Kids are being locked in cages by the government all across the country. The consequences are devastating. According to a report from the Justice Policy Institute:

A recent literature review of youth corrections shows that detention has a profoundly negative impact on young people’s mental and physical well-being, their education, and their employment. One psychologist found that for one-third of incarcerated youth diagnosed with depression, the onset of the depression occurred after they began their incarceration, and another suggests that poor mental health, and the conditions of confinement together conspire to make it more likely that incarcerated teens will engage in suicide and self-harm. Economists have shown that the process of incarcerating youth will reduce their future earnings and their ability to remain in the workforce, and could change formerly detained youth into less stable employees. Educational researchers have found that upwards of 40 percent of incarcerated youth have a learning disability, and they will face significant challenges returning to school after they leave detention. Most importantly, for a variety of reasons to be explored, there is credible and significant research that suggests that the experience of detention may make it more likely that youth will continue to engage in delinquent behavior, and that the detention experience may increase the odds that youth will recidivate, further compromising public safety.

So the state is engaging in violence that scars young people physically and mentally, and hurts their economic prospects; and this practice may even increase rather than decrease the chance of future crime. Moreover, according to the same report, most of these youth are not even a threat to others, as “about 70 percent are detained for nonviolent offenses.”

Once incarcerated, youth are subjected to severe abuses. For example, many youth are isolated in solitary confinement, which is widely recognized as a form of psychological torture. According to the American Civil Liberties Union:

Solitary confinement can cause extreme psychological, physical, and developmental harm. For children, who are still developing and more vulnerable to irreparable harm, the risks are magnified – particularly for kids with disabilities or histories of trauma and abuse. While confined, children are regularly deprived of the services, programming, and other tools that they need for healthy growth, education, and development.

The impacts of solitary on adults are harmful enough. “It’s an awful thing, solitary,” wrote John McCain, “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” Subjecting youth to this kind of torture is monstrous.

Incarcerated youth are also all too often raped and sexually assaulted by guards. According to David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, “4.5 percent of juveniles in prison and 4.7 percent of those in jail reported such [sexual] victimization—rates that ought to be considered disastrously high.” Their risk was higher in youth detention centers, “minors held in juvenile detention suffered sexual abuse at twice the rate of their peers in adult facilities.” Most of this abuse is committed by guards employed and paid with tax dollars:

Some 2.5 percent of all boys and girls in juvenile detention reported having been the victims of inmate-on-inmate abuse. This is not dramatically higher than the corresponding combined male and female rates reported by adults or juveniles in either prison or jail. The reason why the overall rate of sexual abuse (9.5 percent) was so much higher in juvenile detention than in other facilities is the frequency of sexual misconduct by staff. About 7.7 percent of those in juvenile detention reported sexual contact with staff during the preceding year. Over 90 percent of these cases involved female staff and teenage boys in custody.

Government employees are committing child sexual abuse against caged victims. These guards are often repeat offenders. “In juvenile facilities, victims of sexual misconduct by staff members were more likely to report eleven or more instances of abuse than a single, isolated occurrence.” All of this data comes from research conducted by the government’s own Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The impacts of the state’s systematic caging and abuse of children are not equally distributed across the population. The Center for Children’s Law and Policy documents many studies showing the racially disparate impacts of youth incarceration and juvenile justice policies. LGBTQ youth also face disproportionate impacts from the juvenile justice system. According to an article in The Nation:

The road to incarceration begins in pretrial detention, before the youth even meets a judge. Laws and professional standards state that it’s appropriate to detain a child before trial only if she might run away or harm someone. Yet for queer youth, these standards are frequently ignored. According to UC Santa Cruz researcher Dr. Angela Irvine, LGBT youth are two times more likely than straight youth to land in a prison cell before adjudication for nonviolent offenses like truancy, running away and prostitution. According to Ilona Picou, executive director of Juvenile Regional Services, Inc., in Louisiana, 50 percent of the gay youth picked up for nonviolent offenses in Louisiana in 2009 were sent to jail to await trial, while less than 10 percent of straight kids were. “Once a child is detained, the judge assumes there’s a reason you can’t go home,” says Dr. Marty Beyer, a juvenile justice specialist. “A kid coming into court wearing handcuffs and shackles versus a kid coming in with his parents—it makes a very different impression.”

