Article here. Excerpt:

'The psychological and forensic profile of men who murder their intimate partners varies from murderers who kill people they don’t know, a study published online Friday in the Journal of Forensic Sciences suggests.

The study, conducted by scientists at Northwestern University, involved more than 1,500 hours of interviews with 153 male and female murderers charged with and/or convicted of first-degree murder in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Colorado and Arizona.

“You learn a lot about them in that amount of time,” lead author Robert Hanlon, director of the forensic psychology research lab at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said in a news release. “I saw the same patterns and trends over and over again.”

Article here. Excerpt:

Press release here. Excerpt:

'In four recent cases, judges have overturned sexual assault findings by campus disciplinary committees. In each case, the judges ruled the college proceedings lacked necessary due process protections. As the new academic year begins, these judicial decisions highlight the need for renewed focus on fairness in college sex assault cases, SAVE says.

In the most recent case, federal judge Norman Moon ruled that Washington and Lee University created a climate of gender discrimination that served to “railroad” students who are wrongly accused of sexual assault. The judge concluded the university’s bare-bones adjudication process “plausibly support a Title IX claim” by the plaintiff. See Doe v. Washington & Lee Univ.: https://d28htnjz2elwuj.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/06171146/Opinion-on-MTD.pdf

In a landmark case, Judge Carol McCoy ruled that the affirmative consent standard used by the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga was unfair because the rule “erroneously shifted the burden of proof” to the defendant, robbing the student of his due process rights. McCoy noted that “requiring the accused to affirmatively provide consent… is flawed and untenable if due process is to be afforded to the accused.”https://kcjohnson.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/memorandum-mock.pdf

In mid-August, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert H. O’Brien barred the University of Southern California from expelling Bryce Dixon, a football player who was expelled on an allegation of sexual assault. The judge found that that the university’s sexual assault adjudication process was fundamentally unfair to accused students: http://reason.com/blog/2015/08/13/judge-stops-usc-from-expelling-football

Article here. Excerpt:

'But the initiative signals something more worrisome than just Columbia’s distorted priorities, according to this refusenik. “People like me might be losing the right simply to be silent, to be left alone,” he writes. “For the first time I, along with anyone else remotely willing to dissent, am not even being allowed to stay quiet and keep my opinions to myself. The initiative implies that agreement with the ideology—indeed, with a university-mandated code of sexual ethics—is actually required for attendance at this institution.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'Is that what you mean when you say in the book that "every American boy is at risk of growing up to become a rapist"?

"When I say that, I mean that American boys are all growing up in the same rape culture, so they're growing up with this incredible sense of entitlement to women's bodies. Boys are taught that sex is their right – it's on demand, basically – and that girls will resist, and their job is to overcome that resistance. Instead of teaching them about respecting girls as fellow human beings, they're taught that girls are sexual organs.

A culture that devalues girls and women gives social cover to people who want to rape. You don't know which boy is going to be the one who says, "I'm going to go for it." (And it almost always is a boy. There are cases of women raping both other women and men, but men are predominantly the perpetrators, regardless of the gender of the victim.)

Link here. Readers interested in making a submission (comment) can do so until 30 October 2015. Excerpt:

Article here. Excerpt:

'Former Queensland premier Anna Bligh kicked off the topic by answering a viewer's question about whether she would advise young women to pursue a career in politics.

She said women needed to persist longer to be selected as leading figures in politics.

"We need the best and brightest. And to get the best and brightest, we need just as many young women to put their hands up as young men, to stay in the political parties long enough to get preselected and go through those sorts of jobs," she said.

Ms Bligh said despite the brutality of being a woman in Australian public life, she would not discourage young females to make this as their career choice.
...
Former federal independent MP Tony Windsor went one step further in saying women made better politicians than men, praising Julia Gillard for her role as the first Australian female prime minister.

"I think women — I'm generalising here — but I think women tend to make better politicians than the men," he said.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'SCOTTISH Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie is to seek to change his party’s rules to allow women-only shortlists for parliamentary selections.

Mr Rennie said he had “lost patience” with the current system and would take steps to address the gender imbalance within his party at its spring conference.

The party was criticised after its only female MSP, Alison McInnes, lost out to former MSP Mike Rumbles at the top of the party’s north-east Scotland regional list for next year’s Holyrood election.

Similar proposals have been rejected by the party in the past but Mr Rennie said the time was right for a “fresh start”.

He has pledged to lead a working group to look at measures to increase representation of Liberal Democrat women in Holyrood, Westminster and Brussels.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'She had posted a satirical cartoon on Facebook to protest proposed legislation to restrict birth control and women’s rights. Farghadani has since been found guilty of “spreading propaganda” and “insulting members of parliament through paintings.” She has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Farghadani is one of millions of women whose basic rights are being ruthlessly violated. In countries like Iran, Yemen, Egypt, and Cambodia, women are struggling for freedoms most women in the West take for granted.

