Sunflower Voices

According to the recent report from Dalhousie University on their Dal Dentistry restorative justice process, if you’re not a feminist activist, then you are the author of your own misfortune if you are subjected to sexual harassment and abuse:

“This made us realize that we, as women, also contribute to the culture and climate that allows Facebook groups like the one at issue to persist and flourish. We had to ask ourselves: why we are only up in arms when it is about us, but unconcerned with the objectification of other women?”

Really? This is the takeaway from four months of justice?

To feel how improper this message is, let’s change the scenario a little bit: How about if women students at Dal were raped by classmates instead of “just” sexually harassed? Would the lesson imparted through  Dal’s process still be that the women are partially responsible for their rapes because they didn’t previously storm down the doors of the patriarchy?

This “education” received by the women who were targetted for hate-f**king, for being banged into unconciousness, for being “corrected” by rape into servitude, is just one more form of victim-blaming.

And it shows how little space and how little understanding is given to the survivors of abuse. Some women have been deeply traumatized by this kind of harassment. Most survivors struggle mightily with paralyzing bouts of self-blame. To imply blame on these targets because they weren’t feminist enough is almost criminal.

Its also ironic and crazymaking that this is the lesson the administration and “experts” at Dal offered to the women. As anyone who’s tried it knows, feminist activism and any anti-oppression activism that challenges the status quo at Dal is generally greeted by a brick wall or a call to security.

Women are not responsible for sexist oppression at the hands of men. Women do what they feel they have to do to make it through a dangerous, patriarchal, male-dominated world. And sometimes that means go along get along. Still doesn’t make sexual harassment their fault. Shall I say it again: Men’s sexist abuse of women is NOT THE FAULT OF WOMEN!

Sexist abuse of women by men is men’s decision, alone. (Did I just say it again?)

For anyone old enough to remember the Marshall Inquiry in real time, an innocent Native man being called an author of his own misfortune was one judge’s classic racist line letting the powers that be off the hook for their screw-ups. One of Dal’s bravest grads, Anne Derrick (now a judge herself) helped right that wrong. Who will call out the same indoctrination now, as applied to women?

More on Dal Dentistry from Pam Rubin and C :  http://sunflowervoices.ca/no-talking-in-class/

and http://sunflowervoices.ca/letter-from-a-dal-dentistry-patient/