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The really bestest-awesomest part of discussing rape culture with dudes (and select handmaidens of the patriarchy) is their abject denial of rape culture. Yet, objectively, the culture we live in is a rape culture and this study adds even more support to what many feminists have been saying for so many years.
“(April 2014) – New evidence from the journal Gender & Society helps explain what women’s advocates have argued for years – that women report abuse at much lower rates than it actually occurs. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), 44% of victims are under the age of 18, and 60% of sexual assaults are not reported to police.
The study, “Normalizing Sexual Violence: Young Women Account for Harassment and Abuse,” will appear in the June 2014 issue of Gender & Society, a top-ranked journal in Gender Studies and Sociology. The findings reveal that girls and young women rarely reported incidents of abuse because they regarded sexual violence against them as normal.
Sociologist Heather Hlavka at Marquette University analyzed forensic interviews conducted by Children’s Advocacy Center (CAC) with 100 youths between the ages of three and 17 who may have been sexually assaulted. Hlavka found that the young women experienced forms of sexual violence in their everyday lives including: objectification, sexual harassment, and abuse. Often times they rationalized these incidents as normal.
During one interview, referring to boys at school, a 13 year-old girl states:
“They grab you, touch your butt and try to, like, touch you in the front, and run away, but it’s okay, I mean… I never think it’s a big thing because they do it to everyone.”
The researcher’s analysis led her to identify several reasons why young women do not report sexual violence.
- Girls believe the myth that men can’t help it. The girls interviewed described men as unable to control their sexual desires, often framing men as the sexual aggressors and women as the gatekeepers of sexual activity. They perceived everyday harassment and abuse as normal male behavior, and as something to endure, ignore, or maneuver around.
- Many of the girls said that they didn’t report the incident because they didn’t want to make a “big deal” of their experiences. They doubted if anything outside of forcible heterosexual intercourse counted as an offense or rape.
- Lack of reporting may be linked to trust in authority figures. According to Hlavka, the girls seem to have internalized their position in a male-dominated, sexual context and likely assumed authority figures would also view them as “bad girls” who prompted the assault.
- Hlavka found that girls don’t support other girls when they report sexual violence. The young women expressed fear that they would be labeled as a “whore” or “slut,” or accused of exaggeration or lying by both authority figures and their peers, decreasing their likelihood of reporting sexual abuse.
The young women in the study provided insight into how some youth perceived their experiences of sexual violence and harassment during sexual encounters with men. In particular, the study pointed to how the law and popular media may lead to girls’ interpreting their abuse as normal. According to the author, policymakers, educators, and lawmakers need to address how sexual violence is actually experienced by youth beginning at very young ages in order to increase reporting practices, and to protect children from the everyday violence and harassment all too common in their lives.”
Domestic violence. Not acceptable, not ever.
“TW DOMESTIC ABUSE ——When [an abusive man] tells me that he became abusive because he lost control of himself, I ask him why he didn’t do something even worse. For example, I might say, “You called her a fucking whore, you grabbed the phone out of her hand and whipped it across the room, and then you gave her a shove and she fell down. There she was at your feet where it would have been easy to kick her in the head. Now, you have just finished telling me that you were ‘totally out of control’ at that time, but you didn’t kick her. What stopped you?” And the client can always give me a reason. Here are some common explanations:“I wouldn’t want to cause her a serious injury.”
“I realized one of the children was watching.”
“I was afraid someone would call the police.”
“I could kill her if I did that.”
“The fight was getting loud, and I was afraid the neighbors would hear.”And the most frequent response of all:“Jesus, I wouldn’t do that. I would never do something like that to her.”
The response that I almost never heard — I remember hearing it twice in the fifteen years — was: “I don’t know.”
These ready answers strip the cover off of my clients’ loss of control excuse. While a man is on an abusive rampage, verbally or physically, his mind maintains awareness of a number of questions: “Am I doing something that other people could find out about, so it could make me look bad? Am I doing anything that could get me in legal trouble? Could I get hurt myself? Am I doing anything that I myself consider too cruel, gross, or violent?”
A critical insight seeped into me from working with my first few dozen clients: An abuser almost never does anything that he himself considers morally unacceptable. He may hide what he does because he thinks other people would disagree with it, but he feels justified inside. I can’t remember a client ever having said to me: “There’s no way I can defend what I did. It was just totally wrong.” He invariably has a reason that he considers good enough. In short, an abuser’s core problem is that he has a distorted sense of right and wrong.
