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Jesus Christ.

An earthquake in China has killed almost 9,000 people, as of an hour ago. That number is obviously likely to climb.

This of course follows on the heels of the the cyclone in Myanmar that has officially killed 32,000 people, with total death toll estimates in the range of 60,000 to 100,000. And then there’s the far, far (far) less extreme but closer to home and still tragic case of deadly tornadoes in Missouri, Oklahoma and Georgia.

I’m willing to place some money on opportunist “religious” folk using these unimaginable events as some kind of vehicle to condemn abortion and gay rights (but already too nauseous to verify if it has happened). But even my rational atheist self is pretty damn freaked out by this happening all at once. And perhaps rightly so. I’m no scientist and don’t pretend to be, but I don’t quite believe that global warming had no hand in any of these natural disasters.

Quite honestly, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know if there is anything to say in the face of so many lives lost. There perhaps will be as there are further developments. This will not go away overnight, and there are likely to be ramifications for many years. In many areas, there will be poverty, hunger, homelessness and violence. In Myanmar, all of this has begun or is strongly anticipated. And in addition to caring for the simple reason of our shared humanity, as feminists we know that when natural disasters strike, women suffer the most, in addition to children and those who are the most economically disadvantaged

The American Red Cross has been helping in Myanmar, and I can only assume that aid is on the way to China. You can make a donation to the International Response Fund through their website. If you would like to specify where you would like the funds to go — for instance, if you want your donation to go specifically to the Myanmar crisis — you will have to make your donation to Red Cross over the telephone at 1-800-HELP-NOW.

If you know of other/better charities or ways to help, please let me know and I will add them to the post.

[Photo of earthquake wreckage in China via National Geographic.]

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Did anyone doubt that my first post back would be about a rape-related issue that is considered “controversial”? If not, you know me well.

This makes me very happy.

. . . Well, almost.

You see, the British Home Office has released this campaign to fight the sex trafficking industry — and from what I can tell, I love the concept (I have a practical criticism later). But, nowhere can I find the full text on the poster or an image large enough to make out the small text myself. As the Home Office has received my criticism before for some pretty terrible anti-rape ads, I’d like to know the full text before I sing its praises. If you find it, please send it on! I’ll be looking for it over the next few days; just be aware that my opinion is subject to change or expand on that basis. But here’s what we know:

Posters will appear in clubs and pubs from Monday warning men against paying for sex in brothels with exploited or trafficked women.

The posters, which will be piloted in men’s toilets in Westminster and Nottingham, will say “Walk in a Punter. Walk out a Rapist”.

They are part of a six-month home office review into tackling the demand for prostitution, which began in January, and aim to point out that trafficked women are forced into selling sex, and that forced sex is rape.

“So if you pay for sex with a trafficked woman what does that make you?” the posters ask.

They also urge Johns “if [they're] man enough” to call Crime Stoppers if they come across something suspicious.

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UPDATE: The Guardian has removed O’Hara’s blog post about the Johnny Vegas incident and Vegas has filed a complaint. This does not surprise me, actually, as Britain has very strong libel laws and the post called the actions “sexual assault” in the title even though he was not charged or convicted of anything. Personally, I don’t think that this means the incident did not happen. The facts are supposed to be in dispute, but this will be the case with any crime. Again, I’ve seen no one dispute the sexual assault — I have seen disputes over whether or not penetrative rape took place. I also haven’t found a statement from Vegas about the incident, a statement from the woman who was allegedly assaulted, or a statement from O’Hara in defense or retraction of her article.

Of course, I feel that I made it clear in the blog post that he has been neither charged nor convicted of any crime. And I stand by everything I said, in the context of an opinion about what the nature of these actions would be if they occurred, and so long as its recognized that the opinion on this specific instance was based off of an eye-witness account that was corroborated and printed in a major international newspaper. I am reopening comments, but will absolutely close them again if things get out of hand like they did last time.

Warning: I personally found this to be very upsetting and triggering.

