Naomi Wolf has written an essay at the Guardian in which she argues against laws and policies that protect the anonymity of women who have gone to police (or other authorities, such as campus officials) with allegations of rape. The practice is, she argues, “a relic of the Victorian era” —  a “bad law and bad policy” that impedes the fight against rape and should be abandoned.

I left what appears below as a comment on her essay at the Guardian website. Because of its relevance to campus sexual assault policies and recent conversations on this blog, I am reposting it here.

One note: I framed this response in the context of women who had been raped because that was the context of Wolf’s original essay, and because of the analogy to abortion. Everything I said applies at least as strongly to men who have been raped, however, and I’ve posted a follow-up comment to that effect.

Naomi Wolf writes:

And I do, yes, believe that long term there would have been less stigma — like with abortion, that used to be so shrouded in shame and secrecy. That begann to change women Gloria Steinem and other feminists in the seventies began to say, ‘I had an abortion.’ You saw it happened in all kinds of circumstances, not just to ‘sluts’ or ‘bad’ women.

Yes. Certainly. But as you note, these women came forward voluntarily, which is not what you called for in your original piece.

The abortion analogy is an apt one, though perhaps not for the reasons you think. What would have happened if, in the wake of the legalization of abortion, a law had been passed mandating that the name of every woman who obtained one be made publicly available? Would that have reduced the stigma of abortion? Perhaps. But it would also have sent many women underground, driving them to back-alley abortionists because they feared the consequences in their families, among their friends, in their workplaces if the fact of their abortion had become known.

So too with rape. Yes, it can be a powerful and valuable thing when a woman comes forward to talk publicly about her experience. Absolutely. No feminist I know would dispute that. But the moral force of that choice comes from the fact that it was a choice.

What would happen if women were forced to disclose rapes, if their names were disseminated without their permission? Some good things. But also some horrible things.

Some women would refuse to go to the police out of fear of stigma. Their rapists would be allowed to continue to act with impunity. Other women, raped by friends or family members, would be shamed or rejected by their loved ones. Some would be the targets of retaliation by their rapists’ supporters.

These dangers are all real for women who have been raped, and they stand as barriers to effective prosecution of rapists. Your policy of mandatory reporting would raise those barriers higher.

You want women who have been raped to be treated as “moral adults.” But isn’t the essence of moral adulthood that we each have the freedom to choose when and under what circumstances we talk about our own experiences? Shouldn’t someone advocating moral adulthood encourage women to come forward on their own, rather than advocating for women to have that decision taken out of their hands?

In a previous comment you told us that your mother was raped when she was twelve, and that she agrees with your position on this issue. But you also said this:

She gave me her permission to say so and to disclose her experience.

You asked her for her permission, and she gave it. If she hadn’t, wouldn’t you have respected that decision? Wouldn’t any decent human being do just that?

What follows is the full text, translated into English, of an article by Jessica Balksjö which appeared in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet on August 21, 2010.

The article, titled “Thirty-Year-Old Woman: I Was Assaulted” and subtitled “Discusses Charges Against Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange,” constitutes the only detailed public discussion of the allegations against Assange yet offered by either of his two accusers. It has never before been published in English.

This translation was prepared by a Swedish-speaking friend of StudentActivism.net, and lightly edited by myself. I’ll be putting up a post discussing the article’s significance tomorrow.

•          •          •

Aftonbladet has spoken with one of the women behind the rape charges against Julian Assange.

When she met a woman who said she had been raped by Assange, both decided to go to the police.

The 30-year-old woman is going public with her story here in Aftonbladet to explain the specifics of the accusations and to correct a number of errors in a story published in Expressen this morning.

Assange met both women during his visit to Sweden. He was first charged with raping one of the women, charges which were dropped by the chief prosecutor, Eva Finné, but he is still charged with molesting the second woman.

Considers Herself the Target of a Sexual Assault

The women met Assange during his stay in Stockholm. Neither of them had previously met Assange or the other.

The 30-year-old woman says that she considers herself the victim of a sexual assault or molestation, but not a rape.

