Michigan's Abu Ghraib?

June 1-3, 2012 counterpunch.org by BRIAN McKENNA

Teaching Anthropology in a Women's Prison, On the Edge of a $100 Million Sex Abuse Scandal

Every prison has a story. At the Robert Scott Correctional Facility,
in Michigan, the women were not allowed to touch one another or risk
a "major misconduct." Sharing, even a small piece of candy, was
against prison policy and women were written up for lending a smoke.

Surveillance was 24/7 and when you got the snow detail, you could
expect to be awakened at 2:30 AM for a three hour stretch out in the
freezing cold picking ice with a plastic shovel. The work, when they
could get it, was virtual slave labor with full day shifts making
dental materials.

The Governor, Jennifer Granholm, ordered the Christmas lights off the
year I taught there to save money. Christmas exploded when one prison
guard brutally murdered another guard at the gas station across the
street. Many prisoners heard the fatal bullets. It turns out the
shooter had been bullied severely by the victim and took out his
recourse in this violent way. Later he shot himself in the chest but
recovered. Needless to say the women were highly distressed by all
this. Not only did they know the guards (and sympathies went
different ways), but the killing brought back tough memories of other
shootings, often of abusive husbands. There was no counseling for the women.

Lie Upon Lie

I learned the above as a teacher of anthropology there in 2007-2008.
Formally my job was to teach Introduction to Anthropology. I covered
the usual: culture, linguistics, archeology and evolution (Ember and
Ember 2007). But that was not my chief focus. As always, following
Paulo Freire, I seek to empower my students by interrogating, through
critical dialogue, the lived experiences of everyone in the class. I
unraveled the "cultural capital" of students and codify "dangerous
words" for critical discussion. It's part of a Pedagogy of the
Oppressed (Freire 1970). You never know where things will go.

In discussing the War in Iraq, for example, I discovered that some
women were military veterans. When asked about her military
experiences one said, "It was lie upon lie upon lie. I was promised
I'd have a safe job but the next thing you know I was ordered into a
combat zone." She feared for her life. And yet, felons, like these
women, are now eligible to enlist. Even though she was against the
war, one inmate was thinking about it, since it's so hard for a
convicted felon to get a decent job.

A key message is that "To exist you must resist." And they did. The
blue-suited women (with an orange stripe rolling down the side)
resisted the formal prison pedagogy of discipline and punish (with my
encouragement) and talked about "How People die in here from lack of
health care," "How we are political prisoners," and "How people don't
know what goes on in here," and "how we need a revolution in this country."

It was the women who taught me more anthropology than I taught them.
I learned about the culture of the prison, the language of
oppression, the archaeology of knowledge and the evolution of their
fates. But I never learned the horrific depth of suffering that went
on there until I left.

Michigan's Abu Ghraib?

Two Decades of Rape, Tyranny & Retaliation against 500+ Women
Prisoners in Michigan

I was recruited to teach at Scott Prison in 2007 by sociologist Lora
Lempert, a colleague at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Lora
began organizing and teaching volunteer courses there in 2004. She's
been working as a prison advocate since 1997 through the American
Friends Service Committee. Her intent was to give a voice to women
who were invisible and silenced. She faced enormous obstacles. But
she is an indefatigable fighter for social justice who has succeeded
in establishing an effective prison education program in Michigan
(which I'll discuss below). Her favorite motto is, "Forgiveness is
not for sissies."

It is hard to forgive what I am about to relay.

On July 15, 2009, the state of Michigan agreed to pay $100 million to
over 500 plaintiffs in a settlement stemming from ongoing rape,
sexual abuse, harassment and retaliation from male prison guards
(Anderson 2009, Levy 2009, Neal 2009). Importantly, I knew nothing
about this until it was revealed in the media. The agreement ended 13
years of stays, appeals and delays. The lead litigator on the suit
was Deborah LaBelle. One of the team's lawyers, Michael Pitt, said
that the plaintiffs first reported abuses back in 1991. He also said
that one reason the state settled was because ongoing trials from
other victims could have cost Michigan in excess of one billion
dollars. Most of the victims were from the Robert Scott Prison.

It took enormous courage for women to speak out because when they did
there was retaliation from the guards. As Pitt told Douglas Levy,
"You have to imagine what it would be like to make a claim against
the guards when they control every aspect of your life" (Levy 2009).

That is probably the key reason why my own Scott students did not
venture into these issues in my class. According to Pitt, most women
said nothing until they were released. That put them is a double bind
because the State of Michigan claimed that they could do nothing
legally until a women spoke up, but if a woman spoke up she suffered
badly, unprotected by the state.

The world's eyes had long been on Scott prison with reports filed by
Human Rights Watch (1998), the ACLU and Amnesty International who
called Scott one of the worst prisons in the U.S. (Amnesty International 1999).

Dr. Lempert put me in touch with Carol Jacobsen who directs Michigan
Women's Justice and Clemency Project. Jacobsen is a tenured professor
in the School of Arts and Design at the University of Michigan. She
has made several films about Michigan prisons, including Scott. One
film Segregation Unit (2000) depicts a woman being tortured by the
guards, repeatedly chained, screaming and pepper sprayed. The footage
was shot by the guards and released under the Freedom of Information
Act. The woman sued the State of Michigan and won a $92,000 verdict
for torture.

Jacobsen was at the forefront of appealing to Governor Granholm to
grant clemency to scores of women who had served long sentences
unjustly. Many were there for defending themselves against an abusive
husband and/or trying to protect their children. It's a fair
observation to note that many would be free had they had been able to
afford a good lawyer. Still, the weight of gender discrimination and
ignorance about domestic violence and women's strategies for survival
heavily biases prosecutors, judges and juries who continue to blame
women for their own abuse, according to Jacobsen. One clemency
petition was for Delores Kapuscinski who has been in prison since
1987. She was one of my brightest students. According to the petition
(Kapuscinski Petition 2011), Delores "was convicted of first degree
murder and sentenced to life in prison for killing her abusive
husband. Delores had suffered years of emotional and sexual abuse at
the hands of her husband and [feared] that her husband was also
sexually abusing their two children. She planned to take her own
life, but in fear for her children, turned the gun on her abuser. Her
record is exemplary. She has earned a college degree while
incarcerated and serves as a paralegal, assisting other inmates with
their appeals."

Granholm denied Kapuscinski's petition upon leaving office. Few
deserving women get clemency.

Scott was closed in 2009 and all of the women prisoners were moved to
Huron Valley Prison. Jacobsen regularly visits local prisons as part
of her job as a legal assistant and in her role as Director of the
Clemency Project. She reported that when the women arrived there one
of their first jobs was to clean feces off the walls of cells from
the male prisoners who had slept their previously.

"Huron Valley is even worse there than Scott," said Jacobsen. She
reported four suicides over the past 2 years (three by hanging and
one suffocation with a plastic bag) and said that there are at least
three prisoners who appear to have died from medical neglect. Just
last month Huron Valley was ordered to stop routine strip searches on
the women which were described as "sexually humiliating" (Anders
2012). According to Jacobsen, "they still have strip searches of the
women at Huron Valley. They were ordered to stop only the vaginal
cavity searches."

In comparing Michigan's prisons to the rest of the world, Jacobsen is frank.

"Abu Ghraib has nothing on Huron Valley or Michigan prisons. Our
prisons in Michigan have torture going on every day." She pointed
out that "and a number of those soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib were
former prison guards." Jacobsen wants the prisons abolished.

The Inside-Out Prison Exchange: a Resource of Hope

The national security state has stripped college from the prison. The
collapse started in 1994 when the Clinton Administration denied
prisoners access to federal Pell Grants. Most states eliminated state
tuition grants for prisoners as well. The number of college programs
in prisons went from around 350 in the early 1980s to just a handful
by 2001 (Fine 2001). And then funding for higher education
plummeted. Consider this. Today Michigan (with 44,000 inmates) spends
over $2 billion a year on corrections (up from $1.7B in 2005), and
only $1.4 billion on colleges and universities (down from $1.7B in
2005), making it one of only four states that spend more on prisons
than it does on higher education (Snyder 2012).

