Jane Gives Thanks
Readers, as we enter the holiday season, we at See Jane Fights Back would like to take a moment to express our appreciation.
We are grateful to our self-defense activist and scholar colleagues, for their efforts to empower women and girls, and in doing so, to shift the narratives about the perceived inevitability of sexual violence and the perceived omnipotence of perpetrators.
We are thankful for you, our readers, for reading and sharing our blog, and for all the feedback, comments, and stories you have shared with us.
Finally, we acknowledge all those who have been targeted for or experienced sexual violence; we admire and appreciate their courage and perseverance, their willingness to share their stories, and for reminding us all that resistance takes many, many forms.
PS. Snarky commentary returns next week.
An Open Letter to CNN’s Don Lemon and Other Journalists Who Interview Women Who Report They were Sexually Assaulted
Dear Mr. Lemon:
National and international media outlets are covering various aspects of the rape allegations made against actor and comedian Bill Cosby, dating back over four decades. None of it is surprising – not additional victims coming forward, not various celebrities expressing skepticism or disbelief, not stories about the psychological functioning or motives of those bringing allegations.
Nor is it surprising that women who come forward are being asked why they didn’t fight back.
On the evening of November 18, CNN reporter Don Lemon, in an interview with Joan Tarshis, one of several women who are reporting they were raped or assaulted by Cosby, said the following:
“You know, there are ways not perform oral sex if you didn’t want to…meaning using of the teeth…as a weapon…biting…I had to ask.”
No, Mr. Lemon, you didn’t have to ask.
We’re not going to ask you if you would bite the penis of a man orally raping you, Mr. Lemon. We’re not going to ask you if you think you would do it, if a man tried to orally rape you, either.
That’s not a question, Mr. Lemon. That’s victim-blaming.
Advocates of self-defense and self-defense training for women could tell you that, Mr. Lemon. We don’t tell women what they should do. We don’t ask them why they didn’t do it, if they have been raped or assaulted in the past.
Ms. Tarshis says that it did not occur to her to bite his penis. That is the option that occurred to you, when you heard the story, Mr. Lemon. It may or may not have occurred to you in the moment if someone were assaulting you.
This is why self-defense training is so important. Championing self-defense training for women should not be confused with saying that a woman should have resisted. Self-defense training teaches women strategies and options so that if someone tries to rape or assault them, they have a range of choices available to them. And so that they feel empowered to act on those choices, if they choose to, because they believe they are entitled to, because they have the knowledge and practice in doing so, and because they know that if one strategy doesn’t work, another one – verbal or physical – might. Self-defense training helps make resistance a viable option. And, Mr. Lemon, we trust that women make the choice that is the safest, the best, for them, in that moment, and we don’t judge or question their choices.
We don’t tell them what that choice should have been, Mr. Lemon, because we don’t know. And asking a survivor of rape or sexual assault why they didn’t resist in the particular way you can envision, even though you were not there and have no idea whether that would have been a safe, viable, or appropriate choice, is telling them what you think they should have done. Or what you think you would have done.
Instead, Mr. Lemon, you could have applauded Ms. Tarshis for coming forward with her story, and told her that you don’t blame her or hold her responsible for the violence that was perpetrated against her. You could have told her that you believe that she made the best choice she could in a terrifying and dangerous situation.
Mr. Lemon, perhaps you were trying to be helpful. So let us help you, Mr. Lemon, with what NOT TO SAY to someone who tells you they were raped or sexually assaulted:
- Why didn’t you…(fight back, knee him in the groin, bite his penis, scream for help…or whatever you believe she should have/you would have done in the same situation)?
- Why did you…(wear that, go there, say that, do that…or whatever behavior you see as the reason she was raped or sexually assaulted)?
- Why were you…(drinking, drunk, smoking, high…or using whatever substance you think made her responsible for someone raping or sexually assaulting her)?
- If it were me…(fill in the blank with your solution to avoiding rape or sexual assault).
Resistance is complicated, and difficult, and scary, Mr. Lemon, and while many girls and women resist – some with self-defense training, and more without – your question suggests that resistance is simple and easy and obvious and what you would have done/what everyone should have done. Your question suggests that in the absence of resistance, it wasn’t really rape, or that the rape was the responsibility of the survivor, not the perpetrator.
