(MAJOR TRIGGER WARNINGS — Lots of stuff about how Fred Phelps abused his entire family. Please be cautious about reading on or following the links if you think it may be a trigger for you.) Read the rest of this entry »
Marine biologist Sheril Kirshenbaum is, along with Chris Mooney, a co-blogger at The Intersection, a blog on science and public policy whose RSS feed should be in your reader, and if it isn’t, you should go, right now, and rectify the situation.
Done? Good. Now let’s talk about the epidemic of rape facing young women around the world.
Sorry to shift gears without depressing the clutch, but I do so for a reason: to draw attention to an effort launched by Kirshenbaum to attack a problem that is horrifying in its scope:
Today begins a very important initiative called Silence Is The Enemy to help a generation of young women half a world away.Why? Because they are our sisters and children–the victims of sexual abuse who don’t have the means to ask for help. We have power in our words and influence. Along with our audience, we’re able to speak for them. I’m asking all of you–bloggers, writers, teachers, and concerned citizens–to use whatever platform you have to call for an end to the rapeand abuse of women and girls in Liberia and around the world.
In regions where fighting has formally ended, rape continues to be used as a weapon. As Nicholas Kristofrecently wrote from West Africa, ‘it has been easier to get men to relinquish their guns than their sense of sexual entitlement.’ The war has shattered norms, training some men to think that ‘when they want sex, they need simply to overpower a girl.’ An International Rescue Committee survey suggests 12 percent of girls aged 17 and under acknowledged having been sexually abused in some way over the previous 18 months. Further, of the 275 new sexual violence cases treated Jan-April by Doctors Without Borders, 28 percent involve children aged 4 or younger, and 33 percent involve children aged 5 through 12. That’s 61% age 12 or under. We read about their plight and see the figures, but it’s so easy to feel helpless to act in isolation. But these are not statistics, they are girls. Together we can do more. Mass rape persists because of inertia so let’s create momentum.
[...]
Silence Is The Enemy was born–so named because we will not be. All through June, I’ll continue posting information, details, benchmarks, and let everyone know about progress made, new initiatives, and stories from the region. I encourage others to do so as possible. The Intersection, On Becoming A Laboratory And Domestic Goddess, Aetiology, Bioephemera, Neurotopia, The Questionable Authority, DrugMonkey, andAdventure In Ethics And Science will be donating all revenue this month to Doctors Without Borders. The goal is two-fold: Raising funds and–arguably more importantly–awareness. Since blogging revenue increases with traffic, we hope to get people to keep coming back for more information about what’s going on and thinking about how to make a difference. Do not feel obligated to donate, but it’s one idea. There are many ways to contribute: Write and email Members of Congress (Congressional Directory here), speak at community meetings, encourage others to get involved, or donate to our chosen charity (Doctors Without Borders). Help us maximize our donations by visiting Isis, Jessica, Tara, Neurotopia, Mike, DrugMonkey, Janet and returning here often because every click will help raise money. Spread the word. We want to make sure elected officials at multiple levels realize this is a global issue that matters to a large voting constituency!
I will be donating to Médecins Sans Frontières this month, and I encourage others to do the same. But whether you can donate money, or simply can donate your effort spreading the word that rape is not acceptable, and that you support efforts to end it, your efforts matter. It is incumbent on all of us to say that we will not be silent in the face of these attacks, and that the safety and well-being of the women and girls of Africa matters every bit as much as the safety of Americans.
Other blogs discussing the oral arguments in the case I blogged about yesterday.
What’s traumatic about strip searches and sexual assault isn’t that someone touched or saw something previously untouched or unseen. It’s the horror of having someone use your nudity and your sexuality as a weapon to degrade and humiliate you. And anyone who’s been subject to the routine degradation and humiliation dished out by sadistic school administrators has a pretty damn good idea of what was going on here.
Wright, the school district’s lawyer, initially suggested it would unconstitutional for schools to enforce their zero-tolerance policies with body cavity searches, because there is no record of students’ hiding drugs in their vaginas or rectums. But later he backtracked, saying the real problem is that school officials are not properly trained to conduct such searches. When Souter asked him whether body cavity searches would be OK once administrators and teachers had undergone the requisite training, Wright said “that’s to be left up to the local governments.”
Can anyone think of a single incident in the last 30 years in which several children have died after ingesting drugs distributed by one of their classmates on school grounds? Before we let school principals go rummaging through the panties of underage girls, shouldn’t we be at least be able to cite a few examples?
Dahlia Lithwick reports on the oral arguments at the Supreme Court, involving a 13 year old girl stripped-searched because she had been falsely accused of giving ibuprofen to other students:
Adam Wolf, the ACLU lawyer who represents Redding, explains that “the Fourth Amendment does not countenance the rummaging on or around a 13-year-old girl’s naked body.” Wolf explains that he is arguing for a “two-step framework,” wherein schools can use a lower standard to search “backpacks, pencil cases, bookbags” but a higher standard when you “require a 13-year-old girl to take off her pants, her shirt, move around her bra so she reveals her breasts, and the same thing with her underpants to reveal her pelvic area.” This leads Justice Stephen Breyer to query whether this is all that different from asking Redding to “change into a swimming suit or your gym clothes,” because, “why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym?”
This leads Ginsburg to sputter—in what I have come to think of as her Lilly Ledbetter voice—”what was done in the case … it wasn’t just that they were stripped to their underwear! They were asked to shake their bra out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out!” Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts.
But Breyer just isn’t letting go. “In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, we changed for gym, OK? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear.”
Shocked silence, followed by explosive laughter. In fact, I have never seen Justice Clarence Thomas laugh harder. Breyer tries to recover: “Or not my underwear. Whatever. Whatever. I was the one who did it? I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think it’s beyond human experience.” [...]
You see, we now have school districts all around the country finding naked photos of teens and immediately calling in the police for possession of kiddie porn. Yet schools see nothing wrong with stripping these same kids naked to search for drugs. Evidently teenage nakedness is only a problem when the children choose to be naked.
Scott at Lawyers Guns and Money breaks down how the vote is likely to go (Scalia is likely to vote for student’s privacy rights, incidentally, while this will probably be the second time Alito has favored the state strip-searching little girls).
Three points:
1) Yet anther example of how the drug war has eroded sanity.
2) Yet another example of why a Court with only one woman on it is a court that’s unable to fairly administrate justice.1
3) Yet another example of why Democratic presidents appointing “centrist: judges while Republicans appoint far-right judges creates right-wing outcomes, not balance.
