musste das statement von paul erstmal suchen. für mich hatte das aber mehr fragen aufgeworfen als geklärt:
IT'S A TRAGEDY ADDRESSING SEXUAL ASSAULT IN OUR COMMUNITY
Almost two years ago I discovered second-hand that I was being accused of sexual assault. This is an open letter to all have decided that this matter is their business, and all who are concerned with the subject of sexual assault and how it is dealt with. There is more on this subject than I can possibly cover, and certainly more detail than I find relevant to discuss within this letter, so I will concentrate on what I feel is most important in the context of a public address. My foremost obligation has been to resolve this matter with the person with whom I was involved. This has not yet been possible. I have been hesitant to make public statements about the situation, because I still do not know first-hand what this person feels happened, so I will concentrate on the information and experiences I have had. I am not interested in creating polarities that make one person or the other a liar, and to respond to hearsay automatically pushes things in this direction. I do believe something happened between us that made her feel violated and this is something I regret very deeply. I also believe that there are more complexities involved than most people want to consider. I am writing
about this because it has been the dominant object in my life for almost wo years. I am writing about this because I have been horrified by stories of abuse from my friends and family members, and was deeply saddened to feel that something I did may have made someone feel this way. I am writing because I still believe that we can all communicate better and that we must if we really intend to try to do something about sexual misconduct before it happens. I am writing about this because I believe that we can be concerned about these things and still disagree with the knee-jerk reactionaries about tactics. I have avoided talking about how this has affected me because I know how quickly I would be accused of making myself out be the victim. But if we truly are trying to learn a new way to deal with these issues "as a community," I believe we need to know how these types of tactics and these issues affect all of the people involved. Power is power, and if we really want to examine and treat the power imbalances that cause people to hurt other people, we can't wield power as a weapon and expect equality as a result. If we truly want to improve communication in the sexual context, we can't expect to ignore it in the rest of our lives, even if it means discussing things that are hard to discuss.
In November of 2002, I was approached by a friend of someone I had been sexually involved with, and told that she was accusing me of sexual assault. I hunted down what information I could from mutual friends who were present during the time in question, and attempted to contact her via email. She didn't respond, so I wrote a letter based on the scattered information I had received from these various sources. I received no immediate response to this letter, but eventually we exchanged a couple of emails that cannot be well described as communication. We were both defensive and misunderstanding each other, and the email format only exacerbated this situation. Months later, a group of women in Portland (some of whom I saw often and considered friendly acquaintances) began having meetings about me, and eventually called me to a meeting, where I was told how they had decided I should be dealt with. I was given literature, a primer on the vocabulary of rape politics, and it was suggested that I get counseling, and check in with them periodically on my "progress." It was suggested that I should print letters in major publications such as Maximum Rock n' Roll, admitting my guilt and that I should say the same at every show my band played. No one approached me individually. About a year later another group called "Hysteria", unaware of the actions of the prior group, confronted me. They asked me to leave a show I was attending, and passed out flyers identifying me as a rapist, demanding that people "not support Paul from Tragedy by paying for a show, or supporting his band."
They later showed up at a show which Tragedy was playing and passed out these same flyers. Throughout all of this time there have been countless hateful stares, and I've even had my house chalked with circle A's and phrases such as "fuck you," and "you will die." I see hatred in people I've ever met that surpasses that of the rednecks I grew up around in the bible belt of the south. Still, there have been only six people who have come to me with an interest in hearing my point of view. I only say this to emphasize the passive nature with which many people have made up their minds about this situation. There are of course countless friends and acquaintances with whom I opened the conversation. There are also many who simply understand that they weren't there and will never know what happened between She and I, and accept the responsibility of basing their opinions on their own experiences. Many of these people have expressed the belief in the possibility of believing both partiesthat is, that two people can both have different memories, different subjective realities, and that to believe one person's story does not inherently invalidate the other's. There is another current of thought in this community that has been very prevalent, which Hysteria represents well. This philosophy is very fundamentalist, believing militantly in a black and white representation of an issue which is very complex. They believe that the end (which is ultimately ridicule and banishment) justifies any means. There are some very understandable reasons for this position. People want to be able to do something about injustice, and want to see results. Statistically women are often ignored or do not receive enough support when they are raped or assaulted. This is a very depressing fact and something that needs desperately to be better addressed, but I believe we must come up with something that allows for the complexity of all situations. Systematically treating all situations as if they were the same treats us as numbers, not human beings. I believe that most of these people have good intentions, but