Trigger Warning for discussions of childhood sexual violence, sexual violence in schools, and rape denialism

A story of prolonged sexual abuse against children over 25 years shows the dangers of not believing sexual violence survivors who step forward with their stories. In Alabama, a now-retired elementary school teacher named Danny Acker (left) has been charged with four counts of first-degree sexual abuse against two female students under the age of 12. At the time of his arrest, the teacher allegedly confessed to molesting an astonishing 21 female students throughout his career.

Making a horrific story even worse, the school board knew he had a history of sexual abuse allegations all the way back in 1993, were given the opportunity then to remove him from his position of authority, and chose instead to reinstate his job as a fourth-grade teacher. Indeed, they say that given the opportunity, they’d do it again.

Two longtime Alabama school board leaders are defending the panel’s decision in 1993 to reinstate an elementary school teacher who was accused of molesting a student, even though the teacher is now charged with more abuse.

School board President Lee Doebler and Vice President Steve Martin said students, parents and community leaders encouraged the Shelby County Board of Education to return 4th grade teacher Danny Acker to his Alabaster classroom, and the board agreed 5-0. Doebler and Martin are the only board members who remain from those days, and both said they did the best they could with the information they had.

“Looking back, given the evidence we had I would have made the same vote,” Doebler said. “I wish we had some evidence, but unfortunately, we didn’t.” …

Shelby County’s superintendent placed Acker on leave in October 1992 when a student accused him of touching her improperly at her home. A county grand jury reviewed the case and did not return an indictment.

Martin said the superintendent recommended Acker’s dismissal. The school board held a hearing in February 1993 that lasted more than eight hours and then voted unanimously to keep him.

Martin said there were no witnesses and no physical evidence. He said the abuse was alleged to have occurred during babysitting rather than at the school.

Doebler, who was also the board president in 1993, said many students, past and present, and their parents turned out as character witnesses to support Acker, and the board was heavily influenced by the grand jury’s decision to take no action.

“There was no evidence presented to us to indicate the grand jury was incorrect,” he said.

Martin said Acker’s father, longtime County Commissioner Dan Acker, made no effort to influence the decision. “The dad did not call anyone or discuss it with anyone,” he said.

The tragedy here is not only that so many girls were sexually victimized in ways that can never be erased, but also that when shown quite dramatically and horrifyingly the error of their methods, those with the power to have stopped this abuser still do not see the inherent flaw in their system.

When a young girl reported having been sexually abused by a popular and trusted adult male teacher, the school board failed to treat her testimony with the respect that it deserved. Instead, they sided with power. When given the choice between the word of a young girl and the word of an adult man who wielded authority over her, they chose the adult man. When reflecting on the consequences of potentially making the wrong decision, they decided that an innocent man losing his job would have been a greater travesty of justice than countless vulnerable children being placed at the mercy of a predator. They sided with adults’ rights at the expense of children’s rights, with men’s rights at the expense of girls’ rights. They sided with historically and presently white supremacist and patriarchal standards of “evidence” and justice without thinking twice. And then they appealed to our sense of “fairness” to claim that this is the way it ought to be.

With Acker’s reinstatement based largely on the grand jury’s decision, this should be a lesson — though only one among many — on the gross unreliability of the criminal justice system as a reference point for an individual’s true innocence or guilt. At the same time as this system harasses men of color unrelentingly for drug and property crimes, it ignores the violent crimes of white men against women and girls on the basis of their “reputations” as socially valuable¹ members of the community. It should also be yet another lesson as to how the criminal justice system decides when harm has been committed and when community safety has been achieved, as to what exactly the criminal justice system and those systems modeled after it values.

A man’s right to employment and good name were given primacy over the right of girls to have a learning environment safe from sexual terrorism. Indeed, his privacy was likely given extreme concern, as well — in their defense, the school board does not mention any effort to determine if other victims existed, to encourage parents to talk to their children about their teacher, to urge other survivors to come forward.

Even with so many victims, it should come as absolutely no surprise that no others reported on their own. It is extremely common for victims to not speak of childhood sexual abuse until they are adults. Our social silence around sexuality, consent, and interpersonal violence almost ensures that children will not have the vocabulary or the resources to speak of what is happening at the time that it is happening. Children, like all victims of sexual abuse, are also likely to blame themselves; indeed, it is from society that they learn these messages. Those children weren’t wrong in their choices. A grand jury failed to indict him, a community united behind him, a school board chose to reinstate him and put him in the position to abuse further. If his victims feared that they would not be believed, they were probably right.

In 25 years, of at least 21 students, until now only one of these victims had the resources to come forward with her story. It is an indictment of this culture that she had to stand alone, because for 20 years no other victims were given the tools to stand with her. It is an even greater indictment that even when she did have the resources to speak of the violence committed against her, she was not believed. Indeed, an entire community rallied together to call this molested little girl a liar.

We teach children to tell us if they have been the victim of a bad touch (and the consider our work on their continued safety done). But we do not mean it. We do not mean it at all.

Throughout this story is a sustained denial of how power and privilege works. While Acker’s longtime County Commissioner father may not have made any phone calls on his son’s behalf, that doesn’t render his influence over the decision a moot point. Those with true influence need not necessarily flex it in an active way. People simply understand that there will be consequences if those with sizable power and influence are not given the deference usually afforded to them. Further, community members are more likely to stand up in their favor. The school board members defending their decision would have us believe that the great turnout for ACker has nothing to do with his family’s position within the community. But it would extend beyond mere gullibility into willful ignorance to truly accept that as the case. Acker’s family’s status can no more be divorced from the response to his abuse than can his straight white maleness; in a society so invested in upholding hegemonic power, all are considered short-hands for innocence.

Now Acker has been arrested and charged, long after his easy access to a large pool of victims has been removed. He may be convicted, though even with an alleged confession, there is absolutely no guarantee. Best case scenario, he will be punished for his irreversible violence, and that will be considered justice. And yet, it would have been commonly considered an injustice 20 years ago to believe a girl who said she had been abused, to have prevented the opportunity for much of that violence to have ever been committed.

Chances are, this morning, that you’ve seen the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control statistics on sexual violence and domestic violence. Most notably, you’ve probably seen the new statistic that almost 1 in 5 women have experienced rape in their lifetimes.

That’s a terrifying statistic, though not a surprising one to those of us who have been involved in sexual violence work for some time. In light of this undeniably already awful news, it may seem cruel to point out that the reality is even worse than it initially appears from this soundbite. But I also think it’s necessary.

