Canoe, November 9, 2007
An Orleans man who made his ex-girlfriend an unwilling porn star has been sentenced to five months in jail for harassing her with tactics such as distributing DVDs of the couple having sex at the company where both worked.
Serge Rolland Larose, 26, pleaded guilty to criminal harassment in connection with an escalating series of incidents that began last fall after his girlfriend of 18 months moved out.
His ex-girlfriend was eloquent in describing the shame and terror he put her through in a lengthy victim impact statement.
"I still have people to this day come up to me from (the company) making comments to me and saying how they still have the video and watch it," she wrote. "I am not a whore but I feel like one seeing as I am an unwilling part of people's porn collection."
The harassment began with letters and flowers, then repeated e-mails and text messages.
Larose drove six hours to Sudbury to hand a CD of photos of the couple and music to her family.
He delivered a DVD to the victim on which he inscribed the title of his favourite film, which translates from French as Love Me If You Dare. In the film, a star-crossed couple commit suicide together. It terrorized the victim.
Most humiliating was when Larose took a DVD of the couple having sex -- which he'd promised the victim he'd destroyed -- and put copies on the desks of about 15 colleagues. It became common knowledge among hundreds of employees at the firm.
The young woman left her job and lives in fear.
LIVES IN FEAR
"I have a lot less self-esteem and pride seeing as Serge's actions have ripped any pride away from me," she wrote. "I used to be happy-go-lucky, confident and trusting. I am none of these now."
Prosecutor Jacqueline Loignon argued the woman will be victimized again and again by people viewing the DVD.
Larose's lawyer, Dave Morin-Pelletier, argued that his client has no criminal record and comes from a good family and asked that he serve house arrest. A psychiatrist diagnosed Larose with acute adjustment disorder.
In imposing a jail term, Justice Catherine Kehoe said the punishment must send a strong message that harassment of vulnerable, innocent victims won't be tolerated.
__________________________________________________________________
UN: Sexual violence rampant in DRC
UN investigators say the authorities are doing little to stop sexual violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Rape is "rampant and committed by non-state armed groups, the Armed Forces of the DRC, the National Congolese Police, and increasingly also by civilians", Yakin Erturk, a Turkish lawyer, said on Monday.
"Violence against women seems to be perceived by large sectors of society to be normal," she said in a report after an 11-day visit.
Erturk, a special envoy for the UN Human Rights Council on violence against women, said the situation in South Kivu province was the worst she had ever seen.
Acts of sexual violence by armed groups "are of an unimaginable brutality that goes far beyond rape", she said.
Rwandan involvement
Some of the groups were involved in the 1994 Rwandan massacres in which 800,000 people were killed.
"Women are gang-raped, often in front of their families and communities. In numerous cases, male relatives are forced at gun-point to rape their own daughters, mothers or sisters," Erturk said.
After rape, many women were shot or stabbed in the genital area, and survivors told Erturk they had been forced to eat excrement or the flesh of their murdered relatives.
Her report came after charges made by Louise Arbour, the UN high commissioner for human rights, stating that soldiers and police used excessive force and summary executions to stop protesters in the DRC earlier this year.
In the central Equateur province, the police and army often responded to civil unrest "with organised armed reprisals that target the civilian population and involve indiscriminate pillage, torture and mass rape", the report found.
Law not enforced
Although Congo's parliament outlawed sexual violence in July 2006, Erturk said the system was corrupt and in "a deplorable state", while conditions in prisons were "scandalous".
Senior army and police officers shielded their men from prosecution, and when some were arrested they escaped easily, probably "with the complicity of those in charge".
In a few cases courts had ordered the state and individuals to compensate victims.
_______________________________________________________________
Naked truth of the confident over-50s
THE over-50s are now so confident about their bodies that at least one in ten would pose nude for a photograph, new figures show.
Research shows many have been inspired by the Women's Institute members who, in 1999, stripped for a charity calendar and then had their story told in the 2003 film Calendar Girls.
The figures show 43 per cent of women in the 50-plus age group are happy with their bodies, even as younger generations increasingly turn to cosmetic surgery to improve theirs.
One in three mature females say they have become more confident about their shape as they have aged. And 90 per cent say their generation is more at ease with their bodies than their mothers were at the same age.
___________________________________________________________________________
JERUSALEM (AP) - In a precedent-setting decision, an Israeli court has ruled that a dead soldier's family can use his sperm to impregnate a woman he never met.
Keivan Cohen, 20, was shot dead in 2002 by a Palestinian sniper in the Gaza Strip. He was single and left no will. But at the urging of his parents, a sample of his sperm was taken two hours after his death and has been stored in a hospital since.
When the family tried to gain access to the sperm, however, the hospital refused on grounds that only a spouse could make such a request.
Arguing that their son yearned to raise a family, his parents challenged that decision in court. On Jan. 15, after a four-year legal battle, a Tel Aviv court granted the family's wish and ruled that the sperm could be injected into a woman selected by Cohen's family.
