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Richmond Rape – It Could Have Been Your Daughter by Amy Siskind

Submitted by admin on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 15:58

From our friends at The New Agenda. We thank them for telling it like it is!!

....Parents beware: Our daughters are in danger and the statistics are staggering. And as details emerge about the two-and-a-half hour episode, we must use the Richmond case as a teachable moment on gender-based teen violence.

Here’s what the Richmond case signifies, plain and simple: Gender-based assault has become an acceptable norm in our country.

Of course, as usual, our media screwed it up. A major cable network grouped the Richmond case with other attacks on teenagers—males and females—and attempted to make this a youth-violence issue. The print media set out on its victim-blaming mantra: “Sure, the victim was sober during the dance, but had she been drinking before the attack?” “She asked for it, right?” “It’s like the college girl who goes to hang out with one guy and ends up getting raped by eight…well, she chose to go to the fraternity.” Or like the media’s search for what the pop star Rihanna could possibly have done to upset her mild-mannered ex-boyfriend Chris Brown that would make him almost strangle her to death.

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For Runaways, Sex Buys Survival by Ian Urbina

Submitted by admin on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 13:23

... They had sex, and he soon became her boyfriend. Then one day he threatened to kick her out if she did not have sex with several of his friends in exchange for money.

She agreed, fearing she had no choice. “Where was I going to go?” said Nicole, now 17 and living here, just down the Interstate from Medford. That first exchange of money for sex led to a downward spiral of prostitution that lasted for 14 months, until she escaped last year from a pimp who she said often locked her in his garage apartment for months.

... The barriers to rescuing these children are steep: state cuts to mental heath services, child welfare agencies incapable of preventing them from running away, a dearth of residential programs where the children can receive counseling. READ MORE

Iceland, Nordics top world gender equality list - U.S. 31st in World by Burton Frierson

Submitted by admin on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 13:08

Iceland and three other Nordic countries lead the world in gender equality, according to a report released on Tuesday.

The United States, which prides itself on civil rights progress during the past half century, fell four spots from last year to stand at 31st place behind Lithuania and ahead of Namibia, according to the World Economic Forum, a nonprofit group based in Switzerland.

The report ranked countries according to how much they reduced gender disparities based on economic participation, education, health and political empowerment while attempting to strip out the effects of a nation's overall wealth.  READ MORE

Voters For Peace: Rape in the Ranks - The Enemy Within

Submitted by admin on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 12:55

Journalists Pascale Bourgaux and Mercedes Gallego in their trips to Iraq as war correspondents were stunned to hear from military women in Iraq that they should be very careful working in military units due to sexual assault and rape.

When they left Iraq they decided to investigate the issue of rape in the U.S. military. In 2007, they filmed the stories of four military women who had been raped and made a documentary, “Rape in the Ranks: The Enemy Within.” The documentary was shown for the first time in the United States on October 26 at the New York Independent Film Festival.

Tina Priest was raped in Iraq and then found dead of a gunshot in her dormitory room. The U.S. Army claims Tina committed suicide 11 days after she was raped. The mother and sister of Tina Priest don't believe Tina committed suicide. The documentary captures remarkable interactions with them and military officers from Fort Hood who arrive at their doorstep. Tina's rapist was never prosecuted. READ MORE

 

Care2: Rape Victims Get Their Day in Court

Submitted by admin on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 12:17

......Yesterday, an amendment proposed by Minnesota Senator Al Franken to the Defense Appropriations bill that would penalize companies from restricting their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery, and discrimination cases to court passed by a 68-30 vote.

“The constitution gives everybody the right to due process of law... And today, defense contractors are using fine print in their contracts to deny women like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court,” said Franken in his speech on the Senate floor. “The victims of rape and discrimination deserve their day in court [and] Congress plainly has the constitutional power to make that happen.”

The amendment was inspired by the story of Jamie Leigh Jones who at the age of 19 was drugged and gang-raped by co-workers at KBR and then held in a container with an armed guard for at least 24-hours without food or water so she couldn't report the crime. For the past 3 years, Jones has been fighting to bring a lawsuit against the company, but has been unable to bring charges in court because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration. READ MORE

Care2: To Each Her Own – Beauty & the Breast

Submitted by admin on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 12:09

......a conservative estimate would indicate that American women spent around 1.4 billion dollars on breast enlargement in 2008. Considering the state of affairs on this planet of ours, and in this society that we are all walking around in, doesn't this seem to indicate that our priorities are somewhat… out of whack?

Isn't it also more than a little disturbing to be living in a society where it is considered socially acceptable to surgically alter our bodies for the sake of fashion, superficial 'beauty' and sexual 'desirability'? We tend to generally agree that it was obscene that women in ancient China used to bind their feet, and women in Victorian times used to break their ribs to fit into corsets. And yet modern women go under the knife, by the hundreds of thousands every year, to irreversibly alter their outward appearance.

