RIP Rehtaeh Parsons: Victim of Victim-Blaming

Source: Facebook

by Jarrah Hodge

Trigger Warning for rape, cyberbullying, suicide.

On Sunday Rehtaeh Parsons’ parents made the decision to take their daughter off life support. Three days earlier, the 17-year-old had tried to hang herself in the bathroom after being raped and then relentlessly cyberbullied.

According to the Halifax Chronicle-Herald:

Rehtaeh Parsons had a goofy sense of humour and loved playing with her little sisters. She wore glasses, had long, dark hair and was a straight-A student whose favourite subject was science.

But that didn’t seem to matter to the four boys who her mother, Leah Parsons, says raped Rehtaeh at a party when she was drunk to the point of being clearly unable to consent. According to the Facebook page Leah Parsons has set up in Rehtaeh’s memory:

The Person Rehtaeh once was all changed one dreaded night in November 2011. She went with a friend to another’s home. In that home she was raped by four young boys…one of those boys took a photo of her being raped and decided it would be fun to distribute the photo to everyone in Rehtaeh’s school and community where it quickly went viral. Because the boys already had a “slut” story, the victim of the rape Rehtaeh was considered a SLUT. This day changed the lives of our family forever. I stopped working that very day and we have all been on this journey of emotional turmoil ever since.

Police told the CBC they investigated the assault but didn’t have enough investigation to lay charges, but Leah Parsons says the police waited too long to interview the boys and refused to act on the distributed pictures because they “couldn’t prove who had pressed the photo button on the phone”.

Reading this story I was simultaneously heartbroken and overcome with rage. It makes me so sad that we have yet another case of misogynist cyberbullying that has led to yet another senseless, tragic death, another family in mourning. Another young woman, a complex human being who had so much to offer the world, is gone because of the rape culture we live in and the cyberbullying that perpetuates it faster and more furiously than ever.

Toula Foscolos writes in the Huffington Post: “We, as a society, recoil in horror at such tragedies, but fail to see the triggers that normalize violence against women. We shrug them off as unrelated. But they’re not.” Read more

Posted on April 9, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Can-Con, Feminism 2 Comments

Asking for It

Christopher Columbus Park (Boston) at night

by Jessica Critcher

Last summer my husband was out of town for work. Though I missed him, it was exciting to be alone in Boston. I liked the idea of being mysterious and anonymous, minding my own business about town. With my tiny grocery cart, I felt like a woman with a secret. For two dollars I could take a train anywhere in the city– to an art museum or a brewery or a noodle shop or a bronze statue. If I wanted, I could go downtown and ride an elevator to the top of the tallest building in the city and scan the horizon for miles around. Wanting was all it would take to make it happen. The feeling is so pleasant that I like to carry two dollars in my pocket, even when I don’t plan on going anywhere.

We didn’t have air conditioning then. I would write early in the morning with the windows open, feeling breezes on my skin as I ate tomatoes from our roof garden. In the afternoon, when the sun climbed over the buildings and smothered my desk in hard light, I wrote in coffee shops and restaurants and all over the Coast Guard base where I could pilfer WiFi and air conditioning and a quiet place to sit. But when the sun went home, so did I.

One night that summer I got a real hum-dinger of a migraine. I get those quite a bit. The combination of hormonal birth control and staring at computer screens probably exacerbates this problem that I’ve had since I was about ten. Over the years I’ve been poked and prodded and scanned and medicated, and the doctors concluded that some people just get headaches.

That night, my eyes felt hard and heavy like little stones. The pain branched out from a tight knot deep inside my head, forming lightning patterns that stretched out to my scalp. It was too early to go to bed. I was restless. I took medication and massaged the tight pressure points in my face, trying to dissolve the pain like sugar cubes in tea, but nothing budged. I wanted to be cool and quiet in the dark. I wanted to feel a breeze from the harbor on my skin. I wanted to feel cold grass under my bare feet. I wanted to escape my stuffy apartment, to be outside. Wanting it was not enough.

Posted on March 27, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism 1 Comment

On BCCDC’s HPV Vaccine Campaign

by Jarrah Hodge

Some friends in a Facebook networking group I’m involved with drew my attention to a new campaign from the BC Centre for Disease Control that tries to promote the HPV vaccine. I was interested because I’ve done a lot of volunteering on cervical cancer screening awareness.

