Category Archives: Posts
No Joke: College Dog Logo Empowers Rape, Student Claims
College’s Husky Dog Logo Promotes Rape, Says Student
Robby Soave
Apri 26, 2013
The new logo for the University of Connecticut’s sports teams is a terrifying husky dog that calls to mind images of sexual assault, says one student.
The new logo was unveiled last week, receiving mixed-to-negative reviews from UConn fans who preferred the older, cuter husky dog.
But one student went much further, criticizing the new, meaner logo for being a pro-rape symbol.
In an open letter to UC President Susan Herbst, self-described feminist student Carolyn Luby wrote that the redesigned team logo will intimidate women and empower rape culture.
UConn basketball coach Geno Auriemma said the logo “is looking right through you and saying, ‘Do not mess with me.’ This is a streamlined, fighting dog, and I cannot wait for it to be on our uniforms and court.”
In response, Luby wrote, “What terrifies me about the admiration of such traits is that I know what it feels like to have a real life Husky look straight through you and to feel powerless, and to wonder if even the administration cannot ‘mess with them.’ And I know I am not alone.”
There were two sexual assaults at UConn involving athletes in the past year, Luby claimed.
The logo and the teams it represents are menacing to women, she wrote.
“The face of real life UConn athletics is certainly capable of frightening college women,” wrote Luby.
Herbst did not respond to requests for comment.
Link: http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/26/colleges-husky-dog-logo-promotes-rape-says-student/#ixzz2RawkHk9H
Dartmouth Cancels Classes Following Message Board Threats
Dartmouth Cancels Classes After Anti-Rape Protesters Threatened with Sexual Assault and ‘Execution’
David Ferguson
April 24, 2013
New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College canceled classes for a day after students who participated in a protest against racism, homophobia and rape on campus were targeted with online threats. According to Boston.com, protesters were threatened with violence and death after they interrupted a Friday night assembly of hundreds of high schoolers considering enrolling at the Ivy League university.
The threats were made mainly on the message board “Bored at Baker,” a non-university-affiliated website named for Dartmouth’s Baker Library. Some anonymous posters called the protesters “terrorists,” while others said they hoped that campus police would “publicly execute” the group members.
Administrators at the college sent out an email blast Tuesday night announcing the cancelation of classes on Wednesday.
“We feel it is necessary for the community as a whole to have the opportunity to learn about all that has transpired and to discuss further action that will help us live up to our mission,” wrote interim President Carol Folt. “The decision to replace classes for a day with alternative programming is not taken lightly.”
Dartmouth spokesperson Justin Anderson said that student protesters were targeted for threats of violence because of their race or sexual orientation, and that the types of threats were especially repellent. Some he characterized as “really awful stuff, to the point that these students were concerned for their safety.”
“Threats of the nature we were seeing online are never something we can abide,” he said on Tuesday. “Because of the nature of these threats, we think what we’re doing tomorrow is crucially important.”
Instead of classes on Wednesday, students can attend a speech by a social justice and diversity specialist, as well as an outdoor gathering and facilitated discussions hosted by faculty and staff members on campus.
Anderson told Boston.com that while it is unusual for the university to cancel classes, it is not without precedent. Classes were canceled in the 1980s to protest apartheid in South Africa.
Prudie Counsels Teenager Whose Older SIL Tried to Seduce Him
Prudie Counsels a Teenager Whose Sister-in-Law Tried to Seduce him—Then Lied about It
Emily Yoffe
April 23, 2013
Q. SIL Hit On Me: My older brother (by 10 years) is married with a 2-year-old daughter. I am a senior in high school. Last week, I baby-sat for them (as I often do) from when school ended until my SIL came home from work. We always have had a fun friendship, I think she and my brother are a great couple, and I have repeatedly joked about how my brother outkicked his coverage and I hope I am so lucky some day. We joke, it’s flirty but harmless, or so I thought. But she walked in last week, sat next to me on the couch, grabbed my hand, put it on a non-gender-neutral area and told me she had to have me right there. I freaked out and walked out. I called my brother and left a message, but his wife had already spun a whole different story, and now my whole family believes I am at fault. Nobody believes my version. Other than waiting until fall to go to college and get away from the madness, any tips to cope?
