how would this little "white" girl (I assume you are intimating that you are not white) rape you?
Once a troll, always a troll.
It was going just fine before you got involved.
I would suggest that Hawkeye acts like a teenager.
One would have to wonder why you read those posts if you believe that rape is not wrong.
It illustrates why we need the "date rape" laws, that do not require extreme force, and why we need the rape shield laws that limit irrelevant questioning of a victim's past sexual history.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/12/afghan-women/rubin-text
Veiled Rebellion
Afghan women suffer under the constraints of tribalism, poverty, and war. Now they are starting to fight for a just life.
By Elizabeth Rubin
Twenty-five years ago an Afghan girl with green eyes haunted the cover of National Geographic. She became the iconic image of Afghanistan's plight, a young refugee fleeing the war between the Soviet-backed communists and the American-backed mujahideen. Today the iconic image of Afghanistan is again a young woman—Bibi Aisha, whose husband slashed off her nose and ears as punishment for running away from him and his family. Aisha fled to escape beatings and other abuse.
Why do husbands, fathers, brothers-in-law, even mothers-in-law brutalize the women in their families? Are these violent acts the consequence of a traditional society suddenly, after years of isolation and so much war, being hurled into the 21st century? And which Afghans in this society are committing the violence? There are significant differences between the Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Pashtuns, the most populous and conservative group and the one that has dominated political life since the 1880s.
In the Pashtun crescent, from Farah Province in the west to Kunar in the northeast, life was—and in many ways still is—organized around the code known as Pashtunwali, the "way of the Pashtun." The foundation of Pashtunwali is a man's honor, judged by three possessions—zar (gold), zamin (land), and zan (women). The principles on which the honorable life is built are melmastia (hospitality), nanawati (shelter or asylum), and badal (justice or revenge).
The greater a Pashtun man's hospitality, the more honor he accrues. If a stranger or an enemy turns up on his doorstep and asks for shelter, his honor depends on taking that person in. If any injury is done to a man's land, women, or gold, it is a matter of honor for him to exact revenge. A man without honor is a man without a shadow, without assets, without dignity.
But it is not generally acceptable for Pashtun women to extend hospitality or exact revenge. They are rarely agents. They're assets to be traded and fought over—until they can stand it no longer.
At a shelter in Kabul for women who have escaped domestic abuse, I heard about a girl from one of the richest Pashtun families in a province bordering Pakistan. She fell in love with a boy from the wrong tribe. Her father killed the boy and four of his brothers, and when he discovered that his own mother had helped his daughter escape her father's wrath, he killed his mother too. Now he is offering a $100,000 reward for his daughter's dead body.
These are extreme actions by an extreme man. But many Pashtun men perceive that their manhood and very way of life are under assault—by a foreign military, foreign religious leaders, foreign television, international human rights groups—and they hold fast to traditions that for so long have defined what it means to be a Pashtun man.
Why do husbands, fathers, brothers-in-law, even mothers-in-law brutalize the women in their families?
Jury convicts Smart kidnapper, rejects insanity
By JENNIFER DOBNER, Associated Press Jennifer Dobner, Associated Press – 51 mins ago
SALT LAKE CITY – A federal jury found a rambling street preacher guilty Friday of the 2002 kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart in a case that has tugged at hearts around the nation ever since the Utah teenager was snatched from her bedroom and resurfaced nine months later.
Brian David Mitchell could face up to life in prison when he is sentenced on May 25.
Elizabeth Smart gave a slight smile as she heard the guilty verdicts on charges of kidnapping and unlawful transportation of a minor across state lines for the purposes of illegal sex.
Smart then turned to her mother and both smiled. Elizabeth Smart later hugged prosecutors in the Salt Lake City courtroom.
"It's real!" father Ed Smart said on his way out of the courtroom, giving a thumbs up and echoing the words he told a crowd gathered around a church on March 13, 2003, confirming his daughter had been found.
The shackled Mitchell sat singing about Jesus Christ on the cross throughout the reading of the verdicts. He held his hands in front of his chest as though he was praying.
Mitchell's former stepdaughter Rebecca Woodridge told reporters outside the courthouse that she was shocked that jurors didn't see that Mitchell was mentally ill.
"He honestly believes God tells him to do these things," Woodridge said. "He's upset and frustrated that the Lord is making him go through this."
Smart and her family had hoped for the guilty verdict and a long sentence to end the ordeal that began when she was taken from her Salt Lake City home at knifepoint and held captive for nine months when she was 14.
