More than Just a March

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Wednesday's official staff editorial ("Take Back the Night 1992: March for Safety," 22 April) suggests that Take Back the Night's mandate is limited to acts of violence a against women in the streets at night.

However, as the organizers of Take Back the Night 1992, we believe that Take Back the Night must be about more. As Allen S. Galper insists in his dissent, it must confront the misogynist violence of such acts as the brutal murder of Mary Jo Frug as well as of the Law Revue's recent parody of her article on the anniversary of her death.

Hatred of women exists on a continuum, and it expresses itself in verbal as well as physical acts of violence. We are not willing, like Galper, to dismiss what he calls "time-old complaints about shuttle buses and escort services." We have demanded physical safety and greater protection from the University repeatedly, and we will continue to do so.

We are still unsafe as we cross the Yard, go up to the Yard and Quad and walk by the River houses, and we welcome The Crimson's call for better lighting and expanded shuttle bus service.

However, the goal of Take Back the Night is an end to the rampant violence against women, and this violence is often not perpetrated on the streets or at night.

Very often women are not endangered by the stranger sneaking through their windows or attacking them on the street, but by those who are familiar to them or already in their homes.

A survey conducted by Ms. Magazine of college-aged women found that one in four had been raped and that 84 percent of those raped had known their attacker. The single largest cause of injury to women in the U.S. in domestic violence; 52 percent of all women are physically abused by their partner at least once and 20 percent of emergency room visits by women are for injuries caused by battering.

These statistics suggest that better lighting and an improved shuttle bus service will not end the war on women's bodies. Historically, Take Back the Night has been concerned with ensuring safe streets and enabling women to walk alone at night and free from harassment.

However, as women have spoken out about violence at the open microphones of Take Back the Night rallies, in the courts and on the floor of the Senate, it has become apparent that the violence which threatens and touches us everyday is not only or even most frequently at the hands of strangers or in alleys late at night.

"Take Back the Night" must be interpreted symbolically. In the words of Gail Dines, a sociology professor at Wheelock College, who spoke on Monday night about pornography and violence against women, women are asking for too little.

We cannot be content to just take back the night. We must take back the night and the day. We must take back the lives from the threats of violence and from the actual violence that we experience everyday, that one of us experiences every six seconds.

The official Crimson editorial says, "No matter how physically strong a person is, he or she is always in danger of becoming a victim of random violence." We completely agree, and we are appalled by the fact that we are not safe on our own campus or in the streets of Cambridge.

Late at night, we cannot go by ourselves to Christy's, the Science Center or another house without accepting a level of risk that is unacceptable. But Take Back the Night is about more than "random violence." It is specifically about violence against women.

On a lot of campuses, men are excluded from Take Back the Night. At Harvard, we welcome men and ask them to join in our call for an end to the insane violence. Men are involved in the issue of violence against women as the friends, boyfriends, sons, fathers and brothers of women.

In addition, many men, particularly young boys and gay men, are the victims of violence because they are perceived as being feminine or as being somehow like women.

We cannot remove violence against women from the context of the endemic misogyny which fuels it. Although the recent hate crimes statistic reporting legislation does not include sex or gender as a category relevant to the idea of hate crime, the widespread violence against women is a hate crime. It is a way of enforcing the patriarchal dominance that seeks to control women and limit our access to political and economic resources.

In their dissent, Liam T.A. Ford and Matthew J. McDonald criticize the "monotonous chant-mongers exhorting marchers to '--the patriarchy.'" Yet, at the same time, they say," Strive to stop violence against women." They fail to understand that the dominant patriarchal structure engenders widespread, systematic violence against women.

This same dissent labels Take Back the Night as "a wacko Left ideology-fest" and its organizers as "shrill feminists...with a bizarre political agenda."

Unable to engage our ideas in a serious, critical discussion, they are reduced to calling us names. They float the archaic image of hysterical women in an effort to delegitimize our fight to stop the violence and to reclaim our lives.

They criticize our failure to maintain "ideological neutrality," which strikes us as being both impossible and oxymoronic. We assume that they are accusing us of being partisan or of bowing to some party line.

Take Back the Night is about women refusing to bow down. It is not about being left wing or right wing. Those who commit violence do not make these distinctions, and violence touches all women, regardless of political ideology, party affiliation, race or class.

In taking back the night, we are refusing to accept the rapes, assaults, batteries and murders that are committed against us, because we are women, by those we know and those we do not know every day and every night. Jessye Lapenn '93   Heidi Siedlecki '93   Co-coordinators   Take Back the Night 1992