Monthly Archives: September 2010

Why Don’t Rape Survivors Just Go to the Police?

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Why don’t they just go to the police? It’s something one may say when they are not familiar with the criminal legal system (I refuse to call it the criminal justice system anymore since I don’t think the system isn’t truly about justice) and how it handles gender based violence. Unfortunately, I’ve seen firsthand how the legal system is poorly equipped (for a WIDE variety of reasons) to properly address sexual violence. And the past few days I got a few reminders why SAFER exists and why we need to empower students to hold schools accountable so they can do their part to avoid students getting hurt and allowing rapists to graduate.

First, I read this in yesterday’s Metro (09/29/10):

New York. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance was furious over a judge’s decision to sentence a man who admitting to raped three teens to 10 years of probation. Vance said the decision to spare 47-year-old Tony Simmons the maximum eight-year prison sentence was an “egregious breach of the public’s trust.”

This guy admitted to raping multiple teenagers and he didn’t get any jailtime. In my opinion, I don’t think this shows that the court system is well equipped to address sexual violence.

Second, I read Cara’s post over at The Curvature about a police officer who in some twisted way uses the rape of someone as some sort of “lesson” to be “aware of your surroundings.”

Det Snr Sgt Glynn said the attack was a timely reminder for women to be aware of their surroundings.

“Stranger attacks resulting in sex offences are unusual, they do happen but they are not common,” he said.

If someone reports a rape, a police officer is going to be a key element to how the criminal system addresses the case. However, we still see police officers such as Detective Glynn telling people that they should be aware of their surroundings like somehow that would eliminate rape. I read so many articles about attacks that it is almost expected by me to read a quote from an officer warning people to not drink/be alone/use common sense. There is still a lot of victim-blaming and risk reduction language  being used out there by people who should be trained. These people should know more than the average person that the burden lies on rapists and potential rapists to STOP RAPE. The answer isn’t about keeping women sober around men in well-lit areas. While in a group. With tight jeans (because that makes you unrapeable).

Then the last infuriating piece of the reminder of rape culture puzzle is the news about the two students at Michigan State that has been going around. This time the school actually recommended that the “high profile” basketball players be charged with a crime, but the legal system, once again, failed a rape victim. The report says that the DA decided to not press charges despite one of the rapists giving a statement that collaborated with the survivor. Somehow the DA’s department said they didn’t carry forward because the survivor asked not to (she says otherwise), but then there was a piece of info that made me fume.

The accused player who spoke to detectives about what happened also said that he and the other player, who declined to give a statement about the alleged incident, should apologize to the woman because they had “disrespected” her.

Uh, this is beyond just some ‘disrespect’ because you cut them in the lunch line. There was raped involved here. The detectives clearly are admitting that they see that wrong was done here and I’m not sure how you can think someone was disrespected, but rape did not occur. So now we have a young traumatized student who sought justice and has found none. She went to the school AND the state.

These are all reminders that there is a lot of progress to be made when handling sexual assault – not just on college campuses, but also by the police and court systems. Reading these stories can be really intimidating to a survivor and going through school adjudication might seem like an easier and quicker option.

So while this isn’t a complete list of reasons why people turn to schools to handle cases and why we shouldn’t just depend on the courts, I think this is one hell of a reason why we should ensure that we have people trained in all areas to proper handle the dynamics of sexual assault.

Sexual Assault and Campus Housing: Know Your Rights

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This post originally appeared on the ACLU’s Blog of Rights.

The New York Times recently reported that sex offense rates at the campuses and surrounding areas of 12 colleges and universities (including the eight schools in the Ivy League) are 83 percent higher than the overall national average.

This statistic once again highlights the importance of a school’s response to rape. Federal law holds a college or university legally liable when it knows about and ignores sexual harassment or assault in its programs. Because a student who has been subjected to violence or abuse is likely to live near the perpetrator, a key component of any effective response to sexual assault is providing safe housing. However, many schools fail to transfer students into more secure housing or to enforce restraining orders after an assault, jeopardizing students’ safety and rights to equal educational opportunity.