I was not planning to start posting again until I could begin in earnest the series I want to do on classical Iranian literature–and interruption after interruption after interruption has kept me from getting to the point where I am ready to do that–but something happened this week relating to a former students of mine that I need to write about. It is actually quite urgent, probably not to anyone who reads this blog, but certainly to the woman whose message is at the root of this post, and it makes a point that cannot be made strongly or frequently enough: We, especially but not only those of us who have survived sexual abuse of any kind and are strong enough to do so, need, need, need, need, need to speak up loudly and often about the realities of that abuse and how it has shaped our lives (because, whether we realize it or not, it shapes the lives even of those of us who have not been abused, either because we know someone who has or because it shapes the culture in which we live.) You may have seen this post in which I put up a YouTube video of an interview I gave to Jackson Heights Poetry Festival, an organization on whose advisory board I sit. In the interview, I talk about the relationship between my experience of child sexual abuse and the fact that I became a poet. The substance of what I said there is not important here. What is important is that watching this video moved a former student of mine to send me a message in which she told me–and the tone of the message suggests that I am the first person she has told–that she was sodomized a couple of years ago and had been trying to deal with it by pretending it didn’t happen. Even more importantly, though, and more urgently, she said that she suspects her three-year-old daughter is being sexually abused at the girl’s father’s house and that she [my former student] freaks out just thinking about the possibility. As I read the message, it sounded to me like she was saying this freaking out keeps her from acting on what she intuits, which is scary, because even if it turns out she is wrong–and there was no indication in the message that she has any vindictiveness towards the girl’s father that would lead her to make a false accusation (my point being that she might be wrong in good faith)–she needs to tell somebody, first to make sure that her daughter is safe and, second, to alleviate her own anxieties (and maybe understand, if she is wrong, what triggered her unfounded suspicions in the first place).
I responded in all the predictable ways–thanking her for her trust, acknowleding the courage it took for her to speak out, and encouraging her to get in touch with someone about her daughter’s sitation, though since I was running out the door, I couldn’t take the time to look up crisis hotlines or other phone numbers–and I am hoping to hear back from her, but what her message made me think about was, as I said above, just how important it is for us as a society to talk openly about the reality of sexual abuse. More, though, it made me think about how important it is to talk about that reality not just in contexts where sexual abuse is the topic–i.e., talk shows, conferences, seminars, etc. that are set aside for the specific purpose of addressing sexual abuse–but also, simply, merely, in the contexts of our daily lives, because abuse is always already part of our daily lives. Because you never know who is listening and how important your words might be to them.
I am remembering as I write this something that I have written about before, that I was not even thinking about when I started, but that is worth talking about here: An independent study I did five or seven years ago with two women who told me they wanted specifically to work on personal essays that dealt with the sexual abuse they had experienced when they were girls. They were both in a creative nonfiction class I was teaching and one had written an essay about her abuse that, while obviously cathartic for her, worked neither as a public document of personal testimony nor as art, and it was art she was trying to create. The problems in the essay were indicative of the difficulties abuse survivors have speaking out about their experience. Under normal classroom circumstances, I handle this by directing the student to some examples of writers who had dealt with similar topics; I might have a kind of “therapeutic” conversation (and I put that word in quotes because I do not mean that I would try to do therapy) to explore whether or not the student was really willing and able to delve into the topic at the depth and level of complexity it required. (I do, after all, have to assign a grade to the work my students hand me, and the last thing I would want is to give a low grade to an essay in which someone is struggling to come to terms with, or even just to name, the sexual abuse they’d survived because they were not yet able to write about the experience at the college level.) If the answer is no, then I offer the student the chance to write about something else; if the answer is yes, then I try to get them to articulate some of the difficulties they were having in writing the paper as a means of talking about how to deal with them in writerly terms; and I always encourage such students, if they are not in therapy, to seek counseling.
The woman in my creative nonfiction class, however, was not simply fulfilling an assignment I had given. She wanted to be a writer and she told me quite explicitly that she saw me as a role model, and so I was faced with the decision of whether to share with her my own experience of trying to write creatively, to make art, out of the fact that I had survived child sexual abuse. For reasons that are not so relevant here, I decided to do so. Then, when a second woman in the class also began to write about her experience of child sexual abuse, and she told me that she too wanted to be a writer, and she was a damned good writer, when the first woman approached me about doing an independent study, I suggested that the two of them might work together. The story of that independent study is really quite remarkable, but the part of it that is relevant here is this: At the end of the semester, all independent study students at my college are required to present their work at a colloquium; if they don’t, they don’t get credit. As the day of the colloquium drew near, my students grew increasingly nervous, for all of the predictable reasons, but one that stood out was their concern that the faculty and administrators present would think the subject of their work inappropriate for an academic context. So I told my students that I would introduce them by talking about my own experience of abuse and how meaningful it had been to me to be for them the kind of mentor/role model that just was not available to me in the 1980s when I started to talk about my own abuse. At that time, people were just starting to recognize the sexual abuse of girls. No one, as fas as I know, as talking in any substantive way–or at least was being given a forum to talk in any substantive way–about the fact that boys were being sexually abused as well.
And that’s what I did: I introduced those two women by naming myself as a survivor of sexual abuse and telling a little bit of my own story. It was a watershed moment in my life and in my career as a teacher. Not that I had any problem talking about my abuse, but I had always kept that part of my life separate from my professional life. It was “personal,” and so I had not really thought much about the degree to which it informed my practice as a teacher and a writer, my political stances in the world, etc. and so on. There is a great deal more to say about what it has meant to me to integrate these parts of myself, and I will, I hope write more about that. What I want to say here is simply that, if it were not for that independent study and the women who worked with me that semester, I would never have talked in that interview about the relationship between my abuse and my becoming a writer as easily as I did, and I would never have had the chance to encourage my former student to act on her feelings about her daughter’s situation, and my encouragement might turn out to be the thing that moves her to act, and we all know what kind of difference that could make in her daughter’s life (if she is being abused), and in my former student’s life as well.
Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.
[Shorter Amp: Eugene Kanin famously found that 41%, or perhaps 50%, of rapes reported to police are false. Kanin's study is both badly designed and unverifiable; more reliable studies have found that between 2% and 8% of rapes reported to police are false reports.]
In a new (sort of) post on on Ifeminists, Wendy McElroy1 suggests that false rape reports are common, relying heavily on Eugene Kanin’s famous study of false rape allegations. This study is commonly cited by MRAs and anti-feminists. McElroy writes:
How prevalent is the false reporting of sexual assault? Estimates vary widely.
According to much-cited feminist statistics, two percent of all reports are false. Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will (1975), for example, claims that false accusations in New York City dropped to that level after police departments began using policewomen to interview alleged victims. Elsewhere, the two percent figure appears without citation or with a vague attribution to “FBI” sources.
According to a study conducted by Eugene Kanin of Purdue University, the correct figure may rise to the 40 percent range. Kanin examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987. Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as “false.” Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were “false.”
Studies and statistics often vary and for legitimate reasons. For example, they may examine different populations. But such a dramatic variance — two percent to 50 percent — raises the question of whether political interests are at work.
Tellingly, McElroy doesn’t go on to question whether Kanin — or the police whose records Kanin reported — might have “political interests” or biases. If McElroy applied her argument honestly, her “dramatic variance” logic would necessarily raise suspicions of both statistics. Instead, her skepticism (in this article, at least) is reserved solely for feminists.
I think the 2% statistic deserves skepticism and criticism; it’s popularity among feminists is an example of what I meant when I wrote “Within feminism, there’s sometimes too little skepticism regarding statistics and news stories which emphasize harms against women. We’ve created a culture which does a rotten job of self-correction.”
That said, the 2% statistic is not wildly out of line with some other reported statistics. Quoting an article in St. John’s Law Review:2
To illustrate, when the Portland, Oregon police department examined the 431 complaints of completed or attempted sexual assault in 1990, 1.6% were determined to be false. This was in comparison with a rate of 2.6% for false reports of stolen vehicles.
Similarly, Sgt. Joanne Archambault of the Sex Crimes Division of the San Diego Police Department routinely evaluated the rate of false reports over several years and found them to be around 4%.