Queer and transgender youth are treated differently by the justice system before they are even tried and convicted. Once incarcerated, they face brutal violence. From beatings to victim blaming to bigoted slurs from guards, queer and transgender youth are regularly abused in juvenile corrections facilities.

Some of America’s youth incarceration problem begins in the schools. “Zero-tolerance” policies in public schools criminalize violating school rules, producing what is often called the school to prison pipeline. The racially disparate impacts of this school to prison pipeline are well documented, and they often criminalize minor infractions.

Outside of school, youth are often directly targeted by police thanks to ageist laws like curfews. Laws often restrict freedom of movement and bodily autonomy for youth, and justify this coercion through condescending and paternalistic platitudes. In a particularly appalling recent case of paternalism sending youth to prison, a transgender girl was sent to an adult prison without charges or trial, because the state had power over her as her “guardian.” The desire to protect youth provides ideological cover for the state to treat them even more abusively than it treats adults.

The American state is uniquely punitive in some respects. According to Amnesty International, “The United States is believed to stand alone in sentencing children to life without parole.” Amnesty identifies “at least 2,500 people in the US serving life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for crimes committed when they were under 18 years old.” Before turning 18, these youth were permanently separated from society, permanently sent to violent hellholes.

The essence of imprisonment as we know it is throwing away a human being, treating them as disposable. Prisoners are subjected to violence, abuse, and torture. They are held in austere and inhumane conditions. And they are kept out of the general public’s sight. They are punished rather than being made to make amends or provide restitution to victims. It’s bad enough to treat any human being this way. To treat children this way is unconscionable. Stop caging kids.

Ralph Nader discusses a potential left-right alliance.

Vincent Navarro discusses the Mondragon worker cooperatives in Spain.

James Peron discusses how people who hate gays also hate capitalists in the context of the businesses refusing to discriminate against them.

Qatryk interviews Roderick Long in Poland.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the death penalty.

Danny Haiphong discusses the left flank of U.S. imperialism and respectability.

Kevin Carson discusses May Day.

Kevin Carson discusses the governmentalist educational establishment and equality.

Stefan Haus discusses the rise of the right in Europe.

Ron Keine discusses why ending the death penalty should be a conservative priority.

Sheldon Richman discusses how the U.S. blew a chance to reconcile with Iran.

Tessie Castillo discusses a Georgia mother who arrested her own daughter for heroin.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses racism in government programs.

Sheldon Richman discusses the thick and thin libertarian debate.

Travis Wilson discusses why he uses the word voluntarylist rather than anarchist or libertarian.

Ron Jacobs discusses the failure of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Mateo Pimentel discusses the U.S. embargo on Cuba.

Justin Raimondo discusses the non-interventionist sentiment among the American populace.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the continuing Cold War against Cuba.

Zenon Evans discusses the drug testing of teens at three private high schools by a company with a CEO that is a brother of the principal of SEHS.

Robert Fantina discusses U.S. terrorism against Cuba.

Steve Chapman discusses the secrets and lies of the American drone war.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses the ticking time bomb scenario and torture.

Cathy Reisenwitz discusses how government created the campus rape crisis.

Christopher Westley discusses e-cig manufacturers who support regulation.

David Stockman discusses why the warfare state must be dismantled.

Magnus Carlsen beats Anand before the World Chess Championship.

Magnus Carlsen beats Boris Gelfand.

