[Please note the comment guideline change described at the end of this post.]

CBS News

For years, [Madison, Wis] police and city lawyers refused to believe a blind woman who said an intruder raped her at knifepoint. They even charged her with lying about it. Now, five years after DNA connected a sex offender to the attack, the city has apologized to the woman, known as Patty, and is offering her $35,000. Outraged by a book detailing her skeptical treatment by authorities, the City Council approved the payment last month and ordered police to draw up new policies for interviewing crime victims. [...]

The resolution gives Police Chief Noble Wray 90 days to recommend new techniques for interviewing of victims of sensitive crimes, including how to eliminate “the use of lies, coercion, deception, ruses or other techniques designed to break down individuals” in all but the rarest of circumstances.

This non-monetary portion of the resolution is something that all police forces should resolve to do. Rape victims deserve to be treated ethically and not with assumptions that they are criminals who must be broken.

It shouldn’t take the publication of a book such as Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman’s Harrowing Quest for Justice by Bill Lueders (given a starred review by Booklist) to get city leaders to correct an injustice like this. But I’m not surprised that the level of denial about what many rape victims experience is so high that it takes a book — and likely the publicity that came with that book — to get people out of their denial.

In 2001, the state crime lab discovered that DNA from Joseph Bong, a convicted sex offender, matched the semen. Bong was convicted of Patty’s rape in 2004 and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

I wish all cases where the police refuse to believe real rape victims ended with the conviction of the rapist and the clearing of the rape victim’s good name, but that just isn’t the reality for most rape victims who are treated like they are the real criminals.

(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)

This post is a feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only thread.

If you aren’t sure what that means, please read this before commenting.

The model minority myth is foundational to the way many Americans see race in this country. The model minority myth postulates that Asians (broadly defined) are all doing wonderfully here in the US. Many people believe that Asians are more intelligent and have a better work ethic. People who believe in this myth cite stats showing a high level of education, high median family incomes, and a large number of Asian Americans in the most prestigious schools. In this post, I want to talk about just a few reasons why the model minority myth misrepresents the experiences of Asian Americans.

Not all of the statistics of Asian Americans paint a rosy picture. This is not to diminish the accomplishments of Asian Americans, but it is important to understand that statistics can be used selectively. By only citing the statistics where Asians do well, we miss the bigger picture. One of the biggest problems with how Asians are viewed is the tendency to lump all Asian ethnic groups together. When groups are subdivided a more complex portrait of Asian Americans emerges.

Asian Americans and Poverty

It may surprise many model minority proponents to know that Asian Americans have higher poverty rates than whites. Census poverty statistics for 2000 indicate that 9% of whites live in poverty, 24% of blacks live in poverty, 11% of native born (NB) Asian Americans live in poverty, and 13% of foreign born (FB) Asians live in poverty¹. The poverty rate for various sub-groups within the category Asian also varies. For example, Filipinos have lower poverty rates among both the native born (7%) and the foreign born (6%). Japanese Americans (NB=5%, FB=16%) have lower poverty rates than whites if the are native born and higher if they are foreign born. How do other groups fair:

1. Chinese (NB=11, FB=14%)
2. Koreans (NB=12%, FB=15%)
3. Asian Indians (NB=10%, FB=10%)
4. Vietnamese (NB=18%, FB=15%)

In their analysis Sakamoto and Xie (2006) create a category “Other Asians” which includes all groups not mentioned above such as Hmong, Laotian, Cambodians, Indonesians, and some others. Collectively, these groups have very high poverty rates NB=26% and FB=22%, which puts their poverty rates at the same level as African Americans. So the overall lesson here is that poverty is slightly higher for Asians than it is for whites, and poverty levels vary dramatically among Asian subgroups.

Asian Americans and High School Completion

While Asian Americans as a collective are overrepresented among the highly educated, many are also overrepresented in among those who do not complete high school. In 2000 87% of whites and 77% of blacks in the 25-64 year old range had completed high school. For Asians, however, the numbers are complex. Among the native born the overall number is 93% and among the foreign born it is 82% (Sakamoto and Xie 2006). Native born Asians tend to do better than whites and foreign born Asians tend to do worse. Once again there is great variation among the various Asian subgroups that follows a somewhat similar pattern to the one above–Japanese, Filipinos, Indians, and Koreans do relatively well (They are all 89% or higher for both foreign and native born.). Chinese (NB=96%, FB=80%) are in the middle, and Vietnamese (NB=74% and FB=65%) and “other” Asians (NB=81, FB=67%) do poorly.

Conclusion

I have not taken the time to examine labor force statistics or higher education statistics in this particular post, but they do have some some similar patterns. I think it is important to understand the complexities of the experiences of Asian Americans outside the model minority stereotype, while many Asians are doing fairly well economically, thanks to immigration policies that recruited highly skilled workers from the east. Others are not doing so well. Several Asian subgroups like Hmong, Laotians, or Vietnamese consistently have poverty and drop out rates that are on par with or higher than African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. These groups often came as refugees rather than skilled workers. Moreover, the poverty rates tend to be higher than whites for most Asian subgroups. There are no doubt an Asian American working class and an underclass, which we very rarely hear about. (This post will also connect with the second immigration series post.)

This is part of the reason I argued for affirmative action in higher education for Asian Americans. Beyond the fact that I think schools should promote diversity, I also think a good case can be made that many Asian American subgroups are underrepresented in higher education.

