Helen Mirren Thinks Date Rape Shouldn’t Be Illegal

September 2, 2008, category sexual assault

Helen Mirren Helen Mirren was recently interviewed by Piers Morgan for the October edition of GQ magazine. Her experience with being date raped came up, which she first revealed in 2003 during an interview and she stated:

“I was [date-raped], yes. A couple of times.”

“Not with excessive violence, or being hit, but rather being locked in a room and made to have sex against my will.”

Dame Helen said it was rape if a couple engaged in sexual activity but the woman said “no” at the last second.

However, she said: “I don’t think she can have that man into court under those circumstances.”

She said she had not reported her own experiences to police because “you couldn’t do that in those days”.

First off, I am glad that Mirren was not one of the millions of cases in the world where excessive violence is dominant n such a case, but in the second part of her first sentence, I find it sad that a woman who has been through such an experience is still calling it “having sex” against her will. Rape is not sex. Date rape is not sex. In almost all sexual assault cases, sex is never what someone is trying to get out of the situation; it is power over another human being by using what should be a consensual experience between two people in order to shame and violate another human being and gaining power above them.

Second of all, just because Mirren did not report her own experiences because “you couldn’t do that in those days,” makes me feel sympathy for her, especially since she has also stated being a frequent drug user and an experience like being date raped could most definitely lead a woman in the direction of addiction. However, for such a statement to be made by an Oscar-winning actress is a step backwards for people everywhere–The women who listen to her, read GQ magazine and especially for the men who read GQ magazine, as they may take her statement to heart and figure that it’s A-OK to rape a woman and that women will just let it go unreported and they won’t get into any trouble since they may think that it isn’t something that they can get convicted and do jail time for and that is sickening and also dangerous.

To clarify: If you have been a victim of rape or sexual assault of any kind, it is important for you to speak out about your experience and the experiences of millions of other people who are the victim of sexual assault in this world. It is important for you to press charges against your abuser, since most abusers go on to abuse other people throughout their lives and you most likely are not the only person who has been a victim of that person. It is equally as important for figures such as Mirren to not support women and victim-blaming, which is exactly what she is doing.

She has also been quoted elsewhere saying:

“I guess it is one of the many subtle parts of the men/women relationship that has to be negotiated and worked out between them.”

The many subtle parts of the men/women relationship? What? I would like to ask Mirren how it is possible for men and women to work a case of sexual assault out between the two of them. And what about cases where men are sexually abusing men and women are sexually abusing women? Sexual assault is not merely a “subtle part” of the man/woman “relationship” and how, exactly, would a scenario like that work?

Woman: Gee, I really didn’t appreciate being drugged and raped against my will last night.
Man: Oh that is completely understandable and I promise to never do it again. Could you please pass the sugar?

No, I don’t think so.

Via The F-Word.

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Help Teddy Tour Help Survivors

August 31, 2008, category random acts of activism, sexual assault

I have written about the amazing work Teddy Tour does and the amount of childhood sexual assault survivors they help here before. Teddy Tour gives childhood sexual assault survivors some much-needed freedom and support by letting them fill out some info about their abuse, attach their info to a teddy bear or other stuffed animal and picturing it for their website giving other survivors and supporters of survivors the chance to read about their experiences and lets the survivor’s voice be heard and not simply forgotten. After the teddy is pictured for the website it is then sold to raise funds for survivor’s counseling and group work. All proceeds that are raised by Teddy Tour go straight to helping survivors of childhood sexual assault.


Teddy Tour

Teddy Tours ensures that the voices of so many survivors do not go unheard; every survivor deserves the right to tell their story and get their experiences off of their chests and the work Teddy Tour does to make this possible is amazing. I have filled out a tag for myself and my very own teddy in the Teddy Tour population that will be sold for proceeds to help other survivors and if you are also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, feel free to ensure that your voice does not go unheard and fill out your very own tag. Please note that all identifying information is kept secret and that your privacy is important.

So with all of the hard work Teddy Tour puts in for survivors they are asking for a little help along the way from survivors and supporters of survivors who wish to see that no voice goes unheard. Teddy Tour is in need of new teddies and asks that if you find yourself in a position of being able to donate a teddy or two to them, your donation would be lovingly received.

