Sorry, more questions, still no answers!
(I’ll get back to actual entries any time now, really, I promise, including the magic carpet ride my dental hygenist in Minneapolis sent me on. But until then…)
• When I was in Minneapolis, doing my event for the GLBT youth center, I got a handful of questions about sexuality pertaining to infibulated women. This isn’t a shocker: Minneapolis has, for some time, had a substantial Somali and Ethiopian refugee program, resulting in a substantial Somali and Ethipian population there. I did know the basic answers to the questions, but I’d very much like to do an FAQ piece for Scarleteen answering questions not about the issue of FGM, but specifically address practical issues (orgasm and sexual response, healing from genital trauma, ways to respond to long-term health problems, etc.) for women and partners of women who have been genitally mutilated. However, I don’t feel right as a white woman who not only has not survived FGM, but who doesn’t live in/come from a culture or community in which FGM is prevalent. Might any of you know a woman who might be up to collaborating on this with me who does come from one of those perspectives?
• Over the last few years, I’ve noticed at Scarleteen that an awful lot of the worst (as if there were anything less than worst, but you get me) of our incest and friend-of-family rape cases arise from Austrailia and New Zealand. Are any of you better versed than I — and know decent sources I could look at — in terms of incest and friend-of-family rapes in those countries? More specifically, I’d like to have more than the basics I do on the justice system and incest, et al, on how social services generally responds (and what victim rights are), on basic cultural dynamics in terms of social and familial attitudes around incest and rape. (Stephen? Beppie? Kat?)
• Book events! I need to do them! Much to my dismay, I’ve started to discover that Seattleites are big, stuffy prudes, unless you’re approaching sex in a way that’s funny-ha-ha, all about the surfacey bullshit, or are a pro-domme. One big bookstore here even had the stones to tell my publicist that they “didn’t have an area private enough” to do an event with me. Did they think I was going to take my pants off and SHOW everyone sexual anatomy? I mean, I can see that Ann Rule has an event there (who, by the way, I’ve been known to read for a guilty pleasure; I’m a criminiology geek when I have three seconds of free time to read something besides work books, so I’m not dissing Ms. Rule). Is she going to be reading? Does she not need a more private arena to read about serial killing? Aren’t they worried she might give a demonstration? Ugh. So, save one event I got started cultivating yetsterday with a local book store (gods bless Ballard), I’m up empty. Suffice it to say, most of the rest of the world is pretty closed-mouthed, too. We knew full well from the start — it was glaringly obvious during the years of publisher-hunting — that a lot of people would be bloody terrified of this book, but it’s no fun to have it hammered home these days.
I’ll be taking some time over the next week to get this stuff together in a more formalized way, but really, I can be creative about this. For instance, if you’re in WA, Portland, Victoria or Vancouver, it’s easy for me to get to: want to link up a group of parents informally for some gabbing on how to deal with parenting and approaching sexuality with kids and teens? Want to have a sex educator over for a group of teen girls in your community to have an accurate gab-session? Heck, have a table for sex Q&A at your next office party? I’ll do it, man, just give me a shout. Very little is too weird for this gal, as is likely obvious by now.
• I also know I asked this before around a year ago or so, but I only got a response from one person, who never connected with me via email. I really, really, REALLY need to get connected with at least a couple other people who have to rape or abuse counsel, and do the sort of highly emotionally difficult work every day I do — it’s not every single day that things are so loaded, thank christ, but it’s close. And it’s getting more so: Scarleteen and myself have been around solidly long enough, and have established a certain feeling of safety for users long enough, that over the last few years, I wind up dealing with rape and abuse more and more often. Certainly, I’ll do it — I always move first to get survivors to seek out good hotlines and in-person counseling, but they usually stick around for support with me and our volunteers — it’s needed, but it also certainly isn’t what I’d choose to do or what I was prepared to do so much of. Some days, it completely wrecks me emotionally: it’s always particularly tough with hotline or ‘net hotline work because there’s only so much you can do.
(Over the last two months, we’ve also had a couple of abusers post, looking for sympathy. Poor them, they didn’t KNOW their silent, prone, half-asleep girlfriend didn’t want sex or poor them, their girlfriend DESERVES to be hit in the face, so it isn’t really abuse, you see. Don’t even get me started on what it was like to be around me on those days, and how frustrating it is that an IP address and email isn’t enough to file a report on these assholes.)
So, readers: do you do any work like this? Do you know anyone else who does who could also use an extra person to sit and unload it with? I don’t need the connection to be one way, or all about MY stress, I just need some like-minded (or rather, like-worked, if that’s even a real phrase, and I suspect it is not) people to chat with about this stuff.
