Victims of crime should be provided with legal representation, Victorian inquiry finds | Victoria | The Guardian

Most sexual assault survivors and other victims feel ‘silenced and sidelined’ by the justice system, landmark report says.

“When victims report a crime, they expect to play a part in the justice process but in reality, most felt they were silenced and sidelined,” said the commissioner, Fiona McCormack.

Once their case reached the court, almost 75% of the victims surveyed by the VOCC expressed concerns for their safety, mostly due to fear of having to interact with their perpetrator or their families.

One parent told the inquiry she had to sit beside her son’s alleged killer in a court foyer “because there were no separate spaces for victims and their families”.

The inquiry said sexual assault victims faced “some of the most invasive and traumatic aspects of our adversarial trial process”, including cross-examination, applications to access their phone or medical records, and to introduce their sexual history into evidence.

McCormack recommended sexual assault victims be provided with state-funded legal representation during some proceedings, to play a “protective role” for the victim that prosecutors don’t.

Source: Victims of crime should be provided with legal representation, Victorian inquiry finds | Victoria | The Guardian

Luka Magnotta is moved to MEDIUM security Canadian prison after claiming to be TRANS – despite causing outrage by dismembering student making feline torture videos | Daily Mail Online

  • Luka Magnotta, who was found guilty for the murder of Jun Lin, was transferred to a medium-security prison after revealing that he wants to be a woman
  • The gruesome acts of the killer Magnotta were featured in the release of the three-part Netflix docuseries ‘Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer’ 

Brutal killer Luka Magnotta, who was found guilty for the murder of international student Jun Lin in 2012, has been transferred to a medium-security prison after revealing that he wants to be a woman.

In documents seen by the Toronto Sun, a psychiatric team referred to the gruesome murderer with female pronouns and called him ‘Violette’ – arguing that Magnotta ought to have specialized prison support for being transgender.

Magnotta, 41, was sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility for parole for 25 years in 2014, two years after he admitted to killing Jun Lin, a 33-year-old Concordia University student from China, in his apartment in Montreal, Canada.

He dismembered Lin’s body, and sent his remains paired with threatening messages to schools and federal politicians.

Source: Luka Magnotta is moved to MEDIUM security Canadian prison after claiming to be TRANS – despite causing outrage by dismembering student making feline torture videos | Daily Mail Online

Nana bashed at Posie Parker rally upset at punishment handed to her young attacker – NZ Herald

Pensioner Judith Hobson has waited almost 12 months to confront the young man who punched her in the head repeatedly at a Posie Parker “free speech” rally in Auckland.

But Hobson, who asked for her identity be made public – unlike her attacker, aged 20 at the time of the attack – says that while the assault has affected her physically, the police and judicial process was mentally “kicking me in the guts daily”.

At the Auckland District Court yesterday, the accused, whose lawyer said suffers from ADHD and autism, was convicted of assaulting the grandmother and discharged without conviction. He was also granted permanent name suppression and ordered to pay $1000 reparation to Hobson.

“I hope his parents are proud of him. This is an absolute joke, and he’s a disgrace,” Hobson told the Herald.

“I am absolutely livid that he has walked out of the court with, in my opinion, virtually no consequences whatsoever. It’s no wonder victims don’t go to court, because they become victims all over again.”

Hobson said her team would also look into the way police handled her complaint.

Source: Nana bashed at Posie Parker rally upset at punishment handed to her young attacker – NZ Herald

Reem Alsalem on the biggest obstacles to ending violence against women – New Statesman

Reem Alsalem isn’t frightened of controversy. Central to fulfilling her brief as the UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls is her insistence that sex and gender must not be conflated, and should be recorded in data. She also acknowledges that rights can clash – for example, those of women and of transgender people, both of whom are protected under the UK’s Equality Act.

Alsalem has made several high-profile interventions in this space, most recently branding the World Health Organisation’s attempt to draft guidelines on trans healthcare “one-sided”. She has also voiced deep concern over the detrimental impact that the changes put forward in Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill could have on women and girls.

A Jordanian national, Reem Alsalem was born in Cairo, Egypt. She studied at the city’s American University before graduating from Oxford with a master’s in human rights law. She speaks five languages. A career civil servant, for 17 years Alsalem worked around the globe with UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. Since 2016 she has been an independent consultant on gender issues and the rights of refugees and migrants.

It is perhaps because of this work that she recognises the importance of acknowledging biological sex.

“It’s clear that there’s very little reference to male violence against women and girls as a concept [in the UK],” Alsalem told me. “I think that is problematic because we continuously then dilute the phenomenon.” We must remember, she said, that the majority of the victims of sex-based violence are females and that its perpetrators are primarily male.

Her visit to the UK was filled with meetings with a variety of actors. In the Family Court, for instance, she wished to see the urgent prohibition of the use of “parental alienation” allegations in child custody cases (when one parent claims the other has deliberately “alienated” their children from them, an argument campaigners fear is often used by fathers accused of abuse to silence victims) and the end of the promotion of “contact at all costs”.

Alsalem’s insistence on recognising the difference between sex and gender has landed her in trouble. She has been on the receiving end of two open letters signed by NGOs and women’s groups, accusing of her being “anti-trans”, an allegation she forcefully rejects. “Why is it so problematic for women, girls, and also men, to say, ‘This is important; many of our needs emanate from being female, or male, and there are certain instances where it’s proportionate, legitimate and perfectly necessary to keep a space single sex’?” While “that doesn’t apply to everything in life”, it is important, Alsalem believes, for prisons, women’s shelters and sport.