The police report had its origins last Friday, when a second woman contacted the first with a similar, but worse, story. This second woman was between 20 and 30 years old.

Gave a Detailed Statement

Because of the ongoing police investigation, the 30-year-old woman has chosen not to provide details of her allegations at this time, but she gave the police a very detailed account. The other woman has also made a detailed statement to the police.

“I believed her right away since my experience was so similar to hers,” said the woman to Aftonbladet.

The two women decided to go jointly to the police to make their statements.

“I Don’t Feel Threatened”

“It is completely incorrect to say that we chose not to file a report with the police because we were afraid of Assange,” said the woman. “He is not violent, and I do not feel threatened by him.”

In both cases, the sex was initially consensual, but subsequently became abusive.

“The other woman wanted him to be charged with rape. I filed my report as a witness statement in support of her account and to support her. Both of us stand behind our accounts,” the woman told Aftonbladet.

“Charges Not Orchestrated”

The 30-year-old woman dismisses the conspiracy theories currently flooding the web.

“Neither the Pentagon nor anyone else orchestrated these charges. The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who has a warped attitude toward women and is incapable of taking no for an answer.”

In recent days, Julian Assange has been making the media rounds to give his account of the events that have led him to be investigated for rape and sexual misconduct. Assange’s two accusers have been silent throughout this wave of media attention, but one of them — the woman known as Ms. A — gave an interview to the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet last August, telling her own version of the story.

A few details from the Aftonbladet article have been reported in the English-language press, most notably Ms. A’s statement that she does not fear Assange or consider him violent — a statement that reads quite differently in its original context than it does in some second-hand accounts. Other aspects of her account have, however, received virtually no attention.

The interview Ms. A gave Aftonbladet is consistent with the version of events contained in the Swedish police reports that leaked last month, but includes more detail on several important elements of the story, particularly regarding the aftermath of the alleged assaults and her own perspective on Assange’s actions.

There’s nothing particularly explosive here, but the interview does address some questions that have been asked repeatedly in the press and on the blogs, and it’s worth reviewing for that reason:

• Ms. A told Aftonbladet that although she considered herself to have been sexually assaulted by Assange, she did not go to the police on her own behalf. Rather, she accompanied Ms. W — who had decided independently to make a police complaint — to offer support and corroborating testimony.

• She characterized both her encounter with Assange and Ms. W’s as ones in which consensual sexual relations became abusive, and attributed the alleged assaults to his inability to accept no for an answer.

• She stated that she did not regard Assange as a violent person, and that she did not — at the time that she spoke to the reporter — feel fearful or threatened by him. At the same time, however, she characterized Assange’s attitude toward women as warped and described his actions toward her as sexual assault.

• She denied that her actions and Ms. W’s had been orchestrated by any government or other outside agent.

The Aftonbladet article has never, to my knowledge, been translated into English. This summary is based on a Google translation, with a few ambiguous passages clarified by a Swedish-language speaker. I of course welcome corrections and additions.

Update | A full translation of the Aftonbladet article is now available here.

Wow.

So last week someone leaked an extraordinary letter to the San Francisco Chronicle. A group of three dozen top administrators at the University of California, writing to the UC Board of Regents, claimed that they were owed millions in new pension benefits, and threatened legal action against the university if they didn’t get them.

The dispute arose out of an obscure provision of federal tax policy that capped the administrators’ pensions. The group claim that the Regents promised in 1999 to boost their benefits if the IRS granted a waiver — that waiver was granted in 2007, but the Regents haven’t acted.

In ordinary times such a disagreement would go unnoticed by the wider public, but these are no ordinary times. California’s state government is in full meltdown, and the UC system is seeing huge budget cuts, slashing staff, and raising tuition to astronomical levels. To raise pensions by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the system’s highest-paid executives — the provision only applies to those making salaries above $245,000 — would be both a fiscal and a public relations disaster.

So it’s not surprising that UC hadn’t acted on the request. It’s not even surprising that they’ve rejected it again today. What is surprising is the language they’ve used in doing so.

