Article here. Excerpt:

'A recent revelation that a Palm Springs teenager fabricated a story about a kidnapping and sexual assault is a costly back step in the cultural campaign to combat sexual violence, which some experts say may dissuade true rape victims from reporting their attackers to police.
...
False reports of rape are rare, but even a few cases can do incalculable damage to the nationwide efforts to expose and apprehend sexual predators. False reports make the public more suspicious of actual rape victims, and can disillusion law enforcement so they are less receptive to future reports of such offenses. The ramifications are magnified when a few false reports are given more media coverage than real cases of rape, which strike every day.

Worst of all, false reports make actual rape victims question whether their stories will be believed. Afraid to come forward, these victims are more likely to suffer in silence, leaving their attackers free to strike again.

"It hurts us," said Scott Berkowitz, president of the Rape Abuse & Incest National Network, the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the country. "False reports make the public doubt, and they make police more skeptical the next time a real victim walks in the door. Anytime police put a lot of energy into a case that turns out not to have been true, it is naturally going to discourage them and make them more suspicious next time."
...
Speaking generally, Program Director Winette Brenner said false reports often stem from deep-seated pain. Every case is different, but most of the time a person who makes a false report is in desperate need, and does not have any malicious intent, Brenner said.

"It's a cry for help … from a person who is in so much pain that they don't know how to deal with that pain any further," she added.

Story here.

'Police say a Pennsylvania woman chased her boyfriend around a dining room and stabbed him in the chest because he started eating Thanksgiving dinner while she slept off a bender.

Authorities say Jacklyn Blake confessed to officers who responded to her Wilkes-Barre home Thursday. Officers found her boyfriend inside holding a towel over his chest. He was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

The 47-year-old Blake is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, simple assault, reckless endangerment and making terroristic threats. It wasn’t clear if she has a lawyer.

According to police, Blake’s boyfriend says she’d been drunk earlier in the day and attacked him after waking up from a nap. He says she stabbed him and then threw the knife, striking him just below the left eye.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'What I hadn’t expected was how many people would assume that we were having a boy (perhaps because boys are still preferred, even in this supposedly modern time) and would then instruct us about how essential it was to get this hypothetical child circumcised. We heard all the usual arguments: circumcision is necessary due to the laws of Judaism; it is cleaner; it is healthier; it is wrong and even harmful not to circumcise; a Jewish boy will feel “left out” if not circumcised; it’s against our forefathers and everything they went through to not do it; and so on. I was, frankly, stunned by all this. Such comments felt like an attack, and a very personal one too.
...
Eventually, exhausted by these conversations, I asked that we stop talking about it. I said my wife and I understood their point of view, but we’d made the decision not to circumcise, and we hoped everyone else could accept and respect it. There was a brief time when relatives stopped bringing it up.

But then the offensive mounted new attacks by emailing us anecdotes from men, including non-Jews, who said they were “glad” and “grateful” that their parents circumcised them. We were also sent scanned pages from books and articles about the importance of circumcision. My irritation increased, so in retaliation, I began photocopying pages from books too and sending links to medical research. I said I was happy for those men who were grateful to be circumcised but that not everyone was appreciative of such a major decision being made on their behalf when they were infants; we reminded people about various medical and legal cases where men had physical, mental, emotional, or sexual damage from their circumcisions.
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'National Parents Organization is encouraging its members and friends to share recent media coverage of National Parents Organization’s inaugural Shared Parenting Report Card. The media attention heightens awareness of the need for child custody reform and supports shared parenting.  Spread the news to as many people as possible!  We need to win in the court of public opinion in order to move us forward on the path toward change in family that has children’s best interests at heart.

Article here. Excerpt:

'In spite of the online interest, Washington has one of the lowest circumcision rates in the U.S.

In 2012, the Jewish Daily Forward reported that 15 percent of boys born in Washington were circumcised. The top-ranked state is West Virginia, with a rate of 87 percent, according to the Forward’s research.
...
When she became pregnant, Andersen was adamant about keeping her son’s foreskin intact — and finding a foreskin-friendly pediatrician.

“I figured he was born with it, I’m sure there’s a reason that it’s there,” said Andersen, who was shocked at the procedure’s prevalence in the U.S. “American doctors are not educated on how to take care of it. The one thing they learn about the foreskin is that they have to cut it off.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'"If I were you I wouldn't put up with that", “How can you let this happen?”, “Why don’t you just leave?” or “Why don’t you just kick her out?” Until the last sentence, many reading the first three questions would assume that the questions were directed at a woman suffering in an abusive relationship rather than a confused battered husband.

Women today can be combat pilots, astronauts and prime ministers, and yes, they can also physically assault their spouses and life partners.

Article here. Excerpt:

'It’s difficult to imagine a more callous, wholly inadequate response to a culture of seemingly rampant sexual assault at the University of Virginia (UVA) than the one its administrators practiced year after year, according to a horrifying account finally publicized by Rolling Stone last week. But that’s precisely what happens when an entity equipped only to deal with academic misbehavior is instead pushed to do something about sexual assault: it finds itself putting the university’s brand name first and the victims second.