1. Sakamoto, Arthur and Yu Xie. 2006. “The Socioeconomic Attainments of Asian Americans.” PP 54-67 in Pyong Min Gap (ed.) Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. (back)

I’ve recently finished reading Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. She’s one of the many women (and men) whose stories get ignored in the deradicalisation of the black freedom movement.*

The first I read about Ella Baker years ago, in Mary King’s autobiography. But something about the way Mary King described Ella Baker stayed with me, and I’ve always wanted to know more about her. I think it was the tone of respect - Mary King said that a sign of this respect was that everyone always called her “Miss Ella Baker” (most of those in the black freedom movement came from the south - where the use of honorifics was decidedly political).

I’ve always wanted to know more about Miss Ella Baker’s life, and it was fascinating to read about how she became the person who earned such a huge amount of respect among the students who were fighting so hard for such simple demands. But for me, the most interesting aspect of the book was how much I agree with the way Ella Baker did politics.

Ella Baker was a grass-roots organiser. What made her politics and action radical, as that she centred her politics around ordinary people.

Barbara Ransby demonstrates really directly what this meant. In 1959 black people in Fayette County got together and tried to vote, this was a big problem to a lot of white people in Fayette county. A lot of the people who tried to vote were sharecroppers, and they got evicted from their land for trying to vote - they lost their house and their income. Instead of leaving Fayette County they built a shanty town on land donated by a black landowner. SNCC and Ella Baker both considered this an important battle, and supported, and wrote about the sharecroppers. The NAACP report focused on the well-to-do grocer, the teacher and theminister, who were not able to vote, rather than the vast majority of poor, semi-illiterate sharecroppers.

In 1960 there were many young black students who were the first people in their family to go to college, some of these students took action against the racist world they lived in. These students became SNCC, and many adopted Ella Baker’s ideas of leadership. When they went to a town, they were there to organise, to build trust, to build hope, and eventually work their way out of a job. Despite their relatively priviledged position, they didn’t assume that those with power within the black community were more important than those without.

Ella Baker had on-going political disagreements with Martin Luther King Jr., because he had a completely different idea of leadership. He believed in a more traditional view of leadership - that it was his job to lead black people somewhere. Barbara Ransby also implies that Ella Baker also just plain didn’t like Martin Luther King Jr. This is where I stop just admiring her, and start identifying her. I hate Big Men of the Left (they are usually men - I suspect it’s because most people would react really hostilely to women who acted in the same way). I’ve known a few men who were seen, or saw themselves in that role, and I can’t stand them, usually for a reason - but I usually start hating them before I have the reasons. They believe that they know better, and that they are important in and of themselves, rather than for the work they do.

My idea of leadership is much closer to Ella Baker’s - although I don’t have her skills. Personality and aesthetics are part of that - whenever I’ve felt I could make a difference to an important decision people were making I’ve felt the responsibility like a weight and wanted to run away and hide. But it is mostly about my politics - and my vision of the world.

* I’ve written a little bit more about that here

Parts 1, 2, and 3 analyzed the comment itself, but there is a problem related to false accusations that anonymous didn’t attack. I touched upon it in my analysis, but it deserves more attention.

False and/or unfounded accusations against rape victims and those who advocate on behalf of rape victims.

Ironically, those who are most vocal about the problem of false rape accusations against men are often the worst offenders. I’m sure some people will see my analysis of the anonymous comment as an accusation or an attack, but I didn’t attack him, I challenged his statements and his insinuations about those who identify themselves as rape victims or survivors. If he didn’t want me to respond to his comment he could have chosen not to comment on my blog.

I was even accused of lying about receiving this comment and accused of writing it myself as a straw man I could then prove wrong. Because the comment calling me a liar crossed the line into an attack it was deleted — as the person who made the accusation stated would happen — I’m sure there will be those who consider me a double liar because I didn’t approve the spam comment on my post about the Duke rape case and because I deleted the personal attack.

Hey, I wish no real people spouted the beliefs contained in that anonymous comment, but they do and that is no false accusation. The person making the accusation against me apparently didn’t bother to follow the link I gave in part 1 to this comment or to do even a single search on chunks of that comment to find other copies of it with slight variations. In this linked variation of the comment anonymous has no problem making an accusation against the alleged victim in the Duke rape case and no problem deciding on her punishment.

Apparently, for anonymous due process is for men only.

When there is a report about the percentage of primary rape suspects whose DNA did not match the DNA from the actual rapists, there are plenty of people who will twist that data to make the accusation that the same percentage of rape victims have made a false accusation. They frequently go further and give that percentage of rape victims a motive like “gotta blame someone.”

When it comes to attacking rape victims and those who advocate for them, no proof is needed. All they need is something they can distort and turn into an accusation. On occasion, a few will take on the identity of an alleged rape victim such as in the Duke rape case in order to reveal the “truth” about that person.

Telling malicious lies with the intent to hurt others isn’t limited to those who file a police report. It’s a convenient myth that only women make false accusations about rape. But every time a rapist lies and says, “she asked for it,” he’s making a false accusation. If that accusation results in him escaping accountability (through no charges being filed or through a not-guilty verdict) and her being called a liar, real damage has been done and it shouldn’t be shrugged off as if it were nothing. It’s even worse if his lies result in his victim being charged with a crime or if those lies cause someone to feel justified in threatening or assaulting or murdering a rape victim.

We all deserve better than that.

