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

Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Abuse case reveals therapist’s dark past, raises ethical concerns

Associated Press
Originally posted 11 JUN 22

Here is an excerpt:

Dushame held a valid driver’s license despite five previous drunken driving convictions, and it was his third fatal crash — though the others didn’t involve alcohol. The Boston Globe called him “the most notorious drunk driver in New England history.”

But over time, he dedicated himself to helping people recovering from addiction, earning a master’s degree in counseling psychology and leading treatment programs from behind bars.

Two years later, he legally changed his name to Peter Stone. He was released from prison in 2002 and eventually set up shop as a licensed drug and alcohol counselor.

Last July, he was charged with five counts of aggravated felonious sexual assault under a law that criminalizes any sexual contact between patients and their therapists or health care providers. Such behavior also is prohibited by the American Psychological Association’s ethical code of conduct.

In a recent interview, the 61-year-old woman said she developed romantic feelings for Stone about six months after he began treating her for anxiety, depression and alcohol abuse in June 2013. Though he told her a relationship would be unethical, he initiated sexual contact in February 2016, she said.

“‘That crossed the line,’” the woman remembers him saying after he pulled up his pants. “‘When am I seeing you again?’”

While about half the states have no restrictions on name changes after felony convictions, 15 have bans or temporary waiting periods for those convicted of certain crimes, according to the ACLU in Illinois, which has one of the most restrictive laws.

Stone appropriately disclosed his criminal record on licensing applications and other documents, according to a review of records obtained by the AP. Disclosure to clients isn’t mandatory, said Gary Goodnough, who teaches counseling ethics at Plymouth State University. But he believes clients have a right to know about some convictions, including vehicular homicide.

Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Bombshell 400-page report finds Southern Baptist leaders routinely silenced sexual abuse survivors

Robert Downen and John Tedesco
Houston Chronicle
Originally posted 22 MAY 22

For 20 years, leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention — including a former president now accused of sexual assault — routinely silenced and disparaged sexual abuse survivors, ignored calls for policies to stop predators, and dismissed reforms that they privately said could protect children but might cost the SBC money if abuse victims later sued.

Those are just a few findings of a bombshell, third-party investigation into decades of alleged misconduct by Southern Baptist leaders that was released Sunday, nearly a year after 15,000 SBC church delegates demanded their executive committee turn over confidential documents and communications as part of an independent review of abuse reports that were purportedly mishandled or concealed since 2000.

The historic, nearly 400-page report details how a small, insular and influential group of leaders “singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC to the exclusion of other considerations” to prevent abuse. The report was published by Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm that conducted 330 interviews and reviewed two decades of internal SBC files in the seven-month investigation.

“Survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its (structure) — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation,” Guidepost’s report concluded.

Guidepost investigated the SBC’s 86-member executive committee, the convention’s highest governing entity. The firm’s investigators had unprecedented access to the SBC’s leadership and reviewed thousands of internal documents — including previously confidential communications between SBC lawyers.

The investigation sheds new and unprecedented light on the backroom politicking and deceit that has stymied attempts at reforms and allowed for widespread mistreatment of child sexual abuse victims. And it exhaustively corroborates what many survivors have said for decades: that Southern Baptist leaders downplayed their own abuse crisis and instead prioritized shielding the SBC – and its hundreds of millions of dollars in annual donations — from lawsuits by abuse victims.

Among the findings:

A small group of SBC leaders routinely misled other members of the SBC’s executive committee on abuse issues, and rarely mentioned the frequent and persistent warnings and pleas for help from survivors.
  • Fearing lawsuits, leaders similarly failed to inform the SBC’s 15 million members that predators and pedophiles were targeting churches.
  • Longtime SBC leaders kept a private list of abusive pastors and ministers despite claiming for years that such an idea was impractical for stopping predators and impossible to adopt because of the SBC’s decentralized structure. Compiled since 2007, the roster contained the names of 703 offenders, most with an SBC connection. A few still work at churches in the SBC or other denominations.
  • Former SBC President Johnny Hunt is accused of sexually assaulting a woman weeks after his presidential tenure ended in 2010. The woman said Hunt manipulated her into silence by saying a disclosure of the incident would harm the SBC’s churches. Four other people corroborated much of the woman’s allegations to Guidepost. Hunt denied the allegations, but resigned from the SBC’s North American Mission Board days before the report was published.

Monday, April 25, 2022

Morality just isn't Republicans' thing anymore

Steve Larkin
The Week
Originally posted 23 APR 22

Here is an excerpt:

There is no understanding the Republican Party without understanding its leader and id, former President Donald Trump. His sins and crimes have been enumerated many times. But for the record, the man is a serial adulterer who brags about committing sexual assault with impunity, responsible for three cameo appearances in Playboy videos, dishonest in his business dealings, and needlessly callow and cruel. And, finally, he claims that he has never asked God for forgiveness for any of this.

