violation of personhood.
Murray started making moves. She wanted to know what the state of things was both in and outside of King County, so she asked the Washington State Hospital Association to survey its member hospitals. The report found that most Washington hospitals—79 percent—can technically provide forensic exams for survivors. However, in part due to the difficulty of maintaining a consistent pool of trained Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANEs), nearly three-quarters of hospitals surveyed refer patients to other hospitals at least some of the time. That can mean the difference between having forensic evidence for prosecution and not having it, as sometimes that evidence is no longer available even a day later.
All in all, things look better for survivors in Washington these days—but less so across the nation. The vast majority of U.S. emergency rooms do not have access to SANEs, according to the International Association of Forensic Nurses; CEO Sally Laskey says only about 17 percent do. And when Murray, following her request for a Washington survey in 2015, requested a national report from the Government Accountability Office, that report found not only a lack of trained SANEs, but also a startling lack of data around the issue, period.
This essay is so good.
some highlights:
...I don’t know if every man has done something like this, or if most men have – I suppose I take any man who believes this kind of behavior is unremarkable at his word that it is at least unremarkable in his lived experience, which is an awful presumption for another essay.
...But I do believe that Brett Kavanaugh has done this thing, because I believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. And I believe that willfully treating any instance of sexual assault as if it is a harmless, youthful indiscretion is dangerous, but treating a conspiracy to commit sexual assault between two wealthy, drunk young men as some kind of understandable, bumbling accident that could happen to anyone is altogether more appalling.
...After all, there is a terrifying logic at work when a man says to another man, Let’s see what we can do to this woman, together. It is eminently reasonable, in the most literal sense of the word, to deduce that two men claiming “we didn’t” is better than one saying “I didn’t.” It is objectively more effective, if your goal is to exert your power over a woman – and that is the purpose of sexual assault – to enlist the help of a friend in doing so.
...I don’t believe that Brett Kavanaugh wants to make the world a more just place. I believe he wants to reinforce and consolidate power. Because he has done it before, and because it is, in the darkest and most disturbing ways, the logical thing for a boy like him to do.
Harrell is one of 10 people who filed charges with the EEOC detailing widespread sexual harassment. They are being backed by the Fight for $15 low-wage group and the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, founded earlier this year to help provide lawyers for women who don’t have the money to hire one.
Abrams was still resolved to speak out. She now regards the experience with NBC as another painful part of her story. "They took away my voice," she says. "I want people to understand how incredibly challenging this is, with a story like mine that's highly sourced, with me doing this [advocacy] work in the public arena. And I can't get my story out there? If I didn't have those things, let's be very clear, no one would know about this today. I'm speaking out for all the other women who have been silenced, to let them know it's not their fault."
... Considering all this, it is truly only a powerful white man who could have lived the past 20 years — through the defeat of his wife and the social revolution it helped to galvanize — and think that none of this effort or upheaval applied to him, especially given that so much of it applies to him directly. So as he goes on to sell more copies of his book I’d advise Bill Clinton to stop bitching about how this is Kennedy-era ancient history. This is the muck that many of us have been swimming in for decades, and much of it is of your making. Come on in; the water is sickeningly warm. ...
In general, Dewey himself did not deny his actions—only their impropriety. “I have been very unconventional … as men [are] always who frankly show and speak of their liking for women,” he wrote. But, he insisted, it was not his fault if the targets of his “unconventional” actions took offense: “Pure women would understand my ways.”
...Who gets to be the subject of the story is an immensely political question, and feminism has given us a host of books that shift the focus from the original protagonist—from Jane Eyre to Mr. Rochester’s Caribbean first wife, from Dorothy to the Wicked Witch, and so forth. But in the news and political life, we’re still struggling over whose story it is, who matters, and who our compassion and interest should be directed at....
....We are as a culture moving on to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future.
This country has room for everybody who believes that there’s room for everybody. For those who don’t—well, that’s partly a battle about who controls the narrative and who it’s about....
The Monday ruling, which covered three cases against three different companies, involved situations in which employees were allegedly not paid for work. But the decision has far-reaching consequences for many types of cases, including those raising racial and sexual discrimination and harassment claims.
The decision will disproportionately impact low-income workers, who often lack the financial incentive or wherewithal to file complaints on their own. The costs of going to court, for example, would typically far outstrip the amount of back pay to which a woman experiencing pay discrimination in an hourly job would be entitled.
... Letterman may think he deserves points for raising a difficult topic. Instead, he gets points for offering a perfect illustration of what women and people of color are up against. If in the previous three decades, Letterman had hired greater numbers of diverse writers, he would have transformed the comedy world. He chose not to, and that’s part of his legacy. ...
...The spreadsheet was intended to circumvent all of this. Anonymous, it would protect its users from retaliation: No one could be fired, harassed, or publicly smeared for telling her story when that story was not attached to her name. Open-sourced, it would theoretically be accessible to women who didn’t have the professional or social cachet required for admittance into whisper networks. The spreadsheet did not ask how women responded to men’s inappropriate behavior; it did not ask what you were wearing or whether you’d had anything to drink. Instead, the spreadsheet made a presumption that is still seen as radical: That it is men, not women, who are responsible for men’s sexual misconduct....
