Return-Path: <nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.9.3/8.9.0.Beta5/980425bjb) with SMTP id QAA26350; Wed, 22 Mar 2000 16:04:52 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 16:04:52 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <4f.1df6edb.260a8ee2@aol.com> Errors-To: alcrsb@langate.gsu.edu Reply-To: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: AWilder106@aol.com To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-womenlit@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-WOMENLIT:581] Re: Women, Violence, and learning X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Mailer: AOL for Macintosh sub 146 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Status: OR Dear Judy, I have been thinking about your questions all day. For the last one, it seems that children who are victims either stop learning or look to school as a haven and do not end up low literate. I think that the children you are talking about are poor, traumatized, and (potentially) low literate. The only answer is to treat the trauma. If it is untreated then they (hopefully) show up in adult literacy programs where again the problem is to treat the trauma. I say "hopefully" because of the numbers of low literate traumatized adults who don't get to a program. Again, the trauma has to be treated. This means psychological help. It also means education for the literacy providers on how to recognize and work with the symptoms of trauma in the classroom, and to know how trauma distorts learning. It also means alternative learning, as in the use of martial arts or art therapy. On numbers: 1) Herman (1992, 1997) reports that in a random sample of 900 women, 1 in 4 had been raped; 1 in 3 had been sexually abused in childhood. 2) The Times yesterday gave a figure of 22% of women in the United States who had been assaulted by an intimate partner over their lifetime. India (of the 6 countries cited) has a high of 40%. I don't know of any figures (but you might) which look specifically at low literate women. What continually amazes me is our focus on women, who will continue to get assaulted, violated, beaten, and the lack of focus on men--at least it seems that way to me. We will continue to pick bodies out of the river until we ALSO focus upstream and stop them from being thrown into the water in the first place. This should be a male responsibility. I don't hear male voices speaking up on this--about male violence, and what to do about it. Or am I jaundiced? Deaf? Andrea Wilder
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