Silence is the enemy: addressing the causes.

Yesterday, in my first post about the Silence is the Enemy campaign, I wrote:

Addressing rape directly. From the point of view of ethics, you’d think this would be a very short discussion. It is wrong to commit sexual violence. It is wrong to act out your frustration or your sense of entitlement or your need to feel that there is something in your life that is within your control on the body of another human being. It is wrong to treat a woman or a child (or another man) as less than fully human.
Anyone who would argue otherwise could only be a moral monster. Or thoroughly steeped in a culture that regards women and children as less than fully human, and the desire, anger, and frustration of men as something that can be acted out on women and children.

The ethics of sexual violence seem pretty black and white. And yet sexual violence is a reality — as a constant threat, if not as something that has been committed — for more women than you can imagine.
As usual, Zuska say it better than anyone else:

I want to make the provocative suggestion that it is not helpful in some ways to label perpetrators of sexual assault – even those who rape very, very young girls – as “monsters”. I say this as someone who was sexually assaulted at an extremely young age.
I was assaulted by someone I know. I would not call him a monster, though what he did is monstrous. Calling perpetrators of sexual assault monsters makes it seem like somehow we can cut them out of a crowd, easily identify them somehow, know them as in some way different from the more general group of average men. Yet this is not the case. The next time you are in a crowd, look around you. Can you tell who, in that crowd, are the men who have molested their daughters or sisters or cousins or nieces? Of course you can’t. They look like every other man. They come from every walk of life, every social class, every type of occupation. …
Sheril Kirshenbaum wrote, quoting Nicholas Kristof, “The war has shattered norms, training some men to think that ‘when they want sex, they need simply to overpower a girl.’ ” Has it really shattered norms? Or just enshrined, entrenched, enhanced, and elevated a central norm of patriarchal manhood that women exist for men’s pleasure, that a woman, any woman, even a three-year-old “woman” should be available at a man’s whim to service his needs? Women’s bodies are that upon which men enact their struggles to display their masculinity to each other. The rapes being carried out in Liberia and elsewhere are not being carried out by monsters; they are being perpetrated by men, average men, men who are in many cases known to their young victims. The rapes are acts done by men to assert their masculinity and a sense of control in a world in which very little is actually under their control.

How can the people (not monsters) who commit sexual violence commit such ethically monstrous acts? Finding the answer to this question and using this answer to change the conditions seems like a reasonable strategy for stopping sexual violence.
My hypothesis (though it’s hardly a novel one) is that a crucial factor enabling sexual violence is the belief that women and children are “other”, less important than men (at least, less important than men’s desire or rage or need to demonstrate their power to control some part of their world), less than fully human. Other factors — like war — may contribute to sexual violence, but the othering of women and children seems essential for the response to war to take the form of rape.
Ratcheting down the othering just a little bit isn’t enough. For a society to get close to equality between men and women is not enough if it comes down to potential rapists deciding, “My needs trump yours.”
Only achieving the understanding that we are all members of the family of humanity — and that, as such, we are subject to each other — will solve the problem.
And this is why, even as we direct our voices and our donations to help address the crisis of mass rapes in Liberia, we must challenge the attitudes that let men become rapists everywhere — in our schools, in our workplaces, in our military, in our families.
Mass rape is a big thing worth addressing.
Treating women and children as less than fully human is a big thing, too, worth addressing even in case where they aren’t being left to hemorrhage to death but are simply being reminded to stay in their place.
Silence is the enemy. Our common humanity requires us to speak up.