(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)

Note: Comments are limited to feminists or those who can be respectful of feminists and their efforts to fight sexual exploitation. If you want to excuse or minimize the behavior of those who harm others, make the person exploited responsible for their own exploitation, call those who label their experiences rape liars, or tell us that we should be focusing on more important issues, please do so elsewhere.

[This post was originally written and posted in January of 2003, but it got dropped from the database in some blogmove or other, so I'm reposting it now.]

One of the benefits of affirmative action in college admissions, it seems to me, is that it offers a really substantial benefit to blacks at a tiny cost to whites. Not everyone agrees with my rosy view; Michael Lind, for example, once wrote that “in order to accommodate a few less-qualified black students, the University of Texas Law School, like other leading schools, must turn down hundreds or thousands of academically superior white students every year.”

So does the existence of affirmative action bring about a substantial harm to white students applying to selective colleges? Goodwin Liu, in the March 2002 issue of the Michigan Law Review, argues that the cost to whites is actually quite small; and the tiny number of whites who actually are rejected because of affirmative action policies are the least likely people to sue.

Liu calculated how much the odds of whites being admitted to five highly selective universities would change if affirmative action programs did not exist.

(The data on this table comes from pages 1075 and 1078 of the March 2002 Michigan Law Review.)

There’s obviously some statistical noise going on here (at the highest levels of SAT scores, Liu’s numbers indicate that whites have a microscopically better chance with affirmative action programs in place). But overall, the trend is clear: at combined SAT scores of 1300 and above, the presence or absence of affirmative action makes no significant difference at all to the odds of a white student being admitted. At lower scores, the difference exists, but is tiny. A white student with a combined score below 100 has a 96.7% chance of rejection from a selective school with affirmative action, and a 93.3% chance of rejection if aa didn’t exist. In either case, the odds are overwhelming she’ll be rejected; and the primary reason for the rejection is her poor SATs, not her race.

But what about those famous anti-affirmative-action lawsuits? Well, virtually all those suing are whites like Allan Bakke (of the precedent-setting Bakke case). Baake didn’t get into Davis Medical School, but sixteen minority students from poor backgrounds did get in with the help of Davis’ affirmative action program. (Minority students from middle-class or wealthier backgrounds did not qualify for Davis’ affirmative action program). Baake, deciding that he didn’t get in because those darn colored people had taken his seat, sued, claiming that he had been “barred… by reason of race alone - from attending the school.” Despite Baake’s eventual court victory, his claim is untrue; Baake didn’t qualify because he wasn’t good enough, and even if there had been no affirmative action program at Davis, he would have been rejected.

As Liu argues, the very few white students who are genuinely rejected because of affirmative action are the least likely to sue.

A white applicant who seeks admission to a particular school, but is displaced by affirmative action, is necessarily one who has come very close to being admitted. If an applicant of that caliber were to apply to several comparable schools, it seems improbable that she would be rejected in every instance. An applicant who is truly close to the cusp of admission at one institution will more than likely fall on the other side of the cusp at one of the other institutions to which she applied. Such an applicant makes an unlikely plaintiff. If, for example, a white student applies to ten selective schools and, though rated highly at each school, is rejected by all but one or two, the applicant may have legitimate grounds for complaining that she was displaced as a result of affirmative action. But because she has gained admission to one or two schools of comparable quality, her incentive (and, I suspect, psychological urge) to file a lawsuit is considerably attenuated. In this regard, it is interesting to note that in 1973, Allan Bakke failed to gain admission not only to the Davis Medical School, but also to ten other medical schools to which he applied. Bakke, like most white applicants and plaintiffs, was not close to the cusp. (Page 1094).

Anti-affirmative action lawsuits are not put forward by whites who would have gotten in to a selective college if only affirmative action didn’t exist. They’re put forward by whites who have such a strong sense of entitlement that they can’t admit they failed to gain admission because, on the merits, they didn’t deserve admission.

If I were ruler of the world, affirmative action admissions would be the least of the racial remedies we would see; it is certainly far short of what is needed to fight the effects of past and present race discrimination. Nevertheless, in some ways affirmative action admissions are an ideal case: they provide a greatly increased chance of attending the best colleges for blacks, at an incredibly tiny cost to the chances for white applicants. Given the extremely modest nature of AA, my guess is that anyone who finds AA to be too extreme, would find any substantial program that helps blacks too much to ask for.

Update: Sisyphus digs up another piece of trivia about the Michigan case currently being considered by the Supreme Court: one of the folks suing had a legacy preference when he was attempting to get into Michigan. Also, she points out something I didn’t know (but should have guessed) - a century or so ago, legacy preferences were sometimes instituted to exclude Jews.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

Hey, all! We’re having serious networking issues at my house, so my access to the series of tubes we call an internet is going to be somewhere between non-reliable and nonexistent for a while. So moderation here may be extra-slow for a while (although perhaps the other bloggers will pick up that slack!), and I may not be reading my email regularly until this problem is fixed.

Meanwhile, I’ll be reading comics and watching TV. Poor me! :-P

I have been reading several forums about the black students at Indian Univeristy Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) who have demanded better treatment from the administration at the school, and some of the racist vulgarity and ignorance is a bit shocking, so I thought I would do a little quiz. Which of the following statements come from a white supremacist site and which statements come from the local central Indiana message boards? (Answers are in the comments section.)

1.What ever happened to hiring the most qualified person for the job? Once people realise that diversity is a weakness and not a strength, schools will be the first places to see improvement.

2. Not all Whites are rich. Many, many are not and they could use the financial aid. Caucasians have a right to celebrate our background.