• Over at the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Ilya Somin has an excellent reply to the argument that undocumented immigrants have acted immorally by violating the law. As an anarchist I reject the idea that one has a moral obligation to obey the state’s laws. But Somin persuasively argues that even with a presumption in favor of obedience to laws, there are good reasons to believe that other factors make it moral to cross borders without legal permission.
• In other news related to the criminalization of migrants, protests continue across the nation to oppose the ongoing harms of mass deportations. April 5th marked a National Day of Action Against Deportations. Over at PanAm Post, Fergus Hodgson has a good article on the protests.
• Deportations continue to destroy lives and break up families in my home state of Utah. Ana Cañenguez, who I have mentioned previously at this blog, was just told by ICE that her application for humanitarian exemption was denied. This means she will be deported back to El Salvador and her family will be split apart by state coercion. As Ana told reporters,  “I don’t understand why this President can tear families apart.”  We must fight for a world where no presidents or other state actors have that horrible power. As Anthony Gregory puts it, “End deportations now. This is beyond cruel, and such horrors occur hundreds of times a day in the name of immigration control. Obama’s presidency has topped all others on deportations in absolute terms, at least in modern history.”
• Another horror inflicted by the prison state is rape by state actors like police and prison guards. These rapists act with virtual impunity thanks to the state’s institutional power, ideological euphemisms, and the state’s monopoly on law. One of these rapists, Kansas City police officer Jeffrey Holmes, was actually convicted of a crime on Friday. Holmes raped two women, both of whom he accused of prostitution. While prosecutors alleged that he used his position as an officer to coerce the women into sex, prosecutors charged him not with rape or assault but with “corruption.” He was convicted of these charges and sentenced to “15 days in jail and a fine.” This is incredibly lenient compared to typical sentences for rape and sexual assault, and it is yet another example of euphemism being used to shield a state actor from accountability for rape.
• To  understand more about how the prison state enables rape, I highly recommend The Shame of Our Prisons: New Evidence, an article by David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow from last October’s New York Review of Books. The article summarizes lots of recent research on prison rape from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and I find it immensely useful for understanding the specifics of the problem.
• As I write this, I’m listening to a talk by Jonathan Nitzan titled No Way Out: Crime, Punishment & the Capitalization of Power. Nitzan is one of the authors of Capital as Power, and this talk analyzes mass incarceration and punishment through the lens of his analysis of capitalism. This provides an explanation for the seemingly unusual phenomenon of liberal capitalist states incarcerating on a mass scale.
• For another economic perspective on prisons, I also recommend Daniel D’Amico’s talk The American Prison State. D’Amico looks at incarceration and punishment through the lens of free market economics, specifically the Austrian school.

I hope you find these links interesting and informative. I’ll leave you with something you can do to help those imprisoned by the American state. Writing to prisoners can make their life inside the prison slightly less monotonous and more livable. For a good way to start writing letters to prisoners, I recommend writing to prisoners on their birthdays. You can find some information on political prisoner birthdays for April here.

The statement was widely discussed and displeased many in social media, especially for following IPEA‘s research in Brazil, in which 58.5% of interviewees agreed with the assertion, “If women knew how to behave, there would be less rape.”

It is true that Constantino considered that the research’s results indicated the backwardness and the macho culture that are still prevalent in Brazil. Nevertheless, he does not notice that his statement is an accomplice of this toxic culture. The quote, in context, goes as follows:

While the machismo culture does not fade away and exemplary punishment does not come, it would be recommended that women should be more cautious, that they should try to look just a little bit more prudish, and preserved somewhat their intimate parts. I have no doubt that “good girls” are under less risk of sexual assault.

Constantino commits the fallacy of moralizing the explanation of rape. Let us compare: Say sex workers had a bigger chance of being raped than the average woman. This is just an empirical question, of knowing whether sexual work increases or not the risk of rape.

Now, imagine we said this: “Sex workers, because they’re acting immorally, have a higher chance of being raped, while ‘well behaving women’, because they act morally, have a lower chance of being sexually assaulted.” This offhand comment about the morality of the act adds nothing to the explanation and, worse, makes “having a lower chance of being raped” something moral, worthy of celebration. It is a subtle instance of slut shaming.

Sarah Skwire notes correctly that one of the distinguishing features of the rape culture is arguments such as “the victim shouldn’t have been there/shouldn’t have drunk/shouldn’t have worn these clothes/shouldn’t have gone to that party.”

