Tag: gender

How Do You Stop Abusive Relationships? Teach Teens How to Be Respectful Partners

Posted on by robbie

*Last name has been removed to protect privacy
When Diana*, now 22, started dating her first boyfriend seven years ago, she didn’t think the situation would quickly turn into a nightmare. After losing her virginity to him, their relationship took an unexpected and scary turn. “I worked hard to be a ‘good’ girlfriend,” Diana told NationSwell. “I would do things for him because a good girlfriend would do everything he asked.” Limiting her friendships was a common theme, as was continually making her feel like she was in the wrong. “He was very manipulative. But at the time, I was so blind, naive and clueless that I went along with it anyway.”
Though the two dated on and off for about eight months, controlling and condescending behavior — and signs of violence — appeared early and often. “Every time I would try to talk to him about something, he would always shift the blame to me and always put me down.”
Eventually, physical violence became an issue, too. While her boyfriend would continuously threaten to beat up others in their circle of friends — including one moment where he threatened to hit her, too — a turning point came about a month and a half into their relationship. “I hadn’t even thought about leaving him, but he said he had a gun at his friend’s house and was going to shoot himself,” Diana said. “I was scared shitless. I had no clue if I should cry, confront him, or tell him I was there for him.”
Even though her high school had a guidance counselor, it was a meeting with her school’s RAPP (Relationship Abuse Prevention Program) coordinator, Ellen*, that helped her find the support she needed to end the relationship. “I didn’t go to my guidance counselor because they weren’t there to help with emotional issues,” Diana said.
Unlike traditional counselors, RAPP coordinators are licensed social workers trained to host workshops that focus on self-empowerment or LGBTQ relationships, something Diana and her fellow classmates gravitated toward. “Ellen was comfortable and open with us from the start: We’d go up to her whenever something bad was going on with our day, and she would make the time for us. She made us feel comfortable in that space,” Diana said. “That changed high school for us.”
After breaking up with her boyfriend that summer, Diana spent time focusing on herself. She got a job, took swimming lessons, watched shows, went out, and found renewed focus academically. She also trained to become a RAPP peer leader, through an optional program that empowers teens to train others to recognize and change patterns of destructive behavior before transitioning into adult relationships, a process that helped her improve her communication with friends about the ups and downs of teen romance.

“My advice to other young girls out there is to not lose sight of who you are in relationships. Don’t ignore yourself. We only get one body, and we only live our life once, and we are only young once. Do not waste your youth on other people.” – Diana*, 22

HELPING TEENS DEFINE INTIMACY

Funded by NYC’s Human Resources Administration and the Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence, and working in partnership with Day One, Steps to End Violence and Urban Resource Institute (URI), RAPP’s main goal is to create a safe space where teens can confidentially share details about their romantic relationships, at a time when hormones and emotions play a huge role in intimacy. The result: Teens who experienced violence at home, who felt they didn’t have a voice in their relationships, gravitated toward the program. “It brought the students back to the community, and helped them succeed academically,” Luis Matos, senior director of community education and prevention services at URI, told NationSwell. 
Once licensed social workers are certified via RAPP, they’re placed within high schools throughout the city, turning spare space and empty classrooms into safe spaces where all genders and sexual orientations can discuss issues like power dynamics,  disabilities, race and class. Among the services they provide are trauma-informed individual and group counseling, as well as classroom workshops to educate students on what qualifies as abuse. Professional development is also provided for teachers and staff. Participants can be referred by school faculty or peers, or they can self-refer. 
Care is taken to ensure that students of all gender expressions are placed with coordinators they feel comfortable with, and low- and high-income neighborhoods receive equal attention. “This isn’t a program that gets at any particular economic group, because abuse is everywhere: It has nothing to do with gender, race or economics,” said Matos. “It doesn’t matter what community you’re in.”
In each 45-minute workshop, teens learn about “consent” vs. “coercion” — concrete terms that help them to frame their life experiences. “If somebody asks you out five times and you say no four times and on the fifth time you said yes, is that consent? We’ll have lively discussions about that,” Day One Social Work Supervisor Rebecca Stahl told NationSwell. “We don’t try to come into those conversations with answers. It helps young people form a critical analysis of the relationships they see in the media, in school, modeled by their parents and modeled by their peers.”
Stephanie Nilva, a former attorney who practiced family and marital law specializing in domestic abuse, was inspired to start Day One by her work with adult couples. “When I talked to them [about] tracing their history, they would say things like, ‘This happened when we were dating; this happened before we got married,’” Nilva told NationSwell. “But extreme jealousy is a warning sign of an abusive relationship. People say things will settle down … and often, it doesn’t stop.”
While some intimate situations have clear boundaries, “early patterns of abuse are much more nuanced than ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ especially if people are trying out relationships for the first time,” Stahl said — a reality Diana experienced firsthand in her relationship. “I did have my moments where I took a step back and thought to myself, ‘Should I really be with him?'” Diana said. “But he was very, very, manipulative. Every time I would take one foot out, he would convince me to go back in,” she said. 