I sometimes ask my clients the following question: “How many of you have ever felt angry enough at youer mother to get the urge to call her a bitch?” Typically half or more of the group members raise their hands. Then I ask, “How many of you have ever acted on that urge?” All the hands fly down, and the men cast appalled gazes on me, as if I had just asked whether they sell drugs outside elementary schools. So then I ask, “Well, why haven’t you?” The same answer shoots out from the men each time I do this exercise: “But you can’t treat your mother like that, no matter how angry you are! You just don’t do that!”
The unspoken remainder of this statement, which we can fill in for my clients, is: “But you can treat your wife or girlfriend like that, as long as you have a good enough reason. That’s different.” In other words, the abuser’s problem lies above all in his belief that controlling or abusing his female partner is justifiable….”
—Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
It has been awhile since we’ve had a Red Pen of Justice post here on DWR. Thankfully(?) that void shall now be filled by krisman2013’s lovely post titled: Evolution – The Theory that Became a Religion. Can you feel it? The crushingly vapid ignorance about to be put on display is willing the RPOJ back to life where it must, once again, *wiggle* for the cause of justice and rationality.
Let’s just start this off slow and easy because unless you have your black belt in grappling with ignorance this shit will leave you flabbergasted and struggling for breath.
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“It is not uncommon these days for those that do not believe in evolution and the big bang as the origin of all life to be called names, denigrated and treated as if they were troglodytes.”
The reason that you are being called names and denigrated would be because you are demonstrating a dangerously incandescent white-hot grade of ignorance. To people who comprehend basic scientific facts and theories you may as well be stating the earth is flat and the sun is revolving around us.
“Nevertheless, even though I grew up on a steady diet of science”
And only saved by the thickness of your skull did not one iota of the “science” manage to slip in, god bless your heart.
“and heard the preaching of evolution as the definitive origin of life from grade school through college I have big questions.”
My veteran readership will already realize that our journey with Kris is going to end poorly for him. For even in his poorly punctuated thesis we can see one of the tells of insipid religious thought. Conflating the teaching of evolution with ‘preaching’ and thus setting up the entirely false equivalence of science & religion.
Muffin, your science professors were not preaching, they were hoping you might gain understanding on how science and the scientific method works, thus providing a rational framework and methodology for understanding what goes on around you.
Preaching is pretty much the opposite of that as you are *told* how the world works and not to ever question what you’ve been told.
We’ll have to leave it Muffin, as you launch into a series of questions that I’m pretty sure you don’t want the answer to because it will mean you’ll have to engage more than three neurons necessary for maintaining religious belief. Luckily, you have me to kickstart your atrophied mental apparatus. Do keep in mind that learning is hard though and not necessarily fun (for you) or comforting.
“Starting with the big bang, scientists explain that the universe we know of came out of this big bang at the start of it all.”
So far so good.
“In order to postulate that the big bang happened and that they know how and why it happened they use the laws of gravity and physics. “
I can feel the checkmate scientists coming… can’t you?
“At the moment of the big bang, when there was just some universe sized mass inside of a pea there would have been neither the laws of gravity nor the laws of physics. [1]So what were the origins of those laws? [2]If those laws were not formed, did time exist? [3] If time did not exist how are we measuring time? [4] When did time actually start? [5] When did the laws of gravity and mass get created?”
Ahhhh…there we go. Questions that reading for about an hour on wikipedia could answer succinctly. To answer these question, I will be referencing the Wikipedia article curiously entitled “Big Bang Theory“. I have inserted numbers in front of each of Muffin’s questions for easy understanding.
[1] – The origins of those laws came about as a result of the big bang, they did not exist before that time.
[2] – Nothing existed before the big bang, at least not anything we can measure since we require space and time to measure events.
[3] – Time did not exist before the BB. We measure time by arbitrarily by imposing a set of measurements that allow us to come to a commonly accepted understanding of how time passes.
[4] – Time started when there was a break down from of the previous state of being infinitely dense and hot. See, the Big Bang.
[5] – During the Big bang.
I am not a physicist, however you can listen to some people that are.
A short version of the Big Bang and Lawrence Krauss discussing the origin of our universe.
“Who created them? Wait,…. Hold On. I take back that last question. Science can’t have a who or something more powerful than itself. “
Muffin, science is not an person, it is a method for discovering information about the universe we live in. This just isn’t a question that applies.
