Wendy McElroy recently wrote an excellent summary of the methodological and philosophical problems with the commonly repeated claim that 1 in 4 college women have been the victims of rape and/or attempted rape.
Most disturbing is what McElroy calls the “re-definition of sexual violence” to count as rape sexual activity that doesn’t involve even threats, much less violence.
Source:
The Myths of Rape. Wendy McElroy, IFeminists.Com, May 22, 2001.
Nev Moore, president of Justice For Families, has filed a lawsuit against a Massachusetts battered women’s shelter, Independence House, arguing that their apparent close cooperation with the Massachusetts’ Department of Social Services violated her civil rights.
Moore’s case is a fascinating look at the world of DSS and foster care, especially in regards to how capricious and arbitrary DSS decisions can be.
The facts of the case are rather straightforward. Moore’s husband, Tom, had a drinking problem. That didn’t manifest itself into violence until April 1996, when after having too much to drink, the couple got into a fight and Tom knocked down and then kicked Nev. A passing motorist called the police and Tom was charged with assault.
Tom plead guilty to the assault charger and agreed to enter alcohol and anger management counseling. He was placed on one year’s probation. Since that time, Tom says he’s only had a total of three beers and there have been no incidents of violence.
Nev agrees, telling the Boston Globe a couple years ago, “I told him he could never drink in this house again or be here under the influence. Any violence against me or the children would absolutely not be tolerated. Tommy never raised his hand or threatened me after that.”
After the incident, the Moore’s were assigned a social worker who Nev claims insisted that she was in denial about being a battered spouse. Then, in May 1997, the DSS worker claimed that the couple’s young daughter, Brieanna, allegedly said that Tom had hit her, although the girl and Tom both denied this and there is no record of the child having sustained marks or bruises. In fact, a paper filed in court on May 15, 1997, includes a question reading, “Continuation in the home is contrary to the welfare of the child?” and “No” is checked.
Still, Brieanna and her brother, J.T., were both removed from their home shortly afterward and placed in foster homes. Brieanna spent more than a year in a foster home where she says the treatment from foster parents was poor and DSS officials constantly lied to her.
“They kept saying I’d be back home in a few weeks, but I never was,” Brieanna told the Boston Globe in 1999. “They kept saying I’d go back to my old school, but I never did. They said I said that my did hit me, but I never said that. My counselor kept making me say I was afraid to come home, but I wasn’t.”
In her lawsuit against Independence House, Nev Moore maintains that DSS forced her to attend meetings at the battered women’s shelter. At the shelter she was told that the sessions she participated in were confidential, but Moore believes that the shelter shared her comments with DSS. Her suspicions were only enhanced by learning that the shelter relies on DSS for two-thirds of its funding
Regardless of the details of Moore’s particular case, she is certainly correct that too many DSS agencies make decisions based on capricious and arbitrary criteria, and often in violation of established legal principals. In fact in some areas DSS officials maintain they are not bound to observe even the most basic of Constitutional protections guaranteed to the accused.
Sources:
Suit Filed Against Battered Women?s Shelter in Hyannis. The Massachusetts News, March 9, 2001.
From anger to action. Joseph P. Kahn, Boston Globe, February 9, 1999.
This month in an Afghanistan sports stadium crowded with thousands of people, soldiers with the hardline Muslim Taliban movement carried out a criminal sentence — they gave a young man and woman accused of having premarital sex 100 lashes.
The man reportedly collapsed during the whipping. This comes on heels of reports that the Taliban plans to force Hindus within Afghanistan to wear yellow so that they may be more easily identified.
Source:
Taliban beat unwed couple accused of having sex. Feminist Daily News Wire, May 23, 2001.
Writing in National Review, the Hudson Institute’s Stanley Kurtz does a good job of puncturing the anti-free speech views held by many radical feminists, which are now on full display in the controversy over the Independent Women’s Forum newspaper ad.
As Kurtz points out, when University of California-Los Angeles Clothesline Project activist Christie Scott says of that ad that, “I think it was a violent ad, a very hostile ad” or that “the ad is so violent in nature and is presented in such a hostile way,” that she’s simply applying the anti-speech rhetoric of radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon to real world issues.
