Thirty years after the Violence Against Women Act was signed into effect, women still don’t feel safe. Now, with more people unsure of the nation’s future, national security policies are top of mind.
Violence against women and girls is still prevalent today. Approximately 736 million women worldwide (nearly one in three) have been subjected to physical and sexual violence by a non-partner at least once in their lives. This staggering figure underscores the pervasive nature of violence against women in society. Girl Security, founded by Lauren Buitta, teamed up with photographer Kayleigh MacDonald to run a campaign called What We Carry.
The campaign was inspired by the need to spotlight and interrogate how violence against girls, women and gender minorities is both normalized and worsening with evolving threats arising from technology. It is intended to invite people to question the existence of a society in which girls, women, and other groups must exist in a constant state of threat and, in turn, arm themselves in anticipation of harm.
“The experience of sexual violence among women and national security is so highly common that even though, when I started the organization, I didn’t think that sexual violence would be sort of a focal point of the work, it’s just continued to be this undercurrent, both in the narrative that we hear from young women, but also, members of our organization want us to be talking about these issues,” Buitta shares during a phone interview.
Buitta met MacDonald at MacDonald’s What We Carry photo exhibit. The two advocates started a conversation about the dichotomy between images of service members in the military who receive the full support of resources to protect themselves in combat. However, girls and women who confront security threats every day are left to defend themselves with a false sense of security.
MacDonald’s father worked in intelligence, which required the family to live overseas. Living in countries where it wasn’t necessarily safe to be a young girl or an American, heightened vigilance was normal. Moving back to the U.S. was a tough transition. Overseas, she lived in a gated and guarded community; then, her family had to protect themselves in the States.
She created What We Carry as a personal project. During college, she lived in a city where many women carried a self-defense mechanism while walking to class. She became intrigued by the reasoning behind why the women carried something in their purses or backpacks.
“I began photographing the weapons as a way to introduce thinking about the emotional weight that we carry as women who feel it’s necessary to carry actual weapons,” MacDonald explains. “What does that emotional weight do to us over a lifetime? I started photographing friends and then approached strangers on the street. It’s just grown from there into this beautiful community of women and gender minorities that have all been very vulnerable with their stories.”
Buitta spent her career in national security. She launched Girl Security to ensure that the security sector, which is intended to secure people, would not continue to enable different forms of violence against women in the workplace. After her experience with sexual assault in the office, she vowed she’d work to make company environments safe for women and minority genders.
The University of Michigan published a study showing the correlation between violence against women and electronic or entertainment violence. Evidence suggests that exposure to violence in television, movies, video games, cell phones and on the internet increases the risk of violent behavior on the viewer’s part, just as growing up in an environment filled with real violence increases the risk of them behaving violently.
As part of this campaign, Girl Security created a social media exposé, a series of implementable toolkits and calls to action.
“We need to make people uncomfortable with violence,” Buitta concludes. “Specifically, we need to make people uncomfortable with male violence against women. Over 90% of all forms of sexual violence are perpetrated by men. One of the things this campaign calls for, which other countries like the UK and Australia have done, is to make misogyny and misogynistic attitudes and the discussion of male violence against women a call to action.”