GT 2009-04-19: Men in Uniform #3, (possible trigger warning) in which an L.A. county sheriff’s deputy stalks, terrorizes, and forces unwanted sexual contact on a woman he singled out at a bar, flashing both his badge and his gun along the way, and, by way of consequences, gets to plead out to “disturbing the peace” and return to work after a two-week vacation. Malestream media treats the case as if it were an example of a problem with alcohol abuse on the force, rather than, you know, sexual predators being allowed to roam around the city with badges and guns.

<a href=”http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/04/17/death_by/>GT 2009-04-17: Death by Homeland Security #3: The Disappeared, in which the United States government’s border Securitate leaves a man to die from a heart attack while in immigration lock-up, because they just couldn’t be bothered to get a mere immigrant medical attention, and then spends the next few years denying that the man ever even existed.

GT 2009-02-21: how professional social workers colonized the maternity home movement, and what came after looks at a long passage from Ann Fessler’s book on women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade. In particular, it has to do with what happened to the maternity home movement during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and how a movement that originally started, in the early 1900s, as a sympathetic refuge, a form of mutual aid between ordinary women, and a way for unwed mothers to find sources of relief and economic support, was gradually taken over and transformed into a means for professional social workers to sequester pregnant women, to aid and abet the social practice of secret-keeping and slut-shaming, and to separate young mothers from their children.

GT 2009-02-18: Public schooling #2: Criminal texting, in which a 14 year old girl in Wisconsin is detained by the police at her high school, interrogated, searched by a male police officer, arrested for “disorderly conduct,” then body-searched by a female police officer, all in order to find a cell phone that it turns out she was hiding in her pants. The charge is that she was sending text messages in class after the teacher told her to stop, and then hid her phone from the teacher when the teacher tried to confiscate it. This minor classroom management issue apparently was considered a police matter and a cause for arrest, for which the girl could in principle be fined up to $5,000.

GT 2008-10-24: Ending State violence against women in prostitution in San Francisco: in which I speak in favor of Prop. K, a ballot initiative which would result in complete de facto decriminalization of women in prostitution who work in the city of San Francisco. Not because I’m pro-prostitution (I’m not), but rather because I’m against vice cops being able to inflict fines or jail terms on women in prostitution.

GT 2008-10-10: Whiteness studies 104: Class, cuisine, and authenticity: in which I discuss NPR “Progressives,” class, and the construction of “real Mexican cuisine.”

m. leblanc:

If you’ll recall, you are only authorized to use deadly force in order to protect yourself from deadly force,

“Authorized” by whom? If you’re referring to the law, then you are absolutely wrong. Washington state law certainly does not require a threat of deadly force in order to justify deadly force in self-defense. RCW 9A.16.050 considers the use of deadly force a justifiable form of defense against rape, or any other form of “felony or … great bodily injury” against a person or a third party.

As well it should. If your claim is not about what the law allows for, but rather about morality or something of the sort, then I think it is absolutely moral for a woman to kill her kidnapper and would-be rapist in self-defense. Do you disagree? If so, why?

Jill:

which would mean that a lot of kids in more conservative or rural areas would get really crappy sex ed, or none at all. And likely crappy science and literature classes, too. Which is why I think libertarian principles applied to education are problematic.

Well, then. Thank goodness government schooling has done such a great job making sure that kids in more conservative areas don’t end up with really crappy sex ed, or none at all.

Oh, wait.

GT 2008-06-23 (trigger warning), in which a grand jury declares that the Stark Count Ohio Sheriff’s Office did nothing wrong when a gang of several male and female deputies held Hope Steffey down in a jail cell, forcibly removed her clothes over her screams of protest while wrenching her arms behind her back, and then left her completely naked in a freezing jail cell in public view for six hours. (Cf. also GT 2008-02-05: the original story (trigger warning) and follow-ups on the case, including five more women who came forward with complaints about the use of retaliatory, humiliating, unnecessary strip-searches in the Stark County jail.) Steffey is pursuing a lawsuit in federal court.

GT 2008-06-26: State ownership of the means of reproduction (#2) in which I comment on the AMA’s recently adopted resolution calling for “model legislation” to prohibit women from choosing a midwife-assisted home birth.

