Archive for 2001
UK Man Released After 3 Years in Jail on False Rape Charge
In March 1998, Roger Beardmore, 37, was sentenced to 9 years in jail for repeatedly raping a young girl. The victim testified at his trial that between the ages of three and six she had been raped several times while visiting the farm the man lived at.
Earlier this year the girl retracted her statement saying that she had “put a man in prison for no reason.” The girl apparently made up the story in an effort to receive more attention from her mother, but as one of the judges who heard her retraction put it, she now wanted to “right a wrong which had been keeping her awake, crying all night.”
Beardmore was released on bail in May, and formally cleared of all charge on Dec. 14.
Source:
Prisoner cleared after girl admits rape lie. Laura Peek, The Times (UK), December 15, 2001.
Spanish Court Rewards Rapist for Being Drunk
In what it Women’s eNews right calls its “Outrage of the Week,” Spain’s Supreme Court recently reduced the sentence of a man convicted of raping a mentally retarded girl. The sentence for the 18-year-old rapist was reduced from 13.5 years to 8 years on the grounds that the man was drunk at the time. Two co-defendants who helped pin the girl down also had their sentences reduced. The Supreme Court ruled,
Having ingested alcoholic beverages throughout the night, the three accused manifested an intellectual capacity that was slightly below average. Taken together, these may be considered to have keenly affected their volitional faculties.
Since the men were drunk, they had a limited capacity to choose not to commit rape! This is absurd. The only thing these men have a limited capacity for is living within the rules of society. What a stupid decision.
Source:
Spanish Rapist’s Sentence Reduced: He Was Drunk. Women’s eNews, December 15, 2001.
Tags: Spain
Letting It All Hang Out
A couple weeks ago Wendy McElroy wrote an article about an extremely odd series of events involving the Boulder Public Library in Boulder, Colorado.
The controversy started when library refused to fly a large flag outside its entrance. The library claimed it was for safety reasons, but an official with the library also made comments that the flag might be offensive to some patrons. Eventually the library flew a smaller flag.
And then Colorado resident Robert Rowan became so incensed at the library for an art installation at the exhibit, that he swiped the exhibit, and then called a local radio station to confess and explain why he stole the art.
The art exhibit in question was put up by artist Susanne Walker and was titled “Hanging ‘Em Out to Dry.” It consisted of 21 ceramic penises on a clothesline which was meant to make some statement or another about domestic violence (the installation was part of an exhibit for the Boulder County Safehouse, a domestic violence center).
The display was accompanied by signs which repeated myths about domestic violence such as, “Abuse by husbands and partners was . . . the leading cause of injuries to women” (despite being repeatedly debunked, that myth always seems to turn up on domestic violence literature).
McElroy does an excellent job of summing up the argument that this sort of artwork is simply the latest in a long line of anti-male messages. She recounts a recent incident in Tennessee where the YWCA took out ads featuring a blurred photo of a young boy with the caption, “One day he’ll own his own house . . . drive his own car . . . beat his own wife.” McElroy writes of the ad and the exhibit,
The “Hanging ‘Em Out to Dry” exhibit provides the same sort of “awareness” as done an a priori indictment of all boys as wife beaters. It is hate speech directed at a category of human beings. If you doubt this, imagine a display of black penises strung up. It would be condemned as racist in an instant. Why is it less hate speech to expand the category from “black men” to “all men”?
Which is not to say that Walker shouldn’t have right to make such a piece of art, but that people should not be forced to subsidy such bigoted messages. McElroy notes that Rowan said he wouldn’t have had a problem if this art had been displayed at a private gallery, but didn’t think his tax dollars should go toward supporting its message.
Sources:
Hang male-bashing out to dry. Wendy McElroy, Fox News, November 27, 2001.
Man faces charges for phallic art theft. The Associated Press, November 13, 2001.
Tags: Wendy McElroy
Kenya’s President Says He’ll Enforce Ban on Genital Mutilation
In a speech on Kenya’s independence day, Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi promised to rigorously enforce a new law making female genital mutilation practices illegal on girls under 17. “Anyone found circumcising a girl of 16 will go straight to jail,” Moi said.
He also promised police protection for any young girl threatened with female genital mutilation.
Moi affirmed, however, that females 17 and older would be able to choose for themselves whether to undergo the procedure saying that, “for girls above the age of 16 years, it is their choice to be circumcised or not. Should they not want to be circumcised, they shall also be protected by the new law.”
According to the BBC, a 1998 survey found that 38 percent of Kenyan women aged 15 to 49 had undergone female genital mutilation.
Source:
Kenya bans FGM among young. The BBC, December 12, 2001.
Tags: Kenya
Study Claims Victims of Female Stalkers Not Taken Seriously
A conducted by Australian researchers and published in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that law enforcement and agencies dedicated to helping crime victims do not take seriously people who claim to be stalked by women.
