Actions have consequences.

This week the British government barred Chris Brown from entering the UK to perform. As you remember, Brown pleaded guilty last year to a felony charge of assaulting his then-girlfriend, singer Rihanna. With no work visa, his shows in England and Scotland have been cancelled.

Brown was reportedly denied entry because of his record of domestic violence.

A British Home Office official told CNN that “because of his felony charge, it might not be a very good idea” to allow Brown into the country.

…”We reserve the right to refuse entry to the UK to anyone guilty of a serious criminal offense,” said Barbara Woodward, director of the UK border agency’s international group. “Public safety is one of our primary concerns.”

In a Twitter message, Brown responded, saying:

“U ever feel like the storm clouds are too thick for any sunshine to get through? think ima go away!!!!”

Please do, asshole.

Word.

In The Atlantic, Sady Doyle dissected Caitlin Flanagan’s recent piece on teenage romance, observing that

[B]oys aren’t treating girls badly because they have sex; they’re treating them badly because we live in a culture that encourages disrespect toward girls. A man who dislikes women as a group does not change simply because he becomes intimate with one particular woman, and telling girls that love is the key to ending a man’s hurtful behavior plays into many of the most pernicious myths about abuse.

A 2005 survey revealed that one quarter of girls who have been in relationships reported that their boyfriends had pressured them to have sex they didn’t want. Thirteen percent said they had been physically abused by boyfriends. The feedback in the comments? Girls need to take responsibility for themselves. Girls need to have higher self-esteem.

Gee, if it weren’t for defective girls, teen dating violence would not be an issue. Victim-blaming is as old as dirt, of course, but a self-esteem boost is not the cure for gender oppression (or any oppression, for that matter).

Earlier, Jezebel covered the recently released Kendra Wilkinson “sex” tape. It’s considered a sex tape rather than a rape tape because bullying an unwilling woman for access to her body is totally normalized. In the comments, woman after woman sympathized with Kendra and told stories of similar experiences. Meanwhile, other people lamented that girls just don’t have enough self-esteem. If only girls wouldn’t put up with such treatment. If only they said “no” just one more time, if they said “no” louder, men wouldn’t rape them. We can’t expect men and boys to respect girls and women who haven’t overcome the “low self-esteem” resulting from a lifetime of sexist programming.

Queengeorge wrote a really wonderful post on this, concluding

It’s wonderful to teach girls the importance of confidence. But all of the confidence in the world won’t stop abusers. That isn’t how it works. And putting out the message that “self esteem” and a good upbringing are the things that will stop abuse – well, that’s just plain wrong. More than that, though, it sends abused women the message that if they’d only loved themselves a little more they never would have gotten hurt. And as a woman who loves herself quite a lot, I’m pretty sure that just isn’t true.

And I’ll leave it at that.

In ten years, Men Can Stop Rape’s Executive Director Neil Irvin grew the MOST Club from one school in Washington, DC to over 100 locations in ten states throughout the country: California, DC, Florida, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and South Carolina. Kedrick Griffin facilitates the MOST Club with young men in Washington, DC and conducts trainings nationwide.

Griffin facilitates two MOST club meetings a day at nine different DCPS schools. Every week, he spends less than an hour with each group. But that’s enough time, he hopes, to challenge traditional masculinity and push his young charges to respect their female peers.

Griffin attracts middle- and high-school boys with the promise of free pizza and movie tickets. Conversations center around their personal lives, homework and sports accomplishments at first, but eventually Griffin leads the young men in discussions of street harassment, dating violence and what it means to be a “real man.”

In 2003 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified MOST Club as one of the top four gender violence prevention programs in the country. Every school should host a program like this. Society has targeted girls and women with rape and violence “prevention tips” for too long to no avail. Educating boys and men is the only way to reduce male violence against women and girls. The MOST Club is definitely doing it right.

Nuala Cabral – Walking Home – a great piece on street harassment, highly recommended.

Staceyann Chin – Am I a Feminist, or a Womanist?

Amalia Ortiz – Some Days

Wanda Sykes – Detachable Vaginas

According to the woman’s story, the assailant had tried to dance with her but she declined. A short while later, he followed her into the bathroom and beat her. On Friday, police arrested a suspect who had been seen leaving the bar in surveillance video. He was charged with assault and attempted rape after implicating himself. I am so relieved they caught him.

