sexual violence Archives - Wear Your Voice

Sexual Assault Awareness Month: A Wear Your Voice Reading List

Wear Your Voice curated a list of the many pieces we published over the past few years which are fitting reads for Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Content Note: discussions of sexual violence, including r/pe, abuse of minors, coercion, and stealthing Survivors

Apr 2, 2020

100 Years Of White Feminism

White Women Are Complicit in Rape Culture Too

White women are either ignorant or indifferent to how white supremacy uses sexual violence to maintain the oppression of racialized bodies. This essay contains discussions of r/pe and sexual violence It’s not that I don’t like white women, it’s that I can

Jan 27, 2020

Rape Culture

Surviving Rape as a Prison Abolitionist

People try to poke holes in the prison abolition movement by asking “what about rapists, do you want them just wandering around?” But they already are. TW/CW: mentions of sexual assault and details of r/pe. By Miriam Perez-Putnam It took me two years

Jan 10, 2020

Rape Culture

4 Things People Do That Harm Survivors of Sexual Violence

From derailing, to gaslighting, to unsolicited advice: people derail important conversations held by survivors of sexual assault. TW/CW: this article discusses sexual assault/violence as well as gaslighting of a sexual assault survivor By Gloria Oladipo Sometimes, to shame the devil, we have to

Dec 6, 2019

News & Politics

There is no Justice for Asifa Bano Without Freedom for Kashmir

To do justice by Asifa would be to recognize that in her tragedy lies the story of thousands of women and girls in Kashmir who have experienced the same crimes fueled by the same ideologies.

[CW/TW: mention of r/pe or sexual assault, and murder.] By Manaal Farooqi When news of an abduction, rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl in India broke loose earlier this month, the response was polarizing within the nation and amongst its diaspora. Asifa Bano was sexually assaulted for days then murdered by several men, also happened to be a Muslim Kashmiri in Indian occupied Kashmir. The Hindu men who tortured and murdered Asifa were found and arrested, but have received sympathies and demonstrations for their release from Hindu nationalists across the country. The men allegedly committed the crime to drive away Asifa’s family and community, the nomadic Bakarwal tribe members. The injustice has been framed as isolated from the overall occupation and atrocities that have been committed in the past decades in Kashmir, but the history of violence, sexual assault and more in the region has been an intrinsic part of this cycle of violence. Hindu nationalism has been on the rise since the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014, which is the political extension of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) who are committed to creating a Hindu nationalist state. While these changes in government and policies have swept the nation since 2014, these issues have affected the people of Kashmir for far longer. Indian occupied Kashmir has dealt with clashes and insurgencies since 1965, at times with the help of the Pakistani state as well. In current times, the insurgency continues on a different scale with alternative tactics since 2017 — dubbed as the “year of the student uprising”— including mass protests and rallies. This particular generation has been raised in occupation for their entire lives and with the BJP in power they are experiencing the national shift with a deeper sense of estrangement from the state. With comments from both the BJP and Modi asking Kashmiri youth to choose between “tourism and terrorism”, the already established lack of faith in the state and government has deepened.