If you would like to donate a teddy or two, (sewn, knitted or crocheted) please send them to:
Teddy Tour, 30 James St, North Cairns, Queensland, 4870, Australia.

If you can’t donate a teddy but still want to help Teddy Tour out, they are also accepting donations of $5 which you can send here.

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The Word Allegedly…

August 28, 2008, category sexual assault

Really pisses me off. I don’t know about you, but every time I read an article about sexual assault in one form or another, the word allegedly just pops up like it’s normal. Well I’ve got to tell you–It isn’t. It isn’t normal at all. The word allegedly, specifically in most articles on this topic seem to give me the impression that the entire ordeal is being mocked; that it could have happened, the woman said it happened, but did it really?

But now I think I’ve seen the word allegedly and let it go for the last time after seeing this:

man arrested for raping 4 year old daughter

Blood present in the toilet, hospital, doctors…Doesn’t sound like a time to use the word ‘allegedly.’ Sure, it’s in the context to make you wonder if the father actually did it, but I’m willing to bet that yeah, he’s the one who did it since it’s been said that approximately 80% rape and sexual assault that happens to a child is done by a parent, someone in their family, or someone that is very close to them that they trust. Something tells me that a 4 year old doesn’t have many people in their lives that they are extremely close to and trust other than their own family.

I know that Current simply copied and pasted the story shown on their site about this from the original article, so in that case, you, right here, stop using the word allegedly, it isn’t cool. All you other publications out there doing the same thing–The same goes for you!

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What This Woman Wants

August 22, 2008, category media, politics, sexual assault

This Is What Women Want I came across this awesome site a few days ago that is working to give women a voice this election season.

This Is What Women Want is your chance to cut through the spin and tell the media, the candidates and the world exactly what you want this election season. Let’s demonstrate how diverse we are in thought, action, and experience. Let’s uncover what we have in common. Let’s amplify our own and each others’ voices until they cannot be ignored.

This Is What Women Want, brought to you by Center for New Words, is full of what women really want and expect from their representatives. So what does this woman want? Real justice for rape victims.

It is appalling that a person carrying an ounce of weed gets a tougher prison sentence than a person convicted of rape. Women are never “asking” to be raped and by eliminating terms from being used during trials, badgering a woman who had the courage to report her rape, and ultimately giving a rapist a less severe sentence than someone being made an example of in this imaginary “war on drugs” makes women, in particular, more apprehensive about coming forward and pressing charges against a rapist. Women make up a significant part of this country and by treating them like liars and second class citizens, you are helping a widespread pandemic.

Women never “asked” to be raped, it does not matter what they were wearing, how much alcohol they consumed or what her “body language” said to her rapist. It does not matter if that woman is married, is a virgin or what her previous sexual history is. Give women the security and safety they need in order to come forward and report their rape. Stop promoting silence!

What do you want? As a woman, what do you feel passionately about? What needs to change? Go tell them!

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Maybe I’m Just Cranky, Maybe We’re All Just Cranky

August 6, 2008, category international, sexual assault

World Youth Day held in Sydney, Australia from July 15-20, is a Catholic event that brought hundreds of thousands of people together. Now since we know right off the bat that religion is involved, although you wouldn’t be able to notice immediately that it is a Catholic event by looking at their website because they like to be discreet like that, we know that something bad is going to do down because there is nothing more corrupt than the Catholic church, besides the government which feeds off the Catholic church and so on.

Around the same time as World Youth Day, there was an airing on Lateline that was speaking about a family whose two daughters were raped by Father Kevin O’Donnell. Because of the rape, one daughter had committed suicide and the other was very ill because of the abuse. The family wouldn’t accept a Papal apology (because really, who would? I certainly wouldn’t!) that wasn’t backed up by positive action. Oh there people go again asking for the church to actually do something and they won’t have any of that positive action stuff going on. Come on, just look at the Catholic church’s history, they have a list longer than The Great Wall that they should be apologizing for and backing up with a lifetime of positive action.

It was the airing of Lateline, that made Bishop Anthony Fisher say the following statement:

“Happily, I think most of Australia was enjoying and delighting in the beauty and goodness of these young people, and the hope for us doing these sorts of things better in the future, as we saw last night, rather than dwelling crankily, as a few people are doing, on old wounds.” [audio here]

Dwelling crankily? Old wounds? I’m sorry, but when you lose your child to suicide because they were raped at a small age by someone they are taught they can trust, you are not dwelling, they are not to be considered old wounds and there is nothing cranky about it.