“The laws must have been created by the people that discovered the laws. So, they created the laws of physics and then used them to explain why they existed to discover them. “
Err…what? People do not create laws of nature/physics/mathematics. They discover them and by using the scientific method attempt to show that this is how the world works.
“Yet, they can’t explain why the laws exist or why anything exists.”
Did you miss that part about the big bang? Just checking here because it sure seems like you want to insert a sky-daddy that will make everything right for you.
“They can’t even say how the laws actually came into being. Pretty flawed theory. (Yet no other option is allowed in the schools.)”
Err…they were discovered and tested, and eventually proven to be laws we can predict things by. The science in schools is being taught precisely because it is the most accurate version (disclaimer – much of what is taught in k-12 is watered down) of how we know the world works.
“As to evolution, if I mix a bunch of random chemicals together the result is generally a smoothy not life. “
Yet perform that mixing over billions of years and life can evolve and given the evidence it does. See Qualia Soup’s Evolution primer and of course Wikipedia to get started.
“The earth, in its hot violent stage would not have been hospitable enough for random chemicals to come together sufficiently that single living cells could be created. “
How long do you think this ‘hot and violent stage’ was? There were other stages where life could begin, necessarily so since well, we are here.
“The idea of life from stuff by chance goes completely against that law of physics.. “
In a closed system. The earth, by definition is not a closed system so Second Law of thermodynamics does not apply in the way you think it does.
“Just some questions regarding evolution as an improved state of the species.”
Evolution does not always ‘improve’ a species, there are some very disastrous adaptations that have caused species to become extinct.
I’m sure your questions will shed light on your understanding of Evolution.
“If we have been evolving for so long:
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[1] Why are there stupid people? Wouldn’t evolution have selected against them?
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[2] Gay and Lesbian people can’t have children. Wouldn’t evolution have selected against them?
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[3] Mothers kill their unborn fetuses every day, Wouldn’t evolution have selected against that urge?
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[4] Whether 7 feet tall or three feet talk. Wouldn’t evolution have selected against one of them?
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[5] We are called homo erectus. Where is the next human species?
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[6] If we evolved from apes why do the remaining apes not evolve?
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[7] Why do we still get the flu?
Oh wow. So you haven’t read about what evolution is at all. Fantastic.
1 – I often ask myself that question, on some days more than others…
Firstly, people have developed cultures, societies and civilization. All interfere with the process of natural selection and therefore we cannot directly attribute characteristics like “stupid” to evolutionary pressures. More importantly, how do you know that stupid is being selected against? It might be a characteristic in a package of traits that makes the organism in question more fit to survive.
2 – You do realize that people who identify as homosexual are not a different species right? Just checking.
3 – Evolution is a slow and gradual process, at least in terms of human evolution. When you talk about women terminating their pregnancies, this is a social feature of society and therefore is not selected for in an evolutionary sense.
4 – No conception of survival of the fittest present in your mind is there? Why do you think most of humanity fluctuates around a couple of established means? Through evolutionary processes the outliers have been weeded out precisely because the package of traits they brought to the table was inferior to the average you see today, thus they did not reproduce, thus you rarely see three or seven foot people.
5 – Ummm…we are currently called Homo sapiens. Also, as mention earlier, evolution in humans takes a long time, no distinct species has yet evolved from Homo sapiens.
6 – We share a common ancestor from apes, and they are evolving. Will they take the same route we did, most likely not.
7 – Because the flu virus is evolving just as we are. That is the reason there is a new flu vaccination every year, because the virus mutates over time to change itself into a form that is virulent to humans, despite our best immunological responses.
“Interbreeding my explain small species variations in an isolated environment but non of these creatures shows signs of turning into a completely new species.”
A video on how we get variations in species. And how we get new species.
“Even scientists explaining the pre-cambrian explosion are at a lost to explain the rate of observed change and the creation of new species.”
*sigh* Yes, indeed we don’t have explanations for everything. We’re working on, see this video on the Cambrian Explosion.
“I would argue that there is an unseen hand directing all these processes. Science could never admit that. What a shame.”
Ah, everyone saw that coming. Well, then Muffin, please state the evidence for your claim that an unseen hand is guiding all of this and show us all how it is more persuasive that the current biological set of facts it is meant to replace.
