Supreme Court got it right in ruling against 'advance consent' | Vancouver Rape Relief & Women's Shelter

Supreme Court got it right in ruling against 'advance consent' | Vancouver Rape Relief & Women's Shelter

Good post on the implications of the Supreme Court decision, and answering to the worries of people who call it 'state intervention in the bedroom'

AWAN on Prostitution

Aboriginal Women's Action Network address to the People's Tribunal on Commercial Sexual Exploitation, March 18 - 20, 2011, Mohawk Territories (Montreal QC)


Wonderful thought provoking speech from the women of the Aboriginal Women's Action Network about prostitution. Take a look! (also check out their facebook page).

This speech is by cherry smiley.

My English name is cherry smiley. I come from the Nlaka’pamux or Thompson Nation from the Southern Interior of BC and from the Dine’ or Navajo Nation from the South West United States. I would like to acknowledge that we are on Mohawk Territories and to thank the Mohawk people for allowing me as a visitor on their lands. I’m here today to speak on behalf of a mighty group of women warriors, the Aboriginal Women’s Action Network, or AWAN. We are a group of Native women based out of Vancouver BC on unceded Coast Salish Territories. I’d like to talk a little bit about what “unceded” means, because we hear that word thrown around occasionally, sometimes a lot. “Unceded territories” means the land was never surrendered, abandoned, transferred, traded. The same concept applies across BC and Canada, lands were never legally surrendered, transferred, traded, or given.  Today, when someone takes something from someone without permission, you call that “stealing”. When Canada was stolen from it’s rightful caretakers, it meant; it means, that our ways of life, our knowledge and experiences and laws that have served us since time immemorial, are deemed to have no value. My way of life, my knowledge and experiences and laws have no value – it was decided that I, we, as native women, have no value.  And this is where we will start the discussion.

AWAN was established in 1995 in response to a pressing need for an Aboriginal women’s group to provide a much needed voice for Aboriginal women’s concerns regarding governance, policy making, women’s rights, employment rights, violence against women, Indian Act membership and status, and many other issues affecting Aboriginal women today. We are an all-volunteer, unfunded, independent feminist group of Aboriginal women from many nations that share common experiences as native women, and that share an analysis of prostitution as inherently racist, a tool of colonization, and a form of violence against women. Most recently, we have taken a stand against the total decriminalization and/or legalization of prostitution.

As Aboriginal women, we are whole-heartedly invested in the issue of prostitution; this is not simply an “issue of the moment” for us. This is not something we study on the way to our PhDs and then disregard, this is not something we write about, and think about, then forget about. We are women who have been prostituted, we are daughters and

sisters and friends of prostituted  women, we are women who have never been prostituted but who accept the responsibility to speak out for and with those women we know and love and those women we don’t know and love who are being harmed as we speak.

The male demand for access to the bodies of women and girls creates and fuels the market that allows pimps, brothel owners, and traffickers to profit off our backs.  AWAN sees the trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation as inseparable from prostitution, trafficking is the process; it is the forced movement of women and children and prostitution is the result of that movement and we know this from our collective experiences. Our people and our women and children have been forced to move from our traditional homelands, from our territories onto government-created reserves and church-run residential schools, now from and now from reserves into cities, white foster homes, and jails where we continue to struggle against racism, sexism, and violence.

We use the term “prostituted women”, not “sex worker”. Despite what some may say, the term “sex work” does not create a level playing field where men and women, white women and Native women, are equal economically, socially, or otherwise. “Sex work” degenders prostitution and silences the experiences and knowledge of Native women and attempts to hide the real truth, the inequality and hatred, that funnels women and girls into a capitalist system of prostitution that puts profit first, at any cost, that puts men and their interests first, at any cost. And this inequality is real, it’s there whether we choose to acknowledge or ignore it. And we can see it right now, I can acknowledge it right now, in this room, as I stand here before you, hundreds of kilometers and thousands of miles from my homelands,

speaking to you all in a language that is not mine because I am not fluent in my own language. I stand here, speaking to you in a foreign language, a product of residential school. And I stand here before you, having to ask you to please consider my life and my knowledge and my sisters’ lives and my sisters’ knowledge as something that is valuable.

