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“A dream you dream alone is only a dream; a dream you dream together is reality.” — Yoko Ono
Dec
23
Mother’s Disability Featured in Custody Dispute
Filed Under bigotry, courts, disability, discrimination, parenthood, reproductive justice | 10 Comments
Kaney O’Neill is a 31-year-old mother with a 5-month-old son. Her ex-boyfriend, and her son’s father, is now waging an ugly custody battle against her. So far, it’s an experience that countless parents have endured. What makes O’Neill’s story newsworthy, if not rare, is the fact that she has a disability — and her ex is using that disability as evidence that she is an unfit parent.
In September, Trais sued O’Neill for full custody, charging that his former girlfriend is “not a fit and proper person” to care for their son, Aidan James O’Neill.
In court documents, Trais said O’Neill’s disability “greatly limits her ability to care for the minor, or even wake up if the minor is distressed.”
O’Neill counters that she always has another able-bodied adult on hand for Aidan — be it her full-time caretaker, live-in brother or her mother. Even before she gave birth to Aidan, O’Neill said, she never went more than a few hours by herself.
The custody case, expected back before Cook County Judge Patricia Logue next month, raises profound questions about what rights disabled parents have to care for their own children.
Ella Callow, the director of legal programs for the National Center for Parents with Disabilities and their Families, said disabled parents are incorrectly “perceived as unable to perform to standard.”
“No judge wants to be the judge who sends a child home when the child gets hurt,” said Callow, of the Berkeley, Calif.-based advocacy group.
Callow said the bias against disabled parents is such that judges tend to grant custody to an able-bodied partner “even if they have a history that might usually be a heavy mark against them — not having been in the child’s life, a history of violence, etc.”
What Trais is attempting is repulsive, wrong, and inexcusable. But the bigger problem is that parents who try to pull this type of nonsense have a whole lot of backup. It ranges from the multitudes of ignorant online commenters who have agreed with him, to the judges who have ruled previous custody cases based on one parent’s disability, to complete outsiders who feel the right to speak on the matter as experts (emphasis mine):
But Howard LeVine, a Tinley Park attorney not affiliated with the case, said Trais’ concerns are legitimate and may hold legal weight.
“Certainly, I sympathize with the mom, but assuming both parties are equal (in other respects), isn’t the child obviously better off with the father?“
LeVine, who has specialized in divorce and custody cases for the last 40 years, pointed out that O’Neill would likely not be able to teach her son to write, paint or play ball. “What’s the effect on the child — feeling sorry for the mother and becoming the parent?”
Well here we see a bias exposed in all of its glory: you see, Mr. LeVine, all things being equal, the disability wouldn’t factor in to this decision at all.
Dec
10
New Report About Sexual Violence on College Campuses
Filed Under assholes, courts, discrimination, education and schools, misogyny, patriarchy, rape and sexual assault, violence against women and girls | 11 Comments
The Center for Public Integrity has released a three-part report on sexual violence on college campuses, and the response of administrators to such allegations. Part one talks about the culture of secrecy surrounding sexual assault proceedings. Part two talks about the barriers to reporting sexual assault on campus, and how such reports are actively discouraged. And part three discusses how colleges are under-reporting the number of sexual assaults that are committed on their campuses.
Thankfully, the information is presented in a highly digestible form — and I recommend you go read it all for yourselves. But it’s also a huge amount of information, and there are more things to write about it than I can count — from the student told that she would face disciplinary action if she shared the outcome of the sexual assault hearing she had initiated, to the fact that “mediation” (mediation!) is regularly offered as a resolution to allegations of sexual violence, to the administrator who actually told a student that one of her options was to have that administrator call the perpetrator into her office and tell him that what he did was wrong. Schools are actively sweeping allegations under the rug, and since the victim leaving the school is an incredibly common outcome, seemingly also just trying to get rid of the accuser, period.
But in all of this information — and again, there is a lot — one thing in particular stood out at me. And it was the repeated allegation, from many, many sources, that the administrators were motivated by a desire to save the reputation of their schools. Of course, administrators all act appalled at the suggestion. But I can only presume that with so many victims, so many victims advocates, so many victims’ parents, and finally an impartial outside source, concluding independently that this is a main motivating factor, there has to be some truth to it.
This strikes me not because it’s some big surprise, but because it’s a damn travesty. And it’s a travesty not just because the rights and needs of a victim of violence should come before any other such trivial consideration, but also because they’re quite frankly handling their own comparably petty concern absurdly.
