On International Women’s Day March 8th, a large number of local Amnesty groups in Sweden asked around 2600 persons about their attitudes towards rape. The results, released earlier this week, were pretty appalling. While 96 percent agree that rape is a large or fairly large problem in Swedish society, as many as one in five put at least some blame on the victim, based on for instance her looks, behavior, resistance and level of intoxication. The age groups most prone to victim blaming are young people between 15 and 25, and people over 66. When broke down by gender, the numbers reveal that men are more likely to blame the victim than women, and men are also more likely to believe that there can be extenuating circumstances to a rape.
While the study is not scientific, and thus shouldn’t be the basis of any broader conclusions, it does give a clue about peoples’ attitudes towards rape and sexual violence. Here are some of the general results:
- 62 percent has little or no trust in the Swedish justice system when it comes to the possibility of rape victims to get justice.
- about 20 percent put some blame on the victim if she dresses or acts “provocatively”.
- about 25 percent think that the woman is partly to blame if she flirted or made out with the rapist before the rape.
- about 20 percent believe that the woman bears some responsibility if she doesn’t resist or scream during the rape.
- about 20 percent put some blame on the victim if she was intoxicated by alcohol or drugs.
- less than one in ten believe that it is an extenuating circumstance if the rapist is intoxicated.
- about one in ten believe that it is an extenuating circumstance if the perpetrator and the victim are in a relationship.
That so many young people, and especially young men, are willing to blame the victim is horrifying but perhaps not surprising. What is needed is better sex ed in schools, with teachers who are honest and open and able to meet the young students at their level. Sex ed should be more than mere biology or risk awareness, it should also include discussions on such concepts as consent (which many people seem to have a problem understanding), respect, pleasure and how to know what you want and like (and how to understand what your partner wants and likes). We don’t need more “morality” or “purity” as some say, we need more openness, honesty, and better trained teachers. I absolutely agree with Amnesty that sex ed should be a mandatory course for those studying to become teachers.
That those over 66 are so willing to blame the victim is also disturbing. In the Swedish justice system, we don’t have juries but so called lay assessors who judge together with the judge (sorry, but I’m not versed in legal English - a description in English about the Swedish legal system can be found here). These lay assessors are appointed by the political parties, and due to the nature of this work and the experience/connections needed to be appointed, most of them are older men.
So given what Amnesty’s study tells us about the attitude towards rape among people aged 66 and older, maybe it’s not so surprising to hear about how rape victims are asked in court how many sex partners she have had previously and what she have done with them, or how far above the knee her skirt was. (For Swedish readers, if you haven’t read this book on that subject yet, do so immediately!).
I could do that analogy to the wealthy guy getting robbed of this big fat wallet and shiny gold Rolex watch here, but I won’t. I’m just sad, and I don’t know how we, as a society, should begin to address this problem. I do hope that the young people will wise up in the future as they mature and actually start thinking. But maybe that’s too optimistic.
Amnesty writes about the study in Swedish here (where you can also find all the results in pdf-format), SvD writes here, and the Local writes in English here.
So this is happening on the other side of the Atlantic, but I want to blog it anyway. Not because it will mean much or do much, but just because I feel this is important and…well basically I just want to show my support for a voice that should be heard.
Renegade Evolution has been invited to speak at at a debate forum on sex work and pornography at William and Mary College. On her side will also be sex workers’ rights advocate Jill Brenneman of SWOP East. And on the other side there is male “feminist” John Foubert, and anti-sex work activist Sam Berg (”crusader” would probably be a more apt word - I hadn’t heard of the woman before, but after just a bit of reading she seems unhinged. And for someone calling herself a feminist, she certainly displays a lot of hatred of women).
However, now it seems as if the “feminist” and “defender of women” Sam Berg are trying to get Ren uninvited since she is not “comfortable” with Ren being there. Context can be found in Ren’s post. It’s quite a bit lot of context and a lot of old stuff, but that doesn’t really matter here, what is important is this (Ren’s words):
All I want at this point is a chance to speak my side, in a forum. I want the chance to FINALLY get to be a sex worker/porn whore who gets to speak for herself, rather than having anyone and everyone do it for me, or over me, or around me.
Other people have written well about this (see below), and since I am what I am - an insignificant blogger from across the pond, not involved in any blogwars, not identified with any sides, not widely read or know, just little me - I will say this: It isn’t feminism if you aren’t prepared to hear the voices of all women. It isn’t feminism if your only concern is white, middle class, cisgendered, straight and ablebodied women who has the luxury to be involved in abstract academic debates. It isn’t feminism if you, by actions, inaction or words, display hate for certain women and treat them as either poor misguided victims in need for your rescue, or evil patriarchy enablers, young, dumb and full of cum. It isn’t feminism if you, in your quest for that Feminist Utopia, trample on the lives and souls of living breathing women.
