July 2002
Half a solution is no solution!
City of Seattle Councilwoman Judy Nicastro wants to enlist the aid of employers in her effort to help battered women:
City Councilwoman Judy Nicastro ... has worked quietly for more than a year on legislation that would dramatically expand workplace protections for battered women. - J. Martin McOmber - Efforts to prevent discrimination clash - June 9, 2002
Protecting women against domestic violence is a good idea. Among the obstacles victims face, however, is that employers may discriminate against them: A problem Nicastro hopes to mitigate:
Nicastro's proposed law - modeled in part on a year-old New York City ordinance - would prohibit employers from firing or refusing to hire or promote people because they had been threatened, stalked or assaulted by a spouse, boyfriend, roommate or other domestic partner. - J. Martin McOmber - Efforts to prevent discrimination clash - June 9, 2002
Other cities, in addition to New York, have already taken steps to prohibit workplace discrimination against battered women:
A handful of states, including California and Maine, have passed laws requiring employers to give victims time off to take care of legal issues or to get treatment for abuse. - J. Martin McOmber - Efforts to prevent discrimination clash - June 9, 2002
These all sound like fine ideas. But notice anything missing from the equation? Such as men, who comprise half the victims of domestic violence?
Not counting child abuse cases, in which more than half of the perpetrators are women, half of all batterers are women. And half of all victims of domestic violence are men. Yet virtually every law, program and remedy on the books addresses only male perpetrated domestic violence.
Seattle isn't the only jurisdiction looking at how to help battered women in the workplace. - J. Martin McOmber - Efforts to prevent discrimination clash - June 9, 2002
Nor is it the only city to ignore half of the problem. Until legislation and programs to educate the public and end domestic violence address the whole problem, there will be no end. Half a solution is no solution.
Is rape a joke?
Bruce Gaeta, a New Jersey judge, recently brushed off a statutory rape case against a teacher:
It's just something between two people that clicked beyond the teacher-student relationship. I really don't see the harm that was done, and certainly society doesn't need to be worried. - Cathy Young - Double Standard: The bias against male victims of sexual abuse. - June 4, 2002
How could he say this? More to the point, how could he treat rape so casually and get away with it? Where was the outrage? By and large, there was none. Why? Because the 13-year-old victim was a boy:
It's almost pointless to add that such a reaction would be unthinkable if the sexes were reversed. In 1993 in Virginia, a male teacher who had sex wit h three teenage female students was sentenced to 26 years in prison - while the next day, a female swimming coach who had an 'affair' with an 11-year-old boy and sexual encounters with two others got 30 days. - Cathy Young - Double Standard: The bias against male victims of sexual abuse. - June 4, 2002
Why the double standard? Maybe it's because girls can get pregnant. But as Vili Fualaau's case demonstrated, boys can be victimized in this respect, too: the now 18-year-old Fualaau is the single father of two of Mary Kay Letourneau's children. So maybe the bias stems from the view that many boys are horny little buggers who want to be "raped" by some of their teachers, anyway! But in point of fact, the same could be said of girls, too:
Do many adolescent and pre-adolescent boys have romantic and sexual fantasies about their teachers? Of course. Do they, in some cases, participate willingly and even eagerly in the 'relationship'? Yes. But plenty of girls, too, fantasize about teachers and willingly get involved with adult men. And both girls and boys can be ultimately harmed by an experience they initially regarded as a thrill. - Cathy Young - Double Standard: The bias against male victims of sexual abuse. - June 4, 2002
The truth is that most children, regardless of their gender, would be harmed by a sexual relationship with an adult, and as a society it behooves us to protect them all, boys as well as girls. Ironically, growing awareness of this double standard began with the feminist movement:
In this instance, the bias against male victims stems from traditional sex stereotypes, not feminist ones. Indeed, before the feminist push for gender-neutral laws in the 1970s, sexual contact between a woman and an underage male did not legally qualify as statutory rape in most states. - Cathy Young - Double Standard: The bias against male victims of sexual abuse. - June 4, 2002
Demonstrating that there can be good gotten from a collaboration between the women's and men's movements.
