You’re Not Helping v.25

Feminists have gotten a lot of mileage out of the Ray Rice NFL scandal. To be certain, the NFL’s attempted cover-up is embarrassing. Rice’s assault on his now wife was horrible. However, none of that justifies the baffling response several feminists had when other journalists mention Hope Solo.

For those unaware, Hope Solo is a United States soccer star who assaulted her 17-year-old nephew and her sister. Solo faces fourth-degree misdemeanor charges, yet continues to play while the case is pending. In contrast, Rice was fired by the Ravens and indefinitely suspended from the NFL. Several sports journalists noted the imbalance, which appears to annoy some feminist journalists.

Katie McDonough offered the most recent complaint:

[…] A conversation about whether or not Solo should be on the field right now does not require smug finger wagging about inconsistently applied standards of outrage, it requires a grappling with how sports leagues handle violent offenses. (That’s a far more complicated conversation to have than many of us are willing to concede.) Condemning what Solo is alleged to have done does not require erasing a history in which men have systematically used manipulation and physical violence to dominate, humiliate and kill women. And scrutinizing the top brass within women’s national soccer for their calculus around Solo does not require us to insincerely argue that women’s soccer and men’s football are sports that receive equal attention in the media — that somehow it’s just this one time that the public has fallen silent in an otherwise robust conversation about the women’s national soccer team.

Let us look at the two journalists, Juliet Macur and Cindy Boren, to see what they wrote.

Crossing the line

ESPN ran a story on Mike McQueary recently. The article The Whistleblower’s Last Stand covers McQueary’s present circumstances following the fallout of the Jerry Sandusky trial and losing his job at Penn State. The article gives an account of when McQueary informed his players that he would not coach them in the next game. What makes the story questionable is this portion:

Behind closed doors, he singled out each player by name. “You are a good kid, this is why you are here, you belong here,” he said. “I’m not sure what is going to happen to Joe. I’m not sure what is going to happen to me.” Then, as he told them what he had seen and heard in that locker room shower a decade ago, Big Red began to cry.

The players listened in silence, their heads down. “He said he had some regret that he didn’t stop it,” says Patrick Flanagan, then a redshirt freshman receiver. “We didn’t want to see someone we looked up to get emotional. It was heartbreaking for all of us. We weren’t sure who to believe. You see an older man crying, someone you looked up to. It’s sad.”

Finally, McQueary confided in his players something he hoped would make them understand how he’d reacted at the time. He told them he could relate to the fear and helplessness felt by the boy in the shower because he too was sexually abused as a boy.

The article does not focus on that revelation. The only other mention of it is this:

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Another 90 Years In Prison For Ex-L.I. Air Marshal In Child Porn Case — A former air marshal from Long Island, already serving 20 years in prison for sexually abusing young boys has now had another 90 years added to his sentence for asking one of them to help destroy child pornography. Michael McGowan, 41, was sentenced to the added time Monday in U.S. District Court in Central Islip. He pleaded guilty in 2011 to child sexual exploitation. McGowan was already serving 20 years on his 2005 sexual abuse conviction.

Billings judge who gave rapist-teacher 30-day sentence won’t seek re-election — A Montana judge said he plans to retire at the end of the year after drawing widespread condemnation for saying that a 14-year-old rape victim appeared “older than her chronological age.” District Judge Todd Baugh said his decision to step down after 30 years on the bench was unrelated to the public uproar over his actions in the case of Stacey Rambold, a former business teacher convicted of raping a freshman student at Billings Senior High School.

‘Jihad Jane’ gets 10-year sentence for terror plot against cartoonist — A Pennsylvania woman known as “Jihad Jane” who became a follower of radical Islam and sought to kill a Swedish cartoonist was sentenced Monday to 10 years in prison. Colleen LaRose, 50, had faced a potential life term. But U.S. District Judge Petrese Tucker accepted a government request to reduce the sentence, because of her extensive cooperation with investigators. Prosecutors still sought decades in prison, fearing she remains dangerous.

