Another day. Another outrage by the Trump administration. This time the outrage happened on the floor of the United Nations. While the attention of the American people was focused on the troubling conclusions of the Mueller investigation, the Trump administration’s U.N. delegation bullied its way to dominating the terms and diluting the intentions of what was an otherwise noble effort to prevent, treat the aftermath, and pursue justice for sexually victimized civilians in conflict zones – commonly referred to as conflict-related sexual violence.

What is conflict-related sexual violence and who are its victims?

Conflict-related sexual violence is understood to be sexual violence committed by armed actors during conflict. This type of sexual violence most often is aimed at girls and women but sometimes includes boys and men. It is often based on ethnic or political identity. A 2017 report by the U.N. secretary general called conflict-related sexual violence a global epidemic employed as a systematic tactic of warfare, intimidation, terrorism, and torture that destroys the social fabric of communities.

The list of recent conflicts in which documented cases of conflict-related sexual violence have commonly been employed as intimidation tactics spans the continents. Afghanistan, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Colombia, Darfur, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Myanmar, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, and Yemen are just some of the places where hundreds of thousands of non-combatants have been systematically brutalized and traumatized.

What just happened at the United Nations in the name of the American people?

A decades-long, painstaking process to gather data, document survivors’ first-hand accounts, and negotiate terms for a resolution addressing conflict-related sexual violence was suddenly and unexpectedly upended by the U.S. threatening to veto the final language due to ideological concerns about implications in the resolution’s language for providing abortion services to victims of sexual violence and forced rape. 

In a particularly out-of-touch and cruel display of disregard for the suffering of victims and their need for survivor-related services, the Trump administration threatened to veto the resolution and set back years of international efforts to address the violence and suffering if the resolution contained any reference to reproductive rights. Here’s how Foreign Policy magazine described the Trump administration’s outrageous and factually dubious reasoning for the threatened veto:

“The Trump administration pressured Germany into watering down a United Nations resolution aimed at preventing rape in conflict situations, forcing it to remove language on sexual and reproductive health that key Trump administration officials say normalizes sexual activity and condones abortion, according to U.N.-based diplomats and an internal State Department cable.”

Ultimately the authors of the resolution, the German delegation, were so desperate to save what they could that they gave in to the Americans’ demands and stripped the resolution of the language on reproductive rights. On Tuesday, April 23, 2019, Resolution 2467 (2019) passed, with thirteen votes in favor, none against, and the Russian Federation and China abstaining.

Following the vote, it was reported that one diplomat observed that the resolution had been “reduced so much that it’s now inadequate and there isn’t much left.” In a joint statement, four countries–-Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—dared to speak out against what they saw as “the lack of reference to victims’ rights due to the threat of a U.S. veto.” A French diplomat didn’t bother to hide the scorn shared by a majority of the international community when condemning the American tactics. “The Americans have taken negotiations hostage based on their own ideology. It’s scandalous.”

I suppose most Americans will never hear about what just happened at the United Nations. They probably will never hear about the continued suffering of millions of victims of conflict-related sexual violence in places too far away to pay attention to, nor understand how the Trump administration, with its penchant for ignoring the suffering its policies inflict, forced the international community to back down from their well-intentioned efforts to address the victims’ suffering. Once again—in our name—the Trump administration brought shame upon this country on the international stage.

The video below, produced by the U.N. Departments of Peacekeeping Operations and Field Support, documents the staggering scale of conflict-related sexual violence and explains how this brutality rises to the definition of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or acts of torture or genocide.

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I recently administered a survey to a group of students at Truman University on the topic of sexual assault. The results showed that most students didn’t believe male rape was an issue and most thought less than 10% of victims were men.

These individuals would be shocked to learn that 38% of rape victims are actually male, according to a recently released study by the National Crime Victimization Survey. The Bureau of Justice Statistics examined the results after some scrutiny at how large the statistic seemed to be. However, much to everyone’s surprise, the bureau found no error in the study. Society’s attitude towards male sexual assault victims is shifting. In 2012, the FBI changed the definition of rape to include male victims. Before 2012, forced penetration was not acknowledged as rape. However, educating the public on the realities of sexual assault is a long process, and little progress seems to be made. Many people refuse to believe that a man can even be raped.

