McKnight Youth Council to hold Public Safety forum on Friday

Sometimes it seems like we live in a "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" city. Mostly we ignore the potential for violence in our community, or complain and do little to prevent it. Then, when violence hurts or even kills someone, we complain about how nobody does anything.

Truth is, a lot of good people and agencies are doing a lot to prevent violence in Springfield.  Youth-led efforts, however,  are rarer, not because youth don't care, but because often they don't get the structural support they need to do good work.

The McKnight Neighborhood Youth Council.does get the full support of the McKnight Neighborhood Council, and the Youth Council has pulled together a pretty power-house forum on public safety this on Friday and, while focused on McKnight, is open to the community at large.
 

McKNIGHT NEIGHBORHOOD YOUTH COUNCIL HOSTS

                                    PUBLIC SAFETY FORUM

                                    Panel to include  MAYOR SARNO & CMR. FITCHET 

WHEN:           FRIDAY, JANUARY 8, 2010;  6 TO 8 pm

WHERE:         REBECCA JOHNSON SCHOOL AUDITORIUM

                        55 Catherine Street, Springfield

The McKnight Neighborhood Youth Council will host an open forum on public safety at Rebecca Johnson School, 55 Catherine Street, on Friday, January 8, 2010, from 6 to 8 pm.

The forum will feature a panel including Mayor Domenic J. Sarno, Police Commissioner William J. Fitchet, Officer Reggie Miller and Kathleen N. Brown of Springfield Community Policing, Sgt. James Brown of the Neighborhood Watch, representatives of the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department, and Walter Kroll of the McKnight Neighborhood Council Public Safety Committee.

Panelists will be taking questions from the audience about what residents feel are the major problems that contribute to crime and violence in the city and what they want their city government and police department to do about it!

All of the newly elected and re-elected Springfield City Councilors have been invited, as have representatives of Mason Square community and youth organizations, businesses and churches.

The Youth Council, with the full support and backing of the McKnight Neighborhood Council, Inc., is responsible for organizing this major event in bringing greater citizen participation to the important issue of our common need for safety on our streets, in our schools and playgrounds, and in our homes.

The forum is open to all residents of Springfield, although the main focus will be McKnight and the neighborhoods surrounding Mason Square.

For information email mcknightyouthcouncil@hotmail.com, or call Youth Council Chair Jesse Lederman, 351-6785, or  Administrative Staff Kat Wright at 827-9526.

.  
Photo from Meanest Indian's photostream at Flickr.

CNN's Rick Sanchez uses the language of violence

Irony of ironies....this afternoon on Rick Sanchez' show on CNN, he read aloud from the filing documents released by the Los Angeles police that described the "alleged" beating of singer Rihanna by her boyfriend Chris Brown. The literally blow by blow description of the assault was chilling and and graphic.

After reading the filing documents, Rick addressed one of his guests, Ashleigh Banfield from In Session.

"There's talk..that she's gonna go back to him and all that jazz..and as a guy, as a human being, you can't help but wonder why. And there's talk now, that there's some people who know her who are gonna try to knock some sense into her. What are you hearing?"

Hold on! Isn't that what Chris Brown probably believes, that he was "knocking some sense into her?"

Is he next going to call the assault a "crime of passion?"

Photo from Dvux's photostream at Flickr.

Sex workers aren't "asking for it."

On December 27th, two police officers on foot patrol discovered an unconscious woman under a bush in Springfield, Massachusetts' South End. She had been raped and severely beaten, and in the frigid weather, her body temperature had fallen to 80 degrees. She was the third woman since October to be found raped and beaten into unconsciousness.

"If it were a half-hour later, we would have been investigating the city's 15th murder," said Sgt. John M. Delaney, aide to Police Commissioner William J. Fitchet.

The victim is a white woman with a long history with police, Delaney said, though he did not detail her arrest record.

"I hate to say it, I don't want to make her a victim twice," Delaney said, while cautioning the public that the attack did not bear the marks of a "typical" serial rapist.

