2013 – Resolve. Preventing Violence. Transforming Communities

Vulnerability & Safety – The Link

“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.” – Brené Brown

It takes extreme courage to show someone else our true selves and tell them about our deeply personal experiences. We fear judgment, rejection and laughter. We hold our breath when we share something for the first time, unsure of how s/he will respond.

It is easy to forget that this is also a vulnerable time for the other person. Each time we disclose something personal, it is not just a chance for him/her to evaluate us; it is an evaluation time for us of the other person too.

Did s/he listen intently? Did s/he laugh? Did s/he hold your hand and tell you that you were brave for sharing?

Depending on the response of the other person after we share something important, we have the opportunity to either:

A) choose to deepen the relationship
B) choose to distance ourselves from the other person
or
C) keep the relationship the same and continue to evaluate.

When we teach Exploring Healthy Boundaries in our children’s classes for schools and community groups, this is exactly what we are examining. How can we learn to trust others appropriately in a way that they have deserved and earned? How might we become more vulnerable to mistreatment and/or violence if we do not respond to the cues or reactions they have given us? How can we remain distanced and disconnected from others if we don’t forge connections based on others treating us well? How do we decide who is a resource to go to when things go wrong?

What does vulnerability have to do with safety? Everything.

There are times that sharing vulnerability can feel scary and delicious and raw. Other times, feeling vulnerable simply feels scary. By evaluating those experiences, we discover more about who we can trust to be close with us and whom we should keep further away. This may help us avert a dangerous experience — whether physical or emotional — and it may indicate whom we can go to when we feel hurt and/or need help.

Fighting Violence Where It Lives

(This article was written by Meg Stone, the director of IMPACT Boston, and originally appeared here.)

Usually, after a trend of violence committed by strangers, media outlets respond by offering women advice about how to stay safe. The tips are sometimes consistent with good research on which resistance strategies are most effective. Other times, though, safety advice consists of laundry lists of ways women should limit their lives (don’t wear headphones, don’t reach into your purse, keep your hands free at all times, etc.).

I am heartened when I see people addressing their feelings of fear by seeking out information and learning more about what they can do to protect themselves. At the same time, the safety advice most people are giving and getting is only relevant to a minority of assaults: those perpetrated by strangers.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, only about 13 percent of sexual assaults in the United States are committed by strangers. Perpetrators are much more likely to be dating partners, family members, and acquaintances.

So why do the news media, law enforcement officials and, yes, self-defense experts place almost all of their focus on helping women protect themselves from relatively uncommon acts of violence?

It’s because the steps we need to take to prevent rapes perpetrated by people we know are far more difficult. Looking for taxi medallions to ensure that drivers are properly licensed, or crossing the street when we suspect that someone is following us doesn’t disrupt our core beliefs about the people and places that are supposed to be safe.

We are conditioned to feel afraid in dark parking lots, but when we go on first dates, we want to flirt and connect. What if a new person we’re excited about dating ignores us when we say we’re not comfortable with physical affection in public? What if this person tells us we should lighten up and stop being such a prude? It’s painful to wonder whether those actions are warning signs that the person will disrespect other intimate boundaries.

When the concern about safety arises in our own families, the situation can be even harder. What if a beloved grandfather or uncle is touching a child or teenager in a sexually suggestive way? Keeping an act of abuse from escalating may require several family members getting involved. That means they have to be courageous enough to admit there’s a problem and trust and respect each other enough to address it together.

This can be painful. Sometimes too painful.

So instead, we focus most of our energy elsewhere. We become more vigilant about parking lots and taxi cabs. And as long as this heightened awareness doesn’t perpetuate racial stereotypes or cause us to limit our lives unnecessarily, it’s ultimately good. But I hope that this recent wake-up call doesn’t stop with strangers.

If reading the news has prompted us to have more conversations about sexual assault at our dinner tables and in our human resources departments, I hope we will also think about the thousands of acts of sexual violence that never make the news and what we can do about them.

– Meg Stone
Executive Director of IMPACT Boston

Preparing for Safety and Success in School

Families have a long to-do list when preparing for the new school year. We buy growing children new clothes or figure out hand-me-downs, gather pencils and notebooks… And when the first day comes, it can be filled with excitement or dread!

Every child loves learning. You only need to watch an infant learning to crawl or walk to see their pride at mastering a new skill.

So, why is it that getting kids to school can be so difficult at times? For many of us, it was the social arena that proved the most stressful part of school, not the big test coming up.

