Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[Kobi]

An Indonesian woman who was gang-raped by men accusing her of having extramarital sex may be caned publicly for violating Islamic law, an official said Wednesday.

The 25-year-old widow said she was raped by eight men who allegedly found her with a married man in her house. The men reportedly beat the man, doused the two with sewage, and then turned them over to Islamic police in conservative Aceh province.

The alleged attack occurred early Thursday in Lhokbani, a village in East Aceh district.

The head of Islamic Shariah law in the district, Ibrahim Latief, said his office has recommended the widow and the married man be caned nine times for violating religious law, pending an investigation. Its preliminary finding was that the two were about to have sex at that time, but Latief contended they violated Shariah law by being in the same room together. He said they also admitted they had sex earlier.

Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation of 240 million people, has a policy of secularism but allows Aceh, a predominantly Muslim province on the northern tip of Sumatra, to implement a version of Sharia Islamic law.

Police have arrested three of the eight men and are hunting for the others.

East Aceh police chief Lt. Col. Hariadi said those arrested are being questioned on charges of rape. One of the accused is a 13-year-old boy, who would be charged as an adult but prosecuted in a closed-door trial.

Latief said the eight could be caned for raping the woman, but "it will be too lenient if they just received the same punishment of nine strokes."

The criminal charge of rape carries a maximum penalty of 15 years.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/...aning-23619038

[Kobi]

It's only April, but it looks and sounds like October. More than $80 million has been spent on political advertising in only about a dozen Senate battleground states.

About half that amount is targeted at women.

"We have allowed ourselves to be branded [in] a way I do not feel is representative of who we are as Republicans," says Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., of her party's negative reputation on women's issues.

Many ads aimed at women take the most obvious approach: Republicans putting their female candidates front and center; Democrats attacking Republicans for waging a war on women.

But there's more to it than that, says Republican ad-maker Ashley O'Connor.

"Women process information differently than men," O'Connor says. "So much of political advertising focuses on conflict, and facts and figures, and I think that we're already starting to see, when reaching women voters, there's just new techniques need to be used, and a different tone, and more storytelling."

O'Connor singles out an ad aired by Monica Wehby, a pediatric neurosurgeon seeking the Republican nomination for Senate in Oregon. In the ad, a woman tells the story of Webby operating on her daughter.

"Dr. Wehby was going to open her back and reconstruct my daughter's entire lower spine," the woman says. "She just hugged me and kissed my forehead, and she said, 'It's going to be OK, sweetheart. I've got her, and I am going to see you in a couple of hours.' "

"This is a 60-second ad and it's not particularly issue-driven," O'Connor says of the spot. "It sort of goes to this point that when talking to women, I don't think you necessarily have to be delivering factual information to move them. I think connecting with their heart and really trying to build emotion is more effective."

That may sound a little sexist, but appealing to emotions is what all effective advertising does. And the fact that Republicans are trying to do it is the biggest new development in political ads aimed at women.

Aiming For Tough, But Not Harsh

In a typical Republican superPAC ad from 2012, for instance, a man intones a list of Democrats' alleged failings over a soundtrack of ominous music: "Family incomes down, 40 percent living paycheck to paycheck, and Obamacare's new tax on middle-class families."

This year, the GOP has ditched the baritone narrator, the scary music and the facts and figures. Instead, the party is doing what Democrats have been doing for many years: using softer voices and more personal stories.

A Republican superPAC ad running this year features a woman who narrates in a conversational tone: "People don't like political ads. I don't like them either. But health care isn't about politics. It's about people. It's not about a website that doesn't work ... It's about people, and millions of people have lost their health insurance. ... Obamacare doesn't work."

Elizabeth Wilner, senior vice president with Kantar Media, praises the ad.

"It's a very clean ad," Wilner says. "The tone of the ad, her tone, is very sympathetic and very easy on the ears. It's a new kind of attack ad, and it is not a harsh ad in any way, but the message itself is very tough."

Endorsed By Wives, Moms And Daughters

There are other trends this year that both parties hope will appeal to women. Family members are everywhere in ads, especially moms and daughters.

In a Florida special election to fill the seat vacated by Republican Rep. Trey Radel, candidate Curt Clawson's mother appears in an ad to endorse her son. In the same race, Paige Kreegel's wife criticizes "nasty" campaign ads.
Democrats have an urgent problem this year: how to get their most reliable female supporters to become more reliable voters.

In Iowa, the children of Monica Vernon, also running for Congress, promise their mom "will never stop working for the middle class."

Not only is the content of the ads changing, but so are the places in which they appear. Jim Margolis, a veteran Democratic ad-maker, says it's no longer enough to air an ad on daytime TV, or even the nightly news, to reach women.

