He allegedly forced "two women, both in their 20s, to use drugs and perform oral sex on him at gunpoint," Philadelphia's NBC10 reported:

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Prosecutors say the girl went to the home of Scandale Fritz last December and, "after she declined his demands for sex, he raped and sodomized her," and then "demanded the girl have sex with the other two boys" while he recorded it. Chillingly, prosecutors add that Fritz's companion Kenneth Brown can be seen holding a gun in the video. After the incident, the girl filed a police report and was examined at a local hospital. Two days after the alleged assault, the video appeared on all three boys' Facebook pages. Prosecutors say that Fritz has already provided "a handwritten statement to his involvement."

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Speaking to a human trafficking forum at Johns Hopkins University last week, Smart recalled that it was not only fear for the safety of her family that kept her from running but also a sense that rape had ruined her:

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But that doesn't mean everyone agrees on the best way forward, as the New York Times reports:

[On] Thursday, Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, the New York Democrat who has made this her signature issue this year, will introduce legislation that would give military prosecutors rather than commanders the power to decide which sexual assault cases to try...

The legislation, which many military justice experts said they believed was key to stemming the problem, is gaining some support but also prompting ambivalence on Capitol Hill, where many lawmakers are reluctant, for various and often opposing reasons, to remove prosecutorial powers from military commanders...

While the dissent breaks down somewhat along party lines, it appears to be more determined by the background of the lawmaker, with many former prosecutors in Congress saying the complex task of investigating sexual assault should not be left in the hands of commanders, and those with close ties to the military uncomfortable with a change to a 200-year-old tradition that many Western allies have abandoned.

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Last week, that opposition went right to the top, when Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said, “It is my strong belief — and I think others on Capitol Hill and within our institution — the ultimate authority has to remain within the command structure.” He was saying that, of course, while unveiling an annual report showing the number of sexual assaults within the Army had actually gone up in the past year. But on Monday the Pentagon press secretary backed away somewhat, saying the secretary was “open to all options.”

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“Some of these cases … involved the victims being raped after drinking quite a lot of alcohol,” Tung-kwok told reporters. “So I would appeal that young ladies should not drink too much.”

Tung-kwok's comments come in response to a government report showing that rape cases in Hong Kong have increased 60 percent from the previous year. In addition to the spike in reported rapes, sexual assaults rose by 18 percent.

Anti-sexual assault advocates are concerned that his remarks will have a chilling effect on women hoping to report an assault, who may now fear they will be blamed, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

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As Josh Harkinson reports for Mother Jones, after calling journalists and applying pressure to the local high school with a blogger friend, McKee came across Anonymous' #OpAntiBully, an anti-bullying subgroup, and something clicked: "People from Anonymous came and kicked [cyberbully] ass," she told Harkinson. "And I'm thinking, this is what [the rape victim] needs," she said.

So McKee reached out to the group, uncertain of how they would react to her request to get involved; their interest was immediately sparked, as Harkinson reports:

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Moreover, it turns out the Air Force lieutenant colonel in charge of preventing sexual assault has been arrested for  … sexual assault. According to the police report, a drunken Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski allegedly approached a woman in a parking lot in Arlington, Va. Sunday night, and grabbed her breasts and buttocks.

Why has it been so difficult for the Air Force or the Defense Department to remedy this problem?

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A conversation about misogyny in comedy sprang up this week after feminist journalist Sady Doyle wrote a critical response to jokes performed by male comedian Sam Morril. Doyle's impression of Morril's material that night, as well as his Twitter feed, was that it disproportionately relied on jokes about nonconsensual sex, violence and the degradation of women. Her piece was a good-faith effort to bypass the usual debate about “rape jokes,” which often gets stuck around concepts like the importance of dark humor and freedom of speech, to explore issues at hand: the number of women who experience sexual violence, and the merit (or lack thereof) of making those women the target of jokes. An Onion article this week about Chris Brown and Rihanna also functions as a helpful distillation of how violence against women can act as a punch line; many feminists, notably women of color, felt that a domestic violence victim became collateral damage in service of a joke.

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The report comes only days after Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski, chief of the Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response branch at the Pentagon, was arrested and charged with sexual battery in Virginia, an incident that has, once again, brought a military culture plagued by rampant sexual violence and failures of accountability from military leadership into stark relief.

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“Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized. I don’t know what percentage of pregnancies are due to the violence of rape. Because of the trauma the body goes through,” Celeste Greig told the Bay Area News Group in March.

From the San Jose Mercury News:

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In the U.K. on Sunday, Nigel Evans, a senior conservative member of Parliament, found himself responding to accusations of rape and assault -- and declaring them "completely false." His two accusers are both male.