But there is hope: The Inside-Outside Prison Exchange initiative.
Begun by Temple University's Lori Pompa in 1997 the program has 15
Inside (incarcerated) prisoners take classes with 15 Outside college
students. The program stresses face to face collaborative projects.
The college students also get credit. Different state have different
policies on whether the Inside students also get credit. The I-O
Exchange now has over 400 teachers in 37 states.

As with my approach, the Inside Out experience is influenced by Paulo
Freire. Pompa explains the effort this way: "What makes the
Inside-Out program transformative is the emphasis on learning within
a collaborative environment where the subject matter is not only
present in books, but in peoples' lives as well. That is half the
students in any class are living the daily realities of the
contemporary U.S. criminal justice system and the other half arrive
with any number of assumptions about this system and the individuals
involved in it. As outside and inside students begin to share their
perspectives and knowledge with one another, the abstract becomes
concrete, the concrete is understood within a larger framework, and
strangers begin to perceive each other as neighbors caught within the
same interlocking systems of power, prejudice and privilege" (Pompa 2011:262).

In 2007 Lora Lempert took her prison pedagogy to a whole new level
when she began implementing Pompa's Inside-Out Prison Exchange work
at Ryan Prison in Michigan. Lempert is working hard to spread the
program throughout the state. For her work Lempert won the
Distinguished Service Award from the University of Michigan-Dearborn
in March 2012. In an interview with UMD's Reporter, Patricia Caruso,
former director of Michigan Department of Corrections said of
Lempert, "It would be impossible to detail for you the obstacles she
faced in getting this off the ground," said. "From an absolute
prohibition on any MDOC dollars being involved, to complicated
schedule and security adjustments, to staff distrust, this became a
huge undertaking."

Anthropologist Susan Hyatt is doing the same for Indiana (IU News
2009). Hyatt and her colleague from Criminal Justice, Roger Jarjoura,
took the Inside-Out week long preparatory seminar in 2006 in
Philadelphia and then together established the first I-O course at a
men's reentry facility in the Summer of 2007. In Summer 2008, they
brought the program to the Indian Women's Prison and taught a course
on the topic "Women and Social Action." Students do observations,
reflection papers and group assignments. It was a huge success. Hyatt
and Jarjoura are currently recruiting new faculty from around the
state even as they extend the programs into other domains. This past
Spring 2012 she co-taught an Inside/Out class titled, "Ain't No Power
Like the Power of the Youth! Young people, Crime and Activism" at the
Indianapolis Men's Reentry Facility. They are also using the I-O
model in housing for women overcoming addiction settings and at a
work release facility. In May Hyatt was the recipient of Indiana
University-Purdue University Indianapolis's (IUPUI) prestigious
Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Civic Engagement for Faculty.

Liberating the Dungeons

"The premier demand of all education is that Auschwitz not happen again."

Theodor Adorno, Education After Auschwitz

We live in dangerous times. Education is on the run and fear is on
the rise (Giroux 2012). We have become a race of debtors living on
borrowed time (Bauman 2010). The harsh pedagogy of neoliberalism
resounds in our souls: we are disposable. There are 2.3 million
citizens housed in prisons (the highest rate in the world), 8.1%
unemployed and the rest of us are subject to massive surveillance and
invasions of privacy, all in the name of security.

Yet it is the corporate state which creates the conditions of
insecurity even as it profits from the chaos. In an inverted
totalitarian age (Wolin 2008), the government has merged with
corporations in an almost seamless fashion, displacing education and
the "social state" for the prerogatives of capital. Prison labor now
employs more workers than any corporation in the Fortune 500 (except
GM). Wages average from $0.23 to $1.25 an hour in federal prisons.
Inmates are employed by "IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T,
Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard,
Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA,
Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores" (Khalek 2011).

Colleges should adopt their local prison. Professors and students
should work with inmates to write critical histories of their
punishing institutions. What kinds of work on the prisoners
doing? How do they feel about it? What local corporations benefit?
Would they like college courses? How is the medical care? Is there
torture going on? Have suicides spiked? Why? Civic Engagement is a
name for this. We can work on interdisciplinary teams to draw the
links between capital, repression and education. This is a form of
critical pedagogy.

"The Other" is right in here in our backyards. And yet, "It's been
hard recruiting liberal arts students and anthropology students for
this venture," says Hyatt.

Prisoner solidarity work requires more applied anthropology. We need
teachers, critical pedagogues, investigative journalists,
ethnographers and participatory action researchers (PAR). PAR must be
especially attuned to the ethics required of this intervention (see
Fine 2006 for a critical discussion of her work).

Many prison educators are influenced by Freire, but there is no
cookie-cutter formula for critical pedagogy. As Freire said, one must
situate transformative education within its own historical contexts.
All educators struggle with the "line of un-freedom (McKenna 2011) in
their pedagogy. This issue addressed by James Kilgore, a Freirian
math teacher who notes, "I could have embarked on a more radical
course from the outset, abandoning the syllabus and linking
mathematical understanding to a range of issues such as distribution
of wealth, surplus value, and comparative wage rates for different
races and countries. With such an approach I would not have survived
for long. One of the learners would have either complained to the
authorities, or a full-time staff member would have found out through
the grapevine. The Federal System had long since figured out how to
handle such subversion and make sure it does not spread among the
population. In the absence of a significant political movement
pressing for not only transformation of the prison system but also
greater social justice in the country as a whole, there was little
chance of swimming against the tide of prison authority" (Kilgore
2011). But there is much more space for transgressive pedagogy than
might be expected. I myself taught the labor theory of value and
class analysis to my students at Scott Prison. The strategies and
approaches for "transformative pedagogy" are always up for debate.

Every prison has a story. We need prison stories (investigative
journalism) for every town in America. And we need more prison
teachers. The Inside/Out Initiative is a vital step in this direction.

Brian McKenna lives in Michigan. He can be reached
at:mckenna193@aol.com

For More Information:

Dr. Susan Hyatt: suhyatt@iupui.edu

Dr. Lora Lempert: llempert@umd.umich.edu

Dr. Lori Pompa: inout@temple.edu

Professor Carol Jacobsen: jacobsen@umich.edu

A version of this article was originally published in the Society for
Applied Anthropology Newsletter, Vol. 23:2, May 2012. Tim Wallace,
editor. http://www.sfaa.net/newsletter/may12nl.pdf



References

Adorno, Theodor (1950) Education After Auschwitz.

http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/frankfurt/auschwitz/AdornoEducation.pdf

Amnesty International (1999) Not Part of My Sentence: Violation of
the Rights of Women in Custody. Washington, DC:Amnesty International.
See: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/019/1999

Anders, Melissa (2012) "Huron Valley prison for women stops routine
strip search described as "sexually humiliating" Michigan Live. April 16.

Anderson, Nicole, et al, v Michigan Department of Corrections, Court
of Claims No. 03-162-MZ. (2009) See: http://www.nealclassaction.com/

Bauman, Zygmunt (2010) Living on Borrowed Time. Polity:Cambridge.

Eggert, David. (2008) "10 get $15.5M for Mich. Prison sex abuse." USA
Today. Feb. 1.

Ember, Carol, Ember, Melvin & Peregrine, P. (2006) Anthropology.
Prentice Hall, Pearson:NJ.

Fine, Michelle and Maria Elena Torre (2006) "Intimate Details:
Participatory Action Research in Prison." Action Research. 4(3) 253-269.

