Respectability vs RESPECT: Part Two

This and this are connected.

Different women, separated by class, professional status, age, resources and geography.

The connection between these women: they shared an intimate and sexual space with men who did not respect them. These men, feeling unjustly deprived of 'their' entitlements,  deliberately and malevolently harmed and tried to injure them by exploiting the double standard about women's sexual expression that still persists in this 21st century.

In the case of *Nicole* and *Kim* in Halifax, the vindictive actions of a man who felt justified to impugn the respectability of his ex-lover, and to physically endanger her (and her house-mate) were documented by the victims.  Yet the crown attorney declined to pursue criminal charges for what *Adam* did.

As for Lori Douglas in Winnipeg, the first inquiry that thrust her into public view was dropped but a newly formed Canadian Judicial Council panel will be looking at her case - again.

There was one basic question that was never adequately addressed. Given that Douglas testified she had no knowledge of the proposition Jack King presented to his client — an 'invitation' for Chapman to have sex with her — nor had she consented to his initiative, was her spouse effectively trafficking her, and setting her up to be sexually assaulted as well?

It's a moot point now: King died last April, and that aspect of the complicated inquiry was dropped.

It appears to me that it is these women's respectability that is being judged, rather than the criminal actions of vengeful men.

Remember the Rehtaeh Parsons case?  Media attention put a spotlight on the reluctance of the RCMP to adequately investigate the multifaceted and unrelenting sexualized violence that led to her suicide. It forced the police to bring to justice those responsible for her harassment.

Once again, media attention has stirred the police into some semblance of action.  Kim and Nicole's criminal harasser may yet be brought to trial.

Douglas and her lawyers took legal recourse in order to expose the bullying tactics of the original CJC panel for what they were: unvarnished misogyny.

Last word: this exchange of tweets captures how women's respectability is viewed through a sexist lens and why women are challenging the double standard.

From @fortyfs' timeline, here.

Reminder: Respectability vs RESPECT: Part One.

All the declinations of terrorism.

 

On Monday Harper's Politburo staged a nimble bit of Kabuki theatre, as my co-blogger dubbed it.

No longer content to exploit Canadian children and their families for PMSHithead's photo ops, the PMO rallied RCMP resources in support of an emergency debate on Vic Toews' testerical bill for Combatting Terrorism. Alison at Creekside has everything you need to know about the Harper government Con job in this regard: the background, the public histrionics, the tactics.

And now, this:

Internal e-mails obtained by CBC News show that RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson has ordered all senior Mounties to get clearance from his office before committing to any meetings with MPs or senators.

Specifically, they are to notify a liaison office that co-ordinates RCMP strategy with the office of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews.

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson has instructed senior Mounties to notify his office before accepting meetings with MPs and senators, similar to the approval required for his own meetings by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews last year.

In an email dated March 22 from Paulson to more than 50 chief superintendents, assistant commissioners and deputy commissioners, the commissioner said that meetings or lunches with parliamentarians "can have unintended and/or negative consequences for the organization and the Government.

The development has opposition critics accusing the government of undermining the independence of the police. "There's a very large pattern in this government of trying to control information," said NDP MP Randall Garrison.

RCMP commissioner not 'muzzled,' Toews says.

"It's not appropriate for the government to reach into the police operation. It's a very, very fundamental part of what we must be assured exists so that the police aren't doing the work of the government, they're doing the work of the public."

Garrison, who is the NDP critic for public safety, said "these memos raise some very serious concerns about whether the government is interfering in the operations of the RCMP to try and assist in controlling their political message. So I think it's very serious."

Liberal Senator Grant Mitchell, critic for an RCMP reform bill, C-42, said he feared the "politicization of the police force."

From here.

In preparing this post, I reviewed news items about the RCMP covered by MacLeans. 

First, beyond the ongoing, systemic, violent misogyny within the force and in the field, this "incident" struck me as quite symptomatic of the noxious, agonic macho culture of the RCMP.

The document says Const. Martin Simpson wired an SD-100 soft detonator inside the doll “with the assistance and planning” of fellow squad member Cpl. Nigel Blake while Hempston was away on Christmas holidays. The detonators, “classified as high explosives,” were seized when a film company tried to import them in 2003. RCMP Cpl. Annie Linteau, speaking for B.C.’s E-Division headquarters, offered a markedly different account in an statement, saying an unnamed RCMP member had a “low energy” pyrotechnic squib detonate in his hand. “The member was transported to hospital for treatment with superficial injuries.”

When Hempston returned from holidays, he noticed the doll on his desk had been tampered with and picked it up with both hands. It exploded when he turned it on. Among the severe injuries he sustained, according to the lawsuit: damage to his hands that required several surgeries, nerve damage and a loss of feeling in his fingers and thumb, carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands, hearing loss requiring hearing aids, tinnitus in both ears, chronic post-traumatic stress, anxiety, nervous shock and “loss of faith in his colleagues.”

The supposed prank raises a number of troubling issues: the cavalier handling of explosives by the elite 14-member disposal unit; the decision not to charge the perpetrators, although an independent police investigation recommended criminal charges; the fact that Hempston continues to work in a tense environment with colleagues he is suing in a bomb unit that demands teamwork.

From here.

This is how a RCMP officer threatened and abused Ashley Smith. 

