Speed Posting, 9/12/14: The First WOC To Lead the American Bar Association, Oscar Pistorius and Ray Rice

Paulette Brown is the first African-American woman elected to lead the American Bar Association.

Oscar Pistorius has been found guilty of culpable homicide in the death of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.  "Culpable homicide" in South African law is roughly equal to manslaughter.  His actual sentence could be as long as fifteen years or he could even avoid prison altogether, depending on the judge's decision.  The decision not to find Pistorius guilty of premeditated murder hinges on this:

In South Africa, a perpetrator can be convicted of murder if he or she had foreseen that their actions would lead to someone's death and still proceeded with that course of action.
Ms Masipa said she could find no proof that Pistorius had the requisite intention to "kill the deceased, or anyone else for that matter". 

Legal expert Prof Pierre de Vos tweeted : "Not sure rejection of [murder charge] is correct here.
"Surely if you shoot into a door of a small toilet and know somebody behind door you foresee and accept possibility of killing?"
But the judge clearly said on both Thursday and Friday that the prosecution had not proven beyond reasonable doubt that the athlete had foreseen that he would kill someone when he fired four shots through the door of his toilet in the early hours of Valentine's Day 2013.

In the US it's difficult not to see that case as relating to the question of intimate partner abuse and how famous people are treated when they are found to have committed such abuse or even the death of the abused.  But the South African context is somewhat different:

There is a perception here in South Africa that most crime is committed by poor black people targeting the white middle classes or the wealthy elite.
Cue "white fear" - a phrase used to refer to the rich white haves in society who live behind high walls, afraid of the intruder who may come in the night. It was the threat of this intruder that apparently gripped Pistorius with fear on that tragic morning.

It's still hard to say whether Reeva Steenkamp received justice.  I get that legal decisions must be framed on law and evidence and don't always match our innate feelings of what would have been just.

Talking about intimate partner abuse, the Ray Rice case in the United States has provoked a lot of debate about what Janay Palmer and the survivors or victims of abuse in general should have done or should do (and a lot of debate about the National Football League's values, culture and general behaviors). 

I'm still trying to write something very long on intimate partner violence in general, but certain powerful and emotional pieces are worth reading both about the reception of the news by some who would defend Rice or blame his then-girlfriend-now-wife and the dilemma of trying to understand victims who don't leave the abuser or who refuse to charge the abuser: 

First, on the question why victims don't leave their abusers, read this and this.  Second, on the views of some black men who take Rice's side and what's wrong with those views, read this.

Note that all those pieces try to increase our understanding of these cases.  They are not about what courts should decide in any particular case.  Neither do the "why I stayed" pieces mean that the society shouldn't interfere or that the matters are somehow private business.


  

Meanwhile, in the state of Missouri, contraception and abortions are bad, guns good

This post puts together three stories I read about Missouri yesterday.  The first is about a legal case where Paul and Theresa Wieland don't want contraceptive coverage to be available for their daughters who are covered in the parents' group health insurance policy.  The daughters are twenty, nineteen and thirteen.  The couple's lawyer argues that 

“The employees are to Hobby Lobby what the daughters are to Paul and Teresa Wieland,” Timothy Belz, an attorney from the conservative Thomas More Society, who represents the Wielands, told a panel of three federal judges on the appeals court in St. Louis on Monday. A district court had dismissed the case, saying the Wielands lacked standing to sue.

 Whatever the legal merits of that case might be, the idea that parents and employers should have the right to determine whether their adult children or employees, respectively, are allowed to use contraceptives and that both of these are about religious freedom strikes me as stupid.  It's not religious freedom for the adult children or the employees.  But I guess it would be viewed as nothing but religious freedom in a feudal society.

Missouri legislature has been busy creating laws which keep women safe!  In the first such law:

 Missouri women seeking abortions will face one of the nation's most stringent waiting periods, after state lawmakers overrode the governor's veto to enact a 72-hour delay that includes no exception for cases of rape or incest.

Supporters of the law call it a reflection period.  In case a woman was impulse-buying an abortion and needed time to reflect on that.

