Victimization

I should be working. I’ve got a lot to do.

But I just got home from working with my all time favorite group; a group of intelligent, sensitive, fun, interesting women. We spend our time together talking about any and everything. As David once astutely observed (after having read a vocabulary list from one of our weekly sessions), “Ihr habt ja gar keinen roten Faden” (You guys don’t have a central theme).
Right, David. We don’t. And that’s the wonderful thing about it. We don’t. We talk about God and the world. And everything in between.

Today, towards the end of our session we got to talking about current news and some of the more painful happenings in our quaint little world tucked away here in the Alps. We touched on a subject too frightening and too painful to even comprehend.

I don’t want to get into anything specific here because the national and international journalists (I’m using this term very loosely here) are getting enough mileage from it without my help.

But current affairs do bring up a subject that does beg discussion - the subject of victimization. Specifically, the victimization of women and children.

Victimization seems fairly cut and dried to me. You have the criminal and then you have the victim. The criminal is the perpetrator and the victim is the one perpetrated upon (so to speak).
Seems simple enough. But it’s not.

It’s not because some very sick part of society wants desperately to somehow blame the victim for what has befallen her. Why, for God’s sake, didn’t she do something about it? Why didn’t she just escape or something. Why did she ALLOW this to happen to her in the first place (I’m not even going to start a tirade on skirts being too short or too much make up). Any normal person would have planed and executed a cunning escape. No normal person would have been intimidated enough to allow such victimization.

It’s all so terribly easy, from an intellectual standpoint. Women are so damn weak. Get it together, girls. Pull yourself up by your pubic hairs.  (Just goes to show you that we need more gumption, more guts, more ummph.)

Our society helps to create the victim. Our society helps women and children to slip into the revolting pattern of victimization; the belief that yes, we are somehow at fault. The belief that men know better. The belief that we are indeed somehow weaker; inferior to our counterparts.

And yes, once in the pattern of victimization, it is damned hard to get out.

I’m sure there are lots of people out there much more qualified than I to talk about the psychological aspects of victimization and the reasons behind it. And there are also lots of women out there who have been victims and who now are able to look back at terrible, unspeakable happenings and can speak volumes about tyranny, oppression, aggression, power, patriarchism, authoritarianism, fear, paralyzation, impotence and self-hate.

I too have been a victim. 
Although I have always strived to make as little as possible of my private life public  (as little as is possible for a person who is as publicly accessible as I am), I’d like to briefly mention my own private hell. My own private inadequacies, how I ALLOWED myself to become a victim.
I was stalked for over two years by a jilted lover.
I spent two years of my life living in terror and being a victim. I spent two years of my life watching a man drive ahead of me (not behind me) to work, two years of my life getting hundreds of phone calls per day (and night), two years of my life being afraid of going home in the dark, two years practicing with my child how not to go with anybody, not even with those you know and believed you trusted, two years of emotional prison. And I ALLOWED it to happen, because I was afraid and somehow believed that it was my own fault. I finally got help, and the courage to stop the tyranny of a very small man with very large priapic problems. I finally was able to stop being a victim. (Yes, the man who did this to me is still reading up on me in internet and is certainly reading this post. I know because I keep tabs on him and his IP address. So hello, dear RG. I am no longer your victim, and I am no longer afraid of you).

I realize that this is small beans in comparison to what has been going on here in our charming little country of bourgeois lawn tenders (and in comparison to that which is happening around us every day, both hidden and public).
But it certainly does give me a breathtakingly close perspective.

I am not a feminist. I am a humanist. I am a believer in the importance and value of every person; woman or man. And it is here that this belief and the everyday practices of society diverge.
We can’t allow this to continue. We have got to learn to say no to authoritarian patriarchies. We have got to learn to say no to aggression and oppression.
We have got to teach our daughters (and ourselves) that they (we) are strong, that they (we) have an innate value and worth and that nobody has the right to oppress, tyrannize and victimize them (us).

Here are some good links. Read them, but be aware that their language is not quite as sweet as mine. So if you’re under 18 or terribly sensitive, skip ‘em. 
I blame the patriarchy
BitchPhD

Stop the victimization of women and children dead in its tracks. 

josef fritzl amstetten austria victimization patriarchy oppression tyranny oppression aggression power patriarchism authoritarianism fear paralyzation impotence