Society

Who Suffers Most From Rape and Sexual Assault in America?

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An excerpt:

DENVER — LATELY, people have been bombarded with the notion that universities and colleges are hotbeds of sexual violence. Parents fear that sending their teenagers to school is equivalent to shipping them off to be sexually victimized.

But the truth is, young women who don’t go to college are more likely to be raped. Lynn A. Addington at American University and I recently published a study based on the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey data from 1995 to 2011. We found that the estimated rate of sexual assault and rape of female college students, ages 18 to 24, was 6.1 per 1,000 students. This is nothing to be proud of, but it is significantly lower than the rate experienced by women that age who don’t attend college — eight per 1,000. In other words, these women are victims of sexual violence at a rate around 30 percent greater than their more educated counterparts.

The focus on sexual violence against some of our most privileged young people has distracted us from the victimization of those enjoying less social and economic advantage.

Surprisingly, we don’t know much about the latter group. After an exhaustive search, colleagues and I could find no major study that focuses on the relationship between social and economic disadvantage and rape and sexual assault risk in the United States. But existing research does show that disadvantaged women are more likely to experience violence generally, as well as violence perpetrated by an intimate partner. Does this hold true for sexual assault?

I recently tried to answer this question by comparing female sexual victimization rates with a variety of social and economic disadvantage measures from National Crime Victimization Survey data, from 1992 to 2012. These data, like all data, are imperfect, and it is believed that they underestimate sexual victimization rates to some degree. But for my purpose this underestimation was unimportant since it was constant and therefore would not affect the relative differences between groups.

The statistics did indeed show that disadvantaged women, age 12 and older, were sexually victimized (including rape or sexual assault) at the highest rates. Women in the lowest income bracket, with annual household incomes of less than $7,500, are sexually victimized at 3.7 times the rate of women with household incomes of $35,000 to $49,999, and at about six times the rate of women in the highest income bracket (households earning $75,000 or more annually). Homeownership is another example of how economic advantage serves to protect women from sexual violence. Woman living in rented properties are sexually victimized at 3.2 times the rate of women living in homes that they or a family member own.

There are also disparities in rates of violence when marital status and children are taken into account. Single women with children living in the home have the highest rate of sexual victimization: 2.3 times that of single women with no children living in the home; 3.6 times that of married women with children living in the home; and 9.1 times that of married women with no children in the home.

Finally, we can look at educational attainment and the risk of sexual violence. Women without a high school diploma are sexually victimized at a rate 53 percent greater than women with a high school diploma or some college, and more than 400 percent greater than those with a bachelor’s degree or more.

More research should be done to replicate these findings, but it is clear that there is a relationship between disadvantage and sexual victimization. To better understand why disadvantage acts as a catalyst for sexual violence, we must hear directly from the women affected, who can provide valuable information as to how they cope with living on the margins.

Read the rest HERE

Society

Defining nearly all sex as rape

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An excerpt from this article: http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/defining-nearly-all-sex-as-rape/article/2557530

California’s “yes means yes” law turns the idea of sexual consent upside down. Suddenly, nearly all sex is rape, unless no person involved reports it as such.

Consent, under the California law that is spreading to other American universities, is required to be “ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time.” The law also states that “a lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent.” Also, previous sexual activity “should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.”

The law also states that incapacitation due to drugs or alcohol is considered nonconsensual. In theory, one could imagine that meaning black-out drunk or visibly not in control of one’s actions. But in practice, even having one or two drinks hours before sexual activity can constitute “too drunk to consent.”

By this definition, the only sex that isn’t rape is sex where consent can be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt for every stage of the activity. Sure, that sounds reasonable, but the fact that one of the bill’s sponsors doesn’t know how anyone could prove consent tells you a lot about the bill.

So what would provable consent look like? Joke all you want, but descriptions of bland, bureaucratic sexual situations really are the only way to prove consent.

Can I kiss you? Sign here.

Can I touch you? Sign here.

You get the point.

