Tag Archives: University of Michigan

The University of Michigan requiring course on sexual assault & alcoholism

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According to Spero News, The University of Michigan is now requiring all undergrads to take an online course on sexual assault and alcoholism.

From E. Royster Harper, Vice President for Student Affairs of the University of Michigan:

This is a thoughtful program designed specifically for college-age adults. The course is science-based, non-judgmental and non-opinionated, and it relies on proven prevention theories and educational strategies to help students understand the many aspects of sexual assault and alcohol issues.

I’m curious to see what impact this type of course has, and if it will lessen sexual assaults in the first eight weeks of the fall term. According to the Sexual Assault and Prevention Center staff at the U-M, there are three times the amount of clients during this period than throughout the rest of the year combined. They also cite alcohol as being a factor in 80-90% of the assaults.

That blows my mind.

But according to a general study on alcohol & sexual assault, approximately one half of sexual assaults are committed by men who were consuming alcohol (estimates from studies range from 34 to 74 percent); the statistics for the survivors of sexual assault are nearly identical.

Of course that doesn’t mean the survivor is in any way at fault for what happened, but consuming excessive amounts of alcohol can make anyone more vulnerable to crime and assault. If this course does help diminish the number of sexual assaults at the University of Michigan, it would be encouraging to see other universities make this type of pre-college course mandatory as well.

Sex Worker Reporting Sexual Assault by University of Michigan Professor Is Charged With Misdemeanor

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I don’t know why people don’t report sexual assaults when the police are so totally awesome and sensitive.

Back in April, a law student at the University of Michigan who was doing sex work to put herself through school was hired by Yaron Eliav, a professor there. She agreed to let him spank her, but then without her consent, he whacked her in the head twice, hard enough to give her temporary vision problems.

Not only did the police decline to go forward with charges, they charged the victim with a misdemeanor for the sex work.

The rarity of how the case began – with a law student showing up at the police department’s front desk to report she was assaulted while committing a crime herself – was not lost on investigators.

“Perhaps she should have cracked a legal textbook before coming in to the police station to talk about this,” Ann Arbor Detective Sgt. Richard Kinsey said.

He’s a joker, that Sgt. Kinsey.

And his joke is extra super funny because it’s not like any real sexual assault victims are ever doing anything illegal when they are assaulted. Real victims are good girls. As we all know, we can all protect ourselves from sexual violence if we’re careful enough because bad things only happen to bad girls who do unladylike things… Of course if a bad girl ever claims she was sexually assaulted, she must be lying, because only good girls can be sexually assaulted. Bad girls were obviously asking for it.

So if you’re a bad girl, you can’t be sexually assaulted, because you deserved it, slut.

And if you were really a good girl, you couldn’t have been sexually assaulted, because that’s impossible, silly. You must be a secret bad girl who was asking for it, slut.

By the transitive property, the abysmally low conviction rate for sexual offenses is totally reasonable.

This will do a great job of keeping all those false reports by bad girls from clogging up our system. Thank you Ann Arbor police!

As for the school, they’ve initiated some sort of internal disciplinary procedure, and I hope they remember that they may be liable for any future sexual assaults Eliav commits on campus.

Gary Beckman, chairman of U-M’s Near Eastern Studies Department, declined to comment Tuesday and referred questions to U-M spokeswoman Kelly Cunningham.

Cunningham said Eliav is the subject of an internal university investigation, but she couldn’t provide additional details.

“We take this matter very seriously,” Cunningham said.

I hope they mean that.

Via Yes Means Yes.

Unbelievable

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Via brownfemipower:

I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I just found out that Andrea Smith has been denied tenure at the University of Michigan. This is just pure insanity. Andrea Smith is a fantastic scholar focusing on feminism and Native American studies, and one of the only lonely shows in town when it comes to serious study of those intersections. She also has a good reputation as a mentor and professor, and she is a co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, which is a very excellent organization. This is nuts.

Apparently students and others are rallying around this case, but it always takes a lot to have an impact on tenure proceedings. Go do what you can to help.

Threats versus “Fantasies”

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I’ve been thinking recently about university responses to stalking and threats of sexual violence. About ten years ago now, there was a case at University of Michigan, where Abraham Jacob Alkhabaz, known as Jack Baker on the internet, exchanged emails with someone named Arthur Gonda, that contained snuff pornography Baker had written about one of his classmates.

The classmate was named and physically described in the stories that all revolve around raping the classmate, while also torturing, mutilating, and ultimately murdering the woman. Incredibly disturbing and frightening – yet a federal court of appeals found the stories and email discussions were not a “threat” to the classmate. The court actually says,

Baker and Gonda apparently sent e-mail messages to each other in an attempt to foster a friendship based on shared sexual fantasies.

U.S. v. Alkhabaz, 104 F.3d 1492, 1496 (6th Cir. 1997).

Shared sexual fantasies? The Ann Arbor News also ran the heading, “U-M expelling student for internet fantasy.” This language diminishes the violent threats apparent in this communication. Why should violence against women be excused as a “fantasy” when the “fantasy” is about a very real person, and a very real problem of gender violence in our society? Sure this gets into the whole “does watching violence cause violence” issue, and I don’t have an answer for that, but can we draw some distinctions here between fantasy (clearly a word associated with “innocent” and “harmless”) and violent pornographic stories about one particular person, describing her by name and in detail, that I believe do constitute a threat? On the flip side, what should administrations do about this, without crossing over into free speech territory?

Go U Mich!

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People often ask me for examples of good sexual assault policies. Unfortunately no one has a whole policy I’m ready to call “good,” but I can get behind some aspects of some policies. This prevention program at the University of Michigan looks great. Now if only the school would give the center an extra hundred thousand or so and hire a couple more staff members for them, they’d be in pretty good shape.