THE HISTORY OF RAPP IN NYC

While teenagers like Diana view RAPP’s services as an indispensable tool for helping them successfully navigate high school romance, the program has a deep history in the city’s domestic violence prevention strategy. Urban Resource Institute is one of three New York City-based nonprofits that provide domestic violence outreach services while teaching teens to recognize early signs of abuse — the kind that can sometimes be confused with passion. Since its inception in 1980, URI has expanded to operate 12 domestic violence shelters throughout the city, which accommodate as many as 1,200 survivors daily. RAPP was launched in collaboration with Center Against Domestic Violence (CADV) in 1997, which merged with URI in 2018. The program empowers youth to find the help they need to identify and address what makes relationships abusive, while training adults to work with survivors of sexual assault. URI is one of three organizations in the city that offers the RAPP program; Day One and Steps to End Violence also offer it as part of their services.
Initially, RAPP was run out of NYC’s alternative high schools, providing a curriculum designed for teens in areas that typically receive less funding. In 1999, two years after the program was founded, CADV, the predecessor to URI, received enough funding from the New York City Human Resources Administration to expand into five public schools across all five boroughs, and RAPP was officially born. 
“By the time Diana came into our program, we were already in schools for 10 years,” Matos said. “We didn’t have the resources to be in every school but we were able to identify, through the help of the DOE and administrators, schools that might be interested in having a social worker placed in their school to address teen relationship abuse.”
The RAPP program is currently in 94 schools city-wide, and does more than host workshops with students. Abuse prevention, intervention, professional development, community outreach and parent education are also areas of focus, as well as expanding the program into middle schools, through a program called Early RAPP, which launched in 2018. Though those workshops aren’t led by licensed social workers and don’t offer individual counseling sessions, community educators provide in-classroom resources and workshops, to reach students who might be starting relationships even earlier than high school.
Today, Diana is attending college, studying to become a nurse. Though she’s vocal about the lasting emotional effects her previous relationship had and the work it took to heal, she’s grateful for her current partner’s support. She also counts herself fortunate to have found someone who shares her dreams and ambitions. “Something as traumatizing as that … you’re bound to be scarred for life. I let [my current partner] know about what I went through, and he’s been very supportive, understanding, and careful with me, which I really appreciate.”
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3 Ways to Show Empathy When Talking About Sexual Assault

Posted on by robbie

As demonstrated by the current #metoo movement on social media, the words you use when speaking about sexual assault can have an impact on what behavior others view as unacceptable.
In an effort to stay woke, here are three ways to reframe how you talk about sexual assault.