This story is newsworthy enough to a feminist audience: Women risk violence when they reject men. Most times we just get “You’re ugly anyway!” or “Fat bitch!” but in extreme cases, men do things like this or worse. But what made me write about the incident is one extremely frustrating reaction I’ve read in comments sections: Get a gun! (Or some variation on that).

I’ve carry pepper spray, which I’ve written about before. But I’m under no illusion that it will protect me against any and all forms of violence. It could come in handy if I were to catch someone trying to gain entry into my apartment, or if I were to witness someone attacking another person nearby. But in the case of a surprise attack, I don’t think I’d be able to find it, unlock it and aim it at the person.

Like some “rape prevention tips” aimed at women, “Get a gun!” makes women responsible for men’s violence against them. Beaten within an inch of your life? Tsk tsk, should have had a gun. How could a gun have helped that woman in New York? I can just see her, sitting on the pot with a pistol in her lap; out on the dance floor with the loaded gun in one hand. Or are people assuming she’d be able to say, “Hey could you hold on a sec; I’ve got to get something out of my purse” as the guy’s pummeling her? It’s unrealistic and it’s offensive. Guns are not the answer to the problem of violence against women.

I can't even make a joke about this.

A:  Toledo, Ohio.

Other than Peoria, Illinois, I can’t think of a place more frequently thought of as “typically middle-American” than Ohio.  Which makes the latest report about human trafficking even more disturbing.  And it’s really fucking disturbing to begin with.

According to a study conducted in 2008 with the cooperation of state and federal law enforcement, state agencies, and led by researchers at the local university, Toledo (population 316,000; the metropolitan area more than doubles that figure) is the fourth largest hub in the United States for human trafficking–and the largest, on a per capita basis.

Although the researchers themselves admit that their numbers are soft, they indicate that close to 1100 young Ohioans and nearly 800 foreign citizens were victims of trafficking, either for sex or forced labor, last year.  They also estimate more than 6,000 others were “at risk” of being victimized.  I fear those numbers are low-balls.  While the vast majority of trafficked people are women and girls, boys and young men, often gay, are targeted, as well as transgender people, undocumented workers, and others already at a disadvantage (I realize there’s overlap among these groups).

The study indicates that Toledo’s easy access to and from Canada, and its location at the convergence of a number of major highways, make it a natural “distribution” site for traffickers moving their merchandise throughout the nation.

Weak laws concerning trafficking compound the problem.  Battery and solicitation charges are rarely pursued, except when prostituted women and children are arrested, of course.  Ohio governor Ted Strickland signed an anti-trafficking bill into law last year, but thanks to opposition from the state’s Prosecuting Attorneys Association (why, WHY?),  it doesn’t treat trafficking as a crime on its own, merely as a way to tack on penalties for those charged with “real” crimes, like selling drugs or producing child pornography.  Supercalifragilisticexpialifuckme.

Toledo’s nasty reputation isn’t new news; the city was implicated in an interstate child prostitution ring back in 2005.  I don’t know whether to hope that the data collected in the Ohio Trafficking in Persons Study will lead to better laws–and better enforcement of current laws–to prevent this exploitation and care for those who have already been victimized.

If you’re an Ohioan, you might see what you can do to be part of the solution to this horrible state of affairs (donate, lobby, etc.).  If you’re in the business of paying for sex, you might reconsider that practice.  In any case, you might read up on the facts here (PDF).

In the journal Contraception, Elizabeth Miller detailed “reproductive coercion,” when the male partner pressures the girl or woman, through verbal threats, physical aggression, or birth-control sabotage, to become pregnant. One in five of the 1,300 women surveyed said they had experienced pregnancy coercion and 15 percent had experienced birth-control sabotage – tampering with pills, taking the condom off during sex, etc. More than half had experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner.

Leslie Walker, chief of adolescent medicine at Seattle Children’s Hospital said she has seen patients whose boyfriends monitor their periods to ensure they’re not taking Depo-Provera shots (which often cause women to skip their period). Reproductive coercion is another way for men to take and maintain control over women. If she has my baby, she won’t be able to get rid of me.

