All of the minors were under the care of Sandusky’s charity for impoverished youth, ‘The Second Mile Foundation’, which Sandusky founded in 1977. As the grand jury presentment stated: ‘Through The Second Mile, Sandusky had access to hundreds of boys, many of whom were vulnerable due to their social situations’.
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Joe Pa and The Sick Logic of College Football

In case you were wondering why it was so easy for all these people to look the other way for decades, I think this probably goes a long way in answering that question.

(via somerset)

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Nov 10th · 178 · tagged: penn state race class child abuse sexual abuse rape

This is something we don’t speak about enough; the role of economic stress in domestic violence, or the role that cash, pure cash, plays in keeping women vulnerable. It’s a knotty subject; some abusers undermine their partner’s financial security, take exclusive possession of the bank accounts or spend all the money or demand that their partners work less often or stop working altogether, and so the women cannot leave because they have become unemployable or simply don’t have access to the cash they’d need to escape. And sometimes, women don’t leave because there is not and never has been enough money. Nobody should have to choose between the violence of extreme poverty and the violence of an abusive relationship. But it remains a choice between violence and violence. Class is not separable from the discussion. Because gender and class have never been separable at all.
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The Percentages: A Biography of Class (Tiger Beatdown)

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Intersectionality and Feminism

newwavefeminism:

important tidbits from the article:

In the 1980s, Crenshaw was trying to understand why US anti-discrimination law was failing to protect Black women in the workplace, and she discovered it was because the law distinguished between two kinds of discrimination: gendered discrimination and racialized discrimination.

That is, US law distinguished between discrimination against women (on the basis of their gender) and discrimination against Black, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous people (on the basis of their race).

But in her study of discrimination in workplaces, Crenshaw observed that Black women were discriminated against on both bases – their gender and their race – at once.

So, for example, Black women were the last group to be hired at a workplace she studied – after white women and Black men. When the boss decided to lay people off, Black women were fired because they were the least senior – the last to arrive. But that they were hired last was itself due to discrimination. This group of Black women took the company to court and the judge said, “there’s no gender discrimination here because white women weren’t fired. And there’s no race discrimination here because Black men weren’t fired.”

So, Crenshaw concluded that discrimination against Black women in the workplace – as Black women – was invisible to legal concepts of discrimination that saw it in terms of “gender” only or in terms of “race” only. Black women’s experiences of discrimination were rendered invisible by these ways of categorizing discriminatory practices.