So, I’m just showing my support here, insignificant as it may be. Other people have written also, and they have good things to say: Natalia Antonova, Burning Words, Astarte’s Circus, Uncool .
(I’m sure there are more, but no time for reading right now)
On April 7th, two women journalists were brutally killed in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Teresa Bautista Flores, 24, and Felicitas Martínez, 20 worked for the community radio station La Voz que Rompe el Silencio (“The Voice that Breaks the Silence”), serving the Trique indigenous community.
The Triqui indigenous people of San Juan Copala in southern Oaxaca, saw their first radio station, La Voz que Rompe el Silencio, as a major victory of their struggle. When the community declared itself an autonomous region on January 21, 2007, it vowed to stay independent from any party affiliation or influence, creating even a Police of the Community (Policia Comunitaria) to replace government armed forces in the region. The radio was to serve the Triquis people to promote unity, overcome conflicts, and encourage communication among communities, including those that are not formally members of the autonomous region. The radio stressed from the beginning the importance of promoting diversity within the station with the participation of women and particularly, the youth.
Oaxaca suffers from political tensions and attacks from paramilitary forces on the indigenous communities are common. The state of press freedom is very poor. According to the Mexican branch of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) there have been acts of violence against other small radio stations belonging to indigenous groups in Oaxaca, such as Radio Nandia in 2006 and Radio Calenda in 2007. Reporters Without Borders has more. Mexico was ranked as number 136 in their annual press freedom index (2007), and declared the most dangerous country on the continent for the press.
AMARC has released an action alert asking for prompt clarification of the murders, punishment of those responsible, and protection for the witnesses and their children. The whole urgent action appeal with contact information to relevant persons and authorities can be found here.
So, while some of us contemplate the silence that makes us uncomfortable and squirmy in our easy chairs, chew on this: These womyn died on their way to give and because of their voice.
Are you, am I, are any of us western feminists anywhere close to filling even a thimble’s worth of significance and relevance with respect to what is happening to womyn around the world?
It’s a sad world we’re living in. But I’m just an onlooker from an insignificant country whose cowardly prime minister didn’t dare to raise the question of Guantanamo and other human rights abuses when meeting with Bush because it could “damage relations”.
So is impeachment still off the table? Because the U.S. has been hijacked by bloodthirsty ghouls and cowards. Of course, this report is not unexpected, and will be cheered by the right wing. It actually wouldn’t be that surprising if the White House allowed this story to get out. They’ve softened up the public enough to the idea of torture, after all.
Can someone please explain: a consensual blow-job is grounds for impeachment, war crimes and lies that has killed hundreds of thousands are not? A sad world indeed.
A 23 year old man hung himself in a bathroom in the jail in Mariestad. When the personnel found the man, they left him hanging there, locked the door and then called an ambulance. The paramedics managed to restore cardiac activity, but the man died two days later in a hospital. During the nine minutes that it took for the ambulance to arrive, the jail personnel did nothing, they merely let the man hang.
What the hell were they thinking? That he would escape? That someone else would try to save him (and that would be a bad thing)? That it wasn’t their job to do anything about it? That he obviously wanted to kill himself, so they did him a service by leaving him there? That only trained medical personnel would be able to take him down? The incompetence and negligence is so frightening.
This is only the latest of a series of examples of how bad our correctional treatment system is working. Only in the last few days, it was exposed that in 2005, a seriously ill man with pneumonia were left to slowly die in a jail cell in Nyköping. The guards thought that the man had drug abstinence so they did nothing about it, although several doctors say that his symptoms were nothing like those typically associated with abstinence. They guards documented the man’s condition in a protocol, but they didn’t care enough to call a doctor and explain the symptoms, or to take him to a hospital.
Both these men could be alive today had the personnel done their job properly. And the main responsibility lies with the director-general of the Swedish Prisons and Probations Administration, Lars Nylén. Some of his staff is clearly untrained on what to do in an emergency; the policies and protocols on how to handle suicide attempts, ill detainees and other such situation are clearly lacking or not communicated down to the personnel; and some personnel seems to have a frightening disregard for human life, which means they are unfit for their job. Or maybe they though that this was a proper punishment for the jailed person, in which case they are also unfit for their job.
