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The last ten years or so have seen a number of watershed moments when it comes to sexual assault exposure, from the Sandusky affair at Penn State to the Catholic church scandals to Weinsten and Epstein more recently. In politics particularly it's become more a point of contention as it factored heavily into the coverage of Roy Moore's Senate bid, Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination, and Al Franken's resignation from the Senate. Having said that, it was not a deal-breaker for Kavanaugh the way it was for those other, earlier parties, showing a lower stigma to this act than before, paving the way for 2020 which saw two presidential candidates with credible sexual assault claims against them vie for the position of most powerful person in the world, with one of them winning after the story of their allegation largely being suppressed or dismissed by the media. Regardless of Joe Biden's guilt or innocence, a sober reflector on the events cannot be happy that he only needed to do one response, that there wasn't questions about it in the primary or general debate, that in short there seemed to be little interest in it purely based off of political factors and narrative control. But this thread isn't about Joe Biden specifically, rather, it's a discussion about the difficulties of confirming reporting and also a discussion of where activism should go and what can be done to help this issue moving forward. It's frustrating seeing a country where the Oscars can dedicate an entire ceremony to #metoo and in the same ceremony award Kobe Bryant an Oscar. It's frustrating watching sports journalism refer to sexual assault as "adversity" when it comes to athletes; whose adversity is it, actually? And of course, there's the ongoing and seemingly never-ending failures the church has on this issue, Catholic or Protestant, as highlighted recently by allegations against late evangelist Ravi Zacharias. So am I a social worker? No. To briefly dip into E/N here, I was molested twice when I was 7 by a fourteen-year old neighbor of mine. I reported to my parents months after it happened due to death threats from my victimizer and also not understanding the full implications of what I'd been through, being a child and all. This was too much a lapse of time for the local law enforcement to really feel comfortable recommending my family take it to trial, and so it was just left as a note on the offender's record and I was granted a restraining order (though not a particularly effective one). In several ways, I'm not the typical experience of a sexual assault survivor, in that I was male and was believed by everyone I talked to. Where my experience does dovetail more is it being with someone I knew (which most sexual assaults are) and someone who I continued to spend time with even after my assault. I've seen brought up many times situations where the perpetrator of an assault was still spoken of fondly or associated with by their victims afterwards, and I can attest that can happen. I also can attest that the aftermath, even in a believed-in case, can sometimes be in ways worse than the assault itself. I had to grow up as a teenager in a very conservative area that loved to joke around about assault and basically grit my teeth the entire time. While I did get fairly helpful rape victim counseling after my assault (yet another privilege), I did get to see just how poorly public school counseling could handle that situation in the 90s by watching them fumble around when I brought it up and just tell me to focus on the positives in my life instead. But that's perspective, not expertise. I'd love for people with actual backgrounds in this stuff, be it counseling or social services or what have you, could weigh in on their observations of public perception of this crime have evolved over the years and also how we can deal with the bigger problem of how this gets reported. Because, as noted above, I wasn't able to prosecute effectively because I didn't report immediately and probably wouldn't have even gotten very far if I had (this article goes into how that can happen: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/opinions/arlington-texas/). There's also the matter of sorting out "believe victims" versus occasional actual false reporting, and figuring out in what situations people false report and why they do that instead of playing the gross game of believing people unless we disagree with them. Even in the case of Roy Moore, there was false reporting because James O'Keefe is an absolute creep, so seeing studies on how often that actually happens may be interesting. It's not a fun topic and the obvious trigger warnings apply. Preferably this would talk about the phenomenon in abstract and not be a specific relitigating of any particular past molestation case because, sad to say, soon enough we'll probably have yet another case that we're all talking about in a month anyway. Let's keep things civil, it's my birthday after all.
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Nov 10, 2020 15:36
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The needs of a movement are always going to transcend the movement itself. That was seen with Occupy Wall Street, which was much more of an obvious ineffective failure and was outright shut down by the government, and yet one that nonetheless managed to push wealth inequality to the forefront of though enough to make a socialist a runner-up in two straight primaries; The issue is going to be dealt with regardless of whether a hashtag is put on it or not, so the idea that we will cease to care about rape entirely is not a future I think will ever happen. But Occupy could've been a moment that could've been taken advantage of more, and so too is #metoo, and it feels like the momentum of change is doomed to slow. To go to what RPZip posted, I think that's going to be one of the bigger problems going forward, is the idea that some "greater good" isn't served by demanding justice now, similar to those who thought pursuing the civil rights act would endanger the Great Society. I think, being religious myself, very specifically of the church, where it's all too easy to say that exposing an abuser invalidates all the work they've don saving souls, contributing to charity, etc., especially since there's a shortage in clergy, if I'm not mistaken. The same goes for police officers, that them being exposed for abusers lets the dozens of abusers they're tracking down go scot free. (This last argument might've endured a severe blow considering the reputation of cops in this country right now.) I remember hearing in college once someone say, "I would rather die than be raped," and feeling not too great hearing that considering my own history, but what's interesting is as much as stigmatize rape sometimes even more than homicide in our culture, it does get marginalized in practice as merely a "mistake" in comparison to some greater evil. It does get to the idea of what counts as a disqualifying act at all, but that almost seems like a topic for another thread. A final thought here is also about the entertainers who do get "canceled" for accusations but nonetheless come back, usually branded as some conservative personality. These people aren't ever going to get jailed, so there's no concrete punishment, but the "canceling" just ends up being a requirement to code-shift. This feels less than ideal to me, and I wonder what actual atonement practices could be encouraged for, so to speak, lesser offenders so that fear of making one mistake doesn't just turn into a pipeline to fascism. I want to make clear I'm not trying to downplay the acts in any way, it's just annoying to watch Louis CK just do this tone shift bullshit and refind an audience but of all the worst people, which is just going to convince people the only way to escape the long arm of social justice is to be right wing from the start.
