Appropriate for today
MLK’s Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that
Structural sexism and rape allegations
I’ve spent the last week or so doing not much besides writing papers about structural racism and tweeting with #mooreandme, a Twitter campaign to convince Michael Moore to address the way he discussed the rape charges and the women making the allegations on Keith Olbermann’s show last week. The juxtaposition of doing these things at once led me to something I’ve never thought about before.
When we talk about rape culture, we often talk about the need to protect rape accusers from having their personal information made public, as has happened to the two women accusing Julian Assange. The rationale is that rape accusers are often subject to a public backlash including everything from phone harassment to death threats and it’s important to protect them from that, even if that’s something that’s not extended to accusers in other crimes.
However, this argument ignores the structural sexism in the way the legal system pursues rape charges. In court, all decisions are (ideally) based on evidence, either direct evidence that clearly connects the accused to the crime or circumstantial evidence, which postulates a reasonable theory for why and/or how the accused would have committed the crime. Neither of these really work for a rape case, though.
Direct, physical evidence in a rape case is rare. A rape kit, performed in a hospital shortly after rape was committed can help, but many hospitals are reticent to grant rape kits and many survivors are unwilling to consent to one, for a variety of reasons, including feeling doubly violated or concerns about alerting authorities. And, worst of all, many states are years behind in processing their rape kits due to a lack of funding, so even if one is performed, it may not be of any value in pursuing a rapist who is unknown to the survivor. Almost all of this can be chalked up to rape culture; if hospitals performed rape kits as a matter of course for anyone who wanted one, if it was made clear to a survivor that she would be in control of whether the police were notified, if state budgets included unlimited funds for processing rape kits, hell, even if there was a better effort to educate the public on the availability of rape kits, we might see a huge increase in successful prosecution of rapists.
Circumstantial evidence is in an even sorrier state. Rape culture has created a narrative of the “good rape victim”. She is a cis woman who has been attacked by a stranger while going about her everyday life. She has not had a drink. She is dressed conservatively. She is not promiscuous, nor has she ever been accused of promiscuity. She fights back physically during her attack. Any survivor who fails any of these tests can’t have been raped. She was asking for it, through the way she was dress. Or she was just drunk and regretted her actions the next day. Or he is a man, or she’s a sex worker, or has been rumored to be promiscuous, or an immigrant, or trans, and is therefore unrapeable. Rape culture means that it is very difficult for most people to imagine that a rape narrative that falls outside of these narrow strictures is true, or really rape.
As a class of crime, rape is nearly unproveable in court and that’s because how we’ve defined what *is* proveable in court. It’s not a bug of our legal system that rape is rarely reported and that rapists are rarely convicted, it’s a feature, and that’s what rape culture means.
Ezra Klein – Who graduates, who votes and who’s unemployed
Ezra Klein takes a look at unemployment rates vs. voting rates, broken down by educational attainment, in an effort to explain the weird discourse going on over tax cuts vs. unemployment extension. Klein’s takeaway is that people who’ve completed more education (some college or college grad) vote more and are experiencing lower rates of unemployment, as compared to people with less education (HS grad or less). The unspoken assumption here is that the agenda is set by college grads, who favor tax breaks over unemployment, because they’re more likely to personally benefit from the lowered tax burden. However, Klein’s explanation doesn’t account for the case of people with some college, but no degree, who are unemployed at nearly the rate that high school graduates with no college are and who vote at a rate that appears to be splitting the difference between the high school grads and the college grads. How is that the case, though, if unemployment is so much more popular than tax cuts? Are college grads lying when they’re asked about their support for these initiatives?
Obviously, these questions are mostly unanswerable – we’ll never know what secret policy preferences lurk in the hearts of college grads. My point, really, is that making policy decisions or recommendations based on polling data or perceived popularity is seriously problematic. We’ll never know how honest people are when they respond to surveys – stated preferences are often more altruistic than reality, which may be what we’re seeing in the case Klein’s discussing.
More importantly, though, popular policy is often bad policy. This isn’t meant to be an elitist sentiment. Popular policy shouldn’t be good policy – popular policy, by definition, should be policy that most people think are going to be in their own self-interest. Analysts, though, should be looking at the distributional effects, investigating which people are going to benefit and considering that when evaluating policy. Popular policy will almost always leave behind those with the quietest voices – it’s the analyst’s job to counteract that effect.
