Recently in Sexual Assault Category

And because of a blogger, no less! As a big Emma Thompson fan, I'm relieved to find that after blog reader and blogger Caitlin to put together a petition urging Thompson to take her name off of Bernard-Henri Lévy's petition supporting Roman Polanski, it looks like the actress has had a change of heart. Reports Caitlin, who met Thompson after speaking at Exeter University:

Emma did not have much time between meetings, but she gave me all of the time that she had. I asked her why she had signed the petition, and she explained about how well she knows Polanski, how terrible his life has been, and how forgiving the survivor of the rape all those years ago now is. She said she thought the intentions of the judge were unclear, as were the intentions of those who arrested him recently. She told me that a lot of her friends had rung her up asking her to sign the petition, so there had been a certain amount of pressure. She said that she had already been thinking a lot about the petition, as others had expressed their dismay at her signing it.

I handed her our petition and the comments. She read them both through thoroughly, and came back to me. She said, while she supported Polanski as a friend, a crime is a crime. I don't know whether she had realised the extent of Polanski's crime, but she is now fully aware. She will remove her name from the petition - in fact, she said she would call today and sort it out. Even though, she stressed, Polanski has had some truly terrible experiences in his lifetime, experiences that we couldn't even imagine and which should not be taken out of the equation, she agreed that she could not put her name to a petition asking for his release.

She also asked Caitlin to pass along a message to petition signers, saying, "Know that I will remove my name because of you, and all of the good work that you have been doing. I have read your petition. I have heard you. And I will listen." Just awesome. So a big thank you to Emma, but more importantly - thank you Caitlin!

Via Shakesville, who had a hand in this too.

In response to the constant objectification of women, the recent gang rape of a 15 year old girl in Richmond, CA, the unjust incarceration of Sara Kruzan and even the highly publicized violence faced by Rihanna, conscientious rapper and activist Jasiri X has put out a track that discusses the injustice and inhumanity of these crimes.

Love it. Lyrics after the jump.

Sorry, I just couldn't wait two whole days to say FUCK YOU to this quote:

"This dance itself was a successful event."

--West Contra Costa Unified School District spokesman Marin Trujillo looks on the bright side after the brutal gang rape of a 15-year-old girl outside of her high school's homecoming dance.

via The Awl.

The Daily Mail says women might imagine being drugged and put at risk of rape, but in reality they just drank too much.

Dr Adam Burgess, from the University of Kent school of social policy, said rumours about the prevalence of date-rape drugs were little more than an urban myth.

This led young women to underestimate real risks of alcohol misuse, which can include impaired judgment putting them at risk of sexual assault.

'The reason why fear of drink-spiking has become widespread seems to be a mix of it being more convenient to guard against than the effects of alcohol itself and the fact that such stories are exotic - like a more adult version of "stranger danger".'

The study, published in the British Journal of Criminology, found that three quarters of students identified drink-spiking as leading to an important risk of sexual assault - more than drinking too much alcohol.

If a journal of criminology is making these conclusions, you can start to understand the thinking that informs the legal system when dealing with rape cases. The person who analyzed this data set either hates women or is not a woman because (a) "oooh, I was drugged," is a far cry from an exotic story and (b) being drunk isn't what puts a woman at risk of sexual assault--being near a rapist does.

Perhaps looking at the increase in use of alcohol by women and its harrowing effects on self esteem on the body or the mind, or who is providing the alcohol to the victim, creating said circumstances for violence, might be helpful. But no, it is so much easier to blame young women and suggest they have rape fantasies about "stranger danger" and lie about their irresponsible boozing. Anything else you got that will shame women about their habits and suggest they were "asking for it?"

via Daily Mail.

Thanks to Hannah for the link.

Steven Wayne Turner, a (now former) college police officer at Carver Bible College in Atlanta, was arrested for exposing himself to three women that he pulled over. The kicker? This is not the first time Turner has been caught.

In September 2008, Turner resigned from the Lithonia Police Department after an internal affairs investigation found he exposed himself during a traffic stop and then lied about it, Lithonia Police Chief Willie Rosser said Monday.

"He was given the option of resigning or be terminated," Rosser said.

Investigators opted to allow Turner resign instead of filing criminal charges against him, Rosser said.

The lack of criminal charges made it possible for Turner to get a job on a college campus - unbelievable.

Via Jill at Feministe, I see that John Mayer is being more of an asshole than usual - he recently threatened to sodomize a New York Magazine editor. Seriously.

UPDATE: Ann's take after the jump.

In an effort to offer an alternative to "leering drivers," a new fleet of taxis driven by women, that cater exclusively to women, have been launched in the Mexican city of Puebla.

Oh, and they're pink and come with a beauty kit. Sigh.

Providing spaces for women on trains and other forms of transportation has become a bit of an international trend in terms of preventing sexual harassment. And while offering women a respite from what can be a hostile environment (anyone who has ever ridden the NYC trains to school as a female high school student can tell you all about that!) is a nice idea, does it really get to the root of the problem? As I've written before: Shouldn't we be targeting the gropers and harassers? The onus should be on men to stop harassing women, not on women to escape them.

Vianeth Rojas, of the Network for Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Puebla, seems to agree: "We are in the 21st century, and they are saying women have continued worrying about beauty and nothing more...They are absolutely not helping eradicate violence against women."

The good news about the taxis in Puebla, however, is that they're opening new job opportunities for women in what has traditionally been a male profession. Now if we could just get them to ditch the pink...

Related Posts: Japanese men angry over women-only train cars
Tehran introducing all-women transportation
Women-only train cars in Brazil

Pic via AP.

Now this is art - a poem by Calvin Trillin at The Nation, titled...

What Whoopi Goldberg ('Not a Rape-Rape'), Harvey Weinstein ('So-Called Crime') et al. Are Saying in Their Outrage Over the Arrest of Roman Polanski

A youthful error? Yes, perhaps.
But he's been punished for this lapse--
For decades exiled from LA
He knows, as he wakes up each day,
He'll miss the movers and the shakers.
He'll never get to see the Lakers.
For just one old and small mischance,
He has to live in Paris, France.
He's suffered slurs and other stuff.
Has he not suffered quite enough?
How can these people get so riled?
He only raped a single child.

Read the rest at The Nation.

Via ThinkProgress:

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR "if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court." Check out his speech from the Senate floor yesterday:

The amendment passed by a 68-30 vote. Jones commented: "It means the world to me. It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it."

This is a pretty horrific story. In 2007, a public school teacher, while at a party with other teachers from her school, had offensive graffiti drawn all over her body after she had passed out on the floor of the living room.

According to the police report, Etheridge, Town, Piechotte and Woodworth stopped at Town's home on the way to McKinney's house, which is a short distance from the school. There, according to the report, they decided to smoke marijuana and Town produced and provided the drug for the three women, who went to the garage to smoke it. The teachers then continued on to McKinney's house.

Later that night, after more alcohol consumption by all involved, Piechotte crawled between a coffee table and a sofa in McKinney's living room. There she passed out.

According to the report, Town and Beebe decided it would be "funny" to draw on Piechotte's unconscious body. The two proceeded to draw penises on her legs, glasses on her face, write the word "balls" backwards on her forehead and write their names on her stomach. Much of the writing was sexual and crude. McKinney and his wife, as well as Etheridge and staff member Phil Rutkowski, watched the drawing. McKinney took pictures with his digital camera, and at least one person took pictures with a cell phone

This guy is pretty awesome. After leading police to a man wanted for sexual assault and battery in the UK, Lloyd Gardner was told he was being given 10,000 pounds as a reward. Instead of taking the money, he gave it to the survivor:

He spotted two women he knew on the film - and they led police to rapist Jakub Tomczak.

Mr Gardner said he did not deserve the reward and hoped the cash would help the woman rebuild her life.

"It was a difficult decision to make because it is a lot of money and it would have been very helpful but I didn't feel like a deserved it at all."

The 48-year old survivor suffered a skull fracture and severe brain damage from the attack.

Considering the history of the UK agency that is supposed to give reparations to rape survivors, it feels hopeful to know we have folks like Gardner on our side.

Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, is being used to frame a new official sexual education class at Colgate University.

Colgate University has introduced an official sexual education class on campus. "Yes Means Yes" is a series of five non-credit classes held on Wednesday evenings over dinner from 7 to 8:30 p.m. The topic of discussion will be Colgate's "hook-up culture," what one wants in a relationship, how to navigate one's own sexuality better and how to help others with these areas. Facilitators will focus on the formative novel, Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape.

Berger selected Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape, written by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, to emphasize positive sexuality and consensual sex. An individual chapter is assigned for each week's discussion in order to have a strong foundation for conversation and plenty of participation.

As a contributor to Yes Means Yes I'm by no means impartial, but I think the book rocks and has coverage of issues I would have loved to talk about in college.

Way to go Colgate!

But that doesn't mean the rate of rapes in this country still isn't really high.

USA Today reports that FBI data shows that the rate of reported rapes in the U.S. has gone down considerably.

The FBI estimates 89,000 women reported being raped in 2008 -- 29 women for every 100,000 people. That's down from a high of 109,062 reported rapes in 1992 -- 43 women for every 100,000 people. Data for 2009 are not yet available.

"We have seen reform in how police work with victims, gather evidence and investigate rape; we've seen increased awareness of the crime, and we've seen better prosecution," says Michael Males, senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice in San Francisco. "Hospitals now have rape kits that they didn't have 40 years ago" which make it easier to collect an attacker's DNA and other evidence of a crime.

Okay, I'm glad - really glad - that the number of reported rapes have declined. (Thanks, feminism and VAWA!) But there are still over tens of thousands of women a year who are reporting being raped - imagine how many more are not reporting their assaults.

And even if we have made inroads in terms of police and rape kits (though even that is debatable), the culture that condones and excuses rape is far from gone.

Males says in the USA Today piece that today, "you don't see the nightmarish trials of the 1960s where a woman's reputation would be brought into question and people would conclude she deserved it." But the thing is...we really do see that kind of victim-blaming. All the time.

So while, we should thank feminism for the small victories surrounding sexual assault legislation and policy - let's continue to fight the rape culture that makes this country such an unsafe place for women.

You don't even have to watch, and you know it's going to be good.

As we've noted briefly, last week soldiers in Guinea attacked unarmed civilians at a political demonstration in a stadium. Reports and cellphone camera photos of the attack have continued to surface, and today's New York Times has a horrifying account of what occurred in the stadium that day:

I can't sleep at night, after what I saw," said one middle-aged woman from an established family here, who said she had been beaten and sexually molested. "And I am afraid. I saw lots of women raped, and lots of dead."

One photograph shows a naked woman lying on muddy ground, her legs up in the air, a man in military fatigues in front of her. In a second picture a soldier in a red beret is pulling the clothes off a distraught-looking woman half-lying, half-sitting on muddy ground. In a third a mostly nude woman lying on the ground is pulling on her trousers. [...]

The exact number of women who were abused is not known. Because of the shame associated with sexual violence in this West African country, victims are reluctant to speak, and local doctors refuse to do so. Victims who told of the attacks would not provide their names because they were afraid of retribution.

But the witnesses were adamant. "I affirm, in categorical fashion, that women were raped, not just one woman," said Mamadou Mouctar Diallo, 34, an opposition leader who said he had been severely beaten himself. "I saw many rapes."  [...]

"They especially tore into the women," said another former prime minister, François Lonsény Fall, who was also at the stadium. "They were seeking to humiliate them."

The U.S. government has called on Guinean leaders to ensure the safety of the people, but by all accounts the ruling military junta is actually to blame for the violence.

Amnesty International is asking for "an immediate halt to all supplies of security and police equipment to the Guinean government until it has taken practical steps to prevent violations by the security forces and has brought those responsible for Monday's acts to justice."

Check out this moving commentary by Kristal Brent-Zook about the Hofstra student's false rape claims and the public reaction. An excerpt:

I'm having Duke deja vu right now.

Because for every African-American woman who is courageous enough to report a rape, there are 15 other African-American women who choose to keep their assaults quiet.

How many of us can honestly know for certain that our own mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, or girlfriends haven't been raped at some point in their lives?

The problem is that cases like what happened at Hofstra and at Duke somehow end up canceling out in people's minds, the real violence that takes place against women every day. It's more convenient for us. It feels better to say, "See, she lied." It excuses the rest of us from having to face, in any real way, the violence that surrounds and impacts each and every one of us in our own lives, and in the lives of the women we love.

Yes, yes, yes:

It's awesome to see him not join the legion of celebrities who have defended Polanski.

Plus, Lauren has a must-read on this topic.

From the LA Times:

Some of the industry's most prominent women said they believe Polanski, who faces a sentence as low as probation and as high as 16 months in prison for pleading guilty to having sex with a minor, should be freed. "My personal thoughts are let the guy go," said Peg Yorkin, founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation. "It's bad a person was raped. But that was so many years ago. The guy has been through so much in his life. It's crazy to arrest him now. Let it go. The government could spend its money on other things."

Okay, I agree that the government, not to mention the media, should spend resources on other things, but seriously?

Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland this weekend. He's spent the past several decades abroad after fleeing the U.S. during his trial for raping a 13-year-old girl.

Sometimes other bloggers say it first and say it better than I can. May I direct you to these fine writers for some commentary:

Kate Harding: Reminder: Roman Polanski raped a child

Amanda Hess: Common Roman Polanski Defenses, Refuted

Kieran Healy: "I look forward to more detailed explanations of who the Real Victim is here, and more fine-grained elaboration of the criteria -- other than "marvelous dinner guest" -- for being issued a Get Out of Child Rape Free card."

Scott Lemieux: "The fact that the victim forgives Polanski doesn't give him a license to skip out on his punishment."

Amanda Marcotte: "I tend to have a negative view of doggedly pursuing a criminal decades after the crime, but there are exceptions. In this case, I think that that the pressing need to send the message that fame and fortune doesn't give you a free pass to rape is worth the resources and effort put on bringing him in."

Sady Doyle on rape culture and liking the artistic output of someone who happens to be a rapist.

What have you all been reading about the Polanski arrest?

Related posts:
Newsweek hearts Polanski (and victim-blaming)
Loving sex and hating rape: Not mutually exclusive

So, as you know from Military Missive Part One, I'm having an adventure in military life and culture this week. Through out the briefings I've attended, the facilities I've toured, and the panels I've observed, a few things have been foremost on my mind--first among them my interest in holding the military accountable for the epidemic of military sexual assault that takes place.

First I have to admit that this whole experience has been far more trees than forest. In other words, we've focused much more on the nuts and bolts of military training, protocol, and infrastructure than we have on bigger social, organizational, and moral questions. Thus, it's been sort of hard to figure out when to ask various military leaders about my concerns. (For official military speak on the issue, go to thise site.) In any case, you know that a little awkwardness can't keep me quiet, so here's an account of my attempts to get answers:

First I questioned a strategic communications officer--a likable guy who told us all about the army's changing philosophy of "engagement." According to him, the priority is to become "an agent of change" (yes, they are using this exact language) and shift the army's reputation from "cumbersome and bureaucratic to coordinated, collaborative, and cooperative." Great, I asked him, then what is the army doing about the military sexual assault problem. His answer:

I personally have never experienced an issue with gender.

Second...

This post reminds me why Amanda Hess at The Sexist is quickly becoming one of my favorite bloggers.

Update: Apparently Feministing love for Hess runs deep. My bad.

After hearing that a woman at Hofstra University who accused four men of gang-raping her this week had recanted, my immediate reaction was more or less the same as Gina's: "No doubt this will be used against future victims." That sad truth is just the surface.

We typically every rape story framed as two-sided: His (I didn't rape her) and hers (He raped me). She's a victim, he's a villain. Or she's a liar, he's completely innocent. To a large extent, I agree with to Amanda Hess:

Most of the time, we, armchair rape analysts, launch into these arguments before we have any actual idea whether a particular person has raped another person. In most cases, we will never know. What we do know, all the time, is that rape is a problem, and false rape accusations are a problem. The meaningless squabbles between the two camps tend to overlook the fact that people concerned about rape and people concerned about fake rape accusations are both fighting against the same thing: rape culture.

Rape culture does not just encourage men to proceed after she says "no." Rape culture does not simply teach men that a lack of physical resistance is an invitation. Rape culture does not only tell men to assert ownership over whichever female body they desire. Rape culture also tells women not to claim ownership over their own bodies. Rape culture also informs women that they should not desire sex. Rape culture also tells women that saying yes makes them bad women.

Absolutely, we can blame the fucked-up narrative around rape (and race -- all of the accused were men of color) in this country for the total media meltdown that ensues after something like the Hofstra incident occurs. Like Amanda, I want to get beyond the situation at hand and focus on the broader picture -- after all, none of us know what actually happened in that Hofstra dorm room. And we can agree that, like rape, rape accusations are a problem.

But I keep coming back to the fact that trying to compare the two is problematic. In our culture, the incentives for rape are strong. All sorts of social messaging says women are just bodies, not agents. That women are passive and men are powerful, especially when it comes to sex. Women are not very likely to report being raped -- or even acknowledge that "rape" is the term for what happened to them. The incentives for false rape accusations, on the other hand, are few and far between. Think about how we treat women who stand up in public and say that they were raped. They are vilified.

We should be asking why a woman is saying she was raped and then recanting. We should be looking at the campus culture and racial dynamics and history. We should be talking about what we can do about how rape is portrayed in the media. We should not just scream "LIAR!" and leave it at that.

Note: Because we've gotten so much hateful email on this topic, I'm going to make comments subject to approval. If you leave a comment, be aware it may take a bit of time before you see it published.

Well this is horrible:

One in every 33 women who attend worship services regularly has been the target of sexual advances by a religious leader, a survey released Wednesday says.

The study, by Baylor University researchers, found that the problem is so pervasive that it almost certainly involves a wide range of denominations, religious traditions and leaders.

"It certainly is prevalent, and clearly the problem is more than simply a few charismatic leaders preying on vulnerable followers," said Diana Garland, dean of Baylor's School of Social Work, who co-authored the study.

The piece has a story of a young woman who was sexually assaulted by her pastor at her Evangelical Lutheran Church - when seeking spiritual guidance, he told her that having sex with him was ordained by God. Even after years of therapy, she still has a hard time walking into a Church.

Sadly only a couple of states have laws in place around this, including Texas, which defines clergy sexual behavior as sexual assault if the leader "causes the other person to submit or participate by exploiting the other person's emotional dependency on the clergyman in the clergyman's professional character as spiritual adviser."

This just depresses me. I've never been religious so I'd really like to hear from some readers' of faith thoughts on this. Any experiences, thoughts?

ht/ to Hugo.

I saw this on Facebook friend Jen's feed and wanted to share, I thought it was an awesome image - this is Command Sergeant Major James Ervin, the Fort Stewart garrison command sergeant major and Brig. Gen. Patrick Donahue, 3rd ID deputy commanding general for maneuvers, in a Take Back the Night march on Fort Stewart this April.

While we can't ignore the history of sexual assault in the U.S. military, we also can't disregard those who advocate for change with us.

