If Rape is Part of the Culture, Change the Culture

by Jody Dallaire, a City Councillor in Dieppe, NB. Originally posted at jodydallaire.ca, re-posted with permission.

Can you name the 3 Canadian cities with the highest reported sexual assault rates?

Most of us would guess large cities or certain municipalities with reputations for toughness, a large transient population. Places in B.C. or out West maybe, or Ontario. Maybe Halifax is among them, we think.

Well, we come to find out, the 3 Canadian cities with highest sexual assault rates include two in New Brunswick.

Fredericton & Saint John ranked second and third among Canadian municipalities, for the highest number of sexual assault incidents reported to police in 2011.

Using Statistics Canada data about police reports of sexual assaults, Maclean’s magazine established rates per population among communities with a population of 10,000 or more in Canada. Maclean’s only published the “top” 15 cities, and no other New Brunswick municipality made it in the group. The magazine called their list, “Where Canadian criminals go to play – A look at the cities with the most lawbreakers”. Ugh.

The highest rate of reported sexual assaults per capita was in Belleville, Ontario, with almost 137 sexual assaults per 100,000 population.

Fredericton and Saint John, respectively had rates of almost 130 and 115 incidents per 100,000. Halifax was 12th, with 87 reported sexual assaults per 100,000 population.

New Brunswick’s showing on that list is shocking, mostly because it seems that our province is not aware of the extent of the problem nor doing much to prevent the crime.

It is also shocking because we know that, here as elsewhere, most victims of reported sexual assaults are children. In 2009, in 61 per cent of cases, the sexual assault victim was a child in New Brunswick – a child younger than 12 in 21 per cent of cases. That’s about 350 children in New Brunswick in 2009 who were victims of a sexual assault reported to police. Read more

Posted on February 24, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Can-Con, Feminism Leave a comment

My Reality: How to Become an Orphan

Child's_drawing by Roxanna Bennett

[Trigger Warning for discussions of child rape and molestation]

I divorced my entire family in 2005 and it was the healthiest action I’ve ever taken for myself.

In 2004, I started getting panic attacks every time the phone rang. I had never had them before so at first I was convinced I was dying, that I was having a heart attack or something was wrong with my brain. I broke out in hives a lot. Had nightmares. Found myself spending entire days in bed, just staring at the ceiling, unable to play with my son. Sometimes making his dinner and staring slack-jawed at the television was a challenge. I’m not sure when I made the connection between what was happening in my family and what was happening with me but when I came to the realization that they were the source of my pain, I had no choice. It was them or me. My son or my mother. I chose my ability to function as a healthy parent over the feelings of my family and this is why.

I was raped by my uncle, my mother’s brother, when I was four years old. My mother is an identical twin, her sister was like a second mother to me. My biological mother was distant, anxious, sometimes cold. Her sister, my aunt, was more outgoing, warmer. My mother moved out of the province when I was 18 and it was my aunt who was my source of support during my early adulthood. She nursed me when I was sick, let me sleep on her couch when I had nowhere to go. She stayed with my son every night for a year while I put myself through night school. We were very close.

My uncle, who had damaged me beyond measure when I was a child, had been living in British Columbia for years when I made the decision to orphan myself. And this is why, and it sounds small to say it but it wasn’t, it was because of a family vacation. Read more

Posted on February 4, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in My Reality 19 Comments

My Reality: To Want to Kill a Rapist

by Rachael

[Trigger Warning: rape]

People say that there is no right way to break, there is no right way suffer, no right way to get over things as traumatic as this. Yet growing up I got the distinct feeling that there were certain expectations. That there was a certain degree to which “Yes, this is normal”. But if you crossed that unspoken line, then you were either in denial or maybe it just wasn’t such a huge deal after all. If you reacted in the wrong way, people might think that maybe you yourself were ill.

Women aren’t supposed to feel the rage that men do: that would be wrong [insert sarcastic tone here]. That was the subliminal message I got as a child and a young woman. Hence, if I didn’t break down the way I was “supposed to”, I would force it. I was always scared that people wouldn’t take my pain seriously if I didn’t. I knew they wouldn’t because they hadn’t in the past. The irony of this, of course, is that in following the unspoken script put out for us girls I never really dealt with anything. Things don’t go away if you have to force yourself to cry, they don’t get resolved if you have a faux nervous breakdown. If you don’t embrace your own unique way of letting things go they will stay with you endlessly.