Fine, Michelle et al (2001) Changing Minds: The Impact of College in
a Maximum Security Prison. http://web.gc.cuny.edu/che/changingminds.html

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press.

Giroux, Henry (2012) April 11, speech delivered at the University of
Calgary http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxJgr40bBHk

Human Rights Watch, Nowhere to Hide: Retaliation Against Women in
Michigan State

Prisons, Human Rights Watch, New York, 1998.

Hyatt, Susan (2012) Personal Interview. May 9.

Inside/Out Center, Intl. Headquarters of the Inside/Out Prisoner
Exchange Program. See:

http://www.insideoutcenter.org/

IU News Release (2009) "IUPUI Students, Inmates to Celebrate
Completion of Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program Course."

Jacobsen, Carol (2012) Personal Interview. May 13.

Jacobsen, Carol (2008) "Comparative Perspectives Symposium: Feminist
Art and Social Change. Creative Politics and Women's Criminalization
in the United States." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
33(1) Winter.

Jacobsen, Carol (2006) (Co-sponsored by Amnesty International)
"Sentenced" A Video of Robert Scott Correctional Prisoner who later
committed suicide in her cell. See: http://playgallery.org/video/sentenced/

Kapuscinski, Delores Petition. (2011) See:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/free-delores-kapuscinski/

Khalek, Rania (2011) "21st-Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit
Prison Labor." AlterNet. July 21.

Kilgore, James (2011) "Bringing Freire Behind the Walls: The Perils
and Pluses of Critical Pedagogy in Prison Education" Radical Teacher
(90) Spring. Pp. 57-66, 79.

Law, Victoria (2012) "Occupy Prisons, Injustices Behind Bars."
CounterPunch. February 12.

Law, Victoria (2009) Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of
Incarcerated Women. Oakland,CA:PM Press.

Lempert, Lora (2012) Personal Interview. May 9.

Levy, Douglas J. (2009) "Michigan to pay $100M for inmate abuse."
CorrectionsOne. July 27.

http://www.correctionsone.com/jail-management/articles/1859953-Mich-to-pay-100M-for-inmate-abuse/

Michigan Women's Justice and Clemency Project.
http://www.umich.edu/~clemency/index.html

Neal, Tracey, et al v Michigan Department of Corrections, et al,
Washtenaw County Circuit Court Case No. 96-6986-CZ. (2009) See:
http://www.nealclassaction.com/

Pompa, Lori (2011) "Breaking Down the Walls: Inside Out Learning and
the Pedagogy of Transformation." In Challenging the Prison-Industrial
Complex: Activism, Arts & Educational Alternatives. Stephen John
Hartnett, ed. Pp. 253-273. University of Illinois:Urbana.

Wolin, S. (2008) Democracy Inc., Managed Democracy and the Specter of
Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Seidel, Jeff (2009) "Sexual Assaults on Female Inmates Went
Unheeded." Detroit Free Press. January 4.
http://www.freep.com/article/20090104/NEWS06/901040419/Sexual-assaults-female-inmates-went-unheeded

Snyder, Rick (2012) Michigan's Executive Budget Fiscal Years 2013 and
2014, February 9.

'Frequent and severe' sexual violence alleged at women's prison in Alabama

Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama is facing complaints of sexual
misconduct by guards.

May 23, 2012 By Elizabeth Chuck, msnbc.com

Sexual misconduct by male correctional staff toward inmates at Alabama's
Tutwiler Prison for Women is "commonplace" and has resulted in numerous
women becoming pregnant while incarcerated, a complaint filed with the
U.S. Department of Justice alleges.

Equal Justice Initiative, a private nonprofit organization, filed the
complaint about the all-female prison in Wetumpka, Ala., Tuesday after
receiving dozens of claims of sexual misconduct involving male staff
between 2004 and 2011.

In interviews with more than 50 women incarcerated at the prison, EJI said
it discovered "frequent and severe officer-on-inmate sexual violence,"
ranging from women being coerced into performing sexual favors in exchange
for contraband goods to rape by a male correctional staff member while
another male officer served as a lookout.
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Even in instances in which abuse was confirmed, perpetrators received
little more than a slap on the wrist, EJI Executive Director Bryan
Stevenson told msnbc.com.

"In the last two years, the person who received the harshest sentence was
a man who got six months in jail," Stevenson said. "This was for a woman
who was raped and became pregnant. The baby was born, and DNA confirmed it
was his."

Had the rape occurred outside prison confines, the sentence could have
been 50 years to life in prison, he said.

"It actually makes you think you can do this with impunity," he said.

Instead of punishing the staff committing the offenses, Tutwiler punished
the women when they tried to report the incidents, Stevenson said. Anyone
who reported sexual abuse at Tutwiler was called a liar by the warden and
routinely placed in segregated cells with privileges revoked.

Tutwiler Prison Warden Frank Albright did not return a phone call from
msnbc.com on Wednesday, but the Alabama Department of Corrections said it
has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual offenses.

“This is a matter of grave concern to me,” Alabama Corrections
Commissioner Kim Thomas said in a press release. “From the beginning of my
watch, I have made it very clear to my staff that custodial sexual
misconduct will not be tolerated and is an especially egregious offense to
me. We take every action possible to prevent it from happening and if it
does, we undertake prompt corrective employee discipline and pursue
criminal prosecution where applicable.”

But according to EJI's investigation, the Alabama Department of
Corrections has been under-reporting data on sexual misconduct. None has
been provided since September 2010, despite at least four Tutwiler
employees being indicted on charges of abuse during 2011, according to
court records.

Report: Nearly 10 percent of inmates suffer sexual abuse

The Department of Justice did not respond to msnbc.com's questions about
how they are handling the complaint.

It's not clear from the EJI's investigation how many claims of sexual
harrassment the group has received from the prison, which has a capacity
of 956 inmates.

Just last week, the Justice Department published a report on sexual abuse
in state prisons, local jails, and post-release treatment facilities
across the country. Nearly one in 10 prisoners suffers sexual abuse while
incarcerated, the report said.

In 2007, a Justice Department report ranked Tutwiler as the women's prison
with the most sexual assaults, and 11th among all the prisons studied.

Even after the 2007 federal report, Tutwiler policies on sexual
miscconduct continued to be lax, Stevenson alleged.

"Male guards shouldn't be going into the showers and exploiting the
vulnerability of women when they're naked and exposed," Stevenson said.
"Many states have regulations that restrict these kind of breaches. They
haven't done that at Tutwiler."

In fact, Stephenson thinks sexual assault is even more widespread at the
prison than his group has found.

"We think there are a lot more people who have information that they want
to share that didn't feel comfortable doing that," he said. "I'm hoping
the public exposure and scrutiny will make people feel comfortable to step
forward."

Since filing the complaint, EJI has heard from many women who alleged abuse.

"We've gotten some calls this morning from women who seemed so grateful
and relieved that finally, some light has been shed on this."

Abu Ghraib on the Allegheny: Sexual and Physical Abuse at Pennsylvania Prison

September 28, 2011 Solitary Watch

by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

A story out of Pennsylvania reveals the extreme abuse to which some U.S. prisoners are subjected. Yesterday, a suspended prison guard from the State Correctional Institution (SCI)-Pittsburgh was arrested on charges that he sexually or physically assaulted more than 20 inmates–and the district attorney has signalled that there are more arrests to come. As the AP reports:

The 92 criminal charges filed Tuesday include several counts each of institutional sexual assault, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, and official oppression — which amounts to covering up the crimes or allegedly threatening others to do so. The criminal charges mirror allegations contained against [corrections officer Harry] Nicoletti and officials at the state prison in Pittsburgh in two civil rights lawsuits filed by inmates in recent months…

The lawsuits, one filed in 2010 and another on behalf of an anonymous inmate last week, allege the systematic abuse of inmates — especially those convicted of child sex-crimes, or believed to be homosexual —by Nicoletti and other inmates at his direction. The lawsuits say the abuse occurred over the past two years in the prison’s F Block, a reception area where new prisoners are housed for a few days for medical testing and to receive other supplies before they’re moved to permanent cells.

