rape
lborkowski | April 24, 2017In September 2016, Alex Campbell and Katie J.M. Baker reported on an in-depth BuzzFeed News investigation that found Baltimore County detectives often failed to investigate rape reports. They wrote:
The Baltimore County Police Department is one of a number of law enforcement agencies nationwide with an alarming record of dismissing rape cases, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis of FBI statistics. These departments routinely mark an extraordinary percentage of rape allegations as false or baseless — "unfounded.”
Baltimore County Police Department spokesperson Elise Armacost explained to…
gregladen | November 12, 2016OK, lets start out with the assumption that it does not matter who you or anyone else supported in the last election or what your politics are. If it happens, hypothetically, to be the case that a vulnerable person feels threatened by some sort of bully, wouldn't you like that vulnerable person to know that you are an upstanding citizen of good character who is willing to stand up for that person? This is especially true if you are a teacher, or you work in a retail business, or any place where there might be bullies and victims.
One way to convey your willingness to stand up against…
lborkowski | September 26, 2016A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Maryn McKenna at National Geographic’s Germination: How We'll Tackle Diseases That Are Becoming Untreatable (“The United Nations just declared antibiotic resistance “the greatest and most urgent global risk.” Here’s what they’re going to do about it.”)
Kelli Garcia in US News & World Report: We Can’t Wait: With Congress unconscionably failing to act, states must move quickly to protect pregnant women from Zika
Kelly Heyboer at NJ.com: The Invisible Workforce: Death, discrimination and despair in N.J.'s temp industry
Alex Campbell and Katie J.M. Baker…
kkrisberg | May 17, 2016Hardly a day goes by lately without another story on companies like Uber and their model of classifying workers as independent contractors while treating them more like traditional employees and sidestepping traditional employer responsibilities. It’s a model that has serious implications for workers’ rights and wages. However, there’s another form of employment that may be even more damaging to hard-fought labor standards: subcontracting.
In March, the University of California-Berkely Labor Center released “Race to the Bottom: How Low-Road Subcontracting Affects Working Conditions in…
kkrisberg | June 30, 2015This week, the Center for Public Integrity launched a new investigative series into the failure of regulators to protect workers for toxic exposures. The series begins with the story of a bricklayer who developed acute silicosis after exposure to silica, a deadly substance that threatens more than 2 million workers and that OSHA has been struggling to regulate for 40 years. The bricklayer, Chris Johnson, is just 40 years old and can expect to survive less than five years. Reporters Jim Morris, Jamie Smith Hopkins and Maryam Jameel write:
An 18-month investigation by the Center for Public…
oracknows | April 30, 2015If there's one thing that will annoy an antivaccinationist, it's to call her what she is: Antivaccine. While it's true, as I've pointed out on numerous occasions, that there are some antivaccinationists who are antivaccine and proud, unabashedly proclaiming themselves antivaccine and making no bones about it, the vast majority of antivaccinationists deny they are antivaccine. They frequently retort that they are "not antivaccine" but rather "pro-vaccine safety" or some such dodge. Most recently, we've seen this tack taken by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (and, of course, Bill Maher) himself, the…
oracknows | February 13, 2015If there's one good thing about the ongoing Disneyland measles outbreak that is continuing to spread, if there can be a "good thing" about an outbreak of vaccine-preventable disease that didn't have to happen, it's that it's put the antivaccine movement on the defensive. They are definitely feeling the heat. Their reaction to that heat can range from ever more vigorously proclaiming that they are "not antivaccine" in a desperate bid to convince the unwary and those not familiar with the antivaccine movement that they are not antivaccine, all the while softening their antivaccine tropes…
denialism | November 26, 2014The Rolling Stone article, "A Rape on Campus" should be a must read for every one who attends college, plans to attend college, or has children or loved ones on a college campus, especially one with a significant fraternity presence. UVa is my alma mater for two of my degrees, but this story reminded me more of my experience as an undergraduate at Bucknell University, a small, private, liberal arts university in Pennsylvania which is also dominated by fraternity culture. My experience there with sexual assault was not as a victim, but as a member of one of the pseudo-legal sexual assault…
oracknows | October 1, 2014Orac is feeling a little under the weather. I appear to have caught some respiratory crud that’s going around, which, fortunately, isn’t so bad that I can’t go to work, particularly given that today is a lab/office day, but unfortunately made me feel too tired last night to create one of my usual peerless examples of insolent blogging. So this post will be a followup to yesterday’s post and a lead-in to a question I want to pose to you, my readers. Let’s make things a bit interactive.
