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

Month: December 2008

Rates of rape and domestic violence in the United States significantly higher than previously reported

The Department of Justice has recently started using more accurate methodology in estimating crime rates, and what do you know: Gender-based violence is significantly more common than we all thought.

Sexual assault and domestic violence rates are notoriously under-reported, to police and to researchers. Gathering statistics on too-often “private” crimes is a daunting task, and the previous method — using an automated computer system — contributed to severe under-reporting. The new statistics, which were gathered by real people instead of a computerized voice, show a 42 percent increase in reported domestic violence and a 25 percent increase in rape and sexual assault.

The DOJ press release is here. One thing I find particularly interesting about this report is the gender breakdown. In my essay in Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, I talk a little bit about the culture of fear that women are raised in.* We’re raised with the omnipresent threat of rape in public places — taught to hold our keys as we walk to our cars, to not talk to strangers, to not walk outside alone late at night, etc etc. But in reality, men are much more likely to be victimized in public and by strangers:

Of offenders victimizing males in 2007, three percent were described as intimates and 50 percent as strangers. In contrast, 23 percent of offenders victimizing females were described as intimates and 28 percent as strangers. An estimated 20 percent of all violent crime incidents were committed by an armed offender, with a firearm being involved in seven percent of all violent crime incidents.

Here’s the full report (pdf). Of all the women who reported experiencing a violent crime in 2007, 69 percent of them suffered that crime at the hands of someone they knew (not just intimates). For men, it’s 46 percent — and the vast majority of those are from a friend or acquaintance.

So men are more likely to be victims of nearly every crime except rape and sexual assault. Men are more likely to be victimized by a stranger. Women are more likely to be victimized by someone they know, and in private.

And yet it’s women who are still routinely warned to not go to certain places, or told not to walk home alone, or advised to carry mace, even though men have more to fear generally when it comes to crime. Men certainly have more to fear when it comes from crime at the hand of strangers. For women, it’s the home — their own or others’ — that’s a danger zone.

Part of the point I make in my Yes Means Yes essay is that the pervasive threat of rape is a tool of social control over the female population, and that there are certain groups in society who have a vested interest in maintaining that control. The shaming of rape survivors, and the defining of acquaintance rape as “grey” or somehow not as serious as “real” stranger rape, is part of that effort — because if we actually talk about our experiences with sexual assault, a much more complex picture than the stranger-in-the-bushes scenario develops, and it’s a lot harder to use rape as a threat to keep women in line.

These statistics further point to the conclusion that we need comprehensive rape- and violence-prevention efforts that take women’s actual experiences into account, and that don’t put the onus on women to preven their own victimization. We need to work on men, and on giving women options to escape dangerous and abusive relationships. A lot of men commit sexual assault because they feel a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies — an entitlement so deep that they can force a woman to have sex with them and somehow not define it as “rape.” That speaks to much larger socio-cultural issues that must be addressed if we actually want to combat gendered violence.

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*And I wish I had this report when I wrote the essay. Damn.

Sometimes there’s nothing else to say but holy shit

This is horrific.

It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn’s home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked her 12-year-old daughter, Dymond, to pop outside and turn the switch back on.

As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, “You’re a prostitute. You’re coming with me.”

Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat.

As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers who had been called to the area regarding three white prostitutes soliciting a white man and a black drug dealer.

All this is according to a lawsuit filed in Galveston federal court by Milburn against the officers. The lawsuit alleges that the officers thought Dymond, an African-American, was a hooker due to the “tight shorts” she was wearing, despite not fitting the racial description of any of the female suspects. The police went to the wrong house, two blocks away from the area of the reported illegal activity, Milburn’s attorney, Anthony Griffin, tells Hair Balls.

After the incident, Dymond was hospitalized and suffered black eyes as well as throat and ear drum injuries.

Three weeks later, according to the lawsuit, police went to Dymond’s school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant. Griffin says the allegations stem from when Dymond fought back against the three men who were trying to take her from her home. The case went to trial, but the judge declared it a mistrial on the first day, says Griffin. The new trial is set for February.

“I think we’ll be okay,” says Griffin. “I don’t think a jury will find a 12-year-old girl guilty who’s just sitting outside her house. Any 12-year-old attacked by three men and told that she’s a prostitute is going to scream and yell for Daddy and hit back and do whatever she can. She’s scared to death.”

