Take Action: "I Refuse to Be Raped."

The quote above is from a t-shirt worn by some women in the Congo as part of their effort to do something about rape and other violence against women in a place that that United Nations says has the worst sexual violence problem in the world.

The New York Times published a detailed report of actions people are taking in the Congo, including stepped up prosecution of rapists, grassroots organizing, and groups working with rape victims. The American Bar Association has a project to help prosecutions, and playwright Eve Ensler is organizing victim services and has formed an organization called City of Joy.

This is a good example of the kind of multilayered approach needed in dealing with violence against women. Rape should not be tolerated; rapists should be prosecuted. Women need to learn how to protect themselves and must speak out. And others need to provide services to those who are harmed. No one thing solves all problems.

Get the Facts: Gender Affects Crime

Ongoing gender inequity in our society affects your risk from crime.

Over on the Burnt Orange Report, liberaltexan, who I believe is male, has an interesting post on male privilege.

Among the things he points out: Women are significantly more at risk from rape and sexual harassment than men are.

Certainly that means that we need to work together to change those numbers, but while we're doing that, individual women need to be aware of their risk and take steps to protect themselves. As I've pointed out before on this blog, the biggest rape danger to women is not from strangers -- even though that's our worst fear -- but from acquaintances.

Sexual harassment is in some ways a trickier situation, because while it includes many annoying but not dangerous actions, it can affect your career. To protect yourself, you must learn how to make a firm response when something happens -- most sexual harassment policies require that the victim let the attacker know that he was out of line. And you must decide when it's necessary to report an action and take further steps.

But before someone starts raving about how men are victimized by sexual harassment (Don't get confused by the movies, guys: as a fiction writer, I can tell you that all those stories of women harassing men are done because role reversal is more fun to write), let me point out one way in which that gender inequality comes back to haunt men:

Men are at much greater risk from homicide than women.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, 79 percent of murder victims in 2006 were male. In fact, the BJS says men were at greater risk for all kinds of violent crime except rape and sexual assault.

Men are often too cavalier about taking care of themselves, assuming that their strength and gender protect them. They, too, need to pay attention and learn the facts.

Work Together: Indian Tribes Should Be Able to Prosecute Non-Indians

As a general rule, women are at the greatest risk of rape and sexual assault from men of their own race or ethnicity. A Bureau of Justice Statistics report (pdf) from the late 1990s estimates 88 percent of sexual assaults are committed by someone who is the same race as the victim.

But according to a recent New York Times op-ed, that rule of thumb doesn't apply to Native American women, particularly those who live on reservations. More than 80 percent of Native American women who are attacked say that the rapist was not Indian, law professor N. Bruce Duthu said in the article.

Duthu also cited Justice Department statistics saying one in three Native American women will be raped in their lifetimes. Rape is a serious problem in Indian Country. You can read the transcript or listen to this report that played on NPR last year to get some idea of the scope of the problem.

And here's the other shoe: Under federal law Indian tribes can't prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on the reservation. In practical terms, that means a non-Indian who commits a crime on an Indian reservation only gets prosecuted if someone can convince a state or federal prosecutor to take action -- something that doesn't happen often, especially in run-of-the mill cases.

Back in the 1970s, when I spent a summer on the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota, I heard of criminal acts by whites living on the reservations -- acts that went unpunished because the Sioux Nation had no jurisdiction over them. It was obvious then that some white people were deliberately taking advantage of the fact that they were immune from prosecution in the tribal courts. Since that time, according to Duthu, the Supreme Court has upheld the limited jurisdiction of Indian courts.

Congress needs to act now to change this law; it's way overdue. Indian tribes should have the same right to enforce their laws in their territory as any other political subdivision in the country. As long as their authority is limited, Native American women will be targets.

Learn to Fight -- But Not From Bad Videos

According to the Dallas Morning News, there's an armed serial rapist attacking women in the greater Dallas area. In what I'm sure is an effort to help women deal with this threat, the newspaper posted a video giving advice from a police officer and a couple of self defense experts. (Note: the video plays with Flash or the Windows Media player -- it doesn't work with Quicktime.)

Unfortunately, the advice on the video is all but useless to an untrained person. In the first technique, a woman is trapped under a man who is trying to undo his pants. The video shows how she twists her hips to get loose, and then kicks the man.