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Yesterday was the day to blog about the Congo rape epidemic. As Sunday is my day off from blogging, I missed it — but as I always say when I come in late to these things (a specialty of mine), it’s better late than never, and it’s not too late for you to participate either.

I was unfortunately not able to watch the documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, since I don’t have HBO, and I hope that it will be soon available through another outlets for those of us who don’t have access. But I’m happy that it has been made and that it has inspired bloggers to engage on this difficult topic.

It’s human nature to want to ask “who is responsible?” And the obvious answer is “the rapists.” This is absolutely true; of course they are responsible. But this type of epidemic does not materialize from nothingness. When rape is allowed to exist this rampantly and for so long, when weapons and funding do not appear out of thin air, when the world’s richest and most powerful nations turn away or ask simply and disinterestedly “what can we do?”, we must hold others accountable. And as Anxious Black Woman notes, among them are the Corporate Rapists, those who benefit financially from the conflict through their pillaging of the land’s natural resources. She prints a partial list of those corporations that absolutely must be disseminated as far and wide as we can manage:

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A woman is being held in jail as a means to force testimony against her domestic abuser.

It gets worse: she’s pregnant.

And worse: her lawyer says that she is due to deliver every day.

And horridly ironic: one of the charges against her boyfriend is forcible confinement.

The victim, whose name I don’t feel it is appropriate to use (and in any case have seen spelled in no less than four different ways), did indeed testify today. She has said that she wants to raise her baby with her boyfriend and then she made up a highly transparent story about how the abuse didn’t happen, despite the mountain of physical evidence to the contrary. She has also vowed to never call the police again.

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A lot of what I’ve been writing about lately seems to fall under the category of wholly unsurprising and yet still utterly depressing. Here’s another one for the files:

Just like in the good old U.S. of A. (and Australia), a new poll shows that in Ireland, large numbers of citizens think that women are at least “partially responsible” for rape (note: this is a cached page. The Irish Examiner, which helped conduct the study and has the most comprehensive info about the results, is currently experiencing problems with his website. I’ll put the proper link in later if I notice the page is back up).

* More than 30% think a victim is some way responsible if she flirts with a man or fails to say no clearly.

* 10% of people think the victim is entirely at fault if she has had a number of sexual partners.

* 37% think a woman who flirts extensively is at least complicit, if not completely in the wrong, if she is the victim of a sex crime.

* One in three think a woman is either partly or fully to blame if she wears revealing clothes.

* 38% believe a woman must share some of the blame if she walks through a deserted area.

The results also show that defence barristers, looking to swing the deciding three members in every 12-person jury, can exploit misgivings in certain demographics about the perceived responsibility of female victims.

Dramatic differences in empathy towards victims based on age and social class are revealed. Gender, however, had little impact.

In every category, widowed, divorced and separated people took the harshest view on the role of the female victim, compared with married or cohabiting couples.

The results of the poll support the results of the ground-breaking Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) report in 2002, which found 15% of the population believed a raped woman was not an innocent victim.

A few notes are necessary, here.

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This morning, I was reading the latest (March 17) issue of Time magazine. It contains an article on the Darfur conflict, and how the lines between “good” guys and “bad” guys are blurring.

Of course, there are extended descriptions of the violence and of the impact of that violence. But somehow, the issue of rape is conspicuously absent.  In an article that is over 1,100 words long, the word appeared once, towards the very end of the article, as an after thought:

Amid continued militia and government attacks, it is Darfur’s civilians–both Arab and African–who suffer most. Battles last year drove more than 280,000 from their homes. Some find their way to Darfur’s swollen relief camps, home now to well over a third of the region’s population. But the camps are not immune to the violence. Many are controlled by the armed factions, and gangs of all stripes rob and rape many of those who venture outside. Other refugees wander Darfur’s unforgiving scrub, searching for a village or patch of land with some semblance of stability. Darfur’s humanitarian operation, already the largest in the world, struggles to service the displaced. Roads are a gauntlet of banditry, and attacks on relief workers are rising.

