Mar

5

Rape Myths Lead to No Justice for Sexual Assault Victims on College Campuses

Filed Under discrimination, education and schools, misogyny, patriarchy, rape and sexual assault, violence against women and girls | 6 Comments

Trigger Warning for discussions of sexual violence and rape apologism.

You have quite likely read on other blogs about part two of the Center for Public Integrity’s report into sexual violence on U.S. college and university campuses. I wrote about part one of the report, A Culture of Secrecy, back when it was released. And A Culture of Indifference is no less brilliant, distressing and enraging. You can check out all the different sections here: A Lack of Consequences for Sexual Assault, An Uncommon Outcome at Holy Cross,  Lax Enforcement of Title IX in Sexual Assault Cases, and ‘Undetected Rapists’ on Campus: A Troubling Plague of Repeat Offenders. Be forewarned, however, that it may be particularly upsetting or triggering. After merely reading the first section, I was personally so filled with rage that my vision actually blurred for several minutes.

Plenty of bloggers have already written about the general findings, the enormous problem of on-campus violence, and the downright insulting (lack of) response from the institutions where they occur. One particularly great piece was written by Sarah from SAFER, over at RH Reality Check, with my favorite small excerpt reprinted below:

Clearly school administrations do not have the same powers as law enforcement, and as such they cannot technically “prosecute a crime.” But students who choose to use the campus disciplinary system realize the difference. What they expect, and rightly so, is that their school is invested in upholding standards of acceptable and unacceptable student conduct, as they often do when passing judgment in a host of other misconduct cases. Students are routinely dismissed from schools for drug charges and plagiarism. Why should a charge of sexual assault be different? Students are betrayed by their schools not because the school is unable to mirror the criminal justice system, but because the refusal to treat sexual assault as a serious breach of student conduct amounts to entirely dismissing the severity of the crime and the trauma undergone by the survivor.

But as I find myself generally compelled to do when presented with the enormity of rape culture, I want to focus on a few specific, small sections from the report’s findings — aspects of the rape culture CPI exposes which I find to be particularly troubling.

Read more

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

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 | 60 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.

Read more

Nov

13

Support Sex-Positive Sex Education

Filed Under action alert, education and schools, feminism, sex and sexuality | 1 Comment

support scarleteenScarleteen is, in my view, the absolute best sex education website out there. And while I can’t claim to be entirely impartial about that assessment — I know Heather, Scarleteen’s founder, and also received a free sex education training through the site this summer — I can say that it’s an assessment I’ve held since long before I had any room for bias.

And right now, Scarleteen needs your help with their fundraising drive. You can read the full letter here, if you wish to learn about all of the things that the site has done this year, and what they plan on doing next year. But the part I want to highlight is this:

What you might not know is that Scarleteen is the highest ranked online young adult sexuality resource but also the least funded and that the youth who need us most are also the least able to donate. You might not know that we have done all we have with a budget lower than the median annual household income in the U.S. You might not know we have provided the services we have to millions without any federal, state or local funding and that we are fully independent media which depends on public support to survive and grow.

With all that Scarleteen does, they deserve a lot more.

What exactly Scarleteen does is not just provide comprehensive sex education, but provide honest, scientifically-sound, non-judgmental, sex-positive, and explicitly feminist sex education. They don’t just talk condoms and STDs — they talk sexual orientation, gender identity, relationships, sexism and double standards, abuse, masturbation, pleasure, and more. They don’t just talk about heterosexual intercourse, but about all sex acts as being equally valid and not existing in an arbitrary hierarchy of importance. And probably most importantly of all to me, they don’t just talk about sex — they include and emphasize in every single discussion of sex the importance and necessity of mutual, affirmative, and enthusiastic consent.

Those of you familiar with my writing will know that sex education is a subject that I feel very, very passionately about. You’ll also know that my standards for sex education are set a good deal higher than the standards we normally see stated in arguments favoring the bare bones of what can be considered comprehensive sex education. Scarleteen lives up to my ideal model over and over and over again. And that is something I’ve found to be very rare.

If Scarleteen is also a site near and dear to your heart, if my gushing has swayed you at all, if sex education is a subject of importance to you, or if you believe in investing in teenagers and young adults so that they become well-rounded, sexually healthy people, I urge you to make the largest gift you can:

  • To donate to Scarleteen by credit card, online check or via a PayPal account: click here and choose the button at the top of that page for the donation amount and style you prefer.
  • To donate by check or money order directly to Scarleteen: make checks payable to Scarleteen and send to: Scarleteen, 1752 NW Market Street #627, Seattle, WA, 98107.
  • If you would like your donation to be tax-deductible: you can donate by check or money order through The Center for Sex and Culture, a fiscal sponsor of Scarleteen online here. To mail a tax-deductible donation, make your check out to The Center for Sex and Culture, writing “For Scarleteen” in the memo. Mail that to: The Center for Sex and Culture, c/o Carol Queen, 2215-R Market Street PMB 455, San Francisco, CA, 94114. They will send a written acknowledgment of your donation to you for tax purposes, and will send us donations made to them on our behalf after deducting a very reasonable percentage.
  • However you choose to donate, if you want to be listed as a donor on our site, please send us an email to let us know how you’d like to be acknowledged.

