Sexual Abuse Archives - Public Seminar

Genocide

Attacks on Women’s Bodies Reveal the Logic of Genocide in Sudan

Sexual violence and the destruction of medical infrastructure are not separate catastrophes

December 2, 2025 • by Ayotunde Giwa

On October 28, 2025, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher. Satellite images show what Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab identified as bodies scattered across the hospital grounds. Videos filmed by RSF fighters themselves show militia walking through ransacked wards, stepping over piles of dead ...

Attacks on Women’s Bodies Reveal the Logic of Genocide in Sudan

East Asia & Pacific

How Vanessa Chan Came to Write a Global Bestseller, The Storm We Made

A graduate of The New School’s MFA in Creative Writing shines a light on a rarely discussed period of Malaysian history

June 5, 2024 • by Evangeline Riddiford Graham

In the lonely period of the pandemic, Vanessa Chan could not get home to her family. In those years, she lost her mother. She sheltered in place. And she wrote her first book, The Storm We Made....

How Vanessa Chan Came to Write a Global Bestseller, <em>The Storm We Made</em>

Podcast

Without Mothers, There Is No War

A conversation with political scientist Cynthia Enloe about her book Twelve Feminist Lessons of War

March 19, 2024 • by Claire Potter

50 years of feminist scholarship also demonstrates that war does not occur without sexual assault, just as it cannot be prosecuted without civilian casualties. The idea that you can have war without rape, on all sides, is historically implausible....

Sex & Gender

The Courage of E. Jean Carroll

Telling one person you were raped is hard; telling a nation is heroic

May 11, 2023 • by Claire Potter

It would be foolish to tell anyone not to be afraid of Donald Trump, and it would be foolish not to fear the consequences of being widely known as a person who has been raped....

Gender

Racialized Redemptive Labor and Sex Work

An excerpt from Elena Shih’s probing book

April 18, 2023 • by Elena Shih

Commercial sex in Bangkok, broadcast through tourist networks, now links the city in many minds with human trafficking—following the global tendency to conflate all sex commerce with sex trafficking. ...

Racialized Redemptive Labor and Sex Work

Uncategorized

The Women Who Built Playboy

An interview with podcast host Amy Rose Spiegel

October 6, 2022 • by Amy Rose Spiegel and Mette Kierstein

Women who were really responsible for shaping Playboy were Hefner’s closest confidants; they worked in the clubs and interacted with the magazine in ways that changed the trajectories of their lives....

New York City

Good Jewish Boys Gone Bad

Did the sexual monstrosity of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein have cultural roots?

August 31, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

Harvey Weinstein—like Jeffrey Epstein—was the product not of a liberated sexuality gone haywire but of a liberated sexuality that passed them by when it mattered most. ...

Higher Ed

The Problem Is Not Harvard, the Problem Is Graduate School

Sexual harassment is a normal feature of the current power arrangement. What will you do about it?

February 15, 2022 • by Hannah Leffingwell

This is because the system is built to protect, enable, and encourage harassers. Graduate students, whose cheap labor is used by the university to buttress the outrageous salaries of star faculty and senior administrators, are often broke, disempowered, terrified, and exhausted, even prior to being sexually harassed....

The Problem Is Not Harvard, the Problem Is Graduate School

Literature

Savage Tongues

Light, language, landscape, and the political context of intimate violence

October 15, 2021 • by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi

Halfway to the apartment, I decided to cut through the blind alleys of the old city, to climb up through its shaded streets and stout houses, their windows gazing at one another coyly, to the Plaza de los Naranjos. I remembered an old woman who ran a shop in the ...

Literature

Confronting Buried Sexual Trauma

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi talks with Alexandra Kleeman with about her new novel, Savage Tongues

October 15, 2021 • by Alexandra Kleeman and Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi

On the publication of her new novel, Savage Tongues (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi sat down with New School faculty Alexandra Kleeman to discuss the rhythms of language, the influence of light, shadow, and landscape on prose, and the historical and political context of intimate violence. ...

Feminism

Why #MeToo Isn’t Enough

The Morning Show wrestles with the ambiguities of workplace sexual harassment—and how complicated the truth really is

February 25, 2021 • by Claire Potter

"Can the word “rape” describe the experience of a woman who submits to sex, but only because she is so frightened she lost her capacity to move or speak?"...

Europe & Central Asia

How the Most Powerful Frenchman in the World Embraced the Philosophy of Sade – and Lost All of His Power

Libertinage isn’t liberating, it’s a form of fascism

February 11, 2021 • by Mitchell Abidor

_____Recently, I’ve been watching Jalil Lespert’s Netflix miniseries Room 2806: The Accusation. This four-episode docu-drama recounts the rise and fall of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at the time the President of the International Monetary Fund and a leading candidate for the French presidency. Strauss-Kahn (familiarly known as DSK) was arrested in New York ...

Sexual Abuse

Attacks on Women’s Bodies Reveal the Logic of Genocide in Sudan

Sexual violence and the destruction of medical infrastructure are not separate catastrophes

How Vanessa Chan Came to Write a Global Bestseller, The Storm We Made

A graduate of The New School’s MFA in Creative Writing shines a light on a rarely discussed period of Malaysian history

Without Mothers, There Is No War

A conversation with political scientist Cynthia Enloe about her book Twelve Feminist Lessons of War

The Courage of E. Jean Carroll

Telling one person you were raped is hard; telling a nation is heroic

Racialized Redemptive Labor and Sex Work

An excerpt from Elena Shih’s probing book

The Women Who Built Playboy

An interview with podcast host Amy Rose Spiegel

Good Jewish Boys Gone Bad

Did the sexual monstrosity of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein have cultural roots?

The Problem Is Not Harvard, the Problem Is Graduate School

Sexual harassment is a normal feature of the current power arrangement. What will you do about it?

Savage Tongues

Light, language, landscape, and the political context of intimate violence

Confronting Buried Sexual Trauma

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi talks with Alexandra Kleeman with about her new novel, Savage Tongues

Why #MeToo Isn’t Enough

The Morning Show wrestles with the ambiguities of workplace sexual harassment—and how complicated the truth really is

How the Most Powerful Frenchman in the World Embraced the Philosophy of Sade – and Lost All of His Power

Libertinage isn’t liberating, it’s a form of fascism

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