rape

NBC Sports Blog Lifts Steel Curtain on ESPN’s Roethlisberger Rape Embargo

by matttbastard

If only the GENERAL mainstream media establishment would go after each other with this kind of righteous gusto when warranted — as is DEFINITELY the case here:

“We really don’t want our coverage of the civil lawsuit filed against Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger to become an exercise in the bashing of ESPN.  We’ve got some friends who work there (maybe not as many after today), and we don’t generally believe that the network is evil or corrupt or otherwise nasty.

“However, we do believe that the network is way too large for its own good, and that unless and until a true competitor emerges, it’s up to everyone else to point out those occasions when the emperor is riding both bareback and bareassed.

“The handling of the Roethlisberger case makes us wonder whether there’s a complete firewall between the business functions of ESPN and its journalistic activities.  We say this because we’re convinced that the Roethlisberger story initially was ignored due to concerns that ESPN would be jeopardizing its access to the two-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback, who also happens to play for the team with the most loyal and rabid fan base in America.“

The entire post is a must-read, take-no-prisoners smackdown that shows ESPN to indeed “be riding both barebacked and bareassed” (first uncovered by NBC Sports here). And it would seem that the spanking has made an impact, as ProFootballTalk reports in an update:

Technically, ESPN is now acknowledging the report, albeit unwittingly.  As of this posting, the “Top Stories From ABC News” box on ESPN.com’s various pages includes the headline, “Woman:  Super Bowl QB Raped Me.”

Again, if only…

h/t WAM! co-founder & Yes Means Yes co-editor Jaclyn Friedman

(Her take on the Roethlisberger rape suit and ESPN’s initial refusal to cover the story here)

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On the DRC and Rape as a Weapon of War

by matttbastard

François Grignon of the International Crisis Group on the ongoing rape epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where “[t]ens of thousands of women and children were raped in the region last year alone”:

Panzi Hospital in the town of Bukavu in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo specialises in the care of rape victims. Although Panzi has 350 beds, it must send many women home before they have fully recovered because of the never-ending stream of new patients arriving for treatment.

Panzi is emblematic of the catastrophic toll sexual violence has inflicted on the people of eastern Congo over the past decade. The non-governmental organization Medecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) has reported that 75 percent of all the rape cases it dealt with worldwide were in the eastern Congo. A census by UNICEF and related medical centres reported treatment of 18,505 persons for sexual violence in the first 10 months of 2008, 30 percent of whom were children. This year, the situation deteriorated further still, with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reporting a huge surge in sexual violence and rape in eastern Congo.

Reported cases represent only a fraction of the total — a vast number of cases go unreported. Women fear that they will lose all prospects for marriage or that their husbands will abandon them if they acknowledge they have been raped. In other cases, the threat of retribution — coupled with the near certainty that the perpetrators will never be held accountable — discourages women from stepping forward.

Most of the warring parties of the conflict in eastern Congo, including the Congolese Army, Rwandan Hutu rebels, and Congolese Tutsi rebels, have used rape as a weapon of war. Moreover, rape has become ingrained in Congolese civilian society and is widely used to determine power relations. Men and teenagers rape not only women and girls of all ages, but also other males. An estimated 90 percent of minors in prison in eastern Congo have been convicted of rape, according to the non-governmental North Kivu Provincial Subcommission on Sexual Violence.

[…]

The UN’s launch on April 1, 2009 of an overall strategy for combating sexual violence in the Congo was a welcome step. But this strategy and other recommendations for justice reform and for preventing sexual violence will be empty words in the absence of robust engagement at all levels of the Congolese civilian and military hierarchy.

As they say, read the whole damn thing.

Related: See the ICG report ‘Congo: Five Priorities for a Peacebuilding Strategy‘

Update 06.13: Jesurgislac, bumped from comments:

Just as a followup: Abortion is completely illegal in the DRC (though Doctors Without Borders provide abortion to women who have been raped) and it is this combination, of war rape with denial of legal abortion and often denial of treatment following an illegal abortion, that led to Amnesty International adopting the position that access to abortion and follow-up health care is a human rights issue, even if they only support access after rape.

This aspect of rape in the Congo is generally ignored by most articles on the topic. Therefore I mention it.