Firstly, I think it’s imperative to note that these new statistics are inherently cissexist. Definitions in this report assume that women have vaginas and men have penises. There are no individuals who are neither men nor women. Whether any trans* folks were interviewed for this survey is unclear. They may have been disqualified from participation or had their experiences filed under the incorrect statistics. Trans* folks are mentioned exactly once in the full 124 page National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey 2010 Summary Report (pdf); it is simply stated that services specifically for transgender people should be designed, with no accompanying information on their experiences or how they have or have not been included in this study. It is almost certain, in other words, that these statistics do not tell us anything about rates of violence against “women” and “men” but rather cis women and cis men.

Secondly, the definition of rape that is used in the NISVS is in one way unconventionally broad. In several other ways, the definition of rape being used is also woefully incomplete. The full sexual violence definitions used for this study appear below.

Five types of sexual violence were measured in NISVS. These include acts of rape (forced penetration), and types of sexual violence other than rape.

Rape is defined as any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes times when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent. Rape is separated into three types, completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, and completed alcohol or drug facilitated penetration.

• Among women, rape includes vaginal, oral, or anal penetration by a male using his penis. It also includes vaginal or anal penetration by a male or female using their fingers or an object.
• Among men, rape includes oral or anal penetration by a male using his penis. It also includes anal penetration by a male or female using their fingers or an object.

Being made to penetrate someone else includes times when the victim was made to, or there was an attempt to make them, sexually penetrate someone without the victim’s consent because the victim was physically forced (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threatened with physical harm, or when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.

• Among women, this behavior reflects a female being made to orally penetrate another female’s vagina or anus.
• Among men, being made to penetrate someone else could have occurred in multiple ways: being made to vaginally penetrate a female using one’s own penis; orally penetrating a female’s vagina or anus; anally penetrating a male or female; or being made to receive oral sex from a male or female. It also includes female perpetrators attempting to force male victims to penetrate them, though it did not happen.

Sexual coercion is defined as unwanted sexual penetration that occurs after a person is pressured in a nonphysical way. In NISVS, sexual coercion refers to unwanted vaginal, oral, or anal sex after being pressured in ways that included being worn down by someone who repeatedly asked for sex or showed they were unhappy; feeling pressured by being lied to, being told promises that were untrue, having someone threaten to end a relationship or spread rumors; and sexual pressure due to someone using their in?uence or authority.

Unwanted sexual contact is defined as unwanted sexual experiences involving touch but not sexual penetration, such as being kissed in a sexual way, or having sexual body parts fondled or grabbed.

Non-contact unwanted sexual experiences are those unwanted experiences that do not involve any touching or penetration, including someone exposing their sexual body parts, flashing, or masturbating in front of the victim, someone making a victim show his or her body parts, someone making a victim look at or participate in sexual photos or movies, or someone harassing the victim in a public place in a way that made the victim feel unsafe.

So the definition of “rape” includes both completed and attempted rapes. Don’t get excited yet, MRAs — attempted rape is not only an incredibly serious crime, it is also the minority of experience made up under the “rape” 1 in 5 statistic. The table on page 28 of the report shows that 12.3% of cis women reported completed “forced” rape, 8% reported completed alcohol/drug-facilitated rape, and a comparably small 5% reported attempted “forced” rape.¹

Further, the definition of “rape” excludes all other means of rape that do not involve physical force or drugs and alcohol. The above definition of “sexual coercion” would, to most readers here who utilize some form of an enthusiastic or meaningful consent model, also constitute rape.² If we are to include the respondents who reported instances of “sexual coercion” under our definition of rape, the situation gets decidedly worse. A full 13% of cis women reported experiencing sexual coercion. We do not know how how much these numbers overlap with the “rape” statistics presented above. But the report does estimate almost 15.5 million U.S. cis women victims of “sexual coercion.”

(It’s also important to note that not all cis women are equal with regards to sexual violence, either. Cis women who are Native, Black, or identified as multi-racial had significantly higher rates of victimization than women who are white or identified as Hispanic.)

When talking about these numbers, we not only need to note their trans-exclusionary nature, but also their inability to account for the full, meaningful picture. We shouldn’t be saying that almost 1 in 5 U.S. women have been raped when what the information actually shows is that, based on a far more social justice oriented model, more than 1 in 5 cis U.S. women have been raped.

Currently incarcerated persons are probably already the most isolated individuals in the United States. Those who are not only incarcerated but also the victims of sexual violence while imprisoned face little support, few mental health and recovery services, the ongoing threat of violence, and even retaliation should they speak of the abuse. With their support networks ripped from them, their right to safety revoked, and their abusers (who are most frequently prison officials) having control over every aspect of their lives, they are among the most vulnerable sexual assault survivors.

In light of this, sending a 250 character message of support and greeting during the holiday season may seem a truly underwhelming gesture. It is precisely these same conditions, however, that makes such a small act able to speak volumes. Incarcerated persons are cultural pariahs, socially treated as subhuman, and/or told that they deserve sexual violence as a condition of their detention. A few kind and compassionate words, under those circumstances, could mean the world.

Rafael, a recipient of a holiday card through Just Detention’s 2010 campaign and victim of multiple assaults by state corrections officers, stated:

Here I was in my cell sitting on my bed on Christmas Eve, sad but hanging in there. My thoughts were on my mom who passed on in 2004, and thinking ‘man, this is my 24th Christmas behind bars.’ Then at about 4 pm the officer gave me some mail from JDI. I was surprised because I don’t get much mail. Being incarcerated for so long, friends and family have forgotten me or passed on. When I read the holiday cards my heart skipped a beat and I started to cry. Yes, this 46-year old hard-core convict was crying. The kind words of encouragement, blessing, and letting me know that I’m not forgotten from total strangers from far away shattered my emotions. Please let them all know that I love them all and will cherish their words in my heart. And yes, I will walk with my head up high and will share my story with no shame and will help others that find themselves in similar situations.

Another (anonymous) survivor said:

I have been down since 1998 and have not had a card or letter sent to me, nor a visit. To receive those cards has totally left me speechless. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

While Just Detention International works to eradicate sexual violence in prisons — and other activists do work to more fundamentally dismantle the racist (classist, transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, ableist …) prison industrial complex — please take a few short moments today to send a message to a person who has experienced sexual violence while incarcerated. Your message will be transcribed by hand into a card by a JDI volunteer and delivered to a currently incarcerated person who has experienced sexual violence while detained.

