Feminist Activism and YPAR: Privileged Girls Interrupt Rape Culture

Introduction

Pressures to be the “perfect Jewish girl” are present in daily life and perpetuate a society of rape culture within our community. Some of our community members hear the message that women are ‘less than men’ in Jewish religious and domestic spaces, and this allows for rape culture to ingrain itself in our community. Jewish teen girls are clearly aware of the sexist rhetoric that is present in our community, but they often do not have the language or resources to help prevent it. Without a way to solve the issue of rape culture in the Jewish community, pressures to be the “perfect Jewish girl” will continue to harm girls and continue the extent to which rape culture is present. Furthermore, there is a disconnect between Jewish teen girls and their parents regarding these societal pressures. [Research Training Internship (RTI) Report, May 2017, p. 14]

This commentary was written by a group of 10 Jewish, high school-aged teen girls who participated in a collaborative university-community social justice program and represents their developing critical consciousness of the ways in which gender-based violence plays out in their lives and communities. In naming the problem in their lives and communities as “rape culture,” they draw attention to social and cultural practices that embody “violence” against girls and women (Buchwald et al., 2005; Sills et al., 2016 as cited in Mendes et al., 2019, p. 7), that also extend to rape jokes; sexual harassment; cat-calling; sexualized “banter”; the routine policing of women’s bodies, dress, appearance, and code of conduct; the re-direction of blame from the perpetrator in an assault to the victim; and impunity for perpetrators, despite their conduct or crimes (Keller et al., 2018, p. 24, as cited in Mendes et al., 2019, p. 7). In shining a spotlight on rape culture and misogyny, they situate themselves among an expanding community of young feminist activists intent on exposing, critiquing, and educating their communities about gender-based violence while offering counter-narratives to the sexism and misogyny that has become increasingly normalized and all-too commonplace in the 21st century. Their opportunity to expose, critique, and educate their communities about rape culture took place in the context of a university-community collaborative program—Research Training Internship (RTI), which, from its inception, was guided by a commitment to critical, intersectional feminist principles and community-engaged action toward social justice (Catlett et al., 2019). In particular, this collaborative program sought to engage youth in discourse about systemic privilege and oppression, and the participating youth chose to do this through a focused inquiry into, and Youth-Led Participatory Action Research (YPAR) addressing, rape culture.

Our research is situated at the nexus of two domains of inquiry: (a) uses of YPAR, in particular, with privileged youth; and (b) youth feminist-informed activism challenging rape culture. In this article, we build upon a foundation of work that already has begun to examine the particular uses of YPAR with privileged communities. Our work with this RTI community-based project highlights the uses of YPAR with privileged youth, and demonstrates specifically how this methodology and pedagogy creates an environment in which young people can intentionally draw on a feminist approach to interrogation and critique through which to locate themselves within intersecting axes of privilege and oppression. In doing that work, the youth deepened their understanding of the ways in which their own personal identities and experiences are connected to deeper systemic roots of gender-based violence and rape culture (Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1994; Richie, 2012). The focus here is not only on power and positionality, but also on accountability—identifying the ways in which the RTI youth are implicated in intersecting systems of inequality and developing criteria against which they can measure their accountability to break the stronghold of gender-based violence that unexamined privilege props up (Catlett & Proweller, 2011; DiAngelo, 2018; Okun, 2010). While turning the lens inward on one’s privileged positionality invites great risk, it also holds the potential for great reward, challenging current and pervasive ways of knowing and building the capacity for individual and collective social change grounded in a recognition of accountability for privilege, its relationship to oppressive systems, and the harms it produces (Russo, 2019).

Research Training Internship Program

This community-based project brought together three groups: Ma’yan (a Jewish feminist educational organization based in New York), the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago (JUF), and three DePaul University faculty members from different disciplines (Women’s and Gender Studies, Education, and Social Work), collaborating as a team. RTI was originally developed by Ma’yan. After this organization ran the RTI program successfully for several years, they became interested in facilitating its expansion to additional sites. In this context, Ma’yan reached out to university and community stakeholders in our large midwestern city; as a result, RTI currently is being facilitated in Chicago as a university-community partnership. The program annually brings together a group of approximately 10–12 Jewish teen girls from the Chicagoland area to engage in collaborative critical reflection and inquiry on their immediate social context and broader societal injustices. In addition, the program aims to cultivate leadership capacities for critical dialogue and social action with other teens and adult allies inside and beyond the Jewish community and build strategic partnerships among feminist scholars, activists, and Jewish community members. In this program, we seek to engage youth from backgrounds of relative race and class privilege to critically interrogate the ways in which they may be simultaneously impacted by systemic privilege and oppression, and in the process, reevaluate their beliefs about themselves, others, and the world (Swalwell, 2013). Grounded in a feminist theoretical and pedagogical legacy, our work directs attention to the root causes of social problems.