It is no coincidence that, like MacKinnon herself has often done in the past, Scott and others casually dismiss the First Amendment in ways that used to be reserved for those on the far right. Scott, for example, complained that the Daily Bruin, which ran the IWF ad, claimed that it “was basically justified through a free-speech argument. I feel that’s somewhat cowardly.”
For Kurtz, this latest flap — along with that surrounding the anti-slavery reparations ad that David Horowitz attempted to place in campus newspapers — is yet more proof that the campus speech codes and “authoritarian rants” from feminists and others is have a long-term deleterious effect on the way that college students view freedom and democracy.
Source:
Feminists Against Speech. Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online, May 24, 2001.
Yesterday I wrote about the provocative newspaper that the Independent Women’s Forum has been running in some campus newspapers. In April the University of Califronia-Los Angeles student newspaper, the Daily Bruin ran the ad. In May, two UCLA campus groups — the Coalition for the Fair Representation of Women and the UCLA Clothesline Project announced they would organize a protests against the Daily Bruin demanding that the newspaper apologize for running the ad and print a retraction.
Now certainly these groups have a right to protest whomever they want, but the rhetoric from campus feminists is so hilariously inept that it only buttresses the IWF’s contention that Women’s Studies departments foster an anti-intellectual environment.
According to the Clothesline Project executive co-chair Christie Scott, the IWF advertisement “was a violent ad, a very hostile ad. It breeds a very bad attitude toward campus women.” Anything which disagrees with campus feminist rhetoric apparently breeds a bad attitude toward women — at least a bad attitude toward those women’s studies students who blindly accept everything they reread.
Tina Oakland, the director the UCLA Center for Women and Men went further saying, “It [the ad] strikes me as revisionist history. It’s the same thing as the people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened.”
Oakland demonstrated her own faithfulness to accuracy, however, by claiming that both the FBI and the American Medical Association cited the statistic that one in four college women have been victims of attempted rape or rape. In fact, although many feminist sources tend to attribute this claim to the FBI or AMA, this claim is completely false (in fact the FBI estimates rape rates are far lower than 1 in 4).
If you’re going to run around accusing other people of being philosophical counterparts to Holocaust revisionists, it would behoove one to at least get your own facts straight.
As Christina Hoff Sommers told National Review, “This is a common response, hysteria and irrational reactions. Free and open discussion doesn’t exist in most academic forums. Instead of research or debate, they hold rallies and protests — not exactly the most reasonable way to spark discussion.”
Of course when you’re touting statistics and don’t even know the source, much less the methodology behind the statistics, a reasonable discussion is the last thing you’d want.
Source:
The Ladies Doth Protest. Ben Domenech, National Review Online, May 18, 2001.
The Independent Women’s Forum has recently begun running a provocative ad attacking campus feminism and women’s studies departments. The text of the ad debunks what the IWF calls “The Ten Most Common Feminist Myths.”
These myths include: One in four women in college has been the victim of rape or attempted rape; Women earn 75 cents for every dollar a man earns; 30 percent of emergency room visits by women each year are the result of injuries from domestic violence; The phrase “rule of thumb” originated in a man’s right to beat his wife provided the stick was no wider than his thumb; Women have been shortchanged in medical research; Girls have been shortchanged in our gender-biased schools; “Our schools are training grounds for sexual harassment… boys are rarely punished, while girls are taught that it is their role to tolerate this humiliating conduct”; Girls suffer a dramatic loss of self-esteem during adolescence; Gender is a social construction; and Women’s Studies Departments empowered women and gave them a voice in the academy.
For the most part I agree with the IWF’s analysis of common feminist myths, but the opening text to the ad really crosses the line. According to the IWF ad,
Campus feminism is a kind of cult: as early as freshman orientation, professors begin spinning theories about how American women are oppressed under “patriarchy.” Here is a list of the most common feminist myths. If you believe two or more of these untruths, you may need deprogramming.
Some Women’s Studies departments on American campuses certainly do their best to spread myths, but comparing them to cults and the students who buy into the myths as requiring deprogramming is a cheap rhetorical tool designed to enrage rather then enlighten.
In fact many people who take these courses are able to see through the faulty reasoning. Comparing Left wing Women’s Studies departments to cults is just as obnoxious as feminists who dismiss the IWF and other groups as participating in their own oppression or being nothing more than tools for patriarchal ideas.