Beyond signed documents (which, if the signature wasn’t perfect could be interpreted as the person being too drunk to sign their name), would be video recordings of the entire night’s events. This would have to include the first meeting of the two people through some time after the sexual activity. (Perhaps body cameras for college students are the answer?)

If this all sounds absurd to you, it’s currently confined to college campuses and not the population at large. Which is frightening, but not relevant to the larger population outside of college.

At least for now.

Read the rest HERE

Fatherhood

Divorced dads get organized in Turkey

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A man kisses his sons as he sits outside the Eyup Sultan Mosque after Eid al-Fitr prayers in Istanbul, Sept. 20, 2009. (photo by REUTERS/Morteza Nikoubazl)

An excerpt from this article: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/12/turkey-divorced-dads-get-organized-see-children.html#

Female victims of violence and abuse by men often make the headlines in Turkey, but now men are also raising their voices, to complain about ex-spouses. More than 400 Turkish men have lodged complaints with the parliament’s Petition Commission over outrageous alimonies and being barred from seeing their children.

A total of 287 divorced men called for their rights to be protected, saying that they were unable to see their children, that mothers raised barriers for fathers and that existing procedures worked against men. Another 151 requested legal amendments to reduce the alimonies they are forced to pay.

…………

Necil Beykont, who founded the website Divorced Fathers in 2006 to give a voice to fathers barred from seeing their children, has a completely different vantage point on the issue: “The fathers — that is — the newly divorced men, are also to blame. They are diluting the issue. We had already begun to make our voices heard, but now they say they pay too much in alimonies and want this to be taken up as well. Childless men are even more vocal on the issue. With the alimony issue brought in, things naturally become watered down. What we advocate is not the rights of men, but the rights of children and fathers — that is, the right of children to have contact with their dads. Men who are not even fathers are bringing up their alimony problems — their pocket problems — which is making things more difficult for us and even undermining our cause. We cannot even begin to talk about the child’s right to grow up with both parents.”

The Divorced Fathers site has more than 20,000 members today. In remarks to Al-Monitor, Beykont, an instructor at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University, explained how his group’s efforts last year eventually came to naught: “In 2013, we drew up a report at the end of one month’s work with the Justice Ministry’s Directorate-General of Laws and Regulations, investigating judges from the appeals court and family court judges. We came up with ideas on which legal provisions should be amended and what training programs should be drawn up for officials in family courts. But the two ministers with whom we worked quit their posts to become mayors. Their successors have not taken up the issue yet. The Health Ministry, too, should join us. There is a syndrome called ‘parental alienation,’ which the ministry should add to its list of ailments. Psychologists and pedagogues should be involved both in the court process and in the post-divorce period, and their assessments should be taken into account. We need to raise awareness in Turkey of this issue and take action.”

Read the rest HERE

Fatherhood

What ‘New’ Studies Say Is Best For Children Of Fractured Homes

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Trading weekends is out. Children need open access to both parents.

An excerpt from this article: http://thefederalist.com/2014/10/06/what-new-studies-say-is-best-for-children-of-fractured-homes/

What is the best custody arrangement for children after divorce? Most of us outside of family lawyers and courts don’t think about that question until we are faced with it. And then adults tend to choose administrative stability, figuring the kids are as exhausted and spent as themselves. Children of divorce face such an upheaval that it makes sense to adults that the children need time to rest and recover, and so we prioritize routine.

Certainly our custody assumptions support this kind of stability. Typically, one parent gets primary custody, while the other gets Wednesday evenings, every other weekend, half the summer, and alternating holidays. This is so normalized that I was recently encouraged to host a women’s event on Wednesday night because that’s when the kids of divorce are with their dads. It is widespread and predictable.

But those custody norms are informed by old research. We have new research now. In fact, we have enough research that we have long-term studies of children of divorce and meta studies—studies of those studies, a few of which I covered here last summer.

