fuckyeahfeminists:

rhrealitycheck:

Know Your IX aims to educate every college student in the U.S. about his or her rights under Title IX by the start of the next academic term.

In 1972, Title IX of the Education Amendments prohibited sex-based discrimination in schools, guaranteeing students essential and extensive rights to freedom from sexual violence necessary for equal access to education. In 2011, Vice President Biden clarified the standards to which higher education institutions must adhere, including specific guidelines for addressing reports of sexual misconduct.

Yet too many colleges today are failing to fulfill their legal and ethical obligations. In the past year, sexual violence survivors have shared their experiences of administrative neglect, disregard, and abuse at institutions including Amherst College, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Yale University, Occidental College, Northwestern University, and Rice University. Their experiences are not unique but representative of sexually hostile campus environments across the country.

We believe it is time for change. Let’s make next semester better than this one.

They just have a few days to reach their goal! Please contribute and signal boost! This is so important.

physicalgraffiteaforone:

courtneymichellelovecobain:

“We had just gotten off tour with Mudhoney, and I decided to stage-dive. I was wearing a dress and I didn’t realize what I was engendering in the audience. It was a huge audience and they were kind of going ape-shit. So I just dove off the stage, and suddenly, it was like my dress was being torn off of me, my underwear was being torn off of me, people were putting their fingers inside of me and grabbing my breasts really hard, screaming things in my ears like “pussy-whore-cunt”. When I got back onstage I was naked. I felt like Karen Finley. But the worst thing of all was that I saw a photograph of it later. Someone took a picture of me right when this was happening, and I had this big smile on my face like I was pretending it wasn’t happening. So later I wrote a song called “Asking For It” based on the whole experience. I can’t compare it to rape because it’s not the same. But in a way it was. I was raped by an audience, figuratively, literally, and yet, was I asking for it?” 

-Courtney Love

This is disgusting. There’s no way this would happen if a male stage dived.

maymay:

“Repeat Rape: How do they get away with it?”, Part 2 of 2. (link to Part 1)

Sources:

1. College Men: Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists,Lisak and Miller, 2002 [PDF, 12 pages]
2. Navy Men: Lisak and Miller’s results were essentially duplicated in an even larger study (2,925 men): Reports of Rape Reperpetration by Newly Enlisted Male Navy Personnel, McWhorter, 2009 [PDF, 16 pages]

By dark-side-of-the-room, who writes:

These infogifs are provided RIGHTS-FREE for noncommercial purposes. Repost them anywhere. In fact, repost them EVERYWHERE. No need to credit. Link to the L&M study if possible.

Knowledge is a seed; sow it.

knowledgeequalsblackpower:

thepeoplesrecord:

TW: Sexual assault - This is Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski. He is the head of the US Air Force’s anti-sexual assault unit.

He was arrested & charged with sexual battery on Sunday after he drunkenly grabbed a woman’s breasts & buttocks in a parking lot near the Pentagon. 

Pentagon officials were preparing to release its annual report on sexual assault in the military as this incident happened. The number of sexual assaults - reported & not reported - are estimated at about 19,000 each year. 

Read more on this scumbag here. 

+ if you haven’t already, watch The Invisible War, a documentary on sexual assault in the military. It’s on Netflix.

“The Invisible War” - Youtube Link

The many faces of rape.

This makes me sick to my stomach. 

thepeoplesrecord:

April 16, 2013

Two teenage girls have killed themselves in recent months after pictures of them being raped or sexually assaulted circulated among their classmates and online. In Canada, 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons was taken off life support this week after trying to hang herself. Police never pressed charges in her alleged gang rape, which occurred when she was 15.

“Rehtaeh is gone today because of the four boys that thought that raping a 15-year-old girl was OK and to distribute a photo to ruin her spirit and reputation would be fun,” her mother wrote. “All the bullying and messaging and harassment that never let up are also to blame. Lastly, the justice system failed her. Those are the people that took the life of my beautiful girl.”

Canadian authorities are reopening the investigation, which is pretty much the definition of too little, too late. Meanwhile, in San Jose, California, three 16-year-old boys have been arrested in the September 2012 sexual assault of 15-year-old Audrie Pott, who committed suicide eight days later. The boys face felony and misdemeanor charges.

“The family has been trying to understand why their loving daughter would have taken her life at such a young age and to make sure that those responsible would be held accountable,” said family attorney Robert Allard.

“After an extensive investigation that we have conducted on behalf of the family, there is no doubt in our minds that the victim, then only 15 years old, was savagely assaulted by her fellow high school students while she lay on a bed completely unconscious,” said Allen.

Recently, of course, two teenage boys were convicted of a similar rape with photos in Steubenville, Ohio.

There’s nothing particularly new about the rapes themselves. What’s new is that there are pictures and videos, which are immediately circulated. Those mean evidence—though that doesn’t always mean arrests, as in the case of Rehtaeh Parsons—but they also mean that victims face increased bullying, that they don’t have to worry only about running into their rapists in the hallways at school, but about every one of their classmates who has seen the pictures and decided that the way to respond is not by speaking out against rape or quietly supporting the victim but by joining a pack of bullies in attempting to shame and humiliate her. And there’s no redemptive ending—justice in Steubenville is good, but it doesn’t undo what that girl went through; Rehtaeh Parsons and Audrie Pott are dead. What we have is a long, grueling fight to make this less common. We probably can’t eliminate rape. We probably can’t make teenagers not be assholes. But we can fight to change the culture so that everyone knows rape is something for the rapist, not the victim, to be ashamed of. We can push the justice system to act swiftly so that potential rapists don’t figure they’ll get away with it. It’s not easy and it’s not enough, but it would be something. And then maybe the next Rehtaeh or Audrie wouldn’t feel quite so isolated and hopeless.

Source

I guess I hit a nerve with silly white boys yesterday.

“%100 of rapes committed against black women are perpetuated by black men, how do you feel about that?” is the most ignorant thing I’ve heard in awhile, so congrats on that.

floricanto-desnuda:

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles
and my stomach
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and
there are tapes to prove it. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
“I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else
only the color”. And
there are tapes to prove that, too.

Today that 37 year old white man
with 13 years of police forcing
was set free
by eleven white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one Black Woman who said
“They convinced me” meaning
they had dragged her 4’10” black Woman’s frame
over the hot coals
of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go
the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.

I have not been able to touch the destruction
within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85 year old white woman
who is somebody’s mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time
“Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”


Audre Lorde, “Power” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.

a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” audre lorde (1934-1992) spoke clearly and lived passionately. she disavowed all oppressions, and did not shy from contradictions. lorde penned essays, poetry, and a biomythography. we honor her name, her memory, and the life of her works.

grrlyman:

It’s been a little over a year since we said goodbye to my sweet girls. While I haven’t missed them even once, I’ve thought of them often with love and respect.

Y’all don’t even know what those tits went through. From having rapists tell them their freckles were a skin disorder when I was 11, being kicked off of the “peer mediators” team because the teacher thought the school shirt looked obscene on them at 12, not knowing how to ask my male friends to stop touching them when I was 14, and not taking my shirt off during sex until I’d been sexually active for over a year, to getting them pierced at 17 and finally looking at them and finding them beautiful, flashing basically everyone at the Atlanta Pride Parade that year, and really, fully loving them and owning them and seeing them and working them.

I loved my tits long after I realized that I didn’t want to see them in the mirror anymore. I loved my tits when I strapped them down and draped myself in cheap lingerie for the first time on stage. I loved my tits when I made the expensive decision to remove them. I love them now when I trace my fingers over my scars.

You were loved, and you will never be forgotten.