What’s the Connection (If Any) Between Adolescent Drinking and Rape and Violence?

@RHRealityCheck

When two adolescent boys were found guilty earlier this month of raping a teenage girl in Steubenville, Ohio, there was much discussion about rape culture, social media, and whether taking advantage of a passed out girl is just boys’ nature. Many media reports highlighted the drunken state of many of the kids present at the rape, and some argued that the girl’s drunkenness made her at least partially responsible for the abuse she suffered. Meanwhile, the boys’ drunkenness either was not mentioned at all, or was seen as making them less responsible for the attack.

One thing that didn’t elicit much disagreement was the issue of teenage drinking itself. “Where were the parents?” was a frequently asked question. “Why were these kids allowed to drink?” Alcohol and bad parenting, many people agreed, were the real culprits of this rape.

But is that really true? Does alcohol lead to rape and violence? And are parents responsible for adolescent drinking?

The answers to these questions are less straightforward than one might expect.

It is certainly true that a large proportion of violent crimes involve alcohol use. This has been attributed to a variety of factors, including the fact that alcohol inhibits self-control and limits the ability to assess risk, and the fact that some people consume alcohol in preparation for their involvement in violent acts because they believe it will make them braver and stronger.

It is also true that people under the age of 21 consume alcohol regardless of the legal U.S. drinking age, and that many young people binge drink, that is, drink a lot of alcohol over a short period of time.

Younger adolescents are, however, less likely to be involved in alcohol-related violence than they are to be involved in any other violent crimes. And when you look at violent crimes committed by a male perpetrator on a female victim, there is no significant difference between the proportion of women attacked by men under the influence and the proportion of women attacked by men who did not appear to be drunk.

In other words, the fact that a man drinks does not make him any more or less likely to attack a woman.

The influence of parenting and parental drinking on teenage behavior is also not a straight shot when it comes to alcohol and violence. While adult binge drinking in the larger community is a strong predictor for binge drinking in teenagers and college students, parental problem drinking is not—or at least not directly. To summarize a number of quite complex family studies, drinking is not a problem for adolescents in and of itself, though it is obviously not healthy in excess. Rather, the problems are how they drink, how (not if) they see their parents drink, and what they learn to do generally about their emotions and conflicts.

Parenting matters, but, especially for older teenagers, so do peer pressure, societal norms, and genetic susceptibility to using alcohol.

My motivation for looking into the correlation between these issues is not merely academic. I come from Denmark, a country where alcohol use is normalized, even celebrated, among citizens, including teenagers. As I recall it, the main drink served at high school dances back home was beer. Did that make us rape each other? My recollection is that it did not.

This recollection seems to be substantiated by facts. In a recent survey of industrialized countries, Denmark topped the teenage drinking list, while the United States came in last. But rape estimates from Denmark and the United States suggest that women and girls are equally likely to be raped in both countries, or even slightly less likely to be raped in Denmark than in the United States. To put it differently, drinking more does not make Danish people rape more.

My point is not to say that alcohol was irrelevant to the Steubenville rape case. Obviously, the girl’s alcohol-induced unconsciousness enabled the crime in some way (not that it at all excuses the violent acts). I am also not trying to exonerate these teens’ parents of responsibility. I would like to think we have some influence over our children’s sense of right and wrong, and by that I include the notion that we have a responsibility to help people who cannot help themselves.

I do take issue with the notion that alcohol and bad parenting are what caused this crime. Alcohol is a poisonous substance that does damage to your health when consumed in large or even not so large quantities. Bad parenting has much the same effect. But neither ensures that you will commit a crime.

Ending Violence Against Women Shouldn’t Be Controversial—But it Is

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Each year around March 8 (International Women’s Day), representatives of world governments come together to draw up a statement that is supposed to communicate the notion that women and men are equal. This has been a key tenet of international relations since the signing of the United Nations Charter in 1945, so one would think it would not be terribly controversial.

One would be wrong.

The UN Commission on the Status of Women, which has met each year since 1946, tries to set aspirational priorities for women’s equality, and it largely succeeds in doing so. However, for the past several years, members of the commission have disagreed so vehemently about what “equality” means that, in 2012, the meeting ended at an impasse. One week into the 2013 commission meetings, it seems possible that this year’s negotiations are headed down the same path. 

This is all the more frustrating because the main theme of this year’s meeting is violence against women. This is not a new, obscure issue that should require more than two weeks’ discussion to reach an agreement about steps forward. Prevent, protect, prosecute, punish—it is not that complicated.

