Today in Cis Privilege: America’s Campus Rape Policy: Boys Will Be Boys

Beyond the act of physical and sexual violence, post traumatic rape syndrome, as well as the refusal of many rape victims to report when they have been assaulted can be attributed to a prevailing rape culture on America’s college campuses. Rape culture is a term used to describe the way rape, sexual violence, and sexual abuse are linked to the culture of society. Essentially sexual violence and speech against women is normalized and excused in media and pop culture. Thus, male sexual aggression is in a number of ways encouraged and supported in society. Here, violence and sexuality are interchangeable. Violence is seen as sexy, and sexuality is seen as violent. Music fills the airwaves telling women that “I know you want it” and “I’ll BEAT the pussy up” and if you are familiar with soca music from the Caribbean, you may have heard the song “Kick In She Back Door”, which is literally about breaking into a woman’s home (and her body) through anal penetration if she refuses a man’s sexual advances.

This rape culture simply takes its cue from or is steeped in patriarchy; which is the general structure of privilege in society, where heterosexual men have more power and influence over other members of society.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24787-boys-will-be-boys-americas-campus-rape-policy

Today in Cis Privilege: Facebook allows images of violence against women & “jokes” about rape, then lies about it

“It is very important to point out that what one person finds offensive another can find entertaining, just as telling a rude joke won’t get you thrown out of your local pub, it won’t get you thrown off Facebook,” Facebook told the BBC in a statement.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/facebook-still-doesnt-consider-rape-jokes-to-be-hate-speech

Today in Cis Privilege: Chinese Men Buying Brides From Vietnam Is Getting Out Of Control

When Kiab turned 16, her brother promised to take her to a party in a tourist town in northern Vietnam. Instead, he sold her to a Chinese family as a bride.

The ethnic Hmong teenager spent nearly a month in China until she was able to escape her new husband, seek help from local police and return to Vietnam.

“My brother is no longer a human being in my eyes — he sold his own sister to China,” Kiab, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, told AFP at a shelter for trafficking victims in the Vietnamese border town Lao Cai.

Vulnerable women in countries close to China — not only Vietnam but also North Korea, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar — are being forced into marriages in the land of the one-child policy, experts say.

China suffers from one of the worst gender imbalances in the world as families prefer male children.

As a result millions of men now cannot find Chinese brides — a key driver of trafficking, according to rights groups.

http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-men-buying-brides-from-vietnam-is-getting-out-of-control-2014-6?utm_content=buffer94237&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Today in Cis Privilege: Pakistan girl burned alive for rejecting marriage proposal

A teenage girl died in Pakistan after being doused in petrol and set alight by a man who wanted to marry her but whose proposal had been rejected, police said Sunday.

It was the second brutal killing in Pakistan’s Punjab province within days, after a 17-year-old girl and her husband were murdered by a group of relatives for marrying against their wishes.

The latest incident took place Saturday in a village which is part of Toba Tek Singh town.

Sidra Shaukat, 18, was at home without her parents when 22-year-old Fayyaz Aslam entered her house, doused her with petrol and set her alight, Mohammad Akram, a police official told AFP.

http://news.yahoo.com/pakistan-girl-burned-alive-rejecting-marriage-proposal-175732805.html

Today in Cis Privilege: Who Owns Your Womb? Women Can Get Murder Charge for Refusing C-Sections

When most women become pregnant, understandably they believe the choice of how they give birth will remain theirs; whether to deliver vaginally or through cesarean surgery or where to give birth, at home or at a hospital. Decades ago, those decisions were well within the domain of pregnant patients whose reproductive liberty and autonomy interests gained constitutional recognition in the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.

After all, whose body is it anyway? But what may have seemed clear-cut decades ago, is now put to the test by doctors and lower courts.

Decades ago, refusing to undergo cesarean surgery was not a crime. That’s another matter now in the wake of recent “fetal protection” enactments that make it a crime for a pregnant woman to engage in any conduct that might threaten harm to a fetus. Some doctors believe this applies to how a woman gives birth.

Melissa Rowland refused to undergo the cesarean surgery recommended by her doctor. She was later charged with murder after one of her fetuses was stillborn. Rowland accepted a plea deal, which made her criminally liable for child endangerment.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/who-owns-your-womb-women-can-get-murder-charge-refusing-c-sections

Today in Cis Privilege: Systematic undercounting of sexual assaults in the US disguises a hidden rape crisis

Earlier this month, a 911 dispatcher in Ohio was recorded telling a 20-year-old woman who had just been raped to “quit crying.” After she provided a description of her assailant, the caller went on to say, “They’re not going to be able to find him with the information that you’ve given.” This incident had its viral moment, sparking outrage at the dispatcher’s lack of empathy. But it also speaks to the larger issue of how we are counting rapes in the United States. Sixty-nine percent of police departments surveyed in 2012 said that dispatchers like this one, often with little training, are authorized to do the initial coding of sexual assault crimes.