If a man wants to control his partner, impregnating her without her consent is a pretty effective tactic. It doesn’t make much sense to get pregnant against your male partner’s wishes in an effort to keep him around. He can just leave; you’re the one stuck with the baby. Naturally, the commenters at Newsweek refuse to believe it.

The three were instrumental in establishing the country’s first law criminalizing rape in 2005. The founder of Enfofamn, an organization that raises awareness about women through media, Merlet drew international attention to the plight of Haiti’s poor women and the use of sexual assault as a political weapon. She fled Haiti in the 1970s to study in Canada, and returned to her homeland in the 1980s.

She was remembered by her friend Eve Ensler, who remarked, “She had an incredible vision of what was possible for Haitian women, and she lifted their spirits.” Both Merlet and Coriolan held positions in the Haitian ministry for women’s affairs.

Coriolan founded advocacy organization Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen (Solidarity with Haitian Women SOFA). “She wanted women to have equal rights. She wanted women to hold their heads high,” Coriolan’s daughter Wani Thelusmon Coriolan said of her mother.

May these brave, beautiful women rest in peace.

Women are often hardest hit when disaster strikes; that is certainly he case in Haiti. “From where we stand,” said Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of Equality Now, “the most critical and urgent issue is what, if any, contingencies the relief/humanitarian agencies are putting in place not only to ensure that women have easy access to food, water and medical care, but to guarantee their protection.”

If you would like to contribute to an organization or group that serves women in Haiti, please consider giving to one of the following:

ActionAid will ensure that women receive appropriate emergency supplies.

Circle of Health International needs help financing their efforts caring for pregnant women, victims of sexual abuse, and those injured in the earthquake.

Dwa Fanm works to end discrimination, violence and other forms of injustice against women and girls.

MADRE’s disaster relief efforts ensure that women receive and take part in distributing aid.

UNFPA is responding to the needs of pregnant and vulnerable women in Haiti.

A list of Haitian NGOs

Ruchika Girhotra.

The two weeks I was in India, I read the Times of India every day. The Times is the world’s largest English-language daily newspaper by circulation, with a readership of 13.3 million. It is of a decidedly progressive bent, and the stories are expressive, opinionated and don’t even pretend to be unbiased–in fact, many J-school profs would swoon at the blatant editorializing done in the news section. They are also not afraid to make use of their bully pulpit.

I give the Times of India a massive Harpy shout-out for their crusading on one story in particular. Under the heading “Justice for Ruchika”, the Times ran an article every single day of my two week stay about the now-infamous Ruchika Girhotra case. It was nearly always on the front page, often above the fold, always accompanied by a picture of the teenage Ruchika.

The Times coverage is so lengthy and constantly developing that there’s no one simple recap on their site, but there is an excellent summary of the Ruchika story in last week’s Sydney Morning Herald. It reads in part:

A Kafkaesque tale of crime, suicide and corruption has appalled India over the past week, causing outrage even in a country long accustomed to the transgressions of those in power.

The sexual assault of Ruchika Girhotra, 14 at the time of the crime, by a police officer in 1990 has shone a light on an alleged nexus of corruption with tentacles that reach through the police, bureaucracy and political class. What has disgusted observers, and led to a concerted “Justice for Ruchika” campaign, is the alleged scale of the abuse of power that is shaking already rock-bottom confidence in public institutions.

Nineteen years ago, S.P.S. Rathore, a senior police official in the northern state of Haryana, molested Girhotra after arranging to meet her at the local lawn tennis club, of which he was president. Girhotra, a middle class girl and promising tennis player, dared to lodge a complaint against Rathore, now 67, setting off a chain of events that are only now coming to light.

An internal police probe in 1990 into the assault recommended a case be filed but Rathore was promoted and his influence grew further when he was later named as the top police officer for the entire state.

Girhotra meanwhile was expelled from her prestigious [Catholic] private school within months of the attack. The expulsion, the family claims, was part of a campaign of intimidation and harassment designed to force the family to drop their complaint and prevent any prosecution of the policeman. Girhotra’s brother Ashu was accused of theft and then abused in jail at Rathore’s orders, according to the family.

