Letter here. Excerpt:

To the Editor:

Women outperform and outnumber men in postsecondary education, in part because the K-12 system does not provide boys with the same educational experience. It is geared for girls. Our academic system must bolster the experience for girls, but not at the expense of boys.

As we encourage girls to consider STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), we must work equally hard to encourage boys to consider literature, journalism and communications. Boys are often pushed toward math and science, and receive inadequate social support. We need to recognize boys’ differences, and their social and developmental needs.

Article here. Excerpt:

'As part of its Empowering Males of Color initiative, DCPS plans to recruit 500 volunteer tutors for black and Latino males. It will also award grants to schools that devise their own programs to help those students. And, in its flashiest move, in the fall of 2016 it will open a new boys-only high school east of the Anacostia River.

As part of its Empowering Males of Color initiative, DCPS plans to recruit 500 volunteer tutors for black and Latino males. It will also award grants to schools that devise their own programs to help those students. And, in its flashiest move, in the fall of 2016 it will open a new boys-only high school east of the Anacostia River.

Story here. Excerpt:

'George Mason University expelled a student after his ex-girlfriend complained of their consensual BDSM relationship, the student claims in court.

John Doe sued the university and two of its student deans, on Feb. 18, in Federal Court.

Doe claims that his girlfriend, who did not attend George Mason, initiated the BDSM practices (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism).

He says they dated November 2012 until January 2014, and that she requested, and received, acts such as "choking, biting, slapping, spanking, whipping, and restraining her.

They used the safe word "red" to prevent injuries, but doe claims that she told him "that if she said 'stop' during sex, he was not to stop because that was part of the game. However, if she used the safe word, their agreement was that John Doe should stop the sexual activity."'

Story here. Excerpt:

'A group of students at the University of California, Berkeley participated in a silent demonstration on Tuesday to protest parts of a national campus sexual assault conference that they didn’t like.

Among the things the angry students did not appreciate is “fair process” for people accused of committing sexual assaults. The students, who placed duct tape over their mouths and held signs, charged that due process for such defendants is “insensitive,” reports The Daily Californian, the UC Berkeley campus newspaper.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'The "Enough is Enough" tour is coming to a college campus near you.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched the campaign Wednesday to build support for his proposal that would establish a uniform policy for addressing sexual assaults on college campuses.

The policy is now in place for all schools in the State University of New York system. But Cuomo wants to make it a state law that applies to all colleges and universities, including private institutions.

"We're protecting women on SUNY campuses," Cuomo said at a press conference in Albany. "We should protect women on every campus in the state of New York."

Story here. Excerpt:

'Gov. Andrew Cuomo is turning up the pressure on private colleges and universities -- and urging victims to seek off-campus help from law enforcement officials to investigate rapes and assaults -- as he tries to force education leaders to adopt a set of state policies on handling sex crimes.

"If someone gets shot on a campus, that is not an academic matter," Cuomo said today during a cabinet meeting in Albany. "You would call the police." The same should be done when someone claims he or she is raped, he said.

Colleges, Cuomo said, have incentives to investigate serious crimes within campus to keep the prevalence of assaults from the public eye. Using campus police and faculty panels to adjudicate sex crimes can quickly become a "he-said, she-said," situation, the former attorney general said.

Story here. Excerpt:

'A BOURNEMOUTH woman has admitted making a false allegation of attempted rape against two soldiers.

Nicole Richess, 20, was due to stand trial at Bournemouth Crown Court yesterday on one count of perverting the course of justice, but changed her plea to guilty that afternoon.

The court heard Richess had met the two soldiers, now aged 23 and 24, on a night out in November 2012. At the time she was 18 years old.

She alleged the pair attempted to rape her, but when questioned by police the soldiers said they had gone to her home and had consensual sexual intercourse.

Representing Richess, Isabelle Gillard said rumours had circulated after the incident and her client's then-boyfriend of three years had asked her about what happened. She told him the false tale and he advised her to report it to the police.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced support for Oscar winning actress Patricia Arquette’s speech demanding equal pay for equal work in the United States.

“I think we all cheered at Patricia Arquette’s speech at the Oscars because she’s right — it’s time to have wage equality once and for all,” Clinton said in a speech at the Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women.

During an interview portion of the event, Clinton explained to Re/Code’s Kara Swisher that the tech industry is a “Wild West” atmosphere that favors men.

“I think a lot of women find that distasteful, unappealing to be in a situation sort of resembling a locker room in some ways where you just feel like it’s hard to get your voice in, it’s hard to be heard,” she explained.

Clinton claimed that often, women speak their ideas and are ignored until a man comes up with the same idea 20 minutes later and is recognized.

Story here.

'The de Blasio administration will do away with the policy that required a mohel to obtain a written consent form from parents before performing Metzitzah B'Peh, the circumcision ritual that involves the mohel sucking blood from the wounded penis.

The city's health department has for years linked the practice to neonatal herpes, citing four cases in 2014.

But the consent forms, which were put in place in 2012, offended members of certain Orthodox Jewish sects who rejected the link and found the forms to be an impingement on their religious freedom.

During the campaign, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to address the consent form and find a new way that respected religious freedom.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Around thirteen men in the UK will kill themselves today, and the male suicide rate is at a 14-year high. Is it time to accept that society has become dangerously hostile to men, asks Mike Snelle.

Story here. Excerpt:

"A man was stabbed and attacked by a mob when he was wrongly accused of rape, and claims his partner suffered a miscarriage after a gang hounded the couple over the false allegations.

Terry Brown, 33, was forced to flee his home town of Basildon in Essex after Lisa-Jayne Samuels falsely claimed he had drugged and raped her, and even picked him out of an ID parade. 

