Prevalence
HOW PREVALENT IS CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE?
FACT: The real prevalence of child sexual abuse is not known because so many victims do not disclose or report their abuse. Studies suggest an overall prevalence rate of 7.5% to 11.7%*, with the prevalence rate for girls at 10.7% to 17.4%*, and the rate for boys at 3.8% to 4.6%*.
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IS CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE GETTING WORSE?
FACT: Identified incidents of child sexual abuse are declining, although there is no clear indication of a cause.
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Understand the Risks
ARE THERE CERTAIN FACTORS THAT PUT A CHILD AT RISK FOR SEXUAL ABUSE?
FACT: Children of every gender, age, race, ethnicity, background, socioeconomic status and family structure are at risk. No child is immune. FACT: Family and acquaintance child sexual abuse perpetrators have reported that they look for specific characteristics in the children they choose to abuse.
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WHO ABUSES CHILDREN?
FACT: Those that molest children look and act just like everyone else. There are people who have or will sexually abuse children in your church, school and youth sports leagues. Abusers can be neighbors, friends and family members. Most significantly, abusers are often children themselves.
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WHEN, WHERE AND HOW DOES ABUSE OCCUR?
FACT: Many perpetrators "groom" victims and their families.
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WHAT ABOUT SEXUAL ABUSE ASSOCIATED WITH THE INTERNET?
FACT: All avenues that lead to child sexual abuse should be addressed, but internet sex crimes against children are a very small part of the entire problem.
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Treatment for Abused and Neglected Children: Infancy to Age 18 (age fucking 18 in case you missed it)


This manual, produced by NCCAN as part of the User Manual Series, provides an overview of the treatment of sexually abused, physically abused, and neglected children. Child development is briefly reviewed and the study of developmental psychopathology is described. All aspects of child development are considered, including intrapersonal development, interpersonal development, physical development, sexual development, and behavioral conduct development. Consequences of abuse and neglect, assessment of maltreatment, the therapeutic process and the role of the therapist, treatment issues and specialized interventions, and case management are addressed. The manual provides a glossary of terms and list of resources for more detailed ...
https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/usermanuals/treatmen/

The events of the last few days have not painted a very welcoming picture for women in tech. At Techcrunch’s Disrupt conference over the weekend, two giggling idiots demoed an app called Titstare. An embarrassing slab of searing dumbness, what was most troubling about the app was the audience’s approving reaction to it, and the fact that the name “Titstare” sent up no red flags for the organizers at Techcrunch. Then on Monday, it became apparent that the (now ex-) CTO of Business Insider, Pax Dickinson, was a racist, misogynist prick, after tweets like this came to light. Pax is hardly the first racist, misogynist prick on Twitter but one does wonder how such a cesspool of human atoms lasted as the CTO of a large venture funded media company for so long.

It doesn’t take a genius to know there’s sexism in the tech world. You can measure it by listening to the many stories told by women at technology companies or conferences, or you can measure it more empirically: Only 13 percent of venture-backed companies last year were founded by women.

The symbol of this misogynistic movement is the “tech bro.” With hair gelled as firm and unmovable as his concept of gender roles, the tech bro doesn’t mind working alongside women, as long as they don’t mind if he makes sexist jokes, ogles at their bodies, and erupts in hysterics if anyone dares to suggest this behavior might be even a little misogynistic.

But like all symbols, the tech bro is an imperfect explanation for gender politics in the tech world. Not all tech misogynists are bros, not all tech bros are misogynists, and not all bro misogynists are in tech. To simplify things, we used the greatest explanatory tool on Earth, the Venn Diagram:

The Veterans Home in Chula Vista, San Diego, saw a historic moment on Thursday with its first gay wedding.

WWII veteran John Banvard, 95, and Vietnam veteran Gerard Nadeau, 68, have been together for 20 years. They told Fox5 that they'd been waiting on the Supreme Court decision to allow same-sex unions in California before tying the knot.

"It was something we wanted to do for a long time," Banvard told ABC10.

The couple wanted to have the ceremony amongst friends, so on Thursday they were married outside the V.A. Home, where they've lived together for the last three and a half years.

According to an ABC10 report, some of the residents who objected to a gay wedding notified Westboro Baptist Church who called in to protest to the V.A. Home.

"They used language I don't want to repeat," staff member Jim Karellas told ABC10.

Jarune at Everyday Feminism offers some important thoughts on "How the Black Community Can be More Supportive of Black Queer Women."


Allies Don’t:
Police queer woman’s gender expression. Saying things like, “If lesbians are attracted to women, why do they date studs? Why not date a dude?” is erasing to women who date or prefer masculine-presenting women. Studs, butch women, AG’s, and so on, are not “trying” to be men—they’re being themselves. Instead, be aware that there are as many gender presentations as there are people. Even if a woman stands out as different because of her gender presentation, she is probably doing what’s normal for her. Be respectful of every woman’s choices about her body and level of comfort.
Expect lesbians to conform to heterosexual relationship dynamics. Asking a lesbian couple a question like, “So which of you is the man in the relationship?” makes the assumption that there is always a man and a woman in every relationship. On that note, assuming that a woman is dominant or submissive based on her gender presentation, or that all studs like femmes and vice versa, is heterosexism rearing its ugly head. Instead, remember that “normal” is relative. There is no one gold standard for how a relationship should work. So let go of the “boy-girl” dynamic if you support women who don’t conform to these roles in their relationships, same-sex or otherwise.

