Petition started by F&F New York here. Excerpt:

'Domestic violence is a problem throughout the world. A bill known as the International Violence Against Women Act (I-VAWA) has been introduced in Congress to combat domestic violence in other countries. But the bill is deeply flawed because it assumes that all abuse is male-on-female and ignores both men abused by women and LGBT victims. If the bill were to pass, large classes of victims would be silenced and denied access to services.

The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) has looked at domestic violence in 85 countries around the world and that found men and women were equally likely to be abuse perpetrators in most cases (1). PASK also found that LGBT couples were at increased risk of domestic violence (2).

Article here. (Originally submitted by MANN reader 'Mastodon', but a technical problem during an update required the original post to be deleted.) Excerpt:

'Amid a backdrop of intense activism, a male Columbia student is retaliating in federal court against an internal disciplinary conviction of sexual assault.

The student, who is only identified as John Doe in the suit filed Monday, alleges that Columbia administrators sought to make an example out of his case, that his rights under Title IX were violated and that administrators succumbed to external pressures from student activists in determining his guilt. He was allegedly suspended for up to a year and a half as a result.

According to a copy of the complaint, the plaintiff and a female student identified as Jane Doe belonged to the same group of friends and met the night of the alleged incident in a study lounge. They allegedly spent hours chatting and studying, after which the subject of hooking up was brought up.'

Article here. Excerpt:

A C Grayling [link added] has criticised a boycott of the Oxford Union after the president was reinstalled despite being investigated by police over rape allegations, saying he is “innocent until proven guilty”.

The Professor of Philosophy said the president, who was arrested by police earlier this month on suspicion of rape and attempted rape of two undergraduates, should not be subject to “the kangaroo court of opinion”.

He criticised the boycott by Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble, David Mepham, UK Director of Human Rights Watch and Julie Meyer, the American entrepreneur and judge on the BBC’s Dragon’s Den.

Article here.

'He looked up at the clouds and saw a handgun.

A Colorado second grader was disciplined after he drew a picture of a handgun during an assignment where students look up to the clouds and draw what they see.

Kody Smith, 8, went outside May 14, looked up to the sky and saw a big fluffy handgun, KKTV.com reported. When he showed the drawing to his teacher at Talbott Elementary in Widefield, which is southeast of Colorado Springs, he was reprimanded.

The school reportedly filed a behavior report that said Smith’s behavior was disruptive to the school. The school district told the station that the report will not remain on Smith’s record and its response was “in line with routine procedures focused on school safety. But the boy’s parents say he was wrongfully punished.

"He was doing exactly what he was told to do for the assignment,' Angel Rivers, the boy's mom, told the station.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'Apologizing profusely, Julie Schenecker wept Thursday night as she told a judge she believes the two children she shot to death "are in no pain and they are alive and enjoying everything and anything heaven has to offer, Jesus protecting them and keeping them safe until we get there."

Schenecker had just been convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in the Jan. 27, 2011, slayings of her children, Calyx, 16, and Beau, 13. Jurors took less than three hours to reach their verdict, rejecting defense arguments that Schenecker was insane at the time she shot her children.

Following Schenecker's emotional statement, Circuit Judge Emmet Lamar Battles, saying the case was "almost too much for most to comprehend," sentenced her to the mandatory sentence of two life terms without parole.

Schenecker's former husband, Parker Schenecker, told reporters afterward that the verdict "gives my family a sense of relief."

As we mentioned last week, the International Violence Against Women Act (S. 2307) has reared its ugly head. I-VAWA would support five types of violence-reduction programs:

1. Programs to "change social norms"
2. Educational opportunities for women and girls
3. Expanded access to economic opportunities by "increasing distribution, credit, property, and inheritance rights for women and girls."
4. Development and enforcement of civil and criminal legal and judicial sanctions, protections, trainings, and capacity.
5. Enhancement of health sector capacity

We have to ask, what about men and boys?

Studies from 85 countries show men and women are equally likely to engage in partner aggression. And, according to the World Health Organization, men are twice as likely as women to die of violence-related causes.

Please ask your lawmakers to reject I-VAWA because it disregards most victims of violence.

Press release here. Excerpt:

'WASHINGTON / May 21, 2014 – Based on growing complaints by victims and accused students, Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) is calling on Congress to fix the current system of campus disciplinary committees. A 2011 federal policy mandated that these panels adjudicate claims of campus sexual assault. Over 350 editorials to date have sharply criticized the boards both for shortchanging victims and violating the rights of the accused: www.accusingu.org

SAVE is proposing enactment of a new law entitled “SOS: Safety of Our Students.” The law would require that all allegations of campus criminal sexual assault be referred to local criminal justice authorities for investigation and adjudication. The full text of the bill can be seen here: http://www.saveservices.org/camp/campus-rape-courts

Article here. Excerpt:

'The air around us has recently been so thick with accusations of racism and sexism that it’s sometimes been a struggle to get a gulp of unpolluted air.

One day, Richard Scudamore and David Dein of the FA are diving into serious, career-threatening hot water for exchanging and forwarding lewd, unsavoury emails. The previous moment, an obscure presenter on BBC local radio was getting sacked for haplessly playing an 80 year-old record that mentioned the N-word. Then Nigel Farage is roasted alive for unguardedly admitting that he’d be more nervous if a group of Romanian men moved into the house next door than if a German family took up residence.

