Intended Consequences. It is estimated that 20,000 children were born as the result of rape during the 1994
Rwandan Genocide that claimed the lives of over 800,000 Tutsis. Many of these women also contracted HIV/AIDS as a result. Not only do the mothers have to live with memories of this incredibly horrible event, but they along with their children are shunned by other Tutsi survivors.
[more inside]
posted by itchylick
on Apr 20, 2009 -
22 comments
Iraq: "A woman suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers has confessed to organising their rapes so she could later convince them that martyrdom was the only way to escape the shame."
Algeria: "Evil al-Qaeda chiefs are raping young male converts to shame them into becoming suicide bombers, it emerged yesterday. "
posted by davidstandaford
on Feb 4, 2009 -
140 comments
My friends and I confided in each other, swapping stories, sharing out pain, while keeping it all hidden from the adults in our lives. After all, who could we tell? This wasn’t rape - it didn’t fit the definitions. This was Not rape. We should have known better. We were the ones who would take the blame. We would be punished, and no one wanted that. So, these actions went on, aided by a cloak of silence. From
Racialicious.
posted by Navelgazer
on Dec 23, 2008 -
348 comments
Men Can Stop Rape is part of a growing movement to stop rape, sexual assault, and sexual violence by focusing on
educating men. There are efforts to
change the climate on college campuses and
curriculum at
Haverford,
Tulane,
Kansas State,
Idaho State,
University of Wisconsin,
University of Texas,
University of Minnesota,
University of Maine,
Portland State,
Harvard,
University of Rochester,
University of Delaware,
Franklin and Marshall, and
Colorado State, to name a few. Want to start your own? Here's
how.
Not in college? There's
[more inside]
posted by lunit
on Nov 11, 2008 -
279 comments
For many people who lived in Houston in the early 1970s, trick or treat brings up memories of "The Candy Man," serial killer
Dean Corll. He, along with accomplices David Brooks and
Wayne Henley (YouTube), kidnapped, raped, and tortured to death 27 boys between the ages of thirteen and eighteen between 1970 and 1973. Thirty-seven years after the bodies of their victims were discovered in mass graves in southwest Houston and the Bolivar Peninsula, three still were unidentified until recently when the efforts of forensic anthropologist
Sharon Derrick identified victim ML73-3349, now known to be
Randall Lee Harvey.
posted by WolfDaddy
on Oct 31, 2008 -
32 comments
The horrifying crimes of Joseph Fritzl shocked Austria and the world. Recently two essays explored Austrian literature in an attempt to understand what cultural conditions could foster such monstrosity. Nicholas Spice, in
Up from the Cellar, explores the work of Nobel Prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek and her dissection of male violence. Ritchie Robertson searches for antecedents in
Josef Fritzl's fictive forebears.
[via The New Yorker's Book Bench]
posted by Kattullus
on Jun 8, 2008 -
63 comments
Performance Artist Killed on Peace Trip. Pippa Bacca, performance artist, and friend wearing white wedding dresses, planned to hitchhike from Italy to the Balkans to the Middle East to send a message of peace and “marriage between different peoples and nations.” After three weeks on the road, Pippa Bacca was killed by a driver who offered her a ride. Her naked body was found and local authorities said Ms. Bacca had been raped and strangled.
posted by semmi
on Apr 21, 2008 -
106 comments
Nearly 60,000* American children (mostly girls) are abducted by strangers each year. After seeing a
security video documenting a young girl's abduction, 15-year-old Dallas Jessup convinced her Filipino street fighting instructor to work with her on a school project and together they developed a method intended to teach young girls how to avoid
Carla Brucia's fate. The resulting 47 minute video,
Just Yell Fire, is viewable free of charge and teaches easy self defense moves created to help a potential victim avoid abduction or date rape. If there's a girl you love and want to protect from harm, the tips in
this video may just save her life someday.
[more inside]
posted by miss lynnster
on Jan 7, 2008 -
177 comments
Hooker raped & robbed by justice system. Apparently, if you're a prostitute and you're gang-raped at gunpoint, that's not actually rape, but "theft of services". In Philadelphia, judge Teresa Carr Deni ruled exactly that in a case where a woman posted a Craigslist ad offering sex for money -- but when she met with her John, instead of the agreed upon exhange, he pulled a gun on her, raped her, then invited four other men to rape her as well. As if this weren't sad enough, a near-identical case --
with the same defendant -- came up four days later, and the prosecutor decided not to even try it as to not put the woman through the misery of being so resoundly denied justice. Devolution is real, spuds.
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me
on Oct 20, 2007 -
61 comments
Judge bans the word "rape" from a rape trial. Jeffre Cheuvront, a Nebraska judge, "granted a motion by defense attorneys barring the use of the words rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit from the trial of Pamir Safi—accused of raping Tory Bowen in October 2004." This move follows some tightening of language during trials meant to avoid unnecessarily swaying jury members. But has it gone too far this time?
posted by cmgonzalez
on Jun 24, 2007 -
112 comments
The private war of women soldiers. "Last year, Col. Janis Karpinski caused a stir by publicly reporting that in 2003, three female soldiers had died of dehydration in Iraq, which can get up to 126 degrees in the summer, because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being raped by male soldiers if they walked to the latrines after dark."
posted by Sticherbeast
on Mar 8, 2007 -
187 comments
The three-decade decline in teenage and young-adult rape accompanies huge drops in all crimes -- murder, assault, drug abuse and property -- committed by youth... Women's rapidly rising status and economic independence in the larger society fostered new attitudes and laws that rejected violence against women. That younger people growing up in this environment of greater gender equality should show the biggest decreases in rape, while older generations lag behind, is consistent with this explanation... Over the last 30 years, rape arrest rates have fallen by 80% among Californians under age 15, much larger than the 25% drop among residents age 40 and older.