That’s important, because miscoding of such crimes is masking the high incidence of rape in the United States. We don’t have an overestimation of rape; we have a gross underestimation. A thorough analysis of federal data published earlier this year by Corey Rayburn Yung, associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, concludes that between 1995 and 2012, police departments across the country systematically undercounted and underreported sexual assaults.

Yung used murder rates—the statistic with the most reliable measure of accuracy and one that is historically highly correlated with the incidence of rape—as a baseline for his analysis. After nearly two years of work, he estimates conservatively that between 796,213 and 1,145,309 sexual assault cases never made it into national FBI counts during the studied period.

http://www.thenation.com/article/180441/how-did-fbi-miss-over-1-million-rapes

Today in Cis Privilege: She was 17 and forced to have sex with 10 men a day

The scantily dressed teenager stood on the hotel balcony taking nervous drags from her cigarette. She’d been in downtown Ottawa for almost two weeks, forced to have sex with a long line of men.

But on that warm summer night in 2011, one man standing outside her hotel room door had something very different in mind.

Ottawa police Det. Shane Henderson had received a tip from hotel staff about a 17-year-old girl they believed was a prostitute.

So the unassuming policeman did something that would change both their lives and pull back the curtain on the human-trafficking industry in the nation’s capital: He knocked on the door.

These are the stories of how the constable and the teenager met at a Cooper Street hotel and how their journey together would lead to Canada’s first human trafficking conviction involving an adult who had placed a child into prostitution.

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/marys-story-she-was-17-and-forced-to-have-sex-with-10-men-a-day?utm_content=buffer84b38&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Today in Cis Privilege: With 4 Hangings in 2 Weeks, India’s Women Are Living in Fear

The body of a woman was discovered hanging by her scarf from a tree in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on Thursday morning, becoming the state’s fourth such female victim in only two weeks.

Relatives of the dead 19-year-old have filed a report claiming she was raped and murdered, but a district police information officer told the New York Times that a preliminary postmortem examination had found no evidence to suggest rape.

Yet the grisly discovery adds to increasing concerns for women’s rights throughout the region. Most recently, the rape and hanging of two teenage sisters in the same state caused nationwide outrage and global headlines.

“This is not something that is particular for Uttar Pradesh,” Amnesty International India’s senior researcher Divya Iyer tells TIME. “These sporadic news of rapes bring the issue to the fore, but it is important to see it as a continuum. For every case of rape, there are many more that are not reported, because of the stigma attached and the fear of reprisals.”

http://time.com/2869075/india-rape-women-hanging-uttar-pradesh/

Today in Cis Privilege: U.S. Girls Face Genital Cutting Abroad

Last summer, an American-born teenager of Somali descent fled her parents’ home in a suburb here after she discovered that a coming vacation to Somalia would include a sacred rite of passage: the cutting of her genitalia. In Guinea, a New Yorker escaped to the American Embassy after an aunt told her that her family trip would involve genital cutting. And in Seattle, at least one physician said parents had sent girls back to Somalia to undergo cutting.

Immigrant parents from African and other nations have long sent their daughters back to their ancestral homes for the summer, a trip intended to help them connect with their families and traditions.

During their stays, some girls are swept into bedrooms or backwoods and subjected to genital cutting in the belief that it will prevent promiscuity, ready them for marriage or otherwise align them with the ideals of their culture.

“Vacation cutting,” as the practice is deemed by those who oppose it, has existed in immigrant enclaves around the world for decades. Federal law has banned genital cutting in the United States since 1996, and last year it became illegal to transport girls for that purpose.

Today in Cis Privilege: India women deaths: Two more found hanging in Uttar Pradesh

Police in northern India are investigating the deaths of two more women found hanging from trees in separate incidents in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Police said one of the women had been raped and tests were being conducted on the body of the second woman.

Reports said a 19-year-old woman was found hanging Thursday morning from a tree in a village close to the city of Moradabad area, around four hours east of Delhi. Her family told police she was raped and a post-mortem examination was being carried out.

Meanwhile on Wednesday, another woman was found hanged from a tree in loniyarpurwa village, around 60 miles from the city of Lucknow, the state capital of Uttar Pradesh. It is said the 45-year-old woman, who had campaigned against the prevalence of illicit alcohol had been raped before being hanged from a tree.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-women-deaths-two-more-found-hanging-in-uttar-pradesh-9531533.html