Archive for the ‘Rape’ Category
Documentary, Human Rights Reports Chronicle Zimbabwe’s Use of Rape Against Dissidents
The United Nations Regional Information Networks recently carried a report about the premier of “In A Dark Time,” a documentary about groups affiliated with Zimbabwe’s corrupt government using rape as a weapon against dissidents in that country.
For example, the film includes a 16-year-old girl describing how a pro-government militia seize her and her siblings and then raped her as a punishment for her mother’s support of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and Physicians for Human Rights have all documented the ongoing systematic use of rape in Zimbabwe over the past several years. A 2002 Amnesty International report warned of “mounting reports of rape and sexual torture by the [pro-government] militia . . .”
UNRIN reports that studies of the use of torture and other illegal tactics by the government of Zimbabwe and its supporters have found that 40 percent of those subjected to such attacks have been women, who are frequently stripped naked and beaten. Beginning in the summer of 2001, pro-government supporters began using rape and other means of sexual torture with increasing frequency against female supporters of the opposition.
According to UNRIN, the pro-government militias are also illegally kidnapping women and forcing them into concubinage. The young women are forced to perform various domestic duties for the soldiers as well as have sex with them.
All of this, of course, is a direct violation of the Geneva Convention and other international treaties. Ironically, the documentary about these abuses was premiered in South Africa. South AFrica’s Thabo Mbeki has been a leading proponent of a policy of constructive engagement toward Zimbabwe, and has called, for example, for the readmission of Zimbabwe to the Commonwealth after its membership was suspended due to rising levels of political violence (Mbeki has also restored to calling critics of his appeasement policy “white supremacists”).
Source:
Focus on rape as a political weapon. UN Integrated Regional Information Networks, April 8, 2003.
Tags: Amnesty International, Thabo Mbeki, Zimbabwe
Myanmar Denies Its Military Uses Rape as a Tactic
The military dictatorship that runs Myanmar recently denied accusations from a U.S.-based human rights group that its military uses rape systematically against women from ethnic groups that the government is fighting.
Refugees International released a report in early April documenting 43 rapes by the Myanmar military against ethnic women living along the Thailand-Myanamar border. Refugees International spokeswoman Veronika Martin told Agence-France Presse,
Rape is widespread and committed with impunity, both by officers and lower ranking soldiers. The culture of impunity contributes to an atmosphere in which rape is permissible.
The Myanmar government replied that while individuals soldiers may be involved in isolated instances of rape,
But ’systematically using rape as a weapon of war’ is just too ridiculous and these organizations that are putting out such preposterous allegations need to be reminded that the Myanmar Defense Forces also comprises ethnic [minorities] . . .
However, AFP notes that in May 2002 two Thailand-based human rights groups documented a total of 625 rapes of ethnic minority women by members of the Myanmar military from 1996-2001. The U.S. State Department reported in December that it found evidence corroborating those claims of systematic rape.
Source:
Myanmar rejects latest US rape accusation. Agence-France Presse, April 7, 2003.
Tags: Myanmar
Trial of First Women Accused of Genocide
In March the Christian Science Monitor ran a profile of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the first woman formally charged with genocide for her actions in allegedly facilitating Rwanda’s nightmarish violence in 1994. Not only is Nyiramasuhuko charged with genocide, but she is also charged with a crime against humanity for using rape as a tool of political violence.
The Monitor describes how Nyiramasuhuko became a rising star in the Hutu-dominated government. From starting out as a social worker in the Rwandan town of Butare, she became one of the highest ranking individuals in the Rwandan government.
When that government decided to carry out genocide against the Tutsi population, it ran into a problem in Butare. Hutu/Tutsi relations in Butare were generally marked by an absence of the sort of ethnic conflicts that manifested themselves in other parts of Rwanda. So when the genocide began, Tutsis fled to Butare where they hoped they would receive protection.
The government dispatched Nyiramasuhuko to the town to ensure that this did not happen and that the genocidal program was carried through. Nyiramasuhuko is accused of bring her only son, Arsene Shalom Ntahobali and four others to create and carry out a plan which relied upon genocidal violence and rape. According to The Monitor,
It is alleged that they organized, ordered, and participated in massacres against the population, trained and distributed weapons to militiamen, prepared lists of those to be eliminated, and manned roadblocks to identify Tutsis and ensure that none escaped.
Witnesses at Nyiramasuhuko’s trial have testified that they witnessed her instructing Hutu gangs to pick out the nicest looking Tutsi women and rape them before killing them. Nyiramasuhuko’s son is accused of raping ten Tutsi women and of killing several dozen others.
The extent to which rape was explicitly used as a weapon on the Rwandan genocide is staggering. Some estimates put the total number of rapes at around 250,000.
