Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
This is chilling. And informative:
It’s for refuge.org.uk.
In New York, there’s NYC’s services, as well as Safe Horizon.
In Wisconsin, here’s a list.
In the Fox cities, there’s Harbor House and the SACC.
Please do donate to any or all of the above, and spread the word.
45 out of 48 counts, too.
15 years for a 27 year old man who repeated gang raped an 11 year old with 19 other men: that’s what’s wrong with this country.
You don’t really have to wait even a minute for an example of the kind of victim-blaming that Slutwalk is all about, but this one is particularly horrific, as the young woman died in a fire on Saturday and the coverage of her death appeared in The New York Times. The journalist quotes someone who calls her a “he”, comments on the men she invited to her apartment, and describes her curvaceous body.
As if any of these things had anything to do with her dying in this fire. Pathetic reporting, pathetic culture we live in.
Other folks, including GLAAD, Janet Mock, and Autumn Sandeen are calling out this incredibly offensive and dangerous article as well. You can let the New York Times know you’re sick and tired of their victim blaming and transphobia by writing to them here or tweeting @NYTimes. Update: GLAAD also recommends tweeting @NYTMetro, the paper’s Metro Desk, which might get to the reporters more directly.
Please speak up.
Kym Worthy – that’s a name out of a superhero comic in itself, isn’t it? – is Detroit’s prosecutor and she’s trying to get 11,000 rape kits that have never been processed by the Detroit police into the system in hopes of solving some of these crimes.
Today Worthy is a prosecutor in Detroit, with a much different perspective. Her decision not to report the crime, she says, was “all justification and rationalization.” Now she is on a singular mission: seeking justice for people who do report their rapes. She’s leading a charge to get more than 11,000 police rape kits—which contain swabs of semen, saliva, and other evidence—tested for DNA in her city, and to establish a road map for other U.S. cities to do the same. In Detroit the kits had piled up, ignored for years, in a police storage facility, until one of Worthy’s colleagues discovered them in 2009.
11,000.
And that’s the women who came forward.
Another article discusses how exactly these rape kits work in helping get rapists prosecuted:
While the DNA test results identified assailants in stranger-rape cases, they also created leads in cases that police and prosecutors were not expecting. For example, prosecutors told me of tying the same assailant to multiple acquaintance-rape cases that might otherwise have been difficult to move through the criminal-justice system. Said one, “We had an assailant who raped drug addicts coming to him to buy drugs. These are women who may be particularly vulnerable to rape because of their addictions or their socioeconomic status, but whose cases are hard to get a jury to believe. But when we could connect the same guy to a number of rapes, we could get a conviction.”
One of the reasons they don’t get processed is because so often women know the rapist, and so police have found doing the rape kit redundant – they already know who the suspect is.
A rape arrest rate that hasn’t changed since the late 1970s is a national travesty. Imagine anything else having stayed the same in that 40 years: no cell phones, computers, or cable TV, for starters.
The NYPD has a bad record with its treatment of trans people, so one woman – who was arrested for an illegal subway swipe – is suing them.
A trans woman named was killed in DC this week, and the DC Trans Coalition reports other violence as well.
I am never going to understand this kind of violence.
I will honestly say I’m flabbergasted. There is a local election coming up for the city’s Aldermen, and one of the men running, Tom Van Susteren, posted this on his Facebook page, which is public:
How on earth this could be considered appropriate for any politician’s Facebook page is beyond me. Really, I’m staggered by the bad judgment, the treatment of violence against women as funny, and the violence against a public figure as funny, plus torture as funny.
I understand that someone out there finds this entertaining, which horrifies me even more.
No, really. It’s almost something out of a feminist sci-fi:
Women fearful of being raped can insert the Rape-Axe condom inside themselves like a diaphragm or tampon. If her worst fears come true, and a man attempts to rape her, the Rape-Axe’s inside hooks attach themselves to the penis and don’t come off, instead getting even tighter and stopping the man from being able to urinate. The only way to remove it is by seeing a doctor—which will obviously help with prosecution.
Oddly enough, via Gizmodo.
There is a rapist in my old hood of Park Slope, and the NYPD are completely fucking up the investigation. They’re following women home without identifying themselves and asking them about their clothes. It’s unbelievably obnoxious, staggering in its stupidity.
So sign the petition from change.org to get the Chief of Ds to pay attention. Continue reading “Park Slope Cops”
It’s been 13 years since this young man was left for dead in Laramie, Wyoming. I’m sure he’d be proud that his death was turned into a force for good, especially through his mother Judy Shepard’s efforts. We can hope that, anyway.