Tag: Women

Self-Defense Success in the Peace Corps: Kaytea’s Story

To welcome Kaytea Hendricks back to our organization as a self-defense instructor, we wanted to re-publish her self-defense success story from her time serving in the Peace Corps in Morocco. We’re so glad to have Kaytea teaching with us again!

I was on an afternoon walk when I was grabbed from behind. I thought it was a friend messing around. I said, “Come on, let me go.” Then his grip tightened, and I felt his erection. Then it hit me: “I’m being assaulted!”

He grabbed me just like Resolve instructors do during class. I took a deep breath and thought, “Oh no! He has no idea what he just got himself into!” I released a yell that was so powerful I surprised myself! I struck his groin and broke his grip. I turned to see him already sprinting away.

After this event, I felt strong and proud of myself.  Unfortunately, there were other women in my Peace Corps program who were assaulted in a similar fashion, but who had a very different overall experience. They experienced deep, life-altering trauma even though each of them was able to get away and avoid a full-on assault and were not physically hurt. 

One woman had to leave the program and return home; another started seeing a therapist; and a third woman, after therapy, still decided to return home. Although they were successful against their assailants –with no training! – they experienced trauma instead of empowerment.  

I saw how Resolve not only prepared me to defend myself, but prepared me to focus on my success – not my vulnerability. Instead of teaching me how powerful the assailant was, this experience taught me how powerful I am.

Making Sexual Assault Everyone’s Problem

The past few weeks have been overwhelming for many, especially for those of us who are sexual assault survivors. It’s easy to get caught up in the enormity of the problem – sexual assault happening at all levels of our society, no arena exempt.

And meanwhile, I think it’s important to credit those responsible for the increase in coverage and dialogue:

This moment is brought to you by the power of survivors.

To be sure, survivors are in different places in their journeys. Some are still struggling to understand that what was done to them was wrong; others are still finding the words to tell themselves, their diaries, their partners, and their friends. Others have been speaking out, fighting back against the shame of abuse for years – some for decades, including at consciousness raising groups, speak outs, rape crisis centers, and public protests like Take Back the Night rallies and marches.

As a movement, though, we have stopped short of identifying those who did violence to us.

Right now we are witnessing the incredible power of people speaking out. We know that one person speaking out frees others from shame, encouraging others to also speak out. And meanwhile there is a particular power gained when people speak out and name those who have harmed us. We know that it is incredibly rare for a perpetrator to have only one victim. So when one person speaks out, they not only free others to do so in general, but also embolden others hurt by that very same person to also name the harm done.

This takes working against the socialization many of us have received to be nice and not hurt others – even when we are being hurt ourselves. It calls for us to work against the grooming that person did to ensure we would stay quiet. It makes us confront the (strong) possibility of people dismissing us, minimizing or disbelieving what we have endured, and further violence – whether hateful language or physical harm.

These and more are all understandable reasons to not speak out. This is why Take Back the Night was so profound. Take Back the Night represented huge communities of women naming that what they experienced was not an individual shame, but a widespread social problem. It is no small act when young people and adults of all genders claim that title of “survivor” in our violence prevention and self-defense classes. I am honored to share the journey with others as they realize, truly, that it was not their fault, and all of the powerful things they did to survive.

However, I can’t help but notice that today we have massive numbers of identified “survivors,” and incredibly small numbers of accused.

This invariably has the effect of making sexual violence seem like a women’s issue, or an individual survivor’s issue, instead of the community problem that it truly is. This mindset discourages us from placing the blame for violence where it belongs – on the perpetrators. And we must focus on community change if we want to understand how to prevent future instances of violence.

This is exactly what some survivors are doing when they name those who harmed them– they are leading our movement forward. This means claiming our stories as our own. It means saying with authority: I know my own life. I have a right to speak. It means no longer protecting those who have hurt us. It means recognizing that there is no statute of limitations on our truth.

I find this inspiring, and I can’t wait for the next chapter that this opens up for us as we acknowledge exactly how rampant sexual violence is in our society and that we all have a responsibility for preventing it.