The decline of rapeSo, kids today
are different.
posted by y2karl
on Feb 22, 2007 -
93 comments
Human Rights Watch indepth report on male rape in US prisons. "I've been sentenced for a D.U.I. offense. My 3rd one. When I first came to prison, I had no idea what to expect. Certainly none of this. I'm a tall white male, who unfortunately has a small amount of feminine characteristics. And very shy. These characteristics have got me raped so many times I have no more feelings physically. "
posted by petsounds
on Feb 11, 2007 -
149 comments
Last week a video was posted to YouTube and linked to by the Iraqslogger site. The YouTube account ("Deathlyillington") is now defunct but the video survives and purports to show a former guard from Abu Ghraib talking about torture techniques employed at the American-run prison. The man recounts the gang rape of a female teenage detainee, in which one guard "pimped" the girl to others for $50 each. As he recalls, "I think at the end of the day he'd made like 500 bucks before she hung herself." The US Army's Criminal Investigation Department has now launched an investigation, but the question remains, is the video real, or is it a hoax along the lines of
Jesse Macbeth, the
Daily Mirror fake torture photos or the
fake beheading video. The
video contains few clues to the identity of the alleged soldier, who is shown in silhouette but seems potentially recognizable. A
transcript is available.
posted by unSane
on Feb 1, 2007 -
67 comments
The Duke lacrosse rape case hurtled toward perhaps sinister motives last week with testimony from the head of the private DNA lab prosecutor Nifong hired to test the rape kit samples taken from the accuser. Brian Meehan revealed that not only had his lab found DNA samples from five unknown men, none of whom were Duke lacrosse players, Meehan had also agreed with Nifong not to put that info in the DNA Security's final report. Were it not for the fact that the three defendants have counsel capable of pouring over thousands of pages of technical documents, this vital, exculpatory evidence would have gone unnoticed.
Previous opinions in
MeFi.
posted by semmi
on Dec 22, 2006 -
276 comments
"More Vicious than Rape." Thousands of Congolese girls and women, among the hundreds of thousands of rape cases, who have been deliberately harmed following their rape in a particular way with a brutality that staggers the mind.
[more inside]
posted by WCityMike
on Nov 17, 2006 -
112 comments
My Rapist One day several years ago, I opened up my hometown newspaper and found a picture of my rapist on the Engagements page.[via nytimes]
posted by cgs
on Oct 31, 2006 -
142 comments
Sheikh Hilali, the mufti of Australia, has raised more than a few eyebrows when he declared that
rape-victims are to blame for tempting men: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park and the cats come and eat it -- whose fault is it? The cats or the uncovered meat?" Needless to say, the mufti doesn't think the cats are to blame. Australians (including their PM) are not amused and
call for the mufti to step down. Even many
Islamic women think it's the mufti, and not the meat, that stinks. Others argue that at least the mufti (quickly christened the "
rape cleric" by some news outlets) will
force Muslims to fess up and take a stand on whether they really think that women are Satan's agents who incite rape with immodest dress.
The Sheikh himself found it wisest to go on a "
self-imposed holiday" to join the Hajj in Mecca, possibly to pray for attire with larger surface area, and left with the disingenuous remark that he
might step down if someone could "prove" what his *real* intentions were when he made his controversial comments.
posted by sour cream
on Oct 28, 2006 -
112 comments
Joe Francis Gone Wild: Claire Hoffman, L.A. Times adult entertainment correspondent, rides along with
Girls Gone Wild (Slate, SFW) producer Joe Francis on an expedition to a Chicago nightclub. Hoffman claims that over the course of the night, Francis pinned her against the hood of a car. A woman who agreed to be filmed in the crew's bus claims that Fancis had non-consensual sex with her. Reposted with safer language.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Aug 5, 2006 -
57 comments
Go team. I have been struggling with my outrage over this story (the details of what seems very likely to have happened and the terrible, horrible one offs comments that I've read about in response to it) for over a week now. It seems odd that no one has posted the story on MeFi, given its implications on class, race, race relations in an integrated southern city, elite educational institutions, frat boy mayhem (to an extreme), and when no means no and it doesn't matter who is saying it. One thing's for sure,
this story keeps getting worse.
posted by psmealey
on Apr 5, 2006 -
151 comments
Can you score your way out of disgrace? Kobe Bryant's 81 points tonight were the second most points ever scored by a single player in the 59 year history of the NBA, and the most scored since Wilt Chamberlain's 100 point night
44 years ago (when the league was much whiter than it is today). With
a new campaign from one time sponsor Nike and sports writers increasingly touting Bryant as a leading MVP candidate, two of the three elements of modern sports superstardom (sponsorship, good press) have returned to Kobe since the rape allegations that threatened to end his career. Will the final piece of the puzzle (public sympathy) be next?
posted by jonson
on Jan 22, 2006 -
119 comments
