Article here. Excerpt:

'“What do you do if you’re being sexually harassed in your office?” one user asked Monday morning on the anonymous Capitol Hill social-networking app Cloakroom.

It prompted one person, identifying himself as a 26-year-old male working for a 40-year-old female chief of staff, to share his own situation.

“She has slapped my ass, talked about her vibrator, and has asked me sexual questions. I have ignored them but I am thinking about going to the member,” he submitted to the online community, limited to users whose GPS location is within the Capitol complex, or those who register with a staff email address.

The thread drew 30 responses, ranging from vulgar to stoic. Some advised contacting the appropriate ethics committee to document the details or reaching out to the House Office of Employee Assistance for professional and emotional counseling. One warned the user to accept that reporting the harassment means, “You will need to accept that your career on the Hill will be over.”'

Video here. Part of an exciting patriarchal strategy that ensures only men feel welcome on university and college campuses.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Caroline Starmer was not assaulted by the security guard in much the same way as “Jackie” (the anonymous victim of the UVA campus rape story) was not raped as part of an initiation rite during a chapter house party, as actorvist Lena Dunham was not raped at Oberlin College by a Republican called Barry and, indeed, as Sulkowicz herself was almost certainly not raped at Columbia university.

What is it with these crazy chicks?

Well I think I know the answer and it’s one, I’m pretty sure, that all the crazy chicks out there are going to agree wholeheartedly: basically it’s all the fault of men.

Article here. Excerpt:

'As someone who has worked on college campuses to educate men and women about sexual assault and consent, I have seen the barriers to raising awareness and changing attitudes. Chief among them, in my experience, is a sense of skepticism--especially among college-aged men--that sexual assault is even all that dire of a problem to begin with.

"1 in 4? 1 in 5? Come on, it can't be that high. That's just feminist propaganda!"

A lot of the statistics that get thrown around in this area (they seem to think) have more to do with politics and ideology than with careful, dispassionate science. So they often wave away the issue of sexual assault--and won't engage on issues like affirmative consent.

In my view, these are the men we really need to reach.

So enter the headline from last week's New York Times coverage of the latest college campus sexual assault survey:

"1 in 4 Women Experience Sex Assault on Campus."

Article here. Excerpt:

'A recent Association of American Universities Campus Climate Survey reported that one in four undergraduate female students have experienced unwanted sexual contact sometime during their college experience. Overall, the study reported that 23 percent of undergraduate women at the participating universities said they had been physically forced — or threatened with force — into nonconsensual sexual contact or incapacitated when it happened. That included activities ranging from sexual touching or kissing to actual sexual intercourse.

Kimberly C. Lau, a partner at the law firm of Warshaw Burstein in New York City, has spent years defending students accused of sexual misconduct in over 40 cases. She has represented both male and female students who have faced life-altering consequences of expulsion, suspension, and branding as a sexual offender for kissing, touching and even requesting too many social media connections.
...
Another private university found a male student responsible of sexual misconduct (stalking) for sending multiple Instagram follow requests to a female student's Instagram account, and for a single incident of staring at the female student on campus. The male student's disciplinary record now reflects "sexual misconduct" and he was suspended for one year.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

To show your support for all victims, take a moment next month to help raise awareness:

Article here. It's a total boon for litigators and a nightmare for college men. Excerpt:

'An attorney for University of Dayton basketball player Dyshawn Pierre calls UD’s decision to suspend him for a semester following a sexual assault accusation that didn’t lead to criminal charges unfair, and says he will fight it.

“Ignoring that decision made by qualified professionals, the University of Dayton subjected Dyshawn to fundamentally defective and unfair university disciplinary procedures orchestrated to appease a broken Department of Education policy,” said a statement from New York attorney Peter Ginsberg.

“We will be challenging the university’s handling of this matter in the near future.”

Ginsberg’s statement released Wednesday evening followed exclusive reporting by this newspaper that Pierre is not enrolled this semester at UD after another student accused him of a sexual assault that he denies happened, and county prosecutors say lacks sufficient evidence to merit charges.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The story of Rita and Nate is fictional in just one sense. The couple authorized the illegal genital cutting of a daughter, not a son. In every other aspect, the dynamics of their story unfold daily for infant boys in the United States.

We stand alone as the only country in the world that routinely cuts the genitals of infant boys for non-religious reasons. This practice has spawned a multimillion-dollar industry centered upon the harvesting of foreskins (just “google”neonatal human dermal fibroblast). Doctors willing to profit justify the imposition of an elective, irreversible, painful, and risky procedure on the most private parts of infant boys who are unable to offer any semblance of consent.

