feminist blogs

The Guardian and others have been reporting on the growing trend in South Africa where lesbians are raped and beaten in efforts to "correct" or "cure" their sexual orientation. And the authorities are not doing much about it.

After Eudy Simelane, the leading player on the Banyana Banyana national female soccer team was brutally raped and murdered last April, more awareness has been raised, but the prevalence of this horrific trend has only grown with it. One lesbian and gay support group in Cape Town says they get 10 new cases of "corrective rape" every week. And that's just in Cape Town.

And many of these cases result in murder, but with a barely existent conviction rate; there has only been one conviction out of 31 reported cases in the last decade. (The number of actual incidences are predicted to be much higher.)

In response, ActionAid and others have released a report, Hate Crimes: the rise of corrective rape in South Africa, bringing to light the prevalence of the "practice" as well as the failure of the South African legal system to take recourse; hate crimes on the basis of sexual orientation is not recognized under South African law. On sentencing of Simelan's case, the judge said that her orientation had "no significance" in the murder.

Check out The Guardian's video of interviews with some survivors. (Trigger warning.)

This study is really interesting (link it to a PDF), if by interesting you mean deeply tragic and horridly upsetting. According to the Times UK, 1 in 7 people find it is sometimes justified to hit women.

One in seven people believe it is acceptable in some circumstances for a man to hit his wife or girlfriend if she is dressed in "sexy or revealing clothes in public", according to the findings of a survey released today.

A similar number believed that it was all right for a man to slap his wife or girlfriend if she is "nagging or constantly moaning at him".

The findings of the poll, conducted for the Home Office, also disclosed about a quarter of people believe that wearing sexy or revealing clothing should lead to a woman being held partly responsible for being raped or sexually assaulted.

If that is not upsetting enough, Jess at the F-Word breaks the studies down even further. and concludes,

These figures appear to actually show the situation is worse than we thought from that pivotal 2005 poll by Amnesty. For example, Amnesty found about 1/3 of people think women who've been flirting are responsible if they get raped, whereas the Home Office poll puts the figure at a shocking 43%. About 50% believe that women in prostitution bear some or all of the responsibility if they're raped.

The article also suggested that older populations (over 65) and what they call "lower social groups" had a higher percentage of supporting that violence against women is sometimes justified. I actually have no idea what they mean by "lower social groups," and find that language really problematic, especially if they are talking about working class communities and communities of color. I looked through the study and found no delineation by age or background.

Despite those perhaps journalistic assumptions made, this data is appalling.

Thanks to Meg for the link and community post.

Check out this headine: “N.Y. Catholics: Dems Trying to Bankrupt Church.”

Sounds pretty bad, right? I mean, I’m not a huge fan of some of the Church hierarchy’s decisions, but I have no hate for the Church itself or the people who benefit from its services or the people who frequent its houses of worship. And I certainly have no desire to see the Church bankrupted.

Except, oops: Turns out that those mean old Democrats are trying to “bankrupt” the Church by making sure it’s accountable to people who were molested by priests as children. How terrible.

The NewsMax article lists three major points of “attack” on Catholic churches:

A proposal to require all hospitals to perform abortions, or lose their state license would put Catholic hospitals out of business.

Major funding cuts for Catholic schools by Gov. David Paterson, who continues to force the parochial schools to run state-mandated programs at their own expense.

An effort by Democratic lawmakers to abolish the statute of limitations on sex abuse lawsuits against the Church, allowing people to sue over decades-old cases in which the alleged perpetrators are dead.

Let’s go through point-by-point.

1. A proposal to require all hospitals to perform abortions, or lose their state license would put Catholic hospitals out of business.

They’re talking about the New York State Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act, but that’s not at all what the Act says. That Act seeks to ensure that abortion rights will be enshrined into New York law, even if Roe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court. It doesn’t do a whole lot more than bring state law in line with the current national standard — the law basically says that the right to use or refuse contraception, the right to abortion, and the right to carry a pregnancy to term are all fundamental and should not be infringed upon by the state. It’s a pretty tame standard, and no different from the one we’re operating under — but it’s necessary because the current national standard is fairly tenuous. Currently, New York state law treats abortion as homicide, but with many exceptions; that law hasn’t mattered since Roe qualified abortion as a fundamental privacy right, but it would start to matter again if Roe were overturned. You can read the Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act here (pdf). Nothing in the law says that Catholic hospitals (or any hospitals, for that matter) have to perform abortions. Of course, I’m of the personal opinion that if a hospital refuses to provide basic medical services to its patients, then it probably shouldn’t receive any state funding, and I would support a law requiring as much. It’s a huge problem that many Catholic hospitals won’t even terminate ectopic pregnancies — pregnancies that occur outside of the uterus, will never become babies, and risk the pregnant woman’s life. It’s a huge problem that many Catholic hospitals won’t give rape survivors emergency contraception. It’s a huge problem that many doctors at Catholic hospitals won’t prescribe birth control. I think they should lose state funding if they won’t care for their patients. But that isn’t what this law does. Not even close.