Mr. Lemon, we live in a society that does not offer girls and women any regular opportunities to learn how to value themselves and their bodily boundaries, or how to use their bodies aggressively (remember, we’re the cheerleaders, not the football players), and in a society that routinely tells girls and women NOT to fight back because it won’t work or they’ll get hurt or they’ll make things worse. And yet, the question you ask is, “Why Didn’t She Do This or That Aggressive Act in Self-Defense?!
We could add, Mr. Lemon, how about you ask why we’re not teaching girls and women to defend themselves, violently, if necessary. That’s our question, Mr. Lemon. Next time, make it yours.
Sincerely,
Jill Cermele and Martha McCaughey
An Open Letter to Cory Rosenkranz, Counseling Center, Ramapo College
Dear Ms. Rosenkranz,
We have seen multiple stories now – first in the Ramapo News from Ramapo College, but then in Jezebel, in Addicting Info, in the Telegraph – about how you recommended that female students practice their “anti-rape faces in the mirror”. Or words to that effect.
That’s not prevention, Ms. Rosenkranz. That’s victim-blaming. We don’t need to practice our anti-rape faces. Any face we make is an anti-rape face.
Prevention is focusing on changing a rape culture that perpetuates the myth that men’s rape of women as inevitable. Prevention is acting to change social norms about men’s beliefs about their entitlement to women’s bodies, and the eliminating the behaviors that follow those beliefs. And prevention is teaching women how to physically and verbally thwart an attempted sexual assault.
Women do not invite rape by how they look, or what they wear, or the expression on their faces. Or by their perceived attractiveness, or their relationship status, or their sexual orientation, or the color of their skin. Or anything else.
Got that?
We want to reduce women’s risk for assault, Ms. Rosenkranz. We assume you do, too. But if you want to make women safer, empower them – don’t blame them. Encourage your campus to offer self-defense classes that, as the data show, actually reduce the chance that they will be raped and increase women’s feelings of confidence and empowerment.
We assume your goal is to reduce sexual assault on your campus, Ms. Rosenkranz. But making faces doesn’t make people stop raping. Action does. And that’s why we are writing to you, rather than making a “we don’t like what you’re saying” face.
Women’s faces/bodies/clothes/words/behaviors DO NOT invite rape, and rape prevention is not about withdrawing an invitation. So please – check the data, and get your facts straight.
Sincerely,
Jill Cermele and Martha McCaughey
An open letter to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
Dear Your Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama:
We applaud your recommending last week, in conjunction with your attendance at an interfaith meeting in India, that girls learn martial arts self-defense against sexual assaults. In your interview with One World South Asia, you said that women and men should be equally valued in society, and when asked if you had any message you’d like to give to the young girls in India, you answered that “the idea of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to train school girls in martial arts seems a practical solution. For self defence, young girls in India should learn martial arts like Karate. In the long run, education can be an effective tool in helping girls to stand up against sexual crimes.” To this you added that “lower castes should pay more attention in education. They should particularly educate their girls. People who are well off should help the poor people in getting education.”
You didn’t say that girls shouldn’t put themselves in risky situations, Your Holiness, because you know what we know – that sexual assault is not about what women targeted for sexual assault do to “increase” their risk.
You didn’t say that girls are responsible for preventing sexual assault, because you know what we know – that the responsibility lies with perpetrators, not with targets and victims.
We agree wholeheartedly with this agenda for young girls and believe this should be our message to girls in the U.S. as well.
We only wish that you had made this recommendation to U.S. President Barack Obama during your recent meeting with him at the White House. We don’t think you did because they’d surely have put you in their “It’s On Us” video. The goal of that movement, they say, is to “…reframe the conversation surrounding sexual assault in a way that inspires everyone to see it as their responsibility to do something, big or small, to prevent it”. And what you said, Your Holiness, reframes the conversation by suggesting that women don’t need to just hope that someone else gets that “it’s on them”; you reframe the conversation by taking a stance, as the most influential spiritual leader in the world today, that women as equal pillars of humanity, have the right to and capacity for self-defense.
So can you call President Obama back and tell him that?