Today, many bloggers are taking part in the Blog Against Sexual Violence day. I know it’s an American event (as is this), but sexual violence is something which affects people all over the world, so I decided to participate from my side of the pond.
On the one side of the spectrum of why we need to raise awareness about sexual violence is this.
A senior BNP leader with a strong chance of winning a seat in the London Assembly next month has written that rape is a “myth” and that “some women are like gongs - they need to be struck regularly.”
The Standard can reveal that Nick Eriksen, the BNP’s London organiser and the second-highest candidate on its list for the Assembly, is the author of “Sir John Bull,” a notorious far-Right blog which has regularly advocated hatred and abuse against women. The disclosure will be a serious blow to the BNP’s hopes of London electoral success.
On 24 August 2005, Mr Eriksen wrote: “I’ve never understood why so many men have allowed themselves to be brainwashed by the feminazi myth machine into believing that rape is such a serious crime … Rape is simply sex. Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal.
“To suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting that forcefeeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence. A woman would be more inconvenienced by having her handbag snatched.
“The demonisation of rape is all part of the feminazi desire to obtain power and mastery over men. Men who go along with the rape myth are either morons or traitors.”
Some people say that we should not give any publicity to stuff like this, that parties like the British National Party (BNP), which is a disgusting racism-homophobia-misogyny trifecta, is living off controversy and headlines like this. That it just feeds to their rhetoric of being “misunderstood”, “taken out of context” and “silenced”. Eriksen himself has said that he was only “trying to create debate and discussion”.
But Eriksen was running for a political office, he wanted to represent people. And to ignore the hate he was spewing on his blog (even if it was three years ago) - no, we shouldn’t do that. Don’t feed the trolls and all, but if that troll is going to hold a political position, we should damn well call them out on it. You know: The only thing necessary for the persistence of evil is for enough good people to do nothing.
You know, Eriksen’s views aren’t mainstream. But on the other side of the spectrum on why it is important to talk about this stuff are those who say that “yes, sexual assault is horrific and terrible, but…” (what was she doing walking alone at 3 a.m.?; she had sex with the guy previously; why was she acting so flirtatious?; she was a stripper, it comes with the trade; he was her boyfriend so was it really rape; there was no penetration so it wasn’t too bad; etc. etc.).
Yes, I think it is a spectrum. That views like Eriksen’s cannot be separated from the “that’s horrible, but…”-position. Rape apologism is all around. And it’s being spread by women and men alike.
I think that women often blame rape victims, because that means that rape is something that can be controlled. It is a scary realisation to think that you cannot control whether or not some man chooses to have sex with you. For many women’s peace of mind, they would rather hold onto an idea that that sort of thing happens to ‘other’ people; people who then need to be defined.
I was sexually assaulted once. No it wasn’t rape. But it was definitely sexual assault, and rape was not far away. I’m not telling the details - and I’m actually shaking right now and wondering whether I should really type this. I feel guilty. But I decide to break the silence. I haven’t told anyone and now I’m telling the world.
If someone else would tell the story of the sexual assault that happened to me, I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that she was to blame, but yet I am feeling guilty and ashamed. That’s how deeply ingrained victim-blaming is in us. In me. Typing this makes me feel dirty. It feels as if I am trivializing the feelings and suffering of those “real victims” out there when I am presenting myself as one of them. My rationality and my feminist mind tells me that I have the right to own my feelings and experiences, that the blame rests solely somewhere else. But inside me is a nagging voice that says that I brought it on myself, that it wasn’t so bad, that I should have known better, that asks “how could I be so stupid and naive?”. I hear it now as well, telling me that I’m making too big a deal out of it. That I have a reason to feel dirty. It’s telling me to press the delete button. But today, I’m letting my rational and feminist mind win. I am not being silenced by myself any longer.
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PS. I really think you should visit Abyss2Hope who is organizing the whole Blog against sexual violence effort. Thanks for all your work Marcella!
The debate article I wrote about the other day has gotten a reply from Göran Lantz, professor in health care ethics. It’s well formulated and well reasoned. Anders Svensson has been given the opportunity to reply directly. This time he manages without references to military dictatorships like Burma and North Korea (even though North Korea can’t really be called a military dictatorship, it’s more a personality cult taken to the utmost extreme, but Svensson is a lawyer, not a political scientist, so he’ll get a pass for that one). But he still invokes the image of a country where people are hindered to say and think what they want, and where conversations fall silent in fear of repression:
I was gladly surprised by the positive tone which go through much of Göran Lantz’s contribution. he says, though, that those who want it have freedom of speech. That is actually not the case any longer in Sweden.
