Tag Archives: Sexual Assault

News

New research shows that drug-facilitated sexual assault is a myth

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Story in the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Suzanne at Big Blue Wave)

Excerpt:

A toxicology expert from the Forensic Science Service, which analyses evidence for the police, told the Mail he had come across only one sample of blood or urine containing Rohypnol – the most commonly talked about ‘date-rape’ drug – in the past decade.

‘The reality is drink spiking is very, very rare’, said senior forensic scientist Michael Scott-Ham. ‘Alcohol itself is the problem.’

A controversial study, published last week, claimed drink spiking is an ‘urban myth’, a modern scapegoat for a generation of women who cannot face the fact that the vast amounts of alcohol many are imbibing could be in any way responsible for a loss of control, which can have devastating consequences.

‘Something very curious is going on,’ says Dr Adam Burgess, who spent a year researching the issue at the University of ‘s school of social policy for a project funded by the British Academy.

‘How can you account for this great big gap between lack of any evidence for drink spiking and what so many women believe is going on?

‘There’s a displacement exercise going on here. Why, despite all the evidence, do women so readily blame the spiker rather than the amount of alcohol they are drinking? That is the real issue here.’

[…]Could it be that women instinctively feel that if they admit to themselves how much they had drunk they would also be admitting they were somehow to blame for putting themselves at risk?

Believing your drink was spiked transfers the blame to a malevolent, external force, something which women have no control over. It shifts responsibility.

[…]Dr Burgess and his team interviewed 236 women at three universities in Kent, Sussex and London during 2006 and 2007.

They sought to investigate students’ knowledge of ‘date rape’ drugs, whether they or someone they knew had been a victim and whether they had changed their behaviour in relation to the perceived threat.

And consider closely how the attitudes of these women diverge from reality, such that they perceive themselves as helpless victims, even though they are in fact directly responsible for their own misfortunes.

Only ten out of the 236 claimed to have experienced drink spiking personally and none had been subject to sexual assault.

Yet 55 per cent claimed to have known someone whose drink had been spiked.

But among respondents, 75 per cent believed having a drink spiked with drugs was a more significant risk factor for sexual assault than drinking alcohol or taking drugs, despite the fact that police believe the opposite is true.

Another pivotal study offers further evidence that alcohol is the drug to be guarded against.

The study, conducted by the Forensic Science Service in 2005, examined 1,014 cases of ‘drug facilitated sexual assault’ by analysing blood and urine samples from victims gathered by police forces in England and .

In only 21 – about 2 per cent – were traces of drugs found that the women had not taken voluntarily.

These included Ecstasy, gammahydroxybutyrate (GHB) and tranquillisers. Alcohol was picked up in 46 per cent of cases. Illegal drugs such as cannabis and cocaine were in 34 per cent of cases.

Suzanne, who is pro-life, adds:

I am certain that massive amounts of alcohol consumption contributes to abortions in this country.

If you’re a woman who drinks large amounts of alcohol around strange men looking to score, you’re placing yourself in danger. That is the reality.

Unfortunately, people have a strange way of denying reality.

[…]You are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of your actions. Doing something stupid under the influence of alcohol is one of them. That’s obvious. So don’t get drunk.

Well said!

My previous article on women behaving irresponsibly is here. An article from Laura of Pursuing Holiness also talked about the danger of women refusing to take responsibility for their own choices. Her article has a lot of scary examples. And a previous post that documents how leniently women are treated when committing domestic violence is here. According to the best available research, women commit acts of domestic violence at about the same rate as men, even though male victims are almost never recognized by social services.

News

Lehigh University student could stand trial for false rape accusation

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First, here’s the story from Lehigh Valley Live.

Excerpt:

A 19-year-old Lehigh University student who allegedly made a false report about being raped by a campus police officer waived a preliminary hearing today and could stand trial.

Brielynne Neumann, of Shrewsbury, Mass., was lying in the center of Parkhill Street at 11:49 p.m. Sept. 3 when Bethlehem police approached her, according to court records. She identified herself as Brei Scano and gave a fake date of birth, records say.
The lie backfired when police, who claim she was intoxicated, took her to her sorority house to verify her identity, records say. Neumann then told officers she had been raped the day before by a man who claimed to be a Lehigh University police officer, records say.

Bethlehem police turned the investigation over to Pennsylvania State Police, who interviewed Neumann on Sept. 4. According to records, Neumann told a state trooper a different tale then the one she spun for Bethlehem police. She told the trooper she got into a car with a man who said he was a police officer; he groped her before she fled, records say.

When the trooper asked Neumann to sign her statement, she refused, according to police, and recanted the entire story. The trooper wrote in the criminal affidavit, “She admitted that she made the whole thing up.”

So, this woman was drunk in a public place even though she was under the legal drinking age. To cover up her indiscretions and to blame others and appear as a victim, she invented a false rape accusation. I understand that this was a stressful situation for her, but imagine the problems she could have created by getting innocent men in trouble, as happened with the Duke Lacrosse players or the Tawana Brawley case or the Hofstra university case.

