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Frank Lombard, a Duke University official, has been charged with molesting his five-year-old adopted son. There has been all kinds of blog uproar surrounding the media coverage of this story, including accusations that the mainstream media isn’t covering it enough (though a Google news search of the story turned up quite a bit), that not enough of the reports are reporting that the victim is black and that the perpetrator is gay.

As an anti-sexual assault advocate, one of the big problems I have with the coverage of the story is that nearly all news outlets are reporting that the victim is Lombard’s adopted son. Out of 10 stories that I examined, only one, the Washington Post piece, protected the victim’s identity.

News outlets reporting on the relationship between the victim and perpetrator isn’t terribly uncommon, but most of the time reporters are careful not to mention it. So why is it so widely reported this time? Is it because the first reporters to cover it mentioned it, so it’s considered common knowledge now? Could it have something to do with the fact that the perpetrator is a gay adoptive parent?

Considering all of the battles for gay rights, including adoption rights, currently happening all across the nation, it’s hard to miss that some gay adoption rights opponents, including some blogging about this case, might find this story helpful to their cause (you know, because heterosexual parents never molest their children).

My first thought when reading the coverage was that this case supports the myth that most pedophiles are gay, so that detail is “important” to include. Then I realized, however, that out of the 10 articles, only two mentioned that Lombard is gay. And one of those articles is one talking about the struggle of gay adoptive parents to fight stereotypes, so it was actually pertinent to the piece.

So, I’m left scratching my head. Why are so many news stations reporting the relationship of the victim rather than protecting his identity?

I was able to stand in a circle with 22 youth and several adults and sing the theme song to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air last week. That’s right all you fans of Will Smith and 1990s sitcoms, I know the lyrics – do you? “Now this is the story all about how …” Singing (if you want to call it that) was just one part of an amazing morning spent with PODER (People Organized for the Defense of Earth and her Resources) staff and volunteers and the amazing participants in their Young Scholars for Justice program.

Our society has been devaluing and criminalizing youth for a very long time – as Young Scholars for Justice participants have learned and can tell you from experience. The result is that adults often assume the role of teacher, director, mentor and disciplinarian all in one when we engage youth in anti-violence work. These are all positions of power over youth, and this approach leaves them with few roles to take in that work. In addition, adults often believe that youth must be convinced that something is wrong – that they can’t see violence without adults showing it to them. This approach often makes youth reluctant to talk about their experiences and frustrations with injustice and violence with adults. Even with the best of intentions, it comes across as condescending and dismissive.

I remember when I was in college in a class of “non-traditional” students and the teacher told me that I would understand when I got older in response to my disagreement with one of her points. I remember how silenced and small it made me feel. When we try to tell youth how to use their voice, we continue to silence them. It is time we learn to listen, and work with youth in a way that recognizes them as both learners and teachers – as both followers and leaders. In the morning I spent with the youth at PODER and out in the community watching them knock on their neighbor’s doors and talk to their neighbors about the community’s health and safety, I learned more about using my own voice than I’ve learned from any adult in a long time. I want to say thank you to those youth, and to the adults at PODER who work side by side with these youth as equals.

Do you have any thoughts about or experiences working with youth in partnership and based on mutual respect and equity? We’d love to hear them.

A new Texas law, recently signed by Governor Perry, allows information about when someone is linked to a crime via DNA, but who cannot be prosecuted because of an expired statute of limitations, to be noted on their criminal record.

The Dallas Morning News reports one woman’s story:

“He had me undress, removed my jewelry, and at knifepoint …,” she said, stopping to clear her throat and control her trembling voice. Then she went on with details of the vicious four-hour attack.

Dallas police have identified the woman’s attacker through DNA, but he can’t be prosecuted because of an old statute of limitations.

Now, thanks to a bill pushed by a small group of victims and signed into law by Gov. Rick Perry on Friday, the suspect’s DNA link will at least be noted in his criminal history.

The statute of limitations no longer exists for cases involving DNA, but since the law is not retroactive, some perpetrators still walk free if they committed their crime before the law changed.

This new law seems great – it at least takes some action against perpetrators who escape prosecution due to statutes of limitation. I’m curious, though, whether this law actually changes anything or just makes people feel better. What does it mean exactly, for it to be noted on the criminal record? Does that mean if the same person is, for example, arrested in the future for another sexual assault, that the judge/jury will consider his link to the previous assault? Or will it be inadmissable since he wasn’t convicted or even prosecuted? The article doesn’t elaborate…

The BBC reports on Dumisani Rebombo, who raped a woman as a teenager. Years later, he found the woman and asked her forgiveness. Now, Rebombo works with other men in South Africa to prevent rape.