If you’re having trouble knowing what to say, JDI has provided me with some examples of actual messages written by others:

“I wish you hope, healing, and support. Please know there are people fighting for you, even if you have never seen us. Know there is love.”

“May you take comfort in knowing that countless people in the free world care deeply about you and will not stop fighting for justice.”

“From one survivor to another, I send you hope for peace of mind and heart. On both sides of the bars, we give one another strength to go on.”

“Dear Friend, I guess this time of year may feel particularly hard. Please let me take a minute to say that I recognize that your humanity and your safety are worth fighting for regardless of your detention. I wish you hope and joy every day. Be well.”

It is imperative that work to support those currently suffering under oppressive conditions be done simultaneously with work to dismantle the oppressive systems that create those conditions. Ultimately, your words may mean a lot more than you know. Please send a card today and help spread the word.

Trigger Warning for discussions of sexual violence, prison violence, anti-trans violence, rape apologism, and transphobia and misgendering.

Recently, a woman was allegedly raped orally by a prison guard at Riverside Correctional Facility. She reported the assault to authorities, and an investigation was begun. During that investigation, officials learned that she was not cis, as they had apparently been assuming, and promptly transferred her to a male prison (trigger warning on the link).

Jovanie Saldana, who has been named by prison authorities and the media despite being the victim of sexual assault, has now had her basic rights violated many times over. She was violated when a prison guard entered her cell and forced her to perform oral sex on him. She was violated when her brave decision to report this assault resulted in an investigation that placed her under scrutiny and revoked her right to privacy. She was violated when she was sent to a male prison, both denying her true gender and placing her at extreme risk of further physical and sexual violence. And she was violated when her name was released and spread without concern for her privacy or safety.

Clearly, trans prison inmates are not seen to be deserving of the same rights as their cis, non-inmate counterparts. That Saldana is a black woman also could not have helped these already abusive and oppressive figures to see her as more human. (Indeed, trans women of color are at much higher risk of violence than white trans women.) Saldana’s cousin strongly believes that the transfer to a men’s prison is retaliation for her rape allegations; the timing, media attention, and reaction of the prison guard’s union certainly make these charges credible.

If true, it means that the Pennsylvania prison system essentially punished an inmate for reporting rape by subjecting her to likely future rapes. (Fifty-nine percent of trans women are sexually assaulted while incarcerated, and the vast majority of trans women inmates are housed in men’s facilities.) Even if retaliation was not the primary motive behind the decision to move Saldana, the facts remain the same; a victim of prison rape has not been protected, but instead placed in a position where future prison rape is more likely than not.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, however, is far more concerned with Saldana’s gender presentation and genitals than with the allegation that she was raped by a prison guard who had control over every aspect of her daily life. They also are far more concerned about the prison’s apparently lax policy on cavity searches than the fact that a woman is now residing very unsafely in a men’s prison so shortly after reporting that assault. Indeed, they seem more concerned about the threat that Saldana allegedly presented to her fellow prisoners merely by existing:

A source close to the prison system, who asked not to be identified, complained that the slip-up “jeopardized a lot of women over there [at Riverside],” adding that Saldana tallied at least two infractions for fighting with other inmates during Saldana’s stint in the female jail. On average, Riverside houses about 730 inmates daily, Hawes said.

Of course, it’s not noted how many “infractions” most inmates at Riverside have or whether Saldana is the one who instigated the fights. It’s also not explained how, exactly, Saldana is more of a threat than any other inmate at the prison. We’re simply supposed to “understand” that trans women are “really men,” and therefore threatening to all cis women. The specter of sexual violence is also present, as trans women are routinely portrayed by everyone from Christian Conservatives to self-identified feminists as sexually predatory men in disguise.

Through this defamatory portrayal of Saldana, we are supposed to forget that the true sexually violent perpetrator was a cis man. In reality, it’s Saldana who was the victim of sexual violence, and the real threat to the safety of all women in the prison, both trans and cis, was the armed cis guard lording over them. Only in a kyriarchal society could the black trans woman who was raped and then placed in a position where she is very likely to be raped again be effectively transformed into the “real” sexual threat against more socially valued womanhood.

Indeed, the corrections officers’ union plans to exploit Saldana’s trans status to brand her as a liar, unrapeable, or some combination of both (warning for misgendering):

Lorenzo North, president of the union representing corrections officers, declined to discuss the officers’ failure to perform the required cavity searches.

“I don’t know how [Saldana] got through,” North said, adding that all inmates should be searched. “If you don’t strip-search somebody thoroughly, then you’re not 100 percent sure of getting whatever [contraband] that inmate has. He may have something up his butt.”

But North claimed the goof proved that the officer whom Saldana accused of sexual abuse is innocent.

The officer was transferred to another prison after Saldana’s recent complaint.

“I’m trying to get him back to RCF [Riverside] as soon as possible, because he didn’t do anything wrong,” North said.

How, exactly, Saldana being trans — and officers failing to do their jobs, for that matter — proves that she lied about being raped is not exactly clear. We are either to assume that trans women are “liars” by mere fact of living their lives as women (and that people who lie sometimes cannot tell the truth about being raped), or that trans women have no right to bodily autonomy to begin with and therefore cannot be sexually violated.

Either way, the purposeful dehumanization of Saldana and all inmates by proxy is terrifying, as is the stark inability to accept responsibility and hold guards to a standard of professionalism. North’s attitude as a prison guard authority inadvertently makes it incredibly easy to see how the original sexual assault occurred in the first place. Clearly it’s because those tasked with protecting prisoner safety do not give a shit, and excuses for violations will always be made.

This woman’s safety has been severely jeopardized. She needs protection and recovery services for the assault she endured, not an incredibly more dangerous set of surroundings and public outing. The prison system has behaved abysmally, showing a blatant disregard for inmate safety. Rape is not supposed to be a part of the punishment for any crime. And this rule isn’t only supposed to apply if you’re cis.

via Transgriot

Trigger Warning on post and links for graphic descriptions of sexual violence against sex workers, including sexual torture; rape apologism

This past April, a woman who was doing sex work was picked up by one John Hauff and driven to his home to engage in a pre-negotiated sexual encounter. Hauff requested some bondage elements in that encounter — to which the woman agreed, while setting strong limits.

