How Will We Remember Ohio?

I'm not sure what I want to accomplish in this post, but I think it's pretty modest.   I think I just want to make people aware of something, read a couple of articles about it, and think about it.  That's not so much to ask, I think.

In August 2012, in Steubenville, OH, a night of teen partying went horribly wrong.   If party after party of under-aged drinking wasn't bad enough, more than one of those parties apparently were the sites of repeated gang-rapes of a 16 year old girl.   Since that night, as the local law enforcement and civic leadership essentially decided to protect the student athletes rather than the female victim, the Internet has stepped in.   Publicity of the incidents, exposure of the students' web posts and tweets boasting of the repeated assaults, videos and photos of the attacks (including one showing the unconscious teen being carried from one party to another for more raping), and assorted other efforts to expose what Steubenville was apparently trying to ignore, have all occurred online.  

Two students have been arrested and are scheduled to stand trial in juvenile court in February, 2013.   None of the party-goers who witnessed the assaults, posted photos and videos of the assaults, and who failed to stop the attacks or report them to law enforcement have been charged.  The online hacktivist group "Anonymous" has gotten involved and leaked some of the evidence and Roseanne Barr has also gotten involved in applying pressure to political leaders in Ohio to ramp up the investigation.   Even porn actress Traci Lords has spoken about how she was raped as a ten year old when she lived in Steubenville, and speculated that the attack and "culture" in Steubenville must have had something to do with her embarking on a porn career.

The undercurrent to the entire sordid episode is that Steubenville has long revered their vaunted football team and is not likely to actively prosecute those students who participated in the rapes, observed the rapes, or failed to stop the rapes.  

Read about it:
New York Times article, one of the first mainstream news stories about the rapes
Boston Globe opinion column on "stigma shift" from victim to accused
The Nation blog on media explosion
New York Magazine story on threats against NYTimes reporter
New York Magazine story about Roseanne Barr involvement
Buzzfeed interview of Roseanne Barr


So, the question is, will Ohio be known as a place that celebrates gang rape, or a place where it is aggressively prosecuted?  I can't image what it must be like to be a female of any age in this town.
 


 
 

Anti-rape Amendment Signed Into Law

Back in October, I wrote about Jon Stewart's lampooning of Republican Senators who had voted against a Defense Dept. bill to ban contractors from restricting employee rights to go to court over workplace discrimination, including workplace rape.

Well, the legislation introduced by freshman Senator Al Franken was eventually passed and has now been signed into law by the President. You can read about it at ThinkProgress.org. There are also links to articles about how the Republicans were startled that Americans were unhappy with their votes against the measure.

Go figure.

Jon Stewart Lambastes 30 Republican Senators Who Voted to Sanction Rape

I know why a lot of the younger generation get most of their news from Comedy Central; that's where Jon Stewart lives. I don't know why the "mainstream" media didn't find time or space to blast this story all over the country, but fortunately Jon Stewart did.

Seems that Senator Al Franken introduced legislation that would ban the Pentagon from contracting with any company that forces women employees to sign waivers to not sue the company if they are raped as a result of their employment. Why on earth would we need a law like that? Because one of the biggest military contractors on the face of the earth, Halliburton, has a subsidiary (KBR) that does exactly that. And asserted that one of its employees, a 19 year old woman, couldn't sue KBR because of the waiver, after she was gang-raped by fellow employees and temporarily held captive in Iraq.

You need to watch the clip of Jon Stewart and listen to various Republican Senators explaining on the floor of the Senate why they voted against the amendment. Most of these same Republicans just recently were so outraged by Acorn's bumbling that it was their patriotic duty to ensure that group didn't receive "one penny more of government funds." Banning companies from government contracts if they cover up rape? Not the Senate's business in their view.

Fortunately, 68 other Senators who still had brains voted for the bill. Here's a link to the broadcast ** from The Daily Show. Here's a link to Buzzflash posting of the episode. And it's one sorry episode indeed.

** the link to the Daily Show may not work, and I don't know why... :-(