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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Rape. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rape. Show all posts

Friday, November 1, 2019

Can a Woman Rape a Man and Why Does It Matter?

Natasha McKeever
Criminal Law and Philosophy (2019)
13:599–619
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-018-9485-6

Abstract

Under current UK legislation, only a man can commit rape. This paper argues that this is an unjustified double standard that reinforces problematic gendered stereotypes about male and female sexuality. I first reject three potential justifications for making penile penetration a condition of rape: (1) it is physically impossible for a woman to rape a man; (2) it is a more serious offence to forcibly penetrate someone than to force them to penetrate you; (3) rape is a gendered crime. I argue that, as these justifications fail, a woman having sex with a man without his consent ought to be considered rape. I then explain some further reasons that this matters. I argue that, not only is it unjust, it is also both a cause and a consequence of harmful stereotypes and prejudices about male and female sexuality: (1) men are ‘always up for sex’; (2) women’s sexual purity is more important than men’s; (3) sex is something men do to women. Therefore, I suggest that, if rape law were made gender neutral, these stereotypes would be undermined and this might make some (albeit small) difference to the problematic ways that sexual relations are sometimes viewed between men and women more generally.

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3 Final Thoughts on Gender and Rape

The belief that a woman cannot rape a man, therefore, might be both a cause and a consequence of these kinds of harmful gendered stereotypical beliefs:

(a) Sex is something that men do to women.
(b) This is, in part, because men have an uncontrollable desire for sex; women are less bothered about sex.
(c) Due to men’s uncontrollable desire for sex, women must moderate their behaviour so that they don’t tempt men to rape them.
(d) Men are sexually aggressive/dominant (or should be); women are not  (or shouldn’t be).
(e) A woman’s worth is determined, in part, by her sexual purity; a man’s worth is determined, in part, by his sexual prowess.

Of course, these beliefs are outdated, and not held by all people. However, they are pervasive and we do see remnants of them in parts of Western society and in some non‑Western cultures.

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Psychologist Found Guilty of Sexual Assault During Psychotherapy

Richard Bammer
www.mercurynews.com
Originally published July 27, 2019

A Solano County Superior Court judge on Friday sentenced to more than 11 years behind bars a former Travis Air Force Base psychologist found guilty last fall of a series of felony sexual assaults on female patients and three misdemeanor counts.

After hearing victim impact testimony and statements from attorneys — but before pronouncing the prison term — Judge E. Bradley Nelson looked directly at Heath Jacob Sommer, 43, saying he took a version of exposure therapy “to a new level” and used his “position of trust” between 2014 and 2016 to repeatedly take advantage of “very vulnerable people,” female patients who sought his help to cope with previous sexual trauma while on active duty.

And following a statement from Sommer — “I apologize … I never intended to be offensive to people,” he said — Nelson enumerated the counts, noting the second one, rape, would account for the greatest number of years, eight, in state prison, with two other felonies, oral copulation by fraudulent representation and sexual battery by fraudulent means, filling out the balance.

Nelson added 18 months in Solano County Jail for three misdemeanor charges of sexual battery for the purpose of sexual arousal. He then credited Sommer, shackled at the waist in a striped jail jumpsuit and displaying no visible reaction to the sentence, with 904 days in custody. Additionally, Sommer will be required to serve 20 years probation upon release, register as a sex offender for life, and pay nearly $10,000 in restitution to the victims and other court costs.

The info is here.

Thursday, April 11, 2019

6 women sexually abused by counselor at women's rehab center Timberline Knolls, prosecutors say

David Jackson
The Chicago Tribune
Originally posted March 7, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Cook County prosecutors allege that a Timberline Knolls counselor, Mike Jacksa, sexually assaulted or abused six patients last year at the leafy 43-acre rehab center in suburban Lemont. Former patients told police that Jacksa subjected them to rape, forced oral sex, digital penetration and fondling beneath their clothes. He faces 62 felony charges.

The abuse allegations began to surface last summer, but Timberline officials waited at least three weeks to contact law enforcement, police reports show. In the meantime, Timberline staff conducted internal investigations, twice suspending and reinstating Jacksa, police records show.

In early July, when Timberline staff discovered journal entries by a patient that described her sexual encounters with Jacksa, they confronted the woman in his presence, police reports show. Afterward, the woman “went back to her lodge and broke a mirror, intending to hurt herself or commit suicide over the embarrassment and emotional distress the whole situation with Jacksa had caused,” a Lemont police report said. “She was transported to a hospital.”