The campaign consists of several shareable images with facts and stats about the vaccine and how you get it (if you are a woman born between 1991 and 1993 in BC) but this one particular graphic (above, left) really got my goat and I dashed off the following email to the BCCDC, who luckily, responded and acted right away:

To Whom it May Concern:

I just came across your graphic with the caption “HPV Doesn’t Care if You Said ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Get Immunized.” and I was both shocked and dismayed. I’m very supportive of raising awareness of HPV and giving people information about preventative measures like the HPV vaccine but I think it showed astoundingly poor taste and overwhelming insensitivity to bring the spectre of rape into your campaign. The message that women should get the HPV vaccine because they might get raped plays into a culture of fear of rape that most women in BC live in today. It contributes to the idea that rape is something that is almost inevitable and that women’s only protection is to modify her own behaviours. Imagine a woman who has been raped and contracted HPV: the message would feel very much like victim-blaming.

The majority of the other graphics you put out as part of the campaign show what I think is a more productive approach: talking to women and empowering them to learn the facts about cervical cancer and take control over their own health. My only other feedback is that I would like to see more links to cervical cancer information for women who fall outside the eligibility for immunization or who already have HPV. The “Don’t Get Cancer” tagline might be catchy but it’s a little simplistic.

I urge you to reconsider the “HPV Doesn’t Care if You Said ‘Yes’ or ‘No’” graphic and to remove it from your campaign.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and consider these issues,

Jarrah Hodge
Vancouver, BC

I was relieved when almost immediately I received a reply from a Content Strategist at BCCDC saying: “Sorry you were upset. We were in the process of taking it down just as I got your email.”

So the problem is resolved, but I did want to share with you what happened because it shows that these kinds of ads can get approved without someone cluing in that they contribute to rape culture. It also shows that it’s worth speaking up when things like this come out – and they are far too common.

Thanks to the BCCDC for taking swift action to remedy the situation. It was the right thing to do!

Posted on March 26, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Can-Con, Feminism Leave a comment

Steubenville: Not a Bug in the System

by Josey Ross

For a lot of people, the Steubenville rape case appears to be the first time they’ve really thought about rape, rapists, and rape survivors. This is challenging a lot of people’s Law and Order: SVU view of a rapist as an evil stranger in the park, someone we can point to as a bad guy, someone we can confidently assert we don’t know, and we wouldn’t know. Oh, my boyfriend/brother/teacher/friend would never do that. He’s a good guy.

These two young men’s friends are still saying that, still coming up with excuses. They are threatening the victim with death (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/18/two-girls-charged-with-threatening-steubenville-rape-victim/). They are crying over the halted futures of these bright stars.

Nobody in the mainstream media seems to be crying for this brave 16-year-old girl who has just had her life destroyed. That is what rape does; it destroys lives. It breaks people. It shatters your ability to trust others and, more tragically, to trust yourself. It forever strips that piece of you that naively believes in the concept of “safety”.

None of this is coincidence. The wretched events of Steubenville are not an aberration. They are not a culmination of things gone wrong. They are a system working as it should.

This system teaches young men that women are theirs for the taking, that women incapable of consent are not only ripe for violation but have brought it upon themselves. It teaches that rape doesn’t even require concealment, but that you can celebrate and joke about it across social media platforms.

And this system teaches young women to hew to a system of male dominance. If going to a party with your friends is excuse enough for rape and mass humiliation, what the hell happens to those who stand up to the patriarchal system? What happens to those who say: “I deserve to walk without looking over my shoulder” or “I deserve to take up space”?

We’re in the 21^st century and we are still teaching young men that women are less than human. We’re in the 21^st century and we are still ensuring that women who forget that, who dare to think they deserve safety and opportunity, are put in their place, whether subtly or violently.

The events of Steubenville are not a bug in the system, they are a feature of it.

Posted on March 20, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism 1 Comment

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

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

Watch TEDx Talk from SlutWalk Toronto Organizers

by Jarrah Hodge

Back in October I spoke with SlutWalk founder Heather Jarvis about what it was like to get ready to speak at TEDx. Now that that process is over, you can catch her talk with co-founder Sonya JF Barnett. As you’ll see in their talk, Jarvis and Barnett liken language to a virus and apply this metaphor to slut-shaming, calling “slut” one of many “infected words” that have become contagious and are used to dehumanize.

I have to say my favourite part starts around the 4 minute mark where Barnett talks about how much it sucks to be called a “slut” at age 15. That really resonated with me – I share that knowing that all those times I was slut-shamed still stick with me over a decade later.

“Separating my sexual identity from my self-worth has become very difficult over time,” says Barnett and I think a lot of women will know what that feels like and likewise hear their own experiences when Jarvis talks about coping with assault.

I’d encourage you to watch the video even if you have issues with SlutWalk or some of the ways it’s played out in different communities. I think it really grounds the discussion in the very real, lived experiences of women and girls who are slut-shamed and blamed for “asking for it” when sexually harassed or assaulted.

I’m interested to know what other GF readers think – feel free to comment below!

Posted on November 21, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Can-Con, Feminism 4 Comments

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