"The general public should know that this was a woman who engaged in risky behavior, not someone who was abducted at random," he said. Stephanie Barry, Springfield Republican.

What Sgt. Delaney was trying to say, without coming right out and saying it, was that the woman was a prostitute. Similar statements made in October about the other two victims implied the same thing. What Sgt. Delaney was careful not to imply was that in spite of her "risky behavior," the woman was "asking for it." That particular judgment will be made by far too many others in the community.

Women's advocates know that no woman is safe from rape and murder. One out of every six women in the U.S. has been the victim or a rape or attempted rape in their lifetime, and the murder rate for women is 1.35 for every 100,00 women.

But yes-- violence against sex workers is way out of proportion to that of the general population.

The most recent victim's brutalization took place exactly ten days after the 6th Annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. The event was initiated to commemorate the more than 90 victims of the Green River killer Gary Ridgway, who targeted prostitutes because "I knew they would not be reported missing right away, and might never be reported. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught."

"Violence should not be an occupational hazard!" The Sex Worker Outreach Project, along with many others, believes that laws that criminalize prostitution help to put women in harm's way. Perpetrators often count on sex workers not going to the police for protection (there are occasional exceptions: see my post on Officer Jacobson) and the stigma creates the idea that sex workers, especially street prostitutes, are a disposable class of people.

Sadly, as women as a whole experience less discrimination and greater possibilities, the women's movement, if it even still exists, shows little or no solidarity with women who use their bodies to make a living. Radical movements to prevent violence against women have turned into service providers with close ties to the state. I have heard no outcry from the YWCA, no word from any battered women's shelter or rape crisis center. My own organization, Arise for Social Justice, , used to frequent places where we would find sex workers and pass out flyers about safety and resources, but our own resources have been very thin of late. Thinking about this, I have to ask myself if we could have done something to make these womens' assaults less likely.

The real question, though, is what can we do now?

Photo from SWOP-Tuscon.

Please: no more murdered women and children in Springfield in 2008!

Patrick Johnson at the Springfield Republican has a story today tallying up the domestic violence murders in Springfield this year. Three women and five children died at the hands of those they should have been able to trust the most.

It's worth posting both the local domestic violence hotline and the national number. Locally, call ARCH, 413-733-7100. Anywhere in Massachusetts, call SafeLink, 1-877-853-2020.

So often the male perpetrators of these crimes kill themselves after they kill their wives and their children. Why don't they just kill themselves first?

Here's an understatement: domestic violence is a complicated issue. Women are not the only victims; children and men suffer, also. It's not rare for violence to be mutual-- although when it comes to the death of a partner, women are almost always the victims.

Interestingly enough, Johnson's article says that the police were never called to the victims' residences, no restraining orders were ever filed, and no neighbors ever complained about excessive noise.

Perhaps this is because the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction to protect women that women often see the "cure" as potentially as damaging as the violence.

An all too common scenario goes like this: you and your husband are having a fight, and voices get loud. (There may or may not be physical violence accompanying this argument.) You have children in the home. A neighbor calls the police. What happens next depends on whether or not the police suspect violence has taken place. But one thing that will surely happen is that the police will file a 51A-- a Care and Protection order-- with the Department of Social Services. DSS will require that you get a restraining order against your husband and remove him from your home and your life. If you fail to do so, your children may be taken away from you. This is a heavy chain of consequences to bear. Many families that need help are destroyed, and, I think, many women who really do need help won't take the risk of asking for it.

I'm not one who thinks that state intervention and incarceration should be the first step and is automatically the best step to solve every social ill. I believe that women who need to be safe should have a place to go. Once upon a time, battered women's shelters were run by dedicated community volunteers. Now they are funded by the Department of Social Services. And everybody and his brother-- every police officer, teacher, doctor, nurse, case manager and social worker-- is a mandated reporter.

For a deeper and contextualized look at violence against women, check out Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. For a look at a violence against men site that is NOT an anti-woman site (even if i don't agree with every perspective), see Battered Men. There's a hopeful page on the Family Violence Prevention Fund about raising boys into men. Check out their home page for more general information.