This is a guest post from Brittney Hoffman, a GenderYOUTH Program Manager for Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC) in Washington, DC, she can be reached at Brittney.Hoffman{at}gpac.org

I never really had to think about my gender identity or expression. I identify as a female, which so happens to correspond to my assigned sex at birth. I have long hair. I feel comfortable wearing skirts (and pants). I wear make up.

When making a decision about which restroom to use, the only pause I ever had to take was outside the bathroom door waiting in the inevitably long line for the “women’s” restroom. It wasn’t until college when I started to ask different questions about my gender and the gendered environment around me.

I had a lot of friends in college whose gender identity was no longer a given. Short hair, strong bodies, pants and ties - these women challenged my own gender stereotypes and those of their campuses and cultures. During my four years on campus, I was often asked to accompany my friends to the restroom in a dorm, a dining hall, a gas station or a restaurant. For a while, I just thought it was the usual group trip to the bathroom to chat about the failures that were our dates or to laugh about some mundane detail of our day.

But one time, I didn’t want to go. I was preoccupied, busy, tired. My friend looked at me, took my hand and said, “But I need them to know that I’m a girl.” Without me, she said, she couldn’t pass, and if she didn’t pass she didn’t feel safe.

In a recent survey conducted by the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GenderPAC) reports that nearly 1/3 of the students who responded reported experiencing harassment for not meeting expectations for femininity or masculinity. One in four respondents of color reported similar instances of discrimination and harassment. Gender, race, and sex continue to intersect in these moments of miscommunication, prejudice, and violence. These were not isolated incidents - this is an epidemic. And it affects all of us - gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, straight and questioning.

Inspired by my friends’ experiences with gender-based discrimination both on college campuses and in the “real world,” I dedicated my academic and professional careers to the pursuit of gender and human rights. After completing my degree, it was time to put theory into practice, so I came to GenderPAC to advocate on behalf of all students to learn, grow and succeed - whether or not they meet expectations for femininity or masculinity.

As the Program Manager for the GenderYOUTH program, I work with over 1,000 progressive youth leaders working to create GenderSAFET™ campuses - safe, supportive and equitable for all students. And, similar to my experiences with my close friends, so many of the youth involved with the network report similar stresses, anxieties and fears of gender-based harassment on campus, including concerns about school policies, availability of gender-neutral restroom and gender-neutral housing options.

GPAC is gearing up to publish the 3rd edition of the GENIUS Index (Gender Equality National Index for Universities and Schools) to track and evaluate the efforts of colleges, universities, and K-12 school districts to prohibit discrimination and promote awareness of gender identity and expression in their policies. YOU can contribute to the Index, and hold your school accountable for a safe campus environment, by completing the GENIUS 2008 Survey at www.gpac.org/GENIUS2008survey.

Just over ten years ago, not a single college or university was talking about gender inclusion. Today, according to the GENIUS Index, there are 160 colleges and universities with “gender identity and expression” protections in their non-discrimination policies, including 80% of the Top 25 Universities in the U.S. More than 140 campuses provide gender-neutral restrooms. And 30 campuses provide gender-neutral housing options. This movement may be new, but it shows no signs on stopping.

When educators, school administrators, and students come back to school this fall, it’s time to start asking some bigger questions about gender and the gendered environment they create or perpetuate. Many of our nation’s top colleges and universities have acted to alleviate gender-based violence and harassment—when will the rest?

Do your part to combat gender stereotypes and gender-based violence in schools by filling out the GENIUS Survey at www.gpac.org/GENIUS2008survey.

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A commenter left a charmingly patronizing comment on one of my earlier posts about the Mercer University related sexual battery case today, and since it so nicely leads into the post I was planning on putting up today, I think I’ll start with it. (Welcome Feministing readers here from Valena’s guest post. I hope the details below satisfy any further questions.)

What I don’t understand is why we’re so quick to believe her story over his? I mean, come on, we live in the 21st century. I highly doubt the courts dismissed her claims due to his “powerful” family! What were the details of this case? Also, you claim in your earlier posts that you contacted the plaintiff’s firm, but did you ever contact the defendant’s firm? If we want to be treated fairly as woman, then we need to view this case, and the defendant, in a fair light. Just because his family has money doesn’t mean that he’s guilty of a crime. He could make the arguement that he’s being sued BECAUSE of the fact that his family is wealthy. Come on, ladies. Let’s be fair.

