October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month

Last night, as I was writing down my grandma's stories about growing up in a small town in the 30s and 40s, a completely different subject was on my mind. About an hour earlier a friend had texted me saying "Apparently there's a rapist in Davis who's tried to rape 4 women already so just be careful and pass it on."

At first this text didn't faze me. Well, duh, there's always at least one rapist wherever you go and I feel like I'm always somewhat on-guard. I ignored it for a few minutes, then read the message again. "Pass it on." I couldn't fight the feeling that if I didn't pass it on, one of my friends would be a victim, and I knew that if every woman in the city was aware of this guy, his chances of victimizing another woman were slimmer. I texted every girl in the Davis area in my phone (save those who I knew the other girl would have texted). "Thank you!" responses came one after the other, and I realized that not every girl grew up with the mindset that I did.

I grew up watching Law & Order (especially the SVU series), and my mother has always been paranoid about rapists. Before every sleepover she told me not to be alone in the room with my friend's father, and for every trip alone to the store she asked me and my sisters to stay where there were a lot of people. Already in my mind there were criminals, rapists, and kidnappers hiding behind every building, waiting for a crowd to disperse and a young girl to make her way around the corner. In high school, my mom started working for the Women's Shelter Program; I would get headaches on the car rides home from school because of the stories she would tell about her clients. She wouldn't usually detail the physical abuse her clients suffered, but even the emotional abuse -- the courtroom drama, her clients' fears that their abusers would gain custody over their children -- would make me tense.

I am so grateful that I have made it 20 years without being victimized in these ways. I don't like to bring up these details with friends, but I do find that I am much more sensitive about people joking about assault. Er, let me re-phrase. I don't know anyone who jokes about stranger rape anymore; they mostly scare that out of you in junior high. But I know that a lot of my college-age friends are still naive about how often domestic and dating violence occurs. The other day my friend took a quiz on Facebook: "Which Glee character are you?" She got the pregnant cheerleader...but they described her as something like, you're nearly perfect, but you've gone through some hard times, or something. Anyway, she made some joke about it meaning she's pregnant (she's not) and her boyfriend said "where's a flight of stairs when you need one?" I hated that. I don't mind this guy, but I hate him for that comment right now. I kept thinking back to a painting my mom did that incorporated some statements from her clients. One said "he pushed me down the stairs"...and that wasn't the first time I'd heard a statement like that from my mom's job, including descriptions of men pushing their girlfriends/wives down the stairs when she was pregnant.

[I'm getting frustrated and am going to get preachy in a moment.] See, I don't think my friend's boyfriend would ever hurt her, but if this is something our generation can still joke about, it will be hard to condone others when they sound like they are a little too serious about the joke. If we act blind to assault, domestic and dating violence, then we push prevention that much further off. October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Make yourself aware, help make others aware, and think twice before joking about assault.