(Re)defining Feminist Resistance, Activism and Empowerment in Rape Crisis Centres: Black Women’s Perspectives and Implications for Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The anti-rape movement has largely understood issues of sexual violence, including its prevalence, prevention, and response to survivors of sexual violence, from the perspective of Eurocentric ideals of White womanhood. The theories and practices related to violence against women used by mainstream feminists are largely gender-based and do not pay sufficient attention to intersectionality – how race, culture, class, and other important social factors inform deeper understandings of violence against women. In turn, African/Black women’s experiences and contributions to feminist organizing have been overlooked, undocumented and made invisible with hegemonic feminist movements. This dissertation acknowledges, documents and amplifies African/Black women’s experiences working and volunteering in rape crisis and sexual assault centres in Ontario, Canada. Using an anti-colonial, African/Black Canadian feminist and integrative anti-racism theoretical framework to examine qualitative interviews with ten African/Black women about their experiences and perspectives on feminist organizing in rape crisis centres and sexual assault centres, this research reveals that African/Black women feel invisible and that their contributions to the anti-rape movement have been unvalued and disregarded. Based on the ten interviews, I argue that a focus on the intersectional experiences of womanhood for African/Black women within rape crisis centre work is needed to advance social justice within feminist organizing. Consequently, if the colonial and operative processes within rape crisis and sexual assault centres are not disrupted, the anti-rape movement will continue to perpetuate systemic violence with disproportionate adverse outcomes for African/Black women, whether as workers, clients or support seekers in rape crisis and sexual assault centres. This dissertation puts forth several instrumental recommendations and calls for transformative education, pedagogy, scholarship and research that centres the embodied lived experiences of African/Black women in classrooms, higher learning institutions, social services, feminist organizations and subsequent social movements within Canada and elsewhere.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".