Nice dad kills son

ANOTHER nice dad kills his son. Why? (Supposedly) Because his marriage broke up. (Why are women leaving these gems?) I have 3 words for these guys: SUCK IT UP.

 

 

A LITTLE boy thrown to his death from a bridge had tried to comfort his dad after his mother left them.

Friends and neighbours said a marriage break-up probably caused the murder-suicide of Jason Lees, 40, and his toddler Brad.

A neighbour yesterday recounted the heartwrenching day when two-year-old Brad hugged his weeping dad on the back stairs of their Brisbane home.

Marlene Stephens, who lives next door, said she thought Mr Lees’ wife Danielle was no longer living with them when he made the fateful decision to kill his son and take his own life.

“She left him a while back and you could hear and see him crying on the back stairs,” she said.

“I remember the little boy came down and wrapped his arms around him – I’m always going to remember that image.”

Ms Stephens said Brad always gave her a wave.

“It was always so lovely to hear them laugh. He was a beautiful kid,” she said.

Mr Lees, a much-admired teacher at a top private school in Brisbane, rode his bike on to Story Bridge about 2.30am on Monday and jumped to his death with Brad.

His wife, a psychologist from the Gold Coast, could not be contacted yesterday.

The couple met after Mr Lees moved from Canada about 15 years ago.

Bill Lees told the Ottawa Sun he met his baby nephew when his brother and his family visited Canada in 2010 so Jason could referee an international rugby sevens match. “That was the last time I saw them,” he said.

Rugby friends say they used to see Danielle at matches quite often, but hadn’t seen her much in the past year.

“He loved his little son – he was the apple of his eye,” one friend said.

A parent said on Facebook that Mr Lees taught her son.

“Why can I only feel deep sadness for his pain instead of condemning him for what he has done to himself and Brad?” she wrote.

– with Kate Kyriacou and Rose Brennan

Media bias in the UK

http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/hub.1326407570.html

Leveson Inquiry Must Address Sexist Media Stereotypes, Say Women’s Groups

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jan/24/leveson-inquiry-sexist-media-stereotypes?CMP=twt_gu

The Leveson inquiry must address “sexist stereotypes” in the media, which could “condone violence against women and girls”, according to a group of key women’s organisations.

Speaking at the Leveson inquiry on Tuesday, a representative of the group accused some media outlets of feeding into myths about rape, which they argued could prevent some women coming forward to report the crime.

“The media creates, reflects and enforces attitudes in society. Those who work in the media should be conscious of this and should actively seek not to reproduced attitudes which condone violence against women or girls,” said Marai Larasi from End Violence Against Women, a coalition of  40 women’s organisations.

Representatives of the women’s groups Equality Now, Eaves, Object and End Violence Against Women called on Lord Justice Leveson to ban highly sexualised images in newspapers, which they argued would not be broadcast pre-watershed on television.

Newspapers including the Sun, the Daily Star and the Sunday Sport were criticised for “relentlessly” objectifying women, portraying them “as a sum of sexualised body parts”, said Anna van Heeswijk, from anti-objectification of women organisation Object.

“We have to ask ourselves what kind of story does it tell to young people when men in newspapers wear suits, or sports gear, are shown as active participants, while women are sexualised objects who are essentially naked or nearly naked,” she said.

The groups are calling for any new regulation of the press to ban pictures of naked or semi-naked women in newspapers, arguing that the images would not be allowed in the workplace and should not be sold in an “unrestrained” manner at “children’s eye-level”.

Van Heeswijk accused tabloids that carry photographs of semi-naked women on page 3 of “creating a culture of fear which silences … anybody speaking out against the portrayal of women as sex objects”. She cited the example of former MP Clare Short who was branded a “fat” and “jealous” “killjoy” by the Sun when she spoke out against Page 3.

Several newspapers were singled out for criticism during the evidence given by the women’s groups. The Daily Telegraph was criticised for a report which they said suggested a man had murdered his wife after she changed her Facebook status to “single”, and said too often media reports of violence against women focused on the behaviour of the victim.

