It’s up over at Cerebralmum’s. With this being the month of Thanksgiving, she gave it a Gratitude Theme. Looks like there’s some good reading over there, and since I’m trying to rid myself of this cold, I think I’ll spend some time reading through it!
You may notice that I’ve created a little bit of a blogroll over to the right. I found this handful sites in one night of searching the internet and following link after link, looking for blogs of people who have overcome either abuse, depression, cancer or some other type of disability. If you know someone…
Today is my second wedding anniversary. We aren’t going to be doing anything special today to celebrate, mostly because she’s got a 12 hour workday scheduled, but we will be celebrating in style by relaxing in Tennessee for most of the week! After my first marriage ended in utter failure due to my ongoing battles…
One of the posts I’ve been looking at quite a bit from the last Carnival Against Child Abuse is this guest post by Stephanie Gagos about self-esteem. One of the ideas that strikes me, especially given the time of the year is the idea towards the end of balancing accepting yourself while also striving to…
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
Pin In between work conference calls today, I had the opportunity to spend my lunch hour talking to Tiffany Werhner and the Moments of Clarity audience about being a survivor and the importance of World Suicide Prevention Day. I enjoyed having the opportunity to talk a bit about some of the really important issues, especially the…
Lots going on this weekend in the online survivor community. If you’re not out enjoying the weather, or watching some football, there’s plenty of good stuff to read and think about. First up, Dan has the Inner Child Edition of the Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse up. There’s quite a bit of good stuff linked…
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