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.
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.
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 »
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
Lately I’ve been having late-night chats about oppression with a new (white, male) acquaintance of mine. It all started when he called Hillary Clinton a “bitch.”
Personally, I prefer Obama, but the use of slurs specifically intended to keep oppressed groups in a position of subservience don’t go over with me, no matter who they’re directed at.
So I called him on it.
My acquaintance—let’s call him “Byron,” flipped out. I was being oversensitive. I was being crazy. According to him, “There is no oppression of women anymore!”
So I started a dialogue with Byron. After all, if I wasn’t willing to talk to him about these things, what were the chances that he’d ever encounter someone who gave enough of a shit to put up with him again?
Thus began a long and frustrating process of discussing sexual assault statistics, the wage gap, masculinity as it is enforced in our culture, and a million other things that Byron still doesn’t really understand.
I don’t know whether Byron will ever change, but what our conversations have made clear is that he won’t understand my oppression as a woman until he understands oppression in general. As Sudy points out in this post, there is no way to understand one form of oppression in isolation, because oppression does not exist in isolation. People’s identities are complicated and intersecting, and it is simply not possible to understand patriarchy without understanding oppression as a global phenomenon. This has been pointed out numerous times by people facing multiple aspects of oppression, especially many feminist and womanistwomen of color. Predictably, these brilliant thinkers have been pretty much ignored by male dominated progressive movements, and white dominated feminist movements (in case you were wondering, this is part of the reason progressives have been relatively unsuccessful over the past 30 years).
I was disgusted to hear that a woman at the University of Connecticut was sexuallyassaulted. In public. While the crowd cheered.
How did the administration respond? With a call for mandatory training in bystander behavior for all students? With a massive infusion of money to sexual assault prevention programs? Nope.
Here’s what the President of UConn, Michael Hogan had to say about the assault:
“It just makes me feel sick to hear this,” Hogan said. “We do so many things to discourage people from going to these parties and we offer so many other events.”
That’s right. She shouldn’t have gone to a party. That is where things went wrong. When she went to the party. Everyone knows that going to a party means you’re hoping to be sexually assaulted. The men involved were simply responding to her clearly communicated request.
Send President Hogan an email to let him know how you feel about his response.
The Curvature has a post about the sickest public performance I’ve heard about in a long time, which involved comedian Johnny Vegas sexually assaulting a woman on stage. I don’t have anything to add to her outrage and she has the links to the story if you care to know more, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about the audience problem and why bystander training is one of the most important things a university should provide to all their students.
Clearly people in the audience were uncomfortable and at least some of them were horrified (some also apparently enjoyed it, we’ll get to them in a bit), but nobody apparently said anything loud enough to be heard, nobody leaped to the woman’s defense, nobody stood up to put a stop to it. Why?
I don’t pretend to be a psychologist, but from other stories I’ve heard and experiences in my own life, I can make three guesses: (1) Nobody was sure if the woman really wanted it, even though she apparently seemed scared and kept trying to protect herself (2) Nobody wanted to “look like an idiot” who “didn’t get the joke” and (3) (as a corollary to (2)) Nobody wanted Vegas or the other audience members to turn on them.
These fears apply to witnesses to sexual assaults not on stage as well, and have a lot to do with why so many rapists and sexual assailants get away with their crimes. Victims get told to “laugh it off” or “get over it” (one commenter at the Curvature wrote about the similarities to hallway gropings at her high school, which often get treated with a “boys will be boys” erasure of a serious offense and one that, if tolerated, can easily escalate). Victims are questioned as to why they didn’t put a stop to it if they didn’t really want it, or are told by their friends what mistakes they made (blaming the woman for sitting in the front row at the Vegas show) that caused their sexual assault to happen. Most people are afraid of intervening in a situation that seems sketchy, as they are worried they’ll seem uncool or uptight, or, more generously, that there are things about the situation they don’t know and that their interference will be unwelcome. Those who question an assailant, if, for instance, they see him (or her) carrying a person clearly too intoxicated to consent, are told to stay out of something that is none of their business or chided for not being one of the boys or reassured that the victim had consented earlier and it was all okay. And finally, those who are brave enough to intervene may be ignored or themselves harassed (two of the three women who intervened in an alleged gang rape at De Anza have left the school because of the harassment from their classmates).
One way of tackling this problem is with bystander training, which helps people have the information, the courage, and the sense of community support to intervene in a sexual assault situation. If you are a student trying to figure out what you should be demanding of your university, personally I think mandatory bystander training should be near the top of the list. Bystander training comes in lots of varieties, but in general its goals are to help people think of sexual assault as an assault on their community and on people they care about. It tries to dispel common rape myths by helping people think about sexual assault’s impact on them personally and on their loved ones, and then it teaches them tactics for intervening in suspicious situations and offensive conversations. Many include role playing, which I definitely believe in, so that people can practice their interventions and get over some of the awkwardness that most people (myself very much included) are likely to feel.
