"William Hague: All women should feel shame of rape in war zones"

From The Evening Standard:

All women should feel “shame” at the world’s failure to prevent
rape being used as a weapon in war, William Hague will warn today.

In a hard-hitting speech in Washington, the Foreign Secretary will condemn as “unladylike” the “shying away” from confronting sexual violence in conflicts.

He will tell of the 50,000 women raped in Bosnia during the Balkans war 20 years ago and who have still not obtained justice for the crimes committed against them.

He was also due to highlight the “endless list of conflicts”where women, children and men have been brutally assaulted including in Rwanda, South Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Liberia.

“It is still considered unusual for a woman to raise these issues,” Mr Hague was set to say in his speech at Georgetown University.

“But rape and sexual violence are crimes which overwhelmingly happen to women. And that they should happen, while the world does nothing, should shame all women.

“Indeed to shy away from talking about these facts is in itself unladylike.”

Great templates of our time: [Something you don't like] is a vile product of [something else you don't like]

From The Daily Mail, choose your own storyline:

"Vile product of...

A.
• Welfare UK:
• Paralympics:
• Right to inherit from your parents*:
• Warehouses:

B.
• Man who bred 17 babies by five women to milk benefits system is guilty of killing six of them
• Man who ran in Paralympics for South Africa murders girlfriend
• Man who stood to inherit a quarter of a million pound guilty of murdering parents
• Forklift truck driver guilt of murdering five women in Ipswich area

C.
• Mick Philpott treated his children like cash cows generating £60,000 a year in benefits
• Oscare Pistorius treated his Paralympic status as a cash cow generating millions a year in sponsorship
• Stephen Seddon treated his parents like cash cows to land a £250,000 inheritance
• Steve Wright treated his forklift truck as a cash cow to earn tens of thousands of pounds a year

D.
• He plotted to set fire to the family home with his wife Mairead to frame Philpott's former live-in lover Lisa Willis
• He shot his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp who was hiding in the bathroom
• He killed his parents Robert and Patricia Seddon with a sawn off shotgun
• He strangled his victims with the same hands he used to steer a forklift truck

And so on and so forth.

UPDATE: Nick Drew has identified a fifth candidate for the Daily Mail treatment.

* See also: Newsthump

Fun Online Polls: Inappropriate advances & Cameron's lurch to the right

The total sixty-six responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Were you ever the victim of an "inappropriate advance" by any of the following (multiple selections allowed)?

It's never happened to me, thankfully - 50 votes
Other adult not on this list - 14 votes
Jimmy Savile - 4 votes
Dominique Strauss-Kahn - 3 votes
Chris Rennard - 2 votes
Kevin Webster - 2 votes
Keith O'Brien - 1 vote

It's a bit perturbing that a quarter of people have been molested, pestered etc. I'll have to assume that people answered honestly and take this figure as being ball park correct.
-----------------------------------------------
So, David Cameron says he will not "lurch to the right", that's not how it sounds to me or anybody else.

And he's not even lurching to the good intelligent 'right' (face up to the EU, reduce the size of government, cut the deficit by cutting corporate subsidies, simplify taxes etc) he's lurching to the bad populist 'right' (blame everything on the welfare claimants, immigrants and the Human Rights Act, which he can repeal any time he likes anyway, and if not, why not? EU?). Has he promised a "crackdown on crime" yet? That usually gets the crowd going. Of course he can roll all of these into One Big Idea by promising to crack down on Romanian and Bulgarian migrants who come over here to claim welfare payments and NHS treatment under the Human Rights Act. They're not even here yet!

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll. Which of his three Big Ideas would you consider to be typical populist right wing crap?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

"Officials step down after rape allegations misreported as blood poisoning"

From The Daily Mail:

Another hospital could be at the centre of a Mid Stafford-type scandal after 'discrepancies' were found in the way patient deaths were recorded.

Experts fear cases of septicaemia have been incorrectly listed at the Royal Bolton Hospital in Greater Manchester. Four times as many cases of blood poisoning were recorded than would normally be expected at the hospital in a year. Around 800 cases were recorded between March 2011 and April 2012 , although a similar-sized trust would expect to have just 200.

This has raised questions about whether some patients may have been recorded as dying from septicaemia when they also had other conditions that should have been treated or prevented.

Also from The Daily Mail:

Rape victims were pressured into withdrawing their allegations to help police meet crime targets, a damning report revealed yesterday.

Detectives from Scotland Yard’s specialist rape unit persuaded the women to say the attacks they endured were ‘consensual sex’... The shocking treatment was revealed in a report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission into the Southwark branch of Scotland Yard’s Sapphire unit, which investigates rape and sexual assault.

The police watchdog found detectives had adopted an approach of ‘failing to believe’ victims and, in a breach of the ‘first principle’ of Scotland Yard’s rules, had failed to investigate cases properly.

