THREAD: Every so often I volunteer with a bipartisan group that trains young women to run for office. The last time I did this there was one woman who asked how you run for office when there is something you don't want to talk about.
I gave some general insight into how candidates often try to create a zone of privacy while becoming public figures. She didn't get more specific & I didn't ask.
Whatever it was I could tell it was something that both motivated her and that she felt she could never disclose or bear talking about in public. Which made me wonder: How many women don't run for office bc they can't bear the idea of talking about what they have experienced?
And how do women who have been sexually assaulted run for office & maintain their privacy around that? It's not a q I've seen any good political advice or strategic thinking around. But it's one everyone who is interested in more women running for office needs to think about it.
If #MeToo has taught us anything it has taught us that the level of sexual trauma in the female population is high. And young women running for office will not have had a long time to process what happened in their lives.
As more women report, and more women demand justice, there will be more records created about what happened to them. Maybe, hopefully, even more prosecutions and more convictions.
I shudder to think of a world where women are asked to relitigate these traumatic sexual experiences during the heat of political campaigns. There's a reason journalists grant sexual assault victims anonymity, and that standard needs to be upheld in political journalism, too.