2. Major funding cuts for Catholic schools by Gov. David Paterson, who continues to force the parochial schools to run state-mandated programs at their own expense.

New York State is $13 billion in the hole. Budgets are being cut across the board, even for basics like public transportation. So while I’m always sorry to see education costs being cut, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the state to cut subsidies for private institutions when the state is already supporting a vast public school system that could use a whole lot more money. As for the “state-mandated” programs that Catholic schools are forced to run at their own expense… I suspect that means Catholic schools are expected to meet basic educational requrements. Boo. Hoo.

3. An effort by Democratic lawmakers to abolish the statute of limitations on sex abuse lawsuits against the Church, allowing people to sue over decades-old cases in which the alleged perpetrators are dead.

They actually aren’t abolishing the statute of limitations on sex abuse law suits against the Church. The proposed law — which the Catholic Church is rallying hard against — would open up a one-year window for abuse survivors to come forward and file suit. There are definitely problems with the proposal, and it would enable survivors to open up decades-old cases where there may not be adequate documentation or witnesses. Similar legal mechanisms have been used in California and Washington, and the Church did take a big financial hit. But the Church’s complicity in the sex abuse scandals helps to create a set of circumstances under which opening up this window doesn’t seem like a totally unreasonable idea; the abuse wasn’t a case of a few bad apples, it was an institutional problem that the Church itself fully enabled even when it knew better. So the idea that the Church will be held accountable even when the guilty individuals are dead or aged doesn’t bother me as much as it would under other circumstances. I still happen to think that the proposed law is problematic, but not because the Church is being “targeted” — and certainly not because it might be financially detrimental (since when is that an argument against someone’s right to sue you?).

And, call me cold-hearted, but I don’t have all that much sympathy for the Church’s complaints about how being sued for decades of sex abuse may be financially devastating. Sometimes you reap what you sow.

Thanks to Lance for the article.

According to a UK survey, one in seven people think it’s ok to hit a woman if she wears revealing or “sexy” clothes in public. Similar numbers think it’s ok to hit a woman who “nags.” An even higher percentage — a full one-quarter of respondents — believe that a woman who wears revealing clothing should be held responsible if she’s the victim of sexual assault.

Thanks to Laurence for the link.

There really are no words for this kind of case.

A community poster already covered the uproar by the Brazilian Roman Catholic Church of the abortion of a 9-year old girl who was raped by her stepfather. This is despite the fact that abortion is legal in Brazil in cases of rape and when the woman's life is in danger, which both applies to this girl (as she not only weighs just 80 pounds but was pregnant with twins):

The Catholic Church tried to intervene to prevent the abortion going ahead but the procedure was carried out on Wednesday.

Now a Church spokesman says all those involved, including the child's mother and the doctors, are to be excommunicated.

The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil's TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law.

He said the excommunication would not apply to the child because of her age, but would affect all those who ensured the abortion was carried out.

How merciful of them.

In Brazil, there is a horrific story of a 9-year-old girl who was raped and impregnated (h/t Falloch’s comment).  It’s believed that the rape was committed by her step-father.  The girl was not only pregnant at that young age, but also pregnant with twins.  And so, as makes perfect sense, she had an abortion.  Because she was raped, because she was much to young to have a child, and because the stress of having twins would of course have been far too much for a 9-year-old’s body to handle.  And she could have died.

Now, the Catholic Church has excommunicated both the girl’s mother and the doctors who performed the abortion, which likely saved the girl’s life.

Well then.  At least they didn’t excommunicate the girl, right?  Maybe they decided that she was much too young to have made the decision to have the abortion on her own, or to understand what was happening.  But not too young, apparently, to be forced to give birth to the twins caused by her rapist.  Not too young to quite possibly die in the process.

In defending the decision, the Church’s lawyer has said:

“It’s the law of God: Do not kill. We consider this murder,” Miranda said in comments reported by O Globo.

