1 in 5 women get raped?

Earlier in the week, some journalists spoke in support of Rolling Stone’s decision to leave the men out of the story. Helen Benedict, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, told the Times, “If a reporter were doing a story about a university accused of failing to address the mugging or robbery of a student, that reporter would not be expected to interview the alleged mugger or robber.” She continued, “The piece might have been stronger with more than one source, but exposés of wrongdoing often start with one whistle-blower.” But the crime Erdely described was much more unusual and terrible than a mugging. And, even in the case of a mugging, a responsible reporter would not have proceeded without corroboration from someone other than the victim. It wouldn’t have to be a comment from the alleged mugger. It could be a police report, for example, or the account of an eyewitness.

Truth-seeking won’t undermine efforts to prevent campus sexual assault and protect its victims; it should make them stronger and more effective.

Rolling Stone has clarified its apology over a story that had reported a female student was gang-raped at a University of Virginia fraternity, telling readers the mistakes were the magazine's fault, not the alleged victim's.

That's a shift from the original note to readers, issued Friday, when it said of Jackie, the woman who claimed to have been gang-raped at a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, "Our trust in her was misplaced." The updated note removes that line, which struck some critics as blaming the victim.

The magazine said that it shouldn't have agreed to Jackie's request not to contact the alleged assailants to get their side of the story, out of sensitivity to her. "These mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie," wrote the magazine's managing editor, Will Dana. "We apologize to anyone who was affected by the story and we will continue to investigate the events of that evening." The decision not to contact the alleged rapists prompted criticism from other news organizations

It’s disastrous for everybody involved. At this writing, the victim, Jackie, insists she was telling the truth about being raped by seven students. Whatever the truth, she must be in a world of pain right now, particularly if she tried to extricate herself from the magazine story before it was published, as she now maintains.

The destructive fallout goes beyond one woman’s suffering. The Rolling Stone story, which had helped make it all but impossible to ignore the scourge of campus sexual assault, is now going to do the opposite. Because now, emboldened by this one possibly fabricated story of rape, the chorus of people who believe women routinely make these things up will grow louder.

It already has.

We can’t afford to back off because of one big lie and some woefully inadequate journalism. Campus rape is as real as a case like Jackie’s is rare.

A professional violinist killed herself after giving evidence at the trial of her former music teacher, who was found guilty of five counts of indecent assault on Friday.

The Guardian has learned that Andrade, 48, texted a friend three days before her death to say she felt like she had been "raped all over again" after appearing in the witness box at Manchester crown court last month to face Brewer.

The mother of four texted that she felt "fragmented". Asked by a friend if the verdict would make a difference to the way she felt. "No either is awful x," Andrade texted back.
Complaining about a robust cross-examination by Brewer's barrister, who accused her of telling "a pack of lies", she wrote sarcastically: "I'm a fantasist with the Electra complex seeking attention." The judge later said the cross-examination was proper and correct.

Andrade had not initiated the police investigation which led to the trial. Friends said she did not present herself as a "victim" and would have hated to be seen as such. They say she never wanted to give evidence against the Brewers.

Giving evidence, Brewer denied all of Andrade's allegations but admitted to an affair with a 17-year-old pupil at Chetham's in 1994. He resigned when the affair was discovered and the school said he had stepped down for "health reasons". Brewer went on to become the artistic director of the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain and has also directed the World Youth Choir. He served as an adjudicator in international competitions and in 2008 led BBC workshops for the programme Last Choir Standing.

Andrade killed herself the day after Brewer started to give evidence. In the witness box he called her a "fantasist" who was "largely living a fantasy life". The day before her death she had also been told that the judge had directed the jury to find Brewer not guilty on five of the indecent assault charges on the original indictment. The judge said those charges, which related to sexual activity by a canal in Manchester, fell outside the statute of limitations because Andrade admitted in evidence that she may have been over the age of consent at the time, which was 16.

They say she never wanted to give evidence against the Brewers.

