Opinion | The Children of Pornhub – The New York Times

Pornhub rakes in money from almost three billion ad impressions a day. One ranking lists Pornhub as the 10th-most-visited website in the world.Yet there’s another side of the company: Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags.

Source: Opinion | The Children of Pornhub – The New York Times

Controversial ‘virginity tests’ sold by UK clinics – BBC News

Women are being offered controversial “virginity tests” at British medical clinics, an investigation by BBC Newsbeat and 100 Women has found.

The intrusive tests are considered a violation of human rights by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations, which want to see them banned.

Critics say they are unscientific, cannot prove whether someone is a virgin and can be a form of abuse.

The BBC identified 21 clinics and managed to make inquiries with 16 of them, seven confirmed they offer “virginity testing” and several others would not clarify their position.

All said they would carry out hymen-repair surgery, which costs in the region of £1,500 to £3,000. Data from NHS England shows 69 hymen-repair procedures have been carried out in the past five years.

Source: Controversial ‘virginity tests’ sold by UK clinics – BBC News

Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates review – fierce and eye-opening | Society books | The Guardian

Some men have for years been trying to deny women the right to their own safe spaces.

First there is MGTOW, for “Men Going Their Own Way” – their own way being, hopefully, nowhere near women, who are all liars and cheats.. . . MGTOW, like most of the other anti-feminist groups out there, possesses “the special quality of being a group supposedly exclusively devoted to men, whose near-total focus is women”.

Also focused on women is the world of “Pick-Up Artists”, most famously documented in Neil Strauss’s The Game. PUAs profit from workshops teaching shy men how to insult women to get their attention and try their luck. . . .

[A]spiring PUAs are very like “incels”: men who think of themselves as “involuntarily celibate” because women won’t sleep with them. Both groups, Bates points out, essentially think of women as slot machines for sex. “The difference is that incels regard the machines as rigged,” she writes, while aspiring PUAs hope “to learn the exact secret combination of buttons to push and levers to pull, in order to trick the machine into paying out every time.”

Source: Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates review – fierce and eye-opening | Society books | The Guardian

Advocates and lawyers at odds over consent law reform recommendations – Lawyers Weekly

Overnight, the Law Reform Commission published 44 recommendations for improving consent laws, including changes to the “freeze” response that can occur during attacks and a narrower definition around consent for sexual activity with an intoxicated person. The changes will be considered by government for an official response in 2021.

The commission has also stipulated a “communicative consent” model where a person cannot consent to sex if they do not actually say so.

Source: Advocates and lawyers at odds over consent law reform recommendations – Lawyers Weekly

Misogyny in the family courts – VictimFocus Blog – Dr Jessica Taylor

Everyone who works with women who have been subjected to domestic abuse, or children who have been subjected to sexual abuse, will know how volatile, unpredictable and misogynistic our family court system can be.

Each year, thousands of women write to me about their terrifying experiences of the family court system. Despite every woman being an individual, and residing everywhere from Essex to Sydney, the story is the same.

Women who report abuse are quickly reframed as crazy, jealous exes

None of them want to be with their ex, but it’s amazing how credible male ex boyfriends and husbands seem to be, when they accuse the woman of being ‘jealous’ that he’s moved on. Mud sticks, and professionals around her soon begin to make comments or write reports which include these inaccurate assumptions.

No one seems to be taking young girls seriously when they disclose sexual abuse

So why are these signs and disclosures from girls being ignored in the family courts? Why are professionals suggesting that girls are making this up, or don’t know what they are talking about? Why are we so sure that she isn’t being abused, that we will continue contact with sexually abusive parents and ignore her disclosures?

Character assassination is par for the course; and no one seems to care

Reports and hearings often become obsessed with the character assassination of the mother – and become less and less focussed on the well-being and disclosures of the children.

There’s a lot of dodgy psychiatry and psychology going on, with no real process to challenge poor practice

It concerns me how many women are diagnosed or labelled with disorders and psychiatric conditions after meeting a psychologist for 2 hours during an assessment. I have read several reports in which women have been labelled, accused and diagnosed after one short interview, whilst they were under severe stress and worrying about their child being abused.

Parental alienation seems to be the trump card for abusive men

It is clear that real parental alienation does happen in some cases – but choosing to stop contact when a child spontaneously discloses serious sexual abuse is surely common sense, and not an act of parental alienation.

One woman I spoke to was threatened by a judge that if she didn’t support contact with her ex husband, (who had convictions for DV and the child was reporting had sexually abused her), that he would award full custody to Dad as a way to punish/control her.

Evidence is not being gathered correctly or quickly enough when children are at risk from abuse

We already know that on average, children disclose 7 times before someone takes it seriously (according to an NSPCC, 2014 study).

