Category: Rape

Columbia University Refuses to Defend Its Sexual Misconduct Policy

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports that Columbia University is apparently refusing to publicly defend its controversial sexual misconduct policy. The new policy completely strips persons accused of sexual misconduct of any meaningful rights and has garnered a lot of unfavorable publicity for the university.

On February 23, the Columbia University chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union organized an event to discuss the policy. Along with opponents of the policy, such as Columbia Law professor Vivian Berger, the ACLU invited Charlene Allen, the administrator in charge of Columbia’s Office of Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Education, as well as representatives from the campus group that pushed for the new policy, Students Active for Ending Rape (SAFER). SAFER declined the invitation, but Allen agreed to participate. Shortly before the event, however, Columbia issued a statement that Allen would not participate after all. Fox News recently aired a story about the policy, and again Columbia refused to comment on the policy.

FIRE’s Harvey Silvergate said,

Columbia cannot bear the public scrutiny. They didn’t show up at the ACLU event, nor for the television program, because there is no principled defense for their policy. How can they justify the stripping away of the due process protection deemed necessary for hundreds of years. HOw can they justify the stripping away of the due process protections deemed necessary for hundreds of years in a free and decent society? The policy is worthy of the kangaroo courts of the former Soviet Union, the current People’s Republic of China, or Spain under Franco. It is not worthy of a world-class class university in a free country.

A good insight into the sort of thinking that went into this policy was given last year by SAFER co-chair Sarah Richardson. Asked by a reporter about the rights of individuals accused of a crime, Richardson asked, “Why are we so concerned about the rapist?” Guilty until proven innocent is at the core of SAFER’s claims and the “justice” meted out by the Sexual Misconduct Policy.

Sources:

Columbia University unable to defend policy in public; activist enemies of due process censor FIRE, then make a U-turn. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Press Release, March 13, 2001.

Rape on Campus: 1 in 33

Campus rape statistics have become highly politicized over the past decade. Campus feminists and rape advocates often cite figures claiming that as many as 1 in 4 college women are victims of rapes. Critiques of such high figures, including this author, argue that such statistics are based on problematic surveys that vastly overestimate rape incidence among college women.

The U.S. Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice and Bureau of Justice Statistics joined the fray recently with their report, “The Sexual Victimization of College Women.” The report is based on data obtained from interviews with college women. Like a lot of reports, the media chose to sensationalize the reports finding that 13 percent of college women said they had been stalked in the prior year, while downplaying the fact that only 1.1 percent said they had been the victim of an attempted rape, while 1.7 percent reported being victims of a completed rape in the previous year, meaning that about 1 in 33 were the victims of rape or attempted rape in the previous year.

On the one hand the survey backs up other evidence that large numbers of rapes and attempted rapes go unreported to police. On the other hand it also provides evidence that many women’s advocates overestimate the incidence of rape among college women.

Which is not to diminish the extent of the problem. Based on these statistics about 1 in 14 women will be the victims of rape during a four year stay at an American university or college. This is way too high.

Source:

Rape on campus. Geraldine Sealey, ABCNews.Com, January 26, 2001.

Sexual Slavery in the Sudan

In a recent column for the Village Voice, Nat Hentoff urged the incoming Bush administration to take seriously the long standing reports coming from Sudan of the use of rape and sexual slavery as a weapon of war by the government there.

Ever since it achieved independence, Sudan has seen almost constant civil war. The war falls along geographical and religious divides with the Muslim majority in northern Sudan squaring off against the Christian and animist majority in the south. The government of General Omar Hassan al-Bashir is overtly Muslim, but faces numerous rebel movements in the south.

It has long been known that al-Bashir’s government tolerates the enslavement of Christians and animists, and several American organizations have caused a great deal of controversy by raising money to buy the freedom of slaves in Sudan.

