Public Service Announcement: No To Rape Petition Ending!

Following our badly drawn friend's post on seeking immediate help for rape, I'm reminded to make a belated public service announcement.

Firstly, on behalf of all the friends on the farm, I would like to give thanks to the good people at No To Rape for both their efforts in forwarding the important cause of recognising marital rape, and giving us a blog mention.

We on the farm are very honoured to be able to forward conversations on rape culture extant in Singapore--a phenomenon that has really caught us by surprise and disturbed us when it finally reared its unabashedly ugly, misogynistic and abhorrent head since the campaign caught the attention of the Singapore blogosphere.

Secondly, No To Rape will end its petition come 30 November 2009, Monday. That's just three days left for us to spread the message! Please visit the site and sign the petition if you haven't already. (Make sure your friends, family and pets have done it too!)

I reproduce all three of their advertisement videos:





SIGN PETITION!

What to do if you're raped in Singapore.

ETA 23 July 2011: We regret to inform that Police Posts at the hospitals have been removed (cf. Straits Times, 15 July 2011, "All 6 hospital police posts closed down", Mavis Toh).
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In this Porkchop's continued badly drawn efforts to bring you information you might need in case of emergency, I'm going to provide some porcine-weight, choi-ke-lei resources on seeking help in the event of rape or sexual assault, for all women and girls in Singapore.

Rape and sexual assault victims, I think, mostly don't think or know that they're going to be victimised like that. So it can happen to anyone.

A-N-Y-O-N-E!

I'll begin by first revisiting some knowledge shared by Ms Braema Mathi of the estimable Marauh in one of the videos by the No To Rape people, which strangely hasn't seen much circulation from the campaign:

It is important... to be timely and to keep evidence. Don't immediately have a bath. The natural instinct is to scrub yourself clean. Try and call a friend quickly, go to the doctor. Best to go to an emergency unit, because if you go to a GP, from a GP again you have to go to an emergency department.

Once you enter the hospital system, it is very good. The emergency doctors been trained. most hospital you will notice have a little police post [Ed: Please see update above] there... The link will be made. We have a rape investigation squad within the police force. And you'll find that the link will go back to the investigation squad and a lady will come up.

1) Kandang Kerbau (KK) Women's and Children's Hospital. Go To KKH immediately if you can.

Singapore's KKH specialises in WOMEN'S and children's health and support. A cursory search of their website reveals that they boost an "emergency obstetric & gynaecological consultations at KK Hospital's Women's 24-Hour Clinic". They also have a Medical Social Work that offers crisis intervention to "deal with trauma cases such as sexual assault, spousal violence, child abuse and attempted suicide".

Already, a lot of hospitals refer patients to KKH for when they need expert help in dealing with women health issues, so it is this Porkchop's conjecture that KKH will be the best place to seek help, though any emergency ward near would be just as good.

2) Get to the hospital! The point is to get into the hospital system quickly, so that the victim can quickly get the support and help she needs.

3A) Declare, Disease and Document. Declare the assault, check for disease and document all injuries.

In order for the medical professionals and social services to help effectively, victims are going to need to trust the system. It's going to be tough getting this to come out, but learn now that victims must tell the medical professionals what happened in no uncertain terms; even professionals need reminding since they don't receive rape victims every day. Declare the assault, demand tests for sexually transmitted diseases, and request that all your injuries and tests be documented so that evidence is kept as well.

3B) Emergency Contraceptive. EC, also known as the morning-after pill.

Our commenter kindly reminds us EC should be on the table. (We're not sure if these are offered to victims, but they are inexpensive and quite reliable if administered within a 72 hour post-incident window. Obviously, the sooner the better. [Hattip anonymous reader!]

Again, this is a very difficult process to undertake after suffering the trauma of assault, so I highly recommend thinking about the next idea.

4) Find The Friend. Establish some informed support points.

A radical idea for all my female hairless apes earth inhabitants, talk to one or two close friends or family members about emergency situations. Make a pact, who will help you, what must be done (e.g. where to seek help, 'Declare, Disease and Document', etc) and entrust each other to provide the immediate support you need if something bad happens. Under these dire circumstances, it might be better to depend on The Friend to take the necessary steps for you.

Increasingly we make deals with spouses and friends about death and incapacitation arrangements, so consider this another contingency.

5) Marital Rape. Report your having been assaulted anyway!