Since the incident more than two years ago, Dymond regularly suffers nightmares in which police officers are raping and beating her and cutting off her fingers, according to the lawsuit.
Griffin says he expects to enter mediation with the officers in early 2009 to resolve the lawsuit.

So plain-clothed police officers beat up a little girl who they were wrongly arresting, and now the girl and her father are the ones in trouble for trying to defend her?

Dymond and her father did exactly what most people would do in that situation — if anything, Dymond was exceptionally brave in fighting back and yelling for help. The fact that she’s being criminalized for it is beyond comprehension.

Apparently the Milburns have filed a lawsuit against the police department. Hopefully they’re successful.

This case is especially compelling because it involves an innocent 12-year-old girl who did not fit the description of the alleged criminal the police were looking for, and instead was targeted because she happened to have the bad luck of opening her own front door while wearing shorts and being black. But if the allegations against the police are true, it’s troubling on an even deeper level — because it’s an illustration of what sex workers face every day, but are rarely able to fight back against.

Police offiers and other people in positions of power can victimize and abuse sex workers with almost no fear of retribution or legal consequence. The police beat up a 12-year-old girl because they thought she was a prostitute, and, if the news report is accurate, have said as much. Had she actually been a prostitute, that treatment would have apparently been acceptable.

The whole story is disgusting. I haven’t read anything about the officers being suspended or fired, but I sure hope they’re out on their asses for this.

Galbeston Chief of Police, Charles Wiley, can be reached by phone at 409-765-3790, or by email at cwiley@cityofgalveston.org.

Bush’s Last Minute Regulations: They Go Beyond Abortion and Birth Control

Though just last week I got really pissed off at Tim Dickinson’s Rolling Stone piece on Proposition 8, this week he has a really good article about all of the last-minute regulations Bush is putting into place as he walks out the White House door.  Of course, we know all about the anti-choice HHS rule . . . but there’s a lot more than that.

While every modern president has implemented last-minute regulations, Bush is rolling them out at a record pace — nearly twice as many as Clinton, and five times more than Reagan. “The administration is handing out final favors to its friends,” says Véronique de Rugy, a scholar at George Mason University who has tracked six decades of midnight regulations. “They couldn’t do it earlier — there would have been too many political repercussions. But with the Republicans having lost seats in Congress and the presidency changing parties, Bush has nothing left to lose.”

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Friday Random Ten – the Is It Snowing By You, Too? edition

Set your MP3 player to random, and post the first 10 songs that come up.

Friday video, because M.I.A. can do no wrong (this is Buraka Som Sistema featuring DJ Znobia, M.I.A., Saborosa and Puto Prata).

1. Kaki King – Doing the Wrong Thing
2. The Notwist – This Room
3. Tom Waits – Picture in a Frame
4. Cat Power – American Flag
5. Bad Dudes – Heterosaucer
6. Charles Mingus – I’ll Remember April
7. Chris Garneau – Castle Time
8. The Avett Brothers – Pretty Girl at the Airport
9. Quiero Club – Showtime
10. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Black Tongue

A song I’ve been slightly obsessed with, and that’s particularly appropriate given the current NY blizzard (and the video is neat, too):

More tunes below the fold.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Sorry, ladies, but your vagina conflicts with my morals.

In one more blow to women’s health and rights, the Bush Administration has issued a sweeping new regulation giving just about anyone the right to refuse to offer basic women’s health services. It’s being framed as about abortion, but here’s the thing: There are existing laws that protect health care workers from performing or assisting with abortion. Under current U.S. law, no one can be forced to partake in an abortion procedure if they have a moral objection.

This is about birth control.

Leavitt has said the regulation was intended to protect workers who object to abortion, but both supporters and critics said the rule remains broad enough to protect pharmacists, doctors, nurses and others who do not wish to dispense birth control pills, Plan B emergency contraceptives and other forms of contraception. While primarily aimed at doctors and nurses, it offers protection to anyone — including ultrasound technicians, nurses aides, secretaries and even janitors who have any role in the service.

Leavitt said he requested the new regulation after becoming alarmed by reports that health-care workers were being pressured to perform duties they found repugnant. He cited moves by two professional organizations of obstetricians and gynecologists that, he said, might require doctors who object to abortion to refer patients to other physicians who would provide them.