Widely accepted treatment standards say people who report sex crimes should not be forced to give their accounts in front of their alleged attackers.

Timberline Knolls suspended Jacksa a third time in early August, after the police got involved, then fired him Aug. 10. His alleged sexual attacks on patients were “an isolated incident,” said Timberline spokesman Gary Mack. “Facility administrators were greatly saddened by this whole situation and believed they acted swiftly and certainly to take Jacksa off the street.”

The info is here.

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

What can we learn from Dartmouth?

Leah Somerville
www.sciencemag.org
Originally posted November 20, 2018

Here are two excerpts:

There are many urgent discussions that are needed right now to address the cultural problems in academia. We need to find ways to support trainees who have experienced misconduct, to identify malicious actors, to reconsider departmental and institutional policies, and more. Here, I would like to start a discussion aimed at the scientific community of primarily well-intentioned actors, using my own experiences as a lens to consider how we can all be more attuned to the slippery slope on which a toxic environment can be built.

Blurry boundaries. In scientific laboratories, it can be easy to blur lines between the professional and the personal. People in labs spend a lot of time together, travel together, and in some cases socialize together. Some people covet a close, “family-like” lab environment. For faculty members, what constitutes appropriate boundaries is not always obvious; after all, new faculty members are often barely older than their trainees. But whether founded on good intentions or not, close personal relationships can be a slippery slope because of the inherent power differential between trainee and mentor.

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Shame and isolation. It is harder to appreciate the sheer dysfunctionality of an environment if you believe you are experiencing it alone. Yet even if multiple individuals have similar experiences, they may hesitate to share them out of fear and shame or a sense of pluralistic ignorance. The result? Toxic environments can remain shrouded in secrecy, allowing them to perpetuate and intensify over time. For example, a friend of mine from this era did not tell me until years later that she was the recipient of an unwanted sexual advance. This event and its aftermath had an excruciating impact on her experience as a graduate student, yet she suffered through this turmoil in silence.

It is crucial that people in positions of power appreciate the shame and isolation that can accompany being a recipient of inappropriate behavior and the great personal cost of coming forward. Silence should not be interpreted as a signal that the events were not serious and damaging. Moreover, students need to perceive that clear channels of support and communication are available to them.

The info is here.

Sunday, November 18, 2018

Dartmouth Allowed 3 Professors to Sexually Harass and Assault Students, Lawsuit Charges

Nell Gluckman
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published November 15, 2018

Seven current and former students sued Dartmouth College on Thursday, saying it had failed to protect them from three psychology and brain-science professors who sexually harassed and assaulted them. In the lawsuit, filed in a federal court in New Hampshire, they say that when they and others reported horrific treatment, the college did nothing, allowing the professors’ behavior to continue until last spring, when one retired and the other two resigned.

The 72-page complaint, which seeks class-action status, describes an academic department where heavy drinking, misogyny, and sexual harassment were normalized. It says that the three professors — Todd F. Heatherton, William M. Kelley, and Paul J. Whalen — “leered at, groped, sexted,” and “intoxicated” students. One former student alleges she was raped by Kelley, and a current student alleges she was raped by Whalen. Dartmouth ended a Title IX investigation after the professors left, and, as far as the complainants could tell, did not attempt to examine how the abuse occurred or how it could be prevented it from happening again, according to the complaint.

In a written statement, a Dartmouth spokesman said that college officials “respectfully but strongly disagree with the characterizations of Dartmouth’s actions in the complaint and will respond through our own court filings.”

The info is here.

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Priest abuse survivor slams church's lack of 'morality'

Lindsey Ellefson
CNN.com
Originally posted August 15, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

"Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades. Monsignors, auxiliary bishops, bishops, archbishops, cardinals have mostly been protected; many, including some named in this report, have been promoted," the grand jury report said.

Though Dougherty maintained that the Vatican is treating the Catholic church less as "a moral, faith-based organization" than "a business," he told Hill that he is "at peace" now that the report is out.
Dougherty, whose abuse began when he was 10 and who gave his first statement on the ordeal in 2012, noted that Tuesday marked "the end of a very long journey." Although he has been public about his experience for some time, he said, he is "standing on the shoulders of many, many" others who came before him.

The info is here.

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Robot sex and consent: Is consent to sex between a robot and a human conceivable, possible, and desirable?

