politics | Isn't it funny, the things that don't make it into the New York Times and AP? (Reply)

xposted:

TRIGGER WARNING FOR VIOLENCE COMMITTED DURING THE RAPE AND VERBAL VIOLENCE COMMITTED UPON THE VICTIM BY THE FUCKING POLICE.

Strauss-Kahn's Accuser Doubly Vicitimised, Advocates Say

"All of those things do not have anything to do with whether or not she was raped," said Human Rights Watch's Marianne Mollman in an interview with IPS.

"I would like to see one single person who has never told a lie in their life," she added.

Thompson acknowledged the significance of the new information.

"Her credibility is important, any rape victim's credibility is important," he said, "but you cannot become blind to the physical, corroborating evidence." The real question, he said, is, "What is true?"

He noted photos of the accuser's bruises, doctor's reports of a shoulder injury, and a pair of stockings, allegedly torn by Strauss- Kahn as the woman tried to escape.

"When he threw her to the floor, he tore a ligament in her shoulder. That is a fact," Thompson said. "Dominique Strauss-Kahn ripped her stockings. There are holes in her stockings, and the DA knows that. She spit his semen in the room, she spit it on the floor, and as soon as her supervisor came upstairs, she saw that…Detectives of the NYPD, they saw that," he added.

According to the accuser's daughter, several weeks ago prosecutors met with the accuser and "mistreated" her, repeatedly screaming and yelling at her.

"The way they had treated the victim was no way to treat a rape victim," Thompson said.

Refugee status: More valuable than truth?

According to Joseph Chamie, director of research at New York's Center for Migration Studies, most migrants will do whatever it takes to get into the United States.

"Many people are desperate to get into the more developed countries, the wealthier countries, for work," he told IPS.

"There's more than a billion people in Africa. There's more than a billion people in India, as well as China. We have rapid growth in Pakistan, and we have growth in Central America and the Caribbean. These people, many of them want to leave and go to wealthier places," he explained.

But poverty is not a recognised condition for refugee status.

"Underdevelopment is not legitimate criteria for being a refugee, so if you're coming from a poor country, you can't claim you're a refugee," Chamie explained.

MORE

Two things: 1. The IMF is the direct fucking cause of a hell of a lot of the poverty that many refugees want to escape. Consiuder, for instance, the case of what the motherfuckers did to Mali

2. The New York Times is relying on the NYPD Special Victims Division as a source. This same unit right here.

The fuckers who think this:

The detectives’ candid talk about their jobs reveals not only how they assessed the credibility of Strauss-Kahn’s accuser, but how these men—and they’re almost all men—deal with some of the most emotionally grueling police work around. How soon does the victim/complainant, as she (or he) is called in the reports, reveal what’s happened? Is she crying? That’s important. But sometimes the crime was committed months or years before. Sometimes the emotions run a gamut in the space of minutes, from cool and rational to hysterical then back again. Does a woman who claims to have been raped ask for a female detective? That’s taken as a sign of possible deception. “I am betting nine out of 10 times, when a woman asks for a female detective the story is going to be untrue,” says Lamboy. The operative theory is that women who are lying think female cops will be more receptive to their stories.

And this:

The last thing any detective wants, says Lt. Robert Johnson of Brooklyn Special Victims, “is to paint someone with that rapist brush and find out they are not, because the paint never comes off.” Even when they make successful cases, the cops in Special Victims can end up haunted by what they’ve seen and done. Take the case that Sandomir worked a few years ago. He busted a father who liked to have sex with girls ages 9 to 13. When one of that father’s daughters reached that age, he began raping her regularly. When she got older, he moved on to her younger sister. Sandomir, who has two young daughters of his own, put the father in jail. But “it tore the family apart because they still loved him,” Sandomir says. “It bothered me. I shredded the family. But should I blame myself, or him?”

Oh YEAH. I feel SO REASSURED of THESE people's credibility. RIGHTTTT. So once again, a poor woman of color is deemed unrapeable. Once again, some powerful white dude will get away with fuckery personified because there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. Once a-fucking-gain the police prove that they are our enemies in blue. And the words of INCITE- Women of Color Violence and others continue to be proven true Stop Law Enforcement Violence

Second, because mainstream responses to violence against women have relied almost exclusively on the police to protect us from violence, when in fact, police not only often fail to protect women of color and trans folks of color from interpersonal and community violence, they often perpetrate further violence against us, including when responding to calls for help. MORE

see also The Color of Violence

The state is not going to stop rape. The state is built on kyriarchy, and kyriarchy is way too fond of using rape as a way to police women and keep them in their place. And the police are not there to serve and protect anything else except power.

And isn't it funny who gets to be tagged a criminal, and who gets to shrug it off and wander off into the sunset all happy and shit, like nothing is happening? I bet that if even if the rape victim is a criminal, her crimes would be dwarfed by what our DSK got up to, both in his personal life and in his prominent position as chairman of the IMF. But if you are a criminal on a grand enough scale, then you don't pay for your crimes.