalanced approach.

Individuals can communicate directly with Facebook by registering complaints using the Facebook option on every page, by engaging in “debate” when they encounter content that is hateful and by writing and speaking openly about these topics.  Facebook, I’d like to think, is doing the same.

Cover Photo via Memegenerator

In the hours after the announcement of the Steubenville rape case verdict, the coverage has been non-stop. No big surprise in our 24/7 news culture. What should be a surprise, but sadly isn’t, is the sympathetic tone being taken by some reporters about the future of the two boys (or young men, depending on how you classify high school students who are 16- and 17-years old). According the Ms. Foundation, here’s what some of our major news outlets have been saying about the two students who have been convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl:

Shocked? I’m not.

Because it wasn’t that long ago when the New York Times wrote a story (for which it and its author eventually came under fire) about the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in Texas, which contained passages like:

“[H]ow could their young men have been drawn into such an act?”

and

“Where was [the victim's] mother? What was her mother thinking?” said … one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record.”

But it’s not just the media. Even the Supreme Court had its moment when it upheld the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in a decision that held that a high school cheerleader who is sexually assaulted might not even have the right to sit out on a cheer for her alleged attacker:

In her capacity as cheerleader, H.S. served as a mouthpiece through which [the school] could disseminate speech, namely, support for its athletic teams. Insofar as the First Amendment does not require schools to promote particular student speech, [the school] had no duty to promote H.S.’s message by allowing her to cheer or not cheer, as she saw fit. Moreover, this act constituted substantial interference with the work of the school because, as a cheerleader, H.S. was at the basketball game for the purpose of cheering, a position she undertook voluntarily.

Let’s not forget about journalist Lara Logan who was sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square. After the initial outrage over the incident, some commentators wondered publicly if Logan had brought the attacks on herself simply by being a woman covering a story in a Muslim country that has very different attitudes about where women should be and what they should be wearing in public than most of us in the West.

And, of course, we shouldn’t forget the coverage of the sexual assault of an 11-year-old in Maryland, where the newspaper headline initially seemed to blame the girl:

“Mother finds daughter performing sex act on man staying in home.”

I know you get the point.  This post could become an encyclopedic recitation of the numbers of stories like this where victims of sexual assault — even those who are still in elementary school — are portrayed as vixens behaving inappropriately, when we all know what the real truth is.

So then how do we get the media, as well as judicial scholars, to stop spreading the idea that the perpetrators of sexual assault are to be viewed as victims just as the victims themselves are? I hate to say this because I am no fan of censorship,  but maybe if we could keep books like 50 Shades of Grey from topping the bestseller lists, that would be a good start.

Joanne Bamberger is the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Broad Side. Her book, Mothers of Intention: How Women and Social Media are Revolutionizing Politics in America, is an Amazon.com best-seller.

This post was originally published on The Broad Side and is cross-posted with permission.

Photo credit: notanyron via photopin cc.

Graphic credit Ms. Foundation for Women.

Over the past two weeks, the HBO show ‘Girls’ has focused on the mental health challenges of Hannah. We have been introduced to Hannah’s secret – her shameful struggle with anxiety characterized by obsessive tendencies, a necessity to repeat tasks 8 times, often until the point of embarrassment, injury (as we saw last week), and exhaustion.

In the past, many TV shows have attempted to portray the realities of those struggling to maintain good mental health. These portrayals are often inaccurate, used as the butt of jokes, dangerously perpetuating the stigma too often associated with mental health related struggles. As a recent example, a character on Glee ‘developed’ bulimia, as if to assume that an eating disorder is chosen and then easily eradicated. Such misinformation and lack of seriousness is dangerous – it stops those in need from seeking help from supportive others; it has been estimated that the majority of those with a mental health concern choose to conceal their struggles and avoid professional help. It keeps far too many isolated; 2 out of every 5 people experiencing a mood, anxiety, or substance use disorder will seek assistance. It reduces quality of life.