Among other things, Nicoletti is charged with raping inmates, threatening them with other sexual acts, and with having inmates contaminate the food and bedding of his alleged targets with urine and other bodily fluids.

According to the criminal complaint, one of Nicoletti’s victims was a transsexual male who developed female breasts due to hormone treatments. Nicoletti fondled that inmate before raping him, while shouting racial and sexual epithets, including calling him a “weird freaky monkey,” the complaint said.

In another instance, Nicoletti singled out an inmate for abuse by announcing the man’s conviction for a child-sex offense and saying “Make way for the mole,” according to the complaint…

The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections professes to be shocked and appalled. But while Nicoletti’s conduct may represent the extreme, this is clearly not a case of a single rogue prison guard. The AP notes: “In April, corrections officials suspended eight guards at the prison, including Nicoletti, and four top prison officials were removed and have since left the department, although officials have declined to say whether they were fired or resigned.” Today, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports that “Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. said this morning that at least 11 other Department of Corrections employees will be charged after a wide-ranging investigation into sexual and physical abuse at SCI Pittsburgh.”

As Matt Stround reported last week in the Pittsburgh City Paper, one of the inmate lawsuits, filed in July by transgender prisoner Rodger Williams, contains “the assertion that [Nicoletti's] abuse ‘occurred with the full knowledge of the superintendent and other high ranking staff at … SCI-Pittsburgh.’ Williams’ lawsuit names as defendant former SCI-Pittsburgh superintendent Melvin Lockett and other prison administrators…In May, the DOC replaced Lockett and three other high-ranking officials at the prison. All three were named in Williams’ lawsuit; none are currently employed by the DOC. At the time, DOC press secretary Susan McNaughton would neither confirm nor deny to CP that the staffing changes had anything to do with the suspensions or grand-jury investigation.”

According to the Pittsburgh-based Human Rights Coalition, which tracks abuse in Pennsylvania’s prisons, the second inmate lawsuit, just filed on behalf an anonymous prisoner at SCI Pittsburgh, “depicts a situation of intimidation, coercion, and physical assault wielded against inmates who tried to refuse the guards or to expose the abuse. Beatings, filing of false charges against inmates, and retaliatory time in solitary confinement were common…All of this transpired with the full knowledge and inaction of the prison management, including Superintendent Lockett. John Doe’s parents made repeated calls to the DOC and the Commonwealth while their son was incarcerated at SCI Pittsburgh, to no avail.”

Prisoner abuse is not limited to SCI-Pittsburgh. Earlier reports by the Human Rights Coalition, based on extensive inmate testimony as well as prison records, show a pattern of what the group calls “institutionalized cruelty” in the solitary confinement “Restricted Housing Units” at SCI-Dallas, SCI-Huntingdon, and throughout the Pennsylvania prison system.

New York: Action Against the Rapist Pigs of the NYPD

May 29, 2011 Anarchist News

Justice is Revenge...

On May 26th, NYPD officers Moreno and Mata were acquitted of raping a
woman in her East Village apartment. The cops in this city have a long
history of acting with total impunity while unleashing their brutality:
rape, torture, and murder on the city all without any serious response
from the rest of us. We are not naive enough to believe in the "justice"
system that the police are a part of, and furthermore, we were not
surprised that Moreno and Mata were acquitted despite overwhelming
evidence of their guilt. We, however, were and still are filled with rage.

Inspired by both the rowdy end to Friday's protest of the acquittals,
which saw hundreds facing off against the police, briefly blocking the
entrance to the Brooklyn bridge, and repeatedly pushing back police
attempts to corral protesters onto the sidewalk; we are also extremely
encouraged by anti-police actions in Seattle, Oakland, and Denver, and we
decided it was time to push back.

Saturday night we converged on the intersection of Bowery and Houston
street in Manhattan. The intersection was blocked and held for 15 minutes,
fireworks were set off, and hundreds of fliers were thrown into the air
while anti-police chants were screamed into the night and dozens more
leaflets were distributed to motorists and passersby. Traffic came to a
stop as Saturday night revelers gathered to observe the sight of masked
people holding a major intersection. Posters bearing photos of Moreno and
Mata with "NYPD Rapists" emblazoned on them were simultaneously
wheat-pasted on walls throughout the area. Eventually, feeling that our
point was made clear, we headed north up Bowery taking the entire street.
At this point trash cans and other debris were thrown into the street. A
garbage can was also sent through a plate glass window of a Chase Bank
before the crowd quickly dispersed into the night. We encountered no
police response to our actions and suffered no arrests.

This small, yet successful, action was only a beginning. We have had
enough of police terror in this city, the tide is turning.

This action is dedicated, in total solidarity, to Amelia Nicol, currently
in jail in Denver, Colorado facing trumped up charges for taking a stand
against police terror.

Below is the full text of the flier distributed last night:

Moreno and Mata: Pigs Let Out of Their Sties

We hate to say, that unfortunately, we're not surprised...

After the rape and torture of Abner Louima; the years Officer Wilfredo
Rosario spent soliciting sexual favors with the threat of arrest; the
sexual attacks made by Officer Frank Wright; the sodomy of Michael Mineo
on a Brooklyn subway platform; the mutilated corpses of young women
appearing on the shores of Long Island being linked to current and former
cops; as well as the countless incidents of police brutality that don't
make it to the front pages; one can easily recognize a long history of
violence, sexual and otherwise, clearly attributed to New York State's
police departments. With this graphic record allowed to speak for itself,
the sexual assault committed by Officers Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata
is nothing less than the pitiful behavior that we have come to expect from
the NYPD.

In societies such as ours, the most striking expression of the forces of
power and domination are the uniformed police on every corner. To uphold
their authority, police are allowed exceptional recourse to violence, and
earning a badge, in many instances, means acquiring an open license to
rape whomever one pleases. The prevalence of sexual violence by police
should not be understood in terms of sex, but is instead, a violent and
coercive act motivated by the urge for power and domination. It is only in
extreme cases, when police violence exceeds the threshold deemed tolerable
by public and legal standards, the Blue Shied is then quickly brandished
to absolve all culpability. The swift hand of “justice” at best, confines
the police to a sentence of cushy deskwork or a paid exile in their
suburban homes. More often, they are simply let out of their sties and
back into the streets to reconvene their terror. It need be said: that
these observations are not appeals for a fair trial by judge and jury, but
rather to implicate the judicial system’s role in this broader cycle of
State-institutionalized repression, which was constituted by violence, and
can only function by perpetuating it. And while the acquittal of Moreno
and Mata left many of us with a stinging sensation from a public slap in
the face, an adequate condemnation of their actions must also extend to
the entire police, judicial and prison system.

It is true that the State and its servile police uphold the patriarchy,
which is decisively shaped by other forms of domination. In this
contradictory society, where the property relation unquestionably rules,
women are deemed both public and private property. In relation to their
fathers and husbands, women are still thought of as possessions. Thus the
police, designated solely to guard the rights of property, half-heartedly
defend the well-being of women, not as living human beings, but in the
same way they would protect a proprietor’s car, house, or any other
inanimate and purchasable item. If on the other hand, a woman is thought
to have no discernible "owner," then she is considered to be an unclaimed
object readily available for use or plunder. With this in mind, we point
to the innumerable instances, in which women, most often poor and/or
working-class, report having been raped, and the police sardonically reply
with the question: "What were you doing walking around in a neighborhood
like that, alone?"

