Carol Lloyd

When rape is just another workplace dispute

The appalling case of Dawn Leamon, stuck in bureaucratic limbo after claiming sexual assault in Iraq.

Rape is nasty, brutish and inexcusable, but let’s face it: Rape happens in every imaginable setting — dark urban alleys, jungles in the Congo, respectable marriages. So when rape happens in a war zone by members of our Armed Services or their contracted mercenaries, we should be horrified but not terribly shell-shocked.

Still, the rape stories coming out of the American workforce in Iraq blindside me every time. Last week the Nation broke another horror story about a woman who claims to have been sexually assaulted by a U.S. soldier and one of her fellow KBR employees in Iraq. Like the story of Jamie Leigh Jones, the former KBR employee who claims she was held in a shipping container after coming forward about being gang-raped by her co-workers in Iraq, the story of Dawn Leamon, contracted as a paramedic by KBR’s foreign subsidiary Service Employees International Inc., is a stomach turner.

After sharing a verboten drink with other KBR employees, she says she blacked out, then woke up covered with feces and blood next to an unconscious U.S. soldier. Of the events that transpired the night before, she recalls very little: screaming when the soldier was sodomizing her, a KBR employee holding her hand, but instead of helping her, forcing his penis in her mouth. Since she only had one drink and she gave it to someone to hold while she stepped outside, she assumes her drink was drugged.

Ugly, but not altogether unusual. But what happened since her assault seems to be a special kind of mistreatment that U.S. military contractors are perfecting to an art: bureaucratic rape.

She claims she was told to keep quiet about the incident and she did, continuing to work on the base. Eventually, she spoke to the employee assistant at a larger base and filed a formal report — and after a series of interviews with KBR, she says she was asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement. A military doctor she visited and confided in also reported the incident to the CID, military crime investigators. Since one of the assailants was a member of the military, it could become a military case, but the CID won’t be able to prosecute any KBR employees involved. When Leamon engaged an American lawyer via e-mail, she claims her computer was confiscated as “evidence,” effectively cutting her off from the outside world.

Since reporting the case, Leamon (again like Jones) has found herself in a legal limbo. The crimes happened off American soil so American criminal courts can claim no jurisdiction. The Iraqi court system — according to Paul Bremer’s Order 17 — is not allowed to prosecute cases against American military contractors.

As with Jones, KBR has pressed for the matter to be resolved through “arbitration.” Currently, Jones is waiting for a judge to decide whether her lawsuit against Halliburton (the parent company of KBR at the time of her assault) can go to court or must go into arbitration. Get that? A civil suit is the best she can hope for! Jones told “Democracy Now” that she’s started a foundation for other women who have been sexually assaulted by contractors in Iraq, and she claims 40 women have approached her with their stories.

On Wednesday, both women testified before the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, and the Justice Department, according to an AP story, assured the senators the agency took allegations of sexual assault “very seriously.” This amounts to a modicum of progress. When the Senate held similar hearings in December, the Justice Department didn’t even bother sending a representative. But still.

The idea that there’s a place somewhat under American control where a rape or a murder is unprosecutable (and can only be resolved as a workplace dispute) beggars the mind. This legal limbo theory lets the Justice Department quite off the hook. According to Sen. Bill Nelson, who chaired the hearings, there are at least three laws that give the Justice Department the authority to take on these cases. What’s more, the agency claims to be investigating Leamon’s case along with several others. The question is whether they’ll do their job.

Take a stab at how many violent criminal cases against a U.S. contractor the Justice Department has successfully prosecuted since the war began? If you guessed more than zero, you guessed too many.

Tattooed and proudly flabby on the catwalk

An alternative fashion show gives the stiff arm to all those anorexic models.

In a moment when we’re hearing about female models growing ever more skeletal and male models slimming down to chopsticks, I’d embrace just about any trend in fashion that breaks this tired old mold.

It has been two long years since 88-pound Ana Carolina Reston died as result of anorexia — in the fashion world that’s like an ice age. Since then there has been outrage, consternation, committees, proposed legislation and a return to the status quo on a crash diet where even the likes of Elle magazine editor Nina Garcia (not exactly a candidate for a profile in Fat!So?) is saying things have “gotten worse.”

So when a CBC article subtitled “The Rise of Alternative Fashion Models” landed in my in box, I couldn’t help wondering: Is this for real? And it is — there is a new breed of diverse body-typed, tattooed and even transsexual models walking the runway. The problem is that they aren’t doing it in New York or Milan, Italy, but in the explicitly antiestablishment event Toronto Alternative Arts and Fashion Week (known by the mixed-up acronym FAT), which began April 9.

