In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Law

One Brave Woman

After 30 years, Kathleen Ham will confront her rapist in court. The trial against him three decades ago resulted in a hung jury; now, DNA evidence links him to Ham’s rape, as well as the rapes of at least 24 other women.

Now, I have mixed feelings about this article. But one thing it does an excellent job of is showing how disgustingly flawed our criminal justice system was (and in many ways still is) when it comes to sexual assault survivors.

During her examination at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Ms. Ham recalled, she put up a front of cool control. The doctor’s official report cast doubt on whether she had been raped. She appeared too calm, he wrote.

The night after the attack, when Ms. Ham sought refuge in the home of old friends, a street noise made her scream. “That was when I realized that my life was taken away from me,” she said.

Then came the trial. Under the law at the time, the prosecutors had to prove that force was used on Ms. Ham, and that the rape was consummated. They had to have a witness.

Mr. Worrell’s defense lawyer, George C. Sena, kept Ms. Ham under cross-examination for a day and a half. His third question was whether she was a virgin. He repeatedly suggested that Ms. Ham had engaged in rough love with a pimp.

“Well, why didn’t you get out then?” Mr. Sena asked. “Were both your legs broken?”

The prosecutor, the defense attorney, the judge and most of the jurors were men. The two Manhattan district attorneys who re-discovered this case are women. And while that isn’t an argument for the superiority of female DAs, it is illustrative of the positive influence that under-represented groups have had in breaking into various sectors of society. Women’s presence in the police force and in the legal community has had an overwhelmingly positive effect on how sexual assault survivors are treated. It’s certainly far, far from perfect, but it’s a lot better than it was 30 years ago.

What I don’t love about this article is that is paints Ham as more of a victim than a survivor. This is a woman who seems to have had a very successful life, and currently works as a civil rights lawyer. While it’s certainly important to recognize the tremendous impact that sexual assault has on the lives of survivors, it’s important to also look at how much inner strength human beings have — not to portray her as someone who “got over it,” but as someone who had a horrific thing happen to her but who isn’t broken by it. She’s purposely allowing her name to be published to show that rape isn’t shameful for the person who survives it. Thirty years later, she’s putting herself back up on the witness stand, even after having suffered such humiliation there before. That’s bravery.

And the fact that this story is highlighted on the Times website also shows how far our media has come in covering what are traditionally “women’s issues,” and writing about sexual assault. I don’t want to come across as refusing to recognize the continuing, serious problems with our legal system and how we prosecute rape — just look at the Orange County rape case , the Kobe Bryant case, and the half-assed defenses of rape which suggest that if a woman is aroused, she can’t be assaulted. There are lots of problems. But thanks to people like Kathleen Ham and these Manhattan DA’s, things are improving.

Nazis, You Suck

…but Doug Giles kind of understands.

Sure, he’ll take a strong anti-Nazi position — look, Nazis, you guys failed to take over the world, so clearly the movement is a loser. Better luck next time. Pick up a Marvin Gaye record and move on. But, as much as Doug dislikes people who follow dead movements (Communists, for example), he dislikes people who more actively dislike those people even more. Black people, for instance, whose constant, unending looting makes them appear “sub-human” to folks like Doug (Nazism, what?). Mr. Giles lives in fear of these folks, who inexplicably become angry when a group of neo-Nazis show up in their neighborhood to protest their very existance.

I mean . . . what’s going to set them off next? Long lines at Taco Bell, sold out tickets to Snoop’s concert, no booths available at the Olive Garden, a two-week waiting period for 22” rims?

…Because being angry at Neo-Nazis who tell you you’re sub-human is sort of like being angry when you can’t get your Taco Bell fast enough. And, really, the Olive Garden? Wouldn’t something about fried chicken and watermelon be a better racist reference? Jeez, Doug, get it together…

The cherry on top of this multi-layered, dysfunctional cake is that we’re told we have to understand the plunderers . . . yea, feel their pain. Look, I understand getting ticked off and wanting to mess someone up. I feel that way at Starbucks every morning when I’m standing behind a JLo wannabe who uses nine words to order her coffee. It’s all I can do to keep from pile driving her skull with a big French coffee press from their display rack for eating into my schedule and for polluting the atmosphere with her preening self-love.

Dude, you’re in Starbucks. If you don’t want to hear someone use nine words to order their coffee, get a 50-cent cup of black from a cart on the street (50 cent! Black! What am I thinking??). And what was that snide comment earlier about black folks getting mad about long lines at Taco Bell? Pot, kettle, etc etc.

And is anyone else disturbed that the simple act of a woman ordering her drink at Starbucks is enough to send Doug into such a rage that he wants to pile drive a coffee press into her skull? That is genuinely frightening, and it sounds like Mr. Giles needs some help.