Even if marital rape is still not a fucking crime in Singapore, the medical experts and police can and probably will collect all the evidence and statements they need so that they may find other ways to nail the perpetrator. Though the obvious barrier will be actually mustering the power to reveal the information first.

6) Confidentiality. Your information will be kept confidential.

Medical and law enforcement agents are bound by a duty of confidentiality, so trust that what you tell them will be kept absolutely confidential.

+++

KK Hospital Women's and Children's Hospital
100 Bukit Timah Road
Main Line (24-hrs) - (65) 6293 4044

+++
Social Service for Violence

If you're experiencing family/ spousal violence of any sorts and need assistance, please contact these people:

Centre for Promoting Alternatives to Violence (PAVe)

Blk 211 Ang Mo Kio Ave 3 #01-1446 Singapore 560211

Operating Hours:
Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays & Fridays: 9.00am - 6.00pm
Wednesdays: 9.00am - 9.30pm (6.30pm - 9.30pm by appointment only)
Saturdays, Sundays & Public Holidays: Closed

Tel : 6555 0390
Email : admin@pavecentre.org.sg

+ OR +

Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE)

Block 5 Dover Crescent #01-22, Singapore 130005

Tel : 6779 7137
Helpline : 1800-774-5935 (Mon-Fri, 1500hrs to 2130hrs)
Email : helpline@aware.org.sg

+++
Personal Protection Orders (PPO)

You can take out a PPO at the Magistrate Court or at one of the other 4 link centres. Learn more about taking out the PPO. I can't quite figure out the fee system, except that it's $1 for each summon issuance, but if I recall correctly, Minister of Law, Associate Professor Ho Peng Kee, claimed that it should be about 8 dollars to file a PPO.

From the website:

"If you have any police or medical reports, you should bring these with you. However, you do not need to have copies of such reports to file an application for a personal protection order."

"The Protection Order Services unit will arrange for the personal service of the summons on the Respondent by a Court process server at the address provided by you in your Magistrate’s Complaint."

+++

Be kind, pass this along to a friend or family member, and be well.

No worries there, my friend

In the Straits Times Forum, Marcus Foo worries that "'consent' [will] trump what society perceives as morally bad behaviour":

I REFER to Mr Alvin Chen's letter last Monday, 'Give courts more sentencing discretion'. This was in response to Mr Vikram Ranjan Ramasamy's letter, 'Decriminalise consensual underage sex' (Nov 13).

Allowing 'consent' to trump what society perceives as morally bad behaviour is to undermine society's right to enforce its moral determinations. This was an issue that Lord Patrick Devlin addressed his mind to in his essay, The Enforcement Of Morals.

He speaks, of course, of the current hot topic of kiddies bonking (on which see also Badly Drawn Pig and my all-important Magical reminder to adults, "Don't fuck children.")

Marcus is bothered by the possibility that our society prizes sexual consent too highly, to the extent that morally dubious practices will be sanctified in its name.

But he really needn't fret. A large strand of Singaporean society fails entirely to grasp the idea that the flesh of the Magical Chicken is to be directed by the will of the Magical Chicken alone. This incomprehension expresses itself not only in Marcus Foo's inability to describe the puzzling and unreal concept of "consent" without quotation marks, but also in our Penal Code.

Mostly the Penal Code quite sensibly tells adults not to fuck children, but it makes some exceptions to this, which the No To Rape blog lays out in lawyerspeak with nifty bolding:

(1) Section 376A(4), which grants immunity from this offence when a girl under the age of 16 says “yes” to sex with her husband.

(2) Section 376A(5), which grants immunity from this offence, even in situations where a 13-, 14- or 15-year-old girl has said “no” to her husband.

Get that? It's okay to fuck your 13 year old wife with consent. It's also okay to fuck your 13 year old wife without consent. In other words, consent means fuck-all.

Far from consent "trumping" morally bad behaviour, what we see here is the almighty and unquestionable right of the husbandly penis to access the wifely vagina trumping any idea of consent. A mere weeping girl-child won't stop a man from having his due.

So Marcus Foo needn't worry that bodily autonomy is anywhere but in its rightful, subordinate place in Singapore.

