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Archives > Volume 7 Issue 45 - August 17, 2009 Clinton, Ban call for end to rape as weapon of war, "like a grenade or a gun"...
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was visibly moved by firsthand evidence of the brutality of war in eastern Congo, delivering an impassioned appeal for action to end to rampant sexual violence that she called "evil in its basest form." MSNBC News story here
Clinton announced a new package of $17 million in American aid to respond to an epidemic of rape and other sexual crimes directed mainly at women and girls by government troops and rebel groups fighting in the region. Her offer came after a harrowing meeting with victims of violent gang rapes in a crowded refugee camp on the outskirts of Goma where 18,000 men, women and children have sought shelter from revenge attacks raging in the countryside. "The atrocities that these women have suffered, and that stand for the atrocities that so many have suffered, distill evil into its basest form," Clinton said, her voice breaking with emotion. "In the face of such evil, people of good will everywhere must respond." "We say to the world that those who attack civilian populations with systematic rape are guilty of crimes against humanity," she said. At least $10 million of the $17 million pledged by Clinton will be used to train doctors to treat victims of brutal sexual attacks. Some of the funds will also be aimed at preventing abuse. "We believe there should be no impunity for the sexual and gender-based violence committed by so many - that there must be arrests and prosecutions and punishment," she told reporters after the meeting. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday demanded global action to stop government forces and armed groups from using sexual violence "like a grenade or a gun" to pursue their goals. AP News story here He told the U.N. Security Council that the perpetrators generally operate with impunity, and he called for stepped up efforts nationally, internationally and by the U.N. to prevent and respond to sexual violence. "Parties to armed conflict continue to use sexual violence with efficient brutality," Ban said. "Like a grenade or a gun, sexual violence is part of their arsenal to pursue military, political, social and economic aims." The U.N. chief announced that he was in discussions with other U.N. partners to appoint a new senior U.N. official to address sexual violence. He urged the council to immediately authorize the establishment of an independent commission of inquiry into violations of human rights and humanitarian law in conflicts in Chad, Congo and Sudan, including rape and sexual abuse of women and girls. The secretary-general also pointed to "the brutal, predatory and deliberate targeting of civilians" by the Lord's Resistance Army whose activities have destabilized Sudan, Central African Republic, Uganda and Congo. "In Burundi, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the fighting may have ended but sexual violence persists on a very serious scale," he added. Ban spoke during a daylong debate on progress toward implementing a Security Council resolution adopted in June 2008 on "Women, Peace and Security," which demands that all parties to armed conflicts immediately halt "all acts of sexual violence" and take measures to protect women and girls from rape and sexual attacks. The United Nations estimates 200,000 women and girls have been raped in Congo over the last 12 years, when war broke out with Rwanda and Uganda backing Congolese rebels seeking to oust then-Congo President Laurent Kabila. Rape became a weapon of war, aid groups say. CNN News story here "It is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman or girl," says Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch who has spent the last 10 years focusing on Congo. "These are often soldiers and combatants deliberately targeting women and raping them as a strategy of war, either to punish a community, to terrorize a community or to humiliate them." Most times, the women are raped by at least two perpetrators. "Sometimes, that is done in front of the family, in front of the children," Van Woudenberg says. She sighs, "What causes men to rape - I wish I had an answer to that." "Soldiers have committed gang rapes, rapes leading to injury and death, and abductions of girls and women," a report released last month by Human Rights Watch says. "Their crimes are serious violations of international humanitarian law. Commanders have frequently failed to stop sexual violence and may themselves be guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity as a consequence." Van Woudenberg says punishment, unfortunately, is all too rare for sex crimes. "If you rape, you get away with it," she says. According to the United Nations, there were 15,996 new cases of sexual violence registered throughout Congo in 2008. Nearly two out of every three rapes were carried out against children, most of them adolescent girls, the Human Rights Watch report says. A paltry 27 soldiers were convicted in military courts last year. Under the current court system, the military handles accusations of rape against its soldiers - something aid groups say must be changed for real accountability. 1 in 8 church background checks finds criminal record... One in eight background checks conducted on volunteers or prospective employees through LifeWay Christian Resources found a criminal history that might have kept an individual from working or volunteering at a church, the Southern Baptist Convention publishing house reported. http://www.churchexecutive.com/news.asp?N_ID=2039 
Last year LifeWay negotiated an affinity-group discount for screening services for churches with Backgroundchecks.com, a 10-year-old company with 4,500 clients. Since then, according to a news release, about 450 churches requested more than 5,000 background checks on volunteers and prospective employees.