3. yes, Yes , YES !!!! Black History Month is racist. Lets be simple and put it this way.. If we were to make a White History Month to make people aware of our “struggles and achievments” of our race, there would be hell to pay. Just because there black, they think they can shove down everybodys throats how “horrible things were”,” how deprived we are”, etc. etc. etc.

4. These are nothing but a bunch of very well trained race baiting hucksters, preying upon spineless university administrators, taking them for every dollar they can.

I guarantee this: In ten years not one of these “activists”, who are agitating instead of studying, will have become productive or self-sufficient. They’ll blame a “lack of diversity” for their failure to thrive, but it will, of course, be due to the fact that instead of applying themselves to their studies in college they threw tantrums in order to get a separate building for their own kind.
Too bad the media, lawyers, lawmakers, etc. wont wake up to see that its racist and put a stop to all this Black nonsense.. But hey, i guess there afraid of stepping on someones toes.. But that can be another topic of discussion in itself.

5. Gee, if these students really push hard, maybe they could get the administration to give them some real concessions - you know, like separate water fountains, separate dining facilities,”special” classroom seating…in the back. People like this set race relations back 60 years. MLK must be rolling in his grave.

6. I’m sick of people making “demands” for something just because they are a minority. Stop and think. Aren’t we all a minority? The USA is a diversified nation that was built on the immagration of suppressed minorities from all nations. Since when do black American’s deserve any preferential treatment than any other American citizen? My decendants are from Germany and I’ll bet that, if you count all of the German Americans, they would also be a minority. That is the same as any other group of people from any other ancestory. The “students” remind me of a bunch of spoiled high schoolers that protest a dress code or what’s on the lunch menu. If they want to protest something they should protest something of meaningful consequence such as the Irag war, global warming or poverty. They’re only showing how immature they are.

7. All they have to do is hang around and be loud like they are everywhere else and whatever building they choose will be theirs. They have their own mall; Lafayette Square. Their own Expo. They could have Cadillac races at the Speedway. Shooting contests at Don’s Guns… shooting sideways of course. 100 yard dash with your pants around your ankles. All kinds of stuff that normal people would not do.

8. Black students “balk” at offer? You must be kidding me. I can’t believe IUPUI is allowing itself to be bullied by this (or any) group, demanding its own cultural center and other exclusive benefits. If they ultimately get it, white students should protest and demand the same — an exclusive club just for them. Imagine how that would go over!

9. This is total racism, blacks want their cake and eat it too. They want black clubs, their own world, but yet whites are prejudice if they dare look are them crosseyed. I feel what is good for the goose is good for the gander, so come on and be fair. Let’s all respect each other and not look for the first opportunity to point fingers.

10. Is there any other group as racist as the black people? They are the most racist people I know of.

I’ve blogged a few times about the UNFPA — the UN Population Fund - over the years. To review: The UN Population fund doesn’t fund or provide abortions. But they do save thousands of women’s lives, and tens of thousands of newborn lives, each year by providing medical care for women in 140 of the world’s poorest countries. They’ve also been more effective at improving reproductive choice of all kinds for Chinese women, than any other western agency.

But they also provide birth control (which prevents thousands of abortions). In the eyes of the Population Research Institute (PRI), a radical “pro-life” anti-birth control group, this makes UNFPA evil. So the PRI falsely accused the UNFPA of supporting coercive abortions in China. No subsequent investigators — not even the one sent by the Bush administration’s state department, nor the one that was led by a pro-life British politician — found the PRI’s accusations credible. (More details about that in this post).

Nonetheless, based on the PRI’s false accusations, the Bush administration has withheld the US’s contribution to the UNFPA for the past five years — $34 million a year, about 13% of the UNFPA’s annual budget. The UNFPA estimates that “$34 million applied to family planning programmes could prevent some 800,000 abortions, 4,700 maternal deaths and 77,000 infant and child deaths annually worldwide.”

I’m posting about this now is to point out that there’s a chance that the UNFPA’s funding will be restored in 2007, thanks to the Democrats taking Congress.

In 2005, a bill sponsored by Congresswoman Carolyn Mahoney (D - NY) and others would have restored US funding to the UNFPA, but failed 233-192. (A similar measure passed the Senate). Looking though the list of “no” votes, I count 20 Republicans who lost their seats to Democrats in the November elections, and also three Democrats won open seats. In addition, six Republicans who voted in favor of UNFPA lost their seats to Democrats.

If all these new Democrats vote in favor of UNFPA in 2007, then funding for UNFPA should pass in 2007, by 225 to 203. That’s a big enough margin to survive even if there are a handful of anti-UNFPA voters among those new votes.¹

Even if a funding restoration bill passes, Bush could veto — this is an issue that pro-life groups care a lot about. But there will also be pressures on Bush, and on the Republicans, to move away from the extremism that contributed to their loss in the 2006 elections. There is, at least, reason to hope UNFPA’s US funding will be restored next year.

You read more about the Republican ban on money to help poor women and infants by reading the “Alas” UNFPA posts archive; or by reading posts at Miss Pen Name, Republic of T, Population Matters, Peace, Love, Pancakes, and others; or by browsing through the documents and links about UNFPA on Congresswoman Mahoney’s website.

1. In 2005, 95% of Democrats in the House voted in favor of restoring funding to UNFPA. (back)

I analyzed the opening of an anonymous comment in part 1 and the supporting statistics, quotes and studies in part 2, now this 3rd and last part of the comment includes his claims about rape trials.

