A new study about the ongoing rape epidemic in the Congo has some rather terrifying statistics to offer. According to USA Today, 420,000 women are raped in the DRC every year.

Or, if you ask the Boston Globe, 1,152 women are raped every day. The Guardian reports that 48 women are raped every hour. And the Sydney Morning Herald ups the ante even further by putting the number at one rape every minute.

Even if all of the varying numbers did add up just so, I can’t be the only one wondering when exactly this ongoing campaign of sexual terrorism against women turned into a competition over which Western newspaper could write the most shocking headline. Nor can I refrain from asking what, exactly, is the magic number of rapes that will suddenly make us care? Would the headlines still be blaring if it were 30 rapes an hour? Is one rape every one and a half minutes just too few that the numbers needed to be fudged and made even more sensationalistic? Do we, as Western observers, care more now than we would if the number were actually one rape every five minutes?

Do we care now? Will the subject merit our true attention? Will we suddenly start listening to Congolese survivors? Are we ashamed for not having listened more closely before, for not believing the full magnitude when women were already telling us the truth? Do we feel better now that a U.S. organization has officially verified their lived experiences? Or will we remain indifferent until the numbers hit two rapes every minute? Five rapes every minute? One every second? Where precisely is the cut off point for compassion and a sense justice? How many women must be raped before we start to care enough to look at the causes? How high do the numbers have to be?

I am in no way trying to suggest that these numbers do not matter. Nor am I arguing that they are not horrific, that they do not deserve attention, or that headlines on the topic are unwarranted. What I’m condemning is the objectifying and imperialistic tendency towards disaster porn. What I’m criticizing is the refusal to engage with the issue of violence in the Congo in an in-depth and ongoing basis that puts these numbers in context, and the decision to instead resort to pearl-clutching headlines designed to shock Western readers with information we already had and will continue to ignore.

I’m also making clear that the response to this extremely extended crisis would look a lot different were it occurring somewhere other than sub-Sahara Africa. It’s not that the media takes most rape seriously, or that even the most privileged rape survivors are immune to rape apologism, victim-blaming, and indifference — this entire blog is a testament to these things not being true.

But on the one hand, that is precisely the point. These same newspapers that report these numbers with horror and very little background or analysis will tomorrow resort to shaming and casting doubt on rape victims from their own communities. Tomorrow, when it is no longer convenient to feign interest in rape, it will be back to business as usual. Tomorrow, lines will be drawn between the “date rape” that so many women needlessly whine and exaggerate about and the “real” rape that is downplayed by taking it seriously — after all, what about those women in the Congo?

Indeed, the part of this study that has been the most ignored and will continue to be pushed to the margins is the fact that this study shows higher numbers than others, in large part, because it includes rape by intimate partners instead of only rape committed as a tactic of war — a fact that makes the situation look a lot more similar to the one in countries where most don’t consider rape to be a big problem.

And, on the other hand, while the shaming and ridicule of rape victims is ubiquitous in the U.S. and other Western countries, some victims are indeed always more valued than others. We wouldn’t have to wait until the number of rapes hit “one every minute” before we started to care, if a large portion of those victims were white, cis, economically privileged women — at least, not if those rapes were in large part being committed within the context of war and with the level of violence we’re seeing against Congolese women. We wouldn’t have to wonder whether one every minute is actually going to be enough to cause real concern. We would know that there would be outrage.

But women who are black, who are poor, who are from countries labeled “third world” always fall towards the very bottom of hierarchy of rape victims who will gain Western attention. We in developed Western nations can and will ignore their plight because we have constructed them as less than women, less than human. We can simultaneously tut-tut at the atrocity and turn away from it because it is what we expect from those men we have culturally constructed as inherently barbaric, because it’s what we believe the women have come to expect, too.

And we can ignore our role — the role of industrialized nations and of consumers, especially in the U.S. We can look at the numbers and think it is “them” instead of “us.” We who aren’t living in the Congo can refuse to ask the question of why there is so much rape and assume that it has something to do with “lesser” cultures instead of so much to do with our own. We can side-step questions of rape culture and imperialism and colonialism and economic racism and consumer culture. We can forget to ask why we ignored earlier opportunities to ask hard questions and demand change.

We, we reading these headlines divorced from the context in which the news was created, can read “one rape every minute” and exclaim “those poor women!” without wondering why we didn’t care before someone made the headline sufficiently eye-grabbing, and without demanding accountability from ourselves now.

A new study purports to show a disturbing discrepancy between the number of teens who say they’ve “had sex” with those who test positive for STDs. Of those who supposedly said they’d been abstinent, 10% tested positive for at least one of the three common STDs (chlamydia, gonorrhea, and trichomoniasis). As such, researchers and journalists have assumed that at least 10% of those who said they hadn’t had sex must have been lying to their doctors about their sexual histories.

When I first saw the headlines — “Some young adults with STDs say they’ve never had sex”, “‘Abstinent’ teens test positive for STDs” — I assumed that a significant portion of the discrepancy could likely be accounted for by a failure to adequately explain to the teens what “sex” means. The fact is that in dominant culture, “sex” very unfortunately still means “penis-in-vagina intercourse” to the vast majority of people. Ask a lot of teens if they’ve “had sex” and they very well might say no and believe they are telling the absolute truth — even though they may have engaged in all kinds of non-intercourse sexual activities  such as oral sex, hand to genital contact, non-penetrative genital rubbing, etc. And, of course, these kinds of sex all present the potential for STD transmission, to varying degrees.

But my assumption was wrong. The researchers didn’t fail to adequately define “sex” for the study participants — they explicitly excluded all non-intercourse activities themselves in their questioning, by asking only whether each person had engaged in sexual intercourse in the past 12 months.

So let’s talk, instead, about the problems with the study. Frankly, I’m appalled that it’s treated by researchers as though it can teach us anything useful at all. The wording of the question erases all sexual activity that takes place outside of cis heterosexual sexual pairings, contributing yet again to the cultural notion that no other sexual pairings exist, let alone matter. It also erases a good deal of sex that takes place between cis men and women, too — and if what went on during my teenage years are any indication, an even greater deal of what goes on between teenagers who are in sexual relationships but not ready for or interested in intercourse.

So we’ve ended up with some extremely inconclusive data. Even the researchers themselves acknowledge that some of the STDs among those who did not report engaging in intercourse could have been transmitted more than 12 months ago or through non-intercourse sexual activities. Though they try to downplay this likelihood, the fact is that you don’t know what you don’t take the time to ask. Posing better questions in the first place would eliminate a significant amount of guesswork.

But the researchers seem to have nonetheless drawn their conclusions:

Study findings indicate that “sole reliance on young adults’ self-reported penile/vaginal sexual activity as a marker for STD acquisition risk may be imprecise and further, could be problematic,” the researchers write.

They argue that future research should attempt to find ways to reduce “discrepant” reports by young people about their sexual activity.

The researchers note that they did not collect information about anal sex among men and that some cases of chlamydia may persist 12 months after sexual intercourse. And study participants only indicated whether they’d had sex had in the past 12 months.

“Given the length of the reporting interval, the previous 12 months, young adults’ retrospective recall could be inaccurate,” the researchers write. However, they add that “volitional underreporting” could explain discrepancies between self-reports and facts.

The findings suggest that doctors should do more than just ask young people about their sexual activity.

