India: NGOs demand separate ministry, panel to protect men's rights

Article here. Excerpt:

'Kolkata: A forum of NGOs working for men's rights has demanded that the party forming government after the Lok Sabha polls create a separate ministry and a national commission for the protection of men's rights in the wake of "misuse" of dowry laws and registration of "false" sexual harassment cases.

The National Coalition for Men (NCM), a coalition of about 50 organisations fighting for men's rights, has released a 10-point charter of demands to be considered by political parties for the Lok Sabha election.

NCM said they wanted to highlight the increasing rate of "innocent married and unmarried men" falling prey to "gender biased" laws.

Besides a ministry and a commission for men, the NCM's charter, named 'Men-I-Festo', included converting 'gender biased laws' to gender neutral ones, forming a task force to probe suicide by married men and a helpline number for men in distress, NCM president Amit Gupta told a news agency.'

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Rand Paul: "If There Was A War On Women, I Think They Won"

Video and transcript here. Excerpt:

'SEN. RAND PAUL: Well, you know, I think we have a lot of debates in Washington that get dumbed down and are used for political purposes. This whole sort of war on women thing, I'm scratching my head because if there was a war on women, I think they won. You know, the women in my family are incredibly successful.

I have a niece at Cornell vet school, and 85% of the young people there are women. In law school, 60% are women; in med school, 55%. My younger sister's an ob-gyn with six kids and doing great. You know, I don't see so much that women are downtrodden; I see women rising up and doing great things. And, in fact, I worry about our young men sometimes because I think the women really are out-competing the men in our world.'

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UK: Student who falsely claimed rape has jail-sentence appeal rejected

Story here. Excerpt:

'A student whose false rape claims resulted in one of the Thames Valley Police force’s most expensive investigations has been told by top judges she deserved to be sent to prison.

The former Reading University student, who cannot be identified, cried rape after some friends found her looking dishevelled when returning from a night out.

Although the 21-year-old, originally from Birmingham, did not point the finger directly at anyone, the thorough police investigation which followed her claim led to a man being arrested and held overnight until he proved he was elsewhere at the time of the alleged rape.
...
Last Thursday she challenged her jail term, with her lawyers arguing it should be suspended in light of her troubled history and evidence which had recently surfaced.

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"I Look Down On Young Women With Husbands And Kids And I’m Not Sorry"

Article here. Excerpt:

'Every time I hear someone say that feminism is about validating every choice a woman makes I have to fight back vomit.

Do people really think that a stay at home mom is really on equal footing with a woman who works and takes care of herself? There’s no way those two things are the same. It’s hard for me to believe it’s not just verbally placating these people so they don’t get in trouble with the mommy bloggers.

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Jerusalem Post: "Circumcision – defending the indefensible"

Article here. To be clear: This article is *not* an op-ed by The Jerusalem Post; it just appears in it. Excerpt:

'I am a Jewish filmmaker and I have been invited by the Council of Europe to its Parliamentary Assembly next week. By screening my television documentary It’s a Boy! for European parliamentarians I aim to help shore up their commitment to protection of children’s right to physical integrity – a key step toward ending ritual circumcision of boys. Yet there is a struggle underway.
...
Parents like me know from our remorse that it was wrong to make such an irreversible, painful and dangerous decision for our children. We owed our children protection, and we owe it to our communities not to be silenced when we have erred as parents.

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Australia: DHS wants teen returned to mum who held him down while circumcised by witchdoctor

Link here. Excerpt:

'THE Department of Human Services is trying to force a 14-year-old boy who was pinned down by his mother while he was forcibly circumcised by an international witchdoctor to return to live with her.

The teen remained conscious throughout the procedure.

The boy has told authorities he was one of 13 young boys across Melbourne to experience similar backyard procedures by the visiting witchdoctor on Boxing Day, in line with his mother's South Pacific culture.
...
The move is being opposed by the boy's father, who made a complaint to police after learning about the procedure.
...
Victorian Opposition spokeswoman for children Jenny Mikakos called on the State Government to explain if this had happened before and if it could happen again.

"How can the department allow this invasive procedure to occur when one parent and the child himself are vehemently against it?" Ms Mikakos said.

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Suit: Utah adoption laws permit ‘legalized fraud and kidnapping’

Article here. Excerpt:

'Twelve biological fathers whose children were placed for adoption in Utah without their knowledge or consent have filed a federal lawsuit against the state, alleging Utah laws permit "legalized fraud and kidnapping."

The fathers, represented by West Jordan attorney Wes Hutchins, allege that despite knowing about the "gross adoption infirmities" of Utah’s laws, two former attorneys general "did nothing for more than a decade to correct the fraud and deception" that led to their children being placed with adoptive families in Utah.

What happened to their sons and daughters was essentially "kidnapping and highly unethical and disruptive placement into adoptive homes without the knowledge or consent of their biological fathers," the lawsuit states.

Utah’s laws have created a "confusing labyrinth of virtually incomprehensible legal mandates and nearly impossible deadlines" that amount to unconstitutional violations of the rights of unwed fathers, it states.'

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White House Faking Rape Statistics?

Article here. Excerpt:

'President Obama’s latest attempt to shine brightly before America’s college students may be losing some of its luster.

A victim-advocacy group is crying foul over the administration’s latest crisis in need of intervention, claiming the White House’s new campaign to combat sexual assault on campus is touting trumped up statistics for “ideological” reasons.

But an organization called Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, or SAVE, is warning the statistics – notably that one in every five women experiences rape or attempted rape in their lifetime, often on college campuses – are artificially inflated and actually do more harm than good.