First the followup. As you might recall, yesterday, I found an example that helps to illustrate why most…
oracknows | September 29, 2014
One of the things you can say to someone who is antivaccine that will really tick them off is to “call it like you see it” and call them antivaccine. Sure, there are a few antivaccine activists who are unashamed of being antivaccine, but most antivaccinationists, sensing that society in general quite correctly takes a dim view of people who threaten to allow the return of dangerous vaccine-preventable diseases. Indeed, as I’ve pointed out many times before, that’s why antivaccine activists try to hide behind claims that they are “vaccine safety advocates,” often signified by saying, “I’m…
lborkowski | August 18, 2014On NPR's Morning Edition earlier today, Laura Starecheski reported on efforts to use peer groups to prevent young men from becoming rapists. She set the stage by talking with psychologist David Lisack about a study he (and colleague Paul M. Miller of Brown University School of Medicine) conducted among male University of Massachusetts Boston students and published in Violence and Victims in 2002. Knowing that the majority of rapes are never reported to authorities, and wanting to know whether serial rapists were responsible for many of them, Lisack and Brown took a direct approach: They asked…
gregladen | May 5, 2014Miri has posted an excellent “…Review of the White House’s Report on Campus Sexual Violence which is a must read for anyone interested in sexual assault on campuses, and everyone should be concerned about this issue.
I would like to address one aspect of the problem here, briefly: the use of and concern over the term “rape culture.”
When I first encountered the term “rape culture” I was put off by it. I’ve lived in and directly studied, and indirectly studied through the literature, a wide range of cultures around the world, and there is a great range of variation in prevalence of and…
gregladen | March 14, 2014Warning, rapey themes and strong language, go away if you can't handle that.
Which is worse, rape threats or lightening up about rape threats? Since I hardly ever get rape threats and the ones I get are absurd, it is not really for me to say. The question here, is what does a woman who is active on line and gets numerous and scary rape (and other) threats feel about those threats vs. advice from allies(ish) who say "don't worry about it, just leave that behind."
This is tricky stuff, because the overt strategy one takes can vary depending on circumstances and there are a lot of valid…
oracknows | February 27, 2014I've written about conflicts of interest (COIs) a lot over the years. COIs are important in medicine and science because, as much as physicians and scientists like to think that they are immune to such things, we are as human as anyone else. We are just as prone to unconsciously (or consciously) being influenced by self-interest related to our COIs. Most of the time, for purposes of science, COIs are considered to be mostly financial in nature: employment or payments from a drug company, a financial interest in a treatment being studied, and the like. Andrew Wakefield is a classic example in…
gregladen | September 5, 2013Years ago I knew Richard Dawkins as a fellow evolutionary biologist (met him only once, at a memorial event for WD Hamilton, but we have numerous mutual friends and colleagues). To be frank, and I'm only being frank now because I'd prefer not to use my real name, Dawkins was considered a bit of an enigma. He had great fame (and fortune and privilege) but that was without doing much important research. I always defended him back in those days. His fame came from The Selfish Gene and his subsequent books, and his popularization of science was well done and important. Those who complained,and…
gregladen | June 21, 2013Humanity truly sucks and I can prove it. One word: Reddit.
UPDATE: ONLY PART OF HUMANITY SUCKS SEE THIS NEWS
OK, you may want some background.
A Reddit Regular, perhaps a Reddit celeb (or at least he is now) wants to write a book on how guys seduce women, and he's asking for money on Kickstarter. One of his tips is this: You move in close, pull out your penis, take the woman's hand and .... whatever.
I find it interesting that many commenters are referring to that as inappropriate, or sexual assault, by way of objecting to it. I'm pretty sure, though, that it is rape. Probably depends on…
gregladen | September 16, 2012Stephanie Zvan wrote a post re-addressing a few earlier posts she and I had written a few years ago which caused a firestorm of testosterone drenched reaction from men (and a few women) who somehow had a problem with the political, social, and scientific investigation of wartime rape. (A rape in progress, A rape in progress, Part II, Is there a rape switch?, and When Is a Rapist?) In my view, and those of you who know me will recall that I’ve noted this before, this set of posts was actually the first Internet Event in the current Holy War against women and their allies. Certainly,…
kbonham | August 21, 2012A mini furor erupted this weekend, when republican Senate nominee Todd Akin defended his position of denying abortions even to victims of rape, because in the case of "legitimate rape," women have biological defenses that prevent pregnancy:
“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
The liberal blogosphere went nuts, and the story was picked up by all the national media outlets, and even Mitt Romney decided…
gregladen | August 19, 2012... goes down, compared to other forms of insemination, because "the female body has ways to shut that down." That's according to Missouri Congressman Todd Akin. But this only works, according to him, if the rape is "legitimate." From this we can easily develop a sort of Witch Hunt method to determine if a woman accusing a man of rape was actually, "legitimately" raped or if she's faking it. If she becomes pregnant from the rape, the rape did not happen.
Is this clear?
OK, now that we have that straight, allow me to bring out this one piece of data I thought I'd never have use of. It is a…