#metoo – Laura Weinstein PhD

Rape Conviction & an Appalling Headline

Laura Weinstein — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 18:27:48 +0000

The Irish Times should be hanging its head in shame today after this disgusting headline: “Two Men Jailed for Raping ‘Blind Drunk’ student in Co Donegal.”

Two men were convicted of raping a young woman, who is now in her 20s. The men, Boakye Osei (30), of Tooban, Burnfoot, and Kelvin Opoku (33), of Cill Graine, Letterkenny, were sentenced to nine years in prison for their crime. The latter of the two men continues to blither about how he is innocent, and that the victim/survivor set him up by rubbing his DNA on a condom.

Wait, SAY WHAT NOW?

The victim/survivor stated that on a scale of 1-10 of drunkenness, she was a 10 and about to pass out. Does that sound like someone who had the mental capacity to somehow rub a man’s DNA on a condom in order to set him up for rape? Not to mention the fact that the rapist is relying on an outdated, disgusting trope that sets up women as manipulative bitches who falsely accuse men of raping them.

The perpetrators in this case are foul humans. They deserve to every day of that nine years in jail.

And the foulness of these rapists makes the Irish Times headline even more repulsive. These men offered a lift to an obviously intoxicated woman and then raped her. The headline that she was “blind drunk” suggests that the victim/survivor had fault in this scenario.

Disgusting.

Sexual Assault

Laura Weinstein — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 04:19:23 +0000

This weekend’s Irish Times has a couple of stories that address sexual assault in Ireland. The most important one, by Conor Lally, presents some statistics:

“The number of sexual crimes reported to gardaí are the highest on record, the latest Central Statistics Office (CSO) data shows….

However, security sources say it is impossible to determine whether more sex crimes are being committed or whether victims are more willing to come forward due to the impact of #MeToo and other campaigns.

Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan said he noted the pronounced increase in sexual offences and said the Government was committed to prventing [sic] and addressing such crimes.

“I very much welcome that more victims are coming forward to Garda, and I urge victims to continue to do so.”

I have much to praise here, and much to be wary about.

Stories like this one serve a dual purpose:

(1) They attempt to make survivors–and I wish Charlie Flanagan would have said “survivors” instead of “victims”–comfortable reporting sexual assault to the gardaí. We want survivors to report crimes, but it remains difficult to prosecute and convict rapists. The article does not report the ratio of reported assaults to arrests, prosecutions, and convictions. Ireland, like most countries, has a pathetic history of not punishing men (it’s almost always men) who commit sex crimes.

(2) While the article points out that the increase in reported sexual assaults might not indicate an increase in the actual numbers, it fails to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults remain unreported. The SAVI Report demonstrated much higher levels of sex crimes than are disclosed. So, the article may serve to increase fear of rape, while not giving enough details about the crimes. I mention this because stories about increases in sexual assaults create a penumbra that haunts women as they walk through the world. This penumbra, the fear of rape that is stoked by these stories, acts as social control over women. If you are afraid to leave the house, or afraid to walk alone, or afraid to dress a certain way or go to a certain place, your life is limited by fear. The idea of rape controls the choices that many women make on a daily basis, and so short pieces like this one aren’t helpful.

In addition, to come back around to one of my least-favorite favorite topics, people like Gemma O’Doherty will deploy these statistics against immigrants and ethnic minorities and claim that the uptick in crime is linked with the increase in immigration. These are two trends that are completely unrelated, but many people cannot distinguish between correlation and causation. To put this in perspective, imagine that the number of reported rapes has increased in 2019, as has the number of cat adoptions from shelters. Do more pet cats create more rapists? Obviously an absurd notion, as is the notion that an increase in immigration causes an increase in sexual assault. But stay tuned for an update, because I fully expect Gemma and/or Justin Barrett to make such a claim.

Charlie Flanagan’s statement is at least a public acknowledgment of the sexual-assault epidemic. But we need to teach children–tweens and teens, not five-year-olds, to be clear–about consent, and the right of each partner for mutual enjoyment of sex. What does consent look like? What does enthusiastic consent look like? How can a person say no to sex? How can couples have sex safely? I think the new sex ed program will help, but it will take years to see if consent education leads to a reduction in rapes.

