“She Knew What She Was Doing.” Why Do Adults Say This About Abused Children?
If there were no rapist in the vicinity, the child would not have been raped. There is a phrase that has always bothered me when people use it to talk…
If there were no rapist in the vicinity, the child would not have been raped. There is a phrase that has always bothered me when people use it to talk…
Another book from my personal shelf… Some books stay with you long after you’ve finished reading them. Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) is one of those books. But I want…
They were in the kitchen. It was a small, minor disagreement, but he was frustrated and didn’t like her tone. He hit her. She was shocked; there was blood. That’s…
The crime was the perpetrator’s choice, not the victim’s failure to behave perfectly. There is something deeply troubling about the way we expect women and girls to behave after sexual…
“It was ‘that’ kind of man who harmed you, not this kind.” But how can we prevent harm in the future? What did we miss? What went wrong? The burden…
Melba Wilson wrote about something that Black women had certainly been living but had rarely been given room to discuss publicly: incest and childhood sexual abuse inside Black families. Crossing…
I did not arrive at female boundaries because I assumed every male was dangerous. I arrived there because I knew what society does to women and girls when the dangerous…
“History, despite Its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, But if faced with courage, Need not be lived again.” —Maya Angelou “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” was the #3…
What makes this monologue so valuable is its examination of the person who learns to operate right along the boundary. Arabella describes “Bob” as someone who has paid attention to…
Background and Vulnerability: She explains that she and her brother had been sent to stay with her aunt and uncle for what was intended to be a few weeks,…