DO AND SAY SOMETHING
Today, there is an ever growing number of men in pop culture who have been accused of sexual assault, something that didn’t really happen a few decades ago. Women today are blowing the lid on a lot of misconduct conducted by men today, yesterday, and decades before. Hollywood in particularly is grabbing headlines for many cases of power wielding men accused of sexual assault by many many women. The stories seem commonplace, even in the world of athletics, and a lot of people are focusing on how to bring these stories to light and make sure that this doesn’t keep happening.
I don’t think Capoeira is unique in that these situation do occur, and the fact that it does happen negatively affects our community. I know women that have left Capoeira for these reasons, and the people responsible hurt us all because of the bad reputation they give their groups, their peers, and Capoeira as a whole. Here’s the upside! Just because these things happen, doesn’t mean we can’t be proactive in confronting the issue.
METHOD
A friend of mine shared a survey she is doing to bring more awareness to sexual misconduct in Capoeira. The survey is in this link, so please take it. Takes about 3 minutes to finish.
Diagnosing the problem
So why do I like the idea of this survey? If we want to solve this problem, we need to know where to concentrate our efforts. I like the survey because we can gather anonymous stories of what people have experienced. From there we can figure out where these acts happened, by whom, and maybe some ways to prevent it.
CREATING A COMMITTEE
One of the last questions on the survey asks if you would be interested in being part of a committee that tries to find ways of confronting the issue of sexual assault of Capoeira. I’m sure the actions they take will depend on the information they gather, but it would be great to get some representation across different spectrums of the Capoeira world. Teachers, students, men, women, etc. I’m very interested to see what this committee will come up with.
THOUGHTS
It used to be the case that there were barely any women in Capoeira at all. Now there is a massive surge of women coming to Capoeira and I think most would agree that we could do more to welcome our newer members. I like to talk a lot about how the Capoeira community is a tight nit group, especially here in the United States. I see a lot of forward thinking people doing great things and this survey is just one example of that. Again, if you do Capoeira, fill it out and share your thoughts. I’m looking forward to seeing the results of this survey and don’t worry, as soon as I hear news, I’ll be posting about it!
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