Ideas

Liz Seccuro is a speaker, victims' advocate and writer.

The victim of a UVA gang rape 30 years ago — also at Phi Kappa Psi — on why no one believed her then. And why she, too, was afraid to name her attackers

Like many Americans, I read the gruesome account of a gang rape at the University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, as told by reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely in a recent issue of Rolling Stone. Unlike most people who read the article, I was not shocked by it; I was gang-raped at Phi Kappa Psi at UVA in 1984. My story was a small part of the article, for which I spent hours speaking with Erdely from July through November. I was encouraged that my story — a very public one in the last eight years — would be told again in order to give context to the eerily similar rape of Jackie, the student victim in Erdely’s story.

Days of public outrage have trickled into weeks, with new firestorms erupting almost daily to the fallout from the article. On Monday, UVA president Teresa Sullivan chose an undisclosed location — to which reporters were not invited — from which to call on “the wisdom and research of our faculty members, the creativity and imaginations of our students, and the passion and concern of our alumni to find real solutions.” But this week, various media outlets began asking if maybe, just maybe, the whole horrifying story in Rolling Stone is a giant hoax.

Over 30 years ago, I told my own story to then student journalist Gayle Wald, who wrote extensively of my rape in the now defunct UVA newspaper, the University Journal. I asked that she use a pseudonym (Kate) for me, and, like Jackie, I begged her not to interview the one man I knew had raped me, as I feared repercussions. There were two other attackers whose names I did not know. When I went to the dean of students at that time, Robert Canevari, I was covered in bruises, still bloodied, and had broken bones. He sat at his big desk across from me and suggested I was a liar and had mental problems for reporting my rape. Some of my new friends told me not to tell, that no one would believe me, that I would ruin my own reputation and that of “Mr. Jefferson’s University.” Almost a quarter-century after my gang rape, one attacker was arrested and jailed for his participation in it, for about six months. He had written me a letter of apology in 2005, which became the basis for a case against him. I wrote about the crime, the investigation, the plea deal, and its effects on my life in my memoir, Crash Into Me, which Bloomsbury published in 2011. I have become a victims’-rights advocate. The similarities between my experience and Jackie’s story are astounding because the culture has remained almost identical in the three decades separating our rapes.

Do you believe me?

Former George journalist Richard Bradley fired the first shot at the Rolling Stone story. “I’m not sure that this gang rape actually happened,” he wrote in a blog post, using brilliant plagiarist Stephen Glass (whom he edited, and who duped him) as a comparison base for the idea that astounding and uncomfortable stories must be fabricated. Though Bradley’s rant was on his personal blog, doubts have now burbled up at established outlets. Jonah Goldberg shares his opinion in an incredibly dismissive piece at the Los Angeles Times — “Much of what is alleged (though Erdely never uses the word ‘alleged’) isn’t suitable for a family paper,” he writes, as if the brutality of an assault could possibly be a measure of its veracity. (His colleague Meghan Daum was more reasonable.) Slate’s Alison Benedikt and Hanna Rosin, posted a thoughtful piece and podcast that asks the journalistic questions without doubting that brutal gang rapes happen.

And that’s what’s missing in all of this: the distinction between discussing journalism ethics and dismantling an important discussion because the subject matter seems extremely distressing. Wholesale doubt or dismissal of a rape account because it sounds “too bad to be true” is ridiculous. Is it easier to believe a rape by a single stranger upon a woman in a dark alley? What about marital rape? What if a prostitute is raped? Just how bad was it? We should not have a rape continuum as part of the dialogue, ever.

Of course nobody wants to believe that an ugly gang rape could happen at a venerated institution of higher learning, even though our rape statistics prove something is rotten in Charlottesville, in South Bend, in Tallahassee, in Boulder. But Americans are still a puritanical and repressed bunch who would prefer to see the only rosiest picture of our sweet land of liberty.

It’s also why we have struggled to comprehend the allegations leveled against Bill Cosby by 20-something (and counting) different women. Why couldn’t it just be the one, 10 years ago, who we believed? Cliff Huxtable, with his goofy faces, goofier sweaters and lovingly imparted life lessons, could never drug and rape women. But, allegedly, Cosby could, and has.

