December 2014 – Page 40

Face Of The Day

Demonstrators take part in a mass “face-sitting protest” outside the Houses of Parliament in central London on December 12, 2014, as they protest against changes to pornography regulations. By Leon Neal /AFP/Getty Images. Dish alum Katie Zavadski has more:

Oh, and they’ll also be singing “Sit on My Face” from Monty Python. The restrictive legislation on the production of XXX videos was implemented last week, and effectively axed most kinds of BDSM porn production by prohibiting everything from spanking to water sports to [consensual] verbal abuse. But it also banned face-sitting, and, for some odd reason, footage of female ejaculation — because porn-consuming adults should be shielded from seeing naturally occurring physiological responses.

Previous Dish on the UK’s anti-porn insanity here.

Why Are There Fewer Abortions? Ctd

Marcotte isn’t convinced by Frum’s theory that the abortion rate has gone down thanks to the pro-life movement convincing more women to carry their pregnancies to term:

Yes, the abortion rate is down. But if that was due to women choosing childbirth over abortion, then we’d see a subsequent spike in the birth rate to go along with the abortion decline. But as Joerg Dreweke at the Guttmacher Institute pointed out in a 2014 analysis of the same abortion numbers Frum is looking at, “the decline in abortion between 2008 and 2011 coincided with a steep national drop in the birthrate”—13 percent and 9 percent, respectively. “By looking at abortion and birth numbers, this point becomes even more clear: Between 2008 and 2011, abortions declined by about 150,000, but births by roughly twice as much (down about 300,000),” he adds. Women aren’t “choosing life” more. On the contrary, they’re just getting pregnant less.

To be fair, Frum anticipated this objection and thought he had answered it: “At any given moment nearly 40 percent of women are using no birth-control method at all. Almost half of all American pregnancies are unintended.” An interesting point, but it doesn’t change the baseline fact that women just aren’t getting pregnant as often. So what’s going on? … The likeliest explanation is probably the most mundane one. It really is about the contraception.

A More Complex Picture Of College Rape

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, new data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics suggest that college women are actually less likely than their non-student peers to become victims of sexual assault:

The report estimates that 6.1 of every 1000 college students are raped or sexually assaulted every year; assault is slightly more common among college-age nonstudents (7.6 per 1000). Those rates are lower than other studies of college women, including federal studies, have found. The BJS says this is probably a difference of methodology: the crime victims study, which this report is based on, simply asks women about “unwanted sexual activity,” while other studies list specific behaviors or scenarios women might have experienced.

However, the BJS data also confirm that most rapes go unreported, as the above chart illustrates:

Sexual assault victims are typically much more likely not to go to the police than victims of other crimes … But reporting rates are especially low among college students.

Among young non-student women, according to the new report, 67 percent didn’t report their assaults to the police — that’s a little higher than the average for all sexual-assault victims (which is about 65 percent) but it’s about comparable. Among college students, however, 80 percent of victims didn’t go to the police.

Furthermore, it doesn’t look like college students are reporting assaults to college officials, either. 14 percent of nonstudents said that they didn’t report their assault to the police, but did report to another official (which the survey doesn’t define). But only 4 percent of students said they went to another official or administrator.

As Brandy Zadrozny observes, the data also show that college-aged men are significantly more likely to get assaulted than non-students in the same age group:

Though fewer college-age men are raped or sexually assaulted than women, it happens to about 9,400 men annually. Men ages 18 to 24 enrolled in college were more likely to become a victim. Men in college were raped or sexually assaulted at a rate of 1.4 per 1,000, almost five times the rate of non-students (0.03 per 1,000). Men made up 17 percent of rape and sexual assault victims in college and just 4 percent for nonstudents.

Libby Nelson explores why different surveys turn up such markedly divergent numbers on rape:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s study on intimate partner violence finds much higher rates of sexual assault in the general population than the crime victimization survey does. The difference lies in how the questions are worded. Researchers in other surveys, including the CDC’s, don’t necessarily use the term “rape” or “sexual assault” at all. Instead, they ask much more specific questions about what happened, such as “when you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had vaginal sex with you?”

Christopher Krebs, the lead researcher on the Campus Sexual Assault Study, a study of two colleges that led to the widely cited “1 in 5” statistic, says the term “rape” carries heavy baggage. “Women often think of rape as something perpetrated by a stranger, someone they don’t know, someone jumping out from behind a bush or behind a car,” he says. “They think of something that happens that’s violent: they had to be hit or kicked or threatened. They think of it as something that happens when you’re around people you don’t know.”

What Universal Healthcare Doesn’t Cover

Charles Kenny examines attempts to provide healthcare in the developing world:

A World Bank review of extending universal health coverage in developing countries found that providing subsidized or free care did increase access to those services, especially by the poorest people. Such schemes also reduced recipients’ out-of-pocket expenses associated with health care. There were also some successes related to health outcomes. Argentina’s Plan Nacer, for example, provided services to pregnant women and young children, which was associated with a 2 percentage point reduction in early newborn mortality.

