Thoughts on campus sexual assault prevention

This evening, people on campus got an e-mail regarding a rape that took place last week. A news report about the event can be read here.

In his e-mail to students (and as it explains in the article) Sam Sadler encouraged students to call Campus Police if they needed a ride home after hours. For my women's studies Community Action Project last year, my group initially investigated some issues related to sexual assault prevention including safe forms of transportation in instances of perceived danger with specific questions about how the intoxication of the student seeking help might cause problems. The police station was not very receptive to the idea of helping to get a drunk student out of a dangerous situation without it resulting in his or her potential arrest for drinking underage. Recently W&M enacted a policy that provides amnesty to students who seek medical help because of alcohol poisoning and to others who may have been drinking underage who are involved in the process of seeking medical care for their friends. It makes sense, in my mind, that this policy be extended to women and men who seek assistance in getting out of unsafe situations that could potentially result in sexual assault or rape. Preventing sexual assault means changing the ways in which students view consent and sexual activity, but it also means providing safe, reliable ways to get out of bad situations, particularly when an individual is intoxicated.

In light of this recent case of rape, and with the tendency of alcohol to be involved with cases of acquaintance rape (I realize this specific incident does not fall into that category), I decided to write Sam Sadler, Vice President of Student Affairs, an e-mail detailing some of my thoughts. I don't know if anything will actually come of the e-mail, but I felt like I needed to say something while people were actually listening. It was disheartening to know that the best advice Sam could offer to students out late was to call Campus Police since they have seemed really hesitant to help in the past. I am hoping that even by shining a little light on this problem, I might actually see some campus policy changed (or at least have the police be encouraged to respond to student's pleas for after-hours transportation).

What follows is the text of the e-mail that I sent to Sam. I know it isn't very formal, but I wanted to post it here to hopefully get people thinking about ways our campus could work even harder to prevent sexual assault, particularly since it's been such an important topic on campus over the last few years.

Sam,

Last year for my women's studies CAP project, one of my group members called the Campus Police and asked if they would be willing to give rides to students after hours if they felt like they were in an unsafe situation. They said they would only do so if they didn't have better things to be doing. In addition, when the question of the involvement of alcohol came up, they explained that they would not be able to treat the student who felt they were in danger with amnesty. It would seem to me that were an intoxicated student (underage or not) to feel safe contacting the police and certain of their positive response, unnecessary incidents that potentially put students in dangerous situations could be avoided. Honestly, I think it is unfortunate that we can only really rely on campus police to intercede once an act of assault has been committed and that while we are willing to grant medical amnesty to students who go to the hospital, we are not willing to grant amnesty to students, particularly women, who ask for help when they feel unsafe.

In light of this recent event, I would love to see some sort of reinforcement of police policy on willingness to transport students after hours in the form of an e-mail sent out to the campus police officers, and I would be hopeful that there might be some sort of conversation initiated with the office of sexual assault prevention about an extension of the amnesty policy to women and men who seek law enforcement assistance when they feel threatened. Barriers that exist to seeking help make dangerous situations that much more dangerous. Particularly since alcohol is so often a factor in acquaintance rape, I think that it is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Beginning to conclude

Haste suggests in Sexual Metaphors that feminism must work to re-inform the ideologies that shape our institutions in order to actually create change, and it is largely the input we get from various sources that shapes our ideologies--what we buy, who we vote for, what we believe. That makes it important to read/receive the best knowledge possible in order to allow for the ideal shaping of our ideologies. Now, when there is so much information in so many forms readily available, this can be an extremely challenging task.

When I started work on my independent study, I was challenged by the incredible number of resources out there, and the lack of helpful information when it came to selecting the best/most relevant. Part of this problem is that the best academic criticism is only really available in elite places--like inaccessible theory in databases and academic publications that can't benefit anyone without the time, discernment and support systems afforded only in specific situations (like being a college student). I could read on university websites or in JSTOR reviews and suggested lists about which books would be the most useful (which I did), but at the end of the day I had to order my books from somewhere else. On Amazon, the reviews and comments about all of these dense theoretical books and compilations of essays were spare and generally not very helpful.