When the words Duke Lacrosse or Tawana Brawley are mentioned in the same context of the rape story in Rolling Stone, as Goldberg did, and as do the comments of many of the articles posted, including the actual Rolling Stone piece, I am filled with a hollow sadness, and rage. False reporting of rape is rare; it is not a myth perpetrated by the feminist machine. Those who make false accusations are despicable, and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But we cannot choose to disbelieve an account simply because it’s too awful to fathom. I am living proof — verified by the Virginia courts — that the horror is all too real.

Seccuro is a speaker, victims’ advocate and the author of the memoir Crash Into Me: A Survivor’s Search for Justice. She is currently at work on a novel, and lives in Long Island, N.Y., with her husband and two young children.

Read next: If There Were Ever a Time to Abolish Frats, It’s Now

This article originally appeared on Patheos.

10.2 million people sit in prison cells today around the world– and almost half of them are right here, in the United States. While in the US we like to boast about being “#1″ we forget that we’re actually #1 at a lot of things that we probably shouldn’t be proud of – and having the highest incarceration rate in the world is one of them.

And, it’s not just our incarceration numbers that should be a shock to our system, but the recidivism rate that we should find most concerning. In a study from 2005-2010, researchers found that 3 out of 4 former prisoners are re-arrested within 5 years after being released from prison.

Simply put, the way we approach crime and punishment doesn’t work.

I remember back to my days listening to talk radio and the initial chatter of prison overcrowding once we started to realize that our prisons were beginning to bulge at the seams. I distinctly remember the solution one commentator had: build more prisons.

Unfortunately, the approach of building more prisons and punishing more harshly (aka, mandatory sentencing, three strikes laws, the war on drugs) hasn’t worked and has only led to more of the same. In fact, some of our harsh approach to crime and punishment has actually led to more crime as nonviolent offenders (such as folks going to jail for marijuana offenses), come out on the other side of prison more “hardened” than they were to begin with. Throw into the mix the huge vocational barriers someone with a criminal record faces, and our situation is ripe for failure– one that actively produces more crime and brokenness, not less.

Actually, it’s beyond ripe for failure – it has failed. Past tense.

The traditional American approach to crime and punishment doesn’t work.

This past week I’ve been reading a great new book by Derek Flood called Disarming Scripture: Cherry-Picking Liberals, Violence-Loving Conservatives, and really connected with his thoughts in a section called A Practical Guide To Enemy-Love. In regards to our failed approach to crime and punishment he writes:

We commonly think of justice in terms of retribution. When we speak of a person “getting justice ” we mean getting punishment. Love of enemies challenges this understanding of justice and asks: what if justice was not about punishing and hurting, but about mending and making things right again? What if justice was not about deterring through negative consequences, but about doing something good in order to reverse those hurtful dynamics? What if real justice was about repairing broken lives?”

I’ve certainly spoken of this difference between restorative justice and punitive justice both here on the blog and in my book, Undiluted, but Flood brings up some really good additional thoughts on the matter. He goes on to say:

“The sad fact is that our current prison system has become a factory for hardening criminals rather than healing them. Instead of learning empathy and how to manage their impulses and emotions, the brutal culture of prison life teaches inmates that one must be brutally violent in order to survive. Because of these patterns learned in prison, the alarming repeat offense rate is sadly not all that surprising. Locking someone up in the hell of prison life naturally breeds violence, not reform repentance. People do not learn empathy by being shamed and dehumanized. Retribution gains popular support by appealing to our most primitive impulses, but in the end results in a broken system that perpetuates hurt instead and cycles of violence.”

In the book, Flood cites a successful program that clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of a restorative justice approach over a punitive approach: the RSVP program run by the San Francisco’s Sheriff’s Department. In this alternative program, they took some of their most violent offenders and tried a restorative approach instead of just locking them up and throwing away the key. This program that taught them communal living, personal dignity, development of empathy for others, and how to manage their own emotions, had some results many might find surprising: an 80% reduction in violent recidivism, and the total elimination of assault on prison officials (pg. 185).

The effectiveness of restorative justice compared to punitive justice is simply amazing. But, that really shouldn’t be a shock to us. Why wouldn’t restoring a life work better than simply subjecting it to punishment?

