Victim Blaming... The all american pastime of the US

Victim blaming for both rape and murder...

Americans have so many national passtimes... Baseball, flag obsession, racism, sexism, religious zealotry, appropriating the name "football" from the rest of the world and repurposing it and renaming the original sport bearing that name "soccer", bombing innocent bystanders and failing utterly to actually kill the person they're aiming for, and - at the forefront of my mind today - victim blaming. It's been an interesting year for us living in the amazing US of A. We've had Donald Trump turn from an amusing sideline of the election into an actual threat who could possibly have control over nuclear weapons in the not-so-distant future. We've had rapists left-right-and-center getting ridiculously pathetic short sentences, rape victims being disbelieved and slut-shamed. We have had news reports virtually every week about police shooting people all over the place - usually unarmed black kids and adults, the Black Lives Matter movement gaining incredible momentum - and of course opposition. We've had a football player kneel during the national anthem in protest of police shooting unarmed black people and white people going back to the overt racism we saw when the KKK was a popular club to be in, and then that same football player be called a muslim, a terrorist, received death threats, told he's a communist, should both kill himself and allow others to kill him, etc... 

Pretty much the US is a fucking insanely stupid nation at the moment. It's scary to live here, and i'm a privileged middle-class white girl. If i'm scared, I can only imagine how people who are actually in danger from this shit that's happening feel. I'd be fucking terrified to even leave my house. I'd become a hermit and only come out at like 4 or 5 am when almost everyone is asleep and there's less chance of me becoming a target for someone's racist vendetta. 

The US has an interesting history of blaming people for things they can't help. When the British "discovered" North America, they blamed the Native Americans for defending themselves, and punished them by slaughtering them, scalping them, and killing them (admittedly unknowingly) with diseases. When the Dutch and British started the whole slave trade, white people in the US enslaved Africans simply because they had a different skin colour, language, culture, etc... When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Government rounded up all the Japanese (and even Chinese) immigrants they could and shoved them into what were basically concentration camps without the whole gassing chambers part. For thousands of years, women have been considered "unclean", "stupid", "hysterical", and "too delicate" for pretty much everything except embroidery for the simple fact that we have vaginas and periods.

But we seem to have entered an all new low period in our history when we blame women for being attacked and raped, and black people for being murdered. The girl who was sexually assaulted behind a dumpster "had it coming" to her because she was intoxicated, and therefore we cannot even consider punishing her rapist because "it will affect HIM for the rest of his life..." Never mind that she will have to live with the memory for the rest of her life, knowing that when she was helpless someone took advantage of her and tried to stick his penis inside of her... No, the rapist's life and future are what we have to protect right now, obviously...

When it comes to rape the first question is not, "what the fuck did the parents teach their fucking rapey kid growing up?", it's what was the girl wearing, was she revealing too much cleavage, how short was her skirt, did she flirt with the guy, was she a "tease" or "leading him on", did she consent to kissing or fondling, because if so she was definitely asking for sex too, how much did she have to drink, was she wearing makeup, did she tell him she had a boyfriend, did she have a history of one-night-stands, was she "loose" with her sexuality, did she go to parties often, etc... We don't look at the perpetrator of the rape, the person with the penis who - for some reason - thought it was okay to force himself on a resisting woman. No, we look at the woman and analyse everything about her to decide how much she is at fault for another person attacking her. We give her a score of 9/10 her fault for the rape, and the guy only a 1/10, because he must have just misread the signals. 

Universities don't expel rapists, especially if they're on a sports team. They punish the victim of the rape and force her to go to a school where she sees the person who may have ruined her life, who has given her nightmares, panic attacks, a fear of intimacy with people she cares about, possibly even a fear of hugging her parents or friends, and who knows what other triggers and side effects of being sexually assaulted and abused. Judges give rapey little swimming kids 6 months in prison and then let him out after 3 months because anything else will DAMAGE HIS FUTURE... HIS future, mind you. His father pleads with people to be kind to his kid because 6 months in low-security prison was a "steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action"... Why not teach your kid to respect women and if he tries to rape any of them turn him in yourself or beat the shit out of him until he understands what apparently 20 years under your tutelage failed to teach him in the first place. 

"20 minutes" was 20 minutes too much action. Even 5 minutes is too much, 1 minute, 30 seconds... There is no "amount of rape" that is okay. It's not like there's a line of right and wrong, and when you hit the 30 minute marker you've suddenly gone too far. Like, 29 mins and 30 seconds of rape is okay, but 31 minutes earns you a prison sentence... It doesn't work that way. You don't get a free pass because it was a small time period. That's like saying that you get to murder 6 people without any consequences, but if you murder a 7th, OMG, you done fucked up... 