Macalester students are keeping the pressure on to change the school’s sexual assault policy. An article in today’s Mac Weekly, the Macalester student newspaper, describes one student’s efforts to find information for a friend after her sexual assault:
After over an hour of searching the college’s website we were as lost as when we had first started. The most relevant information we found was that there were only three reported sex offenses at Macalester the year before, an extraordinary figure given the national average that one in every six college women is affected by sexual violence. The maze-like search for resources on how to respond to rape gave the impression that the college was under the same illusion I had been. That, “we don’t need to talk about, or provide information about, rape because it doesn’t happen here.”
Ugh. Dealing with college bureaucracy is bad enough to make you pull your hair out when you’re just trying to make it through some tedious registration process. I can’t imagine having to deal with this nonsense in the wake of a sexual assault. We’ll be keeping an eye on Macalester as students push this forward.
I trust that by now, regular readers have seen just about everything Jackson Katz has produced (If not, go).
So I’m moving on to another favorite of mine. If you have not yet encountered the luminescence that is bell hooks, now is your chance. I encourage you to read and listen to every word this woman has ever produced, because she is so infinitely brilliant that she probably changes people’s lives when she orders a cup of coffee.
Here she is, giving the keynote address at the Women of Color Eleventh Annual Conference:
Nora has blogged about work Tasha at the Sowing Circle has done collecting information on companies doing business in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in their greed setting the stage for the civil war and genocidal mass rape (trigger like nothing else) that’s going on right now.
I know some readers here are students starting to become interested in reforming their campus sexual assault policies. If you’re one of them, I urge you to consider your college’s investments in companies that cause or benefit from mass rape to be an integral part of your school’s sexual assault policy. For SAFER, a sexual assault policy isn’t just how your college prevents and and responds to sexual assault on campus. It’s how it reacts to sexual violence in general.
If you want to see just how completely our culture normalizes male violence, take a look at how we react when a woman is the perpetrator.
A female suicide car bomber attacked an Iraqi security forces checkpoint in eastern Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least three Iraqis and wounding 14, an Interior Ministry official said.
When a woman is violent, the gender of the perpetrator is immediately front and center. But the gender of male perpetrators is often simply assumed and made invisible.
Now, I’m not interested in talking about the fact that men are committing most violence just for the sake of it, or for demonizing men. Men are great. Some of my best friends are men! This isn’t about blaming men, but about pointing out the way in which our culture normalizes and accepts male violence, while reacting significantly more negatively to female violence. If you have a rudimentary understanding of cause and effect, I think it’s fairly easy to see that this is a big part of the reason women choose to be less violent.
That leads me to my next point. The most important function of this disappearing act is to prevent us from analyzing why we have a problem with male violence in our culture. By degendering male violence, the media leaves us without a meaningful way to understand what is going on. Jackson Katz has written extensively on this subject, and he’s often the lone voice of sanity when the media starts talking about one more (genderless) “school shooting.”
When we make male violence invisible, what we don’t discuss is how our cultural definitions of masculinity and our expectations of men might be flawed, and what it is we need to change if we’re going to stop the epidemic levels of male violence we currently see.
At the beginning of the semester, there was an incident here at Yale involving a “fraternity prank” and the Women’s Center where 12 members of the Zeta Psi frat stood in front of the Women’s Center chanting “dick dick dick dick” while holding a sign saying “We Love Yale Sluts.” Quite the incident.
On Monday, the Executive Committee of Yale College found the members of this group not guilty of intimdiation and harassment charges. No charges of sexual harassment were ever filed, even though complaints were issued with the Sexual Harassment Grievance Board.
A Yale student discusses the disciplinary procedure at Yale in more depth here:
This incident constitutes sexual harassment. It is defined in the Undergraduate Regulations as conduct that “has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work or academic performance or creating an intimidating or hostile academic or work environment.” Blocking the entrance to a campus space, the brothers of Zeta Psi made it both difficult and dangerous for me to conduct my life as a student, and they did so by using sexually denigrating words and actions.
The Executive Committee, as it stands, fails to address a large number of sexual-harassment cases. It is unusual for a student to come forward and file a complaint. Yet it is rare when students who perpetuate sexual harassment receive a harsher punishment than a mere reprimand.
The Zeta Psi case is emblematic of the University’s flawed justice system — it continues to avoid punishment rather than risk University liability. Would Zeta Psi have been punished if ExComm knew that this “scavenger hunt” was an annual initiation rite? Would they have disciplined the men who shouted in front of the center, “No means yes, yes means anal”? Did ExComm even reprimand the brothers who donned T-shirts commemorating rape as a part of their fraternity initiation? The harassment of female students occurs on this campus time and again, yet due to ExComm’s confidentiality requirements, the community can never know if censure has occurred.
