A New Direction For This Blog

Hi everyone! I am making some changes with the blog, at least temporarily. I may be making a whole new blog, I am not sure. But for tonight, I want to get my feelings put on "paper". I may not be using the traditional paper and pen method, but this will work. :) One of the reasons I am changing this for now is because with everything I have going on now, I do not have much grey matter left to use on creative writing. I do however, find myself in a situation where I have a lot of feelings that I feel writing them down will help me to deal with them. A few of you may know, if you know me or chat with me, that I am a student, but that I am also taking another training besides my regular school work. Well actually two trainings. One, the H&R Block training is just another class, no big deal. It is the other training that is making me feel a lot of stuff. This training is to be a domestic abuse/sexual assault advocate. Well, that's what it started as. I started doing the training as an Honors project for school. That Honors project has turned into a possible job at the local Battered Women's Shelter for now, then once I graduate in May applying to be a dv/sa counselor. If you know me, you know this is different for me. My plan was to be an attorney. A prosecutor to be exact. I strongly feel that you should always keep an open mind, and situations like this are why. I had my life for the next few years planned out. What schools I was going to go to, what I was going to do after each educational step, and what I was going to do once I passed the bar. Sometimes life has something in store for you that you had never even thought of. That is what happened to me. Now that you know kinda where my life is at, let me get back to what I am going to be putting in this blog, at least for now. I am going to be writing in different ways. Sometimes it will be just journal entries of what I am feeling, but other times like what I will be writing tonight, will be article/essay type entries, where I put my views on different subjects. Usually pertaining to dv or sa. What I am now going to write is a little article/essay type piece where I talk about sa and a disturbing trend in the way sa survivors are treated and looked at by society. So let me begin. :)

Victim Blaming

Have you ever seen the Jodi Foster movie called "The Accused"? If you have, did you realize it is loosely based on a true story? A true story that I am sure anyone reading this who was at an age where they read newspapers or watched news at the time of the incident read about it or saw it on tv, even though you may not remember it. I am sure of this because this story made not only national headlines, but also international headlines. This case was called the "Big Dan's Rape Case". You may not remember hearing anything about it, but I do. I remember because it tore my community apart. Yes, this happened in the city I lived in. I have never seen the movie The Accused, nor do I ever want to see it. But I do know it was very loosely based on this case. This incident occured on March 6th, 1983. It was called the Big Dan's case because that was the name of the bar that the attack occured in. What was a day of celebration, the victims daughter had turned 3 on that day and they had throw a party to celebrate that, turned into a very horrific night for this 21 year old mother of two.

All she wanted was a pack of cigarettes. It was late and none of the stores in the area were open, so she went into a small neighborhood bar to buy some. She had a drink while there and was talking to another woman. Two men asked her to leave with them, she refused and got up to leave. Someone else grabbed her from behind and dragged her to the pool table and threw her on the pool table. What happened next is every woman's nightmare. She was brutally raped. Not by just one man, but by several. While patrons of the bar laughed and cheered these men on. But this was not the only rape she would endure before this was over. She was to find herself raped again by not only the justice system, but also by the city she lived in. The defense portrayed her as a willing participant in group sex. The Portuguese community was outraged when the defendants were found guilty, since a lot of them sided with the rapists. They even went to the lenghts of holding candlelight vigils after both trials ended. (The men were tried in two seperate trials. One in the morning and one in the afternoon) 8,000 people held a march after the second verdicts were in.

The reasons these things happened were because of victim blaming. When a woman is raped we tend to blame the victim. Statements like "She should not have worn that", "She should not have been there alone", She should not have been walking alone at that time" help to blame the victim. Think about those kinds of statements for a moment. Think about the fact that rape is the only crime where the blame is placed on the victim and not the perpetrator. When we find out a coworker was mugged while walking to their car after work, do we blame the victim? Of course not. They were only walking to their car, not asking to be mugged. Well, no woman asks to be raped. Sometimes we make bad choices. Sometimes we walk alone at night, sometimes we may wear clothes that may be revealing, or any other number of things that may put us in some kind of danger. But does that men that we should be the victim of a crime? Lets look again at the person being mugged while leaving work. Even if it is a dark parking garage, with no guards or anyone else around, no one would say they should have not been walking to their car, they were asking to be mugged. Yet if that was a woman walking to her car after work, there would be people who would inevitably say she should not have walked out to their car alone, if she hadn't it would not have happened. VICTIM BLAMING. Two same situations, the only thing different is the crime committed. Yet in one case, no one would even think of blaming the victim, and in the other case the victim would be blamed by some people.

Another reason people use for women being sexually assaulted is the clothes they wear. First of all, a man, or a woman for that matter, should have enough will power not to force themselves on a person because of what they are wearing. But there is something else wrong with that theory. Saying it is because the woman was wearing inappropriate clothing would imply that rape is about sex. When in fact rape is about control and power. The rapist wants to exert power over the victim, the sex act is not the motivation. That is a fact that so many people, especially men have a hard time realizing or comprehending. Since there is a sexual act involved, people automatically think it is about sex. I believe one of the ways we can stop blaming the victim is for society to start realizing the real reasons for rape, not the perceived reasons. It is time to start asking questions like "Why did he have to hurt her like that?", or "What kind of monster would do something like that?" In other words it is time to put the blame where it belongs, on the attacker.

There is more than one type of rape, and victims vary from children to the elderly, and include both women and men. Some victims report the attacks, but the majority don't for a variety of reasons. There are different ways for a person to rape someone, be it by coersion, threats, or things like date rape drugs. There are different ways that women deal with being raped, from simply not saying yes, but not really resisting, just so that they do not have to deal with a worse situation such as a beating or being killed, or just so that they do not have to deal with the thought of being raped and all that implies, to fighting back with everything they have. These are just some of the other topics I will be discussing in what I hope to turn into a series of article/essay type entries involving not only sexual assault but also domestic violence. I hope you will come back and read future entries. It will be nice if I could help just one person who reads this, please feel free to leave comments if you would like. The comments will not appear right away, because I have the blog set up to send all comments to me for approval. But as long as they are respectful comments, I will post them.

Before I leave tonight I want to point out something:

If a woman, or man for that matter says no to you either by word or deed and you continue to have sex with them, (rape has to include penitration. If penitration is not part of the act, it is sexual assault. And this is penitration of any orifice with any object.) it is still rape. Sometimes victims do not forcibly say no or fight back. If they let you know in anyway, even by their actions that they do not want it to happen, it is rape. No ALWAYS means No, no matter how that no is conveyed to you.

And that's it for me for tonight. :)

~Janet~