“I BELIEVE YOU”

When Liz Peralta, 24, was 6 years old, she says a man raped her. Beyond the actual assault itself, Peralta tells NationSwell that the biggest challenge was getting over how her mother seemed to blame her for what happened.
“Up until I was 17 I felt like it was my fault. And I remember my mom  — she didn’t intentionally mean it — but her reaction was, ‘How could you do this?’” Peralta says. “I felt like I did this terrible thing, but I was 6. To be scared and to feel alone, those words definitely resonated with me.”
The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network also suggests using other supportive, sensitive phrases, like “You didn’t do anything to deserve this,” “It took a lot of courage to share this with me,” or “You are not alone.”
Giving an empathetic response can be challenging to some. That’s because your reply can have less to do with believing whether or not an assault happened and more to do with how you were raised. A 2016 study found that those who place a higher value on obedience and loyalty are more likely to believe survivors of assault. But those who hold general welfare in higher regard place blame on the assailants.

“HE ASSAULTED HER”

“Animal Farm” and “1984” author George Orwell famously declared, “Never use the passive where you can use the active.” Grammatically speaking, it’s more effective to use an active voice than a passive one. (In other words, say someone did something to someone rather than someone experienced a something by a someone.)
But how does that play into discussions about sexual assault?
“We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women,” says Jackson Katz, activist and founder of MVP Strategies (which provides gender violence prevention education and leadership training) whose quote from a TED Talk last year is currently making the rounds online. “You can see how the use of the passive voice has a political effect. [It] shifts the focus off men and boys and onto girls and women.”
In 2001, University of Kent sociology professor Gerd Bohner published research on the use of passive voice when describing sexual assaults in the British Journal of Psychology. His findings? Those who read passive voice headlines are less likely to hold assailants culpable.

“WHEN A WOMAN SAYS NO, I WILL STOP #HOWIWILLCHANGE”

Men can share how they will act appropriately and be allies to assault survivors by using the hashtag #HowIWillChange.


Adding male voices to the discussion about sexual assault is particularly powerful, considering that up to 30 percent of men don’t believe that rape exists, according to a study published by the University of North Dakota’s Counseling Psychology and Community Services department.

A Bold Law Aims to Eliminate the Gender Wage Gap, School Integration Finally Gets the Funding It Deserves and More

Posted on by robbie

Illegal in Massachusetts: Asking Your Salary in a Job Interview, New York Times
With women only making 79 cents for every dollar earned by a man, how to close the gender wage gap is a hotly debated topic. Will bipartisan legislation in New England, which attempts to level the playing field by forbidding businesses from asking a prospect’s previous salary, be a model for other states to follow?
Is School Integration Finally Making the Grade?, New America Weekly
Dozens of studies prove that school integration leads to student success. President Obama’s new “Stronger Together” grant program encourages districts to fully integrate by income, not ethnicity — giving low-income children of all races the opportunity to receive a better education.
Meet the Mothers Who Have Been Fighting Police Brutality for Decades, BuzzFeed
Described as “ultimate activist mother,” Iris Baez founded the grassroots group Parents Against Police Brutality after her son was killed in 1994. Working alongside fellow grieving mothers, Baez already has scored several important policing reform victories, but the 70-year-old isn’t letting age slow her advocacy work.
MORE: 5 Ways to Strengthen Ties Between Cops and Citizens
 

Inside the Push for Equality in the Gaming Industry

Posted on by robbie

Add gaming to the list of male-dominated industries. Despite the exploding popularity of this medium across demographics — according to a Pew Internet and American Life Project and Mills College survey, 97 percent of American teens aged 12 to 17 play video games at least two hours a week — women make up only 13 percent of the employees in the gaming industry. And that includes business positions, not just creative jobs like the coveted role of video game designer. Additionally, women in this industry are paid an average of 25 percent less than men. What gives?

According to Dr. Mary Flanagan, an award-winning game designer, researcher,and professor at Dartmouth College, the underlying problem is that the industry still exudes “a culture of virtual guns, babes and ammo … and spoils what could otherwise be a revolutionary design space for new kinds of thinking, learning and collaboration, if only the industry would diversify.” In short, she writes in Gamasutra (the online version of Game Developer Magazine), the gender disparity is the last thing that the industry wants to “deal with.” She writes, “No one wants to ask development teams to self- censor. What if that hurts creativity? Why deal with this at all? Wouldn’t it be easier to just avoid women altogether?”

