Opinion
In December 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the initial findings of the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS).
“Approximately 80 percent of female victims were raped before the age of 25, and almost half before the age of 18. About 35 percent of women who were raped as minors were also raped as adults compared to 14 percent of women without an early rape history. Nearly 1 in 5 women (18.3%) and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) in the United States have been raped at some time in their lives, including completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration. One percent, or approximately 1.3 million women, reported being raped by any perpetrator in the 12 months prior to taking the survey.”
Each year, April is designated as “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” (SAAM) in Lake County and across the nation.
Sexual Assault Awareness Month was introduced to Lake County to raise awareness about rape and sexual assault, educate the community and help prevent sexual violence.
On April 25, Lake Family Resource Center sponsored “Denim Day in Lake County.”
Denim Day grew out of a 1998 Italian Supreme Court decision that overturned a rape conviction because the victim wore skinny jeans.
The judge reasoned the victim’s tight jeans meant that she helped her assailant remove them, implying consent.
People all over the world were outraged, and wearing jeans became an international symbol of protest against erroneous and destructive attitudes and myths surrounding sexual assault, thus, Denim Day was born, according to www.SayNoToViolence.Org .
Lake Family Resource Center would like to thank all of the participating organizations for their support of Denim Day and sexual assault victim/survivors, making it a huge success: Sutter Lakeside Hospital, Mendocino Community Health Clinic, Twin Pine Casino, Victim-Witness and the District Attorney's Officee, Lake County Administrative Office, Lake County Counsel, Lake County Board of Supervisors, courthouse employees, Lake County Office of Education, Kathy Fowler Chevrolet, Hillside Honda, Healthy Start and Lake County Probation.
Altogether, 1,363 badges, 185 flyers and 29 posters were distributed in our community. Each person who wore a badge asking “Why Denim?” was prepared to answer that question and have a conversation about sexual assault.
Spreading sexual assault awareness helps to prevent future attacks, hold offenders accountable and educate many. Sexual assault not only affects the victim but also families, friends, bystanders and our entire community.
Reports say that approximately 20 percent of the US female population will be the victims of some form of sexual assault and 80 percent of those completed rapes will occur before age 24 (12% before age 10, 30% between ages 11-17 and 37% between ages 18-24). That is one out of every four or five female children/women!
It’s incredibly sad to realize that this number does not reflect an accurate description of the extent of sexual assault in our country because so many assaults are unreported. Estimates are that only about three to four of every 10 rapes are reported. Male sexual assault is also vastly under reported.
Please speak up and let’s all try to help prevent the next attack … And if you have been sexually assaulted, please know this – it’s never your fault! And the Rape Crisis Center is ready to help and support your journey to wellness after this terrible experience.
The Rape Crisis Center provides 24/7 Crisis Counseling (through the Community Crisis Line – 1-888-485-7733), accompaniment at the hospital and for all law enforcement and court processes as well as assistance to connect with and apply for other community resources.
The Rape Crisis Center will share information about what has happened and why a survivor feels the way they feel.
All services are free and strictly confidential.
Of great concern, the Rape Crisis Centers’ budget has been cut by nearly $10,000 in 2012-13. Please donate to help maintain this vital service in our community. Contact Lake Family Resource Centers – Rape Crisis Center.
Anybody can help! Won’t you?
For more information about sexual assault victim rights and services or to make a donation, please contact Lee Perales at 707-262-1379, Extension 110.
To speak to a trained sexual assault counselor call the Community Crisis Line (24/7) 1-888-485-7733.
Sheri Salituri-Young works for the Lake Family Resource Center, headquartered in Kelseyville, Calif.
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- Written by: Sheri Salituri-Young
I’m no kin to the monkey, no no no
The monkey’s no kin to me, yeah yeah yeah
I don’t know much about his ancestors
But mine didn’t swing from a tree.
That’s the first verse of a famous creationist ditty, “I’m No Kin to the Monkey,” written by Dave Hendricks. You can hear a famous 1972 performance of it by two sisters, Robin and Crystal Bernard, singing at Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKwlUmoiPVY , where it’s called “The Monkey Song.”