Samuels - who had made up the lies to get attention from her mother - was jailed for 20 months after she admitted perverting the course of justice but Mr Brown claims he was made a prisoner in his own home while he spent a year on bail for the false allegations. 

In one incident Mr Brown and his partner, Tracey Choularton, 25, were surrounded by a gang as they left their home and as Ms Choularton tried to flee she tripped and fell. She later suffered a miscarriage.  

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last week, 16 University of Pennsylvania law professors signed a letter protesting the lack of due process in the school’s sexual assault adjudication procedures. This follows a similar letter, signed by 28 Harvard Law faculty. It comes, as well, on the heels of a series of important articles by prominent feminists that individually, and even more so in combination, mount a powerful critique from a liberal feminist perspective.
...
But note also the steep asymmetry between the consequences of drinking and drug use for the complainant and for the respondent: for the former, intoxication is, to one degree or another, the basis for a per se finding of unwantedness even when assent — even when consent — has been given; but for the latter, it has no mitigating effect on his conduct. And now let us say that two Harvard students — one male, one female — have sex after drinking, using drugs, or both, that each of them feels intense remorse and moral horror about it afterward, and that they both rush the next morning to the Title IX Office with complaints. Let’s say they drop their complaints on the receptionist’s desk simultaneously. Which of them gets the benefit of the per se imputation of unwelcomeness, and which of them carries the heavy handicap of no mitigation? The woman and not the man? Both of them? Neither?
...
There’s no agreement in these essays as to exactly what sorts of policies should be put in place of what currently exists. But it is hard to read them all and maintain the belief that the miscarriages of justice remain a rare or marginal problem in campus sexual assault adjudication. It is likewise hard to believe that these kinds of abuses can persist indefinitely without doing real damage to the systems they represent.

Letter here. Excerpt:

'No, “due process of law is not window dressing,” and you have misstated the law of due process in the university setting. It is generally established that public universities owe students minimal due process rights, and private universities owe them none. While you critique the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights’ guidance that the evidentiary standard used should be a “preponderance of the evidence” standard instead of “clear and convincing” evidence, as a legal matter, private universities can discipline students with no process whatsoever. They must only adhere to the contract set forth by their own policies. Thus, the “Open Letter” must be seen for what it is: a disagreement with Title IX’s mandate that sexual assault survivors not be made to struggle through grievance procedures that specially insulate those accused of sexual assault. This policy, and the OCR’s guidance, was designed to fight the pernicious effects of sexism — including sexual harassment and assault — on our campus. Title IX, a civil rights law, mandates this policy for the purpose of ensuring that people are not denied the ability to pursue and enjoy their education on the basis of sex. The proceedings required are not criminal-light proceedings, despite your attempts to portray them as such. Although Penn’s data on discipline is sadly lacking, grievance proceedings are generally remarkable for the lack of consequences for those found to have committed a sexual assault. Few students found responsible for sexual assault in university adjudications are even expelled — between 13 percent and 30 percent by a recent count.

Article here. Excerpt:

'In September Barack Obama launched the “It’s on Us” campaign, designed to fight what he called the “nightmare” of campus sexual assault. “An estimated one in five women has been sexually assaulted during her college years,” Obama announced, pausing for emphasis. “One in five.” America, the president went on to argue, suffers from a “quiet tolerance of sexual assault,” all too often blaming victims, making excuses, or looking the other way. To combat sexual violence, he said, we need a “fundamental shift in our culture.”

With these words, the president of the United States went all in on the idea that America’s academic institutions have been taken over by a “rape culture” —a culture that normalizes, trivializes, and quietly condones male sexual assault against women, blaming female victims while subtly celebrating male predators.

Once rather obscure and confined to sociology and women’s studies departments, the term “rape culture” has slowly invaded the national consciousness. According to Google search analytics, the topic generated almost no traffic in 2005 or before. After 2011, its popularity slowly began to rise—as we’ll later see, this is no accident—and then, beginning in 2013, it spiked, the graph forming a hockey stick that would make global-warming doomsayer Michael Mann proud.

The idea that one in five college women has or will be sexually assaulted is mind-boggling and horrifying. It’s also not true. As Slate’s Emily Yoffe pointed out in December, the statistic—together with two other dubious studies that, just for the heck of it, upped the ante to one in four—would “mean that young American college women are raped at a rate similar to women in Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'Hillary Clinton portrays herself as a champion of women in the workforce, but women working for her in the U.S. Senate were paid 72 cents for each dollar paid to men, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis of her Senate years’ salary data.

During those years, the median annual salary for a woman working in Clinton’s office was $15,708.38 less than the median salary for a man, according to the analysis of data compiled from official Senate expenditure reports.
...
Mark Perry, an economic scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written extensively on the White House hypocrisy related to gender pay equality, said that the data on Clinton shows that she is guilty of the same hypocrisy.

“Politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama can’t have it both ways,” Perry said. “They use raw, aggregate, unadjusted gender differences in pay and then claim that those pay gaps are the result of gender discrimination, like the 23 percent national gender pay gap in aggregate median income.”

“They would then have to admit that they themselves are guilty of gender discrimination and have their own glass ceilings to explain, because they have gender pay gaps that are much greater than the average gender pay gap in Washington, D.C.”

Perry said Clinton needs to either put an end to her rhetoric on the issue or admit that she too is guilty of gender discrimination.

“Either Clinton is guilty of gender discrimination and pays her female staffers significantly less than men, or she is guilty of statistical fraud for spreading misinformation about the alleged gender pay gap at the national level,” he said.