On Saying “No”: #YesAllWomen

We’ve known for years that the fear of further violence influences one’s ability to say “no” when something is unwanted.

Oftentimes, girls, women and others* are socialized to shrug, smile and indirectly express displeasure, hoping that the other person will get the idea. And oftentimes they do – the fact is that 96% of men see a boundary or lack of interest – however it is expressed – and will back off.

Yet, it’s the 4% of men who do assault women1 that reinforce the socialization that we shouldn’t be too out there. Men like Elliott Rodger, who recently issued a misogynist rant and then went on a murder spree that targeted a sorority house on campus, reinforce the concept that women are at risk when they reject men, however nicely. Men like Chris Plaskon, who recently murdered a girl who declined his offer to go to prom, reinforce the idea that maybe it’s better to be evasive and indirect.

These incidents are considered novel in today’s time, made bigger by the widespread reach of the internet and news. However, how many rapes in the community are necessary before women rethink going out at night alone? How many episodes of domestic violence do we need to hear about before we start thinking that we ought to be careful about letting him down gently instead of being straightforward?

At a certain point, violence isn’t even necessary. The threat of violence creates a change in behavior – girls and women would rather say “yes” than be called a b*tch, they choose their clothing based on how it will be perceived, and they don’t even identify violations anymore. A recent study shows that young girls are unlikely to identify sexual harassment and sexual assault as violations because they accept it as “normal.”

In this context, I see a greater need than ever for redefining social norms like we do in our school classes where we educate boys and girls about issues of consent, bystander intervention and boundary-setting. I also see how deeply we need a spectrum of self-defense – to help us understand our boundaries, to redefine what is okay and not okay for us and to be able to communicate that and protect ourselves when those boundaries are not respected. Quite simply, all forms of violence prevention – individual and community, men and women – are necessary to create safer communities.

If you agree, please sign up for a class or get more involved.

* This article focuses on heterosexual situations and gender norms, because of these recent events. Other articles speak more about violence against men, LGBT people and gender-nonconforming individuals.

1. Lisak & Miller, 2002.

Not Quite Enough: White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault

Recently, the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault announced a series of actions to: (1) identify the scope of the problem on college campuses, (2) help prevent campus sexual assault, (3) help schools respond effectively when a student is assaulted, and (4) improve, and make more transparent, the federal government’s enforcement efforts.

These are all fantastic steps, and a huge growth in efforts and attention after several courageous survivors exposed the gross neglect and response to sexual assault on college campuses.

So, what is missing? Women. All of the prevention efforts are focused on bystander education and men’s intervention.

This is great, and all of us in the violence prevention arena agree that it takes men and women working together to end the cycle of violence. The vast majority of men are good. Most people want to help, and just need to learn how. Changing social norms through education about consent and bystander education is something IMPACT does and collaborates with others in the community to do as well.

However, research has shown that traditional gender role norms contribute to a culture that permits sexual violence. And yet, this important effort to end sexual violence is promoting an approach that does just that. Instead of men as perpetrators, it attempts to replace that with men as protectors and interveners. In both scenarios, women are still cast as victims without agency, with men in control.

As our colleague Martha Thompson at Impact Chicago writes, “The message of the White House Task Force that women should focus their attention on awareness of risks and avoiding danger because only men can stop another man from rape and sexual assault is an obsolete message.”

Those of us who work with survivors know of the incredible strength they have. It takes strength to come forward and report. It takes strength to break patterns; to risk losing one’s social status or job; to jeopardize relationships with family and friends; it takes strength to tell complete strangers some of the worst moments of your life.

Women and others targeted for sexual violence have an incredible amount of strength. That strength can be used for preventing violence as well. Women are also able to act as active bystanders. And research repeatedly shows that resistance is effective in reducing the likelihood of an assault being completed, and that resistance does not “make a situation worse.”

We need to examine prevention efforts to be sure they don’t contain echoes of the same gender norms that create gender-based violence in the first place. I greatly appreciate the avoidance of victim-blaming in the White House report, but excluding women entirely is not the answer. Instead, we need to engage women and others targeted for violence in prevention efforts that do not buy into oppression.