“Importantly, our findings reveal that if pediatricians and adolescent medicine physicians do not test all young people, there are likely a substantial number of missed cases of STDs that will go undiagnosed, untreated, and spread to future sex partners,” the researchers write.

Now, it’s not that I’m opposed to more STD testing. As long as informed consent is involved, this strikes me as a good idea. Once privacy and financial concerns are accounted for, consensual STD tests that turn up negative cause little harm. Not conducting STD tests that would have come back positive, on the other hand, causes a great deal. There certainly is a “better safe than sorry” argument to be made.

What unnerves me is the casual glossing over of the inadequacy of the questions asked — and the complete absence of a recommendation that doctors should ask better ones. I say that better than assuming young people to all be a bunch of liars, doctors should work harder to establish meaningful communication with patients and, importantly, to interact with them in a non-judgmental way. A way that doesn’t assume them to be straight, a way that doesn’t assume there’s only one kind of sex, a way that doesn’t suggest imminent judgment if a female patient says she has had sex, a way that doesn’t suggest an assumption that a non-white patient or low-income patient must have had sex. A way, in other words, that treats patients compassionately and humanely.

It’s also important to get to the root of the problem that’s even more insidious than the extremely common and even cultivated feeling of fear and intimidation towards doctors — the social fear of sexuality, and the dominant attitude that sexual activity is something to hide.

To the extent that some young people undoubtedly are lying about their sexual histories to their doctors, surprise is both a naive and irresponsible reaction. Most of us growing up in a sexphobic culture absorb the message through one means or another that sex is something to be punished — if you’re a woman, if you’re queer, if you’re trans, if you’re not married, if you’re non-white, if you’re poor, if you’re disabled, if you’re kinky. Pregnancy and STDs are often misconstrued as “punishments” for having kinds of sex that are not socially approved. And very real punishments are often enacted for certain sexual behaviors — whether they be slut-shaming, homophobic verbal and physical assaults, other forms of social ostracizing, or being cut off from financial support.

Young people are perhaps the most at risk for punishment for sexual behavior. Adolescent sexuality is frequently seen as flat-out wrong, and it’s still considered entirely appropriate for parents to penalize teens for consensual behavior they’ve engaged in with their own bodies. The law has the right to punish them, too — not all states allow minors confidential access to contraception, and most states require that parents be notified prior to an abortion. Coupled with huge gaps in sex education, there’s a lot of fear surrounding the acknowledgment of sexual activity for young people, and many legitimate reasons for it.

In other words, this isn’t just a problem of doctors not being patient, or compassionate, or kind, or understanding, or unbiased enough — though those are very real problems for many people. It’s a social problem regarding how we, as the dominant culture, treat sexuality. It’s something that can’t be cured with a few “sensitivity” trainings, with a book, with a small group of people just giving it a little practice.

But it is something to consider. What if those of us who were raised either explicitly or implicitly to believe that sex is dirty, secretive, and unspeakable hadn’t been? What if we didn’t see sex everywhere, but honest dialogue about it almost nowhere? What if the sex we saw portrayed was genuinely varied both in practice and participants? What if some entirely consensual sexual practices weren’t routinely portrayed as “weird” and “deviant” while non-consensual ones were portrayed as “normal” and “how it works”? What if sex was treated as healthy, for those who want to have it, when they want to have it? What if desired, consensual sex was not treated as something to be hidden, something that was frowned upon or disapproved, something that might result in shame — and not desiring or having sex was treated the same way? What if having an STD or unplanned pregnancy did not have a stigma attached to it? What if there was no confusion about what people meant when they talked about sex, because questions could be asked openly and without embarrassment? What if knowledge of your sexual orientation or activity wasn’t tied to the threat of not having a place to live, a caretaker to help you live independently, or money to survive? What if knowledge of your sexual activities wasn’t likely to be used as a weapon against you because of your race, class, disability, gender identity, or sexual orientation?

I imagine that there would be fewer teens — and adults, for that matter — lying to their doctors about their sexual activities. Because the reasons why we do so would be gone. And they’re not issues that doctors alone can fix, but ones that are on all of us.

One final point: while I imagine this only accounts for a fairly small portion of the discrepancy, it’s important to note that even with better, more inclusive questions being asked of patients, some who say they have not had sex yet still test positive for STDs will undoubtedly be telling the truth. It’s called sexual assault. Young people are particularly at risk for sexual violence, and this fact is almost universally erased whenever the topic of pregnancy and STD risk comes up. Most STDs are passed through consensual sex. But not all. There are very good reasons to ask patients about histories of sexual violence, including reproductive coercion, during medical visits. Assessing a patient’s risk for sexually transmitted diseases is just one of them.

Trigger Warning for violence against sex workers, including but not limited to sexual violence and police violence

Today, December 17, is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. The International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers is a day to remember sex workers who have been murdered, and to acknowledge and spread the word about the ways in which sex workers are uniquely vulnerable to all forms of violence. This year, the list of those who have been killed is forty entries long (pdf); several entries contain more than one victim, and many of the victims’ identities are unknown. It should be noted that these murders are only the ones that are known of. Undoubtedly, they make up only a fraction of the real death toll.

But today is not just about those who have died; it’s also about those who live with violence, or the threat of it, every day. While victims of violence span all social markers, some are more vulnerable than others. The vast majority of victims are women. Women of color are more vulnerable than white women. Trans sex workers are more vulnerable than cis sex workers. Queer sex workers are more vulnerable than straight sex workers. Sex workers are already deeply devalued and dehumanized by society as a class; the more they are additionally devalued and dehumanized along other axes of oppression, the more likely they are to be subjected to violence.

From the SWOP-USA website:

Violence against sex workers is an international concern which plays out on a daily basis, in all countries around the globe.

• A study conducted by the New York City-based Sex Workers Project reported that 80% of participants had reported experiencing violence, including 27% at the hands of police.
• In a report on violence against sex workers in India, 70% had reported abuse by police, and 80% had been arrested without evidence.
• During a meeting of sex workers and advocates from Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa, participants described “routine police violence including sexual violence, beatings, rubber bullets, and spraying sex workers’ genitals with pepper-spray guns.”

It’s these notes about police violence that I want to address specifically. Because as the fabulous Audacia Ray puts it, it’s not just violent clients who hurt sex workers. It’s police. It’s the law. It’s the government.

State violence is wielded against sex workers in many ways. Individual cops certainly pose a part of the problem, as listed above. Beating sex workers, threatening them with weapons, and raping them either through force or coercion. Police officers certainly have a history, like clients, of seeing sex workers as easy victims of violence, victims who they believe no one will care about.

But it’s also the law itself that both promotes abuse and acts as a direct form of violence against sex workers. With many forms of sex work being illegal throughout most of the world, sex workers are placed in a position even more vulnerable than that created by the extraordinary social stigma alone. It’s the oppressive nature of the law that lets police officers rape sex workers, by giving them the option of “having sex” or going to jail. It’s the oppressive nature of the law that puts sex workers at risk of HIV and other STDs by making them afraid to carry condoms and denying them access to HIV prevention funding.  It’s the oppressive nature of the law that makes sex workers afraid to report violence when it is committed against them, not only because they may be subjected to further violence at the hands of police, but because they may also be arrested themselves.