RTI was co-facilitated by a social work professional from the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, and a graduate student in Women’s and Gender Studies from our private midwestern university. Central to the RTI program is a youth participatory action project. While RTI’s pilot year was 2014–2015, and the program has continued over 5 years, the focus of this study involves the 2016–2017 cohort of teen participants. In the context of the bi-monthly sessions, the high school students receive instruction in feminist theoretical and social justice education, and the design and implementation of participatory action research, ultimately developing their own youth-led research project.

Youth Participatory Action Research

YPAR is both a philosophy and methodology that seeks to engage youth directly in collaborative critical inquiry, creating opportunities for them to investigate social issues that directly impact their lives, probe the systemic bases of these issues, and strategize actions to prompt social change (Bautista et al., 2013; Reason & Bradbury, 2006). YPAR has traditionally been an inquiry framework through which youth most immediately impacted by the ravages of structural violence have found a voice through which to act on their own lived experience as social critics and agents of radical social change (Torre & Fine, 2006). An intentional model that “lifts up the voices of those who have historically been excluded from decisions about their own lives and education and engages them in problem-solving” (Wright, 2015, p. 23), YPAR programs and initiatives have largely sought to address structural inequalities, institutional assault, and communal disinvestment and to improve conditions for economically, socially, and politically marginalized youth in their own communities and beyond (Ozer, 2016; Wright, 2015).

More recently, however, YPAR has emerged as a meaningful approach for studying and involving privileged youth in important social inquiry about how power and oppression function, and the role that privilege plays in producing, sustaining, and normalizing social injustice (Case, 2013; Stoudt, 2009). While privilege shapes the experience for those who benefit from it structurally, it tends not to be discussed openly, with critical and explicit interrogation of its integral role in the production and maintenance of social inequality. Those with privileged social identities tend not to be in the position of having to interrogate their own privilege and consider how it is implicated in systemic oppression (DiAngelo, 2018; Goodman, 2015; Howard, 2010; Swalwell, 2013; Wise & Case, 2013). Rather, it is more common for individuals to reflect on their marginalized identities. Over the past three decades, scholars have sought to unpack how students shape and play out their privileged identities, taking a closer look at how privileged identities are enacted in both public and private school settings (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2009; Howard, 2008, 2010; Howard & Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2010; Proweller, 1998; Stoudt et al., 2012; Swalwell, 2013). Scholarship has also documented students’ resistance to confronting their own privilege which has elicited mixed reactions, ranging from feelings of defensiveness and anger, to guilt, shame, and hopelessness (Catlett & Proweller, 2011; Curry-Stevens, 2007; DiAngelo, 2018; Wise & Case, 2013). Privileged youth are raised on and schooled in neoliberal sensibilities of individualism, competition, color-blindness, and personal responsibility, all of which combine to produce and reinforce a strong desire to protect and defend one’s privilege and maintain the status quo (Goodman, 2010; Swalwell, 2013). Even when privileged youth are able to move through the destabilizing effects of interrogating their own privilege, there remains the possibility that they will choose to challenge the status quo through altruistic intentions to help others, which, in effect, reproduces social inequality and further instantiates systemic injustice (Catlett & Proweller, 2011).

