What Rape “Prevention” is Not

Frankly, this (also via Renée).

I don’t even know where to start with that goddamn website, though Renée has done a pretty good job of highlighting how not only does the language shift responsibility onto women, it reinforces the way we are told to be constantly on guard against rape. At this rate, within a couple of years, it’s going to be the only thing women think about, ever. Victory will be ours!

But colour me confused here, because everything on that site says that this “device” is designed to prevent rape. Except…in order to work, penetration – vaginal penetration – has to occur. Which is to say, rape. I mean, that’s all over and above the fact that sexual assault can take many forms, including those that don’t involve vaginal penetration, those that involve penetration with a foreign object or those that don’t involve penetration of any kind. I mean, here I am trying to impose logic onto a clearly “does not follow” premise, but among the FAQs it even assures us that the rapist will not initially feel the RapeX (because, of course, at the moment of the rape, he has been possessed by a crazed demon that doesn’t notice things like that), and that when he does, the pain will be sufficient to render him incapable of killing you while you run away. So it’s not like you’re supposed to use it as a deterrent or something like that…it’s all about the after-the-fact identifiability and getting the rape to end relatively quickly after it begins.

Which is not what the word “prevention” means, unless I missed a memo somewhere.

An Open Letter to Kyle Payne

There are a number of things I wanted to write about this week. There are a number of new things that have happened that weren’t on my original list, and I wish I could be writing about them, too. Instead, I’m writing about Kyle Payne. Why? Because Kyle Payne wants me to be writing about Kyle Payne, essentially. And because if I don’t write about this, I will likely continue to feel unable to write about anything at all for several weeks, continue to avoid the internet, continue to only skim my RSS reader because any mention of Kyle Payne just makes my skin crawl right off my body.

So, without further ado, addressing young Mr. Payne:

I know, somehow, that all this increased attention is actually satisfying to you. I know it feeds into your self-image as a persecuted martyr, the victim of a “smear campaign” perpetrated by a pro-pornography blogger. I know that there is not one brain cell in your entire narcissistic skull that is devoted to anything that is not you, what these nebulous “events” say about you, what people think of you, how your reputation and your friendships have been affected. I know that your main goal is assuring all of us, not least yourself, that your deep down in your soul, you are a True Feminist Spirit, a Good Person, and that the most important question on your mind is how, how, HOW such a thing could have happened to such a man as you.

But despite all that, I can’t let it go. You win this round, it will, in fact, be about you.

I can’t imagine it would ever occur to you how it would feel for any of us to get that email you sent, to see the name of a confessed sex offender in the sent line. I’ll be perfectly honest and admit that it fucking freaked me out, and I spent some time assuring myself that no, my real name isn’t actually on this blog, being again thankful that I remain a tiny, tiny fish in this big enormous virtual pond, and therefore not likely worth more of your time than that form letter took, but I did have to take that time. Because the fact that you sent that nice personal email and wrote that oh-so-revealing post says to me that you’re one crazy fuck, and I do have to step back and think rationally about just how fucking crazy you might be.

And then, because I deserve to know – we, as a collective, deserve to know, and I, personally, as one of many recipients of that email, deserve to hear what you have to say for yourself. I deserve to read your description of what that woman looked like, the vulnerable position that she was in, the urges that you felt, the actions that you took in violating her and the confusion that you felt at the time. It has to have occurred to you just how many rape survivors you sent that email to. It has to have occurred to you that many of us were raped by people we trusted, after we had been drinking, by people with some degree of authority over us. It has to have occurred to you that this story is all too familiar.

The thing about “making amends” is first that you have to have actually changed in order for it to matter, at least enough for you to recognize when your so-called amends are causing harm. One of the first questions male “allies” to feminism ask – and here I mean real allies, which you can tell because I identify them as the ones who ask – is what they can do as men to help women. To help women deal with male violence, with pressure and double-standards and past traumas and current fears, to help end “rape culture” and the ubiquity of sexual violence. In your case, there’s a really simple answer to this question: stop violating women.

