Violence Against Women Act from the trenches: why we need to do something

Ribbon courtesy of www.fem2pt0.com

Intimate partner violence is a topic that's near and dear to my heart for a lot of reasons, one of the biggest being that I've been working on the ground (so to speak) in violence prevention for the entirety of my career and post-secondary education. On a daily basis, I see and work with the trauma that is inflicted on someone by the person (or sometimes people) who are supposed to love them the most. I sit with people who are crying because they were denied a protection order that they desperately needed, or because they changed their phone number again and their offender found them again anyway. I assist people in developing complex escape plans so they can leave their own homes without being stalked or injured.I provide therapy for the people whose brains have been severely altered by the patterns of fear they lived with day in and day out. It's exhausting work, made even more draining by the knowledge that I get to come home to safety and comfort every night while my clients never ever catch a break. For them, this is life.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA; link goes to the bill as it was passed in 1994) in America is one of the most fundamentally important pieces of legislation to the job I do, whether I'm being an advocate or being a therapist. VAWA is what funds every state's coalition against domestic abuse, sexual assault, and human trafficking, which in turn means that VAWA partially funds most of the safe houses and shelters across the country. VAWA is what allows me to tell a trafficked client who was brought here by her husband of three weeks, only to be brutally assaulted and tortured for three years, that she doesn't have to choose between her safety and remaining in the U.S. VAWA is the reason that, during my lifetime (and I'm only 25!), the federal government finally codified marital rape as a crime in all fifty states. VAWA is the reason it's a felony to cross state lines to violate a restraining order.

The significance of this legislation is overwhelming, and while it's imperfect (as are all laws), it is up for renewal on a regular basis and is often revised to expand the protections available to victims of intimate partner violence and human trafficking. In this legislative cycle,the proposed revisions provide greater opportunities for Native American leaders to prosecute perpetrators; facilitate the safety of undocumented immigrants who are caught between deportation and domestic abuse; and prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.

These are huge. Most safe houses in the United States will gladly accept cisgendered women and their children, but don't provide similar safe housing for trans women, genderqueer folk, or men of any stripe. Many state coalitions, including Colorado, will cut funding to safe houses that open their doors to anyone in these categories. Some safe houses even prohibit residents from bringing teenaged sons with them because they're "practically men." Even more safe houses who purportedly offer room for queer ("but cis") women permit such a hostile and queer-phobic environment for these residents that they often feel too unsafe to stay. When you consider that all of these populations experience abuse at approximately the same rate that cis women experience abuse from cis male partners (25-33%, and I kid you not), that means that our current funding structure absolutely discriminates against a significant percentage of the victimized population. We need to expand protection for these individuals so they too can benefit from the law that has made such a difference for straight cis women victims.

The problem is that, somehow, this is under debate in Congress. I still fail to understand how someone can look at information about thediversity of domestic abuse victims/survivors and continue to believe that these proposed expansions to the law are unnecessary. Unfortunately, that's exactly what's happening and even certain cutbacks (particularly to the special visas VAWA grants immigrant victims of domestic abuse and trafficking) are being promoted as a "good idea." Let me explain before I start getting hateful comments about liars abusing the visa system: those visas are a pain in the butt to obtain for the most cut-and-dried cases. If you've never accompanied someone through the torturous process of trying to get one, then keep your silence until you have. It takes years and the kind of documentation of injuries and police reports that most victims never have, regardless of their immigration status. We need more protection, not less, for victims and survivors.

Please take a moment to take a look at the website for the National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence Against Women and find a way to support this important piece of legislation. For those of you in the U.S., write to your Congresspeople. Write letters to the editor of your local newspaper(s). Pass the word along to your friends. Attend the National Day of Action.

Please, whatever you do, don't let this slip by without doing something. The safety of millions of people, literally, are counting on you.

Thankless: attachment parenting and the Time Magazine debacle

The international breastfeeding sign.

