Today is Nelson Mandela’s 93rd birthday, which seems like as good a reason as any to tell this story.
Mandela’s first experience in political organizing didn’t come in the anti-apartheid movement. It came in student government at his undergraduate college, the University of Fort Hare.
In his senior year, Mandela was nominated for Fort Hare’s Student Representative Council, a six-member student government. But in a mass meeting shortly before the elections, the student body of the college voted to boycott, citing the poor quality of the food on campus and the weakness of the SRC itself.
Twenty-five students out of the campus of 150 broke the boycott and voted in the election, and Mandela was elected. He and the rest of the SRC-elect refused to take their seats. Another election was held, a similar number of students voted, and Mandela again refused to serve. Mandela again refused to serve, and was expelled for his protest. He would go on to finish his undergraduate education by correspondence at another university.
Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, is back in court for a second day today, appealing an order that he be extradited to Sweden to face questioning on rape charges. As I noted yesterday, his defense team has shifted tactics in this latest round of argument, and they now claim that the charges against Assange, even if proven, don’t amount to rape. However “disturbing” or “disrespectful” his actions may have been, they say, however much he “push[ed] at the boundaries” of the complainants’ wishes, the two women ultimately consented to the acts in question.
Today Clare Montgomery, a representative of the Swedish prosecutors, is rebutting those arguments, and she’s pushing back hard.
The fact that the two women eventually acquiesced to advances they had originally rejected, Montgomery argues, is evidence not of consent but of coercion. In their statements to police, she says, the complainants describe “circumstances in which … they were coerced by physical force or were trapped.” In two cases — one in which Assange is alleged to have ripped a condom, and another in which he is accused of penetrating a complainant without a condom while she slept — “the complaint is unprotected sexual intercourse where consent had only been given to protected intercourse.” In the latter of these instances, she notes, “nobody suggests she was positively consenting.”
What is at stake here is the fundamental question of what constitutes consent in a sexual encounter. Yesterday Assange’s attorneys suggested that an encounter that begins non-consensually may become consensual if the passive party eventually agrees to the other’s advances, while today Clare Montgomery is arguing that such grudging consent is no consent at all.
The two complainants “let him continue,” she said this morning, but that did not make his actions legal. In fact, that construction is itself evidence of coercion, and thus of rape. “This is non-consensual,” she argued. “It is coerced, and the words used — ‘I let him’ — means non-consent.”
The hearing has just resumed for the afternoon session. More later if events warrant.
Update | More from Clare Montgomery on the incident in which Assange is alleged to have penetrated a complainant while she slept:
“The evidence is absolutely clear that this complainant may be legitimately described as given evidence that she had been penetrated whilst asleep. Furthermore, being penetrated in a way which [it] is absolutely clear … she had not consented to, namely unprotected. It is doubly clear there is no consent. She may later have acquiesced. That didn’t make the initial penetration anything other than an act of rape.”
Montgomery went on to say that the complainant had, by her own account, been “shocked and paralyzed” when she realized what Assange was doing, in part because she had never had unprotected sex before in her life.
Second Update | Montgomery has accused Assange attorney Ben Emmerson of “winding the law of consent back to the 19th century” with yesterday’s arguments.
Wednesday Update | A representative of the Swedish prosecution team is forcefully rebutting the Assange defense’s definition of consent in today’s hearing. Click here for ongoing coverage.
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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is in a London court today, contesting an order that he be extradited to Sweden to face allegations that he raped two women there last year.
Assange’s attorneys are contending that the extradition order is invalid because the actions alleged are not criminal under English law. In doing so, they appear to be conceding the sincerity of at least some of those allegations. “Nothing I say,” Assange lawyer Ben Emmerson told the court this morning, “should be taken as denigrating the complainants” or to “trivialize their experience.” His arguments should not be construed as disputing that they honestly consider Assange’s behavior “disrespectful” or “disturbing,” he said, or that Assange “push[ed] at the boundaries of what they felt comfortable with.”
Emmerson went on to provide accounts of the two encounters in question which granted — for the purposes of today’s hearing — the validity of Assange’s accusers’ central claims. He described Assange as penetrating one woman while she slept without a condom, in defiance of her previously expressed wishes, before arguing that because she subsequently “consented to … continuation” of the act of intercourse, the incident as a whole must be taken as consensual.
In the other incident, in which Assange is alleged to have held a woman down against her will during a sexual encounter, Emmerson provided this summary of the allegations: “[The complainant] was lying on her back and Assange was on top of her … [she] felt that Assange wanted to insert his penis into her vagina directly, which she did not want since he was not wearing a condom … she therefore tried to turn her hips and squeeze her legs together in order to avoid a penetration … [she] tried several times to reach for a condom, which Assange had stopped her from doing by holding her arms and bending her legs open and trying to penetrate her with his penis without using a condom. [She] says that she felt about to cry since she was held down and could not reach a condom and felt this could end badly.”
As in the case of the first incident, Emmerson argues that subsequent consent renders the entire encounter consensual, and legal.
While Emmerson was not vouching for the accuracy of these accounts but merely offering them as summaries of the charges against his client, his introductory statement, excerpted above, was striking in its tone and approach:
“Nothing I say should be taken as denigrating the complainants, the genuineness of their feelings of regret, to trivialise their experience or to challenge whether they felt Assange’s conduct was disrespectful, discourteous, disturbing or even pushing at the boundaries of what they felt comfortable with.”
