Trans women experience a high rate of sexual assault, and oftentimes discussion of it is swept away and never discussed in detail. Catharsis Project wants to change all that. They’re asking for women to come forward and tell their stories. Folks can be anonymous if they need to.
Here’s the link if you are interested: http://interpretivescreaming.tumblr.com/post/20419594897/catharsis-trans-womens-stories-of-sexual-violence
Ok, I’m a couple of weeks late to this party, but looking at the searching my readers are doing, y’all want an update to the horrendous story of that poor girl who was forced to apologize to her rapist down in Republic Missouri when her school refused to believe she was raped. So I wandered the web for a while, and here’s what I found.
The case has officially been settled. The settlement is sealed, and according to the News-Leader, the paper that covered it, they can’t get any confirmation about monetary payout despite sunshine laws. (Sunshine laws require government folks to disclose payouts).
Well, it looks like they’re going to try to keep it ALL under wraps. The News-Leader reporter is still on the trail, and the school district is hiding behind a court order that they say binds all the parties to complete secrecy in all pieces of the settlement. Read more about it here.
Personally, I don’t like it one bit. I totally understand the girl’s parents not wanting to subject her to more public humiliation and an open trial. After all, they have to live there, the rest of us don’t. But when it comes to the school…
I don’t think the school should be allowed to settle with a gag order for the whole thing. They humiliated this young woman, made her write an apology note and hand deliver it to her rapist. Then, because of their bad action, her life became the focus of national attention.
They should be made to stand up in front of a bank of microphones and read a public written apology to this young woman, her family, and the rest of the country for what they did. Every single person who was at all complicit in this whole situation should have to come forward, say their full name and address, and exactly what their role was.
Public shame should work in every direction when a group of people so blatantly contribute to rape culture.
The longer I’m alive in the United States, the less and less we seem to value women and girls. Men think they’re expendable, and now women get in on it by being complicit in lies, coverups, or even procuring victims.
I thought I had heard everything. But this story made me so sick I had to pass it along.
I first happened on it in a post by Boing Boing. A seventh grade special education student was expelled during the 08-09 school year. The reason? She reported being raped by a classmate. School officials didn’t believe her, and suspended her for filing a false report. When she was allowed to return to school the following year, she was provided with no protection from her alleged attacker. During that year, the harassment continued, leading up to another rape in the school library.
The girl was suspended again for, among other things, PUBLIC DISPLAY OF AFFECTION. The suspension came even after her mother took her for an exam, found evidence that a sexual assault had occured, and DNA matching the boy in question was recovered.
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