Hi,

Does anyone have experience/knowledge around accountability processes in response to perpetrators of sexual violence, particularly ppl who leverage greater social standing and status in queer/activist "communities"? I would appreciate any commiseration/advice from other survivors/survivor allies. Thank you.

I also wanted to post some resources I found helpful for my specific situation along the way, which may or may not be helpful for others.

http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/blog/harsha-w/9349
brief 101 of male supremacist power dynamics in organizing circles

http://www.incite-national.org/media/docs/2406_cmty-acc-poc.pdf
Community Accountability Within People of Color Movements
2004 Report from INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence

http://petrushkab.tumblr.com/post/2050734636/rape-culture-questions
rape culture questions

http://petrushkab.tumblr.com/post/12061798464/a-rough-draft-on-rape-culture-in-anarchist-subcultures
Failures in accountability processes

It's with a sense of total unreality that I witness the Republican attack against contraception. Contraception. In 2012. Really, Republicans?

Yes, misogynist toads (of both sexes) everywhere, people have sex, and have since the dawn of time. Women are people. Women have sex. Once, women were powerless due to being enslaved to their biology and had little choice about when or whether they would have sex and when or whether they would create children. Those were horrible times and they were justly called The Dark Ages. Effective artificial contraception changed all that. Now women can do what they were made for - enjoy sex without the grim specter of unwanted/too-closely-spaced pregnancy and the attendant shuttering of any goals they may have had for their lives.

You see, women are the only people to have an organ, the clitoris, that is designed solely for sexual pleasure. Women are meant to enjoy sex for its own sake, contrary to your pearl-clutching invectives. To most people, this is unequivocally a really good thing. Additionally, hormonal contraceptives treat PCOS, metromenorrhagia, and protect women against certain cancers, among other health benefits.

Limbaugh's passive-aggressive non-apology is simply unacceptable. It was only issued because of the pressure of more and more companies pulling ad time from his odious radio show. Let's keep the pressure on. I have signed the Think Progress petition and urge anyone who feels as I do to do the same. You can also contact Rush's advertisers directly, here's a list and updates on whether they have pulled their ads from his show.

1. Deportation fears force immigrant women to be mute on sexual abuse, harassment at work
http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=184726
 

2. The IMF: Violating Women Since 1945
http://www.fpif.org/articles/the_imf_violating_women_since_1945

"As Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the world’s most powerful financial institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), spends a few nights in Rikers Island prison awaiting a hearing, the world is learning a lot about his history of treating women as expendable sex objects. Strauss-Kahn has been charged with rape and forced imprisonment of a 32-year-old Guinean hotel worker at a $3,000-a-night luxury hotel in New York.

While the media dissects the attempted rape of a young African woman and begins to dig out more information about Strauss-Kahn’s past indiscretions, we couldn’t help but see this situation through the feminist lens of the “personal is political.”

For many in the developing world, the IMF and its draconian policies of structural adjustment have systematically “raped” the earth and the poor and violated the human rights of women. It appears that the personal disregard and disrespect for women demonstrated by the man at the highest levels of leadership within the IMF is quite consistent with the gender bias inherent in the IMF’s institutional policies and practice."

(A really good summary/analysis; try to read the whole thing if you can. As an aside, I think they should have quoted someone other than a white American public figure about the situation of women in the Congo...)
 

3. Laila Lalami Defends Dominique Strauss-Kahn's Accuser

 http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-17/laila-lalami-defends-dominique-strauss-kahns-accuser/?cid=topic%3Amostrecent1

"French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote yesterday on the Beast, "What I do know is that nothing can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs." Laila Lalami knows a few more things. Who the real dogs are, for one..."

Slutwalk – in its slick branding – runs the risk of facilitating the dominant discourse of ‘liberated’ women as only those women wearing mini-skirts and high heels in/on their way to professional jobs. In reality, capitalism mediates the feminist façade of choice by creating an entire industry that commodifies women’s sexuality and links a woman’s self-esteem and self-worth to fashion and beauty. Slutwalk itself consistently refuses any connection to feminism and fixates solely around liberal questions of individual choice – the palatable “I can wear what I want” feminism that is intentionally devoid of an analysis of power dynamics.

Historically, this has come at a great cost to low-income women and women of colour who bear the brunt of institutionalized sexism – from lack of access to childcare and denial of reproductive justice to stratification in precarious low-wage work and disproportionate criminalization. In the post 9/11 climate, the focus on a particular version of sex(y)-positive feminism runs the risk of further marginalizing Muslim women’s movements who are hugely impacted by the racist ‘reasonable accommodation’ debate and state policies against the niqab. This marginalization has, at least in part, been legitimized through an imperialist feminist discourse that imposes certain ideas of gender liberation and perpetuates the myth that certain cultural/religious identities are inherently antithetical to women’s rights.

According to Nassim Elbardouh, a community organizer and Muslim woman who grew up in Saskatoon, “Though I support the tremendous effort, I didn’t go to Slutwalk because rather than focusing on lack of consent in sexual assault, there seemed to be a message that I have heard since I was a young girl – that I am only a feminist under the White gaze if I dressed and behaved in certain exposing and forward ways. People need to realize that being ‘scantily clad’ is not the only patriarchal excuse that victimizes women. Sexual assaults against Muslim women are often minimized in our society because Muslim women are perceived as repressed, and therefore in need of sexual emancipation. I would much rather have attended a ‘Do Not Rape’ Walk.”MORE

Let me know if you need a transcript. The Democracy Now videos come with transcripts.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/28/a_woman_among_warlords_afghan_democracy


The U.S. initially denied her visa and there were petitions circulating around to get her here.

Let Malalai Joya speak

Why is the US afraid of Malalai Joya?
 

"But QEJ believes military service is not economic justice, and it is immoral that the military is the nation’s de facto jobs program for poor and working-class people. And since QEJ organizes LGBTQ homeless people in New York City, we wanted to remind the LGBT community and progressive anti-war allies that militarism and war profiteering do not serve the interests of LGBT people. Here’s how:

1. The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans reports that about one-third of all homeless people in the US are veterans, but about 1.5 million more veterans are at risk of homelessness “due to poverty, lack of support networks, and dismal living conditions in overcrowded or substandard housing.” They also report that 56% of homeless veterans are Black or Latino.
2. Some studies also show that one in four veterans becomes disabled as a result of physical violence or emotional trauma of war. There are currently 30,000 disabled veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
3. Rape and sexual violence are very common occurrences for women in the military, and the ACLU is currently suing the Pentagon to get the real numbers on reported incidences.
4. Half of the US budget in 2009 was made up of military spending, including current expenditures, veterans benefits and the portion of the national debt caused by military costs, according to the War Resisters’ League. That is more than the US spent on Health & Human Services, Social Security Administration, Housing and Urban Development and the Department Education combined. Wouldn’t more social safety net spending help the millions of queers who can barely make ends meet?

In short, military service is not economic justice. Furthermore, QEJ understands that there are LGBTQ people in other parts of the world, particularly Iraq and Afghanistan, who have been killed, traumatized, or made disabled directly as a result of the recent US-led wars, or who have become vulnerable targets by fundamentalist backlashes to US imperialism. We stand in solidarity with other LGBTQ people around the globe, and do not condone violence against them or their home countries so that “our gays” have the “right” to serve openly in the military."

 

"Yet no interventions, when tested in large studies, have caused a big difference in children’s or teenagers’ weights."

“That’s a hard call,” said Kelly D. Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. When it comes to health, “it’s hard to think that anything could be worse than smoking,” he said. But obesity has a social stigma attached, which “carries a cost no matter what the medical consequences are.”