John Hauff allegedly violated those limits wildly. Instead of loosely tying her to the bedpost and stimulating her with a vibrator, as she says she agreed, he allegedly chained her to the ceiling and forced painful sexual acts on her involving extreme bondage, paddles, electrical shocks, speculums, and catheters.

The first page of this article in the Seattle Weekly offers a lengthy, extremely explicit description of the allegations in question.

The second page goes on to begin (technically in the second paragraph down):

But is John Hauff a monster? Or is there, as some in the bondage community suggest, another way to interpret what happened between John Hauff and the woman he picked up on Aurora Avenue on April 2—one that makes Hauff less a cruel and sadistic rapist than a participant in a bondage session gone haywire?

Rape is not BDSM¹ gone wrong. And what has been alleged is not “BDSM” or “bondage” but rape and sexual torture. Anyone in bondage/BDSM communities making the argument that there is only a thin line between BDSM and rape is doing themselves an incredible disservice. They serve not to speak for the rights of those who wish to engage in consensual, non-mainstream sexual behavior, but for rapists. To conflate BDSM enthusiasts with rapists is to wrongly vilify BDSM and its participants, the vast majority of whom don’t rape people. And it is to suggest that anyone who agrees to any BDSM elements in a sexual situation is more or less requesting to be raped.

As it turns out, though, this article ends up splitting very neatly among gender lines. All of the women consulted in the piece — one who previously engaged in consensual BDSM scenes with Hauff, and the executive director of the Center for Sex Positive Culture — absolutely agree that the allegations as described constitute sexual violence and are utterly unacceptable.

The men who weigh in on the subject are, shockingly, a little bit less sure. One of them is Master Ray, a man who makes his living doing BDSM trainings, and who seems to have rather antiquated views on gender roles.

The other is Jonathan Kaminsky, the author of the piece himself, who sets up this absurd, rape apologist framing on the basis of nothing more than the word of one BDSM practitioner (against the word of two others), and seemingly his own gut instinct about how rape allegations just can’t be trusted. This is despite the fact that Hauff admitted to police that he did not stop the first two times the woman told him to.

The article is supposedly intended to interrogate whether or not Hauff’s “fetish will set him free.” It’s a real possibility, with both rape culture and mainstream views and misunderstandings regarding BDSM being what they are. But Kaminsky doesn’t explore the prejudices of the average public. He doesn’t consult lawyers regarding defense tactics, or speculate on what “expert” witnesses may be called to the stand to act as apologists. He just asks some people who also engage in BDSM what they think of the case. Most of them say “this sounds like rape.” One reads from a rape apologist script. And suddenly, we’re supposed to believe that there is meaningful “controversy” here and reason to entertain the possibility of a gray area.

We’re not supposed to notice that this angle was manufactured by the author, who turned “one guy I talked to” into “some in the bondage community” and closed his article like this:

Only two people know what happened the night of April 2, what boundaries were drawn, what deals were struck, and how, when, and to what degree they were breached. It is possible that their understanding of what happened on that night differs. It’s possible we’ll never know the truth.

…

What we do know is that no bodies were found in his yard, and no other women have come forward with terrible stories of kidnap and rape. We also know this: The events of April 2 have marked a dark chapter in the lives of prostitute and client alike.

Indeed.

Of course, anyone with the slightest familiarity with rape culture will know that “only two people know what happened” is the classic way of saying that we better take the alleged rapist’s word for it. And anyone who knows anything about alt-weeklies that do their damnedest to seem street-smart will also know that the Seattle Weekly editors have absolutely no excuse to not know the term “sex worker” or how the unnecessarily repeated references to the victim in this case as a “prostitute” (instead of a rape victim) are incredibly stigmatizing towards her in the current U.S. cultural climate. And anyone who knows anything about life will know that not having decaying corpses on your property or a long line of highly marginalized victims who are willing to step forward and involve themselves in a very public case hardly means that you didn’t rape that one woman who says you raped her.

But surely we can all agree that this sucks as much for the rapist as it does for the rape victim, can’t we?

Frankly, if this is what passes for objectivity and journalistic ethics these days, I don’t want it.

But back to Master Ray. Well, some of his own views are as terrifying as they are long-winded:

When the subject turns to John Hauff, Master Ray’s face hardens. He’s never met the man, he says, pausing to sip from his glass of milk. He knows only what he’s seen on TV and heard on the radio. Because he doesn’t have all the details, Master Ray cautions that making a judgment “would be improper and foolish.” Still, he says, there’s something about the young woman’s story that troubles him. She acknowledges negotiating up front for a certain amount of bondage, Master Ray points out. She got in his car willingly, and they drove to his place. There was no threat of brutality in the car.

“It wasn’t a kidnapping,” Master Ray says. “It was a negotiated sex scene between a hooker and her client. And somewhere along the line, she crossed her own panic line and cried ‘Help!’ ”

As for her texting of Hauff’s license-plate number, Master Ray points out that this is standard operating procedure in the fetish community, and doesn’t necessarily mean the young woman was unusually leery of Hauff. “We call that a ‘safe call.’ It’s perfectly legitimate and normal,” he says. Once she’d revealed the text message to Hauff, Ray continues, “What happened next? She got dressed. He took her back where she belonged. He dropped her off. There was no threat. No murder. No ‘Keep quiet or I’ll come get you.’ ”

During a bondage session in which the rules have already been agreed upon, a dominant partner’s saying something to arouse a submissive partner is as common as flirting, Master Ray says. If, during a bondage scene, Master Ray were asked by a submissive he didn’t know if he planned to kill her, he would read it as a sign that this type of talk turned her on. “So I’m going to smirk and say something like ‘We’ll see,’ or ‘Maybe later,’ or ‘Only if you’re not pleasing to me, only if you don’t satisfy me,’ ” explains Master Ray. “Call me a smart-ass, but I’m going to say something that is going to elicit a response from her.”

When the prostitute asked Hauff if he was going to kill her, Master Ray says, “We don’t know what tone of voice she used.” Her question, he says, could have been understood as a clue that this form of “danger” was a turn-on for her. “And the worst part of it is that between the time it happened and when she finally decided to report it, her feelings, her thoughts, can change,” Master Ray says. “Shame can set in. And then he gets punished because now she’s feeling bad about it.”