One thing The Monitor doesn’t mention is that these international genocide trials are very controversial within Rwanda for a number of reasons. First, the United Nations failed to stop the genocide when it had the chance, then helped protect those who organized the genocide when they fled Rwanda, and then turned around and said only they had the ultimate authority to judge those accused of genocide (there have been numerous genocide-related trials in Rwanda, but many of the key participants have ended up in the custody of international agencies who have turned them over to the International Criminal Court).
Second, the length of these trials is something of a bad joke. Consider that the main Nuremberg trial that held former Nazi officials responsible for their crimes took just 10 months. Nyiramasuhuko first entered a not guilty plea before the ICC in September 1997, and her trial is unlikely to conclude until 2005.
Source
A woman on trial for Rwanda’s massacre. Danna Harman, The Christian Science Monitor, March 7, 2003.
Tags: Pauline Nyiramashuhuko, Rwanda
Ah, the Rape Was Traditional
Last October there was an odd controversy in Australia over rape and Aboriginal culture that found an Australian judge expressing the most base and contemptible form of cultural relativism in defending sexual assault against a 15-year-old girl.
As WomensENews.Org reported, the girl’s parents pledged her as a wife to Jackie Pascoe Jamilmira, 50, when she was born. In return, Pascoe gave them a portion of his salary. So she turned 15 years-old and the man claimed her as his wife, but, according to Women’s ENews’ Sonia Shah,
The girl resisted his advances, so he punched her, “put his foot onto my neck” and raped her, according to her statement to the police. When the girl’s family was unable to protect the girl, police took Pascoe, brandishing a shotgun, into custody.
Which is whether things start to get very odd. Pascoe was eventually tried and sentenced to 13 months in jail for unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor (the victim did not cooperate with prosecutors) and a 14-day sentence for a weapons violation.
On appeal, however, Northern Territory Supreme Court Justice John Gallop reduced the length of the sentence to a single day. That’s right, just 24 hours. The judge agreed with expert testimony that such arranged marriages were traditional in the particular Aboriginal tribe that Pascoe belonged to and, therefore, were “morally correct.”
Anthropologist Geoffrey Bagshaw filed a report noting Pascoe’s society, girl’s are considered to be capable of sexual consent one they have their first period. Justice Gallop read from this concluding,
She didn’t need protection. knew what was expected of her. It’s very surprising to me [Pascoe] was charged at all.
In March 2003 the prosecutor in the case announced he would appeal Gallop’s decision saying, “It’s the submission of the appellant today that the sentence imposed of 24 hours for the offence of carnal knowledge was demonstrably and seriously inadequate.”
Sources:
Judge rules rape of aboriginal girl ‘traditional’. Sonia Shah, WEnews, November 29, 2002.
Prosecutor appeals 24-hour term for underage sex. Karen Michelmore Darwin, The Age (Australia), March 14, 2003.
World’s Outrage Directed at Pakistan Rape Case
Pakistan bore the full brunt of world outrage this month after published reports that a tribal council sentenced a 30-year-old woman to be forcibly raped by four men as punishment for her brother’s alleged affair with a woman of a higher prestige tribe.
The incident happened in the last week of June after the brother of Mukhtar Bibi was accused of carrying on an “illicit affair” with a woman of the Mastoi tribe. Bibi and her brother are from the Gujjar tribe which has a lower social standing.
A tribal court decided that as punishment, Mukhtar Bibi would be raped by four men of the Mastoi tribe. In front of hundreds of witnesses, the four men took her in to a room and raped her for more than an hour. The woman’s father tried to stop the rape, but told CNN that, “We begged for mercy in the name of God from them, but they held guns on us and so we were helpless.”
Pakistani police largely ignored the matter. Although the rape took place on June 22, it wasn’t until more than a week later that police began investigating the rape, and then only because a group of human rights lawyers all but forced them to. Pakistan’s Supreme Court was extremely critical of the local police, and promised an investigation into their inaction.
Meanwhile, two of the four men who participated in the rape have been arrested along with some members of the tribal council that passed the outrageous sentence.
Although the tribal decision was extreme even for Pakistan, women’s rights activists in Pakistan noted that such human rights violations are par for the course in a country that is often extremely hostile to women. After all, honor killing is a major problem in Pakistan and that country has sentenced more than one woman to death by stoning for adultery (although none of those sentences has been carried out yet). Human rights activist Fouizia Saeed told The BBC,
We must condemn institutional acceptance of women symbolizing honor and the routine rape and killing of women being carried out to dishonor or restore honor to families, and institutionalized violence.