"We are using data and analytics to try to determine what are the actual programs that women are watching, Margolis says. "And to try to determine, as well, what are those issues, for that particular group, that are going to be the most resonant, that they're going to find the most compelling."

Wherever women are digitally, Margolis says, political ads will find them. A woman who is a Democratic target voter in a Senate battleground state might see campaign ads all day online.

"When you log on in the morning to check the weather, there's a pretty good chance that somebody is going to be talking to you right there," he says.

Your browsing history can say a lot about you, Margolis says, including your gender, interests and issues that matter to you.


The Shoot-'Em-Up Approach

These new ways of targeting women voters, with content tailored to women's concerns, are becoming common. But there's always an exception to the rule. Take the much-imitated ad in which a male politician attacks — literally — the IRS code or a piece of legislation passed by President Obama.

This week, that macho format was adopted by Republican Joni Ernst, a pistol-packing mama running for Senate in Iowa. Ernst already earned attention for an ad about her experience castrating hogs. In the new ad, Ernst rides a Harley to a gun range, and fires off six shots at a target.

"Joni Ernst will take aim at wasteful spending," the narrator says. "And once she sets her sights on Obamacare, Joni's gonna unload."

It seems that even the shoot-'em-up TV ad has achieved gender equality, for better or worse.

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/10/311189...h-women-voters

[Kobi]

When it comes to talking about women, "saying what you mean" and "meaning what you say" don't always have much in common. Words like "b*tchy" and "slutty" are clearly sexist and meant to insult, but even seemingly neutral adjectives have become euphemisms for "uniquely female character flaw."

Used by both men and women, these words are the linguistic equivalents of wolves in sheeps' clothing, often disguised as flattery while used to subtly undermine the woman being described. It's time to strip them down.

Below is a brief compendium of adjectives that are often used to describe women -- and what they really mean:

Bossy: Has on one or more occasion suggested that someone, man or woman, has made a factual error. (Related, know-it-all)

Clingy: Describes a woman who insists on responding to a partner's cues of romance, intimacy and commitment by reciprocating them.

Cold: Used to describe a woman who does not smile enough, or whose resting face does not suggest joyous contentment.

Crazy: Attributes women's behavior to an error in reason independent of speaker's actions, thereby dismissing her feelings as irrational, "while simultaneously absolving ... men from responsibility." A label most women seek to avoid at all costs.

Cute: Used among men when referring to an attractive woman whose intellectual and comedic allure happen to be more pronounced than her conventional sex appeal.

Exotic: Mainstream media's preferred adjective for a non-white female who is also beautiful.

Feisty: Feisty is sassy with a better resume. It's essentially results-based sass, invoked to acknowledge the achievement and/or ambition of a woman, while also warning against it. Remarkably useful to misogynists, "feisty" implies enough aggression to diminish a woman's accomplishment without completely dismissing it. (Related, sassy)

High-maintenance: Wears makeup and/or requires regular attention from significant other. (Related, low-maintenance)

Intense: Applies to women who express their feelings, opinions and expectations freely, and politely excuse suitors not up to matching them.

Laid back/chill: Deeper implication than "casual or relaxed in manner." Often a celebration of a woman's ability to sublimate the emotional excesses of her gender. A woman who is "chill" reacts to her male friend or partner's questionable behavior the way he wants her to -- usually, not at all. Related to the "cool girl" as referenced in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl.

Low-maintenance:
1. Used to describe a woman willing to repress her own needs in order to make no demands on her current or desired partner.
2. A woman who is not interested enough in said partner to make demands. (Related, high-maintenance)

Peppy/Bubbly: Describes an attractive woman with nicely-balanced serotonin levels. Use patronizingly when referring to women whose friendliness and enthusiasm you find annoying.

Perky: Identifies a well-rested, usually petite woman.

Prude: A woman who doesn't engage in whatever romantic or sexual encounter a man has suggested. Use liberally when said woman is not excessively apologetic about her lack of sexual experience or interest therein.

Pushy: Most recently, used to describe a remarkably accomplished woman whose high standards and willingness to insist on them aggressively just kinda rubs colleagues the wrong way. (Related, bossy)

Sassy: An adjective used to describe a woman with a personality. (See, personality: broad spectrum of verbal behavior spanning "is not clinically mute" and "enjoys humor," all the way to "expresses an opinion.") Serves to attribute a woman's comedic or intellectual superiority to a specifically feminine trait rather than actual competence. Related, sassy black woman: Describes self-reliant African-American woman with strength of character. Close association with "angry black woman."

Sweet: Used to indicate a general lack of sass or feistiness. Frequently serves to co-opt a woman's kindness in order to present her as intellectually inferior.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0....html?ir=Women

[Kobi]

WHEN terrorists in Nigeria organized a secret attack last month, they didn’t target an army barracks, a police department or a drone base. No, Boko Haram militants attacked what is even scarier to a fanatic: a girls’ school.