More recently, the FBI reported an unfounded rate of 5.4% for forcible rapes (quoted in a newspaper article, via Abyss2Hope). However, because “unfounded” does not mean “false,” the actual “false” number would be lower than 5.4%. Quoting the Oregon sexual assault task force report (pdf link):
It is critical to bear in mind that a report determined to be unfounded is not synonymous with a false allegation or report. This distinction is important enough that it is worth repeating – a report that has been unfounded is not the same as a false report (or false allegation).
The FBI definition of unfounded specifically refers to cases that are found to be false or baseless. [...] Typically a baseless report is the result of a mistake of law – the reporter believed that they were the victim of a crime when based on the state criminal code they were not.
Even Eugene Kanin has written “unfounded rape can and does mean many things, with false allegation being only one of them, and sometimes the least of them.” (Pdf source.)
So how common are false rape reports? No one can say for certain. However, after conducting a review of the (extremely limited) available research, a recent report by The National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women concluded:3
When more methodologically rigorous research has been conducted, estimates for the percentage of false reports begin to converge around 2-8%.
So what about Kanin’s report, which found that over 40% of rapes reported to police are false? I wouldn’t suggest that Kanin has a political agenda — but I do think his methodology (which consists of tabulating police data from an unidentified small town) was overly credulous.
First of all, it’s important to realize that Kanin has kept secret what police force he was studying. This may have been necessary to gain access to police records, but it also means no other researcher has ever had the chance to verify Kanin’s findings and claims. There is no indication that Kanin attempted to interview any of the alleged false rape accusers to get their perspective, or in any way attempted to independently verify anything he was told by police. Kanin also implies that the recanters were told they’d be charged with filing false reports, but does not report the outcome of those charges.
In other words, Kanin’s study consists of Kanin uncritically reporting the claims of a single police force in a small, unidentified city, without those claims having been checked or verified in any way whatsoever.
Contrast that to this description of a genuinely rigorous study conducted by the British Government:3
The largest and most rigorous study that is currently available in this area is the third one commissioned by the British Home Office (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). The analysis was based on the 2,643 sexual assault cases (where the outcome was known) that were reported to British police over a 15-year period of time. Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports. Yet the researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators, based on the victim’s mental illness, inconsistent statements, drinking or drug use. These classifications were thus made in violation of the explicit policies of their own police agencies. The researchers therefore supplemented the information contained in the police files by collecting many different types of additional data, including: reports from forensic examiners, questionnaires completed by police investigators, interviews with victims and victim service providers, and content analyses of the statements made by victims and witnesses. They then proceeded to evaluate each case using the official criteria for establishing a false allegation, which was that there must be either “a clear and credible admission by the complainant”4 or “strong evidential grounds” (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). On the basis of this analysis, the percentage of false reports dropped to 2.5%.
Kanin (quoted by Marcella Chester) describes how the police relied on by his study determined that a case was false:
In fact, agency policy forbids police officers to use their discretion in deciding whether to officially acknowledge a rape complaint, regardless how suspect that complaint may be. Second, the declaration of a false allegation follows a highly institutionalized procedure. The investigation of all rape complaints always involves a serious offer to polygraph the complainants and the suspects. Additionally, for a declaration of false charge to be made, the complainant must admit that no rape had occurred. She is the sole agent who can say that the rape charge is false. The police department will not declare a rape charge as false when the complainant, for whatever reason, fails to pursue the charge or cooperate on the case, regardless how much doubt the police may have regarding the validity of the charge. In short, these cases are declared false only because the complainant admitted they are false.
However, as the sexual assault task force for the State of Oregon (pdf link) wrote (emphasis theirs):
Victim Recantation is a retraction or withdrawal of a reported sexual assault. Recantations are routinely used by victims to disengage the criminal justice system and are therefore not, by themselves, indicative of a false report.
If over 40% of women reporting rape recant — even though multiple, more rigorous studies have found false rape reports are usually 2%-8% of all reports — that could indicate a police culture which gives rape victims an extremely strong reason to want to “disengage the criminal justice system,” even if they’re threatened with a fine or a short jail stay. And, as we will see, routinely pressuring all reported rape victims to take a lie detector test is a sign of a police department with a strong bias against taking rape reports seriously.
Jody Raphael, of the DePaul University College of Law, wrote:5
[Kanin's study] is frequently cited on web sites devoted to debunking the prevalence of rape. During this ten year period, the police department followed policy (now deemed unlawful by the U.S. Congress for police departments receiving federal funds) that required polygraphing complainants and suspects as a condition of investigating rape reports. Kanin’s department only declared a complaint false when the victim recanted and admitted it was.
In his published journal article, Kanin (1994) admitted that “A possible objection to these recantations concerns their validity….rather than proceed with the real charge of rape, the argument goes, these women withdrew their accusations to avoid the trauma of police investigation.”
And indeed, the Kanin study has been criticized for the department’s use of polygraph testing in every case, a process that has been rejected by many police departments because of its intimidating impact on victims. The International Association of Chiefs of Police disapproves of requiring polygraph tests during rape investigations because “victims often feel confused and ashamed, and experience a great deal of self-blame because of something they did or did not do in relation to the sexual assault. These feelings may compromise the reliability of the results of such interrogation techniques. The use of these interrogation techniques can also compound these feelings and prolong the trauma of a sexual assault” (Lisak, 2007, p.6).
Given the popularity of Kanin’s study, especially in light of the collapse of the Duke University lacrosse players prosecution, David Lisak (2007), an associate professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, cautions that this particular police department employed a common procedure in which officers’ inherent suspicion of rape victims results in a confrontational approach towards the victim that would likely result in an extraordinarily high number of victim recantations. Lisak also points out that Kanin’s is not a research study, because it only puts forth the opinions of the police officers without any further investigation on his part.
Kanin (1994) himself cautioned against the generalizability of his findings…
Sally Baird, in a letter to the editor, also cites Lisak’s article, writing:
Prof. Kanin’s study was examined in the article “False Allegations of Rape: A Critique of Kanin” by Dr. David Lisak in the September/October 2007 issue of the Sexual Assault Report. Dr. Lisak is an associate professor of psychology and director of the Men’s Sexual Trauma Research Project at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Dr. Lisak says that “Kanin’s 1994 article on false allegations is a provocative opinion piece, but it is not a scientific study of the issue of false reporting of rape. It certainly should never be used to assert a scientific foundation for the frequency of false allegations.”
He makes the point that Kanin “simply reiterates the opinions of the police officers who concluded that the cases in question were ‘false allegations.’” After citing an International Association of Chiefs of Police manual (Investigating Sexual Assaults, www.theiacp.org/documents/pdfs/RCD/Inves… p. 13), which states that polygraph tests for sexual assault victims are contradicted in the investigation process and that their use is “based on the misperception that a significant percentage of sexual assault reports are false,” Lisak then observes that “It is noteworthy that the police department from which Kanin derived his data used or threatened to use the polygraph in every case… The fact that it was the standard procedure of this department provides a window on the biases of the officers who conducted the rape investigations, biases that were then echoed in Kanin’s unchallenged reporting of their findings.”
For more reading, I’d highly recommend:
Abyss2Hope is far and away the best blog on this subject: Here, here, here, here and here, for starters. And see as well, Date Rape Is Real Rape.