Researchers Rosemary Purcell, Michele Pathe and Paul Mullen studied 190 stalkers — 150 men and 40 women — who had been referred to mental health facilities from 1993-2000. They found that female stalkers were rarely prosecuted for stalking. The three researchers, each who run centers that deal with stalking and threat management, reported that victims of female stalkers frequently reported difficulties getting law enforcement and other agencies to take them seriously.
“I think when someone is involved in stalking, it should be treated seriously according to the behavior shown, not the gender of the perpetrator,” Purcell told Australian newspaper The Age.
The study did find important differences between women and men stalkers. Female stalkers were far less likely to assault their victims than men, which is consistent with other findings about aggressive behavior in men vs. women, but they did threaten their victims and commit acts of property damage as their male counterparts.
Ninety-one percent of the male stalkers targeted women, whereas female stalkers were as likely to harass other women as they were men.
Source:
Victims of female stalkers ‘not taken seriously’. Peter Gregory, The Age, December 1, 2001.
Tags: Uncategorized
Should Christina Hoff Sommers Just “Shut the F— Up”?
National Review Online’s Stanley Kurtz recently wrote about an incident that occurred at a Health and Human Services-sponsored conference at which Christina Hoff Sommers was silenced and then rudely dealt with by panel members because she dared to suggest that the effectiveness of government programs that target boys and girls would best be determined by statistical studies of the effects of those programs.
The conference in question was devoted to “Boy Talk” — a program sponsored by the Center for Substance Abuse and Prevention which is designed to reduce drug use among boys. Sommers was delivering a speech which she had been invited to give when her comments turned to discussion a similar initiative for girls called “Girl Power.”
Sommers intended to discuss whether or not there is any valid evidence that “Girl Power” actually reduces drug use by girls, when she was informed by Center for Substance Abuse and Prevention official Linda Bass that her speech was now finished. Bass later claimed that Sommers had went over her allotted time, but Kurtz obtained a video of the conference which disputes this claim. According to Kurtz, on the video Bass never mentions that Sommers has gone over the time limit, but instead insists that discussion “Girl Power” is off limits and then simply orders her to end her speech.
Even Jay Wade, a psychologist who also appeared at the conference, told Kurtz that Sommers’ speech was ended not because she was over any time limit, but because CSAP didn’t want anyone criticizing “Girl Power.” And Wade is hardly a person likely to be sympathetic to Sommers. In fact, while Sommers and Bass were discussing whether or not Sommers speech would continue, Wade lost his temper and told Sommers, “Shut the fuck up, bitch” at which point the assembled crowd at the conference erupted in laughter.
Ah, nothing like a good, rational consideration of the issues at hand.
Source:
Silencing Sommers: Clinton holdovers have their way with HHS. Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online, December 5, 2001.
Tags: Christina Hoff Sommers
Nigeria Sentences Woman to Death for Having Sex
A woman, Safiya Hussaini, was recently sentenced to death in the Nigerian state of Sokoto — which is one of a growing number of Nigerian states to adopt an Islamic law code. Here crime? She had premarital sex. Not surprisingly, Hussaini alleged sexual partner was acquitted by the same court.
Last year, a teenaged girl in Nigeria was sentenced to 180 lashes for having sex. The sentence was later reduced to a “mere” 100 lashes which were administered in January 2001.
Hussaini appealed her conviction, and it has been temporarily stayed. She claims that the man who was acquitted of having sex with her in fact repeatedly. Under the strict Islamic law in place in Sokoto, since Hussaini was the only witness to the alleged crime, her testimony was essentially meaningless.
Sources:
Woman’s stoning delayed by Sharia Court. European Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, December 4, 2001.
Tags: Nigeria
Paying Crack Addicts Not to Have Children
Is it ethical for private citizens to pay drug-addicted men and women not to have children? That’s the issue raised by Barbara Harris, whose group pays women $200 if they agree to either be sterilized or use a form of long-term birth control such as Depo Provera. Since Harris started Children Requiring A Caring Kommunity (CRACK), the organization’s Project Prevention has found 560 addicts willing to accept her deal.
Harris will speak at the 28th annual conference of the Association for Behavior Analysis in Ontario, Toronto, in May 2002, and her scheduled talk isn’t going over well with folks who consider what she does analogous to eugenics efforts (according to The National Post, parts of Canada were covered by a law granting the state the right to sterilize some people until 1972).
Harris defended her tactics to the National Post saying, “There’s really no reason a drug addict or an alcoholic should get pregnant. And if we can prevent that from happening by offering them $200, then it’s the best $200 that could be spent.”
Critics, however, raise two major objections — that the practice is racially biased and that addicts cannot consent to sterilization.
The Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy’s Eugene Oscapella told the Post, “If she’s going after crack addicted babies, then she’s going after minorities, plain and simple.” In fact, though, so far the group has had 267 white clients take the $200 compared to 190 black clients.
The claim that drug addicts can’t consent to this is a bit odd. Dr. Peter SElby tells the Post that, “The real issue for people with a medical disability was whether they could appreciate what they were consenting to. It’s the same here, because the drug addiction entices them [crack addicts] to get it done.”
