Pope Criminalizes the Reporting of Sex Crimes. VATICAN CITY — Few eyebrows were raised last week when Pope Francis brought the Vatican’s legal system up to date by criminalizing leaks of official information and formalizing laws against sex crimes.
But now that the laws have been made public, a closer look revealed that the pope has made it illegal to report sex crimes against children. According to the new laws, revealing or receiving confidential Vatican information is now punishable by up to two years in prison, while newly defined sex crimes against children carry a sentence of up to twelve years. Because all sex crimes are kept confidential, there is no longer a legal way for Vatican officials to report sex crimes. “We didn’t mean for this to happen, obviously,” lamented Vatican foreign minister Monsignor Dominique Mamberti. “It’s quite the papal pickle that His Holiness has placed upon our heads. “They know exactly what they’re doing,” claims Fabrizio Perona of Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper. Why is it victim blaming to talk about rape and drinking? "That" thread has gone a bit newkular, and I just wanted to tease out one aspect of the conversation and highlight it separately so that maybe (if anyone is still left standing at this point) we could have a more targeted discussion about the issues around alcohol and victim blaming.
Quite a few people in the thread made the point that by drinking, women "put themselves at risk", because alcohol impairs your judgement and make you more vulnerable to abuse/exploitation. And quite a few other people have pointed out that it is only the case when a potential abuser or exploiter is around to try and abuse or exploit you. Booze is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for rape. Like, I've been shit-faced a bunch of times in my life, and every time I checked my pants during those (happy) occasions, there was a mysterious absence of an unwanted penis in my vagina. Fancy that. But but but, rejoin the alcohol-is-a-risk-factor common sense advocates!
Well, yes. Aha! Well, not quite. Ask Surly Amy: Truth and Consequences. Missing Gender Narratives Regarding Penn State. [content/trigger warning: this post contains references to sexual assault and child sexual assault] It can be precarious for feminist women to examine and critique instances of mass public outrage aimed at the rape of young boys (and the subsequent cover-ups).
When those who are already widely perceived as being "man-hating" compare the outrage that occurs when boys are victimized by men to the apologism that often occurs when women are victimized by men, some will inevitably walk away with the message that Feminists Are Opposed To People Being Outraged At the Rape of Boys. That being said, Historiann makes a good point: "It’s gratifying to see so many sports writers and other male commentators decrying the culture of corruption that big-time men’s college sports breeds. A woman walks into a rape, uh, bar « Fugitivus. A woman walks into a rape, uh, bar. She rapes the rapist, “Hey, rape kind of rape do you think I should rape?” The rapist rapes, “Don’t ask rape! I’m just a rapist!” Ha ha ha ha ha! Welcome to a post about rape jokes. Let me tell you a thing you might not know: the inability to hear rape “jokes” without flashbacks, Hulk rage, and “air quotes” is one of the enduring parting gifts of a rapist.
Another post about rape « Fugitivus. By the by, I consistently use that title because I mean for it to operate as a trigger warning.
I write a lot about rape, but sometimes I write about other things, and I don’t want anybody taken off-guard transitioning from “help computer” into wtf rape-talk. Case you were wondering. What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape. This week, as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was taken into custody by Interpol on charges of sexual assault, and pundits right, left, and center got busy painting the accusations as frivolous and the accusers as lying, scheming sluts, I joined a small but dedicated chorus of feminist voices calling for a serious inquiry into the charges.
We didn't do it because we support government secrecy or because we agree with the vicious international campaign to silence Assange. We didn't do it because we're masochists who like to get into fights on the Internet. We did it because once rape charges break into the news cycle, lives depend on what gets said about them. I have no way of knowing whether Assange is guilty as charged. It's also obvious that the timing and ferocity of Interpol's prosecution of Assange is politically motivated.
Had the backlash against Assange's arrest focused on Interpol's hypocrisy, my colleagues and I would have been free to join and strengthen that critique. Predator Theory. A guest-post by Thomas.
[Trigger Warning, this entire discussion is about rape, rapists, rape methodology and rape-supportive culture] Readers of Yes Means Yes Blog may notice that this largely duplicates my prior writing on Lisak, and I have lifted passages of my own earlier posts wholesale. Though the stranger rape remains entrenched as the paradigm of “real” rape, of rape that is recognized as such, it is not actually the norm. As most readers of feminist blogs know, acquaintance rapes are by far the more prevalent. In this area, understanding badly lags, and relatively recent research could change the understanding of exactly how acquaintance rapes happen, who commits them, and why. It is for this reason that I have been doing everything I can to popularize the work of University of Massachusetts professor David Lisak, and similar work by some of his colleagues.
Though the term is mine and not Lisak’s, the substance of the research can be summarized by the title of this post. The miniskirt made him do it. That 'some' guys up there? That's all the qualification you get, given the fact that from now on I am analyzing the viewpoint behind those who make this argument (in the mistaken notion that it gets men off the hook for their actions). The thinking described in this post is not therefore my own; it is me attempting to parse out the beliefs that are necessary to support a worldview that would find an offense in what many other men would find attractive, and which any sensible person finds unoffensive.
The 'she asked for it' myth always starts with a mini skirt. And a tube top. Or maybe a halter top. She asked for it goes something like this: a woman wearing skimpy clothes wants attention, though she denies it. She is in danger, end of subject, that's it. Anybody who tries the 'involuntary starving dog, etc., etc. Oh, can you hear that? Consent to one thing---say, harmless glances---- is not a blanket release to any guy in the vicinity to physically attack her. Why Rape Isn’t One Big Misunderstanding. Here at the Sexist, one of the most persistent rape myths offered up to excuse sexual assault is the idea that rape is just one big misunderstanding.