The Me Too movement has swept across the country, resulting in the firing and resignations of many famous men. The movement has also had an impact on a local level, all across Virginia, as more and more women come forward with experiences of abuse.
Charlottesville’s Sexual Assault Resource Agency (SARA) serves more than 500 survivors of sexual abuse and intimate partner violence each year. Since the re-emergence of the Me Too movement last October, that number is growing.
“We’ve definitely seen increased numbers, we’ve seen increased numbers of calls, people coming in, we’ve seen increased calls with the emergency department response,” says SARA’s executive director Rebecca Weybright. “So we’re definitely seeing that piece. I think when it all first started, there was kind of this, wow, I can’t believe this is happening. And I think what we’re reaching now is kind of like, how do we take this national movement and apply it locally?"
That’s meant a lot of conversations with colleagues like those at the Shelter for Help in Emergency, the only shelter in this area. It serves a couple hundred people each year, mostly women and children. A key part of Me Too is how abuse is talked about. Can we have conversations about something as common as verbal abuse and something as brutal as rape at the same time?
“It’s not necessarily a hierarchy,” says Kat Dillon, the events coordinator for SHE. “It’s more of a cycle that’s all connected on a certain level. So somebody who sexually harasses someone at work by saying an inappropriate comment and somebody who sexually assaults somebody, those are very different acts and they are both rooted in the same places of need for power, the need for control, a belief in misogyny and very rigid gender roles.”
Dillon says in relationships, power and control can also take the form of financial abuse, like controlling a partner’s access to money. Charlottesville Police Officer Logan Woodzell helped launch the department’s domestic violence prevention and intervention program two years ago. He says abuse isn’t bound by income bracket. “In your upper echelon or upper class people that have a lot of money, they don’t report it, because they don’t want people knowing, they don’t want their neighbors knowing that the police were there,” says Woodzell.
As Me Too’s evolved, local service providers have doubled down on education. One in three teens experience dating violence, according to Dillon, who along with other shelter staff, recently hosted an afternoon workshop at Monticello High School with more than 150 young girls. After filing into the auditorium, the teens dove into the complex issues surrounding abuse in dating and relationships.
Does your partner isolate you from friends? Do they over-text? Do they put you down? The girls broke into smaller groups and dove deeper into media and abuse, self esteem, and what do you do if you see a friend in an abusive relationship.
Back at the Sexual Assault Resource Agency, Weybright says that since Me Too has caught steam, there’s been a local shift towards believing more victims. But she says people need to pay more attention to people of color, different genders, and others historically ignored by the media.
“I think it’s really important that we look at the under-represented voices and making sure that this isn’t for lack of a better description, a white upper-middle class women’s action, but that it does involve voices that aren’t necessarily heard all the time,” says Weybright.
Part of that under-representation, Weybright says, has been blue-collar workers. Male bosses and coworkers may not be Harvey Weinstein, but they can display patterns of abuse all the same. And that culture, she says, needs to change.
“If a woman’s got to constantly be thinking about how do I dress so someone doesn’t say something to me, I have on a low cut blouse or something like that. If we can change that work environment where there’s not that fear, there again, you’ve got more productive people, more energy for ideas,” says Weybright. “It takes a lot away from their quality of life if they’re having to put energy and effort into keeping themselves safe just to do their job.”