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.

Love and sex in the middle of the road

Photo courtesy of plannedparenthood.org

Those of you who follow the Feminist GoGirl might've noticed that I have yet to do a post about sex and safety. It's an important topic, I believe, but it's also one that I've been avoiding. Why? The brief explanation is that most articles that focus on sex, safety, and women wind up being treatises on how not to get raped- and to me, that result is so abhorrent that I've been extremely wary of approaching the topic at all. I don't want the things I say here to be construed as blame, shame, or dire warnings; while I have limited control over how readers receive my words, I want to be as explicit as possible from the beginning.

We are sexual beings, and whether we're engaging in a friends-with-benefits road trip or a torrid one-night-stand tropical vacation, this is okay. As long as your behaviour is okay with you- by which I mean your mores, your opinions, your comfort level- and is consensual, you're fine. Please say this to yourself, as often as you'd like, to make sure the message sinks in. There is nothing wrong with being a sexual being.


I feel the need to emphasize that because, all too often in my line of work, I meet people who blame themselves for the sexual assaults they've faced. "I was passed out drunk at a party," they say. "What else should I have expected?" My answer to that has been, and always will be, that we should expect everyone else at that party to put on their grown-up pants and not get down and dirty with someone who's unconscious. It's not that bloody hard, people! It's not like you trip, fall, and wind up naked and sexual. And if they're conscious when you start but pass out halfway through...God gave you two hands. Go use the washroom.



In all sobriety, I'll note that for a lot of people lines are often drawn with a fuzzy marker. As I've said in previous posts, things that constitute clear-cut sexual predation to me are things that don't faze others. If you feel comfortable with the behaviours being thrown your way, then go have fun! Here, though, I'm going to list your rights- your global, human rights- to use as guidelines when getting frisky on the road. This way, it's all fun and no hurt for everyone involved (unless your frisky comes with kinky, in which case pleasepleasePLEASE establish a safeword).

1. You have the right to consent. This means you have the right to give it and to receive it. Consent is not the absence of no- it's the presence of an enthusiastic, rafter-rattling YES. You don't need to sit down with a laundry list of things you'd like to do with your partner, checking them off in a legalistic fashion. Think of fun ways to find out if your partner is comfortable and to say when you want something done differently! Examples: "I'd really like to _____ your _____ right now; may I?" or "Mmm. Do _____ again with your _____." Insert appropriate vocabulary as needed.

2. You have the right to intervene. One of my favourite webcomics did a couple of strips on this a few years ago. If you see something going on that makes you feel squicky, don't be afraid to find ways to put a stop to it. You can pretend to be the long-lost friend, pretend to be a slavering drunk on the person being creepy, call the police, enlist the person's friends to help, or even just check in with the person that you think is being targeted. There are so many ways to cockblock a potential sexual assault. I recommend looking at the Green Dot Project for ideas on how to make sure that your friends, strangers at the club, or whoever you're concerned about is having a good time.


3. You have the right to use protection. I don't just mean protection against pregnancy. I mean protection against sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Take the time to learn what your options are. Hell, bring some with you! Especially if this is a one-night stand, you don't know your partner's history and your partner might not know what they are (or aren't) carrying. Remember that HIV takes approximately three months to show up in a blood test, and antiretrovirals- the medication they give you if you think you've been exposed to HIV- will make you very very sick for the next 30 days. Play it safe. Know what cultural norms are in the area you're visiting, and come up with safe ways to negotiate protection use. And if your partner-to-be refuses to protect, feel free to walk away.

4. You have the right to have backup. This goes hand-in-hand with #2. If someone's super-pushy about taking you away from your friends (or the crowd), take a step back. Text or call a friend if something doesn't feel right. Before heading out for a night on the town, feel free to declare your intentions so your friends know when to intervene (true-life example: "I plan on dancing with EVERY SINGLE PERSON at this salsa club and then leave them drooling!"). Take the number of a reputable cab company with you so you always have a ride home. If something doesn't seem right, let someone know.

5. You have the right to walk away at any time. Tease, slut, virgin scaredy-pants...I don't care what they call you. If you decide in the middle of things that this just isn't what you want, there's no crime in not finishing. Like I said before: your partner has two hands (or some equal capacity to finish themselves off). If you don't feel safe saying something, then please put your safety first. Getting you out of a bad situation safely is more important than anything else.

6. You have the right to call it what you want. Lots of places and people limit their definitions of sexual assault to very narrow concepts (i.e. excluding spousal rape). If you believe that what someone did was rape, even though the jurisdiction you're in thinks it wasn't even a crime, then it was rape. You might not ever be able to put the offender in prison, or even in a courtroom, but that doesn't change your experience. You don't have to call it bad or drunken sex if that's not what your experience of it was, and you can seek out any services (i.e. advocacy) that are appropriate for you. End of discussion.
If you're looking for sexual assault-related resources, RAINN provides a partial list of international organizations.

In the news: South Dakota

Back in 2006, South Dakota made the news when its governor signed a bill into law that effectively banned abortions unless the mother's life were in clear danger (note: the linked website isn't accurate in all of its articles, but does give a good overview of South Dakota's HB 1215). The news turned into headlines when the President of the Oglala Sioux declared that, if the law continued to exist, she would open an abortion clinic on Pine Ridge Reservation (read: out of the jurisdiction of South Dakota) to offer women options who otherwise wouldn't have them. The South Dakota law is currently described as being "dead in the water."

Now, unfortunately, South Dakota is back at it- this time with a proposed law that would permit homicide against doctors performing abortions...on the grounds of defense. You read that right. The text of the bill, HB 1171, states that

Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person while resisting any attempt to murder such person, or to harm the unborn child of such person in a manner and to a degree likely to result in the death of the unborn child, or to commit any felony upon him or her, or upon or in any dwelling house in which such person is.

Again, you read that correctly. Someone who murders a doctor performing an abortion, under this law, could legitimately claim "defense of the unborn" in the same way one could claim self-defense in other circumstances.

I'll repeat here what I've said before in this blog: I'm wholeheartedly in favour of abortion rights. I also understand that not everyone is. The utter wrongness of South Dakota's proposed law, however, isn't whether or not it favours abortion rights. It's that it favours- no, scratch that- legalizes the murder of a person who is performing an important and, in many ways life-saving, procedure. Theoretically, someone could extend the law to protect themselves if they murder the person who is pregnant and requests the abortion- after all, they're technically attempting "to harm the unborn child" by seeking the procedure. Could such a loophole, if the law passes, lead to the acceptance of vigilantes who believe it's acceptable to murder a person to punish them for an attempted abortion?

Regardless if the law would be extended to cover such instances...we need to act to discourage its passage.