The American approach to crime and punishment needs some re-framing because the old way simply doesn’t work. A punitive focused approach results in over populated prisons filled to the brim– both with some folks who justly should be there, and some who probably should not. All however, are forced to acclimate to a violent prison life that simply turns them into “hardened criminals” even if they didn’t arrive as one. When they are released, they face so many barriers to reintegration into society that the violent survival mechanisms the prison system taught them quickly become one of their only tools to move forward in life.

We cannot continue a system with this philosophical approach and think that we’re actually doing justice– we’re not. Justice, as I write in Undiluted, is about “making the world a little less broken and a little more right,” and as Flood points out in Disarming Scripture, our current system does anything but that.

The solution?

We must become people who long to see a life restored instead of a life destroyed, and we must become willing to do whatever it takes to make the former happen, while resisting the easier path of doing the latter. Together, we can begin to influence culture in such a way that we reform our penal system to become something that sees justice as a life restored instead of punishment given.

Benjamin L. Corey, is an Anabaptist author, speaker, and blogger. His first book, Undiluted: Rediscovering the Radical Message of Jesus, is available now at your local bookstore.

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Brian Moylan is a writer and pop culture junkie.

Caving to lousy preconceived notions before even tuning in is the worst sort of cynicism that Internet culture has to offer

On Tuesday night, I noticed a tweet from a writer friend in my timeline. “I’m watching Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce and…I don’t hate it…AMA.” The joke, other than the “ask me anything” trope, was that he was watching Bravo’s first scripted show in the anticipation of hating it and, it turns out, found it to actually not be that bad.

This is the problem with hate watching, the Internet’s new favorite past time. Anyone with basic cable and a Twitter account knows the drill, where you watch something – especially a movie event, a live program, or an awards show – just so you can joke along with all your friends about how awful it is. It’s so popular that even Allison Williams, the star of NBC’s Peter Pan Live!, which airs Thursday night, knows that plenty of people are tuning in just to make cruel cracks about her performance.

“Watch it the way you watch everything, watch it critically, do whatever you want,” she tells Vanity Fair. “But even if it’s just secretly, go along for the ride.”

Williams picks out the major problem with hate watching pretty quickly, that people will be tuning in under the assumption that it’s going to be bad and they’re going to make fun of it no matter what. That’s kind of sad. Sure, The Sound of Music Live!, Peter Pan’s predecessor in hate watching, had some technical troubles and wasn’t the best thing in the world. But Peter Pan Live! deserves to be judged based on its own merits – or lack thereof.

Part of the reason why anyone tunes into a live broadcast on television is to see if people mess up. It’s like watching Saturday Night Live to see if the actors break character, NASCAR to see the crashes, or a Mariah Carey Christmas concert performance for her voice cracking. That’s only natural and, if it happens, I think it’s fine for there to be dozens of GIFs of the gaffe all over Tumblr within seconds. But as for the overall quality of a program, shouldn’t we wait to actually see if it’s going to be awful before making up our minds? As Williams says, can’t we go along for the ride?

Going into a show you’ve never seen before with 140-character bursts of vitriol in your soul is the worst kind of prejudice. No matter how good Peter Pan is, no matter how many high notes Allison Williams hits, no matter how many soft shoes Christopher Walken does as Captain Hook, people are going to laugh and jeer. That is the worst sort of critical failure. It’s like adoring every single one of Beyoncé’s songs because The Beygency might get you. There are good and bad things about every performance, song, and wig (yes, Allison Williams, I’m looking at yours) but caving to lousy preconceived notions before even tuning in is the worst sort of cynicism that Internet culture has to offer. There’s no defense from that. No matter how good the show might be, people have already tried, convicted, and sentenced it.

Peter Pan Live!, of course, is meant to be an event and consumed with social media. That’s the only way networks can figure out how to get a surge in viewers these days, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we have to get #Tinkerbell trending in order to save her life at the beginning of the broadcast. It’s like the 21^st century version of clapping to show you believe. Programmers are relying more and more on the “second screen experience” to get ratings, but that doesn’t mean our tweets have to be bad-natured.

As Pollyanna-ish as NBC is, the networks are as much to blame for this rise in hate watching as the fans. Some people have expressed that they think Peter Pan Live! is intended to be hate watched, and they’re not entirely wrong. While it seems like this musical is sincere in its intention to amuse the masses, there are certainly plenty of other TV movies that are made with the intention of being torn down.

