 Central Minnesota Take Back the Night Rally Speech Transcript
10/2/2025 I want to start out by bringing us back to the origins of Take Back the Night and why, four decades later, we continue to rally and march. The stubbornness of patriarchy and misogyny remains and oppressive systems adapt at every turn. But men’s violence–whether against women, children, trans and nonbinary people, and other men, remains constant. The idea of taking back the night is painfully simple: women and girls, and many other marginalized communities, are not safe in this world. We march because we want to walk the street, alone, at night, without fear. Something as simple as that should not be considered an unattainable fantasy. But it’s not just about taking back the night, it’s our ability to be self-sovereign beings in the daylight. We know that the most dangerous place for a woman is not on the streets, but in her own home. She is most likely to be assaulted by a person she trusts or who claims to love her. Men’s abuse of women happens everywhere and it happens all the time. I will never “get over” how maddening the loss of liberty I have experienced in my own life–because of the never-ending threat of men’s violence. I will never "get over" my experiences in college where I didn’t first learn about rape culture as a theory in a sociology or women’s studies class, I learned it firsthand, with my own eyes. The introduction was instant–multiple women in my dorm were raped the very first week I moved to St Cloud State University. Experiences like this accumulated over time–story after story. For a period of time, I continued on the path of least resistance. I knew how women were rewarded for going along and not questioning inequitable power dynamics. I thought… well, this is just the way things are. I might as well just adapt. It seemed safer to do so at the time. And I was very wrong. My second year in college, I remembered being at a house party, one I had been to dozens of times before, and it changed my life. What changed me was a simple moment of pause. I stepped away from my friends and stopped and observed what was being done around me and awakened with a new sense of vision. What’s puzzling is there was nothing new or extraordinary about my observations. It was the same ritual as every other time: men plying women with alcohol, men dragging women into rooms, men pressuring women to do things they didn’t want to do, men objectifying and critiquing women’s bodies, men using slurs against women, men high-fiving each other competing about their sexual conquests, men shaming women for having sex, men shaming women for not having sex, men feeling endlessly entitled to women’s bodies, affirmation, and service. But once I stopped for a moment to think critically and listen to my own intuition, the dominos began to fall. I was re-thinking everything. I realized my own complicity. I realized how I played into this “pick me” bullshit that encourages us to sell out ourselves and other women. I started noticing how much energy and effort women devoted to getting tossed some crumbs from whoever the current patriarchs-in-power were. But once I faced all of this, it made me sick. And it has made me sick every day since. A couple years later, I was tabling for a student organization I started to address rape culture and sexual exploitation. I ran into a woman that I saw at those parties. We talked for a bit about the activism I was doing and she asked me if I was a survivor of sexual assault. I told her I wasn’t. She looked at me shocked. She said, “Wow. That’s crazy. That’s really hard to believe. I couldn’t count how many times that’s happened to me.” Let me re-emphasize this: she thought it was borderline unbelievable that I hadn’t been sexually assaulted. See that? That is rape culture. The sexual violation of women is so routine and expected that I was considered lucky to have escaped this reality. She wasn’t wrong. It’s true that most, if not all women, have experienced some form of sexual violence and boundary violations in their life. But whether or not we’ve personally experienced violence, we all are touched by it. We all live with fear and the threat at varying levels based on our positions in the power hierarchy. At least 1 in 3 women have been sexually assaulted and 1 in 3 physically abused–but those numbers are much higher the more marginalized a person is. Women of color and Indigenous women, immigrants, poor, disabled, and LGBT people are targeted at infinitely higher rates. Colonialism, white supremacy, homophobia, ableism, Christian supremacy, and classism compound the harm. Years later, I became an advocate. My life continued to change when I worked at a domestic violence, sexual assault center, and women’s center. Something happens when people know you do this work professionally, or you are outspoken against violence, or you are a survivor yourself. People start disclosing their trauma to you. People I’ve known all my life shared horrific experiences I knew nothing about prior. It seemed like almost every woman I knew had been abused. Long after my college experiences, I continued to notice all the insidious ways sexual violence was normalized. Catharine MacKinnon, a pioneering feminist attorney of anti-sexual harassment law once said, “rape is not prohibited, it is regulated.” When I was in college, this looked like excuses about why some women deserved assault–blaming women for past sexual experience, clothing choices, drinking, being alone with a man, being out at night, ultimately just existing with a female body… As I got older, I saw that rape was regulated in different ways. It was regulated when men used a marriage license as an expectation for unlimited access to a woman’s body. Rape is regulated through enormously profitable sexual exploitation industries where men bribe women for sexual servitude so that women can survive economically. Rape was regulated and legal if it was filmed and put on PornHub for millions of men to get off on. Violation is not suddenly ethical even if someone appears to make a choice. As much as people may say feminism is about choice, I disagree. I think feminism is about getting rid of both the visible and invisible cages around us. It’s not about trying to get men to be nicer or applauding them for the bare minimum–it’s a serious political commitment to end, not regulate, patriarchal oppression in every sphere. As another feminist once said, feminism is not about choosing the apple or choosing the orange within the cage. It’s the cage. The cage itself is the