Treat lesbianism or bisexuality as exotic or kinky. This particularly applies to men who, through cultural conditioning or pornography, have only seen lesbians as objects of male fantasy. Black women have to deal with the objectification and othering of their bodies enough as it is. Allies don’t add to the problem by asking intrusive questions about lesbian women’s sex lives or questioning transgender women about their genitalia. Instead of eroticizing lesbianism, understand that most queer black women just want to live their lives as part of their communities. They have valid, loving relationships that are every bit as private and meaningful as the relationships between straight couples.

The cut and dried numbers behind this crisis mask the tragedy taking place every day: two million Syrians have already crossed over into Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey. (So many refugees have fled to tiny Lebanon that the population has effectively increased by 25 percent.) In addition, there are four million people displaced within Syria. At this rate, the aid organization CARE predicts that half of Syria's 22 million citizens will be displaced or in need of assistance by the end of the year.

Three-quarters of the displaced people in and around Syria are women and children, many of whom will be sexually assaulted during the conflict. While there are no firm figures from Syria yet, human rights organizations and refugee agencies have been documenting cases of sexual assault for months. Cases like that of one family, now in Amman, in which three women -- two sisters and their brother's wife -- were raped in front of their brother and father. A psychologist who has been treating the family for post-traumatic stress disorder believes that the brother's wife became pregnant as a result, but because of the shame surrounding rape, neither she nor her husband will acknowledge it.

Women who become pregnant as a result of rape have few options in this part of the world. International human rights agreements have called on nations to decriminalize abortion, but abortion laws in the countries receiving Syrian refugees are very strict, allowing abortion only to save a woman's life (except Turkey, which has much broader exceptions). Strict laws don't mean that abortions don't occur, however. Data from the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute show that hundreds of thousands of women from the region undergo unsafe abortions every year, putting women's life and health at risk.

Dismissing these restrictive laws as a product of these countries' supposedly conservative Muslim cultures would be simplistic. U.S. law restricts the use of our humanitarian assistance from providing abortion care, even if women have been raped. Under the 1973 Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, U.S. funds may not be used to provide abortion as a method of family planning. For women and girls who have been raped in war, is abortion really a means of family planning?

You might not think that student orientation events would be an appropriate venue for chants celebrating the rape of underage girls. But such chants have apparently been something of a tradition at not one but two Canadian schools — and possibly more? Last week, a scandal erupted at the University of British Columbia after word got out that an orientation event at its Saunder School of Business had included a chant on this particular theme, led by orientation leaders from the Commerce Undergraduate Society.

According to one woman who disgustedly live-tweeted the event, it went something like this:

Y-O-U-N-G at UBC, we like ‘em young, Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for go to jail.

Meanwhile, in Halifax, someone made a video — and posted it to YouTube — of student orientation leaders at Saint Mary’s University chanting a nearly identical chant.

Naturally, noted, er, human rights activist Paul Elam of A Voice for Men felt compelled to weigh in on the issue. He started off by expressing his deep disgust … with having to hear anything about the issue at all:

I swear if I read one more outraged “report” — aka feverish, paranoid rant — that twists something stupid into “evidence” of a “rape culture,” I am going to just lose it.

Yes, how outrageous that a chant joking about raping underage girls at an official school orientation event could possibly be construed as contributing in any way to rape culture! So sorry that your delicate sensitivities were offended, Paul.

After some more predictable histrionics on this “hyper-hipster-hysteria” from Mr. Elam, he got to his main point: blaming feminists for the rape chants.

No, really.

Big news, everyone! According to Slate's Hanna Rosin, the patriarchy is dead. Like really dead. Super deceased. She has no idea why feminists won't stop banging on about inequality and stuff, because she's just not seeing it. Ladies in Congress exist, y'all! Feminist pundits sometimes get airtime! White ladies with books to sell, like Rosin herself, feel totally equal! So in honor of patriarchy's cool new dirt nap, let's read a roundup of all the news that's on our radar that we might call "feminist" but that Rosin would probably just label "victimy whining."

• We'll miss you, patriarchy! Kinda odd that many of your fruits (vajazzling! rape culture! no mandatory maternity leave!) seem to be sticking around, though. [The Cut]

• A group of more than 100 Latina activists who traveled to Washington to advocate for an immigration-reform bill that recognizes the need for family support and reproductive justice were arrested after a peaceful protest on Capitol Hill. [National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health]

• What do the tech-bro events of this past week have in common with Riptide, the new history of how the rise of new media disrupted the old status quo of journalism? Both almost completely ignore women's participation in shaping the culture of digital technology and information. [LinkedIn Today]

• Remembering Chien-Shiung Wu, the female physicist who along with two male coworkers disproved The Parity Law in the 1950s. Her male coauthors—but not Wu—were awarded the Nobel Prize. [American Association of University Women]

Yesterday, the California Senate passed a bill that would guarantee domestic workers basic labor protections such as overtime pay and meal breaks. This could be a huge step for California domestic workers, allowing them to join the ranks of Hawaii and New York, where domestic workers bills are already in place. According to the National Domestic Workers Alliance:

If signed by the Governor, AB 241 would provide all domestic workers who care for California’s homes and families with some of the basic labor protections they have been denied for decades.

This move is particularly important in a state like California, which has the largest population in the country comprised largely of Latinos, many of whom are undocumented. This weighs heavily on domestic workers for whom undocumented status puts them at risk for exploitation in the workplace. As it stands, undocumented domestic workers are paid on average $2 less per hour than their documented counterparts, and are much more likely to be injured on the job or work while sick.

Unfortunately, the legislation may not become law. The last time the bill was passed by the Senate in 2012, Governor Brown vetoed it, arguing that it was too difficult to enforce. He felt that by implementing these regulations, domestic workers might see their hours cut or decreased. In other words, by asking people to treat domestic workers fairly, they might stop hiring them.