It’s the law which puts sex workers in prisons for doing nothing more than using their own bodies as they saw fit, subjecting them to state violence and control on a daily basis. It’s the law which places them in prisons, where it’s possible that they will be denied health care; where they will be compelled to undergo strip searches and cavity searches; where they may be beaten or locked in solitary confinement; where they may be raped by guards or other inmates; where, if they are trans, they may be placed as women in prisons with men. It’s the law which may force them to submit to public floggings while crowds and authorities laugh. Or worse.

The law doesn’t just “fail to protect” sex workers. Far worse, it is an active danger to them. Criminalization of sex work causes violence against sex workers just as much as personal misogyny, racism, transphobia, classism, and homophobia do, and it’s all of these -isms in which such laws are based. These laws are framed in terms of paternalism — we must protect women from their choices, even when we don’t bother to work on why they probably don’t have any better ones available — but they’re really about a much more vitriolic form of oppression. They’re about outright hate. And even if you want to quibble about intentions and motivations, the fact remains that they do just as much if not more violence against sex workers than direct beatings.

Decriminalization of sex work will not magically erase anti-sex worker stigma, or magically make police take violence against sex workers seriously, or magically cause them to stop raping or otherwise abusing sex workers themselves. But that’s no reason for the state, for countless states all over the world, to continue having direct authorization to commit violence against sex workers itself. It’s no reason for the state to have the right to enact violence against vulnerable and marginalized persons precisely because of their vulnerable and marginalized status. And it’s no reason to act as though, when we’re talking about violence against sex workers, we’re somehow not largely talking about state violence.

Sex workers deserve safety. Sex workers deserve freedom. Sex workers deserve human rights. That needs to be remembered and spoken today and every day.

Trigger Warning for prison abuse, specifically denial of medical treatment, and reproductive rights violations.

At the beginning of this year, a 27-year-old woman named Amy Lynn Gillespie died (h/t @DCdebbie). She was 18 weeks pregnant, and died in a hospital after being transferred there by Allegheny County Jail, which was currently detaining her. The problem is that they apparently transferred her much too late, and Gillespie’s mother is now suing the county, among others:

Amy Lynn Gillespie, of Cuddy and, later, Knoxville, was jailed in December for violating the terms of her work release by becoming pregnant. Initially found to be in good health, according to the complaint filed by Downtown attorney Robert N. Peirce, she was complaining by the end of that month of difficulty breathing and discharge from her lungs.

Treated for viral influenza and denied diagnostic tests, according to the complaint, she worsened and then was transferred on Jan. 1 to UPMC Mercy. There she was found to have bacterial pneumonia, too far advanced to be successfully treated with antibiotics. She and the fetus, then 18 weeks along, died Jan. 13.

Mr. Peirce filed the civil rights lawsuit for the deceased’s mother, Luann Gillespie Shultz.

But let us back up just a minute — she was jailed because she was pregnant? Yes, indeed she was.

Ms. Gillespie’s legal troubles started with a pair of shoplifting convictions in 2004. In 2007, she was caught taking shampoo and steak from the Bridgeville Giant Eagle, and told the arresting officer that she did it because she was hungry. That year she was also caught stealing two $55 silver rings from Macy’s, Downtown.

In 2008, she was picked up for soliciting men on Brownsville Road. Put on probation, she was referred to the Program for Reintegration Development and Empowerment of Exploited Individuals, which offers counseling and services to women arrested for prostitution.

She didn’t comply with her probation terms and was sentenced to six to 12 months of jail or alternative housing in February 2009. Mr. Peirce said she would have been released around the beginning of this year had she not become pregnant, been jailed, and gotten sick. He said UPMC Mercy did not appear to be liable.

So she stole some shampoo and steak, and then some lower-end jewelry from a major department store. Then she was caught in the act of engaging in sex work, which should be legal anyway. As a result, she was placed on probation — a term of which that she not become pregnant. And when she did become pregnant, she was jailed.

Which is to say that for shoplifting less than $200 worth of merchandise and using her own body as she saw fit, the state robbed her of the right to make her own reproductive choices. Let us just sit for a moment with the fact that an individual cannot take a $55 ring from Macy’s, but the government can take one’s fundamental right to decide what to do with hir own reproductive capacity. Let us just reflect on how much more highly the U.S. government regards the right of multimillion dollar corporations to their petty property than the right of individuals who can get pregnant, disproportionately women*, to control their own bodies and reproductive lives. The former right cannot be violated without punishment; the latter right is routinely violated as a means of punishment.

Now, to be clear, I am not even remotely suggesting that if Gillespie’s crimes had been more severe, it would have been acceptable to deny her the medical treatment she needed to go on living; this is never okay, even for those guilty of the most horrific crimes. What I am suggesting is that the requirement that Gillespie not become pregnant is wholly wrong, misogynistic, and abusive — indeed, no matter what crime she committed. What I am suggesting is that she never should have been jailed for what she did with her own reproductive capacity, whether intentional or not. No, it is not acceptable to deny any detained person medical treatment. But it’s also not acceptable to detain a person who has done nothing wrong. Gillespie should not have been in that jail to begin with. And this would be a travesty of justice even if she were still alive.

But she’s not still alive. She’s dead, and she didn’t have to die, and someone is to blame for the fact that she did. Someone is to blame for the fact that she didn’t get the medical treatment she needed in time to survive. And when the government detains anybody, with or without legitimate reason, they are ultimately 100% responsible for ensuring that those people receive any and all needed medical care promptly and respectfully. In this case, they clearly failed. With Gillespie dead of a treatable ailment, there’s absolutely no other way to look at it.

The allegations regarding how, exactly, she died are also particularly horrifying:

[The lawsuit] alleges that while Gillespie was serving a 30-day jail sentence, at least one guard ignored her request for help and the jail’s medical staff failed to diagnose her pneumonia early enough.

“Stick it out,” one guard told Gillespie when she asked for help three weeks before her death, the lawsuit states. [...]

Gillespie nearly completed her original sentence for retail theft when she got pregnant, a violation of terms in her halfway house, Peirce said. She arrived in the jail Dec. 2, and though she complained to guards for weeks about breathing trouble and discharge from her lungs, she wasn’t sent to the infirmary until Dec. 29, according to the lawsuit.

The medical staff first diagnosed her problem as viral influenza. After three days, jail staff sent Gillespie to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed pneumonia and noted that the jail didn’t treat her fast enough, according to the lawsuit.

She was sedated and breathing with the help of tubes for nearly all of the two weeks she spent in the hospital before she died.

We’ll have to wait to see if all of the allegations pan out, but the fact is that they are not even remotely unusual. Claims of medical treatment being denied while in detention are extraordinarily common. Our governments routinely fail to treat detained persons humanely, and few people care because of how severely we’ve dehumanized any and all people who are in jail or prisons, and internalized the notion that they deserve whatever indignities we impose on them. No one cares because we’ve decided that “bad” people aren’t really people anymore, and that all people in jail or prison must be bad. Even if all they did to get there was get pregnant.

It’s time to stop denying people of their fundamental human rights. It’s time to stop detaining them when they’ve done nothing to materially harm anybody. It’s time to stop treating people who cause harm like they, too, deserve harm, no matter how appealing vengeance may feel. It’s time to stop treating other human beings’ bodies like property, to stop seeing health care as a privilege, to stop behaving as though we have any right whatsoever to tell other people what they can and cannot do with their own bodies and reproductive functions. Not a single case of denying a person’s right to make their own reproductive decisions is acceptable. Not a single case of prizing property over human beings is right. Not a single case of letting someone die because we thought they were a liar, or worthless, or a slut, or whatever, is okay.

