By David Futrelle
You may recall the outrage when, back in 2017, Education secretary Betsy “Ten Yachts” DeVos met with members of three fringe Men’s Rights groups — two of which have histories of collaboration with Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men — to hear their propaganda about the alleged epidemic of false rape accusations on America’s college campuses.
Well, it turns out that these groups had much more of direct influence that we even knew on DeVos’s recklessly revised campus rape policies, which survived legal challenges and went into effect last week. According to an article by Hélène Barthélemy in The Nation:
Nearly 3,000 pages of e-mails obtained by the anti-corruption organization Democracy Forward through a Freedom of Information Act request and shared with The Nation reveal that the July 2017 meeting was part of a much deeper collaboration between the DOE and these men’s rights groups. From May to September 2017, the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights partnered with NCFMC [National Coalition for Men Carolinas], FACE [Families Advocating for Campus Equality] and SAVE [Stop Abusive and Violent Environments] to develop regulations on campus sexual assault. E-mails make clear that staffers from these organizations participated in conference calls, offered legal advice, and met with high-level employees at the Department of Education. The DOE even hired the main funder of SAVE to help draft new regulations and teamed up with FACE to try to produce supportive op-eds.
The views of these groups have never been hidden. In public and in e-mails with DOE employees, members of these organizations have demeaned the credibility of young women, ridiculed sexual assault survivors, and pushed junk science on campus rape.
Barthélemy goes into great detail on the extensive cooperation between these groups and the Department of Education and does a deft job uncovering the sheer dishonesty, not to mention misogyny, of many of their claims.
I’d strongly recommend you read the whole piece.
UNRELATED NOTE: Not sure why the site was down for several hours today but we’re back now and, well, I’m still rather peeved by the outage, the second one the site has had recently.
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@POM
The author later called seperating the perp and victim a “preliminary action”. You might be right, though.
The author should have just said what they meant, so we’re not both left guessing. I’m reading the article because I want to be informed.
@Naglfar
Yes, eventually this will go away, one way or another. But we have to endure it, and keep ourselves and each other as safe as possible, first. One foot in front of the other.
@ Alan
I agree, that is really fucked up to punish a victim or their friends for not reporting. But as far as professors go, by the time I got to high school my teachers informed me at the start of every year that they could not keep everything confidential, and that they had a duty to report certain things such as suicide plans, child abuse, etc. because they are mandated reporters. They should have a duty to warn the people they interact with ahead of time.
@Moogue
This is how it was at my high school as well, teachers also had to report death threats to others, including those seemingly made in jest, as any could potentially be serious.
@Moogue:
Nonsense. We had over 6000 active cases at our peak, then got it under 1000. Last week the numbers were steadily declining day by day. There is no goddamn reason that this week couldn’t have been like last week in that regard. And next week. And the week after that. And the week after that.
Someone chose to do something different this week than last week, and that choice, whatever it was, is putting everybody at risk. If they had not done so and the decline last week had continued, it might have been eradicated from this province by Labor Day and the only worry then would have been about people importing it again from outside of the province entirely. The brain-dead Tory school reopening plan would be a nonissue, as long as border quarantine policies held up.
But now some idiot has monkey-wrenched that for all of us, and it’s probably going to still be smoldering away when schools open, and after that it will fucking explode.
I don’t suppose anyone has any ideas who might be the idiot in question, who made some different choice this week than last week, and was in an influential enough position that their decisions could turn a slow but steady downward trend into a slow but steady upward trend for a whole fucking province?
Regarding college and university investigations of sexual assault, I’m genuinely puzzled why some institutions are allowed to perform their own private investigations, in-house and extrajudicially, as if they were a kind of sovereign island separate from civil society. In much the same way, we seem OK with churches handling their own sexual assault cases, without recourse to the courts (which as we well know usually leads to abuse being swept under the figurative rug). Surely sexual assault should be a matter for criminal justice, no matter where it occurs or who does it. Police and prosecutors have a pretty bad record when it comes to crimes like rape, but would you rather trust a university (or a church) with a vested interest in keeping bad publicity quiet? Why treat an assault which takes place on a campus, or by a student, any differently from any other crime? Is it somehow not a rape but only an honor code violation if it occurs before graduation?