It is crucial that we, as a society, develop a comprehensive solution to ending sexual assault – one that includes all genders and one that emphasizes community change as well as individual agency.

Ending Violence, Achieving Justice

Today, IMPACT is participating in One Billion Rising, a global movement to speak out against violence against women. Below are the statements Alena is making outside and inside the Capitol.

What a powerful day to be speaking with so many others across the world about violence against women!

The reality is that prevention efforts aimed at keeping women and others who experience violence safe is most frequently packaged in language that blames victims and perpetuates patriarchy and other systems of oppression. Told to not drink, not wear that skirt, not go out at night, to that neighborhood – as if our actions alone can prevent sexual assault.

Individual action might work if violence were the only issue. If violence against women were the only issue, maybe-

However, at IMPACT, we find it important to call out violence for what it is: a tool of oppression. When we recognize violence as a tool of oppression, that means that we MUST come together as a community. Individual avoidance or action is not enough.

It means that we must recognize violence against women is not the only issue that needs addressing. We must address racism, classism, xenophobia, ableism, homophobia, transphobia… all of the factors that we know put individuals in our community at greater risk for violence. It means we must acknowledge that patriarchy hurts not just women, but also our boys and men who are victimized at home or hurt because how they act or dress does not fit into stereotypes of traditional masculinity.

I’m proud to be a part of a community that has so many quality agencies working on these issues. When people need to reach out about sexual violence and/or domestic violence, Solace and Esperanza are there. Increasingly, medical teams throughout the city know how to respond to and compassionately invite disclosure about domestic violence. At IMPACT, we work to provide strategies to both prevent violence in our communities and help survivors heal and feel safer in their daily lives and relationships.

All of these are ways to develop individual and community safety and resilience. Meanwhile, if we are to really develop safer communities, we must consider issues from immigration reform to access to public bathrooms for transgender people and others. We need to investigate every issue that arises and consider: does it have implications for whether our communities are safer?

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We need a solution to violence that does not sell us the prospect of safety packaged in language that blames victims and perpetuates systems of oppression.

We are told to stand up for ourselves, yet many of us already know the risk inherent in that “solution.”

Instead of being supported by the judicial system like George Zimmerman was when he felt needlessly threatened by a young black boy, women, people of color and LGBT people regularly go to prison for defending themselves when faced with violence. Whether it is Marissa Alexander, a young black mother who stopped her abusive ex-husband from possibly killing her; or CeCe McDonald, a young transgender woman who defended herself when attacked in a transphobic and racist hate crime, people across the nation go to prison for “standing up for themselves.”

As long as our prevention efforts and judicial systems use bias as the basis for advice and decisions, we will not end violence and we will not achieve justice.

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 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.

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?

How Leaders Should Speak about Sexual Assault

Todd Akin’s recent comments give us an important opportunity to consider what a true leader for our communities should be saying about sexual assault.
Leadership means sometimes saying things that challenge the social norm. And let’s be clear- in a country where 1 in 3 women experience sexual assault, accepting rape as a tragic yet inevitable part of life for women is the norm.
True leaders would denounce rape unequivocally and state clearly that the blame always lies with the rapist and never the victim. True leaders would acknowledge that there are few consequences for rapists today. They would acknowledge that when 1 in 3 women experience sexual assault, as a society we are doing something to create rapists. They would understand this requires committing to deep cultural changes and invest time and energy into making this happen in our schools and in our media.
True leaders would also acknowledge the power and bravery that women and girls do possess – in their abilities to learn to speak out about what’s happened to them, advocate for themselves and others, and defend themselves in a culture that is otherwise not supporting them and keeping them safe.

Creating change with sexual assault requires a full systems approach. Preventing a sexual assault for one woman is not enough. Even sending one man to prison is not enough. If we truly want our sisters, our mothers, our daughters, our wives and our friends to be safe, we need to create change on a much larger level. Our nation’s dialogue about rape deserves more attention than a footnote in a conversation about contraception. It’s up to our leaders to initiate and support these changes.Let’s take this opportunity to re-focus on what we want to see in our leaders and our society, not just what we don’t want.

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