And still we pretend to be confused and bewildered when we learn that our young people are so insecure about the way they look that they are literally killing themselves.

According to MomGrind.com, at age thirteen, 53% of American girls are “unhappy with their bodies.” This grows to 78% by the time girls reach seventeen. READ MORE

Care2: Compassion In The Face of Parental Consent

Submitted by admin on Mon, 10/05/2009 - 11:47

Once Illinois became the thirty-fifth state with a parental involvement law for minors seeking to end a pregnancy one group quickly organized to help desperate young women navigate this new law. Parental notification laws like the one in Illinois mandate that before a young woman under 18 can terminate a pregnancy a parent, legal guardian, grandparent or other adult family member must first be notified and (often) consent to the procedure. Mandatory parental notification or consent laws are not an infringement on the right to an abortion so long as the legislation provides for a judicial bypass-- a way for young women to petition the court for the ability to access the procedure when it is just not possible to have an adult family member notified and consent.

As of November for young women seeking to end a pregnancy their only remaining legal option to do so without notifying a parent or other adult family member is to petition a judge who may or may not provide the requisite consent. The process for obtaining a judicial bypass is complicated-- and purposefully so. It is designed by anti-choice advocates to make obtaining an abortion as daunting a process as possible. In fact, the process for obtaining judicial bypass is so complicated that after the law was to go into effect the courts issued a 90-day "stay" so that lawyers and doctors to in effect figure out how to deal with the many new procedural requirments so as to avoid the harsh penalties attached to performing an abortion without parental consent.

This is in the face of recent reports that show these kinds of laws have little impact on minors' abortion rates--that making it more difficult to access a constitutionally protected right actually did nothing to decrease abortion rates--it just made the process more unbearable. READ MORE

Care2: Despite the Lilly Ledbetter Act, Wage Gap Widens

Submitted by admin on Mon, 10/05/2009 - 11:35

It looked like progress on paper. The year started out with a new president and the first bill he signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Act. Next, economists predicted that the number of women would equal, and perhaps surpass, the number of men on the national payroll. But the reality isn’t so encouraging...

...The gender wage gap has widened according to the National Committee on Pay Equity. In 2007, women earned, on average, 78 cents for every dollar a man earned. In 2008, they earned 77 cents. That's the same amount reported in 2005. So not only have we made no gains in closing the wage gap over the last three years, we have slid backward and only closed the gap a total of 18 cents in 45 years (since The Equal Pay Act made wage discrimination on the basis of sex illegal). READ MORE

Care2: Why be a stay-at-home mom? - census data debunks the "opt-out revolution"

Submitted by admin on Mon, 10/05/2009 - 11:26

In the progressive community, we all love to talk about the "mommy wars," even those of us who are not yet mommies ourselves. As a Princeton student, I'm especially familiar with Lisa Belkin's infamous 2003 portrait of a group of Princeton graduates who "opted out" of their careers to become stay-at-home mothers - and how Belkin turned interviews with this sample group into the dramatic claim that an "opt-out revolution" was taking place......

.....Clearly, there needs to be a change in our discourse on motherhood. Yes, there are those women, like those profiled in the Belkin article, who have the luxury of "opting out" - but to call it a revolution is not only statistically incorrect, it does an incredible disservice to most women, who do not have the privilege of choice. Instead of focusing on why Princeton graduates want to leave the workforce, we should be looking at why most stay-at-home moms can't enter it. We should be agitating for adequate maternity and paternity leave, affordable childcare, and equal pay. We should be making sure that women have control over their fertility so they can choose how young they want to start families, and encourage them to wait until they are finished with their education to do so. Instead of assuming that women can break the glass ceiling - and are just choosing not to - we need to accept reality, which is that the glass is just as thick, and just as clear, as it ever has been. READ MORE

Care2: Enter at Your Own Risk-Rape Tunnel Turns Art Hoax

Submitted by admin on Mon, 10/05/2009 - 11:15

I don't know much about contemporary art. To be honest, I actually don't have a clue about the topic but when I read about a project where an artist was building a wooden tunnel where he would wait at the end to – wait for it – rape anyone who dared to make it through I was shocked, disgusted, and, well, skeptical. Could this be real?

The artist, Richard Whitehurst's, description of the project was horrifying..........

.........The idea of using the act of rape as art is unbelievable, not to mention disturbing, insensitive, and cruel. Rape is a serious problem; using it as a ploy to discuss art is wrong and only serves to diminish the severity of a problem that affects thousands of woman every year. Just because the project wasn't real, doesn't it mean it was right. READ MORE