A new website has been born! After a few months of inactivity of transster.com, a group of people decided to create an alternative.
Good article on how battered women use various strategies to cope with battering, ranging from leaving the scene to confiding to friends.
When exploring battered women’s protective strategies, the first question to ask is, “Protection from what?” Protection from further violence is a natural and obvious answer to this question, but it is not the only answer. Many other domains of a woman’s life are also threatened by battering: her financial stability, the well-being and safety of her children, her social status and the degree to which she is subjected to a stigmatized identity, her psychological health and sense of self-worth, and her hopes and dreams for the course of her life. These are just a few of the areas that are routinely threatened by a woman’s abusive partner. Indeed, the threats to these domains may in some cases be greater than the threats of injury or physical pain.
Victims are never responsible for the battering perpetrated against them, but, just as people cope and respond to other negative events, victims must also cope and respond to battering. Few people recognize that women are often attempting to cope with numerous threats posed by battering, not just the threat of bodily harm. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to protect oneself from all of these harms simultaneously, or even to spread the risks more or less equally across these domains. Rather, acts that protect against one form of harm often exacerbate other harms. In particular, the unintended consequences of leaving for battered women and their children, especially leaving abruptly in an emergency context, are under-acknowledged by many scholars and advocates (Davies, 2009). It is perhaps natural to assume that escaping violence as quickly as possible is an obvious choice for any victim. The reality, however, can be much bleaker. Some women are so destitute, both financially and socially, that leaving, especially in a short time frame, may be worse than staying.
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[…] assumptions that leaving is always better or safer than staying have meant that people do not always recognize the wide array of protective strategies that victims use. There are many strategies in addition to leaving the abuser or staying in a shelter. One goal of this review is to broaden the definitions of both what women are trying to protect and how they are trying to protect it.
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The typical battered woman is constantly assessing her risk of danger and trying different protective strategies in response. As they see how different strategies work under varying conditions, they continue to strategize and adapt. We need to know much more than we do about when and why women choose particular strategies, and much more about all of the various strategies that women do use. A balanced overall strategy that operates on several fronts—not just focusing on safety but also acknowledging all of the risks that women face—is almost certainly what most women do. In order to best help battered women maximize gains and minimize losses across all the domains of their lives, advocates, providers, and scholars all need to work harder to step back and see the full world in which the victim lives.
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The few studies that assess many types of responses to violence (Hamby & Gray-Little, 1997; Yoshihama, 2002) indicate that many women—perhaps two-thirds—are trying numerous responses to violence, including some that are typically labeled “active” and “passive.” Instead of trying to characterize victim’s coping as either active or passive, it would be better to recognize that a smart overall strategy might include elements of both. That is likely to be the best way to simultaneously minimize harms and maximize the potential for gains.
I found this report on What Sorts of People Blog. Click here to read the report.
G.R.E.A.T. is now looking for people to write blogs on our website. I just began talking to my friends and acquaintances who might be interested, but I’d also like to get people from outside my social network 
Oh, and you’ll get paid a little bit 
For details, CLICK HERE.
Chico
Our Educational Opportunities page has been updated. It now has information of many degree-awarding undergraduate and graduate programs in the UK, the Netherlands, Australia, Republic of South Africa, Japan, and New Zealand (all taught in English). I’m going to do more research for the next few weeks, so stay tuned!
Ok, I’ve made more than a few flyers for our new project in Japan, and two of them are not language-specific so I thought I would upload them here, too.
So, here we go > click
My favorite is the restroom one.
It has been a long time since we stopped updating this website. Not only have we not updated here, but we have not been active as a student club since February 2007, either. It would have lasted for extra few months until I finished at DVC in June, but I failed to complete the paperwork by the due date so the club ended up wrapping up approximately 4 months earlier than initially expected.
After one year of absence of activity, the former members of the club are not DVC students anymore. We transferred to other colleges or finished education. About a month ago, I came back here and read through the blog and pages. With the hindsight, now I can see many ways that I could have done better in leading the club and getting involved in activism further. I thought, maybe we could get back to where we were again and start it over as an independent student organization that has no affiliation with school. I emailed the list, and received affirmative answers from former members.
So now we are back. As an independent student organization based in Bay Area. Only a few of us still reside in Bay Area, so our activities will be basically carried out online rather than offline. But I’m hoping that each of us will make contributions from different perspectives from where they are rather than where we can get together (both physically and theoretically).
If you are reading this, whether or not you have been a member of G.R.E.A.T. or a friend of them or an enemy or whatever, join our list and take part in our effort to educate ourselves, take action, and provide support.
Lots of Love
-masak (masaki, former president)
I just found this documentary.
- Community Notification And Setting The Record Straight On Recidivism
- Written By NCIA Research Volunteers, November 8th, 1996
- Excerpt: WITH OR WITHOUT TREATMENT, THE VAST MAJORITY OF ONCE-CAUGHT SEX OFFENDER 87% DON’T GO ON TO BE REARRESTED FOR A SUBSEQUENT NEW SEX OFFENSE. SEX OFFENDER RECIDIVISM IS MUCH LOWER THAN PEOPLE BELIEVE; ONLY A SMALL MINORITY 13% OF THOSE THAT COMMUNITY NOTIFICATION MIGHT CONFRONT, GO ON TO BE REARRESTED FOR A SUBSEQUENT NEW SEX CRIME.
This is an article about intersex issues which I think offers a very important point to the discussion of the human body – Masaki
From “Intersex” to “DSD”: Toward a Queer Disability Politics of Gender by Emi Koyama, Intersex Initiative
Quote…:
Rather than attempting to de-pathologize this condition or that condition, I’m interested in de-pathologizing the concept of pathology itself. Medical categories can be useful if it existed solely to identify people’s needs for medical services and technologies and to provide them. In the end, I hope to live in a society in which people with various so-called “disorders,” or specific needs for medical services and technologies, can live their lives to their fullest potential, without having to become “normal.”
Click here to read the article by the brilliant activist Emi Koyama
Chico Masak