Tag: rape

Rape at gunpoint is illegal in America? Tell that to the women we work with

Every day on the streets of the US, women are being raped, viciously attacked and left for dead. When women do die, their killings almost never make the local news and the perpetrators who commit these horrendous acts of violence do so with almost total impunity.

Under the country’s laws, these women are victims. But their lives are deemed worthless by the public and the state. They hold no political agency or economic power and, while they are incarcerated time and time again, the perpetrators – the people who hurt them – are never jailed.

The men who attack them are “regular” guys – husbands, sons and co-workers – but they are seen as outcasts, somehow deserving of mistreatment.

This is the reality of life as a victim of human trafficking in the US today.

Rape at gunpoint is illegal in America? Tell that to the women we work with | Global development | The Guardian

‘It wasn’t supposed to be a rape scene’: Why are pornographers getting away with on-camera assault?

Nikki Benz alleges she was violently assaulted in the workplace in 2016. Her primary assailant’s employer investigated and found her account credible enough to terminate his contract. But because her workplace is an adult film set, and because she is a sex worker, she won’t be getting justice. In fact, she was more vulnerable to being sued for defamation than likely to succeed in pressing charges against two men whose actions were caught on tape. She’s the most recent high-profile example of a sex worker denied the protection of the law because of what she does and who she is, despite its legality.

Benz’s credits for work in the porn industry go back to 2002. When she agreed to do a “boy/girl” scene involving anal sex, she was consenting only to be touched by her scene partner, Ramón Nomar. But after the director, “Tony T,” asked everyone else to leave—purportedly to clear the space to make using a handheld camera easier—it quickly became apparent that the two men left in the room weren’t sticking to any industry standard.

Nomar, Benz alleges, gagged her with her own underwear and covered her face, heightening her fear. Tony T began participating in the scene, Benz said, meaning he was touching her without her consent. He choked her. He’d go on to stomp on her head. She called “cut,” and the men ignored her. Benz’s police report said that Nomar penetrated her so violently “blood splattered on the white walls.” To be paid, she had to say she was okay. But she wasn’t.

Sex workers, onscreen and otherwise, have a much higher risk of sexual assault than the general population but have a much lower chance of getting justice. In New York, 46 percent of indoor sex workers reported they’d been forced into an act by a client; more than 80 percent of street-based sex workers have been violated. Benz’s experience was all too believable to others at risk and just as unbelievable to law enforcement, who discriminate against sex workers.

Benz spoke up soon after the assault on Twitter.

‘It wasn’t supposed to be a rape scene’: Why are pornographers getting away with on-camera assault?

Has Daryl Kelly Spent Twenty Years in Prison for a Crime That Never Happened? | The New Yorker

For the past twenty years, Daryl Kelly has been imprisoned in New York State for a crime that may never have happened. He was living with his wife and five children in Newburgh, New York, in the fall of 1997, when he was arrested for rape and sexual abuse. The supposed victim was his oldest child, Chaneya, who was then eight years old. Chaneya testified against her father at trial; the jury convicted him; a judge sentenced him to twenty-to-forty years in prison. At the time, Chaneya’s mother was addicted to crack cocaine, among other drugs, and Chaneya and her siblings went to live with her grandmother. The following year, when her grandmother asked her what exactly had happened with her father, Chaneya told her that, in fact, there had been no rape or sexual abuse.

In the fall of 1999, the judge ordered a hearing, and Chaneya returned to the witness stand. This time, Chaneya testified that she had lied during the trial. The judge did not believe her, however, and Kelly has remained in prison ever since. An attorney named Peter Cross agreed to represent Kelly, pro bono, five years ago, but he has been unable to get him out of prison. I wrote about Kelly’s case for New York, in 2013, and in January, for the first time, Kelly will appear before the state Board of Parole.

His attorney has sent the parole board a packet on his behalf, which includes a letter that Chaneya wrote to her father in prison in 2002, when she was thirteen years old. Her schoolgirl handwriting fills each line of a page of three-ring-notebook paper. “Dear Daddy,” she wrote. “I do feel bad about telling a lie. All I want to do is put it all behind. You want the truth. I’ll tell you the truth.”

Has Daryl Kelly Spent Twenty Years in Prison for a Crime That Never Happened? | The New Yorker

Male rape in America: A new study reveals that men are sexually assaulted almost as often as women.

Last year the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men. The number seemed so high that it prompted researcher Lara Stemple to call the Bureau of Justice Statistics to see if it maybe it had made a mistake, or changed its terminology. After all, in years past men had accounted for somewhere between 5 and 14 percent of rape and sexual violence victims. But no, it wasn’t a mistake, officials told her, although they couldn’t explain the rise beyond guessing that maybe it had something to do with the publicity surrounding former football coach Jerry Sandusky and the Penn State sex abuse scandal.

Stemple, who works with the Health and Human Rights Project at UCLA, had often wondered whether incidents of sexual violence against men were under-reported. She had once worked on prison reform and knew that jail is a place where sexual violence against men is routine but not counted in the general national statistics. Stemple began digging through existing surveys and discovered that her hunch was correct. The experience of men and women is “a lot closer than any of us would expect,” she says. For some kinds of victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences. Stemple concluded that we need to “completely rethink our assumptions about sexual victimization,” and especially our fallback model that men are always the perpetrators and women the victims.

Male rape in America: A new study reveals that men are sexually assaulted almost as often as women.

Annabella Sciorra and Daryl Hannah Discuss Weighing the Costs of Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein | The New Yorker

In March, Annabella Sciorra, who received an Emmy nomination for her role in “The Sopranos,” agreed to talk with me for a story I was reporting about Harvey Weinstein. Speaking by phone, I explained that two sources had told me that she had a serious allegation regarding the producer. Sciorra, however, told me that Weinstein had never done anything inappropriate. Perhaps she just wasn’t his type, she said, with an air of what seemed to be studied nonchalance. But, two weeks ago, after The New Yorker published the story, in which thirteen women accused Weinstein of sexual assault and harassment, Sciorra called me. The truth, she said, was that she had been struggling to speak about Weinstein for more than twenty years. She was still living in fear of him, and slept with a baseball bat by her bed. Weinstein, she told me, had violently raped her in the early nineteen-nineties, and, over the next several years, sexually harassed her repeatedly.

“I was so scared. I was looking out the window of my living room, and I faced the water of the East River,” she said, recalling our initial conversation. “I really wanted to tell you. I was like, ‘This is the moment you’ve been waiting for your whole life. . . .’ ” she said. “I really, really panicked,” she added. “I was shaking. And I just wanted to get off the phone.”

Annabella Sciorra and Daryl Hannah Discuss Weighing the Costs of Speaking Out About Harvey Weinstein | The New Yorker

Dad defends Stanford sex offender

Public outrage over the lenient sentencing of a star Stanford swimmer convicted of sexual assault has been compounded by a controversial letter written by the athlete’s father.

Brock Turner was convicted in March of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman at a fraternity party in January 2015 at the elite university. He faced up to 14 years in prison. Prosecutors asked for six.

Instead, Turner received only six months in jail and three years of probation after a judge worried that a stiffer sentence would have a “severe impact” on the 20-year-old.

The light sentence drew harsh criticism from prosecutors and advocates and prompted widespread fury on social media.

Washington Post

‘I woke up. He was in the room. I didn’t know who he was.’

After The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a poll of more than 1,000 current and recent college students from around the country, a team of Post reporters interviewed more than 50 people who responded that they had, at some point during their time in college, experienced unwanted sexual contact.

The Washington Post