For those of you who haven't been reading Internet news lately, Time Magazine recently ran an "article" with the cover line "Are You Mom Enough?" and a breastfeeding photo that was clearly designed to generate as much outrage as possible. Based on the author's incredible lack of understanding of attachment parenting, I'd say that Time was basically trolling for attention ("How many readers can we piss off this week? Really? That'll put sales through the ROOF!") and didn't really care who they stepped on as a result. There have been enough articulate responses across the web that I'm not going to respond to the article's content here; instead, I want to focus on something else.

The concept of "Mom Enough."

In essence, the question of whether or not someone can be "mom enough"- or, as I'm going to call it henceforth, "parent enough"- highlights one of the fundamental problems of parenting in most of Western society: it's hard. Parenting is a full-time job that limits your sleep and social life, requires you to get intimate with nasty things like poo, and means that a significant percentage of your daily conversation will sound like limit-setting and "Because I'm the parent, that's why!" It means being afraid that this person you've put your time and energy and love into will be injured or killed; it means caring so much that it hurts; it means an entire reshaping of your worldview. It means always second-guessing yourself in case you're not doing a "good enough" job. And in Western cultures, it often means being expected to do it alone (or, at least, as a nuclear family without the "interference" of grandparents). When someone asks the question of whether or not someone is "parent enough" because of their childrearing methods, the underlying truth that is exposed is that the baseline of parenting- the things I've just listed- will already drain you and anything additional will obliterate you entirely.

The challenge is that there are a lot of very good arguments in favour of attachment parenting methods, whether you use all of them or pick-and-choose (as most parents do). Neurobiologically speaking, humans are incredibly social creatures whose brains absolutely require repetitive social stimulation (from humans, not televisions!) in order to develop. We're born with the wiring for most things, but that wiring doesn't get connected unless we have input from the people around us (even basic things like eyes don't work if they're deprived of sensory stimuli!). Combine that with the fact that humans function on rhythms (including the regular, sine wave pattern with which we engage and disengage during a lecture), and it makes sense that babies tend to develop best when they're given pattern-repetitive stimulation that involves all five senses. Even co-sleeping- the option that many parents choose against- is involved in this (warmth of parents' bodies, sounds of their snores and heartbeats, scents of their bodies). But ask any parent or guardian of a small child how they'd feel about ceding more of their time and space to their babies, especially when everyone is grouchy and fussy, and you'd probably get a Glare of Despair. Attachment parenting, in a society that likes to emphasize the nuclear family, is very very challenging- hence the concept of "parent enough."

What they don't tell you with attachment parenting and Western culture is that the two- while not incompatible- certainly are at odds. One of the beautiful things about early neurobiological development is that having multiple "safe" people in a child's life has a positive impact on a child's future coping skills, social skills, overall functioning, and- depending on how diverse those safe people are- even racism. In a culture that emphasizes two-parent families and labels more adults (especially grandparents) as "chaotic," "interfering," or "dictatorial," the idea of allowing other adults to influence your child's early development so strongly seems weak, inferior, or (again) chaotic. Then factor in reality- the cost of living, the number of parents raising children alone, the cost of childcare- and think again about how challenging attachment parenting truly is. How many parents even have the opportunity to consider attachment parenting, let alone the means to implement it?

To me, the fact that we have to turn parenting into a competition of who's "enough" of a parent to utilize a given parenting methodology indicates that we already know something's wrong. We know that, as a culture, we make parenting a lot harder than it already is. Weknow that we isolate families and stay-at-home parents. We know we don't make good childcare affordable and accessible. We know we set up parents to fail by suggesting that some parents aren't parent "enough" by virtue of their choices. We know we make it hard for employed parents to take time when their children are sick or newborn. We make it so that parents who choose attachment options- breastfeeding, co-sleeping, Ergo wraps- are demonized for sexualizing, infantilizing, and overindulging their children instead of recognizing that these are healthy (yes! really! healthy!) and should be options for all parents.