The word “woman?” It doesn’t appear in the article. Neither do the words “child” or “children.” Not once.

Can I possibly be the only one who sees something wrong with that picture?  Yes, the article is about soldiers.  It’s also about the extreme violence they have experienced and the atrocities that they commit. 

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Happy International Women’s Day, everyone. I hope that you have a good one.

Personally, my day is shit. We’re having the worst snowfall of the entire winter today, and that means I can no longer volunteer at/attend Rochester V-Day tonight. Planned Parenthood of the Rochester/Syracuse Region is sponsoring a performance of The Vagina Monologues. I was really looking forward to it, and I’ve never seen the play live before. But I live 45 minutes away, and decided that since we’ll have about zero visibility tonight, icy roads, and I would have to drive on the thruway that gets most treacherous in bad weather, I would rather live. But if you live closer and can make it, go! Tickets are still available at the door. The volunteers have all worked really hard, the cast is great (I saw part of the group last week performing A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer), and the money raised is going to our amazing Rape Crisis Services.

So yeah, I’m kind of mopey. But feel free to cheer me up with some good feminist happenings.

Here’s something that made me smile. Yesterday, Eve Ensler was in New Orleans to promote the 10th anniversary celebration of V-Day in the city next month (partial funds from all V-Days are going to support the women of New Orleans). She met with Mayor Ray Nagin, and he had this supportive if slightly bumbling message about his feelings on V-Day:

Mayor Nagin began his comments at the news conference by saying, “How am I gonna stand up and say, I’m a ‘vagina-friendly’ Mayor to these cameras after ‘Chocolate City’ and some of the other stuff that I’ve done. But you know what? I’m in.”

“She (Ensler) started describing the event, and you know what, I’m a guy and I’ve heard about the Vagina Monologues but I don’t know what was going on. I didn’t know anything about it and she started to describe this event - look, you know I’ve got a script and I’m not following it - and I was absolutely blown away at how awesome this work is. I mean, she is doing God’s work. So, I stand before you, a vagina-friendly Mayor. I am in! And you know what? It is so appropriate right now. New Orleans, Louisiana is the birthplace of jazz, you know, but it is the birthplace of so many tremendous women.”

Hehe. Okay, so maybe he should have stuck to that script. He probably could have done better than saying “I am in!” after declaring his vagina-friendliness. But since “vagina” is still such a taboo word, I imagine that a politician using it would be prone to such Freudian slips. (And this is about a million times better than Bush proclaiming his support for the right of OB/GYNs to “celebrate their love with women.”) I think that he meant no offense, and I take none. In fact, I’m rather happy to see such enthusiastic support from a prominent male public official for a subject so ridiculously unmentionable, for the event and for women. Good for you, Mayor Nagin. Though, just between you and me, I recommend that you start rehearsing speeches before you give them.

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A defense attorney has yet again made a highly offensive argument about how a victim was advertising her desire to be raped by her choice of clothing. But this time, instead of just saying “oh well,” or “tsk tsk” or “everyone deserves a defense no matter how misleading and unethical,” a government official is actually doing something about it (emphasis and brackets mine).

An MSP is demanding action from the legal profession after a lawyer used the way a teenage sex assault victim was dressed as a defence for a client.

Iain Smith also brought up the 15-year-old’s sexual history and said she was not vulnerable.

His client, Rikki Tainsch, was given three years probation for plying the girl with drink then attacking her.

SNP MSP [Scottish National Party Member of Scottish Parliament] Roseanna Cunningham has lodged a parliamentary motion calling for such comments to be banned from the courts.

Tainsch, who had never met the 15-year-old before the day he attacked her, took her to his home in Tibbermore, Perthshire, in August last year.

He then gave her enough vodka and Irn Bru to make her violently sick.

She went to bed feeling unwell but woke to find the 24-year-old assaulting her.

During the trial at Perth Sheriff Court, Mr Smith said the teenager had been “scantily clad”, wearing shorts, black boots and a white top.

He also stated: “There was a suggestion the girl had been sexually active before.

