Jenny’s Pennies

Sorry about the lack of posts lately (to my approximately two readers); here’s a clue to what I’ve been doing.

So, remember this? Now, the investigation is apparently finished and…

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - A bailiff who forgot about a woman locked in a courthouse holding cell and left her there for four days without food, water or access to a bathroom has been suspended for 30 days but will keep his job, officials said Wednesday.

Washington County Cpl. Jarrod Hankins acted without “intentional misconduct” when he left Adriana Torres-Flores in the 9 1/2-by-10 1/2-foot cell, Sheriff Tim Helder said.

Hankins “became busy and simply forgot” about the woman last Thursday, leaving her in the cell with only a jacket until Monday morning. (full story here)

Yep, that’s right. He’s getting off with a slap on the wrist. No criminal charges, no loss of job. For doing something that could have left a person dead.
Oh, no sorry, not a person, an “illegal immigrant from Mexico”. I’ll just second what Vox ex Machina said:

Just because someone has broken the law by crossing a border does not mean that it is okay to deprive them of basic human rights. If Adriana Torres-Flores had been Nancy Worthington, Nice White Lady Born and Raised in Little Rock, that bailiff would be facing charges right now. But immigrants are only people if they have the documents to prove it in today’s America, I guess.

The reason Adriana Torres-Flores appeared in court was because she was charged with selling pirated CDs. Oh yes, the terrible terrible crime of selling pirated CDs. So let’s compare here: Selling pirated CDs plus being an undocumented brown woman = okay to be deprived of basic human rights. “Forgetting” someone in a cell for four days without food, water or access to the bathroom = nah, not so bad, just suspension without pay and then back to business.

Wow. This is appalling.

A woman was locked for four days in a tiny holding cell in a northern Arkansas courthouse, forgotten by the authorities and left without food or water, the local Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday.

The woman, Adriana Torres-Flores, 38, a longtime illegal immigrant from Mexico, slept on the floor with only a shoe for a pillow, and with nothing to drink except her own urine, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. There was no bathroom in the cell.

The chief deputy of the county’s sheriff’s department, Jay Cantrell, says there will be an investigation, but assures that the incident was an “honest mistake” without any malicious intent.

Honest mistake? Well, that may be true, but it’s still a mistake that should get your ass thoroughly fired. But there’s no mention of that idea in the article. Only that there will be an “investigation”. What’s there to investigate? The procedures and policies of the department, yes. But the fact that his gross negligence make the employee in question unfit for his job? That seems pretty clear to me. But of course, the victim was only an undocumented brown woman, so it wasn’t all that serious, right.

While we’re into the immigration issue in the USA:
You really should read this article in the New Yorker about Hutto, a former prison in Texas which is being used to detain immigrants and asylum seekers. Note: immigrants and asylum seekers. Not criminals. About half of the detainees in Hutto are children, many of them born in the USA. Hutto is run by CCA, the Correction Corporation of America, a huge private prison corporation. Their deal with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of Homeland Security pays them approximately $2.8 million dollars monthly for Hutto. There’s good money to be made from keeping unwanted noncriminal brown people locked up. Feministe has more on the subject.

My gut feeling is to agree with Per Gudmundson in today’s Svenska Dagbladet (and it doesn’t happen often that I agree with their editorials).

Background for non-Swedish readers: a few days ago, the Swedish police performed searches at members of Svenska Motståndsrörelsen, SMR (the Swedish Resistance Movement). Weapons and explosives were found, and three men are detained for illegal possession of weapons and preparation to inflict serious damage (I guess that means blowing stuff up).

SMR is a neo-nazi organization which wants to abolish democracy and create an authoritarian national socialist society, hates Jews, Muslims and homosexuals, and struggles for the ultimate victory of the national socialist ideology and the creation of a new world order. (More in Swedish at Expo here.)

They have organized paramilitary training camps for their members, they idolize people like Hitler (obviously) and William Pierce, they want racial war, obviously store weapons and explosives, and their leader, Klas Lund, has been convicted of bank robbery, assault, illegal possession of firearms and manslaughter.

So, my gut feeling is to agree with Per Gudmundson when he says that the SMR members should be charged using the law on terrorist crime. Because that law says that terrorism is (big disclaimer about me not being a legal expert and knowing how to translate legal text accurately) to seek to “instill grave fear in a population” or “to seriously destabilize basic political, constitutional, economical or social structures in a state”. And that seems to fit pretty nicely with a movement that wants to destroy our society and install a dictatorship.

