Tag Archives: Rape

A Day in the Life.

Posted on by
27

On a recent day in New Zealand we were treated to the following news.

A group of rapists who openly bragged about having pack sex with drugged or drunk underage girls on social media were outed by a news outlet, which led to revelations that the police, who have an institutional history of rape of their own, refused to prosecute the rapists even though their identities were well-known (one is the son of a police officer) and four girls complained about the assaults long before the media broke the story. The police apparently questioned the first complainant about her manner of dress and was told that what she wore invited the attack. The cops now argue that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.

The police initially said that no complaints were laid and that the social media sites were only recently opened by the rapists, then closed. Both of those claims have now been proven to be untrue, so either the police spokesmen were lying (and that includes a senior detective and a district commander), or they were misled by their subordinates for reasons yet to be determined. The police also say that the fact that one of the rapists was the son of a sworn officer was immaterial to the (as of yet nonexistent) case.

That may or may not be true. What is undeniable is that a number of underage females were sexually assaulted by men over the age of consent who made public their exploits (including why they stupefied the girls and why they only engaged in pack assaults on them) and identified the victims as a form of public shaming. The cops listened to four complaints about these assaults, decided that there was no merit to them (or no evidence to substantiate them even though four different girls essentially described enduring the same thing done by the same men), then stood by, watched the social media coverage provided by the perpetrators and did nothing.

At the same time this story unfolded a convicted spouse abuser who claimed in defense that he was provoked by his victim was promoted to the most listened radio sports program in the country, having worked his way back into that format less than a year after his conviction and having had the Prime Minister subsequently grace his studio to exchange banter about laddish things (including Elizabeth Hurley’s “assets”).

Not to be outdone on the victim-bashing front, a few other prominent male radio talkback hosts (two of them Maori) ridiculed and insulted rape victims when discussing the case of the underage girls, essentially telling callers that drinking and wearing provocative clothing was primarily to blame for what happened.

Coincidentally, a misogynist bigot was brought back from foreign television exile after a series of gaffes and embarrassments to host a prime time news show at one of the highest salaries offered to a television host in New Zealand. His forte is adolescent potty jokes, particularly those directed at women.

Rightwing smear merchants and other retrogrades blame the rape club’s actions on liberal society and the pernicious effect of modern popular culture (when not Len Brown, for his adulterous behavior, as if that were comparable to rape). There may be some truth in such views (save the Len Brown example), but  there is the small problem that all the other instances cited above involve men of older generations working in venerable public institutions.

Let’s be clear on this: all of the instances cited other than the social media rape club members are not delinquents but well-established members of New Zealand’s institutional elite, and there are plenty of others who share their predilections and positions of esteem (I have chosen only a handful of notorious examples to illustrate the point).

Some of these apologists/pundits keep on calling the rapists “boys” even though the age of consent in New Zealand is 16 (the rapists were and are 17 to 19). That is worth noting because they also argue that at least some of the pack sex with 13 and 14 year old girls may have been consensual, which indicates they have no clue what “age of consent” means in theory or in practice.

Let me put it more crudely: How is it that a 17 year old is a “boy,” and hence acting impulsively and irrationally when sexually engaging a deliberately stupefied 13 year old female, yet that same female is supposedly capable of consenting rationally, as a woman, to pack sex under the heavy influence of soporific?

Are females who are underage, impressionable, alone, unconscious and/or delirious equally responsible for the acts of male adults behaving soberly, collectively, calculatingly and deliberately when using intoxicants for the purpose of sexual conquest as motive for and product of their behaviour towards said females?

There is a more general point to this reflection. What does this series of coincidental snapshots tell us about New Zealand today? Are these aberrations of the Kiwi male character that somehow have gone unpunished and in fact rewarded in violation of accepted norms, or is Aotearoa not a safe place to be female?

 

Clint Rickards and the Waipareira Trust

Posted on by
6

My first reaction to the news that Clint Rickards was elected to the Waipareira Trust Board was outrage.

The second was a stern lecture to myself about the fact everyone, even rapists, deserves a second chance, rehabilitation, and forgiveness.

