Andra Medea
| Andra Medea | |
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| Born |
September 17, 1953 Chicago, Illinois, US |
| Occupation | Project developer in de-escalation and crisis prevention; writer |
| Subject | De-escalation skills, violence prevention & conflict theory |
| Notable works | Against Rape (1974), Conflict Unraveled (2004), Safe Within These Walls (2013). |
| Website | |
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Andra Medea (born 1953) is an American writer and a project developer and theorist on issues of conflict and violence, specifically crisis prevention. She first came to prominence in 1974 when, with writer Kathleen Thompson, she wrote Against Rape (Farrar, Straus, 1974), the book that broke the silence on rape internationally. She later founded Chimera, Inc., which for more than twenty years taught self-defense classes for women based on Medea's early theories of conflict. In the early 2000s, she developed Medea's Conflict Continuum, which she built upon in two books, “Conflict Unraveled” (Pivot Point Press, 2005) and “Going Home Without Going Crazy” (New Harbinger, 2006) and a number of courses, both online and on video, for veterans, lawyers, judges, psychiatric staff and others. Her video “Working with Emotional Clients: The Virtual Tranquilizer for Lawyers” (American Bar Association, 2010) has been a best-selling continuing education program for the ABA. More recently, she developed this work on the continuum even further in “Safe Within These Walls: De-escalating School Situations Before They Become Crises” (Capstone, 2013).
Medea was the daughter of a Lithuanian American machinist, Edward Thomas, and his wife, Emily, who was a homemaker and community activist. While she was growing up in Chicago’s Marquette Park, the neighborhood was a racial battleground, and Medea learned her first techniques for dealing with conflict on the street. She was profoundly affected by her mother's activism. Emily Thomas helped found the Southwest Committee on Peaceful Equality, aimed at fighting prejudice by encouraging dialogue between races, and was one of the founders of Southwest Women Working Together, organized to address the needs of women of all races and ethnicities on the Southwest Side. Medea followed in her mother's footsteps. In 1966. Dr. Martin Luther King led two open housing marches in Marquette Park, which were met by white mobs who attacked the marchers and burned cars. Dr. King was hit in the head with a rock and later stated, “I have never in my life seen such hate. Not in Mississippi or Alabama. This is a terrible thing.” During King’s Chicago campaign, Medea went to King’s west side headquarters, where she first met civil rights leaders. During this time, the American Nazi Party (formally, the National Socialist Party of America), at that time headed by Frank Collin, established its headquarters on 71st St., two blocks from Medea’s home. She and a small group of friends took it upon themselves to “vandalize” the party’s racist billboards. In April 1972, Medea organized, at the Chicago Loop Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), the first conference in the Midwest on the subject of rape. Out of that conference came the organization Chicago Women Against Rape, of which Medea was one of the founders, and the book Against Rape, which Medea wrote with Kathleen Thompson.
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