Kirsti Clapsadle WGS 101 Megan Burke Friday at Noon Response Week 7 This weeks topic in class, intimate

relationship violence, has been extremely interesting to me. I have felt sadness, frustration, and infuriation during the readings, more so the first reading, Violence Against Women. Kirk and Okazawa-Rey bring up many valid and aggravating points on sexual abuse. The one that stood out to me the most was that children and adolescents, prostituted women, homeless women, women with mental disabilities, institutionalized women, very poor women, and women in neighborhoods with high crime rates are rarely included in surveys (Kirk 263). This is not only offensive and ridiculous, but it creates the illusion that their stories are not important or valid, and because many of those women also are disregarded by cops, the women have to suffer for their fictitious invalidity. Another annoyance to me (this one is more understandable, though, because of the difficulty of measuring) is the lack of acknowledgement for emotional abuse. This is a hard thing to measure because there is no physical evidence for proof, but that doesnt mean it is any less painful a thing to deal with than physical abuse. Physical abuse affects women by taking away their power, not just by causing physical pain. The pain that they suffer drives a fear within them that is nearly impossible to escape once it has buried itself within. People often suffer their entire lives even years after recovery from this type of event. Aurora Levins Morales tells about how she suffered most of her life from the effects of sexual abuse, in Radical Pleasure. Morales once considered herself a victim. While these memories have not escaped her, Morales realizes she is now a survivor. She has chosen to reclaim sex in order to fully heal (Morales 284). Morales demonstrates how not all survivors

are letting their horrible experiences weaken them, but have reclaimed their power and have begun to live their lives with the realization that they are who they are because of their experiences. It would be amazing to be able to take out all the negative experiences that the people in this world suffer, but as that is extremely unlikely, it is best to embrace the sufferings we have endured, and let them shape us to be better, stronger people. The men of Men Acting for Change (MAC), for example, have used the experiences of their own, and of people they know, to shape their view on feminism and violence against women, thus shaping their whole lives. These men are angry that other men have set a certain outline of what man should look like because it puts a fear in women. One interviewed member mentioned that he cannot walk behind a woman at night without her tensing, walking faster, and/or grabbing her keys in case of the need for self defense (Stolenberg 290). MACs movement is to let women reclaim their power and wipe away their fear. Something even more frightening than sexual violence is the disregard of women who experience it. In Alternative Interventions to Violence: Creative Interventions, Mimi Kim talks about how some people are ignored by police because of their race, ethnicity, age, social class, or sexual orientation. This creates the need for alternative interventions, but that shouldnt be the case! All people shouldnt be considered equalespecially in the eyes of the law, the people we call on when we need help. Kim also mentions that she embraced three key beliefs/principles of mainstream antiviolence movement in the U.S. and one surprised and frustrated me a bit: that change for perpetrators is unlikely and, more often than not, not worth the effort (Kim 291). This is so frustrating to me because when so many women are ignored, they either stay with their abusers and continue to suffer, or they leave the abuser. In the event that they leave the abuser, wouldnt it be right to think that the abuser would find another victim to beat? If

these perpetrators have little chance of changing, then the chance that they will stop abusing is not great. In The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World, there is a graph of how many women are abused and kept it to themselves, and another of how many women thought it was okay to abuse a women for specific reasons. The numbers themselves, while important, are not as important as the fact that they should be zero. No one should have to suffer any sort of violence and it is unreal that so many people do.