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Nov 12, 2020 14:55
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I think the proof is in the pudding there in that Gillebrandt went after Franken but completely shied away from going after Biden despite it in theory would have worked very well and made her more prominent in a crowded primary process. There's a reason she passed on going after Biden, and that's because going after Franken had cost more far more than it helped her.
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Nov 12, 2020 20:44
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Yeah, I made this thread to not just be about the movement but rather issues the movement was touching upon, I could honestly care less how a hashtag is employed in the future by the usual disingenuous politics class, but I would like to know if there's thoughts on what can be done next.
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Nov 25, 2020 22:35
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What do you think would revive this thread, Relevant Tangent? In all sincerity.
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Nov 26, 2020 03:06
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I really do think there's plenty to debate and discuss about the handling of molestation and the future of its handling. Perhaps this thread could be focusing on the "What Comes Next" part of the thread title more and on the "#metoo Movement" less.
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Nov 26, 2020 05:48
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Bump.
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Feb 4, 2021 20:38
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Timeless Appeal posted:I appreciate the intent and the vulnerability that was brought to the OP, but it really might be helpful to have some stuff to really refer to and discuss. Like some articles that ground us. I think maybe a thread title change too since I think it unintentionally engenders some of the shittier rhetoric. Honestly, I think ignorance is a bit of an issue although I assume most people are in good faith. Yeah, I definitely agree with you on changing the title thread, I thought referring to the hashtag would just be a quicker way to impart the topic of the thread than something bordering on glibness like, "The Sexual Assault Megathread," or the like, but if the conversation is going to be endlessly about the hashtag and its various proponents, that has kinda killed the thread in more ways than one. As for articles, I mean, I don't know where to start with that other than Liz Bruenig articles that are interesting reading but don't lead to much discussion other than, "Doesn't this suck." I was waiting for more people to show up with resources, but that... didn't pan out. Still, absolutely, if you have thoughts on that, share them. I admitted from the start I only have experience as a survivor and not really any kind of social worker experience, and I'd love to learn more. Thorn Wishes Talon posted:c) more flippant poo poo about how people using the #metoo hashtag are the "disingenuous politics class" (this is coming from the OP, no less) If you're going to throw around inflammatory remarks like that, don't post here. I was specifically saying I don't want the discussion to focus on how the topic could be co-opted, which one need only look at how Alex Morse was defamed in his senate race to see there is indeed disingenuous invocations of molestation, albeit ones that are quickly sniffed out because it is in fact hard to fake molestation claims. Rather than overtly focusing on whether that will happen again in the future (it will), I'm more interested, to be frank, in how we can keep things like Joe Biden going through the primaries largely unvetted on these claims from happening again because watching two accused rapists face off against each other in the general was one of the worst things I've ever had to live through as a political participant in America. It is 2021, surely we are better than this. But you wanted to know some more about what survivors are facing, and that seems like as good a point as any to re-kick off this thread. Here's the Bruenig article I was discussing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/opinions/arlington-texas/
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Feb 5, 2021 22:53
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Another reason to rename this thread is talk of sexual assault is probably going to drift more to QAnon stuff with how six million people (with a good percentage of them women) believe in that stuff and how big of an issue sexual assault is in their belief system. Most articles I see explaining the appeal of QAnon typically downplay the seriousness of the sexual assault thought, and while QAnon is obviously full of poo poo, I think its appeal lies in the very real worries about sexual abuse in the wake of two decades of stories about Catholic church abuse, the Penn State scandal, and now Epstein. It's clear this is on people's conscious and is manifesting in this collective belief that the biggest threat facing America is children being kidnapped and turned into sex slaves. For a lot of people, that's fantasy, but I know some people who end up believing that stuff because their own assault experiences give them so much distrust of the system that they're now (excessively) willing to believe in predation around every corner and of course yearn for a strong man to save them. (Why that strong man is known predator Donald Trump is where it breaks down heavily, obviously.) Part of deprogramming people is going to take understanding the real concerns that hide behind their bullshit beliefs, so any articles about about the nexus between assault victims and QAnon would be interesting to see, but most articles I see just dissect how the conspiracy has spread through instagram and the like. It may be impossible to truly psychoanalyze the average Q person and find where their real concerns end and their fabricated concerns begin, but it still intrigues me as a research field.
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Feb 5, 2021 23:18
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Some good responses, but long-term, I don't think this thread is going to work out. If someone else wants to post a thread on this topic, feel free.
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Feb 6, 2021 01:02
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