It's time for men to reclaim their masculinity
Federal Way-based psychotherapist Robert Glover is helping nice guys stop being girly men:
Glover is the author of the self-help book, 'No More Mr. Nice Guy!' (Barnes & Noble, $14.95), and yes, the exclamation point is part of the title. - Mark Rahner - 'No More Mr. Nice Guy!' A Federal Way psychotherapist wants men to reclaim their masculinity - May 9, 2002
Glover doesn't go in for drum beating or any of that touchy-feely drama. Instead, he focuses on rekindling the kind of masculine spirit that built our civilization:
"What I found was that a lot of Nice Guys receive most of their conditioning on how to be male from women, either from dependent mothers or single moms. We have a female-dominated educational system. Growing up in the '60s and '70s, most of those guys heard from angry women about how bad men were and thought, 'I'd better find out what women think is good and try to become that.' - Mark Rahner - 'No More Mr. Nice Guy!' A Federal Way psychotherapist wants men to reclaim their masculinity - May 9, 2002
Or as Playboy Magazine columnist Asa Baber put it:
"In our own slow kind of grubby way, sort of like bears at the end of the winter, we're kind of staggering out there and sniffing the air and saying, 'Wait a minute, we're pretty good guys and we're not just going to fold anymore." - Mark Rahner - 'No More Mr. Nice Guy!' A Federal Way psychotherapist wants men to reclaim their masculinity - May 9, 2002
Innocent until proven guilty?
It's well known that when a man is accused of rape, our society in general and the media in particular pretty much treat him as guilty no matter what. But when a woman is charged with rape, an ugly double standard feminists don't like to talk about emerges:
It's been nearly a year since popular second-grade teacher Susan Lemery left Olivia Park Elementary School amid accusations she had sex with one 14-year-old Marysville boy and fondled another, both friends of her son. ... She still is missed at the school - and still is being paid. - Janet Burkitt - As trial begins, school backs teacher, 38, charged with rape of teenage boy - May 9, 2002
No describing her as an "accused rapist," the way male defendants are vilified. Instead, the focus is typically on the many fine qualities of the accused:
When the accusations first emerged, teachers sent the Lemerys a care package with food, artwork from her second-grade students and cards from adults and children. ... One parent mentioned that Lemery's students sometimes called her 'mom' by mistake. - Janet Burkitt - As trial begins, school backs teacher, 38, charged with rape of teenage boy - May 9, 2002
On June 22, 2002, the Snohomish County Superior Court convicted Mrs. Lemery on three counts of third-degree child rape and two counts of third-degree child molestation.
It's time to end the double standard and treat every person accused of rape with the same degree of dignity and respect, regardless of sex.
- Seattle Times.
Wither fatherhood?
"No man is an island," so we are told. But when it comes to divorce, family courts seem intent on making men into castaways:
In the vast majority of cases, mothers are awarded custody - and research shows that as many as 40 per cent of fathers will lose contact with their children within just two years of separation. - Helen Weathers - May 6, 2002
Happily for British fathers, the courts have taken recognition of their plight and have begun to do something about it:
In an attempt to address this problem, the Lord Chancellor's Department earlier this year published its 150-page report, Making Contact Work, to explore ways to improve contact-recognising that some mothers deliberately frustrate fathers' efforts to see their children, and recommending that court orders setting out a father's right of access should be more rigorously enforced. - Helen Weathers - May 6, 2002
The British organization, Families Need Fathers, finds this encouraging, but fathers still have a long battle against family court bias ahead of them:
Women's groups rightly point out that some mothers, having escaped violent relationships, do not want any contact with the fathers of their children because they fear continued abuse. ... However, there are fathers who find themselves falsely accused of violence, rape or sexual abuse of their children by some mothers who will resort to any means to get their ex-husbands out of their lives - for reasons of spite, revenge or simply convenience. - Helen Weathers - May 6, 2002
But this can be a death sentence: several years ago one of the early leaders of the American fathers' rights movement told me that women who resort to false accusations as a legal tactic to gain custody often condemn their ex-husband to death. "In Iowa," he said, "those tactics send the falsely accused father to prison, where the life expectancy of a convicted child molester is three years."
Three years.
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