Josh Phillips and Rachel Griffin make one heck of a team. The pair met at Central Michigan University, where they were both members of Sexual Aggression Peer Advocates, CMU's sexual assault education and prevention group. Today, they're taking the mission of that group off campus and all over the country.

Dr. Griffin is an Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University. Griffin's written works, including her doctoral dissertation, address the intersection of gender and race.

Phillips is the founder of East Coast Walkers, a group of CMU students who, in the summer of 2008, walked from Miami to Boston to raise awareness about sexual violence. His book about the experience, 1800 Miles, comes out this fall. The Walkers blogged about their trek along the way, and one entry, written from South Carolina, filled me with hope:

"Something remarkable keeps happen on this trip: our restaurant bills disappear. We will stop in a small mom and pop diner, the waitress will undoubtedly inquire what we are doing, and an eavesdropping patron will sneakily pay our tab as we devour whatever food is on the table. It must be magic..."

It's not magic, but something better: it's a sign that Phillips, Griffin and the East Coast Walkers are not alone in wishing and working for an end to sexual violence.

Phillips and Griffin regularly team up to speak about sexual violence, and to teach workshops on awareness and prevention. Their team approach works well, Griffin says, because when they're addressing a crowd on the topic of sexual violence, "there are people who can hear Josh who can't hear me and vice versa."

And now, without further ado, the inaugural Feministing Five, with Rachel Griffin and Josh Phillips.

Yesterday, L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yarovslavksy announced that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department will completely fund the testing of every single rape kit in the backlog within the next two years, and the expansion of a staff to ensure that a backlog will never return to their shelves.

We've been following this story for awhile and it's just so gratifying to see that the coalition of organizations advocating on this issue have won the fight on all fronts.

Thank you to the following groups and all the individuals who got the word out about this outrageous backlog: Human Rights Watch (led by superstar Sarah Tofte), Peace Over Violence, the Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center, the Downtown Women's Center, National Council
of Jewish Women, Hollywood Now, and many more.

I promise I'm not just posting this episode of WBAI's Healthstyles because I'm interviewed on it. The awesome Tristin Aaron of the Women's Media Center guest-hosted this show and interviewed me, Jaclyn Friedman, and Jennifer Block - author of the great book Pushed: The painful truth about birth and modern maternity care. Tristin, Jaclyn and Jennifer are some seriously smart and compelling women - so please give a listen.

After the madness that was Marriott's victim-blaming bullshit towards a rape survivor who was sexually assaulted in their hotel garage in Connecticut, we find (sort of) good news about the case:

The Marriott hotel chain on Monday abandoned its legal claim that a Connecticut woman raped at gunpoint in a hotel parking garage, in front of her young children, had been careless and was partly at fault.

The withdrawal followed days of backlash against Bethesda, Md.-based Marriott International Inc., which had claimed in its defense of a lawsuit by the woman that she had "failed to exercise due care for her own safety and the safety of her children and proper use of her senses and facilities." (Emphasis mine)

The statement given by the Marriott says they are "profoundly sorry that such a terrible thing happened to the victim of this violent crime" and that the lawsuit has "created a mistaken impression that Marriott lacks respect" for victims of violence. Blaming a rape survivor for her assault? That's no mistaken impression of disrespect, but a certainty.

Many are also saying (and I concur) that the damage has already been done. Although it's obviously good that they're not using this horrific defense anymore, what kind of message has already been put out there? Nancy Kushins, executive director of Connecticut Sexual Assault Crisis Services, contended,

"The fear of being blamed for being raped is one of the most common reasons that victims of sexual assault don't come forward."

Transcript after the jump.

*Trigger Warning*

Because being raped isn't traumatic enough, let's throw in some blame shame. Via Hartford Courant.

The woman allowed Fricker to go through her wallet and told him to take it, but Fricker demanded she take off her clothes. He then sexually assaulted her for several minutes while he pointed the gun at the children and threatened to sexually assault one of them. The attack stopped when another car pulled up and the woman screamed. Fricker fled and was arrested three days later in White Plains, N.Y.

In the civil suit, the woman claims Fricker had been in the hotel and garage behaving suspiciously days before the attack and on the afternoon of the attack, but the hotel failed to notice him, apprehend him or force him to leave, the Stamford Advocate reported. The suit also claims that during the attack security personnel did not see Fricker or stop him.

The hotel claims in their special defense that the hotel had not been notified about Fricker and that his acts were unforeseen and beyond their control, the newspaper reported

Thanks to Jaclyn for the heads up.

Carleton University is being sued by an assault victim who says the school failed to have adequate security measures in the building where she was attacked. In response, Carleton has said that the student didn't keep a "proper lookout" for her own safety and should have locked the door to the lab where she was working.

Erik Halliwell, president of the Carleton University Students' Association, says, "We're quite saddened that it seems the university has viewed this sexual assault in a pretty dismissive manner."

Trigger warning.

Prepare to seethe. On a popular Australian 2DayFM radio show segment where hosts "Kyle and Jackie O." have guests on to undergo a lie detector test, little did they know that the 14-year old girl who was brought by her mother and subjected to the test was a rape victim.

The girl had told Kyle Sandilands she was scared before the questions began, but they continued, in which they knew the mother intended to ask them about her daughter's sex life and drug use:

The mother then asked her daughter: "Have you ever had sex?"

The 14-year-old replied: "I've already told you the story about this ... and don't look at me and smile because it's not funny."

After a pause she then raised her voice and said: "Oh OK ... I got raped when I was 12 years old."

Sandilands hesitated before asking "Right ... is that the only experience you've had?"

The girl's mother interrupted, saying she found out about the rape only "a couple of months ago". (Emphasis mine)

The mother also added she just wanted to know if she had had any other sexual experiences. (As if the rape wasn't enough to be alarmed.) The girl also hadn't received any counseling, which the hosts claimed they'd provide if needed, telling the girl she was "off the hook" from answering any more questions.

It's hard for me to fathom how someone could subject their child to that kind of public scrutiny after surviving a rape. But whether her mother is ill, just in complete denial or the issue is more complex than it seems, it's still very upsetting. Not to mention Sandilands' complete dismissal of the rape; while he's obviously no crisis counselor, are you fucking serious dude?

You can hear the entire segment here. Community poster mindprovender also covered this.

h/t to reader Claire.

This weekly Saturday column "Ask Professor Foxy" will regularly contain sexually explicit material. This material is likely not safe for work viewing. The title of the column will include the major topic of the post, so please read the topic when deciding whether or not to read the entire column.

Dear Professor Foxy,

Thank you,
Searching in Vain

Hi Searching in Vain -
I think you are starting off on the right track by speaking with your friends. The next step is to call to schedule an appointment with one of those healthcare providers and make it clear to the person that you want to speak with the provider prior to the visit. If the receptionist refuses to do this, you do not even to step into that office, you know that it is not the place for you.

I am purposefully not saying doctor because there are many other types of healthcare providers with whom you may feel more comfortable. Registered nurses, nurse midwives, and physician's assistants can also provide many of these services and studies show that these types of healthcare providers tend to spend more time with their patients.

Also think about the demographics of the person you want to see. Many people prefer one gender over the other or feel more comfortable with certain age ranges. You can also ask for this information when you call.

Some other ideas include calling a local rape crisis or sexual assault center to see if they have healthcare providers that they regularly work with that they could recommend.

Also think about bringing a friend or loved one for support. This person can accompany you all the way through the conversation and exam.

I recognize that this is incredibly hard and I am doubly sorry that your mother's doctor made it so much worse. Healthcare providers should never reduce people to their body parts, especially when it comes to our genitalia.

We all deserve healthcare providers who talk to us with our clothes on, who listen to our concerns and who treat us like human beings. It will take you time and effort, but I believe you can find such a person.

Best,
Professor Foxy

If you have a question for Professor Foxy, send it to ProfessorFoxyATfeministingDOTcom.

It is after many years of blogging that I cringe every time another woman is forced through a "trial by media," because she has brought up rape charges, especially when it is against someone that is high profile and loved by all. Our newest example is accusations against Pittsburgh Steeler Ben Roethlisberger. He has a lawsuit against him for allegedly raping a woman in a hotel last summer in Lake Tahoe.

Obviously, it would be premature to speculate the outcome of this lawsuit as this story has just out and I have learned that it is best to reserve those judgments for after the facts come out...or don't come out as the case may be. However, the story about the media and it's coverage stays the same. We can still evaluate the way the media portrays women when they bring about rape charges, the extent to which the general public will defend and accept athletes that have been accused (or down right guilty) of sexual assault, sexual abuse and/or domestic violence and lastly, why ESPN has failed to cover the story.

The story has only been out a few days, but people are already asking if she is "woman scorned," or comments on news sites continue to decry that she is "crazy and imagined it." Rape apologists will deny anything that makes their heroes look bad, but the evidence is clear, when a woman brings up a rape lawsuit publicly, she is considered guilty of lying or is deemed "crazy," "delusional" or "money hungry" before given any legal proceedings whatsoever.

Decidedly no, but this case is really interesting. A female politician in Utter Pradesh, India representing the Congress Party, Rita Bahuguna Joshi, suggested that the leader of opposing group, Bahujan Samaj party, Mayawati, be raped in order to understand the suffering of rape victims. Her attempted "criticism" was about how the state of Utter Pradesh is treating rape victims,

In her speech Joshi criticised the Uttar Pradesh government for paying Dalits who had suffered rape compensation of just 25,000 rupees (£315). "I had simply sought to draw the people's attention to the fact that Mayawati's dole of 25,000 rupees to every Dalit rape victim was quite ironical as the state police chief was spending lakhs [hundreds of thousands] on the helicopter ride that he undertakes to hand over that paltry amount to the victim," she said.

While it is common for people to say incendiary things in politics, especially in India where people take very dramatic creative liberties in their political speeches, I think this is taking too many liberties, especially since the point is to have either a decrease in sexual violence or better reparations for instances of sexual violence. Suggesting sexual violence against a woman kind of defeats the purpose.

But that is not what people are protesting in Joshi's statements. According to the article, "She faces charges of insulting a woman's modesty, insulting a person of a lower caste and promoting enmity between groups. The charges all carry possible 10-year jail sentences." Joshi's house was burned down and she was put in jail. The crime however was not hatespeech, it was violating a woman's modesty, or suggesting that she is not modest. So, basically, if a woman is raped, she is the one that is immodest, not the person that raped her. Sounds like classic victim blaming to me.

So while, I don't necessarily agree with Joshi using such dramatic word choice to get her message out, I think it is interesting that her house was burned down and she was jailed, not because this was a hateful and potentially violent thing to say, but because she threatened a woman's assumed modesty.

It looks like the Telegraph has pulled their completely inaccurate victim-blaming piece from last week, also publishing an apology that's barely satisfying:

Owing to an editing error, our report "Women who dress provocatively more likely to be raped, claim scientists" (June 23) wrongly stated that research presented at the recent BPS conference by Sophia Shaw found that women who drink alcohol are more likely to be raped. In fact, the research found the opposite. We apologise for our error.

While the BPS has stated they're happy with Telegraph's actions, this is a completely lazy (and really not entirely accurate) correction. Nonetheless, it's good this was taken down.

h/t to Anne!

Wow.

What's worse is that (via bioephemera) Bad Science blog found that, these weren't the findings at all, according to the researcher Sophia Shaw from the University of Leicester:

"We found no evidence that that women who are more outgoing are more likely to be raped, this is completely inaccurate, we found no difference whatsoever. The alcohol thing is also completely wrong: if anything, we found that men reported they were willing to go further with women who are completely sober. . .

When I saw the article my heart completely sank, and it made me really angry, given how sensitive this subject is. To be making claims like the Telegraph did, in my name, places all the blame on women, which is not what we were doing at all. I just felt really angry about how wrong they'd got this study."

Tell author Richard Alleyne that not only creating false news but resorting to victim-blaming for the sake of getting a "good story" is completely heinous (not to mention illegal) and demand the article be taken down. (Or contact The Telegraph directly.)

I was also found that Current reposted the Telegraph piece (trigger warning re: accompanying image); tell them to take it down.

h/t to Ele.

In the latest issue of Essence magazine, Queen Latifah speaks candidly about her experience with sexual abuse as a child.

For a short period of time when she was a child, Latifah was the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a teenager charged with her care. "He violated me," she says of the abuser. "I never told anybody; I just buried it as deeply as I could and kept people at an arm's distance. I never really let a person get too close to me. I could have been married years ago, but I had a commitment issue." Eventually, she opened up to her parents, who separated when she was young.

...She points out that one in four girls is sexually abused in some way. "That's 25 percent of all girls. This is a real problem," she says. Not unlike many victims of abuse, she wondered if she had played a role in what happened. Her talks with a therapist helped her find the unequivocal answer. "He said, 'Imagine yourself as an adult and think about what a child can do to you. Can they beat you? Can they defeat you? No. Now, imagine yourself as that child.' That really helped put things in perspective. I was a kid, and I had no power or control over the situation."

I have been a fan of Queen Latifah for...well, forever. And I think it's wonderful that she's talking about her experience in a way that recognizes just how common sexual abuse is. The US Department of Health and Human Services reports that 15-33% of females and 13-16% of males were sexually abused as children.

Via Racialicious.

A new study by the Medical Research Council on rape in South Africa reveals that one in four men in South Africa may have raped someone--with most of those attacking more than one victim. Before the critics come out of the woodwork arguing that this is hyperbolic research, be clear, the methodologies were sound; the MRC spoke to 1,738 men in KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces.

There are so many disturbing data points as part of this research, but I think rather than talking about how completely horrifying the facts are, it's important to focus on WHY this is happening. It's easy to read these kinds of statistics and throw up our hands as if there is nothing we can do in the face of such atrocity. Instead, we need to support the feminists in South Africa who are obviously well-aware of this issue and doing everything they can to change the culture of violence.

It's clear that many of the men who admitted to raping women had done so multiple times. This makes it even more critical that focus be put, not only on prevention and cultural shifts, but on prosecution. The legal system in South Africa must support women to come forward about their sexual assault experiences so they can help prevent other women from facing the same fate.

Professor Rachel Jewkes of the MRC, who carried out the research, told the BBC's World Today:

The absolute imperative is we have to change the underlying social attitudes that in a way have created a norm that coercing women into sex is on some level acceptable. And it's partly rooted in our incredibly disturbed past and the way that South African men over the centuries have been socialised into forms of masculinity that are predicated on the idea of being strong and tough and the use of force to assert dominance and control over women, as well as other men.

Related Posts:
"Corrective rape" increasing in South Africa.
Child's play includes sexual assault in South Africa
South Africa will only be free when women are...
Women's Day in South Africa

Thanks to all the readers and community poster Lorenc who brought this to our attention.

Speechless:

A plea deal that sent an ex-convict accused of raping a 4-year-old girl to jail for only a year has prompted outrage across Oklahoma, where lawmakers are calling for the removal of the judge who approved the deal and the attorney general is investigating a new set of abuse allegations.

Under the deal, David Harold Earls, 64, of the southeastern Oklahoma town of McAlester, pleaded no contest last month to first-degree rape and forcible sodomy. Normally, the rape charge carries a sentence of between five years to life in prison, but the deal he struck with prosecutors called for 19 years of his 20-year sentence to be suspended.

While many involved are saying this happened because the outcome of the case rested on the testimony of the now 5-year-old girl, whom made "contradictory statements" in pretrial hearings, Earls admitted to the crime and medical evidence showed she was sexually assaulted. Can someone in law please explain how and why this sentence was reduced so significantly, because I just can't fathom it.

*Potentially triggering*

This story is intense. An 11 year old was brutally raped. Members of her community beat up the man they think committed the crime. The neighbors will not be charged for the beating. Here's why,

Before making his decision, Ramsey said, he monitored Carrasquillo's condition and reviewed surveillance video of the assault. As soon as officers arrived at the scene, he said, the group stopped the beating.

"These people saw him, he attempted to run and they caught up with him," Ramsey said. "If the injuries had been severe, maybe we'd have to rethink it."

The Philadelphia chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police had offered a $10,000 reward in the rape case.

Carrasquillo has not been charged in the rape, but Ramsey said investigators have very strong forensic evidence and witness identification placing him at the scene.

Marc Lamont Hill makes the point that because of the erasure of the experiences of women of color and specifically black women with sexual violence in the justice system and the news media, there is an understanding within the community that no one is going to do anything about this injustice. So while we may fall on the side of never resorting to violence, many people do not have this privilege.

*Possible trigger warning*

While we haven't been the biggest fans of Amazon as of late and their history of selling a rape simulation game (which they did end up banning), it looks like another game involving violence against women seems to have"slipped" past their radar. "Stockholm: An Exploration of True Love" is a game that allows the user to experience,

"...a terrifyingly vivid exploration of Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological condition in which a captive falls in love with her kidnapper. And you play the part of the kidnapper. With a limited number of options, you must figure out how to make her fall in love with you."

This includes using poison gas on the victim, sexually assaulting her and using psychological abuse against her in efforts to make her "love" you. Unbelievable.

Contact Amazon and let them know that profiting off of sexual and psychological abuse is completely unacceptable.

h/t to Jennifer for the heads up.

Check out Jonathan Torgovnik's amazing collection of photographs of the children of rape victims in the Congo. I became aware of his work because of a devastating photo essay in this month's Mother Jones Magazine, which you should all check out if you get a chance (it's not available online).

I had the total honor of attending a Congressional meeting yesterday called "The Growing Needs of Women Veterans: Is the VA Ready?" It was hosted by the House Committee on Veterans Affairs and widely attended by a variety of women veterans' groups who each had a chance to testify about what they see as the growing and unique needs for women veterans (who are currently about 15% of our military).

I plan on writing extensively about some of the issues that were brought up (including childcare, VA climate, cultural shifts, and of course, sexual assault), but what I really wanted to emphasize here at feministing was how inspired I was by the presence of young, fearless women activists yesterday. The stand outs were Anuradha K. Bhagwati, Executive Director of the Service Women's Action Network (which I've written about before), Kayla Williams, author of Love My Rifle More Than You, and Dawn Halfaker (pictured here), of Wounded Warriors.

They each spoke with such passion, clarity, and authenticity at the hearing. As the various leaders and ED's of organizations made their remarks, I was thrilled to hear these young women's voices, which truly stood out as professional, but also unequivocally real. They didn't let the official nature of the meeting or the onslaught of statistics overshadow the fact that women are suffering unimaginable pain because of sexual harassment and assault experiences, inadequate access to reproductive and mental health care at the VA centers through out the nation, and a sense of invisibility in a country that still assumes women don't see combat or get PTSD. Though the day was overwhelming, and the sense of glacial movement in our legislative branch palpable, I left with this rock solid confidence that this generation of women vet activists are going to make things right. They're too strong and bold and eloquent and convicted not to.

P.S. SWAN's site went live today, so be sure to go over and check it out.

*Trigger Warning*

If you know anything about femicide in Mexico, then you already know it is an epidemic of gross proportions. The mutilation, rape and murder of women along the US/Mexico border has become an annual statistic, with little mainstream media coverage and even less national outcry. And the worse part of it is that many of these disappearances are not even investigated, they literally disappear, vanish and are wiped from legibility.

