rape

Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Rapists

By sarajean on 4/15/10 7:37am
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“Don’t let ‘em drug women and throw 'em in trucks,

Make ‘em be civil and respectful and such!”

Until I’d read Alice Sebold’s memoir Lucky, I never realized what rape culture, blaming the victim, or any politics surrounding rape actually entailed. I’ve known people who experienced sexual violence; I experienced it myself as a child when I was attacked at a daycare center. That does not surprise me, though; statistically, 1 in 3 women will experience sexual violence within her lifetime.

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Help Pass the International Violence Against Women Act

By sarajean on 2/6/10 11:43pm
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In college, I was very much into activism against violence against women. (I still am, only now I’m so domesticated that my presence is largely in the form of emails and phone calls rather than marches and protests.) Of all of the causes that I support and believe in, this has been the closest to my heart since I read about female genital mutilation in Marie Claire while I was in high school.

For years, it was my personal mission to inform people about young girls and teens having their clitorises cut off and sewn shut so that only a small opening was left for urination, sex, and childbirth (all made painful from the process)—an opening that usually had to be re-sewn several times because of these acts—an opening that was inflicted on over 130 million women and girls worldwide, from most continents and many, many countries, including our own.

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Clinton Takes Action for Women in Congo

By sarajean on 8/14/09 1:11am
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According to the United Nations, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is the “rape capital” of the world. In the past twelve years, 200,000 women and girls have been raped during the violence and genocide that had riddled the country.

Rapists are often Congolese soldiers, which are said to grossly lack discipline as well as pay. During the genocide in the country, more than 500,000 people have been displaced, driven away from their own homes and villages. Villages have been set afire, hundreds have been murdered, and women—and even some men—have been raped in the conflict.

18,000 peacekeepers, diplomatic visits, and peace treaties have done nothing to curb the violence.

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