Trump's presidency would seem to have vindicated the Southern Baptist Convention's claim that "tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God's judgment." Of course, that was about former President Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Now, tolerating this sort of behavior in a leader is par for the Republican Party course.

And Trump seems to have set a kind of example for other stars of the MAGAverse: Rep. Matt Gaetz is under investigation for paying for sex with an underage girl and sex trafficking; former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, who was forced to resign that post after accusations that he tried to use nude photos to blackmail a woman with whom he had an affair, has not let that stop him from running for the Senate; Rep. Madison Cawthorn has been accused of sexual harassment and other misconduct by women who were his classmates in college.

Democrats, of course, have their own fair share of scandals, criminals, and cads, and they see themselves as being on the moral side, too. But they're not running around championing those "traditional values."

Why do Republicans thrill to Trump and tolerate misbehavior which previous generations — maybe even the very same people, a few decades ago — would have viewed as immediately disqualifying? (A long time ago, Ronald Reagan being divorced and remarried was a serious problem for a small but noticeable group of voters.) Maybe it's because, while Trump is an extreme (and rich) example, in many ways he's not so different from his devotees.

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

State Medical Board Recommendations for Stronger Approaches to Sexual Misconduct by Physicians

King PA, Chaudhry HJ, Staz ML. 
JAMA. 
Published online March 29, 2021. 
doi:10.1001/jama.2020.25775

The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) recently engaged with its member boards and investigators, trauma experts, physicians, resident physicians, medical students, survivors of physician abuse, and the public to critically review practices related to the handling of reports of sexual misconduct (including harassment and abuse) toward patients by physicians. The review was undertaken as part of a core responsibility of boards to protect the public and motivated by concerning reports of unacceptable behavior by physicians. Specific recommendations from the review were adopted by the FSMB’s House of Delegates on May 2, 2020, and are highlighted in this Viewpoint.

Sexual misconduct by physicians exists along a spectrum of severity that may begin with “grooming” behaviors and end with sexual assault. Behaviors at any point on this spectrum should be of concern because unreported minor violations (including sexually suggestive comments or inappropriate physical contact) may lead to greater misconduct. In 2018, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine identified sexual harassment as an important problem in scientific communities and medicine, finding that greater than 50% of women faculty and staff and 20% to 50% of women students reportedly have encountered or experienced sexually harassing conduct in academia. Data from state medical boards indicate that 251 disciplinary actions were taken against physicians in 2019 for “sexual misconduct” violations (Table). The actual number may be higher because boards often use a variety of terms, including unprofessional conduct, physician-patient boundary issues, or moral unfitness, to describe such actions. The FSMB has begun a project to encourage boards to align their categorization of all disciplinary actions to better understand the scope of misconduct.

Saturday, September 26, 2020

University Crime Alerts: Do They Contribute to Institutional Betrayal and Rape Myths?

Adams-Clark, A. and others
Dignity: A Journal on SexualExploitation 
and Violence: Vol. 5: Iss. 1, Article 6.
DOI: 10.23860/dignity.2020.05.01.06 

Abstract

Universities are mandated by the Clery Act (20 USC § 1092(f)) to publicize the occurrence of certain
campus crimes. Many universities rely on “Crime Alert” emails to quickly and effectively communicate when a crime has occurred. However, communications of sexual crimes are often narrow (e.g., limited to stranger-perpetrated crimes) and misleading (e.g., containing safety tips that are not applicable to most types of sexual violence). The current paper presents the results of two studies that test the effects of reading crime alert emails on subsequent endorsement of rape myths and institutional betrayal. In Study 1, participants read a typical crime alert email describing a stranger-perpetrated crime, an alternative email describing an acquaintance-perpetrated crime, or a control email describing an event unrelated to interpersonal violence. Men were significantly more likely to endorse rape myths than were women in the control condition, but not in the typical or alternative email condition. In addition, results from Study 1 indicate that issuing crime alert emails following stranger-perpetrated sexual violence leads to a sense of institutional betrayal among students who have experienced acquaintance-perpetrated violence. In Study 2, participants read a typical crime alert email or an alternative digest email. Participants who read the typical email reported higher rape myth acceptance, but not institutional betrayal, than those who read the digest email. There were also significant gender differences in student opinions of each email that suggest the digest email format may serve as a useful tool for engaging male students in the issue of campus sexual violence. Taken together, these studies provide converging evidence that university communication regarding sexual violence can either perpetuate or positively influence attitudes towards sexual violence.

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.

Monday, September 23, 2019

Ohio medical board knew late doctor was sexually assaulting his male patients, but did not remove his license, report says

Image result for richard strauss ohio state
Richard Strauss
Laura Ly
CNN.com
Originally posted August 30, 2019

Dr. Richard Strauss is believed to have sexually abused at least 177 students at Ohio State University when he worked there between 1978 and 1998. A new investigation has found that the State Medical Board of Ohio knew about the abuse by the late doctor but did nothing.