Because of this, I greatly overshot on reading materials for the semester, and have had a hard time figuring out what comes first. I realized that there needed to be a space out there where someone really provided information on what theory/books to read and what movies to watch. One of the most meaningful ways to have my work this semester make an impact on the larger discipline of women's studies, especially since as an undergrad it is hard to get ones work into more traditional public (and academic) forums, was to post reviews of the sources I was consulting on very mainstream resources, like Amazon, imdb, and Netflix.

Originally I thought that the most important thing in electronic resources was to keep each topic focused on a separate weblog, but now I think that I need to have everything in one place, linked to my identity. So, I m rolling this site over into my larger, new Wordpress account. I am calling this site "Collection Plate." I am eventually going to ask the women's studies department, Reves Center, IR department, Monroe Scholars/Charles Center staff and maybe even the English department to link my site on their pages once I get it fully up and running. I would hope they would continue to keep it accessible at least while I am studying at Oxford next year where I think I'll be moving towards research in nonviolent methods for sustainable international development with a focus on women. I want to keep my new site live then and update regularly, and in the future work towards featuring sections on each of topics in which I am engaged along the course of my studies in and outside the classroom. I am planning to have several pages including freshman year; Kyoto, Japan: classwork and case study; mytwolips; my classwork in my masters program at Oxford; and my case study international peace work/research in Rwanda in 2009-2010.

Sexual Assault Awareness Week II & CAP Projects

I am super happy that the intro women's studies classes are doing their Community Action Projects (CAPs) again this year. It seems to create this really wonderful, open space where women can talk about body issues, sexuality issues, fashion issues, abuse issues, etc. because of the various groups that are hosting all of these really wonderful events, talks, displays, and whatnot around campus. It also certainly doesn't hurt that some of them were during Sexual Assault Awareness week which is a similarly inclined opportunity to talk openly about some pretty serious issues.

I attended a couple of events during the week, including one I posted on earlier and also the pilot for a new co-ed program run collectively by members of 1 in 4 and Every Two Minutes that will allow freshmen to engage in an open dialogue about giving and receiving consent, particularly when it comes to sexual situations and will help them think about the involvement of alcohol. I wish I could tell you more about the program, but because of the fact that is is currently just a pilot, it was agreed that we would preserve the safe space of the room by allowing all of the discussion that took place to remain between those who were there. I am excited, though, that there is at least an ongoing discussion taking place.

The other events I wanted to mention, though, are both CAP projects. The first was a wall that had pictures of various women in different amounts of clothing that was meant to address body image and show pictures of real women. I am always glad to have this sort of display, but I was walking through with a male friend and his comment was: "All of the women who are less clothed are the ones we would typically think of as being more comfortable with their bodies." I also felt like maybe there wasn't enough of an opportunity for the people photographed to have their feelings about the pictures directly attached. I'd love to see a picture of a really pretty girl with the description "Looking at magazines makes me feel fat and ugly." Surely, I don't want people to feel fat and ugly, but I think that it would demonstrate that there are a lot of people who feel negatively about their bodies who others of us look at and are jealous of. I think it would help my understanding of my own body image to know what other women actually think about their bodies.

Finally, I went to an event called "Fashion Shouldn't Hurt," which was all about the different ways that fashion is bad for women. It included several sections including one that depicted the W&M approach to fashion, a lecture from a local doctor on the potential hazards of high heels and a fashion show of cute but healthy fashions. The group also maintains a website about their issue. The models were legitimately all shapes and sizes and the room was packed full of people who were supportive of everything that was being discussed. I felt like I learned at least a little bit, and I have been way more conscious of the things that I personally do on a regular basis for the sake of fashion that might not be the healthiest for me, and I guess that's the point, but my friend pointed out that most of the people in the room were probably already concerned about the issue and that it was the people who weren't there who really needed all of the information the most. I would agree that a lot of events are based on preaching to the choir. At least, though, the events are being held and the ideas are getting talked about.

Sexual Assault Awareness Week Events, I

So, this week on campus is Sexual Assault Awareness Week. The event is participated in by a variety of different organizations and offices and is composed of a variety of events both enjoyable and educational, informative and "just for fun."