We know that you won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, and that you call yourself a feminist. We just hope that your recent recommendation to girls about self-defense is understood by others as not at all in contradiction with your being a Nobel laureate. For we know of your teachings about compassion as well as women’s rights.
Overall, we love your messages, as well as how you offer them. You not only speak, have f2f meetings, and write books; you also have your own Twitter (with 9 million followers!), Facebook, and Google Plus accounts. We do too! (Except we have about 8.9999999 million fewer followers.)
Sincerely,
Martha McCaughey & Jill Cermele
PS: Is being the Dalai Lama a good job?
THE TOP TEN THINGS WOMEN WILL WANT TO DO IF WE TEACH THEM SELF-DEFENSE
There is a lot of resistance to the idea of teaching self-defense skills to women – and we get it. It’s a slippery slope. We all know what happens when you give a mouse a cookie, right? Just imagine – if women practice and enact physical and verbal personal safety strategies, if we have the embodied experience of ourselves as strong, confident human beings who are entitled to protect our own physical and psychological integrity, THEN WHAT?
10. Wear pants
9. Swear
8. Speak in public
7. Vote
6. Operate heavy machinery – like a motor vehicle
5. Have a career
4. Claim an education
3. Control their own bodies
2. Prioritize their own sexual desire and agency
And, the #1 thing that women will do if we teach them self-defense, and we just can’t say it any better than Pat Robertson did: “Leave their husbands…practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”
These are the rights for which feminists have fought, and continue to fight: the right to dress as we like, to speak as we like, to move through the world claiming and participating in all spheres and domains available to men, and the right to live freely, safely, and happily in our own bodies. And that includes the right to self-defense, and to knowing how to protect ourselves. And no one should tell us that we can’t, or shouldn’t have to, have that right.
An Open Letter to the NPR Weekend Edition Staff and the Parents of College Students You Misled
Dear NPR Weekend Edition Staff and the Parents of College Students You Misled:
The August 24 program “Weekend Edition” produced a story on how some universities are “tackling sexual assault before parties start”, which underscores how important it is for parents, as well as colleges and universities, to prepare students in advance, and to remind them of the risk while offering them strategies to reduce it. This broadcast featured a clip of a conversation between a father of an incoming University of New Hampshire student, who is a doctor, and his daughter, “Kelly”. When Kelly asks her father specifically for advice (“What should I know about consent and assault and rape?”), Dad offers Kelly the following advice:
- Anticipate a situation before you get into it
- Always travel with friends
- Have a planned list of activities, night and day
- Avoid isolation
- Avoid substances
Kelly feels better, and Kelly’s Dad, who is clearly educated, informed, and appropriately concerned about his daughter’s safety and well-being, has done his job. And yet, what has she been told, really? Don’t ever be alone, don’t ever drink or use drugs, and keep yourself on a preset busy schedule. In other (vague) words, avoid, curtail, limit, distract, and then hope for the best. She might as well live at home and take all her courses online.
The take-home message of that list of rape avoidance strategies — inadvertently offered, perhaps, but communicated nonetheless — is that once danger is imminent, the outcome is a given. If one’s avoidance measures fail, there is no advice provided, implying that women do not have the option of fighting back.
And yet research has shown that girls and women are capable of safely and effectively resisting rape and sexual assault. Self-defense training is one critical way to teach, and allow for the practice of, active and clear strategies for things you can say and do in a potentially dangerous situation, where someone is trying to rape or assault you. And the research tells us that these strategies make women feel safer, make them more empowered to set and assert their boundaries in a range of situations – including social and dating situations – and can effectively prevent an assault or a rape from occurring.
So NPR and parents, please have these conversations, and please include not only a guy’s legal obligation not to attack but a gal’s legal right to defend herself. Here’s our script for daughters:
If someone tries to rape or assault you, one thing you need to know is that you have the right to protect yourself – verbally or physically. You have the right to tell someone that what they are saying to you, how they are touching you, is not what you want, is not okay, is a crime; you have the right to yell and scream and call for help and make a scene to attract the attention of someone who might be able to help you. And you also have the right to physically resist – by pushing, shoving, hitting, kicking, with any part of your body that you can use – hands, elbows, hips, knees, feet – and against any part of their body – testicles, face, abdomen, arms, legs. And, you need to know these are all things you can do, and have the right to do, but that if you are in danger, we trust you to make the best decision for yourself that is going to keep you feeling as safe in the moment as possible. And that means that while we want you to know that it is okay for you to do these things, it doesn’t mean you have to or you should. You do what’s best for you, and we will love and trust and support you, no matter what.
