Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History, Most Mass Shootings Target Women and Families

[news reporter]

- Child Pornography: A Modern Day Childhood Gonorrhea Epidemic
- Most Mass Shootings Target Women and Families; Study Finds Men With
Legal Guns Are to Blame


Child Pornography: A Modern Day Childhood Gonorrhea Epidemic
By James R. Marsh on February 26, 2013

I am reading a fascinating book by Lynn Sacco, an assistant professor
of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, entitled
Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History.

Unspeakable

Unspeakable is an excellent book which explains how cultural mores and
political needs distorted attitudes toward and medical knowledge of
patriarchal sexual abuse at a time when the nation was committed to
the familial power of white fathers and the idealized white family.

For much of the nineteenth century, father-daughter incest was
understood to take place among all classes and legal and extra-legal
attempts to deal with it tended to be swift and severe. But public
understanding changed markedly during the Progressive Era, when
accusations of incest began to be directed exclusively toward
immigrants, blacks, and the lower socioeconomic classes. Focusing on
early twentieth-century reform movements, Sacco argues that middle-
and upper-class white males, too, molested female children in their
households, even as official records of their acts declined
dramatically.

One of the most interesting chapters in Unspeakable discusses the
revolution in medicine in the early 20th century when doctors were
first able to diagnose gonorrhea vulvovaginitis. Guess what they
discovered?

When physicians began to use the new technology, however, they were
shocked to discover that gonorrhea vulvovaginitis was widespread among
American girls.…But though condemning child prostitution among the
working class was one thing, explaining how girls from good families
had become infected with a sexually transmitted disease was another.
On the cusp of moving from the margins to the center of American
health care, doctors used their professional authority, if not their
medical skills, to twist the etiology of girls’ infections into
existing narratives that fit more seamlessly with what doctors
believed than with what they had discovered. In the process, doctors
attributed fewer infections in girls to sexual assault.

Over the next ten years, doctors diagnosed gonorrhea vulvovaginitis so
often that by 1904 an epidemiologist writing in the Journal of
Infectious Diseases declared it an "epidemic" among girls. In 1909,
Dr. Flora Pollack, who treated girls at the Johns Hopkins Hospital
Dispensary, estimated that at least a thousand girls in Baltimore
became newly infected each year, and she visited police stations and
met with community groups to press for more aggressive prosecution of
their assailants....


In terms of child pornography, it is not possible to provide an exact
number of people trading child pornography across the world. UNICEF
and the United Nations have provided some estimates. UNICEF estimates
that there are more than four million websites featuring sexually
exploited minors. Further, the number of child pornography websites is
growing: 480,000 sites were identified in 2004 compared to 261,653 in
2001. More than 200 new images are circulated daily, and UNICEF
estimates that the production and distribution of child pornographic
images generates in between 3 and 20 billion dollars a year.

The United Nations released a report in July 2009 asserting that there
are approximately 750,000 sexual predators using the Internet to try
to make contact with children for the purpose of sexually exploiting
them....
http://www.childlaw.us/2013/02/child-pornography-a-modern-day.html



Most Mass Shootings Target Women and Families; Study Finds Men With
Legal Guns Are to Blame
Data suggests that a gun present in a domestic violence situation
increases the risk of homicide for women by 500 percent. AlterNet By
Steven Rosenfeld February 24, 2013

A new analysis of 56 mass shootings across America since 2009 finds
women and family members are the most frequent victims, and that the
shooter almost always acquired his guns legally, in cases where the
gun source is known.

“In at least 32 of the cases (57 percent), the shooter killed a
current or former spouse or intimate partner or other family member,
and at least eight of those shooters had a prior domestic violence
charge,” the Mayors Against Illegal Guns report on mass shootings
said, suggesting that the problem of gun violence is far more related
to violence against women in homes than rampages in public settings
such as schools and theaters.

The study also found that in the cases where the source of the guns
was known, almost all were acquired legally: only two examples were
given of mass killings with a stolen or illegal gun. That finding runs
counter to the gun lobby’s oft-cited rhetoric that only criminals
abuse guns.

“We had sufficient evidence to judge whether the shooter was a
prohibited gun possessor in 42 of the 56 incidents,” the report said,
referring to laws barring ex-felons, mentally ill people, drug addicts
and other categories of people from owning guns. “Of those 42
incidents, 15 (36 percent) involved a prohibited possessor and 27 (64
percent) did not.”

MAIG's analysis should help focus the national debate about curbing
gun violence, whether the most horrific mass shootings or ongoing
violence where 33 Americans are killed daily from guns (not counting
suicides). The report strongly suggests that better background checks
before buying guns are needed, as well as far more discussion of
domestic violence and violence against women....

“Assault weapons or high-capacity magazines were used in at least 13
of the incidents (32 percent),” the report said. “These incidents
resulted in an average of 14.8 total people shot—135 percent more
people shot than in other incidents (6.8)—and 8.0 deaths.”
http://www.alternet.org/most-mass-shootings-target-women-and-families-study-finds-men-legal-guns-are-blame