Now, the first thing to point out is that, in fact, our organization includes men and women, although I’m sure none of our guys mind being considered one of the ladies. Second, what we got from the plaintiff’s law firm were some of the documents filed in the case, and what I will be quoting from below are the judge’s statements, not the plaintiff’s lawyer’s. Third, the defendant, and the judge (which I will get to at the end), did indeed make the argument that the plaintiff was only after his money, which is why his money is mentioned at all. Fourth, we believe her story over his because, depending on which research studies you use, rape survivors make false accusations below or just at the rate for other crimes, around 2 to 8% of accusations. So the odds are heavily in her favor. Fifth, what is actually at stake in the case’s petition to Georgia’s Supreme Court is the trial judge’s favoritism towards the defendant, so I think we can be excused for leaning the other way. And, finally, I’m not sure what 21st century you live in, but I live in one where money and power still gets away with an awful lot. No one should be thought guilty because of his or her money or power, but a judge who throws out a case on legally shaky grounds deserves to be questioned as to whether the wealth and power of the defendant’s family had any influence.

A lot of what is at stake in this case are questions of what kind of evidence should be allowed and/or required in a lawsuit related to sexual assault, what kinds of questions or personal beliefs it is appropriate for the judge or the lawsuit to put forward, what constitutes a frivolous lawsuit, and whether proper procedures were followed by the judge. I will try to explain as non-technically as possible (I’m not a lawyer, which helps), and please bear with me. The kinds of things that happened to Melanie Ross (she has agreed to be identified) in a judge’s courtroom in Georgia are wrong and dangerous for other sexual assault survivors. What may seem like legal quibbling could have huge consequences for other sexual assault survivors in Georgia and will be devastating for her personally if allowed to stand.

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From CNN comes this report on a teenager who has reached out for help in dealing with her sexual assault via YouTube. It generally provides some good advice I think - look to professional sites, especially RAINN’s online hotline, that will maintain your confidentiality, and be wary of posting personal details that could make you a target for someone else (the article includes another survivor’s discovery that some of her online “friends” seemed turned on by her rape).

I don’t endorse any sort of “don’t use the internet to warn others or demand action” position though - I was just reading on INCITE!’s new website about community-based alternatives for punishing people that don’t involve the legal system. I have complicated thoughts on how that works (mostly around Americans’ tendency to believe that only people who have been found guilty by a court really did what they are accused of), but I don’t know nearly enough yet to get into that discussion. Suffice it to say that INCITE!’s information has given me a lot to think about, as did the Facebook group about a rape at Lewis & Clark earlier this year. Survivors and their allies need to protect themselves, absolutely, but they also need to use the tools available to them, and the Internet can be a big one.

I’ll update this if I can get the video to work, but in the meantime I’d be interested in hearing others thoughts on the issues raised by the article.

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A new Canadian study shows that (surprise surprise) people judge victims of rape who voluntarily used drugs or alcohol prior to their assault as being more “responsible” for their assault than people whose drinks were “spiked” by attackers:

The Role of the New Date Rape Drugs in Attributions About Date Rape, to be published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, found that the “perpetrator” is still held responsible for the sexual assault, but his actions are “marginally excused” in cases where the victims voluntarily may have drunk to excess or taken illegal drugs before the crime was committed.

“Women’s voluntary consumption of drugs prior to a sexual assault reduced perceptions of perpetrator responsibility and blame and increased blame to the victim compared with other situations,” the paper’s conclusion states. “Our attitudes remain harsh on women who behave in a way society does not approve of,” said Senn. “It remains a real obstacle to justice . . . We have to do more education to make sure our criminal justice system, the police and judiciary are not operating from those biases as well.”

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Via Brownfemipower (that’s right!):

For Immediate Release, Please Forward Widely!
Contact: incite_national@yahoo.com, 484-932-2166

May 14, 2008

INCITE! LAUNCHES BEAUTIFUL NEW WEBSITE!

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence announces the exciting launch of our newly re-created website. Check it out:

http://incite-national.org/

Beautifully designed and engineered by Tumis (http://tumis.com/), a fantastic bilingual design studio dedicated to global social justice that is woman-owned and run by people of color, the new website features an overview of INCITE!’s history, analysis, news, and projects. The site also includes organizing resources, more detailed information about INCITE! chapters and affiliates, and ways to get involved in radical women of color organizing.