AS CBC sums it up: “The event prides itself on celebrating men and women of all shapes and sizes but also embraces ethnic variety and body art. [FAT] models stand anywhere from five-foot-one to six-foot-one; tattoos are flaunted, not concealed; belly flab is accentuated, not spurned.”

What’s not to love? If it came to my city, I’d bare my belly flab and go.

What’s interesting is that the producers claim their inclusive aesthetic isn’t simply healthier for the models but potentially more profitable for the designers. One organizer says designers who continue to hire the same old scrawny white chicks fail to realize “unleashed potential, newfound profit, newfound economic and financial potential that they haven’t yet achieved.” (We’re talkin’ mega newfound potential.)

Does that mean that your average middle-aged, slightly overweight mother of three can finally break into modeling? Not quite. But the article focuses on one particularly promising model — a Kenyan transsexual male-to-female — whose tall, narrow frame looks like a lot of female models everywhere. And after looking at dozens of photos from past years, where you’d be hard-pressed to pinch an inch, it’s obvious to me that the fashion world will sooner embrace transsexual models before pudgy ones.

As one of the organizers admits: “The images still have to be aspirational. You still want that glamour. You don’t want the photograph to look like a driver’s license picture.”

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Real female heroes: Ingrid Betancourt

The political rabble rouser, rumored to be near death, merits more column inches than all the bad girls of Hollywood combined.

Weary of feminine train-wreck tales (Lohan, Spears, pick your poison), I’ve been yearning for stories about real female heroes. I don’t mean ass-kicking female politicians (aka Clinton), but women whose bravery forces you to radically rethink your own life and challenge you to stand up for what you believe in.

Sadly, there aren’t that many news stories about women like this. Or men, for that matter.

But about six years ago I heard an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Ingrid Betancourt, the former Colombian senator and presidential candidate who gave up her posh life as the wife of a French diplomat to fight corruption in Colombian politics, and her voice haunted me for months. The occasion was the publishing of her memoir in English, “Until Death Do Us Part: My Struggle to Reclaim Columbia.” Her political rabble-rousing wasn’t universally popular — it led to death threats and threats on her children’s lives. Those threats in turn forced her children to move to New Zealand to live with their father. Soon after her book was published, in February 2002, Betancourt was kidnapped by FARC, the Marxist guerrillas at war with the government-financed paramilitaries. Since then she’s become (because of her dual French-Colombian citizenship) a French cause célèbre and the guerrillas’ most valuable of an estimated 700 hostages.

Despite a couple of near misses when the Colombian government and the rebels appeared near to an agreement to exchange captives for prisoners, and when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez negotiated the release of a handful of captives last year, Betancourt’s prospects have seemed bleak. In November the government found videotapes of Betancourt and other hostages that suggested that the captives were still alive, but in the soundless video footage she appeared extremely gaunt and did not look at the camera.

Recent news (via the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times, among others): After six years in captivity in the jungle the 46-year-old Betancourt is rumored to be on the verge of death. A priest from a village near FARC-occupied land claimed that she had been taken to the local clinic for medical care, though the doctor and the nurse there have denied they treated Betancourt. A medical mission sent by French President Nicolas Sarkozy landed in Colombia on Thursday, hoping to offer Betancourt medical care. But the most recent report from Reuters claims that the mission remains grounded in Bogota. “Are we pessimistic about a result from this French mission? Yes,” Astrid Betancourt, Ingrid’s sister, told the local media.

At this point it’s impossible to know what will become of Betancourt, but as a progressive politician who has risked her life for her ideals, she merits more column inches than all the bad girls in Hollywood combined. For a great glimpse of her fierce resolve, check out this Salon interview, just a couple of weeks before her abduction, and for a documentary film shot during the years before and after her kidnapping, go here.

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Randi Rhodes calls Hillary Clinton a whore

The Air America host, now suspended, offers more evidence of a troubling mean streak in our culture.

With progressive pundits like Randi Rhodes, who needs wingnuts?

During a recent appearance in San Francisco, the radio shock jock became the latest poster child for mean grown-up of the year. First she called Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton “fucking whores,” along with an inchoate tribute to Eliot Spitzer: “At least [he] spent $80,000 on women.” If you must watch the drivel firsthand, get thee here.

