Feminist Activism and YPAR: Privileged Girls Interrupt Rape Culture

Abstract

This research focuses on a community-based project that foregrounds youth-led participatory action research with privileged youth. The youth’s work involved interrogation of, and resistance strategies for, rape culture. Research findings demonstrate that youth came to see that rape culture has deep roots and disrupting it depends on naming its reality within their lives and its systemic foundations. Building on these emergent understandings, the youth took steps to educate their community about rape culture and gender-based violence, and the consequences of leaving it unexamined. They also created strategies to transform rape culture and facilitate social change within their own community.