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Trained at the prestigious Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Danijela Stajnfeld had, by the age of 26 in 2011, won two major theater prizes

The following year, she abruptly and mysteriously dropped from public view. It wasn’t until last summer that she publicly revealed why.

In her documentary, “Hold Me Right,” about victims and perpetrators of sexual assault, Stajnfeld said that she too had been sexually assaulted eight years earlier by a powerful Serbian man, which had prompted her move to the United States.

“I thought no one remembered me, I didn’t keep in touch with anyone in Serbia,” she said in an interview.

Stajnfeld’s face was suddenly all over the Serbian press again. Television and online commentators praised her for speaking out or savaged her for not disclosing the man’s name.

She said she did not identify the man because she wanted the film to focus on survivors and healing, rather than singling out a perpetrator

Critics questioned her motives. “Sick!” read one headline. “Actress made up the rape to advertise her film.”

While the country has taken steps to advance the cause of women’s rights in recent years — in 2013 it ratified a human rights convention addressing gender-based violence — in Serbia, as in the surrounding region, sexual harassment and assaults are still only rarely reported, and victim shaming abounds.

A longer version, he said, would reveal the broader context, that they were merely improvising dialogue, and that she was possibly claiming he assaulted her to gain publicity for her film.

In January, several other Serbian actresses came out publicly with allegations that they had been raped, and a MeToo-like movement roared to life in this region where the culture of calling out abusers had yet to gain a foothold.

Using the hashtag #NisiSama, which means “You are not alone,” and on the Facebook page Nisam Trazila, or “I didn’t ask for it,” which has 40,000 followers, supporters urged that victims of sexual harassment be believed and perpetrators be held to account.

“After opening up, it was so liberating; I thought the narrative was in my hands,” Stajnfeld said. “But it caused even more unsafety and ridiculous dehumanization.”

Only weeks ago, he had spoken out against sexual assault.

“When a woman says no, that’s the end of it. I don’t understand that someone can’t control their urges,” he told one Serbian newspaper.

“I have never had sexual contact with her. Everything else would be a lie!” Lecic wrote in a WhatsApp message.

But Stajnfeld provided prosecutors and members of the media with an audio recording of her confronting him in a Belgrade restaurant in December 2016

Lecic said what happened ought to “feel like an honor, not to put you in jeopardy.” “Who do you think I am?” he continued. “As if I don’t respect who I am.”

In the recording, Lecic also pushed back on Stajnfeld’s assertion that if she says no, she means no. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said, later adding, “Life is unpredictable, like a game.”

Last week Stajnfeld, who lives in New York, flew to Serbia, met with the police and prosecutors and identified the man who she said assaulted her as Branislav Lecic.

“Maybe she was expecting something more, maybe it’s because nothing happened that she wants revenge, and maybe she wants to build her story through me,” he wrote. “Bad marketing is also marketing.”

When they began rehearsing the play, Stajnfeld said she viewed Lecic as a mentor and a friend, until he began propositioning her to have sex. Then, one day, in his dressing room, she said he abruptly shoved his hand up her dress. Stajnfeld said she pulled away and fled, stunned, but opted not to tell the director because she was worried she wouldn’t be believed, and that it could hurt her career. Lecic denied any sexual encounter took place.

“In that moment, I was so tortured,” she continued. “He was asking me to do stuff for him. I wanted to do anything for this torture to stop. I couldn’t move my arms, my mouth, I couldn’t stop crying,” she said.

“For the sake of justice, for the sake of my healing, for the sake of other victims in the region, I’m speaking out now,

After the premiere of Stajnfeld’s film last summer, media commentators said she should be ashamed, that she had slept with a man to get a role, that she should name him or else be prosecuted, that she dishonored women who had really been raped, and that she looked too happy in a recent televised interview to have been a victim.

“Danijela’s case gave wings to other women, actresses, to talk about what happened to them,” said Dragana Grncarski, a former model and public figure. “Coming out in the open, they prevent things like that from happening to other women.”

A few days before, Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, had rescinded tough Obama-era guidelines on campus sexual assault, saying they violated principles of fairness, particularly for accused students like their own sons.

Women’s groups and victims’ advocates have deplored Ms. DeVos’s moves, saying they will allow colleges to wash their hands of the problem.

