SEEING EACH OTHER THROUGH STORIES

From the front of my classroom, Anne points up at the photograph on the screen. Twenty-five students sit shoulder-to-shoulder, eyes forward.

“Why don’t you request a bigger classroom?” my students often ask. I tell them that I’ve taught in larger rooms before, but the additional space seems to extinguish our energy. The smaller classroom, I find, keeps us closer physically and perhaps emotionally. We can see each other’s responses. We can hear each other’s whispers.

We stare at the screen on which Anne is projecting beautiful photographs of women, and some men, from around the world. They are survivors of sexual violence. As we look at each face captured in a bright smile or a solemn stare, Anne recounts a story.

A white-haired elderly woman, smiling with her eyes and her teeth, sits at a table in what looks like a café, next to a younger woman with black hair who pushes her smiling face against the face of her friend. Anne tells us that both women were raped by the same man. The room is silent.

Anne points to another photograph. A woman wears a kitchen apron and smiles down at her grinning six-year-old daughter. What makes this photograph all the more poignant, Anne explains, is that the woman had been six years old when she was raped. She kept the secret for ten years.

My thoughts take me to my plans for this weekend.

In a few hours, I’ll be leaving my laptop at home and traveling for a week – with a group of new colleagues and friends – to the Dominican Republic as a Global Justice Fellow of the American Jewish World Service. We’ll be touring Santo Domingo and the surrounding area, learning about the discrimination of minorities, the rights of women working in the sex trade, the rights of children, and the rights of people who are transgender, lesbian, gay, and bisexual.

In preparation for our trip, we were asked to listen to an inspiring talk by writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who warns about “the dangers of a single story” (if you have a few spare minutes, watch the video – it’s terrific).

As Anne describes the women in the projected photographs, she tells their stories of sexual violence and I reprimand myself for perceiving these people only through the lens of sexual violence. Yes, they are survivors of rape, but that is only a small part of each person’s narrative. When we come face to face with a survivor of any experience – a survivor of rape, a survivor of genocide, a survivor of cancer – it can often be hard to see that person beyond that trauma. It’s hard to see a survivor’s other stories.

Anne’s choice of photographs – of friends in cafés, of parents, of medics, of business people; seemingly ordinary people – reminds us that there’s more to a rape survivor’s story than her or his assault.

Anne Ream is the founder of The Voices and Faces Project and author of the new book, Lived Through This. Anne and her colleagues have collected testimonies from hundreds of survivors of sexual violence. They help real people – women and men of different ages and from a range of backgrounds – to come forward with their stories of violence and resilience and shame, sometimes for the first time.

By giving the hidden victims of sexual violence a chance to speak and be seen, Anne and her team are helping to break the silences and taboos around rape and rape culture.

A few days later, novelist Christa Desir, visits my classroom. Christa talks about her debut novel, Fault Line (which I wrote about here). And she tells us how her own experiences as a survivor of sexual violence and as a volunteer rape counselor contributed to Fault Line’s plot turns, characters, and purpose. We learn that the events of the novel – including the most shocking and seemingly improbable moments – are all linked to Christa’s realities.

But what’s also important about Fault Line is that we get to know Christa’s protagonists so well that their experiences of rape – as victims and witnesses – live within the contexts and beneath the everydayness of their complicated lives.

Anne and Christa have been visiting my classroom every quarter for over a year now. Some of my students write about how meeting Anne and Christa and reading Fault Line has led to a shift in their perceptions of sexual violence.

Some students explain how listening to the stories of survivors leads to complex, overlapping feelings of hope, sadness, and anger. Some students are struck by Fault Line’s tough ending – a realization that, for many survivors of rape, happy endings are fantasy. Some students express optimism after listening to Anne and Christa talk openly about their personal journeys, of coming to terms with their survivorship, and their activism.

Through such stories, we’re able to grasp how to respond to a culture of rape that often seems impenetrable. We can begin to learn how to respond to friends or family who one day might confide in us their own stories of surviving sexual violence. And when we share stories – of our own and of others – we give permission for others to share their stories too.

Stories are important.

Over the years, my course has grown from a class on design into a learning experience focused on social justice. While we still study the design of community programs in general, we explore community health and human rights programming at the local, national, and international levels.

We learn about addiction through the story of a close friend of mine who has struggled with addition.

We learn about homeless youth and sex workers and their children through the stories of my friend who worked as a case manager for Chicago youth; for many years, she struggled against a broken system.

We learn about the experiences and isolation of survivors of cancer through the story of my friend who fought cancer and, at the same time, created a support community of cancer survivors.

This week, as I view the Dominican Republic as a visitor, I expect to encounter many stories of human rights and oppression to bring back to my classroom, but I must pay attention to the many other stories, including the joyful stories and seemingly everyday stories, that surround and provide context to stories of violence.

While I have a responsibility to teach theories of design, learning, and human development, my teaching has become more and more grounded in storytelling. Because it’s those stories – rather than statistics and theories – that seem to inspire my students – and inspire me.