As an approach that provides youth opportunities to develop their capacities as decision-makers, YPAR empowers youth to re-shape institutions and systems that directly impact them and their communities. As such, YPAR undertaken with/by privileged youth holds great potential for making visible the ways in which privilege is necessarily connected to systemic inequities and operates to reproduce and sustain inequality. Moreover, it creates the context for privileged youth to develop a recognition and understanding of their accountability to move to a more critically conscious place from which to engage in acts of individual and collective radical social change (Stoudt et al., 2012). In the case of our work with privileged, feminist-oriented, activist teen girls, YPAR held transformative possibilities for girls to shape a collective voice of critique, and re-position themselves as accountable allies in the struggle against systemic oppression and for a more socially just society (Brown, 2016). Their work is particularly important in light of a contemporary context where misogyny and rape culture are especially virulent and align with neoliberal tropes of individualism, self-regulation, and entrepreneurial sensibilities to undermine collective efforts to surface systemic oppression (Mendes et al., 2019). Not unlike the recent rise of new and diverse feminist communities bringing much-needed attention to rape culture through expanding digital technologies, the youth in our work are engaged in generating awareness (Keller et al., 2018; Mendes et al., 2019; Phipps et al., 2018; Smith et al., 2011) and prompting dialogue in their own communities about the relatively unspoken and unexamined realities of sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. Through YPAR, they are exposing and critiquing systemic gender-based oppression that is integrally related to power and privilege in their own Jewish communities. As emergent activists, they are engaged in powerful work to enhance their understanding of self as lived in relation with others.

Developed by U.S. feminists in the 1970s, rape culture as a concept and term refers to a culture in which “sexual violence against women is implicitly and explicitly condoned, excused, tolerated and normalized” (A. Powell, 2015, p. 575, as cited in Mendes et al., 2019, p. 7). Rape culture encompasses all of the social and cultural practices that normalize and perpetuate an association between violence and sexuality, often presented as rape jokes, sexual harassment, cat-calling, sexualized banter, policing of women’s bodies and codes of conduct, and blaming women for their own victimization. Recently, there has been a resurgence of attention to challenging rape culture (Lewis et al., 2018), with the goal of interrupting the normalization of sexual violence and victim-blaming tropes, and exposing the social and cultural norms and structures of inequality within which sexual violence is embedded (Keller et al., 2018).

This resurgent attention is compelled by current statistics that document the pervasive landscape of gender-based violence in the United States, the focus of our current research. For example, data demonstrate that one in three women in the United States experiences some form of contact sexual violence in their lifetime (National Center for Injury Prevention and Control et al., 2017). Moreover, 31% of teen girls have been victims of sexual assault or violence, and 77% of rape victims were known to their attackers (Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault, 2017; National Women’s Law Center, 2017).

Given the broad scope and deeply rooted nature of this social problem, and building on recent resurgent interest, young feminist activists are creating new momentum and new approaches to intervening in this pervasive and firmly entrenched rape culture. For instance, invested in disseminating new counter-narratives and “technolog[ies] of nonviolence” (Bock, 2012, as cited in Garcia & Vemuri, 2017, p. 27), many young activists have turned to a range of digital technologies and platforms including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and other varied mobile apps (Mendes et al., 2019). In doing this, young activists are creating spaces to educate themselves and others, cultivating communities of solidarity and support, and creating pathways for justice (Garcia & Vemuri, 2017).

Although YPAR is conventionally thought about as a philosophy and methodology, we also consider it an important expression of contemporary youth activism (Stoudt et al., 2016). Thus, the focus of this inquiry addresses three central questions. First, we explore how the RTI participants made meaning of rape culture and the ways in which it is expressed in their own communities, as well as in the broader society. Second, we consider the ways in which this YPAR project engaged privileged youth in activism to disrupt rape culture, with a particular focus on its ability to shine a light inward through an interrogation of one’s own privileged community. Finally, we discuss the implications of youth engaged in the work of critical consciousness raising within privileged communities as the foundation toward creating social change that is long term and sustainable.

Methods

This article is based on data collected from the third cohort of youth that have gone through the RTI program. Cohort three ran from August 2016—June 2017 and involved 10 youth. Participants were selected to participate in the program through a competitive application and interview process overseen by one of the youth program divisions in our partnering Jewish agency to identify participants with interests in gender, feminism, and social justice, and the ability to sustain participation in the program while balancing school and other extra-curricular activities. Program participants were enrolled in grades 9–12 and were between the ages of 15–18 years. All of the RTI participants were female-identified. Of the 10 participants, nine identified as White and one identified as biracial. All participants identified as Jewish with varying degrees of cultural identity and religious practice. The youth attended a range of schools, including selective public high schools, Jewish day schools, and non-sectarian private schools, and lived in either the large midwestern city in which this community partnership is based or in nearby suburbs. By and large, the participants were middle-to-owning class; in fact, they self-identified as middle and upper middle-class. The cohort met twice a month in 3 hr sessions at the local partnership university led by a social work professional from a major Jewish agency in this metropolitan area, along with two graduate assistants. In the context of bi-monthly sessions, the high school students had opportunities to engage in open and critical dialogue and to receive instruction in participatory action research methodology, in preparation for developing and implementing an action research project as the culminating piece of their experience in the program.