SyFy has seen tremendous success with their burgeoning Sharknado franchise, whose popularity is built on people’s outlandish reactions to its foibles on social media. Sharknado is winkingly awful though, wallowing in its campy plotting and riding the wave of social media scoffing all the way to the bank.

Lifetime isn’t as postmodern about using this tactic. Their intentionally awful but not winking biopics about things like Saved by the Bell, Aaliyah, and Brittany Murphy lure you in with the promise of something good but, based on the Lifetime brand, audiences are predisposed to it being absolutely wretched. (Since we’ve already brought up bad wigs, can we talk about the one in the Brittany Murphy movie?)

Hate watching is now an actual strategy that some channels use, so when something like Peter Pan Live! comes along, we can’t help but feel like it’s the same bait. It is not. Even those shows meant to be ridiculed should be critically considered by the audience based on their achievements. Sharknado 2, while not going to change the course of cinema, was at least enjoyable in its own tongue-and-cheek way. Does that make it good? Maybe it does. (But it probably doesn’t.)

I’m not saying we can’t hate watch things. Nothing gives me more pleasure than going on a 20-minute tear about how absolutely horrendous The Newsroom is. But that is information based on watching several episodes of the show over several seasons. It is not, like so many people’s feelings about Peter Pan Live!, an initial impression based on nothing.

We don’t have to like everything. Heck, we don’t even have to like most things. But I think it’s the responsible and intelligent thing to at least keep an open mind and wait for some actual evidence before making up our minds. And, hey, if Allison Williams can’t hit those high notes – then #HaveAtIt.

Brian Moylan is a writer and pop culture junkie who lives in New York. His work has appeared in Gawker, VICE, New York magazine, and a few other safe-for-work publications.

Nick Gillespie is the editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason.tv.

Want fewer avoidable deaths and potentially angry protests? Then get more video from every possible angle

If you’re outraged—and you should be—that no indictment followed Eric Garner’s death at the hands of the New York Police Department, thank the people who captured the attempted arrest gone horribly wrong from different angles on their cellphone cameras. And start pushing for laws and procedures that not only provide legal protection for citizens who film police but outfit cops with wearable cameras and other recording devices.

Such technologically enabled transparency won’t end all disputes between citizens and law enforcement but it will go a long way to providing clarity in ambiguous cases and, as important, minimizing bad actions by police and suspects alike. It will also have an impact on protests that always have a potential for violence on the part of marchers and authorities.

If official and crowdsourced footage of the confrontation between Michael Brown and Ferguson policeman Darren Wilson existed, it may well have minimized the subsequent protests, militarized response to demonstrators, and the widely criticized grand jury proceedings in Missouri.

Amateur video abounds in the Garner case. Cellphone footage plainly shows cops putting the 350-pound man into the chokehold and other restraining moves that a coroner ruled killed him (chokeholds are explicitly banned by NYPD rules, which should give even police defenders pause). Other video shows NYPD officers standing haplessly over an unmoving, apparently dead Garner for minutes, attempting no resuscitation. The footage is not just disturbing as hell—Garner is heard shouting, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe” repeatedly before he expires—it’s the reason why people across the political spectrum are disgusted by the grand jury ruling. As Rep. Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican who is also a lawyer, tweeted, “Clearly excessive force against #EricGarner.”

These are not pretty pictures but they are essential viewing if you want to understand how the police operate and why so many Americans, especially racial and ethnic minorities who tend to have more run-ins with police, feel about law enforcement.

Given how they come off in the Garner footage, it’s understandable why police routinely try to shut down citizens photographing or videotaping them in the line of duty. Indeed, last August, police in Ferguson arrested several reporters for doing just that. That sort of thing is hardly an isolated incident, either. While there is a court-recognized right of citizens to record the police, there’s also little question that cops and law enforcement at all levels are waging nothing less than a “war against cameras.”

Ironically, cameras are in many—maybe most—instances the police’s best friend. Dashboard-mounted cameras have become standard equipment for most highway patrols and routinely exonerate patrolmen accused of misconduct. Back in August, former NYPD police commissioner Bernie Kerik, who implemented dash cams for his force, said that such footage overwhelmingly vindicates police versions of events. Not only that, they have a calming effect. “If a trooper loses his cool,” a spokesman for Pennsylvania Highway Patrol told The York Daily Register, “The trooper will have to answer for his actions.”

