This month I saw an amazing performance by New Visions: Alliance to End Violence in Asian/Asian American Communities.  This community-based theater group stages scenes in which a husband is verbally abusing his wife in front of family and friends, and then invites audience members to stop the action, step onto the stage in the role of a secondary character, and speak up.

In one re-play, a man stepped into the role of the abusive husband’s friend and spoke to him earnestly, firmly, and kindly about his behavior.  In another, audience members spoke about the power of the mother-in-law in many southeast Asian families, and their desire to see that character break silence in support of her daughter-in-law.

Placing all the responsibility on the victim for ending violence doesn’t work (although of course many survive and manage to get out even without family support). 

Placing all the responsibility on the perpetrator may be ethically or legally accurate, but it also obscures the roles of those in his family and his community who taught him how to abuse women.

And that brings me to this incredible link.  It’s a self-defense project based in a Nairobi, Kenya community with local instructors.  I was enjoying their page of success and survival stories, when I ran across an amazing testimonial from a mother-in-law (Mary Wangui, third story down) fearlessly protecting her daughter from her son.

Self-defense is not just physical - it’s verbal, emotional, psychological, spiritual.  A lot has to be transformed for most women before they can ever defend themselves physically.  We have to believe that we are worth defending, that defense can work, and that we can live with the consequences of setting and defending our boundaries before we can even imagine taking defensive action.  There’s a saying that change happens in this order:

 #1 Awareness

#2 Acceptance

#3 Action

My favorite advice columnist, Cary Tennis at salon.com, expresses this in a wonderful way in his response to a letter from a woman who describes being sexually harrassed by her boyfriend’s “friends.”

 I especially like the way he refers to our innate will to protect ourselves as a “pure moral reflex”.

Why don’t more white people effectively act as allies for people of color?

What’s the difference between a straight person who doesn’t hate lesbians and gays, and one who is actually an ally?

What does it take for men to stand up for women’s safety?

Are you a bystander or an ally? 

Most people I know have had a personal experience of witnessing violence against a woman, and doing nothing.  I’ve done nothing more than once.  I remember standing silently on a street corner in San Francisco when I was 19, and watching a man drag a screaming woman down the street by her hair. I didn’t know what to do.
 
What’s the difference between a bystander and an ally?  Is it that the bystander doesn’t care or can’t be bothered?
 
I think it’s fear.
 
Fear that if we intervene, we’ll be hurt too, or killed.  It’s a very real fear.  Police officers have shared with me that the most dangerous part of their job is trying to intervene in domestic violence assaults.  Sometimes the perpetrator turns on them.  Sometimes the victim turns on the ally too, terrified that she’ll be beaten even worse later because someone tried to help her.
 
There’s social fear too.  You may suspect, rightly, that if you say to your sister “I don’t like the way your husband talks to you” or “Have you noticed the kids are afraid of him?” that you won’t be invited over on weekends anymore.  And you might really need your sister’s love, or approval, or a place to go for Christmas.  That’s fear turning a potential ally into a bystander.
 
There are lots of good reasons to learn how to be safe, effective, and meaningful allies, but one that I’m particularly interested in is the trauma that we experience as bystanders.  The experience of failing to act can have devastating, long-term consequences for the witnesses.  It can haunt us, leaving a sense of shame, inadequacy, impotence, even terror.
 
When I finally got realistic and meaningful self-defense training, it not only taught me how to save my own life, but freed me to be an ally.  For the first time in my life, I was free to make choices.  I could choose when to speak up.  When to ask for help.  When to refuse to back down.
 
Knowing I can physically protect myself if someone tries to hurt me has increased my choices in all areas of my life.  Now I know that I can find support, love, and acceptance even if someone rejects me for speaking out.  Now I’m free to tell the truth in all my relationships.  I no longer have to live small and quiet -  whether that’s staying inside because of a fear of parking lots, or shutting up when I hear a racist “joke” or learn disturbing information about a friend.  When we are free to choose, fear no longer gets to run our lives.  We become better allies and safer in the world.
 
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”  Albert Einstein

On March 11, 2008, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control announced that one-quarter of teen-age girls have at least one sexually transmitted disease.  Here’s the press release.

On March 12, 2008, the American media went crazy. 

I have been accidentally exposed to an enormous amount of shouting, blaming, and moralizing on this topic.  (This is something I usually try to avoid, the US media talking about sex and high school or college-aged girls in the same story.)  It was impossible to miss their tones of shock, disgust, and parental disapproval as commentators placed the burden of this disturbing news entirely on the shoulders of girls and young women.  For a comparison, imagine if the CDC had announced 1 in 4 girls has food poisoning… 1 in 4 girls has an eye infection… 1 in 4 girls has leukemia… 

Now there are a lot of different issues here, but I have yet to hear anyone considering these statistics in the light of the high rate of sexual abuse of girls.  Sadly, I think we have to assume that at least some of these girls were exposed to diseases, including the ones that are fatal if left untreated, by non-consensual sex (that is, rape).