But to my surprise, ‘Girls’ nailed it. Finally! Mainstream TV discussed a mental illness and did it in the right way; it wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t cured after one session or dose of a magic pill, and discussing it wasn’t funny, or natural, or easy. Hannah struggled. Hannah was shamed. Blamed. Hindered. The mental health community was elated. Having admitted to similar struggles, Lena Dunham portrayed her own experiences with mental illness, and in rare fashion, did it in a way that urged those needing help to reach out and find it.

As someone who has been challenged by maintaining mental health (for a quick and dirty summary of my mental health history you can read a previous post) and is now involved in the mental health community in various capacities, I was excited to hear the response from the feminist community. Surely a story line involving a powerful yet empowering discussion of a ubiquitous health concern that affects nearly half of the world’s population would lead to discussion.

I waited…and it didn’t come. There have been ‘Girls’ related posts about the abortion episode, her consistent nakedness, and a general discussion of virginity. Yet, a raw and accurate portrayal of mental illness went virtually unnoticed by the feminist community. In fact, one of the only pieces I read discussing the ‘Girls’ mental health story line  joked that the writers may have considered calling one of the episodes “Crazy Eights” (poking fun at Hannah’s painstaking compulsion to repeat tasks in sets of 8), and referred to her as “mentally ill” in comparison to her “mentally chill” ex-boyfriend.

I was initially disappointed. Now I’m just sad.

Over the past several decades, feminists have united together with the common goal of bringing a voice to all too common gendered issues: reproductive rights, violence, and income inequality. Brave women, then and now, have made incredible ground on these complex and all too deserving societal issues.

But just as these issues which far too often inhibit the livelihood of women has required us to fight, so too does mental health.

Why? Because mental health is a gendered problem.

The prevalence of common mental illness (examples include anxiety and depression) is significantly higher among women. The World Health Organization suggests that unipolar depression is twice as common in women and is thought to become the second leading cause of worldwide disability by 2020. The culture of violence, too, has resulted in women becoming the largest group to struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

And even when we have the ability to seek assistance, which is a rarity, our gender creates a barrier to appropriate treatment. The paternalism of our medical system continues to negatively impact women. We are much more likely to be diagnosed with depression and prescribed medication as treatment, even when men score similarly on assessment tests. We are also nearly 3 times more likely to be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. The over representation of women in psychological areas is heightened among women of colour and low economics.

And let’s not forget society’s depiction of postpartum depression, sordidly referred to as the ‘baby blues’, as if to infer that ‘mom is just a little sad’ and it isn’t a very real, very common, and very hazardous psychological concern.

There are significant gender inequalities within mental health. We have fought barriers in order to discuss other taboo subjects, so why aren’t we talking about this?

I know we have a lot of battles to fight, but we have to fight this one. The well-being of millions of women, around the world, are depending on it.

Photocredit:  HBO ‘Girls’ via wikimedia commons

Or Why a “Small” Consent Revolution Needs to be a “Big” Consent Revolution

The idea of consent, in terms of how we think about sex, sexual abuse, and power, is fairly new and historically radical. Laurie Penny, describing shifting attitudes about these topics, called it a “small revolution,” earlier this week in The New Statesman. A lot of people, especially those with power, are reeling from the unsettling idea that every person, including those without traditional access to power and status, can claim their bodies as their own — maybe even legally and without shame. Maybe in offices. At parties. On school buses. In bedrooms and sacristies. Everyday we hear stories about institutions, places and people surprised to be caught in the crosswinds of this evolving understanding.  It’s hard to cede power.  But, consent is a basic prerequisite to preventing and ending violence against women and the principles behind it far exceed “just rape.”  Consider this list:

• The Catholic Church
• Casa Pio
• Penn State and Jerry Sandusky
• The BBC and Jimmy Savile
• The Boy Scouts

These are with little exception examples of men, operating in virtually all male power structures, not respecting the idea of consent and the rights to bodily autonomy of those without. I know that saying “men rape” is disturbing. So is saying that communities, filled with women, support them. But, this is, as we keep seeing, an overwhelmingly gendered crime. Not saying it out loud will change nothing. And, while women do abuse children sexually, they do not have the power to do it systematically, in groups and behind the cover of institutions.