What we need to do, as movers and shakers in our world, is take the question that Time poses and revert it to our policymakers and ourselves: are we "parent enough," whether or not we have children of our own, to advocate for access? Are we "parent enough" to demand a more parent-supportive culture? Are we "parent enough" to change parental leave policies, child sick time policies, and the current child care industry? Are we "parent enough" to validate the non-neglectful, non-abusive choices the parents in our lives are making? What can we do to reshape the way we conceptualize parenting and child-rearing?

Maybe then we can stop pitting parents against each other and start cooperating instead.

Note: for an engaging, accessible discussion of neurobiological development, check out "The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog" by Bruce Perry.

You Don't Get to Tell Me How I Feel

The same-sex marriage/civil union/domestic partnership kerfluffle that’s been rocking the U.S. lately has been dredging up the good, the bad, and the ugly in a lot of social discourse. President Obama finally came out (har!) in support of same-sex marriage, right around the same time that Mitt Romney reaffirmed his dislike of the same; North Carolina voters overwhelmingly voted against the human rights of LGBQ members of their population; Colorado’s legislature is (at the time of this writing) in an emergency session to resolve its own civil union dispute. The straight population is divided about the issue, but so are LGBTIQ communities across the country- “Do we even want to participate in this antiquated, money-sucking, heterocentrist ritual?” And the question that has come up to me repeatedly this week: who gets to decide? After all, we didn’t vote on your marriage, right? (Actually, if you want to get technical…who gets to marry whom has never been an easy topic. Just ask the Commonwealth of Virginia.)

Something that’s been communicated from a lot of sources around the Internet has been the idea that straight people should have no say in same-sex marriage rights. It’s not their marriage or relationship that’s at stake. Those of us with rings on our fingers are unaffected by these policies and our civil rights aren’t being called into question.

To this, I’m going to give a big ol’ fuck you.

Let me give you one reason why: like many Americans, I’m bisexual/queer (depending on your definition) but married in the old-fashioned sense. My partner- my husband- is a straight, cisgendered guy, and unless you take the time to ask, you’re probably going to assume that I’m straight too. My current relationship, one that I plan to be in for the rest of our lives, is unaffected by what happens with LGBQ marital legislation. But what if it ends? Or what if, instead of falling for Nick, I fell for a Nicole? Or what if Nick decides to become Nicole? Or the unthinkable happens, and as a widow I find solace and new love with a same-sex or trans partner? My right to a committed, legal partnership with someone I love would be taken away from me. I’m not interested in quibbling about whether it’s worse to have that right revoked, or never have it at all- the point is that the absence of that right is simply wrong. And it’s something I walk around with every day, whether I will ever have to confront it in my own relationship(s) or not.

When I lived in Canada, I was part of a wonderfully vital community of LGBTIQ folk who wanted nothing more than a world in which adults can consensually love one another without restriction. There was often a lot of talk about who “gets” to speak and emote on a given topic, and while I understood the root of their concerns- when a group outsider speaks, are they silencing the insiders and appropriating their right to self-advocacy?- I also worried about how this intersected with alliances. As much as The System has hurt a lot of us, we need the support of its benefactors to make lasting change, right? (Apologies for my ignorance, Ms. Lorde, but I’ve always struggled with this.) There’s a strong undercurrent of biphobia in some lesbian and gay circles because we’re “faking it” or, if we’re in the sort of relationship I’m in, we’re “traitors,” and this leads to accusations that we don’t really understand what it means to be discriminated against because we “can” always retreat to the safety of our straight-looking lives. As the same-sex marriage debacle rages on in the States, I’m hearing these sorts of things more and more. Camps of Us and Them are being drawn, and bi/queer folk are increasingly being grouped in the latter.

