People! Enough With the Tentacle Hentai!!!

I'm probably going to have to take yesterday's entry down soon. The last thing I need is Mitt Romney the Mormon Church putting a hit out on me.

I couldn't sleep and so at 3:42 I decided I may as well work on my Soci class' Internet Assignment. Here it is, because, you know, I get all these freaking Google hits on tentacle hentai and maybe it would be more useful if I got hits from people trying to end violence against women. I need to rework some awkward sentences, but here's my draft...

Internet Assignment Three

Circe Smith

 

For this assignment, I chose Chapter 9 and the United State Department of Justice's Office of Violence Against Women <http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/vawo/>.

 

In Thinking About Women, Chapter 9 states, "Explanations of violence against women have usually suggested that its cause lies within the personalities and social backgrounds of individuals who commit violence, but the empirical data on women as victims indicates that the cause of violence lies not in the characteristics of offenders but in the social status of their victims. This is not to say that women are responsible for the violence committed against them. Quite the opposite; it locates the causes of violence within the political and economic status of women in society" (Anderson, M. 279).

 

Women are the victims of crimes because they are women in a society consistently marginalizing and devaluing them on the basis of their gender. Women are victims because of the imbalance of power between the sexes. In nearly all global societies, the inferior status attached to women results in injury, intimidation, physical and emotional abuse towards women based solely upon the fact that they are women and as such deemed inferior. When you hold a group of people as substandard, as lesser, you implicitly consent to violence against this group. When women are targeted as a group based on their sex, this is a hate crime. The Department of Justice, tacitly aware of this fact, has created a division and a website to specifically address violence against women.

"The mission of the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) is to provide federal leadership to reduce violence against women, and to administer justice for and strengthen services to all victims of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. This is accomplished by developing and supporting the capacity of state, local, tribal, and non-profit entities involved in responding to violence against women" < http://www.ovw.usdoj.gov/mission.htm>

The site contains information and resources relating to many areas in which women are exposed to violence. This includes stalking, domestic violence, and sexual assault. Phone numbers are provided as well as the definitions of these acts of criminal violence. There are referrals to publications and research regarding violence against women. Addressing the high rate of violence against Native American women, there is a section called Safety for Indian Women.

I was particularly interested to find information pertaining to the Violence Against Women Act which was enacted to better prosecute offenders, help victims, and ultimately to halt the trend in violence perpetuated against women. Prior to this act of 1994, crime and violence against women were as trivialized, as marginalized, as women were themselves. This act officially recognized that crime against women is an issue of overwhelming significance within our US justice system. My two daughters were born in 1994, one in January of 1994 and the other in December; I think it is significant that I can raise them to be strong, empowered women, their birth year marking the enactment of the Violence Against Women Act.

Reading Chapter 9 and visiting the OVM site, I wonder what it means to live in a  world where slightly more than half our population is female and this percentage of the population is so routinely victimized that the United states must enact legislation in an attempt to deal with this violence.

While women are still less likely to be victimized than men, women are predominantly the victims of violence by men and the overwhelming proportion of this violence is perpetuated upon women by those familiar to them. I wonder what this means as well. Women are not safe within society and they are particularly not safe within their own families and homes?

I particularly wonder what it means that I myself was the victim of domestic abuse during my first marriage back in Eighty-eight. I look back and try to understand how I could have felt that it was somehow... normal. I thought that the physical and emotional abuse was not "too bad," even as I covered my bruises and tried to hide the reality of my marriage.

I remember feeling embarrassed, embarrassed that someone would find out. It seemed to me back then that to have someone discover the fact that I "let" myself be beaten was worse than the fact of my abuse. I isolated myself because of this, isolated myself even more than my husband kept me isolated.

I think that if I felt that it was harder to tell someone than it was for me to ultimately leave, then other women must surely feel the same. I'm thinking that if it was so hard for me to define myself as abused, as the victim of violence, it must be similarly difficult for others. The OVW website provides very clear definitions of violence and I think that sometimes a woman has to see her personal pain set out in a clear font to realize that she is being victimized, the victimization is happening to other women as well, she is not alone, and that there are laws in place to combat this crime.