Use Your Strength: Mobilizing Young Men to Prevent Sexual & Dating Violence

Intermedia proudly offers the new title, Use Your Strength: Mobilizing Young Men to Prevent Sexual and Dating Violence. This film introduces Men Can Stop Rape (MCSR), an award-winning pioneer in youth development programs. In this film, MCSR presents a fresh approach to the problem of sexual violence and date rape. In contrast to traditional efforts, men are not identified as the enemy. Instead, they are treated as allies, vital partners in preventing sexual and dating violence.

Working in classrooms directly with male students, MCSR’s facilitators tap into young men’s native intelligence and good will to help them identify the most powerful male role models in their lives. By emulating these males, and by learning to trust their own logic and good sense, these young men draw conclusions about the proper treatment of women and learn what they must do to foster safe and equitable relationships.

With clarity and conviction, MCSR has offered a program to engage young men, enabling men to transform the dominant messages they hear into messages of integrity and genuine strength. A vital organizing tool.”

Michael Kimmel, Professor of Sociology, Stony Brook Author of Manhood in America and Guyland

Use Your Strength

Click here for more clips and purchasing information.

Here are some items in the news we are watching:.

As the recession continues to hurt the social services sector, the state of California has come up with a creative way to fill some of the funding gaps. From the San Jose Mercury:

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—Counties could raise fees on marriage licenses by up to $10 to fund domestic violence shelters under a bill sent to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger by the state Senate.

Counties already collect a $23 fee on marriage licenses to fund domestic violence shelters. The bill approved Thursday lets county supervisors increase the fee to $33.

Alarming statistics about prison sexual abuse in America were recently released:

A US Justice Department study reported Thursday that, from October 2008 to December 2009, 88,500 inmates nationwide were sexually assaulted behind bars–4.4% of inmates in prison and 3.1% of inmates in jail.

The study showed that Females are twice as likely to be victimized as males, and that 13% of women and 19% of men were victimized in the first 24 hours after being admitted to a correctional facility.

A new study suggests that child abuse rates in the U.S. are on the decline.
From Time Wellness Blog:

The number of maltreated children in the U.S. has fallen steadily in the last two decades, according to a report this week from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

Overall, physical-abuse cases per capita fell 3% between and 2007 and 2008 (the most recent year for which stats are available). Meanwhile sexual abuse fell by 6%, the report says. These figures continue long-term downward trends in the rate of physical and sexual abuse nationwide — with most states reporting cumulative drops of over 50% since 1992 — although neglect cases per capita seem to have remained fairly stable.

For years women who have been sexually assaulted have had to deal with people who believe that is they didn’t say no, then a rape did not really happen. Usually, due to drinking, drugs, or other influences a woman who finds herself unable to say no is unable to consent as well, something society is now much more likely to consider rape.

But in Washington D.C, the same argument — that a woman couldn’t consent so the sex was an assault, is being used to block one means for documenting and prosecuting her attacker.

Read the entire story here

We found this very interesting article by Jaclyn Friedman, who talks about the issue and recounts her personal experience as a sexual assault survivor:

I’d heard horror stories about victims being grilled in excruciating detail about their sexual histories, as if anything a woman may have done in her past made her fair game to be raped in the present. But I got lucky on that front: My assailant agreed to plead no contest to the charges if I agreed to hear him out. So I spent a dark hour and a half in a dean’s office, barely breathing while the guy who’d violated me wept about his family history of alcoholism. A few days later, the dean of students called me to say that the guy had been expelled for a year (the amount of time I had left at school) but that I mustn’t speak of the case — or the punishment — to anybody.

Grateful that I would no longer have to see my attacker around campus, I didn’t think to question the sentence or the muzzle at the time. But as I began to heal, I encountered survivors of on-campus sexual violence who had been taken even less seriously than I had by the system. Gag order or no, I began to speak out about my experience and advocate for change. And then, without warning, my assailant reappeared on campus, turning my last semester into a haze of fear, hiding and post-traumatic stress.

Read the complete Washington Post story.

The Center for Public Integrity has added some new articles to their report about college sexual assault.

Here’s a sampling of some of the interesting articles:

‘Undetected Rapists’ on Campus: A Troubling Plague of Repeat Offenders

An Uncommon Outcome at Holy Cross

The report says the “date-rape drug” phenomenon “is evolving rapidly, as sexual abusers attempt to circumvent more rigorous drug controls by using substances not restricted by the international drug conventions.”

Link to the complete UN Report