By: Monica Gupta,
on 7/31/2016
रेप पीड़ित और लच्चर कानून व्यवस्था निर्भया रेप केस के बाद भी न पुलिस ने, न प्रशासन ने और न ही सरकार ने कोई सबक लिया और रही बात कानून की देवी की .. जब तक उनकी आखों में पट्टी बंधी हुई है कोई उम्मीद नही … महिलाए भगवान भरोसे हैं… बात हाल की है […]
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By: Monica Gupta,
on 6/21/2016
विवादित, बडबोले, अमर्यादित बयान और निशाने पर महिलाए ( अगर नेट पर विवादित बयान सर्च करेंगें तो आप पाएगें कि भरा पडा है गूगल सर्च नेताओ के विवादित बयानो से ) आज अचानक सुर्खियों में आए सलमान खान अपने विवादित बयान रेप्ड वूमन के साथ जोकि न सिर्फ महिलाओ को बल्कि उनके फैंस को भी […]
The post विवादित, बडबोले, अमर्यादित बयान और निशाने पर महिलाए appeared first on Monica Gupta.
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By: Caitie-Jane Cook,
on 5/22/2015
Hampshire Constabulary are the latest in a long line of police forces obliged to apologise to a victim of crime for failing to investigate an allegation properly. In this case, a young woman accused a man of rape. She was not believed; forensic examination of clothing was delayed; in the meanwhile, the complainant was threatened with arrest for ‘perverting the course of justice’ and she attempted suicide. Eventually, following belated forensic analysis, the man was arrested and has since then been convicted.
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By: JOANNA MARPLE,
on 4/13/2015
I read and review a lot of books each year, and this one stands out for me as a story that changed me. I am telling you, it is a must read. If it is on your TBR list, shuffle … Continue reading
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By: Cheryl Rainfield,
on 4/7/2015
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Speak out when you can. Support survivors. Take gentle care of yourself. I do. smile emoticon
-Cheryl Rainfield, author of SCARS, STAINED, and HUNTED, and incest, rape, and torture survivor.
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Speak out when you can. Support survivors. Take gentle care of yourself. I do. smile emoticon
-Cheryl Rainfield, author of SCARS, STAINED, and HUNTED, and incest, rape, and torture survivor.
By: Cheryl Rainfield,
on 11/6/2014
I am honored to have two of my books–SCARS and STAINED–included under PTSD/Abuse & Assault in “Bibliotherapy for Teens: Helpful Tips and Recommended Fiction” by librarian Erin E Moulton on School Library Journal’s site. Erin wrote a moving and insightful article on the need for fiction to help readers, and she put together a fantastic list of books librarians, teachers, and readers can turn to for various mental health issues, including anxiety, depression, PTSD especially from abuse and assault (and resulting in self-harm), dissociation, eating disorders, bi-polar, and more!
I used books to survive my own abuse and trauma as a child and teen–and I still use books to help me cope with the effects of trauma. So it always feels so good to hear from other readers and from librarians (and teachers) who recommend my books to others, or who read my books themselves and find them helpful. Thank you Erin for helping others find my books!
By: LaurenH,
on 6/21/2014
Issues concerning Imperial Japan’s wartime “comfort women” have ignited international debates in the past two decades, and a number of personal accounts of “comfort women” have been published in English since the 1990s. Until recently, however, there has been a notable lack of information about the women drafted from Mainland China. Chinese Comfort Women is the first book in English to record the first-hand experiences of twelve Chinese women who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese Imperial forces during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945). Here, author and translator Peipei Qiu (who wrote the book in collaboration with Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei), answers some questions about her new book.
What is one of the most surprising facts about “comfort women” that you found during your research?
One of the shocking facts revealed in this book is that the scope of military sexual slavery in the war was much larger than previously known. Korean and Japanese researchers, based on the information available to them, had estimated that the Japanese military had detained between 30,000 and 200,000 women to be sex slaves during the war. These early estimations, however, don’t accurately reflect the large number of Chinese women enslaved. Investigations conducted by Chinese researchers suggest a much higher number. My collaborating researcher Su Zhiliang, for example, estimates that between 1931 and 1945 approximately 400,000 women were forced to become military “comfort women,” and that at least half of them were drafted from Mainland China.
Although it is not possible to obtain accurate statistics on the total number of kidnappings, documented cases suggest shockingly large numbers. For instance, around the time of the Nanjing Massacre, the Japanese army abducted tens of thousands of women from Nanjing and the surrounding areas, including over 2,000 women from Suzhou, 3,000 from Wuxi, and 20,000 from Hangzhou. These blatant kidnappings continued throughout the entire war, the youngest abductee’s being only nine years old.