Not that anyone asked, but here’s our script for sons:
If you want to do something physically intimate with someone, tell them and ask them. If the person you’re with has been drinking or using drugs, consider them incapable of offering meaningful consent and move on. If the person is reasonably sober and makes it explicitly clear that the desires are mutual, great. Do not assume you can pick up signals or hints. Do not ever attempt to impose yourself or your will onto another person. It’s neither sexy nor legal. Don’t treat anyone as an “easy lay.” If you don’t understand these principles, you just might get your ass kicked.
That’s the way to tackle sexual assault before the party starts.
Sincerely,
Jill Cermele and Martha McCaughey
The Top Five Things You Need to Know Before Heading Off to College
As we head into August, the internet is bursting with advice for the college student. As college professors, we certainly want students to come to college prepared, and given the news coverage over the last few months about sexual assault on college campuses, we thought, surely, that information about the risk of sexual assault and how to protect oneself, particularly for first-year college women in the first few weeks of the semester, would make it onto these lists. (Actually, we thought no such thing, but we were hoping, optimistic feminists that we are.)
Sadly, though, we found nary a list that even mentioned assault, let alone one that suggested that the young woman heading off to college might need to know of the risks and therefore offered her valuable information about effective ways to defend herself should someone try to rape or assault her.
But no. What we found, instead, were suggestions about how to confront the problems of packing, laundry, and the Freshman 5/10/15.
So it’s not that we don’t think that it can be hard to know what to pack when you’re leaving home for 4 months; we certainly encourage you to figure out how to operate a washing machine, and healthy nutrition is always a plus. In fact, as professors, we’d also encourage you to read your syllabus, do your homework, and proofread your papers.
However, what we really want you to know is that if you are a young woman in college, the risk of someone raping or sexually assaulting you, or trying to, is high; the data (you’re going to hear a lot about data in college, so get used to it) from a lot of different sources says that anywhere from 1 in 5 women to 1 in 3 women will be raped or sexually assaulted during her college years.
What we also want you to know is that there are things you can do to protect yourself.
We trust you’ll figure out what to bring, how to set up your room, and how to declare a major, so we’re not going to give you any advice on how to do that. Instead, here are (drumroll please)….
THE TOP FIVE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT RAPE OR SEXUAL ASSAULT ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES:
- RAPISTS ARE NOT ALL STRANGERS. Statistically, a person who tries to rape you is going to be someone you know, and quite possibly someone you know and like – a friend, a date, a partner. So it is important to be aware of the people you know, not just your surroundings, and to pay attention to how you feel when you are around the people you know. Go with your gut, and trust your instincts.
- ALCOHOL IS TRICKY. Alcohol is implicated in an enormous number of rapes on college campuses, and here’s what we know about drinking alcohol: intoxication can impair your judgment, slow your reflexes, and leave you more vulnerable to dangerous people and situations. Yep, there are criminals (yes, rape and attempted rape are CRIMES) that will try to get you drunk in order to more easily commit an assault against you. Know this: being intoxicated does NOT, we repeat, NOT, mean you are responsible for someone trying to rape you. No matter what. However, for a variety of reasons – health, safety, GPA, avoiding the Freshman 5/10/15 – we recommend drinking legally and responsibility, knowing your limits around alcohol and other drugs, and being aware of the risks associated with drinking.
- YOU ARE ENTITLED TO HAVE AND SET BOUNDARIES. You – not your date, your roommate, your friends, your family, your professors – YOU get to decide what is safe, comfortable, and desirable for yourself, and those get to get to be different for different people, or different at different times for the same person. And no one has the right to push or override those. NO ONE. And what that means is this: YOU GET TO SAY NO. And we know how hard “no” can be to say. Lots of people, but women and girls in particular, often have trouble saying “no” (“NO!”) because they are worried about appearing mean, rude, hurtful, or (gasp) bitchy. And as college professors, with over 40 years teaching experience between us, we’re telling you it’s okay to say no, and in fact, it’s okay even if someone thinks you’re mean, rude, hurtful, or (gasp) bitchy. Here’s our best advice to anyone who tells you otherwise: Fuck ‘em. (You may quote us on that.)
