Mission Statement:
School Staff Against Sexual Violence aims to empower teachers, counselors, students, parents, and community members with knowledge and strategies to disrupt male sexual violence on K-12 campuses. As tenured insiders, we apply our highly nuanced understanding of K-12 systems and governance, and explain the esoteric and complex ways K-12 education subverts its responsibilities under the law. We do this by providing safe, and healing spaces, creative collaboration with diverse stakeholders, grassroots organizing, a praxis of disruption, and a full discussion of the historical and cultural contexts which intersect with this issue.
We are a grassroots coalition of activists lead by teachers and school staff employed in our nation’s K-12 schools, who are fed up with the excuses, ignorance, and minimization of the problem from our leaders.
We needed to reach out to others beyond our own school sites and districts because there are SO FEW of us working on this problem from within. Shockingly, none of us were ever trained on recognizing, reporting, and intervening on student on student sexual harassment and violence, despite being mandated to do so.
We each tried to dig into the problem alone, working in isolation from anyone else with knowledge or self-possession to help students. We suffered SIGNFICANT backlash and microaggressions, and those of us without tenure lost jobs despite being very effective teachers.
We formed this space out of sheer desperation, and the need for love, truth, and beauty in such a morass of ugliness and lies. We have been blessed with sage wisdom from many, and the love and belonging just keeps growing. We have learned a lot, and have turned this knowledge into a clear framework for others to use.
We began as an affinity group in 2021 as a unit of study for a graduate thesis project. Inspired by the ground breaking work of Paulo Freire, we were assembled to share our narratives about our efforts to advocate for justice for student victims of school based sexual harm on California K-12 campuses.
Over a period of several months, teachers from around the state each chronicled the horrific oppression they had experienced while trying to help student victims of school based sexual harm. As we spoke, important common themes emerged. We knew that we were creating something unique in the nation, and decided to keep going after the study concluded.
The space that we made for ourselves became our refuge. In this safe space, we collected ourselves, and grew stronger, smarter, and organized.
Are we still afraid? Yes. Every day. But we refuse to back down.
Note: The original members of the confidential affinity group have changed since the study—some have left, and others have joined since then.