The ACLU Women’s Rights Project has worked with Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER) to create this new fact sheet on the housing rights of college students who experience sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking. Schools must adopt policies that proactively address the housing needs of students who have experienced abuse on campus.

If you are a student who has faced problems with your housing because you have experienced sexual assault or harassment, dating violence, domestic violence, or stalking, please share your story with the ACLU. Our website also has other legal resources on sexual assault.

(You can also check out the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and SAFER’s factsheet on Title IX and sexual violence in schols.)

Asking The Right Questions

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Too often, we in social justice circles ask the wrong questions.

Who is more oppressed? Which oppression is it most important to tackle first? Which particular expression of oppression is the “worst?” Which oppressions can we ignore for now, because addressing them would be too controversial and stall our other efforts? Who is the worst perpetrator of oppression, and how are we better than them?

These are the wrong questions. These are the questions that have us chasing our tails instead of building effective movements against kyriarchy.

To put it plainly, attempts to create hierarchy are not compatible with an effective movement to end kyriarchy.

Likewise, attempts to find the similarities between oppressions are a limited response. Oppressions do often share characteristics, and many commonalities can be found in the experiences of oppressed groups. But it’s also true that every oppression is different, and the interests of oppressed groups are often in real conflict. Some communities of women of color would find their lives improved by anti-racist campaigns that rely on patriarchal narratives, even if those movements increased gender oppression. Similarly, white women might find their lives improved by feminist efforts that increase race and class oppression. The improvements that are possible through such limited efforts, of course, would not constitute true liberation in any way. But they might create more access to resources and power within the context of a kyriarchal system. Ultimately, everyone is harmed by kyriarchy, but the system prevents coalition-building by holding out the carrot of immediate reward and a slightly higher spot in the current hierarchy.

The right questions—the questions that lead us somewhere liberatory—have to do with finding the ways that oppressions rely on each other.
Continue reading →

Mixed Feelings

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Reprehensible items related to sexual assault published in campus newspapers: one could probably devote a blog just to aggregating these and covering the ensuing reactions, retractions, revisions, and convenient omissions. We have certainly covered our fair share of them here (in fact, see the fantastic student guest post from Monday). Sometime I have a hard time summoning the energy to read about, let alone discuss, these incidents. The same cycle gets played out pretty much every time: publication of some mind-bogglingly disturbing “opinion” piece, outrage follows and is circulated among various internet sites, rape-apologists run to the defense of said newspaper/writer, the writer responds (typically with a defensive, disingenuous “apology”), critiques ensue, and sometimes editorial staff comment, apologize, and/or publish a formal retraction of the piece. Rinse, lather, repeat. Sigh.

The latest iteration of this, from the Purdue University Exponent, popped up in a few different news sources this week. The twist this time is that it was a cartoon rather than an op-ed. (FYI: The second and third linked stories contain the image itself, which is not only tacky and offensive, but potentially triggering.) Basically, the joke depicted involves deceiving someone into engaging in a sex act beyond what they have (presumably, for the purposes of the joke) consented to.  Thus, as one story put it, “To many readers, the cartoon in question looked a lot less like boyish hijinks and a lot more like rape.”

The cartoon itself is disturbing to say the least. And in the few days since, the paper has, predictably, been flooded with calls and emails, and the editor-in-chief issued an apology on Monday. Part of me wants to applaud the apology — unlike most in this burgeoning genre, it actually seems sincere, and there are some indications that the staff (or at least the editor who penned the letter) get why they should be apologizing:

I deeply regret that I didn’t see what was depicted, and I apologize to the campus, to any survivors of sexual assault and, well, to any decent person who saw the graphic Friday and was offended. You’re right. We are absolutely in the wrong on this one and we’re doing our best to correct it.

And:

And to those defending us: While we appreciate some of your arguments on our behalf, ladies and gentlemen, suggesting that someone was “asking for” rape is misguided and precisely the problem here.