- THERE ARE THINGS YOU CAN SAY AND DO TO STOP SOMEONE FROM RAPING YOU. You may have heard a lot of (perhaps) well-intentioned but (in our humble, data-informed) opinion, stupid advice on this point that says the opposite, like: Don’t fight back, it won’t work, you’ll get hurt, you’ll make him mad, you’ll make things worse…. In fact, here’s what we know from the data (are you tired of hearing us say “data” at this point? Too bad.):
- YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO RESIST. Self-defense is a human right, and those aren’t just pretty words. You have the legal right to defend yourself, and that means against a rapist, too. And it gets even better – keep reading:
- RESISTANCE CAN WORK. Resistance means a lot of things: walking with confidence, telling someone not to touch you, pushing or shoving someone away from you, kneeing someone in the testicles (“Most incapacitating pain EVER,” our male friends tell us), and more. Fighting back – verbally or physically – against a potential rape or sexual assault makes it LESS likely that the perpetrator will be successful and MORE likely that the perpetrator will fail. Self-defense can work, even if a perpetrator is male, is larger, is stronger; you can use it to prevent or thwart an assault from happening.
- MORE IS MORE. Stronger levels of resistance – both verbal and physical – make it MORE likely that the perpetrator will fail.
- YOU CAN’T TRUST LAW AND ORDER SVU AS YOUR SOURCE OF INFORMATION FOR ANYTHING. (We know this seems off-topic, but just hear us out.) And we say this as huge Law and Order SVU fans, but here’s the sad truth – they just make shit up*. And one of the things they say that’s not true, which you’ve probably heard before, is that fighting back is a bad idea because you’re more likely to get hurt. Just not true in most cases – in most cases, there are no difference in injury rates between women who resist and women who can’t or don’t.
- YOU ARE THE BEST PERSON TO DECIDE WHAT TO DO IF SOMEONE TRIES TO RAPE OR ASSAULT YOU. One of the things that happens when we talk about self-defense is that people say things like, “When you tell women they can fight back, aren’t you telling them it’s their fault if they are raped?”, to which we say, “No, of COURSE NOT!” (Then we roll our eyes and mutter to ourselves because we’re really tired of hearing that.) We want women to know what their options are; we are not telling women what they should and shouldn’t do. Every person and every situation is different, and we trust women to make the best decisions they can for themselves in any given moment. Self-defense is an option, and if you know all your options, you can better make the best choice for yourself to stay as safe as you can in any situation – whatever that choice may be. We trust you.
So that should cover it. College is wonderful, and we want you to be as prepared for it as possible. This is the best and most important advice we have for you. Aside from that, we trust you to figure it out. Although we do think it’s important to tell you that if you overcook microwave popcorn, it will stink up your entire dorm for a week.
Go get ‘em!
Professor Jill and Professor Martha
*If any producers or writers for Law and Order SVU are readings this blog, the authors are totally available for consultation on scripts and dialogue. Totally.
Open Letter to Vice President Biden and the White House Task Force on Sexual Assault on College Campuses
Dear Vice President Biden and the White House Task Force on Sexual Assault:
We’ve read the press release, explored the web site, and followed the mostly positive media coverage about the recommendations of the Task Force. However, as feminist self-defense scholars and activists, and as college professors, we find it interesting, and problematic, that women in the 21st Century continue to be seen as damsels in distress.
We applaud the Task Force for underscoring the seriousness and prevalence of the problem of sexual assault on college campuses, for highlighting the need for better data on the incidence rates, and for requiring colleges and universities to act. However, it’s striking that the only people who can act, it seems, are men. Men can stop raping. Men can serve as “bystanders” and stop their friends from raping. And (mainly male) university administrators can implement programs to reach men, and to better serve the (mainly female) victims that men have raped.
That approach presumes that women are sitting ducks. Easy targets. Rapeable. The best we can hope for, we are being told, is that campuses will adopt better policies, in compliance with Title IX of the Educational Equity Act for reporting the already-completed rape of women, and teach the good guys—the knight-errants roving from party to party—to save the damsels in distress.