Chinese and Malayan girls forcibly taken from Penang by the Japanese to work as ‘comfort girls’ for the troops. The Allied Reoccupation of the Andaman Islands, 1945. Lemon A E (Sergeant), No 9 Army Film & Photographic Unit. War Office, Central Office of Information and American Second World War Official Collection. IWM Non Commercial Licence. Imperial War Museums.
What impressed you most deeply when you heard the stories of these women?
What struck me most deeply were the “comfort women’s” horrendous sufferings. I felt strongly that their stories must be told to the world. Many of the women were teenagers when the Japanese Imperial Forces kidnapped them. They were given the minimum amount of food necessary to keep them alive and were subjected to multiple rapes each day. Those who resisted were beaten or killed, and those who attempted to escape would be punished with anything from torture to decapitation, and the punishment often included not only the woman but also her family members.
The brutal torture was not only physical. These women confined in the so-called “comfort stations” lived in constant fear and agony, not knowing how long they would have to endure and what would happen to them the following day, worrying what their families went through trying to save them, and witnessing other women being tortured and killed. During research and writing I often could not hold back tears, and their stories always remain heavily and vividly in my mind.
I was also deeply impressed by their resilience and faith in humanity. These women were brutally tortured and exploited by the Japanese imperial forces during the war, and when the war ended, members of their own patriarchal society discarded them as defiled and useless. Many of them were ignored, treated as collaborators with the enemy, or even persecuted. Yet what the survivors remember and recount is not only suffering and anger but also acts of humanity – no matter how little they themselves have witnessed. Wan Aihua, though gang-raped multiple times and nearly beaten to death by Japanese troops, never forgot an army interpreter who saved her from a Japanese officer’s sword. She told us, “I didn’t know if the interpreter was Japanese, but I believe there were kind people in the Japanese troops, just as there are today, when many Japanese people support our fight for justice.”
What motivated you to write this book?
In part, I was shocked by the lack of information available. In this day and age, it feels like every fact or story to be known is easily at our fingertips. However, in this instance, it was not the case. Even after the rise of the “comfort women” redress movement, most of the focus was on the “comfort women” of Japan and its colonies, and little was known about Chinese “comfort women” outside of China. This created a serious issue in understanding the history of the Asia-Pacific war and to the study of the entire “comfort women” issue. Without a thorough understanding of Chinese “comfort women’s” experiences, an accurate explication of the scope and nature of that system cannot be achieved.
In the past two decades, how to understand what happened to “comfort women” has become an international controversy. Some Japanese politicians and activists insist that “comfort women” were prostitutes making money at frontlines, that there was not evidence of direct involvements of Japanese military and government. And they say telling the stories of “comfort women” disgraces the Japanese people.
One of the main purposes for me to write about Chinese “comfort women” is to help achieve a transnational understanding of their sufferings. To understand what happened to the “comfort women,” we must transcend the boundaries of nation-state. I hope to demonstrate that fundamentally confronting the tragedy of “comfort women” is not about politics, nor is it about national interests; it is about human life. Dismissing individual sufferings in the name of national honor is not only wrong but also dangerous, it is a ploy that nation-states have used, and continue to use, to drag people into war, to deprive them of their basic rights, and to abuse them.
Peipei Qiu is the author and translator of Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves, which she wrote in collaboration with Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei. She is currently professor of Chinese and Japanese on the Louise Boyd Dale and Alfred Lichtenstein Chair and director of the Asian Studies Program at Vassar College.
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By: JonathanK,
on 6/19/2014
Last week the Guardian reported, “A state minister from Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party has described rape as a ‘social crime’, saying ‘sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong’, in the latest controversial remarks by an Indian politician about rape.” While horrified by these comments, I remembered that a book from OUP India’s office had recently landed on my desk and the author, Pratiksha Baxi, might be able to shed some light on the issue of rape in India for Westerners. Below is a post Baxi sent in response to my query following the story mentioned above. –Christian Purdy, Director of Publicity
In the wake of the Delhi gang rape protests in 2013-2014, a section of the western media was critiqued for representing sexual violence as a form of cultural violence. For instance, a white woman reporter said to a friend, ‘we are filming Indian women of all kinds. You look modern. Please, can you say—I am India’s daughter’. Not fazed by the angry refusal, the reporter found some other ‘modern’ looking woman to mime this script for the camera. The Delhi protests became a resource for a certain kind of racialized sexual politics, which looped back to a nationalist rhetoric decrying the tarnishing of the image of the country abroad. Indian politicians responded by blaming the media, feminists, and the protests for sensationalising rape, and producing the crisis now posed to the image of a globalising economy.