fail to recognize the full effect of their actions, which eventually is to burn and banish, rather than create a positive environment which could serve to reduce the frequency of sexual assault in the future. This fundamentalist, vigilante approach is nothing new, and in fact seems to mirror some of the more oppressive elements of society that many of us fight so hard against. Our culture has a long history of this type of dehumanizing condemnation. On a larger scale, examples are abundant. Within our own scene, there are dozens of examples from the last decade alone of people being publicly "called out," eventually resulting in the banishment of these people from the scene, and the burning out of most others involved. Has this created a safer place? Is sexual assault less common now than it was then? Are these models of justice we want to emulate? Is this "anarchy?" I often hear that "we have no working model to look to" when figuring out how to deal with this subject. Yes there is quite a lack of positive references to learn from, but I think there ARE working models and support systems, or at least ones more effective than the self-repeating model we have in the punk scene, which doesn't have such a successful resume. We do have an abundance of models to avoid, and I think that's a pretty good place to start. If we truly are trying to deal with our own problems within our own community, we must all be
responsible for the actions we decide to take. The conventional stance on the definition of sexual misconduct in the punk/ anarchist scene is that the violation is defined by the survivor. Since pain and suffering are so subjective, I believe this is necessary
when offering support to the survivor. A person feels what they feel, and semantics are not as important here as the need to be supportive and therapeutic. However, as accusatory language, we have to have some common understanding of what these words are describing, so that we can have an idea of what it is that needs to be addressed. Situations involving poor communication, uncomfortable or abusive sexual situations, sexual assault, date rape, and brutally violent stranger rape ALL desperately need to be addressed and dealt with, but if our basic language breaks down then we have no common way of understanding how and what needs to be done. I'm not attempting to quantify or believe I can understand other people's pain and suffering, but these are all very different situations that need to be treated accordingly. Hysteria demanded that I "own the word rapist." If someone read their flyer knowing nothing of the details, how would they distinguish between these aforementioned situations? I don't feel that I raped or sexually assaulted this woman. I do know that we were involved sexually and apparently we were not communicating as well as it seems we should have been. I accept this. Something happened along the way, which made her feel uncomfortable with what happened between us. I fully accept responsibility for this. However much it may condemn me in the eyes of some, I do believe that this is a shared responsibility. When body language is the dominant speech and seems very reciprocal, then things are not so cut and dry. What do we have to go on if there is not enough verbal communication to lend awareness? I believe we all need to be careful of relying on these other forms of communication to be adequate. I think we all need to learn to vocalize our feelings better, and yes, we men need to be aware of cultural reasons why communication abilities are not always equal between men and women. But this isn't universal. Patterns do exist that we need to be aware of, but women are not all submissive victims, nor are men universally oblivious, cold emotional rocks. Most people I know would be offended at such a suggestion. I was completely shocked to learn of this accusation, because things did seem so mutual. We learn from our mistakes, and I've certainly learned from this situation, but I ask: How many situations have many of us been in that could have been similar? Are we all communicating so well in our own lives that we are ready to demonize and dehumanize others for their mistakes? I have been constantly told that I need to be accountable. I do believe in accountability, in personal responsibility. In this situation, I believe I have tried to be as accountable as possible to all relevant parties. I simply do not feel the same level of responsibility to third parties, who know neither She nor I, that some people feel I should. I do feel somewhat responsible to the community at large, because I believe we should be if we are trying to tackle cultural problems. However, this does not mean submitting to every demand made by complete strangers. I have brought this issue up to countless people during the last year and a half. I have spoken about this to those who had the desire to have open dialog. To quote Albert Einstein: "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." Communication does not begin or end in the bedroom. Most of the fucked up situations we find ourselves in have everything to do with communication or a lack thereof. I remain open to dialog, and have done so from the beginning. If we truly want to see a decline in abusive sexual behavior, I believe we must begin by improving communication in and out of the sexual context. Believe it or not, as a person who has been accused of this, I am still saddened by the frequency of abuse and assault in our scene. I do believe this cannot be ignored. I do believe we have a lot to learn about ourselves and why inequalities in power dynamics occur. I do believe we can support survivors and yet remain open-minded to the intricacies of individual situations. Like communication and accountability, justice is not a dissectable concept. I don't think we can demand justice in a fucked up world and ignore major issues such as objectivity and reason when attempting to dole it out. Are we really so afraid of reason that we can't stand to hear out every point of view THEN make decisions? Are we really doomed to simply repeat the mistakes of our own past and mimic those of our larger culture? I hope not.
Paul Burdette
<3 Ich hoffe inständig, sie mal live erleben zu dürfen und werde dann wohl meine Tränen vor lauter Ergriffenheit nicht zurückhalten können. 