Additionally, an Organizing Toolkit To Stop Law Enforcement Violence Against Women of Color & Trans People of Color has been integrated into the new site. This toolkit provides critical organizing resources to address police brutality, immigration police violence, and militarism targeting women and trans people of color. Check it out here:

http://incite-national.org/index.php?s=52

In the coming months, we will develop additional elements in the site including:
* a blog to spark critical dialogue among women of color and our communities about news, events, and ideas
* more developed resources such as a bibliography of books, articles, and films, and a list of weblinks to fantastic organizations and centers of information
* more accessible organizing tools to support grassroots mobilization

Be sure to visit our site map to help navigate through the newly organized site:

http://incite-national.org/index.php?s=85

Thank you to the amazing INCITE! community and supporters, including the Funding Exchange Media Justice Fund, for providing the resources and support needed to create the new site. We still have more work to do to make the site truly dynamic and interactive and your financial support is vital for that project. Please visit our donation page to help sustain this work!

http://incite-national.org/index.php?s=67

To send feedback or questions about the site, please e-mail us at incite_national@yahoo.com.

THANK YOU!

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
PO Box 226
Redmond, WA 98073
phone: 484-932-3166
incite_national@yahoo.com
www.incite-national.org

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence is a national activist organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence against women of color and their communities through direct action, critical dialogue and grassroots organizing.

(I found out about brownfemipower’s return via Sudy, my new blogger hero—go check her out if you haven’t already.)

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This Sunday I hope all of you in NYC will come out for SAY SO! (Sexual Assault Yearly Speak Out). It’s an amazing annual event held in Union Square and organized by the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault. It sounds like this year it will be bigger and better than ever. In addition to survivors sharing their stories, there will be healing vines (I don’t know—I just report these things), reiki sessions, self-defense classes, and interactive art projects. Check it out!

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Thanks to a Tulanian, who left a comment on our earlier article, I just heard about some things that have been going on at Tulane.

In October, a male student was allegedly sexually assaulted by a member of the campus police force. Although the officer has apparently been fired, no information was released to the student body. So we have a potential Clery Act violation there - when a serious crime occurs on campus, students are supposed to be alerted about the crime so they can take extra precautions.

In November, we get some better news - Tulane is working to publicize the resources available to sexual assault survivors on campus,

This problem [lack of awareness] was noted by organizations on campus and was addressed in the spring semester when Vice President of Student Affairs Cynthia Cherrey created a task force to work to standardize sexual assault resourses and education campus wide.

“There has been more funding starting last semester,” REACH [Rape Emergency, Awareness and Coping Hotline] Vice President Lauren Ruth said. “It has helped us to get the message out.”

Then in April, the Hullabaloo (which is an amazing name for a school paper, btw) published an article recounting one reporter’s frustration and fury with the campus police and administration’s complete lack of interest in an anti-gay attack on him.

A week later, they followed up with an article about Anna Minkinow (she has chosen to be identified), who is protesting Tulane’s decision to slap the wrist of the man who a disciplinary hearing found guilty of sexual misconduct for raping her. Her protest, joined by 10 to 20 of her classmates at any given time, sounds amazing. They bound and gagged themselves and stood next to signs protesting the silencing of sexual assault survivors by Tulane’s administration.

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Jaime Leigh Jones, who alleges that she was raped by KBR/Haliburton employees while working in Iraq, will be allowed to have her day in court. KBR was trying to force Jones to have her claims considered in private arbitration, as they successfully did under another judge to Tracy Barker. (Hat tip to Truthout for the link.) You can find more at The Curvature and Tort Deform.

I’m just waiting to hear something, anything (hello, Earth to Congress) about the US government reining in American contractors overseas. As Cara mentions over at the Curvature, it’s not like these contractors are only assaulting their fellow workers. Iraqis are also coming forward with stories of sexual harassment and assault, and nobody is prosecuting those cases either. Call your Congresspeople and demand to know what they are doing about this. So they had some hearings. Big deal. We need clear laws that hold any contractors hired by the US governments to our laws, and make it clear that they can and will be prosecuted under our laws. And until such a law is passed, Congress is not doing enough. (The Executive is a lost cause at this point, obviously. Let’s hope for a sea change in November.)

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I’ve been thinking about several stories from the last week, those of Romona Moore, Joanna Connors, Charlene Blakney, Laura Wills, and Tracy Barker, and they come together around the questions of who feels able to speak and who is heard when they speak.