Smart, now 23, attended the entire trial and provided gripping testimony, describing how she woke up one night to the feel of a cold, jagged knife and being thrust into "nine months of hell" in a mountainside camp.
She said she was forced into a polygamous marriage and endured nearly daily rapes before she was found.
To the chagrin of the family, the case was delayed for years after Mitchell was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial in state court and a judge refused to order involuntary medications. Federal prosecutors later stepped in and took the case to trial.
Carlie Christensen, the U.S. attorney for Utah, praised Elizabeth Smart for her extraordinary courage and determination in seeing justice was done.
"She told it with candor, with clarity and with truthfulness that I think moved all of us," Christensen said.
The prosecutor said one of the biggest challenges of the case was the six years between the time of the kidnapping and the time the case came into the federal justice system. Another hurdle was the state court decision that Mitchell was mentally incompetent to stand trial and its possible influence on the federal case.
The trial turned on the question of Mitchell's mental health — something experts have debated since his arrest 2003, when state court evaluators began to study his religious writings and behavior, including courtroom antics such as singing hymns and shouting at judges to repent.
His lawyers did not dispute that he kidnapped Smart but wanted him to be found not guilty by reason of insanity. Such a verdict would have sent him to a prison mental hospital.
A parade of experts took the witness stand to say Mitchell had an array of diagnoses, from a rare delusional disorder and schizophrenia to pedophilia, anti-social personality disorder and narcissism.
Prosecutors countered that Mitchell was faking mental illness to avoid a conviction, labeling him a "predatory chameleon."
The thinly built Mitchell appeared in court everyday with long gray hair and an unruly beard down to the middle of his chest.
He was routinely removed from the courtroom after loudly singing hymns and Christmas carols and taken to another room to watch the proceedings on closed circuit TV. He kept his eyes closed in court and never spoke to anyone, including his lawyers.
The wrenching saga began when the Smart family awoke to the frightening realization that someone had slipped through the cut screen of a kitchen window on June 5, 2002, and whisked Elizabeth away in the night.
Within hours of the kidnapping, Smart testified, she was forced into a polygamous marriage with Mitchell, tethered to a metal cable and subjected to near-daily rapes while being forced to use alcohol and drugs.
Smart testified that she believed Mitchell was driven by his desire for sex, drugs and alcohol, not by any sincere religious beliefs.
Her abduction and improbable discovery while walking along a Salt Lake City street with Mitchell and his wife on March 12, 2003, riveted the nation and helped focus public attention on child abductions.
The trial's most gripping testimony came from Smart and Wanda Eileen Barzee, Mitchell's estranged wife who pleaded guilty last year to federal and state charges in the kidnapping.
Barzee, 65, testified that she had believed Mitchell's religious revelations that led the couple to live homeless for nearly a decade, traveling the country on foot. She said she had obediently complied when he said God wanted him to "take a young girl by force" so they could practice polygamy.
"I told him that if the Lord didn't open the way, he didn't have to do it," a sobbing and penitent Barzee said during her nearly five hours on the witness stand.
Also troubled by mental illness, Barzee's competency issues were resolved after 15 months of involuntary treatment ordered by a state judge.
Barzee said she also told Mitchell they needed to obey the Lord's commandments then greeted Smart with open arms when Mitchell brought the young girl to the couple's mountainside camp near Salt Lake City.
It was Barzee who prepared Smart for the marriage ceremony, washing her feet and dressing her in handmade robes.
Subpoenaed by the defense, Barzee appeared devastated by her role in the kidnapping and the realization that she had been duped by her husband of 25 years.
"He was a great deceiver," she said.
I'd say this is a very fitting way to end this thread:
Anything to ruin a good ending, right? I really don't like you.
I do not also think that it likely that any male reading this thread can picture themselves breaking into some teenager home and holding a knife to her throat and kidnapping her to be another wife of his under orders of the lord god.
The last time they were face-to-face in a courtroom five years ago, Jamie Nelson was on his way to prison for three years, and the woman who falsely accused him of rape, Cathy Fordham, walked out triumphantly.
The scene yesterday in Room 7 of the Elgin Street courthouse could not have been more different. This time, Ms. Fordham was the accused, and Mr. Nelson, fresh from an acquittal at the Ontario Court of Appeal, sat in the pews as a keen observer. He was only there because he wanted to be.
"I can't begin to tell you what it was like to be in a courtroom again," he said later. "I sat there trembling."