problem. The knowledge I now carry of what has been done to so many women has filled me with a devastating level of grief and made me absolutely furious. I quickly recognized why anger is so discouraged in women. Women’s anger leads to strong boundaries. Women’s anger ignites social movements. Anger is an inward gift we can use to change the world, not to be suppressed. Women are often encouraged to pretend to not know what we really do know. Because once you see and you know, you can’t unknow it. You are never the same. That’s why people in power are always trying to gaslight women. That’s been the historical significance of Take Back the Night and the women’s antiviolence movement. Women no longer sit cowering in isolated shame, blaming themselves, or thinking they’re the only one. They realize they aren’t alone. They speak. They demand space and take back their power. They name names. They stop protecting the reputation of abusers. They push for accountability and march together in solidarity. Going along and doing what we’re told will never keep us safe. As we know, abusers are never satisfied. They will keep taking away our autonomy and our rights until we have nothing left. We are living in the midst of astronomical levels of state-sanctioned violence. And just like we fight back against individual abusers, we fight back against our government and all institutions that actively support, stand by, or cover up abuse. Rapists, abusers, sadists, and passive bystanders are running the show right now in the US. But as the cowards-in-power get smaller and spineless, we will refuse to back down. We will not look away or hide. We get louder. We use our righteous rage to fuel our movements. We will choose integrity, truth, and justice even when the cost is high because the cost of our silence is much higher. We must keep resisting. We cannot wait until we are personally affected. There is always a next victim, a next group on the targeted list, and, in time, you or someone you care about will be next. This is not a time to opt out. This is the time to get even more connected and involved in our community organizations and social movements than ever before. Support and commit to volunteering at the social justice organizations that are doing the long-term, difficult work of intersectional anti-violence advocacy and pushing for progressive political change. In the midst of that ordinary, but life-changing moment at a party, I no longer accepted the idea that “this is just the way things are.” In time, I realized that this is not the way things have to BE and that we have the power to change everything. We created these systems, and we can tear them down. Let’s re-commit tonight to using every ounce of our power, influence, platforms, and voices to fight for the change we want to see. Thank you.
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 Image from Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton website https://www.sace.ca/learn/victim-blaming/ A statement I wrote for our campus program below (the Center's name has been removed): Statement on Victim-blaming and Accountability for Patriarchal ViolenceFeminist analysis of patriarchal violence[1] recognizes violence as a functional tool of oppression (e.g., a dominant group forces submission of a subordinate group, particularly through an illusion of consent or when non-obvious coercive routes are exhausted).
Sexual violence, and all forms of gender and power-based abuse, are forms of political and social oppression that are not the result of an individual survivor’s choices, ontology, identity, vulnerability, character, or reputation. [The Center] uses, and is not opposed to, risk-reduction[2] as a general concept, idea, or strategy. The [Center] does employ some risk and harm-reduction strategies (e.g., education on egalitarian/ethical relationships and sexual consent and communication). However, many common risk-reduction strategies perpetuate oppressive belief systems rooted in sexism, heterosexism, colonialism, white supremacy, neoliberalism, etc. Many common risk-reduction tactics and “safety tips” directed at systematically subordinated groups are only marginally applicable in more rare, stranger-perpetrated sexual assault cases. These tactics often perpetuate inaccurate, sensationalized, and narrow stereotypes of sexual violence that do not capture the broad scope of the issue. Most sexual violence is committed by a person the victim knows and trusts (dates, partners, spouses, friends, co-workers, classmates), as well as authority figures, people of high status, and “helping” professionals in which the public often trusts (clergy, police and criminal/legal professionals, mental health professionals, educational professionals, coaches, supervisors, medical providers, politicians, military, celebrities, etc.) The [Center] is committed to working within our community to change the institutions, systems, and broader culture and politics that normalize violence. We want to invest in ending the harm, not change or constrain the liberty, movement, and behavior of survivors/the people harmed by those systems. We focus our efforts on primary prevention—this means uprooting systems of oppression, stopping violence before it starts, preventing perpetration, and building long-term solutions that address the fundamental causes of violence. In order to eradicate violence, violence must be confronted at every scale (interpersonal, familial/household, community, institutional, systemic, state, and global) and not remain isolated to only the interpersonal. Our vision is not only to abolish patriarchal violence and rape culture, but to make patriarchal violence unimaginable. This also means we work to shift power in a concrete and material way, end dehumanization and sexual entitlement, and resist the belief systems that view human beings as objects to be possessed, commodified, and controlled (the ideological foundations that precede violence). At the [Center], we do not believe behavior-change on behalf of individuals will ultimately stop or prevent violence, because abuse and violence are always a choice by the person/group who cause the harm, not the responsibility of the person/people victimized by it. There is no guaranteed way to “protect” oneself against relationship violence, stalking, sexual harassment, exploitation, and/or trafficking. While there are no perfect victims, a person can do everything considered “right/cautious,” take every “safety precaution,” or implement every “risk-reduction” strategy, and still be violated and abused. A