As a feminist and a proponent of human rights, I’m very troubled by the trend of assuming only women experience sexual assault. Every year, 19-31% of college men receive some form of unwanted sexual contact, and perpetrators are typically female. We’re predisposed to think of sexual assault as a male-on-female crime and tend to discredit any crime that doesn’t fit our preconceived definition of what constitutes as rape. Female perpetrators often have significantly lighter sentences, and male victims rarely step forward. Rape is the most underreported crime in America, and male victims are the least likely to report it. The perfect crime is the one that nobody hears about, and unfortunately, male sexual assault fits in that category all too often. Victims are typically gay and/or non-Caucasian.

The demographic most at risk for male rape is young, African-American homosexual males, although individuals of all demographics are affected. Male rape can be a form of gay bashing and needs to be recognized as a serious issue.

We need to radically change the way we think about rape. Rape is too often categorized as sex-driven crime. However, it has nothing to do with gender or sex-drive. Many rapists report that the gender of their victim is inconsequential. Rape is a crime of power and control.

If we stop labeling rape as a male-on-female crime, we can also avoid the issue of victim blaming. Female victims are often asked what they were wearing at the time of the incident, if their sexuality as a woman was pronounced, etc. Male victims are never asked what they were wearing when they were raped.

It’s evident that gender has little to do with victimization in the case of sexual assault. Genderizing the crime paints women as weak and men as insatiable, two false stereotypes.

Male victims of sexual assault are a minority. But ignoring their experience only encourages the perpetration of crime and does nothing to encourage solutions. A big reason why male victims tend not to report their rapist is because they feel isolated by the crime. This is largely due to the lack of awareness surrounding male sexual assault. The most important thing we can do to encourage an atmosphere of inclusiveness and healing is to raise awareness on the issue of male sexual assault instead of ignoring it. Acknowledging the experience of male rape victims will help change the way we view sexual assault as a whole and help stop the unnecessary genderization of the crime, which hurts both men and women.

Only rapists can prevent rape and stopping rapists from pursuing crime starts by shedding light on it instead of sweeping it under the rug. Rape is not about gender, and recognizing that will help us better understand how to solve it.

The post Men get raped, too, but no one talks about it appeared first on Occasional Planet.

We all know rape isn’t funny. Obviously, it’s a very serious subject. Obviously. It can cause serious, irreversible permanent physical and psychological damage. So why would anyone think rape is funny?

Rape jokes, though–those are something completely different, right? Everybody knows they’re just jokes. Nobody ever means anything by them, and it’s only overly-sensitive people who would protest against something so harmless as a little joke. Am I right? I mean it can’t hurt anyone, right? And male rape gets the brunt of the jokes because it’s the funniest, right? Rape jokes are funny even though rape isn’t… Right?

Wrong. Rape isn’t funny, and that means rape jokes aren’t funny. Call me sensitive if you wish, but It’s. Not. Funny. Ever. And male rape–domestic violence and all–is even less funny because. for whatever pathetic reason, we have so many double standards that we as a society take it upon ourselves to strip the victim of an assault of his perception as masculine. Somehow, shaming victim-blaming has not set in when dealing with male victims.

I saw this video on rape jokes and male rape; it sparked me to read more about something I was largely unfamiliar with. I did not realize that, while male rape isn’t really men getting jumped in an alley (although rape against women usually isn’t either), being taken advantage of is equally traumatic. I found that joining the military increases the chances of males being raped by nearly 100 times, and that the response to military sexual assault is often “Son, men don’t get raped.” I found that what we think would be legally and morally impermissible to happen against a female rape victim is far from unusual for male victims.

USA Today ran an article on male rape and double standards, and I encourage you to read more than this summary excerpt:

“…Courts hold boys responsible for the consequences of being raped. In a case involving a 15-year-old California boy raped by a 34-year-old woman who gave birth in 1995, the courts declared, “Victims have rights. Here, the victim also has responsibilities.”