While this is a good ground technique -- often taught in the Impact and Model Mugging classes -- it's not something you can pick up watching a video. For one thing, you need to learn how to stay calm throughout an attack so that you can identify those moments when an attacker -- even an armed attacker -- is vulnerable. Responding at the wrong time can be dangerous, but if you're calm and relaxed, you will see a good opening.

Secondly, it's not the first technique taught in self defense classes. You work up to material like this. Further, it's useful to practice it in a safe class setting before trying this kind of move. You need to let your body learn that it can do this kind of move before trying it for real.

But what really worried me is that the video contained a couple of scenes showing defense against a gun. Again, these are legitimate techniques, but they're not techniques for beginners. The first one involves moving inside against an armed attacker; the second showed a similar defense when the gun is held at your back.

I might try either of these moves, if I sensed an opening or felt like the attacker was going to kill me regardless -- if you're calm, you'll be aware of these things. But I've spent 20 years in Aikido learning how to enter against an attack. In my experience, most beginners don't do this right immediately.

Not only do I think this video showed techniques that are too advanced, I also think it picked ones that are too intimidating. I would guess -- and I'd love to have readers look at the video and share their own reactions -- that most people would look at these techniques as shown and immediately say "I could never do that."

That's not true -- most people can do these things. But they need to learn them gradually, not be confronted with the scariest techniques right off the bat.

I grant it's better that the police are acknowledging that women can defend themselves. It wasn't very long ago that the standard police response to rape attacks was for women just to go along and not try to do anything.

But I don't think this video is going to help anyone who hasn't had any training. I suggest women look for a good self defense class instead. I'll be providing more links to upcoming classes soon and I'd be glad to post links to training available in the Dallas area specifically, if teachers will send me information.

Protect Yourself: Hide From Men or Learn to Fight?

Mexico City has established women-only buses to protect women from gropers. This isn't a new idea -- in a comment posted to the Ambling Along the Aqueduct post on the subject, Vandana Singh notes that New Delhi ran a few such buses when she was growing up. And I've heard of them in other countries as well.

This doesn't strike me as much of a solution. As Jessica Valenti observes in The Nation, "I'm all for safe spaces for women, but is segregation really an answer to sexism?"

Singh noted in her comment that getting on the woman-only bus was always a relief, which I can certainly understand: When I was in law school, we had a women's lounge -- a restroom that included a large area with couches, comfy chairs, and tables -- and it was always a relief to hole up there to study. We weren't hiding from gropers (though there may have been a few), but from the pressure of continually fitting into what was decidedly a male-dominated world -- our class was about 10 percent women.

A recent study highlights the fact that women are still in a double bind when dealing in the world: do things the way men do, and you're labeled unfeminine; do them in a more feminine style, and you're too soft. Just ask Hillary Clinton. So the occasional respite into a woman-only world does provide some relief.

But protecting women by segregating them from men leads to protecting them by keeping them out of some professions and public spaces. It reinforces the idea that women are helpless. And it limits the lives of the victim of abusive behavior, instead of stopping the abuse.

Besides, the bus isn't the only place where women get harassed. The Washington Post reports that a man -- or perhaps, judging by the varied descriptions, several men -- has been been attacking women in Northern Virginia. The police haven't caught anyone, and women are responding by taking cabs and giving up walking. Of course, cabs are expensive and walking is good exercise, so fear is taking a large toll on these women's lives.

I haven't noticed any cities declaring streets off-limits for men.

Judging from the description of the attacks, I suspect most women could fight this particular attacker off if they had a little training. He's apparently not using a weapon. But the article doesn't even mention learning how to fight as a solution to such attacks. It's not the only answer, of course -- good lighting, regular police patrols, and a societal decision to take such attacks more seriously can all improve safety.

But women can learn enough to protect themselves from such attacks, just as they can develop skills to deal with gropers on the buses. In Singh's comment, she noted that she developed a tough style when riding on mixed buses in New Delhi (though she found it a relief when she didn't have to do that). Making a scene is also a reasonable response.