You say you were unprepared to deal with these feelings because of your personal feminist politics. I consider myself a pacifist – I still get the urge to punch people in the face every so often, but somehow I’ve managed to avoid getting myself arrested for assault and having my pacifist hypocrisy laid out for all the internet to see. I also have a pretty solid grasp on the fact that pacifist or no, my desire to punch somebody in the face generally comes when I’m feeling pissed off because they’re not doing what I would want them to and I want some way to assert my power/control/dominance over the situation. Make of that what you will.

You’re telling me that I “deserve” to listen to what you have to say, that I “deserve” to think about the impact that has had on you, that I “deserve” to see your name in my email box, and you know what, no. I don’t. I deserve to live my life not having to think about what goes on in the minds of narcissistic predators – I’ve damn well spent enough of my time thinking about that, and I’d really like to be free of it from here on in.

I hope you deal with the abuse in your past. No one deserves to have that shit in their head. I hope you get free from it, so that you can stop using it to tie up others. For what it’s worth, I genuinely hope, from the bottom of my heart, that you recover from what you dealt with, and that you come to a place of peace and comfort with who you are, what has happened to you, and how you can truly amend what you’ve done. But I have absolutely no desire to hear about it, not at destination point and not at any point on the journey along the way.

I think I speak for many when I say that if you were to disappear and remove yourself from all of our blog-lives, that is the only possible favour you could ever do for us.

What Kyle Payne Reflects

In the ever-widening discussion of the predatory actions of Kyle Payne (see Ren Ev for a roundup listing of many, many blogs that have written on the subject), there has been some discussion of whether certain groups – in particular, radical anti-porn feminists and male feminists – should have to defend themselves from all being tarred with the Kyle Payne brush. Ren (again, since she’s been most tirelessly beating this drum ever since it was brought to her attention, even despite those *horrifying* burns she’s dealing with) has a post responding to the defensiveness from some radical feminist bloggers (who had previously linked to Payne, or included him in a Carnival), in which she makes the most important point there is on the issue: Kyle Payne’s actions reflect Kyle Payne, and only Kyle Payne. They don’t reflect on anyone who believed him and trusted him, confided in him, or shared certain elements of his opinions.

I know I made a bit of a mistake in the way I expressed myself on GallingGalla’s post on this, and as I said in follow-up there, I do get that there’s a victim-blaming tone to what I said. What I was trying to get at, and I still think it’s important, is that one of the things this story (again) brings to light, is that it’s not okay – and not possible – to assume that all members of Category A are good (and by extension, non-members of Category A are less good, possibly even bad) and trustworthy on all things in all ways at all times. Kyle Payne may or may not actually be against pornography – much as many of us have been psychoanalyzing the guy, there’s only one person living in his head, and thankfully, it ain’t me. But logic 101 says that it’s pretty much irrelevant. Accepting the premises “Kyle Payne is anti-porn” and “Kyle Payne is a rapist” does not lead to the conclusion that “anti-porn activists are all rapists”. Not sure if the “not rocket scientist” in me needs to point out that if the premise is switched to “Kyle Payne is pro-porn”, the applicability of the conclusion remains the same (ie. non-existent), but…

Male feminists, same deal. Part of the point I was trying to make at GallingGalla’s place is much better elucidated by belledame and Betacandy in comments over at Feministe:

belle: but yeah, there -are- some red flags. it’s not foolproof though. I do also think that sometimes, stuff like “dick=bad, estrogen=safe” actually makes it -harder- to identify predators, because honestly that’s not what it’s about.

Beta: It’s really not easy to identify predators, and yet our culture makes victims feel bad for not recognizing them. “Didn’t you know there was something off about him?” and so on.

Post “Prince Charming as Abusive Control Freak”, yeah, I’m pretty wary of the kind of guy who dresses everything up in terms of just how completely he is going to save me, the one who seems just far too good to be true, the one who always knows exactly the right words and turns of phrase like maybe it’s actually kind of practiced…but “male feminists” categorically? Not the same thing. Because you know, the thing with predators is, if the red-flag-warning-sign for potential predator becomes “identifies as feminist” then real predator will shift identifiers, will find a new one, will adapt to the given situation.