Note: For anyone wondering why I didn’t simply delete this post when I rejected it, read this report about college students who were suspended because of their insistence on filing a complaint about a detective investigating a reported rape.

Now to the remainder of anonymous’ comment:

Making it too easy to convict a person of rape, while at the same time making it difficult, if not impossible, to defend against it is wrong! False accusations will destroy a person’s life and reputation. A false conviction will lead to long prison sentences and having to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

And where are we given even a shred of evidence that is it impossible to defend anyone against rape charges or that it is easy to convict a person of rape? The only supporting material from this comment (in part 2) that could be related to convictions is mismatches in DNA evidence.

The supporting evidence from prosecutors and studies of police departments suggest that the majority of false or unsubstantiated accusations don’t result in criminal charges. In the cases that are deemed unfounded none will be prosecuted unless new evidence comes to light that changes the case’s status.

Certainly the rape case that was dismissed because the prosecutor was late doesn’t sound like it’s part of a system designed to give those accused of rape the shaft 100% of the time.

If this claim were true there would be no acquittals in rape trials yet they happen regularly and too often in cases where there was solid evidence of rape and solid evidence that the defendant committed the crime. Only the juries in each of those cases knows why they believed there was a reasonable doubt.

As the Duke rape case shows, plenty of people will jump in to make blatant accusations of wrongdoing against alleged rape victims — including using the word hoax — long before the case gets resolved in the criminal justice system. In a variety of cases, conviction of the alleged rapist does nothing to stop the personal attacks against rape victims.

Give authority to make an accuser’s past medical and sexual history admissible at the judge’s discretion if it’s relevant to the case.

It’s interesting with the cited statistics relating to DNA mismatches that the use or omission of DNA evidence isn’t at the top of his list of needed changes. But this is his only recommended change to the criminal justice system. He isn’t recommending changes to the process of identifying suspects in stranger rapes or asking for changes in the way officers gain confessions. Neither is he advocating to make it easier for convicted rapists to have additional DNA testing done so those who can be proven innocent will be given the chance they need.

He only wants defense attorneys to be able to use more information about the alleged victim.

Since he is asking for a change from the current rules of evidence, I suspect this man believes that information about the alleged rape victim (notice repeated use of accuser) is always relevant as long as it doesn’t make the defendant look bad in some way. He seems to have no problem with a seek and destroy policy toward someone in a rape case as long as it isn’t the defendant.

If there is a concern of further potential trauma to the “alleged-victim”, then further counseling should be encouraged.

By his wording, he makes it clear that he isn’t concerned about the trauma to rape victims. He doesn’t even seem certain why anybody else should be concerned about the trauma to rape victims. Then there’s his use of scare quotes that calls into question the term alleged victim.

If he isn’t sure any alleged victims who are to be cross examined are real rape victims, it makes me wonder if he believes that the only real victim is a dead one or one injured so badly that she can’t remember being raped.

While this man is opposed to men’s lives being destroyed by rape accusations, he seems to dismiss the trauma of being raped and the trauma of pursuing justice through the courts. A little therapy is the most “alleged-victims” might need.

A speedy means just to convict anyone should never be an option.

I don’t know what he’s referring to here unless it’s a general implication that rape suspects are denied due process.

Rape is a horrible crime, but false accusations of rape are every bit as horrible. They are a form of psychological rape that can emotionally, socially, and economically destroy a person even if there is no conviction. The stigma attaches to the falsely accused for life. Few believe them and few care.

Of course, he has to close his comment with the disclaimer that he’s not dismissing the severity of real rape while at the same time minimizing rape by saying it’s never worse than being falsely accused of rape.

But that equality between true rape victim and alleged rapist isn’t enough. He goes one further and turns men accused of rape into rape victims, but he details the additional trauma of this type of rape while describing real rape in one word: horrible.

Would this man tolerate a girl or woman accusing a boy or man or society at large of psychologically raping her and claiming that was as traumatic as physical rape? I don’t think so.

Nowhere in this comment does he acknowledge that men who say they aren’t real rapists might be the true liars. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that being in denial about guilt (publicly and/or privately) is not the same as being not guilty.

Comments like this one do nothing to further true justice for those who really are falsely convicted of rape or those accused when their actions never strayed into exploitive or criminal behavior. And that’s a shame.

Update: Q grrl caught something that I missed in my analysis and that is that he makes all of the false accusers female. Further, people who share his belief will often posts comments that men can be victims too and that we should never refer to rape victims as she since that unfairly excludes males.

That logic implies that he is unfairly excluding males from the ranks of false accusers.

Part 4 gets into a type of false accusation this comment doesn’t attack.

(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)

Note: Comments are limited to feminists or those who can be respectful of feminists and their efforts to fight sexual exploitation. If you want to excuse or minimize the behavior of those who harm others, make the person exploited responsible for their own exploitation, call those who label their experiences rape liars, or tell us that we should be focusing on more important issues, please do so elsewhere.

This is in response to Richard Jeffrey Newman’s comment about male survivors of sexual abuse/assault being left out of the sexual-assault discourse.

It’s a real problem that merits attention. Too often it gets mentioned as a way to attack efforts to fight sexual violence directed at girls and women or as an excuse to attack feminism or feminists. That exploits male victims and they deserve better.

Unless RJN loosens the restrictions, comments can only be made by male survivors.

Opening the purple butterfly boots sent by a set of grandparents. Her majesty is pleased!