Women taking action to protect themselves, whether from gropers or rapists, will eventually provide more safety than token respite on public transportation. After all, as the Valenti article notes in a quote from Katha Pollitt:

Obviously, there would never be enough women-only space to accommodate all women all the time - half the subway cars or half the hotels …Women-only space is just a little breathing place for a few women every now and then.

Get the Facts: Who Should You Fear?

There's a bogeyman who's been used to scare women going back throughout recorded history: The stranger who jumps out of the bushes or breaks into their houses and rapes them.

Sure, women are also frightened of being murdered or mugged and robbed, but fear of rape by a stranger is why people say women shouldn't go out alone and counsel them to put triple locks on their doors and bars on their windows.

And it happens: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (link to PDF file on that page), there were 203,680 rapes and sexual assaults in the United States in 2004, and 64,040 of those attacks were committed by strangers.

Now 64,040 is a significant number of attacks, especially if you think about the amount of pain and suffering each of those victims experienced. Rape attacks by strangers are not something to be ignored.

But still, they amount to 31 percent of all reported rapes and sexual assaults, which means 69 percent of those crimes are being committed by someone the victim knows. Using the BJS statistics, that's 136,550 rapes and sexual attacks.

Now many people jump to the conclusion that the other attacks are by intimate partners and relatives of various descriptions, and those attacks certainly happen. Intimate partners were responsible for 17 percent of rapes (35,340) in 2004, and other relatives accounted for another 3 percent, or 5,600.

But that still leaves a large gap, not counting the 2 percent of rapes in which the statisticians couldn't figure out the relationship of the attacker to the victim. It turns out that 47 percent of sexual assaults in 2004 -- 95,610 attacks -- were committed by people the BJS labels as "friend/acquaintance."

Now before every woman reading this starts worrying about her co-workers, neighbors and the guy they always speak to on the bus to work, let's look at this a bit. We don't have a study to back this up, but I would guess -- based on the ideas in Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear -- that in many of these cases, the women who were attacked at one point or another had a bad feeling about these so called friends and acquaintances. But they didn't act on those instincts, out of politeness or self doubt.

After all, women are raised to be polite, even to creeps, and "women's intuition" is still considered a good joke, in spite of scientific studies showing its value.

But the easiest way to protect yourself against an attack by people you know is to trust your instincts. If you don't like someone -- and particularly if he gives you the creeps in some way -- avoid being alone with him. Don't take a ride with him to avoid hurting his feelings. Don't let him walk you to your car. Don't go party with him and his friends. Avoid him. And don't worry about it if people make fun of your "female intuition."

By the way, many people think rape is an underreported crime, and that's probably true. Intimate and family rapes present particularly sticky issues, and data on those may be inaccurate. Friend/acquaintance rape may also be underreported, especially when the woman thinks she's done something foolish. I wouldn't take the overall number of rapes as a completely accurate assessment.

But I'd speculate that the stranger rape statistics are pretty accurate, because that crime is the one most likely to be reported. If the rape incidence is higher, then the number of stranger rapes is an even lower percentage of the crimes. It's important for all of us to recognize that the crime we all fear the most is not the most prevalent type of rape.

Everyone should take reasonable precautions to avoid stranger rape -- including paying attention and picking up some basic fighting skills. (Rapists tend to prey on people they think won't fight back, so a swift kick can often give you time to run.)

But here's the bottom line: Don't worry so much about stranger attacks that you let a guy who gives you the creeps walk you to your car.

Survival: The First Rule of Self Defense

Today's Washington Post has a frightening story about a woman who was abducted at gunpoint, driven around town, robbed, and raped.

But there's good news here: The woman survived and she remembered crucial facts about her attackers, facts that enabled a good police officer to find and arrest them.

According to The Post story, one of the attackers told the woman that his mother had just died and that they were going to bury her the next day. Prince George's County (Maryland) Detective Sherry Prince jumped on that fact, and, because she knew the area, called the right funeral home. The man was arrested after the funeral.

This is, of course, the kind of attack women worry about the most: Being grabbed by strangers out of the blue. And this one took place at 8:50 in the morning, near a subway stop -- a time and place most of us tend to feel safe.

