Even stranger than South Korea’s criminal justice system, which fined a pair of parents’ when their teenaged son raped a child, is the BBC News’ description of the rape:

The 18-year-old, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, raped a local seven-year-old girl in 2006.

What does ADHD have to do with it?

It’s hard to tell if the article is implying he’s a rapist because he has ADHD or if they’re just adding it in as a detail.  But either way, it reads as though it’s an excuse for his sexual assaulting ways.

Even if the rapist had a more severe mental illness like schizophrenia, it’s an inappropriate descriptor within an article about raping a 7-year-old.  Mental illness, obviously, is no excuse for rape.  Nor is not being “raised right,” as the South Korean criminal justice system implies.

What I loved most about Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure was that it was in many ways a “woman’s picture.” That is, the women, and their experience in the military, albeit in some very specific circumstances, was at the heart of the film. Their villianization, from Janis Karpinski to Lynndie England, from high rank to low, was one of the major crimes of Abu Ghraib and of course almost no one reported on it.

It was with little surprise then that I sat down to read Paul Rieckhoff’s piece in the Huffington Post entitled Sexual Assault and the Military: When Will the Pentagon Take Action?.

Rieckhoff, founder of IAVA (Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America), writes:

Almost one-third of women veterans say they were sexually assaulted while in the military. (In the general population, one out of every six American women has been a victim of a sexual assault.) Already, 15 percent of female Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have gone to the VA for care have screened positive for Military Sexual Trauma. But even these troubling figures may not be telling the whole story; experts estimate that half of all sexual assaults go unreported. [HuffingtonPost]

Read the rest of this entry »

A teenage girl named Crystal has turned to Youtube to share her story of being raped. According to CNN, Crystal is among dozens of young people who are turning to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to talk about sexual assault.

Sadly, the comments which appear below the Youtube video are disgusting. Many think the girl is putting on an act, while others support the attacker. Everything about this makes me sick: the fact that a girl who claims she was raped has no where to turn but to the internet, that people commenting on the video think rape is funny, and that rape even happens at all. I’m really not sure what to make of all of this.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week a classy English comedian called Johnny Vegas (aka Michael Pennington) sexually assaulted a woman on stage as part of his rountine. Some are outraged while others sadly argue that it was just a “joke.”

Here is just part of a first-hand account of the incident:

Vegas insisted that she (the audience member) allow herself to be carried on to the stage by six members of the audience - he called them “pall bearers”. She must pretend to be dead, he said, and he would bring her back to life with an onstage kiss. He warned her that there probably would be tongues. As James Williams, writing on the NOTBBC forum after the gig, put it, “Honestly, you couldn’t have found a nervier or more passive girl if you’d scoured all of London - she was like a rabbit in the headlights, but she was giggling and clearly somewhat enjoying the attention, so it just sort of went ahead without so much as a yes or no from her.” As she was carried on stage, Vegas repeatedly goaded one of the pallbearers to “finger” the girl.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mediarights.org has a great interview with Lisa F. Jackson, director of the film The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo which will premiere on HBO April 8th. The film, which won a Special Jury prize from Sundance this year was shot in the war zones of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006. The documentary breaks the silence surrounding the tens of thousands of women and girls who have been kidnapped, raped and sexually tortured in that country’s intractable civil war.

Just viewing the short trailer below sent chills through my body. I feel infuriated and disgusted by the horrors these poor victims of war have faced and continue to face. I can only imagine the powerful impact this film will have on viewers.

and visit the links page for The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo which features a comprehensive list of organizations working to help women in the Congo.