A Daily Mail report about six footballers being jailed after gang raping 12-year-old girls in a “midnight park orgy” was criticised for the use of the word “orgy” and for referring to the victims as “Lolitas”. Larasi told the inquiry: “Put the word ‘orgy’ in something and what you immediately do is grab the attention, it’s becoming titillating. The focus stays on the woman and what she did or didn’t do.”

When asked previously about this article a spokesman for Associated Newspapers said it appeared on Mail Online, not in the Daily Mail, and was based on a court report from a reputable news agency that contained the words “orgy” and “Lolitas”.

The groups also called on Leveson, charged with investigating the regulation of the media following the phone-hacking scandal, to replace the Press Complaints Commission with an independent body “with teeth” that women and women’s groups could complain to directly. The reporting of violence against women and girls needs to be more balanced and more context needs to be provided about its frequency, they added.

Journalists should also receive training on the “myths and realities” about violence against women and girls, and there should be a code of practice for the way “case studies” are dealt with, the groups said.

Jacqui Hunt from Equality Now said the groups did not want to curtail the freedom of the press but wanted more responsibility. “Freedom of the press, yes it’s really important, it’s key but we have to find a way of making sure that women are not sidelined [and] objectified,” she said.

No excuse but one for Josh Powell – He was dangerous

According to the Associated Press (printed in the Washington Post), Josh Powell’s note was…”a farewell to the world after two years of being scrutinized in the media, hammered by police and questioned by judges, prosecutors and social workers, living his life under a microscope since the day his wife vanished.” Really? Life was so hard for him he blew up his two young children? Poor guy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/explosion-at-wash-home-kills-josh-powell-husband-of-missing-utah-woman-2-young-sons/2012/02/05/gIQAk3dmsQ_story.html

According to another Associate Press article, writers Brian Skoloff, Gene Johnson, and Mike Baker called the case a “salacious saga of finger-pointing and accusations of sex and lies.” So did the tawdry circumstances lead him to kill his children?

http://news.yahoo.com/fire-kills-husband-missing-utah-woman-2-boys-041211345.html

Worse yet, q13fox.com quotes a prosecutor that believes it was the psycho-sexual evaluation that led Powell to murder the kids:

Just last week, the court ordered the boys’ dad, Josh, to undergo a psycho-sexual evaluation.

Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist thinks that may have been what triggered Sunday’s fire.

“Those tests are highly intrusive, highly thorough,” Lindquist said. “They cover a person’s entire life history, sexual history and there’s a polygraph involved.  That was a good choice to get at information.  Clearly it was something Mr. Powell feared and wasn’t about to go through.”

http://www.q13fox.com/news/kcpq-could-more-have-been-done-to-protect-powell-boys-20120206,0,4410383.story

Are you kidding me?

Apparently, the only adults who recognized that Josh Powell, the only suspect in his wife’s disappearance, was dangerous were Susan Powell’s parents. They feared something like this would happen – if only we allowed fear-based suspicions to be used, we’d avert a lot of murders. At a conference on femicide at John Jay College in New York a few years ago, an expert indicated fear was the best indicator for a woman’s murder. Couldn’t there be a fear test just as there is a psycho-sexual test? Couldn’t we put trust into people’s knowledge of the suspect and their instinct? These murders are not unpredictable.

Nor are they an “extreme anomaly” as Carol Gage was quoted saying in an article (“Powell case raises questions about custody laws”) by John Hollenhorst.

http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=148&sid=19139856

Actually, the Leadership Council on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence estimates 58,000 children a year go into unsupervised visitation or sole or joint custody with a physically or sexually abusive parent. Although Powell, the primary suspect in his wife’s disappearance, had supervised visitation, it was at his father’s home — in Washington state (although the children had previously lived in Utah). I’m sure his pro bono lawyer helped him achieve that – quite a feat since many battered women don’t even have legal counsel when they go into court. This is one reason women who allege abuse can lose custody; another is the current climate that stresses contact with both parents. Parental rights shouldn’t – but often enough they do – trump children’s safety, as this case clearly illustrates. For more examples of custody-related homicides like these, the blog Dastardly Dads is one of the few sources keeping track of these tragedies: http://dastardlydads.blogspot.com/  They occur far more often than the media will admit .