Women seek justice for Chilean dictatorship rapes

new topic is started at A2K having to do with rape, hawkeye10 and BillRM always manage to show up for whatever sick reason just like ugly, unwanted flies at a picnic.

all me skeptical,

Quote:
We can’t afford to back off because of one big lie and some woefully inadequate journalism. Campus rape is as real as a case like Jackie’s is rare.
OK, now prove it.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D–New York, is a co-sponsor of the bipartisan Campus Accountability and Safety Act, or CASA, expected to be voted on next year. The legislation would, among other things, require all colleges provide a confidential adviser to guide victims through the entire process of bringing an accusation while no guidance or assistance is mandated for the accused. Gillibrand said in announcing the legislation, “We should never accept the fact that women are at a greater risk of sexual assault as soon as they step onto a college campus. But today they are.”

This is one of the frequently made assertions about campus violence, but the evidence to back it up is lacking. Being young does make people more vulnerable to serious violent crime, including sexual assault; according to government statistics those aged 18 to 24 have the highest rates of such victimization. But most studies don’t compare the victimization rates of students to nonstudents of the same age. One recent paper that does make that comparison, “Violence Against College Women” by Callie Marie Rennison and Lynn Addington, compares the crime experienced by college students and their peers who are not in college, using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. What the researchers found was the opposite of what Gillibrand says about the dangers of campuses: “Non-student females are victims of violence at rates 1.7 times greater than are college females,” the authors wrote, and this greater victimization holds true for sex crimes: “Even if the definition of violence were limited to sexual assaults, these crimes are more pervasive for young adult women who are not in college.”

Rennison, an associate professor at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver, recognized in an interview that her study goes against a lot of received wisdom. “Maybe that’s not a really popular thing to say,” she said, adding, “I hate the notion that people think sending kids off to college is sending them to be victimized.

Assertions of injustice by young men are infuriating to some. Caroline Heldman, an associate professor of politics at Occidental College and co-founder of End Rape on Campus, said of the men who are turning to the courts, “These lawsuits are an incredible display of entitlement, the same entitlement that drove them to rape.” Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, a co-sponsor of the CASA bill, said to the Washington Post of these suits, “I don’t think we are anywhere near a tipping point where the people accused of this are somehow being treated unfairly.”

I’ve read through the court filings and investigative reports of a number of these cases, and it’s clear to me that many of the accused are indeed being treated unfairly. Government officials and campus administrators are attempting to legislate the bedroom behavior of students with rules and requirements that would be comic if their effects weren’t frequently so tragic. The legal filings in the cases brought by young men accused of sexual violence often begin like a script for a college sex farce but end with the protagonist finding himself in a Soviet-style show trial. Or, as in the case of Drew Sterrett, punished with no trial at all.

One campus rape is one too many. But the severe new policies championed by the White House, the Department of Education, and members of Congress are responding to the idea that colleges are in the grips of an epidemic—and the studies suggesting this epidemic don’t hold up to scrutiny. Bad policy is being made on the back of problematic research, and will continue to be unless we bring some healthy skepticism to the hard work of putting a number on the prevalence of campus rape.

It is exceedingly difficult to get a numerical handle on a crime that is usually committed in private and the victims of which—all the studies agree—frequently decline to report. A further complication is that because researchers are asking about intimate subjects, there is no consensus on the best way to phrase sensitive questions in order to get the most accurate answers. A 2008 National Institute of Justice paper on campus sexual assault explained some of the challenges: “Unfortunately, researchers have been unable to determine the precise incidence of sexual assault on American campuses because the incidence found depends on how the questions are worded and the context of the survey.” Take the National Crime Victimization Survey, the nationally representative sample conducted by the federal government to find rates of reported and unreported crime. For the years 1995 to 2011, as the University of Colorado Denver’s Rennison explained to me, it found that an estimated 0.8 percent of noncollege females age 18-24 revealed that they were victims of threatened, attempted, or completed rape/sexual assault. Of the college females that age during that same time period, approximately 0.6 percent reported they experienced such attempted or completed crime.