A: Your brother outkicked his coverage all right, right into the depravity zone. In the years I’ve done this column I’ve had every variation of family-member violation including son-in-law coming onto mother-in-law and daughter running off with stepfather. It’s grotesque when siblings-in-law voluntarily get it on, but it’s actionable when one tries to molest the other. You are caught in a terrible trap here. Your sister-in-law, once rebuffed, put out the word that her younger brother-in-law tried to make a move. And now no one is believing your story because of sexism. It’s just easier to accept that a horny teen acted horribly than a young mother. You need to sit down with your parents and tell them exactly what happened. Say the physical violation was against you, and now she’s compounding it by spreading malicious lies to save herself. Frankly, I think you and your parents should sit down with a lawyer and discuss this. A false accusation of sexual assault is a dangerous thing. If your parents won’t support you, go to your guidance counselor at school, explain what happened, and say you need some adults to help guide you through this morass. You should not become a pariah because you have an unbalanced new member of the family
Iron Maiden Drummer’s Wife Charged with Domestic Abuse
Iron Maiden Drummer’s Wife Charged with Domestic Abuse
Ashley Clemments
April 18, 2013
Rebecca McBrain, the wife of Iron Maiden drummer Nicko McBrain has been charged with domestic abuse after being arrested for an incident that happened at the couple’s Florida home earlier this year.
BocaNewsNow.com reports that Rebecca attempted to stab someone with a decorative sword before throwing and hitting the victim with logs from a firepit in the couple’s garden.
Although the victim is yet to be identified, the fact that Rebecca has been charged with domestic abuse indicates that the person was a resident of the home or a relative.
Rebecca was in court today (April 18) for sentencing and has a trial date set for May 3, 2013. The original incident is reported to have taken place on February 24 when Rebecca was released from Palm Beach County Jail on $3,000 bail.
Rebecca has since entered a ‘not guilty plea’ on the charges but could face a significant amount of time behind bars.
Nicko McBrain became the fifth Iron Maiden drummer when he took over from Clive Burr in 1982. Nicko has been present on every Iron Maiden album since 1983′s Piece of Mind and up to their latest record The Final Frontier in 2010.
Link: http://www.gigwise.com/news/81044/iron-maiden-drummers-wife-charged-with-domestic-abuse
Why Rep. Justin Amash Voted ‘No’ on VAWA
Justin Amash, One to Watch from Michigan
George Will
April 19, 2013
Amash of Michigan voted against reauthorizing the 1994 Violence Against Women Act because, he wrote, it “created new federal crimes to mirror crimes already on the books in every state pertaining to certain domestic violence offenses” and because it addresses “subjects over which the federal government has no general jurisdiction.” The Constitution, he wrote, “explicitly authorizes Congress to criminalize only a few activities, which relate to matters that are clearly federal in nature (counterfeiting, crimes on the high seas, treason).”
Furthermore, federalizing criminal law increases the danger that “a person may be charged in both state court and federal court for essentially the same crime.” This federalization of crime also burdens the federal judiciary and tempts budget-constrained state governments to leave many criminal matters to the federal government.
Title IX Almost Ruined My Son’s Life
Title IX Almost Ruined My Son’s Life
April 17, 2013
In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today titled “A Mother, a Feminist, Aghast,” attorney Grossman writes about her family’s harrowing ordeal after her college-age son was accused of “nonconsensual sex” by an ex-girlfriend, several years after their relationship ended.
Grossman’s piece reads like a Kafka-esque nightmare: with no preliminary inquiry by the school into the accusations, Grossman says, the college’s Title IX office operated under the assumption that “my son would not be afforded a presumption of innocence.” A campus tribunal—seemingly, with no particular background in the law or in evaluating legal evidence—would rule on the claim, with only half of the tribunal needing to decide that the alleged incident “more likely than not” occurred for punishment to be meted out. The list of accusations against the boy were “vague statements,” Grossman says, “lack[ing] even the most basic information about the acts alleged to have happened years before. Nor were the allegations supported by evidence other than the word of the ex-girlfriend.” Her son was reportedly denied the right to represent himself with council at a hearing; the tribunal based its grilling on the “unsworn testimony” of the ex-girlfriend; and seemingly relevant evidence (emails, social media posts) about the nature of the ex-couple’s relationship was not allowed in the hearing. The school even allegedly told the boy not to discuss the matter with potential “witnesses,” nor was he allowed to question his accuser or the witnesses against him.