GT 2008-06-11: Beating up your teenage daughter isn’t just a good idea. It’s the law. In which parents of several teenaged defendants sue for a restraining order against Justice of the Peace Gustavo “Gus” Garza, of Los Fresnos, Texas, and if possible his removal from the bench. After a 14 year old young woman was hauled into his court over skipping school, he ordered her stepfather to spank her with a heavy wooden paddle, in front of strangers in open court. Garza claims he didn’t “order” a spanking per se, and calls this a “punishment option,” because the threatened “alternative” was a $500 fine and a criminal record for the daughter if the stepfather refused to spank her. After the court-ordered spanking, Garza told the stepfather that he hadn’t hit her hard enough.

Several other parents have now come forward, including the parents of a 14-year-old boy with a muscular development disability who Garza ordered beaten as punishment for swearing at a bus driver, and have joined the lawsuit.

GT 2008-05-16: Women and the Invisible Fist, in which I try to offer a close reading and sympathetic reconstruction of Susan Brownmiller’s “Myrmidon theory” of stranger-rape (as presented in Against Our Will, and as against the crude but common misrepresentation of her views as some kind of conspiracy theory rather than the radical analysis of sex-class that they are), consider how the specific case illustrates important nuances that need to be incorporated into libertarian and anarchist theories of spontaneous order, and argue that considering the Myrmidon theory and the (nuanced version of the) concept of spontaneous order in light of each other helps illustrate how key parts of radical feminist and anarchist analysis can benefit from and enrich each other’s understanding of social and political power.

GT 2008-05-20: Cops are here to protect you. (#5), in which Officer Christopher Damonte, 250 pound hired thug for the city of San Francisco, keeps public order by screaming at a couple of “suspect” women, who may have been guilty of being drunk in public and perhaps also intent to commit jaywalking in the first degree, and then, when one of them — Kelly Medora, a 118 pound preschool teacher — had the temerity to ask for his name and suggest that his conduct might be out of line, proceeds to call in his posse, arrests her, and wrenches her arm behind her back, breaking one of her bones “with an audible crack.” The city’s lawyer says that “Damonte used an approved method of holding her arm, but she struggled. Then ‘in an effort to escape,’ she squatted down and ‘broke her own arm.'” The city government decided to pay out a settlement of $235,000 to Medora, while Damonte faces, at worst, “potential” administrative discipline from fellow cops — meaning that this violent, domineering control freak of a man will never face any legal consequences for this heinous assault and battery, except possibly a verbal reprimand, a forced vacation from work, or at the very worst losing his job — while a bunch of innocent San Francisco taxpayers, who had nothing to do with it, will get sent the bill for his violent rages.

GT 2008-05-14: Voyage of the S. S. St. Louis, in which I consider the ways in which anti-immigrant border laws condemn innocent people to misery, mutilation or death, in the name of segregating world population by nationality or in the name of an illusory need for control. Particularly when the victims of violence are women and when (therefore) the abuse and terror inflicted on them is categorized as a “personal” or “cultural” but not a “political” problem by the malestream opinions of a bureaucracy legally entitled to pick and choose who does and who does not count as Officially Persecuted for the purposes of the United States federal government.

GT 2008-05-10: Rapists in Uniform #3: Six women have come forward in the past four months about being subjected to unnecessary and humiliating strip searches at the hands of the Stark County, Ohio sheriff’s department. The most recent, Elizabeth was coerced into removing her clothes even though she never said she was suicidal, and left locked in her cell, naked, for eight hours. She’s now afraid to give her last name or show her face in press interviews, because she’s afraid of retaliation against herself or her family for speaking out.

Sheriff Tim Swanson says it was all done By The Book, which is apparently supposed to mean that it was O.K. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Stark County sheriff’s deputies are repeatedly using strip searches as a form of retaliation, to control and punish women they find uppity, unruly, or otherwise troublesome, under color of the law, and then, to crown all, to insult their victims by saying they did it all For Her Own Good.

GT 2008-03-10: Rapists on patrol (#2) in which David Alex Park, stalker and rapist, is acquitted on all charges, by a jury of eleven men and one woman. Not because he is anything other than a stalker and a rapist—which he as much as admitted in open court, and which was proven well enough anyway by phone records, license plate requests, and DNA evidence–but rather because he is a cop, and the woman that he harassed and sexually extorted danced at a strip club.