At a minimum, such language would seem to preclude two of the defenses that have previously been offered by Assange defenders — that the complainants were merely spurned lovers or government plants concocting fantastical stories for their own purposes.
Note | This post has been edited to further clarify the distinction between Emmerson’s own descriptions of Assange’s behavior and his summaries of the allegations against his client. The core arguments of the piece remain unchanged.
Billy Bragg debuted a new song on stage this weekend, a throwback to the topical political tunes of his youth. Titled “Never Buy the Sun,” it’s a commentary on the scandals currently engulfing the British tabloids owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International.
If you haven’t been following that story, it’s a doozy. For several years now, it’s been known that the weekly News of the World tabloid had illegally hacked into certain celebrities’ voicemail messages as part of its newsgathering operations. But in the last few weeks that story has been completely transformed, as the full scope of the hacking and related misbehavior has come to light.
First it was revealed that the paper gained access to the cellphone voicemail of teenaged murder victim Milly Dowler while Dowler was still missing. Journalists at the time went so far as to delete messages from the system in an effort to free up space for more incoming calls, leading Dowler’s parents to conclude that their child was still alive and checking her phone. It has also been suggested that the deletions misled police as to the facts of the crime, hindering their investigation, and may even have destroyed evidence in the case.
Not long after the Milly Dowler story broke, it was charged that News of the World had hacked into the phones of British servicemembers who had been killed in action, and into those of relatives of victims of the terrorist bombings that struck London on July 7, 2005. More recently, it’s been learned that the paper had made a habit of bribing police officials for tips, and just today, a series of revelations emerged about how papers throughout the News International organization targeted former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his family.
This is a huge scandal in Britain right now — it’s already led to the permanent closure of News of the World and several high-profile arrests, and it’s been compared to Watergate in its potential scope and significance.
Which brings us back to Billy Bragg. Billy’s been a political songwriter for a very long time now, and about a quarter century ago he wrote a song about the British tabloids called “It Says Here.” He’d been messing around with an updated version over the last week or so, but kept finding that new developments were overtaking his songwriting, so eventually he wound up putting together something completely new — “Never Buy the Sun.”
“Never Buy the Sun” is a good song, but its title, and its most repeated lyric — Scousers never buy the Sun — depend on a bit of knowledge of British history that most Americans don’t have. Here’s the skinny:
On April 15, 1989, Liverpool’s local football (soccer) team was playing an important game at Hillsborough Stadium, a neutral venue. At the time, Hillsborough — like many British stadiums — had non-reserved seating and high fences between the stands and the playing field. There was a big crowd for that day’s match, and a bottleneck developed at the entrances at the Liverpool end of the field. Large numbers of fans remained outside even after the game began, and when police opened a small gate to eject a fan, some members of the crowd surged forward. In response, the police opened several larger exit gates to serve as an additional entrance, without putting crowd control measures in place to direct foot traffic. As a result, thousands of fans pressed forward into stands that had no room to accommodate them, and those in the front had no ability to leave — or even move — when they began to be crushed by those behind. Ninety-six people were killed in the crush, one of the worst such disasters in British history.
Four days after the Hillsborough Disaster, the Sun newspaper — like the News of the World, a part of Murdoch’s News International empire — ran a front-page story claiming that as events were unfolding, Liverpool fans attacked and urinated on police who were trying to bring events under control, sexually abused the body of a girl who had died in the crush, and picked the pockets of the dead.
These were all lies.
The Sun did not immediately retract its story, and the paper has subsequently veered between apology and justification. Sales of the paper in Liverpool plummeted in the wake of of the incident, and have never — twenty-two years later — recovered. Today Liverpool is one of Britain’s largest cities and the Sun is one of the country’s best-selling newspapers, but only a few thousand copies of the paper are sold in Liverpool each day. Many newsstands won’t even carry it.
In local slang, a person from Liverpool is called a Scouser.
The leadership of the Simon Fraser Student Society (SFSS) has announced a Sunday lockout of SFSS’s union employees, after two years of unsuccessful contract negotiations. Unless an agreement is reached by tomorrow afternoon, CUPE local 3338’s twenty employees will be barred from working their jobs.
Unsurprisingly, the two sides characterize the state of negotiations differently, with CUPE arguing that SFSS is demanding “dramatic wage rollbacks and cuts to staffing levels,” while SFSS president Jeff McCann says that the student society is asking for a 12% average pay cut, with about a quarter of that loss to be restored over the course of the new contract. (Edit: see comments for more details on the proposed cuts.)
Activists claim that this move is ideologically motivated, noting that newly-elected SFSS leaders announced the lockout simultaneously with an effort to evict the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group (SFPIRG) from student-owned offices.
I’ll be following this story as it develops, but I think one element that hasn’t yet received much attention is worth emphasizing — the timing of the lockout.
Now, I don’t know anything about what triggered this particular decision. It’s possible that there’s a compelling reason why this had to happen now. But as I’ve written many times before, summer is the season when university administrators traditionally launch their most obnoxious initiatives, on the premise that there aren’t any students around to object. If you want to pave a community garden, or eliminate a department, or create a new parking fee, or whatever, summer’s the time to do it.
Like I say, I don’t know why SFSS acted when it did. Maybe they had a good reason. But if they timed this lockout — and the SFPIRG eviction — to take place in July because they knew that their student opponents wouldn’t be able to mobilize … well, that’s just punk. It’s anti-democratic, and it’s anti-student. It’s wrong.
studentactivism.net 
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