Successfully Investigating Acquaintance Sexual Assault: A National Training Manual for Law Enforcement includes an excellent chapter on the question of false rape allegations (pdf link).
False Reports: Moving Beyond the Issue to Successfully Investigate and Prosecute Non-Stranger Sexual Assault (pdf Link).
[Trigger Warning! This post includes a sample question from a study which asked graphic questions about rape.]
(I know that some “Alas” readers looked at the title of this blog post and said “well, no kidding: isn’t that obvious?” But I still think it’s valuable to be able to point to proof. Perhaps this research will lead to the NCVS improving its design in the future.)
I just read an interesting new report about the design of surveys measuring rape prevalence.1
The author, Bonnie Fisher, conducted two almost identical surveys of women in college. (Both surveys were conducted in 1997). In the first survey, respondents were asked a series of 12 behaviorally specific sexual victimization screening questions, such as “Since school began in the Fall 1996, has anyone made you have oral sex by force or threat of harm? By oral sex, I mean did someone’s mouth or tongue make contact with your vagina or anus or did your mouth or tongue make contact with someone else’s genitals or anus.” These screening questions are built on the approach developed by Mary Koss in her influential rape prevalence studies in the 1980s, which have been oft-criticized by conservatives.
In the second survey, respondents were asked the sexual violence screening questions from the governments National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS, along with the FBI’s compilations of police data, is the Federal government’s primary way of measuring crime in the US.
A bit of history: The NCVS used to be called the NCS (National Crime Survey), and didn’t ask about rape or sexual victimization at all; rapes were only counted if respondents brought up their rapes after being asked if they had been “attacked.” In the 1980s and 1990s, in response to feminist criticism, the government redesigned the NCS into the NCVS. Now, along with dozens of other crime-related questions, respondents are asked if they’ve experienced “Any rape, attempted rape, or other type of sexual attack.” They’re also asked:
Incidents involving forced or unwanted sexual acts are often difficult to talk about. Have you been forced or coerced to engage in unwanted sexual activity by—(a) Someone you didn’t know before—(b) A casual acquaintance—OR (c) Someone you know well?
This is a big improvement from not asking about rape or sexual violence at all — but it’s still pretty vague, compared to the behaviorally-specific questions.
In both surveys, each screening question “the respondent reports (answers “yes” to) is then followed up with a detailed incident report that contains multiple questions about what occurred during the incident. The responses to these questions are then used to classify the type of victimization that occurred.”2
But even though the two studies were mostly identical, apart from the questions used,3 the results were very different. Using the behaviorally specific screening questions, Fisher found that 19 out of 1000 female students had been raped since the beginning of the Fall term of school.4 In contrast, using the Federal government’s screening questions from the National Crime Victimization Survey, two out of 1000 female students had been raped since the beginning of the Fall term.
This makes it seem likely that the National Crime Victimization Survey, the USA’s primary method of measuring crime, severely underestimates how often rape occurs.
The last difference is that the second survey, modeled after the NCVS, actually used a slightly broader definition of rape, including incidents of “psychological coercion as well as physical force.” (back)
So as you may recall, Bill O’Reilly was invited by the Alexa Foundation to give a speech at a fundraiser. The Alexa Foundation is a group that supports rape survivors — a great cause — but the invitation to O’Reilly was odd at best, given that O’Reilly has, in the past, embraced a blame-the-victim approach to the crime of rape. So a variety of crazy lefties pointed that fact out, which seemed pretty reasonable, all in all.
One of the writers who followed the story was Amanda Terkel of ThinkProgress. She had the temerity to suggest that maybe, just maybe, someone who thinks a rape victim could be asking for it shouldn’t have been invited to address rape survivors.
O’Reilly responded in typically mature fashion:
This weekend, while on vacation, I was ambushed by O’Reilly’s top hit man, producer Jesse Watters, who accosted me on the street and told me that because I highlighted O’Reilly’s comments, I was causing “pain and suffering” to rape victims and their families. He of course offered no proof to back up this claim, instead choosing to shout questions at me.
Watters evidently followed Terkel for two hours, following her and a friend to a hotel, where they ambushed her. Terkel responded, it appears, as professionally as possible under the circumstances; O’Reilly’s producer, of course, was about as far from the standards of professionalism as is humanly possible.
I’d comment further, but Terkel already has the most sane response to these events:
The main issue remains: O’Reilly should offer an apology/explanation of why, when a woman is raped and murdered, it’s relevant what she was wearing or how much she was drinking. O’Reilly never asked me for a statement nor invited me on his show before sending Watters to harass me. Since I’m a 5 ft, 100 pound woman with an opinion that he doesn’t like, perhaps O’Reilly believes I deserve to be treated this way.
Bill O’Reilly is a bully and a stalker. He should never have been invited to headline an event for anyone, anywhere. Indeed, one can only hope that he will Go Galt someday; the world will be a better place without him in it.
(Via Shakesville.)
UPDATE: If you are familiar with the Facebook on the interwebs, you can lend your support there.
This email was sent to the Alas moderators and I thought it would be a good thing for everyone to discuss.
So I have an interesting, for lack of a better word, anecdote relating to rape culture. I am a 22-year-old white queer female, fresh out of one of the most lefty elite colleges in the US — and I even majored in queer studies while there (and yes, they actually call it queer studies!). I was raised by Democrat-to-leftist parents who are economically upper-middle-class (~$60k combined/yr) but socially and educationally upper class (Harvard.). I never had a feminist “click” moment, because I didn’t realize feminist was anything but a positive term until sometime in high school, at which point I affirmed it ferociously, being the rebellious protodyke I was.
AND YET.
I am currently dating a dude (bio and identified as such), and have been dating this dude for over two years. I tend to go to sleep a couple hours after him, which occasionally, and very consensually, results in my waking him up for a bit with nightnight sex, if he’s up for it. Tonight I started feelin’ it, looked over at him, saw how cute he looked, and found myself thinking very distinctly, in my inner stand-up comic voice, “Oh I am so gonna rape you– wait, what!?”
Now, I did not mean rape literally. What I meant was “wake you up with sexual advances that will lead to sex if accepted.” But my inner monologue went ahead and made a) a joke about rape that b) belitted what rape actually means and c) treated rape as rape-as-compliment!
My point in sending this e-mail is, how horribly pervasive rape culture can be — I look at someone I love, sexually desire them, and want to give them a hopefully pleasant midnight experience, and my broseph inner monologue compares that to rape. As if rape is just surprise sex! If they don’t want it they’re moody! Also I’m only doing it because they’re totes hot right now!
I’m just so, well, terrified that rape can come into my innermost thoughts as “boy, you are gonna love this unexpected goodness!” I spend a good part of my day finding and analysing the evidence of rape culture that show up in advertising, television, and social interactions, and yet my uncensored self still uses “rape” casually and incredibly inappropriately. Horrible and amazing, and something I’d love a comment on, if any of you have got the time.
I answered:
That’s really intense. I think we all have moments like that where it becomes weirdly clear how much our brains have been “colonized” by the dominant culture. For me, they’ll often be about internalized fatphobia, directed at myself and at other women.
I don’t know if there’s a way to get rid of such things entirely. Writer Nisi Shawl describes those quick-thought rising-from-your-subconscious bad reactions as being sort of your “lizard brain,” although obviously that’s metaphorical. We all have those kinds of bad reactions, but the point is to know why they’re bad, and then sculpt your action in the world around that.
