...And This Too

Hard Times for Women Living on the Edge: Economic Anxieties Send Domestic-Abuse Rates Soaring

By Nick Turse, Tomdispatch.com. Posted May 11, 2009.

Even in good times, life for poor working women can be an obstacle-filled struggle to get by. In an economic crisis, it can be hell.

Even in good times, life for poor working women can be an obstacle-filled struggle to get by. In bad times, it can be hell.

Now, throw domestic violence into the mix and the hardships grow exponentially -- as I discovered recently when I talked with "Tyrie" while she was at her job at a child care center in one of New York City's outer boroughs.

"This economy is hitting everybody really hard," the fortysomething woman, originally from Trinidad, tells me. But it's hitting her harder than many. Tyrie is a domestic-violence survivor whose personal suffering has been compounded by the global economic crisis. And she isn't alone.

"Clients are coming in more severely battered with more serious injuries," reports Catherine Shugrue dos Santos of Sanctuary for Families, New York state's largest nonprofit organization exclusively dedicated to dealing with domestic-violence victims and their children. "This leads us to believe that the intensity of the violence may be escalating. It also means that people may be waiting until the violence has escalated before they leave."

"Difficult financial times do not cause domestic violence," says Brian Namey from the National Network to End Domestic Violence. "But they can exacerbate it. When there are tough financial times, couples can be under greater pressure, have higher stress levels."

In fact, a 2004 study by the National Institute of Justice reported that women whose male partners experienced two or more periods of unemployment over five years were three times more likely to be abused.

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/139943/hard_times_for_women_living_on_the_edge%3A_economic_anxieties_send_domestic-abuse_rates_soaring_/

And Some More...

'The Most Humiliating Experience I Have Ever Had' -- Why Is the Supreme Court So Callous About Privacy?

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted May 9, 2009.

A teenage girl is strip-searched and gets snickered at by old men in robes for challenging it -- what's so funny about the Fourth Amendment?

Savana Redding was a 13-year-old eighth-grader at Arizona's Safford Middle School when she was pulled out of class one day by her school's vice principal, Kerry Wilson, and told to bring her books with her.

Rumors had been swirling that a group of students were packing prescription ibuprofen pills -- "contraband" -- and were planning to pass them out at lunch. Redding had been falsely accused of carrying the illicit substance, and Wilson took her into his office for questioning.

She later said in a sworn affadavit:

"Once in his office Mr. Wilson started discussing the importance of telling the truth. I told him I would tell the truth. Mr. Wilson then asked me if I would mind if they searched my stuff. I knew that they would not find anything, so I agreed to the search."

Redding's backpack was searched and, indeed, nothing was found. But the vice principal was not convinced. He ordered her to go with a faculty member to the nurse's office.

"I went to the nurse's office. Mrs. Romero asked me to remove my jacket, socks and shoes. The school nurse, Mrs. Schwallier, was in the bathroom washing her hands. When Mrs. Schwalleir came out, they told me to remove my pants and shirt.

"I took off my clothes while they both watched. Mrs. Romero searched the pants and shirt and found nothing.

"Then they asked me to pull my bra out and to the side and shake it, exposing my breasts. They also told me to pull the underwear out at the crotch and shake it exposing my pelvic area.

"I was embarrassed and scared, but felt I would be in more trouble if I did not do what they asked. I held my head down so that they could not see that I was about to cry."

Redding called the strip search "the most humiliating experience I have ever had." Her mother, who did not find out about the search until her daughter came home from school, sued.

Redding's initial lawsuit was thrown out, but later the ACLU represented her before the San Francisco Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that her Fourth Amendment rights had been violated. This past January, the Supreme Court agreed to consider the decision. Oral arguments took place on April 21.

The Savana Redding case has outraged people across the political spectrum. But according to some who attended the oral arguments in Washington last month, when it came time to discuss it, the justices largely seemed not to get why.

"Editorialists and pundits have found much to hate in what happened to Savana Redding," wrote Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick in the hours following the oral arguments. "Yet the court today finds much to admire."

Never mind the amicus brief filed by the National Association of Social Workers, the National Association of School Psychologists and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (among others), arguing that "a strip search of a 13-year-old student by school authorities is an extraordinarily intrusive search" and warning that "strip searches can cause severe emotional and psychological harm to children." (Savana Redding eventually dropped out of school.) By and large, the eight men on the bench kept returning to the same question -- with the exception of Justice Clarence Thomas, who has not asked a question since 2006 -- why is this such a big deal?

"I'm trying to work out why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym, they do fairly frequently," mused Justice Antonin Scalia. "… How bad is this, underclothes?"