I repeat myself: fuck you. Ignorance of the flexibility and depth of human sexualities aside, this whole concept that They can’t possibly understand or empathize has got to stop. The idea that a shared set of experiences means that any two people completely understand each other is reductionistic and categorizes people according to arbitrary rules. “Oh wait, you’re also a cis woman and have sex with cis women? Great! We totally get each other and are basically the same person!” My relationship may not be on the line right now, but my overall rights are- just like yours. The implication of biphobia for people like me in these debates is that, because we “look” straight, we can’t ever experience discrimination. That’s a load of crap.

Same-sex marriages are everyone’s business, whether we’re interested in one or not, because human rights are everyone’s business. Not everyone is as comfortably “out” as I am, and you never know who will come out when you thought you had them pegged, so the breadth and depth the impact of discriminatory legislation will have is incredibly challenging to predict. To me, the right of consenting adults to love each other and legally support each other should never have been a debate at all. But since it is, it’s about time we stopped using appearances to determine who gets a say in what. Since you aren’t in my head or in my life, you have no idea what I have experienced.

You don’t get to tell me how I feel.

Politics, Politics, Politics

I can't believe we still need this image.

Dia ar sábháil! Since my article a few weeks back about vaginal protests and politicians attempting to legislate idiocy, very few things have changed. We have some victories- such as the narrow defeat of Arizona's "show me your prescription" bill- but we also have continued pressure from numerous lawmakers to curtail the rights and personhood of (cis) women across the United States. Foetal personhood amendments, parental consent laws, and name-calling continue to shape the country's political landscape. I recently gave up frothing at the mouth in favour of banging my head against the wall as a result.

Here's the thing. I grew up surrounded by rhetoric that claimed that America is the greatest country in the world. We have the most freedoms. We have the best history. We have the biggest trucks, too, in case anyone was measuring. Even as a small child I was pretty skeptical of this rhetoric, mostly because my family didn't own a truck and was the product of fairly recent immigrants with their own cool histories. I was, however, raised with a healthy respect for the fact that the United States has the capacity to evolve and change as circumstances require. It's certainly not a speedy or easy process- there was a solid 100 years between the end of the Civil War and the (legal) end of Jim Crow, for example- but it's a process that's certainly possible. In other words, in spite of overwhelming evidence that my home country is a slow-moving behemoth when it comes to social change, I was taught to remain optimistic.

What I forgot to remember is that social change isn't unidirectional, and all the equalities Americans have fought to achieve can be stripped away by an equally determined regressive force. Many of the recent attacks on women's rights have been from the anti-abortion camp, but that's just one piece of a broader movement that apparently seeks to keep women down. Senator Scott Brown, attempting to pander to Massachusetts women recently, praised the "strong women" in his life for teaching him to cook. Apparently, while men knowing how to cook, clean, and sew is a good thing, it takes a strong woman to ensure that that knowledge is adequately imparted. Never mind the terrifying thought that a man might live on his own at some point, or be raised by dad(s), or that women- people- are strong for things beyond throwing a couple of ingredients into a pot. Never mind that his remarks indicate that a woman's strength is in the kitchen.

::insert sound of head hitting wall here::

What drives me crazy is that this is all happening in spite of the aforementioned self-aggrandizing rhetoric. Anyone with a pulse who spends time outside the United States ought to be able to admit that America is a pretty good country but that other countries and cultures have amazing things going on too. Many of us, myself included, might even look at those other countries and sigh wistfully, believing that they could improve a few things about our social systems (coughcough only two parties?! coughcough). But many of us fall prey to the belief that we can- and should- teach Others how to do things. "We might not be perfect on health care," we say, "but at least we're not cutting our children's labia and clitori off! Let's teach Them alternatives!" Off we march to Do Good In the World, forgetting all about our home troubles in the process. I challenge back: "We might not be perfect on genital care, but at least we don't punish the victim of a crime for the rest of their life!" (This is a work in progress as various countries change their post-rape marital and childbirth laws, but you get the picture.)

