April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month

These days, my boss hates me because I missed the Youth Summit and made him and BBBS look terrible. He hasn't said one word to me since I got back to work yesterday. Not his angry silence, not the threat of termination, not the promise of free cookies and Doritos on my desk have motivated me to become engaged in work lately.

But if there IS one thing that's gonna pull me up from being sprawled out on the living room floor sobbing my heart out during my lunch break, it's a Sexual Assault Awareness Rally.

I'd initially stood way to the side of the Capitol steps, but they motioned my friends and I closer to the podium. Luckily, I'm blurred in that shot that published in the paper. They probably had to Photoshop it on purpose, you know with the hand icon that I always thought was for smudging out zits. My eyes were red and puffy and my makeup was oh so attractively tear-stained. I'm doing a whole screw-you-my-grandmother's-dead chic lately.

So I found out Alaska has ranked in the top 5 states with the highest sex-related crimes for the past 22 YEARS. It's got 21x the national average for sexual offenders per capita. This is insane. Sexual abuse and sexual assault makes me want to vomit blood when I hear about them; the reaction for me is so much more visceral than other violent crimes. So the legislature passed two bills upping the sentence to 25 years for assault against a minor, 20 years for assault against an adult, and requiring parolees to have periodic polygraph tests.

What else is cool is that a legislator gave me the sexual assault awareness pin from his own lapel because I didn't have one. Sure there are like hundreds of them at my friend's office, and they're probably in baskets all over town or something, but I thought it was awesome anyway. You don't get that face-to-face with politicians in big cities. Here, I pass by them on the street, stand in line behind them at Alaskan & Proud grocery store, sign them in at the stripclub gym, read their angry diatribes in the local opinion section of the paper, and now, get pins fresh off their own coat. In Cincinnati, my only brush with politicians was with Roxanne Qualls and that was just because I was specifically working on her campaign for mayor, and she lost to Steve Chabot anyway. And she had lipstick stains on her teeth one time while we canvassed neighborhoods, but I was 16 and too scared to tell her about it.