And those’d be my shout-outs for right now: my apologies for them being so all about me. Also in the all-about-me category, beyond really great reviews in Bust and Bitch, there have been some really nice blog mentions/reviews of the book this week. C.K. made my day, and then a day later, Laurie Toby Edison made it even better, especially since she and Debbie paired my review with a review of one of my best friend’s books — a real perk, since Hanne and I miss working together (though each of us had a lot of back-and-forth while we were each working on these books, and each star in our dedications and acknowledgments), so it’s uber-cool when our stuff gets put in the same pile so we can kinda feel like we are again.
(P.S. thanks to my eBay tutorial volunteers: I’ll be pinging you today.)
June 21st, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Hey Heather - As far as book events, I’m useless for Seattle contacts, but… I used to do rape crisis counseling and I have a dear friend who currently does management and counseling work for a hotline. It’s been a long while since I have done that kind of work, so I don’t have any current experience to share (although I’d be happy to listen if that’s useful), but I think my friend would be a great connection for you. I haven’t talked with him in awhile, but I will track him down and tell him to comment here if he’s interested.
June 21st, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Hey Heather, I’ll have to do a bit of extra digging for you, and I’m not sure about NZ, but here in Australia we’ve had some pretty widespread campaigns encouraging women to report sexual abuse, particularly in a family context– these ads are aimed at adult women and refer more to partner abuse, but possibly having that message out there means that teens are more likely to speak up about being abused (or about abuse they know of), even if only in a web forum?
June 21st, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Heather, I came across a couple of sites that might be useful (they link to resources I’ve sent Aussie ST users to in the past):
Stop Child Abuse:
http://www.stopchildabuse.com.au/
ASCA– Advocates for Survivors of Child Abuse:
http://www.asca.org.au/about/about.html
The ASCA site has some stories from survivors who have gone through the legal process– the most detailed of these spoke glowingly about the legal system (in NSW– these things vary from state to state)– but it was a lack of family and community support that prevented her from speaking up.
Of course, at the moment here in Australia the big news story is John Howard’s measures to prevent child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/06/21/1182019286734.html
There is no doubt that sexual abuse is rampant in SOME Aboriginal communities, but of course I’m wary about these measures that Howard is taking– if they do stop abuse, that is wonderful, of course, but to me it smacks much more of trying to gain control of indigenous communities, and using a very real need to address abuse issues as a guise. Tigtog at Hoyden about Town sums it up pretty well:
http://viv.id.au/blog/?p=671
Additionally, my inital response was that I am sure that it’s not just Aboriginal communities in which such abuses are rife– and I think your observations about ST bear that out. It’s unlikely that many Australian kids posting at ST come from these Aboriginal communities, given that the communities in question tend to be extremely poor, and are unlikely to have internet access.
I really can’t think of a specific reason WHY we seem to get more Aussie and Kiwi kids reporting extreme abuse at ST– as I mentioned before, there is the POSSIBILITY that Aussie kids at least are responding to campaigns that encourage the reporting of abuse, but it would be dangerous to assume that that was the case– I’m putting it out there as a possibility, but not an assumption. Another possibility along these lines is that every internet community that I’ve been a part of seems to have had a disproportionate number of Aussies participating (and I don’t seek out specifically Australian communities)– in spite of the fact that we’re technolgically five years behind the US when it comes to the internet, we do seem to use it a lot. Maybe there’s some cultural thing here that leads us to bring our troubles online where the same would not occur elsewhere?
However, this is not to discount the possiblity that higher rates of abuse occur here also– even if Australians ARE more likely to report, and are more likely to do so online, there’s still a good chance that the higher numbers you’re noticing reflect a higher rate of abuse overall. Thinking of why though, that’s really tricky. Certainly, the usual factors come into play– basically the lack of community and family support for talking about abuse, the culture of silence– but I can’t think why it’d be more likely to occur here than in the US.
Just from personal experience, when I was in high school, I had a friend whose father was in jail for abusing her older sister– my friend had actually discovered the abuse of her sister at a young age, which led to it being reported. I did sometimes wonder if my friend had experienced direct abuse too, but if she did, she never said so. There are also a couple of other people I knew from my primary school that might have been sexually abused. I can’t say for sure, of course, and must be even more cautious when talking about memories from childhood, but I think one of these friends may have tried to talk to me about it once. I am, in fact, absolutely certain that this girl did experience abuse at the hands of her adoptive parents (she ended up leaving them because of it), but whether this abuse was sexual I cannot say– I just recall that she told me that her parents made her do really horrible things, and looking back on it, I have a sinking feeling that at least some of those horrible things might have been sexual in nature
. I tried, when I was a child, to talk to my parents about my concern for this girl, but they seemed fairly dismissive of it– but of course, my report would not have included anything about sexual abuse in it– at that age (lucky for me) I don’t think I even knew that such a thing as sexual abuse could occur. Maybe it’s a result of a “She’ll be right mate, don’t interfere in other people’s business” type attitude that it’s so hard for people, especially children, to be heard when they speak out… I just don’t know.