Another new law is also about the safety of women and other people in Missouri! It's a new gun law which makes it easier for people to have guns on them:

 Missouri lawmakers expanded the potential for teachers to bring guns to schools and for residents to openly carry firearms, in a vote Thursday that capped a two-year effort by the Republican-led Legislature to expand gun rights over the objection of the Democratic governor.
The new law will allow specially trained school employees to carry concealed guns on campuses. It also allows anyone with a concealed weapons permit to carry guns openly, even in cities or towns with bans against the open carrying of firearms. The age to obtain a concealed weapons permit also will drop from 21 to 19.

These three stories are not about the same issues.  But they all reflect the political power distribution in the state of Missouri:  Who has the right to self-defense, who has the right to decide who has the right to self-defense and which types of self-defense (or even aggression) are supported by the powers that be. 

How To Read Reports: The New Unicef Report On Violence Against Children

I learned about this new report at Think Progress:

One in ten girls has been sexually assaulted. Six in ten children are regularly beaten by their caregivers. Half of all girls between the ages of 15 and 19 believe a man is “justified” in hitting his wife. Nearly one in five homicide victims are children.
Those are just a few of the findings in a new report from UNICEF that details the “shocking prevalence” of violence and abuse against children around the world. The study — which represents the largest-ever compilation of information on the scope of child abuse — draws on data from 190 countries, and concludes this type of violence has been so normalized that many children are growing up with the assumption it’s just the way the world is supposed to work.

The report has important information.  It tells us where homicide of children (and especially of boys) is common, for example.  That would be in the Caribbean and Latin America.  This should be viewed against the background of high homicide rates in that area in general.  The report tells us that this relatively small area is responsible for 32% of all homicides on this planet (though I'm not sure how the planet is defined here), and speculates that the reasons are in criminal gang activity and the wide availability of firearms.  It's of interest to note that ten countries account for more than one half of all child homicide victims, with Nigeria leading by a wide margin, followed by Brazil, India and the Democratic Republic of Congo.  The United States gets to be included among those ten countries, too, even though it's pretty different in economic and power terms.

So one lesson the report teaches us is that children are not immune from the general levels of violence in an area.  And neither are children immune from the cultural and religious beliefs of their demographic groups.  Thus, the quoted figure of almost half of all girls (44%) between the ages of 15 and 19 believing that a man is justified in hitting his wife (if she burns his dinner, if she neglects the children, if she goes out without his permission etc.) is because that's what the cultures of the interviewed girls believe.  And the boys have similar beliefs, on average, though in several countries the percentage of girls who believe in the husband being entitled to beat the wife is higher than the percentage of boys who believe the same thing.

But here's where I got a bit worried about the report:  Several of its tables quote data separately for various areas and then for the whole world.  The thing is, the underlying data does not cover most of Europe (it does cover Eastern Europe) and neither does it cover the United States or Canada (or Russia, I think).  That's because the data predominantly comes from lower-income countries:

Given the general lack of uniformity in the way data on violence against children are collected, this report relies mainly on information gathered through internationally comparable sources, including the UNICEF-supported Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), the US Agency for International Development (USAID)-supported Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), the Global School-based Student Health Surveys (GSHS) and the Health behaviour in School-aged Children Study (HbSC).

These international survey programmes have been almost exclusively implemented in low- and middle-income countries (with the exception of the HbSC).

So while the focus of this report is largely on these countries, this should in no way be interpreted to suggest that violence against children is not found in high-income nations.

To that end, the report also uses country-specific facts or evidence derived from small-scale studies and national surveys to shed light on certain aspects or circumstances from a variety of countries for which representative or comparable data are unavailable.

The omission of most of the high-income countries doesn't make what is included any less important.  But it does mean that we cannot interpret the averages in the report as pertaining to the world.  The "world" includes all countries, and the views on, say, how justified husbands are to beat their wives are unlikely to be exactly the same in Europe and North America as they are, say, in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The speed with which journalists are now forced to work is probably behind the fact that I've recently spotted a lot of similar problems in published reports or discussions of reports (such as the Rotherham one on child sexual exploitation).  If all you have time to look at is the press release, the press release better be a very good one.  In this case the report itself seems to equate the concept of world with the countries included in the report.  That would not be a problem if the omitted countries were, on average, like the included countries.  But they are not .

