Continuum of Harm to Women

Adapted from Men Can Stop Rape

www.mencanstoprape.org

1. To identify everyday attitudes and behaviors that support the dominant story of masculinity and contribute to men's violence against women
2. To recognize everyday opportunities to challenge the dominant story of masculinity and prevent men's violence against women

Time Required: 60-90 minutes

What You Need:

1. Continuum of Harm cards
2. Masking Tape
3. Flipchart and markers or chalkboard and chalk

FACILITATOR'S NOTES: It is important to ask: what is the root-source of men's violence against women? How do we prevent this violence before it ever happens? What is it that sexual and domestic violence more likely to happen? These questions are best answered from the perspective of culture rather than the individual.

Culture tends to naturalize, to make the everyday normal, so that it seems to be something that has always been rather than something created. Certain attitudes, behaviors, assumptions, and language all become commonplace. Men's violence against women doesn't occur in a cultural vacuum. If perpetrators see the women and girls they assault as inferior, as somehow less, then there must be cultural environments that strongly support that perspective and that in some sense seems normal and commonplace. The continuum exercise is designed to raise young men's awareness of this "normal" cultural environment and promote the idea that young men and women can work to prevent violence against women by challenging and changing that environment.

You will hold up cards with attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors that support violence against women and ask the young men to explain where they would place each card somewhere along a continuum from 'Most Harmful to Women' to 'Least Harmful to Women.' The continuum cards are placed along a wall, with "Most Harmful to Women" to your right and "Least Harmful to Women" at your left. The "Not at All Harmful" card should be placed close to the "Least Harmful" card but far enough away to distinguish it as a separate category. If you're not able to check out the room you'll be presenting in beforehand, it's important to find out whether there will be a wall you can use for the continuum. If not, be creative. For example, line up folding chairs, use the edge of a stage, or locate a moveable blackboard.

EXERCISE

Introduction

"If we begin to understand that what society tells us about being a man is an unhealthy view of strength, that strength is not about being able to pound somebody or force somebody to do what you want, then we'll begin to understand that it's possible to use your strength to prevent sexual and domestic violence. In a lot of ways it takes strength not to be violent."

"So how do you use your strength to prevent sexual and domestic violence? How do men and women work together to stop this violence before it starts? To answer these questions, we have an exercise we want to do."

"We want to set it up with an imaginary scenario. Picture yourself standing on the banks of a rushing river. It's a beautiful summer day. The sun's shining. There's a soft cool breeze blowing. You're relaxed, maybe daydreaming or reading a book. All of a sudden, you look up and notice a person floating down the river caught up in the current. This person is clearly in distress, bobbing up and down and gasping for breath."

"What do you do?" (allow time for the audience to respond)

"It's likely that all of us in such a situation would look for some way to help the person. Maybe jump in if you're a good swimmer. Or find a branch that the person can grab. OK, so let's assume that you're lucky enough to find some way of rescuing him/her. You get the person to safety. Your adrenaline is pumping. But then, no sooner than you lay the person on the river bank, you look up and there's two people coming downstream, equally distressed, also drowning."

"Now what?" (allow time for the audience to respond)

"OK, maybe you go back in. Maybe you get help. In either case, you try to save them again. Let's say that by some miracle you manage to rescue this second person as well. Now you're exhausted, and the adrenaline is wearing off. You're slumped over, hands on your knees and all of a sudden, you look out of the corner of your eye at the river and here comes, not one, but a group of 100 drowning people all gasping for breath."

"What can you possibly do now?" (allow time for the audience to respond)

"It certainly seems unlikely that you could save each and every one of those drowning individuals. So instead, we suggest that you go upstream and figure out where all these people in distress are coming from. Or as one young man in a workshop once said, 'Ya gotta wonder whassup with that river?'"

"It works the same with the epidemic of sexual and domestic violence. If we think of the people in the river as having experienced this violence, then we're talking numbers much greater than 100. Let's be clear, helping survivors heal after the fact, after we have pulled them out of the river, is essential. There are rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters all over the country devoted to doing just that. But if we're going to stop this violence, we also have to examine its origins. Preventing sexual and domestic violence, stopping them before they even start, requires us to go to the source, to go upstream and take a close look at the culture in which this violence exists."