People get taken to court and stripped of their life savings because they bumped the car in front of them and the other driver falsely claims whiplash, when they still have an open cup of water in their cupholder that didn't spill a drop. We can consign a person to bankruptcy and strip them of everything they own because some dude wanted a fat payout by suing, but god help the person who suggests that we legally punish a rapist. That's "cruel and unusual"...

Similarly, all people seem to do these days is blame black people for their own murders at the hands of cops. They don't look at the little kid that was playing in the park with a toy squirt gun, they look at the dude who called it in and said there was a black kid with a gun. The cops didn't investigate what was going on, they just tore up to the park in their cruiser, flew out of it, and shot a little boy dead. No questions, no "put the gun down", no consideration that this was a little kid playing in a park. White people look at a grown man that was shot by the police and they ask "Was he wearing a hoodie? How tall was he? Did he look angry? Did he put his hands up immediately, or ask questions first? Did he resist arrest? Did he follow instructions? Did he have past convictions? Was he doing anything illegal?"... They tell black people to just "follow the law and do what they say and you'll be fine"... Well, obviously not! I'm pretty sure that by now some black people just drop to the ground with their hands out the minute they see a cop, regardless of what they're doing at the time, even if they are just selling girl scout cookies... It's no longer about keeping your nose clean, going about your business, and being safe. It's about assuming you must look like a criminal 24/7, so you have to always assume someone's going to try and shoot you.

And then when it comes to the protesting, the black community can do nothing right. Either they protest by trying to get laws passed to protect themselves, or they go to court to get punishment for the murdering cops, and nothing gets done. Protesting via the court system isn't effective. So they try getting support from the communities and politicians around them. But no one is interested, or even sees that there is a problem. So they get mad and sit down in the middle of roads and conduct peaceful if disruptive protests. They get attacked by white bystanders and the police, even though they are exercising their constitutional right to protest. Next they get really angry and hold violent protests, marches, smash windows, destroy public property, anything to get the attention of the world and highlight the very real problem that their community faces every single day. Discrimination, racism, hate from white people, unequal opportunities, lack of resources and lack of quality education in their communities... The list goes on and on. Even when a single black person protests in a completely non-disruptive, non-violent, not in your face at all way - by taking a knee during the national anthem at a football game - he is held up as an example of a "dangerous, disrespectful black man". Called hateful names like communist, devil, told to go back to where he came from, told to leave the US if he doesn't like the way things are... 

We blame the victims of crime all the time. We blame rape victims for being too provocative. We blame the victims of cop murder for being ex-cons or just looking suspicious (i.e. having darker skin caused by more melanin pigmentation), we blame regular murder victims for pissing the wrong person off, being disrespectful, refusing to do something for someone, not having better house security, etc... We blame pregnant young girls killed by their boyfriends because they wouldn't abort for getting pregnant in the first place. We blame women killed in childbirth for getting pregnant in the first place, even though they tried to have an abortion for their own health and safety. We blame young LGBTQA people who commit suicide for being LGBTQA, and say that if they could only just have tried to be "normal" heterosexuals then they wouldn't have been unhappy enough to kill themselves... 

When horrible things happen to good and innocent people, we blame THEM for it. Not their murders, or their tormentors, not their rapists and their torturers, not the abusive boyfriend or the religious fanatics, not the unfair court systems that pass laws preventing women from terminating pregnancies that threaten their lives... We blame the very people we SHOULD have been helping. We allow this disgusting victim blaming culture to not only perpetuate, but to thrive. 

Why? I have no idea. I cannot comprehend how little compassion a person has to have not to feel the pain of these needless deaths or feel sorrow at how their lives ended.

The ongoing fight to have a voice in my future...

Standing Up To The Institution

So recently I did the risky thing in my college career and stood up for myself to the University. I say risky because apparently it is just "not done" to have an opinion or make a real complaint about something at one's university. 

To be quick and to the point I went to the administrators of one of my universities departments about an experience with a professor teaching a class that had no business ever trying to teach anyone anything. After A YEAR of being shunted around from one person to the next, having my concerns belittled and disregarded, I finally scored a meeting with the Associate Chair of the Department of IB (nameless to avoid any retribution or defamation claims), the department in which this professor was nested. I sat down in a room with the Associate chair (a man) and one of the office workers (a woman) - I promise, those details will become necessary later on - and began to explain why I wanted this meeting in the first place. Upon the table in front of the Associate chair, I placed a stapled pile of documents. On top was a bulleted list of what was to be found within, the main points of 1) my original complaint about the teacher, and 2) my subsequent complaints about the department's handling of my concerns. Now I began to read these out as a brief overview of why we were all there, but then something happened that stopped me dead in my tracks...

