Why 12 Steps Make Me Cranky

There was an article today on cnn.com about a man who was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment today for a rape he committed in 1984. The rape occurred in Virginia which has no statute of limitations on felony prosecutions. The main piece of evidence against him? His letter he wrote in 2005 confessing/apologizing to the victim as step 9 of his alcohol treatment program. Apparently he wrote her a letter, which led to an email exchange in which he stated "I want to make clear that I'm not intentionally minimizing the fact of having raped you. I did." Step 9 involves making amends to those you have harmed, although not when doing so would cause further harm. And that, I guess is the rub, I am not sure as a group I think people recovering from an addiction are in a particularly good place to make that determination. This guy is a great example. He apparently thought that making contact out of nowhere with the woman he raped over twenty years ago would not be harmful to her. According to the article she has since forgiven him (although she did support the prosecution). But forgiving him and wanting the contact in the first place are not the same thing. I am glad that he is taking accountability for his actions and that from the account he has gone on to help others, but I guess I agree with the prosecutor that the letter was a selfish act, this was about his own need for absolution not about her or her feelings or needs. I am not sure what the right answer is for a rapist who sincerely wants to make amends but I don't think unsolicited contact with the person they victimized is the answer.

Georgia Makes History

Living in Minnesota and working on violence against women, I oscillate between being mainly incredibly grateful about the long and rich tradition that has come before me and the work that amazing trail blazers fought through to bring us to where we are today and being a tad envious or maybe wistful about what those early days must have been like. As many young feminist activists will tell you as amazingly grateful and full of admiration as we are of the pioneers in our field it does sometimes get discouraging to constantly be told oh you think that is bad you should have been around when... I am lucky to mainly work with and around women who are very supportive of my generation, but in some sense there is a feeling that the exciting action is over. The movement has important battles yet to be fought but we are never going back to having shelters in our houses or meetings without any funding or any belief that we will be taken seriously (which is a good thing). I am glad, beyond glad, that we have some of the best laws in the world on domestic violence in Minnesota. Minnesota's history as a pioneer on this issue is something to be proud of but there is something about being in from the ground floor.

Well, today we had an amazing ground floor moment here in Georgia! Georgia passed a domestic violence law in July of this year. It is modeled loosely on our law and on the Austrian model. It creates an order for protection remedy for victims of domestic violence. Our law, the second in the country, was passed in 1979 (the year I was born). Despite its passage several months ago, what we were told when we arrived is that no one is using it, there have been no orders, etc. WELL, on Sunday we attended the court hearing for the very first protective order in Georgia. The protection sought was just an order to not engage in further physical or verbal abuse. There was no request of no contact and the petitioner and respondent didn't live together so occupancy was not an issue. The case was actually between an adult daughter and her father. She alleged physical and verbal abuse. The father admitted one incident of physical abuse but denied a pattern. Under the law, one incident is enough and the judge could have ended the matter there with that admission but she let the hearing continue. The hearing lasted for well over an hour. The judge took a brief recess and then granted the order. On the whole the judge did a good job, especially for the first time! There were somethings I wish had been handled differently for example there was an underlying property dispute between the two and although she did tell the father to take it to civil court if he had a problem and not use violence she still allowed a great deal of the time and the focus of the hearing to be on the property and not on the central issues of the violence and the woman's safety. After the hearing we learned that two more cases were scheduled for later in the week and we have heard of more being filed. Ahh, the ground floor!

-A. Monkey

Blog Against Sexism Day

"Pregnant rape victims are essentially assaulted twice," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "First by the perpetrators who raped them, and then by officials who ignore them, insult them and deny them a legal abortion."

Ken Roth is referring to rape victims in Mexico although the way things seem to be headed, give it a year or two and it could just as easily be South Dakota, Tennessee or Alabama.

Human Rights Watch has just released a report, "The Second Assault: Obstructing Access to Legal Abortion after Rape in Mexico," documenting the obstacles faced by rape victims trying to get an abortion in Mexico. In Mexico, legal abortions are only available to rape victims and only to victims who have reported the assault. Due to shame, fear, trauma, humiliation and the rest of the multitude of other reasons rape victims do not report many women are being forced to carry to term the child of their rapist. As utterly abhorrent as that is, the report found that even when victims do come forward and report they are still effectively denied access to abortions through shaming, delays and outright refusals.

"Lidia Muñoz," a 25-year-old rape victim, was intimidated by medical personnel in a public hospital in Mexico City in 2005. An NGO representative who was present gave the following account:

When she got the authorization and went to the hospital to have the [abortion] done, the doctor in charge of her care said to her: ‘We are going to have many problems, because we are going to have to do a death certificate [for the aborted fetus]. You are going to have to bring a hearse, [and] to buy a coffin to take away the body, because we can’t have the body here.’

"Marta Espinosa," a 12-year-old pregnant rape victim in Yucatán was passed from one state agency to another when she tried to obtain a legal abortion. A social worker who physically accompanied her said:

It was a 12-year-old girl, she came from the rural part of the state.... The first doctor had seen her [when she was only] one month pregnant.... The next clinic at eight weeks.... When she came to Mérida [the capital of Yucatán], she was 12 weeks pregnant.... I went to social security, I went to [the public hospital]. I went to the offices of those in charge.... Everyone turned their back. They said: ‘It is not possible.’ I brought the article [of the state penal code] where it says that [abortion after rape] is within the provisions.... In the Family Services agency [where I worked] they wanted her to have the child by any means.... They said to me that she was many months pregnant now, and I said: ‘That’s because many months have gone by while you tell me no.’ (The authorities did not authorize a legal abortion.)

Read the report. I have been reading a lot lately about abortion and choice and the various legal maneuvering going on and I keep intending to write but losing the words. The abortion debate makes me sad and frustrated. Abortion makes me sad. I am pro-choice. I am strongly pro-choice. But I can’t get away from the fact that abortion makes me sad. I am pro-choice because we live in a world that is violent toward women. Rape, domestic violence, trafficking all play in when talking about abortion. Beyond pregnancies resulting out of violence or occurring within violent relationships, our societal framework, that encourages absenteeism amongst fathers, that shames women into carrying pregnancies to term and then shames them for needing assistance, that creates hurdles to access to contraceptives, that is no where near reaching gender equality, necessitates having abortion as a safe and legal option. I think that if we could get to a place where on a societal level we truly supported the children that are born, where men and women bore an equal share of the burden of raising children, where there was no rape or domestic violence, or sexual exploitation, where there was readily available contraceptives, where there was gender equality…then maybe we could start having the discussion about what place abortion has in our society. I don’t know if my position would change or not, but I am all for getting to the place where we could find out.

Today is International Women’s Day and it is also “blog against sexism day.” So here is my plea – let’s learn from Mexico instead of rushing to join them. Let’s table all the restrictive anti-abortion legislation and take all that energy and all that money and address the violence and the social inequalities that make abortion a necessary option first.

-A. Monkey

International Women's Day 2006

Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights and
the Human Rights Program at the University of Minnesota

present

The 11th Annual International Women's Day Celebration

Education • Resources • Advocacy • Activism • Community • Networking • Celebration!


Saturday, March 4, 2006
8:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota
Free and Open to the Public
Keynote Speaker:

Naomi Tutu

Plenary Panel:

Susana de Leon, Peggy Flanagan,
Farheen Hakeem, Pakou Hang,
Nyango Melissa Nambangi


Panels and workshops, performances, film, and display and information tables from over 60 co-sponsoring organizations

If you will be in Minnesota on the 4th, this is set to be an amazing event. For those outside MN, there are celebrations around the world: to see a collection of worldwide IWD events, click