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Nothing’s Shocking

by matttbastard

Hey, remember the Scott Beauchamp teapot tempest? Well, reality (what with its inherent liberal bias) has provided an ironic (if tragic) coda to the tedious saga of manufactured wingnut outrage:

A senior enlisted Army soldier was convicted on Wednesday of killing four handcuffed and blindfolded Iraqi men with pistol shots to the backs of their heads shortly after arresting them in Baghdad two years ago, The Associated Press reported.

A military jury in Germany, where his unit is deployed, found the soldier, Master Sgt. John E. Hatley, guilty of premeditated murder in the deaths of the men, whom he and several other members of his unit had detained after a firefight with insurgents in Baghdad in spring 2007, according to testimony in the case.

Who is Master Sgt. John E. Hatley? Attaturk has the 411:

If you cannot place the name, Master Sgt. Hatley was the direct superior of Pvt. Scott Beauchamp and the person most used to discredit (along with the gay porn star) the New Republic diary of the life of a soldier in Iraq and the ways they dealt with the pressures of Operation Clusterfuck.

Stars and Stripes gives more details of what the NCO who, in a moment of bold understatement, claimed to be “no angel” did to earn his conviction:

Capt. John Riesenberg, assistant government trial counsel, told the jury that their sentence should be aimed at stopping other first sergeants and soldiers from doing what the Company A soldiers did.

“Send a message to the world that this is an army that recognizes that it is different, that American soldiers just don’t do this. They don’t execute detainees in the middle of the night by shooting them in the back of the head when they are bound and blindfolded and dump their bodies in a canal,” he said.

The killings occurred in March or April of 2007.

It was Hatley’s idea to kill the detainees, Riesenberg said.

“A first sergeant in the U.S. Army came up with the idea to commit a brutal execution-style murder of detainees and he did it with his own men. He failed them, the Army, the Iraqi people and the American war effort,” Riesenberg said.

Except some American soldiers quite obviously do “execute detainees in the middle of the night by shooting them in the back of the head when they are bound and blindfolded and dump their bodies in a canal,” along with many other casual atrocities that get swept into the dustbin of history; such uncomfortable facts may not fit with the illusory narrative of duty, honour and exceptional virtue, but they DO occur, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise.

Yeah, well, wevs–at least there still isn’t concrete proof that they ran over any dogs.

As John Cole acidly notes, “That isn’t SOP.”

Related: More things that soldiers “just don’t do”: Heather Benedict on how women serving on the frontlines face the threat of sexual violence–from their fellow troops.

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Stepping Away From the Dick-Snark

by matttbastard

D-Day:

There’s a top-rated diary on Daily Kos right now entitled Dennis Prager Endorses Marital Rape. Somebody explain to me how the CIA isn’t doing functionally the same thing.

Also make sure to check out Echidne and my CFLF co-blogger Kathy for more on the women whose concerns (which, it should be noted, were not broached even in a cursory manner by the Washington Post) have almost been universally silenced by the disturbingly jovial snickering (in hindsight, yours truly is, unfortunately, not innocent in this regard, either).

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Double Standards Masquerading as Mitigating Circumstances

by matttbastard

I ain’t got nuthin but yet another highball of WTF on the rocks for this one:

The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority was under pressure today to give full payouts to at least 14 rape victims who had their awards cut because they had been drinking when they were attacked.

Justice minister Bridget Prentice called on the body to automatically review cases where women had been told their alcohol consumption had contributed to their fate, insisting it was not government policy to blame victims and the guidelines had been wrong applied.

Vera Baird, the solicitor general, also issued a rebuke to the authority. “It is vital CICA understand that women are not responsible for men’s criminality because they have a drink or for any other reason,” she said.

“Nobody would suggest that if someone’s wallet was stolen after having a drink then their compensation should be reduced.”

h/t Debra @ BnR

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PSA: Day of Blogs 2008

by matttbastard

Cara of The Curvature and Feministe is participating in today’s Day of Blogs blogathon. RAINN is the very worthy organization that is benefiting from her tireless efforts.  Go check it out–Cara will be updating every 30 minutes until 9am EDT Sunday morning.

(Full list of participants here.)

