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Date: November 22, 2024 Fri
Time: 12:06 pm
Time: 12:06 pm
Results for gender issues
2 results foundAuthor: Brake, Deborah L. Title: Back to Basics: Excavating the Sex Discrimination Roots of Campus Sexual Assault Summary: It takes some explaining to use the occasion of a symposium honoring the legacy of Pat Summitt, one of the most successful college basketball coaches of all time, to publish an article addressing Title IX's application to campus sexual assault. Neither the coach's record nor the top-shelf program she ran for so many decades calls this topic immediately to mind. And yet, as I reflect on the challenges ahead for Title IX and the continuing struggle for sex equality in higher education, including in university athletic programs, I am struck by how interconnected women's leadership is to a broader set of issues of gender and power, including the sexual objectification and harassment of women. As if we needed a culturally explosive reminder to shock feminism out of a state of apathy, the linkages between gender, power, and leadership were on full display in the bitterly divisive presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Social practices that objectify and subordinate women, and their consequences for women's access to leadership, figured prominently throughout the campaign. This article explores the connections between sexual assault, harassment, objectification, and the challenges facing women in leadership against the backdrop of Title IX. It argues that Title IX's application to sexual harassment, including sexual assault, is an essential part of the law's broader agenda of opening the paths to leadership on an equal basis. More particularly, it seeks to ground the Title IX administrative framework that has emerged for addressing campus sexual assault in the statutory prohibition of sex-based discrimination. Without such a reckoning, the Title IX obligations on universities enforced during the Obama Administration are vulnerable to unilateral rollback by the new Trump Administration. This article begins the project of strengthening the sex discrimination roots of the Title IX framework for campus sexual assault and calls for further work linking the particular obligations the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has imposed on educational institutions to the statutory mandate against sex discrimination. Part I sketches some linkages between liberal feminism's goal of expanding women's access to leadership and the dominance feminist agenda of resisting the sexual subordination of women. It argues that these two strands of feminist legal theory are not alternatives to each other, but are complementary and mutually reinforcing in their shared goal of dislodging the social practices that keep women from power. Ironically, perhaps, the gender inequality that sits at the root of sexual assault as a social practice has been lost in the weeds of the controversies surrounding the specific procedures institutions are required to use in responding to sexual assault complaints. Part II details the gender-blind narratives that are ascendant in the discourse surrounding campus sexual assault and argues that they function to obscure the gendered reality, and the gender inequality, of campus sexual assault. Part III explains the Title IX framework that courts and the OCR have developed for handling sexual assault. It traces the evolution of this legal framework from the statute's broad, general ban on sex-based discrimination in education programs receiving federal funds to the more particular obligations now placed on educational institutions to follow specific practices in addressing campus sexual assault allegations. Although OCR has acted consistently with the role of an enforcing agency by filling in the gaps of Title IX's broad anti-discrimination mandate, I argue that neither the courts nor the agency has fully explained, in a persuasive way, how the emerging Title IX framework is connected to the statute's ban on sex-based discrimination. Part IV begins the work of grounding the specific obligations placed on educational institutions in the statute's discrimination ban. Sexual assault is a social practice rooted in, and reinforcing of, gender inequality. It is not merely the gender of the typical perpetrator and victim (although sexual assault is overwhelmingly a practice engaged in by men and experienced by women and gender minorities, including LGBTQ persons), but the gender inequality in sexual relations on campus that situates sexual assault as a sexually subordinating practice. Most importantly for the legitimacy of the Title IX framework, institutional cultures and institutions' own practices in responding to sexual assault contribute to the campus cultures that reinforce and facilitate sexual assault as a sexually subordinating practice. Institutional responses to sexual assault, and not just sexual assault itself, are deeply gendered and embedded in gender inequality. The very rape myths and peer norms that underlie sexual assault as a social practice also find purchase in the common responses that excuse and minimize sexual assault when it occurs. Without the kinds of specific obligations the Title IX framework places on institutions for handling sexual assault charges, gender scripts and rape myths would have full rein to undermine complainants' credibility and mitigate empathy for their experiences of harm. This article seeks to begin a conversation about whether and how the specific obligations on universities for responding to sexual assault are grounded in the statute's mandate for ending sex-based discrimination on campus. That work remains vital if Title IX is to fulfill its promise of dislodging the gender practices that block women's pathways to power and leadership. Details: Pittsburgh, 2018. 34p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed September 23, 2018 at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1101&context=rgsj Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1101&context=rgsj Shelf Number: 151582 Keywords: Campus CrimeGender IssuesSex DiscriminationSexual Assault |
