There is good news, and bad news, and completely predictable news in the fight against prison rape. The good news: the Justice Department last week announced a major new initiative designed to fight against prison rape. The bad news: it’s being opposed by right-wing ideologues. As Think Progress explains:
This week, the Department of Justice published new standards addressing the epidemic of rape and sexual abuse in our nation’s prisons. The guidelines, which apply immediately to federal prisons and give financial incentives for states to comply, are a laudable, widely praised, and long overdue step in combating rape in the United States.
The American Action Forum, a Wall Street-funded group whose C(4) runs millions of dollars in attack ads against Democrats, responded by lambasting the move as too “costly” and “complicated.” …
The Weekly Standard echoed AAF’s response, bemoaning the cost of preventing people from being raped in prison. The total expected cost is less than 1 percent of the overall cost of our prison system and ultimately “end up saving money — for example, by avoiding the medical costs of injuries suffered by rape victims,” according to the New York Times.
The completely predictable news? Men’s Rights Activists are completely oblivious to all this.
If the Men’s Rights movement were truly concerned with helping men, rather than playing “oppression Olympics” and complaining about feminists and women in general, they would be all over this issue. But I have seen nothing about this on any site in the manosphere, aside from one post on the Men’s Rights subreddit that drew all of six (mostly ignorant) comments. (Looking through one large thread on the subject of prison rape that was recently on r/mensrights’ front page, I found zero references to the Justice Department’s new initiative.)
What accounts for this obliviousness? It could be because MRAs tend to regard the Obama administration as a tool of our (imaginary) feminazi overlordsladies. Or because they would have to acknowledge that women are also raped in prison. But I think the real reason is that MRAs are so disconnected from real activists working in the real world to combat prison rape that they are completely unaware of any of this.
If you are interested in getting involved, or just learning more about the issue, I’d suggest checking out the website of the group Just Detention International, which campaigns against prison rape.
For more links, see this post of mine.
Further evidence that MRAs don’t care jack shit about men.
Ugh. Grammatical torture there.
Men’s Rights Inactivists! Hardly ever working to help their fellow men.
Stopping rape sends money! Therefore the right-wing folks that are opposing this plan has no reason to, and we can solve this problem practically for free!
…
FUUUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUU! *boom*
Why was this measure presented in the first place? Because people wanted to stop rape. Why was this measure opposed? Because of money. You’ve got it backwards, my bitter friend.
I am as thrilled the Justice Department is doing something about this as I am unsurprised that the MRAs have noticed it’s happening. (That is, “lots.”)
It’s like.. right wing idiots vs MRAs in a battle to see who can be the biggest (and/or most dangerous) dumbasses on the planet.
Then again, i’m sure there’s a lot of overlap between those two groups.
Personally, I’m appalled at the idea that we’d consider money when discussing basic human rights to begin with.
Wow… This bill apparently came out on May 17th according to this site. That actually surprises me a great deal. Wouldn’t there be something about this before now for mra groups who’s mission is to combat prison rape?
I suspect a significant number of the right-wing folks saying “but it’s too expensive!” are actually thinking “but rape is part of their punishment for being dirty criminals!”
Most MRAs, of course, don’t give a damn about prison rape victims except when they use them as a tool to tear down women who are victims of rape and their advocates, so colour me unsurprised.
Ninja’d by Viscaria as to why the right-wing won’t do fuck-all about it. I think most MRAs think along the same lines, if they think about it at all.
This MRA, who eventually got booted off the Skeptic Society forum, was very upset that peope laugh about men in prison being raped:
http://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=92&t=16694
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/feminist-lies-feminism/lets-belittle-men/
AVFM mentions the new standards here, about 27 paragraphs down O_O, about halfway through a large rambling post about all the ways in which men are belittled. Here’s the paragraph:
Emphasis mine. That’s pretty short-live praise, just one sentence. Guess it wasn’t a big deal, all the good it did, if it didn’t specifically say female guards can’t pat down male inmates.
Huh… in actually reading an overview of PREA (the bill in question), that’s about the only gendered difference. Female guards being able to pat down male inmates. That’s it. In the next paragraph, it says that
So really, it seems like it’s just pat-downs that are different. Weird, not sure I agree, but it also seems like a weird part to highlight out of an entire bill that seems to do a lot of good.
Further research suggests that one possibility for why female to male pat-downs were not banned was because of concerns that it would limit employment opportunities for female guards.
In a court case (Grummett v. Rushen, 779 F.2d 491), the court found that preventing female guards from seeing male prisoners while showering, due to the way the prison was set up, would prevent female guards from operating at all. And this pdf notes that the employment problem with female guards conflicts with banning cross-gender pat searchs (but argues that prisoner rights should be the priority).
Thanks for posting about this, you’ve inspired me to do the same.
I’m sure the MRA community would tell you that the only appropriate way to fund this sort of measure would be to take the money away from women’s DV shelters. Or WIC.
I’d guess that female-on-male pat downs were not banned because of the idea (whether or not that this is true) that women are less likely to sexually assault male prisoners than men are, as well as being less likely to assault female prisoners. I’d need to see data to know if that is an accurate assumption, but it very well could be true, in which case it would make sense not to ban the people least likely to commit sexual assault from patting prisoners down. On the other hand, it still might be more uncomfortable for male prisoners to be patted down by female guards, and so you could argue for discouraging mixed-gender pat downs for that reason, but it wouldn’t be to prevent sexual assault.
The AAF don’t realize that not stopping rape in the prison system (and reform schools for that matter) costs society much more than money. Most of the rape victims are not doing life sentences – frequently they are kids of 17 serving time for minor offences, but old enough to be tried as adults; they are targetted because of their physical weakness compared to the full grown prisoners. They will be out someday and filled with a burning rage against the society that put them through this. Clyde Barrow was a good example, Carl Panzram too.
Holy fuck, Ruby, nice posts on the skeptic forum:
(She’s not even a consistent troll, unless she thinks bank robbery = rape.)
I really can’t say HOLY SHIT YOU SUCK FUCK YOU hard enough here.
@Cliff:
Waaaiiitt…. That was ruby that was saying that shit? What the flying consensual fuck?
The fuck is wrong with you, Ruby?
NOW can we ban her clueless ass?
I don’t think there are words to describe how much you disgust me Ruby
Actually, the MRA in that conversational seemed to be fairly reasonable about this particular issue. No one deserves to be raped. This should not be a controversial point. It’s rather depressing to see that so many people on that forum disagreed with him about this.
You really need to rethink your opinion on this subject.
Ruby is a feminist yo..its just that some women and men deserve to be raped…
I shouldn’t even have to spell this out (and probably don’t), but:
1) The majority of people in jail and prison are not there for violent crimes.
2) For every prison rape, there’s a prison rapist. Is allowing a rapist to keep on operating behind bars “justice”? If you’re so big on prison as punishment, what about their punishment?
3) Courts sentence people to a particular prison term. That’s their punishment–the prison term. If rape is an intentional part of the punishment, let’s make the courts spell it out in the sentence. (That’s a bitterly sarcastic joke. I only say that because obviously no court would do so.)
4) Points 1-3 are moot anyway because no one, seriously no one including rapists themselves, deserves to be raped. Rape is not a fair or fitting punishment for anything.
Oh, and:
5) Even if you feel a punishment is necessary, it’s pretty fucking sick to find it funny. I would hope that people who believe in the death penalty, for instance, still have the decency to view it as a grim necessity, not a laugh riot.