All five of these women were raped, and all five had their stories told last week. Moore was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by men in her neighborhood while the New York City police ignored her mother’s pleas to search for her. Connors was raped in Cleveland twenty years ago by a stranger. Blakney and Wills are that stranger’s sisters; both of them have also been raped. And Barker is a former contractor in Iraq who was raped by her supervisor after her numerous complaints about his harassment were ignored.

Connors is a professional journalist and authored her own story, in a multi-part series published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Barker is trying hard to be heard when she speaks on her own behalf, but her story has been pushed out of the spotlight by other, “sexier” Iraq rape stories. Moore’s mother is finally being heard, years too late, because a judge has allowed her lawsuit alleging racial discrimination against the New York City police to go forward. And Blakney and Wills’s stories are told less and more briefly in Connors’ article. Color and class are huge parts of all these stories, and they are instructive for thinking through what distances we still need to travel to make sure that every person in this country is equally respected by our judicial system, much less equally safe from sexual assault.

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Feministing has an interesting discussion going on about how Wash U students can best protest Phyllis Schlafly’s honorary degree… Check it out, and add your thoughts!

Personally, while I do recognize the importance of making a statement when it makes sense (and I think it does here), I’m a fan of actions that actually have concrete, measurable results. You’re always more likely to get what you want when you ask for something specific. So my question is, how can students make a statement that will actually make some kind of concrete improvement at Wash U or in the world? What can they ask for?

My suggestion: replace whoever invited Schlafly for that honorary degree with someone who thinks women are people. How? Put some financial/media pressure on the school. Students and alums can make a vow not to donate to Wash U until this person is replaced, and the students who have made the vow can wear something to graduation that will clearly but silently signify their decision to the media (who should be invited). I’d also recommend that each person who agrees not to donate send a letter explaining what they’re doing to the supervisors of the person/people who made the Schlafly decision. I think that with enough organizing, the offending party could be gone within a year. And even if they’re not, the administration at Wash U will think twice the next time they’re considering an honorary degree for some far right wingnut.

Now that’s turning marital rape apologism into lemonade.

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VH1 has a four-part documentary series on sex coming up, and I’m sure tons of recently done-with-finals college students will be watching (if you’re anything like me, the week after finals is mostly consumed with some combination of sleeping, cheetos, and staring blankly at the television, so a four-part series is just perfect).

So if you want to watch, watch. But watch with a critical eye. What exactly is being communicated by Sex: The Revolution?

Teresa Wiltz notes that, for one, thing, white supremacy is on the agenda. According to Wiltz:

The talking heads who shape the discourse over four hours — Erica Jong, Armistead Maupin, Hefner and Gloria Steinem — tend to be the usual suspects, while black and brown folks get shoved to the background. They’re the soundtrack through which white folks found sexual salvation. (Cue the Little Richard music. See the stoned sister falling out of her dress at Studio 54.)

“It’s true,” says Hart Perry, who directed the series along with Richard Lowe. “At one point, we were dealing with the cultural crossover between black and white … when we talk about rock ‘n’ roll. I wanted to talk about Norman Mailer, the White Negro. (But) there was too much competition for stories.

This is pretty much the definition of privilege. “Well, we really wanted to talk about (insert oppressed group here) but we just didn’t have time… We needed to focus on stuff that was more, you know, important.”

I haven’t seen the documentary, but I have some guesses about what else was left out. Frankly, I’m surprised Gloria Steinem even made the cut. But I’m willing to bet that any meaningful feminist analysis, including a discussion of sexual violence, the problematic presentation of commodified women’s bodies as “revolutionary” or “liberatory,” and the trans liberation movement probably aren’t included.

The stories our culture tells us about sexuality are oh-so-relevant to the ways we choose to react/not react to sexual violence. Continue Reading »

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…and not just because our lovely Executive Director, Margaret Mikkelsen, was interviewed for the article. It’s a good piece of student journalism from Stony Brook University on the way that fear of punishment for drug and alcohol violations, fear of hostile judicial proceedings, and fear of the assailant, even if convicted, not really being punished are all major factors contributing to survivors’ unwillingness to report their attacks. The article includes this dead on quote from the mother of a student who has raped at Indiana University

All the girls that knew my daughter saw the guy get one year off and he can come back and he’s not barred from returning to campus,” she said. “They don’t take into consideration how much longer she has at the school. And he doesn’t get brought up on any charges…it’s like telling girls, ‘Don’t bother, because you might have to deal with this guy a month from now - and he’ll be mad.’

Rape is a serious crime, administrators. If you think he is guilty of it, he shouldn’t be back on campus. Period.