More to the point, violence against women requires urgent attention. At least 1 in 3 women has been beaten, forced to have sex, or otherwise abused at some point in her life. Most often the perpetrator is someone she knows, and frequently it is not a one-off incident. Furthermore, domestic violence contributes to a culture of violence; boys who witness their fathers beat up their mothers are, as adults, twice as likely to abuse their own partners as those who grew up in homes without violence.

Many politicians and government officials are also complicit in violence against women. In Egypt last month, parliamentarians tried to make the sexual assault of female protesters the responsibility of the women themselves, arguing that if they hadn’t been on the streets in the first place, they would never have been groped, harassed, and raped.

In Somalia, Lul Ali Asman Barake, who says she was gang-raped by police officers, was jailed for telling a journalist about her attack. Barake was released this week, but the journalist remains in jail.

And this past Monday, Kenyans were given the option of voting for a presidential candidate who is being sought by the International Criminal Court on charges that include orchestrating sexual violence against supporters of his political opponents in 2008.

In light of this, it is perhaps unsurprising that government officials have a hard time agreeing about how, and even if, to end violence against women—after all, some of them represent leaders who believe victims are at least as responsible as their perpetrators. Indeed, Russia, the Vatican, and Iran, whose representatives have reportedly derailed negotiations the most this year, all have recent records of punishing women for speaking out, demanding justice, and simply being female.

So I am not surprised that these negotiations have not gone smoothly. I am, however, appalled. And you should be too. Today, on International Women’s Day, contact your foreign ministry or head of government and tell him or her that you expect to see an agreement in New York next week. A consensus outcome at the Commission on the Status of Women may not necessarily lead to gender justice and equality. But without an agreement, it will be clear to perpetrators that individuals in charge are not planning to clamp down on abuse.

Trans Inclusion: Trust, Verify, Educate

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Last week, the pundit-sphere erupted in vicious back-and-forths over the (lack of) space for trans women in mainstream feminism, and how to talk about transgender people to begin with.

The comment that led to the storm has since been described by the author, Suzanne Moore, as a throw-away line, and, while certainly thoughtless, it was indeed a minor and non-essential component of the essay in which it appeared. In short, in an article about the current state of women’s rights activism, Moore described the perfect body women are expected to have as “that of a Brazilian transsexual.” 

A twitter-storm of criticism ensued, making the point that trans people are victimized and excluded by mainstream feminism (I am paraphrasing the hostile tone of this debate which went both ways). The controversy peaked when the Observer on Sunday published a retort by another writer, Julie Burnchill, that included such offensive language about transgender people that the Observer ultimately took it down. 

It is obvious that not all women face the same challenges. Every disadvantaged group of humanity has a different history of exclusion and suffers in different ways. How we see ourselves, how others see us, and how we believe they see us: all of this has an impact on our experience of discrimination and abuse. 

As a result, the two main substantive points in this debate were not mutually exclusive, though they were presented as opposites. On the one hand, it is true that girls are treated differently (in most cases less advantageously) than boys most everywhere, and that this suffering has an impact on adult women’s self-worth, identity, and ability to exercise our rights. It is also true that many transgender individuals suffer a different—and often both violent and invisibilized—type of exclusion throughout their lives, an experience that would color anyone’s understanding of what is safe and what is not. This is so whether we are talking about trans women or trans men.

Add to any of these one-dimensional exclusion narratives issues such as age, ethnicity, nationality, education, money, and religion, and it will be clear that discrimination varies greatly from sub-group to sub-group. This is hardly news. The point here is that entering into a debate over who is more excluded than whom is a non-starter. The answer will always be: “it depends,” and it is hardly conducive to change to get into a bidding war of wrongs.

There are, however, two lessons to be learned from the Moore/Burnchill vs. Transgender debacle. 

Lesson number 1: we have a long way to go on trans inclusion

I highly doubt that the editor of Suzanne Moore’s original piece saw the troublesome comparison of “ideal female body” with “Brazilian transsexual” as anything other than descriptive or maybe funny. It would surprise me to learn that there had been any conversation about its potentially inflammatory nature. The same is true for the editorial process that led to the publication of Julie Burnchill’s piece, which has been made public. It is abundantly clear that no one thought to seriously question the taste-level or justifiable offense that would be felt upon its publication. 

To be sure, both Moore and Burnchill are free to express both tasteless and insensitive views. The articles may be offensive, even very offensive, but they don’t incite to violence or discrimination and so are publishable without criminal liability—or should be. 

