Sexual Assaults Mishandled At Dartmouth, Swarthmore, USC, Complaints Say

By Tyler Kingkade
The Huffington Post
Originally published May 23, 2013

When University of Southern California student Tucker Reed was sexually assaulted in 2010, she turned to school officials. But instead of helping to bring her justice, she said, their "ignorance and indifference" further traumatized her. She said a USC official told her the goal was not to "punish" her assailant, but rather to offer an "educative" process.

"Rape is not an educative experience," Reed said. "It is a crushing, life-altering, inhuman violence."

Feeling like she had no other options, Reed on Wednesday filed a formal complaint with U.S. Department of Education, claiming USC's administration failed to respond adequately to the assault. Students and alumni who were assault victims at three other prestigious schools -- University of California, Berkeley; Dartmouth College; and Swarthmore College -- filed similar claims alleging the schools failed to properly adjudicate campus sex crimes.

The filings were coordinated through a network of campus sexual assault survivors and advocates. The complainants from the four colleges received help filing the complaints from students and alumni at the University of North Carolina and Occidental College who filed similar complaints against their schools earlier this year. Some students at Occidental and USC have retained attorneys, including Gloria Allred, for potential lawsuits against the schools.

The entire article is here.

Did Mormon Morality Teachings Really Make it Harder for Elizabeth Smart to Run?

By Joanna Brooks
Religion Dispatches
Joanna Brooks Blog post
Originally published May 8, 2013

Elizabeth Smart made big news this week—from Associated Press headlines to feminist blogs like Wonkette and Jezebel to the Mormon bloggernacle—when she connected her inability to run from her kidnappers to feelings of worthlessness stemming from harsh sexual morality lessons traditional to Mormon culture.

Speaking to a human trafficking forum at Johns Hopkins University last week, Smart recalled that it was not only fear for the safety of her family that kept her from running but also a sense that rape had ruined her:

“It goes beyond fear. It’s feelings of self worth. Who would ever want me now? I’m worthless. That is what it was for me the first time I was raped. I was raised in a very religious household, one that taught that sex was something very special that only happened between a husband and a wife who loved each other... For that first rape, I felt crushed. ‘Who could want me now?’ I felt so dirty and so filthy. I understand all too well why someone wouldn’t run because of that alone. If you can imagine the most special thing being taken away from you? And feeling not that that was your only value in life, but that devalued you? I remember in school one time I had a teacher who was talking about abstinence, and she said, imagine, you’re a stick of gum and when you engage in sex, that’s like getting chewed, and if you do that lots of times, you’re going to be an old piece of gum, and who’s going to want you after that? And that’s terrible, but nobody should ever say that, but for me, I thought, I’m that chewed up piece of gum. Nobody ever rechews a piece of gum.  …That’s how easy it is to feel that you no longer have worth, you no longer have value. Why would you even bother screaming out?”

The entire blog post is here.

See Elizabeth Smart speak here.

In Steubenville, why didn't other girls help?

By Rachel Simmons
Special to CNN
Originally posted March 21, 2013

Is anyone else wondering why the Steubenville, Ohio rape victim's two best friends testified against her? With this week's arrest of two other girls who "menaced" the teen victim on Facebook and Twitter, we have the beginnings of an answer.

Rape culture is not only the province of boys. The often hidden culture of girl cruelty can discourage accusers from coming forward and punish them viciously once they do. This week, two teenage boys were found guilty of raping a 16-year-old classmate while she was apparently drunk and passed out during a night of parties last August. Everyone who was there and said nothing that night was complicit; if we want to prevent another Steubenville, the role of other girls must also be considered.

On the night in question, girls watched the victim (Jane Doe) become so drunk she could hardly walk. Why didn't any of them help her? Why, after Jane Doe endured the agonizing experience of a trial in which she viewed widely circulated photos of herself naked and unconscious, did one of the arrested girls tweet: "you ripped my family apart, you made my cousin cry, so when I see you xxxxx, it's gone be a homicide." Why were two lifelong friends sitting on the other side of the courtroom?

The accusation of rape disrupts the intricate social ecosystem of a high school, one in which girls often believe that they must preserve both their own reputations and relationships with boys above all else. This is a process that begins for girls long before their freshman year and can have violent consequences.

The entire story is here.

Slaying the Messenger?

By Allie Grasgreen
Inside Higher Ed
Originally published February 26, 2013

Landen Gambill took an unusual step after she was sexually assaulted.

She reported it.

Unusual why? Because the vast majority of rapes go unreported.

But now Gambill is the one on trial. The student-run Honor Court at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill informed her last week that it’s charging her with violation of the Honor Code under a statute prohibiting “Disruptive or intimidating behavior that willfully abuses, disparages, or otherwise interferes with another….  so as to adversely affect their academic pursuits, opportunities for university employment, participation in university-sponsored extracurricular activities, or opportunities to benefit from other aspects of University Life.”

In other words, as the court told Gambill, she could get expelled for saying she was raped.

The entire article is here.

Facebook refuses to shut rape page run by schoolboy

theage.com.au
By Philip Sherwell in New York

Nobody knows better than MJ Stephens that rape is no laughing matter. So as the victim of a sexual assault, she was horrified when she encountered the contents of a Facebook page full of jokes about rape and violence towards women.

But worse was to come when the young American tried to argue with people who had attached comments to a page called: "You know shes [sic] playing hard to get when your [sic] chasing her down an alleyway" - most of them teenagers and young adults from Australia and Britain.

In sickeningly explicit terms, several of them threatened her and expressed the wish that she be raped again.

Such pages, full of ugliness, aggression and pornographic language are multiplying on Facebook, drawing lucrative user traffic to the social networking site.

Now it has emerged that one of the "administrators" of the page - users with the right to edit its content - is believed to be a British schoolboy linked to a network of hackers in Australia, Britain and America who have set up Facebook pages featuring offensive sexual and violent content.

Micheal O'Brien, a Canadian computer systems engineer who co-founded the Rape Is No Joke (RINJ) campaign to pressure Facebook to delete "rape pages" via petitions and boycotts, has tracked the activity on several such pages and contacted participants online.

He told London's The Sunday Telegraph that associates of 4chan, a loose-knit collection of international "cyber-anarchists" who champion absolute online freedom, including the right to share pornography, have founded and administer several of the pages.

 

The entire story can be found here.

Thanks to Gary Schoener for the link to this article.