Dave Zirin : Steubenville and the Bond Between Jock Culture and Rape Culture

Image from Serious Insanity.

The verdict:
Steubenville shows the bond
between jock culture and rape culture

''I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.'' -- Bob Knight, Hall of Fame basketball coach, 1988.

By Dave Zirin / TThe Rag Blog / March 21, 2013

Progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 22, 2013, 2-3 p.m. (CDT), on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live on the Internet. The show will be rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, Sunday at 10 a.m. (EDT). Zirin will speak live at Chicago's Heartland Cafe, Sunday, March 24, at 3 p.m., and at the Belo Center for New Media on the University of Texas campus in Austin, Monday, April 1, from 7-9 p.m., an event sponsored by the Texas Program in Sports and Media.

As a sportswriter, there is one part of the Steubenville High School rape trial that has kept rattling in my brain long after the defendants were found guilty. It was a text message sent by one of the now convicted rapists, team quarterback Trent Mays. Mays had texted a friend that he wasn't worried about the possibility of rape charges because his football coach, local legend Reno Saccoccia, "took care of it." In another text, Mays said of Coach Reno, "Like, he was joking about it so I'm not worried."

In this exchange we see an aspect of the Steubenville case that should resonate in locker rooms and athletic departments across the country: the connective tissue between jock culture and rape culture. Rape culture is not just about rape. It's about the acceptance of women as “things” to be used and disposed of, which then creates a culture where sexual assault -- particularly at social settings -- is normalized.

We learned at the Steubenville trial that not only did a small group of football players commit a crime, but 50 of their peers, men and women, saw what was happening and chose to do nothing, effectively not seeing a crime at all.

We need to ask the question whether the jock culture at Steubenville was a catalyst for this crime. We need to ask whether there's something inherent in the men's sports of the 21st century, which so many lionize as a force for good, that can also create a rape culture of violent entitlement. I am not asking if playing sports propels young men to rape. I am asking if the central features of men’s sports -- hero worship, entitlement and machismo -- make incidents like Steubenville more likely to be replicated.

There are many germs in the Petri dish of sports. Growing up I had the great fortune of big-hearted, politically-conscious coaches, some of whom patrolled sexism in the locker room with a particular vigilance. As the great Joe Ehrmann has written so brilliantly, a "transformational coach" can work wonders. But different germs also exist. Ken Dryden, Hall of Fame NHL goalie, once said, ''It's really a sense of power that comes from specialness... anyone who finds himself at the center of the world they're in has a sense of impunity.''

On colleges, there is reason to believe that the same teamwork, camaraderie and "specialness" produced by sports can be violently perverted to create a pack mentality that either spurs sexual violence or makes players fear turning in their teammates. A groundbreaking 1994 study showed that college athletes make up 3.3 percent of male students but 19 percent of those accused of sexual assault. One of the study's authors, Jeff Benedict, said,

Does this study say participation in college sports causes this? Clearly, no. We're not saying that. We just think that at some point there is an association between sports and sexual assault... the farther you go up, the more entitlements there are. And one of those entitlements is women.

That was two decades ago but there is no indication that anything has changed. A February 2012 Boston Globe article about sexual assault charges levied against members of the Boston University hockey team, reporter Mary Carmichael wrote about the findings of Sarah McMahon, "a Rutgers University researcher who studies violence against women."

McMahon "said it is unclear whether college athletes are more likely to commit sexual crimes than other students. But she said her work had found a unique sense of entitlement, sexual and otherwise, among some male college athletes, especially those in high-profile or revenue-producing sports like BU hockey."

You can't extricate the entitlement at the heart of jock culture from McMahon's comments about its particular prevalence in revenue-producing sports. The insane amounts of money in so-called amateur athletics and the greasy desire of adults in charge of cash-strapped universities to get their share also must bear responsibility for rape culture in the locker room.

They have created a system where teenage NCAA athletes can’t be paid for what they produce so they receive a different kind of wage: worship. Adults treat them like heroes, students treat them like rock stars, and amidst classes, club meetings, and exams, there exists a gutter economy where women become a form of currency. You're a teenager being told that you are responsible for the economic viability of your university and everything is yours for the taking. This very set-up is a Steubenville waiting to happen.

If people think that this doesn't translate to high school, they're wrong. I spoke with Jon Greenberg, an ESPN journalist and also a graduate of Steubenville High. He describes a school "with a pretty high poverty rate" that was still able to get state funds to build "a swimming pool, a new on-campus gym, cafeteria and more." The dynastic "Big Red" football program drove those changes.

As Greenberg says,

The football players themselves, at least in my experience, weren't treated as heroes or above the law, but the team itself was put on a pedestal, especially when they were good... There are some very good people who played Big Red football and coached football. But there needs to be some changes, most importantly a very serious seminar, for all male students, on the definition of rape and similar curriculum.

In thinking about Steubenville, thinking about my own experiences playing sports, thinking about athletes I've interviewed and know, I believe that a locker room left to its own devices will drift toward becoming a breeding ground for rape culture. You don't need a Coach Reno or a Bob Knight to make that happen. You just need good people to say or do nothing.

As such, a coach or a player willing to stand up, risk ridicule, and actually teach young men not to rape, can actually make all the difference in the world. We need interventionist, transformative coaches in men’s sports who talk openly about these issues. We need an economic setup in amateur sports that does away with their gutter economy. But most of all, we need people who recognize the existence of rape culture, both on and off teams, to no longer be silent.

As for Steubenville, Coach Reno needs to be shown the door, never to be allowed to mold young minds again. Football revenue should go toward creating a district-wide curriculum about rape and stopping violence against women. And "Jane Doe," the young woman at the heart of this case, should be given whatever resources she and her family needs to move if they choose, pay for college, or just have access to whatever mental health services she and her family may need.

After the trial, testimony and verdict, they deserve nothing less.

This article was also posted to and first published at The Nation.

[Dave Zirin is sports editor at The Nation and the author of the new book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down (The New Press). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

See "Dave Zirin, the Man Who Politicized the Sports Pages" -- Ron Jacobs' review of Zirin's latest book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down -- on The Rag Blog.

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Jordan Flaherty : Challenging Louisiana's 'Crime Against Nature' Law

Harassment of New Orleans sex workers. Photo from ColorLines.
Justice Dept. calls law discriminatory:
Victims fight Louisiana's repressive
'Crime Against Nature' statute

Legal action comes with increased scrutiny from the federal government over the conduct of the New Orleans Police Department.

