Entries from May 2007 ↓

By Tracee Sioux

I know this column will reach a battered woman, because according to the US Justice Department, 30 percent of women are beaten by a significant other at one time or another.

This is an issue very close to my heart as I was a battered girlfriend for two years, between 14 and 16-years-old, so I actually know why these women stay. I also know how much courage it took to leave.

In college, when a boyfriend started getting abusive I left quickly. But then he stalked me for months and finally the police were going to put him away for two years. I begged them not to. I knew the last thing I needed was for that man to plot my murder for two years. The court required him to leave the state immediately and not allow him to return for two years to avoid prison.

The key, of both yesterday’s Oprah and my personal experience, was said very clearly by the battered woman’s son who witnessed everything.

DO NOT STAY!

Many women stay because of their children. I can understand the thinking behind this. You don’t want your children to come from a broken home. You don’t want to put them through a divorce. You don’t want the stigma.

You are so confused that you think he will change. That if you do enough things right, he will stop his abusive behavior. You believe him when he says “You make me hit you, if you had cleaned the house like you were supposed to then I wouldn’t have to hit you.”

You believe him because you want to believe you can somehow make him stop by being exactly what he wants you to be. You believe him because this is logic you use on your kids and you are telling the truth, “If you cleaned your room yesterday you wouldn’t be grounded.” You want him to be telling the truth, but he’s not.

You believe, in your heart, that you deserve abuse because you are a terrible person. You are a whore, a slut, a horrible mother, a bad cook, a terrible housekeeper, stupid, idiotic, moronic. Whatever names he chooses to call you. The worst my ex-boyfriend would call me was “used-meat.” After all, who wants a girl who’s not a virgin anymore? You have been listening to his berating of your self for so long that you believe every word of it is true. That’s why you stay. You stay because you think no one else would want you and you’re not strong enough to stand on your own. This is emotional terrorism and every word he says is untrue.

To get out you need to repeat to yourself all the good and wonderful and true qualities about you over and over and over until you believe them enough to go. You need to quietly work your self-worth up through praise of self until you no longer believe his lies about you.

Your daughter, when she hears his opinion of you over and over and sees him hit you, comes to believe these things, not only about you, but about her own self. If you are a terrible slut, then she is a terrible slut. If you deserve to be hit, then she does as well. It doesn’t matter if she is three or 14, the result will be that she will find someone who hits her or emotionally terrorizes her and she will call it love.

You can not raise an empowered girl if you are staying in an abusive relationship. It is an unequivocal impossibility.

Battered women, I know it’s hard to feel that you are worth leaving him for. But, it’s not as hard to feel that your children are worth leaving for. And they are.

The last bit of advice is not to leave without a plan. I left without a plan twice. Frankly, it was scary. Both times the man stalked me, attacked me in public, stole my mail, called my job so many times I got fired, harassed my friends, broke into my house, etc.

This is the link to Oprah’s resources about how to make an escape plan. Here, also, is a link to the National Domestic Violence Hotline website.

You are strong enough to make it on your own.
You are good enough to find someone else.
You are smart enough to find your way out of this.
You are a wonderful person who deserves to be free of abuse.

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By Tracee Sioux

Two big things have happened to protect children from sexual abuse perpetrators, especially repeat offenders.

The State of Texas has passed The Jessica Lunsford Act. Each state has its own version of “Jessica’s Law” before legislatures. The law requirements are a little different in each state depending on how strict or lenient the current laws are. The goal, as a nation, is to get state laws to be uniformly strict in dealing with sexual predators so they can not continue to victimize children from state to state without penalty.

Jessica’s Law includes:

• 25 year minimum sentence for sexually violent offenses against children under 14 years of age.
• Eliminates eligibility for parole for certain sex offenders.
• Makes a second conviction for a sexually violent crime against a child a capitol felony (as in the death penalty).
• Allows children to report the crime for 20 years past his or her 18th birthday.

This is good news for our kids. They deserve to not be sitting ducks waiting for some pervert to victimize them.

To send the message to your own state legislatures telling them they must pass a version of the Jessica Law. These letters make all the difference in the world. Though they might not read every letter word for word, they do make a tally of how many letters they receive about this issue and vote accordingly.

Oprah has a letter for each state’s representatives that you can quickly use in a couple of minutes. You can write each of your representatives in very little time, but with big results for our kids. Click Here.

Last year the Adam Walsh Child Protection & Safety Act passed, which notably required the first Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Registry. It is up and running here.

This is important to you and your children because now by clicking on a single link you can see who, in your neighborhood or school, has been convicted of at least one sex crime. Also, this is the first time ever law enforcement has had this type of tool to track sex offenders from state to state.