If we had inherited the religious or cultural practices that celebrate the removal of a girl’s labia and/or clitoris, then the cutting of girls, the selling of their genital tissue, and an accompanying compendium of pseudo-scientific justification would be commonplace.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The University of Kansas must reinstate a student it expelled for derogatory tweets he posted about his ex-girlfriend, the Lawrence Journal-World reports.

The Kansas Court of Appeals ruled on Friday that Navid Yeasin, who was expelled in 2013, couldn’t be held responsible under the university’s code of student conduct because there was “no proof in the record that Yeasin posted the tweets while he was on campus,” and the code governs only behavior on the campus or at university-sponsored events.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A new survey of sexual assault on college campuses? Cue the claims of proof positive that a “rape culture” exists at schools across the nation.

Take it with a large grain of salt — for the same reason so many similar studies have turned out to fall far short of similar headlines.

In reality, there’s absolutely no sign, in this study or any other, of any “campus rape epidemic.” Indeed, national crime statistics clearly show that women are safer on a US campus than off.

Yes, the heads of Yale, Harvard and other schools responded to the new study with shock and horror. But they’re under fire for supposedly lax responses to what President Obama calls a growing crisis — and plainly lack the courage to stand up to the hype.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'So Harvard has now released the results of its sexual conduct survey and there’s only one question left to answer: How many incidents of sexual assault did not involve drinking?

In a letter to the Harvard students, faculty and alumni earlier this week, the university’s president Drew Faust explained: “Sexual assault represents a deeply troubling problem for Harvard, for colleges and universities more broadly, and for our society at large.”

The data, drawn from the survey conducted in the spring, “reinforce the alarming frequency with which our students, especially but by no means only our undergraduates, experience incidents of sexual assault.”

How frequent is it? Of the Harvard seniors who responded, “31% (or 172 women) said they had experienced some form of ‘nonconsensual sexual contact’ since college began.”'

Story here.

'A West Milford woman and her Wanaque co-defendant were sentenced Friday to five years' probation and $20,000 in restitution for making a false domestic violence complaint that landed the father of her child in jail for 18 days, the Record reported.

Jeanette Crowley, 53, and John DeWitt, 55, both apologized to Michael Stitt in Passaic County Superior Court.

Police arrested Stitt in September 2011 in front of his then 9-year-old son based on an allegation by Crowley that he stalked and assaulted her. Prosecutors later obtained evidence that the allegations were false and charged Crowley and DeWitt with perjury and providing false information to police.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Two weeks ago, a federal judge in Vermont blocked the expulsion of a Middlebury College student who had been accused of sexual misconduct and, without a hearing, was barred from enrolling for the fall semester.

"This case presents a unique situation where the plaintiff was exonerated of the charge of sexual assault by one U.S. institution following an investigation and hearing, allowed to continue his studies the next term, and subsequently determined by (Middlebury) following a second investigation of the same allegation to have committed sexual assault, after which he was expelled," wrote U.S. Judge J. Garvan Murtha.

The student, identified only as John Doe, was enrolled in a study-abroad program run by The School for International Training in November 2014 when he was accused by a non-Middlebury student of misconduct.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Finding a man, yeah.
But if you're really marriage-oriented and this is a high priority for you and you have geographical flexibility, you just might want to put this on your list, you know. San Jose, Denver, Seattle—those are going to be better dating markets for women than Miami or Fort Lauderdale or New York.

That's really interesting because it also speaks to tech's problem as a very, very male-dominated industry...
Right. Back East, the city with the best gender ratio is probably Columbus, Ohio, which has a real burgeoning tech community there.

I'm making a quantitative argument not a qualitative argument. I don't know if these [tech] guys are good guys or whether—I don't know if they can carry on a conversation or not.

They can't.
I'm just telling you by the numbers I think they're less likely to act like dickheads because they don't have the same kind of leverage.'

Submitted by a MANN reader and SAVE member who attended the debate:

'On September 16, Intelligence Squared held a debate in New York City on the issue of whether sexual assault cases taking place on college campuses should be decided by courts rather than by the colleges where the crimes allegedly took place. The motion being debated was stated simply as, “Courts, not campuses, should decide sexual assault cases.”

Arguing for the motion that these cases should be decided by courts were Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School and Jeannie Suk of Harvard Law School, while Michelle Anderson of CUNY School of Law and Stephen Schulhoffer of NYU School of Law argued against it. Both sides acknowledged that false allegations and wrongful convictions happen and that the issue needs to be taken seriously. They also both acknowledged that there need to be changes to the college disciplinary process to address false allegations, although those arguing against the motion gave no specific proposals as to what they would change and made it clear that they support the preponderance of the evidence standard currently required by the Department of Education.