Monthly Archives: September 2003

Nigerian Man Avoids Death By Stoning for Rape

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A man who plead guilty to committing rape in Nigeria recently had his death by stoning set aside after his lawyers plead insanity.

Salimu Mohammed Baranda admitted that he committed the rape of a nine year old girl and apparently refused to defend himself against the charges. According to the BBC, though, family members convinced him to appeal the death sentence and his lawyers claimed that he was insane at the time he committed the crime.

An Islamic court of appeal in Nigeria overturned the conviction and ordered the man committed to an asylum for evaluation.

The BBC story on the overturning of the sentence noted that human rights groups had not exactly jumped all over Salimu’s sentence,

Salimu’s case was a particularly important one for those opposed to such strict Islamic punishments on moral grounds.

In all other cases of stoning punishments being handed down by the Sharia court it has been for those, almost all of them women, who had committed the consensual act of adultery.

Defending a rapist — and worse, one that had admitted his crime — was not something most human rights groups have gone out of their way to do.

But it is the system of justice that is being used here that is the problem. Stoning someone to death for rape is just as barbaric as stoning someone to death for having consensual sex. Both outcomes are the product of a corrupted vision of justice.

Source:

Nigeria stoning verdict quashed. Dan Isaacs, August 19, 2003.

Nigeria stoning verdict quashed. United Press International, August 19, 2003.

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Dowry Demands Still Major Problem In India

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The BBC has done some excellent reporting over the past few months about the continuing problem of grooms and their families demanding large dowries from brides and occasionally resorting to violence if the dowries are not forthcoming.

The issue was brought to the forefront again in May of this year when 21-year-old Nisha Sharma had her husband and his mother arrested under India’s 1961 Anti-Dowry Act. Sharma told police that initially her husband-to-be did not request a dowry but just minutes before the planned wedding demanded $25,000 from Sharma’s father.

When Sharma’s father explained he did not have that kind of money, the groom and his family members assaulted Sharma’s father.

Other women have not been so lucky. The BBC cited Indian government statistics claiming as many as 7,000 women were murdered by their husbands and/or in-laws in 2001 in disputes over dowry payments. Indian domestic violence activist Ranjana Kumari told The BBC,

Somteimes women are tortured to squeeze more money out of their families and in extreme cases they’re killed. Then the husband is free to remarry and get another dowry.

According to the BBC, the dowry problem is one of the factors driving Indian families to use sex-selective abortion (also illegal in India) in order to avoid having female children.

Sources:

India’s dowry deaths. Lucy Ash, the BBC, July 16, 2003.

Dowry demand lands groom in jail. Rajyasri Rao, The BBC, May 14, 2003.

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Violent Crime Continues to Decline, Though Rape and Sexual Assault Levels Off

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In August, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the results of the 2002 National Crime Victimization Survey. Crime rates from the latest NCVS survey were the lowest ever recorded since the survey began in 1973.

The number of rapes and sexual assaults remained largely unchanged from 2001, however, at 0.4 per 1,000. Comparing the two year averages from 1999-2000 to 2001-2002, rape and sexual assault were slightly lower in the latter period. Although rapes and sexual assault seems to have stabilized (in part because the rate is so low that it is difficult to detect changes), the rape and sexual assault rate in the United States has fallen 56 percent since 1993.

Moreover, the level of reporting of rape and sexual assault to police has steadily risen during the same period.

Sources:

Criminal Victimization, 2002 August 2003, NCJ 199994.

US crime hits 30-year low. The BBC, August 25, 2003.

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Two Feminist PACs Endorse Carol Mosley Braun for President

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The National Organization for Women’s Political Action Committee and the National Women’s Political Caucus both endorsed Carol Moseley Braun’s candidacy for president in a move that really underscores where both groups are.

First, Braun is largely a symbolic candidate who was recruited to run for office in large part to try to peel away minority voters from the Rev. Al Sharpton. Second, like the two groups endorsing here, Braun’s vision of feminism is a creature of the far Left.

NOW president Kim Gandy summed up the current state of the sort of feminism that her group represents, saying,

We are particularly please that out of a field of strong progressive candidates, the strongest feminist candidate turns out to be a woman.

Yes, Braun is such a strong candidate that in a Labor Day weekend poll, she garnered the support of a whopping 2 percent of registered Democrats.

The only genuine surprise here is that neither group wanted to wait to see if Sen. Hillary Clinton might jump into the race.

Source:

2 feminist groups back Moseley Braun. Julia Malone, Cox News Service, August 26, 2003.

Poll: Many voters unable to name Democratic candidates. Greg Wahl-Stephens, Associated Press, September 1, 2003.

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Library Settles Internet Sexual Harassment Case

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A Minneapolis decided in August to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against it by 12 librarians. The case nails the final coffin in any pretension that sexual harassment law is anything but a call to censorship.

The librarians sued because the Minneapolis library decided to offer unfiltered Internet access. Inevitably some patrons of the library chose to use the Internet to view pornography.

At which point the librarians sued claiming that their exposure to the pornography viewed by library patrons constituted a hostile working environment.

The federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission agreed in 2001 that there was probably cause that exposure to the INtenret pornography constituted a hostile working environment, but the Justice Department declined to sue the library on behalf of the plaintiffs. So they hired an attorney to pursue the case.

The library decided to settle by paying the librarians $435,000 and likely adding restrictions on Internet access for library patrons.