June 22nd, 2007 at 5:25 am
[…] But it’s in the sweet dovetail the government has managed between small-l liberals and racists that the real pinch lies, I think. The introduction of draconian* measures which are apparently (though without real causation, as s0metim3s pointed out in the comments on the last post) in aid of ‘obvious’ liberal goods: no child sex abuse (huh! see dot-point 2 for a hint on the fact that we might want a national initiative on this front; can you imagine what that would look like? Rather different, I suspect!), kids attending school, sobriety and ‘proper’ sexuality means that a discussion of and disagreement with the means (let alone the assimilative tendencies of the ends) becomes a querying of that which the ends seek to ‘fix’. That is, it’s all too clear a risk to start asking too many questions. In the current climate, we’ve seen how this works: questions about the why of ‘terrorism’ are cast as disrespectful to the dead; questions about the why and why like this here get cast as a failure to act at best, and an approval of child sex abuse, alcohol and substance abuse, house ‘disrespecting,’ porn use and so on at worst. Or they will do. […]
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:59 am
Sadly, here’s an article about more mainstream American FGM:
http://independent.com/news/2007/may/24/designer-vaginas/
The trend to plastic surgery on the vulva (the title is inaccurate, it seems most of the “designing” is on the outside not the inside, but people seem to use vagina for vulva anyway).
June 24th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Heather, another blog entry from Hoyden about Town addressing sexual abuse issues facing women in regional Australia:
http://viv.id.au/blog/?p=678
Basically, if women in the outback report a rape and want a rape kit done, then they have to travel great distances, at personal expense. Now just image how worse that situation is for children and teens. Of course, many of the bad cases we’ve seen at ST have been young people located in cities. But still… ugh.
June 24th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
God this is mortifying. While Beppie is probably right that part of this is Australians being more inclined to use the Internet, I’m reluctant to conclude that this is the whole story - maybe our rates of sexual abuse really are worse than other developed countries even outside remote Indigenous communities. As if we didn’t have enough on our conscience.
I came up with an almost complete blank when I tried digging on NZ for you a while ago. Aus should be easier so I’ll see what I can come up with beyond what Beppie has. I don’t know personally.
As to the Howard Government’s moves regarding remote Indigenous communities, its natural to be suspicious because it comes from this government and there has been so little consultation. However, the point that makes things really clear is that one part of the package will absolutely, definitely increase the rate of sexual abuse in these communities, and the government knows this. While there are some good initiatives in the package, and some that may or may not be helpful it’s hard to take the whole thing seriously when they’ve slipped in a one of their long term ambitions knowing that it will make it easier for white abusers to get access to vulnerable children in the communities.
June 26th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
One of my friends is currently working for a non-profit in Minneapolis, that has a division that works with women that have been through FGM.
I asked her about it, and she will find out if there is someone there that you could contact about being put in touch with someone that could help with writing a FAQ for the site. She said she wasn’t sure if she would be able to get any info due to confidentiality. I told her that even if she can’t put you in direct contact with a person that has experienced it, being able to talk to someone at the NP that could pass your information along to those that have, and might be interested in helping, would be awesome.
I have no idea if anything will come of it, as she just started there yesterday, but I thought I’d let you know.
June 28th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Dude, your Rob Brezny horoscope is right on today, man!
July 18th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
I asked a friend for some help with the Aus/NZ stuff. However, I think I didn’t make clear what you were looking for. She’s come back with research on whether violence against women in Australia and New Zealand really is worse, rather than resources on what to do when it happens, info on the legal system etc.
Nevertheless, there may be something of value in this, particularly in regard to your last question. Here is what she sent:
I’ve been trying to think about the of how we would know if Australia is more violent than other countries and/or has more severe violence. I suspect the answer is we don’t know, and I imagine it would be very difficult to get data that is genuinely comparable, but there is currently an international attempt to do this, through the International Violence against Women survey (Australia is one of the countries). It seems still to be at the data collection stage, and not yet doing comparisons, but it will be interesting I think. There is some info about the Australian end at
http://www.aifs.gov.au/acssa/pubs/newsletter/n6.html#IVAWS.
This research (2000 international Crime Victims Survey http://www.unicri.it/wwd/analysis/icvs/pdf_files/key2000i/index.htm) finds Australian women (alongside women from Sweden, Finland, England and Wales) at higher risk of sexual assault than women from Japan, Northern Ireland, Poland and Portugal, who were least at risk, but who knows how much it can be traced to people in somewhere like Australia having a stronger sense that rape etc is a crime compared to other countries, given our longer history of work on sexual violence. The stats are based on interviews, which depends on people self-identifying as a victim of crime - if you don’t think what you’ve experienced is a crime, you’re not going to identify as a victim of crime.