Perhaps I’m naive, but I’m a little bit heartened by these sentiments, and by the tone of the letter as a whole. But I continue to have mixed feelings, in part because the letter begins by framing the issue partly as one of perception or interpretation:

If someone engages in any sexual act with anyone without his or her explicit consent, it’s rape. The comic can easily be interpreted that way.

Yes, you have a decent definition of rape here, Exponent. And that’s exactly what the cartoon portrayed, so there’s really nothing to “interpret” here. This may seem like quibbling, but it’s not: focusing on “interpretation” or “perception” as a key issue when it comes to something that clearly depicts and/or condones rape contributes to the all-too-prevalent notion that explicit, affirmative consent is not absolutely necessary. Or rather: that some versions of nonconsenual sex (for example, sex with someone who’s incapacitated, or who’s being deceived about some element of the encounter) is not “really” sexual assault. Which, actually, it is.

Like Wagatwe, I’m in part heartened by the fact that the circulation of these stories via the internet means that people often  come together to support victims and demand change (in the Purdue incident, a Facebook group calling itself “Tell Purdue Exponent Advocating Rape is NOT OKAY” quickly sprang up). And I do think that the more these incidents come to light, the more opportunities we have to critique and challenge rape culture.

I just wish I didn’t have to read about them so often.

Johns Hopkins University: Misogyny That Hurts (Student Guest Post)

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This post is written by Yelena Tsilker, president of the Johns Hopkins’ Feminist Alliance. If you’d like to write a guest post about what’s going on at your school, please contact us).

Last week, my school’s student-run publication The Johns Hopkins News-Letter ran two particularly offensive articles: “Local Bison Bear All at Phi Kappa Psi’s Annual Lingerave” by Greg Sgammato, a fat-shaming Opinion piece in which “fat chicks” are referred to as animals and “it”, and “Banging under the influence: The ups and downs” by Javier Avitia, a piece that, at best, normalizes rape in situations where alcohol is involved. Since then, the News-Letter has issued two apologies: one non-apology essentially stating that its satire was simply not understood by all the insecure readers out there, and one real apology that acknowledged the harm done, the mistakes made, and retracted the articles. Granted, the new apology was hidden on page A10 and didn’t even make the front page of the News-Letter site beyond a tiny link at the bottom of the screen, and Sgammato has yet to resign, but.

It’s progress. At least, in regards to the News-Letter.

Perhaps the worst—and, ironically, best—part of these articles is that they provide a very tangible view into the everyday culture of Johns Hopkins University. Although women make up just under half of the undergraduate student body, the campus has an undeniably apathetic and even hostile attitude towards women.

On a good day, Johns Hopkins can be referred to as a ‘boys’ club’. As a research university, most of its science professors are men, including one who, many years ago, told a professor of mine she would not be able to pass his class due to her gender (she got an A). Last year alone, our parody paper, The Black and Blue Jay, posted an article about the humorous side of gang rape, and then, despite a large outcry and many students’ best efforts, Tucker Max was paid $15,000 of students’ tuition money to come speak. Judgment of women by body type, by clothing, by how much they’ve had to drink, is par for the course—and, at the same time, so is the idea that there is nothing wrong and, if there is, it’s somebody else’s problem, not worth talking about, go back to your work and wait for it all to blow over.

In other words, these articles were nothing new.

What these articles did do, however, was hurt. Not just the ‘insecure,’ as the first apology implies, but women across the campus. Women who felt like they were being dehumanized, judged, depicted as automatons who existed—who even chose their friends—solely for men’s pleasure. Who, according to one e-mail the Feminist Alliance received, no longer felt safe on this campus.

It is hard to feel safe in a place where you aren’t respected just because you’re a woman, where our sexual assault policy is vague and, at best, behind the times. Where Hopkins reported no rapes to the FBI in the past 3 years on the undergraduate student campus, even though reports of sexual assault to the Counseling Center went up. Where some huge scandal regularly throws misogyny out into the open, but because of humor, because students are busy, it all just gets buried over again.

I hope that this time will be different. That we’ll be able to carry the momentum from last year’s Tucker Max incident and this year’s News-Letter incident to make lasting change on this campus, change that we desperately need.