While for life’s smaller injuries and incidents the rules have become more relaxed, society still hasn’t fully accepted that there are more reactions women can have when it comes to things like rape than denial or teary breakdown. There is a standard narrative put out for us rape victims. Even today we are often times expected to behave a certain way, and feel certain things. Thing is, not all of us fit this narrative. In fact many of us don’t.

After I was raped, I expected the reaction to happen like they said it should. I’ve spent the last 4 years feeling like damaged goods because it never did. I was supposed to cry, I was supposed to have the perfect breakdown like all the women I’ve seen on TV. I was supposed to go through steps A, B and C. I couldn’t fake a reaction to this, though; funerals sure, breakups no problem.

Not this. Read more

Posted on January 27, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, My Reality 7 Comments

Franchesca Ramsey on How Slut Shaming Becomes Victim Blaming

Franchesca Ramsey shares her experience with date rape to talk about how slut shaming turns into victim blaming. It’s pretty powerful and comes with a trigger warning and a NSFW language warning. If you’d like a transcript you can find it at Racialicious.

-Jarrah

Posted on December 26, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism Leave a comment

FFFF: Kinsey Sicks on Todd Akin

The Kinsey Sicks parody James Taylor’s “Carolina On My Mind” and respond to Todd Akin’s assertion that if a woman experiences “legitimate rape”, her body won’t let her get pregnant.

-Jarrah

Posted on September 7, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in FFFF, Politics Leave a comment

Geek Girl Con 2012 on Game of Thrones

by Jarrah Hodge

The only panel at Geek Girl Con I was disappointed with was “Women in Westeros: Is Game of Thrones Sexist?”. Here’s the panel description from the programme:

The world of the HBO series Game of Thrones and the George R. R. Martin book series is a dangerous (and, given the frequent lack of clothes, chilly) one for women. Westeros itself is clearly sexist – but are the show and books? What’s the line between glorification of sexual violence and critique? How do the books’ and show’s treatment of other socially disadvantaged groups, like the disabled and gender nonconformists, compare?

It sounded great and it was the only GoT panel on the agenda so I even skipped the Buffy musical episode sing-along to go to it. Both panelists had contributed to a collection called Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which I jwill hopefully review here at some point soon. To be fair, panelists Brent Hartinger and Caroline Spector were left without a moderator at the last minute and they hadn’t planned to run the session themselves, but it wasn’t any lack of organization that got to me. Rather, it was the cop-outs used to try to justify the amount of sexual violence depicted in Game of Thrones. Read more

Posted on August 29, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture 5 Comments

Survivors Speak Out to Break Silence about Systemic Violence Against Women and Girls

Thanks to Joanna Chiu for letting us cross-post this past week’s series of posts for Vancouver’s Battered Women’s Support Services on media representations of violence against women in recognition of Prevention of Violence Against Women Week. Read the whole series at the BWSS Ending Violence blog and enjoy this final article.

But all over the media, footage of a woman being punched in the face can be used to promote a reality show, a video of a woman in a neck brace after “rough sex” can be used to promote a vegetarian diet, and artists rapping and singing in a mansion filled with corpses of women hung by chains can be passed as an “artistic” music video.

If you keep watching those shows, supporting the same artists and organizations, playing violent video games or subscribing to the same magazines without thinking about what you’re accepting, like it or not, you are actually supporting violence against women and girls.

The philosophy of Battered Women’s Support Services is that battering does not take place between two people in isolation—violence and abuse happens in a social context, and is deeply rooted in a system that supports the right of some people to oppress others based on privileges such as gender, race, religion, class, sexual orientation, age and physical ability.

The kinds of systems of oppression that perpetuate violence against women are reflected in and promoted through the media, so for Prevention of Violence Against Women Week, BWSS asked me to help bring together media makers and activists in dialogue about how to end systemic violence against women and girls.

Throughout the past week, my blog posts have discussed different messages in the media that take away the agency of survivors of violence and marginalized groups—misrepresenting them instead with highly damaging ideas: Women are sluts, women of colour are really big sluts, women are asking for it, women are crazy “psycho bitches.”

Those media messages, brought to you by the 3000 ads you see every day, and from a myriad of news and entertainment outlets, promote a culture of violence—and a culture of silence.

The debilitating fear, shame and self-blame that many women feel after surviving sexual assault, domestic violence or abuse keep most from reporting the crimes to police, and even from telling their closest friends and family. As a result of this culture of silence and victim blaming, 97% of rapists will not spend one day in jail (Source: RAINN). Read more

Posted on April 21, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture Leave a comment

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