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Homeland Insecurity in the US Dividing Refugee Families

by matttbastard

Steve Lannen of the Lexington Herald-Leader reports on the unintended consequences of so-called ‘material support’ provisions contained within the Patriot Act:

Losi Grodya works two jobs, has a driver’s license, is working on a community college degree and is readying to take her U.S. citizenship exam.

Despite all she has accomplished since settling in Lexington as a refugee from her native Democratic Republic of Congo nearly six years ago, she feels helpless when she talks on the phone with her daughters. Their home has been a Rwandan refugee camp for the past four years.

”They ask me when they are coming. Why is it taking so long? They tell me since I am in America, I must be able to do something to get them to come, but I’ve tried everything I can,“ Grodya said. ”I just want them to come here so we can all be together again. … But I can’t even do that.“

Her daughters, who as of late January were approved by U.S. officials to join her in Lexington as refugees, have seen their cases caught up in a post-9/11 provision in the Patriot Act that bars people from entering the United States if suspected of aiding a terrorist group.

[…]

After months of delay, Grodya learned last week that her daughters are suspected of providing material support to a terrorist group. But she doesn’t know precisely what they are suspected of doing.

Grodya’s five daughters have shared stories not of complicity, but of kidnapping and rape in a country torn apart by decadelong conflict, she said. She fears they have not told her the worst, but that what they have said ”is now being turned against them.“

Unfortunately, because it wasn’t published in the New York Times or the Washington Post, the story of Losi Grodya–and the broader issue underlying her plight–likely won’t get the attention it deserves. But hopefully a little blogospheric momentum will help broaden its impact. So, please, read the whole thing, blog about it, pass it along to your friends, your colleagues, and (if you’re one of our American readers) your Congresscritters.

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Insufficient Evidence to Prove a Negative

by matttbastard

Via Polly Jones, the ultimate judicial Catch-22–drunk teen rape “sex” not a crime: Justice Peter McIntyre claims victim was too drunk to prove she didn’t consent:

Having sex with a drunken 14-year-old he had plied with alcohol was not a criminal offence by former Calgary man, a judge ruled yesterday.

Justice Peter McIntyre said there was insufficient evidence the girl didn’t consent to having sex with Trevor Byron Niebergall.

But McIntyre did find Niebergall guilty of sexual assault for placing his genitals on the girl’s face after she passed out — an act the offender captured on his cellphone camera and showed to co-workers.

McIntyre said the fact the teenage complainant didn’t remember her sexual encounter with Niebergall at a December 2005 New Year’s Eve party did not mean she hadn’t consented.

He noted one witness said she appeared to have the capacity to consent when she and Niebergall went to a washroom in his brother’s apartment, where they had sex. And the Queen’s Bench judge said the girl willingly consumed large amounts of alcohol supplied by Niebergall even after he made lewd sexual comments.

[…]

“The accused’s lewd comments towards her did not compel her to leave,” the judge said. “The complainant was not forced to consume alcohol — she drank … beer willingly and then switched to alcohol. It is not at all clear why she drank so heavily.”

[…]

McIntyre said because the girl drank so heavily and had little recollection of events at the party, he could not accept her claim she didn’t agree to have sex.

“Her evidence was not reliable after she started drinking,” he said

I have much more to say about this at Shakesville.

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Quote of the Day: “So why did the other fucker?”

by matttbastard

Cos, right – here’s a radical thing – if you get raped, it’s the man’s fault. A man fucks you without your consent – that’s not porn’s fault, that’s not your top’s fault, that’s not your skirt’s fault, that’s not a prostitute’s fault. It’s the man’s fault. Cos he’s a scumbag. And some men are scumbags and some men will do that to you and they deserve to have their fucking bollocks cut off. And he can blame your top, your skirt, the porn, his bitch mam, that prostitute or whatever, but the fact is, you’ve probably walked past a million men wearing your skirt and top and those men who’ve looked at you and thought, “Wow!” watch porn, have dreadful mothers, live in a society where prostitution actually happens and think that that top you’re wearing makes you look like Mz Berlin or Darenzia or Marilyn Monroe or whoever floats your boat. But they aren’t raping you. So why did the other fucker?

Lina, What passes for Feminism these days (h/t belledame, written in response to this post by RenEv)

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