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?

Jonathan Kay to the rescue of patriarchy!!!

*Shorter* Jonathan Kay: women lie, women are murderous, women make men do evil things.  

And so, to protect society from homicidal women, he opines that CPC politicians should pass a law that would give government "oversight' in determining a specific gestational minute when an abortion is no longer a therapeutic medical intervention, but a CRIME.

Never mind that in Canada for the last 25 years, the public health care system has efficiently regulated the termination of unwanted or life-threatening pregnancies by applying medical protocols, procedures and restrictions.

Patriarchy [is the name given to a] societal structure whereby men are dominant not in numbers or in force but in their access to status-related power and decision-making power. It is also connected to economics in that patriarchal societies men will have greater power over the economy. 

In our society, because men have higher income and greater access to the economy, they are said to be dominant. Power distribution in society should not be confused with power struggles at an individual level, although they can be reproduced in a smaller scale as well. 

For example, in many small businesses, the owner and top managers are male, and they will hire women to work for them. [And fire them, too.] Patriarchy can be enforced in a variety of ways, including intimidation of women through violence, sexual assault and other forms of harassment, and the discrediting of their efforts to organize and resist. 

Patriarchal societies are typically more authoritarian and rely heavily on legal-rational modes of organization, show stronger military implication and more reliance on police repression to impose authority. It is a society that tends to hold contempt for women [...]   

We've had it with Kay's smarmy, sneering assumptions about women, cloaked in a veneer of gentility and respect for the "public order" he perceives to be threatened by women stuck in a choice between a rock and a hard place. (Trigger warning: these stories by women who had late second trimester and third trimester abortions are heart-wrenching.)

Depicted below are Jonathan Kay's ideological comrades at arms: men like him, who expect the worst from women; they act pre-emptively against anticipated treacherous female machinations.

This guy, for example:

A prominent Saudi Arabian preacher who raped his 5-year-old daughter before torturing her to death because he reportedly questioned the child’s virginity has been spared a death sentence or even a lengthy prison term after agreeing to pay “blood money” to the slain girl’s mother.

Fayhan al-Ghamdi, a former drug addict who rose to national prominence as an Islamic television preacher, was arrested last November and charged with brutally raping and torturing 5-year-old Lama al-Ghamdi to death. According to a medical report, the little girl had been tortured with whips, electric shocks and an iron. She had broken arms, fractured ribs, a broken back and a crushed skull. She died on October 22.

And these ones: 

There are “two forms of feminism,” Buehner argued. There are “cute” feminists like Sarah Palin who will find jobs in the “marketplace” and “get themselves a husband” but will “never submit to the husband, in fact they will use their power probably to make their husband submit to them.” Then, there are the “ugly” feminists whose “lack of attractiveness has not given them access to power that they wanted in the marketplace.” These “attractively challenged” feminists will only find careers in academia and in government agencies, for instance, “you can run the EPA.”

What all these feminists have in common, Swanson argues, is that “all of them want to be free from the family” and together with “the homosexuals” are “destroying society.” Buehner speculates that in the future, feminism will be remembered as “a time in which women lost the love of their children” and “decided to become selfish, narcissistic, family-destroying whores.”

And how about this one:

Diallo, in a civil sexual assault case against Strauss-Kahn, is saying his alleged actions reflected a pattern of misogynistic behaviour. New York City recently passed a law against gender-based violence and there have been other allegations made against Strauss-Kahn by women. Diallo's lawyers wrote in her latest claim: "Strauss-Kahn's conduct towards women generally is, and more specifically his sexual assault of Ms Diallo was, motivated by a gender-animus and a misogynistic attitude."

[...]Soon after his arrest in New York, the French writer Tristane Banon accused Strauss-Kahn of attempting to rape her during an interview in 2003, a claim he called imaginary and slanderous. Prosecutors said they believed the encounter qualified as a sexual assault but the legal time frame to pursue her complaint had elapsed.

Then French authorities lodged preliminary charges of alleged aggravated pimping, claiming Strauss-Kahn was involved in a hotel prostitution ring including prominent figures and police in the northern city of Lille. Lille prosecutors have said they are looking into an allegation that Strauss-Kahn might have been involved in a rape during a sex party in a Washington hotel in 2010.

[...]Diallo's lawyers allude in Tuesday's filing to all those allegations, as well as to an affair Strauss-Kahn had with an IMF subordinate.

Some would disagree that Kay belongs on this spectrum of men who enable, justify, exploit and enforce gender inequality through violent means.

Yet his cavalier disregard for facts in favour of anti-abortion propaganda could inflame mentally unstable individuals, much as Fox News' Bill O'Reilly did when he repeatedly called Dr Tiller a "killer".

