Article here. Excerpt:

'As Yee Xiong prepared to leave the sentencing hearing for a man she said sexually assaulted her at an off-campus apartment when they were students, she felt ready to finally put the case behind her after four years. Then, she was handed a $4 million defamation lawsuit.

The lawsuit from Lang Her, who pleaded no contest to felony assault, stated that Xiong and three of her siblings colluded to alienate him from the close-knit ethnic Hmong community and called him a rapist on Facebook.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Xiong said it was like a “slap to the face,” what she saw as a way for Her to “continue to harass my family and me.”

While such lawsuits have long been a legal strategy, experts say, some of the accused may feel they must seek to clear their names in court at a time of increased focus on campus sex assaults and more serious consequences at schools.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Parents are often terrified when they call Sherry Warner Seefeld.

They’ve just learned that a son — or daughter — has been accused of sexual assault at college. And they’re deathly afraid of what may happen next.

Seefeld, a Minnesota native and the mother of four sons, knows what they’re going through. Six years ago, she was one of those parents. Now she’s on a mission to help other families in that same “horrific” spot, as the co-founder and president of Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE), a support group for the accused.

“Everybody wants to stop sexual assault, you know, everybody does,” says Seefeld, 60, a retired high school teacher in Fargo, N.D. But on college campuses today, she says, the innocent have as much to fear as the guilty.

In the midst of a national outcry over campus rape, she says, students are being labeled sex offenders based on little more than an accusation.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'It was nearly midnight on a crisp Friday in December, the week before finals, when a young man walked a young woman home to her dorm in St. Paul.

The pair, both students at the University of St. Thomas, had started flirting at a campus party where the alcohol was flowing freely. After several drinks, they made their way to a dorm lounge, where a security camera kept watch. Then they retreated to the most private of spaces — a small bathroom.

What happened there would haunt them both, and draw St. Thomas into a legal battle and a divisive national debate over the role of colleges in policing accusations of sexual violence.

This spring, the young man, identified only as “John Doe,” sued the university, saying he was suspended for sexual assault without a fair hearing or even a lawyer to present his side of the story. It’s one of a flood of lawsuits across the country asserting that colleges are trampling the rights of the accused in a rush to crack down on campus rape.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Labour’s Shadow Minister for domestic violence was an ‘abusive bully’ who terrified her former husband and cost him £200,000 in their divorce settlement, a friend claimed last night.

Sarah Champion admitted yesterday that she was arrested and cautioned by police after attacking explorer Graham Hoyland during their ‘very acrimonious’ divorce in 2007.

But the Rotherham MP – who faced calls to resign last night – told a national newspaper the violent bust-up came after she had been ‘provoked for years’ by Mr Hoyland.

Miss Champion, 47, who had ended up in a police cell, claimed the altercation was over who would keep a valuable painting. She said: ‘I’m not proud of what happened and I accept I was in the wrong, but I have nothing to hide.’'

Article here. More from the Damned If You Do Dept. After decades of being told to "leave the girls alone," now under threat of arrest, a clueless woman says she can't understand why the guys aren't chatting her up. No winning for losing. Excerpt:

'And I don’t want to stereotype them all, so let me be more specific: I refer to those my own age, who have forced me to bookmark a cattery website. In the romantic arena, trying to meet a man sometimes makes me feel like David Attenborough, stepping into the jungle to locate a Jesus Lizard (a real thing).

Article here. Good article if you can filter out the "patriarchy" claptrap. Why people who can identify these stereotyping problems against men continue to cling to the belief, nontheless, that our society is "patriarchal", I can't say, except to observe that nymphotropism knows no limits. Excerpt:

Article here. Excerpt:

'A woman from the Fraser Valley is being ordered to pay her father $135,000 in damages after she made a post online alleging he had sexually abused her daughter.

The B.C. Supreme Court judgement was issued yesterday and comes 19 months after the defendant, Tammi Sylvia Janet Zall, made the allegations on GoFundMe against her father, John Macdonald Zall.

"Just under two weeks before Christmas my daughter came to me and told me some inappropriate things that were apparently happening to her at my dad's. Upon hearing that I removed her from the house with the company of the RCMP," she wrote in her post, adding her daughter required additional counselling.'

Press release here. Excerpt:

'A national teleconference will be held on the topic, “How ‘Victim-Centered’ Investigations Undermine the Presumption of Innocence and Victimize the Innocent.” The event will address how “victim-centered” investigations remove the presumption of innocence and greatly increase the risk of a wrongful finding of guilt. The teleconference will be held on October 4 at 1:00 to 4:00 pm, Eastern time.