Teens answering a survey about sexual health and behavior may or may not be willing to respond honestly about their experiences of sexual assault.  They may or may not even be aware that what happened to them was an assault.  They may be unable or unwilling to even remember it.

And while most people seem to be jumping to the conclusion that 1 in 4 teenage boys also has a sexually transmitted infection – there is good evidence out there that the people who have sex with, impregnate, and sexually assault teen girls are actually adult men over the age of 20.

I did find one quote through Planned Parenthood that offers a hint about what’s may really going on:

“A young woman whose first partner is seven or more years older than herself is less likely than other women to use contraceptives at first intercourse, and she is more than twice as likely to rate first intercourse as unwanted than those women whose first partner is the same age or younger. The percentage of women who use contraception at first voluntary intercourse increases as the levels of wantedness rise (Abma et al., 1998).” (emphasis mine) From Planned Parenthood’s Research page.

Incidentally, I found that site to be a great source, they compiled a lot of studies on a wide range of teen sexual health and behavior issues.  Instead of shouting about morals or blaming girls who have been infected, they give real information, much of it hopeful and pro-girl!  They have a site especially for young women too.  It was such a relief to find some real and useful information.

There’s a great article at Broadsheet, the feminist column over at salon.com, that gets to the core of the backlash against women rape survivors. Tracy Clark-Flory responds to the latest crappy journalism claiming that there’s no real sexual assault crisis on campus, that the very real and well-proven statistics simply represent women who consented to sex and then felt bad about it later.

Do women sometimes consent to sex and then feel bad about it later? Sure.

Does that mean sexual assault is rare? Uh, no.

I’ve taught self-defense and personal safety on college campuses for years, and we have to start every class with a lengthy and detailed discussion of what constitutes sexual assault. Sometimes we spend two sessions, that’s four + hours, on the topic. Even when groups of students are able to come to consensus about the definition of “sexual assault” (sexual contact without consent) they struggle with the definition of “consent”.

Most students I encounter believe the definition of rape is: “When a woman I don’t know is out alone at night, and she’s attacked by a male stranger who uses physical force and usually a gun, and who forces her to engage in a very specific sexual act, and she later reports it to the police.”

Actually, sex without consent is rape.

I’ll never forget the student who told me succinctly one night after our first class together: “I thought I didn’t know anyone who’d been raped, but now I realize that I’ve been raped.”

Out of all your friends, family, co-workers, and acquaintances, what percentage have had meaningful self-defense training? And by meaningful I mean training that gave them lots of physical practice, in a wide range of defense scenarios, and left them feeling stronger and more capable. 10%? Less?

In my personal experience, most of us will answer “None” or less than 5%. But if you ask that same group of people – I can guarantee you that more than 5% of them have worried about being assaulted. In fact, it’s not unusual for women to experience some fear of being attacked on a daily or weekly basis. And of course the actual risk of facing assault is quite significant, here’s just one link to some pretty overwhelming statistics.

So why haven’t we all taken a self-defense class? Why isn’t personal safety training mandatory for every grade school, middle school, high school, and college curriculum? Why don’t employers offer it like they offer health care packages, parking passes, and credit union membership? Why are we often taught to swim, sew, cook, hunt, drive and balance a checkbook – but not taught how to protect ourselves? I think the answers to these questions are complicated, and I promise not to write you a 1,000 page treatise as my first blog entry!

Here’s one explanation: Self-Defense is to Sexual Assault what Breast Self-Exam is to Breast Cancer. Regularly examining your breasts for lumps or changes is one of the best defenses you have against breast cancer. This simple action helps detect the disease early, when it’s most treatable. BSE protects us from breast cancer.

In an analogous way, meaningful self-defense training protects you against sexual assault. It’s a positive, proactive step to take, and greatly decreases the likelihood that you’ll be victimized or that an assault will progress past the initial attempt. Because it makes me feel bad. The whole time I’m doing it, I’m thinking about cancer. Or worrying that I’m doing it wrong. Who wants to think about breast cancer? I can think of at least a hundred things I’d rather think about at any given moment. So I don’t do it. And I rob myself of the action that could actually protect me.

So I have a lot of compassion for people who don’t sign up for self-defense training. Who wants to spend an afternoon, or a month, or a year thinking about the possibility of being assaulted, maybe even sexually? Even worse, who wants to think about their children being attacked? But if you could rape-proof your daughter, would you? What would it be worth to you? Who else do you care about? How uncomfortable or uncertain would you be willing to be, in order to provide meaningful protection to someone you love? To yourself? OK, I’m off to go raise my arms in front of a mirror now.