Tag: Prejudice

The Effects of Fear & Violence: Mourning Trayvon

Trayvon Martin’s death, as well as the lack of charges brought against his killer, was horrific for many, but was not surprising.

Women often tell me of their rape aversion plans. They usually include: carrying their keys between their fingers, never going anywhere alone, watching their drinks, not wearing revealing clothes, not going out at night, etc. “Sometimes,” they wearily declare, “I just wish I were a man.” What we don’t usually talk about is the dangers men face, especially men of color.

Men typically are not told to restrict their behavior in these limiting and largely unproductive ways. They are not warned that they’re being reckless, or worse – provoking any violence they might encounter – if they don’t adhere to these rules.

Still, the concept of men as free from the effects of violence in our society is a deeply flawed one. When I teach about violence prevention in schools, teen boys often are resistant until they realize that I’m not just there to teach the girls. Then they express confusion and resentment as they describe learning to evade physical assault by aggressive men and boys, while simultaneously having to demonstrate they are not a threat to others.

A recent story with Donna Britt, mother and author of brothers (& me), on NPR discussed how she raised her boys. She and others are doing a great job of making public what they call “the talk” that African American parents give their boys when they make that transition from cute child to possible threat in the public eye.

This is an everyday reality for boys and men of color, and I’m glad that this is getting some media attention and acknowledgment. Yet, in a culture where we say there’s no way to predict violence, profiling is inevitable.

Soon the evening news will interview another neighbor who testifies the murderer next door “seemed so normal” and everyone will nod that there was no way anyone could have known. Then, everyone, including the police, will grasp at whatever they can– the latest mug shots, the characters from the last movie – to be able to predict the next act of violence. Because we don’t want to be caught off guard.

Safety is not worth this cost to our communities. There are ways of predicting violence – which means there are ways of preventing violence – that don’t include profiling random men of color and blaming victims. Why are we not exploring these?

In an entertainment culture, it is not popular to explore predictability. When there is a mystery, you can be sure that everyone will stay glued to his/her screens, anxious to keep track of the newest development. Meanwhile, this also ensures that sponsors’ advertisements will be watched while viewers eagerly await the next installment of the story.

Despite Gavin de Becker’s book, The Gift of Fear, being on the bestseller list when it first came out over a decade ago, reporters still choose to interview the clueless rather than interview his team that studies how intuition works and the precursors to violence. As a culture, we treat those who know ahead of time as mystical outliers, never pausing to study how it is that the average person could foresee such a thing.

Those who accurately predict violence use behavior as their indicators, not hoodies or race. Concepts like forced teaming (pretending there is an alliance between you that doesn’t exist), using charm and niceness, giving too many details, typecasting, loan sharking, giving an unsolicited promise and ignoring the word “no” are all accurate ways of predicting when someone is acting manipulatively and possibly dangerous. Of course, in order to give credence to these ways of predicting violence and danger, we would have to admit that most violence happens by people we know and/or includes an “interview” process, rather than being a random shooting or a man behind the bushes who says nothing before grabbing his victim.

To say that violence is predictable is not equal to blaming those of us who have experienced it in the past. It is empowering everyone to have more tools for the future so that we may live fuller lives and feel less fear. It is challenging our society to distinguish between paranoia, prejudice and real intuition.

Saying Goodbye to “Stranger Danger”

