harassment
When I heard that Rev. Butler was appointed the first woman pastor of Riverside, I thought she broke the stained-glass ceiling. Instead, the church threw her off the stained-glass cliff. The phenomenon of the glass cliff is one documented throughout the working world. Women are invited into senior-level leadership only at times of crisis, when intractable problems, often caused by male predecessors, cannot be solved. There’s nothing to lose because things have hit rock bottom.
A murkiness in the numbers, combined with a lack of training and awareness, has made sexual harassment in housing a widespread, yet under the radar, problem. But local housing authorities are working to combat the problem on the ground. Their efforts could serve as a model for other communities.
Greenblatt attributed the spike in numbers to President Donald Trump failure to denounce events such as the Charlottesville white supremacist rally and various incidences of bomb threats, cemetery vandalism, and school bullying.
Women are showing that, despite being subject to the most violent and forceful manifestations of our patriarchal society and culture, they are willing to stand up in defiance and in solidarity to ensure that we as a society no longer allow incidents of sexual harassment and violence to go unchallenged, unnoticed, and unbelieved. And almost certainly, many other women who have experienced harassment or assault have decided understandably not to speak out. “Survivors don’t owe us their stories” explained Alexis Benveniste on twitter.
Our Founders knew that religious liberty is essential not only to protect religion, but because religion helps strengthen our nation. From our Revolution to the abolition of slavery, from women’s rights to civil rights, men and women of faith have often helped move our nation closer to our founding ideals. This progress is part of what makes us a beacon to the world.
As Mariame Kaba of Project Nia notes, police violence is not simply just the killing of peoples. It includes the every day forms of harassment, surveillance, and profiling that support both gender and race hierarchies.
The campaign to #sayhername is not simply about remembering and organizing around black women and other women of color who have been killed by the police. It is about re-conceptualizing what police violence means. When we center women of color in our analysis, we see that police violence is much more than individual acts of police brutality. It is an entire system of harassment and surveillance that keeps oppressive gender and racial hierarchies in place.
We are then left with the task of not just holding individual police officers to account, but re-conceptualizing what justice, safety, and accountability should be.
WHEN I WAS 15, my church youth group was not a safe place. Like most youth groups, there were college-age volunteers who served as counselors and Bible study leaders.
One counselor, Paul, took it upon himself to constantly tell me I wore too much makeup, my clothes were too tight, and that I was a flirt. These actions took place in public for six months while other counselors and students watched and laughed. The interactions came to a head when he commented on my lipstick color and I snapped back at him. He grabbed me, forced me onto his lap, and told me I liked it.
At the time, I just thought Paul was creepy; I now recognize his behavior was sexual harassment. I also recognize that the other members of my youth group, including the leaders, saw his behavior and failed to intervene. Why did this happen? Both Paul’s behavior and the leaders’ silence belong to a larger set of attitudes in our culture—and churches—that allows sexual violence and sexual harassment to become normal, even expected, behaviors.
This set of attitudes is known as “rape culture.” When we fail to confront these toxic attitudes in our churches, we undermine our love for our neighbors, ignore the Bible, and misrepresent God as misogynistic.
To my fellow men,
I’m sure you are as heartbroken as I am about the killings at UC Santa Barbara by a troubled young man with a misogynistic manifesto. Heartbroken for the community, for the families who lost loved ones, and even for the young man who felt like there was no other way.
Now I’m not much of a “Tweeter” (is that the right word?), but I heard that a group of us has taken to defending ourselves on Twitter with the hashtag #NotAllMen. They want to say that that #NotAllMen sexually assault women. #NotAllMen expect a date to be reciprocated with sex. #NotAllMen harass women for the way they do or don’t look at us. They want to say that we’re not like those other people, that we respect women as equals, not demean them as prizes or products.
Who cares?
Global religious hostilities reached a six-year high in 2012 and affected more people than government curbs on religious freedom, according to the Pew Research Center’s latest report on religious restrictions around the world.
The report, released Tuesday ahead of National Religious Freedom Day on Thursday, shows that 74 percent of the world’s population experienced high levels of social hostility toward religion, up from 52 percent in 2011.
The sharp rise is due to hostilities in China, which for the first time in the survey’s six-year history, scored a “high” level of religious strife. Home to more than 1.3 billion people, China experienced an increase in religion-related terrorism, mob violence and sectarian conflict in 2012.
The greatest levels of social hostilities toward religion were felt in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Somalia, Israel, and Iraq, according to the report.
DOMINIC WAS 17 years old when the incident occurred. Dressed and ready to go to church, he walked out of his home in the Bronx just a few minutes ahead of his parents. All of a sudden, undercover police officers came out of nowhere, grabbed him, and threw him to the ground. As his parents came outside and discovered this scene, fear gripped them as they screamed to the officers, “What are you doing to my son?” “He fits the description. You stay out of this!” the officers replied. His mother pleaded, “Sir, he hasn’t done anything. He has been with us the whole time.”
While legal and political measures are being undertaken by opposing factions for and against the stop, question, and frisk practices of the New York Police Department, the debate rages. The fact remains, no matter what side you are on, considerable damage has already been done to a generation of African Americans and Latinos (particularly youth), not only in New York City but in other cities that have adopted this model of policing.
According to a recent analysis by the New York Civil Liberties Union, in 2012 “New Yorkers were stopped by the police 532,911 times. 473,644 were innocent (89 percent).” This means that out of more than half a million who were stopped, only 59,267 people were charged with any sort of illegal activity. In addition, 284,229 (55 percent) were African American and 165,140 were Latino (32 percent), most of them law-abiding citizens who were targeted, stopped, questioned, frisked, and found innocent. What is further troublesome is that not all actions conducted by officers were documented, so the actual number of those impacted negatively is even higher.
Social justice index: USA No. 27 of 31. Democrats in Congress attempt to eat on $4.50 a day to protest potential budget cuts. Republicans shift focus from jobs to God. OpEd: Obama, the G20 and the 99 percent. In Congress, the rich get richer. The Shadow Superpower. And the U.S. sues South Carolina over immigration law.