To move on to another reason women don’t report, contemplate this unbelievable guy, expelled from the University of Connecticut - he pleaded guilty to sexual assault, so I have no qualms whatsoever in calling him out - who not only raped a woman, but then pressured her into not reporting so that his career prospects wouldn’t be ruined. Luckily for her and the rest of the world, her friend reported it. While the police were talking to the woman about the assault, he called, demanding to know what she had told the police and that she drop the charges so she wouldn’t “ruin his life,” and then laughed at her when she told him he had hurt her.

I am so, so glad to know that his felony convictions will keep him from being a lawyer. Of course, I have a sneaking suspicion that it was actually the cocaine dealing that really did him in, but I’ll pretend that the world cares deeply about his sexual assault. Bottom line: if he pressures you not to report so you don’t “ruin his life,” feel free to think about what he has done to yours. And whether you should have the slightest bit of sympathy for someone so selfish.

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If you haven’t been over to Dirty Rotten Feminist or abyss2hope lately, head on over. Both have been dealing with some obnoxious rape apologists, which sucks for them, but in doing so both have produced a series of great posts debunking common rape myths. I hope both of them will compile them and keep them up as future references. Dirty Rotten Feminist also has links to some great troll bingo cards, enjoy.

The Curvature is back (yay!) with a post on a fascinating new campaign in Britain, aimed at getting potential johns to report women who appear to have been trafficked. The main point:

Trafficked women are forced into selling sex. Forced sex is rape. So if you pay for sex with a trafficked woman, what does that make you? If you suspect a woman has been trafficked, don’t close your eyes to it. And if you’re man enough, call Crimestoppers.

FRIDA reports on a terrible story about the repeated rape of a developmentally disabled man, and the inadequacy of the police response.

And Menstrual Poetry has more on stupid jokes about rape.

And now, I swear, I’m going back to work.

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I’m sure the administration at Tulane has been busy lately, but you’d think this would have been more of a priority.

From Student Activism:

Ten members of Tulane University’s Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity were arrested this week, and the fraternity was suspended, after a brutal hazing incident that sent two pledges to the hospital. In a statement, the university declared that it has “zero tolerance for any type of … incident which can potentially endanger the well-being of any student.”

But the Tulane student government urged the university to investigate Pi Kappa Alpha, known as PIKE, for drugging female attendees at its parties more than two years ago, and its complaint was ignored.

In March 2006 the undergraduate student government at Tulane sent a five-paragraph letter to the university administration raising concerns about Pi Kappa Alpha, stating that there was “legitimate reason to believe” that the frat had “served drugged beverages to unsuspecting guests” at a party the previous month.

According to the letter, such allegations had been made “every year” in “recent memory” by female guests at Pi Kappa Alpha parties, with attendees “suspect[ing] that they may have been date raped” while drugged…

In a statement this week, the Tulane administration said that there had “apparently” been “no response from Tulane to this letter.”

In addition to the sexual assault problem, the hazing that occurred at PIKE sounds like some of the most horrific enforcement of patriarchal masculinity I can imagine. Not only did members humiliate pledges by making them sing songs particularly associated with femininity whenever they wanted to enter the house, forcing them to do pushups, wrapping them in plastic, throwing eggs at them, and pouring vinegar and hot sauce over them, members poured boiling water on pledges, causing second and third-degree burns. A culture of this kind of violent masculinity is a breeding ground for sexual violence, and I can’t imagine that the administration had no idea PIKE was engaged in bad behavior.

Schools often avoid taking a preventative approach to sexual violence because they think having a “sexual assault prevention program” will give them bad PR by making it seem like sexual assault is a problem on campus. I hope media explosions like this will help them rethink their approach. News stories about the program you have to prevent violence are a lot better PR than news stories about sexual violence that actually occurred.

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Good news from Case Western Reserve. A student I had contact with a few months ago has reported that “thanks to the work of motivated students and supportive administrators at the university” they’ve instituted a new sexual assault policy. I’ve included the text of the old policy after the jump, and here is the new one. I’d love to hear what people think about the changes!
Congratulations to the students who worked hard to make this happen! Continue Reading »

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Megan Gamble, a recent graduate of Knox College, completed a very interesting senior thesis analyzing the disciplinary hearing process on her campus. Through interviews with students who had gone through the process as complainants and witnesses and with faculty and staff members who had sat on panels, she discovers some of the places where the process fails the students it is intended to help and makes a number of recommendations for improving the process.