But American feminists are relatively silent about these injustices — especially feminists on campus. During the 1980s, there were massive demonstrations on American college campuses against racial apartheid in South Africa. There is no remotely comparable movement on today’s campuses against the gender apartheid prevalent in large parts of the world. Why not?

Article here. Excerpt:

'It has been nearly a year since Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law the first-in-the-nation "yes-means-yes" policy on sexual consent. Since that time we've seen more schools adopt the policy, more lawsuits from students and more rulings from judges determining the merits of campus kangaroo courts.

One recent ruling, limited in scope but broad in its potential ramifications, addressed the yes-means-yes policies head-on. Judge Carol McCoy addressed two of the biggest concerns shared by opponents of yes-means-yes — the burden of proof being shifted onto the accused, and the nearly impossible task of proving such consent was obtained.

McCoy overturned a University of Tennessee-Chattanooga ruling that a student accused of sexual assault failed to prove he did obtain consent. Of course, such proof could not be obtained, as there are very few ways — and even fewer legal ways — to provide such proof.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A controversial men’s issues group that has been banned from Pride Toronto’s festival took part in this year’s Capital Pride parade in Ottawa.

The Canadian Association for Equality has a reputation for anti-feminist views, although the organizers insist it promotes gender equality and is not meant to be radical.

CAFE’s event have drawn crowds of fierce protests in the past and the group was banned from Toronto Pride Parade this year, for a second year in a row.

According to Pride Toronto’s news release in June, the group failed to meet that festival’s vision to “create a safe space to engage communities in the celebration of their sexuality.”

The group started a local chapter based in Ottawa this year.

Justin Trottier, CAFE executive director, said the group is a “very moderate social services organization” despite its reputation.

Article here. Excerpt:

'The problem with nearly every government program or regulation is that it spawns a private sector industry to leach off the regulation, as well as a new constituency group to support the perpetuation or expansion of the regime.

Today’s example is the egregious Title IX sexual assault protocols for college campuses, which, as noted here previously, isn’t even a formal federal regulation. It proceeded from a “dear colleague” “guidance” letter from the Department of Education—an example of what legal scholars call the growing practice of “informal rule-making.” It may seem informal to you, but when you’re on the receiving end, with the threats and blandishments of the federal government coming at you, it seems about as “informal” as a request from Don Corleone.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Belinda Guthrie: Sexual consent laws help prevent bad behavior
...
Critics of affirmative consent argue it places an undue burden on the initiator of the sexual activity to prove that he or she had consent and violates the due process rights of the accused.

They argue that such policies will lead to an increase of false reporting of sexual assault after incidents that are, in truth, regretted sexual encounters but nonetheless consensual.

Critics also argue that affirmative consent policies are impractical and impossible to enforce and do nothing to improve the resolution of cases involving "he said, she said" arguments and cases in which one or both parties were intoxicated or under the influence of drugs.

Fundamental fairness and due process requires schools to conduct a thorough, reliable, fair and prompt investigation carried out by an experienced, trained and impartial investigator.

An inadequate investigation or the poor handling of a case by an institution does not warrant a movement away from states adopting affirmative-consent policies.
...
Samuel R. Staley: Questionable laws turn sex into a police process

Rape is inexcusable and deserves to be discussed seriously, but the current nationwide push for so-called "yes means yes" laws is likely to cause more harm than good.

In brief, a "yes means yes" law puts into state statute a legally binding requirement that all parties involved in a sexual encounter demonstrate an "unambiguous, affirmative and conscious decision" to engage in voluntary sexual relations, to quote California's legislation, which passed last year.

In practice, this means getting verbal consent — an explicit "yes" — at every progressive step in a sexual act.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson’s Senate Bill 186 (SB 186) passed the senate floor with a unanimous 63-0 bipartisan vote on Monday.

SB 186, introduced by Jackson in February, would allow California community colleges to discipline students for off-campus sexual assault and sexual exploitation violations. The bill successfully passed through the senate and currently awaits approval by Governor Jerry Brown, who can sign it into law. University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) campuses currently have jurisdiction to expel, suspend or enact disciplinary action on students who commit sexual assault, but not the authority to punish students for incidents that happen off campus grounds.

Jackson said the bill’s success was backed by the common understanding that all college students from UCs, CSUs and community colleges should be held accountable for crimes such as sexual assault.

Link here. Excerpt:

'A Delaware judge on Friday sentenced former Baltimore Ravens cheerleader Molly Shattuck to two years of probation for the sexual assault of a 15-year-old boy, calling the case a difficult one and saying the socialite has already suffered great public humiliation.

Shattuck, who pleaded guilty to the rape charge, will serve 48 weekends in jail for the term of the probation. Prosecutors said the mother of three performed oral sex on the teenager, who attended McDonogh School in Owings Mills with her son."I take full responsibility for what I did," Shattuck, 48, said in between sobs as she stood before Judge E. Scott Bradley. "I was the adult."
...
The judge sentenced Shattuck to 15 years in prison — the maximum sentence for the charges — with all but two years suspended.

"It's not a walk in the park," defense attorney Eugene Maurer told reporters outside the courthouse. He called the sentence fair.