According to one study, false rape accusations are commonly used by women to provide an alibi for some other crime they are guilty of committing. The study lists this reason as one of the three reasons why women invent false rape accusations.

Excerpt:

A study of rape allegations in Indiana over a nine-year period revealed that over 40% were shown to be false — not merely unproven. According to the author, “These false allegations appear to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and attention. False rape allegations are not the consequence of a gender-linked aberration, as frequently claimed, but reflect impulsive and desperate efforts to cope with personal and social stress situations.” ( Kanin EJ. Arch Sex Behav. 1994 Feb;23(1):81-92 False rape allegations. )

In 1985, a study of 556 rape allegations found that 27% accusers recanted when faced with a polygraph (which can be ordered in the military), and independent evaluation showed a false accusation rate of 60%. (McDowell, Charles P., Ph.D. “False Allegations.” Forensic Science Digest, (publication of the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations), Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 1985), p. 64.)

Feminist Wendy McElroy writes about the cases of Tucker Carlson and John Fund:

In his forthcoming biography Politicians, Partisans and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News, Crossfire co-host Tucker Carlson discusses another motive that underlies some false accusations. In 2001, a woman he had never met alleged he had raped her in Louisville, a city he had never visited. After $14,000 in defensive legal bills, Carlson discovered that the woman had a chronic mental disorder. He decided not to sue for redress since it would further link his name with the word “rape.”

And it happened to John Fund of the Wall Street Journal:

Consider journalist John Fund who was arrested on charges of domestic violence and publicly excoriated for sexual misconduct. The charges were later dropped.

Columnist Eric Alterman recently published an article entitled “Who Framed John Fund?” There, Alterman chronicled the false accusations that haunt Fund. Once a high-profile presence on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and a frequent television commentator, Fund now writes for the WSJ‘s far less prestigious Opinionjournal.com and is rarely on TV.

On his Web site, Fund posted a notarized affidavit from his accuser, stating, “Mr. Fund has not been abusive to me contrary to what I said in reports to the Jersey City police.” He has also posted the transcript of a deposition in which she testifies under oath that she has “borderline personality disorder.” Nevertheless, it is not clear whether Fund’s career will recover.

For a more detailed treatment of how false accusations are used to gain the advantage in divorce courts, check out this essay by Dr. Stephen Baskerville. Andrea Peyser writes in the NY Post about how these false accusations can lead to real victims of sexual violence not being taken seriously. I think that the solution is to prosecute false accusers . Their sentences should be proportional to the sentence that the victim of their accusation would have received, if convicted.

News

Members of Canadian socialist parties oppose child sex-trafficking crime bill

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Here is the story from the Winnipeg Free Press. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

Manitoba MP Joy Smith’s quest to have child sex traffickers hit with mandatory minimum sentences survived a challenge Tuesday when a Bloc Québécois amendment to her bill was defeated.

[…]The legislation creates a new offence for trafficking of people under 18 and sets five years as the mandatory minimum sentence upon conviction. The bill sets six years as the minimum sentence for trafficking minors with aggravating factors such as sexual assault.

Currently convictions of human trafficking don’t separate victims by age. The maximum sentence is 14 years (life with aggravating factors) but there is no minimum.

Smith says too many convictions under the law since it came into effect almost five years ago have seen sentences far shorter than five years.

Joy Smith is a Conservative Party MP. Here is the roll call of people who voted against protecting children from sexual predators. 46 MPs from the two socialist parties (the Bloc Quebecois and the New Democrat Party) voted against the bill. The NDP is the English socialist part of Canada, and the Bloc Quebecois is the French socialist party of Canada.

Socialists receive lots of votes from criminals and are generally soft on crime, because they believe that law-abiding victims of crime are actually responsible for criminal behavior, and that criminals are the real victims of crime. That is how people on the left think. Good is evil. Evil is good. Does this remind anyone of the ACORN story?

Conservative MP introduces pro-life petition

In other news, Andrew notifies me that my favorite Canadian MP, Maurice Vellacott, has recently introduced a petition to recognize that abortion causes pain to unborn children.

Excerpt:

Liberal MP Marlene Jennings (Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Lachine) this week put forward a petition calling on the government to adopt effective animal welfare legislation because of the fact that animals feel pain and suffering.

In response, pro-life Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott noted before Parliament that preborn human children also experience pain. However, this fact is not recognized in Canadian law, which allows for legal abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

Presenting his own petition, Vellacott (Saskatoon-Wanuskewin) stated, “Mr. Speaker, as a follow up to that series of petitions in respect of the pain that animals feel and in view of the fact that babies in the womb for the entire nine months feel some considerable pain caused by the abortion procedures that are used in this country, these petitioners in the country of Canada note that in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms everyone has a right to life, freedom from pain and freedom from the kind of assault fetuses experience in the womb…”

Again, the left-wing Liberal Party MP is terribly concerned about animal pain, but not concerned at all about allowing innocent unborn children to be killed. On the other hand, Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott is a solid social and fiscal conservative. He is especially active on men’s rights issues like shared parenting. He has an earned doctorate from Trinity International University in Chicago.

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