Read the rest of this entry »

Quoted from Occasional Superheroine, a blog written by a former DC comics editorial assistant, about the creative process behind the rape and murder of long-established supporting character Sue Dibny:

My theoretical comic company, which, for the theoretical purposes of my theoretical memoir, I’ll call Gilgongo! Comix, was tired of being “pushed around” in the sales wars and in the court of fanboy opinion (such as it was). So with all the red-nosed gumption and determination of Ralphie from “A Christmas Story” Gilgongo! Comix decided to go badass.

They needed a rape. Because there’s nothing quite so badass as rape, lets face it. And the victim couldn’t been from the usual suspects: “The Black Raven” (done that already plus ovaries ripped out), “Bondage Queen” (wasn’t she raped like every issue–at least mentally?), “Demon-Girl” (she was already paralyzed from the last pseudo-raping and that provided all sorts of logistical nightmares for the artist).

No, they had to find the most innocent, virginal, good-natured “nice” character they could find and ravage her not once but twice.

Theoretically, this character’s name was Vicki Victim.

A whole groundbreaking limited series would be built around Vicki Victim’s rape and murder. [...]

[This was] the crucial syzygy that began the chain of events that ended my career. That particular incident had to do with your dead friend and mine, Vicki Victim.

It started with my associate editor running gleefully into our boss’s office, several boards of art in his hand.

“The rape pages are in!”

The strategy worked, by the way. Sales went up.

The long quote above is from a series of twenty blog posts entitled “Goodbye To Comics,” which make it brutally clear that sexism at DC editorial wasn’t limited to how they decided to treat female characters. The entire series is worth reading in order - because she has a disturbing story to tell, and also because she’s an excellent writer with an appealingly dark sense of humor. You can either read the whole thing in the archives, starting with the bottom post and working your way up, or you can instead use the handy table-of-contents-style links Elayne has compiled. But be warned, a lot of it is pretty harrowing to read.

At Comics Worth Reading, Johanna — who also worked in the corporate comics industry — comments:

You put a bunch of immature men, many of whom were very sick as children or had absent fathers or both,¹ and all of whom escaped into over-muscled power fantasies as a result, in charge of a publishing subgroup with no prestige and little money. Several of them have never worked anywhere else, or if they have, it was at one of the few similar companies in the same industry that behave the same way. They’re still geeks, mentally, with low self-esteem and no success with women, few of whom they actually know in person, but they’re power brokers within their little world, and there are thousands like them who desperately want to be them… and you wonder why it all ends up so twisted?

The blogger at Mountain of Judgment agrees with Johanna: “Like a terrarium, it’s a perfect closed system, with the men on either side of the equation–publishers and purchasers–reinforcing one another, bending the superhero comics sharply back toward their ancestors–not in the newspaper comics but in the violent, soft-porn dime novels.”

I haven’t been part of the corporate comics industry. But I’ve been a comics geek all my life, and I’ve run into my share of bitterly misogynistic geek guys over the years. It’s by no means a universal type, but it’s common enough to be a type. I can’t even count how often I’ve heard or read female comics fans describe walking into a comic book store only to be treated as The Woman Thing, subject to suspicious glares, leering, and maybe being hit on. (One friend of mine doesn’t read comics on the bus anymore, because it’s such a pain in the neck being hit on by male comics fans.) Valerie D’Orazio, the writer of “Goodbye To Comics,” worked in a comic book store when she was sixteen — until the much-older owner of the store made a pass at her. When she turned him down, he slimed her character among that entire group of comics fans, and most of them went along with it.

Superheroes are part of the problem. Not all superhero fans are misogynists (some of my favorite friends, including a few women, read superhero comics). But the genre attracts a lot of boys and men who are insecure about masculinity, and who need to read male-oriented power fantasies in which women are babes and men are human tanks. Some of those guys are fine; they grow up, they make female friends, they compartmentalize successfully. But some don’t. Too many comic book guys feel entitled to women’s emotions and women’s bodies, and feel bitter over what they see as an unfair denial of their due.

At the same time, I feel a little uneasy about posting this on “Alas,” where most of the readers aren’t comic book fans. I think a lot of non-fans have the impression that most male geeks are like the comic book guy on “The Simpsons.” And yeah, that type does exist (in both thin and fat varieties), and anyone who spends years in fan culture runs into some guys like that.

But let’s not forget, misogyny rooted in a frustrated sense of entitlement to women is not unique to geeks. You see it among men of all types (including some who get laid as much as anyone). But it’s easier for people to recognize misogyny in lonely male fans, for two reasons. First, because a disproportionate number of fans have poor social skills, and so aren’t good at hiding their misogyny. And second, because “lonely bitter misogynist fan” is a stereotype, so it’s what people are expecting to see.

More links: Blog@Newsarama has a post summarizing various reactions in the comics blogosphere to “Goodbye To Comics.” And When Fangirls Attack! has a list of links.

Finally, Heidi MacDonald at The Beat comments on this story obliquely and visually, by contrasting the way that DC actually depicts Wonder Woman with an really excellent-looking approach that DC rejected.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

1. I’m skeptical about Johanna’s “very sick as children or had absent fathers” observation. No doubt she’s right about the particular men she worked with. But is it a real pattern, or just a coincidence in the guys she ran into? For what it’s worth, I’ve also run into a lot of bitter misogynistic male fannish types over the years, and the ones I’ve known haven’t been unusually likely to have a background of sickness or absent fathers. (back)

This is the second of 3 posts on an anonymous comment I received. Check out part 1 including a comment (on abyss2hope) from someone who tells me what “no means no” really means.

