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There’s lots of important stuff in the AAUW’s new report on sexual harassment in American high schools and middle schools, but I do want to highlight one small finding that hasn’t yet drawn much attention.
The study asked students to identify which kinds of kids were at highest risk for harassment. Ranking second on the list, chosen by 41% of respondents, was “girls who are very pretty.” Fourth on the list, chosen by 32%, was “girls who are not very pretty or not very feminine.”
Yep.
Oh, and first on the list? “Girls whose bodies are really developed, more than other girls.”
Last? “Boys who are good looking.”
Sexual harassment is misogyny. That’s what it is.
A British court has ruled against Julian Assange in his bid to avoid extradition to Sweden to face rape and sexual molestation charges against two women.
The two judges ruled on a variety of technical and jurisdictional issues, but the meat of their ruling addressed two questions: whether the complaints against Assange accurately described the behaviors alleged, and whether such acts, if proven, constituted criminal offenses in the jurisdiction in which they occurred.
Rejecting the Assange legal team’s attempt to portray his alleged actions as “disrespectful” or “disturbing” but not criminal, the judges declared (PDF) that the behavior described in each of the charges was criminal under the laws of England and Wales:
The first complaint described a situation in which Assange held down the arms of the woman known as AA, preventing her from reaching a condom as he attempted to pry her legs open with his own legs in order to penetrate her vaginally. AA’s subsequent consent to intercourse after he had agreed to put on a condom, they found, did not render Assange’s alleged initial use of force against her lawful.
With regard to the second complaint, Assange’s lawyers contended that it is not illegal under English law to penetrate a partner without a condom in circumstances in which she has only consented to sex if a condom is used. The court ruled that such deception would be a criminal act in England, given that AA’s complaint alleged that Assange intentionally sabotaged the condom he was using while they were having intercourse.
In the third complaint, AA alleged that Assange rubbed his erect naked penis against her body while they were sharing a bed under non-sexual circumstances. The judges ruled that AA’s consent to sleep in the same bed as Assange “was not a consent to him removing his clothes from the lower part of his body and deliberately pressing that part and his erect penis against her.”
Finally, in the case of the fourth complaint, the judges rejected the Assange lawyers’ contention that the behavior described would not constitute rape under English law. Under that law, they found, the behavior alleged constituted rape in two separate ways: First, that Assange is said to have penetrated SW without a condom when she had only consented to intercourse if a condom was present, and second that he penetrated her while she slept. “It is difficult to see,” they said, “how a person could reasonably have believed in consent if the complainant alleges a state of sleep or half sleep,” and “there is nothing in the statement from which it could be inferred that he reasonably expected that she would have consented to sex without a condom.”
One important note as to that last charge. Assange’s attorneys contended that SW’s consent to the continuation of unprotected intercourse after she awoke to find Assange penetrating her rendered the entire encounter consensual. The judges rejected that argument, declaring that “the fact that she allowed it to continue once she was aware of what was happening cannot go to his state of mind or its reasonableness when he initially penetrated her.” It was his alleged initial penetration, they ruled, that constituted rape, and consent to non-consensual intercourse cannot be obtained retroactively.
Today’s ruling is not Assange’s final appeal, and it is not a finding of fact by the court. But it is a wholesale rejection of the Assange legal team’s contention that the behavior alleged, even if proven, would not be unlawful in England. As such, it stands as a powerful endorsement of a robust and common-sensical approach to the question of consent in the law of rape and sexual assault.
At last night’s CNN/Tea Party Republican presidential debate, Texas governor Rick Perry was slammed for his 2007 support of a state program vaccinating girls against Human Papilloma Virus — a sexually-transmitted virus that can lead to cervical cancer.
In the debate itself Michele Bachman described the vaccine as a “government injection,” and Perry’s decision as “a violation of a liberty interest.” She also accused Perry, whose chief of staff was a former lobbyist for vaccine manufacturer Merck Pharmaceutical, of pushing the program as payback for campaign donations from Merck.
But after the debate, in a CNN interview, she took it to a really weird place.
One objection to the HPV vaccine is the idea that it might encourage promiscuity by reducing the risks of sexual activity. In her interview, for whatever reason, Bachmann chose to hint at this objection rather than state it openly, and the result was a truly bizarre depiction of mandatory vaccination as — and there’s really no other way to put this — Uncle Sam raping your daughters with needles.
Here. Look:
“When you have innocent little 12-year-old girls,” she said, “that are being forced to have a government injection into their body — this is a liberty interest that violates the most deepest personal part of a little child. … A little girl doesn’t get a do over — once they have that vaccination in their body, once it causes its damage, that little girl doesn’t have a chance to go back.”