The national and international political debates ignore Indian feminists and law academics—who innovated new juridical categories such as custodial rape and power rape—leading the path to conceptualise rape as a specific technique of state and social dominance. They do not cite the learning of subaltern or Black feminists of the Global South. Nor are different jurisdictions compared to raise more serious questions about the cunning nature of law reform in neo-liberal contexts. Although there has been feminist research on rape, feminist interventions in international law and several global collaborations to combat violence against women, there seems to be an inability to carry the complexities of these debates in the national and international mainstream media.
Protests at Safdarjung Hospital. Photo by Ramesh Lalwani. CC BY-NC 2.0 via ramesh_lalwani Flickr.
In India, the political rhetoric on rape continues to deploy conventional scripts: boys will be boys; sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong; alcohol causes men to rape. There is a political refusal to recognise that rape is central to dominance, a routinized expression of sexualised power. Nor is it in political interest to displace the use of rape as a form of social control. Rather rape becomes a means of doing competitive party politics or as a technique of consolidating power.
Sexual assault is used as a means to control dissenting bodies. Rape is a technique of terror that is used with impunity to control social mobility, stifle dissent, reassert social control, gain political control, and target ‘hated’ communities. There is no serious attempt to challenge this kind of rape culture, which inhabits the cultures of policing. It is a political apparatus of sexual terror, not to be confused with theories of male sexuality or as evidence of cultural predispositions. Rather this rape culture rests on a political apparatus, which has several organised features.
First, it rests on a system of policing and law enforcement, which makes rape look like consensual sex, and consensual sex look like rape. For example, the use of the rape, kidnapping and abduction laws to criminalize love across caste or community is rampant, whilst rape as a form of caste dominance is scarcely taken seriously.
Second, the political apparatus of rape deploys violence to produce the public secrecy of rape: while everyone knows that women are raped, we are told no one must talk about it.
Third, this political apparatus rests on a scripted representational regime that attributes the blames of rape to women, alcohol, literacy, poverty, public access and so on—everything but the structures of dominance in a globalising economy. It institutionalises a politics of forgetting—from the traumatic histories of mass sexual violence to caste atrocities—we are told that there is no connection between everyday and mass scale sexual violence.
Fourth, it denies the link between the dispossession of the marginalised from property or land, and the growing rate of sexual violence. In the Baduan rape and lynching case, the children went out to the fields of the dominant caste to relieve themselves. The subsequent demand for bathrooms for dalit women is an expression of this dispossession, which makes them vulnerable to brutal sexual violence, murder and lynching.
Fifth, such a political apparatus acts as a thought police. It denies the right to sexual autonomy and choice. And it rewards those politicians who rape, riot, murder, censor or humiliate.
All this means that there is complicity between state and society in privileging rape as the expression of male power. The state conserves and even stokes the desire to rape as the foundational tool of male power. This is a political trait, not a cultural trait. There is an ever-expanding indifference to sexual violence survivors, which seems to be in inverse proportion to the anti-rape protests. For instance, even today a spare pair of clothes is not provided to rape survivors when their clothes are confiscated as evidence in police stations or hospitals.
Sexual violence can be prevented and redressed if this political apparatus is disbanded. To destroy this political apparatus, the doing of politics—local, national and international must change. Rather than engaging in an aggressive and masculine competition over crime statistics, politicians must engage seriously with the nature of institutional reform and response to sexual violence.
In the context of the international laws and policies on violence against women, the new government must allocate generous gender budgets to provide essential facilities to rape survivors and institute measures to prevent sexual violence. This must accompany zero tolerance for rape of women, men, sexual minorities and children. The recommendations to criminalise marital rape; repeal the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and legislate against rape as a mass crime must be implemented. Section 377 IPC, a colonial law criminalizing homosexuality must be repealed. In other words, sexual autonomy and sexual dignity must be respected. This means that the conventional notions of sexual morality, which regulate women’s sexuality, pathologize queer sexuality and celebrate violent masculinity, must no longer lay the foundations of the Indian polity. National and international politics must recognise rape as political violence rather than cultural violence; substitute the language of ‘rescue’ with repatriation and learn from languages of social suffering rather than vocabularies of power.
Pratiksha Baxi is Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and author of Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India (OUP India, 2014)
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By: Cheryl Rainfield,
on 9/6/2013
My advance bound copy of STAINED just arrived (it doesn’t release until Oct 1st)–and it is gorgeous! Absolutely beautiful. It felt so good to get in the mail today! (In STAINED, Sarah, a teen with a port-wine stain and body image issues, is abducted, and must find a way to rescue herself.)
There is so much excitement and joy in seeing (in person) the book you wrote–the finished copy–for the very first time. I admit that I was so excited to get STAINED that I ran and showed five different neighbors, and then a friendly teller at the bank who always loves to hear about my writing, and my hairdresser, and the clerk at the grocery store who’s always friendly with me. (Laughing) And they were all lovely about it, joining in with my excitement and enthusiasm.
