Courtney E. Martin wrote about my work during the Steubenville sexual assault scandal in a piece for The New York Times on young feminists and youth activism. You can read the full piece at nytimes.com.

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If one were to take cues from pop culture alone, the state of young women today might seem rather grim. Miley Cyrus’s highly controversial, bizarre and hypersexualized dance moves at the recent MTV Video Music Awards was only the latest in a long list of incidents in which teenage girls are portrayed as more concerned with getting attention than with being genuinely powerful.

But the disproportionate amount of ink and pixels spilled on famous and — let’s face it — confused girls like Cyrus distracts from the more interesting work of so-called ordinary girls — like 22-year-old Carmen Rios.

Rios is a member of SPARK, a nonprofit organization that trains girls from 13 to 22 years old, to be activists. In the wake of the much-discussed Steubenville, Ohio,  rape case last March, in which the sexual assault on an incapacitated high school girl was documented on social media and became headline news, the network of young women who blog and create campaigns through SPARK were outraged and wanted to do something about it.

They discussed the most viable strategies on their private Facebook page, in addition to hosting private chats that included the girls, the staff and adult mentors. The group debated whom to aim their message at and what to ask; after all, addressing rape culture is such a complex and daunting task. But a quick survey of some of the most high-profile rape cases led them to an important insight: many of the perpetrators were also involved in high school athletics. (The point here, of course, is not that participating in high school athletics predisposes one to become a rapist, but that an intense high school sports culture, which can, at its worst, breed a sense of entitlement and even domination, is an ideal place for sexual violence education.)

SPARK’s further research uncovered the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) — a national organization that has over 1 million members, the majority of them coaches. (The organization claims to reach 18,500 high schools and over 11 million students through its programming.) NFHS has a variety of online curriculums for coaches and athletic directors, but none of them focus exclusively on sexual assault.

Rios teamed up with a Colby College football player, Connor Clancy — an acquaintance of one of the adult mentors — and created an online petition through Change.org, demanding that NFHS offer resources on sexual assault prevention to their members.

Nearly 70,000 signatures later, something happened. The NFHS director of coach education, Tim Flannery, got on the phone with SPARK’s executive director, Dana Edell, and hashed out a plan for furthering the breadth and depth of resources available to coaches on sexual assault.

Though Flannery pointed out obstacles to mandating such an education program, he saw great value in getting the ball rolling: “The biggest influence in a kid’s life between 15 and 18 is a coach. We know that coach is powerful so we’re trying to get them to understand how to use that power in positive way. We don’t want any more Steubenvilles.”

Online petitions, like the one leveraged in this campaign, are quickly becoming one of the central strategies for girls and young women creating greater awareness of sexism, and a cost or accountability for those who practice it. Girls like Rios have become modern day Davids taking on the Goliaths of our time — multinational corporations like Facebook and Lego, and media giants, like Seventeen magazine and Clear Channel.

The primary platforms for petitions of this ilk are Change.org and WeAreUltraviolet.org — the latter focuses exclusively on gender-related campaigns. Beyond that, a variety of organizations support girls and women to create online campaigns — more broadly called “online organizing” — such as SPARK and Women, Action & Media (WAM), which now does a monthly campaign. I spoke with representatives from these organizations, along with those they’d targeted, about a breadth of campaigns to understand what can be accomplished and what’s still proving elusive.

These online campaigns are often just the first small step in a much longer, more multifaceted change process. Online petitions help leverage media moments to force some accountability, but broader systemic and cultural shifts will only come from doing the follow-up required on the ground.

NFHS agreed to work offline with SPARK, and about a half-dozen partner organizations. This kind of post-petition collaboration appears fairly typical; in the most successful campaigns, David and Goliath may start out as enemies, but end up collaborators.