SPARK a Movement!
1. (noun) a movement to speak out, push back on the sexualization of girls, and have fun while fighting for girls' rights to healthy sexuality.
2. (verb) to rouse strong feeling or action
SPARK is an intergenerational movement fueled by girl activists & their allies. Get at us on Facebook, Twitter, & and SPARKmovement.org!
Got questions or feelings? Leave us a note in our askbox, or submit a post.
According to Department of Defense estimates, over 19,000 sexual assaults occurred in the military in 2010 alone. Over the past 5 decades, more than 500,000 U.S. Soldiers have been assaulted.
Even worse, unlike the civilian world where rape victims can turn to an impartial police force and justice system for help, in the military, rape victims can only appeal to their command—a move that is all too often met with foot-dragging at best, and harsh reprisals at worse. As a result, only eight percent of military sexual assault cases are prosecuted, and far less result in significant prison time.
We, as a society, can no longer allow this criminal epidemic to continue unabated. We are losing too many good soldiers to an unjust system.
Please join us in asking the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Howard “Buck” McKeon and the Chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee, Carl Levin and the leadership of the House and Senate to support the STOP Act and the Holley Lynn James Act in 2012.
These two bills would be the first steps in attempting to alleviate the suffering of military sexual trauma survivors and your overwhelming support of this legislature will send a clear message to the Department of Defense that it needs to take immediate measures to take the decision to investigate and prosecute rape crimes out of the hands of commanders.
Putting this on our blog again (we tried to reblog ourselves but Tumblr ate the post, but we know you know that feel) to say that this issue is STILL ALIVE AND IMPORTANT. Just yesterday, a SECOND lawsuit was filed against the US Military for allowing rampant, unchecked sexual assault and for creating a culture of retaliation that puts all of us—not just service members, not just women, but all of us—at risk. Please sign and share this petition and put pressure on military and political leaders to support legislation that will get MST survivors the help they need AND lay the groundwork for true prevention.
(Source: adamantineheart)
We are super super SUPER excited that SPARK activist Crystal Ogar (aka crystalsavestheday!) will be speaking at Women in the World this Saturday, March 10th. Tune into the entire three-day event using the livestream link above. The summit kicks off March 8th at 6:30 pm, and you can see the full schedule here. Crystal’s panel, The Digital Lives of Girls, will happen Saturday at 11:15!
With the explosion of digital & social media, girls’ lives now unfold in the most public of spaces. Yet innovative young women are harnessing digital technology, owning their images, and leveraging the issues that are most important to them.
Moderator: Chelsea Clinton
Featuring:
- Noorjahan Akbar, Co-Founder and member, Young Women for Change
- Shelby Knox, Director of Women’s Rights Organizing, Change.org
- Crystal Ogar, Activist & Blogger, SPARK
- Emily-Anne Rigal, Founder and Director, WeStopHate.org
- Julie Zeilinger, Founder and Editor, TheFBomb.org
NYC-area college students, this is an awesome internship opportunity!
“The Invisible War” is a groundbreaking investigative documentary film about one of our country’s most shameful secrets: the epidemic of rape in the U.S. military. The film won the 2012 Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and is directed by Kirby Dick (“This Film is Not Yet Rated”, “Outrage”) and Amy Ziering (“Derrida”).www.invisiblewarmovie.com.
We are seeking a motivated and detail-oriented intern to help us connect with audiences, build buzz, and fill seats at film festival screenings of “The Invisible War” in April and May 2012. Interns will work from the offices of the film’s grassroots and community outreach firm, Film Sprout (www.filmsprout.org), located in the Flatiron/Gramercy neighborhood.
Tasks will include:
- Outreach to and correspondence with nonprofit, advocacy and activist organizations in the areas of sexual violence prevention and awareness; women’s and reproductive rights; and veterans’ issues.
- Ongoing research and database management
- Social media promotion and management of online social media platforms
- Weekly mailings of promotional film materials
There’s a (small) stipend & it’s a great chance to work one-on-one with some amazing people, like our partner Nancy Schwartzman of The Line Campaign. Click the link for a full description and instructions on how to apply!
”It has been shown that an educated girl will invest 90% of her future income in her family, compared to 35% for a boy. Yet 250 million adolescent girls live in poverty and are more likely than boys to be uneducated, married at a young age, and exposed to HIV/AIDS. Today, less than two cents of every international development dollar go to girls, the very people who could do the most to end poverty. As long as girls remain invisible, the world misses out on a tremendous opportunity for change.” - http://www.girleffect.org/
With zero tolerance for porn and a refusal to define it, Facebook has deleted breast cancer survivor communities (labeling one breast cancer survivor page as “pornography”), retail business pages, individual profiles of human sexuality teachers, pages for authors and actors, photos of LGBT couples kissing (for which Facebook just apologized), and even the occasional hapless user’s profile who has the misfortune of having someone else post porn on their Wall.
With no comprehensible or clear methodology around sexual speech, we see pages deleted that discuss female sexuality, while pages that joke about and encourage raping women and girls rack up the likes.
Not to mention - a petition, and two months, and a whole lotta common sense about doing the right thing with over-the-top troll pages? Just how incompetently can you run youer product, Facebook? Very, apparently.
"Facebook Finally Removes its Pro-Rape Pages
New pages like this pop up every day—now’s the time for us to keep our eyes on Zuck & Co. to see if they continue to remove pages as reports come in, or if this was just a publicity move.
GEMS (Girls Educational Mentoring Services) works directly with girls and young women who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking, helping empower them to exit the commercial sex industry and develop to their full potential. This week, you can support them by buying this gorgeous t-shirt at sevenly.org
(Also, all donations from the shirts will be DOUBLED due to a matching donor program GEMS has going on right now—that means that each shirt sold puts $14 directly into GEMS!)
I ask Bork if he still disagrees with the high court’s Griswold v. Connecticut ruling that married couples have a constitutional right to the use of contraception?
“Oh, my God, yes!”
And does he still believe that the First Amendment should be limited to political speech and not protect, as he once wrote, “any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or…pornographic”?
“Oh yes!” he answers enthusiastically. “If you look at what they say, the First Amendment supposedly defines things like child pornography. The Supreme Court said there was a right to it. That’s actually insane.”
How about the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment? Does he still think it shouldn’t apply to women?
“Yeah,” he answers. “I think I feel justified by the fact ever since then, the Equal Protection Clause kept expanding in ways that cannot be justified historically, grammatically, or any other way. Women are a majority of the population now—a majority in university classrooms and a majority in all kinds of contexts. It seems to me silly to say, ‘Gee, they’re discriminated against and we need to do something about it.’ They aren’t discriminated against anymore.”
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