Fun Online Polls: Fizzy drinks & Inappropriate advances

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Should fizzy drinks be more heavily taxed?
No - 48%
No - 10%
No - 26%
Other - please specify - 17%

Thanks to everybody who responded.

Top "other" comment:

DBC Reed: Yes: beer becomes comparatively cheaper. No excuse not to drink it.
----------------------
The media is currently thick with revelations about people abusing their positions of power to rape, molest and otherwise behave inappropriately. I'm sure that this isn't a modern thing, that's just the unpleasant side of human nature. What is worrying is that so many victims are too scared to say anything, but once a few have spoken out, the floodgates open. That's the really ugly side of "power". Not so much what the people with power do, but what everybody else is prepared to put up with.

For example:
Chris Rennard
Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Jimmy Savile
Kevin Webster
Keith O'Brien

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll, were you ever the victim of an "inappropriate advance" by any of the above?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar (multiple selections allowed).

"Amorous Bull Damages U.S. Deputy's Patrol Car"

Spotted by Sarton Bander at naharnet.com:

Authorities said Wednesday that a Faulkner County sheriff's deputy was responding to a call about a bull running loose when he saw the man slapping and trying to guide the bull. According to the deputy's report, the bull then "tried to mate with him."

The bull then lost interest and followed a truck down the road. The patrol car sustained minor damage, though no injuries were reported.

The bull's owner says it was the animal's first escape.

Well that's all right then.

"Starkey makes 'cultural' link to gang jailed for sexually exploiting girls"

From The Guardian

Historian calls on schools to teach English history to aspiring Premier League footballers to make them 'English citizens and English men'

David Starkey has risked fresh criticism for describing footballers engaged in sexually exploiting young girls as "acting within their cultural norms".

Speaking at a conference for private school headteachers in Brighton, the historian said their actions were evidence of "what happens when [a country like Britain] has no sense of common identity". "Nobody ever explained [to these men] that just because they are doing a job which requires a mental age of twelve does not that they should be knobbing under-age girls," Starkey told his audience of more than 100 headteachers.

He called on schools to teach English history to budding footballers so that "they are... first and foremost English citizens and English men" instead of seeing statutory rape as a stepping stone to a career as a football player.

Last year, a gang of six footballers from Reading were jailed for the gang rape of two twelve-year old girls.

Roman Catholics heave sigh of relief

It's not just their priests who are all perverts and kiddy fiddlers, some of the other side are at it as well.

Fun With Numbers

From today's Metro:

One in 20 secondary school children has been sexually abused, a charity is warning, amid fears that young victims could be driven to suicide without expert help.

There were 1,225 referrals to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to help children who had been sexually abused last year – four times as many in 2008-9. The number of under-tens seeking support shot up from 30 to 257, with some victims as young as four.

Now, the NSPCC is launching a major campaign called Rebuilding Childhoods, as it funds a huge expansion of critically important therapy... It is feared 60,000 children miss out on therapy every year and risk permanently scarring their futures, the NSPCC says.

Quite how they scale up from 1,225 to 60,000 is unclear.

Or indeed how they square this 60,000 figure with their rather more modest (and possibly realistic) estimates of five years ago. I'm aware that 'sexual abuse' is a broader category than 'rape' but according to this, half of all sexual abuse is rape:

It is the first time the Home Office has released such statistics because the ages of rape victims were recorded for the first time only in 2004-5. In that period, 974 girls aged under 13 and a further 3,006 under 16 were raped* in England and Wales, while 293 boys under 13 and 320 aged under 16 were raped. Only one in 15 assailants - a total of 303 - were found guilty in court. Senior police officers believe actual numbers of rapes may be far higher because many children do not report the crime...

The figures were obtained by the NSPCC, Britain's biggest children's charity, which will launch a campaign tomorrow with the slogan 'Don't Hide It' to urge young people to report sexual abuse to someone they trust rather than suffer in silence. Evidence collected by ChildLine, the 24-hour telephone advice service that recently merged with the NSPCC, shows that of the 8,637 young people who rang in last year about sexual abuse, 4,414 - just over half - said they had been raped.

Caught with his Straussers down

Those who live by the sword...

From The Metro:

Lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said he was the victim of a smear campaign after details of two alleged sexual offences in Sweden were leaked.

Bjorn Hurtig, Assange’s Swedish lawyer, said he would lodge a complaint and call for an inquiry into how the material emerged. He added: ‘I do not know who has given these documents to the media but the purpose can be only one thing – to make Julian look bad.’

Swedish police papers reportedly revealed one of the alleged victims said he deliberately tore a condom during sex in August, while another woman said she woke up to find Assange having unprotected sex with her.

I was present at a judgment by The Court of Public Opinion yesterday, and Mr Assange was unanimously declared 'not guilty' of these offences, which is good enough for me, but I still can't help thinking about pots and kettles.