A qualitative interpretive research design served as the guiding framework for this study (Ravitch & Carl, 2016). In advance of data collection, the study was reviewed by the University Institutional Review Board in August 2014. Data for the study were collected through a range of data collection methods, primarily one-on-one and focus-group interviews, both providing participants with the opportunity to share their firsthand perspectives about their experiences in the programs and the focus of their work around the issue of rape culture. All of the individual interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Data were also collected from fieldnotes recorded at bi-monthly program sessions, including written materials connected to program activities, as well as materials, experiences, and outputs associated with their concluding social action project. In particular, one of the major data sources that informs this research is the culminating YPAR research product that took the form of a Passover Haggadah, which is a retelling of the Old Testament story of the Jewish exodus from slavery in Egypt. The Haggadah is typically read during the Passover Seder meal, a ritual that recounts the historical story of Jewish enslavement and liberation. Along with this central project artifact, all data, including field notes, were analyzed manually through customary inductive methods of open and focused coding. The primary investigators of this study (the three authors) first individually read transcripts and then met to discuss ideas emerging from the data. During this phase, we both captured preliminary ideas that emerged from our qualitative data and worked to establish inter-rater reliability. On the basis of this initial stage of analysis, a more focused coding framework was developed that involved open and focused coding, clustering codes into categories, and further narrowing emergent categories into overarching themes (Ravitch & Carl, 2016; Saldana, 2016).

Findings

One of the fundamental frames of the RTI program is intersectional feminism, which provided program participants with an analytical lens through which to examine their own lives as embodying intersectional axes, that is, “ . . . intersecting patterns between different structures of power and how people are simultaneously positioned—and position themselves—in multiple categories, such as gender, class, and ethnicity” (Christensen & Jensen, 2012, p. 110). A significant part of the political education that unfolded in the program involved focused discussion about the various intersections of race, ethnicity, social class, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and other positionalities, and allowed the RTI participants to see that individuals can experience oppression related to one identity while simultaneously experiencing privilege in relationship to a different identity. Such political education was invaluable to illustrating how inequality shapes the lives of social groups differently as a consequence of how they are structurally situated. Making privilege visible through an intersectional framing of identity laid the groundwork for the RTI participants to identify rape culture as a pervasive and problematic system shaping their lives and communities in particular ways that situate them differently from the experiences of marginalized communities. Over the course of the bi-weekly meetings during the first 3 months of the program, the RTI participants discussed, at length, the ways in which power, privilege, and oppression manifest in their daily lives, mirroring the broader social structure. Significant time was spent unpacking their own experiences of being stereotyped, objectified, and trivialized as young women, pointing to media constructions and cultural tropes that perpetuate dangerous expectations of idealized female perfection, that normalize traditional gender roles, and that disinvest girls of their voice and agency (Brown, 2016; MacDowell, 2017). While the RTI participants hail from relatively class- and race-privileged backgrounds and arguably embody core qualities of the “alpha girl”—confidence, assertiveness, competitiveness, academic- and career-oriented (Bettis et al., 2016)—the empowerment discourse within which they are situated does not preclude them from daily encounters with the challenges of contemporary sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. Through a youth-led participatory action research approach, these youth were able to discuss and frame a social problem that they knew, intuitively, existed, but didn’t necessarily have a language and critical analytic tools to interrogate. As one of the participants astutely observed,

We were doing one of those political education [activities] . . . it’s putting words to these things that we see every single day and that sometimes you get the feeling like that might not be particularly right, like this makes me a little bit uncomfortable, but you don’t know if that’s just the way things are. If, like it’s just you kind of being paranoid, or if there’s actually something wrong, and these things kind of put a name to what we see every single day, and allow you to actually recognize it when you don’t see it, and when you do see it, be able to talk about it in logical, real terms.