And there is also SO much good feeling in holding your finished book in your hands for the first time. In running your hands over the cover, feeling the texture (or smoothness), breathing in the scent of the book, seeing your name on the cover, seeing the way your manuscript became an actual, finished book. Taking in the effect of the cover, the weight of the book, the color of the pages, the fonts used. Feeling proud of your hard work, your dream–and of the publishing team who helped you. My editor, Karen Grove, was fantastic, helping me make STAINED a stronger book, and everyone I worked with at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was lovely.
I think the book designer Liz Tardiff did an absolutely beautiful job. I love the purple dripping from the title on the cover–so fitting when Sarah has a purple port-wine stain on her cheek, and she feels stained by it and the way people judge her, as well as by the abduction and rape. I also love how easy it is to read the one-liner and my name on the cover. I really love the cover–it reminds me of Ellen Hopkins’ books–but I’d already seen the cover (in digital form). What I hadn’t seen and realized was how gorgeous the paper for the dust jacket is. It’s a lovely matte finish with a wonderful, almost grainy texture–a surprise and a delight to hold!
And then the end papers are a deep, rich purple–tying perfectly into the title (and into the port wine stain on Sarah’s cheek), and also the first line description on the inside flap, and my name and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s info on the back flap.
And then a nice surprise, to me, was to take off the dust jacket and see the title in that vivid, shiny purple, overlaid on top of black, along the spine.
I am so lucky to have a cover and a book design I love. I’m so happy! I had a lot of fun with the photos and STAINED; I hope you can tell. (grinning)
Here’s one of me reading STAINED. I know that books can save lives. Books helped save mine, and I still get reader letters every week from teens (and adults) telling me how SCARS helped save them. I hope that STAINED will also be a book that will save lives.
I didn’t used to be able to say or even feel that I was proud of myself…but I am, now. I know my books reach people who need it. I know I write emotional truths, break silences, and talk about abuse and trauma and healing, queer characters and strong girls and things that I care about deeply. I know I’m writing the books I needed as a teen and couldn’t find. So today–with the arrival of STAINED (out Oct 1st!) I feel proud.
Thank you for allowing me to share my excitement and happiness with you over STAINED. (smiling)
And (ahem) if you noticed the blue and orange fabric in the corner of my photos, that is a pair of Petal’s (my little dog’s) pjs. heh.
By: Kirsty,
on 1/31/2013
What is a false allegation of rape? At first, this might appear to be a daft question. Reflecting the general tendency to think of the truth or otherwise of allegations in reductive terms of being either true or false, the meaning of “false allegation” is commonly taken to be self-evident. A false allegation of rape is an allegation that is false; the rape alleged did not, in fact, occur. In the abstract, this seems a perfectly logical and sensible approach.
In practice, however, there is much more to making a formal rape complaint than the simple and solitary assertion, “I was raped”, or, where the identity of the accused is known, “I was raped by X”. Complainants’ statements comprise multiple assertions of fact detailing when an alleged incident happened, where it happened, how it happened, and at whose hands, as well as giving an account of the events and circumstances leading up to and following the incident. For criminal justice professionals, whose priorities are trial-focussed, the question of veracity extends to each and every statement of fact – the who, what, where, when, how and so forth – contained in a complainant’s account. As complainants may conceal or actively lie about any one or more of these facts, the messy reality is that some rape allegations may be more (or less) true (or false) than others. This raises a conceptual question: is an allegation “false” because it’s not genuine, or because it’s not true?
Of course, there’s a certain degree of overlap between these two approaches. Presumably, we would all agree that the alleged rape which is, in fact, a complete fabrication of something that never happened is a false allegation. But how would you describe the allegations of a complainant who, for example, reports being ambushed at midnight by a knife-wielding stranger, dragged into nearby bushes and raped, when CCTV footage, witness statements, and scientific evidence prove unequivocally that the complainant and accused had, in fact, spent the evening drinking together in various local bars and that sex took place at the accused’s home? Or the allegations of a rape complainant who maintains that she (or he) was stone-cold sober at the material time, when a toxicology report shows that, in fact, the complainant had consumed a significant amount of alcohol and a fair amount of cocaine, and witnesses state that she had done so voluntarily? Clearly, the fact that a complainant has lied about some detail or other in their statement(s) does not mean that there was, in fact, no rape. It does, however, mean that their allegations aren’t (entirely) true. Despite a genuine rape incident at the heart of the allegation, the complainant’s account contains assertions of fact that are demonstrably false. And the falsehoods in a complainant’s statement(s) have potentially catastrophic implications for a prosecution. If the complainant, almost invariably the prosecution’s chief witness in a rape trial, has a documented history of providing evidence which, although sworn on pain of prosecution to be true, is, in fact, false, then a prosecution is unlikely to proceed. There may well have been a rape but, in the absence of compelling prosecution evidence independent of the complainant, the chances of proving beyond reasonable doubt that there was are slim.
