It was October 1991 and like millions of others, I was glued to the TV watching Anita Hill testify about being harassed by her former boss, Clarence Thomas. I remember my confusion and rage when Arlen Specter and Strom Thurmond, two senators on the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested Hill had concocted the story to defeat Thomasβ nomination and become a martyr for civil rights.
I was 29 and had just left a job working under two outstanding female supervisors to take my dream job, but was chafing under the male-domination of my new office. Anita Hill was a superstar, the youngest of 13 children, daughter of Southern farmers, who had overcome the setbacks of race, sex and class to graduate with honors from Yale Law School and become a law professor. If they can treat Anita Hill like this, what chance do the rest of us have?
Fast-forward to now. My teenage daughter is in the car with me when the radio announcer says Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is accused of sexually assaulting a woman when they were teenagers. How can I explain to her that Dr. Blasey Ford, like Professor Hill, may be ridiculed and not believed without destroying her growing self-confidence, confidence Iβve fostered by pointing to her stateβs distinction of having the nationβs largest percentage of female legislators and lawmakers willing to expel a state House member for sexual harassment?
Twenty-seven years ago Anita Hill was mocked, ridiculed and called a liar. This past week Christine Blasey Ford has been mocked, ridiculed and called a liar. Our children read their history books about a bygone era of sexism and victim-blaming, then they watch the news and see that nothing has changed. This must be OK.
We owe it to our kids that this not be the lesson they take away from the Kavanagh debacle. Excusing sexual assault is not OK. Excusing sexual assault is failing our children.
We may not be able to control what happens when Blasey Ford and Kavanagh testify. But we can reduce sexual assault by encouraging teens to come forward to report such incidents and believing them when they do.
Teen sexual assault is a reality. Eighteen percent of girls and 3 percent of boys report being victims of sexual assault or abuse by age 17 at the hands of another adolescent.
Teensβ reluctance to report sexual abuse is also a reality. Victims of sexual assault often fail to report because they fear the stigma accompanying their identity as an assault victim, they fear retaliation and/or they are convinced that their story will not be believed. Two out of three sexual assaults are never reported to police. Already Dr. Blasey Ford has received death threats.
We can reduce teen sexual assault by providing comprehensive sex education in our schools, starting in K-8, that includes age-appropriate lessons about consent, refusal skills and the empowerment of bystanders to intervene. We can challenge the gender-based stereotypes that justify violent behavior.
And we can believe teens when they report a sexual assault and provide consequences for the attacker.
Arizona has a long way to go. We lack a state mandate that sex education be taught in public schools and now require any sex education curriculum offered be βabstinence-based.β This is a long way from the Centers for Disease Control recommendation that such curriculum promote healthy sexual relationships and encourage teens to report sexual abuse and misconduct.
But we can change this. For todayβs teenagers, the time to start is now.