Article here. Excerpt:

'I have decided to take basic bullet points of how cults indoctrinate and manipulate people and explain exactly how feminism is doing the same thing, making this movement into a vile cult. Follow along if you’d like, but I’m sure most people who already read my posts are already well aware of what’s going on.

Submission to Leadership – This one is fairly obvious. Though there doesn’t seem to be any set president of the entire feminist movement, there are several “leaders” that feminists subscribe to. Defend to the death, and praise to hell and back.
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Polarized World View – All feminists are good. Anyone who isn’t a feminist is against feminists.
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Feeling Over Thought – If the facts don’t agree with their feelings, feminists do not accept them as truth. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told that an official source is not an official source because a feminist doesn’t agree with it.
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Manipulation of Feelings – Shaming, there is a lot of shaming. In my last post I explained how feminists just love to pick on the physical appearances of women who don’t agree with them. I’ve been called every name in the book.
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Denigration of Critical Thinking – If someone displays logic, offers a valid source, or points out that an argument is a fallacy they are severely degraded for it. 
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Salvation or Fulfillment can only be realized in the group – This one is really important. Feminists are always screaming about the only way that women are ever going to get any equality is to be feminist.
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End Justifies the Means – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a post praising a woman for murdering a man who was an alleged rapist. I can’t tell you how many times there’s been a post about how a feminist wishes to harm someone til they agree with them.
...

Video here. Caption:

"Sexual assault on college campuses is receiving increased scrutiny. As calls to combat sexual assault grow louder on campuses across the country, many are looking to colleges to respond. Do the current methods that universities use while handling rape cases work? How can universities preserve the rights of both the survivors of sexual assault and of the accused students?"

A related item by Cathy Young discussing the debate is here.

Article here. Excerpt:

'For all my writing about the rights of the accused in campus sexual assault hearings, one must never forget that horrific rapes do actually happen on college campuses.

Case in point: A story from Rolling Stone last week about a woman at the University of Virginia who says she was gang-raped at a fraternity party her freshman year. Regardless of the specifics of the crime, it’s clear the university mishandled her sexual assault complaint.

Rolling Stone author Sabrina Rubin Erdely detailed that the head of UVA’s Sexual Misconduct Board, Dean Nicole Eramo, showed no emotion when the woman – known in the article as Jackie – described the gang rape. This is baffling to me, as the level of detail Jackie provided in the article – and the fact that she claims she was sober during the attack – doesn’t lend itself to a shrug.

Story here. If I ever became a legislator, I'd sponsor a bill creating a crime called "Criminal Stupidity". Sure, she may also be nuts, but if that wouldn't excuse a man from it, it shouldn't excuse a woman. Excerpt:

'A mother is outraged after a woman came up and punched her baby in the face at a restaurant on Folly Beach Saturday.

"It was a random act of stupidity," Amber Fortson of Little River said Wednesday.

Barbra Green, 59, of Riverland Drive told arresting officers she thought the 5-month-old boy was a doll and she was joking, according to the incident report.

She was charged with assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature and disorderly conduct and released from the Charleston County jail on $25,262 bail.
...
"We were surrounded by great people, having a great time," Mrs. Fortson said. "People around us were showing us pictures of their babies."

Article here. Excerpt:

'The "potty-mouth princesses" are back, this time with bruises.

For-profit t-shirt company FCKH8 has released a new shock-value video of little girls cursing to raise awareness about domestic violence -- and sell a t-shirt.

Link here (.pdf, 1.3 MB). Excerpt:

'Since many studies on counseling interventions are in sexually active girls, research is needed on interventions to prevent other types of sexually transmitted infections (STI) in sexually active boys and in adolescents who are not yet sexually active. More research is needed on the effectiveness of low-intensity interventions that are more practical for the typical primary care setting. In addition, research is also needed to understand the effectiveness of screening sexually active adolescent males in reducing the spread of chlamydia and gonorrhea, as well as cotesting for other STIs and different screening intervals. Studies providing data about the potential harms of screening would also be valuable.'

-- Found at p. 20 of the report (p. 26 of the .pdf file)

Story here. Excerpt:

'Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition parties agreed on Tuesday to a draft law that would force Germany's leading listed companies to allocate 30 percent of the seats on non-executive boards to women from 2016 onward.

Although Europe's biggest economy has a female leader and roughly 40 percent of the cabinet is female, women still are under-represented in business life.

Among the 30 largest companies on Germany's blue-chip DAX index, women occupied only 7 percent of executive board seats and barely 25 percent of supervisory board seats by the end of June, according to the DIW economic think-tank.

Story here. Excerpt:

'A man in his 20s who was rejected after applying to a women-only university where he planned to study nutrition is suing the college for gender discrimination.

In what is believed to be the first case in Japan challenging the constitutionality of a publicly run women’s university, the man is seeking a verdict from the courts that would allow him to take an entrance exam at Fukuoka Women’s University, according to a lawyer representing the man.

“Not allowing men to take the exam violates Article 14 of the Constitution, which proclaims equality before the law,” the man, whose identity has not been revealed, was quoted by the Asahi Shimbun as saying. He is also seeking ¥500,000 in damages.

A lawyer representing him is arguing that women-only colleges are no longer relevant and discriminate against men.