Another one for JuliaM...

From The Daily Echo:

Mr Charleston was arrested after [19-year- old Jenny Escudero] told police that he had raped her on the bus, which is run by Bluestar.

However, when police questioned Mr Charleston about the allegations, he told them that she had given full consent to their double-decker sexual encounter and that it would have been filmed by the vehicle's CCTV cameras, which were still running at the time. After officers checked the explicit footage they began to question Escudero's story. Mr Charleston was never charged over the allegation.

Escudero, of Lilac Road, Southampton, later admitted lying to police about the rape claim and pleaded guilty at Southampton Crown Court to attempting to pervert the course of justice. Judge Peter Ralls QC said that when he first looked at the case he believed that it would end only in a "substantial prison sentence" as such a serious offence can undermine genuine rape cases...

...can you feel a "but" coming on..?

However, after seeing a threatening letter allegedly sent to her by Mr Charleston's daughter, he told the court it was clear that there was some background to her claims of harassment and that she may have felt justified in making her fake rape accusation as a "genuine cry for help"... He told the court that Escudero had been very young and had "emotional difficulties" when she became involved with Mr Charleston and that the court needed to show an "element of mercy".

Escudero was sentenced to 50 weeks, suspended for two years, and ordered to carry out 240 hours of unpaid work.

... so did the story at least end happily for the bus driver concerned..?

Bluestar operations manager Alex Hornby confirmed that Mr Charleston no longer worked for the firm. He said: "No company, let alone a bus operator, would ever tolerate behaviour of this nature from an employee."

Sublimely tasteless fakecharity name of the day

There's an article in The Metro saying that "Teenage girls are so desperate to join violent male gangs that they are carrying guns, drugs and knives as well as being forced into group sex, new research by police and charities has found..."

Ho hum, that may or may not be true*, but what drew my attention was this:

Teresa Pointing, chief executive of In-volve – a charity dedicated to helping young girls in violent situations...

It is a tradition among fakecharities to choose an existing word, but then to insert a hyphen or a space, or capitalise a letter half-way through, in order to subtly alter the meaning or to give it a double meaning. My favourite example being Smoke Less over in the USA (as in 'smoke less than otherwise' or as in 'smokeless zone'?). I understand the word "involve", and I understand the word "in" but as "volve" is not a word in itself, I can only assume, from the context, that it's an allusion to "vulva", unless somebody has a better idea?

NB, per the 2008 accounts, 98.6% of their income is "Grant income" and Note 2 lists the following grantors:

Education Department, Local Authorities, Drugs Advisory Team, Single Regeneration Budget, Probation Service, Youth Justice Board, Health Authorities, Community Against Drugs, Community Fund, Employment Services.

* It may well be completely untrue, they don't seem to care any more, as evidenced by the recent admission that Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution.

The Righteous let their guard slip

Damn and blast!

I was looking forward to a nice bit of Victimhood Poker in this this article on the BBC website about the staggering levels of rape and murder in South Africa, but it appears to split the blame three ways between "The legacy of apartheid, social deprivation and corruption within the police force...".

Wot? The "legacy of apartheid" only has to take one-third of the blame? This just isn't up to the high standards of an article from three months ago:

South Africa has the highest number of reported rapes in the world. Most experts say this is a result of its violent past and the legacy of apartheid, which often forced men to live in single-sex hostels away from their families.

But to be fair, as well as the dig at apartheid, which ended in, er, early 1994, today's article sneaks in the inference that it was racist for that white guy to be granted asylum in Canada, so that's a 50/50 split in the blame stakes. Phew! Can't have those poor downtrodden South Africans being asked to shoulder too much responsibility, can we?

Classic fakecharity gambit

The basic template for this gambit is included in this article by the BBC.

Step 1. Produce some research that even a non-expert must realise is stretching the bounds of probability:

A third of teenage girls suffer sexual abuse in a relationship and a quarter experience violence at the hands of their boyfriends, a survey suggests. Nearly 90% of 1,400 girls aged 13 to 17 had been in intimate relationships, the NSPCC and University of Bristol found. Of these, one in six said they had been pressured into sexual intercourse and one in 16 said they had been raped.

Step 2: What a coincidence! The all-seeing and all-knowing government already has plans in place to 'do something about it':

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said personal, social, health and economic studies - including relationship education - would become statutory for children of all ages by September 2011.

"Parents have a vital role to play in providing information and advice on sex and relationships," he said. "They should lead on instilling values in their children, but schools have a clear role in giving young people accurate information and developing the skills they need to make safe and responsible choices."

Victimhood Poker - this week's winning entry

From The Metro:

South Africa has the highest number of reported rapes in the world. Most experts say this is ... the legacy of apartheid, which often forced men to live in single-sex hostels away from their families.

I shit ye not.