It is disturbing to put your zip code or address in and see that only two houses or streets down lives someone who has molested a 6-year-old. But, it has become the reality for America. You can input names of people, like the soccer coach, teachers, Sunday school teacher or anyone else with authority in your child’s life, in the system to see if they have ever been convicted. It’s also handy to check whether a sex offender lives next door to a house you are considering buying.

I sat with my 5-year-old and looked at the sex offenders’ pictures in our neighborhood and gave her instructions to never speak to these men and to always tell me if she sees them.

I was no more explicit than these are very bad men, which I felt was age-appropriate. As your children get older you may want to provide more information. Obviously, we’ve spent time on good touching and bad touching in regards to family members, baby sitters, friends, coaches and teachers.

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By Tracee Sioux

One of the most girl-empowering women in the culture right now, in my opinion, is Pink.

Author Disclaimer: Obviously, you must use good judgment about the age-appropriateness of buying your daughter a Pink album. There is profanity and mature subject matter in the lyrics. I do not allow my 5-year-old daughter to listen to my Pink cd. That said, I do think it would be a billion times better for my 14-year-old mentees to listen to than the rap/hip-hop lyrics they pollute their girl-brains with.

Two songs you’ve probably heard if you listen to the radio or watch VH1 music videos in the mornings are Stupid Girl and U and Ur Hand. Both are on her newest album, I’m Not Dead.

Stupid Girls is a fantastic song to make girls, and women, question their world view. I think the lyrics really bring our power and how we are seeking it into focus. My favorite line is, What happened to the dream of a girl president? She’s dancing in the video next to 50 Cent?

It succinctly puts into perspective all the battles feminists fought for, only to see young women stripping down to their g-string on BET while men objectify them and throw cash at their crotches.

Where is the power in that? There is no power in being an object.

Stupid Girls also calls into question how much actual power is in spending or having money. It brings into focus the fact that we are selling our feminine souls when we judge ourselves by what clothes we wear or how extremely thin we can be. Which is what girls envy when they watch E and see all the fabulous trendy fashions celebrities can buy.

U and Ur Hand is the single getting lots of air time right now. The title, to be sure is, what’s the word I’m looking for, tacky, crass,crude, misspelled? The message, however, is one of my favorites.

It’s been a while since I’ve been clubbing. Mostly because I live in a place without clubs. At least clubs with music I want to dance to. However, even in the 90s, when I was single and went clubbing frequently I went to gay clubs. Why? Because I went clubbing to have fun and dance and hang out with my friends. I did not go there to be mauled and fondled or molested by A%$&*@s who thought I was there for their entertainment. Gay clubs had better music and the men weren’t interested in me, which was extremely liberating.

This song brings me back to that period in my life and I remember trying to tell some jerk that was accosting me that I just wanted to dance and hang out and could he just go away and leave me alone? He became increasingly hostile and eventually I had to go get the bouncer.

Some of my favorite lyrics in this song include:

I’m not here for your entertainment.
I was fine before you walked into my life.
We didn’t get all dressed up for you to see.

What worries me about girls today is that many of them believe they ARE here for the entertainment of men and boys. They do not feel “fine” without a man in their lives and they do get dressed up just for men to see.

We, as mothers and as older women, need to make it clear to girls that they are whole and complete within themselves. Girls are people, with feelings and dreams and ideas, not just entertainment for men.

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By Tracee Sioux

I have been a little surprised at the reaction to a vaccine for HPV (human papillomavirus virus), which causes cervical cancer.

I suppose I thought most of the planet, like me, have spent some time hoping that mad-scientists will eventually eradicate cancer. So, when I heard they had an actual vaccine, Center for Disease Control , Approximately 20 million people are currently infected with HPV. At least 50 percent of sexually active men and women acquire genital HPV infection at some point in their lives. By age 50, at least 80 percent of women will have acquired genital HPV infection. About 6.2 million Americans get a new genital HPV infection each year.

My brain is trying to wrap itself around the fact that 80 percent of ALL women will acquire a form of HPV.

Hypothetically, this means out of my grandmother, mother, self, daughter and sister only one of us will NOT be infected. I’m going guess my 83-year-old grandmother might be the safe one.

You know what the whole argument feels like to me? It feels like the same hypocritical puritanical judgment we have always inflicted on our girls and their sexuality.

If you weren’t a slut you wouldn’t get cervical cancer. Serves you right!

However, in this case, it is patently unjustifiable. A girl’s virtue will not keep her from contracting HPV. There is a large population of girls at risk of contracting HPV through cheating or abuse.