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / March 21, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- Eve is a transgender woman living in rural southern Louisiana. She was molested as a child and left home as a teenager. Homeless and alone, she was forced to trade sex for survival. While still a teenager, she was arrested and charged with a Crime Against Nature, an archaic Louisiana law originally designed to penalize sex acts associated with gays and lesbians.

Now Eve is one of nine plaintiffs fighting the law in a federal civil rights complaint that advocates hope will finally put this official discrimination to an end.

This legal action comes in the context of increased scrutiny from the federal government over the conduct of the New Orleans Police Department. A U.S. Justice Department investigation of the NOPD, released last week, found "reasonable cause to believe that patterns and practices of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law occurred in several areas," including "racial and ethnic profiling and lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender (LGBT) discrimination."

The report specifically mentioned Louisiana's Crime Against Nature law, calling it "a statute whose history reflects anti-LGBT sentiment." The report also concluded that investigators "found reasonable cause to believe that NOPD practices lead to discriminatory treatment of LGBT individuals."


Punishing women

Eve, who asked that her real name and age remain confidential, spent two years in prison. During her time behind bars she was raped and contracted HIV. Upon release, she was forced to register in the state’s sex offender database. The words “sex offender” now appear on her driver’s license.

“I have tried desperately to change my life,” she says, but her status on the database stands in the way of housing and other programs. “When I present my ID for anything,” she says, “the assumption is that you’re a child molester or a rapist. The discrimination is just ongoing and ongoing.”

Eve was penalized under Louisiana’s 205-year-old Crime Against Nature statute, a blatantly discriminatory law that legislators have maneuvered to keep on the state’s books for the purpose of turning sex workers into felons.

As enforced, the law specifically singles out oral and anal sex for greater punishment for those arrested for prostitution, including requiring those convicted to register as sex offenders in a public database. Advocates say the law has further isolated and targeted poor women of color, transgender women, and especially those who are forced to trade sex for food or a place to sleep at night.

In 2003, the Supreme Court outlawed sodomy laws with its decision in Lawrence v. Texas. That ruling should have invalidated Louisiana’s law entirely. Instead, the state has chosen to only enforce the portion of the law that concerns “solicitation” of a crime against nature. The decision on whether to charge accused sex workers with a felony instead of Louisiana’s misdemeanor prostitution law is left entirely in the hands of police and prosecutors.

“This leaves the door wide open to discriminatory enforcement targeting poor black women, transgender women, and gay men for a charge that carries much harsher penalties,” says police misconduct attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie, a co-counsel in a new federal lawsuit challenging the statute.

A media-fueled national panic about child molesters has brought sex offender registries to every state. But advocates warn that, across the U.S., these registries have been used disproportionately against African Americans and other communities of color, and are often used for purposes outside of their original intent.

Louisiana, however, is the only state in the U.S. that requires people who have been convicted of crimes that do not involve minors or sexual violence to register as sex offenders.

In 1994, Congress passed Megan’s Law, also known as the Wetterling Act, which mandated that states create systems for registering sex offenders. The act was amended in 1996 to require public disclosure of the names on the registries and again in 2006 to require that sex offenders stay in the public registry for at least 15 years.

Megan’s Law was clearly not targeted at prostitution. However, Louisiana lawmakers opted to apply the registry to the crimes against nature statute as well, and at that moment started down the path to a new level of punishment for sex work. “This archaic law is being used to mark people with a modern day scarlet letter,” says attorney Alexis Agathocleus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, another party to the lawsuit.

People convicted under the Louisiana law must carry a state ID with the words “sex offender” printed below their name. If they have to evacuate because of a hurricane, they must stay in a special shelter for sex offenders that has no separate facilities for men and women.

They have to pay a $60 annual registration fee, in addition to $250 to $750 to print and mail postcards to their neighbors every time they move. The postcards must show their names and addresses, and often they are required to include a photo. Failing to register and pay the fees, a separate crime, can carry penalties of up to 10 years in prison.

Women and men on the registry will also find their names, addresses, and convictions printed in the newspaper and published in an online sex offender database. The same information is also displayed at public sites like schools and community centers. Women -- including one mother of three -- have complained that because of their appearance on the registry, they have had men come to their homes demanding sex. A plaintiff in the suit had rocks thrown at her by neighbors. “This has forced me to live in poverty, be on food stamps and welfare,” explains a man who was on the list. “I’ve never done that before.”

In Orleans Parish, 292 people are on the registry for selling sex, versus 85 people convicted of forcible rape and 78 convicted of “indecent behavior with juveniles.” Almost 40 percent of those registered in Orleans Parish are there solely because they were accused of offering anal or oral sex for money.

Seventy-five percent of those on the database for Crime Against Nature are women, and 80 percent are African American. Evidence gathered by advocates suggests a majority are poor or indigent.

Legal advocates credit on-the-ground organizing and the advocacy of the group Women With A Vision (WWAV) for making them aware of this discriminatory law. WWAV, a 20-year-old New Orleans-based organization, provides health care and other services to women involved in survival sex work.

“Many of these women are survivors of rape and domestic violence themselves,” says WWAV executive director Deon Haywood. “Yet they are being treated as predators.”

Advocates and attorneys announce lawsuit against New Orleans' "Crime Against Nature" ordinance. Photo from Louisian Justice Institute.

Plaintiffs tell their stories

Ian, another plaintiff in the legal challenge to the Crime Against Nature statute, was homeless from the age of 13, and began trading sex for survival. When an undercover officer approached him and asked him for sex, Ian asked for money. “All I said was $50,” he says, “And they put me away for four years.”

In prison, Ian was raped by a correction officer and by other prisoners, and like Eve, he contracted HIV. Now, he says, potential employers see the words “sex offender” written on his ID and no one will hire him. “Do I deserve to be punished any more than I’ve already been punished?” he asks. “I was 13 years old. That’s the only way I knew how to survive.”

Hiroke, a New Orleans resident and another plaintiff in the suit, spoke on a call set up by advocates. “I had just graduated from high school and was just coming out as transgender,” she says. Hiroke was arrested and convicted while still a teenager.