Meanwhile, Justice Stephen Breyer seemed to think that searching Redding's underwear was a pretty reasonable thing to do, since that's where any normal kid would hide prescription drugs.

"I mean, I hate to tell you, but it seems to me like a logical thing when an adolescent child has some pills or something, they know people are looking for them, they will stick them in their underwear. I'm not saying everyone would, but I mean, somebody who thinks that that's a fairly normal idea for some adolescent with some illegal drugs to think of, I don't think he's totally out to lunch, is he? "

("Do you have any studies on this?" Breyer asked lawyers for Redding, while adding "I doubt it.")

http://www.alternet.org/rights/139887/%27the_most_humiliating_experience_i_have_ever_had%27_--_why_is_the_supreme_court_so_callous_about_privacy/

Relevant Context for Today's OUAB Event

Is Porn That Depicts the Subjugation of Hispanic Women Tied to the Rise of Hate Crimes Against Latinos?

By Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's Blog. Posted May 9, 2009.

Lou Dobbs cheers on anti-Latino backlash, while pornography provides the context for the dangerous stereotypes.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation tells us there has been a steep rise in hate crimes against Latinos in the United States in the past six years.

Hate crimes against Latinos rose by nearly 35 percent from 2003 to 2006, a mind-numbing increase that shows no signs of slowing down.

Just last week, an all-white jury in rural Pennsylvania acquitted two white teens of aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, third-degree murder and ethnic intimidation for the beating death of Luis Ramirez.

Experts attribute the rise in hate crimes against Latinos to the parallel rise in anti-immigrant diatribes put forth by ratings-starved nativist TV and radio talking heads like Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, the latter of whom was this week banned from visiting England because of his incitement of hate.

Even though immigrants come to the U.S. from more than 200 nations, and the majority of "illegal" immigrants in the U.S. are those who have come on educational or work visas and simply overstayed, the mainstream media and aforementioned pundits inexplicably continue to pretend all immigrants are Latinos who crawl like roaches across the border to steal jobs and spread disease.

They also pretend: all immigrants are Mexican, though only 43 percent of immigrants to the U.S. come from Mexico; all Latinos are Mexican, even though there are 30 nations in Latin America; all Mexicans are "illegal immigrants," even though millions of Mexican Americans have roots in the United States that predate the arrival of the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock. All too often in the U.S. media, history is an inconvenience.

This steady drumbeat of hate, fueled by widespread misinformation and stereotypes, has led, predictably, to the mainstreaming of fear and loathing of Latinos in general, and Mexicans in particular.

This is nothing new. We have seen the same sort of rise in ethnic and racial hatred played out in many nations during times of economic crisis; scapegoating a powerless group (Jews by Hitler, East Indians by Uganda's Idi Amin, etc.) is a time-honored and desperate technique employed by the powerful when they have led their citizens to economic ruin and wish to sidestep the blame.

Internet Porn: The Invisible Perv(asive) Pundit

While Dobbs and other mainstream talking heads clearly have had a powerful influence on the nation's surging anti-Latino/immigrant backlash, there is one equally powerful, influential and profitable sector of the media that no one is talking about: Pornography.

While few users of the Internet will admit to using pornography, facts published by Familysafemedia.com suggest that nearly half of all Internet users seek pornography online.

There are 4.2 million porn sites on the Web, totaling more than 400 million Internet pages. An astounding 25 percent of all search engine requests are for pornography. Pornography profits each year exceed the profits of NBC, ABC and CBS combined.

And yet no one in the rising-Latino-hate debate has thought to look at this sector of the media for indications of violence and hatred toward Hispanics, and Hispanic women in particular. Except me. Because I'm practical like that, and I'm not afraid to go there. Or anywhere, really.

Rape of Latinas Popular on the Net

I've been keeping tabs on the popular free porn site Redtube.com, which is essentially the X-rated version of YouTube, and have found a very disturbing trend.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, videos claiming to depict the rape of Latina maids or Mexican women seeking green cards, etc., have appeared in the top five videos of the day, often in the No. 1 spot, with high ratings from the site's users.

Often, these videos depict women crying, begging for mercy and enduring unwanted anal sex. (The popularity of Latinas in these videos is all the more alarming when one considers that Latina actresses comprise less than half of 1 percent of all TV and movie roles in the United States.)

It is no coincidence that as hate toward Latinos and immigrants rises, Hispanic women are being presented in a very popular, profitable (and, we pretend, invisible) media outlet as the ideal rape victims.

The Redtube videos routinely show Hispanic women begging for money, for citizenship, trying to simply do their jobs of, say, cleaning toilets, but often "getting what's coming to them" instead. The punishing "what's coming to them" theme is rampant and popular. Someone, somewhere, is getting off on this. Lots of someones.

Direct Impact?

