my wife was attacked in the street yesterday.
fortunately not physically and thank God there were two Latino guys in a car nearby that she was eventually able to get to come to her assistance but even then they didn’t really know what to do and the [can only assume he was completely drugged up] guy continued to threaten.
many, many thoughts on this and the closest to the foreground is complete and utter thankfulness that she is okay… or as okay as someone can be who is verbally and otherwise assaulted…
Val recently shared two blogs with thoughts on related issues:
the first being this very hectic one where she shares a reaction to some of the music and attitude and behaviour we were confronted with when we lived in Kensington, Philly last year: On being woman [explicit]
and the second one in which she shared some situation she has been in where she got involved and took some kind of action to prevent the possibility of an attack or situation ending badly: on being my sister’s keeper
the solution to this is not victim-blaming, nor giving women a list of ways they can dress or act and behave that can “help protect them from being raped” – we should not have to go there.
but i really don’t believe the solution is man-bashing either – all men are not evil, potential rapists waiting to happen – throwing blame at the general male population feels completely unhelpful as well.
and personally, i’m not convinced that joking about rape is EVER helpful [although i know a bunch of people disagree with me on this one – see the next post for verification of that] – for me anything that makes light of or lessens the impact of how absolutely hideous and horrendous and just plain evil rape is, counts against finding a solution to the problem.
this thing is so much huger than any of those three areas – we are talking absence of strong positive role models and negative influence of the media and prisons being punitive rather than redemptive and desensitisation of both the word and the act and a hundred other things…
but just because it looks so huge and daunting, does not give us the freedom to continue with our heads buried in the sand on this one. we need to create safe spaces for people to share their stories. we need to be able to talk about this thing without using blame language on either side and try to figure out together what we can put in place in the short term to at least reduce the risk of it while we look at bigger solutions. we need to be investing into the young men and women of the future and training them up in the way they should go…
as evidenced by my new friend Magda’s letter to her children [aged just 11 and almost 8] that she allowed me to share parts of on my blog over here, that both deals with speaking about sex and rape with her young children and teaching them how to grow up to be young men that make a positive difference.
let’s get serious about working together to put a stop to this. this should not be something we are ever okay about having as a part of our world.
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Irresistibly Fish 