From a piece written in 2004 in Off Our Backs Corie Osborn writes,

For the past decade, a sexual genocide has raged virtually unnoticed in Juarez, the largest city in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Approximately 370 women have been found murdered in the State of Chihuahua over the past decade, according to an Amnesty International report published last August. At least 137 women were sexually assaulted prior to their death.

The majority of these murders occurred in and around Ciudad Jurez; however, in the past three years incidences of murder and disappearances have risen in the nearby state capital Ciudad Chihuahua.

Many of the violent murders that have taken place in Juarez follow a similar pattern. Authorities believe that 93 of the victims fit the same rape-murder pattern, which indicates that they are all the work of a serial killer or killers.

Why has a killer who has murdered more than twice the number of people as the Boston Strangler, Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy combined, been able to continue terrorizing Ciudad Juarez for ten years with only vague interest from the international community or even from the Mexican federal government? And who is responsible for the killings of the other hundreds of women found dead in Juarez over the past decade?

Unfortunately, the answers to these questions are veiled by the power of a dominant machismo culture and what appears to be a police conspiracy preventing a thorough investigation of the murders.

Two years ago the documentary On the Edge: Femicide in Cuidad Juarez took on the horrific examples and sheer numbers of women disappearing in Juarez. The whole thing is up on youtube (in ten parts) and I strongly recommend watching it.

Here is the first part.

I bring this up today is because it was released yesterday that this epidemic hasn't stopped and that the disappearance of women in the Baja peninsula outnumber those disappeared in Chihuahua.

In Mexicali and other parts of Baja California, women's murders tend to get "buried" in the avalanche of news about violent crime, which includes hundreds of slayings, numerous kidnappings and street-side shoot outs since last year alone. While femicides in Ciudad Juarez and the state of Chihuahua garnered international headlines in recent years, little international attention was paid to women's murders in Baja California.

A report issued earlier this year by the femicide commission of the lower house of the Mexican Congress, found 105 women were murdered in Baja California during 2006-2007. Using official numbers, more women were murdered in Baja California than in Chihuahua (84 female murder victims) during the same comparable period.

In 2006-07 Baja California ranked eighth place nationally for women's homicides, falling slightly behind Mexican states with much larger populations including Jalisco, Veracruz and Puebla, according to the Mexican Congressional report.

This epidemic shows us that women's bodies are considered expendable and between patterns of globalization and a corrupt government the bodies of young women are not important and not worth investigating.

Last night, the LA City Council approved a budget that will fund the testing of the huge backlog of untested rape kits in Los Angeles.

According to Hollywood NOW President Lindsey Horvath (who was also recently appointed to the West Hollywood City Council - congrats!), "Over the next two years, we will eradicate the backlog of untested rape kit evidence as long as the Council continues to work with LAPD on a system that holds everyone accountable."

From Human Rights Watch:

As part of the city's budget for the upcoming fiscal year, the council approved money for an additional 26 employees for the city's crime lab DNA section and for using private crime laboratories for outsourcing. The budget now goes to the mayor for signature or veto within 10 days of approval by the City Council. The city has a backlog of more than 5,000 "rape kits," as the collected evidence is called, which have not been tested to try to identify a suspect through matching DNA.

Wonderful news, but HRW points out that this funding only affects the testing of rape kits under the Los Angeles Police Department's jurisdiction." There are still 7,000 more untested rape kits in the 47 other cities in Los Angeles County and stored by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Related: Why Do Rape Kits Sit Around Untested?
Nearly 13,000 Rape Kits Go Untested in LA County

Trigger warning.

The University of Tennessee has extended a scholarship offer to Daniel Hood, "Mr. Football" at Knoxville Catholic High School.

Hood certainly has all the athletic credentials: he led Knoxville Catholic to a 15-0 record and a class 3A state title. For his prowess, he got himself 27 scholarship offers from schools across the country. Indeed, Hood's football highlight film on Rivals.com has been watched 17,594 times.

But then schools caught wind of the horrifying details of his 2003 conviction (something they began to refer to as his "character issue"). Hood and an older friend, 17-year-old Robert Sanrico, who is currently serving 10 years in prison, raped and kidnapped a 14-year-old girl (Hood's cousin no less). Excerpts of the court transcript are here, but I warn you that they are highly disturbing.

All 27 of those scholarships disappeared once schools learned of Hood's legal record. But it appears that UT has managed to look past it. "We didn't go about this lightly," UT coach Lane Kiffin said in a statement Tuesday. "We spent a lot of time researching the issue and talking to a lot of people who are well-respected in the community. Everyone spoke very highly of Daniel. He's a very bright young man who wants to move past this incident and be a good representative for the team, the university and the community."

According to UT athletic department director of public relations, Tiffany Carpenter, the victim wrote a letter on Hood's behalf urging the university to admit him.

This is incredibly difficult for me to process. I won't judge Tiffany Carpenter's choice to forgive and even encourage her cousin to move on. I recognize that every person who experiences sexual assault has to heal in her own way. It does make me wonder what kind of support she's gotten through this whole process (this is the only time she's mentioned in the coverage).

But even more, it underscores the ways in which we still don't take sexual assault seriously in this country. I'm not a fan of criminalizing minors, but this incident is so violent and the punishment so lax (Hood went to a rehab center for a short period of time) that I can't help but feel like this kid's football talent has overshadowed any actual rehabilitation and reflection that he sorely needed and still needs to do. No one mentions if he actually got ongoing therapy, if he has gotten involved in sexual assault prevention efforts, or come to any kind of conclusions about why he committed such a dehumanizing crime against his own relative.

Were he not a football player, he would probably be stuck in a dead end job with no respect, no college scholarships, and no opportunities. (Not optimum, by the way. Just truth.) If he were a young man of color, well, we all know that his punishment would have looked far different. Instead, he's a white guy with a natural talent for throwing a pig skin, and as a result, he'll get a free college education and, quite possibly, could make millions in the NFL. All that money and glory will make the heinous sexual assault of his youth seem like a bad dream. I hate that athletic talent is valued more in this society than women's bodily integrity, therapeutic healing from violent crimes for both the perpetrator and the victim, or sexual assault prevention.

Fuck football.

Email Chancellor Jimmy G. Cheek at chancellor@utk.edu if you want to express your opinion about this issue.

Thanks to Christina for the heads up.

Correction: It appears that Tiffany Carpenter is the PR rep for UT Athletics, not the victim. This was misreported in one of the pieces I read. Thanks to Regann for the info.

*Trigger Warning*

Not so much. Last week women's organizers in Kenya decided to go on a sex strike to ply their husbands into ending political divisions.

via the Root.

The Women's Development Organization spearheaded a weeklong strike in which they called on Kenyan women to withhold sex from their husbands and lovers until they put an end to the political divisions that threaten to destroy the Grand Coalition Government of President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga. The act of conjugal disobedience was straight from the pages of Aristophanes' Lysistrata. The women involved even paid prostitutes not to ply their trade during the seven-day holdout.

As author Lisa Crooms concludes, if only it were that simple. Rape has consistently been used as a weapon of war in Kenya by British soldiers and gang rape has become commonplace. Despite seeming like a creative organizing effort, the implications are not good.

Kenya has also been a country in which gang rape has been part of the violence the sex strikers are trying to force their men to end. Add to this politically exacerbated sexual violence, claims of widespread rape of primarily Samburu and Maasai women by British soldiers. Add those who have been raped and sexually assaulted Somali refugees in Kenya, as well as women and men in Kenya's western Mt. Elgon district near the Ugandan border who have been violated by members of the Sabaot Land Defense Force. Underscoring the widespread link between sex and conflict are the thriving illegal sex trade and its accompanying trafficking of women and girls, the continued refusal to criminalize marital rape, and the sexual abuse, violence, coercion and discrimination that render Kenyan women and girls particularly vulnerable to being infected with HIV/AIDS, and a sex strike seems like a dangerously futile means of coercion.

The proposed sex strike does little to change the way that Kenyan women are viewed and valued in both the public and the private spheres where women are disempowered and largely absent from public positions of power.

I think what it does show is that Kenyan women are acting on the fact that their sexuality is being controlled by state and parochial power, it is just a matter of having the means to organize effectively. It is a sad state of affairs that they are trying to leverage their own bodies and that it is considered laughable since their person hood is not even recognized, let alone their right to consent to sex. Ugh.

Looks like Alaska isn't the only state with a history of charging sexual assault victims for rape kits.

A local Houston news source featured the story, in which a number of survivors confirm that despite police authorities assuring them they wouldn't pay a penny for medical evidence gathered after an assault, they end up getting letters of delinquency and denial letters for funding from the state's Crime Victims Compensation Fund.

These denial letters are generally sent due to strict guidelines imposed by the legislature as to how the bills are paid. (The survivors must exhaust any other potential funding sources like the local police department or their insurance company.) The (not-so-)funny thing about this is that this fund exists to assist survivors financially yet has millions laying around, unspent every year:

Texas State Comptroller's office figures show the fund has tens of millions of dollars left over at the end of each year.

In September 2006, the balance was $67,058,646 and one year later, the balance was $57,669,432.

In 2008, that figure was up again to $66,572,261 that was left unspent in the fund.

"A lot of people aren't going to ask. They're just going to go ahead and pay it and move forward with their lives. They don't want to keep re-living that experience," said Kelly Young of the Houston Area Women's Center.

The sad thing is, as Cara points out, that there are several states that charge victims, despite the violations committed against receiving grants under VAWA by doing it.

I couldn't find a Texas organization taking action on this (if anyone knows of one, please put in comments!), but what you can do is contact the Crime Victim's Compensation Fund directly and tell them to start putting their money where their mouth is. It's just shameful.

This is an issue that's become increasingly dear to my heart, as I've gotten to know a couple of amazing women veterans and read more about their experiences. There is no question that women vets have special needs at this time, especially as the epidemic of sexual assault and the psychological trauma that follows, is being acknowledged publicly for the first time. A few stats in case you haven't been following the issue:

• The current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are employing the greatest number of American servicewomen in US military history.


• Women are rapidly adding to the already existing population of 1.8 million women veterans, most of whom have yet to be adequately recognized for their sacrifices.


• The sexual assault rates among female veterans are astronomically high -- at least 30, and as high as 70 percent.

The Service Women's Action Network, an organization co-founded by a group of women veterans (mostly women of color) in 2006, is poised to step into the gap of services and advocacy and the rest of us need to support them to do this. Here's an excerpt from a recent email I received from co-founder and Army National Guard veteran Jennifer Hogg:

The issues faced by military women today present the public with specific challenges that have largely been rejected as a national priority by veterans organizations, the government and the media. Most major organizations that serve veterans pay mere lip service to the issues of women veterans. They fail to hire women veterans as staff members, and often retraumatize women veterans by minimizing, trivializing, or ignoring the experiences of women in uniform. As we all know, women's issues rarely get the attention they deserve when women are not empowered with the agency and authority to represent their own needs.

Therefore, SWAN focuses on the leadership development of women veterans. Given that few military organizations acknowledge the rampant sexism, racism, and homophobia in both the military and veterans organizations, SWAN ensures that women of color veterans and LGBT women veterans make up at least half of our staff, and that the experiences of women from these populations is featured prominently by the organization on both the website and in media appearances.

SWAN's staff and steering committee consist exclusively of women veterans whose collective experiences in the military encompass a broad spectrum of challenges faced by returning women veterans. These issues include the trauma of combat in Iraq or Afghanistan, the horrors of Military Sexual Trauma, the trials of VA health coverage and the VA benefits system for women, and discharges under the Don't Ask Don't Tell Policy.

If you can give money, do it:
Your donations are tax deductible. Checks can be made out to our fiscal sponsor, The Women of Color Resource Center. Please write "SWAN" in the memo line, and mail your check to:
The Women of Color Resource Center
1611 Telegraph Ave #303
Oakland, CA 94612

Or online.

If you can give some other kind of resources or support, do it:
Email Jen Hogg with grant leads, fundraising ideas, or other in kind donations or support at jen@claimingjustice.org.

Let's let the brave women of SWAN, and all the female veterans they are poised to help, know that we support their basic human rights to bodily integrity, health services, legal support, and healing community.

Remember the new Shia law passed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai that not only potentially allows child marriage and marital rape but also prohibits women from leaving the home? Well, it looks like the law will now be amended, says President Karzai, who is now claiming he "did not know all the contents of the law."

I can't say I completely buy that, although I'll admit I was confused he signed it in the first place considering he's made efforts in the past to combat child marriage. (Some folks predicted it was a political move by Karzai for more votes.) Either way, this is good news.

Via UN Dispatch.

Nicholas Kristof writes an op-ed for the NYTimes about the appalling amount of time it takes for rape kits to actually be tested and how sometimes they are not even tested. It is something that as feminists we have talked about extensively and sexual assault survivor advocates have organized around. The lackadaisical nature of rape kit testing and the general nonchalance or downright ignorance with which police do not investigate rape cases, it becomes damn near impossible to prove someone has been raped. Unless of course, it is to disprove it to save someone's reputation, but I digress.

In discussing the evasive procedure of "testing" for rape he writes,

It's a grueling and invasive process that can last four to six hours and produces a "rape kit" -- which, it turns out, often sits around for months or years, unopened and untested.

Stunningly often, the rape kit isn't tested at all because it's not deemed a priority. If it is tested, this happens at such a lackadaisical pace that it may be a year or more before there are results (if expedited, results are technically possible in a week).

So while we have breakthrough DNA technologies to find culprits and exculpate innocent suspects, we aren't using them properly -- and those who work in this field believe the reason is an underlying doubt about the seriousness of some rape cases. In short, this isn't justice; it's indifference.

True. Disgusting. Telling. Unjust.

UPDATE: Courtney wrote a column on this very subject this week.

The NY City police officers that were charged with the rape of an intoxicated woman have been indicted.

A grand jury in Manhattan has voted to indict two New York City police officers in the December rape of a woman who claimed she was sexually attacked after the officers escorted her from a taxicab to her apartment in the East Village while she was intoxicated, according to law enforcement officials and other people familiar with the case.

The grand jury last week charged both officers -- Kenneth Moreno and Franklin L. Mata -- though the details of the indictment were not immediately disclosed, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The officers, who have been on modified duty, stripped of their guns and badges and working in administrative assignments, are expected to surrender on Tuesday morning and face arraignment in criminal court.

Ugh, what a scary case.

Via NYTimes.

This weekly Saturday column "Ask Professor Foxy" will regularly contain sexually explicit material. This material is likely not safe for work viewing. The title of the column will include the major topic of the post, so please read the topic when deciding whether or not to read the entire column.

Hello,

thanks for taking the time.

Hi Time -
I am sorry. Sorry that you were victimized once by a man and then victimized again by your friends. I am responding to your question, but with a major caveat: this answer is only a start. You need to find a local support group that can give you space to work through these issues with a therapist and others who have had similar experiences. Here are two good places to start: National Sexual Violence Resource Center and RAINN: Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN).

Rape and sexual assault have many definitions under the law depending on where you live. For your purposes, I think they are irrelevant. In my opinion, you were assaulted. You were assaulted by someone who, to some extent, planned this and that makes it feel even worse. You made your discomfort clear, you made your vulnerabilities clear (your lack of control when you drink), and he took advantage of this.

I am sorry your friends did not protect you in this situation or its aftermath. I am using the word "friends" loosely here, because they are not friends. Friends step up when you start flashing. They watch you and intervene when you are out of control. They stop you from doing things you should not do or things you may regret the next day. And real friends certainly do not blame you after the fact.

His girlfriend did what women are trained to do: blame the other woman. Her "perfect" boyfriend couldn't possibly have cheated and surely he did not set up the night and take advantage of another woman, therefore, in her mind, it has to be your fault. You cannot change her mind and it is not worth your time to try. You seem to swing between realizing that her accusations are baseless and ridiculous and internalizing them and blaming yourself. DON'T. None of this your fault: not that night, not her reaction, not how it impacted their relationship, not its impact on your relationship, not how your "friends" reacted.

Your sexual reaction to these events (inability to put it out of your mind when being sexual with yourself or others) is completely normal. Many survivors of sexual assault have the same experience. With support, many survivors are also able to engage in healthy sexual relationships again. It takes time.

As difficult as this sounds, you need to find a way to develop new friendships and relationships with people who are supportive and who would have stepped in. You need to find a professional to help you work through all of this and to provide support as you move forward. Please contact a local support group and start to work through all of these things. You've taken a really big first step by writing in, now move into the next step.

If you have a question for Professor Foxy, send it to ProfessorFoxyATfeministingDOTcom.

Check out this inaugural guest post from Rachel Simmons, author of the bestselling Odd Girl Out, and the upcoming, The Curse of the Good Girl:

Turn the lights down and put on some Ashford and Simpson, because I'm popping my blog cherry today with some guest post access from Courtney. I'm sending out my own personal Thank You Thursday to her for a classy critique of the date rape scene in the Observe and Report trailer. Her speak out hit radars all over the net and has, at this writing, over 30,000 views on YouTube. That's some true blue feminist activism.

Maybe I was staring at Seth Rogen's face one too many times as I watched and rewatched the trailer, but it got me thinking about Hollywood's new comedy Brat Pack, the white-hot crew led by Judd Apatow. Observe and Report may not be Apatow's, but it bears his brand of brothers, to be sure, and has his fans in the crosshairs. Inventor of the "bromance," films which celebrate the male bond, Apatow has been anointed the new king of comedy by a worshipful band of critics.

I'm grateful for the bromance myself. I love using Superbad to talk with teens about masculinity and its suffocating constraints. The bromance portrays a kinder, softer young man who can, as the New Yorker's David Denby wrote, combine "desperately filthy talk with the most tender, even delicate, emotion." As a potty humor-loving girl, I can't complain. These movies slay me.

But the progressive manhood celebrated in Apatow's films frequently brings guys together at women's expense. Women and girls may still be old-fashioned sexual conquests, but in the modern bromance, they're also foils to male friendship. They're nags and nuisances, often one dimensionally so. Somehow, we're expected to swallow the misogyny in these films because they're coated in a syrup of kinder, gentler masculinity. And yeah, they may be obsessed with penis, but these guys love to equate vagina with weakness (as in, "Don't let the door hit you in your vagina on the way out").

I wonder if the bromance is part of a larger trend in guy-centered films where female characters are increasingly becoming objects. Courtney argues that the date-rape scene in Observe and Report blurs the lines of consensual sex. I agree, and I think the blurring on screen reflects a change in the culture of young female sexuality.

The pornification of sex has been defined for young women as a path to personal empowerment. Authentic sexual desire has taken a backseat to the pressure to perform for guys, whether it's through Girls Gone Wild type exhibitionism, sexting, or the straight-girl-on-straight-girl kissing offered up so casually for male audiences. As sexuality increasingly imitates pornography, young women are focusing more on their audience than their authentic experience of desire- and hence we have Anna Faris' character weirdly endorsing her own date rape. Watching the scene feels like that moment in middle school when the nerdy kid laughs at a joke made by the cool kids, but doesn't realize that the joke is about her. Anna Faris' character gets the punch line, sure, but with vomit leaking out of her mouth, the joke is on her.

