Article here. Excerpt:

'The notion that one's negative feelings reflect reality is permeating our college campuses when it comes to free speech and sexual assault.

In an informative article for the Atlantic, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education president Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tackle "The Coddling of the American Mind" — specifically how "microagressions" and "trigger warnings" are leading to mental health problems on college campuses.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Dr. Mary Koss—a scientist, feminist, and acclaimed expert on the subject of campus sexual assault—says the psychologist who popularized the serial predator theory of student-on-student violence has misrepresented his research for years.

“It’s one of the most egregious examples of a policy with an inadequate scientific basis that lives on because it offers a simplistic solution,” said Koss, in an interview with Reason.

Her analysis supports the findings of a recent Reasoninvestigative series scrutinizing the work of Dr. David Lisak, a psychologist and former University of Massachusetts-Boston professor whose faulty 2002 study on undetected rapists persuaded advocates, policymakers, and even the White House that most campus rapists are serial predators.

Koss, an American Regents’ Professor in the College of Public Health at the University of Arizona, criticized Lisak for broadening his data and misapplying the serial predator theory to the majority of campus rapists.

Article here. Excerpt:

'When three Bloomfield Hills kids, caught up in a bitter custody feud, refused to have lunch with their estranged father, a frustrated family court judge found them in contempt and sent them to detention, a move that made national headlines.

Now the judge is poised to try a new — and some say controversial — tack, ordering the family into a days-long intensive intervention, perhaps with live-in therapists.

Oakland County Family Court Judge Lisa Gorcyca is expected to order the Tsimhoni children, ages 14, 10 and 9, into a “reunification program” to help heal their relationship with their father, Omer Tsimhoni. He and the children’s mother, Maya Tsimhoni, divorced in 2011 and have been involved in vicious litigation since.

The mother has physical custody. The father lived in Israel, but has since returned to Michigan, where he is employed as an engineer.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A state court in Tennessee has ruled in favor of a student expelled for sexual assault, saying his school’s procedures improperly assumed he was guilty and forced him to prove his innocence.

The case of Corey Mock and Molly Morris, both students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), has attracted significant attention thanks to a lengthy profile of Morris that was published by Vice last year. Morris claims she was given a drugged drink at a party, and then was later raped by Mock while she was barely conscious and unable to consent. She complained to her school several months later and got Mock expelled. Mock has aggressively protested his innocence, and his father even started a blog dedicated to his son’s case.

Now a Tennessee judge Carol McCoy says the school’s reasoning for expelling Mock was fatally flawed, relying on a standard that forced him to prove that he’d obtained consent for sex, rather than forcing his accuser to show he hadn’t.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A Virginia judge will allow a formerly accused Washington and Lee University student to continue with his lawsuitalleging gender bias against the university.

Judge Norman K. Moon denied W&L's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, allowing John Doe — as he is referred to in the claim — to continue to seek damages resulting from his expulsion from the university. John believes he was wrongly accused of sexual misconduct, and Moon appears to agree.

On Feb. 8, 2014, John and his eventual accuser, Jane Doe, met at an off-campus party. The two danced, talked and kissed.

The two eventually went back to John's residence and talked for awhile. Jane then walked over to John and allegedly told him, "I usually don't have sex with someone I meet on the first night, but you are a really interesting guy." Jane then began kissing John and the two had sex.

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Safe Campus Act seeks to overhaul this system. Under the proposed House bill, colleges and universities would have to report all sexual violence complaints to the police except when the complainant asks for confidentiality—but in that case, no disciplinary action could be taken against the alleged offender. (While the police investigation is pending, colleges would be able to take interim measures such as reassigning dorms or rearranging class schedules to avoid contact between accuser and accused, and briefly suspend the accused if there are safety-related reasons to do so.) While colleges would still hold their own hearings on sexual misconduct, both the accuser and the accused would have the right to legal representation and full access to all the evidence. Colleges would also have more latitude to decide what standard of proof to use in evaluating these cases, in contrast to current federal policy which directs them to use the most complainant-friendly “preponderance of the evidence” standard.

Article here. Excerpt:

Article here. Excerpt:

'“We saved a baby bird!” my oldest son burst out.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Walsh, we didn’t actually touch it with our hands,” assured a flame-haired pal who shares my obsession with E. coli. “We used stuff in the alley to pick it up.”

“It wasn’t squished or run over or anything, so we took it to the animal hospital on Western,” explained another boy, still incredulous that their mission had been successful and that the animal hospital hadn’t turned them away.
...
As the mother of three boys, I remain extremely sensitive to the increasing trend in male-bashing. After all, these are my loves, my life. They are not responsible for releasing a single ill onto the world. They are not predators or instigators of war.

Yet, even I once believed they would walk right past a fallen bird without notice.

Instead?

These boys chose to carry a broken soul to safety in an old beer box.

It makes me wonder what they might do tomorrow if we let them.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'But I found myself thinking, I didn’t sign on for this. Unlike professional athletes or musical performers or reality TV stars, people who become deans of students are not usually interested in the spotlight. Our work goes on behind closed doors where the hearts of students are laid bare and need to be repaired, or in campus forums where our students get to question our decisions and we can defend them, or change them. These things happen in the context of community, and that is what provides meaning and validity. That is how change, and improvement, occur.