What he really should worry about is his own tendency to write torturously overlong sentences like this:

Alternatively, if one can show that as a matter of statistical probability, sexual activity at this age results in an aversion to deepening the commitment of a relationship via the institution of marriage, or that it affects an individual's psyche in the perception of the value of commitment, then in so far as the institution of marriage or the value of commitment is regarded as a moral good that society embraces, one could also find oneself somewhat persuaded that the law should remain.

Not only do I vigorously withhold my consent from this painful contortion of the English language, I also deem it morally bad.

"A response to atrocity denied"

In her essay Women's Status, Men's States, Catharine MacKinnon writes about human rights as "a response to an atrocity denied".

She could very easily have been writing about discussions of marital rape in Singapore. I've Magically added bold bits. Watch out, it's a lot of text.

Before atrocities are recognized as such, they are authoritatively regarded as either too extraordinary to be believable or too ordinary to be atrocious. If the events are considered socially unusual, the fact that they happened is denied in specific instances; if they are regarded as usual, the fact that they are violating is denied: if it's happening, it's not so bad, and if it's really bad, it isn't happening. The given status of a certain people is seen as tautologous with, even justified by, the deprivations of their human rights. Law often collaborates by making an unusual or extreme form of a common violation illegal, so that what is illegal almost never happens, yet the law appears to stand against the violation. Victims are thereby ideologically rendered appropriate to their treatment, the unequal treatment serving to confirm their ontological status as lesser humans. When nothing is done, the treatment, and social status accordingly, confirm and create who one is. Legally, one is less than human when one's violations do not violate the human rights that are recognized. Acts common in human experience, such as rape in war and rape in peace, have been beneath serious notice because they are so familiar, while acts that are uncommon, like the Nazi's industrial murder and the Serbs' industrial rape, have been beyond belief. While disbelief and associated impunity reign, the violated are--systematically and effectively speaking--rendered not fully human legally or socially. When and where this denial is overcome the rights against the extreme and the normal are recognized, the treatment is defined as inhuman and the victims human. Women are in the midst of this process.

Did you catch all that? Familiar, isn't it? Many opponents of No To Rape argue:

All men regularly fuck their wives without consent (it's the only way sex could happen, with those selfish bitches), so it's no big deal - how dare the state intrude in the bedroom! ("if it's happening, it's not so bad")

Only rape with further accompanying violence counts as rape, and that is both vanishingly rare and already comprehensively dealt with; ("if it's really bad, it's not happening")

The law already acts against all those rapes where women employed telepathic powers and their infinite legal savvy to get a protection order prior to the rape happening. ("Law [...] collaborates by making an unusual or extreme form of a common violation illegal")

The reason why they make these arguments is that in their view there is no need for the law to treat the rape of women as the punishable violation of human beings. In their view, women are not fully human. Moreover, they make the arguments specifically in order to maintain a law which prevents women from obtaining fully human status in society.

This is why many of them bring up Geylang at every conceivable opportunity. Because that goes to the interest of an actual human being in the equation, i.e. a man. What's really important here, and needs protection, is the male right to ejaculate, whenever he chooses, into a vagina. That the vagina happens, typically, to be attached to a woman, with all sorts of troublesome notions about wishing to control her own body, is perceived by them as unfortunate and inconvenient. And they want the law to continue to agree.

"Let's get heard".

BREAKING NEWS: No To Rape has a new video!



This badly drawn, gay male unfeminist pig has much disagreement to express:

No to "balanced" arguments suggesting that oppression has validity,
No to believing that women's bodies are not their personal domains to control;
No to always prioritising someone else's life (born or otherwise) before a woman's choice,
No to assuming that the homosex "bottom" role, the receiving end of The Glorious Gherkin, makes one an inferior;
No to thinking that women who are on the receiving end of The Glorious Gherkin are inferior,
No to Penal Code Section 377A,
No to censoring positive LGBTQ material in our local media and education,
No to pretending that the media has no role in moulding minds;
No to pretending that the law cannot protect the interests of the minority despite popular dis(belief);
No to pretending that LGBTQ rights have nothing to do with human rights,
No to arguing that migrant labour and domestic workers Voluntarily choose to work in drastic conditions;
No to always deferring our responsibilities to these migrant workers to someone else,
No to accepting "traditional family values" as the source of all good,
No to the political disempowerment encouraged in Singaporeans,
No to blaming Singlish on bad English;
No to believing the myth that we live in a post-feminist society,
No to using "gay" as a synonym for "stupid/ludicrous",
No to everyday racism that we think is OK since 'no one is hurt',
No to always waiting for someone else to solve our social issues;
No to accepting that 'bread and butter" should always be primed and protected first;
No to ignoring that a lot of these social issues eventually affect your "bread and butter",
No to thinking that meritocracy precludes compassion and empathy.