“SAVE calls on the Obama Administration to fulfill its promise of policymaking based on science, not ideological persuasion,” the organization asserts. “No woman should have to fear rape, [but] inflating the numbers only invites ridicule and doubt.”

SAVE notes Jarrett’s numbers are based on Center for Disease Control, or CDC, studies that have been widely criticized.

The CDC, for example, claimed that in 1.3 million American women were raped in 2010, with an additional 12.6 million women and men victimized by sexual violence, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports only 188,380 rapes and sexual assaults for the same year.

Why the discrepancy?

There appears to be a significant problem in defining what does and doesn’t constitute “sexual assault.”
...
Even by multiplying the number of victims by 10 (in order to factor in the common notion that 90 percent of such assaults go unreported) and accounting for a single woman to spend five years at the university, Hermann calculated only somewhere between 1 in 130 and 1 in 925 Pitt students would experience sexual assault.

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Editorial: The war on young boys

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Obama Administration, through Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and U S. Attorney general Eric Holder, have issued new guidelines designed to end or at least restrict "zero tolerance" disciplinary policies in schools.
...
About every month some story surfaces in "The Week" or "Reason" magazines, detailing how some young child is tossed out of school for a minor offense. A kindergartener kisses a girl on the hand and gets disciplined for sex abuse. A plastic two-inch ultra-small toy gun in the paws of a stuffed bear gets the owning student punished. And so on.

Why have schools gone this way? Well, parents and administrators overreact and codes are drawn up that allow no wiggle room. It's like mandatory sentencing in courts. It mostly works, but not always. It used to be, a generation ago, that the teacher's word was law. Now, one of the staples, in many school districts, is the appeal of discipline to the school board. The board had better be "lawyered up" and better have a written policy covering the transgression.

But the Obama administration policy is designed to stop what they call the "school-to-prison" pipeline. The immediate target was to show concern about the high numbers of African-American students who get expelled. In Chicago, for example, African-American students make up 80 percent of all expulsions. That seems both incredible and unfair.
...
Moreover, race is not the real key here. Gender is the key.

That's gender as in fathers and gender as in sons. Watch "Raising Cain."

In schools today, boys constitute two-thirds of "special education." A boy is five times as likely to be diagnosed as "hyperactive." A boy is 30 percent more likely to flunk out of school.

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NPO: "2013: A Good Year for Dads in Ads"

Article here. Excerpt:

'Once again, Zach Rosenberg provides THE analysis of how advertisers treat Dads. According to Rosenberg, 2013 was a pretty good year. 121 of the 140 commercials that he watched and analyzed fall into the neutral-to-good categories for treatment of dads.

Of course it helps that Kimberly-Clark — for Huggies — and Clorox spoke with dad bloggers. They listened; they learned. Oscar Meyer listened to dad tweets, then apparently ignored. The standout is Unilever's Dove Men + Care with an ad campaign featuring the Miami Heat's Dwyane Wade and the positive contributions of fathers. On the other hand, Procter & Gamble continues to give moms all the credit for our Olympic Athletes. You can enjoy this throughout the winter games.'

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Circumcision divide between Denmark and Israel

Article here. Excerpt:

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SAVE: "White House Report Downplays False Allegations of Rape, Artificially Inflates the Numbers, SAVE Asserts"

Press release here. Excerpt:

'WASHINGTON / January 24, 2014 – A leading victim-advocacy group is charging the recent White House report, Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action, ignores the growing problem of false allegations and relies on inflated rape statistics. Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) calls on the Obama Administration to fulfill its promise of policymaking based on science, not ideological persuasion.

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Twisting Sexual Assault Statistics

Article here. Excerpt:

'It is estimated that one in five women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there — one in five,” President Obama said on Wednesday. The occasion for this lecture: He was announcing the creation of a White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.
...
But is it accurate? While estimates in this range have been reported since the ’80s, the report released in conjunction with the president’s creation of the task force cites a pair of more recent studies for the figure. One of them, “The Campus Sexual Assault Study,” prepared for the National Institute of Justice in 2007, found that 19 percent of women reported “experiencing completed or attempted sexual assault since entering college.” The number who experienced a completed sexual assault was 13.7 percent; 4.7 percent of respondents experienced “physically forced” assaults (3.7 percent of these physically forced assaults were rapes). Eleven percent of women were assaulted while incapacitated by alcohol or drugs.
...
To understand how this works, consider another study to which the president’s report points, finding that 20 percent of women are raped in their lifetimes. In its definition of rape, the CDC’s “National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence” survey includes sex that occurred when the victim was drunk or high, regardless of whether she was incapacitated or unable to give consent. Participants were asked to respond to the question: “When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to give consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you?” A woman could list instances of consensual sex she had while intoxicated that she did not consider to be rape — that were in fact not rape — and the researchers would nonetheless classify her as a rape victim.
...

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12-YO reports rape attempt to avoid saying she missed school bus

Article here. Excerpt:

'A 12-year-old Streator girl could face punishment after making a false report Wednesday of an attempted sexual assault.

The girl reported Wednesday about 3 p.m. that she was approached by a white male as she was walking home from school near North Wasson Street. She said the man pulled down her pants and she ran several blocks to get away.

Streator police reported the girl and her mother came to the police station Thursday morning to confess the report was made up by the girl, for fear of getting in trouble for missing the school bus.'

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False abduction and sexual assault claimant sentenced to probation

Article here. Excerpt:

'A Clarke University student who told police she was abducted from campus and sexually assaulted was sentenced to probation Thursday for making the story up.

Robin A. Levitski, 19, of Warren, Ill., received a deferred judgment after pleading guilty to filing a false report. Dubuque District Court Judge Robert Richter sentenced her to one year of probation and fined her $315 plus court costs.'

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