That’s what extremists do. They target educated girls, their worst nightmare.

That’s why the Pakistani Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai in the head at age 15. That’s why the Afghan Taliban throws acid on the faces of girls who dare to seek an education.

Why are fanatics so terrified of girls’ education? Because there’s no force more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism isn’t drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.

In that sense, Boko Haram was behaving perfectly rationally — albeit barbarically — when it kidnapped some of the brightest, most ambitious girls in the region and announced plans to sell them as slaves. If you want to mire a nation in backwardness, manacle your daughters.

What saddens me is that we in the West aren’t acting as rationally. To fight militancy, we invest overwhelmingly in the military toolbox but not so much in the education toolbox that has a far better record at defeating militancy.

President Obama gives the green light to blow up terrorists with drones, but he neglects his 2008 campaign promise to establish a $2 billion global fund for education. I wish Republicans, instead of investigating him for chimerical scandals in Benghazi, Libya, would shine a light on his failure to follow through on that great idea.

So why does girls’ education matter so much? First, because it changes demography.

One of the factors that correlates most strongly to instability is a youth bulge in a population. The more unemployed young men ages 15 to 24, the more upheaval.

One study found that for every 1 percentage point increase in the share of the population aged 15 to 24, the risk of civil war increases by 4 percent.

That means that curbing birthrates tends to lead to stability, and that’s where educating girls comes in. You educate a boy, and he’ll have fewer children, but it’s a small effect. You educate a girl, and, on average, she will have a significantly smaller family. One robust Nigeria study managed to tease out correlation from causation and found that for each additional year of primary school, a girl has 0.26 fewer children. So if we want to reduce the youth bulge a decade from now, educate girls today.

More broadly, girls’ education can, in effect, almost double the formal labor force. It boosts the economy, raising living standards and promoting a virtuous cycle of development. Asia’s economic boom was built by educating girls and moving them from the villages to far more productive work in the cities.

One example of the power of girls’ education is Bangladesh, which until 1971 was (the seemingly hopeless) part of Pakistan. After Bangladesh gained independence, it emphasized education, including of girls; today, it actually has more girls in high school than boys. Those educated women became the backbone of Grameen Bank, development organizations like BRAC and the garment industry.

Likewise, Oman in the 1960s was one of the most backward countries in the world, with no television, no diplomats and radios banned. Not a single girl attended school in Oman. Then there was a coup, and the new government educated boys and girls alike.

Today, Oman is stable and incomparably better off than its neighbor, Yemen, where girls are still married off young and often denied an education. America is fighting Al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Pakistan with drones; maybe we should invest in girls’ schools as Bangladesh and Oman did.

Girls’ education is no silver bullet. Iran and Saudi Arabia have both educated girls but refused to empower them, so both remain mired in the past. But when a country educates and unleashes women, those educated women often become force multipliers for good.

Angeline Mugwendere was an impoverished Zimbabwean girl who was mocked by classmates because she traipsed to school barefoot in a torn dress with nothing underneath. She couldn’t afford school supplies, so she would wash dishes for her teachers in hopes of being given a pen or paper in thanks.

Yet Angeline was brilliant. In the nationwide sixth-grade graduation examinations, she had the highest score in her entire district — indeed, one of the highest scores in the country. Yet she had no hope of attending seventh grade because she couldn’t afford the fees.

That’s when a nonprofit called the Campaign for Female Education, or Camfed, came along and helped pay for Angeline to stay in school. She did brilliantly in high school and is now the regional director for Camfed, in charge of helping impoverished girls get to school in four African countries. She’s paying it forward.

Educating girls and empowering women are also tasks that are, by global standards, relatively doable. We spend billions of dollars on intelligence collection, counterterrorism and military interventions, even though they have a quite mixed record. By comparison, educating girls is an underfunded cause even though it’s more straightforward.

Readers often feel helpless, unable to make a difference. But it was a grass-roots movement starting in Nigeria that grabbed attention and held leaders accountable to address it. Nigeria’s leaders perhaps now realize that they must protect not only oil wells but an even greater treasure: the nation’s students.

Likewise, any of us can stick it to Boko Haram by helping to educate a girl. A $40 gift at Camfed.org buys a uniform so that a girl can go to school.

We can also call on members of Congress to pass the International Violence Against Women Act, which would elevate the issue of sexual violence on the global agenda.

Boko Haram has a stronghold in northeastern Nigeria because it’s an area where education is weak and women are marginalized. Some two-thirds of women in the region have had no formal education. Only 1 in 20 has completed high school. Half are married by age 15.