After some reflection and chat I reckon outrage is fair. Rickards has a history of abusing a position of power, of taking sexual advantage of the vulnerability of youth, and of condoning and supporting rapists. The role he has taken is one of power, of authority, and of governing and directing services and interactions with the young and the vulnerable. He is in a position to shape the culture of the Te Whanau O Waipareira Trust.

Sure, he deserves a chance to apologise, make amends, and rehabilitate himself – but that’s not what he’s done.

This is a man who, in the recent past, said that the gang rape of a young woman was ok. He has never apologised and said he was wrong. He has consistent spoken against the victims of rape.

He is not a man who deserves a leadership role, and not one who can be trusted with power.

Sexual abuse recovery rationing by the ACC

Posted on by
6

This morning the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists delivered an open letter to the Minister for ACC asking him to explain and justify the proposed changes to ACC’s sensitive claims policy. This issue was covered by Anjum last week and is now picking up steam.

Briefly, the proposals (which are due to come into effect in September) would change both the nature and amount of entitlement of treatment to which sexual abuse or assault victims are entitled. The changes represent a move from a therapeutic model mostly operated by psychotherapists and counsellors to a symptom-management model mostly run by the mental health system. Victims’ entitlement to treatment will generally be reduced to a maximum of sixteen hours, essentially meaning that many victims of the most severe abuse will not be fully treated. In addition, victims will need to explain themselves to as many as three different assessors in order to access this limited treatment, with each assessment a form of revictimisation. As if that wasn’t enough, knowing that many cases simply will not be treatable in the mandated 16-hour timeframe, some psychotherapists have indicated that they will refuse on ethical grounds to begin the work, knowing that they cannot finish it, on the basis of the ‘first, do no harm’ principle which underscores their practice as clinicians.

This means the already-high barriers to effective treatment of sexual abuse trauma are about to get higher. In effect, they are being rationed so as to exclude the ‘worst’ cases who require the most work (and therefore the most cost) to treat. However the revictimisation of repeated assessments and the uncertainty of treatment form a strong disincentive – not wanting to open a wound without being sure it can be closed, many people will simply not seek treatment, and many counsellors will simply not be able to provide it on ethical grounds. This chilling effect will lead to sexual abuse being pushed further underground and the problem fading from the public view to a greater extent than it already is, with potentially catastrophic long-term social consequences. At last count, sexual abuse cost NZ about $2.5 billion per year including the costs of crime, imprisonment, drug and alcohol, other health issues, unemployment and the cycle of abuse which an absence of treatment sustains. For the cost of a few million dollars in treatment, how much will that be allowed to increase?

The most absurd thing is that these are cuts to front-line services for victims of serious crime; the very thing the government said it would be increasing. ACC’s Sensitive Claims Unit costs $30m or so annually to deliver $20m of front-line services, and these cuts will shift that balance much further toward the back-office by relying more heavily on already-overworked case managers and the top echelons of the practice – psychiatrists and clinical psychologists who currently do 10% of the work – rather than the relatively cheap and numerous psychotherapists and counsellors who do the other 90%.

For the inevitable conspiracy theorists, this also isn’t a matter of psychotherapists feathering their nests – for most, ACC work is a small part of their practice, and not an especially lucrative part of their practice, since most can charge (much) more on the open market than what ACC will pay.

Expect this to be a fairly big deal in the coming weeks. It is an issue which is deeply embedded in many policy fields: justice, victim’s rights, human rights, child abuse, crime, drug and alcohol abuse and mental health are just a few. It’s not going away, because sexual abuse is not going away.

L

Disclosure: I was involved to a small extent in the process around this open letter. I have family members on both ends of this issue – both providing and receiving treatment. You probably do, too, even if you don’t know it.

Ok, rape, anything else?

Posted on by
6

From the Department of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, this story from Australia:

Austereo’s Kyle and Jackie O Show sparked the controversy this morning when the 14-year-old girl revealed on air that she had been raped.
The girl’s mother submitted the teen to the test due to her concerns about her daughter’s experiences with drugs and sex and wagging school. Before the actual test, the girl admitted on air to Sandilands, “I’m scared … its not fair.”
Her mother asked her daughter: “Have you ever had sex?” The 14-year-old replied: “I’ve already told you the story about this … and don’t look at me and smile because its not funny.”
After a pause, she raised her voice with frustration and said: “Oh okay, I got raped when I was 12 years old.”
After a long pause, Sandilands then asked “Right … is that the only experience you’ve had?” before the mother admitted she knew of the rape “a couple of months ago”.
Her daughter yelled, “Yet you still asked me the question!