The ruling also ordered the Ministry of Interior to register any children born as a result of the insemination as children of the deceased.
"On the one hand I'm terribly sad that I don't have my boy; it's a terrible loss," Rachel Cohen said in an interview in Monday's Chicago Tribune. "But I'm also happy that I succeeded in carrying out my son's will."
Cohen did not return phone calls from The Associated Press.
Irit Rosenblum, a family rights advocate who represented the Cohen family, said the ruling was significant because it set a precedent for those seeking to continue bloodlines after death.
At the trial, Rosenblum presented testimony, including video recordings, in which Cohen expressed his desire to have children.
"He always said he wanted children," she told The Associated Press. "But there were no regulations in the law that deals with using sperm from dead people."
Rosenblum said soldiers increasingly have been leaving sperm samples, or explicit instructions on post-mortem extraction, before heading to battle.
She said she knew of more than 100 cases of Israeli soldiers who, before last summer's war with Lebanese guerrillas, asked to have their sperm saved if they were killed. American soldiers have also begun donating sperm before heading to Iraq, she said.
"I think it is a human revolution," Rosenblum said. "Ten years ago, who would believe that a human being can continue after he has died. I think it is great for humanity."
Rosenblum said the woman who is to act as surrogate mother has requested to remain anonymous.
"She's like family to us," Rachel Cohen told the Tribune. "Cruel and good fate brought us together."
_______________________________________________________________________
Sunday, 14 January 2007
Mike Buday isn't married to his last name. In fact, he and his fiancee decided before they wed that he would take hers. But Buday was stunned to learn that he couldn't simply become Mike Bijon when they married in 2005.
As in most other states, that would require some bureaucratic paperwork well beyond what a woman must go through to change her name when marrying. Instead of completing the expensive, time-consuming process, Buday and his wife, Diana Bijon, enlisted the American Civil Liberties Union and filed a discrimination lawsuit against the state of California. They claim the difficulty faced by a husband seeking to change his name violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
"Diana and I feel strongly about gender equality for both men and women," Buday said. "I think the most important thing in all of this is to bring it to a new level of awareness."
Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU in Southern California, said it is the first federal lawsuit of its kind in the country. "It's the perfect marriage application for the 17th century," Rosenbaum said. "It belongs in the same trash can as dowries."
Only six states - Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York and North Dakota - have statutes establishing equal name-change processes for men and women when they marry. In California and other states, men cannot choose a different last name while filing a marriage license.
In California, a man who wants to take his wife's name must file a petition, pay more than $300, place a public notice for weeks in a local newspaper and then appear before a judge.
Because of Buday's case, a California state lawmaker has introduced a bill to put a space on the marriage license for either spouse to change names.
The Census Bureau does not keep figures on how many U.S. men are taking their brides' names. But clearly it happening more and more. Milwaukee County, Wis., Clerk Mark Ryan estimated that one in every 100 grooms there now takes the name of his wife.
Bijon, 28, approached Buday about the idea when they were dating. She had no brothers but wanted to prolong the family name. Buday, a 29-year-old developer of interactive advertising, was estranged from his own father and was not attached to his own last name.
"I knew immediately it was pretty important to her or else she wouldn't have brought it up," Buday said.
At one point, the couple tried the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a name change. But Buday said he was told by a woman behind the counter: "Men just don't do that type of thing."
Couples who want to hyphenate or combine their names also must endure the lengthy court procedures in California. One of the more notable examples was Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who went to court to fuse his last name, Villar, with his wife's, Raigosa, when they married in 1987.
Laws giving women an easy choice of names were largely a byproduct of the feminist movement. A 2004 Harvard University study found that the number of college-educated women who kept their surnames upon marriage rose from about 3 percent in 1975 to nearly 20 percent in 2001.
_______________________________________________________________________
Wednesday, 10 January 2007
These days men don't need to hang around their exes' homes to torment them - all they need to do is log on.
When Karen Allison ended her marriage she knew her husband wouldn't let her go quietly. "He had been abusive," she says, "so I expected him to punish me for leaving." She was right. Last November, Darlington magistrates court heard evidence of a two-year campaign of harassment Thomas Welsh had directed at Allison since their split. Immediately after ending their relationship, she had been bombarded with sexually explicit text messages and photographs on her mobile phone. Worse was to come. She soon discovered that her details had been posted on a website aimed at cross-dressers and sado-masochists, where she had been advertised as being "available for sexual services". "It was horrific," she says. "I was getting all these disgusting emails and phone calls."
The court fined Welsh, imposed an indefinite restraining order banning him from going within 100 yards of Allison and also banned him from putting her details on the internet.
In the most recent British Crime Survey, published last summer, 8% of women and 6% of men said they had been stalked within the previous year. And 20% of all women are stalked at some stage of their lives. In the case of men stalking women, the harassment usually starts when a woman ends an abusive relationship or rejects the sexual advances of a man prone to violence and jealousy. According to research carried out at Leicester University, more than 200 women leave the UK each year because a stalker has made their lives unbearable; the average length of time that a woman is stalked is seven and a half years.
