Downplaying female abuse

Last week I posted about the statistics from a UK abuse support organization. The numbers showed that ChildLine received more calls from children, predominantly boys, reporting sexual abuse at the hands of women, predominantly mothers. The numbers demonstrated that while the reporting of female-perpetrated abuse to authorities and law enforcement maybe be low, the actual rate of abuse is much higher. When considered with the recent arrests of three alleged pedophiles, two of whom are female and were the only ones alleged to have abused children, this can paint a very frightening picture that no adult can be trusted.

This, of course, is hardly true. Most people do not abuse children. Even though it is possible that virtually anyone could or will if in the right (or more appropriately, wrong) circumstances, the fact that most people are not child abusers should never be forgotten. It would be terrible for people to create a scenario in which every woman is considered untrustworthy based on the acts of a handful of women.

That said, I expected to see an article or two basically downplaying the ChildLine numbers and shifting the blame and responsibility off female pedophiles onto males. It took less than a week:

An expert on female sex offenders has warned against parents becoming “hyper-vigilant” in response to recent high-profile child abuse cases.

Dr Theresa Gannon – senior lecturer in forensic psychology at the University of Kent – says society risks coming to a standstill if people become so cautious they feel unable to trust anybody with their children.

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“I think these high-profile cases do highlight the need to watch out for people regardless of gender but what we don’t want to get into is a situation where both males and females are vilified, because hyper-vigilancy like that would bring society to a standstill.”

The Prospects of Masculinity

Masculinity and manhood are in trouble. Over the past thirty years masculinity has gone from a respected, decently understood identity to a largely vilified, mocked and ill-understood shell of its former self. This cultural shift left one generation to question the masculine norms they grew up with while the next two generations grew up with no concise male role models. The effect of the absence of any men leading the way resulted in boys trying to sort it out themselves and women –  particularly feminists — trying to create new masculine identities to better suit their needs, all of which served to only worsen the situation.

Being such, it comes as no surprise that when young, feminist-allied men are called to describe masculinity they come up with a very specific narrative:

Wong was one of the organizers of the National Conference for Campus-Based Men’s Gender Equality and Anti-Violence Groups, a long and clunky name for an unprecedented event that took place last weekend at his school. It was the first time that young guys from around the country — guys like Wong, who recognize that the kind of masculinity they are describing is toxic for men, too — gathered to share strategies for getting college men involved in gender-based activism and discuss the work ahead.

In attendance were about 200 individuals, representing 40 colleges and two dozen organizations, many of them sporting titles like Center Against Sexual and Domestic Abuse, Men Can Stop Rape, and Men Stopping Violence. Notice a trend here? This contemporary movement of gender-conscious young men is largely identifying themselves in terms of what they are against. They’re not rapists. They’re not misogynists.

It is far more problematic that in the session with 200 young men brainstorming about qualities associated with masculinity none of them could  apparently come up with a single positive quality about masculinity. That puts the above mentioned groups and Courtney Martin’s article in a much different light. The men associated with the above groups are not identifying themselves in terms of what they are against. Rather, they are identifying themselves in terms of what they know feminists want to hear. This may be why feminist-allied men’s attempts to prove themselves trustworthy to feminists so often fail. Who would trust someone who only speaks of himself in the most negative terms?

Sexual abuse by mothers on the rise

Some myths die hard. Others die quickly. The myth that women rarely sexually abuse has managed to hang on without budging all that much. However, some recent numbers from the United Kingdom show that female child rapists are hardly rare:

MORE children than ever are calling a Swansea-based helpline to report being abused by their own mothers.

The NSPCC today released new figures showing that volunteers at ChildLine’s South Wales base in Swansea counselled a total of 536 children across the UK last year about sexual abuse — 85 of them by a female.

Nationally, ChildLine counselled 12,268 children for sexual abuse.

Although figures show the majority of calls were in relation to abuse by a male, the findings show that more children are reporting assaults from a woman, usually their mother.

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At all ChildLine call centres last year, 2,142 young people across the UK told the charity they had been sexually abused by a female.

Of those callers counselled, 1,311 told ChildLine they had been abused by their mother.

The overall proportion of children calling ChildLine about a female offender has risen from 11 per cent of sex abuse calls in 2004/05 to 17 per cent in 2008/09.

The Fact-Free Message of Feminists

When it comes to men’s issues, it is hardly surprising to find that feminists dismiss them as nonsense. It is difficult to find feminists supporting efforts to prevent visitation obstruction, efforts to raise awareness for male victims of domestic violence and rape, efforts to change biased policies that discriminate against male victims at domestic violence shelters and rape centers or efforts to have parental alienation recognized as a real problem. Feminists contend these problems either do not exist at all or are so rare they are not worth acknowledging.