As Charles Johnson highlights, here we see the “unwritten law of patriarchy:” culture puts the woman in a position of dependence by the relationship between the violence committed by a few men and the attempt by other to protect and control women. These two behaviors work in conjunction to impose rules on women’s personal lives, limiting their freedom. The moralizing explanation of rape is part of this cycle.

Constantino may as well say, “Women who don’t leave their houses are less likely to be raped.” Well, it depends. If family members or acquaintances rape them, that statement is false. He could also say, “Women who don’t drink are less likely to be raped.” All right, but only if he is talking about sexual assaults committed against drunk women. We cannot extrapolate.

We live in a world where women are deceived into accepting false job offers abroad and forced into prostitution. Where women are raped only for going back home from work late at night. Where women are raped because their house has been broken into. Where there is child prostitution and sexual abuse. Where agents of the state can throw a 15-year-old girl in jail along with several men. Where a community council can condemn a girl to collective corrective rape. Where women might be in the middle of war and cannot flee. Where women hop on a van with their boyfriends not knowing who is inside. Where family members, acquaintances and even sexual partners are ill intentioned.

In a world where women are raped only for being women, Constantino should, at the very least, apologize for his pointless moralizing.

When I heard that two rapists in the Steubenville, Ohio case were convicted and sentenced to jail, I’ll admit  part of me felt a sense of relief. According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), only 3% of rapists ever spend a night in prison. It feels good to see rapists fall into that 3%. But the more I consider this case, the more I realize that no prosecution, verdict or sentence can solve the problem.

The men who were convicted raped a 16-year old girl — digitally penetrated her while she was drunk, vulnerable and unconscious. Photographs of the girl’s naked body were taken and shared without her consent. These acts are appalling violations of the right to control one’s own body, the most basic principle of liberty. Rape and sexual assault violate that right in the most personal, damaging and invasive way.

If only the bystanders who witnessed the assault had understood this. It happened at a party. Many peers of the victim and the perpetrators witnessed the assault as it happened and posted videos and tweets about it online. One boy spoke up in the victim’s defense, but was laughed at and did not successfully stop the assault.

Evan Westlake testified at  trial that he saw one of the perpetrators, Trent Mays, smacking the victim’s hip with his penis. He also saw Ma’lik Richmond, the other perpetrator, penetrating the victim’s vagina with two of his fingers. When asked why he didn’t intervene, he answered “it wasn’t violent. I didn’t know exactly what rape was. I always pictured it as forcing yourself on someone.”

What Westlake witnessed was violence. It entailed physically violating another person’s boundaries. But, as is often the case in real rapes, there was no struggle, no armed stranger in the bushes, no screaming victim. What Westlake witnessed was rape. But it wasn’t the comparatively rare stranger rape that haunts the popular imagination. So Westlake did not even recognize it.

We need to change that. In a culture that educated young people about respecting boundaries and treating other people’s bodily autonomy as sacrosanct, Westlake would have known exactly what rape was, and he would have intervened. Throughout the night, when boys assaulted the victim, joked about raping her, and carried her unconscious body between rooms, multiple people would have intervened. But evidently, we don’t live in that culture.

Special Judge Thomas Lipps did little to bring us closer to that culture. Even as he convicted and sentenced the rapists, he made several troubling statements. For example, he claimed that this case shows alcohol is “a particular danger to our teenage youth.” Alcohol was not the problem here; rape was. People can drink alcohol voluntarily and consensually.  Drunk people have the right to have their boundaries respected.

Focusing on underage drinking enables victim blaming. In the Steubenville case, a litany of sexists blamed the victim, one even suggesting that the state should prosecute her for underage drinking. Victim blaming has also played a role in threats the victim has received throughout this case.  By shifting the focus from boundaries and consent to consensual alcohol consumption, Lipps’s comments enable this attitude.