Obviously, the situation in the United States is incomparably better. But we have our own problems. It’s estimated that 100,000 girls under 18 years old in the United States are trafficked into commercial sex each year. So let’s fight to #BringBackOurGirls in Nigeria but also here in the United States and around the world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/op...irls.html?_r=0

[Kobi]

In India, China and many other parts of the world today, girls are killed, aborted and abandoned simply because they are girls. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls(1) are missing in the world today because of this so-called “gendercide”.

Girls who survive infancy are often subject to neglect, and many grow up to face extreme violence and even death at the hands of their own husbands or other family members.

The war against girls is rooted in centuries-old tradition and sustained by deeply ingrained cultural dynamics which, in combination with government policies, accelerate the elimination of girls.

Shot on location in India and China, It’s a Girl reveals the issue. It asks why this is happening, and why so little is being done to save girls and women.

The film tells the stories of abandoned and trafficked girls, of women who suffer extreme dowry-related violence, of brave mothers fighting to save their daughters’ lives, and of other mothers who would kill for a son. Global experts and grassroots activists put the stories in context and advocate different paths towards change, while collectively lamenting the lack of any truly effective action against this injustice.

It’s a Girl is now available for screening events globally.


- See more at: http://www.itsagirlmovie.com/index.p....gvZy5k8T.dpuf

[Kobi]

PLANO — The handwritten sign over the bar at Scruffy Duffies in Plano read: "I like my beer like I like my violence. Domestic."

The words are now gone, but their impact lingers.

"I was like, 'Oh my gosh, do you see this?'" said 24-year-old Courtney Williams. She couldn't believe what she saw on the chalkboard inside Scruffy Duffies Saturday night.

Williams was offended.

"How does someone think it's OK to put something like that up there?" she asked.

Williams asked the female bartender who had written the sign to erase it. Then Williams asked two managers.

They did not take it down.

Williams left the establishment at the Shops at Legacy and posted every detail — along with a photo of the sign — on Facebook.

That post has gone viral.

Williams is surprised by the attention, but others are thrilled.

"My gut reaction was, 'Thank you Ms. Williams for standing up and saying this isn't OK,'" said Vanessa Vaughter, the education program manager at Hope's Door, a women's shelter in Plano. "I was surprised and sad that someone would think it's funny and a great way to sell beer."

The sign did come down after Williams left, according to some of her friends who remained at the bar.

Scruffy Duffies' owners took action on Tuesday. A regional manager told News 8 the manager who was on duty was indefinitely suspended without pay, but an owner suggested that manager could lose his job.

The regional manager also said a new system of checks and balances is in place for any sign that is posted in the bar. All messages henceforth will require approval.

The regional manager added that Scruffy Duffies is making a donation to Hope's Door, and inviting shelter representatives to hold a sensitivity training class for bar employees.

"When one in four women are affected by domestic violence — and in Collin County alone last year we had over 12,000 incidents of domestic violence — then this isn't something we joke about," Vaughter said.

Williams thinks Scruffy Duffies' pledge to work with Hope's Door is a step in the right direction. She's heard from some critics who think she was overly sensitive, but Williams is focusing on the survivors of domestic violence who are thanking her for her stance.

"I want to give them a voice," she said. "It can be a really powerful thing for change."

http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/Sign-...260868081.html

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A woman writing this, thinking it was amusing and a good way to sell beer, is exhibiting internal sexism and misogyny. We often dont realize how the messages we are bombarded with since birth become so much a part of us.
We also dont realize how these messages are derogatory and harmful to us as women.

[Kobi]

Between sun-seared shrubs and the collapsed remains of Istanbul’s Byzantine city walls, police found the body of an American tourist, Sarai Sierra, 33, in February 2013. Ms. Sierra, a New Yorker and a first-time traveler abroad, disappeared after near-constant contact with her family for two weeks. What happened to her is still a little unclear, but a Turkish man has reportedly confessed to killing her after supposedly trying to kiss her.

This is not a case of wrong place, wrong time. Ms. Sierra was not wandering off the beaten path. She was not engaged in risky behavior. She was on a trip hoping to practice photography, according to news reports. This is a terrifying case of what can — and does — happen to female travelers abroad.

Since her death early last year, a number of reports of attacks on female tourists have made headlines. An Italian tourist was reportedly raped by police officers in Mexico in the same month that Ms. Sierra’s body was found. An American tourist was raped in a store in Israel last June. A Norwegian woman was raped (then jailed, for having “unlawful sex”) in Dubai; she and the man accused in her attack were eventually pardoned last summer. On Jan. 15, a Danish woman, 51, reported being raped at knife point in New Delhi. She said she had approached the seven or eight men who attacked her to ask for directions to her hotel. In March, a British woman said she was raped by a security guard in a luxury hotel in Egypt.