As she began to describe her experience, Hiroke’s voice began to shake. “I was being held with men in jail at the time...” she began. Then there was silence on the line. Holding back tears, she then apologized for being unable to continue.

The Louisiana legislature recently passed a reform of the Crime Against Nature statute, but for the vast majority of those affected, the change makes little to no difference. Although the new law takes away the registration component for a first conviction, a second conviction requires 15 years on the registry, and up to five years imprisonment. A third conviction mandates a lifetime on the registry.

More than 538 men and women remain on the registry because they were convicted of offering anal or oral sex, with more added almost every day.

The legal challenge to the Crime Against Nature law, called Doe v. Jindal, has been filed in Louisiana’s U.S. District Court Eastern District on behalf of nine anonymous plaintiffs. It was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, attorney Andrea J. Ritchie, and the Law Clinic at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.

The anonymous plaintiffs include a grandmother, a mother of four, three transgender women, and a man, all of whom have been required to register as sex offenders from 15 years to life as a result of their convictions for the solicitation of oral sex for money.

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Mother Jones, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was also posted at The Louisiana Justice Institute version of this article originally appeared at ColorLines.com.]

• Also see "Culture of Abuse: Police Harassment of New Orleans Transgenders" by Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / April 20, 2011.

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Dave Lindorff : The Strange Case of Interpol's Red Alert

A supporter of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange holds up a placard outside the City of Westminster Magistrates Court in London. Photo from The Hindu / AP.

UPDATE: A British judge granted bail to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday, saying he must abide by strict bail conditions as he fights extradition to Sweden in a sex-crimes investigation...

Supporters outside City of Westminster Magistrates' Court erupted in cheers when they heard news of the judge's ruling. -- AP / NPR / December 14, 2010

Something is rotten:
The strange case of Interpol's Red Alert
on Julian Assange

By Dave Lindorff / December 13, 2010

The other Interpol Red Alert sought by Swedish prosecutors this year was for Jan Christer Wallenkurtz, a 58-year-old Swedish national wanted on multiple charges of alleged sex crimes and sex crimes against children.

Far be it from me to minimize the issue of rape, but to borrow from the Bard, in the case of the “rape” case being alleged against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (technically, Swedish prosecutors say it's not rape, it's "sex by surprise"), currently being held in a British jail without bail pending an extradition request from Stockholm: “Something is rotten in Sweden.”

As I wrote earlier, the alleged sexual crimes that Assange is currently being sought for by a Swedish prosecutor are:

1. Allegedly failing to halt an act of consensual sexual intercourse when his sex partner and host, Anna Ardin, claims she somehow became aware that the condom he was using had “split” and,

2. Having consensual sex with a second woman a few days later without informing her that he had just been with Ardin, and then, a day later, allegedly refusing to return a phone call on his cell phone, when she tried to call him to ask him to take an STD test.

(Assange says he had turned off and was not using his phone for fear he was being traced through it, not that refusing to take a call from a woman one recently slept with should be considered criminal. Cold or even cruel, maybe, but not justification for a rape charge!)

In most countries, including the U.S. and UK, these would not pass the test to be considered a crime, much less qualify as a category of “rape," but Swedish authorities, who in all of this year have only submitted one other request to Interpol for assistance in capturing a sex crimes suspect, asked the international police agency to issue a so-called Red Alert for Assange, who was subsquently asked by police in the UK, where he was staying, to turn himself in or face arrest.

(The other Interpol Red Alert sought by Swedish prosecutors this year was for Jan Christer Wallenkurtz, a 58-year-old Swedish national wanted on multiple charges of alleged sex crimes and sex crimes against children.)

You have to ask, given that Sweden has the highest per-capital number of reported rape cases in Europe, how it can be that only these two suspects -- Wallenkurtz and Assange -- are brought to Interpol.

You also have to wonder how it is that Assange -- charged only with consensual sex “offenses” -- is denied bail by a British court magistrate, despite having several people at his arraignment hearing, including a well-known British filmmaker, ready to post whatever bail might be required to assure his return to court for an extradition hearing, while even people charged with aggressive rape are apparently routinely released on bail in both the UK and Sweden.

Here’s an interesting letter that ran in The Guardian in England, authored by Katrin Axelsson, of the British organization Women Against Rape:

Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations. Women in Sweden don't fare better than we do in Britain when it comes to rape. Though Sweden has the highest per capita number of reported rapes in Europe and these have quadrupled in the last 20 years, conviction rates have decreased.

On 23 April 2010 Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul (respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden) wrote in the Göteborgs-Posten that "up to 90% of all reported rapes never get to court. In 2006 six people were convicted of rape though almost 4,000 people were reported." They endorsed Amnesty International's call for an independent inquiry to examine the rape cases that had been closed and the quality of the original investigations.



Assange, who it seems has no criminal convictions, was refused bail in England despite sureties of more than £120,000. Yet bail following rape allegations is routine. For two years we have been supporting a woman who suffered rape and domestic violence from a man previously convicted after attempting to murder an ex-partner and her children -- he was granted bail while police investigated.



There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women's safety. In the south of the U.S., the lynching of black men was often justified on grounds that they had raped or even looked at a white woman. Women don't take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst.

The long arm of the U.S. in this case is hard to miss here.

Especially in view of one of the latest WikiLeaks State Department cables to be disclosed in The New York Times, which in an article on Thursday laid out how the U.S. had strong-armed even the powerful German government into blocking German prosecutors from indicting and requesting the extradition to Germany of 13 CIA agents involved in the illegal kidnapping and renditioning to Bagram prison in Afghanistan of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen wrongly thought by the CIA to be a terrorist.

El-Masri was kidnapped by these agents in 2003, stripped, bound, placed in an adult diaper with a plug in his rectum, and flown by the CIA to Bagram, where he was repeatedly tortured, sodomized, injected with mind-altering drugs, and held for months, before being simply dropped off by the CIA on an Albanian roadside, after it was determined by the U.S. that a “mistake” had been made.

The U.S. did not want its rendition program and its policy of officially-sanctioned torture disclosed and so it pressed German authorities to drop all prosecution of the agency kidnappers, threatening “the implications for relations with the U.S.” (El-Masri has been barred from suing the U.S. government for damages.)