Firefly will no doubt be around soon to lie again by saying that I am out of touch with what is going on, that nobody agrees with me but some some throwback wanna be rapists, that the politicians are doing damn fine work, that we have proof that the feminists claims of rampant sexual violence on campus are true yadda yadda yadda......

LOL as if a gang rape by eight men on a campus would not be kind of very rare also.

Five William Paterson University Students Accused Of Gang Rape On Campus
By Sascha Brodsky

PATERSON, N.J., Dec 2 (Reuters) - Five college students accused of gang-raping a female fellow student in a New Jersey dorm room pleaded not guilty on Tuesday, in the latest in a series of sexual assaults and harassment incidents prompting colleges to reexamine conduct policies.

The five men blocked a dorm room doorway at William Paterson University in Wayne, and restrained and demanded sex from the woman on Nov. 25, when the campus had largely emptied out for the Thanksgiving break, according to the criminal complaint.

Four men, Noah Williams, Termaine Scott, Darius Singleton and Garrett Collick, all 18, were charged with conspiring to sexually assault the victim. Jahmel Latimer, also 18, joined the attack while it was in progress and is charged with aggravated sexual assault, prosecutors said.

All the students pleaded not guilty in Passaic County Superior Court in Paterson...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/03/-william-paterson-university-gang-rape_n_6257000.html

Rolling Stone magazine last week acknowledged that there were “mistakes” in an article it published describing the gang rape of a freshman named Jackie during a fraternity party in 2012 at the University of Virginia. It is not yet clear whether the discrepancies between Jackie’s account and reporting conducted by The Washington Post, among other news outlets, mean that the story was only superficially inaccurate or substantially false.

Along with public criticism of Rolling Stone’s journalistic failures — the reporter never contacted the alleged rapists — the debacle has led to crowing by skeptics who deny that there is a real problem with campus sexual assault. For them, Rolling Stone’s willingness to accept Jackie’s story mirrors a national willingness to believe that campus assault has reached epidemic proportions.

Such doubts gain traction in part because rape on campus has not been rigorously studied or quantified.

Continue reading the main story
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The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. The school banned Greek activities after the university’s administration was criticized for its reaction to the allegations in the Rolling Stone article.Fraternity and Sorority Groups Call for UVA to Lift Ban on Greek LifeDEC. 8, 2014
In the last several years, allegations that college administrators mishandled complaints, or even discouraged victims from filing complaints, have cropped up at Columbia, Yale, Amherst and Vanderbilt, among dozens of other universities.

The exact scope of the problem, though, remains muddy. Earlier this year, Vice President Joe Biden said that “one in five of every one of those young women who is dropped off for that first day of school, before they finish school, will be assaulted in her college years.” He got that statistic from a 2007 study conducted for the Department of Justice, which found that nearly 20 percent of women reported experiencing a completed or attempted sexual assault since entering college.

That study, probably the best we have, is flawed. It was based on undergraduates at just two unnamed large public universities, and had a response rate of only 42 percent. Other studies on the subject came to similar conclusions but have their own shortcomings. And although colleges are required by the federal Clery Act to publish data on campus crime, there’s reason to believe they’ve been less than diligent when it comes to incidents of sexual assault. As of mid-October, 85 colleges were under federal investigation for how they dealt with reports of sexual violence. (It’s also widely acknowledged that victims underreport sexual assault.)

Anecdotal evidence suggests that campus sexual violence is all too real. Whatever happened or did not happen to Jackie, false reports are rare. In 2009, the National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women released an analysis of research suggesting that the rate of false reporting for sexual assault was in the 2 to 8 percent range.

Still, lack of clarity on what is happening on campuses isn’t helping anyone, least of all victims who, after the Rolling Stone story, may unfortunately face more doubters. There is, however, a fairly simple remedy that has already been proposed in Washington. In July, a bipartisan group of senators introduced the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, which would require colleges to conduct anonymous, standardized surveys on sexual violence and publish the results to a centralized database — or face a fine.