Whether it is on a bus in New Delhi or at a resort in Acapulco, Mexico, the risk of an assault may seem ever-present, if recent high-profile attacks in places like these are indicative of a general state of danger for female travelers. Such news reports have tripped an alarm for many of us who venture beyond familiar destinations, some seeking the sort of solo, immersive experiences that are becoming increasingly common.

We weigh our bodily integrity against our desire to see the world. For us, for women, there is a different tourist map of the globe, one in which we are told to consider the length of our skirts and the cuts of our shirts, the time of day in which we choose to move around, and the places we deem “safe.”

But what is the reality of violence against women now in the places we want to go — and should we be avoiding whole cities because of this risk, as some women are doing? What is the actual risk for women traveling abroad compared with the perception? I talked to statisticians and women’s rights advocates and visited a few countries where notorious cases have recently occurred to get a sense of what is happening.

Headlines in India

Since December 2012, ask most people what country they think of when they think of rape against tourists or others, and they will likely say India.

The brutality of the gang rape and murder of a young Indian medical student on a bus one December evening in New Delhi shocked many around the world. Protests erupted in huge numbers throughout India and beyond, and a government-led commission took an internal look at how the country prosecutes perpetrators of sexualized violence. But on the heels of the New Delhi attack came three more assaults on women in India that grabbed headlines. All three of the victims were foreigners: a Swiss woman during a camping trip with her husband in March 2013 in Madhya Pradesh state, central India; a British woman soon after that in her Agra hotel room; and a 30-year-old American woman in the resort town of Manali.

These attacks have apparently rattled people enough to affect tourism. The New Delhi-based Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry reported that three months after the woman’s death after the attack on the bus, foreign female tourism to India fell by 35 percent.

Still, the truth is that other countries are even more dangerous for women than India. Without firm statistics on violence against female tourists, the closest yardstick is violence against local women — which experts say far outnumbers the better-known tourist attacks.

“The fact is that the rate of rape in Mexico is higher than in India,” said Carlos Javier Echarri Cánovas, a professor of demography at El Colegio de México who studies violence against women. There were 15,000 rape complaints in Mexico in 2010 and about the same in 2011, according to government statistics. Mr. Echarri explained that while 18,359 rape cases were registered in India in the first quarter of 2012, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, Mexico has one-tenth the population of India.

Yet even these statistics aren’t conclusive. Reports of rape in all countries are hampered variously by corruption and a cultural willingness to ignore violence considered “normal,” even close to home. The compelling narrative has been that as more Western women travel farther afield, the more they are at risk. But that is hard to pinpoint statistically. It might raise the question of why few are asking about the safety of traveling as a woman in Western Europe and the United States, a country of more than 300 million people. In the United States about 270,000 women were victims of rape and sexual assault in 2010, according to the Department of Justice. (The department culled data from interviews with households, which means that these are rapes that may or may not have been reported to police.)

Various kinds of Internet searches that I conducted turned up very few news stories about attacks on women in these destinations: There’s one from July 2013 about a tourist from Georgia (the state, not the country) alleging rape in New York and another about a woman from Canada who says a handful of French policemen raped her in Paris in April. Mainly though, searching for news articles on the rape of foreigners in the United States yielded only their mirror image — reports of violence against American women abroad. But this does not mean there are fewer attacks taking place on Western soil.

Experts note that this trend, so to speak, is amplified by the media, which makes individual incidents seem part of a larger pattern. “On average, attacks against white women worldwide receive more coverage than attacks against women of color,” said Cristina Finch, director of Amnesty International USA’s Women’s Human Rights Program.

Looking at the Numbers

Experts I spoke to say they cannot know whether attacks on female tourists are actually increasing. Hard numbers are difficult to come by. None of these groups — UN Women, an agency focused on gender equality; the United States State Department; and nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs — keep data on violence against female tourists. The British Foreign Office, however, does release statistics on how many Britons request consular assistance after a sexual attack; in 2012-2013, 310 people requested assistance, with 138 saying they had been raped and 172 sexually assaulted — an increase of 9 and 12 percent for the year respectively, according to figures from the office’s “British Behavior Abroad Report.”

But those figures are hardly the end of the story. A number of experts tell me that it is possible that violence is on the rise in part because more women than ever are traveling alone, and are venturing ever farther off the beaten path.

For sheer numbers, consider that nearly 25 years ago there were seven million United States passports in circulation, said John Whiteley, a State Department spokesman. Now there are 118 million. Still, Mr. Whiteley said he was not sure he saw a trend when it came to violence against female travelers.

“We do know that over the years that violence against women has become increasingly talked about and reported,” said Ms. Finch of Amnesty International USA. She agreed that there was no way to know whether actual violence against female travelers was up.