Still, Master Ray acknowledges, Hauff’s alleged use of such techniques as bladder manipulation and electric shock, which are at the outer edges of the bondage-play repertoire, give him pause. “If he did spring this on her, then he crossed a line,” Master Ray says. “That would not be tolerated in the [fetish] community.”

There’s something about the woman’s story that bothers him: namely, that he doesn’t seem to think a woman (let alone “a hooker”) who agrees to any kind of sexual contact can then be raped. The fact that she admittedly cried “Help!” doesn’t count. After all, her rapist didn’t kill her. (Master Ray is wrong about her not being told to keep quiet; Hauff allegedly told the woman to not involve the cops, easily understood as a threat in itself.)

His argument seems to be “this would have been completely consensual, if both parties consented.” Which, obviously. The very point is that one party explicitly says she did not consent. But Master Ray asserts that we don’t know the tone of voice she used when asking if Hauff was going to kill her, so the consent was probably implied.

Personally, I’d say that Master Ray sounds like an incredibly irresponsible and dangerous dom, if his portrayal of how he treats partners he does not know and has not negotiated said elements with in advance is accurate. And yet, we are supposed to respect him as an expert not only in BDSM, but also in consent as it relates to BDSM. As if BDSM communities are somehow uniquely immune to rape culture.

According to Master Ray “the worst part of it” is not that a woman was allegedly raped and tortured, but that she might be lying about it. Which alone should tell us all we need to know about him. The myth that women quickly become “ashamed” of their sexual activity and then falsely claim rape in order to protect their patriarchally-approved virtue is a pervasive if widely debunked one. The fact that said myth is able to be twisted and applied to sex workers — the same women who are routinely portrayed as having no virtue left in a world that judge’s women’s virtue on the basis of their chastity — is nothing more than evidence of how far misogynists are willing to contort their own logic to support men’s right to rape (at least certain) women with impunity.

Indeed, one of the truly remarkable things about this case is that the police care at all. One could indeed speculate that the particular amount of violence used and the non-mainstream sexual acts allegedly forced are likely the reason. In a culture where consensual kinky sex is vilified, rape involving elements that would be considered kinky in a consensual setting will always be more severely demonized. In a culture where sex workers are routinely raped by police, where sex workers are almost always too afraid to report their rapes to police, where judges call the rape of sex workers “theft of services,” it’s not a stretch to imagine that we wouldn’t be seeing the same amount of resources or outrage applied had the woman consented to one kind of sex and then forced into another, with no BDSM elements present. We’d be hearing choruses of “what did she expect?”

Clearly some commenters aren’t content to entirely avoid those choruses now. Some people can’t get past the idea that a woman who agrees to any kind of sex deserves whatever violence might be inflicted on her. This is far more so when the woman in question is a sex worker.

But no matter what the Seattle Weekly or Master Ray sees fit to either imply or outright say, there is no such thing as blanket consent. Every person has the right to say no, to set limits, and to have those limits respected. When those limits are violated, it is assault. No matter what other acts they may have agreed to. No matter who they are.

Thanks to Una Feral for the link.

Eighth-grade teacher Shad Knutson has been charged with three counts of sexual assault against three different female students over three years. He is no longer working for Nathan Hale Middle School, where all of the alleged assaults were committed, but he did remain employed with them for three years after the first allegation was made. Numerous additional allegations were made in the years that followed. And still, the school’s “investigations” resulted in his remaining employed, until several months after police finally got involved.

School policy has come into question after a former eighth-grade teacher was accused of sexual assault. Did Omaha Public Schools do enough when students came forward with allegations of sexual harassment against Shad Knutson?

The 34-year-old taught at Nathan Hale Middle School for three years. Each year, a different female student came forward, claiming he touched them inappropriately. But it took until last fall for police to get involved.

Now, Knutson faces three counts of felony sexual assault.

One board member brought up his concerns at a committee meeting Monday. Justin Wayne said he wants police involvement from the very start of an investigation into reported abuse. He said let teachers teach and let police follow the facts.

“As long as OPS’s process and an outside person’s process come to the same conclusion, it’s OK. It’s when they differ (that) there’s an issue,” Wayne said.

OPS said repeated internal investigations into the reports of sexual harassment turned up no credible evidence. But prosecutors disagree.

School staff and district leaders said its policy works. They said they prioritize student safety, while protecting educators from false reports.

Except that student safety clearly isn’t being prioritized when the policy on the sexual assault of 13-year-old girls seems to apply a three-strikes before you’re out rule.

While the question admittedly gets a lot murkier when there are minors involved and the offender is a government-paid and sponsored employee, as a general rule I am not opposed to keeping internal reports of misconduct internal. Victims often do not want to get law enforcement involved, for very good reason. I believe that their choices in terms of reporting methods should be respected (while all options should also be made available and accessible to them), and I do believe that there should be means outside the broken U.S. judicial system for dealing with sexual violence.

The problem, however, occurs when these local systems of accountability are, like the judicial system itself, more invested in protecting the rights and reputation of abusers than the rights and safety of victims. Institutions are notoriously bad at holding themselves accountable. While schools are supposed to be in the business of serving and protecting students, they far too frequently are much more interested in protecting themselves as entities.

This story largely caught my interest due to the way it so closely mirrors an episode I personally witnessed at my own middle school. Also in eighth grade, the new English teacher began sexually harassing a certain female student in full public view. Throughout class he would leer at her, “flirt,” and make highly inappropriate and sexualized remarks about her clothing choices and physical appearance. He would frequently hold her after class for no legitimate reason. She told us (and while I now regret many of our “supportive” gestures, we fully believed her) that during these after-class meetings, he would ask her personal questions, stand overly close to her, brush up against her, and even stroke her hair.

We didn’t know words like “sexual harassment” then. So we just called it “creepy.” But we knew that it wasn’t right.

When she and her mother reported the harassment to administration, they were told, verbatim, that the teacher-predator was “a nice guy” who was “awkward” and “nervous” and that he didn’t “mean it like that.” When the harassment thereafter escalated, she did her best to quietly survive.

And when those of us who watched it happening attempted to engage in rudimentary good bystander behavior, we were repeatedly rebuffed by the adults. A male student who pointedly interrupted the in-class harassment by asking the teacher why he was always focusing on and bothering the student in question was met with a scolding for being rude and making inappropriate suggestions about the teacher’s motives. Several friends and myself — and I do not doubt we weren’t the only ones — attempted to report the harassment on two separate occasions to our two most trusted teachers. In both instances, we were met with aghast faces — not at the harassing teacher’s behavior, but at ours. We were chastised for “gossiping” and insulting the teacher’s reputation, and again assured that the teacher was “a nice guy.” If there was as problem, we were told, the administration would have dealt with it when it was reported. Since they did not take action, there was not a problem, and we needed to drop the issue.