It strains credulity to believe that the same U.S. government that put such pressure on Germany, a NATO ally, is not behind Swedish prosecutors’ sudden intense interest in this preposterous case of consensual sex and a broken condom -- particularly as the initial prosecutor in the case dropped it after learning that the two women, far from being upset following their nights with Assange, had in one case thrown a party for him following the alleged incident, and in the other, left him in her bed while she went out to buy him breakfast.

(Both women reportedly sent twitters to friends bragging about their conquests, messages they later tried to have expunged from the Twitter system).

It also strains credulity to believe that the denial of bail to this particular suspect by a British court -- particularly given that he is not charged with any violent act, and has no criminal record -- is not the result of behind-the-scenes U.S. pressure.

Indeed, it appears that the U.S. is busy trumping up more serious charges against Assange, with his lawyers saying they are anticipating that the U.S. Justice Department (already reportedly in discussions with Swedish authorities about getting their hands on Assange), is planning soon to charge him under the 1917 Espionage statute, the same law that the Nixon Justice Department tried to use unsuccessfully against Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case. That could explain why efforts are being made to try to keep Assange held in a cell.

It could also explain why Assange is challenging the Swedish extradition request.

Opposition to the Afghan and Irag Wars is intense in the UK and is supported by the overwhelming majority of British citizens, which makes Assange something of a hero in Britain for his WikiLeaks exposes of the ongoing crimes by U.S. and UK forces in those conflicts. British government acquiescence to an extradition order from the U.S. on espionage charges would likely lead to massive opposition by British citizens.

Sweden, on the other hand, which is not a member of NATO, but which has some 500 troops participating in the "NATO" war in Afghanistan, does not face the same kind of popular opposition to its role, and Assange may fear that Sweden, a very small country, could be pressured much more easily to hand Assange over to U.S. authorities, with little resulting fuss from the Swedish public.

Back in the U.S., there has been no move by news organizations to come to Assange’s defense. In fact, the corporate media reaction to this whole issue has been the opposite. For the most part, the Swedish charges, and his arrest in Britain on the basis of the Interpol Red Alert, are reported as being about “rape,” without any explanation of the actual “violations,” which would not even rise to the level of a crime in the U.S.

Meanwhile, most editorial pages are condemning the violation of diplomatic secrecy, not the government’s efforts to shut down a source of important news about government ineptness, malfeasance, and deceit.

Yet if it turns out, as I’m confident it will, that the U.S. government has been the driving force behind both the arrest and imprisonment of Assange, and his extradition to Sweden, and if it turns out, as appears increasingly likely, that the U.S. government has also been behind simultaneous decisions by Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, and several Swiss banks to refuse to handle donations to WikiLeaks, as well as by Amazon, which withdrew Wikileak's access to its cloud data storage system, and a DNS registry which de-registered WikiLeak's URL, publishers and broadcasters, and journalists themselves, should be up in arms defending him.

As I wrote earlier, this kind of attack on a news source for purely political reasons is a threat to the First Amendment as profound as the Nixonian attack on Daniel Ellsberg, and the attempt to block The New York Times from publishing his purloined documents about the origins of the Vietnam War.

Andreas Fink, CEO of DataCell ehf, the Swiss company that has been accepting donations on behalf of Wikileaks via Visa, had this to say about the Dec. 8 decision by Visa to cease processing Wikileaks donations:

The suspension of payments towards Wikileaks is a violation of the agreements with their customers. Visa users have explicitly expressed their will to send their donations to Wikileaks and Visa is not fulfilling this wish. It will probably hurt their brand much much more to block payments towards Wikileaks than to have them occur.

Visa customers are contacting us in masses to confirm that they really donate and they are not happy about Visa rejecting them. It is obvious that Visa is under political pressure to close us down. We strongly believe a world class company such as Visa should not get involved by politics and just simply do their business where they are good at. Transferring money.

They have no problem transferring money for other businesses such as gambling sites, pornography services and the like so why a donation to a Website which is holding up for human rights should be morally any worse than that is outside of my understanding.

Contributions can still be made to Wikileaks and to Assange’s defense by wire transfer and by check and ordinary mail. To find out how to contribute, go here.

By the way, if there is anyone out there working for Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, or any banking organization, or in a government office, who can provide me with evidence that the U.S. has been behind the decision of any of those organizations to freeze out WikiLeaks and destroy it financially, I will guarantee your anonymity at all costs. Please contact me or send me documentation.

[Dave Lindorff is a regular columnist for Counterpunch and has also written for such diverse and seemingly mutually exclusive publications as BusinessWeek, The Nation, Extra!, Treasury & Risk, and Rolling Stone. This article first appeared in This Can't Be Happening and was distributed by Truthout.]

Also see:

• J'Accuse: Sweden, Britain, and Interpol Insult Rape Victims Worldwide by Naomi Wolf / Huffington Post / December 13, 2010
• What the Assange case reveals about rape in America by Jessica Valenti / The Washington Post / December 10, 2010

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Scandal in the Church : Time for Pope to Depart?

In 1294, Pope Celestine V issued a decree making it permissible for a Pope to resign. Then he resigned. Detail from portrait of Celestine V, artist unknown.
There is historical precedent:
Should Benedict apologize and resign?

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / April 2, 2010

There's been a lot of controversy in the last few years with the Catholic Church and child abuse. It started in the United States, when it was learned that scores of priests were guilty of having sex with young children. At that time, the church was embarrassed when it was revealed that they knew of the abuse and had tried to hide it instead of reporting the criminal priests to the proper authorities.

The church refused at that time to admit just how widespread the problem was. They told the world this was only a problem in America, and tried to blame it on America's "permissive" society. Well, that excuse has been blown out of the water by recent revelations. It has now been revealed that the problem was just as widespread in other countries (like Ireland and Germany). It has become obvious now that this is a church problem, and not a problem with the countries in which the church is located.

And right in the middle of this scandal is the church's current leader -- Pope Benedict XVI. It is now known that while he was a Cardinal in Munich, the Pope covered up at least one priest's pedophilia and transferred him to another church, where he continued abusing children. Then after being promoted to head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where he had responsibility for disciplining priests guilty of bad conduct, he continued to cover up child abuse committed by priests.

There are now many people who believe the Pope should resign. I agree. If there is even a shred of decency and morality left in him, he should apologize for his serious misdeeds and then resign the papacy. The Pope is supposed to be the moral leader and guide for the church. How can he offer moral leadership after his own immoral behavior? And the harboring and protecting of child abusers is egregiously immoral behavior!