Sometimes, as was raised in that Feministe thread I’ve linked, I worry that the more I unpack this stuff, the more I come to the conclusion that there’s no way to trust anybody, ever. And the thing is…there isn’t. Not for real, not with absolute certainty, not completely. Not on sight, real or virtual. There’s no quick answer, no quick solution, no marker that will make all of this easy and simple and protect us, forever and for always, from ever being hurt or victimized again. Hell, my grandmother is still coming to terms with the very real and very personal reality that ordination to the Catholic priesthood does not automatically make a person trustworthy and safe. My dad, a high school principal post-Columbine, was subject to demands from angry parents that he ban trench coats, with the justification that they could be used to hide weapons. His response was “And if socks can be used to ban weapons, should we also ban socks?” The delusion that we’ll find the marker, that we’ll be the ones to know, is only hurting us and making us more vulnerable to the one who doesn’t fit our assumptions.

This isn’t new. Kyle Payne reflects exactly what predatory behaviour has always reflected – predatory behaviour. Adaptation. Manipulation and deception. Showing people what they want to see. Not radical feminism, not pornography, not male feminism, not men in general, not feminism in general

(*ETA: Just to be clear, I do stand by the original reason I made that comment on GallingGalla’s post, which is that she’s right to express anger at her own categorical exclusion from radfem conversation because of who she is and what she believes, and then to get extra angry when others don’t seem to understand why she’s pointing out the multiple problems with this logic, including the fact that this exclusion doesn’t prevent predators from getting in anyway, and never can)

Carnivals!

Carnivals are a blessing and a curse, in my world. Mostly, they just make me want to read *more stuff* and then I find posts from great blogs that I want to read *more later* and then they also make me realize how everything I could possibly want to say is being said by others, only better and faster and funnier.

And then I’m grateful for that little dose of much-needed humility, in carnival form.

Two new ones up in the past couple of days:

The first ever Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy at Uncool

and the 44th Carnival Against Sexual Violence at, as usual, abyss2hope (honestly, that woman has far more stamina/stomach for this stuff than I can even imagine, and for that the world is a far better place).

I think those titles go nicely together: Good = sexual freedom and autonomy. Bad = not.

There’s a post of mine included in the latter  that one, which I didn’t actually submit myself, and that only scares me a little (seriously, every so often I have these little “oh shit” moments where I realize I’m actually on the *internet* and people *read that*).

How Did You Know?

I say this a lot, but it bears repeating – as cynical as I may appear, I can still be incredibly naive and optimistic about people. I’ve come to actually be proud of that, because it’s not a naiveté borne out of not having bothered to live or open my eyes, and certainly not one borne out of having been sheltered or lucky (though I know that, in many ways, I am).

Sometimes, my illusions get shattered, in small ways as well as big ones.

Relatively speaking, I’m extremely open with people about my experiences of rape. I don’t generally go into detail, but I often reveal that I’ve been raped and revictimized several times, by different individuals, all of whom were known to me. I was talking to a woman yesterday who I’ve known for about six months, and I alluded again to those experiences (unemotionally, just as a statement of fact in contextually understanding other things that had happened to me and the timelines of my autobiography).

She interjected to say “I can’t believe you’ve been raped so many times.” I sort of shrugged and nodded. She said “And they were all strangers?” I responded “Oh no, all of them were acquaintances, people I trusted at least on a basic level.” And then she asked my illusion-shattering question “But…if you knew them, how did you know it was rape?”

I stayed calm and think I actually managed to avoid showing just how shocked I was to be asked this question by a 29 year old, intelligent, well-educated woman (she just graduated from teacher’s college, so she’s going to be passing that education along to the next generation shortly), but I shattered some illusions back with some gentle force.

