I should think that they would be fine with being ordered around by their wife
It seem that we are turning the courtship period of life into one big game of Russian roulette for our young men
Quote:You dont mean to include the ones who like to have a mommy figure for a mate do you? I should think that they would be fine with being ordered around by their wife, and getting into huge trouble when they dont do what the boss tells them to do and fast.Poor poor young men.........................
Above is an interesting link to a study that show when one police department used a lie detector to screen rape complains over a five years period 41 percents of the complains was found to be invalid and the women ended up admitting to filing of false charges
Even if 50% of the rape accusations are false, what about the 50% that are true?
This thread is about the problems of rape--understanding it, stopping it, reporting it, prosecuting it, and punishing it--in those cases where rape has actually occurred. Because you have tried to subvert and distract from this topic, does not change anything. This topic is about what fosters rape as a real crime with very real victims, and what can be done to curb that situation
American University Paper Runs Rape Apologist Column
by Roxann MtJoy
March 31, 2010
It looks like Washington D.C. colleges are a hot bed of sexual health issues this week. The same weekend that that Georgetown University students chained themselves to a statue to protest lack of birth control access on campus, a student-run newspaper at American University published a column that blames feminists and gay-rights activists for taking the fun out of sex and questions the validity of date rape.
American Univesity paper The Eagle ran Alex Knepper's column "Dealing with AU's anti-sex brigade" on Sunday. In it, Knepper makes such enlightened observations as "the goal of contemporary feminism and Gay Party activism is not to explain sex, but to abolish its passion," and "Feminism envisions a bedroom scene in which two amorphous, gender-neutral blobs ask each other 'Is this OK with you?'" And here I thought feminists and LGTBQ activists just envisioned a world where everyone was treated equally and fairly.
Moreover, Knepper seems to think that sexual consent is tricky subject that feminists let get in the way of all the sexual good times. He claims that date rape is an "incoherent concept" and establishing consent in casual sexual relationships can be hard. Funny, "yes" and "no" seem like fairly easy to understand concepts. He writes: "Let’s get this straight: any woman who heads to an EI party as an anonymous onlooker, drinks five cups of the jungle juice, and walks back to a boy’s room with him is indicating that she wants sex, OK?"
Thankfully, I am not the only person to think Knepper's column is outrageous. An anonymous member of the American University community removed The Eagle from newsstands and posted signs saying "No Room for Rape Apologists." Others piled a few thousand copies of the issues against the door of the editor's office. On Thursday, The Eagle plans to run a column by Women's Initiative Director Sarah Brown to counter the one written by Knepper. While I hardly think that any of this will get through to Knepper, I do hope that it gets people thinking more critically about the issues of date rape, feminism, and masculinity. Knepper has got it wrong on all three counts.
http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/american_university_paper_runs_rape_apologist_column
Men Can Stop Rape's Response to American University Rape Apologist
by Roxann MtJoy
April 12, 2010
Last week, I told you about opinion column that ran in an American University student newspaper in which Alex Knepper referred to date rape as an "incoherent concept" and implied that any woman who has been drinking and goes back to a man's place is practically begging for it. Understandably, this angered sexually responsible people nationwide, including a group called Men Can Stop Rape.
Men Can Stop Rape is a fabulous organization that works with young men to teach healthy masculinity and to help end violence against women. Obviously, they took issue with Knepper's column, saying that it "fails to accurately represent the reality of sexual assault on college and university campuses." No kidding. I interviewed one member of the organization, Temple University junior Anwar Nur, about the American University article; he said, "I believe that the author’s reference to date rape as an incoherent concept comes from a lack of understanding about what constitutes consent. In most states, a person cannot legally give consent while they are intoxicated." Nur added, "Even if they are sober, a person still has the right to withdraw consent."
