Intervention: When Your Family Blames You For Your Rape. . .

http://jezebel.com/5436280/intervention-when-your-family-blames-you-for-your-rape-wishes-youd-die-already/gallery/

Rape on College Campuses (US)

http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/concerned_about_bad_press_colleges_provide_cover_for_rapists

Concerned About Bad Press, Colleges Provide Cover for Rapists

by Alex DiBranco

category: Crime

Published December 05, 2009 @ 06:04PM PT

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As a recent college grad, I'd love to say that I was shocked by the findings of the Center for Public Integrity's nine-month investigation into the "culture of secrecy" surrounding sexual assault on campuses. But that would be a lie.

I think it's hard to be a woman on a college campus for four years and not be aware of what a serious problem sexual assault and rape is there; to not know personally one of the at least 150,000 students raped every year; and to not realize how few of those victims pursue legal action against their assailants or speak out publicly (less than five percent). Given that one in five college women will be the target of a completed or attempted rape by the time they get their diploma, you'd hope that administrators would be doing their utmost to address the epidemic of gender-based violence.

Instead, many of the precious few victims who seek to take action against their assailants are deterred from doing so, in either the criminal justice or campus disciplinary system, by college bureaucrats. Since the courts tend not to want to prosecute student rape charges due to concerns about weak "he-said-she-said" evidence, the campus system is the only other recourse. Unfortunately, worried about the college's reputation, these administrators focus more on keeping these young women quiet (using illegal gag orders and the threat of disciplinary action against them for breaching confidentiality) than on protecting their safety by investigating rape charges. The number of assaults reported to support centers each year are almost never represented in the college's crime statistics.

One survivor, advised by a dean to "do nothing," indicates, "It was insulting. This guy had just raped me … and that's her answer?" It also happens to be illegal, under Title IX -- better known for mandating equal access to sport, Title IX also considers sexual assault to be sex discrimination, which colleges are obligated to investigate and take action to put a stop to.

http://jezebel.com/5414393/ask-amy-to-rape-victim-first-you-were-a-victim-of-your-own-awful-judgment

Ask Amy To Rape Victim: "First, You Were A Victim Of Your Own Awful Judgment"

In her latest column, advice columnist Amy Dickinson says she hopes a letter from one of her readers "will be posted on college bulletin boards everywhere." After reading Dickinson's advice for said reader, I sincerely hope this isn't the case.

A reader named "Victim? In Virginia" recently wrote into Dickinson's "Ask Amy" column looking for clarification on an event that happened during a frat party she attended, noting that she was intoxicated and agreed to go to a room with a man who promised he would not do anything inappropriate with her.

"Many times, I clearly said I didn't want to have sex, and he promised to my face that he wouldn't," the reader writes, "Then he quickly proceeded to go against what he "promised." I was shocked, and maybe being intoxicated made my reaction time a bit slow in realizing what was happening." Looking for clarification that she had indeed been raped, the reader later asks, "if I wasn't kicking and fighting him off, is it still rape? I feel like calling it that is a bit extreme, but I haven't felt the same since it happened. Am I a victim?"

Here is Dickinson's charming response:

Dear Victim?: First of all, thank you. I hope your letter will be posted on college bulletin boards everywhere.

Were you a victim? Yes.

First, you were a victim of your own awful judgment. Getting drunk at a frat house is a hazardous choice for anyone to make because of the risk (some might say a likelihood) that you will engage in unwise or unwanted sexual contact.

You don't say whether the guy was also drunk. If so, his judgment was also impaired.

No matter what — no means no. If you say no beforehand, then the sex shouldn't happen. If you say no while its happening, then the sex should stop.

She then goes on to quote a passage from RAINN's website regarding drinking and rape and encourages the girl to get tested for STDs and pregnancy, and to "see a counselor to determine how you want to approach this. You must involve the guy in question in order to determine what happened and because he absolutely must take responsibility and face the consequences for his actions, just as you are prepared to do. He may have done this before."

It's incredibly alarming that Dickinson feels the first thing an obvious rape victim needs to hear is "well, you were drunk, so you were asking for it." Closing her advice with a bit about facing the consequences of her actions, as if getting drunk at a frat party is equivalent to RAPE, is also quite disturbing; the language Dickinson uses seems to evenly place the blame on both parties and make light of an incredibly dark situation, as if the girl should just go up to her rapist and ask him to fess up at the counselor's office so that both of them can move on and he can finally stop, you know, raping people, just as she can stop drinking too much at frat parties.

Dickinson may want this letter posted at colleges across the country as a means to scare young women out of drinking at parties; after all, it's their fault if they get raped, right? It's not about a larger rape culture, or a modern masculinity that promotes the notion of "no means yes," or the incredibly tired parade of victim blamers who still insist that rape is the fault of any woman who dares to drink at a party or wear a skirt or walk down a street at night or go into a room with a man she trusts or dance a certain way at the club or, you know, be born with a vagina.

Perhaps Dickinson is right after all. Her advice should be plastered around college campuses. They could even build an entire course around it: Rape Culture And You: Victim Blaming 101.