Since this great land is still the land of opportunity, my suggestion to the violent ones “without” is this: Why don’t you take all the energy you normally exert in choosing which bandana you’ll wear to hide behind, what moving vehicle you’ll pelt with a fist- sized rock, how much crack you’ll smoke before breakfast, determining what alley has the best bottles for Molotov cocktails and what hole you can slink into post-riot and focus that get-up-and-go into getting your GED, going to college and giving your life to Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Tony Robbins, Oprah or someone of higher power?

Right. Because Doug gave his life to Jesus, and now he only fantasizes about breaking the skulls of young women who have the audacity to waste his precious time by ordering their coffee. Particularly when those women are Puerto Rican, or otherwise resemble JLo (perhaps it’s the amazing ass that infuriates him?) That, my friends, is far more productive and laudable than reacting when Neo-Nazis show up on your doorstep.

A Corner Where L.A. Hits Rock Botton

L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez ventures out to his city’s skid row, reporting on the squalor and sadness he sees there. This week his column focuses on one corner where prostitutes live in porta-potties and offer oral sex for $5 or $10 so that they can buy the drugs they’re addicted to.

Lopez doesn’t get in to policy issues here, but articles like this should make us ask, How can we improve this situation? The war on drugs isn’t working. Arresting these women for prostitution isn’t going to help them. Punitive legal methods simply aren’t effective here. What, then, is a reasonable — and practical — solution?

Praying for Mom’s Freedom

An excerpt from what looks to be a tremendous book about children of incarcerated parents is featured in the San Francisco Chronicle. The story details the struggles of a young man whose mother is in prison; he’s just one of the 2.4 million American children who have an incarcerated parents.

Friday visits were Carl’s favorite. The prison held a “family day” in the yard and he could beat his mother at basketball, and show her his back flips. Sundays “hurt more than fire — knowing I had to leave at a certain time, and she’s not coming with me.” As the visiting hours drew to a close, Carl’s neck would begin to twitch, or he would find himself falling asleep, as if his body wanted to spare him the imminent parting. Often, Gleneisha would have to physically lead her older brother from the visiting room.

Christmas at FCI Dublin was particularly grueling. Each year there was a tree with presents below it, but beneath the bright paper, the boxes were empty. Carl remembers lining up to sit on the lap of the jailhouse Santa, who would ask each child what he wanted for Christmas. Carl would repeat the same answer he’d heard the children in front of him offer — he wanted his mother home. “You shoulda already knew that,” he would scoff as Santa handed him a candy cane, silently adding Santa Claus to the list of authorities who could no longer be trusted.

The United States has one of the highest incarcerations rates in the world, with few rehabilitative options and sentencing guidelines that often limit judges from imposing modified punishments. The “War on Drugs” and archaic drug laws in particular have packed prisons with often nonviolent criminals serving absurdly long sentences. New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws are a prime example of the racism and overzealousness that permeates the drug war; in other parts of the country, this can be seen pretty clearly in drug laws which require tougher penalties for crack cocaine than the powder version, despite the two being the same drug (the racism being that inner-city blacks tend to have higher crack cocaine usage, while more well-to-do whites are more likely to use powder cocaine).

Our incarceration culture has been hurting families for generations, and it’s not getting any better. Throwing drug users and small-time drug deals in jail isn’t helping anyone.

Thanks to Dad for sending me this story.

UPDATE: Sentencing Law and Policy, a great blog that my dad told me about (he’s really on top of it this week, huh?), has more from a recent AP story:

Women are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. prison population, a trend fueled by their growing involvement in drug crimes and by longer sentences in general. But once behind bars, their needs are often overlooked because of tight budgets and the attention given to sex offenders and death-row inmates, advocates say.

Prison and jail officials from around the country are to gather this weekend in Bloomington, Minnesota, to address the rising number of incarcerated women — more than 180,000 in prisons and jails nationwide, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics….

Since 1995, the number of women in state and federal prisons has swelled more than 50 percent, outstripping an increase of about 32 percent for men. Female jail populations are growing even faster.

Most are mothers. Between 66 and 90 percent have children, depending on the type of institution. When a mother is locked up, her children usually end up in foster care or living with a relative other than their father. By contrast, most children with imprisoned fathers stay with their mothers.

Publicizing the “Private”

This is what bravery looks like.

By the time she was in her early 20s, Rania al-Baz had become one of the best known and best loved faces in her home country of Saudi Arabia. As presenter of a program called “The Kingdom This Morning” on state-owned television, her hair was always covered by a hijab, as is required, but her face remained uncovered, and she would choose head scarves of defiantly flamboyant colors to cover her immaculately styled hair. She became, for hundreds of thousands of Saudi women, admirable, enviable and challenging — and, thus, an implicit threat to a society in which women are forced to cover themselves, are not allowed to drive, cannot vote or participate in political life, cannot leave home unless accompanied by a chaperone or travel without authorization from a father or husband, and cannot establish a business without a male sponsor.