(trigger warning behind the cut)

The Meaning of Rights (aka “Not Being an Asshole, The Sequel”)

A few weeks ago, it was International Sex Workers’ Rights Day. Renegade Evolution wrote a post on Alternet lamenting the lack of feminist commentary on the subject (not having noticed it at the time, I feel a *little* hypocritical saying something three weeks later, but remaining timely in the blogosphere, both reading and writing, has just never been a strength of mine). Though she forewarns in the post that she’s feeling “surly”, she actually ends up being quite reserved and gracious given what’s at stake. She’s right–we all have issues that affect us individually the most, and the rights of sex workers is not at the top of everyone’s list, even among feminists. She acknowledges that, but laments that there seems to be very little space on the list at all for something that she cares very deeply about. Point being, Ren’s post is actually quite kind. While I don’t have nearly the passion for the issue that she does, I would like to consider myself an ally in fighting for sex workers’ rights, not least because I consider it the most basic level of “not being an asshole”.

I have a friend who used to be involved in the sex industry. She and I haven’t talked much about her experiences or attitudes towards that part of her life, since that’s just not the kind of relationship we have. At one point, however, as part of a conversation only tangentially on the subject of violence and sex work, she told me about an old friend of hers who had been beaten and raped with a hot curling iron before being sent out for the night. She was instructed that if she didn’t make enough money, injured or not, there would be worse to come.

It’s just one story, and it’s the story of a friend-of-a-friend. But that’s what we’re talking about when we’re looking at “rights”. This is the kind of story that Ren hears about all the time, simply because she’s paying attention, and this is the kind of thing she’s thinking about while she’s listening to “feminists” who blame sex workers for perpetuating misogyny. And these are the comments she gets, immediately:

I think you’re just looking for an excuse to criticize feminists and make yourself out to be some kind of victim of feminists.

I wish no one ill, but this whole “sex workers” empowering movement throws women under the bus by validating a man’s right to buy sex from women. I don’t think they have that right. (from a comment entitled “maybe you should look to men to support since they benefit”)

Why should I spend my time supporting women or men who voluntarily support the patriarchal status quo? What ever ‘sex workers’ may claim – it is not a ‘job like any other’ fair enough do what you want to do but don’t expect me (as a father of two daughters) to give any of my energy to supporting men’s perceived right to female bodies. It’s just not going to happen.

And finally, someone gets to the real point, at the same time as missing it:

When you ask people to support “rights for sex workers”, you hand them a problem. What, exactly, are sex workers rights? How can you expect support for an undefined agenda? There may be a manifesto spelling it all out somewhere, but it isn’t encapsulated in an understandable phrase.

How and why do rights for sex workers differ from the usual human rights?

I actually support everyone’s right not to be degraded and exploited, but I don’t think that’s what the author has in mind.

Except that it is. That’s exactly what the author has in mind, she just focuses her attention on a particular segment of society whose right “not to be degraded and exploited” has been completely, heinously, maliciously ignored. I find it telling that this commenter feels the need to say that s/he “actually” supports everyone’s “rights”, as though this should be in any way surprising, outlandish or controversial to RenEv. I missed the part of her article where she advocated taking away the right to not be exploited or degraded from some other, non-sex-worker segment of society so that there’s enough non-degradation, lack of violence and non-humiliation to let the sex workers have some of it.

There’s a perfectly well-defined agenda here, and asking the question in the second paragraph pretty much hits it–sex workers’ rights are not different from human rights in general, seeing as how sex workers are human and all. The agenda is simply to get everybody else to acknowledge that. I don’t need a manifesto to figure out the general point, but if you’re looking for an understandable phrase to start with in engaging in this kind of discussion, I’ve found not being an asshole to be a useful and attainable goal.

Personal Rant: Lack of Empathy

In comments to this post, Jay and I got to talking about what it is I (we) really don’t understand about many of the people with whom we find ourselves in difficult conversations (to put it diplomatically). In sum, I can understand and appreciate and respect disagreement. What I don’t get is the complete lack of empathy for another person’s basic humanity.