I suppose the intimacy of my cramped classroom reflects the intimacy of each story.

Stories are an entry point into the bigger picture. Stories – multi-dimensional stories that humanize and complicate the sometimes only visible single story – make us care about and understand the real-life implications of policy.

I know that a single week isn’t enough time to grasp the realities of the Dominican Republic. Our guides will no doubt share statistics, and their critiques of social policies, and their strategies for change. But I hope to hear stories that will inspire me to learn more about human rights around the world and I hope to be excited and obligated to share many stories when I return home.

GETTING TEENS TO TALK ABOUT RAPE

When my design students found out they’d be reading Fault Line—a new young adult novel by Christa Desir about underage drinking, gang-rape, and dysfunctional teen relationships—some were confused.

Christa introduced herself to my class as a writer, an editor of adult erotic romance novels, an experienced rape counselor, and a survivor of rape.

Her debut novel Fault Line is about a teenage boy, Ben, whose girlfriend, Ani, is gang-raped at a party he didn’t attend.

The students found Fault Line to be “powerful” and “eye-opening” but they also found its ending “unsatisfying.” Christa asked them to think about how high-schoolers might respond to the book. Teenagers would find the book “scary,” the undergrads. predicted; teenagers would respond by saying, “That wouldn’t happen to me.”

Writing About Rape

Christa explained why she chose to write a “rape book” from a teenage boy’s point of view. Teenage boys are the novel’s primary audience, because rape is too often framed as a women’s issue. “I wanted readers to identify with a boy. A boy who wasn’t a perpetrator. We need boys to engage with questions about rape.”

Through her true-to-life writing style, Christa manages to confront young readers with questions they might not usually consider.

The story of Ben and Ani is messy. The rape breaks their high-school romance, in part because Ani can’t remember what happened at the party. The rumor-mill at their school catches fire and, because she was drunk that night and dancing with strangers provocatively, Ani is blamed for the sexual violence committed against her.

“That’s what happens in the real world,” Christa told us. Teachers and the media and parents have become fixated on warning girls to wear the right clothes and say the right things and act a certain way. And what’s the hidden message? Girls, if you break the rules, if you wear the wrong outfit, flirt with boys, and talk about sex, then getting raped is your fault.

Reading About Rape

“It’s not enough just to teach our boys not to be rapists. Kids need to be responsible for every person at a party.” We need to teach young people to look out for each other. To speak up if they see something that’s getting out of hand and, if necessary, call the police. “For some reason, teenagers are not stopping this,” Christa said.

With a well-meaning young man as its protagonist, Fault Line explores male perspectives of rape culture. Ben wants to help the girl he loves, but he doesn’t know how and, despite his good intentions, he makes some mistakes. Ani is broken and there’s nothing Ben can do. In this way, Fault Line leads readers to “think about how we can help or harm survivors after rape.”

“We lose survivors sometimes.” Christa shared with us the true story of a rape survivor—a friend of a friend—who disappeared. “Nobody knows what happened to her.” In Fault Line, “the ending is left open, so we have the possibility that we lose Ani.”

But real life isn’t always what people want to read, Christa told us. The hard-hitting truths at the heart of Fault Line make the novel unattractive to high-school teachers who worry about introducing their students to taboo topics like rape and sexual violence and consensual sex. As if teenagers aren’t already exposed to all that. As if teenagers don’t need guidance and trusted adults to talk to.

Talking About Rape

Fault Line represents a gap in social programming for teenagers. The book reminds us that we need to design and promote programs that help young people stand up against a culture of “victim-blaming” and “slut-shaming.” Programs that help survivors of sexual violence to speak out about their experiences and break the taboos that allow a culture of rape to continue. Programs like The Voices and Faces Project, which led Christa to write Fault Line. (Christa donates 50% of her royalties from Fault Line to support Voices and Faces writing workshops for survivors of rape and sexual assault.)

Fault Line has some solid, steady sales, but the very taboos that the novel confronts may be preventing it from becoming the massive hit it needs to be. Fault Line doesn’t deliver a tidy moral message of right and wrong all neatly tied up in a positive, hopeful ending. But that’s what makes the book so important.

As the novel gets passed from reader to reader—perhaps often discreetly with a quiet “you need to read this”—people are starting to see this extraordinary book for what it is: Fault Line is a necessary story about the realities of rape with the potential to spark vital conversations, confront taboos, and affect real change within our culture of victim-blaming, shame, and silence.

If you read the novel—and I hope you do—keep Christa’s warning in mind: “There’s no happy ending.” She said it adamantly and she wasn’t only talking about Fault Line.

Class discussion with Christa Desir, author of Fault Line, February 27 2014.

This is the second part of a series on teaching about rape culture. Read part one, here: Laughing About Rape

LAUGHING ABOUT RAPE

Can laughing about rape change rape culture?

