What Will it Take? It Might Take a Little Controversy.
Chicago Foundation for Women’s Town Hall Meeting

By Jack Slowriver, May 1, 2007

April was Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Throughout the month there were speak-outs, demonstrations, film screenings, and discussions all over the city. On April 25, 2007, the Young Women’s Leadership Council of the Chicago Foundation for Women (CFW) held a Town Hall meeting in the Wicker Park neighborhood to discuss what it will take to build a safer state-wide environment for women and girls in Illinois. The question is one that CFW has been posing all year as part of a special campaign to first understand the nuances of violence against women and girls and then create strategies to help lessen its incidence. Acknowledging that younger women and girls may experience violence in ways that are particular to (or perhaps exacerbated by) age, the Young Women’s Leadership Council named three areas of concern for the night’s conversation: media images, sexual assault, and the sex trade.

This conversation is important for two reasons. First, because conversations about violence against women and girls rarely happen in public forums. They rarely happen anywhere. Second, because this is the space in which issues are identified and framed by and for CFW, one of the largest foundations in the country devoted exclusively to women’s issues.  It’s important to recognize that CFW, like all foundations, supports particular types of feminist analysis over others. If we’re really going to end violence against women and girls, it’s important to think critically about who is included in the favored analyses and what strategies or tactics are privileged as a result.

Nikki Patin, a fierce Chicago poet, spoke first at the meeting about the ways in which violence is inflicted upon women’s bodies. She spoke not just of physical violence—in fact—she said very little about that type of abuse. Instead, Patin trained her razor analysis on the media and the ways in which women’s bodies are dissected, subjected to legislative debate, open to cultural critique, or rendered just plain invisible. “To not see yourself reflected in the culture that you live in, except as stereotypes and plastic illusions, is infuriating" she said. "To be given the message that you have lesser value and that your body is not worth protecting is emotionally devastating. Lack of reflection leads to lack of protection.” The entire ten minutes she spoke was equally poetic. 

When the timekeeper insistently waved the white sheet, declaring that her time was really up, Patin left the audience with a mandate that resonated throughout the room. She asked, “So what will it take?” In the course of her talk, she had answered the question several times, in different ways. One suggestion she offered: that it will take “critical analysis of how women's bodies are portrayed in mass media and self-evaluation of the ways in which we are complicit with the oppression of women's bodies.” In her conclusion, she answered the “what will it take?” question with just one word: “us.” The crowd of fifty cheered enthusiastically.

Once the applause died down a bit, Angela Rose, founder of Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment (PAVE), took the stage. She began her presentation with a personal story of leaving her job at a shopping mall and being abducted at knife point and sexually assaulted at a suburban Chicago forest preserve ten years ago. The man who did this had been stalking her for quite some time and was on parole for rape and murder at the time. After being sexually assaulted, Rose went to report the crime to the police. In her words, she was “revictimized by the police. They didn’t believe me. They asked me what I was wearing.” Since that day ten years ago, Rose has dedicated her energy to educating the public and about the prevalence of sexual assault and the need to end the social silence around this type of violence. 

Rose went on to reference dismaying statistics about college women who have endured sexual assault. According to a U.S. Department of Justice study, over 95 percent of college women who have endured rape or attempted rape do not report the incident. Nearly 50 percent of those who have experienced rape, when asked, do not perceive it as such. Rose suggested that these statistics are likely due to the fact that we live in a victim-blaming society and women are likely to have internalized this ethic. Finally, Rose concluded with another personal story. Illustrating the link between domestic violence and sexual assault, Rose recounted a conversation with a friend whom she had confronted after noticing that the friend had several bruises on her body. Rose asked if her friend was being sexually assaulted by her husband. Her friend reportedly replied, “Angela, he controls every aspect of my life. What makes you think it would stop at night?”

Rachel Durchslag, Director of Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (CAASE) was the evening’s final speaker. Durchslag spoke on the prevalence of prostitution in Chicago, asserting that a minimum total of 16,000 women and girls are active in the sex trade on any given day in this city. Of a sample of sex trade workers  in Cook County Jail, 62% had entered sex work before age 18, 86% had experienced domestic violence, 75% had been sexually assaulted, and 66% were victims of incest. Durchslag used these statistics to support her belief that prostitution was not a choice. Quoting the noted anti-porn activist/second-wave feminist Catharine McKinnon, Durschslag argued that the sex trade was inherently exploitive. Durchslag went on to explain that this is why she draws a clear distinction between “sex work” and the “sex trade.” Work, according to Durschslag, implies legitimate employment and “hides the realities of sexually exploited individuals.”

The Town Forum component, during which audience members are invited to give their two cents, lasted about a half hour. The microphone stood alone for a few long minutes until several people stood and approached it. They were followed by several others, at a staggered pace. The comments were scattered and varied, ranging from a call for more research on the issues, to personal confessions about abuse and body image, to the notion that real change begins on an individual level.

In seeking responses to the question of “what will it take to end violence against women and girls?" I noticed a void.  No one discussed the ways in which the definitions of the issues, particularly around prostitution, might be creating schisms within feminist circles that are echoed throughout society. No one spoke of harm reduction or of self-defense training. No one envisioned what radical resistance might look like, except Nikki Patin. She suggested that women use their collective economic power to boycott a wide assortment of “beauty” products. She also reminded the audience of the huge pay discrepancies between men and women, and also between white women and women of color. She wasn’t talking about the individual. Patin’s gaze was trained on the potential power of the collective.

I personally think that we, meaning feminists or radicals or queers or however one might define themselves within this community, should stop erecting ideological barricades around issues central to "the movement." Vehemently asserting only one definitional framework for the ways in which women’s bodies are physically commodified is divisive. It excludes organizations like the Young Women’s Empowerment Project that is committed to a harm reduction approach that respects women’s choices around how they are making a buck, how they are getting by. Promoting the phrase “sex trade” over “sex work” may seem like a silly quibble, but it matters because it is fundamentally about how an issue such as prostitution is defined (by those with money and resources) and simultaneously excluding and alienating other definitions of the issue. I was getting ready to go up to the mike and expound upon this - in short, to be all controversial - but all of a sudden, the time was up.

While the discussion was rich, it was also polite, constrained, and without controversy. In some ways, it was very reminiscent of the ways in which the dominant culture expects middle-class white women to behave. If we’re really going to end violence against women, it will take all of us. That means that it might also take a little controversy.