News
from WomenSafe •Volume 7, Issue 2 • April, 2002
APRIL
IS SEXUAL VIOLENCE AWARENESS MONTH
SEE THE CALENDAR OF EVENTS FOR A COMPLETE
LISTING OF ACTIVITIES
CONTENTS
OF THIS ISSUE
Sexual Assault: When it happens to someone you
know
DreamWorlds II:
Desire, Sex and Power in Music Video (a video review by Deb
O'Donoghue)
Put the Blame Where it Belongs: On Men (by
Jackson Katz and Sut Jhally)
Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic
and Preventing Violence (Mitch Hall reviews two
books by James Gilligan)
WomenSafe Welcomes Deb O'Donoghue
Volunteer Appreciation Week
In Brief...
Sexual
Assault: When it happens to someone you know
Here are some ways you can provide ongoing support when someone you
know has been sexually assaulted.
BE AVAILABLE: In the weeks and months
following an assault, be available for the survivor, whether it is assisting
the survivor in getting the help she/he desires, performing day-to-day
tasks, or just listening. A sympathetic ear can make a big difference
in the recovery process. After an assault, a victim may feel out of
control. Although you may be tempted to give advice or make decisions
for the survivor, it is important that the survivor begins regaining
control by making choices for her/his self. You can be helpful by discussing
options and providing necessary information. The most important things
for you to communicate are the following:
“I’m glad you’re alive.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I’m sorry this happened.”
“You did the best that you could.”
BELIEVE THE SURVIVOR: Do not question
the account of the assault or what the survivor did to survive. Remember
to remain non-judgmental even if the story is hard to hear or you know
the other person involved. Believe the survivor.
REINFORCE THE FACT THAT THE RAPE WAS NOT THE
SURVIVOR’S FAULT: If the survivor feels guilty about
not fighting back, remind her/him that she/he did what was needed to
stay alive.
GIVE THE SURVIVOR THE OPTION TO CALL A HOTLINE:
WomenSafe has trained staff and volunteers that are available
24-hours a day to help survivors. An advocate can accompany the survivor
to the hospital or the police, if she/he chooses to report. All services
are confidential.
BE RESPECTFUL OF SPACE: Following
a sexual assault, boundaries around a survivor’s personal space
usually change dramatically. The survivor may shrink at seemingly non-intrusive
physical contact or seem to need more physical space between her/his
personal space and another’s. Ask permission before making any
physical contact and be respectful of the space the survivor may need.
IF YOU ARE INTIMATE WITH THE SURVIVOR:
With the survivor’s approval, use appropriate touching and language
to reestablish feelings of self-worth. Let your partner be in charge
of any sexual interaction. Talk openly but do not pressure the survivor.
Remember not to take rejections toward intimacy personally. It is not
about you.
BE SUPPORTIVE WHEN THE SURVIVOR MAKES DECISIONS
ABOUT HOW TO PROCEED: A rape survivor needs to feel in control.
The survivor has just been through a traumatic situation in which she/he
did not have any control. It is empowering and healing for the survivor
to make her or his own decisions. You must remember to separate what
you think is best for the survivor to do from what the survivor wants
to do. Be supportive of her/his decisions.
LEARN ABOUT RAPE TRAUMA SYNDROME:
A survivor’s recovery period can last a long time, during which
moods and reactions may change radically from one day to the next. It
will help if you both understand the process that survivors go through.
If you would like more information about Rape Trauma Syndrome, please
call WomenSafe at 388-4205.
GET SUPPORT FOR YOURSELF: When someone
you care about is sexually assaulted, you may also suffer a wide range
of confusing and painful emotions. It can be especially difficult if
you know both the survivor and the perpetrator. It is normal to feel
angry, but confronting the person responsible is not going to make the
situation better. Share your feelings with a support person—someone
you trust—and participate in activities that restore you. WomenSafe
services are also available to you. Keep in mind that your role is not
to make everything better. It is easy to feel like you need to do or
say the right thing, but just being with the survivor and not judging
her/him is helpful.
CONTENTS
DreamWorlds
II: Desire, Sex and Power
in Music
-- Video Review by Deb O’Donoghue
DreamWorlds II is a stirring documentary by Sut Jhally, which
combines powerful images from music video with thought-provoking narratives
that stimulate and educate those who watch it. Jhally illustrates the
impact of sexual imagery, and depicts how women in music video inhabit
a fantasy landscape, a “DreamWorld” where the norms of femininity
are nymphomania and dependence on or subservience to men. His primary
argument is that these representations are predictable and limited,
and that they negatively affect men’s understandings of women,
and women’s understandings of themselves. Using footage culled
from television and cinema, Jhally connects music video to men’s
violence against women and rape culture, and makes a compelling case
for the inclusion in music video of a wider range of stories about female
sexuality and, by extension, masculinity.
