A Community Voice

feministfilm:

Via ContactMusic via Jezebel.

myvivavoce:amandaw:

Trigger warning.

So basically:

High school girl goes to teacher, tells teacher that high school boy raped her. Teacher goes to principal with concerns, offers to escort girl to her transportation home instead of leaving her on school grounds unattended. Principal has a different idea: use this girl as “bait” to try to catch teenagers “having sex” after school. Will have security follow girl around school to catch teenagers gettin’ their hormones on.

Girl is left alone at school,  gets raped again (security: not there to stop it happening! surprise!), principal claims “Oh, well, I never knew the sex was nonconsensual!” but then also claims to be able to disprove that the girl was raped, claims girl “liked” the boy and was jealous of other girls who also were sexually assaulted by the boy, therefore that sex was by definition consented to!

Really, it’s more fucked up than I’ve let on. Read the link if you can. The principal called this a fucking sting operation. His words.

BTW: Upper St. Clair High School has been in the news for fucked-up dealings around girls getting raped there since before I moved here in 2006. I haven’t had a year pass when they were not in the news because girls were coming forward with allegations of sexual assault and school officials being deliberately oblivious and/or actively hostile to them as victims.

This is absolutely horrific. I had to read it twice before I realized that this girl came to school officials reporting a rape, and not only did they use her as “bait”, but that they failed to even operate the “sting” correctly (no security guards around when you’re supposed to be catching someone doing something wrong? no one following her specifically? seriously?), and most, importantly, that they never believed her in the first place. They sent this girl into danger- forced her into danger- without even admitting that she had been raped.

Disgusting.

padaviya:

The ruling comes on the heels of international outrage following the flogging in January of a 16-year-old rape victim. The girl was raped by a man four years her senior and tried to conceal it from her family and her village elders, but after she was hurriedly married to another man a medical exam revealed she was pregnant.

She was forced to have an abortion and her family was publicly shamed and ostracized from the village; the village elders, meanwhile, issued a religious fatwa and ordered her to be lashed 101 times. The girl eventually passed out from the pain.

Tragically, it took such an incident to bring awareness to the problem of Bangladeshi village elders issuing arbitrary fatwas against “criminals,” most of whom are women accused of adultery, having a child out of wedlock, or murky religious “crimes” such as associating with men or people of a different religion. These women are given outlandish punishments, from forced abortions and beatings to exile from their villages and the public shaming of their families.

missnotorious:

How upsettingly symbolic of the silencing of survivors of sexual assault. People don’t want to hear about such “unpleasantries”, so let’s just sweep it under the rug and forget about it instead of letting people educate to prevent it. It’s appalling that a high school, full of the women who will soon fall into an age bracket that is most at risk for sexual assault, is silencing the few who try to help eradicate this horrible crime.

To the people who expressed their disdain over the shirts, calling it a “distraction”: if you think a shirt with a statistic on it is a distraction, how do you think a survivor who was sexually assaulted feels? Do you think that everyday for the rest of their life they will be “distracted” by the crime(s) committed against them? But I’m sure that teal, fabric painted shirt is really a tough thing to deal with, right?

Shame on people.

bollockszine:

A new documentary and the alleged rape of a homeless woman in New York both illustrate what happens when rape victims aren’t “perfect.”

In the New York case, the Post reports that 18-year-old Robert Gonzales is pleading not guilty to the attempted rape of a 23-year-old homeless woman in Central Park, on the grounds that she consented — and that she was drunk. His lawyer James Layton Koenig says, “The victim was intoxicated. Once the facts are laid out, nothing forcible will be proven.” The consent argument seems pretty specious given that Gonzales is accused of robbing the victim after he sodomized and attempted to rape her, but what’s really bizarre is the fact that Gonzales’s legal team is using drunkenness as an excuse.

loveolutionary:

Abel Moreno showed immense bravery, the kind of courage that most people do not have. His actions helped other victims feel as though they could come forward and speak of what was done to them. His actions undoubtedly prevented countless other women from being similarly assaulted by someone in a position of authority. Because of his brave action, this officer will not be able to traumatize more women under the banner of state authority.

And as thanks for that, for being one of the better residents that U.S. society could hope for, we’ve decided that he’s not worthy of being on “our” land anymore.

This case is about several things, chief among them being how we treat the crime of sexual assault, and how we treat other human beings as worthy of rights and decency on the basis of their documentation rather than on their personhood.