A new investigation by a working group established by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine found that the state medical board investigated allegations of sexual misconduct against Strauss in 1996.

The board found credible evidence of sexual misconduct by Strauss and revealed that Strauss had been "performing inappropriate genital exams on male students for years," but no one with knowledge of the case worked to remove his medical license or notify law enforcement, DeWine announced at a press conference Friday.

The investigation revealed that an attorney with the medical board did intend to proceed with a case against Strauss, but for some reason never followed through. That attorney, as well as others involved with the 1996 investigation, are now deceased and cannot be questioned about their conduct, DeWine said.

"We'll likely never know exactly why the case was ultimately ignored by the medical board," DeWine said Friday.

The allegations against Strauss — who died by suicide in 2005 — emerged last year after former Ohio State athletes came forward to claim the doctor had sexually abused them under the guise of a medical examination.

The info is here.

Monday, September 16, 2019

Sex misconduct claims up 62% against California doctors

Vandana Ravikumar
USAToday.com
Originally posted August 12, 2019

The number of complaints against California physicians for sexual misconduct has risen by 62% since the fall of 2017, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation.

The investigation, published Monday, found that the rise in complaints coincides with the beginning of the #MeToo movement, which encouraged victims of sexual misconduct or assault to speak out about their experiences. Though complaints of sexual misconduct against physicians are small in number, they are among the fastest growing types of allegations.

Recent high-profile incidents of sexual misconduct involving medical professionals were also a catalyst, the Times reported. Those cases include the abuses of Larry Nassar, a former USA Gymnastics doctor who was sentenced in 2018 for 40-175 years in prison for molesting hundreds of young athletes.

That same year, hundreds of women accused former University of Southern California gynecologist George Tyndall of inappropriate behavior. Tyndall, who worked at the university for nearly three decades, was recently charged for sexually assaulting 16 women.

The info is here.

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, March 6, 2019

A Pedophile Doctor Drew Suspicions for 21 Years. No One Stopped Him.

Christopher Weaver, Dan Frosch and Gabe Johnson
The Wall Street Journal
Originally posted February 8, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

An investigation by The Wall Street Journal and the PBS series Frontline found the IHS repeatedly missed or ignored warning signs, tried to silence whistleblowers and allowed Mr. Weber to continue treating children despite the suspicions of colleagues up and down the chain of command.

The investigation also found that the agency tolerated a number of problem doctors because it was desperate for medical staff, and that managers there believed they might face retaliation if they followed up on suspicions of abuse. The federal agency has long been criticized for providing inadequate care to Native Americans.

After a tribal prosecutor outside of the IHS finally investigated his crimes, Mr. Weber was indicted in 2017 and 2018 for sexually assaulting six patients in Montana and South Dakota. Court documents and interviews with former patients show that Mr. Weber plied teen boys with money, alcohol and sometimes opioids, and coerced them into oral and anal sex with him in hospital exam rooms and at his government housing unit.

“IHS, the local here, they want to just forget it happened,” said Pauletta Red Willow, a social-services worker on the Pine Ridge reservation. “You can’t ever forget how someone did our children wrong and affected us for generations to come.”

The info is here.

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Former San Diego psychiatrist won't see jail time after admitting to sexual contact with patients

Mark Saunders
www.10news.com
Originally posted January 18, 2019

A former San Diego County psychiatrist who admitted to having sexual contact with seven female patients during office visits and sexual battery will not see any jail time.

Leon Fajerman, 75, was not sentenced to any jail time during his sentencing hearing Friday. Instead, the judge ordered Fajerman to serve house arrest for a year, pay an undetermined amount of restitution, and he must register as a sex offender.

He is eligible to have an ankle bracelet removed after six months of house arrest, pending good behavior.

Friday, victim impact statement's were read in court by the victims' attorney, who called the sentencing of no jail time absurd. Jessica Pride, an attorney representing two victims said they suffered from, “post-traumatic stress disorder, they are also suffering from anxiety, night terrors, insomnia, suicidal ideations.”

The info is here.

Monday, January 14, 2019

Air Force Psychologist Found Guilty of Sexual Assault Under Guise of Exposure Therapy

Caitlin Foster
Business Insider
Originally published Dec. 10, 2018

A psychologist at Travis Air Force Base in California was found guilty on Friday of sexually assaulting military-officer patients who were seeking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, The Daily Republic reported.

Heath Sommer may face up to 11 years and eight months in prison after receiving a guilty verdict on six felony counts of sexual assault, according to the Republic.

Sommer used a treatment known as "exposure therapy" to lure his patients, who were military officers with previous sexual-assault experiences, into performing sexual activity, the Republic reported.