But that’s not the best we can hope for. The highly regarded academic journal Violence Against Women just released an entire special issue in March 2014devoted to scholarship on self-defense against sexual assault, for which we served as the guest editors. In that issue, scholars present data on how effective training in and using self-defense can be for women. These scholars show that self-defense is usually effective in thwarting an attack (Dr. Sarah Ullman of the University of Illinois at Chicago); that self-defense typically results in no further injury to the women defending themselves(Drs. Jongyeon Tark and Gary Kleck of Hannem University in South Korea and Florida State University); that self-defense helps women of a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds (Dr. Lisa Speidel of University of Virginia) as well as women who have been previously victimized (Drs. Gia Rosenblum and Lynn Taska, trauma psychologists in Lawrenceville, NJ); that a good self-defense course is incredibly empowering in a number of ways for women, outside of their ability to thwart an actual attack (Dr. Martha Thompson of Northeastern Illinois University); and that because of the wide range of benefits self-defense training has, it actually helps change the gender norms and ultimately prevents sexual assault more broadly (Dr. Joceyln Hollander of University of Oregon).
We wish to be clear that women are not responsible for rape, no matter their behavior, their attire, or their level of intoxication; promoting self-defense training for women in no way suggests that the onus is now, or should be, onwomen alone to stop rape. Nor would we want to suggest that men who rape can’t ever change their ways, or that college administrators shouldn’t do more to ensure that there is gender equity in all areas.
But we do note, and question, the absence of self-defense as a goal that is part of an overall sexual assault prevention approach. Self-defense is no more individualistic than training individual bystanders to stop a guy before he rapes. Self-defense is no more victim-blaming than suggesting women communicate clearly on dates. Self-defense should be just as much a part of sexual assault prevention efforts as training bystanders and improving policies are. Besides, women really shouldn’t have to wait on government and university bureaucracies when, in a matter of weeks, they could learn the empowering, and effective, techniques of twisting the testicles, kneeing the groin, or gouging the eyes of Joe College Rapist.
Moreover, self-defense training doesn’t just teach women such physical techniques. It teaches women to take themselves more seriously, that they have bodies and lives worth defending, and that they are not pieces of meat, playthings, or pretty prizes of men. That, it seems to us, is an incredibly important message to give to women and their co-eds who are supposed to be learning that men and women are equally deserving of the right to an education. Practicing self-defense enables women to practice being taken seriously, in and out of a bedroom.
The White House Task Force urges colleges and universities to collect better data, to adopt better policies, and to protect the confidentiality of victims. We agree. But we argue that the Task Force must also urge college and universities to put into action what we know from the findings of decades of research: that women can safely and effectively defend themselves against rape, and that self-defense training for women benefits everyone. You want true educational equity? Then teach self-defense.
Martha McCaughey and Jill Cermele
Special issue of Violence Against Women: Self Defense Against Sexual Assault
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN:
SPECIAL ISSUE ON SELF DEFENSE AGAINST SEXUAL ASSAULT
Slated for Publication March 2014 (Vol 20, No. 3)
Table of Contents
Martha McCaughey & Jill Cermele: Guest Editors’ Introduction
Research Articles
Jocelyn A. Hollander: Does Self-Defense Training Prevent Violence Against Women?
Jongyeon Tark & Gary Kleck: Resisting Rape: The Effects of Victim Self-Protection on Rape Completion and Injury
Gianine D. Rosenblum & Lynn S. Taska: Self-Defense Training as Clinical Intervention for Trauma Survivors
Lisa Speidel: Exploring The Intersection of Racial and Gender Identity through Self-Defense Training
Leanne R. Brecklin & Rena K. Middendorf: The Group Dynamics of Women’s Self-Defense Training
Perspectives
Sarah E. Ullman: Reflections on Researching Rape Resistance
Martha E. Thompson: Empowering Self-Defense Training
Deborah White & Gethin Rees: Self-Defense or Undermining the Self? Exploring the Possibilities and Limitations of a Novel Anti-Rape Technology
Jennifer D. Carlson: From Gun Politics to Self-defense Politics: A Feminist Critique of the Great Gun Debate
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