Would you like us to post this on our blog and open it up for comment from others? People might learn from this, or have more substantive comments to add than mine — or feel relieved at seeing the ways other feminists experience and cope with mental “colonization.”*
*
The writer agreed that posting might be interesting, so let’s open it up to comments. What do y’all think?
I’m going to warn y’all: please be respectful of the person who wrote in. She’s a guest in this posting space, and exposed some tender and personal details, even if they are being released anonymously. I’m not going to limit this to feminist-only commenters because I think non-feminist-identified people may have smart things to say about this — but only as long as they are respectful of the subject and the poster.
–
*I put colonization in quotation marks because I know that some people of color object to the term being used as they see it as appropriation. I don’t know of a better way to express the concept clearly, though, off-hand, so I hope that the quotation marks will suffice to demonstrate that the term suggests an imperfect metaphor that should not be taken to diminish the real effects of colonization on literally colonized minds.
Dear Joss and the other writers and producers of Dollhouse,
This show has too much sexual violence. All four episodes so far have contained a threat of sexual violence on some level. If you want to talk about sexual violence, talk about sexual violence. Repeatedly using sexual violence as a minor plot-point is not okay.
In this episode you used sexual violence as a bait and switch for the audience. For a few minutes we were supposed to believe that the Greek guy had given Echo to his nephew as a present so that the nephew could rape her. That is unbelievably disturbing. It is also entirely plausible. We live in a rape culture; many men say that they’d rape a woman if they’d get away with it. One of the things the Dollhouse could give clients is an opportunity to rape a woman and get away with it. If you want to tell a story about that then do so, and I’ll judge it on its merits. But don’t toy with that scenario - please understand that sexual violence is serious and disturbing and treat it as such.
Maia
PS The trust on this is low as you are some of the same people who brought us “Spike has a soul now”
Dear Dichen Lachman (who plays Sierra),
Please continue being awesome.
Maia
Dear Liz Craft and Sarah Fain (writers of this episode),
First go read my first letter twice. Look I appreciate that your depiction of a woman lying about rape was much more critical of the person she was lying to than it was of her. But I think you should have probably thought a little bit harder about the implications of telling a story which incidentally included a woman lying about being raped.
Apart from that, I really enjoyed this episode. Thanks for including so much Echo, I like her much more than any of her engagements.
I thought the resonance of art was well done. From Echo’s reaction to the Picasso picture to Adelle’s comment about Michaeangelo’s views about Marble, you let the metaphor relate to the characters without hitting us over the head with it. I found the ending of this episode almost as optimistic as the ending of episode two: “that meaning and humanity comes from our interest in representing ourselves.”
The episode hit some really nice small notes. The accomplice-who-wasn’t-shot was all smooth charm and trying to pick her up when things were going well, but was the one to blame her wipe on “Hysterical Woman Syndrome” - a nice display of the links between the way women are objectified. I liked that the connection that Echo built with the guy who got shopped saved them both, even though he thought she was a talking computer (nice dialogue throughout by the way).
I’m looking forward to more episodes from you.
Maia
PS Really do read that first letter
Dear Dollhouse wardrobe:
Did you not read the script or do you think Stiletto heels are comfy shoes?
Maia
Dear Fox,
You’ve got lots and lots of money. How about you use some of it to make a second season of Dollhouse.
Maia
Edited to add: Author’s Preface: I see each post in this series as one section of a single piece of writing, not as a discrete essay unto itself. As a result, while each section may contain its own argument, it is not really possible to know whether an issue that you feel is important will or will not be left out of the argument made by the entire piece if you’ve only read a part of the series. I certainly do not mean this caveat to be, in any way, an inoculation against critique, but given the modular nature of posting to blogs and of how blogs are read, it is a caveat I’d like you to keep in mind if you find yourself wondering, and commenting on, why I have not addressed something you feel needs to be addressed. Thanks.
///
To protect the privacy of the individuals involved, some names have been changed and some identifying details have been fictionalized.
Where I lived in the early 1970s, sixth grade was when boys got to see the movie–or maybe it was a narrated film strip with line drawings–about erections, nocturnal emissions, menstrual periods and such (girls got to see it in fifth grade). Seventh grade, if I remember correctly, was when they started teaching about sex itself, which I assume would have included a discussion of birth control, though I am not sure, since a paperwork mix-up placed me in the health class that did not include sex education. So I know I did not learn about birth control there; nor, I am equally sure, did I learn about it in the yeshiva I started attending when I was in eighth grade, where the only classroom-based “sex education” I remember receiving was in Rabbi W’s all-boy gemara class. He would preach at us week after week about the evils of co-ed dancing–it was the season of sweet 16 parties for the girls–and explain how it inevitably lead to unwanted teenage pregnancy. (The boys and girls watch each other dancing, you see, and then they want to slow dance, and so they are touching each other, and then one thing leads to another and, sooner or later they find someplace dark, and before you know it, her belly is big and both their lives are ruined.) My classmates and I talked about sex, of course, but since none of us were even thinking about actually having it, what we talked about tended to be theoretical and had little do with practicalities like preventing an unwanted pregnancy. Three incidents of such talking stand out in my memory, from 8th, 9th and 10th grades respectively.
I first learned about the baseball-diamond-as-metaphor-for-sex in 8th grade, because the big question was whether or not, at someone’s bar mitzvah to which I had not been invited, Robert “got to second” with Sharon over or under the shirt. “Over or under,” of course, was a huge question, one that my classmates pondered at great length, wondering why she would let him get that far, how cool it was that he could get her to let him get that far; or maybe he didn’t have to do all that much persuading, maybe underneath the “good girl” image that Sharon so carefully cultivated was a whole other person that those of us who knew her only in school had never met; and did this make her a “slut,” and how, precisely, did getting that far, did her letting him get that far, obligate him to her in terms of commitment; and what the hell–some people were smart enough to ask–did commitment mean in ninth grade anyway?
I could not imagine why what Robert and Sharon did or did not do with each other was anyone else’s business, nor did I think that the question of when a girl stepped over the line and became a “slut” was anything other than stupid, but I was new to the school, though, which meant no one thought my opinion mattered very much, and so I was almost never included in these conversations. Still, I do remember one time that I spoke up, asking–in response to I don’t remember what–some far-less-articulate version of the following questions: The whole point of touching a girl’s breasts is to bring her pleasure, right? What is wrong with Sharon wanting that pleasure or with Robert wanting to give it to her? And why are we talking about it like Robert was running bases and Sharon was playing (ineffective) defense? You make it sound like sex is a competition that the girl has to pretend to lose, just a little bit at a time, in order for both people to get what they want.
I was not naive. I knew that boys did in fact put “notches on their bedposts” depending on how far they got with any particular girl, and I understood that girls who went too far put that hard-to-pin-down thing called their reputation at great risk. I knew these things, however, as facts, and while I accepted them as information I needed to know about how the world worked, I did not really understand them, and, more to the point, I did not like them. Anyway, no one said anything when I was finished talking. All I have is a picture of my classmates’ faces turned towards me in a momentary, non-comprehending stare, and then they turned back towards each other and continued talking in the terms that were relevant to them.