“I don’t think it is fair to say this was a very vulnerable person.”

Damn straight these kinds of comments should be banned from court. I’ve made this argument more times than I can count (you’ll find many examples under the slut-shaming and courts gone crazy categories). Thank you, thank you, thank you Ms. Cunningham. If it hasn’t been made clear yet, she really is a bad ass:

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Sydney Australia celebrated its 30th Gay Mardi Gras last night! The Mardi Gras Parade is quite the huge event, and draws up to half a million people, both residents and tourists, each year. It is, without a doubt, one of the largest LGBT pride events in the world. The original 1978 march took place when homosexuality was illegal and resulted in police violence. Now, it’s one of the city’s biggest tourism draws.

I went one year while living in Australia — 2003, I believe. It is quite the blast. The floats in the parade mock everything imaginable, particularly those who would like to see them go away, like the Australian government and Catholic Church. They also promote social justice. This year, they focused largely on same-sex marriage rights and the environmental crisis. Oh, and they also had Rupert Everett lead the parade and a float with 250 men dressed up as Aussie pop star and gay icon Kylie Minogue. And I can only assume that the shirtless Dykes on Bikes made their usual appearance.

Of course, the Christian groups like to whine every year about the existence of the parade, and handful turn out to hand out pamphlets. But they don’t get a lot of airtime. The religious fundies have a lot less political power in Australia than in the U.S. I remember being awed and thrilled every year by the open promotion and acceptance of the event by the mainstream media and the dismissive (or outright lack of) attention given to those who want the event stopped.

Is this partially motivated by the huge amount of money that the event brings in for the city? Of course. Does it mean that Australia is some kind of hugely-accepting gay haven? Absolutely not — I ran into a lot of homophobia myself, particularly regarding one professor at uni who was openly gay, proud and, as he liked to say, camp (he was also brilliant, the best teacher I’ve ever had in my life, and a big reason why I’m a feminist). But the fact remains that we’re many years away from this kind of general public acceptance of sexual pride and flamboyance in the U.S.

So happy 30th, Mardi Gras! Did anyone reading this attend? If so, let us know about it in the comments!

(Thanks to Patrick for the head’s up.)

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A man in London has just been arrested on charges of drugging and raping women he picked up in his taxi cab. Though there are countless published stories about the case, the information is exceedingly limited in all of them. Here is the gist:

Up to 35 women may have been drugged and raped by a London taxi driver, police said on Monday.

Thirty women have come forward after a man was arrested last Friday in southeast London on suspicion of rape.

Police were initially investigating five attacks in which victims were picked up in a black cab near Oxford Street, King’s Road or London Bridge.

The suspect is accused of attacking his passengers after offering them spiked glasses of champagne which he said were to help him celebrate a lottery win.

The most recent reported attack took place on February 5 after a 33-year-old woman was picked up near London Bridge Station.

“Every case is being linked,” a Scotland Yard spokesman said.

Knowing full well that the Mirror is about as far from a reputable news source as you can get (don’t worry, the facts are the same in every story), I chose to use their article particularly because of the confounding nature of the first sentence. “Up to 35 women.” Well, 35 women in total have come forward. And instead of reaching what I would deem to be the logical conclusion — that if 35 have already come forward, just think of how many others there are — the Mirror has apparently determined that when 35 women come forward with rape allegations, that’s the definitive total, and at least a few have to be liars.

It’s funny, because it seems to be a theme recently. No, not just calling rape victims liars, since that’s pretty much a theme of living in the world as a woman. I’m talking about women being raped in cabs — and then having it implied that they are liars or to blame for the assaults.

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Again, I’m issuing a trigger warning as strongly as I can. I’ve written about a hell of a lot of disturbing, disgusting cases of rape and gender violence. And this easily ranks among the most repulsive.

. . .

A man is in court for the 2005 rape and murder of a young model. I just discovered the case this morning, and reading through the back stories has me just about physically ill. His defense? That yes, he raped her corpse, but that doesn’t mean he killed her.

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