In Vancouver, Aboriginal women are over-represented in street prostitution.  We know this is no accident; this is not simply a coincidence. This is because the racist, patriarchal, capitalist colonizers have created systems, like the Canadian government, the reserve system, the church, the foster care system, the so-called “justice” system, and the education system that devalue us as Aboriginal women and that work to further exploit our lands and resources.  These systems create conditions where Aboriginal women and girls struggle in and against a society that has been trying for the past 519 years to exterminate us. These systems attempt to funnel our mothers, sisters, and daughters into the institution of prostitution so we can be raped, harmed, and murdered systematically by men.  Our lands and children have been stolen, we have been forcibly removed from our territories and corralled onto reservations, into residential schools, jails, and foster homes, our languages, cultures, and traditions have been outlawed, and we have been legislated wards of the state, all in attempts to take, control, and exploit what rightfully belongs to us as Aboriginal women. The system of prostitution is just another addition to this list.

There are some people out there, mostly white men, that want to legitimate prostitution as work.  They say, “Never mind the overwhelming rates of physical violence and murder, johns are good guys that are just lonely”.  They say, “Never mind the verbal abuse that happens with every trick, they really are just dirty squaws and whores”. They say, “Never mind the woman that go missing”, as if my sisters just disappear into thin air.  They say, “Never mind the average age of entry into prostitution is 14 or 15 years old”. “Never mind because they deserve it because they are women and girls and because they are native women and native girls”. This is what THEY say about US. WE denounce those racist assumptions and say Aboriginal women are smart and strong and proud, and we know what we want. This is what we demand and nothing less:

•       Real choices for women and girls. A choice between unlivable welfare, a job that pays an unlivable wage, and the institution of prostitution on stolen native land in a culture that tell girls from birth that our bodies are for men’s pleasure is no choice.

•       We want men to make better choices and to stop the demand for paid sex, because the systems that work to oppress all women and that oppress native women in particular are created and sustained by individual men. THESE are the people that have choice: the men, and they can choose not to buy a woman’s body, not to rape, not to watch

pornography.

•       As Native women we recognize the contradiction but given the choice between negotiating with the state or unregulated capitalism, we believe pushing the state to create legislation that works towards harm elimination, not harm reduction, gives us the greatest chance of not only survival, but life. When people support the legalization of 

prostitution, they tell us that we do not matter.  They tell us that being raped by strangers for pay is as good it will get for us and that it does not matter if we die.  We do not accept this; AWAN women do not and will not accept this, despite a decision made recently by an Ontario court in late September of 2010. This decision struck down three laws that criminalized prostitution in the province of Ontario.  We know that Canadian laws have not always worked for us as Aboriginal women and have been painfully slow to respond to our needs for life, liberty, and dignity. Unfortunately, Canadian laws are the laws that we have been forced to contend with. The ruling by Justice Himel in Ontario takes away what little protection women had from johns, pimps, and brothel owners and instead allows these very men the legal right to abuse women without consequence and to benefit from women’s inequality. The decision to strike down the prostitution laws eliminates laws that could have been revised and advanced for women’s protection by decriminalizing the selling of sex and criminalizing the buying sex, a model of legislation commonly referred to as the Swedish or Nordic Model of prostitution law. This legislation decriminalizes prostituted women and criminalizes the johns, pimps, and brothel-owners with hefty fines and potential jail time, while offering prostituted women the services they need to get out,

including housing, livable social welfare, job training, and counseling services. A large-scale public education campaign that educates the public about prostitution as a form of violence against women is an integral part of the legislation, and has been proven to be successful in the 11 years it has been implemented in Sweden. So successful in fact, that other Nordic countries have followed suit.  Given this, we want people to educate themselves further about the Nordic model of prostitution law and we want you to support that model.

•       We want you to listen to us and speak with us, not for us.