Dina Deligiorgis, a spokeswoman at UN Women, said there has been increasing attention to violence against women and girls in the last five to 10 years for a number of reasons, including the passage of various resolutions in the United Nations and the start of the United Nations secretary-general’s UNiTE to End Violence Against Women campaign.

How Safe Are Local Women?

Every expert I spoke to, whether in India, Mexico, Brazil or elsewhere, said that cases of violence against international female tourists are not only more likely to make the news, they are also more likely to see justice than cases involving local women.

On Feb. 6, 2013, six female Spanish tourists were raped in Acapulco. On Feb. 13, Mexico’s attorney general, Jesus Murillo Karam, declared the case “resolved.”

Teresa Inchaustegui, the director of the Mexican government’s Center of Studies for the Advancement of Women and Gender Equity, said that though that case had wrapped up swiftly, there were thousands of unsolved rapes of local women every year. And she noted that the Acapulco mayor initially tried to downplay the attack on the women, saying it had hurt the image of the town and that such violence could have happened “anywhere in the world.” (He later apologized for his remarks.)

“It’s undoubtedly a double standard,” said Laura Carlsen, director of the nonprofit Americas Program of the Center for International Policy, of the government reaction to the tourist rapes versus those of local women. An often cited crime statistic in Mexico is that 98 percent of the crimes in the country go unpunished.

Last May, I decided to visit Mexico because the country has long been on the international danger radar — rashes of drug-war-related violence have left headless bodies across the country for years, and recorded violence against local women is staggering. In the northern city of Ciudad Juárez alone, hundreds of women have been killed or have disappeared since 1993.

The United States State Department warns that women should avoid being alone in the country, “particularly in isolated areas and at night” and that rape and sexual assault “continue to be serious problems in resort areas.”

Overall, a number of people who study gender in Mexico expressed something similar to what Mr. Echarri at the Colegio de México told me: “You have a patriarchal society, a misogynistic one, with a widely held belief that women are the property of men.” This, it would seem, can lead to sexualized violence — whether harassment or assault — and foreigners predictably draw attention.

A Dutch citizen, Rachel de Joode, lived in Mexico last year and said she felt there was a reason to be more cautious as a woman “just because of what I heard in the media and around me.” She said she would never go anywhere alone after 9 p.m. without truly knowing the area and using a “safe cab” (one called from a reputable company, not hailed off the street).

Mexico City has taken recent precautions, creating women-only buses in 2008 — women-only subway cars were already in place — on which a number of female tourists, including Ms. de Joode, said they felt safer. And while Ms. de Joode told me that she had been grabbed at in the mixed-gender subway a few times, she had experienced that and worse on the streets of Berlin and Amsterdam.

Lonely Planet, a travel guide for the slightly more intrepid backpack set, also seems to fall on the not-as-scary-as-it-appears side: “Despite often alarming media reports and official warnings, Mexico is generally a safe place to travel, and with just a few precautions you can minimize the risk of encountering problems,” it states online.

In my half-dozen trips to Mexico, I have never experienced any kind of serious sexual harassment. I have, however, been asked for a bribe by the police.

Some Blame the Victim

When it comes to perception versus reality, it might help to look to Turkey. I was recently in Istanbul for a conference on preventing atrocities. I walked in the same places Ms. Sierra walked and felt no danger whatsoever beyond burning my skin in the blasting sun. I was warned, though, when I asked at the front desk of my hotel for directions one evening to a particular part of the city to meet a friend. “Be careful of the men there,” the staff warned.

Like many major cities, Istanbul has its share of crime. But what I found so ominous about this warning was that I was not told to watch for pickpockets or scammers or even violence from the anti-government protests that were in full swing last summer. I was told to watch for men.

Even so, multiple tour operators I spoke to in Istanbul said Ms. Sierra’s murder has had little effect on tourism in Turkey. Government figures show that the number of foreigners arriving in Turkey in May 2013 increased by 18 percent compared with the same month the year before.

Istanbul Tour Services said they had seen no cancellations or drop in reservations after Ms. Sierra’s death. Hakan Haykiri, 51, who owns a store that sells tourist knickknacks in the neighborhood in which Ms. Sierra was found dead, agreed that the case had not affected his trade, dismissing the violence as too common globally to matter.

“The same things happen everywhere in the world and it does not affect tourism,” Mr. Haykiri said. But he went on to say: “If the woman does not flirt, a man would not attempt to do anything, any harassment. Everything starts with a woman.”

This kind of victim-blaming was not terribly uncommon among men I spoke to in Turkey. Erkan Turkan, 30, a manager at Istanbul’s Volare Tour, interrupted a question about whether Ms. Sierra’s murder had affected business by saying, “She was asking for trouble.”