Rembobo talks a lot about the pressure to be hypermasculine and how that influenced his decision to rape:

Before the incident, I was constantly jeered for not being man enough.

At the time I was not ready to have a girlfriend when all my friends did.

I did not tend the cattle or sheep, nor did I attend the initiation school [where South African teenagers are circumcised in traditional rites of passage].

This fuelled my daily jeers.

A friend and my cousin pressured me to prove that I was man enough, by taking part in the rape of a teenage girl in the village.

This was termed “straightening her up”, since she did not want to go out with any of the local boys.

I succumbed to this daily pressure and on the day of the incident, when they saw me trembling with fear, they ordered me to take marijuana and beer to defeat my fears.

I did just that and the two of us [my friend and I] proceeded to rape the girl.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I think that people can change, and this man sounds like he has. Still, I’m not sure that speaking out against rape is the most appropriate thing for him to be doing because at the very least, it could be very triggering for rape victims. Maybe I’m way off base, though… What do you think?

If you’ve read my blog-ography, or met me, you might know that I have a small obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Well, today I was browsing Sociological Images, a great blog that often highlights sexism in culture, I found this circa 2006 video of Buffy creator Joss Whedon talking about why he writes “strong women characters” at an Equality Now event. Start at 2:00 if you want to skip Meryl Streep’s intro and get straight to the good stuff. At about 6:10 it gets really good.

I realize that by posting this, I am ignoring Joss’ stance on the issue (“I believe what I’m doing should not be remarked upon, let alone honored.”), but I think his comments are powerful and worth sharing. As a Whedon fan, I enjoyed hearing him speak about how his mother, father and stepfather all influenced him and his view of women – but I particularly liked the way he points out that the question shouldn’t be why he writes strong female characters, but why others don’t.

Because equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity, we need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and women who’s confronted with it. We need equality, kinda now.

In other vampire/feminist news, check out this mashup of Buffy and Twilight. Though I love Twilight, I definitely agree that the romanticizing of Edward’s controlling, stalkerish behavior is problematic, so it was pretty entertaining to see Buffy put him in his place.

The Cheetah Club, a strip club in San Antonio, is facing legal trouble for hiring a 14-year-old girl as a topless dancer. A manager at the club, Jeffery Shawn Martinez, was arrested on charges of employment harmful to a minor and sexual performance of a child.

Now the owners of the club, RJL Entertainment, Inc., is suing the girl and her parents, saying the seventh-grader “swindled them into breaking state law.”

That’s right, a strip club is suing a middle schooler for deceiving them. To make matters worse, according to police, 48-year-old Leslie Campbell kidnapped the girl in March, took her to Corpus Christi, sexually assaulted her over the course of a week, provided her with a fake ID and forced her to strip at the club.

How does RJL Entertainment justify suing a 14-year-old victim of sexual assault, kidnapping and exploitation? Why aren’t they suing Campbell, the man who forced her to do so?

A 20-year-old Massachusetts man, Kyle Fuchs, was recently sentenced to eight to 10 years in prison for raping three girls and taking or posting explicit photos of one of those victims and two other girls and posting them online.

The man has a long record of sexual assaults:

In 2006, he was charged with raping a girl in Lynn. Meanwhile, Fuchs, then 17, was dating and having sex with a 14-year-old girl from Swampscott and taking explicit photos of her, even after being put on probation in the Lynn case. In 2007, police discovered 42 images of child pornography sent by Fuchs. Police seized his computer and found more than 5,000 other images of underage girls in explicit poses. Another victim said Fuchs had invited her to watch television at his father’s house in October 2004, and while there, attacked her, pinning her to a bed and forcibly raping her. A year later, a girl said Fuchs took her to a secluded spot and “forced her to perform sexual activity,” apologized and then later he forcibly raped her.

Despite Fuchs’ history of exploiting girls sexually, the judge on the case, Salem Superior Court Judge Howard Whitehead, said “This kind of behavior is an outgrowth of the sexting culture,” and believes it “opens the door for predators to come in and exploit” teens.

Huh?!

So Judge Whitehead blames (at least partially) the victims and technology, even though Fuchs has demonstrated numerous times that he is a predator? To me, this seems like a typical fear-what’s-new reaction and effectively ignores the fact that young people have the right to be sexual without being admonished for “opening the door” to rape. Fuchs and Fuchs alone decided to sexually assault and exploit these girls, and he would have done it with or without the use of technology.