Because as a woman? I am not proud to be a student at or future alum of Johns Hopkins University. I know that we can do better, and the fact that we’re not? That, too, hurts.

10/14 at UMD: Preventing Sexual Violence: A Team Approach for Campuses

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We’re really excited to be a part of the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault’s statewide conference “for college staff and other professionals who work collectively to prevent sexual violence and respond to the needs of survivors on campus.” Preventing Sexual Violence: A Team Approach for Campuses will address how colleges can establish comprehensive and survivor-focused policies and procedures on campus. It’s all happening on October 14 at the University of Maryland. Click the link or see the poster after the cut for more info. Registration is now open. Many thanks to MCASA for inviting SAFER to present!

Facebook users rally in support of rape survivor

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This isn’t exactly related to an assault on campus, but I think this case raises a lot of the same reactions and dynamics one would find when someone reports a student raped them at school. A teenage girl was gang raped at a rave party near Vancouver and it was discovered because someone took pictures and posted them on Facebook (I still don’t get how people can ever think this is okay). Needless to say, the pictures spread like wildfire and there were some prompt arrests. While there is a lot of obviously horrible things I could pick apart due to this event, but I wanted to do something a bit different and concentrate on a little glimmer of hope in the article.

A woman created a group (on the same site that was used to spread the evidence of a heinous violation) to show support for the survivor.

Carolyn Anderson said she created “Support for 16yr old victim in Pitt Meadows” on Thursday not so that people could point fingers or place blame, but rather to allow them to send the young victim messages of support.

“So much harm has been done from the viral spreading of the pictures, why not harness the power of the Internet to do something good?” Anderson said. “I think there are thousands of people out there who want to give encouragement.”

I think this is a great example of what we should do when someone has been hurt and traumatized. In a society where rape victims are often doubted and isolated, having a small community (even though it is an online one) of people coming together to remind her that there are non-victim blaming, anti rape apologists out there and they are keeping her in mind. It’s great that it isn’t concentrating on the perpetrators or trying to seek some form of ‘justice’ because this actually can serve to be a great tool for healing for the survivor.

This reminds me of the various stages of recovery that Herman describes in Trauma and Recovery. She writes about the value of public recognition and validation and support. Facebook clearly became an unsafe space for the young survivor, but hopefully this group could serve to be some sort way to show that it can be a place where people are giving coming together to recognize what was done to her. I have read a lot of Herman’s book and I definitely recommend it. I think it has really resonated with me to read how Judith Herman would explicitly say how the reaction of a community is directly related to how a survivor recovers from sexual violence. Recovery cannot be done in isolation: there is a need for not only safe, healthy relationships, but also a safe community.

I hope that this Facebook group doesn’t continue to be the exception and one day the message of wide-spread support and validation become the norm.

On What Makes a School “Dangerous”

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The Daily Beast has released its second annual list of the “50 Most Dangerous Colleges,” using reported incidents of crime on campus from 2006-2008 (the most recent numbers they had access to). Last year when they did this list, they got very specific about their methodology, and I was really put off by a couple of their decisions. For one thing, this:

[B]ecause the most recent Department of Education data cuts off at the end of 2007, we adjusted each school’s number for the violent crime rate increase or decrease in the local area, as determined by the FBI, between then and the end of 2008, so that they would better reflect the current environment.

Whoa, what? You adjusted using local crime data? Since when is campus crime reflective of local crime rates? So that immediately made me suspicious. They don’t address it in this year’s version, so I don’t know if they did it again. But here’s what they had to say about weighting crimes and sexual assault, last year:

Second, since not all crimes are alike, we more heavily weighted the most violent offenses. We considered burglary and motor vehicle theft the most pedestrian. Robbery, which differs from burglary in that it generally involves taking property off a person, was weighted three times as high as those two categories. Aggravated assault and arson, five times. Manslaughter, ten times. Murder, 20 times. The trickiest category was rape. Acquaintance rape is not broken out, and many schools that do the most to support and encourage victims to report the crime—and are thus in many ways the safest environments—also had the most incidents. We wound up giving it standard weighting, in an attempt to balance the crime’s severity without overpenalizing schools that report the most because they offer more support.