Since April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Men Can Stop Rape took this American University mess and used it as a reason to promote its list of five things men can do to stop rape, including accepting when consent is withdrawn and backing off sexual situations when one or both parties is intoxicated. They also suggest ways for men to recognize behaviors and attitudes that foster a culture of violence and then, once recognized, how to prevent or diffuse them.
Not everybody, however, is supportive of the work of Men Can Stop Rape. While that seems almost unbelievable to me, Anwar Nur told me, "Usually when people hear about what I do they assumed that I’m either a reformed perpetrator or that I’m gay." Right ... because only ex-rapists and gay men would be motivated to end sexual violence. Nur is often told about how rape laws are unfair to men. It seems, according to Nur, that people "are afraid to talk about rape prevention and it is mind boggling for them to think of men as a part of the solution." Call me crazy, but I think it is mind-boggling not to think of men as a critical part of the solution. Thankfully, the people at Men Can Stop Rape agree, and won't let naysayers get in the way of their important work.
http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/men_can_stop_rapes_response_to_american_university_rape_apologist
Gag Order
A Nebraska judge bans the word rape from his courtroom.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Usually we leave it up to the linguists and philosophers to muse on the crazy relationship between words and their meanings. In the law, words—the important ones, at least—are defined narrowly, and judges, lawyers, and jurors are trusted to understand their meanings. It's precisely because language is so powerful in a courtroom that we treat it so reverently.
Yet a Nebraska district judge, Jeffre Cheuvront, suddenly finds himself in a war of words with attorneys on both sides of a sexual assault trial. More worrisome, he appears to be at war with language itself, and his paradoxical answer is to ban it: Last fall, Cheuvront granted a motion by defense attorneys barring the use of the words rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit from the trial of Pamir Safi—accused of raping Tory Bowen in October 2004.
Safi's first trial resulted in a hung jury last November when jurors deadlocked 7-5. Responding to Cheuvront's initial language ban—which will be in force again when Safi is retried in July—prosecutors upped the ante last month by seeking to have words like sex and intercourse barred from the courtroom as well. The judge denied that motion, evidently on the theory that there would be no words left to describe the sex act at all. The result is that the defense and the prosecution are both left to use the same word—sex—to describe either forcible sexual assault, or benign consensual intercourse. As for the jurors, they'll just have to read the witnesses' eyebrows to sort out the difference.
Bowen met Safi at a Lincoln bar on Oct. 30, 2004. It is undisputed that they shared some drinks, and witnesses saw them leaving together. Bowen claims not to have left willingly and has no memory of the rest of that night. She claims to have woken up naked the next morning with Safi atop her, "having sexual intercourse with her." When she asked him to stop, he did.
Bowen testified for 13 hours at Safi's first trial last October, all without using the words rape or sexual assault. She claims, not unreasonably, that describing what happened to her as sex is almost an assault in itself. "This makes women sick, especially the women who have gone through this," Bowen told the Omaha World-Herald. "They know the difference between sex and rape."
Nebraska law offers judges broad discretion to ban evidence or language that present the danger of "unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues or misleading the jury." And it's not unheard-of for judges to keep certain words out of a courtroom. Words like victim have been increasingly kept out of trials, since they tend to imply that a crime was committed. And as Safi's lawyer, Clarence Mock, explains, the word rape is just as loaded. "It's a legal conclusion for a witness to say, 'I was raped' or 'sexually assaulted.' … That's for a jury to decide." His concern is that the word rape so inflames jurors that they decide a case emotionally and not rationally.
The real question for Judge Cheuvront, then, is whether embedded in the word sex is another "legal conclusion"—that the intercourse was consensual. And it's hard to conclude otherwise. Go ahead, use the word sex in a sentence. Asking a complaining witness to scrub the word rape or assault from her testimony is one thing. Asking that she imply that she agreed to what her alleged assailant was doing to her is something else entirely. To put it another way: If the complaining witness in a rape trial has to describe herself as having had "intercourse" with the defendant, should the complaining witness in a mugging be forced to testify that he was merely giving his attacker a loan?
