Photo caption: “These stories are like a password. You tell yours to another woman, and they have one to share, too.” Kate Watters on June 20 at Oak Creek Vista between Sedona and Flagstaff, Ariz. Watters was sexually harassed while she worked for the National Parks Service at the Grand Canyon River District between 1997 and 2007. After reporting the initial incident in 2005, she was violently threatened verbally and physically by colleagues and her report was repeatedly trivialized and dismissed. “If telling our story and bringing it out into the open in a visible way gives someone else the courage to come forward, it will be worth it. Courage is hard to find. Shame is a powerful tool of suppressing our voices,” she told me.