Watching the video, I was struck by the blatant sexualizing of women.
The roles the women play are all part of the fantasy life of adolescent
heterosexual males; women prancing around in their underwear, women
as strippers or exotic dancers, school teachers or school girls, hookers
and prostitutes, the dominatrix or the bored housewife. There is a consistent
message sent through these images that women are around for the sole
entertainment and pleasure of men, that they play a decorative role.
Jhally shows us how in some videos it is not enough to show women in
the degrading roles mentioned above: the focus is moved to their fragmented
body parts. The way these parts are filmed distracts the viewer from
thinking about women as real people, with feelings, emotions, thoughts,
intellect and their own dreams and desires. The message conveyed is
that women are not unique, that they are all interchangeable, and that
one is as good as the other.
The most powerful moments of this video are when Jhally uses the audio
track of the gang rape scene from the movie The Accused, superimposing
music video footage of women being portrayed in a number of degrading
character representations. The images are interjected as the women are
being cheered on by groups of men, as if it were a sport. Watching this
scene was extremely difficult. Trying to separate the rape scene from
the music video images is an impossible task after watching them combined,
which is exactly what Jhally intended. They have melded into one for
me, and it has made a deep impact on how I view music video as well
as television, movies and advertisements. The stark reality of these
roles—men as dominant and women as submissive—are apparent
in all aspects of our everyday life.
Jhally uses DreamWorlds II to address the impact of pop culture
on how young men and women see themselves and each other in terms of
sexuality and gender. He illustrates the possible consequences of the
DreamWorld, and implies that although they do not directly cause sexual
assaults, the stories in the videos influence what we believe and think.
They influence what we think about issues like sexual assault and our
attitudes towards them as a society. We can see this in the results
of a survey of over 6000 students as they were presented with the statement:
Women provoke rape by their appearance or behavior: 60% of men,
and 40% of women agreed. A more horrifying response was that 30% of
men agreed to the following statement: It would do some women some
good to get raped. (This poll is taken directly from the film).
The danger of the DreamWorld is that these images are normalized and
are accepted by society as a whole, and by its youngest members. These
images dull the senses and cause society to perpetuate the myths, and
justify the actions of the DreamWorld. They affect how we respond to
rape. Jhally knows that sometimes the lines between fantasy and reality
are blurred, and that the images of the DreamWorld are played out in
the stories told in the gender and sexual power relations of our society.
He asserts that behavior is based on attitudes and beliefs, and that
other stories, not just those of the DreamWorld, are needed to offer
a counterview.
It is our responsibility as individuals to offer alternatives to these
stereotyped roles and provide healthy images to counter those of the
DreamWorld. In offering alternative images of women—women as strong,
intelligent and capable of being more than objects of fantasy—we
can create a new world, a “reality world,” where women are
valued and celebrated. Education and awareness is key to changing negative
attitudes towards women and sexual assault, and will combat the marginalizing
of sexual assault.
More information about DreamWorlds
II and other educational videos can be found at the website for
The Media Education
Foundation.
Sut Jhally is a professor of Communication at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst and founder and executive director of
The Media Education Foundation in Northampton.
Sut Jhally will be presenting at Middlebury College as part of Sexual
Violence Awareness Month, on Thursday, April 25.
CONTENTS
Put
the Blame Where it Belongs: On Men
-- By Jackson Katz and Sut Jhally
(First
published in The Los Angeles Times, June 25, 2000, Sunday Commentary,
Pg. M5)
The outrage in Central Park on Puerto Rican Day shocked and horrified
not only New Yorkers but also people everywhere. In its wake, the media
have rushed to find an explanation, focusing on the "crowd"
or "mob" psychology and the lack of a timely police response.
These are important, but there is a far more central aspect that has
remained largely unexamined: that men attacked and abused women. Seemingly
"normal" men, perhaps fueled by alcohol, acted out publicly
against women in an incredibly hostile and aggressive fashion.
The time is long overdue for us to have a national conversation about
the way our culture teaches boys and men—across class, race and
ethnic distinctions—to think about and act toward women. While
this incident rightly shocked and angered a lot of people, and has caused
women in New York and elsewhere to be even more vigilant about their
personal safety, the most shocking aspect is how long this kind of thing
has been going on with so little public response.