(This gay male unfeminist pig is unsure if he should be putting this up, because the "Notorapers" haven't done anything at their website, nor have they sent any mailer. But since it's available, I guess it's fair game? Besides, the campaign to repeal Singapore's marital rape immunity told TOC that they'll be releasing a new flick, so I guess they're expecting people to look out for it. Anyway, look at the right side for our email, and I'll remove it.)

Your Underlying Assumptions are Showing - I Don't Like Them

Via the No to Rape blog comes this frankly appalling article from The New Paper.
What the article is implying is that when it comes to the issue of marital rape, some consideration has to be given to those who are sex addicts and therefore are unable to restrain themselves. The article reports (if that is a word one can use in when referencing the particular brand of journalism The New Paper is known for) on Lili, a woman who was manipulated back into a marriage with a man she had fallen out of love with like this:

When she left the marital home, he called her repeatedly to cajole her to return home.
“He said he wanted me to come home to look after the children.
I told him that I would come home only if we had no more relations as husband and wife. He said okay,” she said.

Seriously. “Cajole”? How about emotional blackmail? How about using the children as ransom? How about not something any decent human being would do? Cajoling is something you do to get a cat you’ve never met before to come to you to receive some pets. Not something you do to another human being you’ve hurt enough that they’ve made the decision to leave their family. Have we got that right? Thanks. Just had to get that out of the way.

Of course once she returned, he raped her repeatedly. The rest of the article is a discussion of people who are sex addicts, treatments and diagnoses. My question is, if this article is intended to raise awareness of sex addiction, why set it against the backdrop of marital rape, why call the frigging article “Evil Hubby or Sex Addict”? First off, that’s just sloppy writing. Second, the dichotomy is irrelevant in the case of marital rape. Third, calling rapists (even marital rapists) evil doesn’t help the dialogue surrounding the perception of rape as it makes it something “decent” people don’t do. In this rape culture that we live in, rape is committed not by people who are “evil” implying obvious malicious intent, but rather by people who accept the idea that as men, they are entitled to sex from the women they are with – who by virtue of being women are now obliged to service them in exchange for the attention they receive. Until that idea is firmly centred in the public discourse, more substantial discussion cannot proceed (for more examples the fallout wrought by this kind of flawed thinking, see the Magical Chicken’s earlier headdesk).

The main issue I have with the spurious article is the question of the criminality of marital rape in instances where the perpetrator is a sex addict. Sure it was never mentioned outright in the article, but if you open an article describing sex addiction in a rather sympathetic light with a story of an abused wife (and then casting doubt on her judgement with a few rhetorical questions at the close of her story) then what you’re basically saying (given the backdrop of the rather public No To Rape campaign) is that you really shouldn’t criminalize marital rape because there may be sex addicts.

We live in a country where the death penalty is meted out for possessing a week’s supply of hard drugs. Maybe we shouldn’t, because of drug addiction. (As an aside: I do oppose the harsh penalties the Singapore courts deal out for drug offenses, and the death penalty in general, but that’s a whole other post.) You know what is illegal in most countries in the world? Theft. But there are kleptomaniacs out there! Maybe we should stop prosecuting thieves. I am not making these arguments to minimize drug addicts or kleptomaniacs or even sex addicts. These are populations with issues that require professional intervention and will have more difficulty operating in this world whose gatekeepers (although, anthropomorphising the kyriarchy does feed into some misconceptions that hamper the dialogue around oppression, for more see this post from the now dead ProcrastinatioNation) fiercely police the boundaries of what is acceptable and who wields power. That being said, the actions committed by any member of those populations as a result of their condition cause hurt and harm to real people, some more so than others. That cannot be waved away and it isn’t waved away for the arguably lesser crimes of drug abuse and petty theft.