The second talking-about-sex moment that I remember from yeshiva happened when I was in 9th. The boys in my class were scheduled to take a trip to the very famous Lakewood Yeshiva in New Jersey. I don’t remember why I didn’t go, but I was the only boy in my grade in school that day, and so, since our religious classes were all canceled–it would not have occurred to the administration to send me to class with the girls–I spent the morning shooting hoops in the gym. (The day was split: religious classes in the morning, secular classes in the afternoon.) After lunch, the girls and I decided we would cut classes for the rest of the day. After all, how much teaching would go on with more than half the class missing? So we went out to the back of the school, where one of the girls pulled out a copy of the Ann Landers sex test that had recently been published in one of the local newspapers. (What looks like the version of the test that the girls and I were talking about, can, if you’re willing to wade through some religious self-righteousness, be found here.)
We cut our first period class, which might have been math, talking and laughing about what was, for most of us at the time, the entirely theoretical nature of the items on the test; and we were doing absolutely nothing that would have been considered inappropriate anywhere other than an orthodox yeshiva, where the simple fact of our being alone together was cause for concern. Because of what could happen–remember Rabbi W’s worries over co-ed dancing–if we lost control of ourselves. Because of how, even though we were doing nothing but talking, it would look to an outsider that we are alone together in the first place. Then, just as second period English was about to begin, one of the girls who had gone inside to use the bathroom came running out to tell us that the boys were had returned. Apparently, they had stopped to get a blessing from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, one of the most important rabbis of the 20th century. He gave them the blessing, they got back in their bus to go to Lakewood, and the bus broke down, forcing them to return to school. We ran into the building, rushed upstairs and, remarkably, made it to second period English on time, though it was only a few minutes into Mrs. Lynch’s lesson before Rabbi S burst into the classroom, pointed one by one to each of the girls and said, “You! Out!”
When he did not point to me, I thought perhaps I had escaped detection, but he came back a few minutes later, flung the door open with the same law-enforcement air about him, pointed to me and said, “You too!”
We were suspended, the girls and I, not only for cutting class, and not only because the idea of one boy and twelve girls hanging out alone in the back of the school was unseemly, but also, and to some administrators most importantly, because we had been talking about sex. When we were told that, before we’d be allowed back into class, our parents would have to come in to speak personally with Rabbi S, who was only available in the afternoons, I had to ask if my mother, since she worked, could come in the morning to speak with Rabbi F, the dean of the school. You would have thought that speaking to the Dean would be more serious than speaking to the principal of secular studies, but when my mother came in, all Rabbi F said was, “Mrs. Louras [her name from her second marriage], Richard is a real mensch, a wonderful boy. He made a terrible mistake, but we’re sure he’ll never do it again.” That was it. He and my mother exchanged some pleasantries, told me to go back to my class, and wished her a good rest of the day. My mother, who couldn’t imagine why they were making such a big deal out of the whole situation, collapsed laughing against the wall just outside the school entrance. “Remind me,” she said, “Why were you suspended again?” (To be fair, it’s not that my mother did not think I should be punished for cutting class, but she could not imagine that I was being suspended for a first offense or that the “real” problem, as it had been explained to her, was that I’d been alone with the girls and that we were talking about sex.)
I find it hard to believe that Rabbi F did not say more because he did not know why I had been suspended; nor do I think he did not consider my “offense” a very serious one. Most likely, he was just uncomfortable talking about such things with a woman, especially a woman like my mother, who in her jeans and one-button-too-many-undone button down shirt, her long denim frock coat and her afro, did not at all fit the image of the nice, middle-class Jewish mother with whom he was used to dealing. He never said anything else about the incident to me, either, but an incident that sticks in my head as somehow connected this episode took place later that year. Rabbi F pulled me aside one day while my class was in the library and, speaking very softly, indicated with this chin a new girl in the class whose boyfriend everyone knew was not Jewish. (Indeed, it had been the boyfriend who encouraged her to go to yeshiva so she could learn about her heritage.) He said something about her being a very nice girl, and attractive, and how it was a shame that she was dating a non-Jewish boy. Maybe–and I wish I could remember the exact words he used, because I remember thinking even at the time how absolutely precious his phrasing was–I could get friendly with her, not too friendly, mind you, but friendly enough that she would see just how much Jewish boys had to offer her. I refused, of course, and I think this may be the first time I am telling this story to anyone.
In a speech, self-described “conservative feminist” Christina Hoff Sommers said:
Let me turn to my second major objection to contemporary feminism: its reckless disregard for the truth. In doing research for my books, I looked carefully at some standard feminist claims about women and violence, depression, eating disorders, pay equity and education. What I found is that most –- not all —- but most of the victim statistics are, at best, misleading –- at worst, completely inaccurate. [...]
I partly agree with Sommers: Too many feminists — including those we rely on to get facts right (such as academics and published writers) — have been careless about fact-checking their claims. Critiquing a textbook on domestic violence, Sommers writes:
Zorza also informs readers that “Between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency room in America are there because of domestic violence.” This claim is ubiquitous in the feminist canon. But is it false. There are two legitimate studies on emergency room admissions: one by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and another by the Centers for Disease Control. The results of both indicate that domestic violence is a serious problem, but that it is far down on the list of reasons women go to emergency rooms. Approximately one half of one percent of women in emergency rooms are there seeking treatment for injuries from domestic violence.
Sommers cites a second recent textbook, The Penguin Atlas Of Women In The World, which repeats the same error. And she’s right — it is an error. (Although, as I’ll show in a future post, Sommers’ counter-claims are just as false.)
I think this is the strongest of Sommers’ claims. Sommers is right to say that “false assertions, hyperbole and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism in general.” And many errors could easily be avoided if authors just checked primary sources — something that professional writers and academics should do routinely.
Within feminism, there’s sometimes too little skepticism regarding statistics and news stories which emphasize harms against women. We’ve created a culture which does a rotten job of self-correction.
But although she has a point, Sommers is still substantially wrong, for two reasons. First, Sommers conflates unambiguous errors of fact — which will inevitably happen sometimes, especially in a movement the size of modern-day feminism — with well-reasoned disagreements. And secondly, Sommers’ own work is full of errors, and at times actually deceptive.
In her lecture, Sommers writes:
Some of you are probably thinking –- the literature on feminism is vast and complex –- there are bound to be some mistakes. So what? But I and other investigators have not found “some mistakes.” What we have found is a large body of blatantly false information. The Domestic Violence Law textbook and the Penguin Atlas of Women in the World are not the exception. They are the rule.
So here’s Sommers’ argument:
1) Feminist writers sometimes repeat “blatantly false information.”
2) This errors are the rule, not the exception. This is documented in the works of Christina Hoff Sommers and “other investigators.”
3) Therefore, feminism, as a rule, consists of “a large body of blatantly false information.”
The trick here is in point 2. Sommers wants us to believe that her critiques of feminism, as well as those by “other investigators,” are filled with examples of feminists making unambiguous factual errors. But that’s not true. In Sommer’s book Who Stole Feminism?, Sommers does catch feminists making some unambiguous errors, but most of the book is taken up by subjective political disagreements, not by fact-checking.
In order to accept that Sommers’ work demonstrates that a “reckless disregard for truth” is the “rule,” “not the exception,” we’d have to accept that anytime a feminist disagrees with Christina Hoff Sommers — because such disagreements take up most of Sommers’ work — that is evidence of a reckless disregard for the truth. But of course, it’s no such thing.