But.
Just as Svensson, Christian Engström and Mårten Schultz, I think that we should be careful to use the terrorism rubber stamp. Individuals can be guilty of acts of terrorism, but to label a whole movement or organization as “terrorist” is problematic. Especially when the organization or group is incoherent and multifaceted - that may not be the case with SMR, but it is certainly true of other organizations that we, in the era of the “war on terror” have put the terrorist label on.

And, as Christian Engström writes - the law on terrorism has mostly been used against non-Swedish citizens. It has allowed the state to deport them to torture and to freeze their assets, all in breach of human rights and rule of law. Even though it is tempting to put an equal opportunity spin on it and for once use the terrorism law against shiny white very Swedish people, we’d better not. Terrorism can and should be addressed using our perfectly fine “normal” laws.

And I really don’t want something like this in Sweden - The law HR.1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, which is being passed in the USA. It defines “homegrown terrorism” as: the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

This is what the American Civil Liberties Union have to say about it (they’re not too excited, as you can imagine). A snippet:

“Law enforcement should focus on action, not thought. We need to worry about the people who are committing crimes rather than those who harbor beliefs that the government may consider to be extreme.”

So true. So even though my gut feeling tells me that of course the SMR members should be tried as terrorists, the implications, real and possible, makes me think that it might not be such a good idea after all.

Via Feministe, I learned that Monday March 3rd was International Sex Workers’ Rights Day. Sex work/prostitution is one issue where I had a somewhat change of heart, mainly after reading the book “Porr, Horor och Feminister” (Porn, whores and feminists) by Petra Östergren.

As Jill of Feministe said, sex work is one of those issues, much like bikini waxes and porn, where any discussion always seem to divert into ugly fighting. But:

That’s not a great reason to avoid talking about it, but it probably is a good reason for me to defer to those who know more about the subject than I do. So I’ll just point out that sex work is as diverse as any other type of labor, and there is no singular sex worker narrative — not all sex workers are exploited girls from developing nations, any more than all sex workers are high-paid call-girls living fabulous and fun urban lives.

A while ago I found Renegade Evolution, a fierce in-your-face sex worker who has a lot to say about the anti-porn/anti-sex work feminist side. This is long, but worth reading. I also direct you to this post, called “Sometimes it’s the little things“. She has a lot of good stuff actually.

If you read Swedish, there’s Isabella Lund. She hasn’t written about the International Sex Workers Rights Day, but it’s interesting nevertheless.

I’m quite busy today, so I use this post from Cara of the Curvature to explain why sex workers’ rights are an important issue (links go to the same place as in her original post):

So. Why sex workers’ rights? Well, it’s pretty simple. Even those sex workers who enjoy their jobs get a hell of a raw deal. All around the world, sex workers are: investigated and arrested for making a living, deported even when there is evidence of non-consent, left without any form of job security, gang-raped and abused by their bosses but left without recourse for fear that they themselves will be arrested, and arrested for mere suspicion of prostitution, including carrying condoms (which only discourages safer sex).

We know that bad things happen to sex workers, that they are very often raped, abused, robbed, kidnapped or even murdered. But that isn’t even the worst of it — sex workers have horrible crimes committed against them but fear arrest to much report, or do report and end up being mocked or further-victimized. Sex workers are raped by police officers. Sex workers are tortured and killed in cold blood, but their murderers may only be sentenced to 9 years in jail. Sex workers are murdered and then have their entire humanity reduced to their profession.

In the off chance that a case involving a crime against a sex worker actually makes it to court, we can expect that their profession will be trotted out and used against them at every possible chance. When there is little or no evidence that a woman is a sex worker, she’ll often be called one anyway (particularly if she’s a woman of color, trans* or low-income) — as an insult, as a way to call victims liars or suggest that they deserved the rape, or as a way to call victims liars and imply that they just might have deserved that attempted murder. In cases where the victim openly says that yes, she sells sex for a living, the gang rape she suffered at gunpoint by five men will be labeled “theft of services.” Not a suggestion that she’s lying — only a flat-out proclamation that a woman who works in the sex industry has given up any and all claims to personal bodily autonomy and the right to live safely and free of violence. Judges declare in courtrooms that sex workers cannot be raped, and then they are allowed to stay on the bench.

And in Canada, a man accused of murdering two prostitutes says:

“Think of it as stolen property,” Svekla told his sister of the body left in her truck in May 2006.
“If you’re caught with stolen property, it doesn’t mean you stole it.