Grossman, being a lawyer, was able to fight for her son’s constitutional rights (“Who knew that American college students are required to surrender the Bill of Rights at the campus gates?”), and the charges against him were ultimately dismissed. But she concludes that, in Title IX’s well-meaning zeal to guarantee equality between the sexes on university campuses, it has “obliterated the presumption of innocence that is so foundational to our traditions of justice.” Fighting for women’s rights is all well and good—Grossman is a self-identified feminist, after all—but this incident smacks of wreaking “the very injustices the movement itself has for so long sought to correct.”
Link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/cheats/2013/04/17/title-ix-almost-ruined-my-son-s-life.html
I-VAWA: Groups Hypocritically Work Both Sides of Anti-Violence Debate
I-VAWA: Groups Hypocritically Work Both Sides of Anti-Violence Debate
Women Against VAWA Excess
April 17, 2013
Whether you are pro-choice or pro-life, almost everyone agrees sex-selective abortion is an abomination and human rights tragedy.
With a simple blood test, a pregnant woman can now learn the sex of her fetus. She can then induce a miscarriage with a low-cost injection, over-the-counter medicines, or a surgical abortion.
Sex-selective abortion has taken the lives of many millions of female fetuses:
• In China, 1 million female fetuses are aborted each year.
• India’s 2011 census shows 8 million female fetuses were aborted between 2001 and 2011. In Punjab and Haryana, there are over 120 adult males for every 100 females.
• A 2005 study estimated over 90 million females were missing from the expected populations in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, India, Pakistan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
According to the WHO World Health Report, 1.6 million females die from violence-related causes each year. But this 1.6 million figure is easily eclipsed by the number sex-selective abortions.
Reproductive Rights Groups at the Heart of the Issue
Sex-selective abortion arises from a variety of causes, including low-cost (or free) abortifacient agents, easy availability of prenatal testing, and permissive national policies.
Reproductive rights organizations did not intend that sex-selective abortion would become the problem is has become, of course. But these groups relentlessly advocated for the programs that allowed the problem to arise in the first place.
And now they do little or nothing to stop the epidemic.
The Nexus between I-VAWA and Sex-Selective Abortion
Do a Google search on “International Violence Against Women Act” and “reproductive rights,” and you’ll get over 46,000 results. That’s because the same groups that are pushing for I-VAWA are also in favor of easier access to abortion services in India, China, and elsewhere.
And go to these organizations’ websites, you’ll see they warmly embrace reproductive rights.
W.A.V.E. takes no formal position in the pro-choice vs. pro-life debate.
But if groups say they want to advance reproductive rights, then it’s outright hypocrisy for them to also claim they want to stop violence against girls.
April is Sexual Assault Awareness & Prevention Month
April is Sexual Assault Awareness & Prevention Month
Rape, Abuse, and Incest Network
Get involved in the fight against sexual violence during April — Sexual Assault Awareness & Prevention Month! Every 2 minutes someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted, but you have the power to make a difference. Take a stand by promoting RAINN’s mission and free, confidential hotlines services through the National Sexual Assault Hotlines (800.656.HOPE and online.rainn.org). Can’t host an event this April? Here are six easy ways that you can get involved and do your part to support RAINN and the millions of survivors in the U.S.
• Tell a friend about the National Sexual Assault Hotlines (800.656.HOPE and online.rainn.org). It’s never too late to get help, talk to someone who understands what you’re going through.
• Follow RAINN on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook and share the latest RAINN news.
• Add a RAINN web banner to your blog or website.
• Volunteer at your local rape crisis center.
• Make a donation to RAINN to ensure that no one has to go it alone. From now through April 30th, your donation to RAINN will be doubled by a group of generous donors, up to a maximum of $30,000. Your $10 before May 1st helps not one but two survivors through the National Sexual Assault Hotlines.