Sexual harassment isn’t SAFER’s focus, but the similarities between this case and the way sexual assault is handled on most campuses are striking. What it comes down to in the end is that administrators do not recognize women’s fundamental right to attend school without being harassed and assaulted.
(Nora wrote a more optimistic post about this earlier this year. Here’s hoping she’s right, and things will get better.)
From the INCITE! newsletter comes a link to this important essay by Melissa Harris-Lacewell about the experience of watching and discussing the documentary NO! at an event organized by a group of black men.
Monday night’s event helped us to remember that rape is complicated by race. For many black women there is a sense of betrayal that exists alongside the personal humiliation, pain and fear. Intra-racial rape can feel like a rift between a woman and her people. The survivor is cast into silence not so much a by a desire to protect those men who perpetrated, but to protect the black men in her life who she loves, respects and trusts. As Simmons’ NO! reminds us, survivors often feel that by fingering the attacker we might somehow accuse our own fathers, husbands, friends and sons of possessing this same capacity for violence.
When I was in college (oh so many years ago), this was an issue I struggled to understand as a white woman. I was part of a group organizing to increase anti-sexual assault education resources. I think we failed miserably to make it a broad, inclusive movement because those of us who were white did not listen to what women of color were telling us. We did not get it. Part of SAFER’s work is to help student activists, of any background, experience, etc., shut up, listen, get it, and speak out. This essay is extremely helpful in making clear what perhaps I would have understood years ago if I had just shut up for a minute.
I had the pleasure last week of visiting with the fantastic students in the Connecticut College Gender and Women’s Studies program’s senior seminar. Emily DeClue, Carolina Denham, Yalidy Mato, Kaitlin Morse, and Sarah Trapido are co-writing a paper arguing that their school functions as a quasi-state in terms of its authority over their lives and their surroundings, and as such its actions can be analyzed through a human rights framework. They specifically analyze a school’s responsibilities to end sexual assault on campus, arguing that the demands of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and other international agreements around human rights require that all students feel equally safe on campus. Currently, the students note a “gendered discrepancy between senses of ’security of person’” on college campuses. The threat of sexual assault is felt much more strongly by female students and sexual assault is experienced much more often by female students, leading female students to feel much less safe on campus then male students. If the school fails to proactively address and improve this situation, they are failing to see sexual assault as “an inexcusable violation of human rights.”
I met the professor who teaches the class (and chairs the department), Dr. Mab Segrest, at V to the 10th (so you know she’s cool). When she told me what her senior seminar was on this year, I was really excited and very honored to be invited to attend one of the seminars and speak about SAFER’s work and how I thought their new intellectual framework could be useful. They will be working on getting the paper published and possibly also setting up a website to make their work available to other students. We will keep you posted about where you can find their work.
**Note to activists** This Connecticut College class offers a fantastic model for how you can lay some of the groundwork for your school campaign (and possibly bring a SAFER trainer to your campus at your school’s expense). Find a faculty ally you trust, be she or he in Gender Studies, History, Sociology, Anthropology, or any number of other fields, and get them to offer a class on the history of activism, human rights and sexual violence, theories of human rights in the U.S., etc., or, if they are a very strong ally, something as specific as Prof. Segrest’s class. Use that class time to develop your background in the area and to put together a working group on the topic among your fellow students. Nothing impresses a good professor more than seeing the class material put into action in a student’s immediate context, and I’d probably give such a final project an A+.
These students don’t just stop at setting out a theoretical framework; they are also writing about how it might be used in relation to their own campus. Their paper is still developing, so I don’t want to comment too much, but they are looking at how important demands from the human rights framework - consciousness, freedom, security, education, and power - are or are not being met and supported by their campus in terms of the prevention of sexual assault. Are all students being educated with a goal of “the full development of the human personality,” a goal which requires both a consciousness about sexual assault as harm we all have a responsibility to end and a security from sexual assault for all students so they can focus on learning other things. Are students being given (or demanding) power to help determine how the school responds to sexual assault allegations? And are all students equally free - to go where they want, do what they want, be who they want to be - in a way that does not impinge on any other student’s freedom but is also never forcibly lessened by some other student’s desire to be more free than others? I’m really looking forward to the final product.
The Angry Black Woman has a very worthwhile post up about why many women, particularly women of color, choose not to identify with the “feminist” label, or at least feel a lot of ambivalence about that label.
I’ll give you a hint: it’s not because we’re afraid men will think we don’t shave our armpits.
If you want to begin organizing to improve your school's sexual assault policy but don't know where to begin, Change Happens, SAFER's organizing manual for student activists, can help.