Regardless of one’s conceptual approach, then, referring to the alleged rape that didn’t happen as a “false allegation” is uncontroversial. The issue really is whether the rape that didn’t happen the way the complainant said it did might also be described as false. And that is an issue on which reasonable minds might – and, as I have recently argued, do – reasonably differ. “Well,” you may say, “so the ‘false allegation’ is a contestable concept. Big deal. So what?” Well, it is a big deal because nobody’s really discussing what “false allegations” are and yet people keep trying to count them! There’s a fairly extensive research literature and broader critical debate, spanning several decades, on the prevalence of false rape allegations. The prevailing academic orthodoxy insists that false allegations of rape are rare, or at least no more common than false allegations of other offences, with those claiming otherwise – usually criminal justice professionals with first-hand experience of investigating and prosecuting rape cases – quickly dismissed by the mainstream as misogynists and sceptics. But how one conceptualises and defines the “false allegation” has a direct, and often striking, effect on how many are observed. Despite repeated claims to the contrary, research findings are consistent only in their inconsistency. Estimated prevalence rates for false rape allegations range from the sublime to the ridiculous. So the contestable nature of the concept of the “false allegation” matters because divergent estimates may reflect methodological rather than attitudinal factors. Put simply, the various protagonists may not all be counting the same things.
Dr Candida Saunders is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Nottingham. Her article, The Truth, the Half-truth and Nothing like the Truth: Reconceptualizing False Allegations of Rape, appears in The British Journal of Criminology where you can read it in full and for free via the link above.
The British Journal of Criminology: An International Review of Crime and Society is one of the world’s top criminology journals. It publishes work of the highest quality from around the world and across all areas of criminology.
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Image credit: Police Lantern In England Outside The Station. By Stuart Miles, iStockPhoto.
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By: Cheryl Rainfield,
on 8/24/2012
As a survivor of incest and ritual abuse (cults), I always wanted to be saved while I was being abused. But how could I tell anyone when my life was being threatened? I was too afraid to speak aloud (they said they’d kill me if I talked). The one time I phoned a crisis line, I whispered, and it was a fast conversation. But there’s a free app now –Circle of 6–that *might* have helped me–and that I think could help a lot of children, teens, and adult women (or men) in danger, especially from something like date or stranger rape, or assault. (I think it’s harder when it’s your parents abusing you.) This app sends a text message to six friends that you pre-arrange to be your safety people, letting them know your exact location (through GPS). Depending on what you’ve decided ahead of time, this could get your friends to come pick you up, or call you to interrupt an uneasy situation or to check in on you.
There is also another app, Bipper, and Bipper For Kids, that does a similar thing.
I think these apps may help protect a lot of women and kids in danger, and help to save lives (and prevent trauma). They are also being used by people with Alzheimer’s, and even people going on long hikes or rides by themselves. Of course, you have to choose your safety people carefully. But if you have people you trust, this can help a lot.
I wish I’d had this app when I was a child and teen–though since I didn’t have anyone safe around me (cults make sure that doesn’t happen), it wouldn’t really have helped. But I can see it helping a lot of people today. The characters in my books could sure use these apps. And many of the teens who write me could have, to.
If you think these apps are useful, I hope you’ll let your friends know. We need everything we can use to help ourselves and others be safe.
Update: It looks like neither app is available for Android phones–which is what I have. BUT there are some other women’s safety Android apps. A list of safety apps for Android, iPhone, and Blackberry is here.
Some safety Android apps:
bSafe (for Android, iPhone, and Blackberry) Sends an emergency message to your chosen contacts via text with your GPS location, and one contact will call you. You can also program a fake call to you to interrupt an uneasy situation.
Guardly (for Android, iPhone, and Blackberry). Fast way to connect to your family, friends, and 911 if you’re in danger, and help them reach and locate you. You can specify exactly what the emergency is, such as “peanut allergy,” “walking home alone,” “stroke.” (Though for some reason this version isn’t compatible with either my Android phone or my tablet.) There are both a free and a paid version–the paid version connects you up to 911. (I personally think this service should be free–but I didn’t create the app.)
I Am Safe which notifies your location to your partner or parent.
By: Cheryl Rainfield,
on 7/11/2012
I can’t believe *anyone* actually thinks it’s okay to tell rape jokes–never mind that they mind be funny. To me, that’s a sign of great disconnectedness from compassion, from emotion, and from their own vulnerability. Yet that’s just what comedian Daniel Tosh does. Apparently he frequently tells rape jokes in his spiel.