@Etymologist
Not sure about in other countries, but in the US a lot of universities have their own on campus police forces, so most crimes would probably be addressed by campus police at first. I’m not sure how much courts get involved with other crimes at universities either as a result.
@Etymologist
Churches and universities work differently.
For a university, the burden of proof is lower than the burden in the criminal justice system. For many survivors, what they want is some semblance that someone believes them, takes them seriously, and the perpetrator faces consequences, and if they can’t get that in the criminal justice system (which is usually the case) they can at least get that from the student honor code court. They can get some kind of accommodations, like the rapist not living in the same dorm as the victim, or attending the same classes. They can get a system that at least believes them. Or, that’s how it used to be, dunno how it’s going to be now.
With a church, many church catechisms are explicit in demanding that adherents operate within the church system rather than go to the secular courts. They quote Bible verses that say that believers should be able to police themselves and not resort to worldly police. In theory, a church should engage in restorative justice, but in practice they generally just demand a performance of contrition by the perp, and then demand a performance of forgiveness from the victim, and call it a day. It’s a form of spiritual abuse, but you won’t get the churches to see it that way.
I haven’t been following the stats very closely, but a “steady upward trend for a whole fucking province” smells a little like misapplying overall provincial stats. The province is pretty big. Where are these upticks happening? An uptick in overall provincial numbers in one week seems rather vague to try to assign blame to some specific event. Provinces aren’t hermetically sealed.
Totally eradicating COVID pre-vaccine simply isn’t going to happen without strict lockdowns, and probably even then not without having geographical advantages like Vietnam and New Zealand. “Reopening” frankly shouldn’t be happening the way it is, but society has been designed around having certain things run continuously, so to a large extent it just can’t be helped. The problem is bigger than one person or one government.
I notice a common theme with a lot of your posts, a rejection of suggestions and explanations that would require exposing yourself to potentially bad things through no fault of your own. The problem is we have to build the world we want from the world that already exists.
The problem for me, in turn, is that I operate with virtually no margin for error. If I take some sort of gamble and lose, I could very easily find myself without a roof next winter, or without food, or in some other way utterly and royally screwed.
Also, this is not (solely) about me. There are numerous even more vulnerable people in Ontario. Think “also on a meagre disability pension, but with, additionally, a preexisting condition that makes COVID a lot more dangerous”.
Whatever happened that reversed the trend direction will certainly inconvenience me and has a small chance of killing me. It has a much larger chance of killing them, when schools reopen without a proper containment plan with the virus still smoldering in pockets, every schoolchild in Ontario becomes an asymptomatic carrier in short order (save the tiny number who instead get the Kawasaki disease complication and die, of course), and shortly afterward half the adult population is infected by their own kids, or because they worked in a school, and a little after that everyone else gets it just from sheer likelihood of exposure once half the people they come into contact with have the virus.
@Surplus
Ontario is never going to be able to seal itself up enough to keep all cases of Covid out. Rather than getting all upset everytime this happens, you need to work on your ability to manage stress for when it does happen. Control what you can control. Let go of the rest. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
@ An impish pepper
Islands that got covid relatively late or never are in a good position for an elimination strategy, but I fail to see what geographic advantages Vietnam has. Got it in December or January, has several hundred km border with China. Of course, the border with China is no longer a problem, as china has now also successfully pursued an elimination strategy. NZ did well (proud kiwi here) but I swear people only focus on it because 1) you can make excuses why your country isn’t doing the same and 2) they’re white an rich, so worthy of attention, unlike those other countries.
Sorry, pet peeve. Its certainly true a border makes things harder, especially if it is with a country doing badly in the pandemic.