My concern is that the trans community seems to be invisible or “other” to the editors. If these editors did think about the offense the pieces or mentions would cause, that concern was dismissed as irrelevant. This happens most frequently where the butt of the “joke” is already in a disadvantaged position. In a distant past, for example, it was considered reasonable to publish offensively abusive language about Irish immigrants in the United States, because the Irish were seen as less than human and in any case not “one of us.” 

The sentiment that trans people are lesser, have brought it upon themselves, and should just get over it, has permeated a good part of this debate, down to a very unhelpful conflation of “transsexual” with “trans women” with “cross-dressing.” We can do better.

Lesson number 2: we have a long way to go on trust and solidarity

Suffering is felt subjectively: this is the very reason the experience of the victim is central to the definitions of sexual and racial harassment in U.S. law. Imagine a situation where the person who calls a colleague “bitch” or “sexy mamma” gets to decide if that contributes to a hostile work environment or not. No one would ever get beyond the “you just don’t have a sense of humor” defense. 

Of course, identifying abusive language is easy where it so far oversteps existing ideas of propriety that the suffering it generates is “objective” or felt by most, and where the intention to insult is explicit. 

It is much harder where the injury most probably is a result of ignorance rather than intentionally injurious. In such cases, as for example where a mainstream feminist writer compares the ideal female body to that of a “Brazilian transsexual,” our law and practice should allow for trust. Not the kind of trust that leads to impunity and abuse. But the kind of trust where the first reaction to sub-par communication isn’t to assume intentional insult but rather to educate and inform. 

For example, the first time a former boss called me “Sweetie,” I didn’t retort by calling him a sexist pig, I told him I preferred to be called by my name, and not by terms that, to me, implied he had little respect for my professional abilities. He never called me anything other than Marianne after that. And, at least in my presence, he started calling other female colleagues by their names too.

In short: the invisibility of trans communities is real. So are unthinking insults. By treating the latter as intentional, we do nothing to inform and educate about the first.

Silence On Rape is the Biggest Obstacle to Prevention

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I recently held a seminar on rape in war with military lawyers from across the world. We talked through a number of obstacles to prevention and elimination of sexual violence, but at the end of the seminar everyone agreed that the biggest of them all is silence. “We don’t ever get to have this conversation,” the participants agreed.

Unfortunately, this is particularly true in the countries most affected by sexual violence in war: not only is rape not talked about, but many of those who try to address this terrible crime are attacked, often violently. On October 25th, unknown men carried out an assassination attempt on Dr. Denis Mukwege, and succeeded in killing his body guard, Joseph Bizimana. Dr. Mukwege is known for his tireless work in defence of women victims of sexual violence in the Congo.

Silence also reigns in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This week, Amnesty International launched a briefing paper detailing the continued silence about the rapes in Republika Srpska, almost two decades after the war in Bosnia and Herzogovina ended. To the extent there is any attention to the widespread rapes during the 1992-95 conflict, it is focused on the perpetrators—though many are still at large. Meanwhile, the women and girls who suffered systematic rape and forced pregnancies are overlooked.

It is, in fact, a widespread phenomenon that insofar as authorities and the public at large pay any attention to rape and violence against women, this attention is focused on punishing the perpetrator. And it is, of course, important to apply criminal justice where intentional harm has been done to another person, whether physically or psychologically. However, punishment is only effective as prevention when it is seen to be applied. In the case of sexual violence and rape, only a sliver of perpetrators are ever investigated, prosecuted, convicted, and serving a sentence. For more than 97 percent of those who commit rape, it is therefore of little relevance if the law metes out 10 or 20 years of jail time to a very few: most will never spend a day behind bars.

An equally important and often woefully ignored part of guaranteeing justice is to make sure rape victims have access to the justice system in the first place, and that they receive meaningful reparations for the harm they suffered as part of the sentencing.

Neither of these issues is appropriately dealt with in Republica Srpska. Many victims of widespread rape are still, after almost 20 years, unable to talk openly about their ordeals due to post-traumatic stress disorder that has not been dealt with. The authorities have not addressed the stigma attached to sexual violence in society as a whole, and has done little to overcome harmful stereotyping about gender roles, which bleed into public perceptions about rape. As a result, many women say they were mistreated, rather than raped, and the silence surrounding sexual violence continues.

More to the point, perhaps, while the silence continues, victims do not receive adequate reparations for their suffering. “Reparations” is the term for the measures states are obliged to take to help victims overcome their ordeals, and they include both what we traditionally think of as “justice” (that is, investigations and court cases) as well as guarantees of non-repetition, compensation for the abuse, and rehabilitation. Most importantly, true reparations are meant to guarantee the victim that their suffering will never re-occur.