Lipps also advised teenagers “to have discussions about how you talk to your friends; how you record things on the social media so prevalent today; and how you conduct yourself when drinking is put upon you by your friends.” Social media was not the problem here. In fact it provided vital evidence. Rather than advising teenagers to not rape, Lipps advised them on how to avoid getting caught.

With such from the judge, one wonders whether the rapists will learn anything. By the age of 21, both will have been released from juvenile detention. I doubt that prison will teach them to respect others’ bodies and rights. As an institution, prison is built on coercion, on systematically violating people’s bodies. Sexual violence is rampant in juvenile detention centers, and is disproportionately directed against LGBT detainees and survivors of prior sexual assault. The Steubenville rapists might continue to rape captive victims in detention centers, and be released with even less respect for bodily autonomy than they started with.

If prosecutions and prisons won’t stop rape, what will? A good start is educating people, especially young boys, about what rape is, why it’s wrong, and the ethics and practice of bystander intervention. Future Steubenvilles can be prevented by creating a culture where people stand up for each other’s basic rights and take issues of consent seriously.

Among other objections, Skwire and Horwitz contend that Borowski “slut shames women who engage in casual sex.”  Woods seems confused by this and writes, “Shows how sheltered I am: evidently there are people in the world who use the phrase ‘slut shames.'”  He then sarcastically dismisses the idea that casual sex is a legitimate choice made by women.

Now, I’m one of the “people in the world who use the phrase ‘slut shames.'”  And since the concept is apparently totally foreign to Dr. Woods, I hope I can explain to him why I think libertarians ought to oppose slut shaming. Slut shaming is the denigration of women as unacceptably sexual, often perpetuated using epithets like “slut” and “whore.”  While it is typically associated with shaming women for activities like casual sex, women can be slut shamed for practically anything. Dressing a particular way, having large breasts, flirting, rebuking sexual advances, being bisexual, and more can all be used as the impetus for slut shaming. Any woman can be slut shamed and there is no concrete definition of a “slut,” leading some feminists to argue that it is more accurate to simply refer to slut shaming as “woman hating.”

But whatever we call it, slut shaming can have dire consequences.  It certainly did for Hope Witsell. After this 13-year-old girl sent a topless photo to a boy she had a crush on, she faced persistent slut-shaming and harassment from her peers. While school administrators did little to stop this harassment, they did see fit to suspend her for sending the photo. Hope eventually committed suicide. And she’s not alone. Felicia Garcia, Jessica Laney, and Amanda Todd are a few other teenage girls who have committed suicide in response to persistent slut shaming.

The tragic impacts of slut shaming can also be seen in many rape cases. Women who are deemed “sluts” are treated as no longer credible witnesses, because if they want sex or have lots of it, it is apparently inconceivable that they might ever not consent to it.  This form of slut shaming was seen in a 2010 gang rape case that was dismissed when it was revealed that the victim had fantasized about group sex. The judge said of the victim, “her credibility was shot to pieces.”  In a 2008 sexual battery case in Georgia, the judge made the victim reveal a litany of intimate details about her sex and dating history. This was used to slut shame and humiliate the victim.

Slut shaming is even wielded against the youngest rape victims. When the New York Times covered of a case in which an 11 year old was gang raped, the paper of record saw fit to focus on the girl’s makeup and clothing. Later in the same case, defense attorney Steve Taylor blamed this 11 year old girl for being gang raped, comparing her to a spider luring men into her web.

And these are just the stories we can read about in the news. But there are likely plenty more instances of rape survivors being slut shamed that we will never read news stories about. After all, 54% of rapes and sexual assaults are never reported to the police, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. This under-reporting can be understood as partially a response to a culture that slut shames and degrades rape survivors who come forward. YouTube user chescaleigh recently posted a video about her experiences with slut shaming after her rape. She provides a powerful look at how rape survivors are slut shamed in the cases that never make it into news media.

