Posts tagged abuse

kamidoodles:

kamidoodles:

keepjsafe:

I have a good friend, J, who is finally leaving her husband after years of mental and emotional abuse and manipulation. Her friends and family are fully on board with this, luckily for her, but her ex, B, is not.

She’s tired, scared, and needs to get away from him. B, the ex-husband, has broken into her house, stolen numbers from her phone, and called them to threaten people. He’s best described as a loose cannon with a hair trigger, and he’s already successfully wormed his way back into J’s head before with emotional manipulation; they’ve been together for seven years already. We (her friends) want to help her get free at last.

J is worried for her own safety. She and her son (age 4) are moving to an undisclosed location, but they need money to get plane tickets, hotel rooms, and to pay for food and other necessities in the monetary struggles ahead while the legal proceedings unfold. Some funds will also be necessary to go through the divorce process, since he isn’t being fully cooperative with it.

I know it’s a tall order and you might not be in a position to contribute right now, but we’ve set a fundraising goal of $1,000. The more we raise, the more chance we have of keeping J and her son safe from B. Even a couple of dollars will help us reach this goal.

Click here to contribute via Paypal!

If you can’t afford to contribute financially, if you can reblog this post and signal boost, I will be so thankful. Donations are being gathered by a good friend of hers, since she has unreliable internet access at the moment.

If there’s enough interest, I’d love to set up a fundraiser with art/fanfic/etc auctions and that sort of thing.

Please help J out. We love her and we want to keep her safe. If you have any questions, suggestions, or information that could help, feel free to askbox message me.

Hey followers. Help & Signal Boost, please? I know J personally, and this would really, really help her out. If you can’t donate, a signal boost would be really appreciated. This guy is an enormous jerkwad, to put it mildly, and J’s already been through a lot of shit with him.

Thanks, guys. <3 

Reblogging again in case some of you missed it. J’s such an awesome person, anything you could do - even if it’s just a few dollars or a reblog so maybe someone else that can help will see this - would be amazing.

We all talk about social justice and how we need to make things safe for victims of abuse to confront their abusers legally and be able to start their lives anew - here is our chance to do something, ANYTHING, to put our words into action.

Reblogging is all I can afford to do, but if I reblog this and maybe some of my followers do, the right people could see it.

(Source: , via mooglets)

atheismfuckyeah:

Once again Republicans are accusing the Obama administration of religious discrimination because they believe “freedom of religion” means that they should have the freedom to impose their religious beliefs on every American. Sadly this time they’re toying with the health of one of the most vulnerable groups imaginable: the victims of human trafficking.

The Washington Post reports that in September, the Department of Health and Human Services denied a grant to U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has been providing services to human trafficking victims nationwide since 2006. Though the organization got high marks from an independent review board, it refuses to refer women for contraceptives or abortion, so HHS officials decided to give the money to three groups that do. Now more than 30 Republican lawmakers have sent letters to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius complaining that the move was unfair and possibly discriminatory.

Rep. Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey says, “We’re talking about a Catholic group with a superior track record that was pushed aside to promote the abortion agenda.” Women shouldn’t be denied any health information (after all, Republicans are all about “informed consent”), but in an attempt to rile up pro-lifers, Smith conveniently forgot to mention the Catholic organization’s most egregious act. It won’t even provide information about where one can obtain birth control, though most Americans (and Catholics) are in favor of using contraception.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops isn’t legally obligated to provide these services or refer people to other family planning organizations, but it can’t demand that the government provide grants for a program that’s lacking basic features. Richard Sorian, HHS’s assistant secretary for public affairs, says:

“[The agency is] fully confident that the organizations best suited to provide comprehensive case management to victims of trafficking were awarded the grants for these services … The health and ability of these victims to retake control over their own lives is our sole concern in awarding these grants.”

Since the mid-’90s, Catholic groups have received more than $800 million in funding for social services from HHS. While Republicans can only see the issue as part of the neverending political battle over abortion, this isn’t a plot by HHS officials to score a victory for President Obama’s alleged fetus-killing campaign. Pro-life lawmakers may be confused because they aren’t all that interested in women making their own health decisions, but government officials are mainly trying to do what’s in the best interest of women who’ve been horribly victimized.