And if you can’t donate — and looking at the extraordinary vet bill I paid this morning, I couldn’t possibly get that more — do your part to spread the word about an organization that we absolutely need to see continue and thrive.

cross-posted at Feministe

Oct

16

Attorney Uses “Boys Will Be Boys” Defense in Alleged Sexual Assault

Filed Under assholes, courts, education and schools, misogyny, patriarchy, rape and sexual assault, violence against women and girls | 19 Comments

Last week, a freshman at the University of Maryland allegedly gained access to a dorm that was not his own, entered a female student’s room and woke her up by trying to kiss her. He also twice tried to put his hands down her shorts. When the victim screamed, he allegedly ran across the hallway to another room, and grabbed another female student by the head and tried to kiss her. Then, according to the official report, he did something similar to two other students in two other dorm rooms.

So, Seth Rudnitsky allegedly entered several dorm rooms illegally and then attempted to sexually assault their residents. Apparently Rudnitsky has even confessed to entering the dorm rooms and touching the women, though he does not say that he attempted to kiss the women or put his hands inside their clothing. In any case, what he has confessed to alone is already a serious crime — which is why he has been charged with first-degree burglary.

But Rudnitsky’s defense attorney Mark Schamel frames the allegations differently:

Mark Schamel, Rudnitsky’s attorney, said Rudnitsky was intoxicated and made a “typical freshman” mistake. Schamel declined to comment on the specific allegations from the female students who said Rudnitsky tried to initiate unwanted sexual conduct.

“This is not a sexual assault case. You have a really good kid who has never been in trouble his entire life,” Schamel said. “It’s your typical freshman ‘I went out and had too much to drink and was being silly’ kind of case.”

Charging documents refer to the incidents as “unwanted physical contact.” In an interview with police, Rudnitsky admitted to entering “3 to 4 rooms and touching a bed, arm, or shoulder,” according to the documents.

…

Schamel said his client simply made a mistake.

“He had no ulterior motives. He’s a wonderful kid who had too much to drink,” Schamel said. “This frankly shouldn’t even be a criminal case. I think it’s being entirely blown out of proportion.”

You know, the last time I checked, breaking and entering and then sexually touching sleeping people without their consent is not actually a “typical freshman mistake.” And trying to put your hands inside a sleeping woman’s clothing is not “being silly” — it’s assault. How exactly did you spend your college years, Mr. Schamel?

Read more

Oct

3

Edmonton Teacher Fired Over His Gender Identity

Filed Under International, LGBTQ, bigotry, discrimination, education and schools, gender, human rights, trans, transphobia and trans misogyny, work | 8 Comments

A trans man who worked as a substitute teacher in Edmonton, Alberta was fired by a Catholic school upon telling them about his plans to transition:

Jan Buterman is praised in a letter of dismissal for his teaching abilities, but told his gender change from woman to man is not aligned with the teachings of the Catholic church or its values.

The letter says the teacher would confuse students and their parents.

“I am horrified that this would happen to anybody,” said Buterman, 39, who taught social studies, German and French to students in Grades 7 to 12 in the well-to-do bedroom community of St. Albert north of Edmonton.

“I don’t think that someone’s medical condition is really fodder for your employer. It should not be any of their business. I respect people’s beliefs, I do. That doesn’t mean they get to ignore the laws we have around equality.”

Officials with the Greater St. Albert Catholic School Board were not available for comment.

The letter suggests that board officials consulted with Catholic church leaders before telling Buterman that he was being removed from the list of substitute teachers on Oct. 9, 2008. Buterman filed the complaint Thursday before the time limit on filing ran out.

“The reason for removing you from the substitute teacher list follows a conversation we shared in which you indicated that you had been diagnosed with a gender identity medical condition and that you were undergoing physical gender changes from the female gender to the male gender,” wrote Steve Bayus, deputy superintendent of schools.

“In discussions with the Archbishop of the Edmonton Diocese, the teaching of the Catholic church is that persons cannot change their gender. One’s gender is considered what God created it to be.”

Read more

Oct

1

Teacher Groomed 13-Year-Old Girl Through the Internet, Raped Her

Filed Under Europe, International, assholes, courts, education and schools, misogyny, patriarchy, rape and sexual assault, violence against women and girls | 14 Comments

This case is appalling on multiple levels. In the UK, 24-year-old man — a man who worked as a teacher — groomed a 13-year-old girl through the internet using a 15-year-old female alter ego, and then met her in person and raped her.