Victim-blaming is hardly unique to Turkey. Sara Benson, who has written for the Lonely Planet guidebook series since 1999, described an attack she experienced in Malaysia. Riding an old, rickety bicycle to update the company’s guide, she found herself being followed and taunted by a man on a motorbike.

“He’s laughing and cackling and making masturbatory gestures,” she said. “He circles back and I start hurling rocks at him.”

Shaken, she went to the police a couple of villages over. But all she got was laughter when she described what happened, she said. “You’re a white woman traveling around by yourself,” she recalled an officer saying. “You got what you deserved.”

How to Minimize the Risk

So what kinds of precautions can a concerned traveler take? Minimizing risk, whether in a foreign city or a local one, whether you are a woman or a man, is common sense. One easy way to do that is to check the State Department’s website for travel warnings before you head out; the site is regularly being updated and includes cautions about things like carjackings in Mexico and gender-based violence in and around protest areas in Egypt. For more women-specific updates, there are many “What can I expect?” message boards out there, including ones by Lonely Planet. Also, it never hurts to carry the telephone number for your hotel and the local police with you.

One out of every three women worldwide will be physically, sexually or otherwise abused in her lifetime, according to a 2013 World Health Organization study. Julia Drost, the policy and advocacy associate in women’s human rights at Amnesty International USA, said such violence “knows no national or cultural barriers.”

The question then, in the end, is: Should all this violence — real or amplified — stop us from seeing the world?

Summing up what seems to be the underlying sentiment of many female travelers I spoke to, Jocelyn Oppenheim, an architectural designer in New York who has trekked extensively through India, said: “Bad things can happen, but bad things can happen when you get in a taxi in New York.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/25....html?referrer

[Kobi]

New Delhi (AFP) - A minister from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party has said rapes happen "accidentally" in the latest controversial remarks by a politician amid renewed anger over attacks against women.

Ramsevak Paikra, the home minister of central Chhattisgarh state who is responsible for law and order, said late on Saturday that rapes did not happen on purpose.

"Such incidents (rapes) do not happen deliberately. These kind of incidents happen accidentally," Paikra, of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which also rules at the national level, told reporters.

Paikra, who was asked for his thoughts on the gang-rape and lynching of two girls in a neighbouring state, later said he had been misquoted. His original remarks were broadcast on television networks.

The remarks come days after the home minister of the BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh state said rapes were "sometimes right, sometimes wrong".

The minister, Babulal Gaur, gave the remarks on Thursday at a time of growing outrage over the gang-rape and murder of the girls, aged 12 and 14, in northern Uttar Pradesh state late last month.

Modi, whose party came to power in a landslide election victory, has so far stayed silent over the rapes and has not addressed the politicians' comments.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav faced severe criticism for his perceived insensitivity over the attacks on the low-caste girls, who were found hanging from a mango tree after being sexually assaulted multiple times.

Yadav's father Mulayam Singh -- leader of the Samajwadi Party -- was also the target of public anger in April when he told an election rally that he opposed the recently introduced death penalty for gang-rapists, saying "boys make mistakes".

Women's groups have slammed the comments, saying they were evidence that politicians were unable to stem sexual violence because they lacked respect for India's women and were ignorant of the issues.

Politicians also came under fire after the fatal gang-rape of a student on a moving bus in New Delhi in December 2012, a crime that angered the nation and shone a global spotlight on India's treatment of women.

India brought in tougher rape laws last year after the Delhi attack, but they have failed to stem the tide of violence against women across the country.

At the time, several politicians sought to blame tight jeans, short skirts and other Western influences for the country's rise in rapes, while the head of a village council pointed to chowmein which he claimed led to hormone imbalances among men.

http://news.yahoo.com/indian-ministe...070139401.html
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Chow mein is now responsible for hormonal imbalances causing men to rape? That's a new one.

[Kobi]

Rape victims get called a lot of things. Sometimes it's "slut". For the 11-year-old gang rape victim in Texas, it was that she was a "spider" luring men into her web. It's not all bad, though - thanks to anti-violence activists, those who have been attacked also get called "survivors" and "brave". The last word I ever expected to hear to describe a rape victim is "privileged".

Yet in the Washington Post late last week, columnist George Will wrote about campus rape, claiming that being a victim in college has become "a coveted status that confers privileges", and that "victims proliferate" because of all these so-called benefits.

Ah, yes, the perks of being a rape victim! Here are just a few of the "privileges" that being raped at college confers onto women:

For Indiana University freshman Margaux J, it meant dropping out of school because even after her attacker was found guilty, the school refused to expel him.

Columbia University's Emma Sulkowicz had the great pleasure of enduring questions from a disciplinary panel that didn't believe being anally raped was physically possible without manufactured lubrication.

Andrea Pino, then a student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, was told by an academic advisor that she was "being lazy" for applying for medical leave after her rape.