Consider this: patriarchy rewards him hugely, when he advocates for a pre-emptive law that undermines women's human rights. 

In fact, Kay gets quite richly paid for pontificating that it's a "moral" question when in fact any decision regarding the termination of a pregnancy in its third trimester should be informed by medical science and ^NOT by the religious quackery of conservative politicians such as Woodworth, Vellacott and Warawa.

If you repeat a lie often enough ...

Why do zygote zealots and fetus fetishists lie and lie and lie and lie?

Self-righteous pricks like Con MPs Woodworth, Vellacott and Warawa claim they want to *open the debate*.  The sixth estate exposes their lies; these rightwing religious fundamentalists want to pass laws that criminalize abortion.

With the help of paid propagandists like Jonathan Kay, who can't be bothered to present accurate and correct facts in his odious piece of obfuscating glurge.

My first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.

It required a medical intervention to prevent an infection that could have killed me, which happened to Savita Halappanavar in similar circumstances, and to facilitate healing so I might become pregnant in the future, as was my desire.

Now imagine what that would be like if abortion were criminalized at 19 weeks? 

Documentation and evidence would have to be gathered - just like a rape kit - to prove that I hadn't "provoked" my own miscarriage, and then hauled myself to emergency while something bigger and more intense than four menstruations' worth of blood gushed forth. 

At the hospital, I (and my husband) would be subjected to an interrogation from the cop on duty, just to satisfy prurient, sanctimonious crotch-sniffers like Babs Kay, Woodworth, Vellacott, SUZANNE and Maggie Somerville - that it was "really and truly" a miscarriage. 

Health care professionals providing the necessary emergency dilation and curettage would have to complete numerous forms as proof that this health crisis wasn't a "homicide", and that none of us deserved to be jailed, as the fetus lobby would like to see happen.

As fern hill said, there is no LAW regulating abortion but there are medical protocols, procedures and RESTRICTIONS that our public health care system has established with regard to the termination of gestation.

Disgusting tactics that vilify and demonize women and their physicians only serve to provoke acts of violence from mentally unstable people who believe such lies.

Do Canadian doctors, or perhaps a surgical team providing a life-saving procedure to a pregnant woman need to become the target of an abortion vigilante before people like Jonathan Kay take responsibility for publishing LIES?

Illustration above from here.

This is what CONs do

From serial sexual predator Vic Toews' office:

The federal public safety minister's office tried to scale back an apology the RCMP delivered earlier this year to the families of serial killer Robert Pickton's victims, Postmedia News has learned.

A senior adviser to the RCMP commissioner later wrote that the government's proposed revisions — which ended up not being adopted — drained the apology of its "purpose" and "impact," according to internal emails obtained under access-to-information laws. [...]

On Jan. 27, just days before RCMP investigators were scheduled to start testifying at the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry in Vancouver, British Columbia's top Mountie, then-assisstant commissioner Craig Callens, released a statement to media regarding the force's handing of the Pickton investigation.

"I believe that, with the benefit of hindsight, and when measured against today's investigative standards and practices, the RCMP could have done more," the statement read in part.

"On behalf of the RCMP, I would like to express to the families of the victims how very sorry we are for the loss of your loved ones, and I apologize that the RCMP did not do more."

Pickton, a pig farmer, was arrested in 2002 and eventually convicted of six counts of second-degree murder, though the remains or DNA of 33 women were found on his property in Port Coquitlam, B.C. He once told an undercover officer that he killed 49.

Email records show that shortly before the RCMP statement was issued, Julie Carmichael, press secretary to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, wrote to Daniel Lavoie, the RCMP's executive director of public affairs in Ottawa, requesting changes to the text.

"Daniel — please find attached the revised product," she wrote. The next line was underlined for emphasis: "Please ensure the statement issued is reflective of these changes."

The revised statement did not include any acknowledgement that the RCMP "could have done more" in the Pickton investigation and the apology was limited to saying "how very sorry we are for the loss of your loved ones."

Is the Conservative Party of Canada accountable? No.

But it's clearly abject, callous, venal and odious.

Con "Mononcle" Garry gives high school girls advice.

Dianna Sakisheway wrote a scathing letter to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews this week. Her complaint stems from a speech Breitkreuz — known as the father of the legislation to repeal the long-gun registry — gave during a career day at Canterbury High School [in Ottawa] on March 7.

“I am outraged at the irresponsible conduct of the federal government in promoting gun violence to schoolchildren,” she wrote. “You have gone much too far.”

