sexual violence

In Treasure Box, Jamilla VanDyke-Bailey reflects on an important conversation that came too late.

An anonymous whistleblower describes the cumulative effect of sexual harassment in academia.

A supermarket worker turns to her ancestors for help stopping sexual harassment.

A battered woman makes a crucial deal with Dominican Jesus: if she could escape her abuser in order to spend time with her dying mother, she would learn to make flan.

Myriam Gurba maps her sexual miseducation in California schools, homes, and medical offices.

An historian's witness statement poignantly chronicles the aftermath of sexual assault.

Through personal narrative, journalist, survivor, and activist Shiori Ito examines rape culture in Japan.

I was embarrassed to admit I'd been sexually assaulted. It hadn’t really been anything, but it had been giving me nightmares, his lips forming the words, “Your mouth is saying no, but your body is saying yes.” I was someone who was very comfortable, very open, about her sexuality and having sex. Why would the way he acted make my skin crawl for so long after he did it?

After a gang unit stopped my 14 year old cousin for driving in a stolen hoopty, they took her to Eastlake Juvenile Hall and handed her over to a new abuser: a cop.

An older homegirl, a hood mom whom Desiree considered her mentor, announced, "I'm jumping you in."

Myriam Gurba writes about her cousin Desiree, female gangsters, cholas, Mexican bad asses with big hair, and the criminalization of survivors.

A story of workplace abuse: “Saftey words are for Pussies!” read the misspelled Roy-Lichtenstein-does-BDSM faux pop art painting displayed in the office of the Anonymous Sex Toy Company. "Safe, Sane, and Consensual" was the company motto. None of the men running the company understood those slogans were incompatible.

What makes the accusations against Matt Gaetz so plausible is the ubiquity of men like him. Many of them work for state, like my former coworker John William Gunde, a high school teacher arrested for sex with a minor, currently on paid administrative leave.

Pola Oloixarac’s Mona (translated from Spanish by Adam Morris) is a devastating and harrowing satire of the literary world, an alternately hilarious and piercing examination of the culture surrounding books.

When battered women "move on," sometimes, we "start over" in a new home that's, in many ways, a reconstitution of our old home. We might not be sharing walls or a roof with the piece of shit who fucked us up but the weapons he used remain. Weapons like a bed. They don't look like weapons. They look like ordinary things. That's what's so frightening about them.