But a growing corps of legal experts and defense lawyers have argued that the Obama rules created a culture in which accused students, most of them men, were presumed guilty.

Away from the public eye, families have spent tens of thousands of dollars and dipped into retirement savings to hire lawyers and therapists for their sons.

Seefeld

“I was willing to do everything and anything,” Ms. Seefeld said.

The mothers’ resolve comes from their raw maternal instinct to protect their children.

Their sons may not have been falsely accused, the mothers said, but they had been wrongly accused. They made a distinction.

The most active mothers said they stepped forward because they often had more time than their husbands, and because they made a strategic decision that they could be effective on the issue of sexual assault precisely because they are women and, as some described themselves, feminists. “We recognized that power,” Ms. Seefeld said.

Many women, however, feel exactly the opposite way.

They have not been shy about expressing their view of the mothers as “rape deniers” and misogynists who blame women for inviting male violence against them.

But if the mothers do not defend their sons, she said, who will?

“And pretty much the most significant weapon I had was the weapon of public opinion, so that was the weapon I was wielding the hardest.”

Psychiatric patients were managed in the community, with short stay admissions to psychiatry wards if required. On average, patients had two to three weeks of hospitalisation in mixed-gender wards.

And the level of illicit drug and alcohol use in the inpatient population, both prior to and during hospitalisation, heightens the level of behavioural disinhibiton in this population.

In response to escalating assaults in inpatient units, the United Kingdom government adopted a strict policy of gender segregation on psychiatric wards in 2006.

The report does not detail how many incidents involved women, but comment is made that both men and women are vulnerable.

The latest plan to combat violence against women sets out important programs in primary prevention, white ribbon campaigns, work with Indigenous communities and employment-related policies. But has no mention of action to be taken to prevent violence against women in psychiatric wards.

For many decades, women with severe mental disorders were thought to be “too unreliable” to believe when they told their stories of harassment, assault and rape

Over the past years, we have seen improvement in the reporting systems implemented in mental health services and better management of violence against patients, with some shift in the culture of inpatient units; but it is still not good enough.

Investment in improved building designs of psychiatric wards is urgently needed, with special areas designated for women. Wards should be designed to be safe places of healing, with sensitivity for the traumatic backgrounds of many female patients.

Close monitoring of the situation by the general community and governments will ensure violence in psychiatry units is not tolerated.

This mentality is understandable when we consider what innocent victims truly symbolize in our society. It’s hard for parents, or for anyone, to acknowledge that their children could end up as victims of assault.

, “The more innocent a victim, the more threatening they are. Victims threaten our sense that the world is a safe and moral place, where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. When bad things happen to good people, it implies that no one is safe, that no matter how good we are, we too could be vulnerable.

Melvin Lerner showed through his famous electric shock experiments that, even when we are first-hand witnesses to an assault on an innocent victim, we will try to discredit and derogate the victim. The more severe the assault, the greater our derogation. We simply cannot allow the reality that often, good people will find themselves the victims of senseless abuse.

That’s borne out in the way colleges handle sexual assault. While multiple studies have shown that 1 in 5 college women have been sexually assaulted on campus, students determined to be guilty of sexual assault receive only minor sanctions 75 to 90 percent of the time. Only 3 percent of convicted rapists ever see jail

The overwhelming message is clear: Our best and brightest young men will at times become overzealous in their attempts to conquer the world — and if they sometimes conquer young women, it is best for everyone if we pretend it didn’t happen.

We do not want to acknowledge that we are raising half of our children to conquer the world while leaving the other half of our children to be conquered. We would rather focus on the victors and pretend that the victims do not exist. We as a society have created this culture, and only we can change it.

The women I spoke to knew they were doing some of these things but other behaviours were less conscious.

The short moments when women are alone in public space, away from commitments at home or at work – the only moments many people have to themselves – are disrupted.

This kind of safety work goes largely unnoticed by the women doing it and by the wider world.

The trouble is, women are only ever able to count the times when such strategies don’t work – when they are harassed by a man, or assaulted. The work put into the successes – the number of times women’s actions prevent men from intruding – go unnoticed.

Challenging this silence means talking about the range and extent of what women experience, from unwanted comments to flashing, following and frottage.