And this is why slut shaming ought to be opposed by libertarians. Woods writes that, “The core libertarian value is nonaggression.” I hope we can all agree that rape and sexual assault are clear acts of aggression. Slut shaming and victim blaming are cultural practices that make the victims of this aggression suffer more, all while helping the perpetrators of aggression escape accountability. We should vigorously oppose slut shaming and victim blaming in the same way we should oppose any excuses offered for state violence.

That reminds me: Slut shaming also functions as an excuse for state violence. In particular, it relates closely to the state’s persistent use of violence against sex workers. A recent Human Rights Watch report examined four major US cities where cops will use a woman’s possession of condoms as evidence that she is a sex worker. Because apparently, in the slut shaming minds of police, being prepared to practice safe sex means you’re a prostitute. And apparently being a prostitute means you can be “legitimately” targeted for state aggression. In addition to the usual statist practices of kidnapping people at gun point and locking them in cages, the report also found that police sexually assaulted suspected sex workers. Transgender women were regularly profiled as sex workers, showing how gender stereotypes structure state violence.

Now, none of this necessarily proves that Borowski was in the wrong, as her video did not contain the kind of overtly destructive slut shaming discussed here. Indeed, all she said was that media promotes casual sex and that casual sex is not empowering. It could be argued that Borowski was just making a point that many feminist media critics have also made. However, Borowski made her point in a way that easily could also be seen as denigrating women who choose casual sex and makeup, thus furthering a cultural climate of slut shaming.

But this is not an issue that can simply be dismissed as irrelevant, minor, or “just a joke.” Studies have shown a relationship between sexist humor and sexist attitudes or actions. Casual slut shaming preserves the social environment that makes more severe forms of slut shaming powerful.

Think what you will about Julie Borowski’s video. Whether she promoted slut shaming in it is debatable. But I believe libertarians should conclude that slut shaming, and the social environment it creates, are worth opposing. Because we care deeply about aggression, we should seek a world where aggressors are held accountable and the victims of aggression are not shamed and degraded. Slut shaming stands directly in the way of such a world.

Moreover, as a libertarian I favor human dignity. Slut shaming is a real threat to human dignity. For many teen girls, it means relentless and vicious harassment in public school halls, largely unimpeded by school administrators, who are more likely to punish the victims for their sexuality. As we have seen, this can end in suicide. For rape victims, slut shaming means a shifting of blame. It means their sexual history, their fantasies, and their appearance are all turned into weapons to degrade them when they are already wounded by sexual violence. And for those targeted by police, slut shaming can mean that they will be kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and locked in a cage all under the cover of law. It can even mean that their attempts to practice safe sex become used as evidence to legally justify caging and abusing them. This is what a slut shaming culture looks like. Libertarians must join with feminists to stop it.

The prevailing myth about police is that they work “to serve and protect” the people from crime.  Sometimes they may do that, but all too often the police are the ones committing crimes.  I’m not just talking about petty crimes; I’m talking about rape and sexual assault.

Take the case of Milwaukee police officer Michael Vagnini. On October 9th, Vagnini was charged with non-consensually inserting his finger into victims’ anuses on the claim of “searching” his victims for drugs.

The FBI defines rape as “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object … without the consent of the victim.”  By this definition, Vagnini raped multiple people while he was on the job.  In one instance, he allegedly caused his victim to experience anal bleeding for days.  In another, he added insult to injury by allegedly planting drugs on his victim.

Rather than serving and protecting, other officers chose to aid and abet. In one incident, Vagnini’s victim was held down by other officers while Vagnini raped him. Furthermore, the Milwaukee Police Department was aware of these incidents for “a couple of years.” They waited “until authorities recognized a pattern” before they did anything to hold him accountable. Translation: The police department was aware that Vagnini was committing rapes, but they waited to do anything about it until they had determined that he was a serial rapist.

This story is appalling, but sadly it is not unique. For example, in Utah police officers have been known to conduct “forced catheterization” searches, which consist of forcibly inserting a catheter into the victim’s urethra to perform drug tests. In 2004, Haley Hooper was held down by four officers while a catheter was inserted into her vagina.  While this met the legal definition of object rape, her lawsuit was dismissed on the grounds that the officers were protected by “qualified immunity.”  Officers involved in another forced catheterization were promoted rather than prosecuted.