The event I attended tonight was a double film screening of Svetlana's Journey and Cargo: Innocence Lost presented by two students from the Third World Feminisms class being taught by instructor Hilary Marcus. The event information also linked the wikisite the two have produced in the course of their classwork.

Svetlana's Journey is a film by director Michael Cory Davis about a Bulgarian girl forced into prostitution. The project was an attempt to depict the brutal reality of sex work with three main purposes (as espoused by the website): show that that the victims of forced prostitution are not to be blamed for their situation, change the minds of any girls who had considered sex work as a viable option and to demonstrate that Bulgarians care about the rights of women. I would have to say that while I thought the film was able to show how terrible life was for one girl and did depict her struggles graphically and realistically, I didn't think it did a terrific job of meeting some of its other stated goals. If I hadn't been watching the film in an academic environment, I am not sure I would have understood that this was specifically a Bulgarian film or had access to information about how and why these women end up in forced prostitution situations. Certainly the project at large does raise awareness for the issue and the website provides a link to Face to Face, a non-profit group actually working against child and forced prostitution in Bulgaria.

The other film being screened, Cargo: Innocence Lost, was also directed by Davis, but did a much better job to to paint the bigger picture of international sex trafficking and the United States role within the larger transnational industry. Cargo blends reenactments of various parts of the trafficking process with interviews with victims and others involved in the fight against against forced prostitution including police officers, social workers and people involved in attempting to persecute the traffickers. The film illuminated the trafficking process, explaining how and why women were able to be convinced to come to the U.S. in the first place and showing the process of how they are eventually, often violently, wrangled into prostitution. I definitely thought this was a much more informative and interesting film and really thought the screening would have gone better had Cargo been showed first. Still, though, it was a worthwhile event and I am looking forward to the rest of Sexual Assault Awareness Week.

Continuing to explore the potential of the Internet

So, I posted part of this as a comment a few days ago, but enough has developed with this situation recently that I wanted to put it on my main page:

Last night one of my good friends from high school contacted me to say that he found my weblog "inspiring." He and some of his friends who are at U Penn architecture school have thought about starting a weblog with a variety of information related to their field of study. It was cool to know that people are starting to use this sort of tool as an extension of their academic study.

I have recently started talking with a graduate student here who has some academic interest in the Internet who is also keeping a blog. Right now it's largely just random thoughts, but a lot of them are based with the work he is doing in anthropology.

I would love for this sort of use of the Internet to be a growing trend, but I know one important thing will be for there to be some sort of way to make sure that people can actually find these blogs when they're looking for things online. I really do think that these links need to be all collected together in one place. I know that my old study abroad program used to link all student blogs from the college's homepage. Maybe if universities provide students with the ability to link their work from the Arts & Sciences page or even a subdivision of it it would allow these things to be getting read by other people interested in the same field. That's an issue I'm still working on.

Something else, though, is that reading these other blogs has made me realize how my own writing can be a bit pretentious sometimes. A la the discussion that was taking place on Will's livejournal about how college kids can use crazy terminology that makes everyday problems into these academic concepts and arguments, I think it's really true that a lot of what is said is inaccessible to others. I want people to read this and get it...not feel like they've opened up a text book or something. I think that's going to be a continuing goal of mine: to ensure that what I am writing isn't a Judith Butler piece, but is instead something that could be read by a college freshman endeavoring to understand female sexuality for the first time.

two recent poems

These poems aren't super recent, but they do both mention some of the issues I've been thinking about with my independent study, though in a bit of an indirect way. I still wanted to link them here so that you could explore them at your leisure.

Train to Brugge


night driving


Also, I posted links today on Fork... for people to hopefully follow. I would love to get more regular traffic because that would encourage me to actually post every day instead of only once in a while. I also finally posted some information about my first sources although its way back in the archives at this point. I have a lot of other notes to transcribe from my notebook, but it's sort of a slow process since they're a bit scattered.

Internet as academic dialogue.

I have been engaged recently in a debate on one of my good friend's livejournals, Fork.... I have talked about it and linked it here before.

We've been talking about one of his posts that included his views on the relationship between his friends from his high school days with his college friends, especially when it concerned academic dialogues. One of the key examples was racism.