For this to end, men, who tend to be those with greater power in families, businesses, religions, government and in public space in general, need to actively engage in building cultures of respect and consent.

These cases, involving the widespread sexual assault of girls and, most frightening to many, boys, jolt sensibilities because they put into stark relief power differentials that are the scaffolding of rape and abuse and they rudely belie comforting rape myths. Rape myths that say, for example, that violent strangers rape women; that girls ask for it by the way they dress; or that we all lie anyway. They show that rape isn’t just “something that just happens” because poor, or dark, or mentally ill men can’t control themselves. They demonstrate the predatory nature of rapists who target their victims and depend on social and institutional tolerance to rape again and again. Now add these, which aside from Steubenville you may not have heard about, to the list:

• The Steubenville Rape Crew
• The Cleveland, Texas gang rapists
• The New Orleans gang rapists

Or in “other places,” where names are publicized:

• Jyoti Singh Pandey in India
• Isha Nembhard in England
• Anene Booysen in South Africa
• Nevin Yildirem in Turkey

Instead of little boys and girls, these are teenage girls and young women, targeted and raped.  Also graphic, jarring and myth-shattering. These women were targeted because of vulnerability and their cases also demonstrate power differences and institutional enabling.  ”Private matters” spilling graphically into public spaces. Yildrem’s case tidily disposes the idea that women with victim mindsets, implied apparently by just pointing out crimes against them, must “want it” or they’d put up a fight.

While these are sad and fatiguing itemizations, they are not “new.” These are “extreme,” well-publicized cases of daily events. Many “everyday” assaults, say on U.S .college campuses where 28 percent of women are assaulted, take place because of of people’s differing understandings of consent and their expectations regarding who says “yes” and what “no” means. The point of consent as a norm is to make these situations unambiguous and rare. This means we have to accept that telling rapists not to rape, or to face real consequences, works. As it clearly does.

What IS relatively new is that we know about these cases, and more about rape rates everywhere, and we are not tolerating this manifestation of abusive power and entitlement as we used to. A central part of this intolerance has to do with how we’ve changed ideas about consent.  This change is destabilizing because the idea of consent far exceeds “just” how we think about sex and forces us to think about power. Which means that now people with power, that would be mainly men, who before may have dismissed rape have to pay attention.

This idea that consent and respect for boundaries is necessary is as “unnatural” and alien to some people as bathing would once have been. The same people who are mystified are also anxious because what an insistence on consent does is reverse the traditional trajectory of blaming victims as individuals for their rapes and assaults and puts the responsibility on the people with power and the structures that protect them.

In the U.S., we have a long and rich historical tradition of the appropriating of people’s bodies by the uncontested powerful.  In our near history, where black women were raped day after day after day,  rape was an integral part of social and economic order.  The legacy of this bubbles occasionally erupts.  Similarly, in many contexts still the ability to assault someone sexually is a benefit that comes with a job, a title, a marriage, or simply being a certain kind of man in a deeply misogynistic culture.

I genuinely understand the violence against women varies across nations and problems with sliding up and down scales, but each person experiences their assault as a violated individual whose consent is disregarded. That’s why, while the rank injustice of a seven-year old Thai girl being forced to have sex with more than 20 men a day might make you shake if you stop to really think about it, it doesn’t diminish the inhumanity of an Irish boy forced to endure regular assault at the hands of his priest or gang-rapes of young women and sexual assaults of very old ones in Texas or New York.

A culture of consent, recognizing this fact, is based on the rights of potential victims instead of on the rights of potential rapists.  Which would you prefer? Because now, locally and globally, what we have are traditional, religious, legislative, judicial and cultural rape tolerances built into our systems that protect the rights of rapists and abusers. Those who rape and sexually assault count on these disparities and take calculated risks because culture has historically rewarded or favored them.