________________

The Opposition: Lawyers and Feminists

As simple and logical as that presumption sounds, the two main groups actively resistant to shared parenting make for powerful opposition: lawyers and, paradoxically, feminists. That lawyers oppose shared parenting makes sense. Shared parenting arrangements tend to reduce parental conflict and therefore the continued need for lawyers and their fees. (See generally, the myths link above, page 3 and studies cited in footnotes 16-21.) But feminists, a group often heard demanding more domestic participation from fathers and who we might expect to vehemently object to the old legal assumptions that expect the mother to provide primary care for children, their opposition to shared parenting makes no sense.

In fact, as long as women remain the primary caregivers of children, women’s equality is in the best interests of children, and law reform can and must simultaneously take into account and promote both the best interests of children and the equality interests of women.

So while the assumptions about mother care hold, then the assumptions should be followed? I thought feminism was, partially, about breaking assumptions about women’s roles. (Pause here for a moment to ponder that although non-feminists keep getting lectured about how feminism isn’t anti-men, their actions suggest otherwise. They turn their own goals inside-out for simple spite.)

Shared parenting is about family.
There are many fathers’ rights groups who support shared parenting, of course, but that is only because fathers are usually the alienated parent. I’m a member of Leading Women for Shared Parenting and the stories we receive in that organization are overwhelmingly from women. Some are mothers who hardly see their children. Others are grandmothers and aunts who cannot see their grandchildren, nieces, or nephews, because their son or brother is denied access to his children. The heartache strains other family relationships, like the distraught father who avoids talking to his mother so he can keep his angst from overflowing or the mortified sister who inadvertently posted a FB link that upset the alienating parent and ended the little contact her brother had with his children.

Shared parenting isn’t about fathers’ rights. It isn’t even just about children’s rights, although their hurts are certainly the deepest because they last a lifetime. Shared parenting is about family. Divorce is hard enough, severing the family’s spirit. Physically splitting the family as a matter of course means those spiritual wounds cannot heal for anyone, especially the children.

It is time to stop playing money and politics over children from fractured homes. They have enough to deal with. We should do what is best for them. And the four decades of studies really just tell us what we intuitively know: Children need their parents—both of them.

Read the rest HERE

Fatherhood

Top Ten Reasons I Am No Longer A Leftist

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Count me in with the former leftists:

By Robert Gehl, July 20, 2014.

Our friends at americanthinker.com have a fantastic column by Dr. Danusha V. Goska. She was a life-long leftist and recently wrote that she has abandoned that philosophy. Here, she gives her top ten reasons. It’s long, but I highly recommend it.

1) Hate.

If hate were the only reason, I’d stop being a leftist for this reason alone.

Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.

Before that I’d had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.

In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.

If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you’d quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.

One topic thread was entitled “What do you view as disgusting about modern America?” The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.

Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn’t hold any anti-war rally, because you didn’t hate Obama.

I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances — I had no right-wing friends — expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I’m not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don’t know that they were. I’m speaking here, merely, about language.

In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn’t work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.

A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as “Bushitler.” The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it’s not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.

I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would — car exhaust in the garage. I suddenly realized that my “eat the rich” lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.

In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn’t president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.

I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone — even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health — meant a great deal to me.

Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, “No, I’m not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody.”

“Julie,” I said, “You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don’t. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something — capitalism.”

“Yes, but I’m very nice about it,” she insisted. “I always protest with a smile.”

Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I’m sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don’t know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.

I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I’ve stumbled upon a left-wing website.

Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being “sex positive,” one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like “fag,” so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like “butt hurt.” Leftists taunt right-wingers as “tea baggers.” The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.

Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was “prone.” Carmichael’s misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement. McCreight quoted a prominent atheist’s reply to a woman critic. “I will make you a rape victim if you don’t fuck off… I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I’m going to rape you with my fist.”

A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC’s Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment’s loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won’t repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir’s comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.

I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I’ll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.

I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.

 

Read the other nine HERE: http://downtrend.com/robertgehl/american-thinker-top-ten-reasons-i-am-no-longer-a-leftist/