Author: Cornell Law School’s Avon Global Center for Women and Justice and International Human Rights Clinic Title: Judged for More Than Her Crime: A Global Overview of Women Facing the Death Penalty Summary: We estimate that at least 500 women are currently on death rows around the world. While exact figures are impossible to obtain, we further estimate that over 100 women have been executed in the last ten years - and potentially hundreds more. The number of women facing execution is not dramatically different from the number of juveniles currently on death row, but the latter have received a great deal more attention from international human rights bodies, national courts, scholars, and advocates. This report aims to shed light on this much-neglected population. Few researchers have sought to obtain information about the crimes for which women have been sentenced to death, the circumstances of their lives before their convictions, and the conditions under which they are detained on death row. As a result, there is little empirical data about women on death row, which impedes advocates from understanding patterns in capital sentencing and the operation of gender bias in the criminal legal system. To the extent that scholars have focused on women on death row, they have concluded that they are beneficiaries of gender bias that operates in their favor. While it is undeniable that women are protected from execution under certain circumstances (particularly mothers of infants and young children) and that women sometimes benefit from more lenient sentencing, those that are sentenced to death are subjected to multiple forms of gender bias. Most women have been sentenced to death for the crime of murder, often in relation to the killing of family members in a context of gender-based violence. Others have been sentenced to death for drug offenses, terrorism, adultery, witchcraft, and blasphemy, among other offenses. Although they represent a tiny minority of all prisoners sentenced to death, their cases are emblematic of systemic failings in the application of capital punishment. Women in conflict with the law are particularly vulnerable to abuse and other rights violations, either at the police station, during trial, or while incarcerated. Women are more likely than men to be illiterate, which affects their ability to understand and participate in their own defense. For example, of the 12 women on India's death row in 2015, six have never attended school. Illiteracy also increases their vulnerability to coercion, heightening the risk of false confessions. In certain countries, particularly in the Gulf states, most death-sentenced women are foreign migrant workers who are subject to discriminatory treatment. Mental illness and intellectual disability are common among women facing the death penalty. In Pakistan, Kanizan Bibi has been on death row since 1989, when she was only 16-years-old. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, she cannot care for herself in the most basic ways and has lost all awareness of her surroundings. Although she is now confined in a psychiatric hospital, she remains under sentence of death. Many women enter prison as long-term survivors of gender-based violence and harsh socioeconomic deprivation. We have documented several cases of women convicted of crimes committed while they were minors, often in the context of child marriage. These factors receive little attention from lawyers and courts. In many death penalty jurisdictions, gender-based violence is not considered at sentencing. Few lawyers present such evidence, and even where they do, the courts often discount it. In mandatory death penalty jurisdictions, a woman's prior history as a survivor of physical or sexual abuse is simply irrelevant, since the death penalty is automatically imposed for death-eligible offenses without consideration of the offender's background or the circumstances of the crime. Our research also indicates that women who are seen as violating entrenched norms of gender behavior are more likely to receive the death penalty. In several cases documented in this report, women facing the death penalty have been cast as the "femme fatale," the "child murderer," or the "witch." The case of Brenda Andrew in the United States is illustrative. In her capital trial, the prosecution aired details of her sexual history under the guise of establishing her motive to kill her husband. The jury was allowed to hear about Brenda's alleged extramarital affairs from years before the murder, as well as details about outfits she wore. The trial court also permitted the prosecutor to show the underwear found in the suitcase in her possession after she fled to Mexico, because it showed that she was not behaving as "a grieving widow, but as a free fugitive living large on a Mexico beach." As one Justice of the Court of Criminal Appeals of Oklahoma noted, Brenda was put on trial not only for the murder of her husband but for being "a bad wife, a bad mother, and a bad woman." Death row conditions around the world are harsh and at times life-threatening for both men and women. In China, for example, all death row inmates, including women, are shackled at all times by their hands and feet. Women face certain deprivations, however, that do not affect the male population to the same extent. Some death sentenced women must also care for infants or young children who are incarcerated alongside them. Meriam Ibrahim, sentenced to death in Sudan for apostasy in 2014, was shackled to heavy chains in prison while eight months pregnant and caring for a young child. In Thailand and Myanmar, inmates have reportedly given birth alone in prison. In many countries, it is challenging or impossible for women to access sanitary pads or other menstruation products. In Zambia, for example, women must make do with rags that they struggle to clean without soap. The social stigma associated with women who are convicted and imprisoned, paired in some cases with restrictive family and child visitation rules, means that many female death row inmates around the world suffer an enduring lack of family contact, contributing to the high levels of depression suffered by women prisoners. Women on death row may also be denied access to occupational training and educational programs. For instance, the general female prison population in Thailand has access to work programs, but death row inmates do not. One woman in Ghana explained, after being denied educational opportunities while on death row: "I don't do anything. I sweep and I wait." Our country profiles aim to provide a snapshot of women facing the death penalty in several major regions of the world. The stories of women on death row provide anecdotal evidence of the particular forms of oppression and inhumane treatment documented in this report. It is our hope that this initial publication, the first of its kind, will inspire the international community to pay greater attention to the troubling plight of women on death row worldwide. Details: Ithaca, NY: Cornell Law School, 2018. 62p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed November 23, 2018 at: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/node/7202 Year: 2018 Country: International URL: http://www.deathpenaltyworldwide.org/pdf/judged-for-more-than-her-crime.pdf Shelf Number: 153113 Keywords: Capital PunishmentDeath PenaltyDeath RowExecutionsFemales Gender Based PunishmentGender Based ViolenceGender BiasGender IssuesImprisonmentIntellectual DisabilityMental Health IssuesPrisonPrisoners |