There really are no words.

L

NZ Police says stopping rape is women’s responsibility

Posted on by
42

From this morning’s DomPost

Nineteen young women have been sexually assaulted after partying in Wellington’s central city this year, with most too drunk to remember what happened.

Police say the number of attacks on drunk young women is growing. “They are binge-drinking, make poor choices and can’t keep themselves safe,” Detective Senior Sergeant Paul Borrell said. “That’s a worry and that’s the preventable part of it.”

I won’t even try to compete with Queen of Thorns ability to express (out)rage, so this is after several deep breaths.

Is Detective Senior Sergeant Paul Borrell seriously intending to say that women are responsible when someone sexually assaults them? And that addressing rapists’ behaviour is not the way to prevent rape?

To be fair to him, he does go on to say that

“It’s up to friends of victims and potential offenders to do something about it. In my view, if something does happen, all of us have failed that person.”

So apparently it’s not entirely the young victim’s fault, it’s also the responsibility of her friends and (yay) the rapist’s friends, oh and pretty much everyone except the rapist (whose behaviour is apparently unpreventable).

I’ll leave the final words to Helen Sullivan, Wellington Sexual Abuse Help Foundation general manager, who says what the Police should have

“Why should the whole responsibility for a situation be put on women? The bottom line is we should be able to walk down the street or do anything without the threat of sexual violence.”

Watching the watchers

Posted on by
5

Via Eric Crampton, of all people (his “interesting” sidebar is, well, interesting, and incidentally his co-fisk of the BERL booze report is brutal), the news that (in US prisons, at least) guards commit more rapes than inmates is pretty sobering.

Although sexual abuse of prisoners is widespread, rates vary across facilities. For example, 10 facilities had comparatively high rates, between 9.3 and 15.7 percent, whereas in six of the facilities no one reported abuse during that time period. More prisoners reported abuse by staff than abuse by other prisoners: 2.9 percent of respondents compared with about 2 percent. (Some prisoners reported abuse by other inmates and staff.)

Victims and witnesses often are bullied into silence and harmed if they speak out. In a letter to the advocacy organization Just Detention International, one prisoner conveyed a chilling threat she received from the male officer who was abusing her: “Remember if you tell anyone anything, you’ll have to look over your shoulder for the rest of your life.”

This isn’t a report from some two-bit bunch of pinko soft-on-crime liberal nancies – The National Prison Rape Elimination Commission was formed in 2003 by the (then-majority Republican) US Congress, by a unanimous vote in conjunction with the passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act. It is a large-scale demographic and consultative research project intended to first determine the scale of the problem of prison rape, then to develop policy and procedure by which to eliminate it and standards to which prison operators must adhere in ensuring its elimination. As Senator Edward Kennedy, one of the initiative’s sponsors, said “it is not a liberal issue or a conservative issue. It is an issue of basic decency and human rights.” The research has been almost six years in the making.

So, for the benefit of David Garrett and Judith Collins:

Crowded facilities are harder to supervise, and crowding systemwide makes it difficult to carve out safe spaces for vulnerable prisoners that are less restrictive than segregation.

In other words: dorm-style and double-bunked prisoner accommodation means more rapes. Further:

In Farmer v. Brennan [1994], the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that deliberate indifference to the substantial risk of sexual abuse violates an incarcerated individual’s rights under the Eighth Amendment. As the Court so aptly stated, sexual abuse is “not part of the penalty that criminal offenders pay for their offenses against society.”

If it’s good enough for the USA, with the world’s highest incarceration rate per capita, then it’s good enough for New Zealand, which under the previous government as much as the current one, looks determined to challenge that record.