After Matthew Knott raped her, the girl reported the attack, and he has since been convicted on charges of grooming a child for sex on the internet and having sexual activity with a child (read: rape, because consensual sex with a child is impossible). I see no real reason to reproduce the details of the grooming and assault here; you can click through to read about the ways in which Knott manipulated the girl, and how he assaulted her not only through a lack of meaningful consent due to her age (more than enough), but also by obtaining her compliance through ordering her around in a threatening manner. He was sentenced to four years in prison, and is barred from working with children for five years.

Again, there are multiple levels of outrage here. There’s the fact that Knott committed this assault in the first place. Then there’s the fact that he did so as a teacher, someone who is entrusted with the well-being of children and adolescents every day, even if his victim was not one of his students. Further, there’s his mere sentence of four years in prison, which seems a bit short to me, though I suppose that it is in fact much longer than most rapists ever receive. And there’s the sickening knowledge that he will be able to legally work with children again in five years — I assume that means one year after his release? — even though he has raped a 13-year-old, and the school at which he taught at the time of the rape is for students age 11 through 16. One can only hope that no one would be so foolish as to hire him for a position that involves working with children, and certainly not for a teaching job.

Oh, wait, and then there’s this comment from the judge:

Judge Michael Henshaw told him: “It is perfectly clear to anybody here and those reading about these offences to see these were carefully planned calculated offences carried out in a devious way to enable you to meet this child for the purpose of having sex with her.

“The type of activity you engaged in is of enormous public concern.

“Parents throughout this country are no doubt worried sick what their offspring might be doing when they are using the computer.

“There are people like you who adopt identities to encourage children to commit offences.”

Yes, yes, mhm, agreed … what?

I keep trying to read that line another way. Maybe he meant “there are people like you who adopt identities in order to commit offenses through encouraging children”? Maybe, but that’s not what he says. Either way you read it, no matter how generously, the judge here frames grooming a child for sexual assault as “encouragement,” when in fact those two things are worlds apart. That is a big problem. And the way I’m reading it, he also frames the child who has been raped as having committed an offense.

No. No, no, no. Pretending to be a teenager and then telling an actual teen that they ought to go egg someone’s house is adopting an identity to encourage children to commit offenses. Pretending to be a teenager in order to obtain explicit photographs of an actual teen, and then to get her to meet you in order to rape her, is not encouraging children to commit offenses. It is victimizing a child, it is committing an offense, and the suggestion that the child has somehow been corrupted or merely been subject to a bad influence by someone who ought to know better is frankly disgusting.

Treating the rape of a child as just “having sex” that general society finds icky is a huge and pervasive problem. Pretending that grooming children is the same as seduction is a similar problem. And acting as though teenage sex is something just as fearsome, just as valid for parents to be concerned about as an adult raping a teenager, is something that regularly keeps victims marginalized and blaming themselves, and something which only encourages rapists — those like Matthew Knott.

Sep

8

Some Thoughts on Tucker Max

Filed Under assholes, education and schools, misogyny, patriarchy, rape and sexual assault, violence against women and girls | 17 Comments

Over at Broadsheet, the marvelous Sady writes about the Tucker Max phenomenon. Tucker Max is an asshole who makes money from writing books about his (supposed) drunken sexual conquests — and by “drunken sexual conquests,” I mean, “the encounters as he describes them often include coercion, cajoling, heavy intoxication or some element of non-consent and therefore fit the moral definition of sexual assault and, according to some organizations, the legal definition in many places.” (Feel free to go read his website for evidence; I did, but I’m not linking it.) Max makes money from his books, some film he has out, repeatedly calling women by misogynistic names, and also — the subject of particular interest right now — by giving lectures. On college campuses.

These lectures have, quite logically, spawned protests. In her post, Sady argues that the protests are misguided — not because Tucker Max isn’t a piece of shit, but because he thrives off of the attention, and protesting him is giving him what he wants.

Max is a showman. Being hated is a part of his act. He’s a self-described asshole who succeeds by getting people to agree with him. His fans think he’s saying what they can’t; his critics think he’s saying what no one should. But if you’re offended, you’ve noticed him. And for his fans, knowing that he’s picketed by feminists — feminists! Dreaded nemeses of parties and good time! — isn’t cause for concern, but a ringing endorsement.

Giving Max his very own protest makes him seem far important than he actually is. It gives him the enemies he needs. And although Max is getting testier about the protesters, his most telling statement is in his blog post about the OSU incident.

“This was one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me,” he wrote. “This is the type of shit that only happens to famous people.”