For the record, I love a great fart joke. I love Seth Rogen. But let's not give movies with guy bonding a free pass just because they challenge some gender constraints. Pardon the pun, but there's some stinky there, too.

From the CBC:

About 300 mostly young women gathered in Kabul to show their opposition to a recently passed law that forbids women from refusing to have sex with their husbands and requires them to get a male relative's permission to leave the house.

The demonstration, organized by women's rights activists in the country, occurred in front of a Shia mosque recently built by a cleric who helped craft the law. Critics of the law say it effectively legalizes rape within marriage and is a return to Taliban-style rule.

About 1,000 people opposed to the protest surrounded the women and threw gravel and small stones as police struggled to hold them back.

I am so moved by the courage of these 300 women, dwarfed by over two times as many in opposition, marching through the streets for their right to have control over their bodies and their sexuality--even in marriage. I'm also struck by the solidarity of the women police officers, who reportedly formed a human chain around the protesters to protect them from the angry counter-protesters. It's heartening to hear a story where law enforcement respects peoples' right to gather and express dissent, even on such a volatile issue.

Thanks to all the readers who made sure we covered this by sending in links.

Just go read this whole post that Cara wrote and was reposted on Racialicious about Lil' Wayne discussing on Jimmy Kimmel how he "lost his virginity" or rather was raped, when he was 11 years old.

*trigger warning*

This leaves me speechless, but to be honest I have hated Jimmy Kimmel since the Man Show, but Cara gives more analysis then my stumped ass can do at this point.

Go check out Courtney's newest column at the American Prospect about the need for female veterans who are sexual assault survivors and are suffering PTSD to be classified as disabled and eligible for services.

It makes a certain amount of sense that the Veterans Affairs Office is compelled to differentiate combat from non-combat veterans. Those who have been exposed to improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the stress of direct negotiation, and the trials of patrol on a daily basis certainly have a higher rate of PTSD and other disabilities following their tour than those who have not. But it's not a zero-sum game. When the sexual assault rates among female veterans are so astronomically high -- at least 30, and as high as 70 percent, according to Helen Benedict, author of the new book The Lonely Soldier -- the "combat" classification becomes a moot point. Keep in mind that sexual assault is a hugely underreported crime; even the Pentagon admits that only 10 to 20 percent of cases are probably being reported.

Add to this the reality that military culture is built on breaking down some of our most basic psychological instincts through humiliation, deprivation, and submission, and it becomes less and less logical to separate the soldiers who have seen combat from those who haven't. Everyone who signs his or her name on the dotted line of a military contract is destined for psychological trauma of one kind or another, especially if they're female.

I think this point of the culture of humiliation, deprivation and submission is not only a helpful frame in understanding the culture within the military, but also in thinking about the mindset that motivates the military to then create those types of conditions amongst the communities we are warring with be it via prisons or the use of rape as a weapon of war. It seems logical to us that a US military culture that demands a certain level of emasculation, would create, produce and sustain a culture of sexual violence.

I was in LA last week doing some reporting for my new book and it gave me a chance to listen to the radio as I waited out the traffic. Traffic sucks, but damn do I wish I had more occasions to listen to the radio. In any case, I heard this story about Human Rights Watch investigator Sarah Tofte's report on the huge back log of untested rape kits in LA County. An excerpt from Tofte's article:

Through dozens of interviews with police officers, public officials, DNA analysts, rape treatment providers and rape victims, I found that as of March 1, 2009, there were at least 12,669 untested rape kits sitting in storage facilities. In those cases, officers never sent the kits along for forensic testing.

Of these untested kits, at least 1,218 are from unsolved cases in which the attacker was a stranger to the victim. And 499 kits are attached to cases that have passed the 10-year statute of limitations for rape in California, making it impossible to prosecute the alleged assailants even if they were to be identified. Under California law, if those 499 kits had been opened within two years of the attack, the statute would no longer apply. Thousands more rape kits were destroyed untested.

The backlog grew even as the police and sheriff's departments received millions of federal dollars from the Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant, a program the U.S. Congress created to address rape kit backlogs. But the effect of the program is blunted by the fact that grantees can use the money to test any kind of DNA backlog.

File this under serendipity: that same night that I heard this story on the radio I went to a benefit for Peace Over Violence, an LA-based organization, and guess who was there? That's right, Sarah Tofte. We didn't get much of a chance to chat, but she did say that there is cause for concern in Georgia, Illinois, and plenty of other states across the country.

Seems like grounds for a major campaign, doesn't it? Does anyone know about your local police dept.'s backlog of rape kits? How can we organize to get these kits tested?

Last Tuesday's post on the man in Oakland that killed 4 police officers yielded heated responses and I wanted to follow up after everyone (especially me) had some time to mull things over. I want to draw from some of the themes that came up and to update the news that broke last Tuesday night that Lovelle Mixon was also linked to the rape of a 12 year old girl. This act, along with the murders of John Hege, Mark Dunakin, Ervin Romans and Daniel Sakai, are reprehensible acts. I am stating this upfront so that it is not lost that this is a tragedy and there is no excuse for this kind of tragedy.

There seemed to be some concern that the way I approached my discussion of this topic made me sound like an apologist. Perhaps a matter of semantics but despite some folks understanding it was not my intention, there still seemed to be a need to accuse me of it. To clarify, there is a big difference between understanding what creates a condition/thought/action and then justifying that said action.

Thea Lim at Racialicious gave a very thorough breakdown of the fall-out around my post last week and the idea of trying to hold two thoughts at once. She writes,

Now, Mixon actually was guilty. But Mixon's guilt doesn't neutralise the rottenness of the system. In other words, just because Mixon was actually a dangerous felon doesn't mean that we are absolved from the duty to question how justice and innocence is defined and meted out in our culture.

It is not only possible for us to hold these two facts at once, but it is imperative in understanding the consequences of Mixon's actions for the greater community in Oakland and also for understanding how the youth in Oakland are dealing with this atrocity. Perhaps the huge backlash against my piece was due to a desire to use Mixon as an excuse to voice their own racism, whether conscious or subconscious. As lefties it is our job to point out these subtle nuances, as the implications are deadly.

With regard to the poster I chose to repost here, after posting the artist's statement and some conversation via comments and emails, I would just like to clarify why I thought it was powerful. I should have known that putting it up would make me look like I was complicit in making Mixon a poster-child, but the poster says, "Cop-Killer" not "American Hero" so I thought that the fact that I didn't think he was a hero was pretty self-explanatory. What I saw in that poster was several questions come up about what we need to be American. We need our villains, we need our heroes or the story is never complete. In short, people of color become the poster children for whatever we want them to be, Obama is on one side of the American dream, Mixon on the other. Also, while I don't totally agree with all of Weston's take, the one part I do agree with is that Mixon is a product of a culture of violence in America and we can either address that or we can write this off as a one off crazy man.

It is understandable why many different people are bound to the 'one off' point of view. It makes us feel comfortable to think that someone like Mixon is a 'one off' case because it takes responsibility off of us to look at, and, ultimately, change the systemic causes of violence. On the other hand, the belief that he is not a 'one off' incident will most definitely be used to justify further violence in the black community in Oakland and that is what we are afraid of. It is almost effective and more logical for those that live in the community to write this off as an aberration (which statistically it is) as opposed to part of a systemic problem.

But this story is not just about Mixon and his inability to get out of cycles of violence. This is about all the themes and ideas that have come out around Mixon and what that tells us about public perceptions of police brutality, black masculinity and why Oakland youth might be so juiced about this issue. As Puck clarified at the end of the comments section,

Regardless of whether or not she believes cop killing is a message of hope (and it's pretty clear that she doesn't), it's important to recognize that an image like the "poster" was created in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. It's important to recognize that there are a lot of people who see this as a tit-for-tat situation... and there are a lot of people who are conflicted - at once feeling sorry for the people who were killed (and their families) and simultaneously feeling like the system had it coming. Recognizing that these are perspectives that are very real and shared by a lot of people is not the same thing as holding such a perspective. Ignoring that such perspectives are worth considering or even exist stifles our capacity to understand all the angles on a tragedy such as this.

Mixon is a difficult person to build a narrative of police brutality around, but this story isn't about him. He is dead, he can do no more harm. But the police state can, and most likely will, use this case as an excuse to continually police and brutalize people of color in Oakland. Mixon was a very extreme example of violence, but he is still part of an entire system of violence. The more we have a repressive police system that engages in extreme forms of violence, the more people will support the actions of a cop-killer. Some have suggested that if perhaps Oakland police and stood up against what happened to Oscar Grant, Oakland youth would be singing a different tune right now.

In light of Bill O'Reilly's upcoming speaking gig with the Alexa Foundation, an organization that supports the rights of victims of sexual violence, Amanda Terkel at Think Progress exposed O'Reilly's victim-blaming past. In the past O'Relly asserted that the rape and murder of a woman was partially her own fault based on what she was wearing. Strange that Bill O would be speaking at Alexa.

This odd match becomes more apparent because due to the frustration by the O'Reilly camp, Terkel was stalked and harassed by the producers of Fox News. In her own words, Terkel writes,

This weekend, while on vacation, I was ambushed by O'Reilly's top hit man, producer Jesse Watters, who accosted me on the street and told me that because I highlighted O'Reilly's comments, I was causing "pain and suffering" to rape victims and their families. He of course offered no proof to back up this claim, instead choosing to shout questions at me.

I expect O'Reilly to air this "interview" at some point this week, possibly as early as tonight. I have no expectation that he will show the entire altercation or give the entire story about what happened, so here is the full account, offering a glimpse inside the O'Reilly harrassment machine:

You can read the play by play stalking on her post. Terkel concludes that the point remains that O'Reilly needs to apologize that it is in any way relevant what woman was wearing or drinking when she is raped and killed. Suffice it to say, O'Relly and his team owe Terkel an apology for stalking and harassing her.

Feministe, Raw Story and Daniel at the Feministing Community have more. You can also join the Facebook group in support of Terkel here.

Jesse Watter's the producer who followed Terkel can be emailed here.

Also, last night in full O'Reilly style, he called Terkel a 'villian' for standing up for rape victims.

UPDATE: Check out Amanda on Keith Olbermann's show tonight, discussing the incident.

Check out community poster ArmyVetJen's take (who beat us to the punch) on the new statistics just released by the Pentagon showing that there has been a 9% increase in the reports of sexual assault in the military over the past year. AP reports:

The Pentagon said it received 2,923 reports of sexual assault across the military in the 12 months ending Sept. 30 2008. That's about a 9 percent increase over the totals reported the year before, but only a fraction of the crimes presumably being committed.

Among the cases reported, only a small number went to military courts, officials acknowledged.

The Pentagon office that collects the data estimates that only 10 percent to 20 percent of sexual assaults among members of the active duty military are reported -- a figure similar to estimates of reported cases in the civilian sphere.

The military statistics, required by Congress, cover rape and other assaults across the approximately 1.4 million people in uniform.

The director of the Pentagon's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office says that the increase in reports is likely due to more women feeling confident enough to come forward rather than attributing it to an actual increase in sexual violence. While that would be great, as Cara says, there hasn't been any reported increase in awareness around sexual assault by the Pentagon so I'm not inclined to immediately buy that contention. (Also considering prosecutions are still low as ever.)

Reports in Iraq and Afghanistan have rose by about a quarter. You can find the report here. Feministe also has more.

A reader sent in this story, about how this 18 year-old man was given only 6 months in jail for raping two women. (Oh, and he gets work and school release privileges.)

Michael Philbin, son of a Green Bay Packers coach, said he was "ashamed" and "embarrassed." Well, that's lovely, but I wish he was feeling ashamed from prison for more than 6 frigging months. The short jail sentence aside, what really bugged me about this article was the language it used to describe the attacks:

Philbin had sex with one girl after she passed out and was placed on his parent's bed. He then joined another 17-year-old boy in the basement and forced a second girl to perform oral sex, according to the criminal complaint filed last month.

Excuse me, but you don't "have sex" with an unconscious girl. That's called rape.

Brown County Circuit Court Judge Sue Bischel, in accepting a joint sentencing recommendation, said by all accounts Philbin was a good person who made a horrible decision.

Making a "horrible decision" to rape someone doesn't make you a good person who fucked up - it makes you a rapist.

Reading from a pre-sentence report, Bischel said Philbin acknowledged that he took advantage of the girls knowing they had too much to drink.

Took advantage of? Again, rape. Judge Bischel also ruled that Philbin didn't have to register as a sex offender because it was "excessive" (and raping two women isn't?) and that after completing probation he could petition to have the convictions removed from his record.

I am so tired of the rape apologism - in the media, in the courts, in the culture. How much more can we really take?

The Guardian and others have been reporting on the growing trend in South Africa where lesbians are raped and beaten in efforts to "correct" or "cure" their sexual orientation. And the authorities are not doing much about it.

After Eudy Simelane, the leading player on the Banyana Banyana national female soccer team was brutally raped and murdered last April, more awareness has been raised, but the prevalence of this horrific trend has only grown with it. One lesbian and gay support group in Cape Town says they get 10 new cases of "corrective rape" every week. And that's just in Cape Town.

And many of these cases result in murder, but with a barely existent conviction rate; there has only been one conviction out of 31 reported cases in the last decade. (The number of actual incidences are predicted to be much higher.)

In response, ActionAid and others have released a report, Hate Crimes: the rise of corrective rape in South Africa, bringing to light the prevalence of the "practice" as well as the failure of the South African legal system to take recourse; hate crimes on the basis of sexual orientation is not recognized under South African law. On sentencing of Simelan's case, the judge said that her orientation had "no significance" in the murder.

Check out The Guardian's video of interviews with some survivors. (Trigger warning.)

This study is really interesting (link it to a PDF), if by interesting you mean deeply tragic and horridly upsetting. According to the Times UK, 1 in 7 people find it is sometimes justified to hit women.

One in seven people believe it is acceptable in some circumstances for a man to hit his wife or girlfriend if she is dressed in "sexy or revealing clothes in public", according to the findings of a survey released today.

A similar number believed that it was all right for a man to slap his wife or girlfriend if she is "nagging or constantly moaning at him".

The findings of the poll, conducted for the Home Office, also disclosed about a quarter of people believe that wearing sexy or revealing clothing should lead to a woman being held partly responsible for being raped or sexually assaulted.

If that is not upsetting enough, Jess at the F-Word breaks the studies down even further. and concludes,

These figures appear to actually show the situation is worse than we thought from that pivotal 2005 poll by Amnesty. For example, Amnesty found about 1/3 of people think women who've been flirting are responsible if they get raped, whereas the Home Office poll puts the figure at a shocking 43%. About 50% believe that women in prostitution bear some or all of the responsibility if they're raped.

The article also suggested that older populations (over 65) and what they call "lower social groups" had a higher percentage of supporting that violence against women is sometimes justified. I actually have no idea what they mean by "lower social groups," and find that language really problematic, especially if they are talking about working class communities and communities of color. I looked through the study and found no delineation by age or background.

Despite those perhaps journalistic assumptions made, this data is appalling.

Thanks to Meg for the link and community post.

There really are no words for this kind of case.

A community poster already covered the uproar by the Brazilian Roman Catholic Church of the abortion of a 9-year old girl who was raped by her stepfather. This is despite the fact that abortion is legal in Brazil in cases of rape and when the woman's life is in danger, which both applies to this girl (as she not only weighs just 80 pounds but was pregnant with twins):

The Catholic Church tried to intervene to prevent the abortion going ahead but the procedure was carried out on Wednesday.

Now a Church spokesman says all those involved, including the child's mother and the doctors, are to be excommunicated.

The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil's TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law.

He said the excommunication would not apply to the child because of her age, but would affect all those who ensured the abortion was carried out.

How merciful of them.

Check out this reading by Eve Ensler of a section of her upcoming book, I'm an Emotional Creature: The Secret Lives of Girls Around the World. It's called "The Teenage Girl's Guide to Surviving Sex Slavery" and in it she speaks in the voice of a former sexual slave from the The Democratic Republic of Congo:

First let me say that I admire Eve's bold insistence on speaking truth, on writing deeply emotional pieces, on insisting that we talk about and stay conscious of and do something about the most horrific suffering on this planet--things that the rest of us often don't have the strength to face on a regular basis. V-Day is such an unbelievably successful movement--unparalleled in contemporary feminism. The idea that she got a nation of girls and women, and even a healthy number of men, thinking and talking about vaginas--as a metaphor for femaleness and violence and sexuality and so many other buried issues--is nothing short of a modern miracle. For all of this, I give her infinite props.

But I have to say that I find this piece really problematic and it makes me worried about the rest of the book that she's almost finished with.

The girl does sound real in many ways, authentic in her interactions with her friends and her experience of being abducted and raped. It's clear that Eve had spent a lot of time with these women, that she has talked to them about their lives and experiences in great detail. It's clear that Eve has the best of intentions, that she sees her own voice, her own persona, as the most effective way to amplify the messages that these young women from the Congo need the world to hear.

But no amount of reporting adds up to understanding, adds up to truly inhabiting the lives and experiences of others. As a journalist, I have continuously struggled with this reality. The most painful part of my job involves attempting to tell others' stories with empathy and clarity and honesty, while still respecting the living, breathing human being who owns them. I have a higher purpose--to paint a picture, for example, of the new normalcy of body hatred, to enrage people so they try to stop it, to lure people into a social issue with a good old fashioned story--but I also have an ethical commitment to respect people's ownership over their own stories, and quite connected, respect my own limitations.

I feel like Eve has lost sight of her own limitations, like this piece reveals this story of a girl, but also the story of an activist and storyteller who has forgotten to be humble in the process. I haven't read What is the What by Dave Eggers, but it seems that he tried to do something similar and he called it a novel (though he made clear that it was very grounded in reality). I totally get the impulse. You're an activist, a writer, a well-intentioned, empathic human being who feels like the most important stories aren't being told, so you think of the most immediate, palpable way to get them into the world. But it's not that simple.

Why not write a personal essay in her own voice about the experience of getting to know this girl, of hearing these stories? Why not publish an anthology of these women's stories or a collection of oral histories where we hear their voices exactly? Why not bring these women to the U.S. and let them stage their own play about what they've experienced? Why not make a documentary?

For me, Eve is taking too many liberties. She has the power to get these women's voices and stories out into the world, and instead, she has usurped them.

Last year we reported how a University of Portland student, after reporting being raped, was threatened by the school with charges of underage drinking.

In making the university's decision, UP judicial coordinator Natalie Shank suggested to Kerns that she could have been charged with violating university policies herself.

"Based upon my findings in my investigation, I am unable to determine if a sexual assault occurred," Shank wrote May 3, 2007. "I have reason to believe that intercourse occurred, but both parties admit to drinking and therefore, consent--or lack of consent--is difficult to determine. Given these facts, there are possible violations for which you could be charged."