Rape Question A Matter Of Consent [Chicago Tribune]

[Image via SomeECards]

What if we did as much to prevent rape as we do to prevent h1n1?

http://www.bitchmagazine.org/post/swine-dandy-what-if-we-did-as-much-to-prevent-rape-as-we-do-to-prevent-h1n1

Swine & Dandy: What if we did as much to prevent rape as we do to prevent H1N1?

Science and Politics blog post by Meg Stone, November 3, 2009 - 8:05pm; tagged H1N1, Health care, pandemic, prevention, rape, swine flu.

I spent most of this past spring and summer rolling my eyes every time I heard a news story about the swine flu. Almost every day local reporters got hysterical about 5 or 10 or 20 confirmed cases. Entire schools closed in response to a handful of kids with fevers, and as if there were no war in Afghanistan, no economic crisis, and no other epidemics claiming ten times as many lives, newscasters talked about H1N1 (the proper name for swine flu) for hours.

I have a degree in public health and my work focuses on preventing rape and other acts of violence and supporting survivors in healing from abuse. When I see all the attention swine flu is getting, I’m jealous. Other than intermittent news stories about sex offenders on the loose or why women who accuse professional athletes of rape are lying, sexual violence rarely gets any widespread coverage. Certainly no state of emergency declared by the President of the United States.

Now, I don’t want to diminish the grief of those who have lost loved ones to H1N1. I don’t even want to question the scientific validity of the Center for Disease Control’s decision to declare it a pandemic. But the fact remains that the impact of H1N1 is far less than that of other public health crises that receive a fraction of the attention and resources. The CDC reported just over 43,000 cases of H1N1 between April and July of this year and estimates that it will affect a million people, or 0.3% of the total population of the United States. Compare this to the 2.5% of women and 0.9% of men who reported being raped or sexually assaulted in the past year. The most recent statistics about rape available from the CDC are from last year. Swine flu? Last week.

What would our media, our public discourse, and our institutional responses look like if people cared as much about rape as they do about H1N1?

I imagine the federal government urging colleges to stop the epidemic of rape by developing protocols for quarantining students who have tried to use drugs or alcohol to incapacitate women who would otherwise not consent to sex. Or university officials directing students to stay off campus or out of public areas until they are free of the belief that they are entitled to sex any time they want for a full 24 hours. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

I dream of public health departments so inundated with the demand for educational programs that teach kids about healthy relationships that they can’t keep up. Of public outrage that there are not enough doses of self-defense training to inoculate everyone against rape, and of medical experts having to go on television to reassure people that more of these self-defense vaccines are on the way.

Then I wake up to a phone conversation with a principal who tells me there is no dating violence in his school and another with a teacher who desperately wants to offer rape prevention resources to her high school classes but can’t because the entire budget for health education in her district was cut. So much for the dream.

But if I stop resenting H1N1 for getting so much attention for a moment, I realize that what I’m complaining about is actually public health at is best. It is probably true that the coordination of government urgency, media attention, medical system mobilization, and common sense precautions will succeed in thwarting a pandemic. We will probably not look back at 2009 and say it was the beginning of a swine flu crisis that devastated a generation.

What feels like hysteria or over-emphasis is actually the way prevention is supposed to look. It is supposed to be widespread and coordinated. Messages about the importance and seriousness of the public health threat are supposed to be so pervasive that they are almost impossible to ignore. I’m so used to caring about public health crises that don’t get the attention and resources they deserve that I almost can’t recognize what the public health system looks like when it does work.

This kind of focused attention is my wildest dream for our society’s response to HIV, rape, domestic violence, drug addiction, racial health disparities, cancer-causing corporate pollution, food system injustice and every other area of public health that is marginalized.

So why is the public health infrastructure working so well? Because it’s not being undermined by shame, stigma, and denial (you know, the way rape and sexual assault are). Even in the highest drama evening news stories there is almost a complete absence of victim blaming. Personal choices and individual behaviors spread the flu, but our government, our health workers, and our media understand that this crisis is too serious to waste time arguing over whether people who don’t wash their hands or share cubicles with co-workers who fail to stay home from work the recommended 4 to 7 days deserve what they get.

It would be unthinkable for a person to avoid seeking treatment for swine flu because s/he’s afraid that if s/he tells her/his doctor s/he’ll be blamed for touching her/his eyes and nose or lose her/his housing because no parents want to raise their children in a neighborhood where people don’t sneeze into their elbows

As if invoking the finale of High School Musical, when it comes to H1N1, we’re all in this together. Swine flu is not concentrated in any population that people already hate or devalue, so raging debates about whose immoral lifestyle caused it don’t get in the way of an effective public health response. (Even Fox News is posting stories that are sympathetic to people whose jobs don’t have paid sick leave and the hardship they face in missing work as the authorities direct.) Wouldn't it be nice if other health crises were treated the same way?

In watching the rapid mobilization against this virus I know that the public health infrastructure works when our government, our media, and our medical leaders are motivated to mobilize it. H1N1 is not getting any attention it shouldn’t – it’s getting the attention all public health crises should.