Similarly, her perspective is shared by another participant who states that

there is also a population of people like myself—I now know what rape culture is, but there are people who don’t know what rape culture is . . . they don’t know the harm of the (rape) culture. I’m sure people know what rape is. They know what sexual assault is. They know what abuse is. . . . RTI has allowed me to connect all these ideas to this rape culture, and I think that’s a very key fact is to connect all these ideas to this culture, and then help people understand that they’re standing up to a culture.

What this participant is suggesting here is that while rape culture is widespread, it is also invisible and normalized, which renders it difficult to see and disrupt (Giraldi & Monk-Turner, 2016), not unlike other forms of systemic power, privilege, and oppression. As such, the RTI participants spent a great deal of time engaging in discussion about the extent to which rape culture is embedded in a variety of platforms that work in tandem to condone and perpetuate gender-based violence, and began to name the different ways that rape culture manifests in their daily lives. Another participant goes into great detail about rape culture through her description of school-based encounters with sexism, as she observes the various ways that this culture exhibits itself in her life:

It’s like the normalization of the objectification of women, and obviously rape is at the top of the ladder, but then I feel like I see a pyramid and at the base of the pyramid is just what we encounter in our everyday lives, like [B] was saying. Like cat calling and then also in high school, I do physics, and the fact that a majority of the class is boys, and I mean when you hear rape culture you wouldn’t think of a physics class, rape culture, but I really do feel like it’s intertwined. It’s those things of women being treated unequally that lead to the most extreme instances which would be rape.

Moving beyond the school walls, one participant dives into a broader social analysis, noting the complex interplay of

the underlying themes and messages both in media and the larger society and in smaller communities and day-to-day lives that reinforce putting down other people, usually females, and establishing power over them, and that can, like that kind of creates the culture where rape and sexual assault will then occur.

This line of thought extends to another participant’s assessment of the ubiquitous nature of rape culture and the power of rape myths to normalize gender-based violence:

Rape culture is the culture around, not just harassment and sexual assault, but what boys or girls are deemed . . . how they are portrayed in society, like objectifying women’s bodies, and dress codes for girls, but guys don’t have dress codes, how Turnabout is such a big deal because girls aren’t usually allowed to ask boys to prom, or to winter formal, or anything. It’s just the culture around it, and everyone acts, kind of mixes together. Yeah, rape culture, it’s not just rape, it’s sexual assault, it’s how everything leads up to that, I guess. Also, it’s what’s surrounding it, if that makes sense.

What the RTI participants come to realize is that rape culture has deep roots, and intervening in and ultimately disrupting rape culture and its damaging consequences depends on seeing through its veiled manifestations down to its systemic bases. The RTIs begin to recognize this as they grapple with the intersecting foundations of rape culture and the differential effects of gender-based violence depending on one’s social location. This emerging understanding is highlighted in the following comment in their Passover Haggadah:

Queer people, gender non-conforming people, and people of color experience rape culture and violence differently than straight, cis, white people, and this is often overlooked by healthcare professionals, policy-makers, social workers, and other people with power to help.

On a parallel dimension, another participant captures her experience of benevolent sexism that grows out of her position within white, relatively privileged communities as follows:

. . . the idea of benevolent sexism, that someone holding the door for you, that’s not a malicious act, but that’s inherently sexist because the roots of that are sexist and discriminatory. I think that’s something that people might not realize, and it’s a tricky topic because you’re not going to be like, “Oh, don’t be polite, don’t hold the door for me.” It’s the intent of why people feel the need to be chivalrous or whatever because if you’re doing that because of a gendered reason, then that’s not necessarily just, but if you’re doing that just because you want to be polite, then there’s a real difference [ . . . ] then that’s perpetuating more ideals of hierarchy and patriarchy.

This participant reflects an important burgeoning recognition that rape culture can hide behind seemingly benign behaviors, and as such, needs to be strategically, consistently, and continuously unearthed and exposed for what it is and what it does. Another participant similarly articulates the need to dig deep, to surface the source of gender-based violence, and observes,

being able to educate others on what exactly rape culture is, and how we’re all affected by it . . . because if you think it’s just about rape, then it’s like, if you have a tree and you cut it down, like if you want to cut down the tree, and you just cut down the leaves, you’re not really doing anything. You gotta go to the root of the problem, but all of these different issues like toxic masculinity and benevolent sexism are the roots of the problem, so you’ve got to get to understanding those if you ever want to try to stop the rape.