We’re seeing all of these things right here, but they happen separately all the time. They’re all culpable for Amy Gillespie’s death. And if we keep the system going as it is, there will inevitably be more like her.

*EDIT: Language changed. See comments, with thanks to August.

Trigger Warning for discussions of sexual violence against children and adolescents, as well as victim-blaming and rape apologism.

A new study out of B.C., Canada (pdf) on whether age of sexual consent laws are actually doing anything to prevent the sexual abuse of young people by adults has acted as an opportunity to engage in a whole host of rape denialism and victim-blaming behavior. The language in framing contained in the report itself certainly didn’t help, and the media apparently decided to run with it:

Children in B.C. who had sex when they were 12 or under are more likely than older teenagers to have had sex first with an adult, according to a shocking new study by Vancouver researchers to be published today in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality.

University of B.C. and Simon Fraser University researchers analyzed data from the Adolescent Health Survey, which polled 29,000 students in Grades 7 to 12 over three months in 2008, the year the federal government increased the age of consent to 16 from 14.

The purpose of the study was to test the government’s reasons for changing the law after 100 years, but what the authors discovered was that the law apparently does not protect the younger kids who are most at risk of sexual abuse. [...]

They discovered a shocking 39 per cent of students who first had sex when they were 12 or under said it was with someone age 20 or older. Of those who first had sex when they were 14 or 15, only two to three per cent said it was with someone 20 or older. [...]

The numbers were similar for boys (38 per cent) and girls (39 per cent) 12 and under who said their first sex was with an adult.

“Our evidence really doesn’t support that it is the 14-and 15-year-olds who are at greatest risk of having sex with adults. It is the younger teens, and that has always been illegal,” said senior author Elizabeth Saewyc, professor of nursing and adolescent medicine at UBC.

Okay, first of all, I just have to ask: are we allergic to the word rape? Or have we been aiding and abetting rape by covering it up as “sex” for so damn long now that we don’t even know how to properly use the word anymore? Because I’m really fucking tired of pointing out the obvious over and over and over again. A child under the age of 12 — 12!!! — cannot “have sex” with an adult. But as these numbers pretty clearly show, an adult sure can rape hir.

Honestly, it seems the problem is that we don’t even understand what rape is. How can we use the word appropriately if we don’t even know what it means? And it terrifies me to know that we can’t even begin to solve this problem until we do understand what rape means and what consent looks like, within the context of how very, very far away from that point we are. Because here are the “solutions” currently being offered:

In the study report, the authors say additional strategies are needed to protect the kids who are the most vulnerable. They suggest improving education in schools to include information about healthy relationships.

That would include “talking to teens and children about dating and relationships and why older adults might want to date younger teens and why that it is not appropriate,” Miller said. “Also, what does consent mean, and how can we navigate that as teenagers in a relationship?”

Children aged 9, 10, 11, and 12 — and yes, certainly a whole lot younger, too — are being raped by adults. And the “solution” is reportedly to teach those children better about what is an is not appropriate.

It’s enough to make a person break down and cry.

Look, I support sex education, you know I do, including sex education specifically as a means of sexual assault prevention. But such strategies are about two things — firstly, preventing young people from becoming rapists, and secondly, giving young people the tools that may help them to recognize abuse and defend themselves from it.

But teaching young people about how to not rape doesn’t do anything about the adults out there preying on young children. And while giving everyone defense tools is vital, teaching potential victims how to defend themselves is hardly the place to stop. Because sometimes, those tools just aren’t enough, and being able to recognize abuse doesn’t necessarily leave you with an escape mechanism. And always, we shouldn’t have to be defending ourselves in the first place.

Young people aged 12 and under are not the bearers and promoters of rape culture. They are the victims of it. And we cannot “protect” them from it by treating them as though they’re the problem.

As for the question of whether or not the law protects those children who are most at risk of being victims of sexual abuse … no, of course it doesn’t. To the extent that laws act as deterrents to certain kinds of behavior at all, the effect is always limited. The law isn’t protecting children from sexual abuse? It never has. It hasn’t been protecting adult women from rape or intimate partner violence, either. The statistics are mind-boggling and heart-wrenching, across the board. This ineffective nature of our legal system at protecting vulnerable people from abuse is one of the reasons why I think we need to reconsider the system wholly. But the fact is that the law only seeks retribution once harm has been done, not to prevent the harm in the first place.

For that we’re going to need a change in culture, and no, I’m not sure that legislative acts and legal penalties are going to play a large role. A very basic start would be to stop blaming victims by framing the problem as an issue of their “questionable decisions”:

The study found that teenagers aged 14 and 15 do not make more questionable decisions about sex than older adolescents. For instance, very few 14- and 15-year-olds had sex with people outside the “close in age” exemptions.

Dear god, the point of the laws — at least as I understand them, and certainly as they should be — is not to convince young people to not engage in “questionable” behavior, it’s to try to scare off the predators who wish to exploit and harm and abuse them. As I said, laws aren’t hugely effective deterrents to begin with, but no wonder it’s not working here. We can’t even seem to manage to work out who, exactly, the laws are aimed at, what kind of behavior we’re trying to deter (Raping or being raped? Clearly, these questions are difficult!), and who is really to blame.

But I’m telling you, as long as we keep acting like young people, including those who haven’t even yet reached their teenage years, are equal co-conspirators in their own abuse, we’re certainly not going to get anywhere, either within or outside the judicial system.

Image via Lauredhel, through a Creative Commons-Noncommercial-Attribution License

Trigger Warning for discussions of human rights violations against sex workers, as well as sex trafficking and sexual violence.

Tomorrow November 5, the United Nations will, for the first time under its Universal Periodic Review (UPR) system, review the human rights record of the United States. That’s a pretty big deal period, especially since the process is composed not just self-assessment by the nation being reviewed, but also reports by civil society organizations.

Undoubtedly, a lot of really important issues (such as prison rape) are going to be addressed by those organizations, and all kinds of human rights violations by the United States are going to be openly discussed. But one issue set for discussion will not only likely surprise observers, but also be considerably underrepresented in any media coverage that the review garners: that of sex worker rights, and the U.S.’s appalling record with regards to violating the human rights of sex workers.

The U.S. Sex Workers Outreach Projects (SWOP-USA) reports:

This Friday November 5, 2010, the United Nations Human Rights Council will review the human rights record of the United States as part of a new process – the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The UPR calls for a review of member nations’ human rights records every four years, and this is the first time the U.S. has participated. The Human Rights Council will base its review on the U.S. government’s own self-assessment, as well as reports submitted from civil society organizations. U.S. sex worker advocates are engaged in this process, working to highlight the appalling record that the United States has in regards to communities of people engaging in the sex trade.

A comprehensive national report on sex workers’ rights was prepared by the Best Practices Policy Project and the Desiree Alliance earlier this year. The report draws on the perspectives of networks, such as SWOP USA, and organizations working with sex workers, people in the sex trade and people who are affected by anti-prostitution policies in the United States more generally. Two representatives from the Best Practices Policy Project are currently in Geneva presenting summary recommendations to delegations and encouraging countries to ask the United States questions about it’s human rights record in regards to sex workers and to include issues pertaining to sex workers in the recommendations they will raise in Friday’s session.