Reality Check

“I’m a very special Holocaust survivor. I was in the camps with my wife and my girlfriend; and believe me, it wasn’t easy.”

Jack Polak recites parts of his Holocaust testimony with a cheeky smile across his face. Jack—a young, Dutch, married, Jewish man—had fallen in love with Ina—the other woman. And even deportation to a Nazi camp couldn’t get in the way of their passionate affair.

Jack and Ina’s story is the heart of the documentary Steal A Pencil For Me. I teach the film because it reminds us that the Nazis and their collaborators didn’t commit atrocities in a vacuum; the Nazis persecuted and murdered ordinary people who were trying to live ordinary lives. As Jack grins, we smile along and sometimes laugh gently at the complicated reality of his Holocaust experience.

So when I first watched the short film Meet My Rapist (you can watch it here) by director-writer-actor Jessie Kahnweiler, my uncomfortably-amused response felt comfortably familiar.

Confronting Rape

Interested in how we can engage young people and the public in questions about human rights—which includes confronting rape, sexual violence, misogyny, and rape culture—I invited Jessie on a video date. And she said yes!

It was your usual chatter. Y’know... filmmaking, humor, rape, “Holocaust survivor speed-dating,” that sort of thing.

I asked Jessie about using comedy to draw attention to rape culture. “What feels natural to me is using comedy to trick people into giving a shit,” she explained. “I wasn’t like 'I wanna make a rape comedy, like let’s really stir it up,' I wanted to fucking deal with my rape and this is how I deal with it.”

So the film is a form of testimony? I asked her.

“It had been eight years since I’d been raped. And I felt like I’d done everything I was supposed to do. Therapy, y’know—. You could supplement any other kind of trauma or skeleton or stuff people don’t wanna deal with. The film is about me confronting my own denial, and how I’ve moved through all these steps of healing. In this effort to be this strong feminist chick, I forgot to just be.”

Bubble Wrap

I told Jessie why I thought her film works so well as an educational device. In one scene, Jessie brings her rapist home to meet her parents. In another, Jessie’s rapist gatecrashes a job interview and distracts her by popping a sheet of bubble wrap. At the heart of the film is the reality that rape and the aftermath of rape are ever-present. “Will you stop it?! Just stop it!” Jessie snaps.

Moments within the film are so jarring, and the script is so embarrassingly funny, that the viewer is forced to consider how we, collectively, think about and talk about rape and sexual violence. “I was like raped, but I wasn’t like raped,” Jessie smiles apologetically.

“You laugh because you’re uncomfortable,” Jessie explained to me. And I was reminded of teenagers who laugh at photographs of open mass-graves and naked women about to be shot. Laughter indicates surprise and shock and the failure of expectations—and learning.

The 'R' Word

As the film builds, its unexpected scenes reveal questions that survivors of rape rarely ask out loud, in part because our culture of “first-world rape” (as Jessie put it) and victim-blaming and misogyny force survivors to keep their memories and trauma hidden from view. “What’s my rapist doing now?” Jessie wondered out loud. “And does he remember me? And how the fuck am I gonna get over him?”

Rape is taboo.

I toured Auschwitz last summer, I told Jessie, and an employee of the museum told us that Auschwitz tour guides are explicitly discouraged from talking about sexual violence in the camp.

In Meet My Rapist, Jessie Kahnweiler does the opposite. The film’s genius lies within Jessie’s bravery and audacity to say out loud what we’ve been trained to keep silent. “No one here wants an angry woman,” the interviewer warns her. “Because honey,” her therapist smirks, “Nobody wants to marry a rape victim.”

Responses

I asked Jessie about the public’s response to the film.

“I’ve gotten both positive and negative feedback. Some people just don’t get it,” she said, accepting that the film doesn’t speak to everyone. “What I’m most interested in as a filmmaker is how people think the way they do and why they believe certain things. In terms of rape culture, people are like, 'Rape is really bad.' But we’ve gotta open up the conversation. The fact that people are offended by the title Meet My Rapist—now that’s a fucking problem.”

When Jessie talked about the thanks she continues to receive from other survivors of rape, it became clear that the power of Meet My Rapist has even surprised its filmmaker.

“I mean, you wanna talk about the greatest moment of my life? The email from a rape victim. Or the guy who is a father of three who had been molested. I’m being honest about my shit, and it connects with people and helps them heal. As personal as it is, it feels like this issue is so much bigger than me.”

Throughout our conversation, it was obvious that Jessie doesn’t have a particular message or specific agenda. “I don’t have any of the answers. But in my work, the fun is in asking the questions.” Jessie wants people to think and reflect. “I don’t wanna tell you how to feel about the film. That’s your job, to be honest,” she said with a smile. “Sit with it. Be uncomfortable. Do some work.”


Interview with Jessie Kahnweiler, director of Meet My Rapist, December 3, 2013.

This is the first part of a series on teaching about rape culture. Read part two, here: Getting Teens To Talk About Rape