Yet only five out of 18 studies of coverage roll-out found a positive impact on health indicators such as death rates or reduced sickness.

A big reason why:

In sub-Saharan Africa, the five leading killers are malaria, HIV, lower respiratory infections, diarrhea, and malnutrition. Further and growing causes of mortality across the developing world include traffic accidents, tobacco usage, and health conditions related to being overweight. Clean water, access to and use of toilets, condoms, soap, vaccinations, and and bed nets, alongside better nutrition, tobacco controls, and road safety measures can prevent the majority of these deaths. Doctors and nurses save thousands of lives a day, but infrastructure and public health interventions—neither requiring highly trained medical staff—save many millions each year. Often, the medical system can do little more than provide palliative care when these other approaches aren’t used or don’t work.

Mental Health Break

When you’re too lazy to take your dog for a run:

Tis The Season For Cheap Real Estate

Joe Pinsker flags research by L. Rachel Ngai and Silvana Tenreyro on why house are more expensive in the summer than the winter:

Ngai and Tenreyro haven’t built a model that explains exactly why prices vary with the season, but they can at least speculate. It might seem like weather would be a factor—it’s more pleasant to scope out properties during the warmer months—but prices vary significantly even in places where summer and winter are tougher to distinguish, such as Los Angeles and San Diego.

They guess that it has to do with the timing of the school year.

“We think parents of school-age children find it more convenient to search in the summer,” Tenreyro says. But, as she notes in her paper, that contingent is only estimated to make up less than a third of prospective home buyers at any given time—a substantial proportion, but not enough, it would seem, to determine when the majority of homes are sold.

This group’s disproportionately large impact gets to the heart of how Tenreyro and Ngai’s model works, in that it accounts for a snowballing effect. “Because there is this critical mass that prefers searching in the summer, then sellers put their houses on sale in the summer,” Tenreyro says. “And because there are more houses for sale, then other buyers also then prefer to search in the summer and so on and so forth. The effect gets amplified as a virtuous circle.” In this way, the unique preferences of a relatively smaller group of home buyers ends up dictating the market for everyone else.

The 2016 Senate Map

Kyle Kondrik sneaks a very early look at it:

Republicans really helped themselves by running up the score last month in the Senate. The importance of netting nine seats in 2014 as opposed to, say, seven or eight, is clear when one looks at the 2016 contests. If the Republicans were at only a 52-48 edge — a net gain of seven — then Democrats could get to a 51-49 majority in 2016 just by holding all of their own seats and winning the three Toss-ups, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The chances of that combination happening wouldn’t be 50-50, but they would be fairly close to even, and control of the Senate would be very much up in the air to start.

But because the Democrats need to net four or five seats to take control, depending on the party of the next vice president,the Democrats’ opening odds to win the majority are significantly less than 50-50. In order to capture the Senate, Democrats will have to put some currently leaning or likely Republican seats in play, along with winning their own seats and the three GOP-held Toss-ups. That’s certainly possible, but the GOP starts with a clear edge as the cycle begins.

Would You Report Your Rape? Ctd

A reader adds a new angle to the thread:

I was convicted in 2001 of embezzling more than a million dollars, for which I served 1-1/2 years in prison. I may come at this from a different angle, being a gay man who was raped in prison, rather than a straight women raped in college. I didn’t report my rapes (there were three). I didn’t even discuss them with friends.

First, if you think reporting a rape in a college environment is hard on the reporter, it is pure hell in prison.

The very first thing that happens is you’re transferred from your housing unit, so you lose your job and program. I was in a terrific program with one of the greatest teachers of my life, so the loss would have been substantial.

Second, why one was moved becomes common knowledge very quickly (in prison, gossip travels faster than the speed of light), so you will be a target, an known easy mark, wherever you’re put next. Third, the accused, at worst, suffers the loss of a few days good time. Most of the time, the event is found to be consensual sex (because I was gay, so of course I’d want to have sex with a man) and both are punished. I wouldn’t even be able to get medical care to ensure I did not seroconvert (I am HIV-). There was very little upside to reporting. So, I kept quiet and found ways to keep myself out of the situation.

I am sad to say that being raped was not the most traumatic thing to happen in prison. But even now, ten years later, every so often, I still wake in the middle of the night shaking with fear because of my stay there. On the other hand, I wouldn’t now report either. It is over with and done. I’ve moved on and don’t want to be involved in anything there. If this places others in danger, so be it. I don’t think the report would be fair to me or to anyone I accuse. After so long, even I don’t trust my memories of the events.

Thus, I don’t blame people for not reporting – it is a very personal decision. But I also don’t think accusations long after the rape are helpful either. Either go forward at the time, letting the chips fall where they may, or let it go.