I do not know if the teacher’s behavior ever progressed to physical sexual assault either that year or in subsequent years once I had graduated from the school, as it clearly did in the case of Shad Knutson. But I certainly walked away with the impression that if it had, like Shad Knutson he would have been protected. It was my very first lesson in rape culture, though I did not yet know it.

While I do not in any way wish to minimize the experience of the student who was the direct target of his harassment — none of us experienced what she did — our teacher inevitably victimized all of his female students by proxy, by stealing our sense of safety in the classroom. This is how misogynistic harassment and assault work — by terrorizing not only the direct victim, but all women who witness and know of it. We are taught that we, too, can become the victim at any time. We are made hyper-aware of the fact that we will be treated differently and made more vulnerable because of our genders. We are made defensive in our everyday lives.

And in this case, we were taught that the teachers who we trusted, who we very much loved and in whom we confided, the teachers who we believed were there to protect us, would given the opportunity choose their colleague’s reputation of our words. They would protect their own before they would protect us. They would choose friends’ careers over student safety. They would teach us good touch and bad touch and to say something if we saw something, and then when we followed their instructions they would tell us to shut the fuck up.

While I definitely don’t claim the circumstances to be identical, there’s no doubt in my mind that the victims who originally reported the harassment and assaults and the students who watched the administration allow Knutson back into the classroom no less than three times did get a very similar set of lessons. The girls especially were taught that their word and safety would not be valued, that they would not be believed or taken seriously, that what men in positions of authority did to their bodies did not matter, and speaking up was often fruitless. If they were ever privileged enough, as I was, to previously believe that their educators had their best interests at heart, they were taught here that their educators could not be trusted. (And if they already could not trust their educators, this was then yet one more horrific instance in a long series of systemic violence.)

What makes this case even more disturbing is how administrators still do not believe that they have done anything wrong, and still defend their right to put predator teachers’ needs above those abused students‘:

Susan Colvin, principal at Nathan Hale Middle School, addressed a school board committee, which voted Monday to keep in place district policies for reporting allegations of sexual harassment and child abuse.

Board member Bambi Bartek asked Colvin if she believed she had done the right thing.

“Without a doubt, definitely,” Colvin said in her first public remarks about the allegations against former Nathan Hale teacher Shad M. Knutson. Colvin declined to comment further after the meeting. [...]

Proulx said student complaints should be looked into, but in a way that maintains the teacher’s dignity.

Board vice president Shirley Tyree said such allegations should be handled carefully.

“We need to be very, very careful when we start accusing people of things,” she said. “They never get that portion of their life back.”

If nothing has been learned from this case, I don’t know what it might possibly take for a lesson to be learned. After all, one can hardly learn what one actively resists being taught. What we’re seeing here is a clear statement that teacher rights come before student rights and student safety. It’s not a particularly new or surprising revelation that the rights of abusers come before those of their victims, but particularly within a school setting it is one with chilling implications, nonetheless.

A new study about the ongoing rape epidemic in the Congo has some rather terrifying statistics to offer. According to USA Today, 420,000 women are raped in the DRC every year.

Or, if you ask the Boston Globe, 1,152 women are raped every day. The Guardian reports that 48 women are raped every hour. And the Sydney Morning Herald ups the ante even further by putting the number at one rape every minute.

Even if all of the varying numbers did add up just so, I can’t be the only one wondering when exactly this ongoing campaign of sexual terrorism against women turned into a competition over which Western newspaper could write the most shocking headline. Nor can I refrain from asking what, exactly, is the magic number of rapes that will suddenly make us care? Would the headlines still be blaring if it were 30 rapes an hour? Is one rape every one and a half minutes just too few that the numbers needed to be fudged and made even more sensationalistic? Do we, as Western observers, care more now than we would if the number were actually one rape every five minutes?

Do we care now? Will the subject merit our true attention? Will we suddenly start listening to Congolese survivors? Are we ashamed for not having listened more closely before, for not believing the full magnitude when women were already telling us the truth? Do we feel better now that a U.S. organization has officially verified their lived experiences? Or will we remain indifferent until the numbers hit two rapes every minute? Five rapes every minute? One every second? Where precisely is the cut off point for compassion and a sense justice? How many women must be raped before we start to care enough to look at the causes? How high do the numbers have to be?

I am in no way trying to suggest that these numbers do not matter. Nor am I arguing that they are not horrific, that they do not deserve attention, or that headlines on the topic are unwarranted. What I’m condemning is the objectifying and imperialistic tendency towards disaster porn. What I’m criticizing is the refusal to engage with the issue of violence in the Congo in an in-depth and ongoing basis that puts these numbers in context, and the decision to instead resort to pearl-clutching headlines designed to shock Western readers with information we already had and will continue to ignore.

I’m also making clear that the response to this extremely extended crisis would look a lot different were it occurring somewhere other than sub-Sahara Africa. It’s not that the media takes most rape seriously, or that even the most privileged rape survivors are immune to rape apologism, victim-blaming, and indifference — this entire blog is a testament to these things not being true.

But on the one hand, that is precisely the point. These same newspapers that report these numbers with horror and very little background or analysis will tomorrow resort to shaming and casting doubt on rape victims from their own communities. Tomorrow, when it is no longer convenient to feign interest in rape, it will be back to business as usual. Tomorrow, lines will be drawn between the “date rape” that so many women needlessly whine and exaggerate about and the “real” rape that is downplayed by taking it seriously — after all, what about those women in the Congo?

Indeed, the part of this study that has been the most ignored and will continue to be pushed to the margins is the fact that this study shows higher numbers than others, in large part, because it includes rape by intimate partners instead of only rape committed as a tactic of war — a fact that makes the situation look a lot more similar to the one in countries where most don’t consider rape to be a big problem.

And, on the other hand, while the shaming and ridicule of rape victims is ubiquitous in the U.S. and other Western countries, some victims are indeed always more valued than others. We wouldn’t have to wait until the number of rapes hit “one every minute” before we started to care, if a large portion of those victims were white, cis, economically privileged women — at least, not if those rapes were in large part being committed within the context of war and with the level of violence we’re seeing against Congolese women. We wouldn’t have to wonder whether one every minute is actually going to be enough to cause real concern. We would know that there would be outrage.