In Kansas, the courts said the same thing about a 13-year-old boy raped by his 17-year-old babysitter. In Ohio, courts have ordered child support in a case involving a 15-year-old boy and a 19-year-old woman. Sexual abuse of men and boys by women is far from unheard of. In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 5 million men and boys have been “forced to penetrate” and that 80 percent of the perpetrators were women.

Male victims of statutory rape are thought of as culpable for child support because, as males, they are not seen as victims, but always as perpetrators of sex, no matter how young. After all, they were asking for it and should have kept their pants zipped. Isn’t this what we used to say about female victims of sexual abuse?”

The post Male rape: Not funny appeared first on Occasional Planet.

You know how right-wingers really, really want to be viewed as victims? It seems to be a twisted variant on the old adage that the best offense is a defense. The claim is usually brought up to justify offensive behavior like the claim that offering a full healthcare package to your employees would constitute religious persecution since women might collude with their doctors to get contraception that not only encourages what these folks think of as immoral behavior, but might kill a zygote. We all know the drill by now.

Todd Akin, the former congressman from Missouri’s second district, used to excel at this game; his last legislative effort in the House was a classic example of the “if you don’t let me misbehave, you’re persecuting me” gambit. He offered an amendment to the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act that would have permitted abusive and discriminatory behavior on the part of servicemen and women toward their LGBT colleagues. He claimed that since hostility toward LGBT individuals is often based on religious beliefs, prohibiting its expression amounts to religious persecution. I guess that nobody ever explained to Akin that professional standards of civility make today’s diverse military workplace better for everyone – even the religious fanatics whose fanaticism is never, ever under assault just because they are encouraged to act like part of the team at work.

News from TPM is that Akin has given an interview in which he continues to try to vindicate himself after his laughable “legitimate rape” gaffe. What better way than to go the victim route, particularly if he can claim an equivalence to someone really important like Hillary Clinton. Seems that Akin thinks that Clinton deserves the same hold-your-nose treatment that he got because, in the course of her career as a lawyer, she defended a child sex-offender and, as she was legally bound to do, did her best to get him off. Nor did she come to the defence of the women the righwing hauled out to accuse her husband during his sex scandal, for which Akin accuses her of being anti-woman. I don’t remember that Clinton was accused of rape or any real sexual crimes – just fibbing about consensual sex and propositioning staff. Tacky stuff, but not the kind of thing that would inspire the wronged wife to come to the defence of the “other” women. But still, the fact that she isn’t being pilloried from the left must, in Akin’s world view, mean that he is the victim of bias and he really wants to whine about the injustice of it all.

Akin is not the only conservative who is confused about how our law system works. Another recent example has been the outrage sparked by Obama’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Debo Adegbile, who like Clinton, had the gall to do what a defence lawyer does: uphold that pillar of our law that entitles all individuals accused of a crime to as good a defence as possible. Conservatives, in general, seem to have real problems with the nature of judicial process as opposed to moral judgement, and rarely seem to grasp the moral nature of the obligation that demands that lawyers carefully separate personal emotions and beliefs from the process of fulfilling their vital role in that process.

So is there parity between Clinton and Akin that we need to acknowledge? Clinton did a job of work and, as an ethical professional, she did her duty towards her client – just as the prosecutors tried to do the best job that they could do to represent the interests of the victim. That’s the way it works in the U.S. Akin, on the other hand, simply made a few dunderheaded public statements that revealed his real beliefs about women and sexuality. Lots of women heard Akin expressing these beliefs and, along with most educated, civilized folks, were so appalled that they put him out of office.

What’s worse, Akin gives every sign that, despite the opportunity to learn from his errors, he still holds fast to the beliefs that got him into trouble:

“My comment about a woman’s body shutting the pregnancy down, was directed to the impact of stress on fertilization,” Akin writes, as quoted by the Daily Mail. “This is something fertility doctors debate and discuss. Doubt me? Google ‘stress and fertilization,’ and you will find a library of research on the subject.”
“The research is not conclusive, but there is considerable evidence that stress makes conception more difficult,” he continues. “And what could be more stressful than a rape?”