Being such, Kathryn Joyce’s article about the men’s rights movement comes as nothing new. Neither, for that matter, does the complete absence of any evidence supporting the claims she makes in her article about male victimization, custody issues, abuse or parental alienation. She does not cite a single credible source for any of the claims presented, especially in regards to statistics. It is certainly not that she is incapable of searching for them because she went out of her way to link to Angry Harry’s blog in order to make a very loose connection between George Sodini and the men’s movement. Instead, it looks more like Joyce chose to engage in a generalized feminist appeal to authority, one in which she quotes from random people and presents their statements as true without bothering to double-check any of the statistics being cited.

Much of Joyce’s piece is simply a general complaint that men’s groups are starting to be taken seriously. She depreciates RADAR’s efforts and bemoans the recent rulings in West Virgina and in California that found the existing domestic violence policies in those states were applied in a discriminatory manner against men. Joyce does not look at why the courts ruled as it did or why there are studies showing an overt anti-male bias in the domestic violence community or why some courts find that domestic violence laws are being manipulated or why some people who work in the domestic violence community agree that male victims are deliberately ignored and that feminist-driven policies play a major role in that.

She goes on to question whether any of the complaints men’s groups make hold up, with her obvious conclusion being that none of them have any validity whatsoever. 

Woman allegedly raped foster son

From the article:

A 40-year-old Hooper woman was charged Monday with allegedly raping and having oral sex with her 14-year-old foster son several times in October.

According to charging documents filed in 2nd District Court in Ogden, Jennifer Ann Montag told police to investigators that she and the boy had intercourse and oral sex several times at her home between Oct. 10 and 26.

Montag is charged with two counts of first-degree felony rape and three counts of first-degree felony forcible sodomy after someone reported the alleged abuse Oct. 28.

Weber County deputies interviewed the boy at the Ogden Children’s Justice Center. He said he didn’t want to get his foster mother in trouble but acknowledged she had asked him not to “disclose information which could ruin the family or put Montag in jail,” court documents state.

At the same time, detectives interviewed Montag, who confessed to some allegations, court documents state. When police later told her one of the boy’s siblings told a Department of Child and Family Services caseworker that the teen admitted to having sexual encounters with Montag, she confessed to more allegations, court documents state.

The actual title of the article is “Mother charged with allegedly having sex with foster son.” That was sad headline to go with considering the woman is a) his foster mother, not his mother, and b) the first line of the article states that she is first-degree felony rape and sodomy. There was no reason for the writer to play that sort of game with the facts by casting the situation as consensual sex.

15 exonerees attend conference at UTA

From the article:

During a prolonged standing ovation, the Texas exonerees were brought forward one by one. By the time the introductions were done, 14 men and one woman, each having served years in prison for crimes they did not commit, stood together on a stage at the University of Texas at Arlington.

“On this panel there is 200 years of incarceration,” one of them, Anthony Robinson, told a large crowd of students, educators, relatives and government officials. “Two hundred years of suffering. Two hundred years of ignoring a problem that is screaming to be dealt with.

“You have a chance to make a phenomenal difference,” said Robinson, who was wrongly convicted of rape. “This is a cause.”

Wrongful convictions are the greatest tragedy of the justice. There is no telling how many innocent people are servicing time or have serviced time for crimes they did not commit. The majority of the cases mentioned in the article were overturned due to DNA evidence. One must wonder, however, of the dozens of cases the Innocence Project gets sent that have no such evidence proving a person’s innocence. This is particularly problematic in rape cases where in most cases there is nothing but the accuser’s testimony as evidence. There are more cases in which evidence from the crime scene of murders or robberies has been lost or destroyed. These are situations in which the innocent have no means of proving it.

Ignored by society, Afghan dancing boys suffer centuries-old tradition

I posted about the plight of the bacha bereesh two years ago. Boys in Afghanistan are kidnapped and forced to dress as women and dance, but it more often leads to the boys simply being sex slaves who are routinely raped by tribal warlords or whoever owns them. In the two years since the first article I read about this there has been very little mentioning of it. I have not once seen a news segment about it, nor have I heard it mentioned in any of the discussions about the conditions in that country.

It appears that, like in many other instances, the rape and abuse of boys goes largely ignored.

That was why I was rather surprised to see an article featured on CNN about this, and more surprised that it included victims. The overall situation is fairly bad because rape victims are treated horribly in that part of the world, including male victims, and because some of the boys may end up looking and behaving more like women than men, which puts them in greater danger. One of the boys described his experience with police:

Farhad said that he was taken from a party by four police officers one night and almost gang raped at the station Before their commander walked in and stopped the assault. But then, “He said if I wanted to be set free I should give him my money and my mobile,” Farhad said. “I had no real choice, so I gave him my money and mobile.”

Despite the society finding the rape and abuse of these boys terrible, very little is done and very few organizations reach out to help the boys and men who were victims or who remain victims (like the two young men interviewed). They are generally stuck in the abusive situation, having nowhere to turn or go.

Hopefully the CNN report will help raise awareness about this problem so that boys and men do not continue to suffer in silence.