Note that I'm not trying to make light of genital cutting, which I believe is a pretty serious health risk and a systemic failure to provide alternative cultural and medical options for a specific 50% of the population. I would suggest that there's some hypocrisy, however, when Americans (and other Westerners too, I suppose) decry Female Genital Cutting but circumcise male babies as a matter of course. Believe me, I know that the amounts of flesh removed aren't comparable- but we're still okay with cutting an infant's genitals when the evidence in favour of the practice is rather controversial. To make a long story short, Americans spend an awful lot of time criticizing other countries and cultures for their practices while we've got our own cultural challenges to face.

The term "War on Women" that's been floating around the Internet has me a bit kerfluffled, to be honest. On the one hand, while the coordinated attacks on women's health, well-being, and personhood are certainly reminiscent of a political-military strategy, it also feels like a minimization of the sorts of war experiences that Americans haven't had in the homeland for about 100 years. No one's firing guns (I think) and town after town isn't falling to a literal invasion of policymakers. Yet the rhetoric we're seeing here vilifies women on a regular basis: we're studding bulldogs, we're baby-killers, we're drama queens who (according to Brown, anyway) should save our strength for the kitchen. It's just rhetoric, right? But that's where it begins. Discourse and belief feed each other like crazy, and before you know it, the way we talk about women is the way we perceive women. We might not be involved in a literal war quite yet, but this is a great way to lay the groundwork for one.

Let's nip it in the bud. On Saturday the 28th, all 50 states in America will be hosting marches and rallies to protest the nasty-talk. Check out Unite Women for details specific to your state if you're in the U.S., and if you're reading from elsewhere, please send us your support in one way or another. Goodness knows we can't trust our internal politicians to treat us like humans.

Independence in the Land of Conservatism

When my cousin gave me this bag, I nearly peed myself because it's so true.

I've written previously about my brushes with values conflicts in Colorado, so I'll try not to repeat myself. The simple summary is that I'm a radical, queer-rights-loving, abortion-rights-supporting, sex-positive person who has landed smack-dab in the middle of the conservative capitol of America (example: our district overwhelmingly went to Santorum in the Colorado Republican primary). It's led to many a headache and tear of frustration, to be sure, and has given me cause to reexamine my preconceptions about how social change occurs.

For many activists, and I suppose those who study them, the grand understanding that true change begins with small steps is taken for granted. Consider Margaret Meade's quote about small groups of thoughtful and concerned citizens, Betty Reese's quip on mosquitoes as bedmates, meditations on first steps, and similar sentiments that reassure us that all of us tiny people, working together, can and will change the world. As a social worker, trying to make change through individual acts of direct service, I often feel like the Starfish Story is a direct metaphor for my job. There's something heartening about knowing we can make a difference in one person's life, but something equally disheartening in knowing that individual acts of good can't compete with an overwhelming tide of need.

Living and working in Colorado Springs has meant too that my individual work- domestic and sexual violence intervention- is done against the cultural backdrop of an extension of the Bible Belt, mixed with an enormous military population. So many of my clients are stay-at-home moms, or came here for their husband's career, or hold so tightly to what the pundits have told them about their religion (overwhelmingly Christian) that they have no room for alternate interpretations of scripture. They face the same obstacles that any other victim or survivor faces when leaving, only theirs are compounded by a city (and a state) that believes more in bootstraps than in social assistance. "Go get a job!" they hear every day, only they're facing an incredibly stagnant economy that's already overflowing with people who need work; even the minimum-wage jobs, like the stereotypical McDonald's burger-flipping position, are filled. Add to that the constant message they receive from their communities that they're doing something wrong for leaving their husbands, for not staying at home with their children, for being pregnant out of wedlock, for wanting an abortion when their husbands threatened to kill them...And this doesn't even begin to touch the crap my clients get when they're in same-sex relationships, or God forbid men being abused by women. My agency lost a good chunk of its state funding when it opened its safehouse doors to anyone who identified as a woman, cisgendered or not. That's a lot of money- salaries, maintenance, supplies- to have to sacrifice in the name of doing what's right.