I highly recommend checking out her paper, both as a model of a great way that you can use your school work to further your activist goals and as a source of information about college disciplinary hearings. While the details she collects are specific to Knox, many of the general problems she outlines are all too common. For instance, Gamble sees the three largest problems at Knox as

the lack of training for those on the panel, the current guiding documents leave out many details on how the procedures are to operate, and there is a grave scarcity of public information on how to use the [Grievance Procedures].

The examples she gives will probably feel fairly familiar to many students who have gone through their school’s disciplinary process - lack of information before the hearing, unclear procedures within the hearing, confused and unprepared panelists, unclear outcomes, lack of follow up with the survivor and the accused. Her interviewees don’t shy away from speaking bluntly about the process’s failures, and she comes up with six concrete suggestions based on those concerns. It’s the sort of analysis from inside that every school’s disciplinary procedure should get, but few do.

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An awesome set of students at Washington University is vocally opposing their Board of Trustee’s decision to honor Phyllis Schlafly, scourge of U.S. women (and I’m really not joking), wrecker of the ERA, campaigner against the Violence Against Women Act, and marital rape apologist, with an honorary Ph.D. You can find their website here and their Facebook groups here and here. They are calling for people to email the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees and protest the decision to give an honor to a woman who has made it her life’s mission to deny women opportunities and equality, and I urge everyone to do so.

I really like that the students’ protest website links to the Wash U. mission statement, which includes the obligation “to prepare students with the attitudes, skills, and habits of lifelong learning and with leadership skills, enabling them to be useful members of a global society” and is illustrated with a picture of two female and one male student striding through campus. Since Schlafly regularly decries how hard life has gotten for men, squeezed out of jobs and colleges by evil, money-sucking, feminist women, and promotes stay-at-home motherhood as the ideal for women and demands a US foreign policy of disengagement from the rest of the world, the link makes a nice contrast between what Wash U. says they strive to teach and who they are honoring this year. What a slap in the face to every student at Wash U. I’ll look forward to reporting on the protests.

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It sounds like Webster University had a great Take Back the Night last week. I particularly love the headline “Protesters Take to the Streets”! I sometimes think that Take Back the Night marches have gotten normalized on many campuses, and that students and campus communities sometimes miss the anger, the civil rights history, and the radicalness behind these events. I was also impressed, apropos of Ashley’s post on being an ally, with the foregrounding of the intersections between sexual violence and sexism with classism and racism by the event’s speakers and organizers.

I do have to briefly quibble with the claim that most college rapists don’t know that what they’re doing is rape. Although I know that such a claim is often used as a way of keeping men from becoming defensive and refusing to participate for fear that they will feel accused, I (a) don’t believe that that is true, (b) think that such claims can backfire dangerously, as they suggest that what constitutes a rape is somehow complicated to understand, which it is not, and (c) find that a more useful way to prevent defensiveness is to dwell on the fact that over 90% of men will never commit a rape.

That small point aside, it sounds like a great event, and it sounds, from the story told by one of the speakers about a comment by a Missouri state legislator, like Missouri desperately needs these women and men out there protesting - thanks to the Students for Gender Equality for their hard work!

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Oklahoma has passed a law requiring doctors to perform an ultrasound before performing an abortion, even if the patient refuses. For abortions performed in the first trimester, by far the most common kind of abortion, the “best image of the fetus” (which the doctor is mandated by the law to obtain) is usually achieved with an ultrasound probe inserted in the vagina. As a commenter on the Alternet article quickly noted, this meets the legal definition of rape under Oklahoma law.

Coercive penetration by a foreign object (you must have the ultrasound to get the abortion) against a patient’s will is now required by law in Oklahoma. Doctors in Oklahoma are now required to rape some of their patients. Has some substantial part of our citizenry gone so insane that they think this is okay?

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The De Anza rape case, in which three women witnessed the sexual assault of a 17-year-old girl, will not be moving forward. It sounds like prosecutors botched the case by offering immunity to three of the rapists, in hopes they would testify against their friends. Unsurprisingly, this strategy didn’t work out.

I’m disappointed with the criminal justice system, and would hope that at least De Anza College is taking some sort of action to change the culture of their baseball team, who hosted the party where the assault occurred (and, of course, to remove any of the rapists from campus).

The one bright spot in this is the fact that there are truly amazing people out there. These three women are heroes. They charged past nine men, in a situation that must have been absolutely terrifying, to carry the victim to safety. We need more people like them in the world.

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