Organizer CeCe McDonald speaks at the San Francisco LGBT Center. McDonald was incarcerated for actions she took to defend her survival. Prisons do not solve sexual and gender violence; they perpetuate it. (Photo: Pax Ahimsa Gethen / Flickr)
We’re now several months into the Trump administration, and activists have scored some important victories in those months. Yet there is always more to be done, and for many people, the question of where to focus and how to help remains. In this series, we talk with organizers, agitators and educators, not only about how to resist, but how to build a better world. Today’s interview is the 83rd in the series. Click here for the most recent interview before this one.
Today we bring you a conversation with Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan. Kaba is an organizer and educator whose work centers on criminalized survivors of violence and on ending youth incarceration. Hassan is the founder of Just Practice, a community project that focuses on accountability without involving police.
Sarah Jaffe: Sexual harassment and sexual assault are in the news because of a powerful famous man…. Do you feel like the public conversation around these people in the media, on social media, wherever you are hearing it, has progressed at all?
Mariame Kaba: The conversation is absolutely different from when I started doing work around sexual assault…. That was in the late 1980s/early 1990s. The focus at that point was really the question of date rape on campus and the conversation revolved mostly around … “How do we address people drinking and then assaulting people?”
I also came of age at a time before social media. The conversation was very much limited to having talks with your friends about this…. Beyond that, you were talking with folks in a support group setting, storytelling and divulging that you had been raped…. It didn’t feel like you had to premise your conversation around disclosing your own experience before you could actually speak to this in a…