The Best Practices Policy Project report (pdf) is a highly comprehensive and informative document that strongly centers intersectionality and emphasizes not only the generalized risks of violence and civil rights violations that sex workers face, but also how those risks are even more severe for those sex workers who are particularly marginalized on the basis of race, trans* status, immigration status, and perceived sexual orientation. It’s only 5 pages long and a really strong overview of the oppressions faced very day by sex workers in the U.S., so I urge you to read it.

Before the U.N., the Best Practices Policy Project representatives are presenting the three most key recommendations from the report, which are as follows:

The United States should implement comprehensive criminal justice reform that includes measures to stop human rights abuses committed in the name of anti-sex trade laws. This would include repealing laws, including laws against prostitution-related offenses, and eliminate policies, such as “prostitution free zones”, that erode legal protections barring law enforcement from detaining individuals on the basis of how they are perceived or the way they are dressed (ie racial and gender profiling). The application of felony-level charges against sex workers and people living with HIV should be halted as should sex offender registration requirements of those arrested for engaging in prostitution. Criminal justice reform must also address the frequency of abuse of sex workers, or those perceived as such, by law enforcement and other state actors. Similarly, reform must ensure that people involved in the sex trade or profiled as such receive appropriate responses from authorities when they are targeted for violence and other crimes.

The United States should ensure health rights for those engaged, or perceived to be engaged, in sex work and the sex trade. In many jurisdictions in the United States condoms are used as evidence of criminal activity in the enforcement of anti-prostitution laws. Individuals involved in street economies face tremendous stigmatization in health care settings. Sex workers urgently need access to health care services including harm reduction oriented programs, which often are prohibited from receiving federal funding.

The United Sates should reorient national anti-trafficking policy to a rights-based framework and repeal the US governments “anti-prostitution pledge” requirement on foreign aid. Migrants involved in the sex trade who experience exploitation require services and legal support, but the response to human trafficking in the U.S. currently focuses on law enforcement approaches that alienate and traumatize victims. U.S. anti-trafficking policies and practices undermine the health and rights of sex workers domestically and internationally, including requiring recipients of HIV and anti-trafficking funding to adopt a stance condemning sex work. These requirements should be repealed.

It’s my personal view that all of these recommendations should be seen as straight-up common sense. I wrote about the last recommendation much more comprehensively a few months ago, and I’m going to let that post on the issue stand on its own.

The first recommendation is one that I’ve also discussed before, but is most commonly placed in dispute, and the second relies heavily on the former. So let’s repeat it again: a large majority of sex workers agree that laws which make their work illegal do not help them. They criminalize an incredibly marginalized population specifically on the basis of their marginalization. They do not protect a group already incredibly vulnerable to violence from it, but rather make that violence easier for police officers, clients, and others to commit. They ensure that sex workers who want to leave the trade cannot, by giving them highly stigmatized criminal records. And they use laws intended to keep primarily women and children safe to label primarily women, including those who entered sex work as children, as sex offenders. They label them as those likely to commit sexual violence, when they are actually among those against whom sexual violence is most likely to be or have been committed.

We can and should fight human trafficking — including forms that are not sex trafficking, and which receive extremely little publicity — without fighting sex workers. We can and should fight violence without fighting the existence of marginalized populations. Just like we always can and should fight elements of rape culture without fighting either sex or victims of assault.

But this is a point that seems to be continually lost on governments all over the world, family values conservatives, and many feminists. An illustrative example rose at the end of last week, with yet another campaign to drive sex workers who advertise their services online underground:

SWOP-NYC in collaboration with SWOP-USA strongly opposes the misguided campaign against Backpage.com. This campaign is part of a trend of actions against adult services sections online including a recent action against Craigslist.

The campaign against Backpage.com has been framed as a way to “protect innocent women and children” (as per State Attorneys General, Letter to Attorneys for Backpage.com, September 21, 2010, available at: http://ago.mo.gov/pdf/Backpage.pdf). However, the forced closure of this site will not diminish the prevalence of trafficking and, worse, will substantially harm victims of trafficking and people in consensual sex work.

“This campaign purports to protect people, but it actually has the opposite effect,” explained Liz Coplen, Board Chair of SWOP-USA. “Criminalization and repression of consensual sex work drives sex workers underground, creating the conditions which lead to the exploitation and abuses of trafficking.” The models that have been internationally accepted as best practice for addressing sex trafficking center around working with sex workers to end exploitation and abuse, not further criminalizing and marginalizing the work.

…

“First they complain when they see us on the street, then when we are off the street they try to shut our work down by closing the advertising venues. And they claim it’s to protect us! It’s hypocritical, discriminatory and ultimately makes sex workers more vulnerable to the violence they are supposedly so concerned about,” said Michael Bottoms.

Looking at the letter itself (pdf), the paternalism just oozes off the page:

We are writing to request that you immediately take down the adult services portion of backpage.

We believe that ads for prostitution– including ads trafficking children– are rampant on the site and that the volume of these ads will grow in light of craigslist’s recent decision to eliminate the adult services section of its site. In our view, it is time for the company to follow craigslist’s lead and take immediate action to end the misery of the women and children who may be exploited and victimized by these ads. Because backpage cannot, or will not, adequately screen these ads, it should stop accepting them altogether.

…

We recognize that backpage may lose the considerable revenue generated by the adult services ads. Still, no amount of money can justify the scourge of illegal prostitution, and the misery of the women and children who will continue to be victimized, in the marketplace provided by backpage.

Call me naive, but I can’t quite bring myself to believe that this many state Attorney Generals are really so obtuse as to believe that the kind of people who sell the right to rape children will be dissuaded by a single website cutting off their ads and decide “Well, I guess that ends the child rape business for me.”

No, I’m sorry — that’s going to require not only some hardcore dismantling of rape culture, but also serious investigative work on behalf of law enforcement. I doubt that any trafficking victims have been spared rape as a result of campaigns like these — as I’ve pointed out time and time again, rapists will always find new ways to rape. (The goal, of course, is rather to stop people from being and becoming rapists.) Meanwhile, all sex workers trying to sell their services in the safest ways they know how have been pegged as “victimized … women and children” suffering “misery” — as supposedly well-meaning people actively create misery for them by preventing them from finding and screening clients from the safety of their own homes.

This bullshit needs to stop, both in the U.S. and everywhere else. Sex workers need to be treated like adults with agency, and their oppression as a marginalized group needs to be recognized for what it is and combated, rather than compounded by supposed anti-oppression efforts. The rights of two highly vulnerable and oppressed groups — trafficking victims and sex workers — shouldn’t be and don’t need to be placed in conflict with each other. And the fact that said groups sometimes do overlap and often are difficult to distinguish is indeed part of the reason why it makes absolutely no sense to punish one in attempt to support the other.

My hopes are realistically tempered, but I wish all luck to those activists preparing to go before the U.N. While I unfortunately doubt that a transcript will be made available, for those who can watch video, the Universal Periodic Review will be streamed live and available for archived viewing here.

Trigger Warning for discussions of intimate partner violence and attempted forced abortion.

On October 6, Dominic Holt-Reid allegedly pulled a gun on his pregnant girlfriend Yolanda Burgess and forced her against her will to drive to an abortion clinic for a scheduled abortion she no longer wanted to have. Thankfully, she was able to slip a note to a worker at the clinic, who called the police, and Holt-Reid was therefore not successful in forcing her to have an abortion. He was, however, arrested.