Some may believe that the Pope cannot resign since he is supposedly appointed by god to lead the church. That is just not true. It has been permissible by the church's own canon law for a Pope to resign since the late 13th century. In 1294, Pope Celestine V issued a decree making it permissible for a Pope to resign. Then he resigned.

In 1415, Pope Gregory XII also resigned. He did so in an effort to re-unify the papacy. At the time, there were three claimants to the papacy -- Pope Gregory XII in Rome, Pope Benedict XIII in Avignon and Antipope John XXIII.

It is even rumored that during World War II, Pope Pius XII drew up a document stating that if he was captured by the Nazis the church was to consider him as having resigned and choose a new Pope (although this cannot be verified since the church still refuses to release documents from that wartime period).

So it can be seen that the resignation of a Pope is not only permitted by canon law, but there are at least two (and possibly three) precedents for it. It is now time for the current Pope to live up to his moral responsibility -- and that moral responsibility demands his immediate resignation. Nothing less will do.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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A Real Crime : How the Law Treats Sex Workers in New Orleans

'Crimes against nature':
Prosecuting sex workers in New Orleans

More than half of the people on Louisiana's Sex Offender Registry -- which was designed for rapists and child molesters -- are indigent women convicted of sex work.

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / January 15, 2010

NEW ORLEANS -- Tabitha has been working as a prostitute in New Orleans since she was 13. Now 30 years old, she can often be found working on a corner just outside of the French Quarter. A small and slight white woman, she has battled both drug addiction and illness and struggles every day to find a meal or a place to stay for the night.

These days, Tabitha, who asked that her real name not be used in this story, has yet another burden: a stamp printed on her driver’s license labels her a sex offender. Her crime? Offering sex for money.

New Orleans city police and the district attorney’s office are using a state law written for child molesters to charge hundreds of sex workers like Tabitha as sex offenders. The law, which dates back to 1805, declares it a crime against nature to engage in “unnatural copulation” -- a term New Orleans cops and the district attorney’s office have interpreted to mean anal or oral sex. Sex workers convicted of breaking this law are charged with felonies, issued longer jail sentences and forced to register as sex offenders.

Of the 861 sex offenders currently registered in New Orleans, 483 were convicted of a crime against nature, according to Doug Cain, a spokesperson with the Louisiana State Police. And of those convicted of a crime against nature, 78 percent are Black and almost all are women.

Impact on women's lives

The law impacts sex workers in both small and large ways. Tabitha has to register an address in the sex offender database. Her driver’s license has the label “sex offender” printed on it. She also has to purchase and mail postcards with her picture to everyone in the neighborhood informing them of her conviction. If she needs to evacuate to a shelter during a hurricane, she must evacuate to a special shelter for sex offenders, and this shelter has no separate safe spaces for women. She is even prohibited from ordinary activities in New Orleans like wearing a costume at Mardi Gras.

“This law completely disconnects our community members from what remains of a social safety net,” said Deon Haywood, director of Women With A Vision, an organization that promotes wellness and disease prevention for women who live in poverty. Haywood’s group has formed a new coalition of New Orleans activists and health workers who are organizing to fight the way police are abusing the 1805 law.

Activists like Haywood believe that using the law in this way is part of an overall policy by the New Orleans Police Department to go after petty offenses. According to a report from the Metropolitan Crime Commission, New Orleans police arrest more than 58,000 people every year. Of those arrested, nearly 50 percent are for traffic and municipal offenses, and only five percent are for violent crimes.

“What this is really about is over-incarcerating poor and of-color communities,” said Rosana Cruz of VOTE-NOLA, a prison reform organization that is also a part of the new coalition.

Haywood, Cruz and other activists believe they have an opportunity with the mayoral and city council elections next month to change the system. With all of the candidates attempting to distance themselves from Mayor Nagin, who is prevented by term limits from running again, the new mayor is likely to be open to making changes. This includes hiring a new police chief, as all the candidates have pledged to do. Advocates are hoping this is an opportunity to shift the department’s focus. “When there's a new police chief, we can educate them,” said Haywood.

Many of the women Haywood’s group works with are at the most high-risk tier of sex work. They meet customers on the street and in bars. Most are dealing with addiction and homelessness, and many cannot get food stamps or other public assistance because of felony convictions on their record.

“I’m hoping that the situation will look different because of this coalition,” Haywood said. “I can’t tell you how overwhelmed we’ve been from the needs of this population.”

Condemned

Miss Jackie is one of those women. A Black woman in her 50s, she was arrested for sex work in 1999 and charged as a sex offender. Her name was added to the registry for 10 years. When the registration period was almost over she was arrested for possession of crack. She says the arresting officer didn’t find any drugs on her person, but the judge ruled that she needed to continue to register as a sex offender for another 15 years (the new federal requirement for sex offenders) because her arrest was a violation of her registration period.

"Where is the justice?” she asked, speaking through tears. “How do they expect me to straighten out my life?” Struggling with basic needs like housing, Miss Jackie added: “I feel condemned."

Advocates and former defendants claim that the decision over who is charged under which penalty is made arbitrarily, at the discretion of police and the district attorney’s office, and that the law disproportionately affects Black people, as well as transgender women. When asked about the allegations of abusing the crime against nature statute, New Orleans Police Department spokesman Bob Young responded: “Persons are charged according to the crime they commit.”

Wendi Cooper’s story, however, paints a different picture.

In 1999, Cooper had recently come out as transgender. A Black transwoman, she tried prostitution a few times and quickly discovered it wasn’t for her. But before she quit, she was arrested. At the time, Cooper was happy to take a plea that allowed her to get out of jail and didn’t think much about what the “crime against nature” conviction would mean on her record. As she got older and began work as a health care professional, the weight of the sex offender label began to upset her more and more. “This is not me,” she said. “I’m not that person who the state labeled me as… it slanders me.”

Cooper appealed to the state to have her record expunged and talked to lawyers about other options, but she still must register for at least another five years and potentially longer. “I feel like I was manipulated, you know, pleading guilty to this crime… And it’s hard, knowing that you are called something that you’re not,” she said. She is also afraid now that the conviction will prevent her from getting her license as a registered nurse or from being hired.

