Program Overview"RANT!" enables participants to build connections between the ways our society has historically used racial and ethnic epithets to dehumanize minority groups with the way we use words like "bitch," "whore," and "hole," to objectify women. Participants are asked to challenge the acceptance of these words, and identify what purposes they serve, and their ultimate impact: if you can dehumanize a person, you can justify doing whatever you want to them, even using force. In the case of women, this relates to issues of domestic violence and rape. This is further explored in the program by focusing on the words people use to describe consensual sex: "bang," "pound," "hit," and others, define sex as a violent act done to an object. Most often, it is the woman who is the object being hit or pounded. Connections are also made between the crimes of sexual assault and domestic violence and gender-based hate crime, exploring the heightened levels of victim and community impact.
The program begins with the participants exploring the nature of hate crime: a crime motivated by bias against the victim that results not only in more severe violence against the victim than a non-bias-motivated crime, but in spreading fear throughout that victim's community. The audience is encouraged to generate language they believe they would hear the offender utter during the commission of a hate crime, including racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual orientation-related epithets.
The aforementioned epithets are then compared to words used for sexually active women, words generated by the audience members themselves. In addition, these words were then compared to words used for sexually active men, and the audience is challenged to compare the high-status, powerful words for men with the words for women; the latter reduce women to objects, prostitutes, and animals.
The goal of "RANT!" is to connect the dots, to show audiences that traditionally understood hate crimes were similar to crimes typically committed against women (e.g. domestic violence, sexual assault), both in the way justification for the crime was constructed by the offender, the level of violence involved, and the impact on both the victim and their respective communities. It is designed to utilize the fact that most audiences condemn racially, ethnically, and religiously offensive language, which provides scaffolding for their understanding that the same condemnation needs to apply to language that dehumanizes women.
While these are very serious issues, Gail utilizes her years of experience in stand-up and improvisational comedy to lighten the tension and create a safe, fun environment to discuss these ideas. The program depends on participants feeling comfortable and engaged, and is structured so that the audience talks almost as much as the presenter. Ultimately, Gail urges the audience to take responsibility for not only the words they use, but for the behavior that follows from them, furthering the goal of treating all people (not just women) with the respect they deserve.
Background
"RANT!" grew out of Gail Stern's work with the Chicago Task Force on Hate Crimes Against Women, and was initially designed as a means of training prosecutors and law enforcement officers in Illinois how to use the "gender component" of the Illinois Hate Crime Statute. The statute allows for crimes determined to be motivated by an offender's bias against a specific group because of their race, national origin, creed, color, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, religion or gender to be charged as a more serious crime. For example, if a simple battery were a misdemeanor, if it could be proved that the reason the offender targeted the victim was due to the offender's perception that the victim was Catholic, then the charge would be upgraded to a felony. The program was deemed necessary, because while both prosecutors and law enforcement were fast developing an understanding and respect for the law as it applied to religious, ethnic, and racial minorities, it never made the connection between crimes against women and the hate crime law. While activists in the anti-violence movement would argue that if an offender targets a woman for rape, he is selecting her as a target precisely because of her gender. Employing what is known as the "but for" principle used in assessing other bias crimes, but for the fact that the victim was female, she would not have been the target of the crime. Part of the resistance to utilizing the gender component of the statute came from prosecutors' and law enforcement's (and society's in general) acceptance of dehumanizing and abusive language aimed at women as normal, or just more intense slang. While they understood that words like "nigger" and "faggot" could be used to determine an offender's bias towards Blacks and homosexuals, they failed to make the connection with an offender calling a victim a "cunt" and raping her. Profanity and dehumanizing language directed at women was consistently ignored or undervalued as an indicator of bias, because the words have become imbedded in an everyday vernacular. While the program was hard-hitting, in part due to the topic and language used, Gail's experience as a stand-up comedian created both a dynamic learning environment and a safe place for difficult conversations.