Reassuring to know that a lawmaker in the federal government looks so uncritically to Google for information. And that he then can’t even manage to understand the better articles. I performed the search he prescribes and learned that, overall, researchers do say that ongoing, systematic stress affects fertility over time – but not necessarily fertilization. And the key seems to be the systematic nature of the stress as opposed to a single traumatic event like rape. And even these possible relationships are not well understood.

So not only is Akin consistently wrongheaded, in his quest to deny the right to rape victims – and, ultimately, other women – to control their own bodies, he was and presumably is still willing to use political power to write laws that would widely promulgate such wrongheadedness. In contrast Hillary Clinton only conformed to her legal and moral obligation to do her job and represent a client to the best of her abilities. And if you’re still obsessing about Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes, she may have helped defend his presidency from individuals willing – or coerced – to kiss and tell.

Maybe it’s time for Akin to accept the inevitable and stop bleating about how he’s been wronged. Somewhere down the line he’s going to have accept the fact that “Akin” has become the byword for the backward Republican approach to women and reproductive issues. No matter how many books he writes this won’t change. Apparently, given the tone of this latest interview, there’s also no chance of humility or intellectual growth on the part of the out-of-work politician.

The post Todd Akin is back, whining and doubling down on “legitimate rape” appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s hard enough to come to terms with sexual assault—the inevitable cycle of self-blame, self-loathing, abhorrence for the attacker, fear and paranoia, nagging doubts, and plenty of misery—without having longtime Washington Post columnist George Will (or others like him) proclaim that being a sexual assault survivor is actually a coveted title because it comes with “privileges.”

In a column on June 6, Will accused the “epidemic of rape” of being a result of “hookup culture” and a “cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults” and therefore not an epidemic of sexual assault, but of “sexual assault” (his quotation marks, not mine). Will continues by condemning the Obama administration for propagating what he considers the false statistic that 20 percent of women are sexually assaulted in college, and only 12 percent are reported. (He claims that the two statistics cannot coexist). He thus concludes these statistics are a result of overzealous claims of sexual assault that aren’t actually assault (he claims that, without a “preponderance of evidence” suggesting “forcible sexual penetration,” it is not assault) but just trumped up charges based on “nonconsensual touching.”.

Will focuses his invective on instances of campus rape and claims that new policies are “begetting the soft censorship of trigger warnings to swaddle students in a ‘safe,’ ‘supportive,’ ‘unthreatening’ environment, intellectual comfort for the intellectually dormant.”

He concludes by saying that the Obama administration and the academic system are using campus rape as a straw man—fixing a problem that’s not actually there:

Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses — by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations — brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates. What government is inflicting on colleges and universities, and what they are inflicting on themselves, diminishes their autonomy, resources, prestige and comity. Which serves them right. They have asked for this by asking for progressivism.

Will concludes that ”victimhood [is] a coveted status that confers privileges.”

Will focuses almost entirely on campus rape, so I will too, as I muddle through. In countless stories of campus rapes, the horrors don’t end when the rape does: They continue through the insinuating questioning of the victim (what were you wearing? were you drinking? what did you say?) and detailed recounting of the rape (over and over and over again), and the inevitable stigma of being the one who cried rape, the one who was too weak to fight back, the one who used rape as an excuse to cover up indiscretions, the one who secretly wanted it but won’t admit it, the one who might accuse you of rape if you get on her bad side. And then there’s the ever-present threat of STDs or pregnancy. Yup, privileges.

If you don’t believe me, see this very personal and moving story proving just how very wrong Will is: I was raped and I stayed silent about my coveted status.

The post George Will is so wrong about rape appeared first on Occasional Planet.

As I scrolled through the morning news, I noticed that a new Miss USA had been crowned last night. Curious, I clicked the link to read more about Nia Sanchez, the winner of the 2014 title. I was happy to see that the winner was a minority and that she was was a tae kwondo fourth-degree black belt. However, I found her position on sexual assault very troubling and evident of the rape culture that pervades our society.

As a solution to campus rape, Miss USA suggested that women should learn to defend themselves. This implies that women get raped because they’re weak and that they get assaulted because they “failed” in a sense. The idea that you can solve rape through self defense shifts the responsibility onto the victim. It asserts that instead of teaching people not to be criminals, we should teach the target that it’s their job not to get raped.

