San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Account of assault could be watershed
Professor’s testimony likened to Anita Hill’s Flawed beams brace transit center roof, support bus deck
Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony may not persuade the Senate to reject Brett Kavanaugh for the U.S. Supreme Court. But it may have the effect of changing America.
It’s happened before.
Anita Hill failed, in 1991, to persuade lawmakers to block Clarence Thomas’ advancement to the high court.
But her detailed testimony that Thomas persistently tried to date her when he was her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and that he spoke graphically about sex and his own anatomy, laid a new foundation for future victims of sexual harassment to seek justice at work and to prevent it in the first place.
In the decade before Hill’s testimony, the phrase “sexual harassment” appeared 582 times in the New York Times. In the decade after, it appeared 5,122 times. Sexual harassment prevention training, unheard of before Hill, is now ubiquitous. So is the practice of having the human resources department hear from employees whose bosses or colleagues didn’t get the message and start talking dirty or spewing hostility in the workplace.
“Women heard her. They recognized her experience,” said Emily Martin, a vice president at the National Women’s Law Center. “Anita Hill helped the country recognize that sexual harassment isn’t just a personal problem you’re having at work. It’s a systemic issue that deserves a solution.”
And so Ford’s testimony has the power to do that for sexual assault, say lawyers, educators and even advocates for the rights of men. Her story of being 15 and at a friend’s house in the early 1980s when
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San Francisco’s new transit center has a clean, unified look, with a rippling white form that rests atop clusters of diagonal columns. In reality, it’s three buildings in one that stretch for 1,500 feet and twice span major roadways.
Those spans are supported by just four massive beams.
Two of them have cracked. The cracks were discovered Tuesday and prompted the closure of the $2.16 billion structure for safety reasons. While it is too early to determine the cause of the fissures, the fact that they exist is a reminder of how complex this simple-looking structure actually is — and how many things, potentially, can go wrong.
an older boy she said was Kavanaugh overpowered her, groped her and clamped his hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream has now traveled from the hiding place in her memory to the ears of a nation.
Kavanaugh has denied the allegation. His fate hangs in the balance as the FBI prepares to investigate allegations against him, delaying a Senate confirmation vote.
“This will be a flash point for women's political mobilization unlike anything seen since the suffrage movement,” said Stanford law Professor Michele Dauber, who led a successful effort this year to recall a judge widely believed to have imposed a too-light sentence on a former Stanford swimmer who sexually assaulted an unconscious woman in 2015. Now Dauber has formed a political action committee, Enough Is Enough, with the purpose, she told the Stanford Daily, of spreading the word about “elected officials who have been credibly accused of (sexual misconduct) but have never been held accountable because voters lack the information.”
If Dauber is mobilizing troops on the political front, then Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, already heads an army of 3 million teachers.
Garcia said these millions are energized, thanks to Ford, to work from “preschool to graduate school” to ensure that every school has a designated person of trust for students to talk to. She said it’s time to prevent sexual assault, the “most heinous, dangerous type of bullying.”
“This is the civics lesson of our time,” Garcia said. “We have emails coming into the NEA from all over the country saying, ‘How do I talk about this?’
“We are absolutely determined that this is going to stop. This is inexcusable. We’re outraged — and we plan on doing something about it.”
Many say the post-Anita Hill era made possible the #MeToo movement, in which sexual harassment and sexual assault survivors have shaken off the stigma of speaking up and can hold assailants accountable.
The post-Christine Blasey Ford era, they say, is about prevention.
That won’t be achieved by introducing new laws, said Hadar Aviram, who teaches civil rights at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and was a defense attorney in sexual assault cases in the Israeli military.
It will be done by changing society, she said. “It was not that nobody knew what was going on. It was considered normal.
Now, she said, “We need to teach our children to respect each other. To teach my son to treat his female friend as a human being. To teach my son or daughter to intervene when they think someone is in danger. And to explain that misbehavior and excessive consumption of alcohol go hand in hand.”
But how?
“Say you’re watching an old movie, and the guy just grabs the girl and gives her a big kiss on the mouth. That’s the entree to a conversation” with your son or daughter, said Patti Cancellier, who holds a certification in teaching parents how to be more effective.
A way to begin is to ask, “What do you think about that?” said Cancellier, former education director at the Parent Encouragement Program in Maryland. The idea, she said, is for children to learn that they can’t inflict their kisses, or more, on anyone without first getting the person’s consent.
“This isn’t the ‘talk’ that happens once in their teen years,” she said. “It has to come up regularly and be appropriate to the age of the child. It’s best not to judge, or say, ‘You’re wrong.’ You can ask, ‘How do you think someone might feel if they were pressured? How would you feel?’ ”
The post-Ford era will also be a time to focus on men.
“Their roles are changing too, but nobody talks about that in a productive way,” said Lisa Hickey, who in 2010 cofounded the Good Men Project, a website that publishes essays by and about men and their behavior, and where members participate in a weekly Stop Sexism” phone call. Participants include a 16-year-old boy and his father who joined in search of a way to talk about sexual consent.
“We’re not going to change our culture until we look at how men and boys are raised,” Hickey said, noting that in the past men saw their role only as financial providers for their families. Being seen pushing a stroller was an embarrassment. “Society didn’t really allow men to do that.”
That’s changed, she said, so that “having overtly feminine qualities is not bad.”
But things are about to change again, said Hickey. “We’re seeing men starting to get this lightbulb moment,” and it’s about consent.
“Consent has to be an entire lifestyle choice,” she said. “Something you practice all the time: Can I borrow your shirt? How are we going to work on this project together?
“All of those things are consent. If you wait until you’re in a sexual moment, it’s not going to go well. Consent doesn’t get in the way of having great sex,” she said. “It creates great sex.”