So what do I mean when I say subjective political disagreements? By “subjective political disagreements,” I mean questions that reasonable, honest people, basing their opinion on well-founded evidence, can disagree with Christina Hoff Sommers on.
I will focus on one example: the rape prevalence research of Mary Koss. Koss’ research is probably the single example that “conservative feminists” and their allies have used most often to “prove” feminist dishonesty, 1 starting in the early 1990s in books like Sommers’ own Who Stole Feminism?, and continuing to this day (Heather MacDonald published an attack on Koss’ research just last year). According to the Independent Woman’s Forum,2 Koss’ research is the “number one feminist myth” in America.
So what was Koss’ rape research? In the 1980s, Koss pioneered a new approach to surveying populations about their past experiences with rape. Where previous surveys measured rape prevalence by asking respondents a single, sometimes hilariously vague question (”Has anybody ever attacked you in any other way?”), Koss asked a series of comparatively specific questions (”Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man threatened or used some degree of a physical force (twisting your arm, holding you down, etc.) to make you?”) about respondents’ experiences.
Koss’ study of “hidden rape” proved three important facts, which feminists and criminologists had long suspected: that rape happened much more frequently than official numbers indicated; that most rapes aren’t committed by strangers; and that most rapes are never reported to police or other authorities.
Koss’ study, in the decades since, has led two parallel lives. In one life — a life lived in books funded by right-wing foundations, anti-feminist websites, and the like — Koss’ work is an enduring symbol of feminist dishonesty and deception, and is considered a discredited joke, trotted out for rehashed debunkings every couple of years.
In another life, however — a life lived among academic experts — Koss’ work has been amazingly successful. Decades later, her work is respectfully cited in peer-reviewed studies — a few years ago I found that just two of Koss’ articles had been cited over six hundred times.3
Although subsequent research has arguably improved on Koss’ 1980s work, her insight — that rape victims are more likely to recount their experiences in response to a series of behaviorally-specific questions — is accepted by virtually all published rape prevalence researchers. And Koss’ central findings (described above) have been replicated in study after study, including two major studies conducted by the Federal government.
By ordinary academic standards, a frequently-cited study which has been replicated multiple times is solid work. That’s not to say that Koss’ study was perfect — no study ever is — but citations plus replication is the gold standard.
Of course, reasonable people can sometimes disagree with professional researchers, and Sommers and other “investigators” are entitled to their opinions.4 But Sommers’ position on Koss’ research isn’t that reasonable people can disagree. Instead, she and other “investigators” have repeatedly used Koss’ research as their major example of feminist lying, even though Koss’ results are widely accepted by experts and have been replicated over and over.
This is the central dishonesty of Sommers’ thesis: She claims her work shows that feminists “as a rule” have “reckless disregard for the truth,” but most of her book concerns matters that an honest person could easily disagree with Christina Hoff Sommers about.5
Sommers has to frame all her disagreements with mainstream feminism as feminist lying, because that is the basis of her case against feminism. If she admits that reasonable, honest feminists can disagree with Christina Hoff Sommers, she loses her claim that modern feminism consists of “a large body of blatantly false information… at best, misleading –- at worst, completely inaccurate.”
* * *
Earlier this post, I said that “Sommers’ own work is full of errors, and at times actually deceptive.” In my next post in this series, I’ll back that statement up, using her discussion of emergency room admissions as my example.
This post appears both at “Alas, a Blog” and at “Blog By Barry.” To facilitate intra-feminist dialog, the comments at “Alas” are only open to feminists, while the comments at “Blog By Barry” are open to all.
At the end of an otherwise interesting list of convicted people various feminists would pardon — including Assata Shakur, The Amiraults, and all nonviolent drug users (a suggestion that would save millions of tax dollars) — one feminist wrote:
I would pardon every woman convicted of killing her husband before the self-defense plea was admissible in all 50 states because, after all, it probably was. We live in a country where the biggest risk factor for the death of pregnant women is homicide and the number of women killed by their husbands or partners constitutes 41 percent of all women killed (only 11 percent of men killed are done in by their wives or partners). It’s not a far leap of logic to think that those women were making sure they didn’t become part of that 41 percent statistic.
Virtually all of that is wrong.
I would pardon every woman convicted of killing her husband before the self-defense plea was admissible in all 50 states because, after all, it probably was.
First of all, there has never been a time when pleas of self-defense were inadmissible. My guess is that she means any woman convicted of killing her husband before expert testimony on battering and its effects (what used to be called “Battered Women’s Syndrome”) was admissible in all states.
Second of all, it doesn’t appear that the inclusion of excluded expert testimony on battering often changes the outcome of a trial. To quote from a congressional report:
With respect to the disposition of cases, a review of state court cases found that convictions of battered women were reversed in less than one-third of the cases appealed and that, of those reversals, less than half were due to erroneous exclusion of, limitation of, or failure to present expert testimony on battering and its effects.
These findings suggest that, contrary to popular misconceptions, the introduction of expert testimony on battering and its effects does not equate to acquittal for a battered woman defendant.
Still, I agree that expert testimony on battering should be included in any relevant case, and probably juries and judges aren’t giving it as much weight as they should. So there are certainly some good pardons in there. But let’s face it — there are also women who kill husbands for motives other than self-defense.
We live in a country where the biggest risk factor for the death of pregnant women is homicide…
We really don’t. Pregnant women in the US are about eight times as likely to die of medical causes (such as bleeding during childbirth) than they are of homicide. Car accidents come second, and homicide comes third.
It’s unclear if homicide is any more common among pregnant women than it is among non-pregnant women of a similar age (young women are both more likely to be murdered and more likely to be pregnant than other women). But maybe it is — the reporting system isn’t great, and some scholars say that homicide of pregnant women is badly undercounted. But there’s no way it’s so undercounted that homicide is “the biggest risk factor.”
I’ve seen feminists make this false claim before. It’s too bad, because it obscures the biggest preventable cause of maternal death in the US — which isn’t murder, but inadequate health care. Better prenatal care could save hundreds of women’s lives every year.
…and the number of women killed by their husbands or partners constitutes 41 percent of all women killed (only 11 percent of men killed are done in by their wives or partners).
This is misleading and wrong.
It’s wrong because the real numbers are actually a lot more extreme: only 2.5% of men murdered are victims of intimate homicide, versus about 33% of women murdered.
It’s misleading because a portion of that difference isn’t caused by more women being killed by intimates, but by more men being murdered by strangers. In 2005, 1,181 out of 3,545 women who were murdered, were killed by boyfriends or husbands, while 329 of the 13,122 men who were murdered, were killed by girlfriends or wives. To just report the percentage of intimate homicides, without reporting the difference in the total number of murders, creates a false impression.
(Crossposted at Blog By Barry.)
In a letter published in The New York Review of Books, David Kaiser of Just Detention International argues that we could significantly reduce prison rape, if we genuinely wanted to.
“Since 1980 the murder rate inside prisons has fallen more than 90 percent, which should give pause to those inclined to think that prisons are impossible to reform.” We could similarly reduce the incidence of rape in prison.
We know how. To some extent, stopping prisoner rape is simply an issue of better prison management. In facilities where the chief official cares about it, and ensures that his or her subordinates take it seriously, rates of sexual abuse go down dramatically. This is accomplished by, for example, providing vulnerable inmates with nonpunitive protective housing at their request, and establishing confidential complaint systems that encourage inmates to report sexual violence without increasing their risk of future assault or retaliation, from any party.
