notes toward everything

sinidentidades:

The Wednesday hearing began with student senator Jesse Seitz reportedly asking the nominee, Stephen Piotrkowski, how he could possibly interact and serve a minority community as a white male.

Piotrkowski reportedly attempted to appeal to the Student Senate on the grounds that he identifies as a religious minority and has a lesbian sister, but it was to no avail.

After about thirty more minutes of questioning, the Senate voted to block Piotrkowski’s appointment.

Ian Coley, a student on the Associate Student Government Diversity and Inclusion Committee, later said white heterosexual males are not qualified to hold the position of associate vice president of diversity and inclusion.

“This university is not ready, in any capacity, for a heterosexual white male to be in charge in any way of diversity and inclusion,” said Coley, according to the Daily Northwestern.

“I don’t know if any university is,” he reportedly added.

Keep up the great work.

(via proletarianinstinct)

sinidentidades:

The Pentagon announced this week that a sergeant working in the military’s sexual assault prevention office had been charged with — you guessed it — sexual assault. This news came just a week after the officer in charge of the Air Force’s rape prevention program was arrested for sexual battery. 

An estimated 26,000 service members were sexually assaulted in 2012, according to the latest government report. That’s up from 19,000 in 2010, despite recent claims that the military has been focusing more on prevention efforts.

Amid the growing controversy, Congress is hurrying to draft new legislation and Obama has called for stricter punishment for sexual offenders. All officers in the sexual assault prevention office will be re-screened and re-trained, the Pentagon announced. As lawmakers and military officials debate what to do next, we’ve rounded up some of the best journalism on sexual assault in the military.

Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments below, or tweet them to us with the hashtag #muckreads.

The Invisible War, documentary, June 2012

The academy-award nominated documentary has helped bring the military’s rape crisis to national attention. Filmmakers interviewed victims and military personnel to reveal the overwhelming obstacles to prosecuting military rape, and how inadequate efforts have been so far to curbing sexual assault.

Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home, New York Times, February 2013

According to the Pentagon report, 48,100 women (and 43,700 men) reported military sexual trauma last year, which studies say makes them nine times more likely to suffer from PTSD. This two-part New York Times series documents the struggles facing women veterans who’ve suffered from sexual assault, including homelessness and unemployment.

The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer, Rolling Stone, February 2013

The story of one naval officer’s rape details the consequences victims face for coming forward — consequences that keep most victims from reporting sexual attacks. After telling her superiors she had been raped, Rebecca Blumer was accused of lying, sexually harassed, denied promotions and ultimately discharged.

Rape victims say military labels them ‘crazy’, CNN, April 2012

A CNN investigation found another way the military handles rape accusations: labeling victims as emotionally unstable. After reporting a sexual assault, multiple service members were diagnosed with a personality disorder and discharged. Their abuse allegations were ignored.

The Enemy Within, National Journal, September 2012

What is it about the military that makes sexual assault so pervasive? The National Journal digs into the policies behind the statistics, and the legal loopholes exploited by sexual predators.

Pentagon grapples with sex crimes by military recruiters, Washington Post, May 2013

Active service members aren’t the only ones vulnerable to sexual assault. A recent series of scandals across the country exposed military recruiters accused of sexually abusing young people looking to enlist.

Betrayal in the Ranks, The Denver Post, 2004

The Denver Post spoke with more than 60 victims about their battle for justice, and the psychological trauma that lasted long after their assault. Many felt the military blamed them for their rape, while shielding their attackers from punishment. 

sinidentidades:

A group of researchers from the Floating Sheep project - who also mapped racist tweets surrounding President Barack Obama’s re-election - have geotagged racist and homophobic tweets in the United States and plotted them on an interactive map.

Students at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., looked at 150,000 geotagged tweets that contained slurs and were in North America between June 2012 and April 2013. The students read each individual tweet and manually coded the sentiment of each tweet to determine if the given word was used in a positive, negative or neutral way in a project called the “Geography of Hate.”

“The prominence of debates around online bullying and the censorship of hate speech prompted us to examine how social media has become an important conduit for hate speech, and how particular terminology used to degrade a given minority group is expressed geographically,” wrote Monica Stephens, a geographer at Humboldt State, wrote in an introduction to the map on the blog Floating Sheep. “As we’ve documented in a variety of cases, the virtual spaces of social media are intensely tied to particular socio-spatial contexts in the offline world, and as this work shows, the geography of online hate speech is no different.”

“Ultimately, some of the slurs included in our analysis might not have particularly revealing spatial distributions. But, unfortunately, they show the significant persistence of hatred in the United States and the ways that the open platforms of social media have been adopted and appropriated to allow for these ideas to be propagated,” Stephens went on to say. 

Homophobia is also rampant.

Visit The Floating Sheep blog for more information on “The Geography of Hate” project.

iuonstrike:

Many of us involved with the April strike at IU recognized that no matter how much our demands were rooted in the local context, we are still part of a global movement on university campuses against austerity. In that spirit, we want to share links from struggles that have inspired us.

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