Hentoff writes about recent Christian Solidarity international report that the government’s Popular Defence Forces “systematically gang-raped and enslaved black African women and girls during and after slave raids on villages in southern Sudan…”

Hentoff quotes CSI’s John Eibener saying,

It is the custom for PDF troops to gang-rape enslaved women and girls, and execute those who cannot walk quickly during the forced marches to the north. Once in the north, the slaves are divided amongst their masters and are routinely subjected to beatings, sexual abuse, work without pay, and forced conversions, according to successive United Nations Special Rapporteurs.

Allegations of just such atrocities focused the world’s attention on the conflict in Kosovo, but at least in the United States there has been very little about the ongoing use of slavery and rape by combatant’s in Sudan’s civil war (and a lot of the stories that do make the mainstream media focus on the controversy over Christian efforts to buy Sudanese slaves their freedom).

Source:

Gang rape in Sudan. The Village Voice, February 7-13, 2001.

The Tragedy of Female Slavery in Ghana

The BBC recently ran a sad report about the persistence of trokosi — a form of religious slavery — in rural parts of Ghana. Although a law was passed three years ago in Ghana outlawing it, up to 3,000 women are still estimated to be enslaved as a result of the practice.

Trokosi is a religious practice of the Ewe who inhabit Benin, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana. One of the Ewe’s religious beliefs is ju-ju — the notion that the gods punish one person’s sins by causing the death of other family members until the sin is forgiven by the gods. Priests offer to pardon the sin in exchange for some form of atonement.

According to the American Anti-Slavery Group, until the 18th century the offering typically took the form of livestock or other gifts, but that began to change and priests began demanding, and receiving, virgin girls as atonement for the sins of their relatives.

Girls, often under the age of 10, are brought to the priest, ritually stripped of all their possessions, including clothes, and told they have to do anything the priest tells them. Most girls are raped repeatedly.

Technically the girl only has to serve the priest for 3 to 5 years, but the reality is that for many this is a life long sentence. In order for the girl to return to her family at the end of her years of service, her family must pay a redemption fee set by the priest. Not surprisingly, such redemption fees are typically set at prices which the family cannot afford.

To add to the problem, trokosi can be inherited. If a woman dies before her parents can redeem her by paying the priest, they must give him another virgin girl.

It is believed there are up to 4,000 trokosi in Africa, with 3,000 of those in Ghana. As mentioned earlier, Ghana passed a law in 1998 banning the practice but it has persisted, in part due to unwillingness of the government to enforce the law.

The BBC interviewed Hutealor Wede who is a slave to a Ewe priest,

My grandfather had illegal sex with a woman. The gods punished our family. I was the virgin daughter, so I was brought to this village and given to the priest to stop the disasters happening. I have to do everything for the priest. Anything he wants.

Some people, such as Osofu Kofi Ameve, the head of the African Renaissance Mission, defend trokosi and attack those who would outlaw it as imperialists intent on wiping out traditional African religions to establish Western religious. He told the BBC that, “It’s all lies … No woman is a slave in Ghana. Christianity, your Christianity, allows for no other religion. You want to eradicate all African religion.”

Fortunately for the thousands of women enduring such slavery, one of those who does not share this view is the newly elected president of Ghana, John Kufuor, who says he will stop the practice. Kufuor told the BBC, “Young girls should be in educational establishments, not in the harem of some fetish priest.”

Still, at the moment, little has been done to stop the practice except by controversial groups such as International Need and others who have raised money to purchase the freedom of such women. Hopefully Kufuor will follow through and elimination slavery in his country.

Source:

Ghana’s trapped slaves. Humphrey Hawksley, The BBC, February 8, 2001.

The Trokosi: Religious slavery in Ghana. The American Anti-Slavery Group.

New York City to Allow Civil Suits for Gender-Biased Crimes

Feminist Daily News Wire recently reported that the New York City Council approved a new law on November 30, 2000, that will “allow victims of rape, domestic violence, and other crimes motivated by gender bias to sue the perpetrators in civil cases.” According to The New York Times, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is expected to sign the bill.