While I appreciate the recognition that schools with high rates of reported rape may in fact be “safer” because they have created an atmosphere where students feel comfortable reporting, the whole “consequently we gave it standard weighing” seems arbitrary and flawed. More than that however, I am bothered by their point that “acquaintance rape wasn’t broken out.” So? Would acquaintance rape have been weighted “less” than “stranger rape?” This year they don’t even mention rape in their explanation of weighting, making me wonder how they did it.

Another difference between this year’s list and last year’s list is that last year, for a given school, they didn’t list the exact number of each kind of incident for each school. Each school was accompanied with a general paragraph about campus safety. This year the Daily Beast steps it up and lists, for each school, the number of murders; negligent homicides; forcible rape; non-forcible rape; robberies; aggravated assaults; burglaries; car thefts; and arson. What immediately sticks out to me is the lack of any mention of sexual assault (specifically, sexual violations that don’t include vaginal or anal penetration). Granted, the FBI does not have a particularly nuanced set of categories for sex crimes, but they do include “forcible rape, forcible sodomy, sexual assault with an object, and forcible fondling.” Clery statistics are meant to include data on all “sex offenses,” which one assumes includes incidents that would not be categorized as rape. But the Daily Beast makes no mention of other sexual misconduct. They also don’t define their terms, which might leave a lot of folks wondering what “non-forcible” rape is. (Answer: it refers to statutory rape and incest, that’s why there are so few incidents listed).

Looking through the numbers, I have mixed feelings. For one thing, when I see that 128 rapes were reported at Harvard from 2006-2008, I’m more comforted than I am by the fact that zero rapes at Indiana Wesleyan University, one of the schools on the 50 Safest Colleges list. And we’ve talked before about why that is. But mostly I am left wondering about how the Daily Beast’s conception of “what counts” in terms of sexual violence and campus safety. Based on the little they’ve told us over the past couple of years, I’m pretty unsettled by what it might be.

(h/t to my brother for passing along the DB link)

Campus News Round-Up, September 14-21

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Before we get started, last week I mentioned a Senate Judicial Hearing on rape cases in the USA. Amanda Hess liveblogged the hearing, so if you didn’t catch it you can check out her summary.

The Georgetown Voice has a really wonderful must-read feature up about four women who were raped or sexually assaulted at Georgetown, and the struggles they faced and still face in recovering from the trauma and dealing with the school’s judicial process. Author Molly Redden deserves a lot of credit for writing such a powerful piece that tackles so many different aspects of the issue, including the troubling fact that Georgetown currently does not have a sexual assault education program that reaches all of its students. And kudos to the members of GU Men Creating Change who have been pushing the school to adopt such a program.

In other activism news, last year a group of students at Wheaton College began the process of demanding that the school reform its sexual assault policy, and this semester a student and staff review panel will begin examining the policy!

Since a lot of schools cut back on sexual assault programming/services due to budget constraints, I was happy to see this article about how the University of Iowa is not going to stop operating its blue emergency phones. Security says they have only received six “legitimate” emergency calls in the past three years, but the last one from this summer seems to make the case for keeping the system: two women called in fear of an attempted sexual assault and the alarm scared the attacker off.

On Sunday, Jezebel posted a story about two pieces in the Johns Hopkins News-Letter—an editorial in which one male student complains about “fat chicks” at parties and one (curiously in the “news and features” section?) in which another male student lists some “advantages” of having sex while drunk, which includes the fact that girls become more “submissive” when drinking and that drinking too much allows you to forget your stupid behavior. I invite all of you to comment on the second article (the first has been taken down) to tell the author and the paper how they’re contributing to a culture that condones sexual assault. Also, that what they wrote and published ISN’T NEWS. Remember what I said that about student journalism? [Update: so, the "no fat chicks" one was supposed to be satire. No apology on the drunk sex one though. In other news, no one on college campuses seems to know what the word "satire" means.]

