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On Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Safford School District v. Redding, the case of Savana Redding, an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched by school officials looking for prescription-strength ibuprofen.
It’s an interesting and important case, and I’ve got lots to say about it — expect another couple of posts on the subject in the next day or two. But I’d like to start by clearing up a misconception.
A reporter named David G. Savage covered the case for the Tribune Company, which publishes the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times. In his story, which appeared in both of those papers, he said that when Justice Scalia asked Matthew Wright, the school district’s attorney, whether a body cavity search would be permissible in a school setting, Wright “insisted it would be legal.”
Savage’s take on the exchange has been echoed by a bunch of blogs. But it’s a profound misrepresentation of what Wright actually said.
Back in December I wrote about the parents of two high school students who were suing their daughters’ school for suspending them from the cheerleading squad after administrators acquired nude cellphone photos of them.
The students say they never distributed the photos. Though the pictures were circulating widely in the school without the students’ knowledge or permission, none of the students who forwarded or received the photos were ever punished.
In their lawsuit, the families say that the school allowed more school officials to view the photos than was necessary, that they did not conduct a proper investigation of the distribution of the photos, and that they failed to report the incident to the police. (The parents themselves filed a police report on the incident after they learned of it.)
That’s the story as it stood in December. I did some follow-up research this week, and here’s what I found:
Nobody has lived at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard in Durham, North Carolina since March 2006, when police began investigating charges that members of the Duke University lacrosse team had raped a woman there.
Three years later, the criminal charges against the players have long since been dropped, but the house remains padlocked and vacant. Duke owns the building, and wants to tear it down, but lawyers for members of the team are insisting that it be preserved as evidence in a possible lawsuit.
The Duke Chronicle, the university’s student newspaper, has the story.
Feminists are sounding alarms online about the return to cyberspace of a male blogger who sexually assaulted a fellow college student in early 2007.
Kyle Payne, a self-described male feminist and anti-pornography activist, was an undergraduate at Iowa’s Buena Vista University, working as a resident advisor in BVU’s dorms, when he undressed and videotaped an unconscious, intoxicated student under his care.
Months after the assault, while his crime was still unknown, Payne began blogging on pornography, sexual violence, and other issues from a pro-feminist perspective. He continued to do so, without acknowledging his wrongdoing, even after he was arrested for, and pled guilty to, the assault. It was not until he was on the brink of incarceration that publicity forced him to admit his crime on his blog.
Both the fact of Payne’s crime and the manner in which he chose to discuss it generated tremendous outrage among feminist bloggers, and that outrage was revived and intensified last month when Payne, released from a six-month jail term, began blogging again.
Payne’s earliest post-incarceration posts made no mention of his crime or his punishment, although they did include reprints of pro-feminist essays he had written before the scandal broke — including several relating specifically to campus rape prevention. In response to subsequent criticism, he added a disclaimer referring to the sexual assault to his earlier pro-feminist and anti-rape posts, though no mention of his crime appears on the front page of his blog or in his new posts. (He discloses it at the very end of his “Blogger Bio” page, in a one-sentence statement that refers to the assault as a “non-violent sexual offense.”)
For a sampling of response to Payne’s return to blogging, see Renegade Evolution, Natalia Antonova, and Hugo Schwyzer.
Students at the University of Minnesota Duluth staged a protest and counter-concert when rapper Soulja Boy performed on campus on Friday night. UMD student Arielle Schnur said Soulja Boy’s songs “degrade half the student body as sex objects and the other half as sexual assault perpetrators.”
Protest organizers sat down with the director of the UMD student center to plot strategy for a protest that would raise awareness without disrupting the event. In an effort to ensure an orderly demonstration, organizers required participants to attend an informational session on protest rules before the gig.
The demonstrators’ counter-concert, held at the same time as the Soulja Boy show, was free and featured a lineup of local bands.
The protest was given a boost on Friday afternoon when Soulja Boy mentioned it on his Twitter feed.
studentactivism.net 
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