We pride ourselves at IMPACT for basing our programs on solid research and responding to dangers in the community. Occasionally the research or the danger changes, which means our program changes.
A Washington Post article from 2010 summarized data from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children showing how rare stranger abductions are in the United States. IMPACT’s children’s class has always emphasized boundary-setting with people you know more than safety with strangers. We do this because data shows the majority of assaults and abuse of children are perpetrated by people they know.
IMPACT is shifting its children’s classes to incorporate this research, and because we have found a few issues with strict rules with strangers. The first issue is that following these rules often becomes more important than listening to one’s intuition, which is an important skill for a child to cultivate. Children are also likely to break the “stranger rules” if they need help, which can be confusing (a policeman is also a stranger). Teaching them to avoid strangers may create xenophobia and decrease an impetus to intervene as bystanders that witness violence. We believe this later works against the safe communities we all try to create. Most skills we teach with strangers in our adult and teen classes are transferable skills (i.e. skills that might be easier to role-play while imagining a stranger, though they can also be useful later with someone we know). IMPACT teaches awareness, yelling and physical techniques that are still appropriate and useful responses in stranger scenarios.
I am proud to announce that our children’s classes will continue focusing on teaching transferable skills, teaching awareness and boundary-setting with people that the children know (both adults and bullies) as well as physical self-defense skills with a non-specific “bad guy.” We will also incorporate role-plays with strangers where the children have to rely on their intuition (with coaching and feedback from staff and other students) to judge how to best interact and when they need to find a trusted adult.
Please join me in congratulating our staff in making this bold move to take a further step away from “stranger danger” in order to better prepare our children for life without scaring them. And if you have little ones, we’d love to see them in our class at the end of the month!

Without the Myth of Random Violence

Violence is seldom random.  Like all behaviors, violent behavior follows patterns that can be observed.  Once understood, these patterns can be prepared for.  I highly recommend the book, The Gift of Fear, in which the author Gavin de Becker breaks down the behaviors that manipulative or dangerous people use.  He goes into depth about how intuition functions to keep us safe.  At IMPACT, we teach an Intuition Development class on this topic.

If everyone understood that violence follows a pattern, it would have a profound impact on communities:

1.     Individuals would only be appropriately alarmed when a set of behaviors happen, and would feel at peace when they don’t.

2.     People could grow closer, not feeling suspicious of one another because of stereotypes or profiling or past experiences.

3.     It would make a lot more sense to learn a systematic approach to preventing, defending against, and mitigating the impact of violence.

4.     Victims/survivors and others affected by the threat of violence in our society could learn practical skills to avoid, prevent, and diminish violence in their lives and feel safer.  By gaining knowledge and skills, survivors can change the idea that it was something intrinsic in them, or that they are victims.

5.    Good people regularly profiled as potentially dangerous (men, people of color, those wearing baggy pants or piercings, etc.) could walk down the street and get into elevators without having to worry and put effort into not scaring others.

6.     Perpetrators of violence would be seen as using a set of behaviors to hurt and scare (have power over) others, and the behaviors would be addressed more, rather than demonizing the person.

7.     We could address the roots of violence and prevent it on that level, instead of continually having to provide victim services and lock up perpetrators.

Violence will always be shocking and upsetting.  By focusing on patterns, we discover the tools necessary to change how violence affects our communities.

Empowering Youth to Prevent Violence

A week ago I taught a Gay-Straight Alliance in Albuquerque. It was great timing, as they’d been talking about the “gay suicides” that have been all over the news. I felt for them – they’re so upset about what they see going on in the world, that bullying has driven some of their far-away peers to suicide, and they don’t have the tools to stop it.

Without tools to even identify why this is happening, it is so difficult to prevent it from re-occurring.  I asked the students what they did when they heard someone use the word “gay” as an insult or call someone a “fag.”  I expected that they would say it depended on who it was and that they would tell them how hurt and/or offended they were by those words.

I didn’t expect that they would say it wasn’t a big deal.

That day, I taught our “Investigating the Roots of Violence” class that explores the connection between bias, language, and violence. We looked at the names people are called and violence that happens to them based on race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. to keep them in the “boxes” that society dictates.  We explore: What are accepted stereotypes of a latino man?  What does a woman get called when she is assertive?  What range of violence is committed so that different people will not claim their individuality and their power?

It is not surprising that teenagers don’t see the connection between language, politics and violence.  It is also not surprising that everyone will work on the issue most important to them, whether it is violence against women, racially motivated violence, GLBTQ rights, or any other social issue that inherently involves addressing power imbalances.  However, until we teach our youth about and are willing to see the connection between all these manifestations of violence, and start working together at addressing the origins, we will struggle to make profound change.

My hope for the coverage of GLBTQ suicides is that it will help us find more ways to work together to make the world a more desirable place to live for all of our youth.

© 2024 Resolve · PO Box 8350 · Santa Fe NM 87504