Reem Alsalem is not afraid of involving herself in controversial subjects, including the gender transition process and conversion therapy. In her statement issued to the government after we met, she took the opportunity to warn policymakers that any law banning conversion therapy should be drafted extremely carefully. It “must take account of the fact that many young women who express a desire to ‘transition’ socially and/or medically may in fact be same-sex attracted, or experiencing other issues, such as neurodiversity or dealing with past trauma,” she wrote. “Legislation should never prevent these young women being supported holistically and should ensure transition does not become the only option it is acceptable to discuss with them.” As the UK and other countries continue to make legislation in this thorny territory, it will be fascinating to see what Alsalem says next.

Source: Reem Alsalem on the biggest obstacles to ending violence against women – New Statesman

This Never Happens – Peaker’s Corner

#ThisNeverHappens documents cases where men use the cover of a woman identity to commit violent crimes. It is closely related to #NotOurCrimes where violent crimes committed by males are reported on as being committed by women.

Note how the language used to report on earlier cases is more likely to attribute crimes to males. Later reports attribute crimes wholly to women, or females.

Source: This Never Happens – Peaker’s Corner

Grandmother stabbed to death in shopping centre carpark

A 70-year-old grandmother has been stabbed to death in front of her young grandchild in a “harrowing” attack in a Queensland shopping centre carpark.

The woman was found in a pool of blood in the underground carpark of Town Square Redbank Plains Shopping Centre, southwest of Brisbane, about 6.10pm Saturday.

“Let’s be clear, this is an abhorrent, cowardly, violent attack on a 70-year-old grandmother in front of her six-year-old granddaughter,” said Detective Acting Superintendent Heath McQueen.

Source: Grandmother stabbed to death in shopping centre carpark

US: Trans-Identified Male Killer Who Fed Victims to Pigs Serving Life Sentence in Women’s Prison

A trans-identified male convicted of the grisly murders of two men is serving his 50-year sentence in a women’s correctional facility. Vietnam war and US Navy veteran Susan Monica, born Steven Buchanan, had dismembered the bodies of his victims and fed them to pigs at a 20-acre farm he owned in Wimer, Oregon.

The lead detective involved with the case told the court that Buchanan had admitted to killing over a dozen victims in a similar manner. “She(sic) told me that if she(sic) told me about the 17 others that she would spend the rest of her(sic) life in jail,” said detective Eric Henderson, referring to Buchanan as a woman.

A former cellmate of Buchanan’s at the Jackson County jail testified to getting “chills” after receiving a birthday card from Buchanan signed, “from the sweetest murderer in Jackson County.”

It is unclear how many men claiming a transgender status are currently being held in women’s facilities in Oregon state. As Reduxx previously reported, a man in custody for the brutal murder of his ex-girlfriend had been briefly transferred to the Coffee Creek Women’s Correctional Facility, but was quickly moved back to the male estate just weeks later for unknown reasons.

Source: US: Trans-Identified Male Killer Who Fed Victims to Pigs Serving Life Sentence in Women’s Prison

The AI industry is on the verge of becoming another boys’ club. We’re all going to lose out if it does

A recent New York Times article released a list of people “behind the dawn of the modern artificial intelligence movement” – and not a single woman was named. It came less than a week after news of a fake auto-generated woman being listed as a speaker on the agenda for a software conference.

Unfortunately, the omission of women from the history of STEM isn’t a new phenomenon. Women have been missing from these narratives for centuries.

In the wake of recent AI developments, we now have a choice: are we going to leave women out of these conversations as well – even as they continue to make massive contributions to the AI industry?

Prior to computers as we know them, “computer” was the title given to people who performed complex mathematical calculations. These people were commonly women.

One 2018 study of 4,000 researchers who had been published in leading AI conferences found women made up just 12% of this group.

The omission of women isn’t limited to the AI industry, or even to STEM. As historian Bettany Hughes notes, women occupy a meagre 0.5% of recorded history.

A lack of gender diversity in AI has a demonstrated ability to harm and disadvantage women and, by extension, all of us. While many argue that improving AI training datasets could address the gender gap, others rightly point out that women should also be included in data-collection processes

Source: The AI industry is on the verge of becoming another boys’ club. We’re all going to lose out if it does

Hijacking the Murder of Women: Nothing is Sacred to Trans Activists

By JL

On 6th December 1989, a man called Marc Lépine walked into a mechanical engineering class at Montreal’s École Polytechnique with a semi-automatic rifle. He separated the men from the women and then instructed the men to leave. He declared that he was ‘fighting feminism’ and opened fire on the nine women who remained. He killed six of them.

Lépine then wandered the building for 20 minutes, targeting and shooting women. He murdered a further eight women before finally killing himself. His page-long suicide note made clear that his barbaric actions had been motivated purely by his hatred of women. “Feminists have always enraged me. I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker.

In 1991, to commemorate the female victims of that senseless massacre, the Canadian parliament inaugurated 6th December as The National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence against Women.

But, of course, like anything else that centres women, in recent years even this most sad and solemn occasion has been appropriate by trans-identified males who use the murder of women to colonise our sex.

In 2021 a Canadian province deemed that the best person to speak at a memorial service for these murdered women was a male.

Incredibly, they invited Anastasia Preston, a Trans Community Outreach Coordinator at an LGBTQ+ sexual health clinic, to speak at the service. Such a choice would have been wholly inappropriate whatever the circumstances. But the man they invited clearly has no empathy or respect for women. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Only a few months before the memorial service, he retweeted this.

When people expressed their outrage at this appalling insult to Lépine’s victims, CBC turned off the replies to their tweet.\

What an insult to the women murdered by a man who hated feminists, that the principal speaker at their memorial was a man who hates feminists.

Source: Hijacking the Murder of Women: Nothing is Sacred to Trans Activists