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Added later:  Why would this minor thing bother me so much that I wrote about it?  Because the more the speed of news delivery increases the more the audience will be left with false or at least somewhat misleading information.  That's not what information dissemination is supposed to do.

Climbing the Mars Hill. Mark Driscoll's Misogynist Church Eight Years Later.

I wrote about the Mars Hill church and its creator, Mark Driscoll, eight years ago on this very blog!  You can even read that antique post. 

The Mars Hill church is a good case study on extreme religionists and what makes their little hearts thump and their little minds tick. 

I sometimes suspect (fairly often, actually) that one big draw of extremist literal interpretations of Islam, Christianity and Judaism is the very literal permissions the holy books give to hate on women and to control women and to state that gods want women subjugated.  That is, I think some people, especially misogynists, are drawn to those interpretations because they sanctify their unpleasant bundles of feelings about women and sex and give permission to hate on women.  All this could work in the reverse direction, naturally, so that someone who finds the literal God or Allah then just realizes that now he or she must hate on women and build them tiny little corrals in which they can breed for the purposes of one sire.  The reverse direction seems more likely to me.

So how is the church of misogyny and homophobia working out for Mark Driscoll, it's sole progenitor?  It's done pretty well over the years.  Lots of people have joined Driscoll's flock of true believers.  But not that long ago someone found that Driscoll has been foaming-at-the-mouth about the perfidy of the wimminz on the Internet.  Under a pen-name.  Here are a few examples:

Mark Driscoll has long been a controversial figure, whether posting on Facebook about effeminate worship leaders, or saying wives had to take some of the blame for their husband's infidelity if they had 'let themselves go'.
Revelations this week that the Mars Hill pastor had in 2000 posted a series of condemning messages online under a pseudonym were therefore met with almost universal horror.
The series of posts, which have been removed from message boards, reveal a tirade of angry rants.
Beginning with the words "We live in a completely pussified nation," Driscoll – under the name 'William Wallace II' – initiated a thread in which he condemns the majority of Christian men for being "Promise Keeping homoerotic worship loving mama's boy sensitive emasculated neutered exact male replica evangellyfish."
According to Driscoll, "It all began with Adam, the first of the pussified nation, who kept his mouth shut and watched everything fall headlong down the slippery slide of hell/feminism when he shut his mouth and listened to his wife who thought Satan was a good theologian when he should have lead her and exercised his delegated authority as king of the planet.
"As a result, he was cursed for listening to his wife and every man since has been his pussified sit quietly by and watch a nation of men be raised by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers."

Driscoll ended his comment by noting that he expected many women to disagree with him, but "they like Eve should not speak on this matter".
"And, many men will also disagree," he added, "which is further proof of the pussified epidemic having now become air born and universal."
 

The linked article states that these revelations were met with horror.  But surely everyone knew what Driscoll preaches?  I seem to have figured it out eight years ago.  Is it the stronger language that makes the new revelations so horrifying?  That we see his Freudian slip hanging tattered under his priestly robes?  Or is it that we cannot criticize someone's religious beliefs until that someone says the same thing with nasty slurs?

Whatever.  Driscoll isn't doing quite so well right now.  He was removed from the Act 29 network in August, and now his evangelical mega-church is shutting down some of its member churches:

The Washington-based evangelical megachurch Mars Hill is shutting (some of) its doors. Following controversy over founder Mark Driscoll’s well-documented homophobic and sexist remarks, church officials announced over the weekend that they would be closing several of Mars Hills 15 Pacific Northwest branches, citing financial difficulties caused by “negative media attention.” Several staff and clergy members have also been laid off. At the end of last month, Driscoll himself announced that he would be taking a six-week-long leave of absence.