The Continuum

"What we're going to do now is take you through an exercise that will help us all walk upstream and begin to examine the cultural origins of violence against women. The exercise is called the Continuum of Harm to Women. What we're going to do is show you a series of cards. On each card is a behavior, belief, assumption, or attitude. What we want you to do is to place each card somewhere along a continuum from 'Most Harmful to Women' to 'Least Harmful to Women.' And if there are some which you feel cause no harm at all, we'll place them to the side under the heading 'Not at All Harmful.' We could make the continuum 'Harm to Men,' but we focus on women because they are sexually assaulted in much higher numbers. Before we begin, I want to emphasize that there are no right or wrong answers here. We expect that you will disagree about where the cards should go and we may end up having to split the difference in your opinions in order to place each card. More importantly, we want to hear what you think and give you a chance to share your views with each other."

Here's a sample of possible cards:

"Referring to one's girlfriend as 'my bitch'"

"Using alcohol or drugs to 'loosen a girl up'"

"Blaming a woman/girl for being raped because she wore revealing clothes"

"Honking or whistling at a woman/girl walking down the street"

"Believing that when a woman/girl says no to sex, you just have to push a little harder"

"Telling a man/boy that he throws like a girl"

"Acquaintance rape"

"Using 'He' in a paper to refer to men and women"

"Stranger rape"

"Believing that a woman's place is in the home with the kids"

"Looking at Playboy"

"Joking about how a girl 'needs to get smacked'"

"Refusing to wear a condom"

"Grabbing a girl's butt as she's walking down the school hallway"

"Yelling at your girlfriend for talking to another guy"

By no means are the cards limited to those suggested above. We encourage you to come up with some of your own.

Debriefing the Continuum

"Now that we've discussed some of these cards, I want to return to where we started this exercise: the river. Let's say we go upstream and, when we get there, we find a man shoving people in the river, one after another. I say 'man' because, as I mentioned earlier, when a rape is committed, it's almost always by a male. What do you imagine this man thinks of the people he's throwing in the water? What's his view of them?"

*Give the audience time to respond.

"Exactly. He thinks that they're nothing, they're inferior, that they're less than him. It is much easier to commit violence against people when we see them as less than fully human. For example, it is common during wartime to portray the enemy as an animal in order to make it easier for soldiers to kill them. Walt Disney, in fact, became famous drawing German soldiers with pig faces during World War II. Exposing allied soldiers to that kind of propaganda reduced their resistance to committing violence. Racist violence and gay bashing rely on a similar form of dehumanization, and it's the same with sexual and domestic violence. They depend upon attitudes or assumptions or language or actions that dehumanize women. We believe that every single card on this continuum chips away at women's full humanity. Calling a woman a "bitch" is literally referring to her as a female dog - an animal. Looking at Playboy involves seeing women as one-dimensional sex objects on display to get men off. Even using 'he' in a paper to refer to men and women does damage. A former male workshop participant, in fact, said that using 'he' is one of the most harmful things you can do because it makes women and girls invisible. It's the ultimate insult because it sends the message, not that women are simply inferior, but that they don't even exist."

"In isolation, each of these attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs may not be extremely harmful, but taken all together, they are part of a culture that supports sexual and domestic violence. Together, they create an environment in which some men are more likely to harm young women and think it's okay. Another way to think about it is that each attitude or behavior on a card is a metal bar. If 'Telling a man/boy that he throws like a girl' is one bar in front of you, it's not such a big deal. You can walk around it. But if the bars start appearing all around you, pretty soon you're in a cage. This is the situation that women face every day, their freedom limited, their status diminished, and their safety compromised. It is this cage that we must dismantle, because it makes women more likely targets of sexual and domestic violence. Without this cage, we wouldn't have this violence."

"Stopping this violence, therefore, doesn't mean waiting until you encounter a violent situation in progress to intervene. If that's what you wait for, you will likely never act. What we must do to prevent sexual and domestic violence is pull out its roots by standing up and speaking out against all the attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors that we witness every day that dehumanize women and support the violence. Think about how powerful all your voices can be together. In the same way that all of these cards together create an environment in which this violence is more likely, all of you speaking out together can create an environment in which it's is less likely. Only then will we start to make our community and our world safer."