Finally, the worst part of my weekend was reading this article from the University of Georgia student newspaper about the connection between alcohol and a recent sexual assault. It begins: “Deciding to have only one or two drinks downtown may feel limiting to students, but it could prevent them from becoming victims of rape, according to University and law enforcement officials.” And it doesn’t get better from there. You know what would prevent people from “becoming victims” of rape? (You know, because it’s something that you become, not something that is done to you, of course). If other people didn’t rape them. But once again, it’s always the potential victim’s responsibility to monitor their own behavior without any mention of how we change perpetrator behavior. Nice job, ya’ll.

More on music

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Ashley’s brilliant dissection of Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie” reminded me of an old favorite song of mine, by the British MC Ms. Dynamite. “Put Him Out” is a song that exhorts someone in an abusive relationship to leave, or as the title puts it, reject the abusive partner. Now there are a couple of things I quite love about the song and the video. For one thing, it emphasizes that abuse isn’t just about physical violence. It refers to controlling behavior (the abuser “tells you what to wear and how to behave”) and verbal abuse (he “shout and curse at you in public places”). The video depicts folks from a range of socioeconomic classes and races. And some of the video’s scenes are fun and celebratory, with crowds of young people mouthing the words to the chorus — sort of a fantasy rendition of the community support victims and survivors should receive.

But as much as I love Ms. Dynamite, there’s a lot that troubles me about the song and video. Of course, it almost goes without saying that framing the issues of intimate partner abuse as something that can be solved by just “putting out’ the abuser is simplistic, and wrongly places the burden on the victim rather than the perpetrator. But what’s equally troubling to me is that that the song seems to conflate abuse with other undesirable (but not necessarily abusive ) behaviors, like infidelity and laziness. Sure, we might encourage someone we know to get out of a relationship because of one of those latter two, but linking all of these together is problematic. Abuse is often trivialized (or minimized, as Ashley describes), both within a relationship and by the culture at large. One way we can change that is by having an accurate definition of what abuse is, and naming it when we see it represented in pop culture products (like the Eminem song).  While I think it’s awesome that Ms. Dynamite wanted to condemn intimate partner violence, I wish she would have saved some of the other stuff for a different track.

Video here and lyrics below. Readers, do you have favorite (or un-favorite) songs about these issues?

Now Im’a tell it like this girlfriend,
He don’t love you.
Never have I seen him kiss or hug you,
He don’t make effort,
He don’t respect you,
Or accept you for you.
Tells you what to wear and how to behave,
Comes in your home and treats you like his slave,
Don’t need him if he make you sacrifice your freedom,
Get him out your life.
Shout and curse at you in public places,
Sleep in your house on a part time basis,
He ain’t even taking care of his child,
He don’t make you smile.

I understand you love him and you’re down,
But that don’t mean you got to be his clown.

Girl, you got to put him out,
Change them locks and all that.
Girl, you got to put him out,
And this time don’t take him back.
Girl, you got to put him out,
Take the time to love yourself.
Girl, you got to put him out,
You can find real love with someone else.

He don’t even know how to be honest,
All he know how to do is false promise.
Any real man agree he ain’t a man after the first time that he raised his hand.
Treat your home like hotel,
Don’t pay his way,
Lost count of the times that that dog has strayed.
Sleep around,
Creep around,
Bring back disease,
What if next time it was HIV.
Four baby mamas, Eight kids and no work,
You can play strong but I know that it hurt,
You make the choices,
You gotta stop this,
‘Cause girlfriend,
The boy’s worthless.

I understand that y’all love birds from school,
How did you get from being his girl to just bein’ his fool?

Your little girl needs a daddy,
I agree,
But the fool is far from that.
Any boy can be a father,
That ain’t reason enough to keep on takin’ him back.
He never reads with her or takes her out,
That shit’s called neglect you hear.
Sure she confused and tired of always seeing mama’s face bruised and drowning in tears.
Look what you showin’ her by lettin’ him disrespect you,
You just growin’ her to think that it’s something that all men do.
You owe it to yourself and your daughter ’cause she thinks it’s all all right,
When she get older,
Follow the footsteps you showed her,
How you gonna look her in the eye?