I sent him an e-mail of a post I had written that I couldn't publish because it was too many characters and started a correspondence with him. It felt good to be talking to other people in my community about real issues we both care about. Even more than that, I felt like the forum of a blog or livejournal does provide a class-like atmosphere. The moderator is the owner of the blog; they teach us something, even if only how to start thinking about the issue.

I have considered most of the people whose livejournals I read religiously (Fork..., pragueislife, XCKD, subtled) to be my teachers. I have learned about male sexuality, poetry, gay life, teaching English overseas, physics math and humor all in the same package and the military, but not just from anyone--from my friends.

I love that this is a community I am participating in more actively. I think it is one of the most important learning and educational tools we have ever created. Now, with a stable cable or phone connection, the world is at one's fingertips even with very few other resources available. Bloggers have been looked at as maybe an unnecessary trend, but maybe that's because we're reading the wrong types of blogs. I think if there were a site to connect all of these really important conversations together in a moderated way that it would be really incredible. A way to provide a space for certain topics of common interest. Maybe this is one of the things that could eventually develop into an opportunity. I already know girlfriends that I would hire to help with the operation and people I would ask to contribute.

I realize that I have so much information right now on my hands with regards to my independent study and I have been having all of these very tangible conversations about my subject matter but I sometimes forget I might not have actually published a post on these things. I need to find the right balance between these non-visible experiences and ones that result in academic dialogue.

words for women writers part one.

Don't tell long stories that don't change subject or have a greater meaning.

They're never as interesting to everyone else as they may or not may be to you.

I know that probably sounds pretentious, and that's not my purpose, but it's not fair to you for you to go on in life not knowing that. It's one of those things that your friends will never tell you because they love you, but it is not one of your more redeeming qualities.

I wouldn't call it child pornography...

One of my most meaningful continuous dialogues about literary expression of sexuality, kids and all things worthwhile continued tonight and culminated in this post, a poem, on that individual's livejournal. Just thought I'd share since one of the discussed topics was the question of the nymphet (think Lolita) and the difference between kidding and not and the fine line of appropriateness.

This was a topic that had been breeched earlier in the day at dinner when a few girlfriends and I were talking about what it means to take naked pictures of your own children and how careful you have to be about it because of the media's obsession with child pornography. My one friend, who works as the assistant director of an art gallery and is quite aesthetically savvy, mentioned a woman, Sally Mann, whose photographs bring the aforementioned fine line of appropriateness into question. It should be noted that the pictures she takes of naked children are all her own, but her exhibit (later turned into a book) stirred up controversy. She also has a book called At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women which is a series of pictures of girls on the verge of womanhood. I am excited to look over this book which we do have at Swem and to respond to the way that these pictures portray these girls. Another interesting thing to note about Sally is that she is from Lexington, Virginia so I feel like she's of particular interest to those of us here in the state. And a personal "cool fact" is that she attended Friend's World College, now Global College, the program through which I did my semester abroad.

Also, I came across this news story this evening and thought it was worth linking.

Back from Break

So, I am back from spring break now, and did a good bit of reading and thinking over the course of the week but was away from the Internet. One of the things I have been having a hard time with is posting regularly and in a timely manner. With weblogs, one of the important things is to post when things are happening, not weeks and weeks later, but I sometimes feel like I need a bit longer to really let my thoughts stew before I'm prepared to post about them. Basically, this is why I never ended up posting about the Sex Workers Art Show and I Love Female Orgasm, both really important, relevant things going on on campus that I had a lot to say about. I realized in retrospect that it wasn't necessarily as important for me to say everything exactly right as it was just to say something and get it out there while people were still thinking and talking about the event, so in light of this and in light of my recent return to campus, I am going to make an effort to post at least three times a week for the rest of the semester. I have a couple of drafted posts that will hopefully go up soon, but in addition to these, I'm going to try to have intermittent posts that summarize everything that I've been doing by way of my project.

This past week I led a service trip of a small group of W&M students and most of the reading material I took with me involved my independent study. Because of that, I ended up getting a chance to discuss a lot of the things I've been reading about and thinking about which was really wonderful for me. I've realized that I do actually have a lot to teach people when it comes to women's bodies and sexuality, especially since these are really sensitive topics and I am really comfortable discussing them, so hopefully I'll be able to continue formulating a conversation from my studies long after I'm done with the official independent study part of things. I know I'm already planning to maintain this weblog through my graduate work.