• Rock Your RAINN Pride with Bands4RAINN: In honor of SAAPM, buy 4 bands for just $10! All proceeds benefit RAINN.
Jodi Arias Trial Witness Taken to ER after Online Attacks
Alyce LaViolette, Jodi Arias Trial Witness, Taken to Emergency Room After Online Attacks
Simon McCormack
April 12, 2013
A defense witness in the Jodi Arias murder trial was taken to the emergency room after a wave of online attacks.
The social media floodgates opened after domestic violence expert Alyce LaViolette testified that Arias stabbed her ex-boyfriend nearly 30 times, shot and stabbed him in self defense.
The Arizona Republic reports:
The tweets and other social-media posts began appearing the next week. “You can show your disgust with LaViolette,” they began, and they posted her office phone number and her website, and they suggested that people write negative reviews of her best-selling book on Amazon.com.
Someone also posted photos of LaViolette eating dinner with one of Arias’ defense attorneys and posted the picture on Facebook. A friend of LaViolette’s told the Republic that the defense witness went “to the emergency room last weekend for anxiety attacks and palpitations.”
Attorney Anne Bremner, who said she received death threats after she provided legal council in the Amanda Knox case, told The Huffington Post that the kind of online ridicule LaViolette received could affect attorneys and witnesses in high-profile trials.
“It’s something to take into account,” Bremner said. “If I had kids I would consider it even more so.”
Bremner said laws designed to protect witnesses like LaViolette may not be equipped to deal with social media firestorms.
“We have to look at whether the laws that protect the justice system have kept up with the Internet,” Bremner said.
Criminal defense attorney Steve Cron said he’s “saddened” to see LaViolette’s reputation impugned, but said it doesn’t seem like the online commenters have crossed any legal boundaries.
“It is a total abuse of the rights of free speech trying to intimidate someone, to slander and harass them because they voice an opinion,” Cron said. “But the people who have done it have not crossed the boundaries between bad-mouthing somebody and something that would be threatening.”
Though he finds the attacks cruel and unfounded, Cron said they’re likely covered by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.
Arias, 32, is on trial for the murder of her ex-boyfriend. Prosecutors say she killed him in a jealous rage. If convicted, she could face the death penalty. LaViolette’s testimony is expected to continue testifying Thursday.
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/12/alyce-laviolette-attacked-jodi-arias_n_3064621.html
Arias Key Witness Feels Social Media’s Heat
Arias Key Witness Feels Social Media’s Heat
Michael Kiefer
April 11, 2013
For three days this week, a domestic violence expert witness named Alyce LaViolette held her own against prosecutor Juan Martinez in the Jodi Arias murder case in Maricopa County Superior Court.
But LaViolette was annhilated in cyberspace.
The Arias case is an international phenomenon, reduced to a parable of good and evil when relayed in 140-character posts. Travis Alexander, the secret lover she killed in 2008, has become a cause celebre. Arias has become a pariah, and everyone associated with her is considered evil by thousands in the social-media audience.
LaViolette took the stand March 26, hired by the defense to persuade the jury that Arias was a victim of domestic abuse by Alexander.
MORE: Arias trial topics turn to fairy tales
The tweets and other social media posts began appearing by the next week. “You can show your disgust with LaViolette,” they began, and they posted her office phone number and her website, and they suggested that people write negative reviews of her bestselling book on Amazon.com.
As of Tuesday, there were more than 500 of them, panning the book and calling LaViolette a fraud and a disgrace.
People also were calling the organizations that had booked her for speaking engagements, trying to persuade them to fire her.
And on a day when she and Martinez bickered over the meaning of stalking, someone had obviously followed her to dinner and later posted photos of her dining with Arias’s defense attorney Jennifer Willmott and one of her legal staff. The posted photo was accompanied by comments implying that somehow, defense attorneys are not allowed to communicate with the experts they hire.
The barrage of cyberstalking was the subject of lengthy meetings in a judge’s chambers on Monday. It sent LaViolette to the emergency room last weekend.
Legal observers are not certain if it constitutes witness tampering, slander, or just an expression of free speech.
“It’s the electronic version of a lynch mob,” said retired Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Kenneth Fields.
But it is probably a taste of a future to come.