Freedom of speech is not that which is marked by the new ground of values of political correctness. On the contrary, freedom of speech is being subjected to serious attacks.
I often think about a headline which struck me already years ago. It says: “When conversation fall silent”. This has already begun in Sweden.
There is only one thing to say about that:
Seriously though, it would be becoming to Svensson and his ilk if they for once would produce any clear examples on how this silencing works and how freedom of speech is being infringed. Also, I am very interested to learn, in clear reasoning, how same sex marriage would affect freedom of speech negatively. Svensson has been allowed two articles in a big and highly regarded newspaper now. Countries in which freedom of speech is truly repressed (like Burma and North Korea) don’t usually let people complain about how they are being repressed. I would like Anders Svensson to talk to some Burmese and North Korean refugees about how Sweden is just as bad as their countries when it comes to freedom of speech. I think they could give him a useful lesson on the subject of what true repression looks like.
Hamlin, 37, said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems.
The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin’s chest, the Dallas-area resident said.
Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The agent then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewelry, Hamlin said.
Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said.
She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.
“Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her,” said Hamlin’s attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties. Allred is a well-known Los Angeles lawyer who often represents high-profile claims.
Applying pliers to the torso of a mannequin that had a peach-colored bra with the rings on it, Hamlin showed reporters at the news conference how she took off the second ring.
She said she heard male TSA agents snickering as she took out the ring. She was scanned again and was allowed to board even though she still was wearing a belly button ring.
It’s clear that the male TSA agents, on a stupid power trip, used Hamlin for their own entertainment: A chance to ogle her breasts and snicker at her pain and humiliation. You know, setting off the metal detector should be the cause of a more thorough inspection. As in 1) a hand-held detector (that wand thing they run over your body), 2) a same-sex pat down and finally 3) same sex visual inspection. Once it was clear that the “threat” in this case was nipple piercings, the TSA agents should have apologized for the inconvenience and wished Hamlin a safe journey.
This story begs a lot of questions:
Why did they all have to be there to observe the piercing removal - to defend each other if she were to use her pierced nipple super powers and blow up the airport? Why did they only force her to remove her nipple piercings and not the belly-button ring? Is it a more dangerous threat to air travel safety to have metal in one part of your body than in another? If the nipple piercings were so dangerous, then why was Hamlin allowed to keep the jewelry and carry it on board the plane?
You know, when this type of stuff happens, many people say that the victim should just suck it up and deal. That she or he is making too big a deal out of it. That it probably wasn’t too bad. That we need to accept things like this in order to be SafeTM. I’ve traveled quite a bit, and have experienced power abuse and violations, although nothing as bad as what Hamlin went through, from security personnel and border agents. Most of the time, we just bow our heads and hold back our anger, relieved to be let into the country or onto the plane. Kudos to Hamlin for standing up for her rights and speaking out!
More about the story from Cara here and here, and at Shakesville here.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders has released his anti-Islam film “Fitna”. It was quite comical today when editorial writer Per Gudmundsson (Svenska Dagbladet) on page 4 in the paper questions whether the movie really exists and complains how it has been stopped by politicians, the media and companies like Google, and then in the same paper, on page 21, there is an article about how the movie is available on the internet. And it’s very Google-able. Per Gudmundsson has noted his mistake.
From what I have read about the movie (I’m sorry, but I’m not going to watch it. Scold me all you want for it, but I’m not) it doesn’t really seem like an insightful work of art. Selected quotes from the Quran blended with pictures of the terrorist attacks on New York, London and Madrid, of executions and stonings and other such terrifying things. More pictures of the Quran, and then in the end the sound of a page being ripped out, said to be a page from a phone book, and then a call to the Muslims themselves to rip the “evil pages” out of the Quran.
Some commenters I have read are of course hailing Wilders’ film as a very important wake up call to us in the west. How? What does the movie accomplish? To me, it seems to add nothing new - any one can pick up a Quran at a book store (albeit translated unless you read Arabic) and the movie clips are of the same kind readily available on the internet, and in many cases, on our TV screens during the evening news. An internet documentary, of which there are twenty a dozen. A tired provocation.
It seems as if the right wing populist parties and the extremist islamists are living in some kind of symbiosis - they can’t exist without each other. For the extremist islamists, the movie is yet another reason to preach their hate, and for the anti-Islam populists, the protests become yet another reason to preach their hate and make yet another movie or caricature. And on and on it goes. Sigh.