The fact that judges are not rushing to ban similarly conclusory legal language from trial testimony—presumably one can still say murder or embezzlement on the stand—reflects not just the fraught nature of language but also the fraught nature of rape prosecutions. We as a society still somehow think rape is different—either because we assume the victims are especially fragile or because we assume they are particularly deceitful. Is the word rape truly more inflammatory to a jury than the word robbery? Yes, the question of the victim's consent surely makes a rape trial more complicated than some other kinds of criminal trials. But the fact that the evidence may be more equivocal hardly makes the underlying word more likely to incite blind juror outrage.
Wendy Murphy teaches at the New England School of Law and has spent years studying the relationship between language and the courts. She describes Judge Cheuvront's order as part of a growing trend on the part of the defense bar to scrub the language of trial courts, one that has "really blossomed after the Kobe Bryant trial." The big shifts she's noticing: Whereas defense attorneys once made motions to limit the use of the word victim in trials, there is an uptick in efforts to get rid of the word rape. Moreover, she points out, these strategies used to be directed toward prosecutors, but they are now being directed toward witnesses as well.
Do a Lexis search on the influence of inflammatory language on juror perceptions. Try to find some social science data on the effect of loaded courtroom words on conviction rates. Not much out there, notes Murphy. That's one of the things that makes the Nebraska case so maddening. If judges are going to take it upon themselves to issue blanket orders that would have witnesses testifying that black is white, one might hope that they are trying to remedy some well-documented evidentiary problem.
You needn't be a radical legal feminist to cringe at the idea of judges ordering rape complainants to obliterate from their testimony any language that signifies an assault. At worst, that judge is ordering her to lie. At best, he is asking her to play at being a human thesaurus: thinking up coded ways to describe to the jury what she believes to have happened. If Mock, Safi's attorney, is correct in stating that "trials are competing narratives of what happened," why should one side have a lock on the narrative language used? Can it really be that the cure for the problem of ambiguous courtroom language is to permit less of it?
And there's another problem underlying Cheuvront's order: Jurors will not be told of it. Not only is the "dangerous" language to be hidden from them, but the fact that it's been hidden will be concealed from them as well. They are not merely too emotional to hear the phrase rape kit. They are also evidently too emotional to know it's been hidden from them in the first place.
Professor Robert Weisberg teaches criminal law at Stanford Law School, and he acknowledges that judges in rape trials face a particularly complicated challenge when it comes to keeping prejudicial or conclusory language from a jury. He has no problem, for instance, with the fact that courts have gradually jettisoned the word victim for the less loaded complainant. The former proves too much. But he cautions that there is no value-neutral word for unwanted sex and that the word intercourse "understates what happens in a rape case." He warns that a blanket ban on the word rape may in fact be the worst solution. A jury instruction from the judge or gentle admonitions that witnesses watch their language throughout the trial is the better, more transparent fix. "That," says Weisberg, "is what judges get paid for."
If we've learned anything from the dreary wars over politically correct language in America, it's that purging ugly words from the lexicon hardly makes the ugly ideas they represent go away. Trials exist to ferret out facts, and papering over those ugly facts with pretty—or even "neutral"—words doesn't just do violence to abstractions like language and meaning. When it's done in a courtroom, the real victim—if I may still use that word—may well be the truth
http://www.slate.com/id/2168758/pagenum/all/#p2
Putting the Term "Rape" on Trial
By MEG MASSEY Monday,
Jul. 23, 2007
Words are powerful. In court, they can make or break a case. But just how far should the judicial system go to control them? That's the question central to one case in Lincoln, Nebraska, where a sexual assault trial has morphed into a federal case over the First Amendment rights of witnesses and, more broadly, the language surrounding rape.