Last of Fabricated ‘Satanic Ritual Abuse’ Prisoners Finally Freed — Among the atrocities that Frances and Dan Keller were supposed to have committed while running a day care center out of their Texas home: drowning and dismembering babies in front of the children; killing dogs and cats in front of the children; transporting the children to Mexico to be sexually abused by soldiers in the Mexican army; dressing as pumpkins and shooting children in the arms and legs; putting the children into a pool with sharks that ate babies; putting blood in the children’s Kool-Aid; cutting the arm or a finger off a gorilla at a local park; and exhuming bodies at a cemetery, forcing children to carry the bones.

Natalie Webb Accused Of Raping Own Kids, Charging Adults To Watch — Natalie Webb, an Oklahoma mom, stands charged today with raping three of her own four children — and a police affidavit says other adults paid her for the privilege of watching. The fourth child escaped the abuse only by hiding in a dumpster, the affidavit says. Authorities in Beckham County say they were alerted to accusations against Natalie Webb in August of 2013 when an Oklahoma Department of Human Services investigator reported that Natalie Webb was “selling sex” with children to other adults, according to KOKH TV News in Oklahoma City.

Penn State abuse scandal: Jerry Sandusky tries to get his pension back from university — Jerry Sandusky described his career and retirement from Penn State by video link Tuesday as testimony began in a hearing into whether he can get back the retirement benefits he lost after being convicted of child molestation. The proceeding at the headquarters of the State Employees’ Retirement System in Harrisburg involves the pension he earned while working for decades as a Penn State assistant football coach.

Roast Busters outrage ‘open season on men’ — November 2013 was a sorry month for us Kiwis. We were noted internationally as the rape culture capital of the world when the Roast Busters story broke. Having the annual White Ribbon Day campaign launch on the horizon was just sheer bad luck in terms of timing. A national campaign focusing on violence against women at the same time as a national scandal the likes of Roast Busters is a recipe for disaster.

Survey finds high rate of rape, sexual assault at Montana State Prison — A nationwide survey of prisoners found Montana State Prison has one of the highest rates of rapes and sexual assaults, but state corrections officials questioned the report’s methodology and said Wednesday it’s unlikely the problem is as bad as it seems. The U.S. Department of Justice survey of inmates in 233 state and federal prisons and 358 jails released last year identified Deer Lodge prison as one of 11 with high rates of sexual victimization of inmates.

Twitter trolls: women are abusers too and we ignore them at our peril — Today two people have appeared in court charged with sending abusive and menacing tweets to the feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez. They have both pleaded guilty. Last July, Criado-Perez made headlines, after she became the focus of a huge outpouring of abuse on Twitter. She received some 50 rape and murder threats every hour for two days. Her trolling was that bad it started trending. She had originally come to prominence having successfully campaigned to keep a woman on British banknotes and this mini victory has irked some in the digital ether.

When Good People Do Nothing: The Appalling Story of South Carolina’s Prisons — In two months, America will observe the 50th anniversary of one of its most dubious moments. On March 13, 1964, Catherine “Kitty” Genovese was brutally murdered in Queens, New York. What made her case infamous—legendary, even—was that nobody responded to her cries for help. “Please help me, please help me!” she cried, over and over, and at least 38 people in her neighborhood who heard those cries did nothing to help her.

Viviana Gunn sentenced for gruesome torture of 13-year-old brother-in-law Jordan Gunn — AN AMERICAN woman who repeatedly tortured her 13-year-old brother-in-law by beating his genitalia with a baseball bat, sliced his skin with a heated knife and left him tied naked to a doghouse without food and water has been sentenced to 31 years in jail. Viviana Gunn, 34, was sentenced on Monday after pleading guilty in August to the charges. Her husband, Brandon P. Gunn, 27, will be sentenced on January 17 for the same crime.

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Abused foster teen who hung hImself “wanted to be white” — Sexually-abused as a child and shunned by the education system, a teenage foster boy was driven to take his own life. Alex Kelly, 15, was found on the floor of his cell at Cookham Wood Youth Offending Institution, Kent, with trainer laces tied around his neck, after hanging himself, on January 24 2012. Pronounced dead the following day, Kelly was serving a ten month sentence for theft and burglary from a vehicle.

