I was nearly unconscious by the time we arrived at the emergency room & they came to the car to take me in. Fortunately, the police said he was driving suspiciously and had followed him to the hospital and arrested him there after I told them that he had done it. It was a long and drawn-out legal process, but he did ten years. He never once apologized, but rather said it was my fault for trying to break up the family.

By the grace of God, it is now over fifteen years and I’ve come out of the ordeal with only a hernia (that is tolerable), scar (I’ll never wear a bikini), and a LOT OF MEMORIES.

Thank you.

by matttbastard
 ”We call these people ‘missing women’ – Aboriginal women are missing in so many ways in our society. … I really believe there are aspects of society that have to change so that things like this, in the best cas…

I know most of you do not live in Philadelphia . However, I’m sure there at least some of you who know folks who live and/or work in Philadelphia . If you do, please spread the word and encourage folks to attend the press conference and equally if not more importantly encourage folks to voice their opinions at the polls, in Philadelphia , on Tuesday, November 6, 2007.

THE FOLLOWING IS BEYOND OUTRAGEOUS and Judge Teres Carr Deni should not be allowed to serve another day in court.

In Struggle,
Aishah

************ ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********

PRESS CONFERENCE

Thursday November 1, 2007

1pm

Outside Municipal Court ( Criminal Justice Center )

1301 Filbert St , Philadelphia

Monday October 29, 2007

To the Editor:

We were appalled to learn that on Oct 4 Municipal Judge Teresa Carr Deni dropped all rape and assault charges in the case of a woman gang-raped at gunpoint. Because the woman was working as a prostitute, Judge Deni decided that she could not have been raped and changed the charge to “theft of services.” Deni later said that this case “minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.”

As groups organizing against rape and in support of victims, we could not disagree more. All women have the right to protection from violence. The idea that any woman is “asking for it” is a lie that we fought for decades to destroy. It is especially offensive to see it revived by a female judge, who reached her position as a result of the women’s movement and is now using her power to deny justice to the most vulnerable women.

Deni told Daily News columnist Jill Porter that the victim met another client before reporting the rape. We have learned that this is completely untrue; the transcript of the hearing proves it. For a judge to make a false (and self-serving) accusation against a victim in the press, in addition to her prejudiced and reckless contempt for women’s safety, confirms that she is unfit to serve. The outcry following Deni’s decision shows how out of step with public opinion she is and that most people believe that prostitute women deserve the same protection from violence that we all have a right to expect.

No woman is safe when prostitute women aren’t safe. Serial rapi sts and murderers often target prostitute women knowing that they are more likely to get away with it. Labeled criminals by the prostitution laws, women are less likely to report violence for fear of arrest themselves. When sex workers do report, the violence is often dismissed. Here, the same man and his friends gang-raped another woman four days later. Decisions like Deni’s are a green light for further attacks.

The victim in this case was a Black single mother with a young child. In Philadelphia , where one in four people lives in poverty and welfare has been almost completely dismantled, many women have been forced into prostitution to survive. This should not make them fair game for rapi sts .

We are glad that the District Attorney is pursuing the original rape charges. The public can make our voices heard in the November 6 election: vote “No” on the retention of Teresa Carr Deni as Judge of the Municipal Court of Philadelphia.

Mary Kalyna

On behalf of

Global Women’s Strike

Philadelphia , PA

and

Women Against Rape

US PROStitutes Collective

Black Women’s Rape Action Project (BWRAP)

Legal Action for Women

Every Mother is a Working Mother Network

Wages Due Lesbians

Payday Men’s Network

To Be Re(a)d: Document

from http://brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com/

Today, Wednesday October 31st 2007 women of color and allies around the country are wearing red as part of a collective healing and revealing process in response to sexual violence against women of color. This collective red is meant to be antidote to shame, a warning sign to those would continue to blame women of color for the outrageous abuses that our society condones against us. This collective red is meant to fill in the missing frame of the black and white of Jena. This red is an invocation of gendered wounds and demands that we remember what Ida B. Wells told us, which is that the lynching of black men and women and the rape of black women and men are twin tools of the same repression. And blood is red.

In 1973, when Toni Morrison published her second novel Sula, she changed black feminist literary criticism forever. In fact, I like to day that black feminists created black feminist literary criticism to deal with Sula, the character and the text. In partnership with her first novel The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s Sula does more than insert black female characters into a literary scene that had ignored and caricaturized them. With these two novels Morrison insists that the very form of the novel must bend and bow and breathe and move to witness the experiences of black women and girls. The Bluest Eye could have been the first contemporary black female bildungsroman (coming of age story), except that Pecola, the main character (but not necessarily the protagonist) never grows up. Incestuous rape and violent racism shatter anything that would dare look like growth in that novel. Even the flowers. One could argue that in The Bluest Eye white supremacy (in the voice of the falling apart Dick and Jane reading primers) is the protagonist, and Pecola herself is the antagonist, criminalized for a small attempt at existence and vanguished by the pervasive triumph of racism, as patriarchalism, as capitalism and the death of a soul, the splitting of a mind. The Bluest Eye is Morrison’s first major study of what it means to be re(a)d. What happens when we are excluded from the very language we learn to read in? What are the dreadful consequences of an agreed upon social reading of black girls that spells us “worthless”?