Last week, he was charged with attempted murder. But not against Yolanda Burgess, as you might expect. He’s been charged with attempted murder of her fetus.

The facts of the case: A man is accused of trying to force his pregnant girlfriend at gunpoint to get an abortion. The question: Can he be charged with attempted murder of her unborn child?

In what may be a precedent-setting case, prosecutors have leveled such a charge against Dominic Holt-Reid under a 1996 Ohio fetal homicide law that says a person can be found guilty of murder for causing the unlawful termination of a pregnancy.

Police say Holt-Reid, 27, pulled a gun Oct. 6 on his three-months-pregnant girlfriend, Yolanda Burgess, and forced her to drive to an abortion clinic. Burgess, 26, did not go through with the procedure; she managed to slip a note to a clinic employee, who called police.

Ohio’s law and ones similar to it in dozens of other states have been routinely used to win convictions in auto accidents in which a pregnant woman died, and instances in which a mother-to-be was attacked physically.

Almost all of the articles discussing this case focus on the question of whether or not the prosecution is likely to succeed. But while busy discussing whether or not the charges are practical, few are asking whether or not they’re ethical.

According to the AP, the law in question was passed after campaigning by a man whose pregnant wife was killed during a car crash. Supporters of the law claimed that they were not attempting to impact laws on abortion, despite the fact that protection of fetuses under criminal statutes implies personhood.

This is an ongoing issue throughout the United States. Anti-choice organizers keep working to pass “fetal personhood” laws and amendments in various states, which would grant civil rights and protections to fetuses. Even at the same time as they publicly claim such laws would not impact abortion rights, they are clearly designed to do precisely that. And even if such laws failed to overturn the right to an abortion in court, they do serve to reinforce in the public consciousness the idea that fetuses are independent people separate from those gestating them, who deserve rights of their own. Such also laws often pit the rights of pregnant women and people of other genders against those of the fetuses they are carrying, reducing autonomy and attempting to construct pregnancy as some sort of sacrificial prison.

At the same time, bereaved families who have lost pregnancies in violent crimes often campaign for laws recognizing fetuses as unique victims of violence, as a form of justice for their loss. Unfortunately, their well-intentioned efforts often get co-opted by anti-choice activists, or inadvertently serve to assist them.

For this second group, I have nothing but compassion. Losing a wanted pregnancy through violence is undoubtedly a traumatic event, and that loss should be treated with the gravity that it deserves. I do understand that many people view their wanted fetuses as babies, as people, and I respect that. But the fact remains that one cannot end a pregnancy through violence without committing an act of violence against the pregnant person. It’s physically impossible. And as women make up a vast majority of those who are pregnant, these laws end up only serving to obscure the violence that is committed against women. And when pregnant women are at significantly higher risk of domestic violence and even murder, that erasure becomes an enormous problem.

It is this issue that I actually care about even more than the issue of whether or not the fetus’ legal protection from violence bestows personhood upon it. Abortion rights are highly precarious in the U.S., it’s true. But so is women’s right to not be assaulted. So is the right of women to be recognized as full human beings that have autonomy, deserve safety from violence, and exist independently from their reproductive capacity.

These rights, and the lack of them, are of course all inextricably linked. One, after all, cannot be seen as existing independently as a full person regardless of the contents of one’s womb without having the right to secure a safe and legal abortion. But looking at this case, what disturbs me is not how it could potentially impact abortion rights some day down the road. What disturbs me is the fact that I had to look through at least half a dozen articles about charges of attempted murder against a fetus just to find what exactly Holt-Reid was charged with, if anything, for his act of violence against the woman carrying that fetus, Yolanda Burgess. The Sydney Morning Herald finally provided the details:

Dominic L. Holt-Reid, 28, was arrested Oct. 6 as he waited for his girlfriend in the clinic’s parking lot. At the time, Columbus police charged him with kidnapping and carrying a concealed weapon. A six-count Franklin County grand jury indictment returned Friday added other kidnapping and weapons counts, along with the attempted murder charge.

Firstly, the fact that this information was not readily available shows how thoroughly erased the woman has become in this story. It’s not interesting, what he did to her. It’s not interesting, what the government sees as his crimes against her person. It’s just not interesting that a pregnant woman was assaulted. After all, that happens all the time. How does this affect lawyers?

Secondly, the fact that by far the most serious charge that Holt-Reid faces is for the crime against a fetus that had been gestating for less than 3 months, as opposed to the full grown, living, breathing woman he held at gunpoint, is shockingly misogynistic. Holt-Reid allegedly kidnapped Burgess, threatened her with death — after all, what is forcing a person to do anything at gunpoint if not a threat on their life? — and attempted to make her forcibly undergo an unwanted, invasive surgical procedure, that would have violated her inalienable right to make her own reproductive decisions, no less. That is what he did. He didn’t attempt to “murder” a fetus. He attempted to force a woman to have her uterus surgically emptied against her will, with the implied threat that he would kill her if she did not. He tried to make her end a pregnancy that she did not want to end. He terrified her, assaulted her, kidnapped her, and in addition to his gun attempted to use her own body as a weapon against her.

But if Holt-Reid were to be convicted of all of the charges laid against him, who would that “justice” be for? Who would have their rights upheld by that victory? Who would the media be discussing as inexorably having the right to be free from violence?

As is much too commonly the case, it wouldn’t be the woman.

Trigger Warning for rape apologism, brief descriptions of sexual violence.

This morning I was reading about a rape that was recently committed in Perth, Australia, by an assailant who accosted a nanny answering the front door at her employer’s home. The details of the attack itself are, of course, horrible and distressing. That the assailant followed up his attack by placing a call to the victim’s employers demanding that they not report the assault (as though they own their employee in the first place …) is additionally loathsome and likely acted as an extra trauma to an already highly traumatized victim.

But up to that point, the story was still an incredibly routine one — and I use the word “routine” here with the saddest of all tones. It’s not that these assaults don’t matter, not in the least. It’s that there’s only so much one can say over and over and over again about the fact that somewhere, someone decided to commit an act of sexual violence against another human being.

So it was not the grotesque act of violence that caught my attention, but the only slightly less routine commentary that went with it:

Det Snr Sgt Glynn said the attack was a timely reminder for women to be aware of their surroundings.

“Stranger attacks resulting in sex offences are unusual, they do happen but they are not common,” he said.

“I don’t expect people to change their habits because of this offence but at the same time they do need to be aware of their surroundings.”

“People”? I highly doubt that Sgt. Glynn is telling men that they need to be aware of their surroundings due to the threat of rape. And while I would absolutely love it if a detective being quoted in an article about rape was a gender activist purposely using inclusive language to acknowledge the incredibly real and highly prevalent threat of sexual violence faced by people of non-binary genders (or non-genders), given the context I’m going to go out on a limb and make an educated guess that this is very sadly not the case. I’m really pretty sure that Sgt. Glynn is referring entirely or almost entirely to women. The same people who are always told to keep an eye out on their surroundings and to try their damn hardest to not get themselves raped.

So a timely reminder to watch our surroundings and learn an incredibly valuable lesson about taking responsibility for our own safety? No. What this case is yet another a “reminder” of is not how important it is to be cautious, but that women aren’t safe in their own homes. That women aren’t safe at their places of employment. That women don’t just have to worry about being a potential target out at parties or bars or dates or other social events, or when we’re out at the store by ourselves at night or riding public transportation alone, but all the time. We also have to worry about answering the goddamn front door. Not to even mention who we might be sleeping next to at night.