In 1996, Ms. Fordham, 30, testified that Mr. Nelson, 34, had raped her. In November of that year, Justice Hugh Fraser, basing his decision on her word, found Mr. Nelson guilty and sent him to prison.
Last week, the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned the conviction based on a mountain of new evidence suggesting Ms. Fordham's word was unreliable.
Yesterday, Ms. Fordham appeared in front of Judge Fraser facing her own charges. In May, she pleaded guilty to uttering death threats against a former boyfriend.
The plea was part of a deal that saw the Crown withdraw a charge of making a false police report in conjunction with another woman.
Two weeks ago, Ms. Fordham, through her previous lawyer, Marni Munsterman, told Judge Fraser she wanted to take back her guilty plea. In the meantime, Mr. Nelson's wrongful conviction became national news.
Yesterday, Ms. Munsterman told the judge she had to drop the case because her client was giving her instructions she couldn't follow.
Ms. Fordham's new lawyer, Mitchell Rowe, said his client still wanted to change her plea.
The Crown attorney then said they would reactivate the public mischief charge for making the false police complaint.
The judge accepted these motions, then informed the court that he would not hear the case any further.
"It has come to my attention in the last couple days that this individual appeared before me on another matter some five years ago," Judge Fraser said. He went on to say it would be inappropriate for him to continue hearing Ms. Fordham's case.
She will now appear in court on Friday to face the death threat and public mischief charges.
Ms. Fordham says she has new information that will exonerate her of any wrongdoing in any court proceeding.
"I am very confident that the new evidence that has been made available will not only clear me of any wrongdoing, but will also prove that Mr. Nelson's acquittal was unjust and unfounded," she said after her appearance.
She said the new evidence will be made public at her appeal of a previous public mischief conviction for laying a false complaint.
Ms. Fordham spent her time in the courtroom pressed against a wall, her face hidden, on the opposite side of the room from her detractors, who included her ex-boyfriend, Mr. Nelson and her former co-workers and clients at a the Vanier Community Support Centre.
Ms. Fordham ran the now defunct half way house for two years until she wrongfully accused two men of assaulting her. She was eventually charged with this and convicted after a trial last summer.
A police investigation determined her halfway house was a snake-pit of drugs, alcohol, sex and terror. She reined over it all with an iron fist making dozens of police reports on the men in her care.
After this investigation, rape charges against another man she'd accused were dropped at the request of the Crown.
Ottawa police are now investigating whether she should be charged in relation to her complaint and testimony against Mr. Nelson.
After her court appearance yesterday, she lingered in a witness room, hoping the hostile entourage would leave her alone.
When that failed, she and her lawyer had no choice but to walk a gauntlet through the courthouse and outside to where her mother was waiting in a car.
Ms. Fordham used a white wind-breaker to cover her head and didn't acknowledge any of the taunts from her detractors.
"How do you think it will feel on your first Christmas in prison?," said Mr. Nelson, who walked stride-for-stride with his accuser. "How do you think it will feel?"
Another begged her to take off the jacket she was covering her head in.
"C'mon Cathy, you're so beautiful, show us your face," he shouted sarcastically. "It's Casper. You look like Casper the ghost."
Outside, Mr. Rowe said his client would not discuss her situation and said the day had been difficult for her, and even more so knowing the presence of several of her enemies.
"I think she wants to have her day in court," said Mr. Rowe, who only became Ms. Fordham's lawyer late last week. "She has a right to a trial, and she will have a trial.
"She is very scared right now. She feels very vulnerable of other people. I don't think she is scared of justice. She is just scared."
The appearance represented Mr. Nelson's first time back in a courtroom with his accuser since Nov. 14, 1996 when he went off to jail for a crime he never committed.
Mr. Nelson said Judge Fraser made eye contact with him as he sat in the second row from the back, beside his father, and said he was touched by a simple nod from the Judge.
He also admitted he spent a sleepless night and restless morning, wondering if he could even muster the strength to even attend.
"We were standing by the locks at the Chateau Laurier and I was thinking about how nice it would be to spend the day on one of those boats," said Mr. Nelson. "I didn't go to sleep all night.
"Just seeing how quickly (Ms. Fordham) turned her head away. It didn't hide the shame. The shame is hers to carry."
Mr. Nelson said he was undecided if he would attend Ms. Fordham's trial. He is expected to launch a civil suit against the police and attorney general's office in the coming weeks.