Sula could have been the first contemporary black female bildungsroman, except that whereas The Bluest Eye leaves the main character with a split mind, witnessed by the black girls who survive, Sula is an intersubjective novel with two protagonists that cannot exist without each other, Sula and Nel grow apart, but the love between girls is the miracle, hope and home of this novel (a theme Morrison will return to in her most recent novel Love).

Sula arrived well placed in time to become the catalyst that it was and is for black feminist literary criticism. The book was published right when the first black women’s lit courses were being taught in newly formed Black Studies and Women’s Studies programs in colleges in the NorthEast. The two foundational texts of black feminist literary studies, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics and the Black Women Writer’s Literary Tradition” and Barbara Smith’s “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism” both read Sula as their primary text and as an instance through which to imagine what black feminist literary criticism could be. Even though Morrison wouldn’t achieve national recognition until she “manned” up…or won the National Book of the Month Club selection for Song of Solomon (a radical and beautiful and rich book in it’s own rite), Sula was the book black feminists clung to. Audre Lorde mentions in an interview that she doesn’t care that it was Song of Solomon that Morrison won the award for…it is Sula that “lit me up like a Christmas tree”.

And indeed one of the topics we can discuss is why Morrison gained national recognition once she wrote a novel that centered around a black man. It might be helpful to realize that when Morrison won the National Book of the Month Club selection she became the first African-American writer since Richard Wright to do so.

The passages that cause black feminists to canonize Sula are the passages about mutual self invention that occur between Sula and Nel. The most cited passage is the one where the narrator explains the destined friendship of the two girls noting that “having long ago realized they were neither white nor male…they went about creating something else to be.” This is a proposition as far reaching as to appear in Afro-Scottish Maud Sulter’s description of a art exhibit she curated in England and as long lasting as to reappear as the “different sort of subject” that Hortense Spillers asks for in her 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”. The two other moments of the text that black feminists theorists drew in the sky are Sula’s insistence when her grandmother suggests she should settle down and have some babies that “I don’t want to make someone else. I want to make myself.” This challenge to motherhood completes the critique of heteropatriarchy that allows Barbara Smith to claim Sula as a “lesbian” text alongside the books final revelation that the loss of a husband is nothing compared with the loss of a girl friend. And the book ends with the word that has framed all of my days. Girl, girl, girl, girl, girl.

Spiraling out into this moment the desperation in that one world, girl speaks the prayer to the only thing that I believe can save us, and that is the love between women and girls of color that fills us with the bravery to make a new world language. When the Irish boys in the novel attempt to attack Nel and Sula, with designs on sexual abuse, Sula cuts of the tip of her finger…shifting the boys’ reading of her from prey to predator. Re(a)d is the color of threat. Is the color of blood, of nothing to lose, of everything born to be remade.

So today as I dress myself in re(a)d on behalf of my sisters and my own survival take me as a sign.

I wear red for my aunt who was struck dead by her abusive boyfriend. I wear red for my cousins who have been victims of sexual abuse.

Lastly, I wear red and I encourage others to wear red for me, who is a survivor of sexual abuse. I have not been silent about my experienes, so I wear red to give others the space to be vocal about their experiences.

Many of you have heard of the young African-American sister who was held captive and brutally tortured and raped by six white assailants for a month in West Virginia. While this crime was shocking, it is only one of many unspeakable recent acts of violence toward Women of Color across the country.

In response, Women of Color are launching a campaign called “Be Red Be Bold Wear Red on October 31st Campaign.”

As an API woman, I am appealing to other APIs and encouraging us all to learn about these cases and to participate in the Wear Red Campaign. We know that sexual assault affects our communities. Asian women have been targeted in sexual assaults because of their race, have been trafficked, abused, and exploited because of their nationality and/or immigration status, and we know of many cases of American and European pedophiles and sex criminals vacationing in or fleeing to Asia.

We’re all part of the same communities as oppressed people and People of Color. The young sister in West Virginia is just one of the more high profile victims from our communities this year; even so, the mainstream media has given the epidemic of violence toward women in our communities short treatment. It is the sad truth that we cannot look toward the mainstream to support us during difficult times.

We have to show support for each other. We owe it to ourselves, our communities, and each other, and that is why I hope you will participate. Please read on for more information.

Sopheak
National Organization of Sisters of Color Ending