I've been watching at least two films every week on the broad theme of women's sexuality and bodies, and I have a lot of these I haven't written on yet and I've also been reading some poetry and a few books on the topic, so look for responses to these soon. Also, I would really like for my webpage to show up in searches, but I don't really even know how to go about getting it to show up on search engines, so if anyone has any suggestions, let me know!

Techno-Ethics

I get concerned, sometimes, about the proper way to cite ideas coming from readings in the technical world. I just posted on my goals site, What I Will, a post entitled "some realizations." In this post I am drawing on some of my own ideas and experiences about everyday life and linking them to things I have learned recently, specifically from my Management Skills for Public Service Seminar I am taking through W&M's Career Center. On my goals post, I do not specifically cite where I am drawing the idea from, namely because in the presentation we had the man demonstrated two primary sources that use this same idea and since he was a secondary source, I don't feel the need to actually attach a bibliography. At the same time, I did feel the need to come here to this blog, linked under the same common blogger.com identity, to comment on my concerns about technical ethics. See, this section could just count as the bibliography. I also thought, then, that I should probably somewhere have a list of everything I am reading at any given time posted. There is a Facebook application that does that, but I generally don't add my textbooks, but maybe it would be worthwhile. And, then, would that count? I'm not sure.

Confidence

I realized tonight that I have gotten into a habit of thinking that I am the "ugly girl." You know how you are casually dating or sleeping with someone and he and his friends are always talking about the other sweet parties they go to? Sometimes it starts to feel like the girls at all these other parties that they bring home are smoking hot and you're just the one they feel ashamed to mention to people. The interesting thing, though, is that when you are actually around them, for whatever reason, often enough to find out about the other girls they're bringing home, or if you were to randomly stumble into an awkward situation one night, sometimes you realize that you're not the ugly one. In fact, you're pretty smart, funny, laid back, cool, and assured, comparatively. It made me wonder about why sometimes powerful women have a hard time finding happiness in romantic relationships. I think it has to do with what a man (or another woman) can handle at any given time. A strong, worthwhile woman is a lot harder to play games with than someone equally attractive but a little less headstrong both because she can see what's going on and because strong women do command a decent amount of respect. Thinking about all of these good things made me realize that I have been forgetting about the power of positivity over the past semester or so. I had been forgetting that worry about things makes them true instead of just believing in yourself, wanting certain things, and waiting to see what happens, which generally brings out the best of all circumstances.

I'm going to breathe now, for a while, and remind myself of all of the good that is life and of all of the good ways of looking at things. That's it, for now, but I'll probably have more to say on it later.

Initial Sources

I first started listening to Edward Fischer's lecture series from The Great Courses series entitled Peoples and Cultures of the World. There were lectures on family and marriage and after listening I felt like I had a much more open mind about various notions of marriage and family. I know these things and some examples Fischer uses will come up as I proceed along with my research.

After this, I headed with a group of my friends to Europe. I carried with me a copy of Ann Lamott's Bird by Bird. This book , on the art and craft of writing, detailed a contemporary woman's perspective on writing and new millennium life. Her reflections helped me think a lot about my experiences last semester taking class with the fiction author David L. Robbins. I had really struggled to navigate the path between how I write and how Professor Robbins wanted us to write. I was actively examining gender and sexuality in several of my stories (Behind the Bathroom Door and Sonata in C Sharp), but I wasn't always feeling like I was supported in some of my decisions about subject matter.

Once the new year began, I traveled to Paris where I participated in a writer's workshop at the legendary Shakespeare and Company bookstore and went to the Musee Dorsay where I saw, among other things, the Ferdinand Hodler exhibition, one of the special collections. His women were so strong and powerful and the sexuality was so frank I was almost shocked to find out that he was painting in the 19th century. I lost my friend in the museum, so I picked up a book in the library to read while I was waiting called Art, Women and Society. I am still in the process of reading it as I'm getting ready for the beginning of school.