The very same State, that condones, justifies, and aptly promotes rape, is
given the chance to secure another reprehensible victory, when its said
critics fall prey to a limited political vision and confront it with a
single issue campaign. We feel the need to reprimand the false opposition,
in their various manifestations, for again proving to be astonishingly
inept in recent days. On the one hand, we are obliged to mention the
noticeable absence of the various anti-police brutality organizations and
consider this a clear indication that they have joined the other side. On
the other hand, we censure many of the feminist groups in New York City,
who talk a big game, always reassuring their comfortable existence within
their tiny and insignificant activist circles, yet seem quite happy to
give their silent consent to the police's activity by doing little to
nothing in response. To reduce the conduct and subsequent acquittals of
Moreno and Mata exclusively to a question of violence against women, or to
a question about police violence, leads us to a dead-end, always missing
our target, which left unscathed, wins again by default.

When more than half the population of living, breathing human beings is
inexorably regarded as things, no amount of legislative reform or
conclusive judicial rulings can cure the symptoms afflicting an ailing
society. In our present situation, we can therefore only rely on popular
justice. A justice, in which, there is no room for judge, jury and trial;
instead, there exist only the masses and their enemies with no mediating
body in between. Furthermore, the masses, when they perceive somebody to
be an enemy, and when they decide to punish this enemy, they do not rely
on an abstract universal idea of justice, the farce passed off in a court
of law, they rely only on their own experience, that of the injuries they
have suffered, that of the way in which they have been wronged, in which
they have been oppressed; and finally, their decision is not an
authoritative one, that is, they are not backed up by a State apparatus
which has the power to enforce their decisions, they purely and simply
carry them out.

We vehemently cite Stonewall in 1969, Los Angeles in 1992, Cincinnati in
2001, and Oakland in 2009. For justice to finally become a substantive it
requires that it take the form of an angry mob; aroused and incensed in
the middle of New York City, carrying with it an unmatched fury as it
stampedes down city blocks, to then finally descend upon One Police Plaza
with a tremendous impact, unleashing a carnage comparable only to the
devastating force of a natural disaster.

Justice is Revenge!

- May 28, 2011

Hundreds of women report rapes by Gadhafi forces

By MICHELLE FAUL, Associated Press May 28, 2011

BENGHAZI, Libya – At first, the responses to the questionnaire about the
trauma of the war in Libya were predictable, if tragic: 10,000 people
suffering post-traumatic stress, 4,000 children with psychological
problems. Then came the unexpected: 259 women said they had been raped by
militiamen loyal to Moammar Gadhafi.

Dr. Seham Sergewa had been working with children traumatized by the
fighting in Libya but soon found herself being approached by troubled
mothers who felt they could trust her with their dark secret.

The first victim came forward two months ago, followed by two more. All
were mothers of children the London-trained child psychologist was
treating, and all described how they were raped by militiamen fighting to
keep Gadhafi in power.

Sergewa decided to add a question about rape to the survey she was
distributing to Libyans living in refugee camps after being driven from
their homes. The main purpose was to try to determine how children were
faring in the war; she suspected many were suffering from PTSD.

To her surprise, 259 women came forward with accounts of rape. They all
said the same thing.

"I was really surprised when I started visiting these areas, first by the
number of people suffering from PTSD, including the large number of
children among them, and then by the number of women who had been raped
from both the east and west of the country," Sergewa said in an interview
with The Associated Press.

Rape has been a common weapon of war throughout the ages, most recently in
conflicts from the Balkans in Europe to Sri Lanka in Asia and in
sub-Saharan Africa, where Congo has been described as the epicenter of
sexual crimes.

Across the world, rape carries a stigma. But it can be a deadly one in
conservative Muslim societies like Libya, where rape is considered a stain
on the honor of the entire family. Victims can be abandoned by their
families and, in some cases, left in the desert to die. Speaking to a
journalist is out of the question.

Sergewa's questionnaire was distributed to 70,000 families and drew 59,000
responses.

"We found 10,000 people with PTSD, 4,000 children suffering psychological
problems and 259 raped women," she said, adding that she believes the
number of rape victims is many times higher but that woman are afraid to
report the attacks.

The women said they had been raped by Gadhafi's militias in numerous
cities and towns: Benghazi, Tobruk, Brega, Bayda and Ajdabiya (where the
initial three mothers hail from) and Saloum in the east; and Misrata in
the west.

Some just said they had been raped. Some did not sign their names; some
just used their initials. But some felt compelled to share the horrific
details of their ordeals on the back of the questionnaire.

Reading from the scribbled Arabic on the back of one survey, Sergewa
described one woman's attack in Misrata in March, while it was still
occupied by Gadhafi's forces.

"First they tied my husband up," the woman wrote. "Then they raped me in
front of my husband and my husband's brother. Then they killed my
husband."

Another woman in Misrata said she was raped in front of her four children
after Gadhafi fighters burned down her home.

"She ran away with her children and tried to escape to the port, but then
they started shelling the port. In the chaos, she was separated from the
children," Sergewa said.

"She was distraught when I interviewed her, not knowing if her children
were dead or alive. I wish I knew the end of her story, but I don't know
what happened to her."

Doctors at hospitals in Benghazi, the rebel bastion, said they had heard
of women being raped but had not treated any. The first international
airstrikes on March 19 saved the city from falling into the hands of
Gadhafi forces who were advancing in columns of tanks.

However, a doctor in Ajdabiya, 100 miles (150 kilometers) south of
Benghazi, said he treated three women who said they were raped by Gadhafi
fighters in March when the town was invaded.

"These women were terrified their families would find out — two were
married, one was single," Dr. Suleiman Refadi said. "They only came to me
because they also were terrified that they may have been infected with the
AIDS virus." He said they had tested negative but doubted they would
return for follow-up tests.

Gadhafi's fighters were forced out of Ajdabiya weeks ago and the town now
is largely deserted but for the rebels.

In a highly publicized case in Libya, Iman al-Obeidi burst into the hotel
housing foreign journalists in Tripoli in March and accused pro-Gadhafi
militiamen of gang-raping her because she is from rebel-held eastern
Libya. Her anguished disclosure was captured by Western cameras and shown
around the world.

Earlier this month, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in
The Hague, Luis Moreno-Campo, said he has "strong evidence" of crimes
against humanity committed by Gadhafi's regime, including serious
allegations of "women arrested and gang raped."

One of Libya's leading psychiatrists, Dr. Ali M. Elroey, told the AP that
he has set up three mobile teams to treat trauma victims of the war in
their homes or in temporary shelters: one for PTSD, one for other
psychological problems and one for rape survivors.

Elroey said they need to reach out to people in their homes because the
stigma associated with psychiatric care is leaving large numbers of
patients untreated.

His outpatient clinic at Benghazi's psychiatric hospital has treated more
than 600 patients in two months, many responding to radio and newspaper
advertisements offering psychiatric help for war trauma. He said most were
women, though none had acknowledged being raped.

Sergewa said she has interviewed 140 of the rape survivors in various
states of mental anguish, and has been unable to persuade a single victim
to prosecute. None would speak to the AP about her ordeal, even with a
promise to hide her identity.

"Some I diagnosed with acute psychosis; they are hallucinating," Sergewa
said. "Some are very depressed; some want to commit suicide. Some want
their parents to kill them because they don't want their families to bear
the shame."

Some already have been abandoned by their husbands and fear seeking
treatment could get them ostracized or cast out of their communities.
Others have kept the rapes a secret for fear of retribution from spouses.
"They fear their husbands will take them out to the desert and leave them
there to die," Sergewa said.

It is likely more rapes could occur as the conflict drags on, Sergewa said.

"They are using rape not just to hurt women but to terrorize entire
families and communities," Sergewa said. "The women I spoke to say they
believed they were raped because their husbands and brothers were fighting
Gadhafi.

"I think it is also to put shame on the tribes or the villages, to scare
people into fleeing, and to say: 'We have raped your women,'" she said.