Lily Frank and Sven Nyholm
Artificial Intelligence and Law
September 2017, Volume 25, Issue 3, pp 305–323

Abstract

The development of highly humanoid sex robots is on the technological horizon. If sex robots are integrated into the legal community as “electronic persons”, the issue of sexual consent arises, which is essential for legally and morally permissible sexual relations between human persons. This paper explores whether it is conceivable, possible, and desirable that humanoid robots should be designed such that they are capable of consenting to sex. We consider reasons for giving both “no” and “yes” answers to these three questions by examining the concept of consent in general, as well as critiques of its adequacy in the domain of sexual ethics; the relationship between consent and free will; and the relationship between consent and consciousness. Additionally we canvass the most influential existing literature on the ethics of sex with robots.

The article is here.

Monday, February 12, 2018

Prison for psychologist had sex with patients

Perrin Stein
Gillette News Record
Originally published January 12, 2018

It was standing room only in the courtroom as dozens of people gathered Thursday afternoon to see a former Gillette psychologist sentenced to prison for sexually assaulting two patients.

“During my brief time as a therapist, I did more harm than good and acted in ways that will reverberate in these women’s lives for years to come,” Joshua Popkin, 33, said before being taken into custody to serve two consecutive three- to five-year prison sentences for two counts of second-degree sexual assault.

Popkin met the two patients while interning at Campbell County Health in 2015.

One of the patients was seeking treatment for mental health issues related to a previous rape by an assailant elsewhere, according to court documents. After treating her at CCH, he saw her at his private practice, where he made increasingly sexual advances toward her. In June 2016, he had forced sex with her, according to court documents.

The article is here.

Thursday, August 3, 2017

The Trouble With Sex Robots

By Laura Bates
The New York Times
Originally posted

Here is an excerpt:

One of the authors of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics report, Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, England, said there are ethical arguments within the field about sex robots with “frigid” settings.

“The idea is robots would resist your sexual advances so that you could rape them,” Professor Sharkey said. “Some people say it’s better they rape robots than rape real people. There are other people saying this would just encourage rapists more.”

Like the argument that women-only train compartments are an answer to sexual harassment and assault, the notion that sex robots could reduce rape is deeply flawed. It suggests that male violence against women is innate and inevitable, and can be only mitigated, not prevented. This is not only insulting to a vast majority of men, but it also entirely shifts responsibility for dealing with these crimes onto their victims — women, and society at large — while creating impunity for perpetrators.

Rape is not an act of sexual passion. It is a violent crime. We should no more be encouraging rapists to find a supposedly safe outlet for it than we should facilitate murderers by giving them realistic, blood-spurting dummies to stab. Since that suggestion sounds ridiculous, why does the idea of providing sexual abusers with lifelike robotic victims sound feasible to some?

The article is here.

Thursday, December 24, 2015

How a Prominent Legal Group Could Change the Way Colleges Handle Rape

By Sarah Brown
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published December 4, 2015

The American Law Institute, a scholarly group influential in legal circles, is beginning to craft guidelines on campus sexual assault that will seek to outline best practices and bring some clarity to the tangles of compliance with federal law.

The institute is perhaps best known for its Model Penal Code, which is the bedrock of many states' criminal statutes, including sexual-assault laws. A team at the institute is now revising the sexual-violence provisions of the penal code.

The campus-rape project, on the other hand, will involve developing "guiding principles" for college officials, courts, and legislatures to use as a resource, said Suzanne B. Goldberg, a clinical professor of law and executive vice president for university life at Columbia University.

She and Vicki C. Jackson, a law professor at Harvard University, are the two primary authors of a framework that has just begun to take shape. Several principles that are part of a preliminary draft were discussed last month at the project's first official meeting.

'The attention to this issue in the last several years has put a spotlight on the need for processes that respond fairly and effectively to the complaints that come in.' The principles will cover reporting, interim measures designed to help alleged victims, relations between campus and law-enforcement officials, and the adjudication of cases. "The attention to this issue in the last several years has put a spotlight on the need for processes that respond fairly and effectively to the complaints that come in," Ms. Goldberg said.

The entire article is here.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

State board proposes discipline for University of Oregon psychologist over record release in rape case

The Associated Press
Originally published September 25, 2015

A state licensing board is proposing a $5,000 fine, a reprimand and ethics training for the head of the University of Oregon’s counseling office.

The proposed discipline, announced Friday, stems from allegations that Shelly Kerr released a student’s counseling records to the UO’s lawyers without the student’s permission. The student sought counseling after she said she was raped by three basketball players.

The rest of the article is here.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Feds oppose UO for releasing alleged gang-rape victim's therapy records

By Richard Read
The Oregonian
Originally published August 20, 2015

A federal official advised universities this week to not share a student's medical records without written consent, contradicting the University of Oregon's release of an alleged gang-rape victim's therapy records to the school's lawyers.

