Overlooked: Black Womxn Survivors of Sexual Violence

Warning: This article includes accounts and mentions of sexual violence, homicide, and enslavement.

This past weekend, investigators of the Tallahassee Police Department were delving further into a missing person case when they found the bodies and confirmed the deaths of two women: 19-year-old activist Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau and 75-year-old community volunteer Victoria “Vicki” Sims. Salau was a Black woman who recently graduated high school and had been active in promoting inclusive justice for the Black community. Sims was a dedicated advocate for elder Americans and a volunteer at the local chapters of the AARP and the Second Harvest Food Bank. 

Although a double homicide investigation was launched this past Monday, both friends and strangers raise the question of why Salau’s previously posted accounts mentioning unsafe living conditions and sexual abuse weren’t acted upon institutionally. With respect to the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement, it is important to include intersectionality in the conversation. We must remember that Black Americans face unique oppression not only on the basis of race, but also on that of gender, sexuality, ability, religiosity, and class, among other identity markers. In this article, I specifically look at several nuances of the oppression that Black womxn* face as survivors of sexual violence.

It Was Ruled.

Along with legally institutionalizing the enslavement of Black people, the foundation of the United States is accountable for the continuous objectification of Black girls and womxn today. In Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence of the Old South, Jeff Forret—a professor of history and Distinguished Faculty Research Fellow at Lamar University—recounts the verdict of the Court of Appeals of Mississippi in George v. The State in 1859. On behalf of George, an enslaved Black man who had raped an enslaved Black girl of around nine years old, the defense successfully made this argument:

“The crime of rape does not exist in this State between African slaves…The regulations of law, as to the white race, on the subject of sexual intercourse, do not and cannot, for obvious reasons, apply to slaves; their intercourse is promiscuous, and the violence of a female slave by a male slave would be a mere assault and battery.”

The inequities among enslaving Whites and the enslaved Blacks were exemplified by the “obvious” inapplicability of White America’s laws to the cases of Black Americans, which wrongfully painted Black Americans as incapable of having a sense of morality, hence the word choice of “promiscuous.” Further, this oppression was compounded for Black womxn by the dismissive misrepresentation of rape as assault and battery. In today’s context, this misrepresentation would have resulted in different consequences for the perpetrator. 

According to the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School, “assault” refers to the act that puts an individual in a position where they worry about immediate physical harm, while “battery” refers to the actual act that causes the individual physical harm. The offenses of “assault” and “battery” are separate, but when they occur together—which they often do—then that instance is referred to as “assault and battery.” 

Assault and battery can be charged as either a misdemeanor crime or a felony crime, while rape is straightforwardly treated as a felony. In order for the incident to be considered as rape, there must be some form of sexual intercourse involved, as opposed to sexual contact in the case of sexual assault and sexual battery. 

Depending on the level of the offense the perpetrator is convicted of—a felony or a misdemeanor, as well as the class of the offense—it could mean the difference between a relatively smaller or larger fine, a relatively shorter or longer sentence, a sentence to a jail or a prison, and definite or indefinite post-conviction consequences like the aforementioned sentences and fines compared to restrictions on voting and obtaining housing and employment. For example, in the state of Tennessee, rape is considered a Class B felony, which constitutes a sentence of eight to thirty years in prison and a maximum fine of $25,000, while sexual battery is a Class E felony, which constitutes a sentence of one to six years in prison and a maximum fine of $3,000. 

Simply put, the charges for assault and battery are lighter than those for rape. However, we must acknowledge that although these ramifications are set in place for perpetrators, it does little to restore justice for survivors, especially if the perpetrator is socioeconomically privileged.

It Was Perpetuated.

Black womxn have been either perceived as “unworthy” of sexual attention or hypersexualized by the perpetuation of destructive stereotypes, thus obstructing the narratives of Black womxn survivors of sexual violence. There are three overarching typecasts that detract from understanding their truth: the Mammy, the Jezebel, and the Sapphire.

The Mammy is a stereotype that developed in the early 1900s as a Black caretaker who represented the unrealistic expectations of Black womxn to cater to the needs of others and never to her own. With the matronly figure associated with the Mammy stereotype, Black womxn are viewed as “the antithesis of the European standard of beauty” and therefore unable to incite any sexual desires that could conceivably lead to sexual violence. The stereotype of Aunt Jemima derived from that of the Mammy, though it is mainly focused on skilled domestic work like cooking. The commodification of such stereotypes may be exposed and admonished now, as recently done with Quaker Oats Company’s branding of Aunt Jemima, but it is only one dent in the societal internalization of these harmful images.

The Jezebel is a stereotype that portrays Black womxn as objects for sexual desire—as objects for sexual exploitation. This is an attempt to excuse the sexual violence that Black womxn suffer from by presenting them as promiscuous—in the same sense as George’s counsel used the word in his argument. Therefore, as author and columnist Tamar Winfrey-Harris says in The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America, “the persistence of this belief makes black women more vulnerable to sexual [violence] but less likely to be believed when they are violated.”

The Sapphire is a stereotype that is widely known as “the angry Black womxn.” Mengwe Wapimewah, a dancer and student at Pace University who has been vocal about the Black Lives Matter movement, says this about the Sapphire: 

“[It] presents Black womxn as angry, rude, aggressive, stubborn, and overbearing. This stereotype is used to negate the words and experiences of Black womxn who advocate on their own behalf.” 

It Can’t Be Overlooked.

The systemic oppression against Black womxn has been encoded in our laws and in our minds. A study by psychologist and scholar Jameta Nicole Barlow, PhD, MPH, highlights that the trends signal a communal need to address the unmet needs of Black womxn survivors of sexual violence. Per the National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community (Ujima): 

For every one Black woman who reports her rape, 15 do not.

One in four Black girls are sexually abused before reaching adulthood.

One in five of Black women are survivors of rape, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

These are only a few of the trends that encompass the Black girls and womxn who have become a statistic due to social, economic, and legal disparities. We must actively make an effort to educate ourselves on how to support Black girls and womxn and uplift their voices instead of overlooking them.

A step to take to learn more about how to support Black womxn survivors of sexual violence is to check out organizations like The Loveland Foundation, the National Organization of Sisters of Color Ending Sexual Assault, and Girls for Gender Equity.

*Note: “Womxn” is used to include non-cisgender women. “Women” was used to share the account from Winfrey-Harris and the statistics from Ujima used in Dr. Barlow’s study to preserve the integrity of their insights. However, Dr. Barlow did stress that there are disparities in the experiences of sexual violence between cisgender women and non-cisgender women.