L

Rational responses to trauma

Posted on by
6

The Sharks Sex Saga continues. Tania Boyd, the victim’s former workmate says the victim bragged about “bedding” players, and goes on:

It was definitely consensual, absolutely.
She is saying she is still traumatised etcetera, well she wasn’t for five days, or four days at least, after that affair.
I can’t work out what’s happened. Does it take five days for it to sink in?

Tania Boyd, having not been there, can’t know whether consent was given – only if Clare – the victim – implied (to her, after the fact) that consent was given. She can’t know the truth of the situation since the victim may well have implied to her that there was consent when there wasn’t. The question of consent is a complicated one, as well – Clare might well have agreed to some sort of sexual contact, but at each escalation consent needed to be renewed, and according to her it wasn’t. There’s a good discussion of this involving our Anita at The Hand Mirror.

Ms Boyd has begged the question of consent by assuming that a woman having been raped by a lot of powerful, famous men would act in a way which someone who hadn’t had such an experience would consider rational – that is, by immediately calling a halt, or immediately reporting the events, or whatever. But trauma, especially sexual trauma, especially when it involves power imbalance, is a complicated thing, and it does screwy things to one’s sense of reason. Incidents like this can have many responses which might seem rational to the traumatised person at the time but utterly irrational to others. Bragging about the event could be seen as a form of post-purchase rationalisation; that is, Clare may have thought it started off as a good experience and perhaps even initiated it, and tried to mask the fact that it turned nasty (to herself as much as anyone) by bragging about the event. This could also be seen as a call for attention; an invitation to workmates, friends or family to offer support. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing.

As to the second statement, if Clare genuinely is traumatised now, then it follows that she was traumatised in the initial four days, it just wasn’t apparent to Tania Boyd, which isn’t really surprising at all given that her response was not one of support but of disgust. Not that that wasn’t a reasonable response – I have no idea how close these people were or what the nature of the workplace was, and bragging about one’s sexual exploits is pretty polarising.

As to the third statement, the answer to Ms Boyd’s question is – yes, these things do take time to sink in. According to a family member with extensive professional experience in this field, the median period of time between incidence and reporting of rape is eighteen and three-quarter years; viewed in this light four days seems very rapid indeed.

This story is being deployed without qualification in apologia for the men in this incident, whereas articles advocating Clare’s perspective are strongly hedged so as to make clear that the facts of the case haven’t really been established. The headline goes beyond euphemistically describing the events as `group sex’ and calls it a `romp’, for goodness’ sakes.

L

What David Garrett really thinks

Posted on by
26

ass_in_jailI’m guessing most of the country has moved on from this issue, but last week I suggested that vto post his email reply from Garrett on the `creature comforts’ issue. He didn’t want to, which is fair enough, but I was interested in my own personalised bit of invective, so I emailed him myself.

I didn’t get invective, I got an explanation of what (and how) he really thinks on this matter, which is most excellent. For all that I disagree with his policies and his ideas, David appears to be entirely lacking in guile, which can only be a good thing inasmuch as it enables the electorate to take him at face value. (Ok, not entirely without guile – he was complaining on Focus On Politics (audio) on Friday that the media take his jocular utterances too seriously.)

The email thread is reproduced verbatim below the fold. I had delayed posting this over the weekend in order to give David time to reply to my last message, but as of this morning he hasn’t done so.

L

Continue reading →

Accepting torture

Posted on by
10

Between even more travelling for work than usual and a cold I’ve been a bit beyond writing, although my list of half written posts has grown :)  Of everything that’s gone on recently it’s the issue of prison rape that’s been closest to a coherent thought. More precisely, why do we accept prison rape?

Since David Garrett’s offensive comments plenty of people have talked about the idea of rape-as-a-part-of-your-punishment and I’ve particularly liked:

  • Idiot/Savant’s “Creature Comforts” which neatly ties the issue back to ACT’s anti human rights agenda.
  • Maia’s Reasonable Opinions which points out that comments like Garrett’s make it clear that some people are rapeable. The comments thread, while heated, is worth a read too!

All of the MSM commentary, and most of the on-line discussion, has taken for granted that prison rape occurs. Where is the analysis of how much prison rape occurs and what is, or could be, done to to eradicate it?

When did prison rape gain acceptance as a normal and inevitable part of our society? What would it take to change that?