The six-page draft letter from Kathleen Styles, the U.S. Education Department's chief privacy officer, was issued this week after repeated inquiries by The Oregonian/Oregonlive and members of Oregon's congressional delegation.

In effect, the letter steamrolls a UO Counseling Center confidentiality policy weakened in March by center director Shelly Kerr, clinical director Joseph DeWitz and university associate general counsel Samantha Hill. The Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners is investigating four UO psychologists, including the two center managers, after Kerr secretly gave the woman's records to university attorneys in December without seeking her permission or notifying her therapist, Jennifer Morlok.

The entire article is here.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Belgian rapist Frank Van Den Bleeken 'to be euthanised' in prison this week

By Roisin O'Connor
The Independent
Originally posted January 5, 2015

A convicted murderer and rapist who won the right to end his life rather than endure 'unbearable suffering' in prison will be euthanised on 11 January.

Granted the right to die under Belgium’s liberal euthanasia laws in September, Frank Van Den Bleeken claimed he could not face the rest of his life in jail and argued that he would never be able to overcome his violent sexual impulses.

The entire article is here.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Sexual Assault and Rape Culture

Constructive liberal discourse has been a source of important gains on these issues. The alternatives are toxic.

By Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic
Originally posted June 27, 2014

The description of "rape culture" that sums up its insidiousness better than any I've ever seen was published several years ago at the Washington City Paper by Amanda Hess.

"Rape culture does not just encourage men to proceed after she says 'no,'" she wrote. "Rape culture does not simply teach men that a lack of physical resistance is an invitation. Rape culture does not only tell men to assert ownership over whichever female body they desire. Rape culture also tells women not to claim ownership over their own bodies. Rape culture also informs women that they should not desire sex. Rape culture also tells women that saying yes makes them bad women."

The entire article is here.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

The rape of men: the darkest secret of war

By Will Storr
The Guardian
Originally published July 16, 2011

Here is an excerpt:

It's not just in East Africa that these stories remain unheard. One of the few academics to have looked into the issue in any detail is Lara Stemple, of the University of California's Health and Human Rights Law Project. Her study Male Rape and Human Rights notes incidents of male sexual violence as a weapon of wartime or political aggression in countries such as Chile, Greece, Croatia, Iran, Kuwait, the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. Twenty-one per cent of Sri Lankan males who were seen at a London torture treatment centre reported sexual abuse while in detention. In El Salvador, 76% of male political prisoners surveyed in the 1980s described at least one incidence of sexual torture. A study of 6,000 concentration-camp inmates in Sarajevo found that 80% of men reported having been raped.

The entire article is here.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

The Ethics of Virtual Rape

By John Danaher
Philosophical Disquisitions
Originally published April 26, 2014

The notorious 1982 video game Custer’s Revenge requires the player to direct their crudely pixellated character (General Custer) to avoid attacks so that he can rape a Native American woman who is tied to a stake. The game, unsurprisingly, generated a great deal of controversy and criticism at the time of its release. Since then, video games with similarly problematic content, but far more realistic imagery, have been released. For example, in 2006 the Japanese company Illusion released the game RapeLay, in which the player stalks and rapes a mother and her two daughters.

The question I want to explore in this post is the morality of such representations. One could, of course, argue that they are extrinsically wrong, i.e. that they give rise to behaviour that is morally problematic and so should limited or prohibited for that reason. This is like the typical “violent video games cause real violence”-claim, and I suspect it would be equally hard to prove in practice. The more interesting question is whether there is something intrinsically wrong with playing (and perhaps enjoying) such video games. Prima facie, the answer would seem to be “no”, since no one is actually harmed or wronged in the virtual act. But maybe there is more to it than this?

The entire article is here.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Quiet No Longer, Rape Survivors Put Pressure on Colleges

By Libby Sander
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published August 12, 2013

In February, writing on her blog, Tucker Reed identified a classmate at the University of Southern California as the man who raped her.

Ms. Reed, then a junior, included his name, three photos of him, and a detailed account of their troubled relationship.

The post went viral.

Within two weeks, Ms. Reed's apartment became a haven for fellow students who also identified as survivors of rape.

They baked cookies, killed zombies on Xbox, and began writing letters to the university, expressing their dissatisfaction with how it had treated them.

Before long they had formed a group, the Student Coalition Against Rape, or SCAR.

As the Southern California students were finding one another, so were survivors across the country.