Sergewa says women will continue to be targets of the militiamen, and this
makes it all the more urgent to finish her study and get it published.

"We must throw light on what is really happening in Libya and fight to
bring justice for these women, to help heal them psychologically," she
said.

___

Associated Press writer Mike Corder contributed to this report from The
Hague.

48 women raped every hour in Congo, study finds

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, Associated Press May 11, 2011

DAKAR, Senegal – The African nation of Congo has been called the worst
place on earth to be a woman. A new study released Wednesday shows that
it's even worse than previously thought: 1,152 women are raped every day,
a rate equal to 48 per hour.

That rate is 26 times more than the previous estimate of 16,000 rapes
reported in one year by the United Nations.

Michelle Hindin, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School
of Public Health who specializes in gender-based violence, said the rate
could be even higher. The source of the data, she noted, is a survey that
was conducted through face-to-face interviews, and people are not always
forthcoming about the violence they have suffered when talking to
strangers.

"The numbers are astounding," she said.

Congo, a nation of 70 million people that is equal in size to Western
Europe, has been plagued by decades of war. Its vast forests are rife with
militias that have systematically used rape to destroy communities.

The analysis, which will be published in the American Journal of Public
Health in June, shows that more than 400,000 women had been raped in Congo
during a 12-month period between 2006 and 2007.

On average 29 Congolese women out of every 1,000 had been raped
nationwide. That means that even in the parts of Congo that are not
affected by the war, a woman is 58 times more likely to be raped than a
woman in the United States, where the annual rate is 0.5 per 1,000 women.

Previous estimates of the number of rapes were derived from police and
health center reports in the nation's troubled east where the conflict is
concentrated. The authors of the study used figures from a government
health survey and pooled data from across the country.

The highest frequency of rape was found in North Kivu, the province most
affected by the conflict, where 67 women per 1,000 had been raped at least
once.

"The message is important and clear: Rape in (Congo) has metastasized amid
a climate of impunity, and has emerged as one of the great human crises of
our time," said Michael VanRooyen, the director of the Harvard
Humanitarian Initiative.

Margot Wallstrom, the U.N. special representative for sexual violence in
conflict, welcomed the study.

"Conflict-related sexual violence is one of the major obstacles to peace
in the DRC," she said in statement, using the initials for Congo.
"Unchecked it could disrupt the entire social fabric of the country."

Wallstrom said the figures in the study are higher than the U.N.'s because
it covers all sexual violence — including domestic and intimate partner
violence — not just from military actors.

U.N. figures tend to be conservative because they must be verified by the
organization itself, she said.

Wallstrom said she consistently stresses that "the number of reported
violations are just the tip of the iceberg of actual incidents."

__

Associated Press Writers Saleh Mwanamilongo in Kinshasa, Congo, Edith
Lederer in New York and Mike Stobbe in Atlanta contributed to this report.

Libyan woman who claimed rape gets death threats

April 4, 2011 Associated Press

NEW YORK – A Libyan woman who says she is the person who burst into a
Tripoli hotel to tell foreign journalists that she had been gang raped by
Moammar Gadhafi's troops told a CNN interviewer Monday that she is out of
custody but is receiving death threats from regime loyalists.

CNN said it was confident that the woman interviewed is in fact Iman
al-Obeidi, who made international headlines on March 26 when she was
dragged away from the Rixos Hotel by government agents as she screamed her
allegations of rape to foreign reporters.

The CNN interviewer, Anderson Cooper, said the network could not be
certain the woman they spoke to by telephone is al-Obeidi, but they were
satisfied it was her after days of research and from the testimony of
several people who had talked with al-Obeidi at the hotel and with the
women interviewed. She spoke in Arabic through a female translator, but
was not shown on camera.

The story she told was also consistent with the account al-Obeidi gave at
the hotel.

She said, "There is no safe place for me in Tripoli. All my phones are
monitored, even this phone I am speaking on right now is monitored. And I
am monitored."

"Yesterday I was kidnapped by a car and they beat me in the street, then
brought me here after I was dragged around," she said.

"Yes, yes, I want to leave Tripoli. In the middle of the night I get
nightmares, and I feel threats 24 hours a day. They are constantly
threatening me, with death."

The woman interviewed by CNN said that after the initial hotel uproar,
Gadhafi's militamen bought her new clean clothes and took her to the
Libyan TV station to have her broadcast a recantation of her story, to say
that the rebels had raped her, but she refused to do so.

"The TV station has no credibility and I was fearing the consequences,"
she told CNN. "Behind the camera, I was facing 15 Kalashnikovs."

On Sunday and Monday, al-Obeidi did telephone interviews with two TV
networks, but she was not seen. A government official said she had an
agreement not to talk to reporters, but she was blocked from getting to
the reporters' hotel again on Sunday.

The last time al-Obeidi, who is from eastern Libya, which is now in rebel
hands, was seen was when she was dragged away from the hotel on March 26.
She had gone to the hotel after she said she had escaped her gang-rape
ordeal.

She said that Gadhafi forces originally abducted her from a taxi at a
checkpoint, repeatedly raped her and held her captive for two days.

"Of course they had my hands tied behind me, and they had my legs tied,
and they would hit me when I was tied, and they would bite me, and they
would pour alcohol in my eyes so I would not be able to see," she told
CNN.

"One of them, when my hands were still tied, before he raped me he
sodomized me with his Kalashnikov rifle," she said.

"They said, 'Let the men from eastern Libya come and see how we treat
their women, and how we rape them, and abuse them.'"

She managed to escape after she was untied by another captive, a
16-year-old girl, she told CNN.

The woman who spoke to CNN claimed she was detained and beaten when she
tried to reach reporters in the Rixos Hotel a second time on Sunday.

She told CNN that she earlier was stopped from leaving the country at the
Tunisian border and returned to Tripoli. The Tunisian border is to the
west of Tripoli.

On Sunday a Libyan dissident network based in Qatar played a phone
interview where a woman claiming to be al-Obeidi said Libyan authorities
had declined her request to join her parents in Tobruk. Tobruk, near the
Egyptian border, is under rebel control.

Government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said al-Obeidi had made a deal with
the attorney general not to speak to reporters so as not to compromise her
case, and that he was aware that al-Obeidi was trying to reach media on
Sunday.

"She broke her agreement with the attorney general by trying to speak to
the media and was taken away," Ibrahim told The Associated Press.

Ibrahim said he didn't know what happened to al-Obeidi after she was taken
away from the hotel.

Afaf Youssef, a woman the government said is al-Obeidi's lawyer, told The
Associated Press on Monday that her client was refusing to speak to
reporters because her case was under investigation.

Youssef said she was one of two lawyers taking up al-Obeidi's criminal
case against the men who she says raped her. She also denied earlier
government claims that al-Obeidi was a prostitute.

Al-Obeidi's rape claim could not be independently verified. The Associated
Press identifies only rape victims who volunteer their names.

Congo colonel gets 20 years after rape trial

By MICHELLE FAUL, Associated Press Feb 21, 2011

BARAKA, Congo – One by one, the rape survivors relived their attacks for a
panel of judges: A newly married bride flung her torn, bloodied clothing
onto the courtroom floor. A mother of six dropped to her knees, raised her
arms to heaven and cried out for peace.

Nearly 50 women poured out their stories in a wave of anguish that ended
Monday with the conviction of an army colonel for crimes against humanity
— a landmark verdict in this Central African country where thousands are
believed to be raped each year by soldiers and militia groups who often go
unpunished.

It was the first time a commanding officer had been tried in such an attack.

Prosecutors had sought the death penalty for Lt. Col. Mutuare Daniel
Kibibi, who was accused of ordering his troops on New Year's Day to attack
the village of Fizi, a sprawling community 20 miles (35 kilometers) south
of Baraka on an escarpment of mountains covered in banana trees.