But women who are black, who are poor, who are from countries labeled “third world” always fall towards the very bottom of hierarchy of rape victims who will gain Western attention. We in developed Western nations can and will ignore their plight because we have constructed them as less than women, less than human. We can simultaneously tut-tut at the atrocity and turn away from it because it is what we expect from those men we have culturally constructed as inherently barbaric, because it’s what we believe the women have come to expect, too.

And we can ignore our role — the role of industrialized nations and of consumers, especially in the U.S. We can look at the numbers and think it is “them” instead of “us.” We who aren’t living in the Congo can refuse to ask the question of why there is so much rape and assume that it has something to do with “lesser” cultures instead of so much to do with our own. We can side-step questions of rape culture and imperialism and colonialism and economic racism and consumer culture. We can forget to ask why we ignored earlier opportunities to ask hard questions and demand change.

We, we reading these headlines divorced from the context in which the news was created, can read “one rape every minute” and exclaim “those poor women!” without wondering why we didn’t care before someone made the headline sufficiently eye-grabbing, and without demanding accountability from ourselves now.

Dear Jane Doe,

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry that they put you through this. Both the ordeal of the rape and the ordeal of having your entire life dragged through the mud, after all of which they refused to provide you with the simple dignity and decency of an acknowledgment of what they did to you. I’m sorry that money and reputation were valued more highly than your human worth — they judged horribly wrong. I’m sorry your community did not stand more strongly behind you. I’m sorry that all of us, as a society, created a world where this was possible. I am so, so sorry.

I believe you.

I believe that they raped you that night. I don’t care how many courts in the world say otherwise. This trial did not diminish my belief in you. For while excuses which suggest that rape victims bring their assaults on themselves may sway some, they do not move me.  They convince me only of their speakers’ lack of ethics, their inability to perceive sexual violence as serious in the first place, their lack of true defense that involves meaningful consent from the accuser. In any judicial system that did not exist inside a rape culture, that did not buy myths which serve to uphold a system in which men can rape with impunity, yours would have been a slam-dunk instead of a disaster. This I know.

In all that I have read about your rape, your trial — and it has been quite a bit — I have seen remarkably few people who have slandered you, called you names, and attacked your personhood argue that you were not violated, that you consented to what happened. I have seen them almost always argue, instead, that you simply deserved it.

They are all wrong. Every last one of them. You did not deserve it. You did not deserve it. You did not deserve what they did to you. Nothing you wore, nothing you said, nothing you did, nothing you drank made you deserve it. You did not deserve it. I hope you know that.

I believe that these men raped you. And you deserved that acknowledgment from a court of law instead of some random blogger. You deserved an award in your favor, not my empty words.

But I support you. There are others here who also support you. We believe you.

And though none of us are you, or have experienced just what you have now, your fellow rape survivors stand in solidarity with you, as people who have been assaulted, disbelieved, devalued, and pushed aside. As people who deserve more from the societies we live in.

You deserved more. I’m sorry. And because it cannot be said enough: I believe you.

In Love,
Cara Kulwicki

Last year, I wrote quite a bit about prisoner rape and the failure of the Department of Justice to implement new standards to address the epidemic in a timely fashion. I previously urged you to submit public comments to the Justice Department regarding the implementation of new guidelines. Almost a year has passed, and still the Justice Department is moving ahead on the issue at a snail’s pace, as people in detention are being raped every day with little to no recourse, and with their rapists (most likely to be prison guards) frequently controlling every aspect of their lives.

Now, we are entering the very end of the final comment period, which closes on April 4, 2011. After this comment period ends, the Department of Justice will finalize its new standards regarding prison rape, and prisons will all have one year to comply or risk losing federal funding.

This final comment period is extraordinarily important, because the new standards are not even remotely shaping up to be the sweeping set of changes that are required. A press release I received via email from Just Detention International reads in part (emphasis mine):

“Key parts of the Justice Department’s standards are unconscionably weak,” said Lovisa Stannow, Just Detention International’s Executive Director. “The next few days are the last chance for advocates, survivors, forward-thinking corrections officials, and concerned citizens to demand that something meaningful be done about the disgraceful epidemic of prisoner rape.”

In 2003, Congress unanimously passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). PREA created the bipartisan National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, which spent years studying the problem before delivering its recommendations to Attorney General Eric Holder for ratification. In his proposed version of the standards, however, Holder has dramatically watered down the consensus recommendations by the commission.

Holder has removed limits on cross-gender pat searches and viewing of inmates using the toilet or shower, despite having documented that most staff abuse of inmates is cross-gender, and that it often begins during pat searches. Contrary to the clear intent of PREA, the Department has also decided that the standards should not apply to immigration facilities — even though immigration detainees are among the most vulnerable to abuse. Holder has even proposed that corrections agencies be allowed to police their own compliance with the standards by using an internal employee to conduct audits, rejecting the commission’s recommendation (and standard practice in the Western world) that oversight be conducted by independent monitors.

“The stated reason for weakening the commission’s recommendations was cost,” said Stannow.  “But the Justice Department’s own data, together with its preliminary cost-benefit analysis of the standards, make abundantly clear that much stronger standards would be warranted even from a purely financial perspective. This suggests that the Attorney General’s true reasons for weakening the standards are primarily political.“

These changes are dramatic, they are unconscionable, and they are unworkable. And they cannot be allowed to go forward without a fight. Restricting cross-gender supervision is one of the most obvious ways to effectively prevent a large number of assaults that are being committed every single day. And attempting to address the issue of sexual violence in detention without addressing immigration facilities is blatantly discriminatory and hateful, not to mention hugely ineffective. That there could possibly even be political reasons to not take the most effective steps to prevent prisoners from being raped is sickening and infuriating.

But the prison lobby is strong, and so is the anti-immigration lobby, which frankly believes that undocumented persons don’t deserve safety or protection of any kind. That’s why getting as many comments in before the deadline on Monday is extremely important.

Just Detention International has all the information you need to submit your public comment. JDI provides a letter template for you, but please take the time to write your own. Submitting public comments is not like contacting your representative — it is quality that counts over quantity. The Department of Justice needs to hear about why standards to address prisoner rape need to be strict, why they need to include immigration facilities, and why restrictions on cross-gender supervision are an integral part of any serious effort to prevent as many assaults as possible immediately. Read more in-depth talking points from Just Detention International and get your comments in by Monday, April 4.

