Last weekend, two teenage boys who were popular football players from Steubenville, Ohio, were found guilty of raping a teenage girl last summer at a party. In a culture that portrays rapists as scary men in dark alleyways, the boys and many of their friends did not identify what happened as rape and even photographed [...]
Tag Archives: rape
Power and Sex: Presumed Consent is Killing Equality.
IN Swaziland, teenage girls are taught about sexually transmitted diseases, condoms and HIV testing information handed out at will as they learn that sex is dangerous and mostly for men. In India, The Justice Verma Committee’s recommendation on recognizing marital rape as an offence under criminal law was hastily swept aside by the Standing Committee [...]
Sympathetic Rape Coverage is Nothing New
In the hours after the announcement of the Steubenville rape case verdict, the coverage has been non-stop. No big surprise in our 24/7 news culture. What should be a surprise, but sadly isn’t, is the sympathetic tone being taken by some reporters about the future of the two boys (or young men, depending on how you classify high school students [...]
Consent and Ending Violence Against Women and Children
Or Why a “Small” Consent Revolution Needs to be a “Big” Consent Revolution The idea of consent, in terms of how we think about sex, sexual abuse, and power, is fairly new and historically radical. Laurie Penny, describing shifting attitudes about these topics, called it a “small revolution,” earlier this week in The New Statesman. [...]
The Problem With “Grey Rape”
Recently, in an article for the Good Men Project , I referred to “grey rape” a term popularized by Cosmopolitan in a 2007 article titled “The New Kind of Date Rape.” I continue to place scare quotes around the term because while it does the work of communicating the issue that I am trying to talk about, it is also [...]
Trigger Warning, A Documentary
“A man walks into a bar…” Every joke can be a setup for a rape joke. When rape victims turn on their TVs, they face a strong possibility of being confronted with reminders of one of the worst experiences of their lives. What’s worse, these experiences are likely to be laughed at. Rape jokes [...]
Woman Raped by Uber Cabdriver: From New Delhi to DC, We Need Solutions to End #VAW
In December, a Yahoo! Group for DC’s Cleveland Park neighborhood, posted a message detailing a rape allegedly committed by an Uber cab driver a few days prior. According to the post a 20-year-old woman who used Uber, an “on-demand” cab service accessed via a smartphone app, was attacked, knocked unconscious, and raped by her driver after receiving a ride to her [...]
On Topic Of Rape: As Men We Mostly Don’t Know What We’re Talking About
It really didn’t have to come to this, but now that we’re here: why are we men suddenly so intent to make asses of ourselves in conversations about rape? I’m an American man — like many other American men, I was raised to believe my opinion has inherent value. Like other American men, I feel entitled [...]
To India: A Letter Back From Washington, DC
When I was a girl, I had a pen pal in New Delhi. I hadn’t thought about her in years, until today when I read A Letter from New Delhi in The Washington Post. The author poignantly describes how a young female college student in New Delhi, Avantika Shukla, must carefully consider every moment of [...]
Notre Dame Football Players Rape Cover-up – What’s in the News and What Isn’t
Januaryu 7th, 2013/ Updated Version, January 9th, 2013 Thanks to extensive media coverage, almost everyone in the country knows that Notre Dame lost their championship football game to Alabama. But despite last year’s coverage on CBS, MSNBC and the Washington Post, few Americans are aware of Notre Dame’s cover-up of rapes by Notre Dame football players. Why is the football [...]