Military prosecutor Col. Laurent Mutata Luaba said the men "behaved like
wild beasts," terrorizing defenseless civilians they had orders to
protect.

Doctors later treated 62 women for rape. One woman testified that Kibibi
himself raped her for 40 minutes.

Kibibi and the 10 of his men who stood trial with him were the only ones
identified after the rampage.

As the defendants were being led away in handcuffs, hundreds of people
jeered at them, booed and shook their fists. Some shouted, "Kibibi! You
thought you could get away with this! Now you are going to jail!" and "You
must pay for your crimes!"

Kibibi, 46, who is married with eight children, was convicted of four
counts of crimes against humanity but will serve no more than 20 years in
prison.

Kibibi denies all the charges and says the testimony by his bodyguards was
part of a plot to denigrate him. Defense attorney Alfred Maisha described
his client as a "valiant hero" who had served in the army since 1984 and
had risked his life many times in the defense of the country.

Maisha said many of the troops under Kibibi's command were poorly trained
and included former members of rebel and militia groups.

Witnesses said the soldiers descended in a fury upon the village, where
residents had stoned a soldier to death who had been involved in an
altercation with a local shop owner.

The soldiers smashed down doors and went house-to-house, pillaging,
beating and raping for an entire night, from 7 p.m. until 6 a.m. the next
day, witnesses said.

Three of Kibibi's officers received the same sentences, and five others
got lesser sentences. One man was acquitted and another will be tried in
juvenile court.

But even as the men were sent away, women feared that some attackers had
escaped justice.

"Most of the rapists are still right here in our village," one woman said
as she nursed her baby. "If we go to the river for water, we get raped. If
we go to the fields for food, we get raped. If we go to the market to sell
our goods, we get raped.

"Our lives are filled with danger," she said. "There is no peace."

Rape has long been used as a brutal weapon of war in eastern Congo, which
suffered back-to-back civil wars starting in the late 1990s. The eastern
portion of the country is still brutalized by armed groups.

At least 8,300 rapes were reported in 2009 alone, and aid workers say the
true toll is much higher. The victims have included a month-old baby boy
and elderly women. Even the biggest U.N. peacekeeping force in the world
of 18,000 troops has been unable to end the violence.

During the trial, aid groups said new reports of rapes were emerging, this
time women believed to have been attacked by Rwandan Hutu rebels.

Monday's verdict came only after prosecutors and lawyers were ferried to
this remote corner of eastern Congo, which is accessible from the
provincial capital only by helicopter or a nearly nine-hour road journey.

The mobile court was paid for by George Soros' Open Society Initiative and
aided by several other agencies, including the American Bar Association,
Lawyers Without Borders and the U.N. Mission to Congo.

Activists said they hoped the verdict would serve as a warning to others
who expect to attack civilians with impunity.

"If word about the court is spread around the country, it could have an
enormous impact on deterring future crimes, now that the rule of law is
finally being enforced domestically, to at least some extent," said Kelly
D. Askin of Open Society Justice Initiative.

The total number of victims will never be known. The women who testified
in court were identified only as Female 1 to Female 49 out of fear for
their security and efforts to reduce the social stigma associated with
rape.

The remembered horrors piled up over four days of agonizing testimony. A
35-year-old woman detailed how she was beaten with rifle butts and fists
before five soldiers threw her to the ground, tore off her clothes and
took turns raping her, even as she vomited, urinated and defecated.

The soldiers took all the money she had been saving for more than a year —
60,000 Congolese francs ($650).

A white-haired grandmother described being beaten up and raped by 12
soldiers in front of her husband and children.

Women testified that they later spent up to three weeks hiding in the
nearby forest with their children, building little grass huts and foraging
for berries and roots instead of returning to Fizi.

Their statements were then recounted in open court where hundreds of
people, mainly men and boys, gathered under a burning sun.

Some survivors spoke so softly it was hard to hear them over the sniffling
and whimpers of babies and the occasional drumming of an equatorial
thunderstorm on the tin roof.

The other victims would not testify, fearful they might be shunned by
their husbands and community or be targeted for reprisals by the military.

Others are still coming forward, including one elderly victim who only
emerged Sunday from the forest with a broken rib. Her face remained
swollen out of shape seven weeks later.

The 49 women who testified are to receive up to $10,000 each in
compensation from the government — double the amount given to victims in
previous cases.

Unspecified other damages must be paid for victims' "humiliation,
degradation of their health, social stigmatization, risk of divorce, and
possibility of HIV," presiding judge Col. Fredy Mukendi ordered.

Many complained that the sentences were not harsh enough.

"We are happy that this trial has been held, but we are not happy with the
result," said Oscar Muzaliwa, 26. "The sentences are too low. (They)
should be put to death for what they did."

Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on Accountability

Jan. 8, 2011 Anarchist News

by Angustia Celeste

I was asked by a dear friend to write this piece about accountability
within radical communities- offer some insight in light of the years we've
spent fighting against rape culture. Except I don't believe in
accountability anymore. It should be noted that my anger and hopelessness
about the current model is proportional to how invested I've been in the
past. Accountability feels like a bitter ex-lover to me and I don't have
any of those... the past 10 years I really tried to make the relationship
work but you know what?

There is no such thing as accountability within radical communities
because there is no such thing as community- not when it comes to sexual
assault and abuse. Take an honest survey sometime and you will find that
we don't agree. There is no consensus. Community in this context is a
mythical, frequently invoked and much misused term. I don't want to be
invested in it anymore.

I think its time to abandon these false linguistic games we play and go
back to the old model. I miss the days when it was considered reasonable
to simply kick the living shit out of people and put them on the next
train out of town- at least that exchange was clear and honest. I have
spent too much time with both survivors and perpetrators drowning in a
deluge of words that didn't lead to healing or even fucking catharsis.

I am sick of the language of accountability being used to create mutually
exclusive categories of 'fucked up' and 'wronged.' I find the language of
'survivor' and 'perp' offensive because it does not lay bare all the ways
in which abuse is a dynamic between parties. (Though I will use those
terms here because its the common tender we have.)

Anarchists are not immune to dynamics of abuse, that much we can all agree
on but I have come to realize more and more that we cannot keep each other
safe. Teaching models of mutual working consent is a good start- but it
will never be enough: socialization of gender, monogamy- the lies of
exclusivity and the appeal of "love" as propriety are too strong. People
seek out these levels of intensity when the love affair is new, when that
obsessive intimacy feels good and then don't know how to negotiate soured
affection.

That's the thing about patriarchy its fucking pervasive and that's the
thing about being an anarchist, or trying to live free, fierce and without
apology- none of it keeps you safe from violence. There is no space we can
create in a world as damaged as the one we live in which is absent from
violence. That we even think it is possible says more about our privilege
than anything else. Our only autonomy lies in how we negotiate and use
power and violence ourselves.

I really want to emphasize: there is no such thing as safe space under
patriarchy or capitalism in light of all the sexist, hetero-normative,
racist, classist (etc) domination that we live under. The more we try and
pretend safety can exist at a community level the more disappointed and
betrayed our friends, and lovers will be when they experience violence and
do not get supported. Right now we've been talking a good game but the
results are not adding up.

There are a lot of problems with the current model- the very different
experiences of sexual assault and relationship abuse get lumped together.
Accountability processes encourage triangulation instead of direct
communication- and because conflict is not pushed, most honest
communication is avoided. Direct confrontation is good! Avoiding it
doesn't allow for new understandings, cathartic release or the eventual
forgiveness that person to person exchanges can lead to.

We have set up a model where all parties are encouraged to simply
negotiate how they never have to see each other again or share space. Some
impossible demands/promises are meted out and in the name of
confidentiality lines are drawn in the sand on the basis of generalities.
Deal with your shit but you can't talk about the specifics of what went
down and you can't talk to each other. The current model actually creates
more silence- only a specialized few are offered information about what
happened but everyone is still expected to pass judgment. There is little
transparency in these processes.