Things DO change.  Rape rates in the U.S., while still absurdly high, have declined steadily – 60 percent in the past 20 years. The less we tolerate it, the less it happens. Still though, today in the U.S. someone is raped or sexually assaulted every two minutes. Globally the numbers are the same or worse. And, of course, this is where I have to say false accusations in rape cases are no more likely than they are in any other type of crime.

Last year, as the result of years of feminist activism, the FBI changed its 80+ year definition of rape to reflect consent (as in unconscious people cannot consent) and include men.  And, while it made this change, consent as a legal standard is still a very difficult one for most people to grasp and employ.  For a good overview of what affirmative consent in the law means read Thomas MacAulay Millar’s excellent and comprehensive piece on the topic at Yes Means Yes.

We are in the early, early, early days of what consent represents. Today is the opening day for the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. As Michele Bachelet, head of UNWomen, said only moments ago while addressing the Commission, “We have made progress in norms and standards. Now we must talk on the challenge of implementation and accountability.” And for that, we need men do it with us.

I talk to people all the time who refuse to acknowledge that rape and sexual assault are abuses of power.  If you still doubt this, think about why a man took the time to carve the words “mine.”  In North Carolina. Not New Dehli. People are not born to rape other people. We teach them that it’s defining, useful and acceptable. We can teach them them that it is none of those things. Misogynistic custom, culture, religion and so-called honour are not worth preserving.

Resources

YOU CAN LIVE STREAM THE UN COMMISSION’S WEEKLONG EVENTS HERE. or follow on Twitter at @UN_Women.

UNWomen
Men Can Stop Rape
Bell Bajao
Say NO – Unite
White Ribbon Campaign
No More

This post is originally published on Huffington Post . It is cross-posted with permission.

Photo credit Szagi via Creative Common.

Rape, rape culture, domestic violence, and violence against women impact us all. The Pixel Project, a virtual, volunteer-led nonprofit, works to eradicate violence against women globally. They are currently running the Valentine 2013 YouTube Cover Carnival contest to raise awareness through the power and artistry of music. They dedicated the contest to Jyoti Singh Pandey, “the Delhi Gang Rape victim, to honour her courage in fighting for her life until the very end.”

I had the honor and pleasure to interview Founder and President Regina Yau about the Pixel Project and their creative and inspirational project.

The Pixel Project’s mission is to raise awareness, funds and volunteer power to combat violence against women; get men and boys involved; “generate conversation by tearing down taboos and creating safe online spaces;” and “challenge expectations and inspire activism.” Passionate about building a grassroots network, they provide entry level positions for diverse people to participate – by sharing their skills and unique experiences — who may never have thought about activism before. Pixel Project wants to engage and inspire people through art, social media, online strategies, and pop culture to work towards ending violence against women.

The Valenine 2013 YouTube Cover Carnival contest runs until 9PM EST, March 14, 2013. Yau told me the response to the contest has been extremely positive. In fact, they have extended the original deadline to accommodate more artists. They have received entries from musicians around the globe, including from the U.S. Sweden, Australia and Canada. Jyoti’s “story crossed boundaries and borders, so should this tribute.”

Without further adieu, here is my interview with the lovely and articulate Regina Yau on the YouTube Cover Carnival, Jyoti Singh Pandey’s bravery, Delhi being called the “rape capital,”  and how to end rape and violence against women:

1. Megan Kearns: What inspired you to start the Valentine 2013 YouTube Cover Carnival and the Music For Pixels Campaign?

Regina Yau: All The Pixel Project’s campaigns combine social media, pop culture and the arts in fun and unexpected ways. Music is a natural choice for us and the “Music For Pixels” campaign combines social media and music. It is also our first YouTube-focused campaign and the YouTube Cover Carnival is just one of three programmes under the campaign. The other two programmes are our year-end ’16 For 16’ digital EP and the ‘Artiste of the Month’ program (currently being developed) for established YouTube artistes.