Nw this is my idea of good news!!!!!
What the Assange case reveals about rape in America
By Jessica Valenti
Friday, December 10, 2010
Let's get this out of the way: Sweden does not have a "broken condom" law. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was not arrested because his contraception failed mid-coitus. Nor is he charged with "sex by surprise."
The details of Assange's arrest last week are being sorted out in a bizarre game of Internet telephone in which misinformation reigns. Facts about the alleged assaults are hard to come by and are confused by contradicting media reports, translation issues, political bias and cultural disdain for rape victims.
Everyone from Fox News's Glenn Beck to feminist writer Naomi Wolf is getting in swipes. Beck told viewers that Assange is being investigated for "sex by surprise" (again, not a real law) because of a "radical" feminist bent on revenge. Wolf wrote a snarking letter to Interpol in the Huffington Post, arguing that the accusers are using feminism to "assuage . . . personal injured feelings." And AOL News writer Dana Kennedy dismissed the incidents as a simple "condom malfunction."
Now, we don't know if Assange is guilty or innocent - but we do know that the accusations against him have been badly reported, misconstrued and generally pooh-poohed. In the same way that Assange's document dump held a mirror to U.S. diplomacy, the accusations against him and the subsequent fallout reflect our country's overly narrow understanding of sexual assault, and just how far we are from Sweden's legal standard.
The allegations against Assange are rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion. He's accused of pinning one woman's arms and using his body weight to hold her down during one alleged assault, and of raping a woman while she was sleeping. In both cases, according to the allegations, Assange did not use a condom. But the controversy seems to center on the fact that both encounters started off consensually. One of his accusers was quoted by the Guardian newspaper in August as saying, "What started out as voluntary sex subsequently developed into an assault." Whether consent was withdrawn because of the lack of a condom is unclear, but also beside the point. In Sweden, it's a crime to continue to have sex after your partner withdraws consent.
In the United States, withdrawing consent is not so clear-cut. In September, for example, prosecutors in North Carolina dropped rape and sexual battery charges against a high school football player because sexual contact with the alleged victim began consensually. The dismissal documents cited a 1979 North Carolina Supreme Court ruling, State v. Way, which says that if intercourse starts consensually, "no rape has occurred though the victim later withdraws consent during the same act of intercourse."
So if you initially agree to have sex and later change your mind for whatever reason - it hurts, your partner has become violent, or you're simply no longer in the mood - your partner can continue despite your protestations, and it won't be considered rape. It defies common sense. Who besides a rapist would continue to have sex with an unwilling partner?
It was only two years ago that Maryland overturned an archaic court ruling stating that if a woman withdrew consent, any sex that followed wasn't rape. In 2007, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals justified this old ruling, explaining that anything after the initial "deflowering" of a woman couldn't be rape because "the damage was done" to her virginity and she could never be "reflowered." In fact, the injured party, according to this ruling, wasn't even the assaulted woman, but the "responsible male's interest" - that of her father or husband. It took until 2008 for the state's highest court to change this.
"The United States has relatively regressive rape laws; in most states, there's a requirement of force in order to prove rape, rather than just demonstrating lack of consent," feminist lawyer Jill Filipovic wrote last week. "We're deeply wedded to the notion of rape as forcible . . . a consent-based framework for evaluating sexual assault is not yet widely accepted."
The fact that U.S. law is so ill- equipped to actually protect women in realistic scenarios is a national embarrassment - not to mention a huge hurdle in obtaining justice for sexual assault victims. Swedish rape laws don't ban "sex by surprise" (a term used by Assange's lawyer as a crass joke), but they do go much further than U.S. laws do, and we should look to them as a potential model for our own legislation.
In fact, some activists and legal experts in Sweden want to change the law there so that the burden of proof is on the accused; the alleged rapist would have to show that he got consent, instead of the victim having to prove that she didn't give it.
"I am proud to live in a country where rape and assault are considered to be serious crimes," Swedish feminist Johanna Palmström told me. But "even if we have good laws, it still happens too often that people who report rape are questioned and slandered - we see that now with the women who have reported Julian Assange."
Indeed, better laws do not always mean justice for victims. Only 20 percent of the rape cases reported in Sweden in 2008 resulted in a court trial. A 2010 report by Amnesty International notes that acquaintance rape in Sweden is on the rise and that victim-blaming is just as alive there as in the United States: "Young and intoxicated women in particular had problems fulfilling the stereotypical role of the 'innocent victim.' As a result, neither rapes within intimate relationships nor 'date rapes' involving teenage girls generally led to legal action."
