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Last night at Penn State thousands of students took to the streets. They tore down light poles. They vandalized cars. They overturned a news van. They lit a fire. They threw rocks at police and at least one bystander.
Why? Because their football coach, Joe Paterno, was fired.
And why was he fired? Because nine years ago, one of his staff witnessed Jerry Sandusky, one of Paterno’s former top assistants, anally rape a ten-year-old boy in the team’s showers. And because when that staffer reported what he had seen to Joe Paterno, he did nothing. No police were called. No investigation was undertaken. Paterno didn’t even revoke Sandusky’s access to the team’s locker rooms.
Sandusky was indicted on forty counts of sexual abuse last week. Two top administration officials were indicted for covering up his crimes. And yesterday Joe Paterno and the university’s president were fired.
Some Penn State students supported the Paterno firing. Others — many others — attended a vigil last night for Sandusky’s victims.
But thousands took to the streets around the campus chanting “fuck the trustees” and “we want Joe” and breaking things and hurting people.
And I honestly have nothing more to say about that.
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.
Youth culture scholars Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick have a thought-provoking op-ed in today’s New York Times, one that challenges a lot of the assumptions teachers and parents bring to bullying discussions.
High school students, they’ve found, rarely use the word bullying to describe even the most obvious examples of such behavior. Instead, they — particularly girls — dismiss it as “drama.”
Dismissing a conflict that’s really hurting their feelings as drama lets teenagers demonstrate that they don’t care about such petty concerns. They can save face while feeling superior to those tormenting them by dismissing them as desperate for attention. Or, if they’re the instigators, the word drama lets teenagers feel that they’re participating in something innocuous or even funny, rather than having to admit that they’ve hurt someone’s feelings. Drama allows them to distance themselves from painful situations.
Adults want to help teenagers recognize the hurt that is taking place, which often means owning up to victimhood. But this can have serious consequences. To recognize oneself as a victim — or perpetrator — requires serious emotional, psychological and social support, an infrastructure unavailable to many teenagers. And when teenagers like Jamey do ask for help, they’re often let down.
No student wants to be identified as a victim. And so…
Antibullying efforts cannot be successful if they make teenagers feel victimized without providing them the support to go from a position of victimization to one of empowerment. When teenagers acknowledge that they’re being bullied, adults need to provide programs similar to those that help victims of abuse. And they must recognize that emotional recovery is a long and difficult process.
Boyd and Marwick highlight a fundamental contradiction in anti-bullying campaigns. Adult rhetoric treats bullying as serious business, but adults in positions of power in such environments rarely exercise that power in ways that back up that rhetoric.
Adults: think back to the worst example of bullying you experienced or witnessed in high school. Now imagine that behavior taking place in a workplace, an adult social setting, a college classroom. Imagine how it would be addressed in such a context. The gap between what you imagine and what you saw in high school is the gap between society’s rhetoric on bullying and students’ reality. And in most cases that gap is vast.
A hundred members of Occupy Boston were arrested in the early hours of Tuesday morning after police tried and failed to get them to give up a satellite encampment across the street from their main Dewey Square occupation. Multiple reports from the scene suggest that the cops used excessive force in the course of making the arrests.
Meanwhile New York mayor Mike Bloomberg made his most conciliatory statement to date on Occupy Wall Street yesterday, saying that he would make no move against the demonstrators in Liberty Plaza “as long as they obey the laws.” Bloomberg, who had previously declined to answer questions about whether he would allow the camp to continue indefinitely, said yesterday that “the weather” could well be the determining factor in how long the occupation goes on.
What these two disparate developments — a raid in Boston, an olive branch in NYC — have in common is a recognition that shutting down major OWS protests is not a practical option for local police right now. Whether Bloomberg or Boston mayor Tom Menino would like to end the protests or not, they each recognize that right now any such attempt would prove disastrous. OWS is just too big, and too popular, to shut down completely.
So instead of a full frontal assault, what we’re seeing in both New York and Boston is an attempt at containment. In NYC, that’s taken the form of mass arrests at street demonstrations. In Boston last night it took the form of pushback against expansion.
Expect to see more of this kind of pushback, in these cities and nationally. And expect to see heightened tension around it as the OWS movement grows in numbers and the spaces already occupied become ever more cramped.
Two survivors of yesterday’s massacre at Utoya have written blogposts describing their experiences.
One post comes from Prableen Kaur, the head of the Worker’s Youth League in Grorud, a district in Oslo. Her post has been verified by, and republished in, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten.
The other was written by Khamshajiny Gunaratnam, a 23-year-old youth activist, whose identity and authorship of her blogpost was confirmed by the newspaper Dagbladet.
Kaur and are apparently close friends — each makes references in their post that seem to refer to the other.
I’m not going to quote at length from either of the posts — if you decide to click through, be aware that they describe harrowing scenes of violence in some detail. (Be aware as well that the links above are to Google automatic translations of the posts, which were written in Norwegian.) But I do want to repost something that Gunaratnam said near the end of her entry:
“I’m still in shock. And that is why I write this note. I can not bear to tell the story over and over again. … We continuously hear who was shot, etc. I have omitted that. It is degrading to the relatives. They deserve better.
“We deserve not to die. And that is also why I write this note. We are just normal teenagers. We are engaged in politics. We will make the world a better place.”
studentactivism.net 
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