The Department of Education has repeatedly issued directives calling for equitable campus investigations. In 2001 the Office for Civil Rights issued its Revised Sexual Harassment Guidance mandating that universities undertake “adequate, reliable, and impartial investigation of complaints.” Likewise, the OCR’s 2011 Dear Colleague Letter on campus violence explained, “a school’s investigation and hearing processes cannot be equitable unless they are impartial.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'I spent most of today in Westminster Magistrates’ Court. Last Saturday I received a summons to appear in the court at 09:30 today – giving me just two working days to obtain legal advice – in connection with my alleged obstruction of the highway during our anti-MGM protest in Parliament Square on 1 June. A video (14:52) is here, my arrest by a (Kiwi) policeman takes place soon after 13:30.

I registered my presence with the relevant person, and it was immediately clear something was amiss. At 11:30 – two hours after my arrival – I was informed the police / CPS hadn’t submitted any papers. Responding with lightning speed, at 15:30 the papers were made available, and I duly explained I’d be pleading ‘Not Guilty’ at the trial, and went through some tedious related form-filling.

Article here. Excerpt:

'At last year’s Conservative party conference in Manchester, we created quite a stir with our Male Genital Mutilation (‘MGM’) protests, handing out leaflets, and engaging with a considerable number of conference attendees. A video (3:14) is here.

We plan to make an even bigger impact at the next conference, in Birmingham, in less than two weeks’ time. Some of our placards and leaflets will feature the image at the start of this post, of a distressed (and restrained) baby boy, about to suffer the excruciating (and illegal) assault of genital mutilation.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A jury will decide whether Rolling Stone defamed the University of Virginia's dean in its since-retracted article about a gang rape at a campus fraternity, after a federal judge on Thursday denied summary judgment on key issues in the lawsuit.

Nicole Eramo sued Rolling Stone in May 2015, claiming the story cast her as the chief villain and painted the school as one that is indifferent to rape on its campus.

During the time of the alleged incident, Eramo was in charge of performing intake of sexual assault complaints, providing support to victims and participating in panels and conferences related to the issue. She claims the November 2014 article destroyed her reputation as a supporter of sexual assault victims and triggered hundreds of threatening messages from the public.'

Press release here. Excerpt:

'A national teleconference will be held on the topic, “How ‘Victim-Centered’ Investigations Undermine the Presumption of Innocence and Victimize the Innocent.” The event will address how “victim-centered” investigations remove the presumption of innocence and greatly increase the risk of a wrongful finding of guilt. The teleconference will be held on October 4 at 1:00 to 4:00 pm, Eastern time.

The Department of Education has repeatedly issued directives calling for equitable campus investigations. In 2001 the Office for Civil Rights issued its Revised Sexual Harassment Guidance mandating that universities undertake “adequate, reliable, and impartial investigation of complaints.” Likewise, the OCR’s 2011 Dear Colleague Letter on campus violence explained, “a school’s investigation and hearing processes cannot be equitable unless they are impartial.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'On September 14, The Washington Post published what can only be described as a public display of child abuse. In an article entitled “My teen boys are blind to rape culture,” feminist writer Jody Allard chastises her sons for questioning the propaganda she feeds them.

“They’ve been listening to me talk about consent, misogyny and rape culture since they were tweens. They listened to me then, but they are 16 and 18 now, and they roll their eyes and argue when talk to them about sexism and misogyny.”

That Allard’s boys won’t take up their mother’s fight makes them “part of the problem,” writes Allard. They’ve “dipped their toes into toxic masculinity,” she adds. Toxic masculinity is a favorite feminist term. It means the more masculine a man is, the more vile he is. Nice, huh?'

A new trend called "victim-centered investigations" is troubling us at SAVE.

The gist of the new investigatory approach is to start from believing the complainant and to continue the investigation from the complainant's perspective--thus ending the police's role as neutral fact-finder: http://www.saveservices.org/sexual-assault/investigations/ 

Colleges are starting to look into using this technique, and we need stop it.

We are asking you to contact the university or college where you attended school, and ask them to continue implementing fair investigative procedures.

Tell them to preserve the presumption of innocence on their campus.

Thank you!

Very best,

Gina R. Lauterio, Esq.
Policy Project Director
Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE)

Article here. Excerpt:

'I am obsessed with gender issues, and thus am constantly surfing the Internet, using various Google combinations to see what goodies I can find. My main problem is that after years of being a strong supporter of feminism, I discovered, nearly 25 years ago, that it was boys much more than girls who were struggling in school, not to mention in other even more significant ways – for example, committing suicide at around four times the rate that girls were. Having three sons (the youngest of whom was 12 when I made this discovery), I realized that my children were being ignored. Having later been blessed by the birth of four grandsons, my concern about boys as a group has only increased.

But the concern of our country hasn’t.