“Mr. Breitkreuz spent most of his allotted time discussing firearms and cited a Texas study that showed women who carry guns are less likely to get raped, including a specific number of women who avoided rape as they were armed,” Sakisheway wrote [...]

From here. Hmm, I wonder how Toews will react to that. If the teenage girl who babysat for his family had been armed with a gun, his political career might have been cut short.

So CPC MP Breikreuz agrees with DJ! that women should "Stand their ground"? Who would have guessed.

In other news relating to the "future" the Harper government has laid out for Canadian youth, the Flaherty budget has slashed, effective immediately, the operating grant contract it had with Katimavik.

The move comes as a surprise to the Katimavik organization, which says it has been kept in the dark about any upcoming cuts. Its National Director of Marketing and Communications Victoria Salvador has said, however, that the group is trying to diversify its funding in order to stay afloat.

Despite the Tories' determination to kill the program, the group expressed hope in a statement Thursday that lobbying the government can still save the program.

Katimavik expressed "extreme disappointment" over the funding decision and argued its purpose is more important than ever. "At a time when civic engagement and voter turnout are at an all-time low, when youth unemployment rates are double the national average, this is clearly the worst time to cut Katimavik," the group wrote.

In this tweet the author of the news item claimed: "One Tory told me today, they view it as a Liberal recruiting ground..." which begs the question where the CPC gets its own recruits: Fundamentalist christian churches? Reactionary school bullies? Armed forces rejects?

As Calgary Sun columnist Stephen Lautens observed: "Katimavik - creating young people too smart and kind for the Cons for 35 years."

“I was always attracted to older men”...

This quote is brought to you by that paragon of journalistic integrity: SunMedia aka Sun Infotainment.

That much-vaunted integrity was on display when David Akin deign to step down from the heights of his high horse to rub elbows with hoi polloi - figuratively at least - and to defend his readers' right to view pictures of an accidentally exposed royal buttock.

In keeping with such rigorous standards of hard news reporting, the SunMedia hack who covered the trial of Bartley Sagmoen supplied the verbal equivalent of the porn industry's *money shot*.

A 15 year old adolescent girl allegedly declares “I was always attracted to older men”; ipso facto some girls are *naturally* inclined to feel libidinous urges toward grandfather figures. That would certainly be a self-fulfilling belief among pedophiles and SunMedia does appear eager to validate its readers' pathologies.

When a teenager announces the existence of a long-held interest in sports for example, one can safely assume evidence of family support, coaching, participation in events and so on.

What *cultural* environment and which institutions would foster the development of yearnings for the sexual attention of older men, now that the Vatican Taliban has stopped protecting clergy who are sexual predators?

I offer this observation. Beauty pageants that require female children to exhibit themselves as creepy parodies of Vegas showgirls might possibly provide good training ground in that regard.

UPDATE - I removed the embedded video. Strangely enough, the adverts for the Ontario govt played fine though the ABC report about Eden Wood didn't. Click here to view it.

There appears to be a number of such events in the US; The Learning Channel has dedicated itself to producing a series that covers this phenomenon. Hard-hitting journalism and serious analysis? Nope, just sugar and spice and all things nice.

Fortunately, it seems Australians are not eager to deprive their daughters of their childhood and to deliver them as raw material to mold and shape into budding pedophile bait.

You can imagine the howls of outrage from the owners of kiddy pageant franchises who are being denied their right to exploit girls, to train them in the art of being valuable sexual commodities and to get rich doing it. Greed just doesn't get ANY respect these days.

Unless one might happen to be Rupert Murdoch, of course.

Grand merci to JB and JCP for source material.

How many crimes does it take?

How many crimes does it take to make the *criminal justice system* finally act in accordance with the law, and lay charges against one of its own?

Quite a few it seems - most outrageously committed in plain view, in open defiance of the laws that the system has, seemingly and reluctantly, finally enforced. From here:

Former Gatineau police officer Jeffrey Greetham, who was fired last February 9 after a disciplinary hearing, was formally charged Tuesday with sexual assault. [...] The crimes allegedly took place between 21 April and 1 May 2010 [...] In a terse statement, the Chief of Police of the City of Gatineau, Mario Harel, described the behaviour of the accused former police officer as "unacceptable". [...]

During the years he was employed by the force, Greetham's record of charges for actions contrary to his professions code of ethics continued to mount, and in 2002, he had to answer two charges of sexual assaults against a 15 year old girl.

After a very brief hearing, the charges were dismissed. The judge concluded: "Faced with no evidence in support of the complainant's weak version of the alleged sexual assaults, the court is unable to discredit the accused's version."

More about Jeffrey Greetham, here.