And they will also have to answer when they turn off or mess with cameras at inopportune moments. The Albuquerque, New Mexico PD did just that earlier this year when it fired a member for failing to turn on her body camera before engaging in a fatal shooting.

You don’t have to believe that “everyone behaves better when they’re on video” to recognize the vast benefits of ubiquitous video from official and distributed sources. It might have prevented violence in Ferguson in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting (it may even have helped to avoid the incident in the first place). While it did not help to bring an indictment in the Eric Garner death, it has raised disturbing and totally legitimate issues about police behavior and techniques. Those are good things, even if they are born out of tragedy.

Police should actually be the most supportive of increasing the amount of footage, especially footage taken by cameras they’re wearing. A year-long study of the Rialto, Calif., police department found that using “officer-worn cameras” reduced use-of-force incidents by 59% and reduced complaints against the cops by 87.5%. Between the Brown and Garner deaths—and cases such as the one in Cleveland where police shot and killed 12 year old Tamir Rice—law enforcement needs to work hard to regain the trust and confidence of the American public. Assuming they are acting in good faith and in accordance with proper policies, literally being able to show things from their point of view may be one of the best ways they can reassure us all.

Nick Gillespie is the editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason.tv and the co-author with Matt Welch of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America.

Being identified as such threatens the kind of woman she sees herself as

Landon Jones is a former managing editor of People and Money magazines.

The unpunished deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner have sparked protests reminiscent of the start of the Free Speech Movement

On Dec. 2, 1964—50 years ago this week—a graduate student named Mario Savio climbed the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California at Berkeley and gave an astonishing speech. He denounced the university as a soulless assembly line and urged students to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus…you’ve got to make it stop!” Savio’s harangue ignited the Free Speech Movement, the Vietnam antiwar movement, and eventually everything we think of as the Sixties.

Today, after decisions by grand juries not to indict the police officers who killed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, the question becomes: Are we now poised at a similar historical moment? The protests that followed the shooting of Michael Brown Jr. last August have not died out but rather intensified as they spread across the country. And more protests followed this week after the policeman who held Eric Garner in a chokehold was not charged. As with the Sixties, the new movement has generated its own rhetoric, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!”

And the same questions that were asked about the Free Speech Movement are being raised again. Where is the movement going? What are the objectives? Who are the leaders? Is it helping or hurting black people?

This is what the first months of a new movement feel like. It first looks for leaders. Will it be Al Sharpton, in the role of Mario Savio? Cornell West, instead of Noam Chomsky? Then it looks for focus—harder to find now amid the centrifugal forces of social media.

These thoughts were all on my mind Thanksgiving morning. I was walking on the half-block of city street that curves in front of the Canfield Green Apartments in Ferguson. Here is where Michael Brown fell, and here is where his people’s memorial now rises. It is a terminal moraine of grief: two jumbled piles of teddy bears, handwritten prayers, St. Louis Cardinals baseball caps, colored handkerchiefs, letters, and makeshift crosses, all thrown together and encrusted with the previous night’s snowfall.

I grew up not far from here, and the school bus that took me to school every day skirted this place. Michael Brown’s memorial is fully accessible to the public, though the busy nearby street of West Florissant was barricaded until this week and treated as a crime scene because of vandalism. Police are everywhere on the streets, and National Guard trucks are parked in front of shops with windows boarded and sprayed “BLACK OWNED.”

For anyone from St. Louis who loves this good-hearted city, famous in equal measure for its fried ravioli and generous spirited sports fans, this is a place of infinite sadness. Here is the sidewalk where Officer Darren Wilson wanted Michael Brown to walk instead of in the street. Here is the light pole where he fell. Here is the crime scene.

The jaunty lyrics of Meet Me in St. Louis offer a promise to the city’s émigrés. T.S. Eliot grew up here, too, and hardly ever came back. I heard him speak during one of his visits when he gave a nostalgic talk about playing in the back yard of the school where his father had taught. Eliot had no special brief for St. Louis, but I like to think he had our mutual hometown in mind when he wrote in Four Quartets that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Landon Jones, a former managing editor of People and Money magazines, grew up in St. Louis.