[S]ome children who disclose recent rape or sexual abuse have not been referred for tests or examination for several weeks, sometimes as long as two months, by which time all DNA evidence would be gone, and some injuries would arguably have healed.

I have also come across poor practice in which children have disclosed serious sexual abuse, and the way we have dealt with it is to send uniformed officers into their houses, or taken children to police station evidence suites where the child has instantly stopped talking and has refused to speak about anything.

Decades of research evidence is being totally ignored

Research clearly gives us lists of things to look out for in children who might be being sexually abused, and despite many of these signs being present in these cases, children are being ignored.

Research on offenders seems to be being ignored too. Men with previous convictions for sexual abuse or accessing child sexual abuse imagery have been given unsupervised access to children because professionals have argued that his own children are not at risk.

Final thoughts

Women need to know that their case was not a one-off. They need to know that they are not to blame, and that they are one of thousands of women who have been labelled and gaslit in the family court system. So many women contact me to talk about their cases and experiences, and they have no idea that this happens to other women, too.

Source: Misogyny in the family courts – VictimFocus Blog

Of all people, female prisoners deserve single-sex spaces | UK| The Article

A female prisoner is bringing a Judicial Review against the Government after she was sexually assaulted by a transgender, male convicted rapist who was placed in a women’s prison. The victim is challenging the lawfulness of placing male-bodied transgender prisoners convicted of sexual and violent offences against women in the female estate. The High Court case was due to begin last week but has just been adjourned till later this year.

Make no mistake; the public sector is suffering from ideological capture in the shape of “gender identity ideology”; and that capture is undermining science, data and research, and women’s rights. To illustrate this we need to look no further than the Minstry of Justice’s revised policy document that covers the care and management of transgender individuals within the prisons estate.

Alarm bells go off straight away when we read that the policy refers to individuals who express a wish to live as a gender “opposite to the biological sex assigned to them at birth”. This is scientifically illiterate. Everyone knows that sex is not assigned at birth. But the language is familiar — you will find it wherever institutions have succumbed to gender ideology.

The Ministry of Justice has unilaterally brought in sex Self-ID, a policy now explicitly rejected by the Government. It says that, “Individuals managed by HMPPS are able to self-declare that they are transgender and are supported to express the gender (or non-gender) with which they identify, with staff using correct pronouns”. This appears to mean that a violent rapist can declare that he is female, and from then on female staff will be required to refer to him as she.

Source: Of all people, female prisoners deserve single-sex spaces | TheArticle

The myth of the male bumbler – The Week

Allow me to make a controversial proposition: Men are every bit as sneaky and calculating and venomous as women are widely suspected to be. And the bumbler — the very figure that shelters them from this ugly truth — is the best and hardest proof.

It’s counterintuitive, I know. For decades now, the very idea of a duplicitous, calculating man has been so exceptional as to be almost monstrous; this is the domain of cult leaders, of con artists, of evil men like the husband in Gaslight. And while folks provisionally accept that there are men who “groom” children and “gaslight” women, the reluctance to attach that behavior to any real, flesh-and-blood man we know is extreme. Many people don’t actually believe that normal men are capable of it.

Predatory men normalize their predation and support each other.

Most of us know that when a politician sits on the stand and insists that he “does not recall,” that it’s a political performance, a manipulative pretense intended to obfuscate. Let’s apply that intelligent skepticism toward this rash of professions of male incompetence. To put it in pragmatic terms: You can be a bumbler, or you can keep your job. You can’t have both.

Source: The myth of the male bumbler

Victoria’s proposed sexual assault victims law, explained.

Jill Meagher, Aiia Maasarwe and Eurydice Dixon were Victorian women whose deaths have become central to the discussion about violence against women in this country.

Each was sexually assaulted and murdered in separate, unrelated incidents in Melbourne over the past decade, sparking nationwide headlines, tributes and advocacy.

Yet under proposed changes to Victorian law, it could soon be illegal to tell their stories.

Source: Victoria’s proposed sexual assault victims law, explained.

Massive child abuse ring smashed with 44 Australians arrested

More than 40 Australian men have been charged with possessing child abuse material and sharing their material online via a cloud storage platform.

Federal police on Friday said they’d filed 350 charges in total against 44 men in every Australian state and the ACT, with 16 children removed from harm’s way.

The cloud storage platform was allegedly used by thousands of sex offenders around the world, with some alleged Australian offenders also producing their own abuse material.

The AFP said its Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation has in the past 12 months intercepted more than 250,000 child abuse material files online, while 134 children – including 67 in Australia – were removed from harm in the 2019/20 financial year.

Source: Massive child abuse ring smashed with 44 Australians arrested