The RTI participants’ quotes here, indeed, trace an emerging critical consciousness of power, privilege, and oppression as it’s played out in a pervasive and often invisible rape culture. What is unfolding here parallels what Case (2013) discusses, in terms of teaching students of privilege to move beyond the cultural and ideological norms that delineate their lives, toward becoming critically conscious and taking steps to challenge the status quo. By first naming the reality of rape culture within their daily lives, the RTIs took their first step toward conceptualizing their youth-led participatory project on rape culture within which they aimed to interrogate the ways in which rape culture operates in their lives, educate their community about the pervasiveness of this issue and the consequences of leaving it unexamined, and create strategies to transform rape culture and bring about social change within their own community.

The RTI emphasis on using YPAR as a form of youth activism to disrupt rape culture finds parallels in the recent work of teen feminists who have collectively mobilized in earnest against the normalization of rape culture and victim-blaming tropes through active engagement with digital technologies and social media platforms. Social media sites with this orientation and mission have provided safe and creative spaces for community, solidarity, and support around documenting experiences of sexual violence, harassment, and sexism and the struggle to uproot and bring an end to gender-based violence (Mendes et al., 2019; Phipps et al., 2018). Through virtual platforms, young feminist activists are intentionally and strategically challenging the silence that surrounds rape culture and making it visible (Keller et al., 2018). Similar to feminist activists using online participatory communities, the RTI participants mobilized as a community of feminist activists exercising their political agency by drawing on youth-led participatory action research as a framework for their social justice work around the issue of rape culture. As one participant put it,

It’s also so silent in the Jewish community. Nobody ever talks about rape culture. Just hearing the word makes people, you know . . . yeah, but that’s the whole point. We wanted to hit this issue where, the unspoken issue. I think that’s why we chose it.

As this participant articulates so simply and clearly, surfacing the “unspoken” draws attention to what traditionally has remained invisible. Indeed, communities of privilege often exhibit significant investment in obfuscating social issues that could otherwise expose deeper problems within the community (Howard, 2010). As such, too often we see privileged individuals and communities direct attention outward, which often translates into altruistic attitudes and charity models toward other communities that are constructed as deficient and in need of service (Mitchell, 2008). Unlike the liberal feminist framings of free choice, women’s equality, and using one’s privilege “for good” that were evident among RTI participants entering the program in previous cohorts, these young people appear to be grappling with the central ideas of intersectional feminist thought that calls on privileged youth to engage in a critically focused interior investigation that puts the spotlight on engaging with their own community rather than an outward turn toward helping others in need.

As introduced previously, the RTI participants decided to take up the topic of rape culture and its disruption in particular within the Jewish community in the form of a Passover Haggadah and community Seder, directing the interrogation lens toward their own community through a time-honored ritual with which their community is very familiar. In so doing, they resist an all-too-common practice among privileged communities to bury issues within their own community as a defensive mechanism and strategy to protect and preserve privilege (Howard, 2010), and instead, choose to work on a project that focuses on intervention and community accountability as a way to understand and expose the fundamental bases of gender-based violence in their own Jewish communities. At the center of the Passover holiday, the Seder is a ritualistic meal that is organized around the reading of the Passover Haggadah, which is a retelling of the Old Testament story of the Jewish exodus from slavery in Egypt and outlines steps for important actions, which include the consumption of symbolic foods that represent the Jewish enslavement, release from captivity, escape and liberation, throughout the Passover meal. There is a long history of women joining together in community to celebrate the Passover Seder, what has been described as a “unique opportunity to create a women’s community, deepen the spirituality of their Passover celebration, and explore their Jewish identity in a new context” (Anisfeld et al., 2003). Moreover, the decision to take up the topic of rape culture in the Jewish community surfaced for the RTI participants against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election, in response to “the overt, hostile sexism between candidates and pundits, the ‘locker room talk/pussy-grabbing’ video recorded in 2005 and released during the campaign season, and the many allegations of sexual assault and violence that surfaced before and after the election” (Research Training Internship (RTI) Report, 2017, p. 13), and created the space for these youth to reflect on and make sense of this as a collective. Their decision to focus on rape culture also was in response to the “pressures to be the ‘perfect Jewish girl’ that the RTI participants roundly articulated, and that they found to be a consistent theme in research that earlier program cohorts had conducted. These young women are giving voice to what has been described as the” insatiable appetite for the exceptional individual: (Hesford, 2014, as cited in Edell et al., 2016, p. 706), the commodification of girlhood that has piqued in the form of unrealistic expectations of perfection that demand ongoing self-improvement across numerous physical and psycho-social dimensions; the policing and over-surveilling of women’s bodies; and the valorization of stereotypical femininity, a vision of the ideal neoliberal subject that simultaneously and paradoxically reinforces privilege in these young women’s communities while also undermining girls’ sense of empowerment and political agency (Bettis et al., 2016; Brown, 2016; Woolley, 2017).

