Hellobee

A year ago, I wrote a post “Raising Our Children to Resist Rape Culture.” That post was written in response to news breaking of a 2005 video of Donald Trump caught bragging about sexual assault. I tried to capture some initial thoughts I had about how I wanted to raise our boys so that they can resist the pervasive rape culture that exists today.

A year later, the New York Times published an article revealing Harvey Weinstein’s repeated sexual assault and harassment of women in the industry. As I watched the news unfold, I was pleased to see less dismissals of his behavior (though, of course, there were some) and his expulsion from the Academy, horrified (but unsurprised) by the sheer number of women he had harassed and assaulted, outraged on behalf of all women (and all sexual assault victims, regardless of gender) and ultimately exhausted by yet another round of news that, for me anyway, has the effect of reopening old wounds.

In some ways, the Weinstein news hit a nerve for me because of the inherent power asymmetry between himself and his victims. He had the power to control the fate of young actresses and other individuals in the entertainment industry and he abused it.

In my post from a year ago, I mentioned, briefly, that I was the victim of sexual assault when I was fifteen. There have been other incidents of sexual assault and harassment over the years, both before and after (too many to count, some of which I didn’t even recognize as harassment until adulthood), but the one that sticks out in my mind and continues to haunt me more than a decade later, is the one when I was fifteen.

One of the big problems surrounding sexual assault is the culture of silence around it. Before I mentioned it last year, I could count on one hand the number of people I had talked to about it. And I’m certainly not unique in staying silent.

And so, the “Me Too” campaign was born, first on Twitter then spreading to other social media platforms, such as Facebook. The idea behind it is to give voice to victims of sexual assault and harassment — and, to be honest, I can’t imagine a single woman out there who wouldn’t say “me too.” To stand up, speak out and demonstrate that these are not isolated incidents. To demonstrate the magnitude of the problem.

#MeToo. I’m still not comfortable talking about what happened, but I’ve opened up about it a bit more over the last year to try to break through the culture of silence, even if just a little bit. I was fifteen. I was too scared to tell anyone, even my parents (perhaps especially my parents). The man was a coach, someone I had trusted. More significantly, he was someone I felt had standing in the community. My teammates loved him and a classmate overheard our guidance counselor talking about how wonderful he was. In some ways, I may have been an easy target; I was an obedient student, deferential to authority, my parents were divorced and never came to my sporting events. The year it all happened, my mother fell very ill and was in and out of hospitals, including two major surgeries. I felt alone. I felt scared. I felt that no one would believe me. I worried that I had brought it on myself; the coach was popular and I appreciated the extra attention he gave me, before I realized what was happening. He would call me (he looked up my phone number through registration records) or send me messages via AOL Instant Messenger (I gave him my screen name). His comments became more sexually explicit and I didn’t know how to react, other than either trying to laugh it off or ignore them until they became more than mere comments. Looking back, I think the worst part was not the feeling that I couldn’t talk to my parents about it, but that I felt that I had to actively hide what happened. I was terrified that they would blame me for what happened. Because I was too afraid to tell the school or my parents about what was happening, I took the only way out that I could see without generating much suspicion or questioning: at the end of the season, I quit. I certainly blamed myself at the time, and then felt even more guilt when the coach assaulted another girl months later.

While everything that I wrote about a year ago remains true (that we need to end the “boys will be boys” mentality; we need to end the idea that girls are the ones who must be sweet and kind; we need to end the myth that when a boy does something mean or inappropriate, it’s a sign of affection; and we need to end slut shaming), I offer the following additional thoughts that I hope I will incorporate into my own parenting:

We need to teach our children meaningful lessons about consent and that they control their own bodies. I never want Lion or Panda feel pressured into giving someone a hug or kiss, even if it’s Grandma or Grandpa. Lion is shy and slow to warm up and with family living across the country, every time he sees them it can feel like starting from scratch. Our children need to feel that their body is their own and they should never feel pressured into unwanted touching of any kind. I hope these early lessons will lead to conversations about meaningful consent as they grow older.

No means no. Likewise, we have instituted a rule in our home that no means no. If Lion says stop when Mr. Dolphin is tickling him, we stop. I know that it’s typical for something like tickling or rough housing to keep on doing it, but for me, the words “stop” and “no” mean exactly what they say. Likewise, when I say “stop” or “no” to the kids, I expect them to listen immediately and respect these words even if they seem to have selective hearing when I tell them it’s time to get ready for bed or come to the table for dinner. Although we can have a conversation about why I want them to stop a particular action, I need them to stop the second I say no.

Alcohol is not an excuse. My children are obviously too young to understand the effects alcohol can have on judgment, but I hope we can raise them in a way where they understand that alcohol is not an excuse for bad behavior. It’s insane to me that some people responded to the Weinstein news with a suggestion that if only we didn’t serve alcohol at functions where men and women mix, we wouldn’t have sexual assault. First of all, that’s simply false. Second, can’t we just say that sexual assault is wrong? Full stop.

Harassment is serious, not a joke. When I was in high school, I was super skinny and could never find jeans that fit. Even in the smallest size, the waistband always gaped. One of my male classmates would try to toss pens into the waistband. He was a friend and I tried to laugh it off as a joke because I didn’t want to be seen as not having a sense of humor after already having a reputation of being “too innocent.” I hope my kids do not grow up thinking that harassment is something to be taken lightly.

Have courage and avoid being a bystander. We’ve encountered some incidents in the past few months where another child was bothering Lion (i.e., punching and tackling him). It took us awhile to find out what was happening because Lion didn’t tell us about it initially, he just kept complaining he didn’t want to go to school. Things changed dramatically when I told him that we could go talk to the teacher and she emphasized that if someone was bothering him, he could run and talk to her. I want our kids to have the courage to talk to someone they trust if they are being harassed. I also hope that they if they are aware that someone else is in trouble, they will have the courage to step in or find someone who can help.

Empathy. At the end of the day, I think that teaching empathy can go a long way. Lion has so much empathy and is great at reading social cues to determine how another person feels. We talk a lot about how other people feel and why they might be happy or sad and so on. Lion understands that when he does something, those actions have an effect on the people around him. I want him to make good choices and learn to put himself in other peoples’ shoes.

At the end of the day, I hope that sharing my story, even just a sliver of it, helps break down the culture of silence. I’m still struggling to come to terms with what happened and I’m still healing. But when I linked to my blog post from last year on Facebook, a friend (and mentor, really) reached out to share a link to an article he’d written about his own experience, with the message, “You are not alone.” Reading his story made me cry, but in many ways helped me in my own journey toward healing.

And while I certainly don’t have the answers to fix the pervasive rape culture we live in, I hope that I can at least offer some thoughts on how we might change this culture for the next generation.