Here’s the next section of the anonymous comment:

I was surprise of how many false rape accusations have been made by several independent surveys reveal that 42% to approximately half of all accusations made are false. Most cases involve divorce battles involving the custody of children, some for revenge for withdraw of affection, monetary gains, an excuse for infidelity, or misidentification.

Yeah, right. Surprising. But it’s not so surprising that he isn’t as skeptical of this claim as he is of rape accusations.

It’s also interesting how he slips in misidentification since those are cases where a rape occurred and the only problem is identifying the rapist. I suspect those are stranger rapes and rape/murder cases such as this one where the confession to rape/murder is being disputed or this one where the DNA evidence cleared a man who is still a sex offender because of another conviction which hasn’t been overturned.

By bringing up the issue of custody, he seems to be including any reports of suspected child sexual abuse and calling any unproven claims of that type false rape allegations.

His intent is to convince people that it’s been proven that nearly half of all girls and women who report rapes were not raped or sexually assaulted but he can throw in everything but the kitchen sink to count as a valid false accusation.

I suspect that if there is a loophole in the law (marital rape excluded from rape law, for example) the person who reported the rape automatically becomes someone making a false allegation according to this commenter’s view of false allegations. That same problem may exist in crime statistics collected by different government agencies as well.

While he brings up false rape allegations, he doesn’t bring up the strategy of rapists and those accused of rape to make allegations against the alleged victim such as the rape trial of the father of a chess prodigy or the stranger rapist who claimed he was breaking into a woman’s home for more consensual sex.

By the logic used by many people like anonymous if these people are convicted of rape, they should also be convicted of making a false allegation when they make claims about the victim that are subsequently proven to be false.

According to the FBI, one of every 12 claims of rape filed in the United States are later deemed ‘unfounded,’ meaning the case was closed because the alleged victim recanted or because investigators found no evidence of a crime.

This is a blatant attempt to distort data that says one thing to mean another. Just because someone can’t prove a crime was committed, or classifies it that way, doesn’t mean it wasn’t committed. Just because someone doesn’t believe a victim doesn’t mean that victim was not a victim. Recanting a rape allegation is as problematic as confessions given by those accused of rape.

Howard County Police classified one out of every four rape allegations as unfounded in 1990-91.

Just because they did this doesn’t mean one out of every four rape allegations was false as this comment is implying. Or that this number reflects only cases where a girl or woman says she was raped.

The National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers says around 600 teachers a year are falsely accused - a trebling since the 1989 Children’s Act.

I looked up this claim and the subject of false allegations was not specific to allegations of rape. One of the problems that leads to unsubstantiated allegations and damage to reputations can be shoddy, incomplete investigations. If claims appear to be dismissed too easily by those in charge, more people will abandon the system of investigation and take their claims public. Rather than the solution being a gag order, the solution should be thorough investigations that document what happened so that the innocent party is protected whether that is a student or a teacher.

Citing a recent USA Today article, discussing the miracle of DNA and FBI studies of sexual assault suspects, DNA testing exonerated about 30% to 35% of the more than 4,000 sexual assault suspects on whom the FBI had conducted DNA testing over the past three years.

Since they had DNA, the problem was not false reports of rape. This mixing of identification of unknown rapists and rapist/murderers with women who accuse specific men of raping them is no accident but a deliberate strategy to inflate the number of women who lie about being raped.

Purdue sociologist Eugene J. Kanin, in over 40% of the cases reviewed, the complainants eventually admitted that no rape had occurred (Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1994).

There are serious flaws in this study, yet people who want to appear as if they have done full investigations always neglect to point out anything that doesn’t support their assertion. This number could as easily be caused by the way those charged with investigating rape treated alleged victims. If victims come in scared and traumatized and are treated like suspects who must be badgered and threatened, it wouldn’t be that hard to break many of those victims.

1985 the Air Force conducted a study of 556 rape accusations. Over 25% of the accusers admitted, either just before they took a lie detector test or after they had failed it, that no rape occurred.

This data is meaningless since one of the ways to get false confessions is to use props such as lie detector tests to induce a confession. Where’s the study of the matching alleged rapists and the results of their lie detector tests? Oh, wait. Alleged rapists have rights.

1996 Department of Justice Report, of the roughly 10,000 sexual assault cases analyzed with DNA evidence over the previous seven years, 2,000 excluded the primary suspect, and another 2,000 were inconclusive.

Again we get the mixing of unknown rapists with the assertion that no rape occurred.

Linda Fairstein, who heads the New York County District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit. Fairstein, the author of Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape, says, “there are about 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about 50% simply did not happen.”

But what data supports this assertion reportedly made in Penthouse magazine in the late 1980s? And what constitutes a report of rape? Does it include calls where someone says they think someone is being raped or sexually abused? If a call came in about a rape in progress and the police find nothing and nobody related to the call, is that considered a false allegation? If a cop refused to believe a report and labels it a false report without any investigation, how do we know the cop’s instincts were correct?

Craig Silverman, a former Colorado prosecutor known for his zealous prosecution of rapists during his 16-year career, says that false rape accusations occur with “scary frequency.” As a regular commentator on the Bryant trial for Denver’s ABC affiliate, Silverman noted that “any honest veteran sex assault investigator will tell you that rape is one of the most falsely reported crimes.” According to Silverman, a Denver sex-assault unit commander estimates that nearly 50% of all reported rape claims are false.