But if a person is so addicted to drugs that he or she cannot consent to long term birth control or sterilization, how can such a person possibly consent to potentially becoming a parent? The consent issue seems to raise a lot more problems than it solves (if a drug addict cannot consent to Depo Provera for money, could the same addict consent to drug treatment for money?)
Michel Perron adds a note of caution, noting that targeting crack addicts may be necessary since the jury is still out on the effect of crack addiction on fetal development. That is certainly true, but even if crack proves not to be all that harmful to the fetus, a crack addict is unlikely to prove to be an ideal parent. As Professor Arthur Schafer of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba told the Post, “I think it’s legitimate to say to drug addicts, if you have babies they are going to pay a terrible price when they’re born and when they grow up and have you as a parent.”
Source:
Advocate of sterilizing addicts coming to Toronto. Odile Nelson, National Post, November 15, 2001.
Are Bikinis Just as Bad as Burkas?
In an op-ed for the Boston Globe historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg and women’s health advocate Jacquelyn Jackson argue that while women in Afghanistan are celebrating the demise of the Taliban by removing their burkas, women in the United States have yet to fully realize how oppressed they are by the wearing bikinis and other cultural phenomenon that distort women’s body images.
According to the duo, “our war against the Taliban … highlights the need to more fully understand the ways in which our own cultural ‘uncovering’ of the female body impacts the lives of girls and women everywhere.” Their op-ed continues,
Taliban rule has dictated that women be fully covered whenever they enter the public realm, while a recent US television commercial for “Temptation Island 2″ features near naked women. Although we seem to be winning the war against the Taliban, it is important to gain a better understanding of the Taliban’s hatred of American culture and how women’s behavior in our society is a particular locus of this hatred. The irony is that the images of sleek, bare women in our popular media that offend the Taliban also represent a major offensive against the health of American women and girls.
Whew. Who knew the Taliban were on to something in their extreme misogyny? Islamist parties in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have often demanded the abolition of women’s sports on the grounds that sports are unfeminine and tend to showcase women’s bodies in a lurid manner (Muslim extremists in Kuwait, for example, were horrified at the sexually provocative outfits worn by women’s soccer teams during the 2000 Olympics). Many women’s activists in the Middle East pay a high price for fighting such views, only to have feminists like Brumberg and Jackson mimic the conservative argument that, as they put it, “…American girls and women have been stripped bare by a sexually expressive culture…”
Brumberg and Jackson go on to indict media images for contributing to “eating disorders, teen smoking, drinking, and the depression and anxiety disorders that can occur when one does not measure up…” For good measure they also endorse the American Medical Association’s unwarranted assertion that there is a link between “violent images on the screen and violent behavior among children.”
Brumberg and Jackson’s finish their op-ed with a flourish that is as absurd as it is audacious,
Whether it’s the dark, sad eyes of a woman in purdah or the anxious darkly circled eyes of a grail with anorexia nervosa, the woman trapped inside needs to be liberated from cultural confines in whatever form they take. The burka and the bikini represent opposite ends of the political spectrum but each can exert a noose-like grip on the psyche and physical health of girls and women.
Source:
The burka and the bikini. Joan Jacobs Brumberg and Jacquelyn Jackson, November 23, 2001.
Tags: Afghanistan
If You Disagree with Rob Okun, You’re Not a Good Father
Some feminists and feminist organizations have had a long standing animosity to the Father’s Rights movements, culminating with National Organization for Women’s 1996 press release claiming the movement was “using the abuse of power in order to control in the same fashion as do batterers.” That animosity was on full display recently in an article penned by Rob Okun and published by Women’s eNews.
After a lengthy look at the role of father’s in family life — which Okun claims can be “a force for great good in family relations and child rearing, or a force of hostility and estrangement” — Okun informs his readers that father’s need support and a fair shake from the courts unless they are in any way involved in the Father’s Rights movement. In that case, all bets are off. Okun writes,
Many such fathers see their children’s mothers as actively trying to deny them access to their children, and more than few get involved in what are often called “fathers’ rights” groups. It’s not uncommon to see handfuls of men with signs advocating the rights of dads picketing in front of family courts in many states in most sections of the country.
…
Nonviolent fathers deserve support as they look for a fair shake in custody cases in which they have legitimate claims. But others have forfeited any such claims for support if they intimidate their children’s mothers, harass the court or affiliate themselves with groups more interested in fueling conflict than in maintaining the well-being of their children.
Presumably, Women’s eNews would not run an article from a conservative suggesting that women who spend their time picketing at NOW-sponsored events are bad mothers who have forfeited any claims for support, but it had no problem giving Okun’s article the headline, “Involved fathers care for kids, not picket courts.”
Right, and a woman’s place is at home caring for children, not in the work place.
Source:
Involved fathers care for kids, not picket courts. Rob Okun, WEnews, October 31, 2001.