As YouTube is the most popular video sharing channel in the world, the music video element of the “Music For Pixels” campaign has added another dimension and increased momentum for our social media outreach given that we have previously mostly campaigned through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, Pinterest and other text and link-based social media channels.

For us, working with popular YouTube artistes such AHMIR, Ali Brustofski, J Rice, Lisa Lavie and YouTube producers such as Mike Kalombo makes a lot of sense because their music is already on social media and they all have a ready-made built-in audience of extremely supportive fans.

In addition, using a visually stunning YouTube music video featuring a fabulous cover of a very popular song really helps us get the message of love and anti-violence out by:

• Getting the attention of people who love music but who might not necessarily have an interest in the cause.
• Giving our supporters an extra cool tool to share and take the message viral.

2. MK: I love that the Carnival is spreading awareness about violence against women and supporting musicians. Why did you choose music as a medium?

RY: To us, music is a tool for engaging the audience emotionally with the cause without resorting to triggering materials such as horrific imagery. Many people who would otherwise have taken the first step towards supporting the cause have been put off by such tactics in the past because, let’s face it: it’s difficult to face up to the ugliness of humanity inherent in violence against the women and girls in our lives. So we use music as a way of getting people aware of the issue and to get interested in finding out more about it and how they can help.

So, we created the Music For Pixels campaign as a platform for us to work with YouTube artistes to educate the online audience about violence against women in a positive way because music is one of the most effective ways of getting people to absorb an important message while being entertained.

3. MK: Who is the intended audience?

RY: The Music For Pixels campaign (and all the programs under it) is aimed at three different audiences in line with our mission to get people the world over engaged with the cause:

• For women and girls who have experienced any gender-based violence, we aim to send them a positive and empowering message that they matter, that they are beautiful inside and out no matter what. One DV survivor who supports our work left a comment that the song “makes my soul dance!” That was such a satisfying moment!
• For the general audience including men and young people, we aim to encourage them to think about, value and engage in positive and healthy relationships with women and girls in their families and communities.
• For musicians/artists, it gives them a platform for using their music to say NO to violence against women while getting exposure to new audiences or, in the case of the YouTube Cover Carnival, getting prizes that will help their careers along.

4. MK: There are many songs dealing with empowerment as well as with rape and domestic violence. How did you select the Greatest Love of All and Little Things?

RY: We wanted to give artistes a choice of 2 empowering, positive and popular songs to cover – one that is very recent hit on the charts, and one that is a classic song that most people would have heard at some point in their lives.

‘Little Things’ is our choice for the recent hit song because the lyrics are about loving a woman for who she is, even the little quirks that she herself does not like. Too many women find themselves in relationships with men who, at best, don’t appreciate them for who they are and who, at worst, abuse them because of it.  This song is a reminder that we need to be more accepting and supportive of the women and girls in our lives and empower them to love and value themselves.

‘Greatest Love of All’ is the people’s choice song – voted in by our supporters from around the world in an online vote a couple of weeks before we launched the Valentine 2013 YouTube Cover Carnival. It’s a very timely and poignant song choice because this month marks the 1 year anniversary of Whitney Houston’s death and Whitney herself was a domestic violence survivor.

5. MK: Why did you want to showcase the Carnival around Valentine’s Day?

RY: We actually run the Carnival twice a year – February for the Valentine’s Day season and August for the Fall edition of the contest.

The Valentine YouTube Cover Carnival dovetails nicely with the ‘Season of Love’ which provides a focal point for us to work with artistes to spread the theme of positive and empowering love through music. In February, the Carnival becomes a platform for spreading positive messages about healthy loving relationships to counteract the overwhelming number of popular ‘love’ songs out there which extol the virtues of unhealthy relationships, rampant misogyny and even abuse.

6. MK: I know you’ve dedicated the Valentine 2013 YouTube Cover Carnival to Jyoti Singh Pandey because of her strength and courage. What made you choose Jyoti specifically rather than dedication to all victims and survivors?