This controversy is also a stark reminder of what often seems like an impassable chasm that separates Western attitudes toward women from those in countries dominated by traditionalist versions of Islam.
Sources:
Police attacked in Pakistan rape case. The BBC, July 5, 2002.
Pakistan police arrest second gang rape suspect. CNN, July 6, 2002.
Protests over Pakistan gang rape. Owais Tohid, The BBC, July 3, 2002.
Tags: Pakistan
South African Education Minister Calls for Women Only Train Cars
South African Education Minister Kader Asmal this week suggested that female-only train cars need to be created in order to reduce the level of violence directed at women on South Africa’s public transportation system.
Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has experienced a massive crime wave that has seen it lead the world in most violent crime statistics. The high crime rate has in turn led to vigilantism and other problems.
The BBC cites figures claiming that a woman in South Africa today is more likely to be raped than she is to learn to read. Officially, there were almost 25,000 rapes reported to police last year in South Africa, or one for approximately every 850 females.
To put these numbers in perspective, in the United States there are about 72 reported rapes per 100,000 females. In South Africa, that rate is almost 120 reported rapes per 100,000 females.
Several private rail companies in South Africa have already started running female-only train cars, and Asmal suggested that more are needed to protect women.
Source:
Female only trains for SA. The BBC, July 2, 2002.
Tags: South Africa
Conviction Rate for Rape Falls Precipitously in Great Britain
A report about rape prosecutions in Great Britain recently found that the rate of conviction had fallen from 1 conviction for every 3 cases brought to trial in 1977 to just 1 conviction for every 13 cases brought to trial in 1999. Why has the conviction rate fallen so sharply?
One explanation, of course, is that police and prosecutors are simply bungling the job. The report blames police for not being thorough enough in collecting evidence and prosecutors for not empathizing with rape victims enough.
But it is difficult to believe that police and prosecutorial actions visa vis rape cases have declined that much since 1977, especially given the enormous publicity in the United Kingdom (as in the United States) about the horrors of rape.
An alternative explanation, which the report apparntly did not examine, is that police and prosecutors in the UK are under pressure from groups and are bringing to trial weak cases today that would not have been prosecuted or would have led to a plea bargain in the 1970s.
It would be interesting to see researchers take a random sample of 1977 cases and 1999 cases that went to trial and compare the strength of the evidence in those respective samples. I suspect they would find that marginal, difficult to prove cases were not brought to trial in 1977 whereas they are being brought to trial today, and naturally the conviction rate is going to decline.
Source:
Rape conviction rate has dropped to just one in 13, inquiry reveals. Ian Burrell, The Independent (UK), April 1, 2002.
NOW Hypocrisy on Rape Testing
The National Organization for Women sent out a press release last week asking for funding of DNA testing of rape evidence. Just for a second I thought maybe NOW had gotten its head out of its rear end and was going to call for judicial reform to make sure men convicted of rape who claim their innocent get a chance at clearing their name with DNA testing. But, of course not. Instead NOW wants $250 million to process a backlog of rape kits stored by police around the country.
According to NOW, there are thousands of rape kits sitting in police evidence lockers that have never had a basic DNA analysis conducted. Why? Because it costs $1,500 and those silly police seem to think that the best time to do a DNA test is when there is a suspect in hand to compare the DNA to. NOW, on the other hand, seems to think that women’s will be helped by a $250 million effort to make sure that DNA test results sit in evidence lockers until a suspect is in hand (and without some sort of national DNA database, that’s what will happen with almost all of these results).
On the other hand, NOW has yet to call for any sort of funding to allow convicted rapists who claim they are innocent to avail themselves of DNA testing. In many cases, they cannot afford such testing and even if they can, in some cases inmates long ago exhausted all appeals and courts are wary of taking another look at the case, even just to examine DNA evidence.
But when it comes to justice, the NOW is satisfied to remain an girls-only club.
Source:
NOW urges funds for DNA testing of rape evidence. NOW Press Office, March 13, 2002.
Tags: National Organization for Women
Is Virginia’s Proposed Marital Rape Statute a Good Idea?
Virginia’s legislature is considering altering its laws to make it easier for married women to file rape charges against their husband. Some critics of feminism are up in arms over this proposed change, but, in fact, passing the law would be the right thing to do.
The issue here is pretty straightforward. Under current Virginia law, a woman who wants to accuse her husband of rape must first meet two criteria — she must no longer be living with her husband or she must provide some evidence of a serious bodily injury. If she is still living with her husband or did not sustain a serious bodily injury, she cannot accuse her husband of rape.
The proposed law would eliminate those two requirements, giving married women the same rights under the law that single women have.