How many of us would have concentrated better in school or had better attendance if we had the skills to deal with problems that came up with friendships, classmates, and people we interacted with on the way to school?

When youth have a plan for dealing with a stressful social situation, it means they can choose a strategy to deal with the issue as it arises, and then put the thought away. But when a concern arises and they don’t have a strategy, this unsolved issue makes it very difficult to concentrate on what is in front of them.

When youth have the skills to speak up and take action against bias, social cruelty, bullying, harassment and exclusion, as well as answer the “what if it gets worse?” question in their minds, our communities are safer and more supportive for everyone. Individual students can spend more time learning & succeeding and less time worrying about their social interactions.

It can be frightening to address our fears about our children head on, but we do it. We do it so they are prepared for security and success. We do it with fire safety; we do it with car and bicycle safety. We can also do it with personal safety.

Feeling Safe in an Unsafe World

“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability… To be alive is to be vulnerable.” -Madeleine L’Engle

Choosing to prepare is a courageous act. It requires that you face that there are no guarantees in life; it requires that you concede that risk and vulnerability are natural parts of life.

This, I believe, is why our classes can seem frightening to some. It is not because of what we do in the classes — in reality, we structure the entire class around supporting students and helping them to feel safe as they address their fears. However, the act of admitting that there is, in fact, a reason why we should learn violence prevention and self-defense strategies, can be daunting.

In our classes, we don’t focus on the bad or scary aspects. We have seen enough assaults on TV, described on the news, and oftentimes, experienced in our own lives, to last a lifetime. So, at IMPACT, we have a chance to focus on what we can do.

When I teach, I tell students to focus on what I am doing, rather than on what the assailant character is doing, for this reason. It takes effort to shift one’s gaze from the actions of the attacker to that of the person defending herself. It is entirely possible that one could become consumed with threat and forget to move on to one’s own agency. Focusing on your agency doesn’t mean ignoring the threat, rather that we have chosen to focus on options we have to increase our safety in an inherently unsafe world.

I think that this — perhaps even more than the verbal strategies and physical techniques taught in class — may be the most beneficial part of the class: guidance about how to approach violence and risk in a healthy and honest way, and in a way that focuses on our own agency as individuals and as families.

Preparing Girls for Dating, Parties & Friendships

When I was checking out colleges as a teenager, I was concerned about safety on campus. So I asked questions. I noticed many schools had blue light emergency phones on campus, and many of my questions centered around their presence or absence. I experienced a rude awakening when I encountered a student generous enough to answer my questions.

She was passionate and indignant as she noted the blue lights were nowhere nearby when her “friends” who she trusted raped her. She told my 17-year-old self that rape usually happens by someone you know.

That conversation stuck with me for over a decade, but it wasn’t enough to stop me from having to learn it firsthand. Even majoring in Women’s Studies did not prevent me from entering an abusive relationship during my college years.

What I needed were concrete skills and strategies. I needed to think of safety as something that I should be conscious of in my relationships, not just when I was walking alone at night. I needed to learn to connect behaviors in my relationships to larger patterns of abuse. I needed to practice having difficult conversations, and I needed to see breaking up as an option that did not indicate failure. I needed someone to tell me that while it is always the perpetrator’s fault and never the victim’s, that I could take action and do something about it.

Whenever I think of the lack of preparation we give girls for the situations they are bound to face with dating, parties and friendships, I keep coming to one conclusion: It’s just not fair.

It’s simply not fair to know, as adults, the situations our young women are bound to face and not prepare them with the skills to negotiate them. It’s not fair to ask them to depend on the men around them to have good intentions in order to stay free from violence. It’s not fair to only arm them with “don’t wear a short skirt” or “run away & get help” as their only defenses to complex situations.

As a teen, I didn’t know the right questions to ask. So, as adults, we need to ask the colleges and universities where we send our children how they prevent sexual assault on campus — with programs, not just with security staff and emergency phones. We need to ask our college prep and high school programs how they are preparing girls for situations that could seriously jeopardize their academic success as well as emotional well-being. And we need to ask them how they’re preparing boys for situations they may face and how they can become agents to stop sexual violence as well.

Intuition & Trust

This past week I fixed my first flat tire on my own. It felt like a tremendous success story, not just as a woman with a flat tire, but as an IMPACT success. Three men stopped and offered help, and I realized I trusted them, and trusted them for very good reasons!