Although some women have tried to fight the sex offender charges in court, they’ve had little success. The penalties they face became even harsher in 2006 when Congress passed the Adam Walsh act, requiring tier-1 (the least serious) sex offenders to stay in the public registry for 15 years. There’s also an added danger to fighting the charges, according to Josh Perry, a former attorney with the Orleans Public Defenders office.

“The way Louisiana’s habitual offender law works, if you challenge your sentence in court and lose, and it’s a third offense, the mandatory minimum is 20 years. The maximum is life,” he explained.

Perry estimates that on an average day two or three people are arrested for prostitution in New Orleans, and about half of them are charged under the crime against nature statute. “Right now, there are 39 people being held at Orleans Parish Prison [for] crimes against nature,” Perry told a gathering of advocates. “And another 15 to 20 people… charged with failure to register as a sex offender.”

Sex workers accused as sex offenders face discrimination in every aspect of the system. In most cases, they cannot get released on bond, because they are seen as a higher risk of flight than people charged with violent crimes. “This is the level of stigma and dysfunction that we’re talking about here,” said Perry. “Realistically, they’re not getting out.”

Organizing for change

Advocates have said the ideal solution would be to get state lawmakers to change the law, but they feel there’s little hope of positive reforms from the current legislature. For now, organizers want to put pressure on police and the district attorney’s office to stop charging sex workers under the crime against nature statute.

There is a great deal of work that needs to be done. Haywood is working with lawyers and national allies to develop a legal strategy, as well as a broad local coalition that includes criminal justice reform organizations like VOTE-NOLA and activist groups like the New Orleans chapters of Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence.

“We’re trying to organize, but we’re also working on the human rights side of how it’s affecting their lives,” she said. “This is a population that works in crisis mode all the time.”

Jennifer, a 23-year-old white woman who asked that her real name not be used in this story, has been working as a prostitute since she was a teenager, and also works as a stripper at a club on Bourbon Street. She recently broke free of an eight-year heroin addiction. Unless the law changes, she will have the words “sex offender” on her driver’s license until she is 48 years old.

Haywood said that stories like this show that the law has the effect of forcing women to continue with sex work. “When you charge young women with this -- when you label them as a sex offender -- this is what they are for the rest of their lives,” she said.

Jennifer said it’s affected her job options. “I’m not sure what they think, but a lot of places won't hire sex offenders,” she said.

Haywood said the women she sees have few options. Many of them are homeless. They are sleeping in abandoned houses or on the street, or they are trading sex for a place to stay. “The women we work with, they don't call it sex work,” she said. “They don't know what that means. They don’t even call it prostitution. They call it survival.”

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience and audiences around the world have seen the television reports he’s produced for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, GritTV, and Democracy Now. His post-Katrina reporting for ColorLines shared an award from New America Media for best Katrina-related reporting in ethnic press. Haymarket Press will release his new book, FLOODLINES: Stories of Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, in 2010. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org . This article also appears in ColorLines Magazine.]

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Forced Prostitution in Mexico : Lost Women of the Narcoguerra

"Sex Slave" by Vangobot / Pop Art Machine.
Organized crime in Mexico:
Massive transnational sex trade

The networks of traffickers in women use Mexico as a bridge to move teens to the U.S. and Canada where they are sold and sexually exploited.

By Michael Reynolds / The Rag Blog / December 3, 2009

Evangelina Hernandez continues to open windows on the under-reported consequences of the narcoguerra. This time with her chilling investigative piece on Mexican organized crime’s lucrative transnational sex trade and forced prostitution in this morning’s El Universal, "Prostitución forzada, otra cara del yugo a migrantes."

Hernandez leads with the harrowing account of “Nancy," a young woman snatched up by traffickers in Chiapas while riding a train carrying migrants north from Guatemala. Her abductors were Los Zetitias, a franchise of the Zetas’ diversified global criminal enterprises.

Hernandez’ telephone interview with Nancy’s brother “Rafael," details the circumstances of his sister’s brutal saga that began in the Las Anonas Chiapas-Mayab railway station where Nancy was forced into a van and driven north to a safe house where she was beaten and threatened with death unless she participated in a pornographic video in which she was raped by several men.

Rafael told Hernandez that his sister’s kidnappers promised that she would be let go after this “little job." Instead, said Rafael “the first video was followed by another and another.” Days later the 20 year-old Nancy was taken to a Tijuana brothel and forced into prostitution until she completed a “quota” set by her abductors. Two and half months later she was ordered to call relatives in the U.S. to fork over a ransom for her release. Rafael got the call and agreed to pay.

Without giving details, [Rafael] said that he paid a designated smuggler to move his sister to America, [and] also deposited a large sum of dollars as a “ransom” for her to surrender, but not before being warned that talking would be his death sentence.

Nancy’s sordid ordeal is just one of thousands of such stories. Hernandez provides the alarming facts:

More than 20,000 Central American women are currently prostituted in brothels and bars in south-southeast Mexico, according to End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT).

Women and girls are trafficked under false pretenses to Mexico from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. They sell them in bars for not more than $40 where they are held against their will in a situation of slavery and forced to cover their costs of accommodations, food and drugs, says the Global Report of Actions Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents (ECPAT).

The owners of many of these bars are local politicians, bankers and people with economic power operating from the shadows and earning revenues. The report warns that traffickers are recruiting younger and younger women, mostly girls.

The networks of traffickers in women use Mexico as a bridge to move teens to the U.S. and Canada where they are sold and sexually exploited, according to the World Report on Trafficking in Persons 2009, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

A 2009 American Bar Association report cites 47 organized criminal groups in Mexico that are engaged in sexual and labor exploitation in the Federal District and 17 states including Baja California, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Quintana Roo, Chiapas, Chihuahua, Tlaxcala, Tamaulipas and Jalisco -- the first four of these are regarded as “sex tourism” destinations. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission estimates these sex trafficking networks bring in about $50 million per year.

Hernandez closes her report with Rafael’s disheartening but understandable takeaway from his and his sister’s nightmare.

Doomed to remember

Nancy is not crying, but spends many hours without a word. She paid a high cost to reach her destination.

Her brother Rafael thinks that if one day they go to Guatemala, they will not return on a plane that stops in Mexico.

He fears that criminals will keep their word and kill them. They are never going to complain, because they doubt that the authorities will do anything to stop the rape, kidnappings and murders of women in Central America.