Abuse victim tells how he helped snare perverted teacher — A MAN who was abused by his teacher as a child says it was his own son who inspired him to pursue justice. The man, now in his 30s, was targeted by perverted teacher Nicholas Quest. He kept quiet about the abuse he suffered until he started looking at schools for his five-year-old boy, and then decided he could not stay silent.

Herts police launch campaign for male rape victims to come forward — Herts Constabulary launched a campaign this week encouraging victims to access the specialist support that exists for them. The campaign, called Operation Fortitude, is being run by the county’s community safety unit – which brings together professionals from the police and county council – and will see posters put up across the county and business cards available to take away.

Hazing and creating a social outcast

When we hears about hazing in sports, we tend to hear about the vicious treatment and its aftermath on the victim. We rarely hear about how it plays out in the community when the victim speak up. For one boy, it did not play out well:

At the state high-school wrestling tournament in Denver last year, three upperclassmen cornered a 13-year-old boy on an empty school bus, bound him with duct tape and sodomized him with a pencil. […]

The students were from Norwood, Colorado, a ranching town of about 500 people near the Telluride ski resort. Two of the attackers were sons of Robert Harris, the wrestling coach, who was president of the school board. The victim’s father was the K-12 principal.

After the principal reported the incident to police, townspeople forced him to resign. Students protested against the victim at school, put “Go to Hell” stickers on his locker and wore T-shirts that supported the perpetrators. The attackers later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, according to the Denver district attorney’s office.

As the article notes, this is not the first time these kinds of sexual assault hazing rituals have happened. The article reports that in 2009 a study found that 10 percent of boys reported some type of sexual assault at the hands of their peers. The hazing is not limited to junior high and high school students either. College students also face similar types of hazing.

Part of the reason it is so common is because some view it as a rite of passage:

Rutgers fires Mike Rice

Rutgers University fired head basketball coach Mike Rice following the controversy over a video showing the former coach verbally and physically abusing players. Rutgers knew about the video for months, but decided to conduct an internal investigation first. However, once the video went viral, the university had no choice but to respond.

The school’s Director of Intercollegiate Athletics Tim Pernetti stated, “I am responsible for the decision to attempt a rehabilitation of Coach Rice. Dismissal and corrective action were debated in December and I thought it was in the best interest of everyone to rehabilitate, but I was wrong. Moving forward, I will work to regain the trust of the Rutgers community.”

That may prove difficult. When Eric Murdock first brought the video to the school’s attention, they fired him:

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Boys ‘worse at school due to stereotypes’ — Stereotypes about boys being intellectually inferior to girls affect children during the first years of primary school and prevent them fulfilling their potential, researchers found. Teachers should assure boys that they are just as academic as girls and avoid doing anything which could make them feel inferior such as splitting classes by gender, they said. In the first stage of the study researchers presented 238 boys and girls aged four to 10 with a range of scenarios related to behaviour or performance, such as “this child really wants to learn and do well at school”.

Circumcision DOES reduce sexual pleasure by making manhood less sensitive — Men who are circumcised are in for some bad news – it puts them at a disadvantage in the bedroom, according to experts. A study found those who’ve had their foreskin removed as children or adults experience less intense sexual pleasure and orgasm than their peers. ‘We’re not saying less sexual activity or satisfaction, but sensitivity,’ senior author Dr Piet Hoebeke, from Ghent University Hospital, said. The practice is common in the U.S, with three-quarters of men having the procedure for non-religious reasons.

Former area Boy Scout tells his story of abuse — The Boy Scouts of America are under heavy fire these days: first, for the group’s stance against membership by gays, and second, for the so-called perversion files. A judge in December ordered the release of tens of thousands of pages detailing decades of alleged sexual abuse by men inside the organization against Scouts in their care. Instead of turning these tips over to law enforcement for investigation, the Boy Scouts of America chose to keep them in private files.