Tormented by the stress she believed she had inflicted upon her family, Ruchika finally poisoned herself in 1993 at the age of 17. Her brother was released from jail soon after she died.

Nineteen years after the original assault – a long time even by Indian standards – a court last week found Rathore guilty of molestation and sentenced him to six months in jail and a 1,000-rupee [$21] fine.

Given that virtually all sexual predators are serial offenders, I think we can safely assume that Ruchika Girhotra was not SPS Rathore’s only victim–she was just the only one who dared to speak out. She was one of very, very few who do so; in the National Capital Region, where Ruchika and her family lived, sexual assault is so underreported as to be almost statistically non-existent. The Hindustan Times noted that in the NCR, only 506 cases of molestation were reported last year–this in a metropolitan area with a population of 15.9 million. I’m willing to believe that India’s conservative, patriarchial society has a lot to do with the non-reporting, but cases like Ruchika’s make it clear that Indian law enforcement is also to blame; even when a young victim and her family report the attack and actively pursue prosecution, the system is so stacked against them that the results can be as bad as the original crime. In fact, publicity from Ruchika’s case has empowered other women to report similar cases where they were ignored, humiliated or harrassed by the police and local officials when they reported assaults. In all those cases as well, the accused were older, more powerful men who conspired with local government or law enforcement to keep the victims quiet.

What’s worse, even if the victim did get the state to successfully prosecute her abuser, the penalties are a joke. After being convicted of molesting Ruchika, SPS Rathore was sentenced to only six months jail time and a fine of $21. The laws are also vague about what constitutes criminal molestation; currently, Section 524 of the Indian Penal Code defines molestation as “assault or use of criminal force on a woman with intent to outrage her modesty” (it’s generally interpreted as any sexual assault that falls short of penetrative rape).  As a result of the Ruchika Girhotra case, the law ministry has drafted a new bill that gives a much clearer definition of molestation, does not permit bail in cases of molestation, and raises the maximum prison sentence from two years to five:

“Tough measures are required to deter sexual offences against women,” Law Minister M. Veerapa Moily told the Hindustan Times. “Following the shocking Ruchika case, it is clear that molestation needs to be treated as a serious sexual offence as rape.”

Five years seems like a light maximum sentence to me–in New York state, for example, sexual assault carries a maximum of 15 years–but it’s high time the government addressed the fact that the current laws do almost nothing to punish abusers, which virtually guarantees that their victims will not risk reporting the crime.

Even better, the unrelenting publicity and pressure from the media has forced prosecutors to file more charges against Ruchika’s attacker–charges her family has been requesting for years. The Times reported yesterday:

A fresh case was on Tuesday registered against former Haryana police chief SPS Rathore, who was charged with abetting the suicide of teenager Ruchika Girhotra three years after molesting her. Sources in the Haryana police said that Rathore could be arrested anytime now.

The fresh first information report (FIR) charges the former director general of police under Section 306 of the Indian Penal Code for abetting the suicide of Ruchika in 1993, three years after he had molested her, police officials said.

The FIR has been filed after Ruchika’s brother Ashu had filed a fresh complaint last week seeking that Rathore be booked for abetment of suicide of his sister.

Rathore was last week booked by the Panchkula police in two different cases, charging him of attempt to murder, forging and tampering with evidence of Ruchika’s death, criminal conspiracy and wrongful confinement. Most of the charges slapped against him in both FIRs are non-bailable ones.

There’s no doubt the Times‘s “Justice for Ruchika” crusade has been successful, and proves once again the power of public opinion and an activist media. They were not above some back-patting in an editorial last week:

…public and media pressure have forced a relook at cases where the accused were powerful enough to subvert justice. The way these cases were handled is a blot on our investigating and judicial agencies.

…the heartening thing is that public pressure has succeeded in preventing the accused from getting away. This is of course not an answer to the ills plaguing the justice delivery system in India, but only a short-term remedy to making government agencies more responsive. But we can only hope–and what better time than the beginning of a new year–that those who commit crimes and then shamelessly use their influence to subvert justice will now think twice about it.