For more of Evangelia Hernandez’ excellent reporting, see her October reports from the US/Mexico border on corruption here, here, and here. They are in Spanish, but are well worth utilizing Google’s translation feature.

[Michael Reynolds, an investigative journalist and author, is a former correspondent for Reuters who has written for Playboy, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Rolling Stone, High Times, Alternet and other publications. He was senior intelligence analyst with the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center and has served as a consultant on domestic terrorism and transnational security. His blog is NarcoGuerra Times where this article also appears.]

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Roman Holiday : Fatty, Woody and Polanski, Oh My!

Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle and Al St. John. Silent screen giants, 1917.
Hollywood's patriarchal license

His artistic defenders cling to the slim excuses the situation affords. It was a youthful indiscretion. It was, but not for Polanski.

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / October 1, 2009

Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle was Buster Keaton’s close friend. Arbuckle had rescued Keaton from Vaudeville, bringing him to Hollywood to act in his two reel (silent) movies in the early 1920s. Fatty had been one of the original Keystone Cops, comically inept policemen whose sped up enforcement activities are still pretty funny to watch in black and white. Thanks to Arbuckle, Keaton’s stone face became star material. Keaton was never known to smile on camera after that time.

As everyone must know by now, Roscoe Arbuckle was the subject of Hollywood’s worst scandal. An actress died at one of his parties, and the rumors and allegations about the circumstances surrounding her death made it certain that Fatty Arbuckle would never work in Hollywood again. His old friends suddenly disappeared, despite the fact that the subsequent trial cleared Arbuckle. The only friend who stuck by Fatty was Buster Keaton. And for that (and perhaps some other reasons), Buster was also blackballed in Hollywood.

But who wasn’t to blame? Charlie Chaplin was a genius, but also had a talent for involvement with underage girls. He eventually left the USA and never came back. Hollywood is about sexual fantasy. It’s not supposed to spill over into life? What are gossip columns for?

Fast forward the movie to the 1970s and you could see the latest generation of bad boy Hollywood directors. Pedophilia was a current running through Woody Allen’s art films. His involvement with the underage Mariel Hemmingway, other dalliances culminating in his courtship and eventual marriage to his own step-daughter. This was cutting edge patriarchal license at the time and remains some sort of world record I’m sure for male star sexual audacity.

Filmmaker (and wanted man) Roman Polanski.
And of course there was Roman Polanski, who everyone wanted to cut some slack for because his wife, sex symbol Sharon Tate and his unborn child had been murdered by the Mansonites. If only the underage girl Polanski drugged and had non-consensual sex with had been sixteen, instead of uh.... thirteen. That’s a little young, even by Hollywood standards. Roman did the deadbeat, splitting the USA in a hurry to avoid sentencing. And somehow he has avoided it ever since. Until last week when the Swiss arrested him on the old US warrant.

His artistic defenders cling to the slim excuses the situation affords. It was a youthful indiscretion. It was, but not for Polanski. He was 45 years old. The victim has forgiven him. But not at the time it appears, for he was arrested. His art makes him above the law...

Shades of Norman Mailer. Mailer, the self promoting novelist and historian, defended Henry Abbott, the sensational prison author, helping to get him released in the early 1980s. After Abbott snapped at the Binibon Restaurant (corner of Second Avenue and Fifth Street), stabbing and killing the owner’s son in law Henry Adan, Mailer refused to back down from supporting Abbott as an artistic genius who somehow deserved to be placed above the law.

Too bad Hollywood never considered forgiving Fatty Arbuckle. It would have been great to see what kind of art he (and Buster Keaton) would have created had they been allowed to continue to work on big budget movies. They were saints compared to these modern guys.

(If you can find a copy, the best book to read on Buster Keaton is still Keaton, by my grandfather, Rudi Blesh.)

Buster once told Rudi: “I’m on the side of the animals...”

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Rape Not Just South Africa's Problem

Women place white flowers outside parliament during a demonstration in Cape Town. Photo from AFP.

While the South African numbers may be particularly high, this is a worldwide problem. Men... have been brought up to believe that women are second-class citizens -- sometimes little more than property to be used as a man sees fit.

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / June 20, 2009

The South African Medical Research Council has just conducted an anonymous survey in that country concering rape, and the results were quite shocking. The survey was conducted in both rural and urban areas and crossed all racial lines. Here is what they found:

• One out of every four men admitted to committing at least one rape.
• Of that 25%, nearly half admitted to committing multiple rapes.
• 73% of those admitting rape committed their first one before age 20.
• One in 20 men has committed a rape in the last year.
• Gang rape was common and considered a form of male bonding.

Obviously, that country has a serious problem. Professor Rachel Jewkes, who carried out the research, says, "The absolute imperative is we have to change the underlying social attitudes that in a way have created a norm that coercing women into sex is on some level acceptable... it's partly rooted in our incredibly disturbed past and the way that South African men over the centuries have been socialised into forms of masculinity that are predicated on the idea of being strong and tough and the use of force to assert dominance and control over women, as well as other men."

Mbuyiselo Botha, from the South African Men's Forum, which campaigns for women's rights, agreed, saying, "I think that yes, the figures are that high and for us, for me in particular, that is a very sad state of affairs. It means that we continue in South Africa to be one of the highest capitals of rape in the world. I don't think it's cultural per se; I think it has to do with how a lot of us men worldwide were raised. The issues of dominance against women, issues of inequality, are pervasive and you find them throughout the world."

Botha is right. While the South African numbers may be particularly high, this is a worldwide problem. Men all over the world have been brought up to believe that women are second-class citizens -- sometimes little more than property to be used as a man sees fit.

And we in the United States should not be feeling superior to any other country. Although things are slowly beginning to change here, we have a history of relegating women to an inferior status. It was not until well into the twentieth century that most women in America even gained the right to vote.

In fact, the idea of second-class status for women is so pervasive that it has even been codified by many of America's religious institutions. And this is true in all religions (with the possible exception of some modern pagan sects), including christianity. It is not uncommon to hear ministers and priests telling women to be obedient to their husbands, and denying them leadership positions in the church.