Throughout the spring, they exchanged a hail of Facebook messages and tweets, swapping stories, giving advice, and, before long, mobilizing.

The entire story is here, behind a paywall.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this story.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Why Don’t Cops Believe Rape Victims?

Brain science helps explain the problem—and solve it.

By Rebecca Ruiz
Slate.com
Originally posted June 19, 2013

Here are some excerpts:

This is rape culture in action. It puts the burden of proving innocence on the victim, and from Steubenville, Ohio, to Notre Dame and beyond, we’ve seen it poison cases and destroy lives. But science is telling us that our suspicions of victims, the ones that seem like common sense, are flat-out baseless. A number of recent studies on neurobiology and trauma show that the ways in which the brain processes harrowing events accounts for victim behavior that often confounds cops, prosecutors, and juries.

These findings have led to a fundamental shift in the way experts who grasp the new science view the investigation of rape cases—and led them to a better method for interviewing victims. The problem is that the country’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies haven’t been converted. Or at least, most aren’t yet receiving the training to improve their own interview procedures. The exception, it turns out, is the military. Despite its many failings in sexual assault cases, it has actually been at the vanguard of translating the new research into practical tools for investigating rape.

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This is why, experts say, sexual assault victims often can’t give a linear account of an attack and instead focus on visceral sensory details like the smell of cologne or the sound of voices in the hallway. “That’s simply because their brain has encoded it in this fragmented way,” says David Lisak, a clinical psychologist and forensic consultant who trains civilian and military law enforcement to understand victim and offender behavior.

The entire story is here.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Sodomy Hazing Leaves 13-Year-Old Victim Outcast in Colorado Town

By Chris Staiti & Barry Bortnick
Bloomberg News - Jun 20, 2013

At the state high-school wrestling tournament in Denver last year, three upperclassmen cornered a 13-year-old boy on an empty school bus, bound him with duct tape and sodomized him with a pencil.

For the boy and his family, that was only the beginning.

The students were from Norwood, Colorado, a ranching town of about 500 people near the Telluride ski resort. Two of the attackers were sons of Robert Harris, the wrestling coach, who was president of the school board. The victim’s father was the K-12 principal.

After the principal reported the incident to police, townspeople forced him to resign. Students protested against the victim at school, put “Go to Hell” stickers on his locker and wore T-shirts that supported the perpetrators. The attackers later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, according to the Denver district attorney’s office.

“Nobody would help us,” said the victim’s father, who asked not to be named to protect his son’s privacy. Bloomberg News doesn’t identify victims of sexual assault. “We contacted everybody and nobody would help us,” he said.

High-school hazing and bullying used to involve name-calling, towel-snapping and stuffing boys into lockers. Now, boys sexually abusing other boys is part of the ritual. More than 40 high school boys were sodomized with foreign objects by their teammates in over a dozen alleged incidents reported in the past year, compared with about three incidents a decade ago, according to a Bloomberg review of court documents and news accounts.

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About 4,000 sexual assaults occur each year inside U.S. public schools, as well as 800 rapes or attempted rapes, according to a letter the U.S. Education Department sent to educators in April 2011.
“We don’t tolerate this anywhere else in our society,” said Antonio Romanucci, a Chicago attorney representing some of the alleged Maine West victims in a civil lawsuit. “So why are we tolerating it in our schools?”

The entire story is here.

Thanks to Lamar Freed for this article.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

UNC-Chapel Hill drops honor court case against student

By Phil Gast
CNN
Originally posted June 7, 2013

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has dropped honor-court proceedings against a student who said the school retaliated against her for a sexual assault allegation.

In an e-mail to faculty and students on Thursday, Chancellor Holden Thorp said an outside review indicated no evidence of retaliation against Landen Gambill, who accused her ex-boyfriend of rape.

Gambill is one of several students who sparked a Department of Education investigation into how the university handles sex assault cases.

Thorp said a section of the honor code pertaining to "disruptive or intimidating behavior" would be suspended pending further review.

"This action is not a challenge to the important role of students in our Honor System, but is intended to protect the free speech rights of our students," the chancellor said in his e-mail. Thorp said the "important issue" will receive further discussion.

Gambill's attorney, Henry Clay Turner, had written a letter to Thorp, saying his client believed the university was retaliating against her because it let the student-run honor court charge her with intimidating her former boyfriend.

Gambill did not file a sexual assault report with police, and her former boyfriend -- who has not been identified publicly -- denied her accusation, according to his attorney.

The entire story is here.