Miss USA, when you told millions of young women across the country that they need to “take it upon themselves” to solve the problem, you were promoting the rape culture. You’re teaching little girls that it’s their job to prevent a crime they have no control over. You’re teaching the victim that the reason they were assaulted was because they couldn’t defend themselves, that they weren’t “enough.”

We don’t solve rape by “fixing” women. We solve rape by teaching people not to be rapists. I’m tired of being told that my wardrobe will “cause” rape. I’m tired of being told that my sex organs will “cause” rape. I’m tired of being told that my femininity will “cause” rape. Only rapists can “cause” rape.

It’s never the victim’s fault. Promoting self defense just shows how inherently backwards our country is when dealing with this problem. We should be promoting basic human respect for one another instead of making the victim responsible for the crime.
That being said, it’s time to stop assuming that only women get raped. Many rape victims are actually male, but because society has branded rape a man-on-woman crime, many men feel too ashamed to come forward. They too, feel that they have “failed” and that their rape is a result of their “weakness” or inability to defend themselves. And so we push the problem even further under the rug.

There’s nothing wrong with making people stronger and empowering them. In fact, that should be encouraged. But when we teach victims to solve a crime of which they are not the perpetrator, we’re participating in victim blaming. And that, Miss USA, is the cornerstone of rape culture.

The post Miss USA and the rape culture appeared first on Occasional Planet.

“Rape is a horrific crime, and rapists are despised”…. supposedly. Hopefully, that line causes you some outrage—a little indignation. If it didn’t, well, then, case in point.

The problem is that we pay a lot of lip service to how abhorrent rape is, however we as a society have a tendency to systematically treat it with levity, if we don’t just sweep it under the proverbial rug. Rape pervades the music we enjoy, the jokes we laugh at, the media entertainment we enjoy, everything. And we don’t even notice it anymore. What could be stronger evidence than our general desensitization to the atrocities of rape?

Defining rape culture

According to the Marshall University Women’s Center, “Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture.” By definition, we live in a rape culture society.

Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women’s rights and safety. Rape culture affects every woman.  The rape of one woman is a degradation, terror, and limitation to all women. Most women and girls limit their behavior because of the existence of rape. Most women and girls live in fear of rape. Men, in general, do not. That’s how rape functions as a powerful means by which the whole female population is held in a subordinate position to the whole male population, even though many men don’t rape, and many women are never victims of rape. This cycle of fear is the legacy of rape culture.

Convinced yet? Zerlina Maxwell asked in her TIME magazine article:

Is 1 in 5 American women surviving rape or attempted rape considered a cultural norm? Is 1 in 6 men being abused before the age of 18 a cultural norm? These statistics are not just shocking, they represent real people. Yet, these millions of survivors and allies don’t raise their collective voices to educate America about our culture of rape because of fear. Rape culture is a real and serious, and we need to talk about it. Simply put, feminists want equality for everyone, and that begins with physical safety.

Consider this, too. According to an analysis by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), 97% of rapists never spend a single day in jail for their crimes. But statistics take the emotion out of the heart-wrenching facts. So, Maxwell also detailed her own tragic encounter with rape and rape culture.

“You were drinking, what did you expect?”

Those were the first words that I heard when I went to someone I trusted for support after my roommate’s boyfriend raped me eight years ago. When I came forward to report what happened, instead of support, many well-meaning people close to me asked me questions about what I was wearing, if I had done something to cause the assault, or if I had been drinking. These questions about my choices the night of my assault — as opposed to the choices made by my rapist — were in some ways as painful as the violent act itself. I had stumbled upon rape culture: a culture in which sexual violence is the norm and victims are blamed for their own assaults.

“Victims are blamed for their own assaults.” I initially found that hard to believe, too. We are an intelligent, well-developed, civilized society; we would never blame the victim, right?

Wrong.

