Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[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]

ST. LOUIS (AP) — A Missouri-based Army drill sergeant has been accused of sexually assaulting 12 female soldiers during the past three years, including several while he was deployed in Afghanistan.

Staff Sgt. Angel M. Sanchez appeared at a pretrial hearing at Fort Leonard Wood on Wednesday and could face a court-martial later this year, defense attorney Ernesto Gasapin said Thursday. The Washington Post first reported on the charges against Sanchez.

Military court records indicate that Sanchez is accused of using his supervisory position as a drill sergeant with the 14th Military Police Brigade to threaten some of the women he's accused of assaulting.

He is accused of sexually assaulting four women and assaulting eight others by touching them inappropriately, said Tiffany Wood, a Fort Leonard Wood spokeswoman.

The charges, filed earlier this month, come amid persistent criticism by Congress over how the Pentagon handles sexual assaults. The U.S. Defense Department says more than 5,000 reports of sexual abuse were filed in the most recent fiscal year — a 50 percent increase from the previous 12 months.

The Pentagon's first formal report on sex assaults in its ranks — released two days after Sanchez was charged on May 13 — shows that in the vast majority of the cases the victim was a young, lower-ranking woman and the offender a senior enlisted male service member, often in the same unit.

Sanchez served one tour each in Iraq and Afghanistan, earning a Bronze Star, before arriving at the Missouri post in August. He's been assigned an office job with his unit as his legal case unfolds.

Several of the women Sanchez is accused of attacking testified at Wednesday's hearing. But Gasapin said the initial accuser chose not to attend the hearing.

"It starts as one allegation and spreads out," he said, referring to the investigation that led to multiple accusers coming forward. "We have serious questions about the credibility of the witnesses making these accusations."

The defense lawyer said he expects an investigating officer's full report to be complete by June, at which point Sanchez's case could be set for a court-martial. The charges could also be dismissed or downgraded, Gasapin said.

Military prosecutors say Sanchez's alleged crimes date back to his year in Afghanistan, which lasted from March 2011 until March 2012. Prosecutors allege that during that time, Sanchez assaulted a female soldier at Outpost Dandar in Kunar province and also had a sexual relationship with a soldier "subject to his direct control."

One of the alleged incidents took place at Fort Richardson, Alaska, according to military court records.

At Fort Leonard Wood, Sanchez is accused of forcing one woman to perform oral sex on him in an office he shared with other drill sergeants. That accuser said Sanchez suggested she would be kicked out of the Army if she didn't comply with his demands for sex.

"I can be your replacement for your girlfriend," he is accused of telling a Fort Leonard Wood soldier who is gay.

A married soldier in Afghanistan said that Sanchez, who was also married, told her and others that "I know you guys are married but it's OK if you have a deployment buddy."

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called sex assaults in the ranks "a clear threat" to male and female service-members when the Pentagon released its latest statistics.

In December, Congress approved changes to the Uniform Code of Military Justice that strip commanders of their ability to overturn military jury convictions. That law also requires a civilian review if a commander declines to prosecute a case and requires that any individual convicted of sexual assault face a dishonorable discharge or dismissal.

The law also provides alleged victims with legal counsel, eliminates the statute of limitations for courts-martial in rape and sexual assault cases and criminalizes retaliation against victims who report a sexual assault.

Federal lawmakers are considering even further changes, some of which are opposed by top military commanders.

Greg Jacob, a former Marine who now works for the Service Women's Action Network, said the charges against Sanchez suggest that the military "hasn't fixed the problem." He said the inherent power imbalance between a drill sergeant and a lower-ranking soldier make the allegations even more disturbing.

"You're taught to trust authority, trust the chain of command," said Jacob, the group's policy director. "You're dependent on these people for everything, from your food to your sleep to your safety."

http://news.yahoo.com/sergeant-accus...042859324.html

[Kobi]

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.

Consider the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. “sexual assault.” Herewith, a Philadelphia magazine report about Swarthmore College, where in 2013 a student “was in her room with a guy with whom she’d been hooking up for three months”:

“They’d now decided — mutually, she thought — just to be friends. When he ended up falling asleep on her bed, she changed into pajamas and climbed in next to him. Soon, he was putting his arm around her and taking off her clothes. ‘I basically said, “No, I don’t want to have sex with you.” And then he said, “OK, that’s fine” and stopped. . . . And then he started again a few minutes later, taking off my panties, taking off his boxers. I just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything — I had already said no. I was just tired and wanted to go to bed. I let him finish. I pulled my panties back on and went to sleep.’”

Six weeks later, the woman reported that she had been raped. Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of “sexual assault” victims. It vows to excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults.

The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent — too high but nowhere near 20 percent.

Education Department lawyers disregard pesky arithmetic and elementary due process. Threatening to withdraw federal funding, the department mandates adoption of a minimal “preponderance of the evidence” standard when adjudicating sexual assault charges between males and the female “survivors” — note the language of prejudgment. Combine this with capacious definitions of sexual assault that can include not only forcible sexual penetration but also nonconsensual touching. Then add the doctrine that the consent of a female who has been drinking might not protect a male from being found guilty of rape. Then comes costly litigation against institutions that have denied due process to males they accuse of what society considers serious felonies.

Now academia is unhappy about the Education Department’s plan for government to rate every institution’s educational product. But the professors need not worry. A department official says this assessment will be easy: “It’s like rating a blender.” Education, gadgets — what’s the difference?

Meanwhile, the newest campus idea for preventing victimizations — an idea certain to multiply claims of them — is “trigger warnings.” They would be placed on assigned readings or announced before lectures. Otherwise, traumas could be triggered in students whose tender sensibilities would be lacerated by unexpected encounters with racism, sexism, violence (dammit, Hamlet, put down that sword!) or any other facet of reality that might violate a student’s entitlement to serenity. This entitlement has already bred campus speech codes that punish unpopular speech. Now the codes are begetting the soft censorship of trigger warnings to swaddle students in a “safe,” “supportive,” “unthreatening” environment, intellectual comfort for the intellectually dormant.

It is salutary that academia, with its adversarial stance toward limited government and cultural common sense, is making itself ludicrous. Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses — by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations — brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates.

What government is inflicting on colleges and universities, and what they are inflicting on themselves, diminishes their autonomy, resources, prestige and comity. Which serves them right. They have asked for this by asking for progressivism.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...f0a_story.html