Meg Bossong: Badass Activist Friday

It’s Friday, and we all know what that means! Interviews with your favorite badass feminists and activists. Whether social media queens and kings, creative artists, sex educators, or just kick-ass personalities, these people harness righteous anger, instigate movements and inspire cultural change. We’re here to honor them and their work, but more importantly, to highlight how we can all get up, plug in, and Just Start Doing.

Today’s Badass is Meg Bossong. Meg is the Community Mobilization Project Manager at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC), a center that offers one-on-one counseling, legal help and a 24-hour hotline for survivors of sexual assault, as well as their families and communities. Meg has a BA in Political Science and an MS in Law and Social Policy, and she has been working at BARCC since 2007.

Let’s hear what she had to say to us!

How did you get started at BARCC? What is your background, and what brought you to this work?

It’s probably easier to talk about how I ended up doing sexual violence work first, and the reason for that is that I was lucky enough to grow up with parents who were themselves activists and public servants in various ways, and who encouraged my activism and social conscience from a very young age. I got to college knowing I was interested in social justice issues around gender, sexual and reproductive health, and race, and college was where I was first exposed to sexual violence as a social justice problem (as opposed to just a personal safety concern). And truly, sexual violence prevention is at the intersection of all of those issues and many others.

I worked on sexual assault response projects all through college, where I was a political science major studying social movements and their role in political change, but I ended up graduating at a bit of a loss for how to actually get involved in the non-profit sector. (Actually, mentorship of young non-profit professionals, especially women, is one of my side interests, and something I think is really critical for us to take on.) I spent a couple of years in a job that taught me great skills but that I ultimately knew I wouldn’t stay in, and quit to go get my Master’s degree in Law and Public Policy.

It was truly my intention to be a full-time student, but I went to conference on domestic and sexual violence and the law at Northeastern University’s law school, where I met Stephanie DeCandia, an attorney who is BARCC’s Manager of System Advocacy and Policy Development at a networking session, and found out about a job opening coordinating the education and outreach volunteer program, and I’ve been at BARCC now for about 4.5 years.

Your specific job description is Community Mobilization Project Manager. What does this entail? How do you reach out to people? What have you found to be the best way to approach people?

At this point, that role has two major components. One is that I manage the “Community Change” program, which consists of myself, our education and outreach coordinator (who runs the education volunteer program and coordinates all of our speaking engagements and trainings) and our immigrant outreach and curriculum coordinator (who both develops a lot of our training programs, and works with organizations serving various immigrant communities in Boston). Basically, the focus is on our community-facing work, so working with media and some social media (I do the tweeting for @barcc), thinking strategically about our outreach goals and community partnerships, and that sort of thing.

The other component is that I’m the project manager on a multi-year prevention grant. We were very lucky to get a 5-year grant to design community-based prevention programming in some specific communities in the West Suburban area. It’s been interesting because they’re communities who are very well-resourced in terms of intervention services—that is, “after care” services—for survivors, but that didn’t have much in the way of primary prevention programming focused on stopping assaults before they occurred. So we’re about 2 years into that grant, and starting to move forward with two very different projects in two adjacent, but very different, towns.

One of the real luxuries of having that long-term funding is that the first year or so was spent just on evaluating the type and quality of our relationships in those towns, and then building additional relationships with people who were interested or who we learned over time were really on the same page about safety and prevention programming and that we could work well with.

We’ve learned a couple of really important lessons, both in these communities and in our other work, which is that relationships really, really matter, and that we have to be a true community partner if we want other people to invest in the issue of sexual violence the way we want them to. So, practically speaking, that’s meant going to a lot of meetings and events that weren’t necessarily right in our wheelhouse because it was important to the community and to the people we have relationships with.

For example, I wanted to work with the school system in one community, so I joined the School Health Advisory Committee for that district. I went to a lot of meetings about school nutrition, the bake sale policy, and head injury protocols, because it’s totally unreasonable to expect to just show up out of the blue one day and say, “Hi, I’m Meg, and you don’t know me, but it’s really rape that’s the most important thing here, so could we talk about that instead?” The idea of meeting people where they’re at doesn’t just mean, “…so you can talk them into seeing things your way.” It’s about understanding what’s important to other people, and where your shared values really are. One of the difficult things, though, is that most organizations’ funding and most individuals’ jobs aren’t structured to give them the amount of time and latitude to do that.

Vancouver tried a relatively rare approach to rape-prevention last year, by targeting the potential rapists, rather than the potential victims. Unsurprisingly, that approach yielded real results. The focus on perpetrators rather than victims for prevention of rape is one that activists in this area, such as yourself, have been advocating for years but that is continually avoided. What do you think it will take to really turn around the way we rape prevention is put into effect? Do you think Vancouver will act as an example in this?

Well, if you think about it, it’s a complete paradigm shift for us, culturally, to focus on the people whose behavior is abusive or aggressive. But it certainly can be done, and it has to be done, because nothing else will truly prevent sexual violence in the sense of, stopping individuals from offending.

One of the other really critical pieces to this approach is not just about focusing on individuals who are sexually abusive, but in fact, on the people around them. What we understand from a lot of the research is that most adults who sexually abuse are not doing it “accidentally”, which is to say, making an honest mistake as to whether or not they have consent, and in fact they do a lot of evaluating of their social group and environment to see if their boundary-crossing behaviors will be validated, or at least ignored. We need to do just as much work with those individuals’ friends, family, colleagues, and communities about how to intervene in those situations.