In deciding to address the issue of rape culture in/through a re-writing of the Passover Haggadah, the RTI participants saw this as a way to engage their privileged communities in social justice work to end gender-based violence. Since the reading of the Passover Haggadah at the Passover Seder is a familiar communal activity, the RTI participants wagered that it would be a context within which community members would be more open and receptive to considering an issue that is more often than not shrouded in silence. Several RTI participants articulate this sentiment, beginning with this participant:

I think if we were just to go to a Jewish community and be like, “Let’s talk about rape culture, let’s solve this.” It wouldn’t do anything because it’s too unapproachable, and again, it has such a harsh label to it, but I think by tying it into tradition like we did, it’s a more subtle way of getting a really important message across, so rather than having just dialogue about it, which is important, I think, to reach a larger community.

Along similar lines, another participant had this to say,

I think religion plays a really big part in our society. If you educate people through their own religion, I think it’s a lot easier to relate to it in a way. Learning about rape culture through a Haggadah is something that’s very normal for us to read around springtime. Adding in the rape culture aspects is . . . it’s an uncomfortable subject, but it makes it a little bit more comfortable because you’re teaching it through a comfortable way of thinking.

Re-writing the Passover Haggadah around the topic of rape culture is an act of political contestation through which normative ways of thinking are challenged, and privileged community members are encouraged to hold themselves accountable to working in solidarity with others toward positive social change. As one participant reflects,

We chose to focus our Haggadah on rape culture because of how much it is integrated into our daily lives. Rape culture embodies many of the injustices that we have studied this year, and we feel that it is important to bring to light these society injustices. The culture around unfair gender roles/expectations, sexual violence, and sexism in general is so integrated into our world, but our society, and our Jewish community institutions, are not doing enough to stop or address it. This Haggadah is not just a feminist analysis of our community. It is an invitation to those with privilege, resources, and power to join us in changing the rape culture around us. (RTI Report, 2017, p. 14)

Furthermore, the Passover Haggadah is a space for the RTI participants to point out that those in positions of relative privilege are not commonly open to challenging and disrupting the oppressive systems they perpetuate. Instead, they are potentially complicit in reproducing oppressive systems, noting that resistance to change is often about how power and oppression “either serves them (those in positions of privilege) in some way or because they are afraid of the unknown potential of liberation and what it means for them” (RTI Report, 2017, p. 23). Yet, through the RTI program, they have come to see that the more others are prompted to critically interrogate their own privilege and its benefits, the better prepared they are to challenge and disrupt deeply entrenched systems of power and oppression. For example, as part of the Seder ritual, Four Questions are typically asked that are central to understanding and encouraging questioning and dialogue about the purpose of the Passover celebration. The first of these questions,

The Wise Child/The Accomplice Asks: What are the testimonies of people who are oppressed by rape culture? How can I listen openly and nonjudgmentally to them, and be witness to their voices? How am I personally implicated in the perpetuation of rape culture, and how can I use my privileges to help?

Mirroring this inquiry, the RTIs asked the adults in attendance at their Seder to pose for themselves a question about how the conversation around rape culture might be relevant to them. In so doing, they encouraged community members to recognize the ways in which they are implicated in, and impacted by, the perpetuation of rape culture. Moreover, the RTIs are challenging their community to take action and to hold themselves accountable (RTI Report, 2017, p. 24). Posing this question positions the Haggadah as a space in which to begin to advocate for community change, where those present at the Seder are made privy to the notion that “with great power comes great responsibility” (Swalwell, 2013), reminding “those with privilege, resources, and power to join us in changing the rape culture around us,” ( . . .) to use your power to become accomplices . . . in the disruption of rape culture” (RTI Report, 2017, pp. 14–15). For instance, the RTIs center attention on their male-identified and cis-gender community members, remarking,

We would also like to give a special shout out, in particular, to the male-identified and cis-gender folks who are reading this because of the tremendous potential they have to use their gender privileges to hold other male-identified and cis-gender people accountable for their words and action.