If anything, this means we can't stop at changing legislation. For true justice, there needs to be a cultural shift in the way Americans think about sex, consent and rape, so that when women come forward - whether they're accusing a celebrity, a sports star or a neighbor - our immediate reaction isn't to misconstrue or speculate about their motives, but to listen.
None of this is to say that the accusations against Assange are true - we have no idea. And there is little doubt that the timing of the legal proceedings is politically motivated: Assange's accusers came forward in August (the same month they allege being attacked), but it's only now that authorities are vigorously pursuing the case.
Assange clearly believes that the world has a lot to learn from his work with WikiLeaks. But we can also learn from his dismissive attitude toward these allegations.
"They called me the James Bond of journalism," Assange told the New York Times in October, discussing the warm welcome he got in Sweden. "It got me a lot of fans, and some of them ended up causing me a bit of trouble."
That "bit of trouble," as he put it, and the way the Swedish authorities are pursuing the allegations, is a key lesson. Whatever Assange is revealing about this country's diplomacy, his high-profile case has also shown how far the United States is from Sweden - and from justice - when it comes to victims of sexual assault.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/10/AR2010121002571.html
Dec. 06 2010
Dartmouth Punts on Sexual Assault
By Svati Narula
Tuesday evening, Acting Dean of the College Sylvia Spears hosted an update on the College administration’s initiatives to address alcohol use and sexual assault on campus. The public unveiling of the College’s new approach to these contentious issues has been long-anticipated among students; on the topic of sexual assault, that has been doubly true since early this fall, when Dartmouth was once again reported to have a distressingly high rate of reported sexual assaults compared to other college campuses. How the College should, or plans to, proceed in order to effect a positive change has often been unclear, despite much discussion and reporting on the issue over the past few months. Spears’s Tuesday presentation did little to clarify the College’s intentions.
Much student attention has focused upon the findings of the College’s most recent Clery Report, which tracks campus crime rates, including reported sexual assaults. The report indicates that in the years 2008 and 2009, the combined number of reported sexual assaults at Dartmouth were the highest in the Ivy League. In 2007, the College saw 19 incidents of forcible sexual offenses; in 2008, 23 cases. That compares with 8 cases and 13 cases at (the much larger) Yale in 2007 and 2008, respectively. The number of sexual assaults at Dartmouth did decline in 2009 to 10.
Nevertheless, many students, faculty, and alumni were distraught by the negative publicity the College received from a column in the New York Times, titled “Preparing Children to Be Safe at College,” published on September 10th of this year, which said that a report by a private security firm, Insite Security, showed that Dartmouth had the highest rate of sex offenses among all campuses (all Ivy League schools, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Duke, and MIT) surveyed. Distressingly, Dartmouth topped the list among a number of schools where the rates of sexual assault are already abnormally high: three-quarters of these elite institions reported rates of sexual assault that were over 80% higher than the national rape average.
But those numbers can be difficult to track, notes the Chair of the Student Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault (SPCSA) Katie Lindsay ’11. “People quote numbers here and there,” Lindsay said in an interview with The Dartmouth Review. “We really don’t know what our numbers are; we don’t know how they compare to other schools, because there’s such a high percentage [of cases] that goes unreported.”
In interviews with both the Times and The Dartmouth Review, Spears said that the College’s high incidence of sexual assault reports might actually be an indicator of progress. “The number of reports is never an accurate portrayal of the number of sexual assaults,” she said. “While it’s counter-intuitive, sometimes the better programmatic footing you’re on, the more sexual assaults come forward. Some people might say, ‘Well, why wouldn’t you want the number of sexual assaults to go down?’ We recognize that nationally, sexual assaults go underreported, and the better systems you have in place, the number of reports, not instances, goes up.”
Not everyone agrees with the use of that reasoning. “Implicit in that message is that there isn’t a problem, which is just false,” said SPCSA member Mattie Govan ’11. “There’s a problem on every single university campus in the country.”
Spears’s Tuesday presentation focused on a few concrete solutions to the issue of sexual assault at Dartmouth: expanding Dean’s Office staffing to improve the effectiveness of clinical care to sexual assault victims; creating a shuttle program to provide late-night rides to students; implementing a student sexual assault hotline; and developing a handbook that would outline legal and other options facing sexual assault victims. Spears also pledged to “increase education, resources, and outreach related to sexual assault,” as well as to “expand the current program for campus-wide dialogue about sexual assault.”