This is so generic we have no way of knowing what all of the scenarios are which are being called false. Just because he was zealous in the rape cases he prosecuted doesn’t mean he’s skilled at assessing the validity of all rape cases.

And how do we know honest veteran sex assault investigator always equals skilled at assessing cases between people who know each other and where there wasn’t great physical trauma? Sometimes veteran equals cynical and eager to be rid of the half of the cases which are assumed to be false. Get an ex-con victim with an attitude and a drug habit who says she was raped? False report. “Next!”

I’m sure coping with the workload is easier if you believe that the cases which were dumped are all false reports.

Through all of the proof given to show that nearly half of those who report rape are liars, this commenter shows that he only cares about beyond-a-reasonable-doubt proof when it comes to accused rapists. Accusations against alleged victims don’t need no stinking proof just the lack of a convicted rapist.

Where are the statistics on the number of convictions for making false rape accusations? What’s the ratio between convictions on sexual assault charges and convictions on false accusation of rape charges?

The possibility of a report on real criminal behavior being labeled nothing more than a false allegation seems beyond this commentor’s comprehension or it brings up issues he’d rather pretend don’t exist. Yet he can think of every possibility where innocent men are called rapists. Does that fit under the label of being objective? I don’t think so.

Part 3 gets into the issues of the rape trial.

(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)

Note: Comments are limited to feminists or those who can be respectful of feminists and their efforts to fight sexual exploitation. If you want to excuse or minimize the behavior of those who harm others, make the person exploited responsible for their own exploitation, call those who label their experiences rape liars, or tell us that we should be focusing on more important issues, please do so elsewhere.

Someone left an anonymous spam comment on my post “Duke Rape Case: The Danger Of Screaming No Rape” on my home blog and I rejected the comment since it repeats many myths and distortions about allegations about rape, and those who report being raped.

However, for the same reason I rejected it, this comment is worth analyzing. First, I know it was a spam comment because I’ve seen variations of this comment before. From reading the full comment, I believe this anonymous person is male and therefore will refer to him as a he.

I find it telling that he posted as anonymous rather than giving his name. He’s willing to make accusations, but isn’t willing to take ownership of those accusations or his personal motivation. Ironic considering his condemnation of false accusations.

Here’s the opening:

False accusations of rape destroys lives (Whether accidental or malicious)

This is an allegation rather than a fact which in many cases are clearly false (Tucker Carlson was falsely accused of rape and his life wasn’t destroyed) and it manages to slip in the idea that many girls and women who say they’ve been raped are delusional. He isn’t saying that false allegations can destroy lives and that omission of the word can is not by chance.

By the recommendations made later in this comment (which will be included in part 3), the commenter is willing to destroy the lives of rape victims to help men avoid being convicted of rape.

Rape is a horrible crime, and anyone who commits it should be punished to the full extent of the law.

Here we get the standard disclaimer given by all those who attack rape victims — alleged and proven — meant to give the person a free pass to recommend changes that help rapists avoid being punished to the full extent of the law and which harm real rape victims.

This is a very hot and emotional topic, but we must not get so emotional that we lose our objectivity, and create laws that condemn the falsely accused.

Here we get the implication that anyone who disagrees with him has lost objectivity and that he is being purely objective (not a rapist or anyone who was ever or could ever be accused of rape) and nothing he does harms or condemns real rape victims.

His implication is that detachment from the pain of rape is good. Viscerally understanding rape and caring passionately about justice for rape victims is bad and should exclude people from talking about rape laws and the enforcement of those laws.

Once the accusation is made, the “accused” is assumed to be guilty by just referring to the “accuser” as a “victim”, and not as an “alleged-victim.” This attitude colors the public’s, police, and juror’s perception as “victim” versus “the accused”; thus implies guilt.

I find it interesting in this claim about the power of semantics that he says calling someone a victim is wrong while leading with the word “accusation” rather “a report of rape.” We are supposed to use “alleged victim” but he uses “accuser” which has definite negative connotations and implies her guilt.

The bottom line seems to be that word choice can be used to color perception, but only when it favors the defendant at the expense of rape victims or alleged rape victims.

Part 2 will include an analysis of his statements about the number of false rape reports and part 3 will include an analysis of his positions on rape trials.

(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)

Note: Comments are limited to feminists or those who can be respectful of feminists and their efforts to fight sexual exploitation. If you want to excuse or minimize the behavior of those who harm others, make the person exploited responsible for their own exploitation, call those who label their experiences rape liars, or tell us that we should be focusing on more important issues, please do so elsewhere.

The Census Bureau is beginning the debate for the 2010 racial categories list. I received a query on a list serve yesterday asking what people thought about the term “Negro.” This leads me to believe that the Census is considering removing the term from the 2010 form. I expect there to be several debates over Census language and categories. Once the data is collected the other big issue will be how the data is tabulated and reported. Just to give you an idea here is a copy of the 2000 ethnicity (Spanish Origin) and race questions. This is exactly how they appeared last time.

If you would like to look at how the Census forms and race questions have changed throughout US history, here are a few links.

History of Census Racial Categories

Instructions and Copies of Census Long and Short Forms From 1790-1990

Photo Copies of Early Census Forms

2000 Census Short and Long Forms

over at Abyss2hope.

This edition includes a variety of topics including the story of how the criminal justice system contributed to the suicide of a teenaged rape victim. Note: For those who think I should be obligated to call her an “alleged” rape victim, she endured the trial, including the attacks on her character contained in her cross examination, and her rapist was found guilty.