And when, in a recent performance, he was telling rape jokes, and a woman audience woman yelled out that rape jokes are never funny, according to the audience member, Daniel said: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…”
Okay. Wow. Let’s just pause here for a minute. In a world where women are frequently raped–every 2 minutes in the US, someone is raped, and 9 out of 10 of them are usually women–this man thinks he suggest a woman get gang-raped? Seriously?
As a woman, I am offended and outraged. As a incest and sexual abuse survivor, as a ritual abuse survivor, I am horrified. I know what it’s like to be raped. It leaves emotional and psychic wounds that don’t go away. It dehumanizes us. It makes us feel worthless, dirty, like garbage.
Stances like Daniel’s are one of the reasons I write the kind of books I do. Books that talk about rape and sexual abuse, victimization and oppression. Books that also talk about the strength of survivors, and our ability to not only fight back and heal, but to thrive after something so traumatic. To find safety for ourselves, and to help others find it, too.
We need strong voices to counteract voices like Daniel’s. And so I am so grateful to the woman audience member who stood up to him in the show, and who then blogged about it so other people could hear about it. When we raise our voices, we are often heard. We CAN make a difference.
That’s something that, to me, is so powerful about books. We can help others who don’t understand an issue really get inside another person’s experience and emotions through story. We can help them feel. I’m always grateful when people stand up to oppression–in real-life situations, in conversation, and in books, film, art. I hope for a world without hatred. Without abuse, rape, oppression. I will never stop hoping for that. Care to join me?
How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr
In this novel, a young woman whose darkness has been a long time coming connects with a once happy family that has recently experienced the sudden and devastating death of the father. The widow has invited the pregnant un-wed 18 year-old into her home with the intent of adopting the baby when it is born. Her daughter, in her last year of high school, thinks her mother has lost it. All three are so busy trying to save themselves from their own grief that almost no communication takes place. Aptly named, this story follows to resolution the dictum, “The life you save may be your own.”
Told in alternating perspectives of the two teen girls—Mandy and Jill—both the main and the supporting characters gradually emerge as complex and appealing individuals. Mandy negotiates with herself as she tries to both ditch her unfortunate childhood and to make better decisions for the new life she will bring into the world. Jill uses hostility as best she can to shut out others in her quest to numb the loss of her father. They are as different as two teens can be; their only common ground is the mother’s generosity and sorrow that holds them in an embrace. The magic of this story is how the author slowly brings them together to resolve the underlying and yet most gripping conflict in the plot, which is the question of the quality of life that awaits the new baby.
Zarr’s books, while clearly targeted to the teen girl audience, also fit well into the category of “If it’s good enough for a teen to read, it’s also good enough for an adult to read.” In fact this is a great book for mother and daughter to share.
Gaby
By: Laurie Halse Anderson,
on 8/19/2011
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I was planning on writing an update about the book banning efforts of Wesley Scroggins in Republic, MO next month. The school board finally made its decision about which books it would remove, and since we are so close to the one-year anniversary of the mess, I had decided to write about it then.
But then I found out that the mother of a special needs girl has filed suit against same school district in which she claims her daughter suffered “multiple sexual assaults” and was raped by a classmate in school in seventh grade. The suit claims that the daughter told school personnel, who did not report the accusations to authorities, that her daughter was shamed into recanting and forced to write a letter of apology to the rapist, then was RAPED AGAIN by the same boy in same school the following year.
So I am writing about the Republic School District a little earlier than I had planned to.
(I have linked to the original complaint, the district’s responses and other news coverage at the end of this post.)
The outrages pile up one atop the other. According to the complaint filed by the mother, this girl (then in seventh grade) suffered from repeated sexual harassment from the boy in question. When he finally raped her, she went to school officials. They told her mother that they did not think the girl’s accusations were credible. After that, they met with the girl a number of times, without the mother being present, to discuss her claims.
Apparently no one at the school contacted the police.
If I had written this storyline in a novel, my editor would have dismissed it as ridiculous. She’d say something like, “That would never happen in America today. School officials know that they are mandated reporters. They would have called the police the first time the girl spoke up.”
They didn’t. Instead, they made the girl write an apology letter to the boy she accused of raping her. Then they made her deliver it to him.
And then? They referred her to juvenile authorities for making up the whole story and suspended her for the rest of the school year.
(There is a big unanswered question here: did the police, acting on that referral from the school for false accusation, investigate? What did they find?)
When the girl started eighth grade the following September (2009), the lawsuit claims she was the victim of “repeated sexual assaults” for the entire school year. In February of 2010, the suit alleges that the boy took her to a secluded corner of the library and raped her.
The girl immediately spoke up again. School officials were skeptical and did not take any action. The girl was taken (by her mother, I believe) to the Child Advocacy Center for a SAFE exam (Sexual Assault Forensic Exam). The exam showed a “positive finding for sexual assault.” Semen collected in the the exam was found to be a DNA match for the boy in question.