Dartmouth’s sexual assault problem has recently come to the fore as a subject of heated debate on Dartmouth’s campus, not only due to the release of annual statistics. On September 28th of this year, an email with “blitzjack” in the subject line was distributed to all student inboxes from the Google Mail alias of “Expecto Petronus.” It was presumably targeted at freshmen, and included an attached song titled “Out of Control.” Lyrics included: “the Dartmouth frat bro will steal your soul… he’s a rape case waiting to happen to you, and the College doesn’t care.”
Campus reaction to the email was strong. Annie Lape ’13 called the song “completely unproductive” because it singled out a part of the student population (fraternity members); “the last thing you want to do is get a huge portion of students on the defensive,” she said. An editorial in The Dartmouth on October 1st condemned the message for “employing fear tactics and demonizing a campus constituency;” both The Dartmouth Review and The Dartmouth published several more opinions regarding the email and the larger topic of campus sexual assault throughout October.
The administration has made some attempt to get its own message out. On October 6th, an email with the subject line “Community Message on Sexual Assault” was sent to the entire campus from Dean Spears. It included six bullet points detailing current efforts to expand and enhance sexual assault resources on campus, and three bullet points encouraging students to show zero tolerance for sexual assault, take responsibility for helping others, and to ask for help from S&S. It also provided contact information for Kris Baxivanos, the interim coordinator of the Sexual Abuse Awareness Program (SAAP).
Lape, who said that she listened to the “Out of Control” song when it landed in her campus email inbox, but did not read Spears’ email until the Review asked her to comment on it, said, “Okay, so there is some information in there. It sounds like they have some good programs. But...they have people figuring out what to do next, and talking about what to do, and I’ll be interested to see what they actually end up deciding to do.”
Some students suggest that one problem has been a lack of official communication from the College detailing the steps it’s taking to prevent assault. When pressed on this point, Spears said, “We could have campus dialogue all day long, you know? And higher ed does a lot of that. For me, the action that we need around the issue of addressing sexual assault is more important than a statement that lasts all of 15 seconds in our community and goes away.” And while there has been little communication from the administration since early October, it is possible, as Lape’s comment suggests, that many students demanding more information from Spears did not even read the information she has distributed.
Indeed, the administration, along with a core group of students, was working to address the issue of sexual assault long before the campus debate erupted this term. Last spring, shifts in staffing in the SAAP program and the Center for Women and Gender prompted concern among some students who thought that there was a gap in student resources for sexual assault. At that time, according to Lindsay, President Kim suggested forming a committee.
According to Spears, even though the SPCSA was not completely formalized until this term, students on campus during the summer term “identified a number of things that we were able to move very quickly on,” including upgrades to the SAAP website, hiring Baxivanos, and revamping the sexual assault education that freshmen were to receive during orientation. Spears said that the administration and students both saw the need for enhanced orientation education, and over the summer Dartmouth faculty members actually proposed bringing in a program called “Sex Signals,” which was implemented and “received very positively” by the ’14s.
A series of follow-up education sessions was also scheduled “because we all know that one-shot education around any topic does not do it,” Spears noted.
Student interviews with The Dartmouth Review indicate that Spears’s assessment of “Sex Signals” is shared among some students on campus. Vanessa Trinh ’14 said that the actors put “a really interesting spin” on the issue, adding, “I thought that the discussion at the end was really good for all the students because they made it really comfortable for people to speak out and be open about it.”
Trinh said the presentation provoked private discussions among groups of ’14s after they walked away from the show, which might indicate that it had the desired effect. However, she added that the follow-up facilitations in the days and weeks afterward “started to feel like overkill. It was like, ‘Okay, we get it.’”
“Sex Signals” is certainly not without its own controversy. In his column in The Dartmouth titled “Explicit Signals,” Roger Lott suggested that the College goes too far when it forces “ostentatious and sexually charged material” upon students for the sake of education. Lott mentioned the Sex Signals event, in addition to the role of Sexperts on campus, as an example of “lewd” content presented in a “lighthearted manner.”
While students such as Trinh may tolerate this kind of programming in small doses, too much of it may be unwelcome. Also, striking a balance between programming that is informative versus programming that is too explicit or that trivializes serious issues is a continuing challenge. A student at the open SPCSA meeting on October 18th said she thought that “Consent Day,” held at the end of summer term, “trivialized” the idea of consensual sex with its free t-shirts and carnival-style games.