Then, suddenly, on April 13, 2004, Baz disappeared from the airwaves. When she emerged two weeks later, her face was all over the newspapers, but it was barely recognizable. Her husband had savagely assaulted her, slamming her face against the marble-tiled floor of their home until it suffered 13 fractures. He was disposing of what he assumed to be her dead body when she showed signs of life and, panicking, he took her to the hospital, where doctors gave her only a 70 percent chance of survival.

During the days in which Baz was in a coma, fighting for her life, her father took photographs of her grotesquely disfigured face. And after she recovered, she decided to permit the photographs to be published, thus doing what no woman in the kingdom had ever done. Of course, there was nothing particularly unusual about her bruises: Baz was a victim of one of the world’s most common, and least punished, crimes. But in Saudi Arabia especially, Baz had shattered a wall of silence about domestic violence. The images of her grotesquely bruised and swollen face sent shockwaves through her country and around the world, casting an unwelcome but glaring spotlight on the abuse of women that thrives behind the mask of Saudi religious dogmatism. Baz would also go on to divorce her husband — almost unheard of in Saudi Arabia, where divorce is invariably the other way around — and win custody of her children, again in defiance of precedent.

Read the whole article. One of the many things that it brings up is the power of the visual in social movements — Baz publishing pictures of her face after being beaten up by her husband, Donna Ferrato’s Living With the Enemy, Ms. Magazine publishing police photos of Gerri Santoro dead on the floor after an illegal abortion (warning: graphic). The visual is effective because it’s one more way to tell those stories; honestly representing the experience of the people living oppression is far more poignant than simply political sloganeering.

Baz’s story is particularly interesting because it’s clear that it would have been much easier for her to shut up and go back to the man who tried to kill her. Even after pressing charges, her husband was sentenced to 300 lashes and six months in jail — and that was eventually halved (not that I’m advocating lashing people; just pointing out that three months in jail for attempting to murder someone is pretty light).

“The crucial thing,” says Baz, “is that the structure of society — the fact that a woman cannot drive or travel without authorization, for example — gives a special sense of strength to the man. And this strength is directly connected to the violence. It creates a sense of immunity, that he can do whatever he wants, without sanction. The core issue is not the violence itself, it is this immunity for men, the idea that men can do what they like. It is the society of which the violence is an expression.”

Sounds like grade-A patriarchy-blaming. And she’d be right.

It’s too easy to read a story like this and respond, “Wow, they sure are backwards over there in Saudi Arabia,” thus exoticising domestic crimes and excusing yourself (ourselves) from any ownership over this society, which also tacitly excuses violence against women. Yes, women in the United States have far more resources than Saudi women when trying to escape abusive situations, and the cult of silence around such violence has had holes poked in it here. For that, we can all thank feminism. But to claim that the cultural ills which promote and allow intimate partner violence exist there and not here is delusional to the point of being dangerous.

Miers and Feminism: A Mixed Record

Reading and thinking about Harriet Miers all week has left me conflicted. I’m not keen on her political stance on gay rights and women’s reproductive rights, but on the other hand we have a woman who, during the 2nd wave, not only walked through doors that feminism opened, but opened a few herself.

While I am not comfortable with someone whose experience with interpretation of Constitutional law is next to nil and whose stance on abortion is that women are murderous, and thus do not want her to be the newest member of SCOTUS, there are several things that make me like her against my will.

For one, she was the first female president of Texas State Bar and first female president of Dallas Bar Association. As feminists have been critical of the lack of women in political leadership posts, we ought to recognize her key roles in these positions. Further, and I find this very interesting, she used her posts to start conversations between warring interest groups, and developed a record for being “unafraid to take on controversial issues, sometimes even to her own political detriment.”

On one hand, she was willing to meet with pro-abortion rights groups, gay rights groups, and AIDS activists to hear them out on their concerns.

Miers told gay activists that she could not support the repeal of a Texas law banning sodomy. On the other hand, she stated in a questionnaire for the Lesbian/Gay Political Coalition of Dallas that she supported equal rights for gays.

Abortion rights activists asked Miers if she supported an ordinance that protected abortion clinic patients from harassment.

“‘She said, well, I’m sorry, it’s murder, and that’s that,’ said Joy Mankoff, founder of a local women’s political action network. ‘There was no room for any discussion.'”

In other words, “I sympathize, really, but y’all are SOL.”

Nonetheless, the idea that she was willing to meet face-to-face with political opposition is fairly rare anymore. More interesting is that Miers eventually left this post essentially stating that civil service was too political instead of working toward doing the “right thing.” And frankly, I want politicians who are willing to conversate, compromise, and moderate, more than I want politicians who will say the “right thing” to score votes.

