[**TRIGGER WARNING**] Rape, American Style
Decades after “Denim Day,” “Take Back the Night,” and other global rape-awareness movements were popularized my students are still living the reality of violent silence. Nearly every girl in my Women’s Leadership Project (WLP) feminist mentoring program has been the victim of sexual assault or abuse. Initially, most have no language to articulate their anger, much less their post-traumatic stress experience. The repressed rage that girls of color carry with them about rape and sexual harassment comes out in shame, blame, and self-hatred. It’s spit out in the casual misogyny of their embrace of epithets like “bitch” and “ho.” It’s displayed in the yards of Rapunzel-esque hair that they swath themselves in to obliterate their “ugliness.” And it is manifest in the increasing number of “very young girls” that are sucked into prostitution, brutalized by gang rape and “pimped out” by men they view as father figures. During a recent day of dialogue moderated by WLP students at Washington Prep High School many girls were loathe to identify sexual violence as a significant factor on campus. There were numerous anecdotes about girls being threatened with gang rape as well as adult male campus security guards sexually harassing girls. Nonetheless, it was female behavior–and not male behavior and the culture of the school–which was criticized. In the grand scheme of the community the experiences of girls of color don’t matter. Far too often in mainstream discourse, rape is only politically significant when it is framed as a phenomenon that happens “over there”, in the backward “third world,” or “here” to a young white female victim in the civilized U.S.
In the aftermath of the young Indian student’s death, the outcry against the country’s misogynist culture of rape, murder, and dehumanization will hopefully be a watershed for legislation protecting women from sexual assault and intimate partner violence. But the patriarchal nationalist resentment that writer Desai portrays as India’s affliction also drives the savage anti-feminist backlash in the United States and its culture of violent silence.
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