In an understandable attempt to not trigger or cause more pain we talk
ourselves in increasingly abstracted circles while a moment or dynamic
between two people gets crystallized and doesn't change or progress.
"Perps" become the sum total of their worst moments. "Survivors" craft an
identity around experiences of violence that frequently keeps them stuck
in that emotional moment. The careful nonviolent communication of
accountability doesn't lead to healing. I've seen these processes divide a
lot of scenes but I haven't seen them help people get support, retake
power or feel safe again.

Rape breaks you- the loss of bodily control, how those feeling of
impotence revisit you, how it robs you of any illusion of safety or
sanity. We need models that help people take power back and we need to
call the retribution, control, and banishing of the current model for what
it is- revenge. Revenge is OK but lets not pretend its not about power! If
shaming and retaliatory violence is what we have to work with then lets be
real about it. Let's chose those tools if we can honestly say that is what
we want to do. In the midst of this war we need to get better at being in
conflict.

Abuse and rape are inevitable consequences of the sick society we are
forced to live under. We need to eviscerate and destroy it, but in the
meantime, we can't hide from it- or the ways it affects our most personal
relationships. I know in my own life an important process in my struggle
for liberation was making my peace with the worst consequences of my
personal assault on patriarchy. Dealing with being raped was an important
part of understanding what it meant to chose to be at war with this
society.

Rape has always been used as this tool of control- proffered up as a
threat of what would happen if I, in my queerness and gendered ambiguity,
continued to live, work, dress, travel, love or resist the way that I
chose to. Those warnings held no water for me- in my heart I knew it was
only a matter of time- no matter what kind of life I chose to live because
my socially prescribed gender put me at constant risk for violation. I was
raped at work and it took me a while to really name that assault as rape.
After it happened mostly what I felt, once the pain, rage and anger
subsided was relief. Relief that it had finally happened. I had been
waiting my whole life for it to happen, had had a few close calls and
finally I knew what it felt like and I knew I could get through it.

I needed that bad trick. I needed a concrete reason for the hunted
feelings that stemmed from my friend's rape, murder and mutilation a few
years back. I needed to have someone hurt me and realize I had both the
desire to kill them and the personal control to keep myself from doing it.
I needed to reach out for support and be disappointed. Because that's how
it goes down- ask the survivors you know most people don't come out of it
feeling supported. We've raised expectations but the real life experience
is still shit.

I was traveling abroad when it happened. The only person I told called the
police against my wishes. They searched the "crime" scene without my
consent and took DNA evidence because I didn't dispose of it. Knowing I
had allowed myself in a moment of vulnerability to be pressured and
coerced into participating in the police process against my political will
made me feel even worse than being violated had. I left town shortly
thereafter so I didn't have to continue to be pressured by my 'friend'
into cooperating with the police any more than I already had. The only way
I felt any semi-balance of control during that period was by taking
retribution against my rapist into my own hands.

I realized that I also could wield threats, anger and implied violence as
a weapon. After my first experience of 'support' I chose to do that alone.
I could think of no one in that moment to ask for help but it was OK
because I realized I could do it myself. In most other places I think I
could have asked some of my friends to help me. The culture of nonviolence
does not totally permeate all of the communities I exist in. The lack of
affinity I felt was a result of being transient to that city but I don't
think my experience of being offered mediation instead of confrontation is
particularly unique.

In the case of sexual assault I think retaliatory violence is appropriate,
and I don't think there needs to be any kind of consensus about it.
Pushing models that promise to mediate instead of allow confrontation is
isolating and alienating. I didn't want mediation through legal channels
or any other. I wanted revenge. I wanted to make him feel as out of
control, scared and vulnerable as he had made me feel. There is no safety
really after a sexual assault, but there can be consequences.

We can't provide survivors safe space- safe space, in a general sense,
outside of close friendships, some family and the occasional affinity just
doesn't exist. Our current models of accountability suffer from an
over-abundance of hope. Fuck the false promises of safe space- we will
never get everyone on the same page about this. Let's cop to how hard
healing is and how delusional any expectation for a radical change of
behavior is in the case of assault. We need to differentiate between
physical assault and emotional abuse- throwing them together under the
general rubric interpersonal violence doesn't help.

Cyclical patterns of abuse don't just disappear. This shit is really
really deep- many abusers were abused and many abused become abusers. The
past few years I have watched with horror as the language of
accountability became an easy front for a new generation of emotional
manipulators. It's been used to perfect a new kind of predatory maverick-
the one schooled in the language of sensitivity- using the illusion of
accountability as community currency.

So where does real safety come from? How can we measure it? Safety comes
from trust, and trust is personal. It can't be mediated or rubber stamped
at a community level. My 'safe' lover might be your secret abuser and my
caustic codependent ex might be your healthy, tried and true confidant.
Rape culture is not easily undone, but it is contextual.

People in relation to each other create healthy or unhealthy exchanges.
There is no absolute for 'fucked up', 'healed' or 'safe'- it changes with
time, life circumstance, and each new love affair. It is with feelings of
unease that I have observed the slippery slope of 'emotional' abuse become
a common reason to initiate an accountability process...

Here is the problem with using this model for emotional abuse: its an
unhealthy dynamic between two people. So who gets to call it? Who gets to
wield that power in the community? (And lets all be honest that there is
power in calling someone to an accountability process.) People in
unhealthy relationships need a way to get out of them without it getting
turned into a community judgment against whomever was unlucky enough to
not realize a bad dynamic or call it abuse first. These processes
frequently exacerbate mutually unhealthy power plays between hurt parties.
People are encouraged to pick sides and yet no direct conflict brings
these kinds of entanglements to any kind of resolve.

Using accountability models developed all those years ago to deal with
serial rapists in the radical scene has not been much to help in getting
people out of the sand pit of damaging and codependent relationships.
Emotional abuse is a fucking vague and hard to define term. It means
different things to every person.

If someone hurts you and you want to hurt them back- then do it but don't
pretend its about mutual healing. Call power exchange for what it is. Its
OK to want power back and its OK to take it but never do anything to
someone else that you couldn't stomach having someone do to you if the
tables were turned.

Those inclined to use physical brutality to gain power need to be taught a
lesson in a language they will understand. The language of physical
violence. Those mired in unhealthy relationships need help examining a
mutual dynamic and getting out of it- not assigning blame. No one can
decide who deserves compassion and who doesn't except the people directly
involved.

There is no way to destroy rape culture through non-violent communication
because there is no way to destroy rape culture without destroying
society. In the meantime let's stop expecting the best or the worst from
people.

I am sick of accountability and its lack of transparency.
I am sick of triangulating.
I am sick of hiding power exchange.
I am sick of hope.

I have been raped.
I have been an unfair manipulator of power in some of my intimate
relationships.
I have had sexual exchanges that were a learning curve for better consent.
I have the potential in me to be both survivor and perp- abused and
abuser- as we all do.

These essentialist categories don't serve us. People rape- very few people
are rapists in every sexual exchange. People abuse one another- this abuse
is often mutual and cyclical- cycles are hard but not impossible to amend.
These behaviors change contextually. Therefore there is no such thing as
safe space.

I want us to be honest about being at war- with ourselves, with our lovers
and with our "radical" community because we are at war with the world at
large and those tendrils of domination exist within us and they affect so
much of what we touch, who we love and those we hurt.

But we are not only the pain we cause others or the violence inflicted
upon us.

We need more direct communication and when that doesn't help we need
direct engagement in all its horrible messy glory. As long as we make
ourselves vulnerable to others we will never be safe in the total sense of
the word.

There is only affinity and trust kept.
There is only trust broken and confrontation.
The war isn't going to end anytime soon
Let's be better at being in conflict.

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