Cara again:

Yup — a dead sex worker’s body is akin to stolen property. This is precisely what I’ve been getting at. The stigma against sex workers not only puts them in danger, forces them to live below the radar and makes reporting a crime next to impossible. The stigma against sex workers causes them to no longer be seen as human. Clearly, this guy is a murderer and a twisted fuck. I can’t say that the words that come out of his mouth are ones I would normally use to make a point about our society. But read the stories above, and then tell me that this is not only a more frank expression of those same attitudes. Because it is.

Sorry about not having anything original to say about this. I hope to compose my thoughts and offer something on the subject soon (with a discussion about the “Swedish model” included, of course), but for now, go read the links!

Added: There is nothing wrong with a little shameless self-promotion, so here you can read a report I did for Amnesty on a debate about Petra Östergren’s book (in Swedish).

So, this week we saw the verdict in a very high profile rape case here in Sweden. (Read about it: BBC, the Local 1, the Local 2, the Local 3, the Local 4, the Local 5, the Local 6).

Short recap: Opera singer Tito Beltran gets two years in prison for rape. The court was unanimous in its decision. The rape took place in 1999, during a concert tour involving some of Sweden’s most well-know artists. The victim was the 18 year old nanny of one of the other artists.

Much debate has ensued, some people hail the unanimous verdict as being very clear and giving courage to other victims of sexual violence to report the crime to the police. Others say that there is a lack of evidence, and that the crime took place too long time ago (it wasn’t reported until last year). Tito Beltran himself says that the accusations are false and that he is the subject of a conspiracy. It was reported today that he will appeal. The verdict is not based on any physical evidence, but on the credibility of the injured party and the witnesses - very rare in rape cases.

In the public debate being held at internet forums, blogs and the discussion forums at big media outlets, the loudest people seems to be the one that says “oh watch out all men, make sure to get a signed and witnessed consent form from any woman you have sex with because now you can end up in jail just because you pissed her off.”

Besides the inherent misogyny in such remarks, they are blatantly false (it is not easy to be convicted of rape, and I am not saying that it should: we should of course uphold the standards of a fair justice system for all crimes). But what also bugs me in the whole media frenzy about this case is that the victim seems nowhere to be seen. In public debates about crime and criminal justice, you always hear “think of the victim!” and “why all the regard for the perpetrator?”. But in rape cases, this often seems to shift. This of course has partly to do with the fact that rape involves a sexual act, and that rape is difficult in that the crime often takes place in private, the perpetrator not seldom being someone the victims knows. This of course creates special circumstances.
But still…

Granted, I haven’t followed this case too closely (most of the reporting seems to have been done in the tabloids, which of course are delighted over a rape case involving some of Sweden’s most well-known artists with elements of conspiracies and racism). But the victim has been surprisingly absent from the reporting. If it is done with regard to her privacy and out of respect for her, that is fine, but I suspect that is not the case. But as I said, I haven’t read all the reporting.

But when it comes to the “do I need to record her on my cell phone when she says she wants to have sex with me?” and “what if she changes your mind midway?” type debate, I really don’t see how people like this resonate. Or how they have sex, for that matter. I mean, don’t you communicate with your partner? If your partner signals that no, I don’t want this anymore, you fucking stop what you’re doing (unless you’re involved in BDSM power play but then you settle things like this beforehand with safe words and such) and communicate. If you talk about it and listen to each other respectfully I think there is very little chance that the woman will run off the next day and report you for rape, even though she “changed her mind”. I know in the world of some people evil “feminazis” do this all the time to throw all the men in jail, but out in the real world, communication and respect goes a very long way and eliminates the need for signed consent forms and recorded “yes I want to do that”-messages. In the words of Portly Dyke at Shakesville:

If, at any time, you perceive that your partner looks uncomfortable, apathetic, disinterested/disengaged about what’s going on, stop and ask them questions like: “Are you enjoying this? Is there something else you want?”, etc.. Then listen to their responses and take creative, consensual action on what you hear. I suppose that having apathetic, listless sex may be a turn-on for some people, but if you want to hear that resounding and enthusiastic consent (YES! YES! YES! over and over for hours without interruption), then continuing without enthusiastic response maybe isn’t such a great strategy in terms of building your sexual mojo.

Read the whole thing!
(And yes, in this post I take it for granted that the perpetrator is male and the victim female. I am aware that this is of course not always the case.)