Perhaps the most important thing detention facilities can do is employ classification systems that effectively separate likely rape victims from likely sexual predators. This requires maintaining basic data about inmates; it also requires training staff to accurately assess incoming prisoners’ various levels of threat and vulnerability. Prisoners placed in protective custody must be segregated by security level. A maximum-security gang member and a sixteen-year-old first-time offender placed in an adult facility may both require extra protection; that does not mean they should be put in the same cell. Recent innovations in facility design are helpful, particularly the use of pod-shaped configurations of cells rather than the traditional rows. But no matter what the architecture, effective surveillance of inmates is essential, and meaningful rehabilitative programs such as GED courses—leading to the equivalent of a high school diploma—which used to be much more common in American prisons than they are now, have been shown to reduce all sorts of violence. [...]
Some policies that could reduce prisoner rape need funding. Legislators can help in other ways as well. Overcrowding makes it much more difficult for staff to meet their responsibilities, particularly of supervision. But overcrowding is close to inevitable if we lock people up at present rates. Offering treatment instead of incarceration to nonviolent drug offenders would by itself reduce prisoner rape enormously. In any case, we need laws that increase the independent oversight of detention facilities, and therefore their accountability. And Congress should repeal or at least substantially amend the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996, which as DeParle writes “has cut in half the number of inmates filing civil rights complaints,” and which makes it especially difficult for inmates to seek redress for sexual abuse.
Daisy at Our Decent Into Madness writes:
In Iran, a woman was attacked by her scorned suitor turned stalker: he threw sulfuric acid on her face, blinding and permanently disfiguring her. He’s been sentenced to a punishment of having five drops of acid put in each of his eyes. [...] This is cruel and unusual punishment, a human rights violation. They’re very right. This man has been sentenced to torture.
What struck me, though: cruel and unusual punishment relative to what? It’s very easy to sit here in the United States and say it’s barbaric to put acid into this attacker’s eyes. But what would happen to him here? He’d be thrown into a prison, where, chances are, he would be raped for years with absolutely no consequence.
Our courts don’t sentence convicts to torture. (Not that this stops our government from torturing!) No, we just let them be tortured by other convicts instead.
Via Five Before Midnight and Behind The Blue Wall, and pointed out to me in comments by Radfem.
As I’m sure someone will point out in comments, it’s one person’s word versus another, emails can be faked, etc etc.. I don’t claim to know exactly what’s happening here, and readers should remember that appearances aren’t always reality. But after reading this news story from the Palm Beach Post, I think the blogger’s claims are extremely credible.
What’s also frightening is that neither of the police forces involved here — not the one employing the cop, nor the one where the threatened blogger lives — are willing to lift a finger to enforce the law against these threats.
“Alas” readers (with some help from Pandagon readers) responded to anti-feminist attacks on the Family Place by donating $725. (The Family Place helps victims of intimate violence (regardless of sex) with shelter, hotel vouchers, and counseling.)
“Alas” has just made a matching donation of $725, bringing the total to $1450. Yay us!
Paige Flink, the director of The Family Place, emails:
Still contemplating whether to send an acknowledgment letter to Glenn Sacks, two people specifically said they were doing it in his honor, one thanked him for helping them find another good non profit, and another person said something not so kind about him, which I won’t repeat.
Thanks to everyone who contributed!
[This is the third post in a series, criticizing the recent campaign by anti-feminist Glenn Sacks against The Family Place. I'd like to remind readers that "Alas, a Blog" will match any contributions you make to The Family Place this week (up to $800 total), so please donate, and then let me know in comments or by using the form!]
This post continues the interview with Paige Flink, the executive director of The Family Place. The Family Place, a Dallas-based group providing shelter and services to victims of domestic violence, was the subject of a recent campaign by men’s rights activists, led by Glenn Sacks.
Once again, thanks to Ms. Flink for being nice enough to talk with me.
Did Glenn Sacks, or any other men’s rights activist, contact you about these ads prior to beginning their campaign?
No. They started blasting before I ever heard from him.
Did Glenn Sacks directly call or write you once his campaign had begun?
He did call me later, kinda the way I remember it happening, our bus ads had been up for about three weeks, the Dallas news ran an article about it. He [talked about the ads] on a Sunday radio show, and then on Monday DART was deluged with emails. Then I got a call from him the following week. He called saying, and I’m paraphrasing, “I have a way for you to get yourself out of this mess you’ve gotten yourself into.” I did not return his phone call.1
Why didn’t you return his call?
Well, I didn’t return his call.. at that point, we were being attacked. It wasn’t a conversation I had started, and I didn’t feel like my point of view would make any difference.
Does The Family Place provide services to male victims of domestic violence?
Yes we do. We do. Of course, there’s a huge difference in the number. On an average year we’ll shelter between 700 and 900 women and children, and we’ll council 8-20 men who are victims.
We do not shelter men in the facility, but we do provide hotel vouchers. We have a suite we can use. Most of the men who have come to us have been men in same-sex relationships, so we work with the Dallas Resource Center, which provides services for gays and lesbians. And when they come with kids we help them too; we have sheltered men with children.
Would you consider bus ads designed to reach out to male victims of violence?
We would certainly consider it. This was our 30th anniversary and we had been saving money for a campaign, and we targeted women specifically because our experience has been that when women think about what their children are witnessing, they are more likely to take action. We are ultimately trying to prevent murders, and women are the most likely victims of murder in these situations.
It was a small campaign, but we wanted it to be memorable.
Would you have been open to, for example, the idea of Glenn and his audience raising funds to help pay for an ad campaign reaching out to abused men?
Sure. My experience has not been that with these father’s rights groups, but if a father’s rights group had contacted us and said we want to help raise money to provide counseling services and to provide shelter, that would have been incredible. But that’s never happened.
How would you respond to a men’s rights activist who said “men aren’t using the services because there hasn’t been enough outreach to men”?
I would talk about the reality of the person who seems harmed the most, and with limited funds, we have to serve the people who are in the most danger. The lethality in family violence of a women who’s being harmed by a man is greater. We don’t have unlimited funds, and the most vulnerable are the women who have children. The women in our shelter usually come because their children have become a target. That is the very specific response we were targeting in our campaign.
We weren’t trying to make a big point about “sexism” and all of those other things — that wasn’t the point. We had a very specific point we were trying to make: There is a cycle of violence. We want to reach the people who most need our help. We want to reach them before they get murdered.
What advice would you give a men’s rights activist who is sincerely concerned about male victims of domestic violence?
I would say, get together another group of men and raise the money to provide the services for the people you say are needing them. And go out there and say “we are the new men’s shelter, and we are here to serve men who have been victims of family violence and sexual violence in their homes.” Do it just the way the women’s shelters stared 30 years ago.
Then show when you open the doors — when The Family Place opened the doors in 1978, it was full, because so many people needed help. Then show the numbers, go back to your donors, and say “I had to turn away 100 men because I lacked the funding.” Everything that happened with shelters for women, happened because of the demand.
Don’t put me down because I’m trying to help somebody. Go out there and help somebody.
Instead of bashing women’s organizations, stand up and help somebody yourself. That’s what I’d say.
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