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.
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…
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.
carmen rios 