Although the women left the meeting convinced that Miers was completely opposed to abortion rights, one, liberal lawyer Louise B. Raggio, continued to support Miers and still does. Miers, for her part, has raised money to promote a lecture series on women’s issues bearing Raggio’s name. The first speaker was feminist Gloria Steinem.

“The abortion issue is a bad issue for me,” Raggio acknowledged, “but overall you look at the whole, and there are many issues I could agree with her on.”

In the late 1990s, while Miers was on the advisory board for Southern Methodist University’s law school, she helped create and fund a women’s studies lecture series named after pioneering Texas lawyer Louise B. Raggio, who was a mentor to Miers. As stated above, the first speaker was Gloria Steinem, a fact that drives conservative pundits batshit crazy.

But in the context of Miers’ life and the lives of other successful women in her age bracket, feminism plays a crucial role. How quickly it is that people forget that feminism used to be quite acceptable, and for the most part, still is. Most people can recognize that the efforts of Steinem and Co. have led to greater rights and opportunities for American women, and because of American influence on global social and economic spheres, on the rights on women worldwide. Despite the most infamous of feminist rhetoric*, second wave feminists were quite moderate in their political advances, knocking down walls that would have kept women like Miers in second-rate positions for a lifetime. Miers, who was in college during the civil rights movement and the first woman lawyer at a firm during the early 1970s, no doubt recognizes that the feminist movement of her early adult years was about common sense civil rights, from which she no doubt benefitted. It follows that Miers would logically agree to be a part in starting this women’s rights consortium.

Other than on the issue of abortion, and possibly other reproductive rights issues, it is quite easy to argue that Miers is feminist in several ways, but especially in her style of leadership. Judging from the WaPo article and elsewhere, Miers’ record shows she was committed to empowerment, community, social action, and reflexivity, values that are at the crux of feminist leadership and pedagogy. Her post in positions such as the ones detailed above shows that, despite her reservations on abortion and sodomy law, she served as a catalyst for setting a political tone based on thoughtfulness, reflection and cooperation, a tone for which her critics branded her wishy-washy on rather potent issues. Instead of telling her constituents what was best for them, she often asked them how best to handle an issue, acknowledged that she did not have all the answers, and did what she could to find a remedy that would please all parties even to the detriment of conservative interests. With Miers, we have an authority who acts as a non-authority, whose primary interest is building and maintaining a sense of community.

But despite the flickers and flames of feminism that I see in Harriet Miers, what troubles me is a woman who has plainly stated that she believes that abortion is murder, who refused to advocate for the end of the Texas sodomy laws, someone whose political loyalty has been characterized as adoration, and whose Constitutional scholarship doesn’t exist, has been nominated as the next Supreme Court justice. We have a person ready to enter a lifetime appointment who doesn’t seem to believe in the value of citizens’ legal privacy.

Despite my hunger for her kind of leadership style, I have to advocate for a negative vote on Harriet Miers for far more reasons than I have detailed here. But part of me believes that she might be the best to come our way. If not her, who?

* Despite the negative connotations that have been attached to feminist thought and movement since the public exposure of the most racidal feminist rhetoric, it is still necessary to recognize that this language and thought was critical because it did in fact make everyday women look at themselves so differently. It is a perfect example of moving to a more radical sphere in order to shift every day politics, thus gaining the most simple of civil rights for American women.

** Not so interesting fact: Harriet is my middle name.

Read More…Read More…

It’s a “private issue,” right?

Just when I was in love with opinion columnists, this had to go and happen:

Chicago Sun-Times columnist and editorial board member Neil Steinberg was arrested at his home late Wednesday and charged with striking his wife during an argument.

(…)

“We hope for the best for Neil and his family,” said Sun-Times Editor John Barron.

So is he fired? Suspended? As far as I can tell, no.

I’m not necessarily a proponent of people losing their jobs (or being unable to get a job) because of past crimes (especially misdemeanors) that they committed. However, the standard changes when the person in question is a public figure, as Steinberg is. Should he have his entire life destroyed over this? No. But he should be hit a little harder than “We hope for the best.” I wonder if the reaction would have been the same had he been arrested for child abuse. Even if he does get fired, he can always get a job at an amusement park.

Thanks to Julia for the link.

Whoopsie Daisy

A Texas grand jury on Wednesday indicted Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates on charges of conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme, forcing the House majority leader to temporarily relinquish his post. A defiant DeLay insisted he was innocent and called the prosecutor a “partisan fanatic.”

DeLay responds to the accusations and steps down as floor leader. Alas.

More: A chronology of key events and controversies in DeLay’s career.

And even more: Can you say schadenfreude? I certainly can.