A woman is at risk for dying of cervical cancer if she has the bad luck of being married to an adulterer.

* Though they vary from study to study, the most widely accepted figures indicate that between 50 and 70 percent of married men (between 38 and 53 million men) have cheated or will cheat on their wives, according to Ruth Houston, the author of “Is He Cheating on You?-829 Telltale Signs.”

Sexual abuse victims are also at risk of contracting HPV, which can develop into cancer.

* During FFY 2005, an estimated 899,000 children in the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico were determined to be victims of abuse or neglect. Approximately 9.3% of them were victims of sexual abuse, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Department, 2005 Child Maltreatment report.

* Twenty percent of teenage girls and young women have experienced some form of dating violence, according to the United States Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women.

Not requiring the vaccine is unfairly denying basic healthcare to ALL girls period. According to the intercourse is not required to contract the HPV virus. One should assume that many young girls participate in foreplay or sexual experimentation for years prior to having actual sex.

Condoms or other contraceptives do not prevent the spread of HPV because an exchange of fluids is not required to pass the virus from person to person. HPV can be spread from skin to skin and condoms do not cover all contagious areas.

The only thing to protect girls from cervical cancer is the Gardasil HPV vaccine. The vaccine prevents 70% of cervical cancer. Other drug companies are developing similar vaccines which may be more or less effective.

What breaks my heart is the inevitable image of a woman in her early 20s finding out that she may die or never be able to conceive because she contracted this virus. Maybe she had sex with her steady boyfriend in high school and they broke up and she married her college boyfriend and they became a typical young married couple who goes to church every Sunday. Oh, but instead of wearing a scarlet letter “A” she gets to fight cancer. With chemotherapy, hair loss, infertility and possible death.

This cancer kills around 26% of women who are diagnosed with it.

Maybe her parents are people with conservative family values, or maybe her insurance company won’t cover it because the state doesn’t require it to enter school, or her parents are just ignorant and irresponsible.

Either way, no girl deserves to die of cancer because she had sex, not even a promiscuous girl. The punishment, and really lets just admit it’s punitive to deny someone basic health care in an attempt to prevent sex, is not equal to the crime.

This scare-tactic method of encouraging abstinence has been ineffective in the face of AIDS, pregnancy and every other sexually transmitted disease. Why, would we think that it would be effective just because cancer is in the forbidding sentence? Adolescents have no sense of mortality. They have no sense of future long-term consequences. It’s the curse and blessing of the teenager that they are blissfully unaware that they will ever be 30.

Nor is cervical cancer or HPV a natural consequence or an unforeseeable circumstance from having sex anymore. No more than having babies is a natural consequence of sex. I have sex all the time, but we have chosen to have only two children and have used information and scientific advancement to prevent the natural consequence of children. Now that we know what causes cervical cancer and we know we can vaccinate girls against it, then there is deliberate harm in withholding the vaccine. Now that we have the knowledge and access to a vaccine, cervical cancer is now a natural consequence of neglecting the health of our girls.

I don’t agree with the argument that it’s the parents’ right to choose whether or not their daughter should be vaccinated. I believe it is every girl’s absolute right to be protected from cervical cancer. The only way to ensure that a girl has access to her right to basic health is for the government to require the vaccination.

The reason all vaccinations are required to enter school is to prevent the spread of communicable diseases that pose a significant health threat to society. HPV and cervical cancer represent a significant health threat to ALL girls, promiscuous or not, and HPV is a very wide-spread communicable disease.

The reason the immunization should be given upon enter the sixth-grade is because a lot of sexual experimentation occurs in junior high school. By high school, for a lot of our girls, it’s already too late. By the time a girl reaches 26, coincidentally around the same time she’s considering marriage, so many girls have already contracted the virus the CDC doesn’t even recommend the vaccine.

The reason parents, in general, are not a good option to guard their daughters’ health in the case of HPV and cervical cancer is that parents usually aren’t the first to know about their daughters’ sexual activity. If seven out of 10 girls have sex by the time they are 17, it’s reasonable to assume that six of those girls’ parents don’t know about it.

Texas was the first state to confront the issue. They confronted it with puritanical judgment and a complete denial of reality.

I encourage you to write your legislature, governor and health department and request that the vaccination be required for girls in your state.

If you’re a parent, please be pro-active and responsible for your daughter’s future health by getting her immunized against the HPV virus. This is a prime teachable moment to talk to young girls about the potential consequences of sexual experimentation in an honest and open way. I really believe if we are open and honest with girls about sex, instead of punitive, forbidding and secretive then we will be much more effective in encouraging them to make better decisions about their sexuality.