While most screenings returned clean records or only minor traffic offenses, LifeWay said, 80 found serious felony offenses and more than 600 people had some type of criminal history that may have disqualified them from volunteering or working at a church. While not a statistically representative sample, 450 churches is 1 percent of the 44,848 Southern Baptist congregations claimed in LifeWay's most recent Annual Church Profile. Projected onto the other 99 percent of Southern Baptist churches, that would add up to 8,000 serious felony offenses and more than 60,000 people with some sort of checkered past in churches across the convention. "It is so important in this day and time to run these checks," Barbara Strong, church secretary at Jubilee Worship Center in Westmoreland, Tennessee, said in the press release. "We just don't know who is coming into our church. We'd like to think everyone is a good Christian, but we can't know that." Since Southern Baptist churches are self-governing, the denomination doesn't screen prospective employees or volunteers for them. The SBC Executive Committee "strongly advises" churches to be diligent in choosing leaders and volunteers, however, and includes a link on the convention's website to the Department of Justice Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website. While vital, experts say sex-offender registries alone aren't very effective in spotting sexual predators. They list only those convicted of a crime. Because victims typically are reluctant to come forward and with statutes of limitations on molestation laws in many states, only an estimated10 percent of sexual predators are brought to justice. Of 13,000 Catholic clergy "credibly accused" in the pedophile-priest scandal that rocked the Roman Catholic Church during the last decade, about 6 percent were even investigated by police. According to a 2004 study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, about 4 percent of Catholic priests who served in the United States since 1950 had been accused of sexually abusing minors. See eGuide/clergy abuse While hard numbers are lacking for other religious groups, Philip Jenkins, a professor at Penn State University, has estimated the figure among Protestant clergy at between 2 percent and 3 percent. In 2007 the Associated Press polled three major insurers for Protestant churches and totaled claims of minors being sexually abused by clergy, staff or other church-related relations at about 260 reports a year. That's a higher number than the average of the 228 credible accusations against Catholic priests per year reported in the John Jay study. See vol5_iss40. For more information, see eGuide/screeningvolunteers. In other news... 
Britons got their first look Tuesday at the mother behind a horrific child death that shocked the country. MSNBC News story here The face of 28-year-old Tracey Connelly, who stood by as her infant son Peter was tortured for months on end, stared out from the front pages of Britain's newspapers under headlines which read: "Unmasked" and "Out of the Darkness." Accompanying articles described the hideous abuse suffered by her son at the hands of her boyfriend Steven Barker, a Nazi memorabilia collector who tortured animals and was convicted of raping a 2-year-old girl. To the sickening details was added the suggestion that Connelly, Barker, and his brother Jason Owen - all three of whom were sentenced for causing or allowing Peter's death last year - could receive new identities and years of police protection to protect them from an angry public. The Daily Telegraph newspaper estimated such a program might cost the taxpayers 1 million pounds ($1.6 million) a year.
With social networking sites the main online communication vehicle for teens, every status update, tweet, or wall post lives forever on the Web, but sometimes, teens say, they reveal a little too much. CBS News story here A Common Sense Media national poll of 13- to 18-year-olds found 39 percent of teens surveyed say they have regrets about some of their online activities. And 29 percent said they've shared information online they wouldn't normally share in public. Rebecca Randall of Common Sense Media told CBS News, "Anonymity opens the door wide for kids not to take responsibility for their online actions." The poll also found 25 percent of teens admit to creating a profile with a false identity. And where are the parents? The survey indicated they are often out of the loop. Only four percent of parents think their kids check Facebook 10 times a day, whereas 22 percent of teens actually do. See more at eGuide/MySpaceandFacebook.
A Missouri mother who was tried on accusations she was involved in a MySpace hoax directed at a 13-year-old girl who committed suicide has been told she can use the Internet again. MSNBC story here The lawyer for Lori Drew says she has been offered a job that requires her to use a computer and the Internet. A federal judge in California on Thursday modified Drew's bail so she can. Drew was convicted last fall in the case where she was accused of illegally accessing a computer to harass a neighborhood teenager, Megan Meier. U.S. District Judge George Wu tentatively threw out convictions against Drew in July. For more on this story, see vol5_iss76, vol6_iss75, and vol7_iss40.
No blood evidence was found in the car driven by Casey Anthony, the central Florida mom charged with her 2-year-old daughter Caylee's murder, according to documents released Friday. Fox News story here The new information comes despite investigators' theory that Anthony, 23, stored her little girl's body in the Pontiac Sunfire's trunk before burying her in a wooded lot near the family's Orlando home. The just-released report, done by Bluestar Forensic, did conclude that human decomposition was detected in Anthony's car - even though no traces of blood were discovered. Among other documents released Friday by the state attorney's office are images of trash collected as evidence and a T-shirt similar to one worn by Caylee that says "Big Trouble Comes in Small Packages." For background on this case, see vol6_iss78.
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