The story goes back to Oct. 30, 2004, when Tory Bowen, then a 21-year-old student at the University of Nebraska, met Pamir Safi, an Army reservist, at a downtown Lincoln bar. After sharing drinks, they left the bar together, went back to Safi's apartment and engaged in sexual intercourse. Bowen says she was too drunk — and, she believes, drugged — to consent to sex. Safi says their encounter was consensual.
Because the issue at stake was one of consent, not assault, the words that Bowen and Safi chose in court to describe the incident were particularly fraught. And according to Clarence Mock, Safi's defense attorney, the term rape seethes with enough emotion to prejudice a jury and is itself a legal conclusion. Once that word is uttered, Mock says, "the skunk is in the jury box and it's hard to get the smell out."
So, when the trial began last October, Mock convinced Judge Jeffre Cheuvront to ban the words rape, victim and assailant from the trial — including from Bowen's testimony — arguing that such words would be "unfairly inflammatory, prejudicial, and misleading." Nebraska state law holds that "evidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed" by the potential for unfair prejudice.
Under the language restriction, Bowen testified that Safi "was inside of me and on top of me" when she regained consciousness the morning following their meeting. That trial ended in a hung jury.
Bowen says that the court's vocabulary ban hurt her credibility with the jury because she had to remain so cognizant of word choice as she testified, knowing that one mistake could result in a mistrial. "At first I just wanted a conviction," she says, "but now I want to be able to tell my testimony without language obstruction and have a jury decide."
Mock felt that the ban ensured his client a fair trial. "She, like any other witness, is subject to the rules of evidence," he says of Bowen. "To say that there is a First Amendment right of the witness to say whatever they want in a courtroom is a silly notion."
The second trial was scheduled to begin last spring. This time, Bowen refused to comply with the court-ordered language ban, which had been expanded to include the terms "sexual assault kit" and "sexual assault nurse." On Bowen's behalf, protesters demonstrated outside the Lincoln courthouse, and a petition, which Bowen signed, circulated on the Internet to change Nebraska law. Because of the publicity surrounding the case, Judge Cheuvront declared a mistrial during jury selection, accusing Bowen of inciting public furor over her case. "Ms. Bowen and her friends hoped to intimidate this court and interfere with the selection of a fair and impartial jury," he wrote in his July 12 decision.
Bowen's attorney, Wendy Murphy, says her client had nothing to do with the protest, which was organized by PAVE (Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment), a Chicago-based advocacy group for rape victims. "She supports the protestors and is glad they are there and signed the online petition, but that's it," said Murphy in an e-mail. But since Bowen has decided to take her language-ban appeal to the federal district court, she and her lawyer have begun soliciting support from PAVE and other national advocacy groups.
It's significant that this First Amendment challenge regarding the rights of witnesses has originated in a sexual-assault case. Sex crimes, due in part to their intensely personal nature, tap into a complicated set of cultural values and historical meaning; thus, a ban on sex-crime-related words carries a different weight from one on words like "murder" or "embezzlement." Michelle Anderson, an expert in sexual violence and the law, and the dean of the City University of New York Law School, notes that rulings like Cheuvront's reflect the way that the courts have traditionally viewed rape cases. "The notion that the word rape is so charged derives from an historical willingness to place a higher burden on rape victims who come forward," she says, pointing out that in the past, rape cases had required corroboration and evidence of the use of force, and instructions could be given to the jury to treat an alleged rape victim's testimony with special caution.
"It's a way of putting a thumb on the scale because often in acquaintance rape cases, the woman experiences the intercourse as rape and the man experiences it as sex," Anderson says of the language ban. "It's a way of denying the woman's ability to describe her experience as she lived it." To her, the fact that Bowen described her ordeal as simply "inside of me" was a problem because "it's so bland that it could describe what a dentist does with dentist tools to excavate a cavity." Murphy agrees: "Nobody in that courtroom was allowed to describe what happened as a crime."