From Jezebel

I have no words to describe what I am feeling.

So I shall post this comment posted on the article: 

Any group that truly believes that it is acceptable to deny contraceptives, abortion access, or information about either of the above to victims of horrible amounts of sexual abuse has absolutely NO moral authority. 

~Mooglets

I bolded for emphasis.

Because yeah.

The Catholic Church is pretty disgusting.

mooglets:

Maybe one day, in the pitiless light of hindsight, it will become clear why a woman’s false statements about her immigration status, made years ago, were deemed more pertinent to an accusation of attempted rape than the vaginal bruising she allegedly incurred during the encounter itself.

To be fair, it was not just the fact that Nafissatou Diallo made false claims about her background that undermined her credibility to the point that on Monday the Manhattan district attorney decided to tell the judge to drop the charges Diallo made against Dominique Strauss-Kahn. There were other factors, and not just those proffered by Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein, who argued – wrongly – that economists don’t commit sex crimes, and, of course, friend to all famous male victims of the American justice system, Bernard-Henri Lévy. He insisted – also wrongly – that “grand hotels” always send in “a cleaning brigade”.

Diallo has been shown to have told lies in her life, certainly. None of these lies, though, had anything to do with her version of what happened in room 2806 in the Sofitel, a version that has been backed up by forensic evidence.

First, her lie about her immigration status was that she had been – gotcha! – gang raped. But the reason she lied then was that she thought it would help her gain political asylum. Her motivation for doing so now is decidedly less clear. The much- repeated story about her telling a friend on the phone that she was planning to bilkStrauss-Kahn has since been rubbished by her lawyer as a poor translation, and anyway, her actions since suggest she is the world’s worst blackmailer. When she waived her right to anonymity, she not only gave the defence more material to mine for inconsistencies but gained no money and risked – heck, guaranteed – damaging her personal reputation and employment prospects for life. Moreover, she sure won’t be able to try that ol’ rape accusation trick on any other unsuspecting man. She did not think this plan through.

Her recall (under great emotional stress, whether she was lying or not) of the chronology of what happened precisely after the alleged assault altered slightly and that was offered up as further proof of her unreliability and, as far as I know, there is no definitive guide to how anyone behaves after a sexual assault.

A French attorney told the Guardian on Monday that “It’s not that he [the DA] doesn’t believe her, it’s that he doesn’t believe her to be a good victim.” A woman who gets intoxicated can be raped. Prostitutes can be raped. And a poor woman who has told lies can be raped. In fact, it is often the women who “don’t make good victims” who are most at risk because they are the most vulnerable, and it is these women who are least likely to be listened to.

Diallo’s past proved to be more incriminating than Strauss-Kahn’s, a man with an infamously predatory reputation towards women, and who has since been accused of another sexual assault by a French writer. In an interview with the Swiss magazine L’illustré, a former mistress of Strauss-Kahn said that Diallo’s description of how he grabbed her “encouraged me to believe this woman”. But all too often in rape cases, the principle of presumption of innocence for the accused tips into assumption of guilt for the accuser.

Rape accusations – like abortions, or becoming a single mother – are not something most women do for a lark, squeezing them in between mani-pedis and Pilates or, in the case of Diallo, cleaning another man’s toilet. That Diallo lied about a rape in order to gain asylum in America where she has since been so humiliated by a “sexual encounter” is just one of the bitter ironies here.

Despite the efforts of the DA and Strauss-Kahn’s defence team, a trial most certainly did happen: it just happened to be a trial of the accuser rather than the accused. Strauss-Khan has denied the allegations, and what occurred in room 2806 will never be known. What has been proved, on an international scale, is that only women who have led lives as sheltered as Rapunzel and have memory recall as robotic as computers are capable of being raped. The rest are money- grabbing sluts with vaginal bruising.

From The Guardian

The majority of the comments on this article go a long way to showing that women have a fucking lot to deal with in rape cases. Jesus christ, some of these people…