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But Flanagan argues that this issue should be “dealt with,” for the betterment of the industry. Not only is it proven that women can design great video games (and other games as well), but in general, Flanagan argues, the industry would benefit from teams that include a variety of opinions and ideas from different demographics.

In fact, gaming was arguably created by a woman, Anne W. Abbott, who designed the first board game published in the U.S. in 1843. Other iconic American games, such as Jenga, Monopoly, Portal, and Centipede, were also created by women. And the Alien Game project has proven that games that are created by women have a broader appeal across genders, which equals greater sales and profits for businesses.

Flanagan is pushing to revolutionize the gaming industry by making it gender equal by 2020. To do that, she says that women in the industry need to speak up and make their presence known. She recommends that these women visit schools or host a panel at a gaming conference to prove to young women and girls that they, too, can become game designers. But the men can also help, by pushing for equality on industry panels and in the workplace. After all, diversity is good for business. “If we add more diverse voices to the video game industry, we will create vastly different games that reflect a diversity of thought and social values,” Flanagan writes. “Bring us different games, those that inspire, teach, entertain and open minds.” And bring in the women.

ALSO: Give Video Games a Chance to Help Kids Develop Positive Traits

The Surprising Key to Closing the Gender Pay Gap

Posted on by robbie

Dr. Claudia Goldin has a novel solution for the pesky pay gap that persists between men and women, and its benefits could extend well beyond the workplace.
Goldin, a Harvard University economist, hypothesizes that if companies allow employees to work flexible schedules and reward them based on what they actually accomplish — not the hours they toil away in the office — the pay gap between men and women will be whittled away. “The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might even vanish if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who worked long hours and who worked particular hours,” she writes in a study published in the American Economic Review. To boil it down, according to Goldin’s extensive research, the wage gap isn’t just about gender. It’s about time. Literally.
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The oft-cited statistic about the gender gap is that a woman earns 77 cents for every $1 a man makes. This, of course, doesn’t account for the fact that women often choose lower-paying careers. They also choose to leave the workforce at certain points — many times due to family responsibilities — meaning that they actually have less work experience than men when they get into the latter part of their careers, as Derek Thompson points out in The Atlantic. Still, when you adjust for all those variables, a wage gap of around 9 percent persists. Goldin argues that this isn’t due to straight-out discrimination, but rather, hours worked.
Say a woman and a man are up for a promotion in a corporate job. They have similar qualifications and are equally strong candidates. The only thing that distinguishes them is that the man logged more hours overall because the woman took maternity leave or stayed home with a sick child from time to time. Because of these common scenarios, men often end up getting the promotion simply because they have spent more time working. It’s not exactly fair, but it’s not unfair either, given that they have equal qualifications.
Instead of focusing on the standard 9-to-5 (and then some) workday, which has been the norm for generations, Goldin suggests that companies give their employees more autonomy, allowing them to create schedules that work for their lifestyles. In order to do this, Goldin recommends a pay-per-hour policy, which has been proven to lessen the wage gap between male and female workers. For example, pharmacists are paid in a “linear” fashion, meaning that men and women on the same level get paid the same amount. The more hours they work, the more they get paid, and vice-versa. There’s no cultural penalty for leaving work at a normal hour to get dinner on the table. Coincidentally, this profession boasts some of the lowest gender pay gaps among high-earning occupations.
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Of course, it’s not easy to change work culture, especially in corporations where face time is often considered more important than actual productivity. However, flexible work schedules can lead to a range of positive results beyond lessening the gender pay gap. It encourages telecommuting, which cuts down on a company’s operations costs, reduces traffic (a bonus for the environment), and increases productivity. Working too many hours is also proven to increase stress, reduce productivity and decrease overall happiness. Not to mention the fact that many people work extra hours without extra pay. Work flexibility will not only help even out the wage gap, but could also breed happier, healthier employees. Who wouldn’t want that?
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