•       We want a collective definition of freedom. We want you to know your freedom is tied to ours, and ours to yours. As Native women, we refuse to let the patriarchy separate us as women in this fight for the freedom and safety of all women, worldwide, and we ask you to do the same.

•       We want you to organize and advocate to your government for a guaranteed livable income, safe and affordable housing, women-only detox and recovery centres on demand, and comprehensive medical services.

•       When defending the legalization or total decriminalization of prostitution, we want you to consider: what am I defending? Because you are defending a hateful, violent, capitalist industry that works to devalue all women but particularly native women, and why would you defend that? We want you to consider: who am I defending when I advocate for the legalization or total decriminalization of prostitution? Because you are defending johns, pimps, traffickers, brothel-owners and their right to purchase women, and you are defending men that have no interest in women’s equality because they profit directly from it.

       Our freedom and safety as women and as Native women, Indigenous to this land, is possible and we won’t be told otherwise. We are women who have survived over 500 years of attempted genocide and we know what we want, and what we want is an end to prostitution.

Grassroots

I'm sure most of you are suffering from the Harper Hangover, as I am. Lasts nights results were appalling. And his vow to move Canada farther to the right was worse. But I, for one, refuse to wallow. We have two choices: we can slink into a stupor along with 39% of our country who refuse to vote, or we can organize and fight back. We cannot let Harper make the changes that he wants to this country that we love. He will make it unrecognizable. And so we fight back. Remember, 60% of those of us who voted did not vote this man into power. We are in the majority. But because our electoral system is broken this man has control of our country for four years.

So what do we do?
.
I can't help thinking of the practice of midwifery, something that is utmost on my mind these days since I'm waiting to here back from their training program at Ryerson. Midwifery was stamped out in Canada. More so than any country in the world, more so than even the United States. It only became legalized in the early nighties. And how did this come about? Grassroots, of course. People, especially women, harassed their MPs. People made phone calls, they wrote letters. The gave money in the tens of thousands to support midwives who were put on trial. They marched.

This is what we on the left need to do. We must march. It is a privilege to be apathetic. It is a privilege not to feel like you have to vote. It is a privilege to remain uninformed, to imagine that what the Canadian government does could not possibly have an effect on you.

We on the left cannot afford that privilege any longer. Women are no longer equal in the eyes of the government. Aboriginals are no longer equal in the eyes of the government. The poor will be trampled on, and that especially includes our children. As far as this government is concerned global warming does not exist. We have no more priveleges in the face of this right wing, big business, secretive, lying, harmful government. We must fight back. We must demonstrate. We must organize on our local levels.

Even Stephen Harper has acknowledged that Canada is not as right leaning as his party. He wants to take out country in that direction. We cannot give him an easy time of it. We cannot wallow in our Harper Hangover. Let's march.

Theory vs. Practice

I’ve been hibernating.

I’ve always been a big reader. I read in the bathtub. I read until the wee hours of the morning. I read when I walk down busy streets. This voracious need of mine was encouraged by university, where I studied philosophy and history, and some weeks was assigned a thousand pages of reading. Every couple of months I order a whole bunch of books off the internet and take a ton more out of the library and curl up and don’t emerge until someone prods me, eyes blinking, into the sunlight weeks later. As you might have guessed, I’m interested in feminism. So this recent book hibernation has included such works as Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Brownmiller, Sisterhood is Forever edited by Robin Morgan, and Ain’t I a Woman: black women and feminism by bell hooks.

I’ve learned a lot. But it’s gotten all tangled up. Robin Morgan wrote in her original foreword to the Sisterhood is Powerful anthology that once you become a feminist activist you start to strip away the layers of denial and blockages you’ve put up to shield yourself from the barrage of hatred that’s directed at women from people and culture on a daily basis. I’ve lost my shields. Conversations with some family member have become fraught. The news ain’t better. I basically have to not read ANYTHING on the internet. Walking down the street alone wasn’t really all that fun to begin with. It’s not that I’m afraid all the time. It’s that I’m fucking angry or sad all the time. And that isn’t a helpful way to live myself. So I’ve retreated to the world of books. Reading the feminist theory was a way to stay connected to my activism, or so I thought. But here’s the thing about theory. It takes you out of what is actually going on with women. I’ve been working way too much with my head lately and not enough with my hands. Reading the theory doesn’t make me want to do anything. It makes me want to NOT do things. I retreat; I don’t engage.