These rapes happened under the cover of “searches,” but some officers are even more brazen. Craig Nash, a San Antonio police officer, allegedly raped a sex worker while he was holding her in custody.  In this case, there was DNA evidence against Nash, which is more than many rape cases have. Yet Nash was able to plead down from sexual assault to “official oppression,” which only carries a sentence of one year.

Meanwhile, Nash’s victim, a transgender woman, was locked up in a men’s prison. There, she likely faced persistent sexual violence and harassment. If not, it was probably because she was placed in solitary confinement, which is widely considered a form of torture. Either way, Nash’s victim faced a harsher punishment from the state’s “justice” system than the man who raped her.

These are just a few examples. Charles Johnson of the Molinari Institute has documented many more cases like this in a short series of blogs titled “Rapists on Patrol.”  But these are just the cases we know about.

Rape and sexual assault are notoriously under-reported crimes. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 54% of rapes in the United States are not reported to police.  There are many reasons for this. For example, victims may justifiably fear that scrutiny will be placed on them more than on their rapist, and that the most intimate details of their personal lives will become fodder for victim blaming.

But when the rapist is a cop, the incentives not to report become stronger still. The rapist will be protected not only by sexist social norms, but by his powerful role in the criminal justice system. With such strong incentives for victims not to report, I think it is fair to conclude that the police rapes we’re aware of are merely the tip of the iceberg.

We are told that police are necessary to protect us from crime. But instead, police are committing truly appalling crimes. And for the most part, the legal system is protecting them while they do it.

Meanwhile, the state’s criminal justice system is woefully inadequate even at prosecuting rapes committed by ordinary citizens. According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, 97% of rapists will not spend a single night in prison.

To fix this, we need a new system — a system that holds all perpetrators of violence accountable, without the privilege and injustice that has always characterized the rule of the state.

Translations for this article:

• Dutch, Machtsmisbruikers.

Yes, you read that right. Not only was a serious crime not investigated, but the alleged victim was forced to take part in a sting operation to catch non-criminals. And then she was raped again.

How could something like this happen?

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (“Suit charges Upper St. Clair officials made rape victim ‘bait,'” July 30, 2010) reports:

According to a court filing submitted by the school district, [school Principal] Dr. Ghilani didn’t believe that the students were in danger or that any safety concerns were present. Instead, he thought students were having consensual sex in school after hours.

He devised a plan to have school police officers follow the students in question to determine who they were and where they were going.

Ideas about teens and sex — that sex is something that older adults must restrict until teens are older or married — come through here. Catching teens having consensual sex in school appears to be a higher priority than pursuing an alleged rapist. It is the role of the administrator to protect adolescents from sex — preventing them from honestly learning about it — whether consensual or not.

It should be asked what role sexism played. A male principal did not believe a female student’s accusation, but decided that she was accusing the male out of jealousy. His response could not honestly be called skeptical. The principal was so sure of what happened that he decided to investigate something entirely different from the actual complaint. He did not appear concerned for the victim’s well-being.

The Post-Gazette contains passages from the school’s legal filing:

Security personnel followed the students. Whether the sexual activity was alleged to be consensual or nonconsensual would not have altered the plan. … The plan to was to monitor the students and stop the students before any sexual activity occurred.

This makes it sound like the accuser was at least as much a subject of investigation as the accused.

At the root of the problem are authoritarian ideas. The victim’s personal autonomy is denied, not only by the rapist but by those in charge. If she can be useful in establishing greater control, she’ll be used for that purpose. The administrator will decide what kind of risk she is to be put at.

Authority often becomes institutionalized irresponsibility. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. When one person is in charge of another, the ruled is expected to serve the ruler. Since the ruler views individuals as a means to the end of power he will take care of the ruled as means, not as ends in themselves.

Authorities betray freedom. Whether through social prejudices that they buy into or through their priorities of securing power first and individuals second, they hurt people.