Voices of rape culture

●       The cold, foggy weather is like a rape, and ”if it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.” -Clayton Williams, Texas gubernatorial nominee (March 1990)

●       “I would hope that when a woman goes into a physician [for an abortion], with a rape issue, that that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage, or was it truly caused by rape.”-Chuck Winder, Idaho candidate for US Senate (March 2012)

●       “It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, [pregnancies from rape are] really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” -Todd Akin, Missouri Senate (March 2012)

●       “I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”  –Richard Mourdock, Indiana candidate for the U.S. Senate (Oct. 2012)

●        “Some girls rape easy” -Roger Rivard, a state representative in Wisconsin (Oct. 2012)

●       Rape is just “another method of conception.” -Paul Ryan (January 2013)

There are more, but I can’t go on. It’s too repulsive. Consider this, though: If our politicians, representatives of us and of our country, make these “speech errors,” even after careful pruning and refining their every word, what about the rest of us?

Pardon another rant against Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” but rape victims themselves call the lyrics of the song “from the mouths of rapists.” That’s right. The blockbuster song exemplifies rapes. Please check out the link, and then delete the song from your playlists if you can.

Think about Law and Order SVU. Granted, it’s nice to see the bad guys get caught and thrown behind bars, but it gives us the misconception that a) rape only happens to women b) rapists are usually strangers c) rapists don’t wander our streets, because rapists get caught, and rapists get convicted.The fact that we are so disillusioned and so very desensitized to rape lends credence to the fact that we do live in a rape culture, no matter how much we hate to believe it.

Rape culture is when…

Maxwell created a Twitter hashtag #RapeCultureIsWhen to “spark a public dialogue about rape culture and shift the conversation away from the myths that shame so many survivors into silence. This conversation is meant to be a tool to educate people about what rape culture is, how to spot it, and how to combat it…. The following statements are made up of contributions to the #RapeCultureIsWhen hashtag, as well as the myriad personal stories of survivors with the courage to speak out:”

Rape culture is when women who come forward are questioned about what they were wearing.

Rape culture is when survivors who come forward are asked, “Were you drinking?”

Rape culture is when people say, “She was asking for it.”

Rape culture is when the mainstream media mourns the end of the convicted Steubenville rapists’ football careers and does not mention the young girl who was victimized.

Rape culture is when cyberbullies take pictures of sexual assaults and harass their victims online after the fact, which in the cases of Audrie Pott and Rehtaeh Parsons tragically ended in their suicides.

Rape culture is when, in 31 states, rapists can legally sue for child custody, if the rape results in pregnancy.

Rape culture is when college campus advisers tasked with supporting the student body, shame survivors who report their rapes. (Annie Clark, a campus activist, says an administrator at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill told her when she reported her rape, “Well… Rape is like football, if you look back on the game, and you’re the quarterback, Annie… is there anything you would have done differently?”)

Rape culture is when colleges are more concerned with getting sued by assailants than by supporting survivors. (Or at Occidental College, where students and administrators who advocated for survivors were terrorized for speaking out against the school’s insufficient reporting procedures.)

Maxwell advises that we stop teaching women how “not to get raped” and start teaching men not to rape. Because that’s rape culture.

The Marshall University Women’s Center similarly includes these societal norms as examples of rape culture:

●       Blaming the victim (“She asked for it!”)

●       Trivializing sexual assault (“Boys will be boys!”)

●       Sexually explicit jokes (“Don’t drop the soap!”)

●       Tolerance of sexual harassment

●       Inflating false rape report statistics

●       Publicly scrutinizing a victim’s dress, mental state, motives, and history

●       Gratuitous gender violence in movies and television

●       Defining “manhood” as dominant and sexually aggressive

●       Defining “womanhood” as submissive and sexually passive

●       Pressure on men to “score”

●       Assuming that only promiscuous women get raped

●       Assuming that men don’t get raped, or that only “weak” men get raped

●       Refusing to take rape accusations seriously . A new study suggests thatpolice systematically undercount rape reports.

Combating rape culture

●       Avoid using language that objectifies or degrades women

●       Speak out if you hear someone else making an offensive joke or trivializing rape

●       If a friend says she has been raped, take her seriously and be supportive

●       Think critically about the media’s messages about women, men, relationships, and violence

●       Be respectful of others’ physical space even in casual situations

●       Always communicate with sexual partners, and do not assume consent

●       Define your own manhood or womanhood.  Do not let stereotypes shape your actions.