Trigger Warning for descriptions of sexual violence and abuses against sex workers

Last week, Jordan Flaherty wrote an article at Colorlines about how sex workers are being punished under an archaic and punitive law that specifically targets those who are convicted of selling oral or anal sex (as opposed to vaginal sex). The law makes these sex workers open to being labeled as felons by police and prosecutors, and worst of all, forces them to register as sex offenders.

Last month, a coalition of advocates, including Women With A Vision and the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed a federal lawsuit challenging the statue:

Eve, who asked that we not reveal her real name or age, spent two years in prison. During her time behind bars she was raped and contracted HIV. Upon release, she was forced to register in the state’s sex offender database. The words “sex offender” now appear on her driver’s license. “I have tried desperately to change my life,” she says, but her status as a sex offender stands in the way of housing and other programs. “When I present my ID for anything,” she says, “the assumption is that you’re a child molester or a rapist. The discrimination is just ongoing and ongoing.”

Eve was penalized under Louisiana’s 205-year-old Crime Against Nature statute, a blatantly discriminatory law that legislators have maneuvered to keep on the state’s books for the purpose of turning sex workers into felons. As enforced, the law specifically singles out oral and anal sex for greater punishment for those arrested for prostitution, including requiring those convicted to register as sex offenders in a public database. Advocates say the law has further isolated poor women of color in particular, including those who are forced to trade sex for food or a place to sleep at night.

In 2003, the Supreme Court outlawed sodomy laws with its decision in Lawrence v. Texas. That ruling should have invalidated Louisiana’s law entirely. Instead, the state has chosen to only enforce the portion of the law that concerns “solicitation” of a crime against nature. The decision on whether to charge accused sex workers with a felony instead of Louisiana’s misdemeanor prostitution law is left entirely in the hands of police and prosecutors.

Prior to the lawsuit, Colorlines was covering the issue over a year ago. Melissa Gira Grant wrote about the suit at Third Wave right after it was filed last month, and the INCITE! Blog was on it both last year and earlier this month. You should definitely go check those articles out, as there’s no doubt that I’m behind. But I still think the issue is worth writing about and getting further attention.

As noted by Flaherty, Louisiana is the only U.S. state that requires people who have been convicted of crimes that do not involve minors or violence outside the sexual violence itself to register as sex offenders. Meghan’s Law, which created sex offender registries, was clearly intended to target rapists. Louisiana has actively made the choice to abuse the registry to further shame, punish, and vilify sex workers who have not committed any violence. Women are by far the primary target of these efforts, though gay and bisexual men are also incredibly vulnerable. Of the women targeted by the state, women who are non-white, trans, and/or poor are most open to attack.

People convicted under the Louisiana law must carry a state ID with the words “sex offender” printed below their name. If they have to evacuate because of a hurricane, they must stay in a special shelter for sex offenders that has no separate facilities for men and women. They have to pay a $60 annual registration fee, in addition to $250 to $750 to print and mail postcards to their neighbors every time they move. The post cards must show their names and addresses, and often they are required to include a photo. Failing to register and pay the fees, a separate crime, can carry penalties of up to 10 years in prison.

Women and men on the registry will also find their names, addresses, and convictions printed in the newspaper and published in an online sex offender database. The same information is also displayed at public sites like schools and community centers. Women—including one mother of three—have complained that because of their appearance on the registry, they have had men come to their homes demanding sex. A plaintiff in the suit had rocks thrown at her by neighbors. “This has forced me to live in poverty, be on food stamps and welfare,” explains a man who was on the list. “I’ve never done that before.”

In Orleans Parish, 292 people are on the registry for selling sex, versus 85 people convicted of forcible rape and 78 convicted of “indecent behavior with juveniles.” Almost 40 percent of those registered in Orleans Parish are there solely because they were accused of offering anal or oral sex for money. Seventy-five percent of those on the database for Crime Against Nature are women, and 80 percent are African American. Evidence gathered by advocates suggests a majority are poor or indigent.

There are several broad critiques to be made of sex offender registry programs. In addition to the racial profiling and discriminatory enforcement noted in the Colorlines article, there are also further questions regarding whether sex offender registries actually keep communities safer and/or lower recidivism rates. Support for sex offender registry programs generally, however, should not be viewed as in any way incompatible with thinking that the Louisiana system is being used as a means of violence and oppression against sex workers and must immediately be overturned.

This is not in any way about keeping communities safer. It is about further punishing and portraying as deviant those who have failed to comply with societal rules regarding sexuality, class, and womanhood. It’s not about making communities safer, it’s about specifically ensuring that these particular community members are as unsafe as possible. And in that sense, it’s certainly working.

Because of the way that sex workers are generally made vulnerable to violence, as well as the ways that prisoners face frequent sexual assault, the most callous part of this practice may be the fact that such large numbers of those forced to register as sex offenders for non-violent offenses are victims of sexual violence themselves. Most of the women and men profiled in these articles talk about having been raped, whether as adults or children, whether by clients or family members, by prison guards or fellow prisoners. They must register as sex offenders, be unable to find employment or residences, face harassment and assault, and bear scarlet letters on their identification while at the same time, probably all of their actual rapists do not have to do the same. They have not only been raped, but been given their rapists’ punishments. They have not only been raped, but told that they are like, or perhaps worse than, their actual rapists.

And while this form of punishment for an act that should not be illegal in the first place is not even remotely acceptable for those who do engage in sex work because it is their preferred profession, it is also worth noting that there are many sex workers who do sex work as a form of survival or have otherwise been coerced. These workers are already more likely to be in street-based economies, and therefore are more likely to be targeted by law enforcement and more likely to be singled out for felony instead of misdemeanor punishment as a result of judicial prejudice.

In other words, punishing people for what they choose to do with their own bodies, when those actions do not harm any other person, is unconscionable — as is punishing them specifically for selling forms of sex perceived as less acceptable by a cissexist, heterosexist, anti-sex society. But quite a few of those women and men who have been forced to register as sex offenders didn’t even necessarily have a choice. And for that, they have been branded by a racist, anti-trans, classist, anti-gay system.

It will be interesting to see how this case plays out, and whether the court will decide with power and oppression as usual, or with the people and justice.