Well, we have some good news. According to StudentActivism.net, the school's sexual assault reporting policies have been revised.

The school handbook now reads:

"To foster the safety and security of the entire community, the University of Portland encourages reporting of all instances of sexual assault. However, no disciplinary action will be taken without the consent of the survivor. To remove barriers to reporting, the University will not pursue potential policy violations of the survivor which occurred in the context of the sexual assault. Likewise, the University will not pursue potential policy violations of a person who comes forward to report sexual assault."

I love good news.

Trigger warning

From The New York Times:

Two police officers have been assigned to desk duty while prosecutors and the police investigate a complaint that at least one of them raped an intoxicated woman after they escorted her into her apartment in the East Village three months ago, the police said on Sunday.

Footage from a nearby bar's video surveillance camera shows the two officers helping the woman into her building on Dec. 7 and returning twice during the next two hours, according to the bar owner, who provided the video to investigators.

The woman was so impaired, that she got sick in a cab and the driver called 911. The video shows the officers helping her home and leaving. It then shows them returning to her apartment 39 minutes later, in which one of the officers notices the video. When the video catches them leaving, it appears as if they're trying to avoid the camera's range.

The Internal Affairs Bureau is conducting an investigation, but no arrests have been made yet.

Via Holly @ Feministe.

Well, this is good news. After community poster Gexx alerted us on Friday to Amazon's sale of a rape simulation game where not only does the player stalk and rape women, but force them to get an abortion, Amazon has now pulled the game from the site. "We determined that we did not want to be selling this particular item," said a spokesperson for the company.

However (and not surprisingly), the video game company, Illusion, is defending the game's right to exist. Their statement: "We believe there is no problem with the software, which has cleared the domestic ratings of an ethics watchdog body."

I wonder what fucked up, misogynist "watchdog group" that was.

Arizona State University has settled with a rape survivor for $850,000.

The young woman was raped in her dorm room by a student who had been previously kicked out of school after accusations of rape, inappropriate sexual comments and touching, and exposing himself to female students and staff. The Arizona Republic reports that he "was allowed to return to campus in August 2003 and to rejoin the football team, but he received no counseling."

"Historically, universities have downplayed rapes," said Joanne Belknap, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and researcher in violence against women. "In general, they don't want people to know about it because people won't want to send their daughters there and women won't want to come."

This is the first settlement to require a statewide system of universities to change the way it responds to complaints of sexual harassment and violence, and it sends a warning to all universities and colleges, Belknap said.

For more information on sexual assault on college campuses and ways to get involved, check out SAFER.

On Monday, Yes Means Yes co-editors Jessica and Jaclyn Friedman will be livechatting on Feministing with contributors Miriam, Samhita and Cara from the Curvature and Feministe about the book.

The chat begins at 3 pm EST. Make sure to check it out!

Algeria's top CIA operative has been accused of drugging and raping two Muslim women in his home, who after nearly two years of investigation, has been returned home to Washington, DC. Since Andrew Warren wasn't just an officer but headed the entire CIA office of security services in Algeria, the case is being perceived as potentially damaging to the U.S. as the new administration makes attempts to wipe clean our Bush-dirtied image in the Muslim world, according to the Washington Post.

While a CIA spokesperson claimed that they "would take seriously, and follow up on, any allegations of impropriety," Warren has yet to be officially charged. I hope this happens soon, considering there's videotaped evidence; apparently Warren has several videotapes of him "having sex" with women, including a tape of him raping one of the accusers, who is shown in a semi-conscious state.

Pretty much everyone else is declining to comment on the case, although WashPo managed to get a jackass to very clearly confuse rape with romance:

Mark Zaid, a private attorney who represents current and former CIA officers, said the case raises questions about the adequacy of the agency's self-policing of its senior officers. All CIA officers are required to report any unofficial contact with foreign nationals, although in practice, the agency sometimes looks the other way when its employees engage in romances overseas, Zaid said.

While cases of rape would be "unbelievably rare," the reality is that some agency employees "are sleeping around while posted overseas -- sometimes brazenly -- and no one does anything about it," he said.

The U.S. government is no stranger to sexual assault accusations, whether as a weapon of war or within the military, and also in cases like this where a top official feels entitled to women's bodies in his stationed country. One of the survivors told investigators that she briefly became conscious during the attack, asking Warren to stop, in which he said to the effect, "Nobody stays in my expensive sheets with clothes on."

However, the Department of Defense has a history of downplaying the existence of sexual assault by their folk. So while we worry about this case and how it's going to effect our relationship with Muslim nations, it also wouldn't be a bad idea to start paying attention to the larger problem surrounding it.

Colorado State University Police Chief Dexter Yarbrough was suspended on a litany of charges, like falsifying police documents - but it was this quote that stuck with me:

Yarbrough told students in a class lecture that "women want the dick, even when they say 'no.' They want the dick."

Ah rape culture, enforced by media, education and police alike!

Thanks to Brad for the link.

A week after I blogged about the the recent case of a lesbian being gang raped right outside of San Francisco, we find that most of the suspects have now been found and arrested.

Two of those in custody are 15 and 16 years old.

Dennis Prager's thoughts on why women have no real right to deny men sex (excuse me, the "giving" of their bodies) couldn't be summarized in just one column. No, Prager needed a sequel to his ode to marital rape.

Jesse takes apart the whole piece, so I won't reinvent the wheel - but I will leave you with my favorite part:

Why would a loving, wise woman allow mood to determine whether or not she will give her husband one of the most important expressions of love she can show him? What else in life, of such significance, do we allow to be governed by mood?

What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? (Emphasis mine)

And that's all I have to say about that.

It takes a certain je ne sais quoi to unabashedly argue in favor of marital rape. Of course columnist Dennis Prager doesn't call it that. No no, he prefers to use some sort of bizarre high school logic about how ladies who really love their man will "give her body" on demand.

It is an axiom of contemporary marital life that if a wife is not in the mood, she need not have sex with her husband. Here are some arguments why a woman who loves her husband might want to rethink this axiom.

And here I thought the "if you really loved me" argument was only relegated to after-school specials! How wrong I was.

First, women need to recognize how a man understands a wife's refusal to have sex with him: A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him. This is rarely the case for women. Few women know their husband loves them because he gives her his body (the idea sounds almost funny).

Haha, because the ideas of men's bodies as commodities is ridiculous, of course! Outside of the insulting notion that men only recognize love through sex, Prager also seems to think that sex is simply about women "giving" their bodies to men. (In fact, he writes some variation of the phrase "give your body" or "deprive your body" multiple times in the article.) The idea that sex could be a mutually enjoyable and wanted expression of love is lost on the dude. Which is actually pretty sad.

Prager goes on to write that men are no more than animals, and that "every man who is sexually faithful to his wife already engages in daily heroic self-control." (Seriously.) But don't worry, gals, Prager has a sensitive side:

Of course, there are times when a man must simply refrain from initiating sex out of concern for his wife's physical or emotional condition.

Talk about a keeper!

Yes Means Yes contributor (and long-time Feministing commenter) Thomas actually has a great essay that gets to the heart of what's wrong with Prager's ideas about sex:

We live in a culture where sex is not so much an act as a thing: a substance that can be given, bought, sold, or stolen, that has a value and a supply-and-demand curve. In this "commodity model," sex is like a ticket; women have it and men try to get it.

In this case, Prager seems to believe that men have an inherent right to the whole frigging box office.

Melissa, Jesse and Jeff have more.

Trigger warning

This is pretty devastating. Last Saturday in San Francisco, a lesbian was beaten and repeatedly raped by four men, while the perpetrators "made comments indicating they knew her sexual orientation." They then left the 28-year old naked outside of an abandoned apartment building, who was helped by someone living nearby.

This year has brought an increase in violence against LGBT individuals and a dramatic spike in murders resulting from LGBT hate crimes. And not surprisingly, some folks believe that anti-LGBT legislation such as California's Prop 8 is what is fueling the fire. Avy Skolnik of the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) responded:

"Anytime there is an anti-LGBT initiative, we tend to see spikes both in the numbers and the severity of attacks. . . People feel this extra entitlement to act out their prejudice." (Emphasis mine)

The NCVAP is beginning to conduct research in the states that had gay marriage bans on the ballot this year to document the correlation with hate crimes.

Police in Richmond are offering a $10,000 reward to those who could lead them to the attackers. In the meantime, the local rape crisis center has set up a trust fund for her. Just donate in honor of "Jane Doe Richmond."

Trigger Warning

Apparently there's a comic called Rapeman that features a superhero who sexually assaults women who have "wronged" men. Anyone know anything about this craziness?

Thanks to Maddy for the link.

Our lovely readers in LA are having a Feministing Holiday Happy Hour next week to benefit SAFER, an amazing organization that fights against sexual assault on college campuses. Here's a bit of info:

Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER) provides organizing training and support to college and university students so that they can win improvements to their schools' sexual assault prevention and response activities. By offering students the necessary support and resources, confidence-building and leadership training, SAFER empowers student activists to rally the community and push school administrations to take action.

We're bummed we can't make it, but we'll be there in (holiday) spirit! Check out their community post for details, and check out the facebook event.

Women in playing dead for photography and fashion purposes might be considered high art or cutting edge marketing, but it is usually just a tacky excuse for sexist art and the reason it is considered avant garde is because it is offensive. That type of art annoys me.

**This images are not safe for work and are potentially triggering.**

Exotified images of women of color being tortured and images put together to play to the fantasy of "savage" with sexual overtones is actually just deeply disturbing. I am well aware that you can't curtail someone's fantasies, but I argue you sure as hell can analyze them. Women's bodies placed in native and indigenous seeming contexts where they are being dragged and eluding to torture or essentially comparing their bodies to animals to be hunted is a shocking display of colonial misogyny and woman hate. This calendar should be protested.

This is pretty appalling. An Illinois woman is suing Waukegan radio station WXLC for being sexually assaulted on a "date" she won from one of their contests.

The station promoted Travis Harvey as a "great" and "kind" guy in their challenge, "Win a Date with Travis," which she ended up getting after being asked a series of questions by Harvey along with other contestants. So after being tested and judged as to whether she was an adequate "date" for the bachelor, Harvey invited her to his house on the night of their oh-so-special date where he drugged and raped her.

And this all happened despite the fact that Harvey had a record, which the station failed to find out:

Baizer [the rape survivor's attorney] said Harvey had previously been convicted twice of violating a domestic violence order of protection taken out by another woman. The radio station was negligent for not checking Harvey's record, and for promoting him as a safe--and desirable--date, the suit alleges.

To top it off, Harvey himself was only charged with criminal sexual abuse and is just serving probation for a measly year. (Since there was no physical evidence.) *Fuming*

h/t to Veronica.

More and more cases are popping up where men are being acquitted of rape with the defense that they were sleepwalking so they didn't realize they were raping someone. Common sense-wise, this holds almost no water, yet it seems to be a viable defense for some courts.

Jason Jeal, a 37-year-old roofer with no medical history of sleepwalking, admitted sex had taken place. But he was cleared of rape after he insisted he had been asleep and had no idea what he was doing.

Mrs McKenna, a middle-class mother of one whose husband holds a respectable full-time position, said the acquittal in June had left her feeling 'shocked and degraded'.

Last night, she waived her right to anonymity to highlight her concern that attackers will increasingly use the defence that they were asleep. She has already gained the support of MPs and campaigners who argue the sleepwalking defence 'defies common sense'.

Apparently, carrying out sexually violent acts in your sleep is called 'sexsomnia' and is condition where you carry out "indecent" acts in your sleep. I think it should probably be more aptly titled "rapesomnia" since sex assumes consent.

I find this story and the other examples of the sleepwalking defense to be extremely troubling. Thoughts?

This is just sad. Remember the man that took modelizing to an even more deplorable level? Well, he was found guilty of 1 count of rape and 15 counts of sexual assault.

A Beverly Hills fashion designer, once touted as a future star of the catwalks, was found guilty Thursday of sexually assaulting seven girls and young women, capping a two-month trial that offered a sordid portrait of the fashion world.

The jury of six men and six women deliberated for seven days before finding Anand Jon Alexander guilty of one count of rape and 15 counts of sexual assault and other charges.

In general I don't really support incarceration, but since it is usually the only tool we have access to when sentencing for rape, it is sadly one of our only options. Anand Jon shouldn't be allowed to use his influence to manipulate women and then rape them. It is disgusting. It is necessary and should be noted when the criminal justice system takes the testimony of women seriously in rape cases.

But I do want to take an opportunity to talk about two factors that I think are also at play here that are not being talked about. The first is the way women are treated in the modeling industry and how they are often taken advantage of in unfair or abusive ways and the second is Anand Jon's race and citizenship.

An industry that functions off the objectification of women's bodies will create sexist work conditions if they are unchecked or deeply functioning within the constraints of capitalist patriarchy. Furthermore, women are frequently competing to get to the top and make a career out of modeling which also results in compromising situations whether by choice, by demand or by necessity. Unfortunately, I don't think Jon is alone in his sexual abuse of women in the modeling industry.

But I also think the fact that he is South Asian makes him an easy person to find guilty and throw our (deserved) disgust at, since he is not American, but an "other" that engages in those deplorable things that "others" do. Pushing the blame outside of the context of any type of homegrown abuse that happens within the US (or Western)-centric modeling industry gives us the ability to not be self reflective. This doesn't in any way minimize or justify Jon's deplorable behavior, but more to situate it within the historical power relations at play in the narratives surrounding the sexual assault of white women by brown men. Despite his own behavior that should be punished, I think it is high time we take a hard look at modeling as an institution and think about the sexist stereotypes it promotes that frequently fetishize and make normal the sexual abuse of women.

There are many misperceptions about the role of women in the Iraq war. We have written about the role and rate of sexual violence in the military and this is an interesting radio interview with a several women that have served in the Iraq war. It goes into the role of women in the military and in combat, specifically debunking the assumption that women don't engage in combat or security. It also includes a call from a listener who asks if we as Americans want "our" women having the potential threat of being POWs and what that means to which Kristen Holmstedt replies that she doesn't feel women's bodies are any more valuable as POW's as men's. I think this is really really interesting.

While we talk about women and war, one listener asks, "why are we glorifying war?" So while we can on one-hand fight for the rights of women in war, it is always important to step back and think about what we are actually supporting. I know most of us anti-war folks do, but it is a slippery slope from full inclusion and equitable treatment for all constituents in the military to working for an end to the war in Iraq.

Finally I was waiting patiently for them to bring up sexual trauma in the military and towards the end they get into it and one woman speaks frankly about her experience with sexual harassment in the military and how the military dealt with it. Really upsetting.

Check it out here and let me know what you think.

Sorry to conflate two issues, because in the same breath that I was going to post something for Veteran's Day to remind us of the soldiers in Iraq and that we must hold a new administration accountable to get them the fuck out, this article popped up on my screen, and, well, it is really not cool.

We were outraged to find out Palin allowed rape victims to be charged for their own rape kits, but we didn't know she learned how to do it from the Pentagon. According to Penny Coleman at Alternet, TRICARE, the Pentagon's healthcare plan doesn't cover rape kits either.

Currently, forensic examinations are not covered for beneficiaries in civilian health care facilities through TRICARE medical plans because TRICARE "may cost share only medically or psychologically necessary services or supplies. Forensic examinations are not conducted for medical treatment purposes, but for the preservation of evidence in any future criminal investigation and/or prosecution."

The decision to treat rape kits as purely evidentiary, ignoring the very real medical and psychological benefits to the victim, is reprehensibly primitive thinking. Making sure that those legislative changes happen as planned would be a long overdue step out of the primal ooze that has slimed our military in the eyes of our citizens and the world.

Disgusting.

I got a bunch of emails from readers about a recent episode of The Office that contained what all agreed was a non-funny joke about rape (though there's never really a funny rape joke, is there?). I hadn't seen the episode and couldn't find it anywhere - luckily, one of my students at Rutgers was kind enough to send it my way.

I generally really love The Office and think that its jokes - even on subjects like race and sexuality - are generally pretty smart and progressive. But I hated this. Thoughts?

Thanks to Alissa for the vid.

Pic from Grant Neufeld.

There's a great article in Minnesota's Star Tribune about college activists' attempts to focus sexual assault training and education on men.

Instead of teaching women not to walk alone at night or to carry Mace, some colleges are trying something much harder -- changing college men.

..."The fact of the matter is that prevention comes down to, largely, males. Because males are primarily the ones perpetrating these crimes," said Lauren Pilnick, sexual violence education coordinator at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

The piece also tells the story of Tyler Jones, a senior at the University of Minnesota who went through sexual assault prevention training and found himself using that education in a barroom exchange:

"Hey, see that girl over there?" Jones recalled an acquaintance asking, nodding toward a woman he wanted to take home. "She's almost drunk. Not quite drunk enough. ... What shot should I buy her?"

There was a time, Jones says, when he might have laughed off the remark. Not anymore.

"You want to buy her something really strong to like, basically knock her out?" Jones, a University of Minnesota senior, recalled saying. "Man, that's not right. That's rape. That's sexual assault."

The acquaintance looked stunned. "Whatever," he mumbled, and walked away.

I think moments like these are incredibly important: Having men name assault, and calling it what it is to their peers - especially in a culture that so often puts the focus of sexual assault prevention on women.

Wow. The FBI rounded up 600 adults and rescued 47 children in 29 different cities for sex trafficking of minors.

"Sex trafficking of children remains one of our most violent and unconscionable crimes in this country," Pistole said.

The 47 rescued children ranged in age from 13 to 17, and all but one are female. Of these, Pistole said, 10 had been reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Child prostitution has taken on a new urgency in recent years with the growth of online networks where pimps advertise the youngsters to clients. The FBI generally gets involved in child prostitution cases that cross state lines.

A University of Pennsylvania study estimated that nearly 300,000 children in the United States are at risk of being sexually exploited for commercial purposes.

Those are staggering statistics. There is no other demographic data on the youth, but I do wonder what impact the declining economy has had on this issue.

via AP.

Via DCist and The Washington Times:

The paper signs began arriving last week in the mailboxes of the roughly 1,200 violent and child-sex offenders across the state with a letter explaining how they are to comport themselves on Oct. 31.

"Halloween provides a rare opportunity for you to demonstrate to your neighbors that you are making a sincere effort to change the direction of your life," the letter states.

In addition to posting the sign, the offenders must stay at home, turn off outside lights and not answer the door, according to the letter obtained by The Washington Times.

Samhita has written about this before, CA law requiring former sex offenders to live a certain distance from parks and schools, and GPS tracking devices. I know the subject of policing of sex offenders is a touchy one, but I think I agree with Samhita that these policies don't get at the overall problem here, which is the lack of services to address the underlying problems. Also, the stigmatization of formerly incarcerated people is a serious problem. Once someone has been incarcerated, regardless of how law-abiding they might be for the rest of their lives, they are consistently discriminated against.

Also I think this plays up on the idea of Halloween as a heyday for child predators. You know all those tales parents tell their kids about razor blades in unwrapped candy? Maybe it's linked to religious campaigns against Halloween, a celebration with pagan roots.