It’s not just an inability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, it’s a complete unwillingness to recognize that this someone else is speaking from a place of very real and very personal emotion. For the sake of remaining concise, let’s limit this to my own experiences as a feminist talking about sexual violence. I acknowledge fairly publicly that I’ve been raped on multiple occasions. I acknowledge that I’ve been abused in other ways that are less easily named. I talk about the ways these abuses and assaults continue to affect me in my day to day interactions. I talk about fear, anger, grief, loss, attempts to enter into new relationships, what it means to trust again, and plenty more. I talk about the fact that practically every aspect, every event, every relationship that has taken place during the second half of my 28 years on this earth has been affected by one event that probably lasted, in and of itself, no more than twenty minutes. I talk about the later assaults, including about how some of them were facilitated by the use of alcohol. I’ve been working for weeks on one post about trust and love and connection in this context–for weeks because I start to write it, then have to stop because I realize I’m just complaining in circles for no productive communicative purpose, and only making myself more miserable, or because I start digging up emotions I’m not quite prepared to recognize yet, either publicly or privately.

And these people laugh. They will flat-out say “Wow, you’re really funny, getting all worked up about this stuff that doesn’t bother me at all”. If they’re slightly more savvy about it, there’s just a general tone of condescension and mockery to their dismissals of your opinions and conclusions. More than anything else, there’s the definite message that they want to defeat you in this conversation. This is not about cooperation. They know that they are right, you are wrong, and they would enjoy seeing you cave.

This is what I really don’t understand about people who are so hostile towards feminism, people who dismiss us as exaggerating the problems of violence against women in order to further our cause. This image exists in their head of a cackling, witch-like, unfeeling feminist, and what they want is to see that woman broken, that horrible man-hating smirk wiped right off of her face.

So let me be perfectly clear: this causes me pain. Talking about this causes me pain. Talking about my own experiences causes me pain. Listening to friends tell me about their experiences causes me pain. Reading stories in the newspaper about this causes me pain. And hearing people laugh about the fact that this causes me pain causes me more pain than anything else. I have absolutely no desire to “win” anything in these conversations. I will argue, and I will cite statistics, and I will acknowledge that I think I’m right about what’s “true” in terms of these dynamics and that I would love to educate others on that truth. But the point of doing that is to increase cooperation and understanding and more than anything else, empathy.

Talking to someone who has absolutely no willingness to recognize that this causes me pain, that I feel no great sense of victory, and that this way is not, in fact, the “easy” way to live is the one thing that makes me feel completely hopeless. Because it’s not an inability to recognize that. Any number of people can say exactly what I’m saying here and have said exactly what I’m saying here, and anyone who understands English is capable of seeing what we’re talking about. Can they all “understand” what it means to feel this kind of pain, or experience this kind of violence, or whatever? Probably not, but the concept of “understanding” an emotion is an extremely abstract one and not what we’re talking about here, anyway. What they are capable of doing is seeing and believing that pain exists, and approaching the issue from the perspective of cooperation.

If they don’t, it’s because they’re not willing. If they’re not willing, it’s because they have a lack of empathy so deep it means they essentially don’t recognize that what we say comes from a real human being. And that is seriously fucked right up.

Question: What Do We Stand To Gain?

Jill at Feministe links to yet another article talking about how rape statistics are exaggerated and proceeds to painstakingly take apart its logical flaws and rape apologetics. There are so damn many of these articles, however, and many of them include the notion that feminists are constantly inflating the proportion of women who have been raped. And as Jill points out, these kinds of arguments require all forms of mental gymnastics and contortions of reason in order to fit the statistics into the theory.

But beyond that, I really want to know what these people think are feminists’ motivations for inflating these statistics. This article is more straightforward about it than most, in that it explicitly spells out the claim that feminists are inventing rape where none happened. Feminists, apparently, are so desperate to believe that a crisis of violence against women exists, that rape is altogether too common, and that we need to work and work hard to stop it, that they will search for any means possible of making people believe that. When someone gets all anti-feminist about equal pay, or men’s rights activists start spouting off about how divorce/child support issues always benefit women, or anti-choice crusaders try to push through bills like the “Unborn Victims of Crime Act”, and they include statements about how the selfish, selfish feminists just want everything their way all the time, at least I can make sense of their arguments. They think women are asking for more money or unfair amounts of freedom or an unequal redistribution of wealth. They’re wrong, but I can see why they could imagine this cabal of feminists sitting in their ivory towers drumming their fingers and developing ways to strengthen the matriarchal stronghold on society, and I can respect that this feminist conspiracy at least appears to be made up of humans with standard human desires for power and money.