The link between pornography and violence against women is a subject of much debate. While researchers at the University of California, San Diego and University of California, Berkeley found that watching porn might reduce rape, researchers at Columbia have concluded that watching violent videos or video games increases violent behavior in the viewers.

The most recent statistics on rape and ethnicity published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics reflect the time period 1993 to 2000, meaning they would not represent the spike in hate against Latinos since 2003.

It will be very interesting to see if there has been a quantifiable increase in sexual violence against Hispanics for this most recent time period.

Why I Believe Sexual Violence is on the Rise Against Hispanic Women

While I've always been on the receiving end of "go back to Mexico"-type hate mail from the time I began working as a staff writer at the Boston Globe, I have noticed a change in the tone of my hate mail in recent years.

Now, they are apt to have sexual overtones along with the "go back to Mexico" message. They are also increasingly signed by people who say they are "angry white males."

One such person recently called a police department to tell them he planned to find me and cut my clitoris off with a fish knife. Thankfully, he has not found me yet.

Rape is considered a separate category from "hate crime," in most instances (not sure why, frankly), and I was unable to find any statistics about the rise in rapes of Hispanic women.

I suspect there has been an increase in this type of crime, and that it has paralleled the general rise in hate crimes against Latinos reported by the FBI. I also suspect that in the case of undocumented women, this crime is going entirely unreported.

With Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio now asking armed civilian posses to go after "illegals," you can only imagine what sorts of men might sign up for the task and what they might do to women.

Good Girls Don't Talk About Porn

I know it is considered impolite to discuss pornography in the context of serious media. I know firsthand that the mere mention of pornography will illicit more lascivious chuckles than discussion in America's newsrooms, the vast majority of which are headed by men.

But I also know it is irresponsible not to pay attention to a medium with such broad reach and impact; when I was a reporter at the L.A. Times and discovered that the porn industry eclipsed Hollywood in sales, I suggested the paper add a porn beat. I was laughed at. The male editors (and they were all males) guffawed and snuffled in their bow ties. Good girls, and respectable news outlets, they informed me, did not pay attention to pornography.

But even good girls know, better than anyone, how powerfully pornography shapes the behavior of men -- in the bedroom and out.

I have little doubt that the increase in Internet pornography depicting the rapes of Hispanic women is playing a vital role in the rise of hate crimes against Hispanic women.

I suspect there is a reciprocal relationship, and that the rise in hatemongering and scapegoating of Latinos/immigrants on CNN and talk radio is actually leading to increased (undiscussed) demand for degrading and violent pornography depicting white males abusing Hispanic/immigrant females.

Can Porn Be Hate Speech?

I believe violent pornography targeting a specific racial, ethnic or religious group is hate speech. I am not alone.

Just as England chose to ban Michael Savage for inciting hatred, Canada ruled in 1992 to outlaw violent sexual material, ruling it a form of hate speech.

I do not know what effect this has had on the distribution of such material via Internet, but I do believe such a ruling in the U.S. would go a long way toward getting the media and hate-crime watch groups to pay attention to disturbing trends in porn, rather than laughing it off.

See more stories tagged with: hate crimes, porn, latinos, hate speech, hispanic women

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez is a recovering journalist and practicing author. Read more of her work at her blog.

NOTICE

TO THE PUBLIC

Progressive groups and collectives all across Columbus are converging today, Monday 11 May, at 7:30PM at Hitchcock Hall (2070 Neil Avenue) to protest an OUAB-sponsored event featuring self-proclaimed misogynist Tucker Max (see Ohio Union Activies Board at OSU Sponsoring Misogynist for more details). Any and all who are against the celebration of sexual humiliation and violence are strongly encouraged to come stand in solidarity with others who are appalled that this event is taking place with the use of student activity funds.

NEW PRESIDENT OF THE PEACH DISTRICT

to all the wonderful readers and residents of the peach district experiment-

i have exciting news

spontaneously ive relinquished my role as 'president'

i will maintain all of my current roles... such as ideology engine...idea spinner and general hype guy... poet and town cryer...partial organizer etc. etc.
however the functions of the presidency (which are truly symbolic and nothing more than anyone elses role in an obviously counter hegemonic space) will be taken
over by fariba massah... a young persian american woman who was born to govern an instinctually feminine space. more to come on this front... also can we please have an organized sit
down hang out drink it down meeting at on the fly about the festivus...




cheers
luck
and peachy keen

brett

FOR THOSE OF YOU NOT CURRENTLY IN THE LOOP ABOUT THE PEACH DISTRICT PLEASE FOLLOW LINK I ASSUME IS PROVIDED TO THE RIGHT...!

woo

I PROPOSE A WAR ON TouRISM