And who doesn't look at Lizzy Seeberg – a St. Mary’s College student who killed herself a week after reporting being raped by a a Notre Dame football player – and not think, wow, how lucky!

It takes a particular kind of ignorance to argue that people who come forward to report being raped in college are afforded benefits of any kind. If the last few months of coverage of the rape epidemic on college campuses – including new stories from brave young women today in the Guardian – has shown anything, it's that survivors of sexual violence are treated abysmally by administrators, peers and campus police. But to someone like Will – who calls this a "supposed" scourge of rape and puts the term "sexual assault" in scare quotes – rape is hardly even a real thing.

To demonstrate the "capacious definitions of sexual assault" that Will believes are running rampant on campuses, the conservative columnist cites a case in which a woman said, "No, I don't want to have sex with you" ... only to have her alleged attacker proceed anyway. The only people who could find ambiguity in this are idiots and, well, rapists. (And even the latter, I imagine, would recognize this as an assault.)

In response to Will's column this week, women on Twitter started posting under #SurvivorPrivilege, a hashtag started by writer and anti-rape organizer Wagatwe Wanjuki. "#SurvivorPrivilege of graduating 6 years later than planned bc, yanno, rape. How covetable!," Wanjuki tweeted. Activist Katie Klabusich wrote, "#SurvivorPrivilege is getting to explain to truly would-be allies in your life that yes, your boyfriend could rape you. & it was rape-rape." Washington DC-based Robyn Swirling tweeted, "#SurvivorPrivilege was losing all my friends when they decided it was easier to remain friends with my rapist than stand with me."

The good news from Will's very bad, no-good column is that anti-rape activism is clearly having a profound effect on the culture. The rape-apologist backlash – sadly, Will is hardly alone in his ignorance – is in full effect precisely because feminist language and recommendations around sexual assault are being taken seriously by the White House, the media and (hopefully, soon) schools as well. For people like Will – misogynists who believe rape is about "ambiguities" rather than violence – this shift also represents a win for feminists more generally.

Today, if you argue that women who drink or who dared to have past consensual sexual encounters are somehow un-rapeable, you will get taken to task. There's much work to be, for sure – victim-blaming is still much the norm in some circles – but gone are the days when you could say something stupid and sexist and it would go unnoticed or applauded. I'm sure that this change in what's socially acceptable terrifies Will and his cohort because it upends everything they believe about women, sex and consent – and it reveals them for the dinosaurs that they are.

I'm willing to bet that Will has an inbox full of emails from rape survivors (no, no scare quotes necessary) who are educating him on exactly the kind of perks they got if they came forward. I doubt these people's stories will change his mind, but I do know they're changing the country.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...ge-george-will

[Kobi]

****Trigger Warning****

(Reuters) - Egypt has asked YouTube to remove a video showing a naked woman with injuries being dragged through Cairo's Tahrir Square after being sexually assaulted during celebrations for President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's inauguration.

Sunday night's assault took place as thousands of people enjoyed inauguration festivities, raising new worries about Egypt's commitment to fighting sexual violence.

Authorities arrested seven men aged between 15 and 49 for sexually harassing women on Tahrir Square after the posting of the video, which caused an uproar in local and international media.

It was not clear whether the men arrested took part in the assault shown on the video.

"The Egyptian embassy in Washington DC and a number of Egyptian authorities, at the direction of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, have requested the YouTube administration to remove the video of the sexual assault victim," Sisi's spokesman said.

"This came in response to her wish, which she expressed during the president's visit to her yesterday at the hospital to check on her condition," he added in an emailed statement late on Thursday.

YouTube was not immediately available for comment on the Egyptian request. The clip showing the assault was still available on the video-sharing website on Friday.

Egypt approved a new law this month which punishes sexual harassment with at least six months in jail or fines of at least 3,000 Egyptian pounds ($420). The United States has urged Egypt to make good on its promises to fight sexual violence.

Sexual assault was rife at demonstrations during and after the 2011 uprising that ousted veteran president Hosni Mubarak and has been common for a decade at large gatherings in Egypt.

Sisi, Egypt's former army chief who won a landslide poll victory last month after deposing elected Islamist president Mohamed Mursi last July, has frequently spoken highly of women and their importance to society.

A police officer who rescued the victim of sexual harassment should be honored, Sisi said, in an apparent reference to the woman in the video.

But some liberals have been wary of Sisi, especially after remarks he made defending an army practice - later denied by an army court - of conducting "virginity tests" on female protesters who complained of abuse.

Sexual harassment, high rates of female genital mutilation and a surge in violence after the Arab Spring uprisings have made Egypt the worst country in the Arab world to be a woman, a Thomson Reuters Foundation survey showed late last year.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...edName=topNews