But those of us who apparently spend all our time inventing rape statistics and surveying women in order to convince them that they’ve been raped stand to gain…what exactly? I realize that people who write articles like this have never spoken to a flesh-and-blood feminist in their lives, but I’m beginning to wonder if they’ve ever even had a real conversation with a human being.

Betacandy was writing an article a while ago that included a reference to rape statistics and chose to use a conservative 1 in 8 estimate, rather than the oft-cited 1 in 4, which is a number that was reached independently by several reputable agencies, feminist and non-feminist alike (including Statistics Canada). Her strategy was to avoid getting sidetracked onto an argument about the statistical accuracy of the numbers when regardless of which is closer to the truth, those numbers are absolutely unacceptable. I’ve heard far too many women tell me their stories of rape and sexual abuse, not to mention the stories I have myself, and I never want to hear another one. Ever. I never want to have to. It does me absolutely no good to drum up statistics that only make the problem seem bigger and more hopeless and more universal and less worth fighting against.

Do they think feminists get paid on commission for the number of women we can get to disclose rape to us? What the hell kind of sense does any of this make?

If any one can provide an actual answer for what it is we are supposed to gain with this strategy, I’m all ears.

Brazen Sex-Positivity (aka “Not Being an Asshole”)

I’ve always hated dividing and subdividing political opinions and personalities and labeling everything to death as a kind of shorthand quick-reference way of understanding individuals and arguments (even though, having read my Lakoff, I know how natural it is…it’s still frustrating). As such, I haven’t really bothered to think of myself as “sex positive” or “anti-porn” or “third wave” or “post-wave” or whatever other intra-feminist label we want to work with. And as usual, this is really just kind of naive wishful thinking on my part.

I’m way late on writing this post, but as I mentioned, both me and my computer were in for repairs this week. But here’s the little corner of the “sex-pos” debate I came across last weekend, via Natalia Anatova:

• Renegade Evolution, a blogger who does sex work, wrote about a particularly aggressive incident of harassment that took place while she was stripping
• People can’t stop talking about it, and several “feminists” among them seem to want Ren Ev to basically admit that she deserved it and the whole thing is the fault of watered down Spice Girls sex-positive faux-feminism
• People I tend to read and respect (being newly extra-arrogant, I’ll just refer to them, for the sake of categorization, as “not assholes”) jumped in to say “whoa, this is some crazy-ass victim-blaming going on here”

So now what I’m doing is jumping in to say “Whoa, this is some crazy-ass victim-blaming going on here”.

And if that were the only anti-sex-work bullshit I had seen in recent days, maybe the little part of me that had died would have stayed smallish, but then there was this other story, right here in Hamilton, about a 25-year-old man accused of raping several sex trade workers.

This guy wants us all to know that he’s really a good person. Nothing like this will ever happen to him (yes, to him) again. Things happen…this was just totally out of his control. The whole problem was that he trusted that kind of person. If he had just managed to avoid ending up in a car with a crazy drugged-out prostitute (six times), none of this would be happening.

Hell, presumably if they had just managed to not be crazy drugged-out prostitutes in the first place, nobody would ever get raped at all.

it is one thing to be assaulted in the daily course of an ordinary life–and here I mean even a life that a guy would count as ordinary

Oh, except that it was the feminist who said that last part. The feminist who said that there’s a difference between one kind of rape and another, or rather, one kind of victim and another. Because why should we listen to that kind of person? Brazen. If by “brazen” we mean “A woman who thinks it’s her right to define exactly how sexual she is willing to be, with whom, and in what context”.