Ironically, “broken down on the side of the freeway” is the scenario that I use most in teen and adult classes when demonstrating verbal and physical skills in context. When I introduce the scenario, I sometimes hear gasps or murmurs of agreement, especially from women, as that is a situation that truly worries them.

In classes, the Suited Instructors play characters that say all sorts of nasty things as they approach, being suggestive, lewd, and simply not going away when I say I’ve got help on the way.

In real life, that’s not what happened. The first man who stopped asked if I had help on the way, and when I said I was trying to remember how to do it, he gave me some pointers. Then he wished me luck and drove off. The two men who came after also asked if I needed help and each of them also went away once they saw I had it under control.

I thought about how I knew I could trust them: None of them got very close to me. They all were friendly and helpful, commiserating and making jokes, but none of them tried to bond with me through the experience or sought to gain my trust through a quick encounter. There was no presumption of a relationship because I was on the side of the highway with a problem and they were men with knowledge and experience.

Oftentimes when people think about intuition, they think of it as “How do you know when something’s not okay?” For some, though, we know quite well when things are not okay. It’s more of a question of how to know when things are okay and when to relax

I was elated after the experience, not just because I conquered a flat tire independently, but because I got to relate to these men from a place of trust and lightheartedness, instead of feeling suspicious or worried as I might have in the past. When I count the ways IMPACT has freed my life, this is one of the most valuable ways to me: I can truly be present with my entire community.

When Confronted with Road Rage, I Had a Paln

A few weeks ago when I was driving, I noticed a car get out of my way and then abruptly pull behind me. I was puzzled when he turned into the same parking lot as I did, parking nearby for the same business. I was unsettled enough by the turn of events that I delayed in the car, thinking I would let him go in first to avoid further trouble, even if it turned out to be just a coincidence.

After a few moments of not seeing him pass in the rearview mirror, I decided I didn’t want to be late and got out to go in. I was startled to see him watching me as I crossed to the business. Instead of getting out to go to a destination, the man started his car and slowly drove past, looking me over, and then drove away.

I went in, noticing my feelings of confusion, anger and worry, and considered asking someone at the front desk to keep a look out. I also reviewed what I knew about his car and his appearance, wondering if I could identify him if he came back – worst-case scenario – and did something to my car.

I had plans to be there for over an hour, and for the first few minutes, I was preoccupied as I decided what I wanted to do and worked out what I thought happened and why he went away.

This could be a story about fear and the dangers of driving these days. It isn’t though – for me, at least. For me, it’s a story with two important components.

I had a plan. In fact, I had several plans. As events unfolded, I sifted through my plans and shifted them as I took in more information. Instead of feeling panicked, I was weighing my options.
I’m a rather petite woman. More likely than not, I was not the person he was hoping to get into a verbal argument with and then hit. Undoubtedly, he’d had a bad day, if not a hard time for a while, and was looking for someone to take it out on. I wasn’t that target. If I was a man, things might have been different.

I love the small fact encompassed in Point #1: We cannot control the world around us and avoid every situation, but we can plan for when things happen.

Point #2 is more complex and sad for me. Violence against men is largely unacknowledged and minimized or misinterpreted (for example, calling a situation a “fight” instead of an “assault”). It is unfair for men to be expected to not only be able to defend themselves, but also the women and children in their lives with absolutely no training at all.

Men are targeted because of being men just as women are targeted because they are women (as are LGBTQ individuals, older people, etc.)

We all deserve to have the assurance of having a plan, instead of having to depend on circumstance and not being an assailant’s “ideal target” in order to stay safe.

When Feeling Safe Isn’t Enough

When I took my IMPACT class years ago, I thought my biggest concern was safety. And it was, in many ways. My fear of violence really affected my life in a negative way. However, my biggest concerns could have been better described as:

wanting to understand how to trust others in a way that was more nuanced than an all-or-nothing approach
wanting to understand how I could speak up for myself without feeling mean
wanting to feel –not just know– that my body belonged to me & I could dictate my experiences
wanting to understand that previous bad experiences were not my fault & yet that they didn’t have to be repeated

Another IMPACT chapter recently noted that concern about safety was not the top reason why students enrolled in their classes. That initially surprised me, and I wondered if that could possibly be true for our students if we surveyed them.

I read the director’s email, and I noted that the top reasons for registrations in their chapter actually echoed many of my feelings and things I’ve heard in classes.