I think what challenges me the most about activism here is that so many facets of my life actually meet the expectations of the local, socially-conservative culture. My partner and I are both cisgendered, we're married, and we came here for his career. He's the breadwinner (by a long shot; I don't think I could support us both on my nonprofit salary). Though my values conflict with local ones on a routine basis, I'm technically a Christian. We're both White and Anglophone. In short, there's nothing that stands out about us as being anything other than your run-of-the-mill, socially (and possibly financially) conservative Colorado Springs residents. For me, it's pretty depressing.

What it has meant, though, is that the whole "little things add up to make a big difference" philosophy has become a necessity for survival. When my husband and I shop or eat out together, for example, I pay. It doesn't matter in terms of finance- it's a shared account- but it does matter in terms of challenging the tacit assumptions on the part of every single cashier and server out here that a heterosexual-looking married couple should always pay their cheque via the man. I kid you not; I find myself having to reach for the bill rather frequently. I've become no stranger to correcting financial and social institutions that assume that Nick and I share a last name, although I'll admit I get a good laugh when they assume that my name is his. I have to be very conscious about my use of the term "partner" because, the second I use the word "husband," a palpable transition occurs and suddenly I feel like the secondary representative of my Husband-Headed Household (this was a particular problem when doing our taxes). These may seem like little things, but the overwhelming message I get is that I exist via my husband- and I'm reasonably sure we left 1950 behind a long time ago.

It's exhausting to feel the constant pressure to represent ourselves a certain way in public, and to be completely fair, we have met some wonderful people out here who don't fit the mould any better than we do. They ask for our names, they put the cheque in the middle of the table, and they treat both of us like human beings. How novel! More often than not, however, I feel the same overwhelming sense of despair when I realize that each time I pay the cheque, it's just one tiny gesture against a very deeply-rooted values system. What I want to do is go to the Capitol and petition/yell/pontificate until my point is made and things change; unfortunately, not all social change can be accomplished through a policy avenue. Individual minds can't be legislated to think new things, and so much of what I feel I'm fighting is a belief structure. Such independence is gained, it appears, through day-to-day struggle.

What I think this means for all of us is that "the good fight" doesn't just happen during massive street protests or the collective crafting of genitalia. It's the little things we do with our actions, whether we're facing a majority culture of conservatism or living the dream in an equality-based city, that shape the way people think. Assumptions are the stuff of social training; what we can do, through our tiny behaviours, is reprogram those instincts.

Snatchels

The cutest vagina you'll ever see, knit in my own living room.

I have a long history of struggling with strong feelings for my country and trying to balance my loathing for its incredible capacity for stupidity with a deep appreciation for the autonomy I'm theoretically granted here. Over the last two weeks, this challenging see-saw has become extra-wobbly as a series of proposed bills and speeches by state and federal legislators has reduced my personhood to some combination of whore, cow/pig, and rights-less incubator. If you think I'm joking or exaggerating, please check out those links because, unfortunately, most of that is verbatim.

It's one thing, I think, to grow up female/woman in a country where you know your basic civil liberties are only a handful of decades old, while simultaneously being aware that other women around the world would do an awful lot to have those same opportunities. There's a lot of pushback against people like me who campaign for an end to social discrimination because "feminism isn't necessary anymore." Truthfully, a lot of disenfranchised Americans (female or otherwise) can identify with that basic sentiment; with voting, education, and employment available, many of us are a lot better off than our ancestors 100+ years ago. But that doesn't mean that feminism, or activism more broadly, is redundant. The personhood amendment up for grabs in Colorado, for example, would prevent someone from seeking an abortion even in cases of rape or incest. The long-and-short of it is that, while the amendment protects a foetus from being "killed for the crime of his or her father" (direct quote), it doesn't protect the mother from the same.