victim/survivor’s choices or character are irrelevant to an abuser’s choice to abuse (e.g., dress, drinking, flirting, who they hang out with, sexual decisions, “risky/dangerous situations/environments,” how they respond/resist sexism and violence, reporting decisions, or levels of personal vulnerability, assertiveness, self-esteem, and/or confidence). Vulnerability is not inherent to an individual but is intentionally created by systems of oppression and dominant groups to subordinate, marginalize, and target particular groups. Violence/abuse perpetrated against a person is never, regardless of the context, the fault or responsibility of the person victimized. Perpetrators are motivated to perpetrate for many reasons independent of the person they abuse. In addition, promoting individual changes to a potential victim’s behavior does not mean the abuser won’t abuse, it may mean the abuser abuses regardless, and/or they may choose to target a different person to abuse. Either way, the abuser usually continues abusing as they are socially rewarded and not held accountable. While our center works to educate and raise consciousness on ethical relationships and sexuality, education alone is not enough to protect someone from abuse, because they do not hold systemic power and are not in control of the abuse. For example, educating people of color on racism (what racism is, how to identify it, etc.) will not stop systemic racism. Educating disabled folks on ableism or queer folks on homophobia, transphobia, and heterosexism will not end it. Likewise, a victim/survivor’s knowledge and ability to identify abuse does not mean the victim, on their own, can prevent it or has the power to stop it. Victim-blaming messages directed at subordinated groups are used to distract the public from challenging the oppressive behavior of dominant groups. Cis women, femmes, people who experience/d feminine socialization, and other marginalized groups often internalize and have been lectured their whole lives to modify their behavior, dress, etc. to appease or de-escalate cis men and other dominant groups. [Our Center] is committed to not perpetuating these messages. This statement was written for accountability purposes and to share our [Center's] analysis of violence as an informational and educational tool. If you see our [Center] share any type of messaging through social media, presentations, awareness campaigns, advocacy, support services, etc. that conflicts with the analysis above in this statement, please contact [us] immediately. Your feedback and accountability is critical to us. Sincerely, Rebecca Kotz [1] “Patriarchal Violence (PV) is an interconnected system of institutions, practices, policies, beliefs, and behaviors that harm, undervalues, and terrorize girls, women, femme, intersex, gender non-conforming, LGBTQ, and other gender-oppressed people in our communities. PV is a widespread, normalized epidemic based on the domination, control, and colonizing of bodies, genders, and sexualities, happening in every community globally. PV is a global power structure and manifests on the systemic, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized level. It is rooted in interlocking systems of oppression.” – Black Feminist Future [2] Examples of common sexual assault risk-reduction (primarily with strangers) strategies: carrying pepper spray or weapons, “buddy systems,” not drinking, pouring your own drinks, not leaving drinks unattended, not going anywhere alone, not wearing clothing perceived by men as “sexy”, self-defense classes, carrying your keys in your hand, not wearing headphones/talking on a cell phone, avoiding elevators and stairs, avoiding poorly-lit areas, remaining alert/vigilant, etc. Though these tactics or behavior changes can create a feeling of safety, they ultimately will not prevent sexual violence.  Our returning guest Rebecca Kotz points to specific moments of our history (e.g. the de-funding of social welfare systems) which have resulted in a system that relies heavily on the prison industrial complex and prostitution industrial complex systems. Rebecca asserts that the only way forward is dismantling these systems and uprooting harmful ideologies that inflict sexual violence on one group to protect another dominant group. She instead hopes we can all work together to challenge these beliefs and instead create a system based on transformative justice, an approach that seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation and punishment or systemic violence. Cited Sources/More Resources Below:
 Our returning guest Rebecca Kotz unpacks The Equality model, which aims to partially decriminalize prostitution, “shrinking the sex trade” and a step forward in ending sexual exploitation. Rebecca says this goes beyond a policy change, but also involves identifying the ways victims are coerced into the sex trade and working to comprehensively cover those vulnerabilities. She shares the need for service providers to be trained well when working with victims as well and questions our reliance on the criminal/legal system as the primary path out of prostitution.
She also explains how social norms also need to shift as a majority of victims of sex trafficking receive little understanding or support once they are considered an adult, and therefore considered responsible for their actions by the public at large. In addition, she shares the need to end the demand for prostitution and, more broadly, the normalization of sexual coercion, objectification, and commodification. If you’d like to learn more about the Equality Model, visit: www.equalitymodelus.org To learn about Minnesota’s campaign for partial decriminalization, Safe Harbor for All, visit: www.sh4all.org  When attempting to understand what perpetuates such crimes as sexual abuse and exploitation, especially against women, we may only want to think of the individual players involved. But could we be missing a key component?
Our guest Rebecca Kotz asserts that if we want to see the tide of oppression change, we need to consider the deeply-entrenched systems in place which create ideal conditions for these crimes to happen in the first place. Rebecca has worked tirelessly to advocate for big-picture change in her home state of Minnesota, which has included creation and facilitation of Safe Harbor programming for adult and minor victims of sex trafficking in addition to a feminist-rooted accountability program for men convicted of soliciting prostituted/trafficked individuals. |
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