This is basically a rehash of the federal Violence Against Women Act provisions that were thrown out as unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court a few months ago. The goal here is to codify into law the radical feminist construct that there men as a class oppress women as a class.

As an example, the Feminist Daily News wire notes that for a civil suit to be allowed under this law, it must be accompanied by evidence of gender bias such as the act “perpetuated stereotypes of women’s submissive role.” Under this law, then, a rapist who rapes and sodomizes a woman could find himself in civil court, while a rapist who rapes and sodomizes a man would not have to worry about a suit under this statute because the criminal act couldn’t be construed as an example of “gender bias.”

The ultimate message such laws send is that crimes of violence committed by men against women are much more serious than crimes of violence committed by women against men or by men against men, since only the crimes in the first category are part of a society-wide conspiracy against women.

At one time, feminists might have saw such unequal protection before the law for men and women as a sign of overarching paternalism, but today it’s just business as usual.

Source:

NYC Establishes Civil Rights Remedy for Victims of Gender-Biased Crime. Feminist Daily News Wire, December 1, 2000.

Columbia’s Star Chamber

Columbia University recently decided it had a problem. All of the red tape that Americans come to expect when accused of serious crimes, such as the right to have a lawyer present, the right to cross-examine witnesses, and the right to confront one’s accuser were getting in the way of the university dealing with alleged rapists and sexual harassers. Fortunately Columbia found a solution — get rid of all the mumbo jumbo about the rights of the accused and simply throw the book at the bastards.

Columbia’s new guidelines for dealing with sexual harassment and assault charges leave those accused of such transgressions almost no ability to defend themselves. Under its old policies, accused students had to be given at least 48 hours notice of any hearing along with a list of witnesses who would testify. Now their is no requirement that they notify students in advance, and are not required to inform the accused of the charge or the witnesses until immediately prior to the accused testifying. It goes without saying that contrary to long-established principles of Western jurisprudence, accused students are not allowed to attend their trial — they aren’t even allowed to be in the room when other witnesses testify. Instead they are forced to rely on “summaries” of any testimony made by the three personal panel administering the case.

Even that wasn’t enough for the feminists on Columbia’s campus who complained that red tape was letting too many sexual harassers and others off. Only students or faculty who have undergone “special training” in sexual harassment and sexual assault will be allowed to preside over such cases. Columbia claims that this will make their panels more objective, but of course it will do just the opposite. As The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education noted, whether it be the witchcraft trials in the 16th century or the special drug courts in America today, “judges and jurors in such ‘special’ courts assume that it is their mission to eliminate a widespread and specific social problem rather than to achieve justice for individuals.”

Columbia even went so far as to completely eliminate any standard of proof for charges of sexual harassment and/or assault. Under its old policy an allegation had to be proven by “clear and convincing evidence” and specified that the burden as on those making the accusation to prove their cases. The new policy simply omits any mention of standards of proof and who has the burden. As FIRE notes, “it is an invitation to trial by hysteria in a politically charged atmosphere.”

And Columbia certainly has a politically charged atmosphere. Law professor George Fletcher was warned by Law School Dean David Leebron that because one of his law exams included a question about case law that involves victims of violence who believe the net result of the violence against them benefited them that his exam was illegal and possibly constituted sexual harassment.

Columbia defended its policies in a letter saying that it was mandated by law to deal with sexual harassment, but if Columbia were a public university its sexual harassment police would be blatantly unconstitutional. Because it is a private institution, it is free to simply throw out even minimal safeguards for students accused of sexual harassment or assault.

Sources:

Columbia public relations official makes false claims to defend a fatally flawed policy. Press release, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, October 25, 2000.

Back to the Middle Ages on campus. John Silber, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, November 3, 2000.

Higher ed. Norah Vincent, The Village Voice, October 25-31, 2000.

Hail Columbia?. Edwin Feulner, The Heritage Foundation, October 27, 2000.

Academic freedom under assault at Columbia Law School. Press release, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, September 29, 2000.