To determine if a child’s weight is a problem, a key measure is body mass index

Of the 10 children in my family, I was the only one who was obese. I didn’t know it at the time, but my family mirrored obesity trends in Holtville, the small town in California where I grew up. In Imperial County, which borders Arizona and Mexico, 1 in 10 people were considered obese in the 1970s and ’80s. I hated being obese and fantasized about a magical solution that could transform me overnight.

Fast forward to the present: My weight is under control and I’m the director of programs at Clinicas de Salud del Pueblo, a non-profit community clinic in Imperial County.

Unfortunately, obesity is more common here than when I was a kid. Today, 4 in 10 children in Imperial County are considered obese or overweight. Couple this with a poverty rate of 22 percent, and you have a recipe for an unhealthy community.

To determine if a child’s weight is a problem, a key measure is body mass index—measuring the child’s weight against a national standard for their height, age, and gender. A child in the 85^th percentile or more is considered overweight; at the 95^th percentile and above, a child is obese.

One major problem is that many parents see obesity as something their children will outgrow—not a major health concern that requires treatment. The clinic used to tell families to eat healthy and exercise, and to come back next year for a physical exam. This method didn’t work. Most kids don’t grow out of being overweight or obese and many parents don’t know how to help them make healthy choices around food and exercise.

In 2011, my clinic saw an opportunity to join forces with other agencies—including San Diego State University’s Institute for Behavioral and Community Health and the Imperial County Public Health Department—to come up with a new strategy for controlling obesity. One focus is identifying problems much earlier, and monitoring them more closely over time.

In order to get real money, we applied for a 4-year research grant from the Childhood Obesity Research Demonstration (or CORD) study of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The grant program is part of the Affordable Care Act and aims to tackle childhood obesity in impoverished communities. We were fortunate to be one of three sites funded—the others are in Massachusetts and Texas.

Last year, we invited 600 children to participate—and we allow any family to access the services. Three to four times a year, the child sees a clinician for a weight management and wellness exam. A patient care coordinator also works with the family. Finally, community health workers (or promotoras) lead a series of workshops on parenting skills, setting goals, and incorporating fun games into physical activities.

One of the first families to participate in Clinicas’ family wellness program was the Padillas, whose 11-year-old daughter had been struggling with her weight. It was difficult for them at first. The family doesn’t have a car and needed to find a ride or take the bus, which can be tricky. And, like many families, they felt reluctant to visit the clinic when they lapsed.

The Padillas eventually figured out how to manage the plan. They went on walks, watched less TV, gave up drinking sweet tea, and ate less fattening foods. Today, they eat more fruits and vegetables, drink more water, go to sleep earlier, and include more physical activities in their daily routine.

But it’s not just families that need to commit to change. As part of Our Choice/Nuestra Opción, experts conducted training with the staff of clinics, childcare facilities, schools, recreation agencies, and restaurants. There’s work to do in improving our own health.

The magical solution to childhood obesity that I wished as a kid doesn’t exist. Tackling this problem means making a long-term commitment—and understanding that change won’t happen overnight.

Leticia Ibarra is director of programs at Clinicas de Salud del Pueblo, Inc. She has 16 years of professional experience in research, project management, working with clinics, and consulting in community-based, collaborative health communication and promotora interventions to improve the health and well-being of Latino and immigrant communities. She wrote this for Zocalo Public Square.

My 16 year old son has earned his permit and I am the one who has the most availability during the week — thus, it’s become my “privilege” to teach him how to drive

This story originally appeared on xoJane.com.

Possibly one of the worst fights I had with my mother when I was a teenager occurred at the intersection of McClintock and Cornell in Tempe, Arizona. I was making a left turn and had inched her Toyota Camry into position. Oncoming traffic was heavy and my mom was gripping the emergency brake and maybe even looking for an oxygen mask. She was giving a ton of instructions and I thought I heard her say go, so I did.

We missed being in a head on collision by approximately half an inch. I believe our argument went something like this:

Mom: “Oh my God! Are you trying to kill us? F#$%, Crazy, Jesus-H Fu*&%%^, etc. What the heck were you thinking?”

Me-(ego bruised): “No, I wasn’t trying to kill us, Mom, just you because you would have been hit first!”

Mom: “Give me the goddamn keys!”

