#rape

New Nail Polish Technology Raises Important Questions

Why Rape Prevention Activists Don’t Like The New Nail Polish That Can Detect Roofies

“I think that anything that can help reduce sexual violence from happening is, in some ways, a really good thing, but I think we need to think critically about why we keep placing the responsibility for preventing sexual assault on young women.” — Tracey Vitchers, the board chair for Students Active For Ending Rape (SAFER) via Think Progress’s Tara Culp-Ressler

The US Department of Justice says there are about 89,000 rapes are reported each year, but that a whopping 95% or rapes are never reported. There is a rape crisis underway on college campuses in particular, and President Obama and the US Congress are trying to address it.

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

So a  lot of people got really excited when 4 male college students developed a nail polish that changes color when submerged in drinks to detect several date-rape drugs. Their motivation was pure in wanting to cut down the number of rapes of women who unknowingly drink something that will make them unresponsive and unable to recall the details of a rape.

However effective this may turn out to be, many believe this is like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound because it places the responsibility to prevent rape on the shoulders of the victims, further limiting their behavior, rather than the perpetrators.

Women are already expected to work hard to prevent themselves from becoming the victims of sexual assault. They’re told to avoid wearing revealing clothing, travel in groups, make sure they don’t get too drunk, and always keep a close eye on their drink. Now, remembering to put on anti-rape nail polish and discreetly slip a finger into each drink might be added to that ever-growing checklist — something that actually reinforces a pervasive rape culture in our society.

What do you think?

Best Essay Explains Misogyny and Rape Culture in a Way that Men Can Understand

A Gentleman’s Guide to Rape Culture 

We are so grateful to author and actor Zaron Burnett (@zaron3) and Medium (@medium) for bringing his essay that puts misogyny and rape culture in a feminist perspective. It is a must-read for every young (and old) man, women too. It continues the important conversation that has finally (and thankfully) been thrust onto the front burner due to recent events.

Within just a few paragraphs like this one, Zaron transported me back over 40 years ago when these ideas were rightly assumed by the many men who identified as feminists, the most authentic males in my orbit, including my dear partner and husband, Dan Massey, who went on to higher shores recently. These guys, straight, gay, bisexual, and trans, that were with us from the beginning were the most beautiful creatures to us: Behold, The Man!

When I cross a parking lot at night and see a woman ahead of me, I do whatever I feel is appropriate to make her aware of me so that a) I don’t startle her b) she has time to make herself feel safe/comfortable and c) if it’s possible, I can approach in a way that’s clearly friendly, in order to let her know I’m not a threat. I do this because I’m a man.

This is how men behaved in the early feminist movement, it was about being good men, authentic men, giving comfort and safety to the other half of the population while supporting a movement that explicitly stands for political and social justice. Male feminists wanted (and should want to adopt) this perspective because it replaced the awful predatory, conquering control of women they were taught at their parents’ knee and saw among their male peers. Very unfortunately, as feminism aged and stays lodged in radical feminism which express their hatred of men particularly transwomen, it has failed to keep alive the idea that feminism isn’t just for women.

It was always intentionally co-ed and had to do with your perspective on the world and how you wanted to make it better, how you wanted to destroy coercive systems, such as reproduction legislation, preserve good things about the world, such as hospice started in the 11th century, and create new, more human and voluntary systems, such as abortions that are private between a woman, her doctor, and her family. Feminist issues have no gender boundaries.

Zaron continues .. .

Flickr/Creative Commons

Flickr/Creative Commons

If you are a man, you are part of rape culture. I know … that sounds rough. You’re not a rapist, necessarily. But you do perpetuate the attitudes and behaviors commonly referred to as rape culture.

You may be thinking, “Now, hold up, Zaron! You don’t know me, homey! I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let you say I’m some sorta fan of rape. That’s not me, man!”

I totally know how you feel. That was pretty much exactly my response when someone told me I was a part of rape culture. It sounds horrible. But just imagine moving through the world, always afraid you could be raped. That’s even worse! Rape culture sucks for everyone involved. But don’t get hung up on the terminology. Don’t concentrate on the words that offend you and ignore what they’re pointing to — the words “rape culture” aren’t the problem. The reality they describe is the problem.

Men are the primary agents and sustainers of rape culture.

Rape isn’t exclusively committed by men. Women aren’t the only victims — men rape men, women rape men — but what makes rape a men’s problem, our problem, is the fact that men commit 99% of reported rapes.

How are you part of rape culture? Well, I hate to say it, but it’s because you’re a man.

Zaron Burnett III public domain image

Zaron Burnett III
public domain image

The essay goes on to explain it all in great detail. I’m bringing it to every man (and woman) I know because it is so important and educational. It is guaranteed to make you more of man and more of a human as soon as you finish reading it.

