Not in My Community…Oh, Really?
February 27, 2010
by Amy Siskind
|In the coming days, The New Agenda will be launching our new website for The New Agenda Foundation, our 501(c)(3). The Foundation’s work will be educational, and our primary issue will be teen dating violence and the sexualization of our teenage girls.
Please also be on the lookout for information on an educational event on teen dating violence co-sponsored by The New Agenda Foundation and Liz Claiborne Inc. (commitee in formation).
And for those of you thinking, well maybe elsewhere, but not in my community, think again.
Everything I’ve read in the statistics is coming true right in front of my eyes.
In the past week alone, I’ll learned that a girl in my 7th grade daughter’s grade took a picture of herself in a bra and sent it to a boy. It was then circulated to a whole lot of boys in her grade. This is called “sexting” and is part of the growing problem of digital dating abuse:
- 1 in 2 of all 14 – 24 year olds has been the target of some form of digital abuse.
- Nearly 1 in 4 teens in a relationship have texted or called their partner hourly between midnight and 5:00 AM.
And also this week when I hosted a party for her middle school basketball team, girls from the 8th changed clothes after to go to a co-ed party. Despite the wintery conditions up here in the New York area, these girls left my house scantily clad. Gaining acceptance with girls apparently requires a vastly different apparel than how our girls are socialized that they need to dress to please the boys (I add socialized because many of the boys aren’t comfortable with this either).
This issue is very, very real. Please join The New Agenda Foundation as we work to bring silent, untold crisis to the public attention.
Amy,
I would like to send a special donation to assist with this program. Just like stopping animals from breeding cuts down on the amount of animals from being killed in shelters, stopping young girls from become sexualized robots saves them from empty lives and decades of pain and suffering before seeing the ‘light.’
This is exactly where feminism needs to be–where it matters most.
Thank you jenniferintexas and we really no need financial support. We have no employees and are doing this 100% volunteer. If you want to donate towards our work on teen dating violence, the Foundation website will be operational in the next couple of days……www.thenewagendafoundation.org
We could really use your support – even if you can’t make it to the actual event!
Good work. The reason young girls and women are being sexualized is because of corporate media which real women have only a small and distorted voice in. Every show or magazine aimed at these girls has the goal of making them feel like they need to purchase their sexuality or like something is wrong with them so they have to purchase product to correct their flaws. These girls need their own media and they need to be able to define their own sexuality without input from pornography or gay men and fashion world. In my daughters 8th grade class 6 out of 30 girls were in TREATMENT for eating disorders. These girls need an alternative to corporate media sexual indoctrination. They need to be able to recognize violence against them and ask for help as well as know how to stop it themselves reflexively and daily. Good thing they are a strong and resilient bunch when supported.
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