There are many factors we don't know -- were other people around, were the men hiding, did the woman dismiss any bad feeling she had about them because it was morning and they were young guys? But here's one important thing we can glean from the newspaper story: The woman who was attacked kept her head the whole time. Note these facts:

• She was able to give the police a thorough description of the rapists.
• When the man told her about the funeral -- the kind of detail that people aren't likely to make up -- she paid attention and remembered to tell the police.
• And -- perhaps most important -- she figured out how to go along with the attackers so that they did let her go.
  

That last point is important. We don't know how she did that, and perhaps she doesn't know either. Maybe she could just tell that these men weren't killers and likely wouldn't cross that line unless she did something to make them think she was a threat. Maybe she did something that allowed them to think she was having a good time, so that it never occurred to them that she would go to the police.

What I am sure of is that she figured out how to survive. And that's the bottom line. Rape is a horrible crime; armed robbery is terrifying. But surviving it -- and not just surviving it, but coming away with enough information to get the attackers arrested -- that's a victory.

Remember, the core principles of self defense apply even if you're in a terrible situation, such as this woman was. If you've been abducted, you really have to stay calm, pay attention, be flexible, and trust your instincts: You're sizing up the attackers and watching for opportunity. You may really want to spit in the face of the man who's hurting you, but if your instinct tells you he'll let you go if you pretend he's a nice guy, follow your instinct.

And always remember: It's not the victim's fault. If you're attacked, it may be important for your future self protection to figure out what -- if anything -- you could have done to prevent it, but even if you find something you could have done better, the attack was not your fault.

A criminal attack is always the fault of the attacker. The purpose of self defense is to limit your vulnerability to criminals, not to make you responsible for their bad actions.

Get the Facts: Rape, the Crime Every Woman Fears

In discussions of women's safety and self defense, rape is always on everyone's mind, whether it's discussed openly or not.

Rape is what people mean when they say it isn't safe for women to go out alone at night. When universities and businesses set up escort programs for women, they do it to prevent rapes. While armed robbery and other kinds of assault may also be a problem -- and a danger to both men and women -- an unarmed escort is no real protection against that.

The most frightening thing about rape is that it can happen anywhere and anytime. It doesn't just happen to women who walk down dark alleys late at night and it isn't always committed by strangers who jump out of bushes. In fact, date rape and other attacks by acquaintances are not uncommon.

Recently The New York Times City Room blog wrote about a phenomenon called "gray rape." They were following up a report in Cosmopolitan by Laura Sessions Stepp. According to the articles, gray rape is:

sex that falls somewhere between consent and denial and is even more confusing than date rape because often both parties are unsure of who wanted what.

Though I respect the work of Sessions Stepp and am interested in the ideas presented by experts in the Times piece, I think these people are finding more complexity than actually exists. Basically, if one person -- and it's usually the woman -- doesn't want to have sex, it's rape.

• If you're too drunk to consent, it's rape.
• If you were physically coerced, it's rape.
• If you were threatened, it's rape.
• If you were manipulated by someone who plays head games, it's rape.

Now it may not be possible to prosecute the rapist in all those circumstances. Even threat and physical coercion may be hard to prove, and when people are drunk, it is hard to find the facts. In the case of someone who manipulates others with complex head games, it may not only be impossible to prove rape, it may take the person who was attacked some time and reflection to even realize what happened. But that doesn't mean these situations aren't rape.

Fortunately, you can protect yourself from most date rape situations:

• Trust your instincts: This is probably the most important rule. Do not end up alone with anyone who gives you the creeps.
• Drink responsibly: I'm not going to lecture anyone about getting drunk -- I've been known to do it myself -- but learn to stop before you get so blasted you don't know what you're doing. And if you're unwinding after a particularly stressful week, do so with people you trust.
• Say "NO!": If you don't want to have sex, don't be quiet about it. Make it clear. Don't just go along because you're afraid the guy will call you names or damage your reputation.
• Learn to fight: If you know a few fighting skills, you can get away from a date rapist just as you can from a stranger.
• Be creative: The lore of self defense abounds with stories of women picking their noses or doing other things that can change the circumstances. If you're calm, you'll be able to come up with some ideas.

By the way, in the Times report one expert said rape is among the crimes least likely to generate a false report, while another said 9 to 10 percent of acquaintance rape reports are false, even though date rape and its cousins are underreported in general. Those facts may not actually be contradictory, but they need investigating. I'll let you know what I find out.