This seems like a pretty obvious change that probably should have been done a long time ago, but critics both in the Virginia House and on the Internet have criticized the bill on a number of grounds. Stuart Miller wrote a critique of the law, Martial Rape — What a “Can of Worms”! that presents two arguments against the marital rape statute. Lets look at those.
First Miller opens his critique with the bizarre view that a marital rape statute might discourage men from getting married. Since data show that married women suffer less violence from their partners than do non-married women, the law might actually increase violence against women by lowering marriage rates. It is also true that children living in married households are less likely to be abused by their parents than are children living in unmarried households. Does it follow, then, that we should decriminalize child abuse among married couples? Besides, I thought it was the radical feminists who were obsessed with groups rather than with protecting the rights of individual. Presumably women who are raped by their husbands would prefer to be treated like individuals rather than figuring in some grand collective calculus by Miller and others.
The second argument Miller offers is also an argument that was made in opposition to the law on the floor of the Virginia House — some unscrupulous women might use this law to file false rape charges against their husbands to gain leverage during divorce proceedings.
Certainly, if this law passes, some women will in fact do this. So what? The fact that some women might twist and abuse the law is hardly much of a justification for jettisoning the rights of women who do not abuse the system in that way. The solution to that problem is not saying that married women must jump through all sorts of extra hoops to charge their husbands with rape, but rather demand that more be done about the problem of false allegations.
Virginia’s current law is absurdly antiquated. That a woman in Virginia cannot file a rape charge against her husband if she is currently living with him and did not sustain a serious bodily injury boggles the mind. The Virginia legislature should pass this change to its statute on marital rape, and it should also pass legislation toughening treatment of men or women who file false allegations.
Source:
Marital Rape — What a “Can of Worms”!. Stuart A. Miller, Strike-The-Root.Com, March 3, 2002.
Domestic violence a priority. Pamela Stallsmith, Virginia Times-Dispatch, February 24, 2002.
Do Rape Shield Laws Forbid Questions about False Allegations?
In February 2001 the United States District Court for the Eastern District issued a ruling in an odd rape case that boiled down to this: do rape shield laws protect accusers from being questioned about previous false allegations of rape that the accuser may have filed?
The case involved Wisconsin resident Jessie L. Redmond who was convicted in 1993 of raping and providing cocaine to a 15-year-old girl. Redmond worked as a counselor at a group home for alcohol- and drug-abusing youths. In December 1992 he was arrested and later convicted after one of these youths claimed that Redmond had supplied her with cocaine and had sex with her.
Redmond’s case took a very odd turn which involved the eventual suspension of his attorney. His original lawyer, Mike Sandy, showed up at the court and passed himself off as the girl’s attorney in order to illegally obtain the girl’s juvenile court file. Among the things that file contained was detailed information about another allegation of rape that the girl had made in early 1992. Police investigated that allegation and determined that it was a false allegation and the girl was charged with contempt of court.
Sandy would eventually have his law license suspended because of that and other incidents. At Redmond’s trial, however, Sandy wanted to ask the girl about the previous false allegation of rape that she had made. The judge in the case, Dennis Flynn, refused to permit that. Although Wisconsin’s rape shield law includes a specific exemption for false allegations, Flynn ruled that the line of questioning about the previous allegation would be prejudicial while having little value for determining the truth of the case against Redmond.
Redmond’s case was then taken up by Howard Eisenberg, the dean of Marquette University Law School. The case ended up in the U.S. District Court which eventually overturned Redmond’s conviction. It noted that since the only evidence against Redmond was the testimony of the girl, the girl’s previous false allegation indeed had probative value. The opinion of that court reads, in part,
But the fact that the girl had led her mother, a nurse, and the police on a wild goose chase for a rapist merely to get her mother’s attention supplied a powerful reason for disbelieving her testimony eleven months later about having sex with another man, by showing that she had a motive for what would otherwise be an unusual fabrication.
…
And thus the court’s ruling, though ostensibly based on the rape-shield statute, derives no support from that statute. The statute protects complaining witnesses in rape cases (including statutory-rape cases) from being questioned about their sexual conduct, but a false charge of rape is not sexual conduct
Redmond was ordered released by the court. He was somewhat vindicated by the decision, but in the process lost 8 years of his life due to an incredibly bizarre interpretation of a rape shield law — an interpretation that the U.S. District Court dismissed out of hand.
As Attorney Mark Richards, who represented Redmond in his first round of appeals, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “A lot of people will point to this and say it is proof the system works. But it’s not proof that the system works, because this guy has been sitting there (in prison) for 7 1/2 years.”
Sources:
Redmond v. United States. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 99-2333, February 14, 2001.
Court reverses rape case conviction. Tom Kertscher, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, February 21, 2001.