That’s just … wow. I don’t … I can’t …
Update | When I first posted this, I was gobsmacked by the language itself — the use of such heavily loaded molestation imagery to describe a non-invasive, voluntary medical procedure. But a little while ago a friend reposted it on Facebook, and two friends of his quickly commented to point out something else.
You know what, if anything in this discussion, “violates the most deepest personal part” of you? You know what “causes its damage,” and doesn’t give you “a chance to go back”?
Cervical cancer.
Second Update | I’ve asked the women who commented on my friend’s Facebook page for permission to repost their notes, and they’ve graciously given it. They sum this all up far better than I could:
Jeannette Elizabeth: “Someone should maybe describe for Bachmann, in intimate detail, the violation of lying in a hospital room, knees shaking, legs spread wide, having cancerous cells scraped from one’s cervix.”
Melinda Kersha McDonald: “I couldn’t agree with Jeanette more. I’ve been there and done that. I have scars that can’t be seen and complcations that will haunt me for the rest of my life. This vaccine could have saved me from that. Making cancer a thing of the past can never be a bad thing.”
A few months ago I was out at a fancy ice cream place with my eight-year-old daughter. She got chocolate chip, and on a lark I asked for a taste of tarragon and pink peppercorn. It was delicious, and I wound up buying a cup.
I offered her a taste. She declined. I thought she’d really like it, and I thought she’d be chuffed to have tried such a weird flavor, so I offered again. She declined again. “Just one taste,” I said.
“No,” she said. “My body, my choice.”
I’ve used that phrase with her and her sister since they were toddlers, trying to drum it into them. Don’t want to hug your grandma? Don’t want your sister tickling you? Don’t want to wear the mask from your Halloween costume when you trick-or-treat? Your body, your choice.
But this was the first time she’d used it on me. She was right. And I apologized.
Her body, her choice. Period.
The Department of Education recently issued new guidelines on campus policies on sexual assault, including a directive that judicial bodies investigating sexual assault allegations employ the “preponderance of the evidence” standard in their deliberations.
“Preponderance of the evidence” is the standard commonly used in resolving civil cases — lawsuits — in the United States. It basically means that the question at hand will be resolved by a determination of which party’s version of events is more likely to be true. (“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is the standard of guilt used in criminal cases in the US, and there are other standards used in other circumstances, too.)
I don’t yet have an opinion on the DOE’s directive, and I think it’s an important question, so I’ve been reading up on it. And I just noticed something really weird.
As I noted above, “preponderance of the evidence” basically means that the judicial body will determine which side of the case, based on the evidence, is more likely to be in the right. If they come down on the side of the complainant, even hesitantly, the defendant is found guilty. It makes no difference, in other words, whether they’re completely convinced or have major doubts — whichever side they think is more likely to be in the right is the side that wins.
A common way of explaining this is to say that preponderance of the evidence means that if even 51% of the evidence presented supports one party, that party gets the decision. It’s an arbitrary number, of course — there’s nothing magical about 51% as opposed to 55% or 50.623% — but it gets the concept across. Whoever has the stronger evidence wins. Period.
So you see the 51% thing a lot. It’s all over the place — the number 51 appears in about a quarter of all web hits for the phrase “preponderance of the evidence.” But occasionally you see other numbers, like 50.1%, or even 50.000001%. And here’s where it gets interesting.
The number 50.1 appears only rarely in Google hits on “preponderance of the evidence” — a few times per thousand. But in pages in which the word “rape” or one of its variants appear as well, 50.1 shows up almost three times as often. You see a similar bump for 50.01, 50.001, etc.
Those numbers aren’t that big. It doesn’t seem to be a complete glitch — the numbers go in the opposite direction when you add “civil law” to the search instead of “rape,” for instance — but the magnitude isn’t huge.
Check out what happens when you substitute “campus sexual assault” for rape, though. The number 50.01 shows up three times as often as you’d expect, and 50.0001 shows up nearly seven times as often. Plug in “Title IX,” the campus sex-discrimination law on which the ruling was based, and 50.0001 shows up more than fifteen times as often as it should.
What does all this mean?
Well, one thing it doesn’t mean is that a campus assault case in which 50.0001% of the evidence supports the complainant is going to result in a conviction. The very concept of “50.0001% of the evidence” is meaningless — the idea that you could quantify the evidence in a sexual assault case to a precision of two parts in a million is absurd.
And that, of course, is why “50.0001%” is a figure of speech that you hardly ever see in discussions of this legal standard. It’s not coherent. It’s not meaningful. It’s not illuminating of the issues at stake.
And that is precisely why it keeps coming up in discussions of Title IX and campus sexual assault. Because “preponderance of the evidence means the side with 50.0001% of the evidence wins” is a lot scarier than “preponderance of the evidence means that the relevant body looks at all the evidence and rules for the party it thinks has the stronger case.”
studentactivism.net 
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