Right now the SPCSA is working on implementing a more consistent and effective response system for victims of sexual assault. Lindsay said, “A very important issue that we’re working on is trying to publicize resources, and trying to streamline first response.” Govan said that the committee hopes to publish a flowchart-like document that victims can use to navigate the process of getting help after an assault, with options for approaching different people who they feel most comfortable talking to first. This flowchart was one of the concrete action items to which Dean Spears pointed during her Tuesday discussion.
An additional measure advocated by the SPCSA, and included in the roster of Dean Spears’s planned changes, is expanding the Sexual Abuse Awareness Program office, with the creation of a new staff position, so that Baxivanos is not working alone.
There is a subcommittee of the SPCSA dedicated to reviewing the dispiclinary process for sexual assault cases and making recommendations for changes to it. Govan is a member of this subcommittee, but at the time she spoke with the Review, she said she didn’t know much about the disciplinary process at all, since the subcommittee had not yet had its first meeting. “From my perspective,” she said, the COS [Committee on Standards, Dartmouth’s disciplinary hearing board] process “is very shrouded in secrecy, so I’m hoping that through this review process I’ll get to learn a lot more.” According to Govan, the plan is for this evaluation to get underway “in a couple weeks.” She acknowledged that it may seem as if things are proceeding slowly. “It’s still the research gathering stage right now,” she said, but “it’s the most critical stage. We don’t want to just dive in headfirst, making recommendations with no idea whether they’ll work.”
Yet, in her presentation Tuesday, Spears de-emphasized the importance of gathering new information. She said “there’s nothing new out there” that can help solve the problem. She also hinted that the COS process would not be coming under review any time soon, noting that an evaluation was done three years ago. As for whether another review will prove necessary, Spears said, “we’ll see.”
In the meantime, students continue voicing their concerns. “There’s a sense of frustration that all anyone’s doing is telling people that sexual assault is bad, which we already know,” Will Bishop ’12 said. “I think that almost everybody on campus really cares. But I also think there’s a lot of inertia, and a lot of blame-assigning.”
“I think it’s perceived as radical or man-hating to even acknowledge that there is a problem – there’s sort of this association with feminism,” Elisabeth Ericson ’11 said. “And also this sense that if you’re saying there is a problem with sexual assault on this campus, then, by extension, you are accusing individual frat brothers of being rapists – they get very defensive and say ‘Oh, but I’m not like that,’ or ‘my friend wouldn’t do that.’ There’s this personal defensiveness that I think gets in the way of maybe acknowledging that there might be systemic factors.”
Lindsay hopes her work with the SPCSA will help students move from just discussing sexual assault to caring about it to eventually feeling like they are equipped to handle the issue when they face it. She said, “We’re not asking everyone to take this on as their cause, but we want to create a community where people will want to step in when they see situations that aren’t safe,” and will feel an obligation to do so.
“This problem exists on every college campus. I don’t think it’s the fault of the Greek system,” Lindsay said. “There are attitudes that exist in the Greek system, and it allows certain things to happen without people stepping in. I think what exists in our culture inhibits people from stepping in, and then on the other side inhibits people from feeling like they can report something and be supported by the community.”
Others on campus point to “low self-esteem” as a major factor in students’ treatment of one another. “One of the main problems that we have is that a lot of students, especially female students, are not confident enough,” Ahmad Nazeri ’11 said in an interview with the Review. “One of the things sororities can do is kind of work on this and encourage their members to be themselves, and not to feel pressured in any situation,” he said.
Lindsay, who is not affiliated, said, “I do think that there is a lack of a strong female community on this campus that pervades everything. I wish it were stronger. I think sororities are one way to go about doing that – I don’t think it’s the whole answer.”
Bishop wonders if sororities might actually exacerbate the problem. “The social atmosphere of, or in, sororities is probably a contributor to the non-reporting of sexual assault,” Bishop said. He noted that he had heard “remarks about women in sororities being pressured by their so-called ‘sisters’ not to report an instance of sexual assault.”
But Ericson, who is a member of Kappa Delta, said, “I’ve found [Kappa Delta] to be a very supportive environment and a very positive environment.” She said she has never heard of a sorority discouraging reporting of a case, and that both unreported rape cases with which she is familiar – she personally knows two students who have been victims – have gone unreported because of situational ambiguity. “She either wasn’t sure that what she had experienced was bad enough or that it was really rape or because she didn’t want to ‘ruin the guy’s life,’” Ericson said.
