“In order to move forward in addressing sexual violence within API communities, we must move forward together. We must remember our collective legacies of survival, resistance and resilience in the face of fear and erasure. This is long-term work that we are a part of and we will need each other to do it.
We must target the root cause of sexual violence – not only on the incidences themselves, but also on the conditions that allow for sexual violence to continue. Many of these conditions actively perpetuate sexual violence, whether they are social norms about women’s sexuality, transphobia, government policies that respond to sexual violence by only pushing for more severe criminalization and punishment, moral and religious beliefs about sex and bodies, or the concrete inaccessibility and isolation that disabled APIs face, leaving them more vulnerable to victimization. It is not enough to work on only one of these factors; we must understand how they are all connected and how they together create a climate that supports sexual violence.”
NAPIESV, Community Listening Report on Sexual Violence 2013