And you might be excused for thinking that you might have detected it echoing through the Tennessee General Assembly recently.
Eighty-seven years after the notorious Scopes trial, the Tennessee legislature recently passed a bill encouraging teachers to present the “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of topics that arouse “debate and disputation” such as “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning,” and the governor allowed allowed the bill to become law without his signature.
Scopes was convicted in 1925 of violating a Tennessee law that forbade the teaching of human evolution in the state’s public schools, and that law remained on the books until 1967, when the Tennessee legislature repealed it, anticipating the Supreme Court’s 1968 ruling that such laws are unconstitutional.
But creationist tactics have evolved. After it was no longer possible to ban the teaching of evolution, creationists tried to have creationism – whether in the form of “creation science” or “intelligent design” – taught alongside evolution.
With a Supreme Court ruling in 1987 against the teaching of creation science and a federal court ruling in 2005 against the teaching of intelligent design, the strategy is increasingly recognized as a failure. And so the subtler approach of the new Tennessee law.
Despite the lofty rhetoric about critical thinking and scientific inquiry surrounding the bill, it was clear what the purpose of its supporters was.
After all, the bill was pushed by the state affiliate of the fundamentalist Focus on the Family, and a columnist for Scientific American (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scopes-creationism-education&;page=2 ) reported that its main sponsor in the Tennessee House of Representatives “could not explain why a Christian organization would be pushing legislation that supposedly has nothing to do with inserting religion into science class.”
A less evasive state representative explained his support for the bill on the floor of the House by mangling a passage from Francis Bacon and misattributing it to Albert Einstein: “A little knowledge would turn your head to atheism, while a broader knowledge would turn your head to Christianity.”
In passing the bill, the legislature ignored the opposition of the scientific community, including Stanley Cohen, Tennessee’s only Nobel laureate in science, and of the educational community, including the Tennessee Science Teachers Association, representing the supposed beneficiaries of its provisions.
Having taken indefensible stands on the science and the pedagogy, is it any surprise, then, that the legislature also took a questionable stand on the theology, by assuming that accepting Christianity requires rejecting evolution?
Certainly there are people who think so; that, after all, is what creationism is all about. But that’s a distinctively religious view, and in a modern, pluralistic, secular nation, where separation of church and state is a fundamental principle, it’s not a view that legislators should be using their offices to promote.
Moreover, Christianity is anything but unanimous in rejecting evolution: there are plenty of Christians – clergy, scientists and laypeople – who accept evolution as compatible with, even as enriching, their faith.
Over 13,000 members of the clergy have endorsed a statement calling on policymakers to “preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge.”
Entire denominations, including the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Methodist Church, have expressed their support for the uncompromised teaching of evolution.
So Tennessee’s new law is motivated not just by religious concerns but by narrowly sectarian concerns: precisely what the framers of the Constitution were so careful to discourage.
It isn’t as though people of faith in Tennessee aren’t aware of the problems with their state’s new antiscience bill and with creationism in general.
State Sen. Andy Berke, opposing the Senate version of the bill, spotted the problem straightaway, commenting, “I’m a person of faith. If my children ask, ‘How does that mesh with my faith?’ I don’t want their teacher answering that question.”
Lenn Goodman, a distinguished philosophy professor at Vanderbilt University, recently wrote a book insisting on the scientific validity of evolution while offering, “Where evolution asks how we came to be, Genesis probes what it is to be human.”
As Tennessee braces for what may be a new Scopes trial, it is important for people of faith who support the integrity of science education to stand up and be counted.
If I may end with a parody of the verse with which I began:
This monkey law just has to go,
Because it just isn’t true,
It’s such a disgrace to Tennessee,
A disgrace to the human race too.
Peter M. J. Hess, Ph.D., is director of Religious Community Outreach at the Oakland, Calif.-based National Center for Science Education, www.ncse.com . He is from Cobb, Calif. and lives in Berkeley, Calif.
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- Written by: Peter M. J. Hess
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