“And the first reason might be, well, she agreed to go back to his room, and she did want to make out with him, but she didn’t want to have sex, and he kept going, she said no. So at that point she was like, ‘Well, I’m drunk, I agreed to go there, so is it my fault? Did I deserve that; did I implicitly agree to have sex when I went back to his room?’” Women’s unwillingness to report these cases, Ericson believes, allows tacit permission for men on campus to act more aggressively than they might otherwise. “I think that mentality also maybe encourages guys to go farther than they probably should because everybody knows that the lines are so blurred, so who really knows what happened, right?”
Spears noted that on college campuses, alcohol is the crucial enabler of sexual assault. She said that, at Dartmouth, “people don’t have to use force, because what is used, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is alcohol. You can’t consent if you’re intoxicated – you just can’t.”
Some students also hurry to add that alcohol is hardly the only aggravating factor in campus sexual assaults. According to Lindsay, “It’s not alcohol that makes it different on college campuses, it’s the fact that people know each other, more than anything. In our minds, that means it’s somehow less than the violent stranger rape we hear about – but it’s really not. In my opinion, the difference on college campuses is that it’s people who know each other, and alcohol is involved, but it’s more the fact that it’s acquaintance rape rather than stranger rape. And the issues are related, and I think we need to figure out a way to incorporate alcohol education and sexual assault education together.”
Bishop said that people at Dartmouth “don’t want to give up our partying culture. And I think a lot of people are just sort of maybe talking themselves into the idea that we can solve this problem without a fundamental change in Dartmouth’s partying culture and I don’t really believe that to be the case.”
In response to that assertion, Spears said: “If we say ‘the solution is changing the culture,’ I would ask people, ‘what does that mean? How does one ‘change the culture?’ Because that seems like some giant, nebulous something.” Instead, she suggested, “How about changing behavior one student at a time?”
August Oddleifson ’13 agrees that “changing Dartmouth’s culture” is not a reasonable goal. He said that what is reasonable is “to critically evaluate the parts of Dartmouth culture that lead to sexual violence and then think about ways to turn those specific factors around.”
Similarly, Lindsay said, “Everyone talks about the ‘Dartmouth culture’, but what’s more important is to pinpoint specific attitudes and work on changing those.”
Some students point to a perceived double standard regarding what passes for acceptable behavior, “inside the classroom versus outside the classroom,” as Nazeri phrased it. To illustrate this, Ericson said we need look no further than the “Bored at Baker” website. She said the website and “the sexist bullshit that people write on there” makes her “despair about Dartmouth culture and society.” How can it be that the same students who spend off-terms feeding the poor and helping the sick are also using their time to write “I’m horny as f**k” and “I prefer waxing to shaving” for all to see online?
Regarding this issue, Spears said, “President Kim has articulated many times his vision of Dartmouth students using all their talents, and expertise, and this incredible education that they get here, to go out and solve the world’s biggest problems.” However, “in order for students to be effective leaders in the world, they must be effective leaders on our campus, which means looking out for one another [and] using the same kind of critical analysis of situations that we use in the classroom in life outside of the classroom. And not having two sets of standards for how we operate.”
Spears explains that, after increasing awareness of an issue such as sexual assault on campus, the next step is to help students build and practice the skills they need to confront the issue. The hope is that when an individual is in a certain situation, he or she knows how to take action and also feels comfortable doing so. Spears insists that “there [are] really very simple ways to engage in bystander intervention” and that “it can be done in a way that’s not perceived as embarrassing people.” She added, “People can still have great fun, have fantastic parties, and have a vibrant social life, while still exercising a certain level of integrity and social responsibility for one another.”
Whether Spears’ words will translate into tangible changes remains to be seen. Govan, like many others interviewed for this article, said, “I just want to examine the administration with a critical eye, because I know that universities want to protect their reputation first and foremost.”
Lindsay said, “President Kim really does care about this issue, and he has made himself available to work on it, and he is making the funds available to be able to do what we need to do. I don’t think students should refrain from criticizing the administration, but sometimes we don’t recognize how hard people are working for us.” She added, “they know how this institution runs better than we do, so we can provide our perspective as students, but at the end of the day, they’re the ones that can say ‘this will work,’ or ‘this can’t work’.”
http://dartreview.com/features-page/2010/12/6/dartmouth-punts-on-sexual-assault.html