And now our work is the subject of bloggers and activists who are so driven by agendas that they cannot consider an alternative viewpoint. Our efforts to serve our campuses are being pushed aside by the cottage industry of “consultants” and lawyers who prey on the fear of presidents and boards, worried that their institution will be the next one featured in The New York Times.

Story here. Excerpt:

'The California Green Party is attracting controversy after posting an image on its official Instagram page which promotes “free slaps” to be metered out to ‘straight white men’.

The photo shows two women sat behind a table which is covered with a banner that reads “Finally! Free Slaps For Cisgendered Straight-identified White Men.” The image is supposedly designed to draw attention to ‘rape culture’, a perennial obsession for feminists and liberals that has been vehemently debunked.
...
The post attracted numerous irate comments, including from one woman who remarked, “Why is it just cis white straight males??? How is that NOT offensive. Are they the only ones (raping). I’m a rape survivor and I hate this.”

“My rapist(s) weren’t just white straight cis males,” she added. “The person who molested me as a child was a woman, the guy who raped me when I was 19 was black.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'Following up the reports that Malawi24 released on 25 July that circumcision does not help in the reduction of HIV but exacerbates it, reports have emerged that have agreed with the facts that we had earlier established.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), one of the world's renowned NGOs working on public health, has released statistics showing that HIV infection rate in Malawi has doubled in recent years despite a range of interventions put in place to tackle the spread of the virus that have included relentless campaign on condomisation and circumcision.

According to the statistics by MSF, HIV rates have doubled in Malawi moving from 10% to 20% in 1 year. Strangely, this has been the same period that Malawians have been manipulative forced to go through circumcision in masses with the promise that it reduces the contraction of HIV.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Unhappy with a campus judicial proceeding that led to his expulsion following a sexual assault allegation, a former Washington and Lee University student will be allowed to contest the finding in a federal courtroom.

The student’s lawsuit against the school can go forward, a judge ruled this week.

U.S. District Judge Norman Moon wrote in an opinion that the allegations made in the lawsuit, if “taken as true, suggest that W&L’s disciplinary procedures, at least when it comes to charges of sexual misconduct, amount to a practice of railroading accused students.”

Identified in court records only as John Doe, the student cited several grounds for his assertion that an internal judicial process slanted to favor female accusers over male defendants resulted in his being wrongfully found to have had nonconsensual sex with a fellow student.

Article here. Excerpt:

'There are two rival bills in Congress addressing campus sexual assault. A nominally bipartisan bill spearheaded by Democrats Claire McCaskill and Mark Warner focuses on heaping more requirements on schools to turn their disciplinary systems into witch-hunts. Republicans in the House of Representatives, meanwhile, have introduced a bill that tries to balance protecting women from sexual assault with protecting the rights of those who have been accused of this horrible crime.

Right now, absent the case of a star athlete who the school needs for a championship shot, if a school receives a complaint by someone alleging sexual assault it has every incentive to find the male student guilty, regardless of what actually happened.

On the one hand, if the man is found not responsible – perhaps because he didn’t actually commit a sexual assault – the school can be sued by the woman, investigated by President Obama’s overly aggressive Department of Education, and publicly shamed.

I thought this was an interesting little tidbit. Excerpt:

'One of the strange things about feminism is how this movement, built upon hateful slander, has acquired the power to silence its critics. In 1977, when a few dozen women turned out to hear Andrea Dworkin speak in Amherst, it was still possible to oppose feminism on an American university campus. Today, dissenting voices are almost never heard in academia, where feminists exercise the kind of controlling power wielded by the mullahs in Tehran or by Kim Jung Un in Pyongyang.
...
Silencing opposition is necessary to feminism’s success in reducing educational opportunities for males. Females are already 57 percent of college enrollment and in some fields, such as psychology, women outnumber males more than 3-to-1. As the percentage of males on campus dwindles, feminists in academia become ever more vehement in their denunciations of male students as rapists and harassers. Colleges now “teach women that men are the enemy and men are treated as such on campus,” as Helen Smith explains in her book Men on Strike. “Many men have just decided that they don’t belong in college ... more and more men drop out of college or never attend.”

The time has come.

Thanks to your hard work, a strong due process bill has been introduced to address campus sexual assault. SAVE formally endorses it, and we need your help to get it passed.

The bill is called the Safe Campus Act (H.R. 3403) and was introduced last week by Reps. Matt Salmon, Kay Granger, and Pete Sessions. The bill can be read here.

The bill will pass off most investigations to the police and restore many vital due process protections on campus, such as the right to a lawyer and to cross-examine.

Please contact your legislators today and tell them to co-sponsor the bill.

To reach your representatives, call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121, or find your U.S. Representative at http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

Thank you so much!

 
Gina Lauterio, Esq., Policy Program Director
Stop Abusive and Violent Environments   
www.saveservices.org