But rape, apparently, is a-okay.  After all, I don’t see the step-father, who allegedly admitted to having raped the girl since the age of 6, being excommunicated.  Killing a fetus is apparently worthy of such censure and shunning.  Horrifically violating a small child, though?  Well, we all make mistakes.  And this stance is of course nothing new.

The lawyer also argued that the girl just should have carried to term and had a cesarean section.  Because obviously a lawyer knows the girl’s condition better than her own doctor.  And obviously the girl’s mental well-being doesn’t count for a damn thing.

Who knows what a cesarean section would have done for the girl, since the doctors didn’t present the issue of her giving vaginal birth as being the main health concern here.  But oh well.  God says.  Clearly, if this child died in the course of fulfilling “God’s wishes,” it would have been a lesser tragedy than the cold-blooded murder of those innocent little fetuses.  After all, in other extremist Catholic doctrine, a woman is better off dead than raped anyway.

RH Reality Check asks: Is this what religious objection to abortion looks like?  Seeing as how the point of the entire anti-choice movement is indeed to erase any and all concern for the woman in question, in fact to erase her very existence if at all possible . . . clearly, yes.  In an extreme nutshell, this is exactly what it looks like.

cross-posted at the Curvature

Check out this reading by Eve Ensler of a section of her upcoming book, I'm an Emotional Creature: The Secret Lives of Girls Around the World. It's called "The Teenage Girl's Guide to Surviving Sex Slavery" and in it she speaks in the voice of a former sexual slave from the The Democratic Republic of Congo:

First let me say that I admire Eve's bold insistence on speaking truth, on writing deeply emotional pieces, on insisting that we talk about and stay conscious of and do something about the most horrific suffering on this planet--things that the rest of us often don't have the strength to face on a regular basis. V-Day is such an unbelievably successful movement--unparalleled in contemporary feminism. The idea that she got a nation of girls and women, and even a healthy number of men, thinking and talking about vaginas--as a metaphor for femaleness and violence and sexuality and so many other buried issues--is nothing short of a modern miracle. For all of this, I give her infinite props.

But I have to say that I find this piece really problematic and it makes me worried about the rest of the book that she's almost finished with.

The girl does sound real in many ways, authentic in her interactions with her friends and her experience of being abducted and raped. It's clear that Eve had spent a lot of time with these women, that she has talked to them about their lives and experiences in great detail. It's clear that Eve has the best of intentions, that she sees her own voice, her own persona, as the most effective way to amplify the messages that these young women from the Congo need the world to hear.

But no amount of reporting adds up to understanding, adds up to truly inhabiting the lives and experiences of others. As a journalist, I have continuously struggled with this reality. The most painful part of my job involves attempting to tell others' stories with empathy and clarity and honesty, while still respecting the living, breathing human being who owns them. I have a higher purpose--to paint a picture, for example, of the new normalcy of body hatred, to enrage people so they try to stop it, to lure people into a social issue with a good old fashioned story--but I also have an ethical commitment to respect people's ownership over their own stories, and quite connected, respect my own limitations.

I feel like Eve has lost sight of her own limitations, like this piece reveals this story of a girl, but also the story of an activist and storyteller who has forgotten to be humble in the process. I haven't read What is the What by Dave Eggers, but it seems that he tried to do something similar and he called it a novel (though he made clear that it was very grounded in reality). I totally get the impulse. You're an activist, a writer, a well-intentioned, empathic human being who feels like the most important stories aren't being told, so you think of the most immediate, palpable way to get them into the world. But it's not that simple.

Why not write a personal essay in her own voice about the experience of getting to know this girl, of hearing these stories? Why not publish an anthology of these women's stories or a collection of oral histories where we hear their voices exactly? Why not bring these women to the U.S. and let them stage their own play about what they've experienced? Why not make a documentary?

For me, Eve is taking too many liberties. She has the power to get these women's voices and stories out into the world, and instead, she has usurped them.

Last year we reported how a University of Portland student, after reporting being raped, was threatened by the school with charges of underage drinking.

In making the university's decision, UP judicial coordinator Natalie Shank suggested to Kerns that she could have been charged with violating university policies herself.

"Based upon my findings in my investigation, I am unable to determine if a sexual assault occurred," Shank wrote May 3, 2007. "I have reason to believe that intercourse occurred, but both parties admit to drinking and therefore, consent--or lack of consent--is difficult to determine. Given these facts, there are possible violations for which you could be charged."

Well, we have some good news. According to StudentActivism.net, the school's sexual assault reporting policies have been revised.