The British media says the claims against him go back as far as 2009 and as recently as this past March. The 55-year-old Evans has not been charged with any crime, and though he will not be chairing House of Commons debates this week, he has vowed he will not step down. He was interrogated over the weekend, and police searched his car and home. Though the accusers, said to both be in their 20s, have not been named, Evans says that the claims have been made by "two people who are well known to each other and until Saturday, I regarded as friends ... I cannot understand why they have been made, especially as I have continued to socialize with one as recently as last week."

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“It was a simple task to discover [prosecutor] Elizabeth Lederer on Google, just as those boys were easy to find in the park,” Dwyer writes. “The petition has found someone to blame, repeating the very mistake of the injustice it deplores.”

Indeed, the petition started by Frank Chi (the other co-author of this column) to fire Elizabeth Lederer from Columbia Law School may have affected her online search results. But by reading Dwyer’s column, you’d think her life was ruined. Locked up, key thrown away.

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Carcano decided to tell her story publicly for the first time after reading here about the Peace Corps Equity Act, introduced by Sen. Frank Lautenberg last week, which would modify the current policy by extending Peace Corps health coverage to abortions in case of rape. Carcano, who is now working as a research assistant on HIV/AIDS, says she wasn't particularly educated about the politics of abortion. But then, in the months after her ordeal, the headlines were full of politicians talking about abortion, "legitimate rape" and doubting rape victims could even become pregnant. "I came back to my country and I felt like other Americans were against me or against my choices," she says.

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Imagine he wanted – and legally had the right to be – that child's father. It's a very real scenario, all across America. But in one state, that may soon be changing.

As a riveting CNN story last summer, at the height of "legitimate rape" fever, illuminated, a stunning majority of states – 31 of them – offer some form of visitation and custody rights for men who impregnate their rape victims. And it's not just the threat of having to co-parent with one's assailant that's a nightmare for many victims -- it's the ugly opportunism it inspires. As attorney Shauna Prewitt, whose daughter was the product of a sexual assault, wrote back then, "When no law prohibits a rapist from exercising these rights, a woman may feel forced to bargain away her legal rights to a criminal trial in exchange for the rapist dropping the bid to have access to her child." A baby can become a bargaining chip.

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The sobering prevalence of sexual assault in the armed services and the failures of military leadership to hold responsible parties accountable (only 10 percent of sexual assaults reported in 2011 went to trial) have created a military culture that is increasingly dangerous for female service members.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has offered two Senate proposals to begin the process of reform in American military culture. The first measure, introduced last week, will provide increased access to reproductive health care to female service members. The second, set to be introduced next month, intends to reform the way the military handles sexual assault cases.

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"The safety and security of Peace Corps Volunteers is our highest priority. Over the past few years, we’ve put in place a number of new, significant practices and safeguards to reduce the risks for Volunteers and ensure victims of crime receive compassionate and effective support.

The Peace Corps supports Senator Lautenberg’s bill and the President’s Fiscal Year 2014 budget, which extends the same rights and protections to female Peace Corps Volunteers as many of their federal colleagues by applying exceptions on abortion restrictions as outlined in the Hyde Amendment."

As Mary Kate Shannon waited to find out if she was pregnant after being raped for the second time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru, the healthcare coordinator told her her options were limited. "If I were pregnant, the Peace Corps could not pay for the abortion due to some kind of federal law," Shannon recalled in an interview with Salon. They would, however, pay for parenting classes.

"I felt betrayed," Shannon said. "I felt like it was a decision that was going to be made for me. I wasn't in a place financially where I felt like I could pay for it."

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Horrific sexual assaults in the United States, India, South Africa and elsewhere have brought global violence against women into stark relief, and Tutu, joined by education nonprofit head Jacob Lief and author, activist and rape survivor Sohaila Abdulali, views stopping it as more than just the work of governments and law enforcement. Ending rape culture, they say, is also "family work," a conversation that must be had around the dinner table if its message is ever going to take hold:

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With the grand jury case looming next week, search warrants have been executed against Steubenville High School and the offices of the local school board in order to determine if other laws were broken in connection with the rape. Under particular scrutiny is Steubenville football coach Reno Saccoccia, who, evidence suggets, knew about the rape early on, but didn’t report the crime to school administrators or local police, as is required by Ohio law. Saccoccia's contract with the school was renewed on Monday.

"What I hope people will believe when we're done is that we did everything we could to find the truth and that justice was done," DeWine told the Associated Press. "What you're seeing today is just part of that effort."

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This new emphasis is stated clearly in the introduction, as well as in amended protocol throughout the guide:

We know that effective collection of evidence is of paramount importance to successfully prosecuting sex offenders. Just as critical is performing sexual assault forensic exams in a sensitive, dignified, and victim-centered manner. For individuals who experience this horrendous crime, having a positive experience with the criminal justice and health care systems can contribute greatly to their overall healing.

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