Listening closer to participants in recent classes, I noticed people talking about wanting:

to be able to protect their families
to heal from past hurts when they’d hit a wall with their progress
to be more assertive in their professional & personal lives
to be able to control their anger
to not have to ignore homeless people & others on the street
to have better relationships
to not always be kicking themselves after a difficult conversation with things they wish they had said.

While I believe feeling safe is an underlying aspect of being able to address all of these other issues, I love and feel honored to be a part of a curriculum that people feel they can come to in order to address such diverse needs.

What Do You Do to Prepare?

Traditional safety advice for women says women should:

•Never go out late / after dark.
•Always stay in groups.
•Not go to bad neighborhoods.
•Carry keys between their fingers.
•Carry mace / a gun / a whistle.
•Check under their cars / in their backseats before getting in.
•Not wear short skirts.

Women often prepare themselves by doing any / all of the above, or by worrying; as if worrying every day could protect us from the pain of an assault. We oftentimes apply this same or similar safety advice to our children.

I looked for a personal safety program that went beyond this list because I was outraged by the idea that I should have a curfew imposed on me that did not apply to men. I wanted to be able to do things independently; I didn’t want to always have to be with a friend. I was frustrated by advice that ignored the fact that some of us live in or work in bad neighborhoods. I was incredulous that this advice didn’t acknowledge that though many worry walking on the street alone, that the majority of the hurt we’ve experienced was by someone we knew, not someone lurking in the parking lot. And I resented the implication that I brought any abuse I endured upon myself.

In truth, following the above protocol did not keep me safe, but it did make my life smaller and made me more fearful.

It’s interesting to me that ultimately these are our choices. We can do these actions every day that result in increased fear and suspicion of others, particularly those that may fit a certain stereotype; or we can invest time in learning life skills.

When we learn skills, our lives open up with possibilities.

Twenty hours assured me that I didn’t need to worry about what I was wearing, that, in fact, clothing would neither deter nor attract the typical assailant. A couple weekends in the classroom meant that I opened up to men again, because I understood the difference between a nice guy and someone who was willing to cross my boundaries, regardless of how I felt. After the class, I trusted myself to react to signals I was receiving both from those in my life and strangers, instead of making excuses for them or denying what was clearly happening. After four days, I felt a change in my body, knowing that it was a safe place that I could now protect.

We all prepare for violence and hurtful events in life differently. Preparing should make us feel safer and our lives bigger, not more scared and more retracted. What do you do to prepare?

Protecting Our Communities After Tragedy

Imagine, for a moment, hearing about a tragic car accident. Imagine overhearing bits and pieces about a driver swerving out of control and hitting oncoming traffic at a speed of over 75 mph. You see clips of family members of those who died sobbing on the news. People talk about it for over a week.

How would you perceive that story? How long would it take for you to recover?

Now, imagine that same story but that you had never heard about seat belts, never learned the rules of the road, how to maintain safe distance, and how to look around your car and rearview mirror for irregularities. In fact, imagine you were told that you would be cared for in that sort of situation by people who said they could handle it, but still look fearful.

How would you perceive that story and how would you feel about getting into a car again? How long would it take you to recover?

Now, imagine you are seven years old.

Having tools makes all the difference. It doesn’t mean car accidents never happen, but it means that you have an understanding of how to deal with the risk and that the story plays in your head differently.

Just as you wouldn’t teach a new driver about car accidents and drunken drivers first thing, school shootings are not the place to start a discussion about child or school safety. Even trained officers and military struggle with how to deal with shooters — this is not the topic to begin with for teachers, families and children!

Just as car safety begins with learning about adjusting mirrors and looking both ways before pulling out of the driveway, personal safety for children has the same basic steps.

Teach them to trust their intuition. Teach them how to get help and what to say. Help them practice setting a boundary and saying no. Help them learn simple physical strategies to stop an assault.

By teaching them to deal with scenarios like bullying and unwanted touch, you prepare them for situations that are statistically far more likely and that they can do something about, and you empower them to deal with the terrifying stories that, unfortunately, they will continue to hear as they grow older.

I highly recommend the following articles from Kidpower for caregivers and others:

Helping Children Regain Their Emotional Safety After a Tragedy

How to Empower Kids in the Face of Armed School Violence

Tragic Shootings: Kidpower Answers to Common Questions About How To Be Safe

Schools & Organizations

Businesses

Donate >

Year: 2013