In the audio, the Bishop also goes on to say that they are trying to create better processes to make sure acts like this never happen again and then ask for constructive advice from people who believe they have the answer to prohibit clergy sex abuse from happening. I have a phenomenal idea! How about you stop protecting clergy sex offenders? Isn’t that a hell of a thought? How about when news comes out that one of the clergy members is a pedophile, you don’t simply relocate him to another church in another area so he can go on to do it again? Try that, asshole.

Apparently Bishop Anthony Fisher believes that any survivor of sexual assault who talks about what happened to them are just cranky. Maybe we all just need to get over it.

More and more suicides occur every year because of sexual assault, because people are told that they shouldn’t talk about it, because people are told that they are the ones who are tainted and disgusting and should be ashamed when really, the sex offenders themselves should be ashamed and not only that, but they should be locked up so they can never, ever, ever do it again.

Via Hoyden About Town.

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Rape and Victim Blaming

June 15, 2008, category sexual assault

Derek, a lovely feminist blogger and vlogger over at Doing Feminism has an incredible new vlog up over at his site on rape and victim blaming. With recent accounts of rape happening within 10 blocks of his house, he decided to make a vlog about rape and how so many people blame the victims for rape even existing and using such bullshit lines like “Well women shouldn’t wear short skirts or go to bars or stay out after dark.”

You should go watch the video, it’s fabulous.

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Woman Experiences 19 Hour Rape and Torture

June 8, 2008, category sexual assault, violence against women

On April 13, 2007, a 23-year-old Columbia University journalism student was followed from the elevator in her apartment building to her apartment door by Robert A. Williams. He asked if she knew where a Mrs. Evans lives and when she stopped and hesitated, her had the perfect opportunity to force himself into the woman’s apartment.

After forcing himself into the woman’s apartment, Robert A. Williams, 31, put the woman in a chokehold and slapped her cellphone out of her hand. After turning a clock to the wall so the woman didn’t know what time it was, he raped her repeatedly and cut her hair because “he wanted to see her face, her fear and humiliation.” He made her sit in her bath tub and told her to gouge her own eyes out with a pair of scissors. When she refused, he punished her by throwing boiling water onto her face and body which caused such a jolt, that she broke her wrists out of the restraints he had put on her earlier.

Throughout the 19 hour ordeal, he had also doused the woman with bleach, forced her to swallow handfuls of pills and chase them with beer, sealed her mouth with glue, and bound her wrists and legs with shoelaces, cords and duct tape. When told to gouge her own eyes out with a pair of scissors the second time, she held the scissors in between her knees and lowered herself onto it, turning her head at the last minute and stabbing herself in the neck, hoping to kill herself–But it didn’t work.

After slicing the woman’s eyelids open intending to ruin her vision because “a blind witness could never identify her attacker,” he fastened her legs and arms to a futon, and she lost consciousness. When she awoke, she smelled smoke and got herself (and the futon she was fastened to so she couldn’t move) to the fire and used it to free her arms.

This is an intense, scary, horrific and very, very real story. More people need to speak up about this type of violence because it happens and it isn’t always making headlines.

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Mother’s Day and the Release of No Trespassing

May 11, 2008, category film, sexual assault

no trespassing Today is Mother’s Day and no matter how hard I try to forget about this day, it still manages to come, mock me and leave for another year.

This day is by far a great day for most people–Mothers for one. It is also a great day for people to show their mothers how much they love and appreciate everything that they have done for them. However, sometimes you get that special case where one day out of the year just doesn’t mean the same to someone as it does to others; and Mother’s Day is that day for me.

I have not seen my mother in almost a decade. No, she isn’t dead, but she may as well be. My mother was not like most out there. My mother was a child abuser. She was a child sex trafficker and a child molester. She was (and still is) a drug addict and an alcoholic. I stayed silent about so much that happened during my childhood for so many years and it was last year where I pretty much just deteriorated. My layers of walls that I had spent years of my life perfecting melted away and I started to talk about what I had gone through and that was the best time of my life. I had stayed silent for so long because I was afraid of what people would say, how they would see me and most of all, I was afraid of what the rest of my family would think about me. While I was still in my mother’s custody I had told her that I would tell on her some day and she said that no one would believe me and I believed her.

