By Sarah Hall
Editor
It’s not only the LGBTQ community that’s struggling with the results of the election. Many sexual assault survivors are having a hard time dealing with the fact that the President-Elect is on record making comments about, according to Vera House Executive Director Randi Bregman, “what would be considered a sex crime in New York state,” statements that he referred to as “locker room talk.”
“We’ve heard about it from people that we’re currently serving,” Bregman said. “[There’s] a lot of grief. A lot of anger. A lot of hurt feelings…. There’s been a lot of desire to find support and help one another to continue to do the work we do every day in the face of, what feels like, a step backward in terms of the progress we thought we were making in changing the culture.”
Bregman noted that there were some Trump supporters making crude comments—or worse—in the days since the election. However, she believed they represented a minority.
“There are people out there saying, ‘I can grab your p**** because my guy got in.’ They’re yelling that on a campus,” she said. “But I think this is a smaller number of people.”
Instead, she said many people that she spoke to voted for Donald Trump based on other concerns.
“I know I’ve personally talked to people who voted for the president elect because of expectations about economic change or something very unrelated to any of the issues that people who’ve have been disenfranchised feel fearful about,” Bregman said. “I’m working hard in my conversations with them to talk about, ‘If that’s true for you, then join us in this commitment to take a strong stand, to continue to work to change the culture, and to ask people to step up.’ We’re hopeful that people on both sides of the aisle who feel strongly about ending domestic sexual violence, and people who feel strongly about the need to change our culture, to make it less likely to tolerate sexual violence, those who may have voted for the president elect and those who haven’t, that we all work together to make sure that we continue moving forward.”
She acknowledged that doing so would not be an easy task.
“I think that there are tremendous challenges ahead,” Bregman said. “But we’ve faced all kinds of challenges over our history of this work in the sexual assault movement and movements to end other kinds of oppression. And I’m always an optimist. I always am hopeful about people finding the good in themselves… And I’m hoping that we’ll see some different conversations around sexual assault.”