Article here. Excerpt:

'The other day a male friend met me for dinner looking pale about the gills and generally discombobulated. It transpired that, during his Tube journey, he'd been what can only be described as 'set upon' by a group of inebriated women who were on a hen night. As they shrieked an ear-splitting version of Beyonce's 'Who Run the World (Girls!)', two of them proceeded to sit on his lap, pinning him to his seat, while a third performed an involuntary (on his part) lap-dance. Luckily, they disembarked a few stops later (still screeching and flinging their arms around random male passers-by) otherwise my friend would have been trapped in his seat all the way to zone six. He couldn't make himself heard over the impromptu karaoke and didn't feel he could push them off for fear of appearing aggressive. So, he simply laughed along uncomfortably, praying the entire humiliating episode would, at some stage, come to a conclusion.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Passions have been running high on the issue of sexual assault on college campuses, with women telling wrenching stories, universities being accused of failing victims, and the federal government seeking ways to force schools to do better. It seems like an unimpeachable cause. But, like many moral crusades, this one relies on too many uncritically accepted claims, often embraces blind zealotry, and has the potential to hurt innocent people without necessarily aiding those it seeks to help.

As proof of the catastrophic scope of the problem, we are told that one in five college women will be sexually assaulted by the time they graduate. But this figure comes from surveys in which the questions used to measure alcohol- or drug-facilitated sexual assault are worded so broadly as to lump together incapacitation and impairment, and in which most women classified as victims of rape do not believe they were raped and do not report the incident because they don’t think it’s serious enough to report.

Much-publicized personal narratives of sexual assault are likewise plagued by fuzzy definitions, ranging from violent rape to intoxicated sex in which the woman feels she was too drunk to properly consent. A recent letter in The Harvard Crimson from an anonymous student who failed in her quest for redress illustrates these gray areas. The letter describes a drunken encounter in which the woman never said she wanted to stop, only telling the male student to “stop kissing [her] aggressively,” and “obeyed” when he asked her to satisfy him. When the account was posted on Slate, the liberal online publication, even many commenters usually sympathetic to rape accusers felt the man’s behavior sounded boorish but not criminal.
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'As an Obama Administration report on "sexual assault" provokes anger at injustices against falsely accused men, eminent historians, political philosophers, constitutional scholars and nine hundred others are condemning attacks on a professor who drew attention to a related larger crisis which threatens Western society.

Professor Stephen Baskerville was furiously attacked by feminists and gender activists after his September lecture "Politicizing Potiphar's Wife: The New Ideology" mentioned unconstitutional procedures which empower females who falsely accuse males of rape or "harassment."

Baskerville's work is part of rising international outrage that includes prominent women warning that decades of feminist propaganda has resulted in men being routinely denied basic legal rights and due process, and often their lives are ruined by illegal imprisonment, impoverishment and loss of their children.

Story here.

'A mother who was so drunk as she walked with her 1-month-old baby that she caused the infant to fall out of a stroller near a busy street plead guilty Monday, according to Humble police.

Sandra Grohman, 29, plead guilty to endangering a child and was sentenced to 180 days in jail.

A concerned citizen called authorities on April 22, 2014 to report that the mother, who appeared to be intoxicated, was pushing a stroller in the 1200 block of S. Houston Ave. about five feet away from a busy roadway. The witness said the mother had fallen over, causing the baby to fall out of the stroller.
When officers arrived, they determined Grohman was intoxicated. They had the baby checked out by EMS at the scene.

Her baby was released to Children’s Protective Services.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Forget the “war on women.” American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers says that there’s a “war on boys” unfolding in America’s public school classrooms.

“Being a normal boy is a serious liability in today’s classroom,” Sommers said in a short video lesson* for Prager University, a conservative video series. ”Increasingly, our schools have little patience for what only a few decades ago would have been described as boyishness.”

Sommers says it’s past time to make elementary schools more friendly to boys, and she has four ways to do that: turn boys into readers; inspire their imagination; get rid of zero-tolerance policies; and bring recess back.

Story here. Excerpt:

'It looks like the pro-choice Feminist Studies professor who assaulted a pro-life teen on the campus of UC Santa Barbara is looking for financial assistance due to “growing legal fees”

In March, the Santa Barbara District Attorney filed charges of grand theft, battery, and vandalism against Professor Mireille Miller-Young for violence she committed against young pro-life activists who held a peaceful outreach on the UC Santa Barbara campus on March 4th.

Article here. Excerpt:

'WASHINGTON — College officials often aren’t clear about how they must report cases of campus rape and sexual violence, and victims often feel they don’t have the support they need to hold assailants accountable, Sen. Claire McCaskill said Monday following a Capitol Hill roundtable.

The discussion focused on the Clery Act, which requires colleges and universities to disclose campus crime statistics. Some of the participants who met with McCaskill and Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., said that schools report the crimes differently and many don’t provide the training needed to investigate the attacks.
...
A former sex crimes prosecutor in Kansas City, the Missouri Democrat said the changes to the legislation that she and Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., are working on will include a requirement that schools annually conduct anonymous surveys to learn more about sexual assault cases on their campuses.

The surveys are needed because current law does not provide good data, McCaskill said. While some schools have complained about the costs of conducting the survey, “many universities are going to be reluctant to shirk away from the responsibility of finding out exactly what the problem is on their campuses,” she said.

The legislation also will set penalties for violations of the crime-reporting law and mishandling of cases under civil rights legislation. The penalty is loss of all federal financial aid money, but it’s so extreme that it never has been imposed.

McCaskill said lawmakers were considering fines based on a school’s size, as well as rewards for good training programs and reporting, such as special consideration on grant applications.