I found myself wondering which man Dana was going to enlist in order to define that ordinary life. Based on his soft-spoken interview with the Spec, I’m fairly sure Mr. Khairzad would have a certain viewpoint on the subject. Is it fair to pick the most heinous example I happen across in order to make this point? Not really, I guess. But again, in all my naiveté, I can’t fathom how someone can fail to recognize that making these arguments–that some women just “deserve” rape more, or sympathy less, or should expect to be assaulted, or are somehow complicit in their own assault by making sexuality a part of their every day lives–is on a continuum with saying “Poor me, I’m being accused of raping people who aren’t really people in the first place”, and at cross-purposes with anything, you know, empowering.

If this makes me a twittery sex-pos moron, well, hook me up. Hearing echoes of the words of rapists from the mouths of self-identified feminists is not on my list of ways to have a good time.

Numbers: Four and Thirteen

I’ve had a very difficult couple of weeks. The details are not really mine, so this will remain more cryptic than I normally am here, but I can’t write anything at all without writing something about this.

The numbers are four (years) and thirteen (victims).

Both are too small.

It would not be difficult for me to imagine a way in which this case has consumed four years of my psyche, my emotional energy, four years during which this has confined and limited and restricted me. And I’m not one of the thirteen.

Many of them could say that this has eaten away at, taken, absorbed, occupied, maybe even destroyed, but minimally, affected, four decades of their lives.

That number–thirteen–only counts the direct acts of violence. It doesn’t count the friends who were trusting him with their children and who are still reconciling themselves to that betrayal and their own sense of guilt. It doesn’t count the other children from the very, very small community, many of whom knew it was happening, but didn’t understand what it all meant, and so just did everything they could to have it not be them, and it doesn’t count the remorse they feel now that they understand what that meant for others. It doesn’t count the children of the thirteen and then some, who could never quite figure out why there was so much anger, so much dismissal of emotion, so much abuse in their homes. It doesn’t count the people who had to learn that someone in their family, someone they loved, is exactly the kind of monster they worried about from far-off TV news stories, whether he ever touched them/their children or not.

And it only counts the thirteen who were strong enough to speak. Who were strong enough to remember, over and over, and subject themselves to questioning, investigation, trial, judgment, side-taking and accusation. It doesn’t count the ones who have never, or have barely, admitted it.

I honestly don’t know what “justice” means. I don’t. I’m not confident I believe in a legal system based on the concept of punishment and retribution, because I know that my own desire to see others suffer, no matter the ways in which they’ve wronged me, has always caused me to suffer more in turn. I’ve often said I don’t even know what to think about heaven and hell and divine justice, because I genuinely don’t spend much time on the subject, but I’m confident I don’t want to think of my God as a punishing one. I wish that meant that the inadequacy of four years didn’t matter, but it doesn’t.

I want restoration and wholeness and grace and healing. I don’t want revenge or an increase in the net suffering of the universe. But I can’t make myself okay with “four” (and fewer because a pudgy 74 year old doesn’t cause that many problems in a cell).

The world is broken, and I’ve long known that. I know it above all else with respect to sexual violence and the complete lack of value we as a society place on preventing or punishing it. I’ve seen stories of judges dismissing the claims of victims, minimizing the pain of victims, blaming victims, putting victims on trial both literally and figuratively. I don’t hear a lot about the “success” stories like this one–there’s nothing so heinous about it that it would capture the righteous indignation of the blogosphere, there’s no gross and blatant misrepresentation of what happened and why it matters. The judge said all the right things about the effect on an entire community, a betrayal of trust and the suffering experienced by everyone sitting in that room.

And then she said “four years”, and I wasn’t prepared for that. I don’t know why, I just wasn’t. I wasn’t prepared for someone not to say anything horrifically wrong or completely misguided about sexual violence but to conclude nonetheless that four was a satisfactory number. On some level, I can understand–hate, but understand–the mentality that leads to victim-blaming and denial. I can’t understand a mentality that knows, but decides it’s not really that important. It’s only four years important.

Whether I agree with this system in terms of its functionality and philosophy or not, this is the one that assigns numbers and scales and gradations to what acts are more damaging than others, and it’s the one that we use to talk about what we as a society care about.

And these numbers are fucking fucked up.