Recognising the sheer scale of the effort women are habitually putting in to avoid public sexual harassment could help us to change a culture that makes victims accountable for not preventing assault. We continue to talk about the problem as though women need to take more responsibility for preventing sexual assault. But preventing sexual assault is something women do daily, often without realising it.

if one person can think he’s hooking up while the other feels she’s being raped, it makes sense to have a law that eliminates the possibility of misunderstanding. “You shouldn’t be allowed to make the assumption that if you find someone lying on a bed, they’re free for sexual pleasure,”

About a quarter of all states, and the District of Columbia, now say sex isn’t legal without positive agreement,

And though most people think of “yes means yes” as strictly for college students, it is actually poised to become the law of the land.

But criminal law is a very powerful instrument for reshaping sexual mores.

Should we really put people in jail for not doing what most people aren’t doing? (Or at least, not yet?)

It’s one thing to teach college students to talk frankly about sex and not to have it without demonstrable pre-coital assent. Colleges are entitled to uphold their own standards of comportment, even if enforcement of that behavior is spotty or indifferent to the rights of the accused. It’s another thing to make sex a crime under conditions of poor communication.

Most people just aren’t very talkative during the delicate tango that precedes sex, and the re-education required to make them more forthcoming would be a very big project. Nor are people unerringly good at decoding sexual signals. If they were, we wouldn’t have romantic comedies.

“If there’s no social consensus about what the lines are,” says Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a retired judge, then affirmative consent “has no business being in the criminal law.”

The example points to a trend evident both on campuses and in courts: the criminalization of what we think of as ordinary sex and of sex previously considered unsavory but not illegal.

Some new crimes outlined in the proposed code, for example, assume consent to be meaningless under conditions of unequal power. Consensual sex between professionals (therapists, lawyers and the like) and their patients and clients, for instance, would be a fourth-degree felony, punishable by significant time in prison.

most of these occupations already have codes of professional conduct, and victims also have recourse in the civil courts. Miscreants, she says, “should be drummed out of the profession or sued for malpractice.”

It’s important to remember that people convicted of sex crimes may not only go to jail, they can wind up on a sex-offender registry, with dire and lasting consequences.

We shouldn’t forget the harm done to American communities by the national passion for incarceration, either. In a letter to the American Law Institute, Ms. Smith listed several disturbing statistics: roughly one person in 100 behind bars, one in 31 under correctional supervision

the case for affirmative consent is “compelling,” he says. Mr. Schulhofer has argued that being raped is much worse than having to endure that awkward moment when one stops to confirm that one’s partner is happy to continue. Silence or inertia, often interpreted as agreement, may actually reflect confusion, drunkenness or “frozen fright,” a documented physiological response in which a person under sexual threat is paralyzed by terror

To critics who object that millions of people are having sex without getting unqualified assent and aren’t likely to change their ways, he’d reply that millions of people drive 65 miles per hour despite a 55-mile-per-hour speed limit, but the law still saves lives. As long as “people know what the rules of the road are,” he says, “the overwhelming majority will comply with them.”

He understands that the law will have to bring a light touch to the refashioning of sexual norms, which is why the current draft of the model code suggests classifying penetration without consent as a misdemeanor, a much lesser crime than a felony.

This may all sound reasonable, but even a misdemeanor conviction goes on the record as a sexual offense and can lead to registration

An affirmative consent standard also shifts the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, which represents a real departure from the traditions of criminal law in the United States. Affirmative consent effectively means that the accused has to show that he got the go-ahead

if the law requires a “no,” then the jury will likely perceive any uncertainty about that “no” as a weakness in the prosecution’s case and not convict. But if the law requires a “yes,” then ambiguity will bolster the prosecutor’s argument: The guy didn’t get unequivocal consent, therefore he must be guilty of rape.

“It’s an unworkable standard,” says the Harvard law professor Jeannie C. Suk. “It’s only workable if we assume it’s not going to be enforced, by and large.” But that’s worrisome too. Selectively enforced laws have a nasty history of being used to harass people deemed to be undesirable, because of their politics, race or other reasons.

it’s probably just a matter of time before “yes means yes” becomes the law in most states. Ms. Suk told me that she and her colleagues have noticed a generational divide between them and their students. As undergraduates, they’re learning affirmative consent in their mandatory sexual-respect training sessions, and they come to “believe that this really is the best way to define consent, as positive agreement,” she says. When they graduate and enter the legal profession, they’ll probably reshape the law to reflect that belief.