The school handbook now reads:

"To foster the safety and security of the entire community, the University of Portland encourages reporting of all instances of sexual assault. However, no disciplinary action will be taken without the consent of the survivor. To remove barriers to reporting, the University will not pursue potential policy violations of the survivor which occurred in the context of the sexual assault. Likewise, the University will not pursue potential policy violations of a person who comes forward to report sexual assault."

I love good news.

Trigger warning

From The New York Times:

Two police officers have been assigned to desk duty while prosecutors and the police investigate a complaint that at least one of them raped an intoxicated woman after they escorted her into her apartment in the East Village three months ago, the police said on Sunday.

Footage from a nearby bar's video surveillance camera shows the two officers helping the woman into her building on Dec. 7 and returning twice during the next two hours, according to the bar owner, who provided the video to investigators.

The woman was so impaired, that she got sick in a cab and the driver called 911. The video shows the officers helping her home and leaving. It then shows them returning to her apartment 39 minutes later, in which one of the officers notices the video. When the video catches them leaving, it appears as if they're trying to avoid the camera's range.

The Internal Affairs Bureau is conducting an investigation, but no arrests have been made yet.

Via Holly @ Feministe.

Following in the wake of the beating of a 15-year-old girl by county cops in Washington state, and adding to the growing mountain of police brutality against women I am even more disheartened to hear about another set of accusations of police violence. This time, two male cops escorted a drunk woman to her home in the East Village, then returned to her apartment twice in the early hours of the morning. On their third visit, something happened. The cops are calling it sex; the investigators are dubious; the woman reported it later that day as a rape.

The thought of two police officers, supposedly entrusted with the safety of the people, taking advantage of an intoxicated woman makes me want to puke. This story has unfolded in the city’s media over the last few days. First the accusation and investigation, including a discovery of heroin and the “personal information” of other neighborhood women in the accused rapist’s locker. I don’t know what “personal information” means. A little black book of women he could go have sex with while on duty? Photos? Stalking notes? Who the hell knows. (The guy is married with two kids, incidentally.)

Yesterday, it came to light that multiple surveillance cameras had caught the officers’ comings and goings throughout the night, even though they appeared to be trying to stay out of sight of the building’s main security camera. Once again, I have perturbed and mixed feelings that the constant surveillance we live under around here (and in so many other cities) actually helps document abuses of power and violence against women. In this case, friends of the woman went to a nearby bar later the same day to ask the owner for surveillance footage.

Today, the younger cop told investigators that his senior partner did have sex with the woman they helped home. He claimed it was consensual. According to the NY Post, investigators are not buying that story. She was too drunk to walk by herself less than two hours before the time of the alleged rape, according to witnesses and cameras. And she certainly didn’t think it was consensual: the next day, she told the district attorney’s office it was rape.

UPDATE 3/4: Today the New York Post is reporting that the junior officer is now saying that his partner raped the woman while he stood by, and that he will testify against the accused.

You’ll notice that I titled this post “NYPD accused.” I don’t consider this kind of thing an isolated incident, and I think it’s very dangerous to assume that it’s just a case of “a couple bad seeds.” Police abuse of authority and irresponsible, illegitimate use of violence — and make no mistake, non-consensual sex is violence — is a pattern, not an exception. It is part of an authoritarian culture where whatever the police say, goes. No matter how many “good cops” you think there are, we cannot profess surprise or exceptionalism when some asshole abuses that power.

Furthermore, this happened in the 9th Precinct, in the East Village. Feministe bloggers (specifically, Jack and I) have tangled with the 9th Precinct before, not far from where this alleged rape happened, in person. I have seen them exercising unconscionable use of force on more than one occasion, taking their aggression out on drunks and challenges to their rule.

A couple summers ago, I was a block away from where the alleged rape happened. I saw half a dozen cops, probably 9th precinct, grab an intoxicated man and “subdue him” by bouncing his head on the pavement until there was blood all over the sidewalk. We yelled at them to ask why they were doing that, they screamed at us to get back and not interfere if we didn’t want the same. This is a common occurrence around here. It’s also more than common that thousands of women in this city go out with friends and coworkers and partners, get drunk, and take a cab home. It’s not too uncommon to end up puking in a cab. I can’t even remember all the times I have helped someone puke into a plastic bag or a thermos, in the back of a cab. I myself was puking in a cab three weeks ago, not far from there. Lucky for me and many others, I had cab fare. Luckily, nobody called the cops.

(h/t to Gothamist and the queer yenta)