An Iron Lady

This past week has been Dianne Feinstein’s finest hour. In fact, it has been the Senate’s finest hour – with the remarkable speeches of Senator Udall and Senator McCain as well. The torture apologists often try to dismiss the report as some kind of partisan hatchet-job. But they never grapple with Feinstein’s long record of support for the CIA, and the respect she commands among her fellow Senators. Nor do they confront the unique personal perspective of John McCain, the Republican’s candidate for president only six years ago. A reader in California praises her senior Senator:

DiFi has a core of steel. Thanks so much for posting her tweet stream. She may be far – far! – from perfect to this liberal’s eyes, but she’s tough and she’s seen shit and I think she’s done putting up with it. I’m sure you’ve seen the footage of a young Dianne Feinstein, hours after having found Harvey Milk’s body, announcing his and Mayor Moscone’s death to the press. I first saw it in The Times of Harvey Milk before I lived in California, and I thought of it (as she must have) when she was the first person out to the microphones at Obama’s first inauguration. (And of course in old Washington style, she was the one who hosted the private dinner where Barack and Hillary worked it out.)

I don’t think the CIA would be wise to mess with her at this point in her life and legacy.

With any luck, they’ve learned their lesson.

(Photo: Committee chairman Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) listens to an aide during a hearing before the Senate (Select) Intelligence Committee on June 5, 2014. By Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The Torture Doctors

Michael Daly introduces us to the amateur goons who ran the torture freak show:

James Elmer Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen are not the first Americans to employ waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” against our enemies. But they are almost certainly the only ones to get rich doing it.

They did so by employing what is widely dismissed as “voodoo science” based on misapplied principles in a program that CIA records suggest produced little, if any, intelligence of significant value. And they might have gotten even richer. The Senate Intelligence Committee report says they secured a contract with the CIA in 2006 valued “in excess of $180 million.” The CIA canceled the deal three years later, but by then the duo had received $81 million.

This is one reason I remain befuddled by the pro-torture right’s response to the facts in the report. If you are in favor of torture, you should be horrified that the CIA contacted it out to goons with no relevant experience or interrogation training. If you care about wasting government money, you should be appalled by this instance of total incompetence, rewarded by tax-payers. But the Republicans’ rank partisanship precludes them from being internally consistent and coherent. They’re just backing their own team – even as that team clearly betrayed any confidence the torture-supporters might have expected.

Then there is the question of whether qualified psychologists or doctors were implicated in these war crimes. Roy Eidelson and Trudy Bond question whether the American Psychological Association was involved:

Responding to the new Senate report, the American Psychological Association (APA) was quick to issue a press release distancing itself from Mitchell and Jessen. The statement emphasized that the two psychologists are not APA members – although Mitchell was a member until 2006 – and that they are therefore “outside the reach of the association’s ethics adjudication process.” But there is much more to this story.

After years of stonewalling and denials, last month the APA Board appointed an investigator to examine allegations that the APA colluded with the CIA and Pentagon in supporting the Bush Administration’s abusive “war on terror” detention and interrogation practices.

The latest evidence of that collusion comes from the publication earlier this fall of James Risen’s Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War. With access to hundreds of previously undisclosed emails involving senior APA staff, the Pulitzer-prize winning reporter concludes that the APA “worked assiduously to protect the psychologists…involved in the torture program.” The book also provides several new details pointing to the likelihood that Mitchell and Jessen were not so far removed from the APA after all.

Jefferson M. Fish also cites Risen’s book:

In the book, Risen documented the extensive contacts between APA and the U.S. government, both leading to and following the change in ethical Standard 1.02. Risen wrote:

Perhaps the most important change was a new ethics guideline: if a psychologist faced a conflict between APA’s ethics code and a lawful order or regulation, the psychologist could follow the law or “governing legal authority.” In other words, a psychologist could engage in activities that the U.S. government said were legal—such as harsh interrogations—even if they violated APA’s ethical standards. This change introduced the Nuremberg defense into American psychology—following lawful orders was an acceptable reason to violate professional ethics. The change in the APA’s ethics code was essential to the Bush administration’s ability to use enhanced interrogation techniques on detainees. (Pp. 194-195)

In December 2008, following a presidential election in which both Barak Obama and John McCain condemned torture, the APA proposed removing the offending sentence and replacing it with, “Under no circumstances may this standard be used to justify or defend violating human rights.” This change, which was subsequently implemented, would seem to imply that the sentence had been created for just the purpose described by Risen.

Relatedly, Steven Miles, author of Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors, talked to Julie Beck about the role of doctors in torture. Beck asks, “Why would people use medical knowledge and expertise learned to heal people for the opposite purpose?” Miles responds:

It’s pretty interesting, I’m writing a book on just that question. The docs who get involved in this, number one, are careerists. They get involved for rank and career, and the regimes never coerce them, or extremely rarely coerce them. Instead what happens is the regimes treat them as some kind of elite. The docs are generally not sadists. This is not the stuff of Saw, for example. They go along with the dominant political theme of the prison: “These are our enemies and we gotta squeeze them for the information.” The thing that’s so interesting is that there is research showing that force of interrogation does not work, that it’s counterproductive. These docs seem to be entirely unaware, not only of the ethics codes, but also of the ineffectiveness of these interrogation strategies, that they never mount a protest.

The banality of evil.

(Image via ABC News)