RY: As mentioned before, our “Music For Pixels” campaign (including the YouTube Cover Carnival) is partly created to use music to send survivors and victims a positive and empowering message that they matter, that they are beautiful inside and out, that there is help out there, that there is hope out there, that they can rebuild their lives.

We have specifically chosen to dedicate the Valentine 2013 YouTube Cover Carnival to Jyoti Singh Pandey because her horrific case has been a tremendous force in raising awareness about Violence Against Women (VAW) by bringing it to the attention of the worldwide audience. She has become a potent symbol because she put a name, face and human story to the horror of gender-based violence that makes it far more difficult for anyone to sweep the issue under the carpet.

…We hope that many more artists will join the contest to help keep the momentum of the anti-Violence Against Women activism triggered by Jyoti’s rape and murder alive and going strong. As it is, despite the initial heavy media coverage on her case, interest is waning in India and worldwide as is the usual pattern for any high-profile VAW case. This time, we are determined to keep her story at the forefront of people’s minds to really lock in the message that VAW is unacceptable and music is a positive way of doing so.

 7. MK: Delhi has been called India’s “Rape Capital.” Do you think that’s an apropos or an unfair moniker?

RY: Delhi may have the highest reported incidents of rape but to call it India’s “Rape Capital” is to be incredibly reductive of the issue of VAW in India. To put things in context: the Trustlaw Women/Reuters survey of women’s rights experts and anti-VAW that I took part in last year, India was named the worst country for women among the G20 nations because of the extremely high and brutal levels of VAW in the country. Apart from rape, street harassment, sexual assault and domestic violence, they have culturally specific forms of gender-based violence including female infanticide, dowry murder and forced marriage.

In addition, VAW statistics anywhere will be skewed because it is still a taboo issue which victims do not report out of shame, fear of victim-blaming and the potential for triggering further violence against them.

Delhi may be in the spotlight because of Jyoti’s death and its position as India’s capital but it is far more constructive to see it as the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tackling VAW in India.

8. MK: After Jyoti Singh Pandey’s rape, demonstrations were held in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Why do you think Jyoti’s attack in particular ignited such an outpouring of outrage and activism?

RY: In a nutshell, I think one of the major reasons why Jyoti’s attack became a trigger for public outrage in these countries is that it comes at a point in history in these countries when people are slowly by surely gaining more education and have simply had enough of the entrenched and stark inequalities that relegate women to second-class status and which leave them constantly experiencing (or being threatened by) violence against them just because they were born female.

I’d say that the most important thing that Jyoti’s death did was provide people in these countries with a focal point for local anti-VAW activism. Oft-times, horrendous VAW cases may light the fuse of outrage but rarely does it provoke widespread public action. This is what is so astounding about Jyoti’s case – that it was the catalyst for widespread public protests.

I just wish that this did not come at the cost of Jyoti’s life (or any other woman’s life, for that matter).

9. MK: Jyoti Singh Pandey was incredibly brave and her death a tragedy. How can we take steps to prevent another senseless tragedy?

RY: Most individuals will find the issue of Violence Against Women (VAW) absolutely overwhelming, discouraging and uncomfortable because VAW is a very ugly and culturally entrenched and condoned form of human rights abuse in most, if not all cultures. It is so easy and convenient to think: ‘What can I do anyway? I am just one person!’ and just shut it all out and not bother at all.

However, the key to preventing further tragedies is for individuals and communities to take action to stop the violence and change the social and cultural norms that condone VAW. Any government can pass law after law but if it isn’t implemented and practiced on the grassroots level, it’s pretty much useless.

A good place for most people to begin taking action to stop the violence is to acknowledge that VAW exists and that it is not a “women’s issue” but a family and community issue that affects everyone on some level. With at least 1 in 3 women and girls worldwide experiencing some kind of VAW at some point in their lives, all of us do have victims and survivors in our social circles – they could be your mother, your sister, your daughter, your friend.