The bottom line is: Marital rape is inexcusable. Regardless of your personal addictions or your sympathies toward addicts (who are not undeserving of those sympathies, mind), forcing another, autonomous human being to relinquish control and ownership of their own bodies is wrong. That’s all there is to it and it’s a simple concept. To oppose the No To Rape campaign is to deny that women are autonomous human beings with a right to the bodies they inhabit and that’s what we need to be focusing on. Too long has the discussion of rape given rapists the benefit of the doubt. Let’s start talking about getting rapists to understand that rape is never acceptable. To see what flipping the dialogue looks like, go here.

I don't think you've tested that

Few things shock me. I mean, think about it: I'm a blogging Chicken which is also Magical. I'm so implausible that I'm probably imaginary. So nothing mere humans come up with should surprise me anymore.

Nevertheless, some of the gems on this thread at Temasek Review gave me pause. The No To Rape campaign quite sensibly argues that being married shouldn't legitimise rape, and cites one particular case:

Ten years ago, in the case of PP v N, a man tied up his wife, gagged her, slapped her, and forced her to have sex with him. No charges could be brought for rape, only for much lesser offences. The law has been tweaked slightly since, but today the outcome would be the same.

Buried amongst the epic fail in the comments is this contribution from one 'btan':

The case of the husband tying up and beating the wife, don’t you think that the beating is worse than the sex part??

Inquiring minds wish to know: has 'btan' tested this proposition? Has 'btan' ever been tied up and slapped? Has 'btan' ever been raped? Has 'btan' surveyed a large sample of women - or even a small one - to ask them about their preferences as between (a) being tied up and slapped and (b) having a penis repeatedly inserted into their vagina against their wishes, and found an overwhelming response in favour of (b)?

Heck, while we're at it, has 'btan' consulted a sample of men, and discovered that they would choose having a penis inserted into them against their wishes over being tied up and slapped?

Or is it possible that 'btan' is quite simply making shit up so as to restate an unsupported prejudice: namely that rape isn't that bad because having penises put in them is what women are for?

A thought which makes even this hardened Chicken sick to her Magical core.

Too much

Sometimes I'm told that women "have" "too much" gender equality these days. This is confusing. My bird-brained instinct is to think that either there is gender equality in society, or there isn't. If there isn't, then nobody "has" it; and if there is, then - it being, you know, "equality" and all - women and men "have" it to the same degree.

But things became clear when I considered a shocking example: the oppressive power of the family-busting feminist state is so immense, I hear, that you can't even hit your wife anymore.

Unless, that is, she comes back home late, cares about her job, wears a short skirt, or doesn't wait until the third (or fourth, or fifth) incident to complain about being beaten. In those cases, one member of the police told Associate Professor Narayanan Ganapathy of NUS, we might cut you a little slack. Confronted with a woman who says, "My husband hit me", officers might take into consideration:

whether she was wearing a short skirt, trying to flirt or look ‘‘bitchy’’, like want to fuck around, comes back home late, cannot be bothered about the house or her family, just want to make money, too career-minded – I tell you this is the cause of much violence in the house. . . this type of women will even sleep around or fuck around with their male colleagues to get to places. . . Then there is another type of woman, one who takes care of the family, comes back home early after work to look after her children and husband, cooks for the family, keeps the family and house in order, devoted to her husband, honest, very careful about her behaviour, doesn’t want to make a mountain out of a mole even when the husband sometimes whack her a bit. . . First type of women call the police, I tell my men, just show your face, second type, I will be a bit more interested. . . sometimes, there have been cases where I personally talk to the husband to take care of his wife and family because the wife is so good to him already. . .

- Ganapathy, Narayanan (2002) 'Rethinking the Problem of Policing Marital Violence: A Singapore Perspective', Policing and Society, 12:3, 173 — 190

So the meaning of "too much" gender equality is that authorities have to make any effort to respond to wife-beating at all. That's how extreme things have become: officers might have to "show [their] face" and some radical feminist zealots in the police force even nobly take it upon themselves to tell a violent man, "Hey, that's not very nice."

Who knows how far it will go in the future? In some perverted world, maybe they'll have to treat punching your wife (or raping her) like an actual crime which you investigate and prosecute and everything - even if she's a career-minded slut who didn't vacuum the flat that morning. Maybe all police officers will be told, as part of compulsory training, that protecting people from violence is their job, which they have to do regardless of any asinine gender stereotypes they hold.

What a frightening prospect.

"I do/n't."

Before I forget, please watch this, then support the No To Rape campaign against Singapore's marital rape immunity by signing the online petition.



(via Badly Drawn Pig.)