In response to the Times‘s editorializing about their editorials, a reader named A. Srikantaiah wrote a letter to the editor which pointed out one important reality–a no-brainer actually–which none of the media coverage I read ever mentioned:

With reference to the editorial ‘Justice Interrupted’, the media has been full of news on the Ruchika case for the last several days. Of course, SPS Rathore who molested her deserves severe punishment. There can be no dispute over that. But my question is, if Ruchika had belonged to a socio-economically deprived family, would the news channels have focused on the case so much?

Innumerable woman and minor girls have been subjected to molestation and rape by the rich and powerful over the last 60 years, but the media rarely takes serious note of these incidents. One cannot help but feel that this is because most of the victims belong to the poorer sections of society.

The Ruchika case, outrageous and disgusting as it is, appears to be the catalyst for a serious re-examination of how the Indian legal system prosecutes sex crimes, and how society treats victims of sex crimes (and their attackers). It’s also touched off a populist uprising about abuse of power by elected officials and law enforcement. Corruption is an unpleasant fact of life in India, and this story is an easy way for the press to tap into the suppressed rage a lot of Indians feel about their society’s not-so-level playing field.

Of course, because there’s no moral gray area in Ruchika’s story, it’s an easy one for the Times to champion. Ruchika’s death was so tragic, her attacker’s behavior so vile and the complicity of his powerful friends so undeniable it’s easy–and not inaccurate–to present it as a clear-cut showdown of good versus evil. Still, the Indian press, and the Times in particular, deserves a lot of credit–and respect–for keeping this case in the public eye and providing a platform to address critical issues like violence against women and police corruption. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of the same in the United States.

*I ripped a number of these stories out of the newspapers themselves and carried them home in a file, so in some cases where I quote but don’t link, it’s because I’ve retyped text from the articles I saved.

And yet… and yet.  A couple of months ago I saw Where the Wild Things Are.  I didn’t see it out of nostalgia.  As a child it didn’t do much for me – I remember the naked picture of course, but I sort of skipped picture books because I was an early reader – or rather, was out of them by the time certain books got a foothold in my mind.  No, I saw it because I do, after all, like Spike Jonze – one of the few real talents in the hipster-movie set, it seems to me, along with Charlie Kaufman.  And because it was a fundraiser, and because I like Lauren Ambrose, and because I see just about every movie that sounds like it has even the slightest chance at greatness.

I can tell you that I tolerated the movie for just about fifteen minutes, and I can also tell you the exact point at which I got so annoyed I considered walking out.  I can’t quite remember if it was in the book, but at the outset of the movie, you are shown a trophy which Max’s dad allegedly gave him, inscribed, “You are the owner of this world.”  And just that briefest of images made me want to put my fist through the wall, kick the seat in front of me, storm out into the lobby, scream at the heavens.  It was meant to be touching, sweet,  a father’s gesture to the expansiveness of a young boy’s imagination, I know.  But the hubris of it just sort of clunked off the curb, and from there on out I sat, arms crossed, bitchface on, irritated by the Karen O score, annoyed at the wild rumpus, indifferent to the pathos of finding out that the world will always disappoint you.

Because let me ask you this: can you picture someone giving a young girl a trophy with that same inscription?  I can’t.  And for some reason that hits a nerve, because in that image is, it seems to me, the whole key to the patriarchy itself: some people growing up thinking – hell, knowing – that the world belongs to them.  Courtesy of that small bit of personal indoctrination, (some) men become the assholes who Explain Things, who forget to check if the person they’re fucking is enjoying it, who are indifferent to war if it means building a narrative of greatness for themselves.

But you want to know the strangest thing?  Even knowing all that, I couldn’t help but be a little jealous, from an aesthetic standpoint.  Lizzie Skurnick is right, of course, when she says that “ambitious” is an empty term, usually used to justify giving male literature the benefit of the doubt where so-called “greatness” is concerned.  But I can’t help but wondering if it rather gives boys an edge in the imagination department, this whole “world-owning” thing.  I don’t know that it’s pure coincidence that men have written most of the great imaginary epics while women have often been much more adept at what I think of as chamber novels.  It’s not that I think women aren’t capable.  It’s that very early on, we are simply told to keep our eyes on the ground, while little boys are told to reach for the stars.  That has to have an effect, it seems to me, and I think I can feel the anchor sinking in women’s writing a lot of the time.

Does anyone else feel this way?