If reasoned discourse prevails, the myths that the IWF complains about will quickly be punctured. In choosing to go for a gut-level emotional response and accuse these departments of being cults, it will end up alienating many students who might have otherwise taken a more seriously look at feminist myths.
Source:
Take Back The Campus. SheThinks.Org, April 17, 2001.
I feel the same way about fatherhood as I do about abortion — I don’t care what you do in private, just don’t make me subsidize it. But along comes a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans who think the solution to a myriad of social problems is to simply throw millions of dollars into fatherhood programs.
Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh and Republic Sen. Pete Domenici propose spending $380 million over 5 years to promote what they call “responsible fatherhood.” Noting that up to one-third of children currently live with homes out there father, and that there is a direct correlation between absentee fathers and a host of social ills, Bayh and Domenici want to spend the money on programs that would provide counseling and parenting programs for men.
“We must try to counsel men to wait until they are ready to assume the awesome responsibility of bringing a child into the world,” Bayh told Hearst Newspapers.
Up to $25 million of the funding would pay for public service announcements about marriage and responsible fatherhood.
Ugh. Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t see anywhere in the Constitution where COngress is empowered to aid in establishing “responsible fatherhood.” Besides which, if other government programs designed to alter deeply ingrained social attitudes about things like drug usage are any indicator, it is all but given that such a program will have little if any impact on increasing the number of responsible fathers.
Source:
Senators push solution to the father of all problems. Hearst Newspapers, May 2, 2001.
Lebanon recently held a two-day conference to explore the problem of so-called honor killings in that country. In an honor killing a woman who has allegedly disgraced her family’s honor is killed by her husband or other close male relative. Such murders are still an all-too common affair in some countries.
In Lebanon, for example, lawyers speaking about the topic estimated that about one woman per month is killed as part of an honor killing (typically for allegedly committing adultery or engaging in pre-marital sex). Technically Lebanon’s legal code was modified in 1999 to outlaw the practice, but many men in the country believe that they will not suffer any legal penalty for such killings.
In addition, men who commit honor killings are allowed to use that as a mitigating circumstance in their trial. A man convicted of an honor killing might receive only a few months in jail.
Honor killings are a big problem in countries such as Pakistan and India where, as in Lebanon, they are technically illegal but prevailing customs mean judges and juries look the other way and let perpetrators of honor killings off with light sentences.
Fortunately there are a growing number of women and men in these countries starting to stand up and demand an end to this hideous practice.
Source:
Beirut hosts ‘honour killing’ conference. Kim Gattas, The BBC, May 13, 2001.
In March the United Nations Children’s Fund released a report highlighting the continuing worldwide problem of childhood marriage of girls. Childhood marriage is an especially acute problem in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
An extreme case is a country such as Nepal where 7 percent of girls are married before age ten and 40 percent by age 15. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, and other countries, very large percentages of girls are married before their 18th birthdays.
Attendant with child marriage are other abuses such as domestic violence and honor killings. As UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy put it, “Forcing children, especially girls into early marriages, can be physically and emotionally harmful.”
Aside from the domestic violence problems, there are also numerous risks from pregnancy-related complications for these young brides. Pregnancy-related death is the single leading cause of mortality worldwide for girls aged 15 to 19.
Source:
Child marriage ‘violates rights’. The BBC, March 7, 2001.
A handful of small studies had suggested that the age at which girls enter puberty had been declining dramatically. This led to an explosion in possible explanations, from environmentalists who blamed it on manmade chemicals to some feminists who blamed it on the glut of sexualized images that children are exposed to. But a new, larger study published in the British Medical Journal confirms what other larger studies have reported — there has been little or no change in he age at which girls experience their first period.
In the study, 1,000 British girls completed a questionnaire about their first period. The average age at which the girls reported having their first period was 12 years, 11 months. This represents an almost negligible decline of about 6 months from the average menarche age from the 1950s and 1960s.
The small change is likely due to the same reason that the age of girl’s first period declined by more than a year between the 19th and 20th centuries — an overall improvement in general nutrition.
Sources:
No change found in age of menarche. National Center for Policy Analysis, May 4, 2001.
Girls maturing slightly earlier. The BBC, May 3, 2001.