According to charges brought by Brian Roberts, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted the case, Sommer assaulted his patients through "fraudulent representation that the sexual penetration served a professional purpose when it served no professional purpose," the Republic reported.

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.

(cut)

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.

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Oxfam scandal is not about morality, but abuse of power

Kerry Boyd Anderson
arabnews.com
Originally posted February 18, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Two of these problems directly relate to the #metoo movement against sexual harassment and abuse. First, the Oxfam scandal is not about personal sexual immorality. It is about abuse of power and sexual exploitation. When these men entered a war zone or an area that had suffered a massive natural disaster, they were not dealing with women there on equal terms; they were in a position of power and relative wealth, and offered women in desperate circumstances money in exchange for sex. These women were part of the population the aid workers were supposed to be helping, so using them in this way constitutes a clear breach of trust. This is one of the #metoo movement’s key points — this type of behavior is not about personal morality, it is about abuse of power.

Another problem that the scandal highlights is the way that many organizations protect the men who are behaving badly. In the Oxfam case, the focus has been on one man in a leadership position: Roland van Hauwermeiren, who created an enabling environment and participated in the hiring of prostitutes. Van Hauwermeiren previously led a project team for the charity Merlin in Liberia, where a colleague reported that men on the team were hiring local women as prostitutes. After an internal investigation, he resigned. He later led Oxfam’s team in Chad, where similar accusations arose. Despite this, Oxfam put him in charge of a team in Haiti, where the behavior continued. Following an investigation, van Hauwermeiren resigned, but he then went on to work for Action Against Hunger in Bangladesh. 

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.

Saturday, November 18, 2017

For some evangelicals, a choice between Moore and morality

Marc Fisher
The Washington Post
Originally posted November 16, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

What’s happening in the churches of Alabama — a state where half the residents consider themselves evangelical Christians, double the national average, according to a Pew Research study — is nothing less than a battle for the meaning of evangelism, some church leaders say. It is a titanic struggle between those who believe there must be one clear, unalterable moral standard and those who argue that to win the war for the nation’s soul, Christians must accept morally flawed leaders.

Evangelicals are not alone in shifting their view of the role moral character should play in choosing political leaders. Between 2011 and last year, the percentage of Americans who say politicians who commit immoral acts in their private lives can still behave ethically in public office jumped to 61 percent from 44 percent, according to a Public Religion Research Institute/Brookings poll. During the same period, the shift among evangelicals was even more dramatic, moving from to 72 percent from 30 percent, the survey found.

“What you’re seeing here is rank hypocrisy,” said John Fea, an evangelical Christian who teaches history at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pa. “These are evangelicals who have decided that the way to win the culture is now uncoupled from character. Their goal is the same as it was 30 years ago, to restore America to its Christian roots, but the political playbook has changed.

The article is here.

And yes, I live in Mechanicsburg, PA, by I don't know John Fea.

Friday, August 19, 2016

'It Just Happened'

By Jake New
Inside Higher Ed
August 2, 2016

Either by choice or when required to do by state legislation, colleges in recent years have moved toward a policy of affirmative consent.

The change moves colleges away from the old “no means no” model of consent -- frequently criticized by victims’ advocates as being too permitting of sexual encounters involving coercion or intoxication -- to one described as “yes means yes.” If the student initiating a sexual encounter does not receive an “enthusiastic yes” from his or her partner, the policies generally state, there is no consent.

Research by two California scholars, however, suggests that students’ understanding of consent is not in line with the new policies and laws. Instead, students often obtain sexual permission through a variety of verbal and nonverbal cues, both nuanced and overt, that do not always meet a strict definition of affirmative consent.

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.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Remembering a Just World: Motivated Recall of Victim Culpability

Sahil Sharma
New York University

Research over the last 30 years has demonstrated that individuals will often blame the victim for his or her misfortune. Just World Theory (Lerner, 1980) argues that individuals do so because they are
motivated to perceive their world as fair and just. Gender seems to moderate the effect of Belief in a Just World (BJW) on victim blame. Conflicting evidence suggests that this motivation affects women in different ways from men—she either blames the victim more (Janoff-Bulman, 1980) when there is a threat to the just world or less (Foley & Pigot, 2000) regardless of threat. It is less clear whether just world concerns impact recall of actual victim culpability. In this paper, we investigate whether individuals misremember information about victim responsibility for a sexual assault in order to satisfy the goal to believe that the world is just. We hypothesize that individuals whose just world motive has been experimentally heightened will be more likely to misremember details of a sexual assault in a way that confers responsibility on the victim. Results showed that memory mediates victim-blame. Men, when faced with a high threat to their belief in a just world, blamed the victim more than did women and misremembered the victimization of a female to inculcate greater blame.

The entire paper is here.