What do you all think?

Please file this under WHAT THE FUCK? If that line of defense works, someone please bring me some oxygen before I die. It is interesting though how social networking sites have become forms of evidence. I guess we better be careful we don't smile too much in our Myspace and Facebook pictures, lest we get accused of looking too happy to have been a victim of sexual violence.

Thanks to Martina for the link.

This PSA just about takes the victim blaming cake and plays off several inaccuracies about sexual violence towards young women.

TRIGGER WARNING.

Cara takes it to task at the Curvature. I am disgusted by this video.

Update: After thinking about this some more, I think what is upsetting about this is that it perpetuates the belief that rape is a young woman's fault and that if parents buy their daughters alcohol they are putting them at risk of rape. I am assuming that there is a harm reduction campaign around parents monitoring alcohol intake of youth by providing it for them and probably providing a place for them to drink it.

It is victim-blaming to suggest it is the fault of parents for buying alcohol or the fault of their daughter to be drunk and therefore gotten herself raped. What about telling young men to not rape drunk women? That is what the focus of the PSA should be. Perhaps another conversation about youth and alcohol consumption is needed, but let's not tangle the issues. Alcohol is not the cause of misogyny and sexual violence against young women.

Really?

Thanks to Maranda for sending this in. I can't think of any explanation for this, it is just reprehensible.

UPDATE: The ad says, "Easy Drinking Taste. For people who like things that are "easy" and "drinking." It is hard to read.

It is no secret that women in the male entertainment industry are often subject to harsh conditions, violence, lack of pay and sometimes murdered. But I think the abuses faced by women that have recently immigrated are harsher, especially when they may not have networks developed yet, they may not understand the legal system or aren't sure who they can turn to or if they are still waiting on papers, oftentimes fear will keep them silent.

Most of the time the women are paid next to nothing, $2 for a dance, $10 for a set and $40 for an hour.

via AP.

The scene plays out in immigrant neighborhoods across New York, providing a key source of employment for immigrant women and a haven for men seeking to stave off the loneliness of being far from home. It is a perfectly legal form of entertainment -- there is no stripping, but plenty of hand-holding.

But some of the women say the clubs have a darker side. They complain about exploitative management, sexual advances from clients and even violence. A dancer was recently shot and killed in Queens, and one of the city's largest dollar-dance venues is now the target of a federal lawsuit.

They have yet to find a gunman for the young woman that was killed. They didn't mention her name in the article. Ultimately, the dancers have been coerced to put up signs saying they are treated fairly, but frankly they don't have much of a choice.

Furthermore, the article discusses how this is an old form of entertainment for lonely men and became popular during the depression. Since the economy is tanking, I wonder if there has been an increase in violence faced by women working in all facets of the male entertainment industry. Finally, suggesting that this is the old form of work, one wonders why dancers aren't treated better, even with benefits and stock options. Sometimes the obvious seems ridiculous because sexism is so ingrained in how we look at exotic dancing.

Trigger Warning

I'm way late to this, but I thought it was worth posting anyway. A woman has brought a lawsuit against against NYC's Metropolitan Transportation Authority after she was raped on a train platform three years ago and no one helped her.

And the victim, now 25, told the Daily News this weekend that she forgives her attacker ("I know he was sick in the head"), but not the token booth clerk clerk at the 21st Street station, "I can't forgive those five seconds when I stared into his eyes, screaming for help, imploring him with my tears and all I got back was a cold stare."

The victim's suit, filed two years ago, claims the MTA is negligent for not properly training its subway workers as well as lacking the proper communication tools between a booth and the platform below. As the woman, now 25, was being attacked, she says not only did the token booth clerk see her yet stay in his booth, but another conductor whose train entered during the attack saw her being assaulted and allowed his train to leave the station. The only action taken by both the clerk and the conductor respectively was to call into their command center for further help.

Apparently token booth clerks are not supposed to leave their booths, but I have a hard time believing he couldn't have done anything.

When asked in a pre-trial deposition why he didn't try to at least scare away the attacker by informing him that police were on their way, he said, "I did not even think about it." He says that when the woman was taken out of his view to the platform for the ten minutes that followed, he did "nothing really. I was just waiting for the police."

This absolutely terrifies me to my core.

Family Guy, which I must admit I enjoy, seems to have a thing for rape jokes. And I'm getting sick of it.

The most recent episode, I Dream of Jesus, featured this conversation with Peter and a waiter (Peter is trying to get the waiter to give him a jukebox record he likes):

Peter: Can I have that record? I love that song. I'll let you have sex with my daughter...

Waiter: I don't know...let's see what your daughter looks like.

P: She's...uhh...(pans past Meg to "hot" girl)...right there!

W: Ok, I'll do her. But can you tell her to cry and beg me to stop?

P: I think that can be arranged.

And this isn't the first time the show has made light of violence against women. Usually, I'd consider Family Guy one of my (Un)Feminist guilty pleasures, but I think I have to cut the show off completely. Sigh.

Thanks to Caitlin for the heads up.

Wow, check out this amazing little girl. Nujood Ali, all of 10 years old, went to court and requested a divorce from a husband (three times her age) who beat and sexually abused her. The LA Times reported:

On Tuesday morning, the divorcee, possibly the world's youngest, once again became a schoolgirl.

"I'm very happy to be going back to school," she said, waiting in her ramshackle home for her younger sister Haifa to get ready. "I'm going to study Arabic, the Koran, mathematics and drawing. I will do that with my classmates and I will definitely make friends there."

Thanks to Ms. EmmaB for the heads up.

Yeah, I don't have much sympathy for creepy modelizers. The modeling industry has enough problems, we don't need to add sexual perverts or serial rapists to the mix.

According to the LA Times,

He was touted as the next big thing, an up-and-coming clothes designer who landed a prime spot as a guest on a reality fashion television show.

But prosecutors told jurors that designer Anand Jon was in reality a "serial rapist" who exploited his position in the glamour industry to lure young aspiring models to his Beverly Hills apartment, where he lived out his sexual fantasies in a series of assaults.

Continue reading Throw the book at Anand Jon.

Posted by Samhita - October 01, 2008, at 07:50AM | in Beauty, Sexual Assault

Jonathan Martin reports that the Obama campaign was looking to recruit a rape survivor to appear in an ad.

Kiersten Steward, director of public policy at the Family Violence Prevention Fund, served as a conduit between the campaign and victims and women's advocates.

"Obviously, this is a big ask and I haven't seen a script but presumably it will be a brief 'this is what happened to me, we need someone who will fight for women like me, these are the guys to do it,'" Steward wrote in a Sept. 15 e-mail. "Again, that's just my assumption, given how these things usually go."

So it raises the question: Is this exploitative? Or is it simply a compelling way to draw attention to a very serious issue?

My gut reaction was similar to Megan at Jezebel's:

While I'm all for bringing more attention to the issue of sexual assault, I am more than a little disturbed that the Obama camp would be asking a victim to share her story (and likely be attacked by conservatives) in order to score some political points. It's one thing to go to them and offer to share her story, but it's another thing for them to come to her and ask.

But that's not the side I ultimately end up on. Political and issue-based campaigns frequently recruit people with first-hand experience to speak publicly and in ads. I wondered, would my reaction be so strong if the Obama campaign was seeking a laid-off autoworker to discuss his economic policies? Decidedly not.

Is it even possible? CNN is trying to fact check whether or not Palin knew about the police chief charging rape victims for their rape kits.

Jesse breaks down the stupidity of this attempt.

Confederate Yankee and Jim Geraghty think they've got us dirty liberals on the "Wasilla charged rape victims for rape kits" story. Never mind that it was the stated policy of the town and that a state law was passed specifically to counteract Wasilla's ass-backwards policy. They've got spotty, poorly conceived research on their side!

Right. Something that happened repeatedly, was fought against in a state wide initiative, and stood out state-wide as something Wasilla was specifically stubborn about and Palin didn't know about? How is that even possible? And if she didn't know about it, given the problem of violence against women in Alaska (1 in 3 native and indigenous women assaulted in their lifetime), does this sound like someone who effectively deals with the emergencies at hand? I am thinking, hell no.

John Aravosis asks if Sarah Palin's decision to make sexual assault survivors pay for their own rape kits was really rooted in her extreme anti-choice ideology. He speculates that she was opposed to funding the kits because usually victims are offered emergency contraception at the time the rape kit is performed -- and people like Palin consider EC a form of abortion. (Other crazy anti-choicers have gone as far as to suggest that some women fake rape to obtain the EC that usually comes with a rape kit.)

Now, that's a possible explanation. But I think it's equally likely that she forced victims to pay for the kits themselves because of her conservative budget-cutting ways. Not because of her position on choice, but because she just doesn't think the government has a financial obligation to help women in this situation. (Or in just about any situation, really.)

Of course, it isn't necessarily either/or -- both of these things could be factors. I'm guessing we'll never know, because something tells me Palin won't be publicly explaining her decision anytime soon. But the choice angle is something interesting to think about, especially in light of the ongoing battle over physician and pharmacist refusals.

Finding out that Sarah Palin charged Wasilla rape victims to pay for their own rape kits was quite a shock. How much of a shock is another question, but the very idea of making victims pay up to $1200 to gather medical evidence against their attacker seems surprising even for the most conservative of folk.

Well, apparently Palin's history of apathy towards victims of sexual assault doesn't end there.

Shakesville put it all together after finding the details behind Troopergate. While Palin fired her Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan after he failed to reopen an investigation into her sister's ex-husband, her failure to address the epidemic of sex crimes in Alaska led him to plan a trip to Washington to seek federal funding to address the problem, in which he was stopped short in his tracks:

The last straw, the McCain campaign said, was in July, when Monegan planned to travel to Washington to seek federal money for a plan to assign troopers, judges and prosecutors who could exclusively handle sexual assault cases -- one of the state's most intractable crime problems.

In a July 7 e-mail, John Katz, the governor's special counsel, noted two problems with the trip: The governor hadn't agreed the money should be sought, and the request was "out of sequence with our other appropriations requests and could put a strain on the evolving relationship between the Governor and Sen. (Ted) Stevens."

Four days later, Monegan was fired. He said he had kept others in the administration fully apprised of his plans to go to Washington.

Not only did Palin drive her Public Safety Commissioner to Washington due to her failure to address sexual assault in her state, but didn't allow him seeking federal funds because of a fear of mucking a relationship with a senator later indicted for corruption. And then subsequently fired him. Melissa says:

And even if it were true, it still means that Palin is shockingly indifferent to rape and domestic violence in her own state and contemptuous of the people who don't share her indifference--and, weirdly, the McCain campaign appears to believe that's somehow more palatable than Palin having simply fired Monegan for insubordination because she wasn't getting what she wanted from a public servant on her personal family matter.

That's quite an amazing calculation.

Yes it is. It has become painfully clear that not only is Sarah Palin not an advocate for rape victims, she is not an advocate for women. But Palin doesn't hate women; she just doesn't care about them.

Pic via AP.

Hard to know where to begin with a headline like this:

Set aside for a moment the classic journalistic mistake of confusing "sex" with "rape." Here's what this story is about:

Police who videotaped a man having sex with his comatose wife in her nursing home room violated his constitutional rights, an appeals court ruled Thursday.

David W. Johnson, 59, had an expectation to privacy when he visited his wife, a stroke victim, at Divine Savior Nursing Home in Portage, the District 4 Court of Appeals ruled. Therefore, police violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches when they installed a hidden video camera in the room, the court said.

The court ruled that taping the incident with a hidden camera was a violation of the man's Fourth Amendment rights (which protect against unreasonable search and seizure). I gotta wonder, if the nursing home staff suspected this man was raping his wife, couldn't they have performed medical tests on her to determine as much? It seems like installing a hidden camera was not the smartest way to go about this.

Ok, now back to that problematic headline. (Other papers wrote even more appalling versions.) A person in a coma is unable to consent to sex, no matter what her marital status. The framing of this story only serves to reinforce the notion that non-consensual sex in the context of marriage is just sex, not rape. Did Phyllis Schlafly write this headline? The stats: 1.5 million American women are raped or sexually abused every year by an intimate partner. Establishing that husbands do not legally have a right to sex with their wives whenever and whenever they want it was one of feminism's hard-won battles in the U.S. (one that's ongoing in other parts of the world). In some ways, this article is a perfect example of why it can be so hard to get society to acknowledge that this situation rape: This woman no doubt consented to sex with her husband earlier in their relationship, but that's no longer relevant. Now that she's in a coma, she is unable to consent. This is why we fight so hard to keep information about rape victims' previous sexual encounters out of the courtroom: Because consent on Monday does not mean it wasn't rape on Tuesday.

This article also raised questions for me about whether spouses/families receive any kind of information or training about what kind of contact is appropriate with a family member who's in a coma. Anyone know?

Ophelia and Renee have more.

A new report by Child Trends found that approximately 18 percent of women aged 18 to 24 years old report having experienced forced sexual intercourse at least once in their lives. This release from the Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF) notes that the most common types of force are verbal or physical pressure, and being physically held down.

More than half the women forced to have sexual intercourse report experiencing each of these types of force. Approximately a quarter of the women report being physically hurt.

The fact that women are more likely to be assaulted when they're young is not new information, but the people at FVPF are using these numbers to talk about an issue that isn't often discussed: reproductive coercion.

The organization, who had a call out last year for stories of birth control sabotage, has launched the kNOw More initiative, which examines the reproductive health consequences of sexual coercion and violence.

From FVPF President Esta Soler:

The intersection of sexual violence and reproductive health is largely unexplored...With this initiative, we are overcoming stigma and raising awareness about the many women who, while dating or in relationships are forced into choices not their own through rape, sexual coercion or because partners prevent them from using protection. These women are at risk for sexually transmitted infection, unintended pregnancy, HIV, and more. Some suffer miscarriages when they want to carry pregnancies to term. Others become mothers before they are ready. Still others lose their fertility. We are creating a space for women to share stories, and raising awareness among those who may be at risk as well as their friends, policy makers and others.

The stories on the website are chilling. Take this one, from Kylie:

When I first met my ex, he never wanted to use condoms. He did want me to use the 'morning-after pill,' I'll admit. I was quite young and didn't know how to stand up for myself, so I became pregnant after coerced sex. For the next four years, I stayed with my ex for the sake of the baby, suffering the most horrific kinds of abuse - physical and emotional. His 'reason' for abusing me? Because I 'trapped' him through pregnancy. Although the only thing I'd been doing since the pregnancy was begging him to let me leave, he threatened to kill me, the baby, and my entire family if I ever attempted it.

Make sure to spread the word about the initiative - this is too important an issue to overlook.

Multiple readers clued us into the latest incredibly disappointing fact about Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin: under her mayoral leadership in Wasilla, Alaska, rape victims were charged for their own rape kits. Op-Edna explains:

A rape kit is a sexual assault forensic evidence kit, used to collect DNA that can be used in criminal proceedings to assist in the conviction of those who commit sex crimes. The kit is performed as soon as possible after a sexual assault or attack has been committed. It is usually humiliating and uncomfortable for the victim-imagine enduring that and then paying $1200 just so that the criminal who assaulted you might be caught.

Let's put this into perspective. One of the services that almost every American (with the exception of a few hardcore Libertarians, I suppose) agree that our government should provide is policing and investigation into crime, especially of a violent nature. Rape, one of the most difficult to prosecute, disproportionately affects women--young women, in fact. If Palin wants to play fierce mother hen in her stump speeches, I suggest she explain how it is that she wouldn't do everything in her mayoral power to make sure that rapists be caught and prosected.

What adds insult to injury here is her stance on abortion for rape victims. So, not only did she neglect to support women who were raped in getting the evidence they needed to get justice, but she doesn't believe they should have the right to choose what happens with their bodies after they've endured such violation.

What a frickin' feminist.

Note: the Democratic governor changed this heinous policy in 2000.

Earlier this year, we covered the case of a veteran who - despite raping several girls and women and attempted murder - was still buried with full military honors. It looks like Canada isn't too far off, where a recent story gives us a middle aged man who is still receiving the Governor General's Star of Courage award despite pleading guilty to sexually assaulting a teenager:

Guy Armand Raes of Airdrie was recently named a recipient of the Governor General's Star of Courage award. On Wednesday, a week after the announcement, Raes was in front of a provincial court judge pleading guilty to sexually assaulting a teen he befriended through an RCMP investigation. He will be sentenced next week.

Raes, 50, helped rescue a young couple and guided other residents to safety during a massive row house fire in Airdrie, a residential community just north of Calgary, in August 2005.

The court case has no bearing on Raes's award, according to the Governor General's office. "He is being recognized for an act of bravery that happened in 2005," said Marie-Paule Thorn, spokeswoman for the Governor General's office.

Now this is obviously a different case than a serial rapist, but it brings up a broader issue about the dismissal of sexual assault and failure to hold people accountable by military and governmental authority.

Thoughts?

Say it isn't so, Helen!

In a recent interview, actor Helen Mirren talked about being raped and, shockingly, why she doesn't think women should bring date rape cases to court.

She told GQ: "I was [date-raped], yes. A couple of times.

"Not with excessive violence, or being hit, but rather being locked in a room and made to have sex against my will."

Dame Helen said it was rape if a couple engaged in sexual activity but the woman said "no" at the last second.

However, she said: "I don't think she can have that man into court under those circumstances."

Mirren said that she didn't report her own rape because "you couldn't do that in those days."

I feel terrible for Mirren, but I think her comments are really damaging. Jess at the f-word puts it best: "In reality, in this country, right now, men can rape with impunity. And in this country, right now, rapists are getting away with it because of woman-blaming attitudes."

Clearly, they're just ASKING to be raped.

Here at Feministing, we've seen our fair share of victim-blaming articles. But this one takes the asshole, rape-apologist cake.

Trigger Warning

Peter Hitchens (yes, they're related) writes that a rape victim that was drunk "deserves less sympathy."

Wait, it gets worse. As Melissa at Shakesville points out, Hitchens makes flat out false statements like "women who get drunk are more likely to be raped than women who do not get drunk," and that rape is "the inevitable result of the collapse of sexual morality." (You know, because rape never happened before free love, per-marital sex, feminism, etc)

But here's the real kicker:

Of course she is culpable, just as she would be culpable if she crashed a car and injured someone while drunk, or stepped out into the traffic while drunk and was run over.

Getting drunk is not something that happens to you. It is something you do.

Melissa's response:

At this point, as you can see, Hitchens has totally lost the plot. Indeed, "getting drunk" is not something that happens to you--but getting raped is. Comparing getting behind the wheel of a car and getting held down and forcibly penetrated without consent is patently ludicrous, not to mention about as divorced from the actual experience of being raped as I can imagine. Essentially, Hitchens' argument is that women should be responsible for their choices, without ever acknowledging that rape isn't a fucking choice.

Hitchens can't seem to get his head around the idea that rapists rape women, rather than women magically "getting themselves" raped. There's so much more to say, but really, it's impossible to unpack all of the idiocy in this article (including the charming accompanying art above). So I'll leave that you, lovely readers, in comments.