The public statement, released jointly today by Board of Regents Chairman Russell Gould and UC President Mark Yudof, says that the Board’s action a decade ago wasn’t “self-executing” — that it gave the Regents permission to raise pensions on the group, but didn’t obligate them to do so. Given the state of UC’s finances, it would be imprudent to do so now. And here’s the kicker:

Months ago, the Board retained counsel to assist the University in the event this position should need to be defended in the courts. While those who signed the letter are without question highly valued employees, we must disagree with them on this particular issue.

Translation: We’re lawyered up. Do what you gotta do.

“Fuck Hamas,” it begins. “Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA!” The Gaza Youth Manifesto for Change, published three weeks ago, is an angry indictment of (nearly) all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and it’s been getting a huge amount of attention on the internet and beyond.

The anonymous authors of the manifesto — eight secular Gaza college students, they say, three women and five men — are fed up:

We are youth with heavy hearts. We carry in ourselves a heaviness so immense that it makes it difficult to us to enjoy the sunset. How to enjoy it when dark clouds paint the horizon and bleak memories run past our eyes every time we close them? We smile in order to hide the pain. We laugh in order to forget the war. We hope in order not to commit suicide here and now. During the war we got the unmistakable feeling that Israel wanted to erase us from the face of the earth. During the last years Hamas has been doing all they can to control our thoughts, behaviour and aspirations. We are a generation of young people used to face missiles, carrying what seems to be a impossible mission of living a normal and healthy life, and only barely tolerated by a massive organization that has spread in our society as a malicious cancer disease, causing mayhem and effectively killing all living cells, thoughts and dreams on its way as well as paralyzing people with its terror regime. Not to mention the prison we live in, a prison sustained by a so-called democratic country.

…

We do not want to hate, we do not want to feel all of this feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore. ENOUGH! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough control, limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings, sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious bullshit, enough incarceration! WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we want!

It’s powerful writing, drawing on traditions of non-sectarian youth organizing — because young people often lack strong personal commitments to existing institutions, their organizing often operates outside of, and critical of, such structures.

But is the manifesto too good to be true? I wondered myself, the first time I read it. Edward Teller, a blogger at Firedoglake is wondering too, noting the international funders behind the Sharek Youth Forum, whose suppression by Hamas the manifesto condemns. Is the document genuine, Teller asks, or is its publication yet another chess move by one of the forces it’s ostensibly opposed to?

The Guardian ran an article on the manifesto over the weekend, interviewing several of its authors in Gaza. “The group,” the paper said, “is currently investing most of its time and energy in debating new strategies to pursue a web-based platform for change.”

Interesting. I’m eager to see how this story develops.

Update | I asked GYBO, via their Facebook page, if they had a response to the Firedoglake story, but they deleted my post from their wall. I’ve just emailed them to ask the question again, and will update if I receive any response.

Wednesday Update | I apparently owe GYBO an apology. As they noted on their new blog this morning, Facebook restricted their ability to post on their page yesterday. As part of that restriction, they say, posts to their wall on which they commented were automatically deleted by Facebook itself. If this is true — and I have no reason to doubt it — then my previous update was in error. Sorry.

GYBO hasn’t yet replied directly to the questions about their funding and affiliations raised at Firedoglake, but another post at their blog yesterday provided a bit more detail about their political perspective and goals. I’m still interested in hearing their response to the Firedoglake stuff, and I intend to ask them again via Twitter today, but I do want to make something clearer than I did yesterday.

When I borrowed Edward Teller’s formulation of the question of GYBO’s identity — “is the document genuine … or is its publication yet another chess move by one of the forces it’s ostensibly opposed to?” — I gave that particular analysis more weight than I intended. The reality is that the question of GYBO’s “genuineness” and that of the group’s affiliations are two separate questions. Whether GYBO is affiliated with funders outside of Gaza, or affiliated with people who are affiliated with such funders, is a separate question from that of what its goals and motivations are.

The folks at GYBO — or some of them, at least — got the impression yesterday that I was hostile to their project. That’s a mistaken impression, but the responsibility for the mistake is mostly mine, not theirs. Again, apologies.