Thursday Air America Radio announced that Rhodes had been suspended because of the comments, so good for it. Yet such suspensions won’t offer but a drop in the bucket against our wasteland of media vitriol. Forget sex and violence; I think playground cruelty is the source of the most obscenity. Have you seen the outdoor ad campaign for the new romantic comedy “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”? The black-and-white billboards proclaim: “I’m So Over You, Sarah Marshall,” “You Suck Sarah Marshall,” “My Mother Always Hated You, Sarah Marshall,” and “You Do Look Fat in Those Jeans, Sarah Marshall.” It’s the first time I’ve wanted to shield my daughter’s eyes from a spectacle in the city.

Ironically, the person who has been most articulate about the current mean streak in American culture is Barack Obama, Rhodes’ apparent favorite. But as someone who also favors the senator from Illinois, I’ve become increasingly queasy about the tone some of his supporters are willing to take. At a recent brunch, I heard a sweet elderly woman wearing an Obama button talk about “just hating” Hillary Clinton. She had no idea who her fellow partygoers were voting for.

As ad hominem insult has become normative political speech, professional bloviators like Rhodes seem to have to go farther each day to retain their “edge.” Still, why does Rhodes need to be so misogynist when she’s carving up her victims with her tongue?

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Buckle up those fetuses!

A report on pregnant women and seat belts is a reminder of the slippery slope in how we talk about the unborn.

A U.S. News and World Report article about a new report on seat belt use among pregnant women had me regurgitating my bran flakes this morning.

“Seat Belt Use by Pregnant Women Could Save 200 Fetuses a Year.” Headline peeled from the cover of the Onion? No, it’s a story about a new study from the University of Michigan and forthcoming in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The study found that pregnant women should wear seat belts, not only for their own safety but also for the safety of their fetuses.

Very well. Since there is apparently some folklore that advises pregnant women against wearing seat belts (strikes me as patently absurd), there’s no harm in a scientific study proving the obvious: Seat belts save lives. Not just “regular people” but pregnant women with big vulnerable bellies.

But the angle of the article — the saving of 200 fetuses a year, a rather small number given the approximate 43,000 automobile deaths in the United States every year — seems kinda insidious. (In case you missed it, Oklahoma passed legislation this week that allows healthcare workers to refuse to perform abortions and requires abortion providers to do ultrasounds of all pregnant women seeking abortions, along with another bill that makes it a felony to assault a pregnant woman and cause a miscarriage.)

Would I be devastated to lose a pregnancy in an automobile accident? Of course. But with headlines focused on saving fetuses (not their mothers) combined with new laws and Horton hearing every creature however small, it seems there’s a not-so-silent march toward endowing fetuses with personhood.

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What causes crybabies?

New research in primates suggests that it's not just overanxious parenting.

Next time you hear the theory that it’s the mother’s fault her baby screams every time she attempts to leave the room, try casually saying, “Sounds like you guys haven’t read that ‘variation at the mu-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) influences attachment behavior in infant primates’ from the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” and see if you don’t get the floor.

This study of monkey genes, reported by New Scientist, suggests that intense infant and toddler attachment may not be a matter of clingy helicopter mommies creating their own crawling, bawling excuses for Valium addiction. If rhesus macaques offer a window into human experience, the crybaby phenomenon may have biological roots.

Neuroscientist Christina Barr of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, Md., told the New Scientist that the bodies of infant monkeys are like human infants in that they release pleasure-inducing substances called opioids when they spend time with their mothers — chemicals that act via the same brain receptors as morphine. But some monkeys (again, like humans) have a gene mutation that seems to intensify this pleasure and make withdrawal from it more painful. For those 25-30 percent of the monkeys with the genetic variation, maternal separation produces unremitting distress with repeated separations; those monkeys seem resistant to weaning and developing peer relationships. In contrast, monkeys without this extra attachment gene exhibit decreasing levels of distress with repeated maternal separation and spend more time exploring the world.

While this study may be good news for mothers and fathers who blame their own parenting style for their children’s insatiable neediness, it delivers its dose of bad news as well. The genetic variation that creates intense maternal attachment is also associated with an increased vulnerability to alcohol and drugs. Another study found that macaques with the genetic mutation drink more alcohol than normal monkeys when given the chance, leading Barr to compare a genetic proclivity to maternal attachment with a sort of proto-addiction. “In a sense it’s very similar to effects that you would see during periods of intoxication and withdrawal,” Barr told Science Central.

This may not completely staunch the theories that anxious attachment derives from negligent or obsessive parenting (another chapter of the endless tome “It’s all Mom’s fault!”). But it does offer one alternative explanation for how parents can raise one child who easily adjusts to the inevitable separations from caregivers and another who just won’t let go.

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