As it stands, no doctor, nurse, or other health care worker has to perform abortions. But under two professional codes of conduct, if a doctor won’t provide a certain service, he or she needs to refer the patient to someone who will. When the service isn’t an emergency, referal can be a pain in the ass, but it’s reasonable enough for something like abortion, where the surgery has to be scheduled in advance anyway.

So I’m not against making reasonable compromises and accomodations for religious and moral belief. But I am against people refusing to do their damn jobs because of some claimed morality that, interestingly enough, seems to only have the effect of punishing sexually active women:

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The Cyber-Quilting Experiment

The other day I received an email about this great article, which contains an interview with Adele Nieves about the Cyber-Quilting Experiment, a project that aims to bring attention to violence against women of color.

The project examines how the Internet can be used for social justice work and movement building activities. Cyber-quilters help communities that struggle with utilizing technology for movement building by providing access to technology, education and networking resources.

“Cyber-quilters are the thread, the middle person for areas that are marginalized or simply unsure about how to use technology,” explained Adele Nieves, a journalist, activist, writer and cyber-quilter.

Cyber-quilters assess the needs of the community and connect them to resources, either directly or via an online resource center. Resources include computers, education on using available technologies, translation and editing services, studio time, utilizing workshops and seminars – and more.

“It’s kind of a pay it forward mentality,” said Nieves. “For example, if a cyber-quilter puts on a self-care workshop, she might offer [the workshop itself] to the community, teach the community so that its members can bring it to other people.”

[. . .]

It might be tempting to say something cliché like it’s “not your grandmother’s quilting.” But here’s the twist. Cyber-quilting emphasizes history and those who came before. Cyber-quilters value the “stitching” together of stories to build an intergenerational movement. There’s active outreach to both older and younger generations.

Which works beautifully when considering that violence is an intergenerational process. Personal and societal narratives reflect the power of the intergenerational transmission of trauma, oppression and victimization.

The Cyber-Quilting Experiment began in late 2007, and I can’t stress enough how brilliant and revolutionary the project seems.  Go read the whole article, and learn more about the Cyber-Quilting Experiment and how to get involved.

Ladies, let’s get the painful part over first!

Something to get your gag reflex started early: Rick Warren on wives submitting to their husbands.

In most of the threads I’ve read about Rick Warren delivering the invocation at Obama’s inauguration (including the one here), there have been people in the comments arguing alternately that (1) it wasn’t Obama’s decision, and (2) even if it was, he’s trying to gain political capital and reach across the aisle — he’s being strategic, you see.

That’s all fine and good. The first point, as far as I can tell, is a non-starter. Obama isn’t just being handed a list of inauguration speakers and performers — he has a hand in selecting them, and I have a hard time believing that if he said “I don’t want this person,” the committee would insist. The second point I understand, but it also strikes me as apologism. You don’t build political capital on the backs of your allies. I’m a big Obama fan. I understand that being a uniter is great and important, and it’s how he got elected. But I guess I didn’t realize that “unity” meant “unity at the expense of the basic civil rights of your fellow citizens.” That’s what Rick Warren represents and promotes, and that is a big problem.

While we on the left obviously do need to understand that Obama is going to make compromises and he’s going to disappoint us, it’s crucial that we don’t just follow in lockstep. Part of the reason the religious right has political capital is because they kick and scream and mobilize when their agenda isn’t on the table. It strikes me as phenomenally stupid for progressives to sit down and shut up now that we have a center-left President-elect. Instead, this should be the time for us to really raise our voices and remind Obama that we are his base and we are part of the electorate as much as religious conservatives. Sitting around backing up his more moderate decisions isn’t going to give him any incentive to move left. We have to be pragmatic, and we have to understand why he takes a particular course (and we have to remember that he’s not a left-wing dream; he’s a fairly moderate Democrat). But insisting that everyone get in line and support every decision he makes is not a good strategy if we want to give him a reason — and the ability — to support our agenda.

And Rick Warren’s agenda? It’s a little different from ours.

Below are some excerpts from Rick Warren’s Ministry Toolbox, pulled from the section on Wives, Husband and Christ by Beth Moore.

1. Submission does not mean women are under the authority of men in general.
I love the King James Version’s rendition of Ephesians 5:22 “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands.” Guess what? Wives aren’t asked to submit to anyone else’s husband! Just their own!

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