Aside from context, headlines should also correctly place the blame and read something like this – Josh Powell, suspect in wife’s disappearance, sets fire to home, kills self, two sons. It should include his name and perhaps his status in the case. It should identify him as the person who set the fire, in an active voice (not “Fire kills husband of missing Utah woman , 2 boys” ). And, he should be identified as the father of the children. I’ve noted several cases of “father absent” headlines on my blog in the past.

The media can help raise awareness of custody-related cases of murder by providing accurate headlines and basic context — and most importantly, by correctly identifying the cause of murder – in this case, a dangerous father with malicious intent.

 

 

Twice victimized

I’m happy to see sexual assault getting more media attention these days, stemming from the Penn State scandal. I can only hope this will continue to snowball – to include family court cases, for example.

The New York Times ran this article and has a follow up next week on the care of victims:

The twice victimized of sexual assault

It is all too easy to see why. More often than not, women who bring charges of sexual assault are victims twice over, treated by the legal system and sometimes by the news media as lying until proved truthful.

“There is no other crime I can think of where the victim is more victimized,” said Rebecca Campbell, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University who for 20 years has been studying what happens legally and medically to women who are raped. “The victim is always on trial. Rape is treated very differently than other felonies.”

So, too, are the victims of lesser sexual assaults. In 1991, when Anita Hill, a lawyer and academic, told Congress that the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her repeatedly when she worked for him, Ms. Hill was vilified as a character assassin and liar acting on behalf of abortion-rights advocates.

Credibility became the issue, too, for Nafissatou Diallo, an immigrant chambermaid who accused the head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, of forcing her to perform fellatio in a Manhattan hotel room. Prosecutors eventually dropped the case after concluding that Ms. Diallo had lied on her immigration form and about other matters, though not directly about the encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn.

When four women, two of whom identified themselves publicly, said they had been sexually harassed by Herman Cain, the Republican presidential hopeful, they, too, were called liars, perhaps hired by his opponents.

Charges of sexual harassment often boil down to “she said-he said” with no tangible evidence of what really took place. But even when there is DNA evidence of a completed sexual act, as there was in the Strauss-Kahn case, the accused commonly claim that the sex was consensual, not a crime.

Female murder-suicide case

Okay, I don’t see a ‘nice woman kills family’ template like is typical with the “nice guy kills ex/wife/family.” But, like with male perps, they have not identified this woman’s relationship to the baby – nor have they mentioned the other victims in the headline:

Neighbor saw woman shoot at baby

 

Authorities have said five people, including two children and a baby, were killed in a murder-suicide, but they haven’t identified the shooter. The bodies were found Friday in Emington, a small farming community about 80 miles southwest of Chicago.

What drives a father to kill?

Does this sound like the guy is trying to rationalize a father’s violence or be sympathetic to it? Kinda creepy.

What drives a father to kill?

The typical profile of a family annihilator is a middle-aged man, a good provider who appears dedicated, devoted and loyal to his family. However, he is usually quite socially isolated, with few friends and with profound feelings of frustration and inadequacy. The tipping point is some catastrophic loss or impending tragedy that threatens to undermine his sense of self and amplifies his feelings of impotence and powerlessness. In individuals for whom their family is an integral part of their identity – part of themselves, rather than a separate being – murdering the family is akin to a single act of suicide. It is a way of regaining control; of obliterating the impending crisis. This explains why men will often not only kill their partner and children, but also pets and destroy their property by setting fires. It is an eradication of everything that constitutes the self.

In addition to this, they are often motivated by bitterness and anger and a desire to punish the spouse; while killing the partner is an act of revenge, killing the children is an act of love as he believes he – and therefore they – will be better off dead than face the imminent loss of power.