●       Get involved! Join a student or community group working to end violence against women.

The post Rape culture: Defining it, acknowledging it, working to end it appeared first on Occasional Planet.

“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”  U.S. Representative Todd Akin (R-MO).

“If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.” Texas gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams (R-TX), March 1990.

“I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you.” – 2012 Presidential candidate Rick Santorum (R-PA).

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, Rep. Todd Akin, and 214 other Republicans co-sponsored the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” which would prohibit federal funding of abortions except in instances of “an act of forcible rape or, if a minor, an act of incest.” (H.R. 3, 112^th Congress, January 20, 2011)

I have a friend who is one of the strongest — yet most gentle and loving — souls I have ever known. She asked me to bring you her story. She doesn’t ask for your pity. She asks only for understanding. According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, there are over 207,000 sexual assaults in the United States each year. Here is my friend’s story, in her own words.

Catherine’s story

I am a rape survivor.  I cannot speak for every rape survivor; I can only describe my own experience.  It is nothing like some of the recent politicians would like us to believe.

My name is Catherine Mary Redfern. I was 24 years old that day. I waited at the bus stop in my baggy sweats with my backpack, just having finished a long hike.  An approaching pickup truck slowed down. The driver asked me if I needed a ride. I said no. He continued down the road, then he turned around. He was out of the truck and dragging me into the bushes before I could react.

For me, this is what rape is:

It was screaming so hard and for so long for help that didn’t come.  Screaming that made me lose my voice for four days.

It was fighting so hard for myself, that when I was finally alone and could see, I saw that I had no fingernails left – just bloody nail beds where my nails had been from fighting and scratching to fight off my rapist.

It was tears running down my bloody face because I wasn’t strong enough to fight him anymore as he held me down and beat me into submission.

It was whimpering while praying as he thrust and pushed so hard against an unwilling participant, and calling on God to help me, wondering why he had abandoned me when I needed him the most.

I was raped – I did not experience the rapture of God’s intention to bless me with a child.

I was raped – it was not consensual, it was not legitimate, and my body certainly did not start working to shut down a conception process – it was too busy fighting for its own life.

I was raped – I am unable to categorize it as honest or dishonest rape.  I can categorize as violent, painful and cruel.  It was physically and psychologically scarring.

I was raped – it was unexpected; I did not ask for it; it certainly wasn’t planned.  Does that make it an emergency rape?

I was raped – for hours I fought for my life and the right to control who touches my body.  Although I lost that fight, I did not rape easy.

I was raped – I felt a lot of things when it became clear that it was inevitable.  I hated my rapist.  I hated myself.  I hated God.  There was no desire to relax, lie back and enjoy it.

Regardless of whether you are a man or a woman, if you think men and women in this country are overreacting to a few comments taken out of context, sit for a moment and think some more.  Think hard about what your real, visceral reaction would be if your wife, mother, sister or daughter called you from the hospital to tell you she had just been raped.

Unfortunately, if your wife, mother, sister, or daughter were raped, you may never have the opportunity to feel a reaction, offer comfort or give support.  You may notice some intangible change in the vitality of the woman you love, but to spare you the pain and anger of knowing what happened to her without being able to do anything about it, she may not tell you.  Even if she wanted to, she may be afraid of what her family, friends, coworkers and society would think of her — because on some level, our society still blames a woman in part for being raped.  Why else are words like “honest rape,” “legitimate rape” and “forcible rape” being tolerated as part of our lexicon about this crime? My rape was thirteen years ago. I have not yet told my parents.

I have always considered the United States to be one of the most progressive countries in the world when it comes to women’s rights.

That is why it angers me to see the word “rape” being used without thought and bandied about as a political ideological concept, rather than a word to describe a violent, abhorrent crime against women. I was raped. I am a survivor. I was fortunate enough to live in an age when I did not have to worry about bearing the child of the man who brutalized me. There are some in America who would force me to bear that child, in the name of some warped God-directed concept of respect for life

I ask you this: What god deserves worship who would “bless” a violent, soul-destroying act with an unwanted living reminder? What nation would allow a religion to write law that dehumanizes a woman into nothing but a vessel, as my rapist saw me?