I hope that teaching people that women have a right to sexual pleasure, and that men do are not entitled to access to women’s bodies, society will move in a different direction.

Unlawful Carnal Knowledge in the 21st Century

Laura Weinstein — Sat, 29 Jun 2019 12:39:47 +0000

I wrote my dissertation on sexual assault against women and teenage girls in twentieth-century Ireland. I’ve published an article on the crime that used to be known as “unlawful carnal knowledge of a teenage girl aged 15 to 17” that demonstrated that Irish law did not really care about this crime. In fact, in almost all cases that were prosecuted, the girl in question had become pregnant as a result of the encounter. The law cared about pregnancy outside of “wedlock,” but did not really care about the trauma to the teenage girls in question, or their ability to say yes or no to sex. Jury verdicts reflected this–in large part, though not exclusively, because juries for most of the 20th century were all male, and girls were seen as tempting Eves.

How far have we come? Well, the following story appears in today’s Irish Times: “Man slept with underage girl his son was dating, court told”. The article describes a situation in which an adult man in his early 40s had repeated sexual encounters with a 15-year-old girl. He took pictures of her in “compromising” positions. She performed oral sex on him, and they had intercourse on many occasions. The man has been charged with 31 counts of having intercourse with a child (under the 2006 Sexual Offences Act). He has also been charged with 8 counts of “defilement of a child” for the acts of fellatio. The man denies all of this, despite the girl’s testimony and text messages that prove the relationship.

There are so many problems here that, as a historian, I’m not equipped to count them all.

The Irish Times should be ashamed of itself for this headline. The man “slept with” an underage girl? No, the man raped an underage girl. There is no legal concept of a 41-year-old man “sleeping with” a 15-year-old girl. By definition, that act is illegal because a 15-year-old girl cannot consent to sex with an adult man. The editors of the Irish Times should know this and the paper’s headlines and writing should reflect this.
The man took photos of the teenage girl in “compromising” positions. Why wasn’t he charged with anything related to child pornography? These photos probably still exist. They could have been uploaded to the Internet (or, more likely, the dark web), and they could still be used against the victim/survivor, who is now an adult woman in her mid-20s.
The article focuses on the fact that the first time the man met the victim, she was wearing a very short white miniskirt, that turned him on. Why is this fact relevant to anything? It’s not relevant to whether the crime took place. It’s not relevant to consent, which is not a factor in statutory rape cases anyway. The only purpose served by the focus on her miniskirt is to sexualize a teenage girl and mitigate the man’s responsibility in the case because she was wearing an outfit that one could classify as “provocative.” [She was likely trying to turn on her boyfriend, the man’s son, not the 41-year-old man.] This harkens back to the old fashioned idea that women were tempting men, and that the male sex drive is so powerful that men simply cannot resist. Surely we’ve moved past that notion in 2019, right?
Why does the law distinguish between sexual intercourse and oral sex here? Both acts are SEX. Both occurred with an underage girl and a man in his 40s. This distinction is absolutely draconian. The acts of oral sex should be classed as rape also. A teenage girl cannot anymore consent to fellatio than she can to vaginal intercourse, and the law should not distinguish between these offences.

Here we can see that there are enduring problems with the ability of Irish law to protect underage girls (and boys, too) from sexual predators. The law doesn’t take seriously the inability of teenagers to consent to sex with older men. Thankfully, the law does accept the legitimacy of consensual sex between teenagers. Progress has been made.

But the law, and apparently the writers for the Irish Times, still buy into gendered tropes about how a girl was dressed and different types of sex (vaginal, oral, anal). I am eager to see the verdict in this case, to see whether the Irish people accept these tropes. Will the jury acquit this man because of the girl’s miniskirt? Will they accept the idea that the 15-year-old girl consented to sex, and therefore the crime wasn’t so bad, even though the law says differently? The girl didn’t become pregnant from the encounters, so if things are basically the same as they were 50 years ago, the jury will acquit the man because without a pregnancy, the crime really wasn’t so bad.

Stay tuned for the verdict.