Your Must-Read of the Day
The Longest War, by Rebecca Solnit, details the ways that physical violence against women and political hostility toward women are part of the same epidemic of gendered violence and control, leveled almost entirely by men. Women are beaten, raped, killed, harassed, controlled and abused by men at astounding rates. We write these incidents off as isolated or personal, tragic but certainly not epidemic. On other pages of the newspaper we talk about conservative encroachment on women’s bodily autonomy as if that’s totally separate from violence, as if it’s a “social issue” or a difference of political opinion. But all of it — the violence, the domestic abuse, the street harassment, the online harassment, the gang-rapes, the abortion debates, the contraception battles — comes down to a desire to control women, and rage when that control isn’t maintained.
...read moreRape Culture, Purity Culture and Where Virtue Sits
I haven’t had the stomach to write about the horrific Indian gang rape that left a woman dead, but this NYT op/ed by Sohaila Abdulali is worth a read. My favorite part:
...read moreRestorative justice and domestic violence
The lead story in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine is about a young man who shot and killed his girlfriend, turned himself in, and largely because of forgiveness and empathy from her family saw his sentence partially influenced by a legal process called restorative justice. I read the article with interest, since I’m a big fan of restorative justice practices and think they should be instituted more widely across the United States. But this story as an illustration for restorative justice troubles me.
...read moreThe Pope and Killing Gay People
The Pope met with one of the leaders of the “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda, and reportedly gave her a blessing. I write about it in the Guardian, and discuss how the Catholic church uses sexuality to control its followers when it feels its power is threatened:
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This is just a very good plan from the NRA to prevent further mass shootings.
The NRA held a press conference today detailing their plans to prevent more mass shootings in the United States. Mass shootings now happen with some regularity, and your standard run-of-the-mill shootings where only one or two or three people are hit happen daily. The NRA’s response? Put armed security guards in schools, and create a national database of mentally ill people (what this database will be used for is unclear). A few thoughts:
...read moreKids, mental illness and violence
There’s a lot of talk about the role that mental illness may have played in the Sandy Hook shootings on Friday. It is important to emphasize the fact that mentally ill people are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators of it, and that most acts of violence — including deadly gun violence — are not at the hands of mentally ill people. And when it comes to crime, where we draw the line at “mentally ill” is not always easy. Someone can be deemed mentally competent to stand trial and still be severely mentally ill; someone can understand the wrongness of his actions and fail at adequately pleading an insanity defense and still be severely mentally ill. Our jails are packed with disproportionate numbers of mentally ill people.
...read moreShould NYC Compensate the Wrongly Convicted Central Park Five?
The Central Park Five are the five men who were wrongfully convicted for the 1989 rape of a jogger in Central Park. A few weeks ago I wrote about the Central Park Five for the Guardian. It’s a heartbreaking case — the jogger barely survived the attack, and suffered enormous physical trauma. The city was enraged and hungry for a conviction. Donald Trump put out a “bring back the death penalty” ad in response to the crime. Five black and Latino boys were interrogated for hours and deprived of sleep until they confessed; once actually arrested and charged with the crime, they recanted. Racial tensions boiled, with racist caricatures of of-color youth going “wilding,” prowling the streets in a “wolf pack” for innocent white victims proliferating in the white-dominated media. While the woman was generally treated as an innocent victim, even she didn’t totally escape victim-blaming — writing about this case even 20 years later inevitably leads to many people asking, “Why was she jogging in Central Park late at night? What did she think was going to happen?”
...read morePat Robertson on wife beating
Hey remember how Mitt Romney appeared alongside Pat Robertson this weekend to talk about God and Christian values and stuff? Now Robertson is encouraging men to beat their wives, so that’s cool. Very cool guy to hang out with and rely upon for moral guidance.
...read moreIs it time to talk about guns yet?
The suspect in the horrific shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin has now been identified. He is Wade Michael Page, a 40-year-old army vet and described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “frustrated neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white power band.” He’d also washed out of the army [...]
...read moreBDSM’s Rape Problem And How To Fix It: Summary Of “There’s A War On” Series
In a podcast after Not What We Do , I declared that I’m not going to do BDSM community PR. We have problems. We have at least as much of a rape culture within as the mainstream, and I’m not going to shut up about it. This post summarizes what I said at the Yes Means Yes Blog, in a seven part series that ran 21,000 words. The original, full posts are at these links:
...read moreBut he didn’t want to be questioned!
Good news, criminals: You can sexually assault someone, get caught, decide you simply don’t feel like being questioned right at this moment and then walk free. Or at least those are the rules the NYPD plays by:
...read moreProsecuting “Bad” Mothers
A must-read in this week’s New York Times Sunday Magazine about over-zealous Alabama prosecutors bringing charges against drug-addicted mothers. It’s a troubling and complex issue. Obviously no one thinks that using drugs during pregnancy is a good idea. Obviously it is a tragedy when a baby is stillborn, or born with drugs in its system. But many of these cases involve stillbirths which cannot be clearly tied to drug use — all the prosecutors know is that the pregnant woman used drugs (even one time) and the baby was stillborn, and so they assume (and argue, with little to no evidence) causation. And because most folks don’t understand just how complicated pregnancy actually is — and after the 80s “crack baby” hysteria, don’t understand that drug use during pregnancy actually doesn’t usually cause long-term problems in the child — people hear “drug-using mom” and “stillborn baby” and it’s easy to conclude that A led to B, even though that’s not actually how it works.
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