What I want to know is - if the anti-Islam crowd are so hell-bent on defending our freedom and our way of life against the said onslaught of scary scary Muslims, what is their proposed solution to the “Islam problem”? Because all of the solutions which comes to my mind run quite contrary to that beloved freedom and democracy they so want to defend. So, what do they propose? Deporting all Muslims? Converting them to another religion by force? Forbid all expressions of Islam (however that one will work)? Invade all Muslim countries, kill their leaders and forcibly convert the population to Christianity (the Ann Coulter solution)? Make being a Muslim a punishable crime (and what should be the punishment? re-education? death? prison?)? Round up all Muslims and put them in special camps? What is the idea?
I haven’t heard anyone in the right wing populist anti-Islam crowd actually propose a solution to the perceived problem. It’s like when pro-choicers ask the pro-life crowd what the punishment for having an abortion should be. The answer is — crickets. Or some mumbling about “but that’s not what I meant”. It’s easy to rail and chant and make movies and provoke, but when they are called on the consequences of their ideas, they are mostly speechless.
PS. nowhere in this post have I questioned the right of Geert Wilders to make the movie and to show it. He has every right to do that, no matter how stupid it is. That is not the point.
(I promise, the headline will make sense if you read on!)
Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet publishes a tired old same-sex-marriage-will-destroy-society tirade in their debate section today. It’s written by Anders Svensson, who says he’s a lawyer and law teacher at Stockholm University. I pity his students (and hope they take him on tomorrow):
Imagine a country were the legislators re-interpret human rights according to a value-neutral ideology, where dissidents are violated and where media censors unfit opinions. The military dictatorship of Burma or North Korea? No, it’s the country of Sweden.
Dear Anders Svensson: If you write a long opinions piece about a contentious issue and then get it published in a really large newspaper, where debate ensues and people are allowed to have different opinions and counterarguments are raised and you get support from some and critique from some, and all this happens without the police knocking on your door or you losing your job or getting imprisoned or tortured or threatened - that’s usually a sign that you’re not living in a military dictatorship.
His main argument against same sex marriage is not “won’t somebody please think of the children!” or “horses and box turtles and forty wives oh my!” but this:
It is not hard to see how a gender neutral marriage law would be yet another weapon of censorship against traditional values.
Oh really? What would be censored? How would this censoring work? Would legions of newlywed same sex couples invade newsrooms, lecture halls and kitchen tables everywhere to make sure everyone follows the “homosexual agenda”? Svensson, of course, doesn’t tell. But he sure is censored and oppressed, the poor little sod, sitting there at Stockholm University and getting his writing published in a large private newspaper. Yes, you can really feel the Swedish military dictatorship at work here.
But if the GLBT folks are so powerful that they can impose a brutal military regime à la North Korea on us unsuspecting Swedish citizens (they’ve done a great job of masquerading it as a pretty decent democracy, I can tell you), you would wonder why they haven’t managed to get that gender neutral marriage law passed in the parliament yet. Maybe they forgot to squeeze it in between brunch and facials.
A good society must rest on stable ground of values which are reflected in legislation. What does this ground of values look like? Well, it can’t lack values. In Sweden, we have abolished this ground of values and are traveling down a road of lack of norms. How can the legislature accept this?
If people aren’t allowed to think and speak freely, a democratically stable ground of values are missing. We don’t need any more laws which despite good intentions create a fearful society where conversations die out. I want to warn the Swedish parliament of taking further steps down this road of silence and censorship. The parliament should say no thanks to this sophisticated form of euthanasia for marriage.
As often with these kinds of articles, there’s no substance. No explanations, no examples, no logical arguments, not any arguments at all about why a “good society” can’t coexist with same sex marriage, why same sex marriage hinders people from thinking and speaking freely, which values will be destroyed and how and why conversations will be silenced. No explanation on how man-woman marriages will be “euthanized” if man-man or woman-woman marriages are allowed. No line of reasoning to follow. Just fluff and a lot of words.
Also, note this lovely allegory, used to rail against anti-discrimination laws and policies. As a metaphor for gay people, he uses a weed.
A dandelion isn’t discriminated against because it can’t call itself a tulip.
So, uppity gay-dandelion-weeds should be satisfied with the civil unions they have today (which people like Anders Svensson raised all kind of hell against when they were introduced in the 90s because they would destroy society, but which they now present as a great “separate but equal”-solution) and not destroy the lovely garden of heterosexual tulip-marriages. Dandelions can also silence conversations and turn countries into North Korea. Or something.
Tor of Antigayretorik takes on the train-wreck article here, tireless and to the point as always.
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