But the very last thing we need is a reminder. Because a part of living as a woman in a rape culture is being reminded of that threat every day.

These reminders aren’t useful, they aren’t infrequent, and they certainly aren’t harmless. Women know to watch their drinks, they know to use the buddy system, and they know to check the peep holes in their doors. They’re told close to every time they switch on the news or open up a newspaper or think of stepping outside their front doors. They’re told just about every time someone wants to pretend to engage in “rape prevention.” They’re reminded every time they check the back seat of their cars before getting in or make sure to walk home before it gets dark out or fish the keys out of their purses well before they reach the door. (This is called a rape schedule.) They know.

So what this constant “advice” actually serves to remind women of is the fact that their bodies exist in a constant state of both perceived and actual vulnerability to those who do not see them as fully human. What these tips actually serve to remind women of is that they need to be kept in line and constantly sheltered by a society that really isn’t usually so eager to “protect” them once they talk about having already been assaulted. What these tips serve to remind women of is that if they don’t follow each and every one to the letter all the time and they are assaulted, they will probably be blamed for their own rape. What these tips serve to remind everyone of is that the victim really should have been more careful, and what a shame it is that she wasn’t, because this whole thing could have been avoided if she’d just read a list of safety tips in a pamphlet. What they serve to instill further into the social consciousness is that we can’t stop rapists, so it’s women’s permanent curse to just have to live with them and watch out for them at every turn.

And I can’t even imagine how awful it would be to have a man break into the private residence where you’re working and tie you up and rape you, only to then read in the papers about how your rape is a really good opportunity to remind women like you how important it is be aware of your surroundings and do a better job of making sure that you’re not raped, too. I can’t imagine the feelings of shame and self-blame it would likely inspire, nor the anger at having your trauma used to browbeat other women into taking responsibility for the actions of violent people and events they can’t control.

The people whose actual job it is to stop rape responding to rape not by telling victims how to come forward or where they can find resources, and not by discussing means of actual violence prevention through a focus on perpetrators, but by telling women how important it is to make sure they’re constantly on the lookout for assailants? That’s rape culture.

Trigger Warning for discussions of rape apologism, specifically related to birth rape and other medical rape, and graphic descriptions of rape, including birth rape.

This post has been slowly brewing over the past week, as I was sincerely hoping to not feel ultimately compelled to write it. I note this simply because in the meantime, there have been many conversations taking place elsewhere on the same subject — conversations which I have read or participated in, and which have helped to shape my own visceral reactions and thoughts. Several of the posts which have influenced the ideas in this one are linked in this one, leaving the words in their original contexts. Some of those conversations were private, which I note with a very special acknowledgment to bfp. And some writers have asked not to be linked. But I strongly encourage you to click through on everything that is present, with a note that the above trigger warning applies, and a reminder that just because other writers have influenced my thoughts, that doesn’t mean they necessarily agree with all that I have written.

In this post, I’m just going to be entirely honest about what I think and feel.

For the past month and a half, I’ve largely been away from the internet for personal reasons. As life began to settle down and I started to make my return to the web at the end of last week, I slowly started coming across several posts written in my absence that made me wish I’d just stayed away. The first I encountered was “Bad Birth Experiences Aren’t Rape” by Amanda Marcotte over at Double X. The second was “When Giving Birth is a Traumatic Violation, Is It Rape?” by Brittany Shoot over at Change. And the last was “The Push to Recognize ‘Birth Rape’” by Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet. There are almost certainly other similar posts; I didn’t seek them out, as I don’t wish to read them.

All of these posts were inspired by one at Jezebel that introduced the concept of birth rape to its readers with a highly noncommittal tone (ETA: Jezebel itself has a history of mocking medical assault). For those new to the concept, a decent basic primer can be found here (and links to others in the comments are welcome). Birth rape describes the experience of women and pregnant people of other genders having their bodies violated and penetrated without their consent in the process of giving birth, usually though not always through the forcible insertion of hands or medical tools into the vagina or anus without consent, and frequently with explicit non-consent. Victims are often physically held down, told to shut up, ignored when they scream or cry or plead, threatened, and/or called names as their bodies are violated. Just as survivors of other forms of rape, birth rape survivors experience physical and emotional trauma, often rising to the level of PTSD — only compounded by the general lack of recognition that birth rape is real, and the frequent guilt at having such trauma associated with their new child coming into the world.

In other words, birth rape is a term used to describe a specific form of rape that is committed in a birthing context, without the use of a penis.

But as in the posts linked above, this concept is extraordinarily challenging for some people, including feminists, who have taken to outright denouncing the use of the term — though, to her credit, Shoot’s post is by far the most ambivalent on the subject. Marcotte argues that birth rape should not be called rape because unlike supposedly real rape, it is not sadistic in intent. The definition of rape, she argues, should be based on the rapist’s motivation, not the victim’s experience, or we otherwise have lost our tools to combat rape effectively. Clark-Flory argues that birth rape shouldn’t be called rape, on the other hand, because rape is a special word, and using it to describe these experiences is “a violation in its own right”:

We have a special word for forced sexual intercourse, because it deserves a special word. Rape is used as a tool of terror, torture, intimidation and war (as we’re seeing right now in Congo). Sometimes it is about violence, sometimes it is about sex, and sometimes it is about both. It is a special kind of crime not only because of what it is, but also because of what it does to the victim (in her own mind and others’).

I’m used to seeing this sort of thing — discussions about whether or not an event that is admittedly horrible really deserves to have the title “rape” attached to it, accompanied by convoluted reasons as to why calling it rape would just mess everything up for real rape victims. What I’m not quite as used to is seeing it being done in the name of feminism and/or anti-rape activism.

To see rape defined by the perpetrator’s intention rather than the victim’s experience is particularly devastating for me — personally, I thought that a big part of anti-rape activism was getting people to realize that it doesn’t matter what the rapist supposedly meant, what matters is that sie raped someone. I thought that anti-rape activism was about centering victims’ voices. And I never thought that all rape had one solution, anyway, so to suggest that we can’t incorporate birth rape experiences for practical reasons of activism is absurd to me, and dismissive of the nuances inherent in our actual cause. And when we dismiss nuance, marginalized lives and bodies are always the first to get tossed out.

I also thought that a big part of anti-rape activism was about broadening our definition of rape, not narrowing it — throwing out the stranger jumping from the bushes with a knife as the only model of rape, and recreating a model that encompasses a wide variety violent experiences and promotes affirmative, enthusiastic, meaningful consent as minimum standard of decency rather than a nice bonus if you can get it. I thought that anti-rape activism was about acknowledging that rape is not just one thing, that there is more than one way to violate a person and to be violated, and that whether consent was given was more important than how much force was used. Especially in this context, the posts in question come off as nothing more than language policing, against particularly marginalized populations, no less.

But even questions of technical definitions and what exactly it is that we wish to eradicate in fighting this thing called “rape” aside, I do know one thing for sure. When women come forward and start saying “I was raped,” when they find the power to use that word to describe their own experiences and open up to share their trauma with the world, responding with “no you weren’t” — with whole blog posts about the subject, in fact — is about the worst possible way that a person can do feminism.