We are raising generations of boys in a society that in many ways glorifies
sexually aggressive masculinity and considers as normal the degradation
and objectification of women. Consider: misogynistic music and videos,
the sexual bullying by entertainers such as Howard Stern, the growing
presence of pornography and female stripping in mainstream culture,
and the crude displays of male dominance in professional wrestling.
To demonstrate how deeply imbued our society is with the attitudes that
stem from this acculturation—i.e. How "normal" the Central
Park perpetrators were—imagine what the response might have been
if, instead of a group of men assaulting women, the Central Park event
had consisted of a group of white people targeting and attacking people
of color. Wouldn't the media discussion have focused on racism as the
proximate cause of the attacks rather than on the "mob mentality"?
And would we be searching for sociobiological explanations for antisocial
behavior? No, we would focus, rightly, on the persistent problem of
racism in America and on the need to teach our (white) children to respect
and embrace racial and ethnic diversity.
Or consider if the genders had been reversed in the Central Park attack.
Media discussion would have zeroed in on what was going on with the
female gender that caused some women to act out in this way.
Yet when a group of men target and attack women, the "experts"
talk about crowd psychology, marginalizing the discussion of the societal
sexism that fuels sex crimes.
This "degendering" of the discourse around male violence is
not unique to the Central Park fracas. In recent years, there have been
thousands of news stories, television specials and town meeting discussions
of "youth violence," which is perpetrated overwhelmingly not
by youths of both sexes but by adolescent males. Last summer, Woodstock
'99 featured several rapes and countless sexual assaults by men against
women. The festival concluded with a shameful display of wanton destruction
by out-of-control males. And yet the discussion afterward blamed it
on the "crowd." More recently, when groups of men went on
a rampage after the NBA victory of the Los Angeles Lakers, the media
focused in again on a "mob" out of control.
One explanation for the reluctance of the media to make these obvious
connections is that the few brave souls who dare speak the truth—especially
if they are women—run the risk of developing undeserved reputations
as male-bashers, which can hurt their careers. Therefore it is the special
responsibility of men to speak out.
Fortunately, there are signs that the tide is slowly turning. High schools
and colleges are paying more attention to the need for gender-violence
prevention education with young men. Recently at the United Nations,
there was an international panel discussion of men talking about ways
that boys and men could help prevent domestic and sexual violence. In
Namibia earlier this year, there was a first-ever national conference
of men that was devoted to this subject. For the past decade, men in
Canada have run campaigns in which men wear white ribbons to symbolize
their refusal to be silent in the face of other men's violence.
These are small but significant steps toward creating a society and
a world where the crowd of men who are outraged by gender violence overwhelms
the crowd that commits such violence.
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times.Reprinted
with permission by Sut Jhally
CONTENTS
Violence:
Reflections on a National Epidemic
and Preventing Violence (Mitch
Hall reviews two books by James Gilligan)
The
American forensic psychiatrist James Gilligan has made major contributions
to understanding the behavior and mentality of the most violent people
in our society. After 25 years of working in the prison system of Massachusetts
where he conducted in-depth interviews and made therapeutic interventions
with serial killers, other murderers, and rapists, he wrote Violence:
Reflections on a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).
He followed this book with Preventing Violence (New York: Thames
and Hudson, 2001). Gilligan did not content himself with the comforts
of his prestigious position on the faculty of the Harvard University
Medical School and a lucrative private practice because he wanted to
unearth the roots of violence, believing that this could contribute
toward its prevention. He reasoned that he could gain the knowledge
he sought only by working with and studying violent offenders. These
two books describe his discoveries and correlate them with the findings
of other researchers.
Both books are lucid, engaging, powerful, and passionate. Despite the
troubling subject matter, they are good reading. Gilligan is a role
model of courage in facing horrific realities and of compassionate,
humane insights. He is also a masterful storyteller who weaves together
social scientific analyses and data with moving, heartbreaking narratives
that reveal the severely damaged hearts and minds of those who kill.
In the first book, he explains the necessity for a tragic perspective
on violence. We learn about the extremes of child abuse suffered by
virtually all those who later become murderers. We learn how shame is
at the psychological core of all who kill, and we see the devastating
effects of “structural violence,” which refers to harmful
inequalities of wealth and power due to class and caste stratification.
We also learn why males commit 90% of the violent acts, including the
sex crimes and domestic violence against women. Gilligan reminds readers
that understanding does not imply excusing or exonerating. Rather, he
hopes to inspire appropriate social interventions and invites us to
view violence as a paramount public health issue.