This post made me tired, when I realized that this wasn’t so much a smackdown, but rather a lesson on basic scientific literacy. A sad commentary indeed, but not quite the calibre of what I’m used to for RPOJ articles. Oh well.. :)
A helpful infographic from the WHO. (having trouble reading the poster? “control + and control – ” may be able to help you out check the large version)
“You want to say Hi to the cute girl on the subway. How will she react? Fortunately, I can tell you with some certainty, because she’s already sending messages to you. Looking out the window, reading a book, working on a computer, arms folded across chest, body away from you = do not disturb. So, y’know, don’t disturb her. Really. Even to say that you like her hair, shoes, or book. A compliment is not always a reason for women to smile and say thank you. You are a threat, remember? You are Schrödinger’s Rapist. Don’t assume that whatever you have to say will win her over with charm or flattery. Believe what she’s signaling, and back off.
If you speak, and she responds in a monosyllabic way without looking at you, she’s saying, “I don’t want to be rude, but please leave me alone.” You don’t know why. It could be “Please leave me alone because I am trying to memorize Beowulf.” It could be “Please leave me alone because you are a scary, scary man with breath like a water buffalo.” It could be “Please leave me alone because I am planning my assassination of a major geopolitical figure and I will have to kill you if you are able to recognize me and blow my cover.”
On the other hand, if she is turned towards you, making eye contact, and she responds in a friendly and talkative manner when you speak to her, you are getting a green light. You can continue the conversation until you start getting signals to back off.
The fourth point: If you fail to respect what women say, you label yourself a problem.
There’s a man with whom I went out on a single date—afternoon coffee, for one hour by the clock—on July 25th. In the two days after the date, he sent me about fifteen e-mails, scolding me for non-responsiveness. I e-mailed him back, saying, “Look, this is a disproportionate response to a single date. You are making me uncomfortable. Do not contact me again.” It is now October 7th. Does he still e-mail?
Yeah. He does. About every two weeks.
This man scores higher on the threat level scale than Man with the Cockroach Tattoos. (Who, after all, is guilty of nothing more than terrifying bad taste.) You see, Mr. E-mail has made it clear that he ignores what I say when he wants something from me. Now, I don’t know if he is an actual rapist, and I sincerely hope he’s not. But he is certainly Schrödinger’s Rapist, and this particular Schrödinger’s Rapist has a probability ratio greater than one in sixty. Because a man who ignores a woman’s NO in a non-sexual setting is more likely to ignore NO in a sexual setting, as well.
So if you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights.
For women, who are watching you very closely to determine how much of a threat you are, this is an important piece of data.”
an excerpt from Phaedra Starling’s “Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced”
“Can every one of my male followers read this? And please, before you get defensive (“I would never rape anyone!”) keep in mind, women being afraid of Shrodinger’s Rapists (oh my god i still can’t get over the encompassing brilliance of this phrase) is a conditioned, learned response from being immersed in rape culture and the evolution of sexism and sexual violence in our society from the day we’re born. And unfortunately, it’s very difficult to unlearn without the efforts of all genders to dismantle it.
Which is where you come in.”
You see it every day, the micro aggressions against people, the sexism, the put-downs. Make your corner of the world a safe space for everyone, it is the least you can do as a decent human being.
Forced Birthers Lying (again) for Jesus – How shocking.
The escorts and clients hear lies coming from the anti’s all the time. The breast cancer link that doesn’t exist, the “fact” that 20% of all women who have abortions attempt suicide, the curious item about how the equipment the clinic uses is 27 times more powerful than your home vacuum cleaner (although the anti recently upped that to 29 times, I guess people weren’t being properly scared at the lower number). The list goes on and on. These are all attempts to scare and unnerve the clients but are easily dispelled with a little Google-fu. Lately though there have been a couple of examples of the antis lying to their own flock.
In a recent article by Matt Damico in the Southern Seminary Magazine he said “There are a number of Catholics and other individuals who also do sidewalk counseling – although the number of escorts usually outnumbers the…
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Tragic accidents happen.
“A multimillion-dollar lawsuit has been launched by the parents of a student who almost died after being strangled by a lanyard at his school in Bearspaw just west of Calgary.”
You don’t sue people for not thinking of every possibility that might happen. If this isn’t the case , I look forward to our children being encased in foam for their protection and certainly not using potential hazardous materials such as pencils or pens.
–Source.
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Mystro
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