First week opinions

I am really finding this class to be already so eye opening and interesting.  The articles I've read so far; I've found myself nodding along and agreeing with the authors viewpoints.  Audra Simpson's talk was very well done.  I was familiar with most of what she was talking about but she presented it in a very in your face manner which I believe was necessary because it must be tiring repeating the same facts over and over again without the present government taking it as seriously as they should.  I wish I could have been there to see it live.

 This talk reminded me of a piece I saw on CBC, there was a social worker trying to help the girls on the street and give them a way out when they were ready to take it.  She also had strong personality but she understand where these girls were coming from because she had been there herself and had managed to get out.  The most heart-breaking in the piece was about this one girl whose face they blurred.  She was prostituting herself to make money for her mother.  The lady trying to help her was in tears, and it brought me to tears, because this young girl was prostituting herself, in a larger sense, for her mother's approval.  The stories behind the women who have lost themselves and their lives in the missing Aboriginal women case are unique and need to be told.  We need to know every story so we can look at them as people not just as statistics.  I feel if we knew names, and histories behind every picture we can connect with the women using the Defensive Attribution Model.  This is not, to me, an Aboriginal Women problem, it should be a women problem.  I believe if it was treated as such then their would be a bigger uproar.

There was something that I did find a bit problematic in the Rebecca Campbell article "From Thinking to Feeling", Emotionally involved: The Impact of Researching Rape.  The accounts themselves were horrible enough to read and the researchers reactions for most of them made sense to me.  However the story about the prostitue that was raped three times was especially disturbing.  Then, top of that, the researchers reaction was something I found upsetting.  What difference did it make if she was a prostitue? She knows when she's been raped, it does not have to fit a pre-accepted scenario that the researchers are supposed to understand and agree with.  They repeated a few times that she said that she hadn't been paid for it.  So what? When she has clients, she is paid for it.  When she was raped, she wasn't.  This doesn't change that what she went through was horrific and deserved the researchers full sympathy as they had given to other survivors.  This shows me that there still needs to be more understanding and compassion for rape survivors,  and that their stories do not have to fit in a neat box.  They know they were raped and that's it.