Rape/Sexual Assault Culture

Oakland's gotten rough lately.

 

As others have noted, your first point is incorrect. While pre-school accusations have been infrequent, there have been several. Also, unprovable, if not totally concocted, allegations during divorce proceedings are all too common, unfortunately.
"Experts" are quick to offer their opinions (& that's all that they are) about various syndromes, but this testimony is also questionable IMO.
Finally, after 40 years working in the CJ system, I continue to range between skeptical and cynical about uncorroborated reports by crime victims. The automatic acceptance of claims has led to some serious injustice.

 

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I visited the courtroom during the course of this trial. While the term "media circus" was not created about this case, it could have been. There were other problems with the investigation and the prosecution.

 

Here's an article which suggest that HU will act, when allegations are established:
http://www.boston.com/2013/12/06/bgcom-harvard/uryITY9XKuxSrOpk3NGUJK/story.html

 

OK but why is this a university matter? Surely those are crimes. Surely I am not permitted to push and insist and intimidate a woman who is trapped in a room with me, saying no, until she complies with my wishes. No?

 

A modern version of the white slavery mania. People love conspiracy theories and horrific sex tales. Put those two things together and they're off to the races -

For example -

Replace Jews, French, Negroes, and Italians with Russians, Albanians, and Saudis, and you have the plot of the recent films Taken, Taken 2, and Eastern Promises. Which I am sure that many people believe are semi-documentaries.

 

From the same article -

People love women-as-victims tales. Still do. Which is a shame, because it deters from vigorous prosecution of the many, many cases where women actually are victims.

 

Yeah, see, I still haven't seen a reliable study to suggest that the "woman who cried rape" is remotely close to being a statistically relevant trend. It is dwarfed by the number of unreported rapes.

 

I do not claim that it is. I am certain that far, far more rapes go unreported than are reported. I would like that to change. I'd like to see those who claim to care about women letting go of the issues of prostitution, porn, sexting, and consensual teenage sex, and spend 100% of their energies instead on getting every non-consensual sex crime reported and prosecuted.

Then I think we'd be somewhere.

 

The large discrepancy between supply and demand means that prostitution as it now exists has a huge non-consensual connotation (with women trafficking being one of its symptoms). As such, it cannot be divorced from the rape discussion. As for pornography, I would frame that in a larger context of being part of the image forming that presents women as commodities to be used.

 

Well if you can't believe the UN on the number of human trafficking (I assume you think they exaggerate), then why believe them on Global Warming?


https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/global-report-on-trafficking-in-persons.html

 

I think you're making that up. I think you hurt your credibility in writing that, and that you do women no favors by denying them the right to make choices, and suggesting that they must be somehow coerced if they make choices that displease you. I will also point out that this line of thought has been common with English politicians decrying trafficking and child prostitution, and an expensive police sweep that interrogated 7,000 women found those claims to be almost entirely false.

I think that attacking pornography as somehow being related to rape is frankly bizarre. I might as well say that women's magazine's do the same thing because of their focus on hot celebrity bodies and hot celebrity looks. I say let's deal with actual crimes, not with people who are willingly doing things.

Well that is what I say, you disagree, and we have each said our bit. Probably time for us to move on from this ... or at least I will, I promise.

 

Have you read the report? It's pretty much data free on how much trafficking goes on. They don't know. The report is mainly about how many people are investigated or convicted for trafficking in countries.

Then there is stuff like how many people were "victims of soliciting prostitutions," in France, which is Orwellian for "prostitutes whom we busted for trying to get business."

I am not saying trafficking doesn't happen, and note that it was not on my list above that I said people shouldn't bother with, because they should. That is nonconsensual and as I have written I am all in, 100%, on going after nonconsensual activities.

But I also know that it's a field for hand wringing, bullshitting, and reports like this that get waved around. Updated versions of the 1920s item that I printed. Thus, a cop going to a park, busting a woman who is trying to line up a client, is an example of sex trafficking? WTF is that doing in the report? That is Fox News level reporting.

 

Well was she a Russian immigrant that was brought over illegally and told that the only way to repay her debt is by prostitution?

Then again if she is working in the park then 1) she is probably not a slave (too high risk to let them out like that) or 2) she already paid her debt and now she is out working on her own.

I do agree not all prostitutes are trafficked girls, we really do not know how many are underage or trafficked, and I am not really sure if legality/regulation would make it easier or harder to separate the trafficked women from the non trafficked women.

Underage is harder, I doubt that many people will argue on making that legal, but the demand sadly is there, as long as that demand exists, there will be a supply.

So in your scenario if the arrested prostitute is 15 years old and she want to be a prostitute, then is that an example of sex trafficking? or just Fox News level reporting?

How about a 17 year old? or a 13 year old?

 

Don't you see what you are doing? You're making stuff up, Fox style.

If this woman was forced to come illegally, then report that. If this woman is underage, then report that. But to assume forced to come illegally, or underage, from the bald statistic that she was caught trying to work as a prostitute, is dishonest. It is an intent to deceive.

Let this report go. It does not help the cause. Again, I am all in favor of ensuring that nobody is forced to work illegally, or that underage girls (or boys, that happens too) are not in the business. Let's put enforcement money and laws to work on those items. But we don't need to snow the audience in the process, at least we shouldn't.

 

Well each country (also NGO's) in the countries report their numbers so you fo find disparities in what is being reported.

Example.

In 3 years, 21 Victims of trafficking in Mexico (well the few States that keep records about this).

That tells me this report shows more than just prostitutes being arrested (Maybe pimps).

and the reports differentiates between sexual labor and other forced labor.

