What Is Intersectionality? How to Integrate It Into Anti-Incest Activism
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 7 hours ago
In this recent episode of Incest AWARE’s OutSPOKEN Discussion Series, Incest AWARE Alliance members, Dr. Ethan Levine, Shirkydra Roberts, Kiki Saragnese, and Josephine A. Lauren discussed the importance of intersectionality when improving methods of incest prevention, intervention, recovery, and justice.
Introductions: Activists with Lived Experience
Josephine, (Jo.) Incest AWARE’s Co-Founder, started off the discussion by asking Shirkydra to introduce herself. Shirkydra shared that she’s excited to be speaking in a space with fellow activists with lived experience of incest abuse. Shirkydra passed the torch to Kiki, who serves as Director of Prevention and Outreach for the Missouri Network Against Child Abuse. She popcorned to Ethan, who shared that he has been connected to Incest AWARE for over four years now.
Ethan shared that he has worked in the advocacy space for a long time, and Incest AWARE is the first organization he's been involved with to acknowledge that intersectionality should be a major part of our work.
He used to work on the prevention and outreach side and more recently has focused on research and evaluation, to study what the impact of our work is on us as providers or activists, and also on the folks we're serving.
What is Intersectionality?
Jo. asked Kiki to define what intersectionality is. Kiki joked that she’s delighted to brush the dust off her Women’s and Gender Studies degree. Kiki explained that the term “intersectionality” was initially coined by a critical theorist named Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who aimed to describe what she was seeing in the community around her during the crack epidemic. She worked in the legal space and aimed to describe the way that she was seeing Black women experiencing the criminal justice or “the criminal punishment system,” differently than white women.
“She coined this term ‘intersectionality’ to describe the intersections of identity that all of us live in and operate in,” Kiki said. “In her initial writing, she was specifically using that term to talk about the experiences of being Black, of being a woman, of being criminalized, of being a parent and a mother, of being in relationship, and being in communities that were criminalized during this period.”
The goal, Kiki explained, is to understand that no one is experiencing just one of these things at the same time. “We are all living in multiple identities at once, and Dr. Crenshaw used intersectionality to talk about that,” she said.
Examples of Intersectionality & the Intersections of Discrimination
Next, Jo. asked Ethan to weigh in. He brought up a case that Dr. Crenshaw discussed in her foundational University of Chicago Legal Forum paper, where a Black woman filed a claim of employment discrimination when a factory refused to hire her. The judge claimed she couldn’t be experiencing racism or sexism, because the factory hired women and Black people. However, all the Black people hired were men, and all the women hired were white. However, there wasn’t a legal framework to address this. “It was considered unfair or too much to make a combined racism sexism claim,” Ethan explained, “So this was just imperceptible in the law.”
Jo. then asked Shirkydra to share her perspective as an Incest AWARE Alliance member, as an engineer in the Navy, and as a sexual assault advocate in that space. “How have you seen or experienced intersectionality specifically with the issue of sexual violence?” Jo. asked.
Shirkydra said her experience as a woman of color reflects the case than Ethan described, where you often see someone from a different race or ethnic background not be penalized for something that someone who looks like Shirkydra would be penalized for, and people do not feel protected because of that. Sometimes people don’t feel safe to speak up about sexual violence until they retire and take off the uniform. Shirkydra compared this to growing up in a low-income area, and thinking some things that you have to live through are normal. When putting on a uniform, there are similar experiences where things are normalized.
“You're constantly being like, choked or sometimes it feels like muzzled based on the environment I'm in that says, hey, because of, whether it's gender, whether it's race, whether it's sexuality, that based on the environment, I do not have a voice in any of these spaces,” Shirkydra said.
Journeys to understanding intersectionality
Jo. asked Kiki to share how she has encountered intersectionality in her life, either personally or professionally. Kiki explained that she was observing this discrimination and didn’t know how to describe it, until she learned about this intersectionality framework. She compared it to when students go to school and gain this framework to see the world the way others are seeing it. She felt similar to what Shirkydra described as “muzzled,” when she was growing up as a culturally Jewish, closeted queer person in a Christian Bible-belt community.
Kiki also described her early anti-violence work at a domestic violence shelter, and noticing how identities changed the way people not only experience violence, but also access care and support in their community.
Ethan also started his activism journey young, so Jo. asked him to share how intersectionality has shaped his journey, as a person and a professional. Ethan shared how he started training at a rape crisis center as a hotline volunteer when he started college, and he noticed how not thinking intersectionally can cause lateral harm among survivors and advocates.
“About a year and a half into doing that work, I came out as transgender, started using the name Ethan, and was fired from that role, like explicitly for that reason,” Ethan shared. Luckily, he got scooped up by a queer anti-domestic violence organization after they heard about what happened to him. That organization was founded by some queer women who noticed women being denied domestic violence services due to gendered stereotypes about domestic violence (such as that only men abuse women and women can’t abuse women).
For Ethan, that showed him that, “If we're not thinking about sexism and homophobia and transphobia together, then we open ourselves to that kind of violence.”
Another example Ethan shared, he witnessed during his later role at a shelter. He witnessed two survivors break the confidentiality rules. In one case, a white survivor was allowed to access services anyway despite violating the confidentiality rule in front of Ethan, while a Latina woman who mentioned what town the shelter was in got kicked out of the shelter with her kids due to the minor confidentiality breach.