The boy was arrested and pleaded guilty to the charges brought against him. (The lawsuit does not the specify the exact charges or his sentence.)
What did the school do? The lawsuit says it suspended THE GIRL again for “Disrespectful Conduct” and “Public Displ Add a Comment
By: Sandra de Helen,
on 6/13/2011
Yesterday I went to see a one-woman show by Brenda Phillips called No More Pity Party Blues. Brenda has a gorgeous voice and is a wonderful entertainer. (She is also an artist, and her "tickets" were take home cards of her art. Bonus!) Her material flowed through stories from her life, covering the first time she was "in love" in second grade through being sexually abused by "play uncles" through real loves in her adult life, to today. She shows how she has come to take responsibility for her own self, her own part in her happiness. Along the way there was wonderful singing of the blues and gospel that had the audience moving, clapping, and vocalizing along. Next time she brings this show out to play, be sure to go. I'll let you know as soon as I hear about it. This was a short notice kind of thing, Brenda will be bringing it back.
I too have been working on my own personal history, as I recently wrote about. We all have things we have to overcome. Some are worse than others. For me I find that some of the things that might be considered the most horrendous to others are not the ones that were hanging me up. Or maybe not the first step. My most recent non-fiction piece that I wrote about was about being molested by a friend of my mom's. Not losing my virginity at the age of 12, or being married at 15, or being a battered wife, or when I was raped, or the things that I consider much worse that I won't even mention here. But that molestation was what changed me from the innocent babe that I was, to the person I was to become. I began taking the steps to take charge of my own life, began making my own bad decisions that led to many of those bad things that happened later in my life.
At this stage in my life the big decisions all have to do with forgiveness. Brenda talked about that yesterday. Forgiving oneself. I find it relatively easy to go back and forgive my 12 year old self for the decisions I made, but I still stick at the decisions I made at 21 and older. Intellectually I can say that I did the best I could at the time. When I knew better I did better. My heart twists and turns when I try to forgive those decisions that resulted in pain for my children. I'm still working on forgiveness.
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By: Matthew Cheney,
on 3/13/2011
A post by Timmi Duchamp first brought to my attention a now-infamous article in the New York Times, "Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town", which reports on a gang-rape of an 11-year-old girl by 18 men of varying ages -- from early teens to 27.
Timmi described the article as being chiefly concerned with the rapists rather than their victim, and I must admit that at first, being in a particularly optimistic and naive mood or something, I thought, "No, there's got to be some mistake -- the Times wouldn't let something like that through, would they?"
They would. They did. It's a nauseating article.
Timmi nails it, and so do Mary Elizabeth Williams in a Salon piece, "New York Times's Sloppy, Slanted Child Rape Story", and Mac McClelland at Mother Jones with "The New York Times' Rape-Friendly Reporting". Perhaps the most vivid proof that James C. McKinley, Jr's reporting for the Times for this story is rotten comes from a comparison with other reporters' approaches to the same story, which Latoya Peterson at Poynter does quite well. (Though as Irin Carmin at Jezebel pointed out, the Times isn't the only one with appalling coverage.)
The Times's Public Editor, Arthur S. Brisbane, wrote a blog post saying he thought the story "lacked balance", which is true -- all of the force of the story is on the side of people in the community who want to blame an 11-year-old for being a victim of a gang rape and who feel sorry for how tough the lives of the alleged perpetrators will now be. But there's a whole lot more going on here, a whole lot more than just a moment of bad journalism.
Part of the problem is a perceived insatiable desire to know among the public, and the need to fill pages and broadcast time -- newspapers and TV news shows live to give us the details. Especially at a time when news is constantly updated on websites and 24-hour channels, there is an imperative to offer new information and to quench the (perceived? real?) unquenchable thirst of the audience for more, more, more.
But when a victim is 11 years old, there is, or should be, a limited amount of information available, and McKinley seems to have been sensitive to this, unlike other reporters who, apparently, dug up her Facebook page. (These people can live with themselves? They can sleep at night?) But he needed to write a story, and he couldn't just write a few sentences, because there are columns to fill and hungry readers to satisfy, so he filled out his story with what he could most easily get. Whether he cherry-picked the most noxious views of the people he quoted, we don't know, but what he did was create a portrait of an entire town that apparently thinks 11-year-old girls deserve to be raped. Even if that were true (it's not, according to other reporting), McKinley gave those people most of his attention, making the story all about them, when the basic fact of the story is: 18 boys and men allegedly raped an 11-year-old girl.