This—guarantees of non-repetition—is where justice for individual cases meets prevention as a whole. Unfortunately, this is also where our efforts are the weakest: if part of the reason rape happens is because we allow it to, that means that to issue a guarantee that rape will stop, we have to change. And that kind of fundamental change is incredibly hard.

The good news is that it is not impossible. There are conflicts where rape is rare, and there are relationships where violence is impossible. In my recent seminar, we talked about how to change the way our most immediate family and friends think about rape. If we all make sure the 10 persons we are closest to understand that rape is wrong and never the fault of the victim, we will have changed the world.

Hopefully, change will come soon to Republika Srpska and anywhere else where silence continues to reign.

On Savile, Sandusky, and the Power of Rape

Rape is about power. The attacker seeks to control and subdue the victim's physical and psychological integrity. When we address rape, it is therefore essential to overturn this power-imbalance and restore dignity and control to the victim. Most often, we fail miserably at this.

Consider the case of recently deceased BBC television host, Jimmy Savile. BBC leadership has all but acknowledged they preferred to suspend investigations into Savile's allegedly repeated sexual assaults on hundred of children over the years, rather than risk upsetting their star. This case mirrors the decade-long collective calculated cluelessness at Penn State football coach where evidence of Jerry Sandusky's abuse of children was routinely ignored in favour of the revered coach.

It is no wonder that less than half of rape victims file a report with the police: if those around them stand with the attacker, why wouldn't the police? And, in fact, studies show that police officers believe rape victims are more likely to lie about their assault than victims of any other crime, despite evidence to the contrary. Three percent to 8 percent of rape complaints are false -- similar to the proportion of other crime complaints.

But even when sexual assault is reported, investigated, prosecuted, and a conviction has been handed down -- the probability of this happening is less than 5 percent -- power-dynamics prevail. In Ireland last week, for example, a 29-year-old man was offered the opportunity to pay his way out of jail after he was convicted of violent sexual assault of a 17-year-old girl. The sentence rightly led to protests from pundits and lay-persons alike, though it highlights a simple fact: neither rehabilitation of the attacker nor justice and support for the victim is a priority in the manner in which we deal with rape.

The priority, it seems, is power.

Over the past decades, law-makers in many countries have responded to rape and sexual assault mostly when particularly graphic violence has been detailed on the news: a child abducted and abused, a woman forced to work in a brothel. These cases are horrific, indeed, and the suffering of the victims and their families cannot be overestimated.

However, state responses to sexual assault that are born from media attention to specific cases can, and often do, have negative consequences.

First of all, narrowly targeted responses contribute to separating the "deserving" from the "undeserving" victims. Policies that focus on "forcible rape", "legitimate rape", and rape by someone who is not the victim's spouse implicitly support the notion that some people "had it coming". The list of justifications alleged perpetrators of rape have successfully used to defend their actions is truly absurd: it is not rape if the victim was my daughter, my wife, if she was drunk, or if the rape was somehow the expression of "culture."

These justifications run counter to human rights obligations on crime prevention and protection against abuse. Every individual -- adults and children alike -- has the right to live free from violence and sexual abuse. It is a core governmental obligation to promote public safety by holding offenders accountable and by putting in place effective crime prevention measures.

And narrowly targeted responses are often not effective at preventing rape. Sex offender registration laws and community notification measures in the United States, for example, have shown to be costly to society, harmful to reintegration efforts of ex-offenders, and--most notably--without any discernible effect on public safety. Indeed, the mere fact that only about 5 percent of rapists are ever convicted should say something about the effectiveness of community notification: not very high. Add to this the fact that the vast majority of sex offenders do not reoffend, and the relative uselessness of sex offender registries as instruments of public safety becomes clear.

We can restore power and dignity to rape victims by treating rape like we would treat any other crime. That means taking rape seriously and investigating it fully. It means having the necessary equipment on hand to obtain evidence in a timely and dignified way (and not, as Amnesty International found in Alaska, making women pay for flights to get to police stations that stock rape kits). It means applying the same standard of proof for all crimes and all victims, regardless of their sexual history and marital status. And it means sentences that take into account appropriate factors like the gravity of the offence, the specific circumstances of the crime, and the age and maturity of the offender.

Rape and sexual assault are expressions of power imbalances. For prevention to work, policy makers must look at the motivation behind them -- much like they should look at the motivation for other crimes. We should examine the social forces that allow some offenders to walk away with impunity and others to be punished disproportionately.

Our approach to rape should break the power dynamic, not reinforce it.