Instead of investigating spousal abuse, which is a form of gendered terrorism when enforced by individual sociopathic males whose actions are implicitly sanctioned by authorities, the RCMP set up a sting operation to entrap the female victim.

This occured in the same province where the alleged group rape and cyber-harassment of Rehtaeh Parsons was desultorily investigated by the RCMP. 

DJ! also posted about serious miscarriages of justice, at the hands of the RCMP.

So. Who will be carrying out and enforcing the provisions of S-7?

The RCMP.  As Alison put it:

Let's suppose you know someone, perhaps your landlord or a colleague at work, that the government suspects may one day in the future commit an act of terrorism. You can be detained for up to 3 days without charge while being questioned. You don't get to hear, let alone challenge, any evidence given against you or your colleague, even if it's tortured out of someone you've never heard of in Syria, and you can be held without trial for a year if you don't co-operate.

Every one of us is as vulnerable and exposed as this man was, merely for contacting Harper's office to register his opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline.

Who needs the Spanish Inquisition when Harper's Politburo, or "The Centre" has the RCMP to do its bidding? 

A continuum of cop violence against women: systemic and authoritarian, sexualized and fetishized. (updated)

From Ayesha, we learn about yet another woman's death, as a the tragic outcome of a desultory police investigation.

In an extensive post on a Facebook memorial page, her mother Leah Parsons described how the straight-A high school student became depressed and suicidal after the incident.

“The person Rehtaeh once was all changed one dreaded night in November 2011. She went with a friend to another’s home. In that home she was raped by four young boys . . . one of those boys took a photo of her being raped and decided it would be fun to distribute the photo to everyone in Rehtaeh’s school and community where it quickly went viral,” Leah Parsons wrote. “Because the boys already had a ‘slut’ story, the victim of the rape Rehtaeh was considered a slut.

“This day changed the lives of our family forever.”

Rehtaeh, who was a 15-year-old high school student in Cole Harbour at the time, was repeatedly bullied at school and “suddenly shunned by almost everyone she knew.”

“She was never left alone. She had to leave the community. Her friends turned against her. People harassed her. Boys she didn’t know started texting her and Facebooking her asking her to have sex with them. It just never stopped,” her mother told CBC.

Racialized women in Canada experience this daily.  First Nations, Metis, Inuit, Black, all brown-skinned women of mixed ancestries rarely if ever trust the police to take reports of sexual violence directed at them seriously, and to investigate properly. In reality, reporting such violence makes them vulnerable to the cops' own abusive practices, as case after case demonstrates. Operation Thunder Bird attempted to expose this reality.

In Ottawa, a judge recently exonerated the sexualized brutality that a police officer used against a woman detained for alleged public intoxication - a "charge" which was never actually shown to be founded.

Violent cops like Steve Desjourdy can sexually humiliate, degrade and punish jailed women with impunity. His actions which were challenged in criminal court, have been excused and thus can become the official standard that police taking women into custody can apply.

According to the judge who presided over the trial, Desjourdy "used reasonable force".

Many who viewed the internal video that captured Desjourdy and his colleagues' actions, observed that he seemed to be enjoying his job, exerting force in order to break the detained woman's will and her instinct to defend herself from the cops' deliberate, sexualized violations.

Familiar patterns of cops' fetishized brutality against women keep surfacing.  It would appear a measure of implicit identification with the perpetrators of sexual assault impinges upon some police officers' professional capacity to effectively investigate violent crimes against women.

In my opinion, the RCMP has become irreversibly corrupted and poisoned by misogyny; this latest outrage is more evidence of the toxicity of its systemic sexist culture.

UPDATE: Two excellent blogposts that MUST be read. Both cut to the core of the way rape culture enables violence against women and girls.

Child porn isn’t a “community issue,” RCMP from Steph Guthrie really nails the misogynist sub-text of the shoddy excuse the RCMP provided for its MASSIVE lack of due diligence, with regard to the taking and distribution of the photo of Rehtaeh Parsons.  A crime was committed; it's the RCMP's job to deal with it.  Unless its officers' sloppy lack of professional dedication is a recognition that the institution is de facto complicit with child pornographers and sexual assailants in that community.

This is heart-wrenching:

[...] where the fuck were the school officials, the members of the law enforcement, the people who should have made sure that she had adequate follow-up mental health care after her hospitalization? Where were they, and why didn’t they do anything? Or if they did do something, why didn’t they do enough?

Rehtaeh’s rapists are still out there. They are still in high school, they are still going to parties and they are, quite likely, still raping. Why wouldn’t they? They got away with it once, didn’t they? Rehtaeh’s rapists are still living normal, untroubled lives, and she is dead. [...]

Saying that we need to educate boys and girls about appropriate behaviour is victim-blaming. Saying that this wouldn’t have been a problem if the pictures hadn’t ended up online is like saying that rape is fine, but publicly broadcasting it isn’t. Calling Rehtaeh’s death a tragedy because we’ve lost a beautiful young woman is a joke – seriously, what bearing does her appearance have on how sad her death is? And since Landry is refusing to open an official review into how the RCMP handled this, isn’t he basically saying, “I think she was lying about the rape, but gosh, she sure was hot”?

All of this, every single word of this statement, all of the things that Rehtaeh endured, every single detail presented here is rape culture.

Read the comments too.


So, with regard to the way it deals with sexual violence against women and girls, should Canada feel *superior* to India?