 

See also: An Open Letter to Privileged People Who Play Devil’s Advocate (via Feministing) and Misogyny in the News, At Last.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wartime Sexual Abuse — of Men and Boys

“Everybody has heard the women’s stories. But nobody has heard the men’s,” says Stewart M. Patrick, a senior fellow at the DC-based, non-partisan think tank The Council on Foreign Relations, writing for The Internationalist. His recent report was widely circulated this summer on the startling 22% of males and 30% of females who have been sexually assaulted as a terror tactic and weapon of war used throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Lisa F. Jackson’s award-winning documentary,  The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, likewise offers disturbing data on this nascent crisis. The film won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2008 and subsequently inspired a UN resolution condemning rape as a weapon of war.

Rape is always a crime of opportunity wherein the victim is not targeted based on appearance, gender, or behavior but because he or she is simply available. War only enlarges and magnifies the politics of this violence.

The male rape epidemic has affected men in Bosnia, El Salvador, and many other war-torn nations, and in the androcentric world, focused on men, the image of a weak man has not been sympathetic.

How will this male-on-male rape be incorporated in and be fairly addressed by the United Nations, the individual state, and/or Non-Governmental Organizations? Patrick addresses this question and encourages you to take progressive action for these victims.

 

 Adrianna Midbama contributed to this post. The full article appears below.

Stewart M. Patrick’s, “Stopping Wartime Sexual Abuse – of Men

Today, I would like to draw your attention to a disturbing phenomenon ignored by the foreign policy community but all too common in global conflict zones: The pervasive sexual abuse of men in war.

Women, of course, bear the main brunt of wartime sexual violence—as they always have. Last December, my CFR colleague Mark Lagon hosted a sobering meeting with the eminent legal scholar and activist Catharine MacKinnon. Now the special gender adviser to the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, Mackinnon in 2000 argued the path-breaking legal case Kadic vs. Karadzic — about mass Serbian rape of Bosnian women — which for the first time established mass rape as an act of genocide. Over the past two decades, international attention to rape as a weapon of war has been growing. Documentary filmmakers have often been in the forefront. In 2006 Lisa F. Jackson traveled to DRC to interview thousands of rape victims, and their perpetrators. Her resulting film, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2008 and subsequently inspired a UN resolution-condemning rape as a weapon of war. Several of my CFR colleagues — including Laurie Garrett, Isobel Coleman, and Matthew Waxman — have spoken and written eloquently on the scope of such atrocities and the need to hold perpetrators accountable.

At the same time, as the Guardian reported on Sunday, the United Nations (UN) and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) “barely acknowledge” the pervasive sexual violence against men that occurs in modern war.

The article documents the terrible suffering of a Congolese refugee who was captured by rebels and raped multiple times per day, and watched countless other men be similarly brutalized. 22% of men in Eastern Congo reported being victims of sexual violence, compared to 30% of women. One victim reported the crime to police, and was laughed at. A doctor in whom he confided merely gave him Panadol (a local equivalent of Tylenol). He described:

Everybody has heard the women’s stories. But nobody has heard the men’s.”

The violence, and the disregard, is global. 80% of Bosnian males imprisoned in concentration camps and 76% of El Salvadoran male political prisoners report sexual abuse. Yet, of roughly 4,000 NGOs addressing wartime sexual violence, only 3% mentioned male victims (and usually only in passing).

Read: U.S. trade policy; is America AWOL?

International institutions are also falling short. They should be lauded for attempting to address mass violence against women during wartime, but the protection and outreach must be extended to all victims.

The Guardian quoted one refugee who sought help from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and was told “‘we have a programme for vulnerable women, but not men.’” Margot Wallström, the UN special representative of the secretary-general for sexual violence in conflict counters that UNHCR does assist both men and women, but that women are “overwhelmingly” the victims. Emerging studies, however, suggest sexual violence against men is more widespread than commonly acknowledged.

Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that some countries do not criminalize sexual abuse of men, as this report (PDF) by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documents. International humanitarian law criminalized rape in the twentieth century, but “prosecution was nonexistent” during the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and its Rwandan counterpart (ICTR) included rape in the category of crimes against humanity, war crime, and genocide, but abuse against women earned harsher punishment than abuse against men.

However, Lara Stemple of the University of California’s Health and Human Rights Law project also notes that:

“There are dozens of references to “violence against women” — defined to include sexual violence — in United Nations human rights resolutions, treaties and agreements, but most don’t mention sexual violence against men.”

The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 treats wartime sexual violence as something that only impacts on women and girls… Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced $44m to implement this resolution.”

“Because of its entirely exclusive focus on female victims, it seems unlikely that any of these new funds will reach the thousands of men and boys who suffer from this kind of abuse. Ignoring male rape not only neglects men, it also harms women by reinforcing a viewpoint that equates ‘female’ with ‘victim’, thus hampering our ability to see women as strong and empowered. In the same way, silence about male victims reinforces unhealthy expectations about men and their supposed invulnerability.”

I recognize that this is not an easy subject for men, in particular, to acknowledge. But we all need to shine the spotlight on such suffering to underscore that sexual abuse, no matter the gender of the victim, is abhorrent—and that perpetrators must be held to account. And the world needs to provide legal resources and psychological support to men who demonstrate the courage to come forward in reporting such crimes, despite the social stigma so often attached to their plight.