The third sexual-assault trial has yet to be rescheduled, but in the meantime, Bowen hopes to eventually take her appeal from the federal district court to the U.S. Supreme Court and achieve a national standard for allowable language in the courts — one that upholds a witness's right to free speech without treading on the right of the accused to a fair trial. As Murphy put it, "There should not be a discrepancy as to the fundamental right of a witness to testify truthfully in a court of law."
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1646133,00.html#ixzz0vwknLhYL
Alleged Rape Victim Asks High Court For Help
Certain Terms Declared Off Limits By Trial Judge
July 11, 2007
LINCOLN, Neb. --
An alleged victim in a Lincoln sexual assault case asked the Nebraska Supreme Court on Tuesday to overturn a judge's ban on terms like "sexual assault" and "rape" at trial.
Pamir Safi, 31, is accused of sexually assaulting former University of Nebraska-Lincoln student Tory Bowen three years ago. Jury selection in his trial began Monday.
Judge Jeffre Cheuvront has barred any references to sexual assault over concern about inflammatory statements that might prejudice the jury. On Monday, Bowen and her attorney informed the judge that they would not sign the order agreeing not to use banned terms during courtroom testimony.
Because of jury selection in the case, an expected hearing over how the judge is going to handle that paperwork did not taken place on Tuesday as scheduled.
"I'm angry," Bowen said. "I was raped and I'm not afraid to say it."
Bowen's attorney on Tuesday asked the state's highest court to step in.
"We asked them to move quickly, because we learned there's a good possibility the judge might wait until Tory actually takes the stand and have her disobey his order in court," said Bowen's attorney, Wendy Murphy.
Safi is accused of sexually assaulting Bowen after a party at a downtown bar in 2004. Attorneys said the court is having problems seating a jury because of pretrial publicity and other factors.
The trial could start as early as Thursday afternoon, lawyers told KETV NewsWatch 7. Bowen said she hopes the issue over words gets settled before she's called to testify.
"It's my free speech. I would go to jail for it. And I'm not afraid of that. What's unfortunate is I would have served more time than the defendant," Bown said.
Bowen and her attorney said that now they can only wait to hear from the Nebraska Supreme Court on whether it will step in.
http://www.ketv.com/r/13657698/detail.html
Supreme Court Dodges 'Rape' Testimony Issue
Wednesday October 22, 2008
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of a Nebraska case in which a judge barred all witnesses from using the word "rape" during a sexual assault trial. Judge Jeffre Cheuvront banned the word in order to ensure a fair trial for accused, he said.
The accused, Pamir Safi, was released after two mistrials and prosecutors decided not to try him the third time.
Judge Cheuvront also banned witnesses from using terms like "rape kit" and "victim" while testifying in the trial. Meanwhile, he allowed the defendant's attorney to use "sex" and "intercourse" to describe the incident between Safi and the victim, Tory Bowen.
Lawyers for Bowen argued that the judge violated her constitutional rights by barring her from using the words during her testimony to the jury. During the trial, Bowen accused Safi of sexually assaulting her in October 2004 when she was too intoxicated to give consent. Safi insisted the sex was consensual.
The first trial ended in a mistrial when the jury deadlocked in November 2006. Judge Cheuvront declared the second trial a mistrial in July 2007 due to new coverage and public protests on Bowen's behalf. Prosecutors declined to try Safi a third time.
When the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, it upheld a lower court's ruling that the federal courts had no jurisdiction in the case.
"Tory Bowen and this case will forever be known as the beginning of reform on this important issue, because we laid the groundwork for the inevitable day when judges will stop making such ridiculous rulings," Bowen attorney Wendy Murphy told
http://crime.about.com/b/2008/10/22/supreme-court-dodges-rape-testimony-issue.htm
My first grandson will be hitting the dating and courting age in roughly eleven years from now and by that time with the changing roles of women in society, he might not be in as must danger, as I fear for him after reading some of the postings on this thread.
They do these things in spite have being told that they are wrong (and yes they got the message, they just rejected it) , often even though it is already technically against the law and they could get rung up for them.