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by Tracee Sioux

Last week, while at a friend’s getting my hair done (read more about my Pink Hair Fiasco), our two 5-year-olds were playing dress up.

Since I was stuck in the chair, I had asked Ainsley to take care of Zack and keep him occupied in the bedroom with the other kids. During our visit, I also instructed her to keep him away from the drop-off of the stairs, feed him some toast, get him his sippy cup and take the nail polish away from him.

My friend commented, “You really expect a lot more of Ainsley than I do of Adalie. I don’t really expect anything at all of Adalie. I totally baby her. She doesn’t even have to keep her room clean or help around the house.”

I think the vast difference between the two 5-year-old girls, going to Kindergarten in the fall, may have made both of us examine the level of responsibility and expectation our daughters experience through our mothering.

I can’t tell you how her reflection went. She has a teenage daughter, so obviously her perspective is different from my own. She already has a decade of mothering experience on me and will no doubt reflect on mistakes or triumphs she made with the first daughter when deciding how to raise her second and third daughters.

I don’t have the benefit of that experience, so I just jump right in with what I appreciate about my own upbringing and my experience as a daughter. And likely, as most parents do, a little naivete and idealism about how I think a child should be raised. Every parent must be blessed with a little of this naivete and idealism, or they will just flounder around all the parenting advice not knowing what to do, flustered by this study or that, this evidence or that, this theory or that and feeling like they will inevitably screw their kids up.

As I explained to my friend, my daughter was an only child for 4 years. She had no siblings and therefore played independently quite a lot of the time. We spend quality time together cleaning the house. We would go about our chores pretending to be English and speaking in an accent while folding laundry and I would throw the wet clothes at her, trying to knock her down and bury her before they went into the dryer. She thought this was hilarious fun.

She wanted to help. I let her. She thought it was fun to be like me, capable of cleaning mirrors or toilets. Sometimes, when I wanted to hurry and get it done I’d tell her she couldn’t use the toilet brush and she’d cry. I’d tell her, you’re a strange, strange child. What kind of kid throws a fit if they aren’t allowed to clean the toilet? And she’d respond, me!

I think it may be a little known secret, but most if not all, children want to help clean the house. Especially if you are jamming out to the radio or being silly while doing it. I once let the kids in the church nursery use the vacuum and they were lining up begging for their turn.

As a result of her desire to help she’s now pretty competent at mopping floors, scrubbing toilets and sinks, putting dishes away, wiping mirrors, putting toys away, organizing, some parts of laundry, and a bit of cooking that doesn’t involve knives or taking things out of the oven.

As she gets older though, things have changed a bit. She complains more than she begs to help. She’s discovered that jumping on the trampoline with the sprinkler on is way more fun than mopping or picking up her toys.

Ah, but not only do I know how competent she is, and therefore how much real help she is in getting the dirty jobs done, but my expectations about her participation are high.

After all, when I look around the house I see clearly that she’s our biggest mess maker. The clothes and laundry alone are a huge job since dress-up is one of her favorite games. Not to mention that she loves to write and draw and leaves art and paper everywhere. When I look at my disaster of a car I realize she has brought all her favorite things, some spare shoes, a couple of jackets, a ton of books, dolls, purses, papers, artwork from school and half eaten apples or granola bars and turned it into an embarrassing garbage dump.

When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s kids had chores. The kids in my family, and the kids I grew up with in my neighborhoods, were expected to help around the house and do chores. We were not allowed to go and play until our rooms were clean, beds made, and whatever chores we had been assigned were done. In my house the cleaning of the kitchen rotated nightly between the four siblings. After dinner the counters were wiped, leftovers put away and the dishes were done by the child whose turn it was. We cleaned bathrooms and mowed the lawn, sometimes we were given a $5 – $15 allowance for these particularly difficult chores. For the others, we did them because we lived there. Period. And if we didn’t, we got in trouble.

I can appreciate this now. I can see that helping around the house helped shape me into a competent person. I know what work is and I know that I can do it. I also know HOW to do it, and I realize that many of today’s kids are growing up without the experience of washing a dish or sweeping a floor. I feel bad for those kids. Imagine going out on your own, after high school whether it’s to a dorm or an apartment, and not having the slightest idea how to take care of yourself? A feeling of incompetence isn’t fun.

My child is no Cinderella. She isn’t worked like a slave. But, she does have to help around the house.

When she asks me, Why do I always have to help?

I tell her the truth, because you live here and everyone who lives here has to help with the housework. You help make the mess and you can help clean it up. I am not the maid.

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