I still don’t know what the rest of my family thinks. I was never really given the opportunity to speak to them about all of this; whenever the subject of my mother has come up my grandmother would be the first one to say that she didn’t want to hear about anything because it made her upset to even think about what happened. My father, while I love him immensely, has never been one to show or voice his emotions and so the verdict is still out on that one. My aunt had talked to me very briefly about it, after reading an interview I had done with my local newspaper about being a survivor of child sexual abuse. Not being given the opportunity to actually speak to my family about my childhood, I decided to publish it in a newspaper and send it to the doorsteps of 70,000 people living in my area.

While I have undoubtedly progressed in this whole healing process (not to mention being raped when I was 18 at the one and only college party I had ever attended and starting the whole “healing process” over again,) I have quite a ways to go and with that, to further symbolize this day for me, my short film No Trespassing was released today.

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Report It on Angela Shelton Day

April 29, 2008, category random acts of activism, sexual assault


Report IT

Happy Angela Shelton Day!

Today is the day where the Report It campaign, a campaign motivating survivors of sexual assault to report their cases via an online form at the Report It website, comes to a close with the biggest rally of unified sexual assault survivors taking place at various courthouses across the country! Today, on Angela Shelton Day, survivors are being asked to go to your local courthouses and say that the silence of sexual assault survivors has went on for far too long.

Sexual assault is the most under-reported crime in the world and it is also the least talked about. By being a survivor and living through your abuse and talking about your abuse, you are breaking the silence surrounding this pandemic. One person can change the world, so if you are able, please go to your local court house and speak up for the rights of survivors everywhere.

Here is the statement that is being read at rallies across the country:

“Sexual assault is the most underreported crime in the world. All too often victims do not report the crime to authorities for fear of not being believed, mistrust of the legal system, because they blame themselves for the crime or fear of retaliation. It’s time to address why this happens to sexual violence victims, while victims of other crimes, like robbery, don’t hesitate to seek justice. Victims of sexual violence deserve the equal protection of our laws. They deserve to be heard and validated. The Report IT Campaign is a first of its kind effort on behalf of all victims — an initiative designed to give hope to all victims that we can end the silence surrounding sexual violence. Our loud, unified voice today will be the first step in a multi-year effort to inspire much needed reforms and better access to justice for all victims.”

But this isn’t the end of the collaborative rally from Angela Shelton and PAVE. In fact, PAVE will be collecting reports from survivors for the next year, in 2009 this rally will run again just as it did this year but hopefully with even more people and in 2010, PAVE is taking this rally straight to Washington DC.

If you haven’t already, report your case today on Angela Shelton Day by filling out the online form. I filled mine out this morning and now it’s your turn!

If you need someone to talk to remember that you can always call RAINN. It’s safe and confidential. 1.800.656.HOPE or check out the online hotline.

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Help Us Help You Help Others

April 26, 2008, category random acts of activism, sexual assault

Skirt Sports SkirtSports, a retailer for sport apparel for women and children, has recently put together a campaign that will help their customers give back to the organizations and charities that mean the most to them.

Help Us Help You Help Others is a campaign unlike most others I have seen. Not only can you donate to a charity and help that charity help others in need, but you, as a SkirtSports customer, can choose the charity that Help Us Help You Help Others donates to.

Over a period of a month, SkirtSports asks people to nominate their favorite charity and the charity that receives the most submitted nominations will receive a $500 donation from the SkirtSports Help Us Help You Help Others campaign plus whatever amount is received through your donations, which range from donations of $5 to $100.

For the month of April and in honor of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Help Us Help You Help Others will be donating to SOAR (Speaking Out Against Rape) SOAR is an amazing non-profit organization which runs national awareness, education and prevention programs to help survivors of sexual abuse reclaim their voice, confidence and lives. You can learn more about SOAR at their website here.

In order to donate to SOAR through Help Us Help You Help Others, go here and select the amount you would like to donate. 100% of your donations go straight to SOAR; there is no tax or fees of any kind and it gets donated directly. As an added bonus, SOAR has a special promotion through SkirtSports where if you buy from their website you receive 10% off on all online purchases by using the promo code SOAR–and while you’re at it, don’t forget to make a donation to SOAR.

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