I ask you this: Think of the women you love as you choose your lawmakers.

Thank you for reading my story.

The post A rape survivor tells her story. Think about it when you vote. appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Where does Todd Akin get the idea that, when she’s raped, a “woman’s body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down?”

Here’s an Akin tidbit that offers a clue.

For many years, Akin held Fourth of July picnics for supporters and friends at his family homestead in suburban St. Louis. And at those parties, he would dress up in a three-cornered hat and other colonial regalia. Akin took his colonial-themed party seriously, and so did others. According to the Washington Post,

[Akin’s church pastor] “would read from Ecclesiastes, take off his colonial robes to reveal a revolutionary military uniform and then march off with George Washington to war.”

Akin’s magic-womb theory is an idea that was floating around during America’s colonial period.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

In those days, prior to modern medical understanding of conception, women were considered to be “more amorous” than men, and it was believed that both partners needed to have orgasms in order for conception to occur.

Nicholas Culpeper’s 17th century midwife manuals espoused that it was a woman’s “womb, skipping as it were for joy” that produced “in that pang of Pleasure” the “seed” needed for conception to occur. If both husband and wife were not properly in love and enjoying sex, conception would fail, he asserted, because “the woman, being averse, does not produce sufficient quantities of the spirits with which her genitals should normally swell.”

Obviously, Todd Akin simply LOVES the colonial era and all its trappings, including, it now seems clear, its quaint and scientifically bogus ideas about women and their mystical lady parts.

The post Todd Akin’s colonial-era ideas appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Dear Congressman Akin: When a man and a woman love each other and decide that the time is right, they call the stork. Nine months later, a little bundle of joy arrives on the happy family’s doorstep. That’s how pregnancy occurs when two consenting adults engage in intercourse, right?

No, Todd Akin, that’s not how it works. Your unfounded remarks about how conception takes place are exactly the reason why politicians should not make medical decisions about a woman’s body. It is extremely disconcerting that somebody like yourself, who clearly has no knowledge about the women’s life cycle, or how pregnancy even occurs, is attempting to legislate my medical decisions.

Let’s talk sex, Mr. Akin. Each month a woman ovulates, meaning that her ovaries release an egg. For a span of approximately 24 hours, that egg, if exposed to a sperm, can be fertilized. The catch is that sperm can live up to a week in a woman’s body. So if a man and a woman have sex, and a sperm enters the womb within a week of ovulation, there is a chance that the intercourse could result in conception. That chance is the same whether the sex is consensual or not.

It would be great if our bodies had some magical emergency valve where if we didn’t want to get pregnant, we wouldn’t. That would likely result in far less abortions than any type of anti-choice legislation conservative law-makers could ever cook up.

However, the female body does not have such a safety mechanism. The stork doesn’t skip over rape victims.

More disconcerting is your bizarre notion of “legitimate” vs. “illegitimate” rape. No means no. I understand that consent can sometimes fall within a gray area, especially when drugs and alcohol are involved. However, when a man or a woman is forced to have sex, against his or her will, he or she has been raped. End of story. The question of legitimacy has no place in this discussion.

Please tell me what an illegitimate rape looks like. “I’m sorry ma’am, it doesn’t seem that you were traumatized enough to make your rape legitimate.” “I’m sorry sir, it seems that the rape you endured wasn’t violent enough to meet our strict standards of legitimacy.” Victims of violent crimes need not be further victimized by our legal system.

Now, how to proceed? I think you should apologize, and acknowledge that you did not merely misspeak but that your remark was completely divorced from fact or science. If you truly want to atone for your remarks, you should back off, and leave our vaginas to the gynecologists. No other medical decisions are legislated. If masturbation or Viagra were illegal, we’d be having a different conversation. People who do not understand the female body should not create legislation that affects it.

The post The truth about sex and pregnancy, as told to Todd Akin appeared first on Occasional Planet.