From the Editor's Desk

If we really want to keep our children safe, we must look danger in the eye. For girls in our society, the danger of being used by a man as a repository for his sexualized rage is never far off. On any given day, the chances are slim that any school-aged girl, anywhere, will grow and learn and play for the whole day without being affected by men’s anger in some form. Will she face it in sexual harassment by other students, or in unwanted sexual attention from adults at school, subtle or overt? Will she dress in unhealthy, restrictive clothing designed to showcase her body as an object of sadistic desire? Will she read sexual threats in the grafitti on her school walls, or hear them in the songs she listens to on her iPod? Will she internalize her own general lack of worth from the absence of strong, self-respecting women and girls represented in her schoolbooks? Will her contributions in class and in sports be trivialized and used against her? Will she receive religious instruction that insidiously twines together a joyous obedience to the Spirit and an unholy subservience to men? If, like a huge number of US children, she is living in poverty, will she learn that there is always a man who expects to be able to use her body in exchange for the most basic and meager means of survival?

These assaults are all manifestations of men’s collusion to keep women and girls down, to see us as less than whole human beings. But we are human beings, and human beings love freedom, and women and girls in particular tend to be uppity and brilliant. Also, even when we try to stay down and humble to save men’s egos or our own skins, it’s never enough. The addiction to inequality is insatiable and its only logical conclusion is the total elimination, by the one who supposes himself more, of the one who is supposed to be less. For these reasons the system of sexual oppression is never stable and individual men, driven crazy by the refusal of women and girls to disappear altogether, take it upon themselves to assert their power with extreme and murderous violence, like the most recent school attackers.

Usually men do not kill several women at once, outside of a military context. Men also do not usually cross outside their own protected spheres of influence to attack women — they punish their “own” wives, daughters, or employees, members of their own communities. These crimes are camouflaged so effectively by familiar, well-enforced cultural values that it is still a challenge for women and girls even to assert that they are crimes. So when a strange man (an “outsider,” a “loner,” a “drifter”) targets a group of girls or women with whom he has no personal connection, it startles those observers to whom several centuries of violent, sexualized domination and a current epidemic of rape, pornography, and sexual abuse do not represent a pattern.

We who believe in freedom have no excuse to count ourselves among the startled. If we really want to keep our children safe, we must raise them to love equality and to fight whatever compromises it. We must teach our boys to reject the temptations of a false superiority, and help them to turn their backs on the fraternity of violence. We must, ourselves, model relationships of respect and mutuality and, where warranted, of confrontation and nonviolent revolution. And no matter how much these terrible events make us want to lock our girls up at home and hold them tight for their whole lives, we must instead walk out with them into the world, shoulder to shoulder, looking danger in the eye.

As always, this issue of Peacework is filled with stories and images of people uniting to find their joy, power, and insight, and offering practical tools to help others join the struggle. We mourn the fallen, and we fear the bombs, but we don’t hide. There is no place to hide from injustice. We have to go out and meet it in the streets.