The next step after acknowledgement is to never remain silent when you are witness to misogyny or VAW. Misogyny feeds the gender inequalities that propagate VAW and VAW literally costs lives as we have seen in the case Jyoti and so many other women. Summon up your courage to speak out, take action and get support from others to intervene.

And if you catch yourself thinking: “My one action isn’t going to change anything,” just remember: every action, no matter how small, no matter how insignificant it seems, is yet another contribution to stopping violence against women.

10. MK: What is the message or lesson from the contest you hope people take away?

RY: As with all our campaigns, we hope that the YouTube Cover Carnival will send out a loud and clear message that Violence Against Women needs to stop and that there are positive steps that individuals and communities can take to do so.

We also hope that by dedicating the Valentine 2013 YouTube Cover Carnival to Jyoti, we will remind people that VAW is a pressing human rights issue with fatal consequences for the women and girls in our communities if it remains unaddressed and unchecked.

The Pixel Project’s Valentine 2013 YouTube Cover Carnival contest runs until 9PM EST, March 7, 2013.

Photo credit The Pixel Project.

Recently, in an article for the Good Men Project , I referred to “grey rape” a term popularized by Cosmopolitan in a 2007 article titled “The New Kind of Date Rape.”  I continue to place scare quotes around the term because while it does the work of communicating the issue that I am trying to talk about, it is also a term that can lead to victim-blaming—and that is not something I ever want to do. “Grey rape” implies that rape occurs on a spectrum.

In order to discuss the problematic issue of rape being on a sliding scale, some key terms and ideas need to be identified and expanded upon. This idea of ‘grey rape’ is surrounded by context. The topic of rape is a big one, and a less than thorough examination of the topic does not do it justice.

What is rape culture?

Put simply, rape culture is the prevalence and minimization of sexual violence.
Dissenters of the existence of rape culture often cite the prevalence of falsely reported rapes, a topic that Nigel Hawks describes with great sensitivity in an article on StraightStatistics.org. He ends his article with the statement, “the statistics are so open to interpretation that what you believe they show depends very much on the preconceptions you start out with”.

RAINN statistics point to the prevalence of rape for Men, Women and Children in America:

• 1 out of every 6 American woman have been the victims of attempted or completed rape
• 1 out of every 33 American men have been the victims of attempted or completed rape

As to the existence of rape culture, it would appear to be obvious that it exists. Casual rape jokes proliferate on Facebook. There’s been a bright spotlight shone on the gang rapes in India, and there’s a never-ending reel of rape victims on the nightly news. Surely, these things hint that something is amiss in our society. The term “grey rape” is a mixture of assumptions that are framed around the perceived difficulty around responsibility and consent. A more recent article written by Elena Klaw, et al. (2005), explains the summation of a study which sought to further challenge rape culture.

The processes involved in developing rape consciousness appear parallel to those involved in the development of feminist identity. Awareness, or a cognitive realization about the pandemic of sexual violence, appears fundamental to the development of antirape attitudes and behaviors.

As expected, the emotional reactions that seem to accompany this awareness are often intense, ranging from helplessness and grief, to rage and empowerment. Social activism, an integral part of rape consciousness, appears to be premised upon a cognitive and emotional processing of the role of rape culture in daily life.

What are rape myths?

A study by Martha Burt found that many Americans believe troublesome misconceptions about rape—in her study they are called  rape myths. These include the perceived level of promiscuity of the victim (i.e. she’s a slut), and the idea that if a girl engages in necking or petting and she lets things ‘get out of hand’ it is her own fault.

Additionally, attitudes towards rape are strongly connected to a cultural acceptance of interpersonal violence. In Burt’s study over half of respondents think that reported rapes may be because a woman is trying to get revenge on a man, or is trying to cover up an illegitimate pregnancy.