In the second book, he discusses three levels of violence prevention:
primary prevention involving education and social policies for the entire
population, secondary prevention with those most at risk for violence,
and tertiary prevention with those already violent to reduce the likelihood
they will continue to act out violently.
In both books, Gilligan provides persuasive evidence that the criminal
justice system we currently have, including but not limited to the death
penalty, is severely dysfunctional and actually increases levels of
social violence. He shows disturbing parallels in how both murderers
and their prosecutors see themselves as agents of justice. He also shows
how the richest and most powerful segments of the population benefit
from the violence of the poorest and most disenfranchised. These are
not easy subjects to consider, but they are essential subjects if we
are to have any hope for a safer, more just and peaceful society. ~~~
Mitch Hall is co-director of Checkmate--Winning
Strategies for Environmental Peace, co-author of Ignoring Binky:
The Life and Times of Victor Evertor, and author of The Plague
of Violence: a Preventable Epidemic, both available through Checkmate.
He also teaches on the Goddard
College Health Arts and Sciences Program faculty.
CONTENTS
WomenSafe
welcomes Deb O’Donoghue
Deb joined our staff in January as the new Sexual Violence Program Coordinator.
We are very glad to have her as part of the agency. She has a BA in
Education, Foundations of Counseling, and was co-director of the Jackson
Street After-School Program in Northampton, MA. Deb was also a counselor
advocate for Everywoman’s Center at U-Mass, Amherst. Deb has a
lot of enthusiasm and new ideas—we are glad to have her as part
of our team.
April
21st-27th is Volunteer Appreciation Week!
WomenSafe would cease to exist without our volunteers. We would like
to extend a HUGE thanks to our many volunteers, RSVP and Board members
who work to end sexual and domestic violence in our community.
Thank
you to the RSVP volunteers who donate so much of their time to help
with mailings.
We would also like to thank those who offered their services, food or
space for the WomenSafe Celebration that was scheduled for February
1st"
Celestial Sirens
Middlebury Bagel Bakery
Womensing
Middlebury College
Random Association
Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op
Noonie’s Deli
WRMC Middlebury College Radio
Greg’s Meat Market
The Grille
The Mae Belle Chellis Women’s & Gender Studies Center
We are very disappointed that we had to cancel the event due to the
ice storm that hit Addison County that Friday, but we are very excited
about all of the positive energy and support elicited from the community
around the celebration of our new name.
CONTENTS
In
Brief
CLOSET
TOO FULL? CLOTHES THAT DON’T FIT? GET READY FOR SPRING CLEANING
!
Clean
out your closets this spring and donate your items to Neat Repeats.
Designate WomenSafe as the agency that will profit from the resale of
those items. While you are there check out the awesome bargains! Neat
Repeats, Bakery Lane, Middlebury, VT 388-4488
Please
support these area businesses that donate to WomenSafe:
A & P
Bristol Financial Service
Business Telephone Systems
Cabot Creamery
Cellular One
Clay’s
Computer Associates
County Tire
Feed Commodities
Fire and Ice
Gaines Insurance Agency
Greenhaven Gardens
Green Mountain Coffee
Greg’s Meat Market
Lightning Photo
Main Street Stationery
Middlebury Animal Hospital
Middlebury Bagel and Bakery
Middlebury Print
Middlebury Natural Foods Co-Op
Mike’s Auto and Towing
Neil & Otto’s Pizza Cellar
Panda House
Pioneer Environmental Associates
Shaw’s
Smart Communications
Vergennes Building Supply
Vermont Bookshop, Inc.
White River Timber Framing
Donor
Fund
A friend has set up a donor fund through the VT Community Foundation
to benefit WomenSafe. If you are interested in making a gift of any
size or would like more information, please call Naomi at WomenSafe
(388-9180) or the VT Community Foundation at 388-3355.
Mother's
Day Fundraiser
Please
check out our poular Mother’s Day
fundraiser, coming up in May. Honor your mother by giving a donation
to WomenSafe. Your gift will help other mothers and their children be
safe this Mother’s Day. In acknowledgement of your donation, we
will send a Mother’s Day card to the woman in your life that you
would like to celebrate. If you would like more information please give
Barb a call at 388-9180.
Support
Groups
Support Groups are available for women who have experienced emotional,
sexual and /or physical abuse in a past or present relationship. Support
groups offer a chance to meet other women who have had similar experiences
and to offer support, understanding and empathy to one another. The
groups take place in a relaxed, safe atmosphere with an emphasis on
respect and support. All groups are free and confidential; childcare
is provided. Call WomenSafe for information at: 388-4205 or (800) 388-4205.