As Eugene Volokh noted in an article on the case back in 2001 for Reason, this case could have far reaching impact,

This is just the latest great leap forward for harassment law. Harassment law already forces employers to suppress sexually suggestive displays (not by any means limited to pornography), sexual jokes, politically offensive statements, and religious proselytizing.

During the Clinton scandals, employment experts sensibly suggested that employers had to suppress Clinton-Lewinsky jokes, because such jokes might have helped create a “sexually hostile work environment.” The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has argued that “educational harassment law” — a body of law developed by analogy to workplace harassment law — requires universities to implement student speech codes. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission has likewise argued that public accommodations harassment law outlaws American Indian team names and mascots, on the grounds that such symbols are racially offensive. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination forced a Boston bar to take down a display that supposedly expressed racist viewpoints.

Ah what a brave new world harassment law has opened up.

Sources:

Library settles with workers who sued over hostile work environment. WCCO.Com, August 15, 2003.

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Secular vs. Religious Forms of Feminism

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Wendy McElroy wrote earlier this year about how Islamic feminism presents Western radical feminism with a number of problems precisely because of Middle Eastern feminists tend to ground their activism in Islam.

For example, in an interview with Pakistani newspaper Daily Times, Dr. Asma Barlas outlines how she bases her feminist activism in Islam including her resistance to the “feminist label,”

As a Muslim, I resist the label ‘feminist’ because it suggests — wrongly, I believe — that one can only contest assertions of male authority from within feminists paradigms. I believe, to the contrary, that it is possible to do so from within a Qur’anic framework as well. At the same time, I am always happy to acknowledge my many intellectual debts to feminist theorizing.

As McElroy points out, this sort of view puts Western feminism and Islamic feminism at odds,

Islamic feminism tends to be pro-family and not inherently anti-male. In her book In Search of Islamic Feminism, researcher Elizabeth Fernea reports that many Muslim women call themselves “feminists” but want to distance themselves from Western feminism because of its perceived antagonism toward men and the family. Haifa Abdul Rahman, deputy secretary of the General Federation of Iraqi Women, observed: “We see feminism in America as dividing men from women ? separating women from the family. This is not good for anyone.”

On the other hand, Barlas herself offers evidence that feminist activists in Muslim countries themselves might become secularized and reject Islamic feminism, much as some early feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton rejected Christianity,

I did, however, visit Pakistan some years ago and, to my dismay, found that most of the women activists I met had not the slightest interest in a reformed understanding if Islam; rather, they felt that secularism and human rights were the way to go.

Which presents an option that McElroy doesn’t address — that a major effect of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq who-knows-else will accelerate the process of secularization in Muslim countries.

Source:

Interview: “Feminist paradigms is not the only way to contest male authority . . .” The Daily Times, Pakistan, August 10, 2003.

Iraq War May Kill Feminism as We Know It. Wendy McElroy, Mens News Daily, March 19, 2003.

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Man Files Lawsuit Over Access to Domestic Violence Shelters

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Eldon Ray Blumhorst, 42, has filed a civil rights lawsuit against 10 battered women’s shelters in Los Angeles that denied him a place to stay. Blumhorst called the 10 shelters in December saying that he needed shelter from domestic violence, but none of the shelters would accept him on the grounds that they only serve women.

Blumhorst maintains that is a violation of California laws that prohibit sexual discrimination by programs receiving state funding, as the domestic violence shelters do. Writing on the case for Women’s Enews, however, Elizabeth Zwerling quotes a lawyer representing 9 of the 10 shelters as saying that,

Women’s shelters receive funding from the state pursuant to a gender-specific funding statute. . . . Our argument is that these are lawful programs. The case has no legal merit.

Zwerling interviewed people at Los Angeles shelters who said since they have limited resources, they have no choice but to focus on women and children. Ben Schirmer of Rainbow Services told Zwerling that,

The fact that we limit ourselves to women and children is not to say that it is not a problem with men. It’s that we have limited resources and it’s all we can do to try and keep up with the demand for services for women and children.

It’s not clinically appropriate to house men and women in the same facility.

Another shelter director, Kathie Mathis of the Domestic Violence Center of Santa Clarita, tells Zwerling that she doesn’t simply turn away men, but rather refers them to shelters that do take men. “We’re all in a network,” Mathis said. “No one is turned away; they’re just referred.”

But according to an article about the case by Glenn Sacks, the nearest shelter to Los Angeles that accepts men is 80 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Moreover, that shelter does house bot men and women and, according to Sacks, does so apparently without the sort of clinical problems that Schirmer seems to think are inherent to the practice.

Zwerling cites California State University, Long Beach professor Martin Fiebert’s research that reviewed more than 100 international studies of domestic violence and found that women are “as physically aggressive or more aggressive than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners.”

She follows this up, though with a quote from Linda Berger, director of the Statewide California Coalition for battered Women, who maintains that most violent acts by women are defensive.

But as Sacks notes, two large studies of domestic violence funded by the National Institute of Mental Health found that women were just as likely to initiate violence in domestic settings as were men.

Blumhorst’s lawsuit is a long shot at best, but it’s interesting that Schirmer attacks the lawsuit with largely the same language that targets of lawsuits by feminists have used,

It’s hard to run a nonprofit in today’s economy. It’s easier to sue than to start a new shelter. But lawsuits like this that take us away from our mission do not help anybody.

If only those pesky men would take their lawsuits over gender equality and go home!

Sources:

Suit presses for ‘gender symmetry’ in shelters. Elizabeth Zwerling, Women’s eNews, July 21, 2003.

Battered husbands’ injuries no jokes. Glenn Sacks, Ifeminists.Net, June 17, 2003.

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