“If this is a movement that's largely defined as women helping each other out, that can really mask racism and homophobia within the space,” Ethan said. He elaborated that he has also seen some advocates who are white claim to know the importance of intersectionality to absolve themselves of complicity in oppression, without taking any anti-oppression actions.
Jo. said that it just goes to show that there’s room for education, not only about how we think about intersectionality, but how we act on it. Jo. shared that in her own experience, she recovered incest memories and entered into therapy in her mid-20s, which is young compared to many survivors who don’t disclose until their 50s.
“I was really kind of sold this idea that if I did the work, I'd get better, and if I just tried harder, I'd get better,” Jo said. “It took 15 years of paying out of pocket for therapy, trying all the different new methods that were supposed to heal me, and then a lot of independent research to learn that I'm disabled, that I'm neurodivergent, and that so often what healing means, at least in the therapeutic spaces I was in, was to assimilate to neurotypical and able society,” she shared.
Jo. said the measure of wellness shouldn’t be how well you fit into society, and that’s why she always tries to bring disability and neurodivergence into conversations about healing. Healing looks different for all of us and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all picture of it. “Therapists…are here to accompany people into their truest selves, not to mold them into what society needs them to be,” she said.
Experiences of Intersectional Oppression as Incest Survivors
Shirkydra said she was grateful to be safe in this advocacy space as a Christian woman, never feeling discriminated against because of that, even though a lot of people have experienced harm in religious institutions. She also appreciates all that she’s learned from activists from other cultures about mental health, because in her culture, in the Black community, it was very much taboo and not discussed, as were incest and sexual assault in general.
Shirkydra shared that due to the strength and independence of women being idolized in Black culture, she felt pressure to keep silent about the sexual abuse she experienced as a child. She worried that it would be normalized if she spoke up, and that would be more hurtful than dealing with it herself was.
Ethan shared that his abuser was an uncle who belongs to a different race than he does, and he felt complicated about speaking up about it, due to fear of contributing to ideas that result in over-criminalization of racial minorities. He also experienced homophobic marginalization within his own family, and his uncle was able to use that to groom him, because he was the only person in his family that he could talk to about his sexuality.
Lack of Historical Intersectionality in the Anti-Violence Field
Jo. asked Ethan to share about his published book, Rape By the Numbers, and how intersectionality relates to research and data within the sexual violence and anti-incest space. Ethan explained how an early study of rape published in the 1980s that helped call national attention to the problem and have it called an epidemic started off with limitations, by only including male-on-female sexual violence. Also, that survey showed huge racial disparities among women who experienced sexual assault, but the conversations in the press afterwards were focused on gender, because the researchers weren’t focused on race.
Lessens for Intersectional Anti-Incest Activism
Jo. shared that she thinks intersectionality is a great framework for activism, because it asks us to see reality as it really is, as opposed to how it appears through someone in particular’s experience that doesn’t align with others’ experiences.
“Incest really does exist at the intersections of so many other social issues. And so, if you're doing anti-incest activism, you're also doing so much other types of anti-oppression work,” Jo. said. “We can't solve incest if we don't solve ableism and racism and transphobia and xenophobia and homophobia and all these other things, because you know incest is going to exist in any culture where those other things exist,” she added.
She spoke about the importance of holding the complexity of your own and others’ stories who exist within different intersections than you.
Kiki added that we often have to grapple with the complexity that family is often the safest and least safe space, and sometimes it’s both for the same person. “Sometimes home is where they want to be, right? And sometimes home is where someone is really getting hurt,” she said.
She related that to Ethan’s story of how a family member was able to offer him something no one else could, and use that to harm him. Kiki also shared that she thinks sometimes we do a disservice to kids and young people by assuming that family and home are the same thing. Kiki also shared that in many communities, there is a taboo around talking about sexual health and sexuality, and talking about it could be a protective factor to prevent sexual abuse, not just child sexual abuse but across the lifespan.
Closing Messages About Intersectionality
Shirkydra emphasized the importance in her work of being educated by those who look and sound different than she does, “Looking out of the eyes of the people that are in front of me and not just looking out of my own,” she said.
Jo. shared that as an organizer, she always tries to amplify the voices of activists and researchers who are marginalized.
Ethan shared that he aims to actively de-center himself in his work, especially now that he is working in anti-trafficking, which is not something that he’s a survivor of. It’s important to constantly be listening and learning from other people whose experiences may or may not connect with your own.
About THE OutSPOKEN Series:
Incest AWARE's OutSPOKEN Discussion Series features guests in the field of sexual violence prevention committed to our mission: ending incest abuse by raising awareness of the epidemic of sexual violence in the family system, and supporting survivors and their loved ones along their healing journeys. To view the series, click here.
About Incest AWARE:
The Incest AWARE Alliance is a collective of incest survivors and allies working to improve methods of incest prevention, intervention, recovery and justice. We offer a healing support group for adult incest survivors, an alliance of anti-incest advocates and activists seeking community, as well as https://www.incestaware.org/learning-library. Thank you for your interest in becoming Incest AWARE.