Me: *Walking home*

Fast forward 27 years. My 16 year old son has earned his permit and I am the one who has the most availability during the week—thus, it’s become my “privilege” to teach him how to drive. I imagine that the previous sentence will be read with glee by mom. I think she’ll share it with her friends and they’ll have a hearty laugh about how what goes around comes around. And they’ll be right.

Here’s what I didn’t understand when my mother was teaching me how to drive. She didn’t see me as a young adult with a sense of responsibility and underlying comprehension of the risks involved in this rite of passage. If she was anything like I am now, she saw me around the age of 4 or 5, holding my blanky and starting the ignition. I know this because when I look at my son, I see him in his OshKosh B’gosh overalls. I see that little cherub controlling a death trap in the guise of a Nissan. In an effort to avoid a public freak out and to keep my son in the driver’s seat, I have compiled a list of actions to be taken in order to survive teaching my teenager to drive. Please use as needed.

Xanax is a-okay.

I’m not saying you should score it on the street, but I mean I can’t see you, so.

Please pay attention: The first time you pull out of a neighborhood or parking lot and onto a main thoroughfare, you will want your anti-anxiety meds to have taken effect. I love my primary care physician. She has a teenage daughter. Solidarity.

Clip your fingernails to the quick.

You’ll be clenching your fists on average of 74,876 times every trip you take with your teenager. Avoid extra pain by removing the possibility of scarring your palms.

Practice your poker face—then apply it to your voice.

Think relaxation tapes from days of yore. Conjure your most boring teacher’s voice. Do anything to remove emotion because even joy will be received with an overreaction.

For example, when my son successfully completed a series of 3 point turns and I praised him, he interpreted my praise as though I had just said, “Dude! You’re like a master driver! Why not go ahead and blast Jay Z or Drake while you navigate the freeway on-ramp! Be sure to try to recline your seat as you hit 60 mph too.”

Every time you are tempted to scream out in total panic and despair at your teen’s lack of judgment, clench your butt muscles instead and apply poker voice. My butt is getting so firm.

Watch a documentary or film featuring European roadways.

The first time your kid begins to drift onto the wrong side of the road, simply say, England.

Resist the urge to let your teenager drive him/herself to school.

There is an invisible cloud of Look-there-are-my-friends-I’mma-act-like-a-jerk — it’s like vapor. You will also potentially be saving your child from the embarrassment of parking on the curb because he/she was trying so hard to be noticed.

When you occasionally stop at a red light while your teenager is driving and look out the passenger window so that your child doesn’t see your tears, be alert enough to notice the older woman giving you a knowing look. Silently curse her when the light turns green because you are deeply envious of how much her car belongs to just her.

Make sure that you and your significant other are on the same page about things like speed limits.

In my state, if you actually drive the speed limit, you will put your life at risk. Hence my fear of my son applying my very safe husband’s advice too earnestly.

Know the habits of drivers in your area.

My son is currently tapping into his psychic abilities because in our town one is supposed to just know when the car ahead plans on turning or merging lanes. Mind reading is a must.

Keep the younger siblings muzzled in the backseat.

My daughter is only a couple of years younger than my son. They are the fiercest friends in the world. The car is not the world. The car is where your daughter will kick the back of the driver’s seat causing your teenager to turn around mid-acceleration to utter profanities you didn’t know he knew while your daughter lobs them back causing your poker voice to vanish. Lightening quick actions you never knew you possessed will be taken in a display of something akin to bionic parenting — such as simultaneously squeezing your backseat-child’s knee to show you mean business, and hitting the hazard lights as the voice of Thor rises from the depths of your body to silence the moment. In the silent aftermath you will demand the keys be removed from the ignition. Using your now-raw-non-neutral voice you will instruct your children to walk home and think about what they’ve done.

My son is improving in his driving skills every day. He dreams aloud about what kind of car he’ll purchase when his 16 birthday rolls around this December. This is hilarious and somewhat adorable. We’ve been discussing things like getting a job and reality.

My husband and I spent a recent Saturday at a team parent meeting because our boy made the JV basketball team. At the meeting, we were informed about the practice schedule among other things. Our boy now has to be dropped off and picked up from school on average of 28 times per week. Suddenly, December can’t come soon enough. Luckily for all of us, the road to school and back is a straight shot, and if he has his own car I can follow him if I feel like it. I think I’m going to feel like it.

Jess Burnquist is a teacher living in Phoenix, Arizona.