There are two examples that we reference to illustrate that this kind of change can be done, and has been done in most people’s lifetimes. One is around smoking (at least here in Massachusetts, and in some other parts of the U.S.) Rather than saying either, “Smoking is an individual choice that everyone makes for themselves” or “When you smoke, it’s bad for you as an individual in these ways…”, the thing that really shifted public policy and attitudes around smoking in public places was a change to, “Your smoking is harming other people’s health, and we will help you quit, but in the meantime, you can’t smoke in this restaurant (or office, or wherever) and cause harm to other people.”

The other is around drunk driving. The message used to be, “Well, stay off the roads during holidays and events, because there are drunk drivers out there, and drive defensively to avoid them.” We’ve completely switched that to, “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” And not just friends, but strangers. The idea that a bartender could take someone’s keys from them would have been unheard of 20 years ago, but we’re at a point now where the City of Boston is considering empowering valets at city restaurants to be able refuse to return cars to people who are clearly intoxicated. That’s an amazing cultural shift!

In terms of Vancouver, I will say, and I mean this as an absolute compliment to them: I don’t know if it’s entirely the poster campaign that’s responsible for this.  The messaging is really important, but the Deputy Chief also talks about the fact that those community norms messages were supported by better training for police officers and more effective investigation and enforcement. So, at the same time as the city was sending an important message about what behaviors are not acceptable (sexually assaulting people incapacitated by alcohol), they’re backing that up with effective enforcement and low tolerance for sexual violence.

BARCC developed a bystander training program for bar staff, and then rolled it out in partnership with other community agencies, like the police department. (You can read more about that here and download the curriculum for free here.)

The vast majority of the efforts to prevent rape and sexual assault focus on the potential victims. Just a few months ago, another campaign that focused on women was released and sparked some controversy in its focus on telling women not to drink as a means of preventing rape (The folks of feministing.com talked about it here.) Why do you think this is so pervasive? It shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how rape happens – why do you think the public idea of rape remains so divergent from the way rape actually happens?

Well, I have two theories. One is a little more militant and conceptual and the other is a little more empathic and concrete.

The more theoretical piece is about intersecting oppressions and privilege: for a very long time, some groups of people in society have gotten used to feeling entitled to and controlling the bodies and behaviors of other people. That has been around gender, but it’s also around race, age, disability or ability, immigration status, socioeconomic status, religion, and often many of those things in combination. We become comfortable with and attached to that privilege, and it’s not easy to give it up. This is what really critical discussions about rape culture happen around, and at the same time, it also becomes a very difficult conversation to have on a practical level, especially with folks whose worldview might be very different.

So, on a more concrete level, I think this victim-focused idea persists because it gives us this illusion of control. It allows us to say, “Well, if I can pinpoint whatever this victim did that they shouldn’t have done (or didn’t do that they ought to have), then I will always (or never) do that thing, and I will teach my loved ones the same thing, and then we’ll be safe.”

The thing that allows me to feel safe walking through the world and good about most people in it is that I absolutely believe that we can work together as communities and as people in interpersonal relationships to clamp down on the sexually abusive behavior of some individuals we know, and promote norms of health and safety.  But unless you’ve already made that paradigm shift, if you just take in for a second the reality of sexual violence is that you (or someone you care about) is most likely to be sexually abused or assaulted by someone you also know (and perhaps care about), and that that person was intentional in their behavior? That’s a pretty terrifying lightbulb moment. I can see why people reject it.

Are you working on any exciting projects right now? OR, are there any efforts in rape prevention work recently that you would like to highlight here?

There are a couple of things I’m really excited about and really want to highlight.

One is around conversations I’ve been able to have with Joan Tabachnick (who would be a great candidate for this space, by the way) about bystander approaches to sexual violence prevention. We’ve been looking at ways to look beyond individual bystander skill building to think about organizational and community-level policies that can support bystander interventions, because it’s becoming increasingly clear that some communities and organizations are better than others at encouraging proactive prevention steps, and it would be good to understand concretely what makes them better and how to help others become better.

Another project, BE SAFE, is something Steph Trilling, BARCC’s Youth Outreach Coordinator has worked hard on is actually a collaborative project of a number of organizations working across sexual and mental health, sexual violence, healthy relationships, and substance use, with the goal being to work with youth-serving organizations on how to address these issues in an interconnected way, from the policy and management level down to a youth programming level. It’s exciting to think about working on prevention issues in an integrated, multi-issue way, since that’s the way most people experience their lives.

There’s also some really great work by my colleagues that I want to mention quickly. Melissa Gopnik, BARCC’s managing director, has been working in conjunction with the Enough Abuse campaign for a few years now on a training for early childhood educators, and policy help for administrators of day care and preschools (available here) that would demonstrate a model for responding to sexual behaviors in young children in ways that promote healthy child development and prevent child sexual abuse.
Thank you so much for your time and those wonderful answers!

Tags: activism, advocacy, barcc, boston area rape crisis center, community outreach, counseling, meg bossong, rape, sexual assault, sexual violence