As long as this type of thinking occurs, as long as women are relegated to an inferior status in our institutions and in our society, rape will continue to be a problem. And America does have a serious rape problem. Consider some of our own statistics:

• Nearly 15% of American women have been raped.
• About 15% of rape victims are under age 12.
• Every two minutes someone in the U.S. is raped.
• In the last thirteen years, there were 4.2 million rape victims.
• About 73% of rape victims knew their rapist (acquaintance, family, boyfriend, husband, etc.)
• And perhaps the worst statistic of all -- ONLY 6% OF RAPISTS WILL EVER GO TO JAIL!

Those statistics may not be as high as South Africa's, but they are just as unacceptable. We preach gender equality in this country, but seldom is it practiced. Far too often, women are relegated to second-class status. And if a man believes women are inferior, it is just one more small step to commit and/or justify a rape. That is the true root of the problem.

Too often our society wants to blame rape on things like movies, magazines, music, books, television or the internet. But these things aren't the cause or the problem. They are merely symptoms of the real problem -- the societal treatment of women as being inferior to men.

The only way to stop rape is to start treating and respecting women as equals to men. Of course, those who commit the rapes must be punished, but this alone will not solve the problem. We must stop mouthing the word equality and make it a reality.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger, an excellent Texas political blog.]

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Sex Crimes in the White House

Fernando Botero / Abu Ghraib 57, 2005. Image © Fernando Botero, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.
Abu Ghraib and the Sexualization of Torture
By Naomi Wolf / July 7, 2008

Naomi Wolf is a best-selling author and essayist.

NEW YORK - Sex crime has a telltale signature, even when those directing the outrages are some of the most powerful men and women in the United States. How extraordinary, then, to learn that one of the perpetrators of these crimes, Condoleezza Rice, has just led the debate in a special session of the United Nations Security Council on the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

I had a sense of déjà vu when I saw the photos that emerged in 2004 from Abu Ghraib prison. Even as the Bush administration was spinning the notion that the torture of prisoners was the work of "a few bad apples" low in the military hierarchy, I knew that we were seeing evidence of a systemic policy set at the top. It's not that I am a genius. It's simply that, having worked at a rape crisis center and been trained in the basics of sex crime, I have learned that all sex predators go about things in certain recognizable ways.

We now know that the torture of prisoners was the result of a policy set in the White House by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Rice -- who actually chaired the torture meetings. The Pentagon has also acknowledged that it had authorized sexualized abuse of detainees as part of interrogation practices to be performed by female operatives. And documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union have Rumsfeld, in his own words, checking in on the sexualized humiliation of prisoners.

The sexualization of torture from the top basically turned Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay into an organized sex-crime ring in which the trafficked sex slaves were US-held prisoners. Looking at the classic S and M nature of some of this torture, it is hard not to speculate that someone setting policy was aroused by all of this. And Phillipe Sands' impeccably documented Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, now proves that sex crime was authorized and, at least one source reports, eroticized: Diane Beaver, the Staff Judge Advocate at Guantanamo who signed off on many torture techniques, told Sands about brainstorming sessions that included the use of "sexual tension," which was "culturally taboo, disrespectful, humiliating and potentially unexpected."

"These brainstorming meetings at Guantanamo produced animated discussion," writes Sands. "'Who has the glassy eyes?" Beaver asked herself as she surveyed the men around the room, thirty or more of them. She was invariably the only woman in the room, keeping control of the boys. The younger men would get excited, agitated, even: "You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas" [reported Beaver]. A wan smile crossed Beaver's face: "And I said to myself, you know what, I don't have a dick to get hard, I can stay detached."' [Sands, p 63]

The nonsexual torture that was committed ranged from beatings and suffocation, electrodes attached to sensitive areas, and forced sleep deprivation, to prisoners being hung by the wrists from the ceiling and placed in solitary confinement until psychosis was induced. These abuses violate both US and international law. Three former military attorneys, recognizing this blunt truth, refused to participate in the "military tribunals" -- rather, "show trials" -- aimed at condemning men whose confessions were elicited through torture.

Though we can now debate what the penalty for waterboarding should be, America as a nation, maintaining an odd silence, still cannot seem to discuss the sex crimes involved.

Why? It's not as if the sex crimes that US leaders either authorized or tolerated are not staring Americans in the face: the images of male prisoners with their heads hooded with women's underwear; the documented reports of female US soldiers deployed to smear menstrual blood on the faces of male prisoners, and of military interrogators or contractors forcing prisoners to simulate sex with each other, to penetrate themselves with objects, or to submit to being penetrated by objects. Indeed, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 was written deliberately with loopholes that gave immunity to perpetrators of many kinds of sexual humiliation and abuse.

There is also the testimony by female soldiers such as Lynndie England about compelling male prisoners to masturbate, as well as an FBI memo objecting to a policy of "highly aggressive interrogation techniques." The memo cites a female interrogator rubbing lotion on a shackled detainee and whispering in his ear -- during Ramadan when sexual contact with a strange woman would be most offensive -- then suddenly bending back his thumbs until he grimaced in pain, and violently grabbing his genitals. Sexual abuse in US-operated prisons got worse and worse over time, ultimately including, according to doctors who examined detainees, anal sodomy.

All this may sound bizarre if you are a normal person, but it is standard operating procedure for sex offenders. Those who work in the field know that once sex abusers control a powerless victim, they will invariably push the boundaries with ever more extreme behavior. Abusers start by undressing their victims, but once that line has been breached, you are likely to hear from the victim about oral and anal penetration, greater and greater pain and fear being inflicted, and more and more carelessness about exposing the crimes as the perpetrator's inhibitions fall away.

The perpetrator is also likely to engage in ever-escalating rationalizations, often arguing that the offenses serve a greater good. Finally, the victim is blamed for the abuse: in the case of the detainees, if they would only "behave," and confess, they wouldn't bring all this on themselves.

Silence, and even collusion, is also typical of sex crimes within a family. Americans are behaving like a dysfunctional family by shielding sex criminals in their midst through silence.

Just as sex criminals -- and the leaders who directed the use of rape and sexual abuse as a military strategy -- were tried and sentenced after the wars in Bosnia and Sierra Leone, so Americans must hold accountable those who committed, or authorized, sex crimes in US-operated prisons. Throughout the world, this perverse and graphic criminality has added fuel to anxiety about US cultural and military power. These acts need to be called by their true names -- war crimes and sex crimes -- and people in America need to demand justice for the perpetrators and their victims. As in a family, only when people start to speak out and tell the truth about rape and sexual assault can the healing begin.

Source. / The Huffington Post

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