A webinar bringing visibility to the invisible forms of sexual assault that happen in jails, prisons and in the military.
Sexual Assault is a form of violence used around the world to terrorize, control and maintain systems of exploitative capitalism. The #MeToo movement has created important space for people, primarily women, to speak out about their experiences of sexual violation, harassment and assault. However, as is often the case when victimization is defined, the role of state violence against marginalized communities is often obscured and made invisible. This is especially true in the environments of jails, prisons and the military where accountability and transparency to the public are limited and where the cultures themselves are highly controlling and patriarchal.
#MeTooBehindBars is a campaign that exposes the specific ways in which the prison system uses sexual and gender-based violence, including homophobia and transphobia, to target the people who it incarcerates and whose daily lives it has almost total control over. The campaign was launched in response to two assaults where correctional officers (COs) used physical force, sexual harassment, and homophobic and transphobic insults against transgender, gender non-conforming (GNC) and/or queer people at women’s prisons in California. The campaign supports a lawsuit filed against the CDCR by five plaintiffs targeted in the incident, one of whom is our panelist Stacey Rojas (Rojas), while incarcerated at Central California Women's Facility.
This webinar identifies the military as another institution where sexual assault is rampant. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has adopted the term military sexual trauma (MST) to refer to severe or threatening forms of sexual harassment and sexual assault sustained in military service. In response to widespread exposure in the military and the lasting damage to mental health as a consequence of sexual violence, the VHA has implemented a universal screening program for MST. With this discussion we introduce #MeTooBehindBarsStripesandStars to draw the parallel between the military and carceral institutions as cultures that foster sexual abuse in different through related ways. As does #MeTooBehindBars, the aim is to influence the #MeToo movement, by encouraging models of transformative justice rather than expansion of the carceral system and propagation of the mentality of punishment control so pervasive in both criminal legal system and in the military.
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