Sometimes, there are no words.

Via The Curvature.

Community blogger MaraJ3791 covered this a couple of days ago, and thankfully some good news has come out of this heinousness.

The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) attempts to mitigate violent crimes in the UK by giving victims reparations. But in their most recent case, a 25-year old woman who was raped was told the £11,000 she was to be given was actually going to be reduced by 25% because she was drinking on the night she was assaulted. She received a letter saying that, "the evidence shows that your excessive consumption of alcohol was a contributing factor in the incident."

"It was just so cruel and unthinking and so wrong because there is nothing you can do to prevent yourself being raped. It is not illegal to go out and have a drink, it is illegal to rape somebody," said the survivor.

The good news is that after some pushing, the decision has been overturned. But unfortunately, this is too little too late for others. The CICA also acknowledged that they had already cut reparations for 14 other rape victims this year, but refused to review the past cases to potentially right their wrong.

"If an applicant accepts our decision then that case is finalised and closed," the CICA said. "If they wish to ask for a review they must do this themselves, in writing."

The fact that these people can be so smug after admitting guilty to blatant injustice through victim-blaming is beyond me. Let the CICA know that they should take responsibility for their shameful actions and give the 14 women their reviews; they certainly shouldn't have ask for it.

Please check out this excellent op-ed from the Sunday Times about the lack of justice for women violently sexually assaulted in indigenous communities.

Some tidbits,

ONE in three American Indian women will be raped in their lifetimes, statistics gathered by the United States Department of Justice show.

The situation is unfair to Indian victims of all crimes -- burglary, arson, assault, etc. But the problem is greatest in the realm of sexual violence because rapes and other sexual assaults on American Indian women are overwhelmingly interracial. More than 80 percent of Indian victims identify their attacker as non-Indian. (Sexual violence against white and African-American women, in contrast, is primarily intraracial.) And American Indian women who live on tribal lands are more than twice as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted as other women in the United States, Justice Department statistics show.

Rapes against American Indian women are also exceedingly violent; weapons are used at rates three times that for all other reported rapes.

They pretty much say it all.

Babies have been sold on the black market for a long time and in highly impoverished areas it often seems like a good idea when you stand to gain thousands of dollars. But inevitably, when you are selling not only the product (a baby) but also hijacking the means of production (a woman's body), illegally, gender based human rights violations are pretty much inevitable.

Call it bizarre business, but the fact is that it is booming. It could be described as a baby factory where women who suffer disability in child bearing source babies. The proprietors are clever enough, as the homes are registered as non governmental organizations(NGOs). In the homes, the operators simply source teenage girls who are pregnant and not interested in keeping the babies. In some cases, some who are desperate to make money are lured into the business. They are taken into the homes where there are men ready to make sure that the girls become pregnant.

I find this last line particularly disturbing. How exactly do they make sure the girls become pregnant? How exactly does one "become" pregnant? Are they forced into having sex perhaps?

And to ascertain that the girls are healthy, HIV and AIDs tests are conducted on the girls before being admitted. The girls stay there until they give birth. Once they are through with this assignment, they are allowed sometime before they leave the homes. Depending on their ability to negotiate, the NGOs, according to our source, pay about N50,000 for the baby. In most cases, the girls do not see the babies they carried for nine months, as there is a ready market for them.

Wow, just wow. The police have been raiding homes and arresting the girls, such as this example where neighbors were complaining that the young women were being held hostage against their will. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me-arrest the girls. Also, Nigeria doesn't have the best track record in taking care of their mother's to be.

Reader Castro tipped us off to this awful and incredibly flip Time article about a sexual assault that occurred decades ago:

But the story got even better when newspaper suspicions proved true and McKinney was forced to admit she was none other than Joyce McKinney, the former Miss Wyoming who 30 years ago fled Britain to escape charges of kidnapping a Mormon missionary and forcibly having sex with him.

(Emphasis mine.) That's right. The genders are reversed from the way we normally read this sort of bungled news story. But that doesn't make it any less appalling. (Renee at Womanist Musings had a great post on this awhile back.)

In fact, let's just count up this article's offenses:

• Defines an act of sexual assault as a "sex scandal." The headline should read "Cloner dogged by sexual assault." A sex scandal is what John Edwards is experiencing right now, in the wake of his consensual affair. It is distinct from sexual assault, which is what Time is talking about in this article.
• Uses the phrase "had sex with" in lieu of "raped" or "assaulted." (We've discussed this before...)
• Perpetuates the totally false idea that because the victim did not try to escape, that means the act was consensual. (Cara has written about this a lot.)
• Names the victim.

Ugh. Write the Time editors here, and ask them to seriously reevaluate how they write about rape -- regardless of the victim's gender.

I'd say that's a good idea. Via BBC News:

Gamma-butyrolactone and 1,4 butanediol are available in cleaning fluids and industrial solvents, but when swallowed together they turn into GHB.

Scientific advisors have suggested these were increasingly becoming "a legal substitute" for GHB and may have been used in sexual attacks.

The chemical industry will be consulted before any change to the law is made.

GHB is already banned in the UK due to the prevalence of its usage for sexual assault but the separate chemicals are not as of yet. A number of kids were hospitalized last year when the ingredients were found in the toy "Aquadots" and - like little kids tend to do with toys - they ate them.

Picture via BBC.

Girls Gone Wild crew supervisor Matthew O'Sullivan, 37, was arrested for sexually assaulting a 20 year-old woman on the "party bus" while the show was filming in Long Island, New York.

[Trigger Warning]

At O'Sullivan's arraignment yesterday, Suffolk County prosecutors said he and the victim started touching and kissing, which she had no problem with.

But things took a tawdry turn when he allegedly pulled down her shorts and underwear as he put his hands around her throat to keep her from running out.

The young woman was able to break free when her friends came on the bus. The pals yanked back a curtain and saw her struggling with O'Sullivan, prosecutors said.

The friends called 911 and the victim was able to flag down a passing police car...

Seriously, when is someone going to shut this fucking operation down? How many more women have to be assaulted by Joe Francis and Co. before something is done? And yeah, I realize that you can't put them out of business because of the actions of a few of their employees, but it's clear that this company breeds and condones violence against women.

Via Gothamist.

The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released a report yesterday afternoon on the prevalence of sexual violence in juvenile detention centers. An estimated 4,072 accounts of sexual violence were reported during 2005 and 2006:

An estimated 36 percent of the allegations of sexual violence in juvenile facilities were youth-on-youth nonconsensual sexual acts, such as rape and forcible sodomy; 21 percent were youth-on-youth abusive sexual contacts, such as unwanted touching or grabbing with the intention to exploit sexually.

About 32 percent of all allegations of sexual violence reported in state juvenile systems and local or private juvenile facilities involved staff sexual misconduct, defined as any act of a sexual nature directed toward a youth, either consensual or nonconsensual; 11 percent involved staff sexual harassment, including repeated comments or demeaning references of a sexual nature to a youth.

Victims of substantiated incidents of youth-on-youth sexual violence were more likely to be male (73 percent) than victims of staff-on-youth violence (49 percent). Females were more likely to be victims of staff sexual violence than victims of youth-on-youth sexual violence (51 percent versus 27 percent).

Check out the entire report.

Yesterday the House held a hearing on sexual assault in the military, a topic we've written on repeatedly. Not just the insanely and disturbingly high rates of sexual assault, but the effect is has on female vets.

Rep. Louise Slaughter reintroduced the Military Domestic and Sexual Violence Response Act, which would establish an Office of Victims Advocate within the Department of Defense and hopefully improve efforts to respond to cases of sexual violence and harassment in the military.

At the hearing, sexual assault survivor Ingrid Torres testified. What an incredibly brave woman:

"The road after sexual assault is a long and challenging one. As is typical of violent crime, I suffer from PTSD, violent nightmares, and depression. I still wake in the night, he still comes after me in my dreams... Because of the impending courts martial, I was advised not to talk openly about the case, which caused rumors and misconceptions to run rampant. There was no escaping it and no making it better. The hostility grew with my silence...Ultimately, our society still publicly and privately tries the victims in sexual assault cases. Rape is the only crime where the victim has to prove their innocence."

RH Reality Check has more.

In other congressional news, yesterday the House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act. Bush has vowed to veto the legislation. Because he likes making $1 to your 76 cents, dammit.

Not only does this headline from 10News in San Diego victim-blame in the worst (and perhaps most common) way, the article itself is no dream either. Not once are the words 'rapist' or 'men' mentioned. Check out the lede, for example:

San Diego police are investigating a rising number of rapes involving young women who go on drinking binges, becoming too intoxicated to fight back or say "no," it was reported Tuesday.

What's so hard about instead writing, "San Diego police are investigating a rising number of rapes involving men who attack intoxicated women." It's shorter, more accurate, and doesn't blame women for being raped. It's like magic! I guess I won't be holding my breath.

via Scott, this is a truly disgusting story out of my home state:

A fellow student-athlete at Iowa alleged she was sexually assaulted by two football players on October 14, 2007. Within 36 hours of the assault the victim reported the incident to the highest levels of the Iowa Athletic department. Including athletic director Gary Barta, head football coach Kirk Ferentz, associate athletic director Fred Mims, and a faculty member. According to the victim's mother all of these individuals encouraged the victim to allow them to handle an on campus investigation rather than reporting the assault to authorities.

Left to handle the investigation, the mother states Iowa officials did nothing for over three weeks. In fact, one of the alleged perpetrators even moved in three doors down from the victim, and the victim says she was constantly harassed by the men and received no protection from university officials. Ultimately, she contacted the local police on November 5, over three weeks after the assault. This finally prompted an action from Iowa. On November 13, Coach Ferentz announced that the two players charged with sexual assault were suspended. Although he did not disclose why the two men were suspended. This was almost a month after he became aware of the sexual assault allegations.

Scott pointed out to me that this Iowa case sounds a lot like U.S. v. Morrison. In that case -- which went all the way to the Supreme Court -- Christy Bronzkala, a student at Virginia Tech was raped by two football players. The college punished one of the athletes but not the other, and when a state grand jury failed to charge either man with a crime, Bronzkala sued under the Violence Against Women Act. (VAWA initially had a clause that said women could sue their abusers/attackers in federal court. That provision was struck down when Bronzkala lost her case.)

Looking back, the thing that is most striking to me now about U.S. v. Morrison is what a sadly typical tale it is. I mean, just yesterday the SAFER Blog posted on a Clemson football player who -- despite accusations that he punched his girlfriend and threw her down the stairs -- will remain on the team. It becomes so painfully clear, after reading story after story like this, that in 9 cases out of 10, college authorities value their athletes more than the women on their campus.

UPDATE: In a previous version of this post that MovableType must have gobbled up, I also linked to our posts on the DeAnza rape case, and some of Cara's great blogging on this issue -- and put in a plug that you should totally go sponsor her for her blogathon fundraiser to benefit RAINN.

Yesterday the Washington Post had a piece on the backlog of untested rape kits in the U.S.

Rape kits can help identify unknown assailants by matching DNA profiles obtained from evidence to profiles in the FBI's national DNA database. The kits can confirm the presence of a known suspect's DNA, corroborate a victim's version of events or exonerate innocent suspects.

Most states are not required to notify victims if their evidence has not been tested, so people usually have no idea whether their kits have been processed. Many victims assume that silence from the police means that their kit did not yield helpful information. A much-delayed National Institute of Justice report on the state of the rape-kit backlog is due to be submitted to Congress in the fall; experts on the crime expect it to show that a significant backlog remains.

(What's in a rape kit? The Denver Post did this graphic to explain.) This is an issue that many, many local newspapers have covered, stating the backlog numbers in the local community and (usually) highlighting one survivor's frustration with the system. But there's been little national action on this issue in several years.

It's not only the processing of rape kits that's at issue -- it's access. Some women have been denied them altogether. Take this story from last year about a Howard University student who was repeatedly denied rape kits at several DC hospitals.

I'd really like to know more about how rape-kit processing works. Is there a queue, where every new kit is just added to the line? Or is this a situation where uninsured and other women at a disadvantage in the medical system get shunted to wait in line, while others can jump ahead and have their kits processed right away? Does it matter what sort of attorney you have prosecuting your rape case? I'd love to hear from someone who knows more about this.

In the meantime, take action! The Post had some great suggestions for how Congress can start fixing this situation. Write your Senators and Representatives ask Congress to:

• Require that states that receive grants to use at least 30 percent of the money to pay for testing backlogged rape kits


• Build in accountability by requiring that states report how many rape kits are tested annually


• Lift restrictions against states using the grants to pay private labs for DNA testing; crime lab directors across the country have cited this as a reason that they have not applied for or been able to fully spend their grant money


• Remove an amendment that would require states to expand their DNA databases to include all felons and certain arrestees. Adding people who have not been convicted of any crime to DNA databases raises civil rights and civil liberties concerns, adding unnecessary controversy to the program.

Sexualized violence comes with the territory of war. It is an age old tactic and also a byproduct of the pressure of war and the insistence on overt misogyny. So it is no surprise that according to the AP 15 percent of women that have served have experienced some form of sexual trauma. That shouldn't make it any less revolting.

Of the women veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who have walked into a VA facility, 15 percent have screened positive for military sexual trauma, The Associated Press has learned. That means they indicated that while on active duty they were sexually assaulted, raped, or were sexually harassed, receiving repeated unsolicited verbal or physical contact of a sexual nature.

Rape is clearly not only a weapon of war, but a byproduct of it creating an internal dysfunction within the military industrial complex.

via AP and ThinkProgess.

And sign this petition. Tomorrow is the three-year anniversary of LaVena Johnson's death (on July 19), which was ruled a suicide but was, in all likelihood, a rape and murder.

Phillip Barron has been working incredibly hard to bring attention to her case. And you may have read about LaVena recently on Feministing, or from Cara, Megan at Jezebel, Gina at What About Our Daughters, and Kate at Broadsheet,.

Retired Army Col. Ann Wright explains what we all want investigated:

From the day their daughter's body was returned to them, the parents had grave suspicions about the Army's investigation into Lavena's death and the characterization of her death as suicide. In charge of a communications facility, Lavena was able to call home daily. In those calls she gave no indication of emotional problems or being upset. In a letter to her parents, Lavena's commanding officer Captain David Woods wrote: "Lavena was clearly happy and seemed in very good health both physically and emotionally."

In viewing his daughter's body at the funeral home, Dr. Johnson was concerned about the bruising on her face. He was puzzled by the discrepancy in the autopsy report on the location of the gunshot wound. As a US Army veteran and a 25-year US Army civilian employee who had counseled veterans, he was mystified how the exit wound of an M-16 shot could be so small. The hole in Lavena's head appeared to be more the size of a pistol shot rather than an M-16 round. He questioned why the exit hole was on the left side of her head, when she was right handed. But the gluing of military uniform white gloves onto Lavena's hands hiding burns on one of her hands is what deepened Dr. Johnson's concerns that the Army's investigation into the death of his daughter was flawed.

They glued the white gloves onto her hands to hide burns. A literal cover-up. It's so clear that this and other details of LaVena's case don't add up to suicide. And it's sadly not exactly far-fetched that she was sexually assaulted: A full one-third of women veterans report rape or attempted rape during their time in the military. So it's important to keep the pressure on Congress and the military to open an investigation into her death. For LaVena, yes. Absolutely. But also for other military women whose rapes and murders have been covered up. Wright writes,

The military has characterized each of the deaths of women who were first sexually assaulted as deaths from "non-combat related injuries," and then added "suicide." Yet, the families of the women whom the military has declared to have committed suicide, strongly dispute the findings and are calling for further investigations into the deaths of their daughters. Specific US Army units and certain US military bases in Iraq have an inordinate number of women soldiers who have died of "non-combat related injuries," with several identified as "suicides."

Please sign that petition today. There may also be a legal fund established in the near future. We'll keep you posted.

Ok, so I know we haven't blogged about the latest McCain rape joke news. In case you missed it, McCain allegedly told this joke in 1986:

Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, "Where is that marvelous ape?"

Classy, huh? McCain's spokesperson at the time denied it, though the reporter who recorded the joke, Norma Coile, said, "I'm not sure exactly what the wording was of the joke, but something was said. Some joke involving a rape and ape was said. Enough women repeated it to me at the time and the McCain campaign had a non-denial denial."

Yes, the "joke" is appalling. But I think the McCain campaign's response to the joke resurfacing was even worse. A spokesperson defended McCain's humor this way:

"He's long said that he's said and done things in the past that he regrets," Rogers said. "You've just got to move on and be yourself -- that's what people want. They want somebody who's authentic, and this kind of stuff is a good example of McCain being McCain."

I think there are enough examples that we can conclude this is true. Just McCain being McCain.

This is horrible. An 11-year-old girl in Milwaukee was sexually assaulted by "as many as 20 men" and boys (ranging in age from 13 to 40) -- the last of whom was recently sentenced.

Seventeen-year-old Terrell Jefferson was the 14th person punished for his role in the Labor Day 2006 assault. Authorities said as many as 20 men and boys engaged in sex acts with the girl over several hours. A 16-year-old girl was accused of helping get the younger girl to take part. [...]

A number of women in the girl's neighborhood said the males involved were good people who made bad decisions.

"Five years? Ten years? That's ridiculous," said LaToya Bell, 22, sitting on a porch with four others who nodded in agreement. "They (are) getting time for nothing. That girl, she knew what she was doing."

She was 11 years old. I have no words. Go read Gina at What About Our Daughters (who has been following the case) and Renee at Womanist Musings.

An 18-year old girl from Auckland has accused four players of the England rugby union team of raping her, and the team has gone into victim-blaming overdrive.

But what has since followed that night at the Hilton is a mountain of suspicion about the woman's intent and an insane thought from the football union's chief, Francis Baron, that this has all been a "sting". Yes, a plot by the "bitter" All Blacks to bring down English rugby.

...The British paper The Independent said those insiders believed the allegations of rape after the first Test in Auckland were "designed to destabilise" England. "If there had been any substance in the case it should have been dealt with," a Twickenham official said. "The whole episode has been unsatisfactory, but you have to remember that New Zealand are still bitter with us over their exit from the World Cup." (Emphasis mine)

Ri-ight. It's amazing how this young woman has been completely erased and dehumanized - she's just part of a larger plan to bring down a team, she was a willing participant, a groupie, a liar. I'm just so sick of it.

Jessica Halloran, who penned the above article about the case, notes that in the past decade, all English soccer players who have had sexual assault allegations made against them have had the charges dropped. And for the past 28 years, "not one professional footballer from any major Australian football code has been convicted of sexual assault." And something tells me it's not because they're all innocent.

Here's a charming one. Via Jezebel, we find out that the attorney for 26 year-old Kelsey Peterson - a 6th grade math teacher who plead guilty to raping her 12-year-old student - is blaming the victim by using racist stereotypes:

"I resent the term 'child.' You're baby-fying this kid. This kid is a Latino machismo teenager."

You know, so he was asking for it. Just disgusting.

I don't even really understand what this shirt is all about. But it's being sold on Amazon. And it's grossing me out.