In the USA this can mean people that get arrested for smuggling people from Mexico/China.

But when you look at the number of victims (and they separate under 18) and compare it to the number of people that come across every year, something tells me that this is more than just arresting people for helping people come into the country.

page 136.
https://www.unodc.org/documents/Global_Report_on_TIP.pdf

 

In the UK there are three prostitute stereotypes.

a) the drug user, working to pay for drugs supplied by their pimp
b) the trafficked East European, tricked into the job by criminal gangs
c) the S&M club madame, mainly dealing with high-paying (and often famous) customers

There is a "d", of women working independently, but that seems to confuse people as they don't fit into the a, b and c pigeonholes.

While there are undoubtedly a huge number of "types" in reality, the tendency tends to be to lump all in with a & b as non-consensual and something that needs to be stamped out.



I don't agree with your take on porn (although it depends on the material - a top shelf magazine is somewhat different to a hardcore DVD). There's a basic fact that guys like looking at women, and banning porn entirely won't change that. Indeed, when porn was effectively banned, back in the past due to tougher censorship laws, guys just got thrills from looking at provocative images of women who happened to be wearing skimpier clothes than normal for the day.

If a guy is turned on by porn it does not mean he sees women as something there just for sex. It's just a pretty normal biological reaction.

 

Don't get me wrong. I totally agree with you, that all allegations of sexual assault need to be referred to an independent law enforcement authority for investigation. That does not mean that all allegations are valid, or capable of being established beyond a single or competing versions. Nor does or should it pre-empt concurrent inquiries by any organization involving both alleged victim & alleged suspect, whether an employer, university, the military, social club, etc.
These problems exist in the military, where a recruit, cadet, soldier or officer can make an accusation, only to have it reviewed by military police & subject to rejection by a commanding officer!
As for universities, how would the public react if advised that when one co-worker was accused of raping another, management would either conduct the investigation itself, or feel compelled not to take any action, while an independent police investigation was in progress?
That said, I could see why Harvard may feel that the woman's allegation, no matter how stridently made, with all her subsequent problems, may still not establish it as true. AFAIK, we don't have the man's side. However, I can't fathom why HU couldn't compel the male student to relocate, instead of suggesting that the complainant move.

 

A friend of mine in graduate school needed a topic for a dissertation, and he proposed "Victorian pornography," largely because he didn't think there'd be that much of it (history dissertations take a long time to research and write). When he got to England, he made the rounds of various archives. He decided to write instead on the lives of working class people working at and living in the environs of one of the public schools in the 1850s, largely because there is an immense amount of Victorian pornography.

Just as the invention of the video cassette and the widespread availability of the internet made pornography more readily available than before, so too did the invention of the camera. Surprise, surprise.

 

Your second comment may be true, but false reports might be significant, compared with reported rapes, if each one was not treated as a rare occurrence. We normally only read about them, as a backlash from a media case that received lots of coverage. Most prominently the Duke Lacrosse case:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/news/story?id=1728226
Even though the woman recanted & admitted prostitution, the players were thrown of the team for rules violations.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/16/hofstra-rape-student-lied_n_289473.html
Amazingly, it was athletes surreptitiously, if not illegally, recording the latter two incidents, which revealed the false allegations, as AFAIK the victims only recanted when shown the video or advised of its existence.
The only reason we know about these false accusations, is that the initial reports & arrests made national news. Note the NYPost headline in this blog, "Smeared For Life":
http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/p/lamb-to-slaughter-hofstra-false-rape.html
A Slate article followed the Hofstra case & mentions an 8% "unfounded" rate, in a 1997 DOJ report of all reported sexual assaults in 1995:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...9/10/how_often_do_women_falsely_cry_rape.html
Here's a wiki page linking many official reports:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape
and links to perhaps the most infamous case:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tawana_Brawley_rape_allegations

 

As I wrote, people love lurid rather than reality. The vast majority answer is d), women who chose the occupation because it pays well.

From Wiki and originally The Guardian -

55 police forces. Nearly 10 million pounds. Zero cases found. Not that evidence matters with this topic. People gonna believe what they wish to believe.

As for a), I have no idea but obviously Belle du Jour wasn't one of those. As for c), that of course would be 1 in 1,000, or something like that. Celebrities visiting expensive S&M clubs aren't exactly typical customers. They make the news though.

 

http://www.fbi.gov/newhaven/press-r...utm_source=fbi-in-the-news&utm_content=303170
http://www.fbi.gov/minneapolis/pres...utm_source=fbi-in-the-news&utm_content=303170
http://www.fbi.gov/stlouis/press-re...utm_source=fbi-in-the-news&utm_content=303170
http://www.fbi.gov/washingtondc/pre...utm_source=fbi-in-the-news&utm_content=303937
http://www.fbi.gov/sanantonio/press...utm_source=fbi-in-the-news&utm_content=305569
http://www.fbi.gov/stlouis/press-re...utm_source=fbi-in-the-news&utm_content=305832
http://www.fbi.gov/albany/press-rel...utm_source=fbi-in-the-news&utm_content=305972
http://www.fbi.gov/minneapolis/pres...utm_source=fbi-in-the-news&utm_content=306901
http://www.fbi.gov/kansascity/press...utm_source=fbi-in-the-news&utm_content=307684
http://www.fbi.gov/newark/press-rel...utm_source=fbi-in-the-news&utm_content=307791

 

Fascinating what evidence you can find to back up your beliefs when your beliefs are rooted in reality, isn't it?

 

Everything Brummie just said is bullshit.

 

FBI statement:
http://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/i...ce=congressional-testimony&utm_content=308870