Now, I said up above that Sady is marvelous, and I agree with her something like 95% of the time. This is one of those times when I’m going to have to very strongly disagree, at least partially. First of all, I’ve never been a huge fan of the “ignore him and he’ll go away” approach. Secondly, it may indeed be true that Tucker Max doesn’t warrant a protest, but his lectures on the other hand, absolutely do. Because while Max personally thrives off of the attention, he is not the one that these protests should be trying to reach. Nor, actually, is the student body who will attend his shows anyway.

Read more

Jun

29

Pregnancy As a Sign of Intimate Partner Abuse

Filed Under education and schools, pregnancy, rape and sexual assault, reproductive justice, violence against women and girls, women’s health | 9 Comments

There is a truly excellent article by Lynn Harris up right now at Alternet called When Partner Abuse Isn’t a Bruise But a Pregnant Belly.  It’s about the way that intimate partner violence often takes the form of rape and other sexual coercion, and the dangerous implications of a failure to recognize as much.

I strongly recommend that you go and read it, because this is a major problem in our movements.  So often, people supporting access to sex education and contraception also support measures to reduce intimate partner violence, and vice versa.  But far too regularly, we also fail to tie those two movements together, and the connection is dangerously overlooked in many if not most pregnancy prevention efforts and intimate partner violence prevention efforts.

It’s a part of the reason why I so strongly feel and regularly advocate that anti-rape education needs to be a part of sexual health education.  Of course, sexual violence is a sexual health issue.  But from a strictly practical level, you can’t teach kids how to use condoms and expect that to be enough to prevent pregnancy and STDs on the whole.  The current model, the way in which we teach teens (and adults!) how to use condoms and other contraception, almost always supposes that consensual sex makes up for all of the STDs and pregnancies they’re attempting to prevent.  And it just plain doesn’t, as much as we wish it did.

And so we need to treat education about abuse — both proven programs that reduce the rates of abuse, but also lessons in how to identify and recognize abuse and to get help when it occurs — not as some kind of bonus aspect of sex education, or something to do if we can fit it in past the really important pregnancy prevention stuff.  Rather, it’s necessary and integral part of sex education, just as much as condom use and the rest.

It’s something we need to address it in classrooms.  And we also, as the article quite clearly proves, need to make sure to get the message out to doctors and nurses, as well.  Otherwise, we’re only going to spend too much time poorly attempting to treat the symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself.  We’re going to keep on using tactics that in too many cases, just aren’t going to work.

Thanks to KaeLyn for the link.

May

30

University of the Pacific Says Date Rape is Not Rape

Filed Under assholes, courts, education and schools, misogyny, patriarchy, rape and sexual assault, slut-shaming, violence against women and girls | 21 Comments

Last year, three male basketball players allegedly raped a woman (also a basketball player) at a party.  The assault took place on campus at the University of the Pacific, where seemingly the rapists and victim were all students.  Now, the woman has filed a lawsuit alleging that the school did not treat her case seriously; the woman herself left the school once the administrators refused to remove the accused from the campus.

Sounds bad, right?  Like we’ve got yet another university that doesn’t take rape seriously.  Oh, indeed we do.  But even more than I’m interested in what the university did and did not do behind closed doors, I’m interested in what they have to say openly to the media (trigger warning):

A woman identified in court papers as Jane Doe claimed in a March lawsuit that two basketball players raped her at a May 2008 party at Townhouses, campus housing on Pershing Avenue, and that a third player came into the room where she was and assaulted her as the first two players were leaving.

Pacific spokesman Richard Rojo said Thursday that the school does not consider the incident to be a rape.

“We would call it date rape,” he said.

Rojo said the university considers “outright rape” and date rape to be different, in that date rape does not involve “a rapist jumping out of bushes and attacking people randomly.”

He said, “These are people who knew each other. … It’s a social situation and unfortunately an all-too common problem at universities.

“It doesn’t make it right. It’s a sexual assault, and that’s why the university took action in this matter.”

Doe said in her lawsuit that Pacific’s handling of the matter was hostile, causing her to feel unwanted at Pacific. Doe, a freshman, left the school

I stared at this a good, long, hard time before I could believe what was really in front of my eyes.

Not because I’m surprised that the view is out there.  Please, I’ve had it expressed directly to me with regards to my own rape.  What I’m shocked over is the fact that a university would, seemingly with no shame at all, openly and publicly express such a view.  “Date rape is not rape.”  When I regularly use that example of the man jumping out of the bushes as what many people believe to be the only real rape, some people think that I’m exaggerating.  Quite clearly, I’m not.  As you can see right above, it’s coming out of the mouth of the spokesperson for a university commenting on the school’s handling of a rape on their campus.

Read more

Next Page →