Bros Before Hos: College Fraternities and Sexual Exploitation, by Nicholas Syrett, explores one way that extreme homophobia and hypermasculinity interact to contribute to a culture of sexual violence in many fraternities.

The article discusses both overt sexual violence, such as the gang rapes of women, and practices such as defining sex as a conquest. Both, he argues, “are the logical outcome of a culture of masculine supremacy and sexual exploitation that has made its home in some college fraternities.”

According to Syrett, as homosexuality became more visible over the years, fraternity members felt more pressure to demonstrate their heterosexuality and deflect any questions that might arise in response to the culture of male intimacy and homoerotic initiation rituals in their organizations. This, coupled with the rise of dating and the increased willingness of college women to engage in sex before marriage, meant that more fraternity men began seeking casual sex with women to uphold their masculine images. Syrett contends that, “This emphasis upon casual sex is part of a bigger problem, however. Social scientists have demonstrated that it places pressure on men who are not otherwise having sex to do so in order to save face, and this can lead to sexual assault.” The statistics back his claim up:

College fraternities—currently numbering three hundred fifty thousand undergraduate brothers with more than four million alumni—have become a haven for a masculinity that takes sexual conquest as one of its defining characteristics. Indeed, the social science literature of the past three decades has shown that fraternity men are more likely than their nonaffiliated classmates to rape women, and some studies have estimated that as many as 70 to 90 percent of reported campus gang rapes are committed by members of fraternities. This makes fraternities a dangerous place for the women who frequent their houses and attend their parties. In their sexist logic—and in their own words—“Brothers Over Babes” or “Bros Before Hos.” [Emphasis mine]

Read the whole article for an interesting perspective on sexual assault within fraternities and how frat culture has evolved over the past century. The author, Nicholas L. Syrett, is an assistant professor of history at the University of Northern Colorado where he teaches classes on women, gender, and sexuality in U.S. history and wrote a book titled The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities.

Via Jezebel, I learned of Betty Makoni, founder of the Girl Child Network (GCN), which started in Zimbabwe and has now expanded to Swaziland, Malawi and South Africa.

Makoni founded the GCN as a support group for women and girls who were raped as a result of “the virgin myth.”

The virgin myth – a widely-held superstition that sex with a virgin will cure a man of HIV or AIDS (and, pre-AIDS, a range of mortal illnesses; this isn’t a new idea)- has led to a rash of child rapes in sub-Saharan Africa (most notably in South Africa) and the ensuing pregnancies and AIDS infections are a little-addressed source of shame for the victims.

The GCN now has three “empowerment villages,” which provide asylum, medical care and counseling to girls who are victims of violence. To date, the GCN has aided about 35,000 girls.

Betty Makoni continues to do this work despite the danger it puts her in personally. Last year, she was forced to move to the UK because she was receiving death threats. She is an inspiration to me for risking her own safety in order to offer support to girls who are victimized because of this pervasive myth. Check out the Jezebel article for links to more stories about Makoni, the GCN and “the virgin myth.”

I have run across statements asserting that drugs and alcohol cause violence, including sexual violence, in a couple of places recently, and I’ve done a lot of thinking around it. And, since I have this vehicle of the blog, I’m gonna share my thoughts and encourage you to share yours so we can figure this out together.

I’ve run into a lot of folks who have drug and alcohol counseling backgrounds who put forth this belief about the causal nature of drugs and alcohol, as well as folks who’ve lived with violence and substance abuse in their lives, so I want to honor their very real experiences. However, it seems to me that alcohol and drug abuse is more of a symptom, an excuse, and at most correlates to violence. I think that most folks would agree that drugs and alcohol lower ones inhibitions, but it is the underlying propensity towards and belief in the validity and right to violence that causes violence. If alcohol is the accelerant that fuels the fire of violence, it is still the fire of violence already burning that must be extinguished if we are to prevent it. If we remove the accelerant (drugs and alcohol) the fire will still burn and people who are violent will find other excuses to justify their violent acts. We know that many people who abuse drugs and alcohol are not violent. Likewise, we know that many people who are violent don’t abuse drugs or alcohol.

As we move forward in our prevention work, we must keep an eye to drug and alcohol abuse as they are factors in many sexual assaults, but we also must remember that the removal of substance abuse will not make our communities safer without first dealing with the underlying violence in individuals, communities and our society as a whole.

I know that not everyone agrees with me, so I really do want to hear your thoughts so that we can have this conversation and learn to understand where each of us is coming from. Maybe we can find a way to talk about drugs and alcohol that allows us to acknowledge its role in sexual violence while maintaining our focus on the underlying conditions that contribute to violence.

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