The May edition of the Carnival Against Child Abuse is up over at ImagineIf and even though it kind of snuck up on me, there appears to be lots of good reading material, once again!
It’s hard to believe, but next month will be the carnival’s first birthday. Wow, the year has just flown by! I’ll have to spend some time thinking about what I want to contribute to the year anniversary Carnival. Hopefully, you will do the same!
Pin This is really my biggest problem. Sometimes, sadness, grief, anger, and uncertainty are entirely appropriate, so why are we telling people to ignore those emotions?
Look at it this way, when we watched George Floyd’s death on video, we all felt something, and it probably wasn’t all that pleasant. Or, when we read the overwhelming number of deaths from COVID, we felt something. Maybe we all didn’t feel exactly the same thing, but we all felt something, and maybe most of all we felt a need to do something about it. If we had simply flipped the page and focused on what we are grateful for, we weren’t changing anything, we aren’t doing the things we need to do to keep ourselves safe and well. We are just ignoring it.
Some of you may know that I’ve been maintaining the Male Abuse Awareness Week Google Plus Page for the last year or so. As the full year has come to a close, I was sent the paperwork to become an “official” volunteer for the PLuna Foundation, the larger organization behind Male Abuse Awareness Week. It…
Tonight as part of our normal Friends of the Library Board meeting, we also had a meeting with the branch managers of the various library branches. As part of this meeting we gave them an overview of what we’ve been doing and working on. Since we should have the website launched sometime in late June,…
I wrote this about the day over on my tech site: “As most of you know from reading my sites, I very closely identify myself with my Irish heritage. I’ve spent a lot of time studying Irish history, as well as the history of Irish-Americans. I have a great respect for the people of Ireland…
The second edition is up! Looks like there is plenty of good reading material in there. Hopefully, I’ll have time to poke around in it soon!
Pin What I want to address, however, is how our society defines victims and how it leaves far too many people behind. The article above is a great example. How many people, if asked about sex trafficking, picture little white girls or women abducted from Target? Probably a lot. For many, the only information they’ve ever gotten about trafficking are warnings about Target or shopping mall parking lots from their Facebook friends. They don’t know how many teenage boys from broken homes, living in poverty, are pulled into being trafficked. How many gay youths, rejected by their families, fall victim to it? How many immigrant children here, with no parental supervision, are sold off by the people who should be protecting them from sexual slavery?Â
Those stories, even if they’re told, are not going to grab national headlines. They are not going to evoke world-wide outrage and sympathy. Those are things that happen to “other people”. We might even be tempted to start looking for reason why it’s their own fault, or at least the parents fault, right?Â
From a media perspective, we also have to keep this in mind. An abduction of a young white girl from her home, is a rare event. It’s actually newsworthy because it happens so rarely. When it happens, it’s shocking. A trans, minority, teen being coerced into selling themselves, with no one to turn to for protection, isn’t any of those things. A gay male teen being kicked out of their parents house and trying to make it through homelessness, is also not something that happens so rarely that there would be major news coverage of it. These things happen all of the time. So often, that they aren’t really news.Â
So, which group should we have support and services for? I’d like to vote for ALL OF THEM. But that will take educating people about the reality of who gets abused, who gets trafficked, and for us all to accept that it happens everywhere. Until we get there, and are willing to see all different types of people as victims, we will continue to fail one group or another. That’s not acceptable.Â
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Sounds good, thanks Mike!