Thanks to Anique for the heads up.

So I watched this segment on 60 Minutes this weekend (which was a rerun of an old episode) about African Americans using genetic genealogy to find out about their family history. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are finding out that they have white relatives. The whole segment is super interesting but it killed me that not once did anyone talk about the rape of black women and how that figured in to this genealogy. Wtf, 60 Minutes?

This petition was inspired by the R. Kelly verdict from last week, read and pass along.

Statement of Black Men Against the Exploitation of Black Women

Six years have gone by since we first heard the allegations that R. Kelly had filmed himself having sex with an underage girl. During that time we have seen the videotape being hawked on street corners in Black communities, as if the dehumanization of one of our own was not at stake. We have seen entertainers rally around him and watched his career reach new heights despite the grave possibility that he had molested and urinated on a 13-year old girl. We saw African Americans purchase millions of his records despite the long history of such charges swirling around the singer. Worst of all, we have witnessed the sad vision of Black people cheering his acquittal with a fervor usually reserved for community heroes and shaken our heads at the stunning lack of outrage over the verdict in the broader Black community.

Over these years, justice has been delayed and it has been denied. Perhaps a jury can accept R. Kelly’s absurd defense and find “reasonable doubt� despite the fact that the film was shot in his home and featured a man who was identical to him. Perhaps they doubted that the young woman in the courtroom was, in fact, the same person featured in the ten year old video. But there is no doubt about this: some young Black woman was filmed being degraded and exploited by a much older Black man, some daughter of our community was left unprotected, and somewhere another Black woman is being molested, abused or raped and our callous handling of this case will make it that much more difficult for her to come forward and be believed. And each of us is responsible for it.

Keep reading and sign petition here.

Thanks to Kara for the heads up.

At Thursday's meeting of the UN Security Council along with Condoleeza Rice, a resolution was adopted declaring rape and sexual violence as a “war tactic” that aims to “humiliate, dominate, instil fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group.”

We all know that this has been a long, long time coming, but nonetheless a sigh of relief to see the UN and other groups begin to recognize and document rape as a weapon of war.

Now we need the international community to adopt international law of rape as a war crime; let's hope this speeds the process. Check out the full resolution here.

A controversy has been raging over at Jezebel over a post on the new HBO documentary about the Roman Polanski statutory rape case. (For more on the case, the Smoking Gun has the grand-jury testimony. Potential trigger warning.) Slut Machine (right) and Jessica (left) posted an IM conversation they had about the film. Here's a snippet:

It's true that age of consent laws are imperfect. But there's a vast difference between a 17-year-old girl having consensual sex, and a 43-year-old man giving a 13-year-old girl champagne and Quaaludes and then raping her. And I use the word rape because she did not consent. When the district attorney asked the girl why she did not resist Polanski, she replied, "Because I was afraid of him." (For more on how damaging it is to conflate fear and consent in sexual assault cases, read this post by Cara.)

Slut Machine posted a response yesterday, writing, "Just because we have vaginas, doesn't mean we're all victims." She continued:

I hinted at this a bit in my post about that Roman Polanski documentary, but people really took it the wrong way, saying that I was a rape apologist or something, which is just silly. I think what it comes down to is maybe the divide between second and third wave feminism. Or actually, maybe it's that some people don't accept that feminism isn't monolithic, and that we can (and do) have different views about a number of things, from porno to age of consent, with the one basic truth being that "women are people too." Of course I'm not a rape apologist. But I'm a child influenced by riot grrrl and the sex-positivity movement, so maybe things I say can come off as harsh, and perhaps get misinterpreted by those who don't place as much importance on those things. (Or maybe people placed too much importance on an IM conversation, which is always a more casual form of communication.)

I don't see this as a sex-positive/anti-porn divide. Or a second-wave/third-wave divide. I really don't. And like I said earlier, I'm open to debates about age of consent. I (like many Jezebel commenters, I'd guess) am a sex-positive, third-wave feminist who was mostly upset about the post because it failed to strongly state that 13-year-old + drugged + no consent = RAPE. Just because the victim later said the legal process was tougher on her than the actual incident does not mean it wasn't rape. Just because she was an aspiring actress who'd tried drugs before doesn't mean it wasn't rape. Just because her mom probably shouldn't have left her alone with a lecherous dude doesn't mean it wasn't rape. (Oh, and an IM conversation is more than a casual back-and-forth when it's screen-grabbed and posted on a highly-trafficked blog.)

To a certain extent, I get where Slut Machine is coming from when she nods to the fact that she wants to steer clear of defining all sexually active teen girls as victims. I hear that. The attitude that teenage girls shouldn't be interested in sex -- that they should be demure and never assert their sexuality -- is an attitude we repeatedly rail against when we talk about abstinence-only programs. And I absolutely, 100% get where Kathleen Hanna is coming from when she sings, "I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, babe." But with a non-consensual incident, all that goes out the window. Because we're no longer talking about sex. We're talking about rape.

(This raises some similar themes as my back-and-forth with Moe over "gray rape." Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here.)

This was the headline to a recent CNN update on the R. Kelly trial. This possible "vixen" was as young as 13 years old at the time of the taping. Check out this gem by Kelly's defense attorney:

He juxtaposed that image with the female in the video, who takes money from the man before having sex with him. 'The woman on that tape is getting paid,' he said. 'The woman is a prostitute, not a victim.'

Disgusting.

Just lovely.

This week, Newsweek covered a new HBO documentary on film director Roman Polanski, in which the infamous case where he was charged with drugging and raping a 13-year old girl is discussed. Interesting language Newsweek decided to use to describe the crime:

There was champagne and a Quaalude for refreshments before a trip to the bedroom. When Samantha's mother found out, she called the police. Polanski never denied he'd had sex with her but maintained it was consensual. Samantha said it was not. She also told detectives she'd been drunk before. And she'd had sex before. (Emphasis mine)

Not surprisingly, the general language of the piece has a similar tone, describing the case as Polanksi being charged for "having sex with" a 13-year old. The article ends with:

This deft and subtle film is a fitting tribute to a man—like him or not—whose life deserves more than tabloid headlines.

It absolutely drives me insane how Polanski and other high profile sex offenders like accused Woody Allen are treated like martyrs for having to endure the tabloids for heinous crimes, and labeled as these brilliant, tragic and fascinating men. Is it just me or is there something really disturbing about this?

RH Reality Check has a great piece up about Jackson Katz, an educator and activist who works on gender violence issues.

Katz says, "As a culture, Americans first must take the step in acknowledging that violence against women is not a women's issue, but a men's issue...The first problem I have with labeling gender issues as women's issues is that it gives men an excuse to not pay attention. This is also the problem with calling them gender issues, because the majority of the people in the status quo see gender issues as women's issues."

I'm especially interested in Katz's ideas about how the messages that women get about rape (don't go out at night, don't drink) are risk-reducing rather than prevention - and how those messages completely take men out of the equation.

"These programs focus on how women can reduce their chances of being sexually assaulted. I agree that women benefit from these education programs, but let us not mistake this for prevention...If a woman has done everything in her power to reduce her risk, then a man who has the proclivity for abuse or need for power will just move on to another woman or target," he says.

I highly recommend reading the whole piece - there's even a section where Katz explains how passive sentence construction in the media coverage of violence against women perpetuates the notion that rape is something that just happens to women, rather than something that's perpetrated by another person.

Valena Beety is an attorney and a board member of Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER), an organization that works to empower students and hold colleges accountable for sexual assault in on- and off-campus communities.

Melanie Ross thought Daniel Day, her college classmate, was fun and a decent date - until they were having sex and she told him he was hurting her. She asked him to stop - and he didn’t. After that, Ross broke up with Day, and avoided him.

Unfortunately, because of events a month later, Ross is now suing Day for civil sexual battery.

Her lawsuit against Day is now on appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, in part because of the victim-blaming actions of the trial court judge. Judge Phillip Brown, despite a Georgia rape shield law, compelled Ross to disclose every person she had ever dated, or engaged in any sexual activity with, including their names, dates of interaction, and contact information. This evidence was supposedly to show “consent;� the actual purpose was to humiliate the victim and discourage her and other victims from pursuing these cases. Under Georgia state law, and federal law, a victim’s sexual history with third parties is supposed to be irrelevant. The result of this case is that any victim who brings a civil claim for sexual battery in Georgia must be prepared to discuss all of her previous sexual partners. The judge ultimately found Ross was not raped in part because, as all that testimony showed, she was not a virgin.

The trial court judge not only dismissed Ross’ claims - he ordered her to pay $150,000 for the court costs of her attacker. The judge found there was no evidence to support her claims of rape, in large part because Ross did not remember anything from the encounter: “There’s no witnesses in there. There was no evidence. It’s a closed door. And there’s no possibility that there could be any proof that there was rape...�

This was after the judge had dismissed the evidence: Ross could have received lacerations and redness documented in a rape kit from shaving, and “[b]ruises can come with a bump into furniture or from other causes.� As far as the claim that Day gave Ross a rape drug, defense counsel responded, “neither Day, nor anyone else for that matter, would have to use any type of drug to convince Plaintiff to participate in sexual conduct.�

The judge found that since Ross and Day had previously had a sexual relationship, Ross should have known her claims were “frivolous... there was no reasonable belief that a court would accept Plaintiff’s claims...�

The nightmare of this case, for Melanie Ross and for all future rape victims in Georgia, is that she was forced to discuss in elaborate detail her sexual past, and then she had her claims dismissed in part because she wasn’t a virgin. Moreover, not only did Ross lose her case, the judge fined her $150,000 for bringing it in the first place - a fee sure to dissuade other victims from coming forward with their own claims. This case is currently being appealed to the Supreme Court of Georgia, which can choose to hear it or not - let’s hope they right this wrong before it hurts more victims.

NOTE: As noted by some of the comments in response to my posting on a Georgia state court case, I want to confirm that Daniel Day was charged with sexual battery, a civil charge, rather than criminal rape. Day was not charged with criminal rape, and has furthermore not been found guilty of civil sexual battery.

Starting next year, survivors of sexual assault will be able to undergo anonymous rape kits.

Starting next year across the country, rape victims too afraid or too ashamed to go to police can undergo an emergency-room forensic rape exam, and the evidence gathered will be kept on file in a sealed envelope in case they decide to press charges.

The new federal requirement that states pay for "Jane Doe rape kits" is aimed at removing one of the biggest obstacles to prosecuting rape cases: Some women are so traumatized they don't come forward until it is too late to collect hair, semen or other samples.

Some hospitals already offer anonymous rape kits, but most states refuse to cover the cost of the exam (approximately $800) unless the survivor files a police report.

Beginning in 2009, states will have to pay for Jane Doe rape kits to continue receiving funding under the federal Violence Against Women Act, which provides tax dollars for women's shelters and law enforcement training. States will decide how many locations will offer anonymous rape exams and how long the evidence should be kept.

Awesome.

Thanks to Thomas for the link.

Can we please stop calling every attempt at analyzing pop culture "outrage"? Kthx, moving on.

Annalee Newitz's piece from the San Francisco Bay Guardian last week embarks on the task of justifying the violence and misogyny in Grand Theft Auto 4.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving is lobbying to get the video game rated "adults only" (effectively killing it in the US market, where major console manufacturers won't support AO games) because there's one scene in the game where you have the option to drive drunk. Apparently none of the good ladies of MADD have ever played GTA, since if they had they might have discovered that when you try to drive drunk, the video game informs you that you should take a cab. If you do drive, the cops immediately chase you down. Which is exactly the sort of move you'd expect from this sly, fun game, which hit stores last week.

I actually stand at a different point than MADD and I don't necessarily support the censorship of the game, I don't really think censorship works. The more ratings and labels you put on something, the edgier and sexier it becomes. Censorship doesn't change the fact that violence and misogynist sex scenes make up the bulk of edgy popular culture or that violence is a serious problem for youth today and so is the sexualization of women, along with violence against women.

On some level, I do agree with proponents of GTA 4. Several of my friends have said, "but it is just fun." I don't deny that advances in video game technology are in fact mind-blowing and down right incredible and the they are fun. Hello, I am a blogger, I get the nerd new-cool-fun-fangled-technology thing.

What I can't get down with is justifying blatant misogyny by calling it art.

If GTA4 were a movie, it would have been directed by Martin Scorsese or David O. Russell, and we'd all be ooohing and aaahhing over its dark, ironic vision of immigrant life in a world at war with itself. But because GTA4 is a video game, where players are in the driver's seat, so to speak, it freaks people out. Earlier installments of GTA-inspired feminist and cultural-conservative outrage (you have the option to kill prostitutes!), and concern over moral turpitude from Hillary Clinton (you can beat cops to death! Or anybody!).

I think it is really problematic to lump all criticisms of GTA4 together. I believe at some point, I was written about along with a conservative writer (shudder to think) and that is not giving the full range of view points space to air their concerns. I am pretty sure if a movie had prostitute killing in it, I would write about it, but that is besides the point. GTA4 is not a movie, it is bigger than a movie. In fact, movies switched around their release dates for the release of GTA4. In the first week out it has grossed 500 million dollars. Furthermore, it is played, repeatedly and it is a role playing game, where you are the person engaging in violent acts. It is a fantasy, your fantasy. Perhaps there is a moment of identification like this with movies, but it is different then actually acting something out yourself.

Phyllis Schlafly, who is set to receive an honorary degree from Washington University this week has reiterated her support of marital rape. (Because, sorry, if you think that women who have gotten married have don't have a right to refuse sex - you are supporting rape.)

In an interview with Washington University's student newspaper, Schlafly held her anti-woman ground:

Could you clarify some of the statements that you made in Maine last year about martial rape?

I think that when you get married you have consented to sex. That's what marriage is all about, I don't know if maybe these girls missed sex ed. That doesn't mean the husband can beat you up, we have plenty of laws against assault and battery. If there is any violence or mistreatment that can be dealt with by criminal prosecution, by divorce or in various ways. When it gets down to calling it rape though, it isn't rape, it's a he said-she said where it's just too easy to lie about it.

Was the way in which your statement was portrayed correct?

Yes. Feminists, if they get tired of a husband or if they want to fight over child custody, they can make an accusation of marital rape and they want that to be there, available to them.

So you see this as more of a tool used by people to get out of marriages than as legitimate-

Yes, I certainly do.

Find out how can you can contact Washington University about this honorary degree nonsense here.

Via Right Wing Watch.

(Trigger warning.) In 2003, 21 year-old Ramona Moore - a student at Hunter College in New York - told her mother she was going to Burger King down the street and would be right back. She never came home.

Moore was held in a basement a few blocks away where she was raped and tortured for four days before her captors beat her to death. The police, who Moore's mother begged for help, did nothing to find her.

Sean Gardiner at The Village Voice has a huge piece not only on the police's mishandling of Moore's disappearance - but also how it has sparked a historic racial bias case against the city.

Moore's mother Elle Carmichael is bringing forward a a civil-rights lawsuit claiming that the NYPD has a "practice of not making a prompt investigation of missing-persons claims of African-Americans, while making a prompt investigation for white individuals."

Not exactly shocking news, of course, but the case would be the first of its kind.

To prove racial bias, Carmichael's team would have to "show it's happened in a pattern of instances," says NYU law professor Paul Chevigny. And the only way Chevigny can think of to do so would be to take a large sample of missing-persons cases, identify the race of the people involved, and then determine whether there really is a pattern.

Carmichael's lawyer, Robert Barsch, is apparently attempting to do just that. He tells the Voice that he has heard from a number of black people who have also had their attempts to have police open up missing-persons investigations ignored. And he plans to point to the [Svetlana] Aronov case as a prime example of the flip side of that coin. After all, the NYPD tried harder to find Aronov's dog than they did Romona Moore. (Link added)

Tried harder to find a dog. "If this was a white kid, they would never had done this," Carmichael told Gardiner.

"I had to say to the detectives one day: 'You know, I feel the same emotions and pain as a white person.' "

Read more about Moore and the case against the NYPD at What About Our Daughters? and The Feminist Underground.

Several readers wrote in to tell us about this horrific "piece of flair" that you can send to friends on Facebook through this application. Now, users can create their own buttons so I'm going to assume that the creators of this application didn't make this - a user did. But that's not excuse. Contact the developers of Facebook's "Pieces of Flair" and let them know that rape isn't funny.

UPDATE: The developers of this application have emailed us to let folks know that they've taken the button down and are committed to their program being free of offensive, violent buttons like the one above. Kudos to them.

It's stories like these that make me doubt the idea that people are basically good. (Trigger warning)

Melissa Bruen was sexually assaulted on the University of Connecticut campus while a group of men cheered. Even more distressing is that the assault was retribution for fighting back against another man who was assaulting her.

On a weekend night, Bruen was walking home along a campus trail (actually known as "the rape trail" if you can believe that hit), when she was "picked up by [her] shoulders, pinned up against the pole and 'dry humped' by a stranger."

At first I thought it was one of my friends' attempt at humor, until I heard the man moaning.

I hung up the phone, and shoved the man off me. I am 5'5". He was around 5'11".

"My, aren't we feisty tonight," he said.

I was assaulted when I was very young - I wasn't about to let it happen again. When he came toward me, I grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him down to the ground. I held onto his shoulders and climbed on top to straddle him. He started thrashing side to side, but I was able to hit him with a closed fist, full force, in the face.

A small crowd had gathered, mostly men. Now they seemed shocked. I was supposed to have been a victim, and I was breaking out of the mold. I hit him in the stomach, while clenching my legs around him to prevent another man from pushing me off. In all, it took three men to pull me off my assailant.

He got up and ran off, yelling at me, as if I were the would-be rapist.

Bruen started yelling, "You just assaulted me...He just assaulted me." Instead of coming to her aid, a group gathered around her.

Another man, around 6'1", approached me and said, "You think that was assault?" and he pulled down my tube top, and grabbed my breasts. More men started to cheer. It didn't matter to the drunken mob that my breasts were being shown or fondled against my will. They were happy to see a topless girl all the same. I punched him in the face, and someone shoved me into a throng of others. I was surrounded, but I kept swinging and hitting until I was able to break free of the circle they had formed.

If this doesn't ruin your day, I don't know what will. Though I have to say, I'm grateful to Bruen for sharing her story. Given how prevalent victim-blaming is, writing an article about your assault is no small thing.

What's truly incredible about this story is how it really dismantles the idea that teaching women to protect themselves (via self-defense, specifically) is truly effective. As Melissa points out, "Bruen did everything that she was supposed to do, but instead of being hailed a hero for pummeling someone who sexually assaulted her, she was further assaulted for her trouble." (Make sure to read Melissa's full post by the way.) This isn't to say that I think women shouldn't learn self-defense or fight back against assault - on the contrary, I think they should if that's what's best for them. But it's not an answer to rape culture (in which a crowd of people can stand and fucking cheer as a woman is being assaulted) - and that's what we need to be fighting back against.

Again, big kudos to Bruen for - as she puts it - "get[ting] a few good swings in." Not only against her assailants, but against a culture that would have her silenced.