Reflections on Culture and Violence

I think that anyone who works in the field of education or prevention will say they learn a lot from the children they are educating. In order to use education as prevention successfully there must be an exchange of ideas, thoughts, and feelings. This notion came home to me recently through experiences at work, as well as in my spare time.

The experience that truly brought on this cathartics was when my home was broken into in the middle of the nights. I woke up to threats of violence and racial slurs by a group of drunken men. They had falsely identified our house as the home of some individual that had hit their friend.

When woken up I had know idea of what had just happened but as soon as I had some sort of cohesive thought process I called 9-1-1. The police took what seemed like an eternity to arrive. Once on the scene, one officer did not take any fingerprints and did not leave any report number. He did not look for the individual. He simply labeled it as criminal damage and left, leaving us with a door jam in splinters and no way to secure our household.

When a traumatic event happens survivors are more often than not left to ask the question "why?" I went through extenuating circumstances to try to ascertain why the police were so unconcerned with the assault. Is it because we live in a poor neighborhood? Is it because we are brown and our assailants were white? Maybe it was because no one was physically hurt. I kept thinking to myself: "What would have happened if a group of 8 or so men had broken into a home in an affluent neighborhood?" We even made incident reports in the paper and they felt the invasion of our home only with 5 minute of one officers time was not worthy of a report. Even pulling over a car for running a stop sign is worthy of more time.

My attempts to understand the incident were further clouded by my roommate's and friend's negative reaction to me calling to police. He and his friends are Native American and they thought I should have gone down and "handled mine". My decision to not partake in the escalation of violence was seen as negative particularly because I decided to involve the police.

Two days later four of the men came back and busted in what was left of our door and entered the house. I was not at the residence, but because of my lobbying my roommate called the police, only to have the same results as last time. No arrest, no fingerprints no police report number. This time the assailants had dropped their cell phone. To add to this, my roommate was physically attacked and had to fight back with a knife.

It is not my intent to slander the police but bring to light the culture we perform education in. I came to many conclusions from this episode. It was almost worth going through the trauma to gain the insight... almost.

I combined this experience with my background of doing rape and violence prevention with teens and minority populations to come up with some conclusions. The fact that I received so much flack for calling the police reflected the feeling that our only hope of justice in this mater is retaliation. Now it is recorded that we have a motive to assault another. In a lot of minority communities, (teens being one of them,) the police are seen as someone who puts you or your parents in jail. Gang involvement and so-called forms of deviance can be seen as a way for youth and minorities to gain justice and economic opportunity. If you are jumped someone in the other gang will get jumped in return. And as the cliche goes: "Why work at Mickey D's making $5 an hour when you can make $500 and day?"

What does this mean in terms of rape and violence prevention? I think this is the key to running successful programs for youth. Teens, not to mention victims/survivors focus most of their activities on equality and justice. If you were to tell a victim you really don't want to hear their story but can tell them how they can act better, what do you think their response would be? The same is true for teens. We have to hear, and really hear their stories and establish equality in our relationships with them in order for them to in return hear us. This is especially true when teaching about things such as sexuality and relationships because we are not teaching facts and figures but want what we teach to translate into behavior changes. If we want youth to change their behavior we have to change ours as a culture, or at least in the culture of the classroom so youth won't have to fall back on so-called deviant behavior to get their needs met.