Only in a misogynistic rape culture is it possible for an institution to go about avoiding the appearance of sexual assault taking place on their campuses by telling the victim to shut the fuck up rather than by rooting out the offenders and getting them off the campus. It’s a bizarre reaction. For most people, if you want to avoid being seen as a liar, you try not to lie. If you don’t want to be seen as a thief, you don’t steal things. If you don’t want people to think you’re a jerk, you try to be a considerate, nice person. And if you don’t want your campus being perceived as unsafe, you try to make it safer.
Unless, of course, you want to take the easy way out, and making your campus safer involves refusing to partake in a misogynistic culture.
Yet again, we run up against the diametric perceptions of rape as theoretically even worse than murder, and as practically on par with accidentally bumping into someone on the sidewalk. Because rape is, in practice, seen as negligible, no big deal, a molehill turned into a mountain, administrators can dismiss the woman standing in front of them, speaking of being raped the night before. Because rape is, abstractly, treated as the greatest horror one can commit, and one that only a subhuman monster could even consider, those administrators have an even bigger reason to dismiss that woman, lest their institution be seen as a home to those kinds of monsters. They’d rather it be the habitat of actual rapists than perceived as the habitat of mythical ones.
That’s a big problem to unpack, because it’s rooted in so many different aspects of rape culture — from victim-blaming to rape denialism, from the idea that rape is not a common occurrence to the idea that rape is an unstoppable, unpreventable force not worth fighting. But we do know from repeated demonstration that student activism can go a long way towards changing individual school policies. And so if you’re a college student, despite the enormity of the problem, you shouldn’t feel helpless — rather, you should be getting to work. I recommend SAFER’s newly launched initiative, the Campus Accountability Project as a great place to start.
Dec
8
Watching The Wheels
Filed Under Gratuitous Beatles Blogging | 8 Comments
December 8, 1980, a few hours before Lennon was murdered.
Today is December 8, and 29 years ago tonight, John Lennon was lethally shot by a stranger in front of his own home. His wife was walking in front of him. One of his sons was upstairs, waiting for his daddy to come home from the studio and tuck him into bed.
I truly hate thinking about John’s actual death. I’d much rather write about his life. But when it comes to this day, the murder is what I always feel confronted with. When I think of November 29 (the date of George Harrison’s passing), I feel sadness and loss, but I don’t immediately think of cancer. When I think of December 8, I do think of gun violence. And in many ways, I think it’s important to remember why and how John died.
Dec
2
13-Year-Old Girl Commits Suicide After Classmates Spread Nude Photos
Filed Under education and schools, media, misogyny, objectification, patriarchy, sex and sexuality, sexual exploitation and harassment, slut-shaming, violence against women and girls | 61 Comments
Trigger Warning for discussions of suicide, descriptions of non-consensual sexual conduct, victim-blaming and slut-shaming
The Tampa Bay St. Petersburg Times has printed the truly gut-wrenching, tragic story of a 13-year-old girl named Hope Witsell, who committed suicide after a photograph of her breasts, which she sent to a boy’s cell phone, was forwarded all over the school.
At the end of the school year at Beth Shields Middle School, the taunting became so bad that Hope Witsell’s friends surrounded her between classes. They escorted her down hallways like human shields, fending off insults such as “whore” and “slut.” A few days before, Hope had forwarded a nude photo of herself to a boy she liked — a practice widely known as “sexting.” The image found its way to other students, who forwarded it to their friends. Soon the nude photo was circulating through cell phones at Shields Middle and Lennard High School, according to multiple students at both schools. … School authorities learned of the nude photo around the end of the school year and suspended Hope for the first week of eighth grade, which started in August. About two weeks after she returned to school, a counselor observed cuts on Hope’s legs and had her sign a “no-harm” contract, in which Hope agreed to tell an adult if she felt inclined to hurt herself, her family says. The next day, Hope hanged herself in her bedroom. She was 13.
Her death is the second in the nation in which a connection between sexting and teen suicide can clearly be drawn.
I recommend that you go read the full article, because despite the many problems with it, there is a lot of information there, some of which I will not have the time to discuss here.
As Veronica Arreola said on her Twitter, while the media insists on calling this a “sexting-related suicide,” it’s much more accurately referred to as a “slut-shaming suicide.” Because the photograph she sent is not what drove this poor girl to kill herself — the non-consensual spreading of the photograph, and the subsequent reaction that her classmates and all adults in positions of authority had to it seems to absolutely have been what drove her to despair. And that is a truly vital distinction to make if we actually care about the fact that a 13-year-old girl is dead, and why.
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“Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.” — Susan B. Anthony