After the feminist Seder, one participant reflected on these invitations for action, observing,

The most important thing it does is obviously tell you what you can do and give you a way of, like gives each participant a way of kind of continuing the resistance to rape culture on their own and opens up a path for them to fight it, however is best for them.

Opening up discussion among those participating in the Seder about their various roles in perpetuating rape culture, they draw on the notion of the accomplice, who in contrast to the idea of the social justice ally, does not merely lend support, but rather engages in risk-taking as an active participant seeking to destabilize systemic power (J. Powell & Kelly, 2017). To that end, they ask the adults and other young people present at the Seder to consider how, as accomplices, they might use their privileges to work in solidarity with others and what their responsibilities are in that capacity (RTI Report, 2017, p. 16). As they discuss the “Ten Commandments of Being an Accomplice, Fighting Patriarchy, and Shutting Down Rape Culture” in their community Seder, they challenge community members to: “Know when to step back and not take up too much space. Your job is not to speak on behalf of others or decide what the agenda should be. Show up, but don’t take over.” Indeed, throughout their Passover Haggadah, the RTIs offer multiple examples of how accomplices can shut down rape culture, taking steps to educate others with similar privileges through open and honest conversation with friends and family; bear witness to the testimonies of those who have been oppressed by rape culture; and stand with others in solidarity as part of a “radical community of witnesses where power lies in our willingness to witness each other, and see ourselves in experiences that aren’t our own” (RTI Report, 2017, p. 26).

Implications and Conclusion

In line with the core assumptions that youth are the experts on their own experience and should be at the center of inquiry, our YPAR program provided the RTI participants with opportunities to position themselves as agents of change on issues—in this instance, rape culture—directly relevant to their lives as Jewish teen girls. They then used their research as a platform for critical consciousness-raising among those within the Jewish community. If the Passover story is in fact a story of Jewish political resistance toward liberation, then it stands to reason that the RTIs would choose this platform as their expression of critical engagement and activist work around gender-based violence. In effect, the Seder lays the groundwork for strategically modeling how change must happen, first, within one’s own community.

Drawing on intersectional feminist theoretical framings allowed the RTI participants to think through the impact of privilege in their lives, as well as to envision ways to use that privilege to work toward social change and social justice. This transformative work facilitated important connections across intersectionality, power and privilege, and pervasive rape culture, all of which come together to problematize the normalization of violence against women. Through this YPAR project, what had been hidden and invisible now had the opportunity to surface and become illuminated. Furthermore, the RTI participants sought to model critical interrogation of privilege, resources, and power, as an invitation to their community to join in a collaborative enterprise to change the rape culture within which their lives are so deeply embedded.

As the RTIs learned during their year in the program, interrupting privilege is a central goal. Instead of falling into the role of the “white savior,” bestowing charity on, and altruism for, communities deemed in need of “fixing,” (DiAngelo, 2018; Okun, 2010; Russo, 2019), they turned the lens inward through a project that focused on intervention in their own community with a goal toward creating a sense of individual and community accountability. In so doing, their YPAR project helped expose the fundamental and systemic bases of gender-based violence in their own Jewish communities. In addition, this year-long process contributed to the development of the RTIs’ enhanced sense of self-efficacy and re-positioned them as agents, rather than the all-too-common positioning of young women as objects.

Moving forward, we look toward future work that will continue to excavate more complex and nuanced understandings of the operations of privilege. To this end, it is invaluable to enlist YPAR as a strategy to engage youth from privileged backgrounds as they work toward interrupting systems and take on responsible roles in addressing and solving issues in their own community. The challenge of this work lies in disrupting and destabilizing systems of privilege from which individuals and communities do benefit. This work can be uniquely unsettling—that’s why it’s so important to create programs like this that provide perhaps not a safe space, but a brave space (Arato & Clemens, 2013) in which young people have the opportunity and support to face unsettling realities about institutional and interpersonal injustices that contextualize violence against women. It is our hope that this work within one’s own privileged community ultimately will create a generative environment for future collaborative work in which privileged young people can join together in resistance to sexism and rape culture, in solidarity with other, differently situated young people, to end gender-based violence.