The Associate Chair (AC from this moment forward) decided it was a good time to interrupt me before I really got on a roll and actually got to the point of the whole meeting. He talked over me and told me it was "his turn to talk". He told me that he had thought the issue was resolved the previous year when he replied to my email about my concerns about this teacher with a "I'll look into it". He wanted to know why we were even having this conversation in the first place. Now, he had just interrupted me from actually telling him that, so he could have saved himself some trouble by having decent manners and waiting for me to finish my intro, but that would have been far too difficult.

During the next half hour, Mr. AC talked down to me like I was a naughty child. He told me that my original "Teacher Evaluation" that listed in detail the numerous ways in which I found the teacher and class to be inadequate and unacceptable to be "overly aggressive" to the point at which he had been considering reporting me to Student Conduct. He said that my claims and assertions were unfounded and not based on fact and without sources. I was very curious to know how he thought I could add sources to my own experiences... I told him that it was unfortunate that no one had written a peer-reviewed paper based on his departments teaching standards, otherwise I would have been happy to provide a works-cited page along with everything else. He said that I was obviously upset and overemotional and that he wanted to resolve the situation quickly because he had canceled another meeting in order to sit down and talk with me and he felt that he was wasting his time. The woman in the room did absolutely nothing, neither stood up for her fellow female against this bullying behaviour, nor supported him in his arguments. I was very disappointed in her.

This entire experience was rather horrible and the entire time I felt:

• belittled 
• marginalized 
• put down because of my gender (female)
• bullied and pushed around because I am young and a student
• unfairly threatened with student conduct
• upset because I was constantly being interrupted and talked over

Some people in this world, in this country think that we (aka everyone) don't need feminism. They see feminism as an ugly word, they think that it means that feminists see men as inferior, that we want them to be slaves to us women. But really, what we mean when we say we are feminist is that we want to have the same opportunities as men, we want to stand up for ourselves and have people in authority (usually men) take us seriously, not use tactics that make us feel worthless and not have them belittle us. 

It is a hard thing in this world for a young girl to stand up to male authority and tell them what she thinks. It is hard to walk in knowing you are outnumbered, that there is no one at your back to stand up for you, that it's only you against this big scary establishment. But you do it, because you think it's the right thing to do. You hope that you can make a difference for future students. You hope that because you had the lady-balls to stand up for yourself that in the future another girl with a similar issue or a similar complaint might be strong enough to do the same. And then you walk out having been belittled and bullied and threatened and you feel as though your attempt failed miserably. You understand why more people don't speak up for their rights, why more students don't go beyond giving a a bad RateMyProfessors review. You feel as small and insignificant as a bug that big man in the big suit and the big position had just squashed. 

The whole point of college - beyond just getting an education - is to try new things, spread your wings, explore the world from the safety-net that is still not being a "real adult". We are told to challenge convention, to challenge the way things have always been and to fight for what we think is right. And then we have an experience like this. For some it is their first D grade, and they are instantly disillusioned. For me it wasn't my first D or my first failed class. It wasn't my first negative sexual experience or my first boyfriend. It wasn't even the first terrible teacher that taught me nothing and frustrated me for 11 weeks when I could teach the class better. For me, it was using my rights of freedom of speech, it was standing up to the status quo and being shot down so thoroughly that I'm surprised I am actually ready to write this at all after just a week. 

I'm amazed that I am emotionally and mentally ready to even walk past that building again. Two years ago I would have altered my route to class to avoid it, but now even so soon after my disillusionment, I proudly hold my head high and flip off the entire building as I walk past. Yes, maybe this is a teensy bit juvenile, maybe I should be the "better person" and go on with life, but I refuse to allow my negative experience to happen to another student. I refuse to be silenced and marginalized because of my gender and because I say some things that they don't like. Just because I criticize the ability of their staff to teach properly and their department for not taking student's claims seriously. They have now validated everything I just said to them and I will somehow make it count. 

My plan going forward is to go straight to the legal advice, advocates, and representatives that my school supplies to students and seek their counsel on my next steps and what I should avoid in order for Mr. AC not to have any reason to hold something over my head. From there, I will go to student conduct to tell them of this experience and explain exactly what went on, just in case Mr. AC does go ahead and "report" me. I will be ahead of the game on that count and I wish him luck if he tries to go after me. Next, I will be going to my student government ASOSU, whose job it is to help students with problems they are facing and to advocate for their rights. There needs to be some sort of support and outreach to students who want to try to confront big departments in the future. There needs to be some kind of way for students to have an advocate with them to support them and help them with their goals when taking on other AC's. Finally, I want to propose to my universities paper that they should write a column about how departments try to silence student's voices and try to push their concerns to the back burner while walking all over them.