Tell Your Men to Give Peace a Chance

While we're updating agendas, all the teenage girls and young women reading Shakesville should update theirs to include: Convince violent young men who are boyfriends, friends, classmates, or otherwise your peers that they shouldn't use guns.

Shaker Broce passed this along under the subject line "Girls are supposed to stop violence. Again." which pretty much sums it up. I guess when they're not busily trying to stop domestic violence, girls are now expected to put themselves in between gangbangers and their guns and stop street violence, too—which, let's face it, leaves them precious little time to stop rape and also prevent unwanted pregnancies on their own.

Ahem.

[S]ome who work to prevent violence against women questioned whether the effort skirts close to blaming women or places a large burden on people who often are victims themselves.

"There is a fine line that we ask everybody to be mindful of, between empowering victims and placing the responsibility on them to end the violence," said Toni Troop, spokeswoman for Jane Doe Inc., a statewide coalition of organizations that combat domestic violence. "Ultimately that responsibility is on the entire community. Raising awareness, empowering young girls to believe in themselves, in each other, has to go hand in hand with ... talking to the young boys who are primarily the perpetrators of this violence."

[Michael Hennessey, the assistant chief of the Boston School Police] said a similar campaign will be geared toward high school boys and that the goal is eventually to have both male and female students in the same room exploring the causes of violence.

Eventually.

But presumably long after the girls have already taken on board important messages like:

"Females do have a lot of say. ... A lot of the drama that happens on the street is over a female," said Samantha Allen, a 17-year-old senior with short brown hair that sloped over her forehead.

Allen said there is a name for girls who, either wittingly or unwittingly, initiate conflicts through their boyfriends, brothers, or male friends. They're called "set-up chicks," she said.

"They're chicks that run their mouths to other parts of the city," Allen said. "They cause a lot of violence."

Of course they do. It's the chicks "running their mouths" that cause the violence, not the fact that men with guns react in a wildly inappropriate way.