While this points to severe psychological problems with underlying personality issues and maladaptive coping strategies, this, in itself, does not necessarily constitute a mental illness. However, professionals are divided as to whether these men can be held truly culpable for their actions. For the few that survive, jurors tend to find them responsible for their actions and therefore guilty of murder, but some end up detained in secure psychiatric hospitals indefinitely.

Experts, such as Jack Levin, Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts who has studied family annihilators, have argued that they typically do know right from wrong and points to the fact that they are well planned and selective and that if a friend came along, the father wouldn’t kill him or her – instead, he kills his children to get even with his wife because he blames her and hates her.

Others, such as Tony Black, former chief psychologist at Broadmoor, are more circumspect. Black has argued that for anyone to commit such a heinous crime, there must be something fundamentally wrong with them and it is unhelpful just to simply think of them as ‘bad’. But what can be done to prevent such atrocities? Is there the possibility of intervention before such murders take place or ways to identify at risk men?

Scott Mackenzie, a consultant forensic psychiatrist in Essex who has assessed family annihilators for the criminal justice system, feels that often there are underlying anti-social personality traits and fundamental issues with rage and anger management. But these psychological traits are not uncommon in the population, and most will never go on to murder their family. ‘Those who act are often angry and resentful individuals. There is often a prior pattern of domestic abuse. But predicting with any reliability who will suddenly flip and resort to this kind of behaviour is incredibly difficult, if not near impossible. After any such incident there are inevitably questions asked if anything could be done, if someone could have intervened or spotted the signs. Tragically, in most cases, the answer is no.’

Wrong answer! Here is how we prevent it:

  • Look for the red flags (anger, resentment, abuse, control, coercion)
  • Take threats seriously
  • Believe women when they express fear
  • Do NOT provide leniency in domestic violence
  • Treat domestic violence like other crimes
  • Educate society on domestic violence (myths vs. reality)
  • Don’t be silent about abuse – it can lead to shame, victim blaming, tolerance for this crime
  • Change how the media present stories – the “nice guy”‘ murders wife – does not provide the context to understand DV
  • Change the culture – violence against women is not inevitable

 

Police officers won’t be charged with domestic violence

Of course they won’t…

Two officers arrested in domestic violence cases won’t be charged

http://www.jsonline.com/watchdog/watchdogreports/2-officers-arrested-in-domestic-violence-cases-wont-be-charged-5e3ffuf-135762328.html

Interesting…

Domestic violence is far more common among the families of police officers than among the rest of the population, according to the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Center for Women and Policing. At least 40% of police families are affected by domestic violence, as opposed to an estimated 10% in other households.

Male privilege on the Internet

Interesting post on the Feminist Law Professors blog – written by a male ally 🙂

Harassment, male privilege, and jokes that women just don’t get

http://www.feministlawprofessors.com/2011/11/harassment-male-privilege-jokes-women-dont/

Male privilege on the internet — or in law, or in society at large — isn’t going away any time soon. But let’s call it out, and let’s label it for what it is. When male interlocutors tell a female writer that she is overreacting and just isn’t getting the joke, they are speaking from a starting place of male privilege. They are assuming that casual threats of violence are something which can easily be shrugged off, and are ignoring the vast difference between lived experiences of men and women in America. And they are denying the reality of something which, in all likelihood, they don’t even understand.

I’m baaaack

Thanks for hanging in there with me. I was pretty busy these past 3 months – I went back to work full-time, bought a condo, went on vacation, and now, am getting ready for the holidays. My posts will probably still be a bit erratic, but I wanted to get back into the swing of things.

And, I have to say, while I’ve been away, the posts  about horrific rapes (tied up, peed on…) have been getting some of the most hits – and I don’t think they’re looking at these posts from an analytic viewpoint if you know what I mean. How ironic to write about sexual violence and have the pervs show up. I hope they did some reading while they were here.