safety in numbers

just imagine if you were this teenaged girl's parents. you send her off to her high school homecoming dance. take tons of pictures of her in her new dress, with her hair done, and standing nervously next to her date. before you know it, she's called for a ride home...uh-oh. wondering what kind of adolescent embarassment or BFF squabble might have precipitated the early call, you get in the car to go pick her up.

except that you can't find her at the school gym.

when you do find her, she's been raped, beaten and robbed. by several men. in front of numerous other people. who did nothing to help her.

what could have been going through those people's minds? she deserved it? she asked for it? she should have known better?

the only message this kind of horror gives us is that women are considered OBJECTS, worthless and expendable.
still.
today.

equality is not a reality for women. no matter how many of us like to think 'we've come a long way baby'. not until the rape and torture of women on a daily basis is erradicated. and if we can't even do that in our own neighborhoods, how can we hope to do anything for the women in the congo, or darfur, or afghanistan?

THIS is what feminism is about. and this is why i can't understand when women and men shy away from that label. is the rape of one in every 4 women ok? does that sound like we've "achieved equality"?? rape culture is the reality. but i do not accept that this will always be the case. and the more of us who do not accept that reality, the sooner we can change it.

STOP RAPE.

survival

Patti Rosenfelder survived rape and sexual assault 30 years ago, and wants to tell her story. I think it's a story everyone should hear.

Lolita Windsor's son stabbed her repeatedly and held her captive, over a period of hours.

Darfuri women live in fear, even after they have fled their war-ravaged homeland in Sudan. The refugee camps are almost as bad as the conflict zone, where a simple trip to gather firewood often results in attack and rape.

Darfur. The Congo. The United States of America.
Not so very different from one another, for women.
We live under the constant threat of violence, rape and the knowledge that domestic violence and sexual assault are stopped or punished in only a fraction of the cases. The war on women is real, and every woman who has ever walked across a parking lot holding her keys the way Patti Rosenfelder does knows it.