I've frothed at the mouth so many times this week that I've been rather dehydrated. Discourses about feminism and women's rights, particularly women's reproductive rights, are always entwined with other discourses around social inequality such as racism, classism, and level of physical or mental ability, but I'm sick of how many things seem able to be diluted to the spectra of sex and gender. In the 21st century, in a country that likes to tout itself as being The Most Advanced On the Planet, basic concepts (such as the fact that I am, in fact, a human and not livestock) seem to elude many of our most powerful. To add insult to injury, it often feels as though I'm a lone (or, if not lone, at least very tiny) voice screaming to an uncaring wilderness.

The balancing factor this week has been the discovery of the Government-Free VJJ movement. While the usual course of writing letters to lawmakers and ceaselessly calling their offices can exacerbate the lonely "I'm talking to a wall!" feeling, a cohesive movement to send a message feels somehow more productive. You can recycle a letter or turn off a phone, but it's difficult to ignore the cute and cuddly vagina that's landed on your desk.

That's right! The Government-Free VJJ movement is a craft-centred form of political protest that facetiously suggests that (primarily male) politicians would stay out of our vaginas and uteri if they had a set of their very own. Whether sewing, crocheting, or knitting, each one takes only about 30 minutes to complete and can be made with relatively cheap supplies. The goal is to send at least one to each politician who has been systematically degrading and violating women's personhoods through speech or proposal. The movement itself has already caught some media attention, which is promising; since I've already knit four, I've spent every stitch envisioning a storm of news coverage about how Washington and state capitols have all been inundated with hand-crafted lady-bits. Even better is trying to imagine the press releases coming from these lawmakers' offices in response to the influx: "Representative England is unavailable, as he is currently trying to figure out how livestock learned to knit."

There's something to be said for the medium of choice, for while a hand-held vagina is difficult to ignore, it also uses trades (sewing, knitting, etc.) that are part of the pantheon of "Things That Only (White?) Women Do Because Men Are Too Busy Running the World." In other words, is it subversive or complicitly patriarchal to use domestic activities to make a political point about women's rights? There's a discussion to be had there, I'm sure, but I have to admit that the excitement of giving lawmakers a bunch of vaginas to ponder has short-circuited my critical thinking skills.

If you're crafty, or wish to learn crafty skills in order to participate in the VJJ movement, check out their website. They have a list of patterns to follow, as well as a sample script to include in your cuddly cooter package. When you're ready to mail yours off, use this form to let the movement's organizers know which politicians you're sending them to. The goal, of course, is maximum distribution! Naturally, I highly encourage all of our readers to produce at least one. As a clarification, this isn't about being pro- or anti-abortion rights (although I'm sure you can guess my opinion). This is about drawing attention to the treatment women, as a very generalized group, are given in a male-dominated political landscape.

When you've made your vajayjay or uterus, take a picture and send it in to Go Girl! We'd love to make a gallery of how Go Folk everywhere envision their crafty political engagement in or with the U.S. After all, in how many countries can you use yarn genitals to make a point?

This post also appears today on Go Girl Magazine.

Victims and Victimization

Ribbon courtesy ofwww.fem2pt0.com

There's a new law proposed in my dear old home state of New Hampshire that has me rather riled up. This is saying something, especially given that I've been distracted by the Planned Parenthood and Susan G. Komen drama. In essence, two of the state's more conservative legislators are trying to amend New Hampshire's domestic violence law to state that police may not make an arrest on a domestic violence call unless they have witnessed the crime(s) in action. It's an entirely stupid proposal, one that seems to have no merit unless its writers are hoping to get away with such crimes themselves, but it's worth discussing here because intimate partner violence- domestic violence, battering, whatever you wish to call it- is a global problem with implications for all of us.

