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Your Take: A group of women is appealing to the president to include girls because while the violence affecting young people of color is often framed as a problem for boys, girls are in crisis too.
One crisp November morning in 2012, a 14-year-old girl named Maia* grabbed her backpack and rushed out of the house to make the morning bell. She took her normal route to school but picked up her pace when a white van began following her. She ran, but couldn’t outpace the 10 teenage boys who grabbed her at gunpoint, forced her inside an abandoned house and repeatedly raped her.
Maia’s story, though tragic, is all too common in the North Lawndale section of Chicago where she lives—the same neighborhood that Ta-Nehisi Coates recently profiled in his Atlantic cover story“The Case for Reparations” as being “on the wrong end of every socioeconomic indicator.”
Currently, North Lawndale has a homicide rate triple that of the entire city and a poverty rate that’s double that of Chicago as a whole. In 2011, North Lawndale’s only rape crisis center quietly shut its doors despite the fact that the neighborhood’s rape rate is one of the highest in the state.
The struggles of working-class African-American girls like Maia—almost 60 percent of whom are victims of sexual assault according to an ongoing study by Black Women’s Blueprint—are too often ignored: by the local police officers who initially doubted her story; by her state lawmakers who have yet to make the recommendations of the Ensuring Student Success Act, to help survivors of domestic and sexual violence stay in school, mandatory in Illinois.
And now by the White House’s new My Brother’s Keeper initiative, a $200 million public and private partnership to help young people of color reach their full potential in the United States, and which focuses exclusively on boys and young men. In Chicago, the violence that affects all young people of color—guns, gangs and school suspensions—is frequently framed as one that only impacts boys of color. That those same—and additional—forms of violence affect girls of color rarely makes headlines or pushes funding.
When Maia’s local precinct turned her away, she went back to school and found refuge in A Long Walk Home’s Girl/Friends program, a North Lawndale-based leadership institute which I co-founded and that empowers African American and Latina teen girls to end violence.
In response, our Girl/Friends youth leaders walked her to and from school and sponsored sexual assault awareness trainings for administrators and teachers and male and female students at their school and our host site, North Lawndale College Prep Charter School. Our staff, made up of trained therapists and community organizers, provided individual counseling and family counseling for Maia, her mom and her brothers.
This is why I signed the letter “Why We Can’t Wait: Women of Color Urge Inclusion in My Brother’s Keeper,” to urge President Barack Obama to expand his initiative to include both boys and girls of color. Our perspective is not that there is no value in gender-focused interventions; it is instead that it is wrong to use gender to justify the lack of concern for and attention to girls like Maia, even though she suffers in the same communities that Coates described and confronts similar racial disparities to her male peers.
Source: The Root | SALAMISHAH TILLET
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