Friday, June 10, 2016

... and it is June 2016 (part 1)

Hello mathgirls,

It is June.  I'm sad.  Lots of time has passed.  We are playing Final Fantasy XIII as a follow-on to Child of Light.  I wish two people could play.

I have something sad and serious to talk with you about: Brock Turner.

This is about violence.  You live in a world with it.  Your world has law because it is a world full of monsters that look like people.  Law isn't about making people good - it is about getting rid of the ones that show they are monsters.

A boy very badly hurt a girl.  It is a trauma-trigger for a lot of friends and family.  Without any consultation with me, and as part of being trauma-triggered, your mother told you about both sex and rape.  Mathgirl, you are still 7 for a little while.  I was not ready for this.

Brock Turner did not just harm the girl at Stanford, he harmed you.  He harmed your innocence.

Here are some internet links on the story:
I am going to have to teach you some things.  Fate, as it often does, has forced my hand.

One in six women in their lifetimes.  Every two minutes.  
 
I am going to teach you how to leave forensic evidence to prove you said no.  I get to talk you through a rape kit, dangit.  All the blood of all the men in the world can give testimony if someone tries to do the unclean. 
I am going to teach you how to avoid most of those situation.
I am going to see that you are taught about 200 ways to deeply harm or maim any piece of vomit that wants to mistreat you.  I'm house poor, paying two mortgages and not having very much fiscal flexibility.  I don't know if I can afford to put you in a class.  I don't know if I can afford not to.

Some say I should teach you to first flee.  While that is good in theory, it is the sequence that leaves you most vulnerable.  It gives you the least real power after the fact.  It also has the highest chance of making you a victim.  If you fail here, the war is lost. 

Some say I should teach you to break his nose first.  That makes you a tank, but most delays your chance to not have it happen ever.  It doesn't give the chance to be innocent yourself.  It doesn't give the chance to show he (or now s/he) is guilty in the end.  It gives you the power to do to them what they want to do to you - to do violence.  It also does not guarantee that you win in the end.  Fighting back against rapists has not stopped 1 of every 6 college girls from being a victim.

The order has to be - empowered in the end, empowered at the beginning, and empowered.  Rapists are very often repeat offenders.  The greatest service to femininity is going to focus on putting them in jail.  It will give you peace, and give others innocence.  If all women do it, then it gives the most women the best cases. If all people do it, then it gives the most non-perps the best cases.

This is for now.  The US is moving aggressively toward being a rape-dominant culture.  It can go in one summer from being anti-gay to pro-gay, but there is no will in the media and politicians to do good, only to attempt to harness the money and power of an alleged sexual revolution.  Pity.  I wish that our culture could move from being pro-rape to anti-rape. 

There will be more young-people sexually assaulted in the next 10 years than in the hippie revolution.  And if somebody else think there were no extraordinary amount of violence and harm done there then they were part of the problem and have not done science nor justice.  Child, I will strongly resist them getting you.  We can fend them off.  They are not yet strong enough, though they will abuse the surveillance state to proliferate their agenda, they do not own it yet.