But the problem here is not only about balance and about the choice of narrative point of view, or the choice to add "human interest" to the bare facts with interviews -- it's also about language, as various people have pointed out. Consider the fourth paragraph of the
By: Stacy A. Nyikos,
on 10/5/2010
Speak
By: Kristi Helvig,
on 9/28/2010
WARNING: This post is about rape. It's not about censorship, which I could go on for days about, because that has been comprehensively covered in other posts. It's not about religion, which I could go on for weeks about, maybe even years. It's not even about Dr. Scroggins and how amazed I am that he has a Dr. in front of his name given the magnitude of his ignorance. Or that he could find a book about rape 'pornographic' in any way. Devastating and tragic, yes. Pornographic, no. There have been many posts addressing the issue how Dr. Scroggins, a self-proclaimed Christian in Missouri, attempted to get the book SPEAK by Laurie Halse Anderson banned, along with several other books, for being akin to soft core pornography. His actual article can be found here. I will say one more thing about religion. Rape happens to young women (and some young men) of ALL religions, so to imply that a good Christian shouldn't let their kids read a book about this topic is absurd and irresponsible.
My YA hat is off today. I'm writing this as a Ph.D. licensed clinical psychologist who has worked with hundreds of rape survivors. Rape is an ugly act, and we have a tendency to sweep ugly things under the carpet, where we don't have to look at them. This is an issue that is too important to hide.
I've worked with girls impregnated by their own fathers and step-fathers. I've worked with girls whose mothers kicked them out of the house for trying to "steal their boyfriend" after said boyfriend repeatedly raped them. I've worked with girls who 'accepted' rape from family members, hoping it would spare their younger siblings from the same abuse. I've worked with girls who were date raped and did SPEAK only to be blamed themselves or told it was "her word against his," and then had to see the perpetrator in school every day. My heart has broken over and over again for these girls, but one of the best parts of my job is helping give a voice to those who feel they don't have one. Helping them become stronger than they ever thought they were before. Helping them SPEAK.
RAPE STATISTICS:
Impossible by Nancy Werlin
A good part of being a teenager is the uncovering of mysteries about one’s own self. Lucy has more of a task with this than most teenagers since she is the target of an ancient curse, one based on the song Scarborough Fair. In a contemporary teen setting, Lucy must first discover the nature of a curse that threatens to irrevocably determine an unacceptable fate. Then, with the help of foster parents and a loving boyfriend (as well as the modern advantage of technology) she must try to break the curse.
A little of the supernatural really makes this story of strength, courage, and love sparkle. The obstacles are powerful, the drive for resolution is intense, the strength of love is thrilling. Teenage girls in my eighth and ninth grade classes last year were thrilled with this book. While there is some violence and moderately inexplicit sex, including a slightly surreal rape scene, the overriding theme is the power of love and resolve in overcoming adversity.
Gaby Chapman
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By: Lizzy Burns,
on 3/2/2009
Safe by Susan Shaw
Publisher: Dutton Juvenile Books
Release date: October 2007
Overview: Tracy is a “normal” thirteen-year-old girl. She enjoys basketball, hanging out with her best friend Caroline and dreads piano lessons. She has a great relationship with her dad and has a special way to remember her mom who died when she was three. She has grown up feeling and being safe. Her life is drastically changed, though after she is raped, beaten and left for dead by a classmate’s older brother. She no longer feels safe anywhere or with anyone.
Tracy’s story is heartbreaking and on more than one occasion, I just wanted to give her a hug and keep her safe myself. Shaw aptly illustrates Tracy’s denial of the crime against her and the many methods Tracy employs to find a “safe” place (getting lost in her music, isolating herself from friends, staying at her own home, etc.). The one thing I had trouble believing was that Tracy and her friends were thirteen – they behaved as more mature teens would.© Elizabeth Burns of A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy
By: Sandra de Helen,
on 2/24/2009
Stop! Don't move along, there's plenty to see here! Check it out. Tonight we are already in chapter seven ... we are going to end the summer of 1956, and begin 8th grade with the dreaded Mr. Sadler. We'll come back to the beginning and pass it. If you don't know, we started the book with an attempted rape of the 12-year-old Poor Little Thing, then her own decision to give up her virginity to 15 year old Ronnie. Now she's trying to live as though nothing has happened, but life isn't that simple. Rumors are flying and she has to face up to reality -- tonight! Come join me at 7pm Pacific Time at www.PIVTR.com ... log in about 5 minutes early so you are all set, because Lillian the station owner will put me on the air as soon as I call in, and I may start a couple minutes before 7. She does this to allow me to finish at a good stopping place.
It's going to be a fine evening for curling up beside your computer and listening to me read to you for 30 minutes. Let me take you back to the 50's to the life of a precocious adolescent who is foundering without boundaries in her life, but still finds joy and optimism at every turn.
Watch out playing with that book. You’ll get it stained
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