While many complain that intimate partner violence is treated differently than other forms of violence, it's very important to make one thing clear: intimate partner assaults are not the same as stranger assaults. In a physical assault from a stranger, there's rarely much history to explain the situation. We often think about such assaults as being preceded by drinking, disagreements, or other crimes such as robberies. The history of the people involved- or, really, lack thereof- means that future safety concerns are generally minimal. There might be some criminal charges, and in extreme cases a restraining order, but otherwise things go on. When the assault is perpetrated by one intimate partner against another, however, it's almost always the latest in a series of controlling and abusive tactics that that person has used to gain power and control over their loved one. In most abusive relationships, the physical violence is preceded by verbal abuse, threats, isolation of the victim, and other tactics that have contributed to the buildup towards a physical assault. Context is key because, for many victims, police involvement can make a relationship more dangerous. What may have been an offhand threat to kill may turn into a serious plan as the abuser stews in jail after the arrest is made. The safety of the victim(s) has to be paramount, and for that very reason many states have reconsidered their mandatory arrest policies (where at least one party has to be arrested on a domestic violence police call).

This reconsideration, however, is not New Hampshire's proposed law. Rather than leaving the decision to arrest up to the responding officers, who we hope are well-trained in assessing the situations they encounter, the law would remove the power to arrest altogether. After several years' experience as a victim advocate in multiple states and countries, I can tell you that holding abusers accountable is hard enough without preventing the police from doing their job of arresting dangerous individuals. Taking this discretion and authority away from the police does nothing to help the victims of abusive partners. In fact, it gives the abusers more power in the relationship ("What're you gonna do, call the cops? They can't do anything. Just try."). The insidious message that this sends, even to those who aren't in abusive relationships, is that victimization in certain contexts is okay.

As the article I linked rightly points out, domestic violence laws in New Hampshire- and around the world really- have changed a lot for the better in the last half-century. Intimate partner violence has, for a very long time, been perceived as a private problem. In America, the phrase has long been that "you don't wash your dirty laundry in public" and community members have been encouraged to turn a blind eye to the abusive and violent relationships that exist all around them. Only in the last few decades have we finally begun to recognize that violence of this variety will not stop when we tacitly permit it to continue.

The problem is that, even without legal setbacks like this one, we continue to believe that intimate relationships confer ownership of one party by the other and thus the abuse is okay. For a lot of people, this specifically refers to the legal status of cis women as their husbands' property; I can assure you, however, that possessive and controlling behaviours are not bound by simple sexism and can (and do) occur in all different types of relationships. Many state coalitions against domestic violence have revised their mission statements and lobbied their governments to reflect the fact that intimate partner violence occurs in same-sex relationships, relationships involving trans and genderqueer folk, and can include male victims of female offenders. Some human beings, for whatever reason, have a propensity to enjoy being in charge of each other and are willing to take this to an extreme in a variety of ways- sex and gender aside. What we see in intimate relationships is reflected, albeit in a distorted fashion, in other forms of power-based interaction. Think of human trafficking, for instance, or the way global trade choices often leave entire countries without access to basic necessities. Intimate partner violence is a very specific form of power-based personal violence, to be sure, but it's symptomatic of the way humans are taught- in all societies- to assign value and worth to each other. For me, the proposed law in New Hampshire is an outrage but unsurprising in this global climate.

Where does that leave us as GoGirls? Laws like this one are proposed- and sometimes passed- around the world on a regular basis, and their effect isn't simply to restrict the humanity of the victims of domestic violence. Global awareness of intimate partner violence has usually been through the lens of sexism, but I would suggest we add other lenses as well. Racism, ethnocentrism, religious bigotry, and other forms of categorizing and judging people all play vital roles in the way we react to- or sometimes permit- the diminishment of a given portion of our populations. Our awareness and response to these systems of oppression (including our complicity in them) is the first and best step we can take in ensuring that thought patterns like the ones that led to the New Hampshire proposal cease to exist.

This article also appears on Go Girl Magazine.