And doing feminism this way has consequences, just like using feminism oppressively always has. As far as consequences go, I don’t care whether or not it “turns people away” from the “movement,” frankly — after all, if this is what they hope to encounter upon sticking around, I think that they deserve fair warning, and I can’t exactly blame them for wanting no part. What I care about is the pain and the harm that it causes. What I care about is the fact that if, after years of struggling to finally claim the word “rape” for my own experiences, someone had immediately responded to me in this way with something about how calling myself a rape survivor was insulting to real survivors or harming their activism, I just might have died. Literally.

What I care about is the fact that I am a woman who was raped, and my rape did not consist of what most people think of when the word “rape” is uttered. It certainly wouldn’t fit under Clark-Flory’s narrow definition of “forced sexual intercourse,” the most common understanding of which would be limited to only involving a penis inside a vagina. I care that as a survivor who already doesn’t “count” under a lot of people’s definitions, these posts have all personally hurt me deeply.

I care because I am not a survivor of birth rape. And if these posts have cut me as deeply as they have, I cannot even begin to imagine the effect they’ve had on many victims who have experienced birth rape, or on victims who have experienced other forms of medical rape. I care because none of them deserve that. No survivor does. I care because they’re being told how to name their traumatic experiences by those who mostly have never been faced with those same experiences themselves. And I care because they are being harmed in the false name of anti-rape activism.

The theme has come up several times that calling birth rape “rape” is somehow insulting or even violating to survivors of real rape, because real rape victims are special, and their trauma is more real.

And I’m here as a survivor of rapes that are supposedly at least somewhat real to say that the only insulting and violating thing going on in this “conversation” is women being told that their rapes don’t count because they were committed by doctors instead of dates, in hospital rooms instead of the back seats of cars, with forceps and gloved hands instead of penises and ungloved fingers. I’m writing this because it’s patently arrogant and repulsive to insinuate through such language policing that those survivors who have experienced one of these violations haven’t also experienced the other.

Telling other survivors that their experiences of violation aren’t real enough, and just weren’t sexual enough of all things, to use our special fancy word is wrong. And if this is how the word “rape” is going to be used against other survivors of abuses of power and abuses of bodily autonomy and violations of self — as a weapon, like it is right now — then I don’t want it. If the word rape doesn’t include all of those victims of violence that it needs to include, we need a better word. If the word rape is so fragile that we must minimize the horrific experiences of some survivors, the violence they lived through, and the violations they felt in order to protect it, we need a better word. And when the major response to a somewhat mainstream conversation about birth rape is quibbles about words rather than compassion and organizing, we need a much, much better feminism to become the dominant one.

Last Friday, Titania Kumeh wrote an excellent blog post at Mother Jones about the International AIDS Conference in Vienna, and the over 100 sex workers and advocates who protested outside. The protest was about how U.S. funding to fight HIV transmission explicitly and deliberately excludes sex workers, even though they are one of the groups most vulnerable to becoming infected and transmitting the virus to others.

The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) requires that funds do not go to sex workers or those who work with sex workers, and has done so for years. In fact, it recently came up in a post that I wrote about police abuse against sex workers in Cambodia. But while the situation is nothing new, it is discussed far too little, and needs to be highlighted whenever an opportunity presents itself. Because it’s killing people.

Back in 2003, Congress mandated that in order for any group or organization to get US global HIV/AIDS funds, it must have “a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.” (See: Sex, American Style). The 2008 PEPFAR fact sheet states “prostitution and sex trafficking are abusive and dehumanizing to women, and they fuel the spread of HIV.” It’s not clear whether former-President Bush—who implemented PEPFAR and its anti-prostitution pledge—recognized the difference between sex trafficking and prostitution, spoke to any sex worker-run organizations that combat exploitation, or spoke to groups that seek HIV preventative care and battle sex trafficking. The anti-sex worker, anti-trafficking pledge left sex worker organizations—which incidentally work with one of the most at-risk populations for HIV (PDF)—out in the cold.

“We need HIV treatment but we don’t need the mandate that sex workers are excluded,” says Pisey Ly of Cambodia’s Women’s Network for Unity (WNU), a sex worker advocate organization. When WNU applied for US HIV prevention funds, it was denied and told to drop its sex worker status, Ly says. It refused. “The original idea behind WNU was to be an independent sex worker organization, to provide sex workers with ownership and leadership to speak about the issues that effect their lives,” Ly says. Because of PEPFAR’s anti-prostitution policy, Ly says, many donors and NGOs that once worked with Cambodian sex workers have abandoned them for fear of losing their US funding.

Meanwhile, unprotected intercourse between sex workers and clients is the main cause of new HIV infections in Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Really, you should go read the whole post. I wholeheartedly mean that — quoting as much of Kumeh’s text as I would like to would genuinely constitute copyright infringement.

What it comes down to though, is this: U.S. policy is not only failing to help sex workers, it’s actively harming them. Through requiring that any group oppose sex work in order to receiving funding, we’re not just failing to provide funding to those who already didn’t have it and leaving them where they started — though when the situation is so dire, that would be unconscionable on its own. No, we’re ensuring that organizations that previously worked with sex workers and trafficking victims, providing them with information, resources, and care that they needed, no longer will. Because they can’t keep working with sex workers and trafficking victims and afford to stay open.

It’s very similar to the Global Gag Rule. It’s probably just as deadly, if not more so. And it deserves every damn bit as much attention from feminists and other people who care about women’s rights and welfare.

The PEPFAR policy is blatantly misogynistic and sex worker-phobic. It makes sense that organizations should be anti-trafficking in order to receive funds — kidnappers and rapists don’t need anymore money than they already have — but it certainly doesn’t make sense to say that organizations can’t even assist trafficking victims as a part of their work, as such victims are usually among those who most need assistance. To further extend anti-trafficking sentiment to anti-sex worker sentiment is to conflate two issues, and obscure them both. And to deny funding and services to sex workers because they are at particular risk for contracting and transmitting HIV is more than counter-intuitive, it’s downright nonsensical. No — it’s malicious.

I would go so far as to say (and do not doubt that I am not the first) that such a denial of funds constitutes a direct act of violence. With a vast majority of sex workers being women, it constitutes an act of misogynistic, gender-based violence. With sex workers also being disproportionately women of color, trans*, and/or non-straight men,  it further constitutes an act of racist, transphobic, and homophobic violence. And when the U.S. has such great financial power over those who are most vulnerable to it, the label of colonialist violence also applies. We know that when sex workers don’t have access to condoms and information about how HIV is transmitted and prevented, they die. And yet, we continue as though we’re not killing them, or as though their deaths do not matter.

I greatly resent the notion that PEPFAR’s anti-sex work rule has anything to do with “protecting” women. The paternalistic notion that sex work is inherently “dehumanizing to women” isn’t based on a concern for women’s health and well-being. If anyone was concerned about that, the rule wouldn’t exist. The rule is about shaming and punishing those women who step outside of society’s bounds, whether through choice or coercion or force, of what a proper woman acts like. The rule is about appeasing the concerns of religious groups and middle-class moralists and generally taking out society’s hateful, misogynistic disgust at sex workers at those who can be harmed the most. It’s about taking power and abusing it in the worst way possible, just because we can.

Just because we can, and because we can simultaneously tell ourselves that by doing so, we’re doing something good.

And until the rules regarding access to U.S. anti-HIV funding are changed, it’s just yet more blood on the nation’s hands.

h/t @audaciaray