Cyber-stalking - the use of technology such as the internet and mobile phone - to track victims has increased sharply in the past few years. Many of the offenders are men who are disgruntled and angry at being rejected by their partners. Rather than creeping around outside the victim's home, or following her to work, though, some of these men, as Allison found, post details of their victim on websites containing sexually explicit material.
Others email pornographic photographs and videos of the victim (often taken without her knowledge or consent) to family members and work colleagues.
Welsh, who runs a transvestite mail-order and cross-dressing service for men, used his personal website to post Allison's details. Other cyber-stalkers sign their victims up directly to public sites where people advertise for casual sex, often writing their victim's profile as if she is available for all manner of sexual activity with strangers.
Such men, according to Hamish Brown, a former police officer and an expert on stalking and harassment, fit the profile of the "obsessional stalker" - an ex-partner who refuses to believe that a relationship is over. "These men refuse to give up, however clearly the victim tells him she doesn't want to know. He has this attitude of, 'If I can't have her, no one will'," says Brown.
When Sophie Green started getting emails from her ex-partner, Simon Ward, saying things such as, "Oh, you saw so-and-so and went to that bar at that time, did you?", she realised he was tracking her movements through information she had written on her personal blog. "There was always an implicit threat that he would track me down so I stopped blogging, which I really resented." Green began to receive sexually explicit emails from Ward, often containing pornographic photographs. "I found them really disturbing and felt sexually violated, which is presumably what he wanted, because I would not have sex with him any more," she says.
"Simon knew I had been raped when I was 13, although he insisted on calling it 'surprise sex'. He discovered my email address and password and then would subscribe me to really violent rape sites."
Green changed her personal email address, but Ward soon discovered her work one, and began sending her pornography and threats on a regular basis.
When sexually explicit emails are sent to a victim's workplace, they risk humiliation and even losing their jobs. Jane Thompson split from her boyfriend of only three weeks, "because I felt smothered by him". One morning soon after, when she arrived at work, a colleague asked her if she had emailed her from home over the weekend. It turned out that her ex-boyfriend had sent Thompson's colleague "a folder with about 10 photos of us both having sex", she says, "and at that moment I wanted to die."
Thompson's ex had used a method common to cyber-stalkers - tracing their victim's email address and sending messages from that address containing offensive, pornographic and even libellous material.
According to research by an expert on stalking, Dr Lorraine Sheridan of Leicester University, half of all victims are now harassed via the internet. And despite the image of the stalker as a creepy loner, there is a growing online community to help and support the cyber-stalker's efforts. So-called "revenge" websites, such as Avengers Den and Get Revenge on Your Ex, are becoming more popular, says Sheridan.
I spent an hour surfing such sites and what I found was profoundly disturbing. One site advertised itself as being able to assist those wishing to experience "the pure, unadulterated satisfaction you get from totally crushing your ex's self-esteem and annihilating their reputation". Another offered a service called "fake SMS", where a message can be sent "to your ex" which appears to come from someone else. One satisfied customer wrote that, "I sent the bitch a message saying she is a dirty slut (etc etc) and made it come from her mum's boyfriend!!!"
One man had sent his ex a text message saying, "I know I said you were the best sex ever, but I lied - it was the drugs talking and I needed them to ---- you", and programmed it to repeat on the hour, as well as play down her phone answering service on her landline.
These sites are not specifically targeted at men wanting to exact revenge on women (there are women who post on such sites, often describing how they sent advertisements for Viagra, or penile enlargement operations) and there are no figures to give a breakdown on the gender of users. But trawling through them, the majority of those leaving posts seem to be men.
"Whether the stalker harasses his victim by letter, in person or by email is irrelevant," says Brown. "But victims of cyber-stalking have often told me they get terrified of the 'invisible' stalker who is hiding in cyberspace, because he could be anyone and everywhere."
One woman who responded to a request I posted on an anti-stalking website told me that her ex-husband posted her name and address on a website used to meet sexual partners, posing as her, and offering "group sex with her". "It was really scary," she tells me in an email, "because when I read the posting it said I like to act out rape fantasies, so men in twos and threes should break into the house, have sex with me and ignore my screams of terror, as that is all part of the game."
The good news is that cyber-stalkers are more likely to be caught than others, because there is usually a trail of evidence from computers and mobile phones. However, stalkers are usually determined, and often put time and effort into becoming technical experts.
"I had no idea that what he was doing was illegal," says Green. "The police need to make it clear, and get the message out to women that sending malicious communications - whether by hand, post or computer - is a crime."
The effects on victims of stalking do not go away when the stalker finally does. "It will take me years to get over what he did and to feel safe again," says Allison. "I just wish something had been done to stop him before he almost ruined my life"