The study was written in 1980, and if it seems peculiar to cite a study that is older than the writer of this article, consider that the rape myths presented in the paper are still in the popular lexicon today. If anything, victim-blaming has increased by opponents who seek to disprove the existence of rape culture. The same type of people who claim intoxicated women avoid responsibility for their own actions by declaring rape.

What about false rape accusations?

Before even delving into this topic, a reader needs to understand that statistics in the social sciences are not like those in the hard sciences—they are often open to interpretation and the replicability of the studies is often impossible. This makes the research fall short of the standards of the scientific method. In addition, there is not one defined use of the phrase “false rape accusations” and so researchers are often using different criteria and thus counting different things. There is also a long-standing argument between researchers and criminal justice professionals on the instance of false rape charges.

There is a popular study used in websites that wish to raise concern over the prevalence of falsely reported rape charges. The study was written by Eugene Kanin and published in 1994. It was an examination of one small town said to have resources, such as a polygraph, available for use in all cases. The study found a riveting 41% of the cases were admitted false by the complainant. The trouble is the sample size was 109 people, and because Kanin was not able to release the name of the police force the data is not independently verified. Additionally David Lisak criticized the article as being less than a scientific study that lacked systemic methodology. Basically Lasik took issue with the fact that Kanin recorded a case as a false report when the police department notified him that a case had classified as such.  Further, polygraph test on complainants (the victims of the cirem) could certainly be viewed as intimidation by the police department.

I’m not a statistician, and so my tendency in the exploration of this topic would be to go with statistics verified by professional organizations like the FBI, but again there are issues of classification. They name the “data unfounded rape accusation” which is not synonymous with “false rape allegation”. David Lasik’s study however, named the percentage of false rape reports at as 5.9% and added, “these results are consistent with those of other studies that have used similar methodologies to determine the prevalence of false rape reporting”.

Now, what is ‘grey rape’?

Recently, Richard Graham, a Tory MP came under fire for the same old song and dance about how to avoid rape. Telling a woman to avoid dressing slutty offers only false protection for women. Hijabi women too experience rape. This cultural inclination towards victim blaming is where my GMP article came under fair scrutiny. It is difficult to discuss the ways in which a person can try to keep themselves safe without falling into the trope of foisting the responsibility back onto the victim.

This victim-blaming is what surrounds the term ‘grey-rape’, and it perpetrates the idea that we do not live in a rape culture. The dominant counter-narrative is that women are attempting to foist responsibility of their sexual behaviours by crying rape..  The greyness suggests that there may be some sexual violence that is less bad or more permissible than other types.

That’s a lot of baggage…

Let me share a personal story to attempt to unpack some of the difficulties around the term ‘grey rape’, but please understand that it is not my intention with my own story to discredit the feelings or experiences of anyone else. At the age of seventeen, I was coerced into sex that I was not yet ready to have, due to what I perceived to be my “responsibility” in a relationship with my boyfriend. I don’t consider him a rapist because I didn’t say no, and I was not drunk.

Still, that didn’t prevent me from suffering from many of the same feelings (shame, anger, and self-blame) that rape victim’s encounter. Looking back, I wish we both had taken more time and care into the progression of our sexual relationship. That conversation came years later, and I hope he left with an understanding of the importance of obtaining enthusiastic consent. In sharing this story with others, I have found many ladies have similar experiences. Hopefully this experience may highlight to others that not only does yes mean yes, but women have the ability to say no.

I certainly don’t believe that is possible to accidentally rape someone. Yet in reality, I have experienced coercion and the fuzziness surrounding sexual activity while intoxicated.

The grey area I speak of seems to exist in our own moral context around sexual engagement. Under the eyes of the law, a grey area can’t exist. It must be stated that rape is sexual violence and it is always wrong. Consent has to be a binary black and white situation to avoid the possibility of causing great trauma to another human being. I don’t desire the hardline of sexual violence to take along with it people who are falsely accused, but this writer at least; can see no other path to equality than by clearing up the grey areas with the crystal clear concept of consent.

Photo credit article-3.com.