Sree Sreenivasan, chief digital officer and professor of journalism at Columbia University, said he had never seen anything like the attack on LaViolette.
“This is a logical extension of witness intimidation, taken to an extreme conclusion,” he said.
But he believes we will see it again.
“I imagine this is going to be standard operating procedure in prominent cases,” he said.
Jodi Arias, 32, admits killing Alexander, 30, but she claims she did so in self-defense. He was found in June 2008 in the shower of his Mesa home, with nearly 30 stab wounds, a bullet in the head and a slit throat.
The case evidence has played out in digital format, from steamy photos and an X-rated phone-sex call recorded on a mobile phone to hundreds of text messages, instant messages, e-mails, MySpace pages and blog posts.
It has spawned a social media sub-cult of followers who chronicle the trial on Twitter and Facebook pages, with pages that support Alexander or condemn Arias. Martinez has been raised to folk-hero status, frequently photo-shopped with photos of Alexander to make it look as if the two are standing arm in arm. Tweets fly every day during trial, exchanging conspiracy theories, mostly praising Martinez and damning the Arias defense team. Some of it lapses into obscenity, such as the tweeter who uses a screen-grab photo of Arias’ nether regions as an Avatar.
The social-media subcult has not been content to merely watch the trial. It has decided to take part.
LaViolette, 65, has worked as a counselor and psychotherapist for battered women since 1978. She has founded programs in domestic abuse, written books about the subject, given speeches at conferences and testified as an expert witness in trials.
During her testimony in the Arias trial, she described domestic abuse, and then walked the jury through why she felt that Arias had been controlled, manipulated, and physically, sexually and emotionally abused by Alexander. Martinez fought her bitterly, questioning her theories and her credentials, trying to make her crack and bumble as he had done to earlier witnesses. LaViolette, who spent a career counseling aggressive people, did not back down.
Since Martinez began cross-examining LaViolette late last week, the two have traded insults like a pair of boxers throwing kidney punches in the clinch. The slugfest was a stalemate, and trial watchers saw what they wanted to see: Martinez bobbing and weaving with rapid-fire questions that he demanded be answered by yes or no; LaViolette standing her ground and occasionally stinging Martinez with jabs like, “If you were in my group, Mr. Martinez, I would ask you to take a time out.”
The cyber cult took up the Twitter suggestions to harass LaViolette.
“Shame on you Alyce!!! I hope Jodi gets the death penalty and you watch your career flush down the toilet,” a person named Carol wrote as a review to LaViolette’s book, It Could Happen To Anyone: Why Battered Women Stay.
“She looks like Harry Potter’s grandmother and I am sure that she has a crush on Jodi Arias because why else would she lie for that skank killer!” wrote C. Pride”Mommyof5.”
They have attacked other segments of her career.
“I’ve been contacted by numerous people asking that she be removed from our speaker’s list,” said Rick Kenworthy of ABIP Training in Los Angeles, an organization that provides training for abuse counselors.
One of LaViolette’s friends, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, said that LaViolette was getting countless angry phone calls and e-mails at her own office in Long Beach, at least one of which was serious enough that her colleagues contacted police.
The friend said that the stress of the harassment had driven LaViolette to the emergency room last weekend for anxiety attacks and palpitation.
In Arizona it is a felony to tamper with or influence a witness.
“I think it’s an effort to dissuade the witness from testifying free of outside influence,” David Derickson, a former Superior Court judge who now practices law, said of the attacks on LaViolette.
But what can be done, especially if it’s coming from other states, even other countries?
Fields, the retired judge said, “If it’s just the general public and there’s no intention (by the prosecution), then there’s nothing to be done about it.”
Derickson also wondered if it constituted slander.
“They’re trying to destroy her reputation,” he said.
Fields thought one solution would be to turn off the TV cameras. “I think we’re going to have to revisit the policy of televised trials,” he said.
But David Bodney,a First Amendment attorney who represents The Arizona Republic, balked at that idea.
“I think it’s entirely unfair to blame camera coverage for a group of persons who are expressing their views,” he said. “The court has the authority to take steps to protect that witness from threats and other misconduct.”
Link: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/11/jodi-arias-trial/2073067/