This is coming back to me with sharp relief because my last shift at Vancouver Rape Relief is this Sunday. I needed those hours. Because what you find working with a dedicated feminist group is not just the strength to go out and face that barrage of asshole verbiage, although it does do that. But what I’ve found after these past months working with VRR is laughter, community and even joy. Yes I have to take rape crisis calls. Yes the house is a transition house for women who have been abused by their partners. But what I find again and again is that I come out of that house in a better mood then when I went in. I feel energized; I do have the will and the courage to tackle what we face as women. Better than that, I have other women to do that with. We are doing it! (bloody tiny piece by bloody tiny piece). You feel incredibly connected to other people when you volunteer. When you become an activist in your community you meet people who urge you to do things. There are events to go to, conversations to be had, and there is always someone who needs a helping hand with something. This activity focuses and energizes my mind.

What do I get from hibernating with these (wonderful) books? New tools to analyze the situations yes. Especially sexist, racist, and homophobic tendencies within myself. These books certainly open my horizons. But no connections. And no real spur to act. It’s all within me. Academia and my love of reading have too often instilled in me the will to write, to think, but not to act and to do. I want to use my hands and my feet. That’s what volunteering at Rape Relief has given me. The will to march with other women on cold, rainy days. To speak up publicly, not just on the internet. To not focus on the big picture or sweeping generalizations but see real, concrete, physical, wonderfully complex women. To see a woman as a woman and not a category. I would recommend bell hooks or Susan Brownmiller to anyone. But the lessons I’ve learned from some of the women from Rape Relief are a hundred times more valuable. The theory informs my practice of feminism, of course. But the real life practice is what makes any of the theory useful. Real life interaction with women yanks this woman kicking and screaming from her bed, her library card, and her pile of books. My feminism cannot just be what I think about the world. It has to be what I do in the world. I keep coming back to this quote from Gandhi: My life is my message. My words are less important than the philosophy I embody. Thinking is not enough for me anymore. I love to read. It still makes me happy. But hibernation is not healthy or helpful for me. The time of hoarding books to myself, and hoarding my time and energy for myself, is over. It’s time to give and give and give of what I’ve learned and what I am.

Psst: Talking about doing in the world. Us Canucks are having an election. Please check out Earnest and Jest for insightful political commentary. And if you’re Canadian, do something in the world and VOTE VOTE VOTE. (Er…that was not meant to be an instruction to commit election fraud.)

Yeah. It hurts. So now what?

Kate commented on my post Because it Hurts:

While I'm proud to call myself a feminist and happy to share my views on gender politics whenever such subjects come up, you're not going to see me at a protest or a women's shelter any time soon. Because I'd rather not think about it. Because I can't stand to see it. Because it hurts too much.

I'm sure there are many women out there who know there's something deeply wrong with society, but don't fight against it because of the pain or the stigma or the perceived futility. 

What can we women do when fighting sexism hurts so badly?

Because it Hurts: Why Women and Men Aren't Feminists

I started crying on the bus this morning. Because of a book. My Feminist book club’s selection for this month in Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. I can across a passage describing a discussion group on pornography that Jensen had lead with a group of women who (like me) work in centres that work with battered women and rape survivors. He describes the sadness in the room at the end of the session and quotes a woman who had been mostly silent until the end. He writes:

Throughout the workshop she had held herself tightly, her arms wrapped around herself. She talks for some time, and then apologizes for rambling. There is no need to apologize; she is articulating what many feel. She talks about her own life, about what she has learned in the session and how it made her feel, about her anger and sadness. Finally she says: ‘This hurts. It just hurts so much’.

Gross

Breaking: The House votes to strip Planned Parenthood of its funding.

Make yourself feel a little bit more cheerful by hearing what some representatives had to say to defend Planned Parenthood.