Sex may become safer for some, but it will be a whole lot more anxiety-producing for others.

Some soldiers married Asian women and brought them home as war brides, while others primarily viewed Asian women as sexual objects. Both approaches perpetuated stereotypes of Asian women as sexually submissive, either as ideal wives or sexually exotic prostitutes.

In online digital pornography, Asian women are disproportionately presented as victims of rape, compared to white women or women of other racial backgrounds.

Harmful stereotypes of Asian women in American popular culture date back to at least the 19th century. Back then, American missionaries and military personnel in Asia viewed the women they met there as exotic and submissive.

The most recent high-profile example of this dynamic is the 2015 rape of a woman by white Stanford student Brock Turner. Not until 2019 did the woman, Chanel Miller, reveal her name and identity as an Asian American woman.

In March 2020, Asian American and Pacific Islander community organizations joined with San Francisco State University’s Asian American Studies Program to document incidents of anti-Asian racism occurring across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The group has found that Asian women report hate incidents 2.3 times as often as Asian men.

Asian women are not the only targets of racial and sexual violence. Any non-white woman has a greater risk of these perils than white women do.

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour

Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists

why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?

I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women

I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge.

The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding

The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended i

The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility

ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.

American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said: ‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.

The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves.

the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria

As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens

The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law.

We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls.

From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble.

I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive

It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class.

It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.

‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning.

I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember.

the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.

I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’

I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.

Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.

But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it

I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces

The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.

Sarah Everard in London. Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan and Daoyou Feng in Atlanta.

Eight women, two continents apart, killed in the space of two weeks. The suspects in both cases are men.

London, Ms. Everard disappeared while walking home from a friend’s house, and was found dead a week later. A police officer was charged with kidnapping and murdering her.

In Atlanta, a gunman stormed three massage parlors and shot and killed eight people — seven of them women, six of them Asian — raising speculation that the attack was racially motivated

In the days after Ms. Everard’s body was found and protests calling for deeper social change grew across the United Kingdom

the British government announced an experimental pilot program (though there is no fixed start date yet) that would categorize cases of gender-based violence and harassment motivated by misogyny as hate crimes.

“Across the country, women everywhere are looking to us not just to express sympathy with their concerns, but to act,”

“Stop telling them to stay at home and be careful, and start finding those responsible for the violence.”

In Atlanta, the arrested suspect told the police he had a “sexual addiction,” according to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, prompting some activists to call for him to be charged with a hate crime there, too.

“What can’t be forgotten is the hate crime statute says ‘because of gender’ as well,”

“The angle of misogyny has to be looked at.”

Do ‘sweat the small stuff’

As women around the world watched the two events unfold, they started sharing their own stories on social media of having been in similar situations that had the potential to escalate and turn similarly violent.

Women spoke of all of the things that they — like Ms. Everard — did “right,” including walking on well-lit streets, and talking on the phone or clutching their keys in their pockets while doing so — and described how they still ended up in dangerous situations.

Asian women spoke of all of the ways in which sexism and racism coalesce to expose them to a unique form of harassment that can lead to violence and abuse.

Their stories confirm that violence against women isn’t an aberration, but a “global public health” crisis of “epidemic proportions,”

In the United States, one online survey in 2018 found that 81 percent of women had experienced some kind of sexual harassment during their lifetimes. In the United Kingdom, 97 percent of women aged 18 to 24 said they had been sexually harassed, according to UN Women UK.

These numbers are all from before the coronavirus pandemic; with the onset of the health crisis, domestic abuse surged and public spaces became eerily empty, leaving women feeling increasingly worried about their safety.

Violence against women is consistently underreported because women are scared of retaliation for speaking out or they fear the stigma associated with sexual violence,

UN Women’s initiative to end gender-based violence.

“We’re not joining the dots, nobody is making connections,

“There is a big picture here that we are just repeatedly missing. There are connections between the normalized daily behaviors that we brush off and the more serious abuses.”

a woman recalls that when she was in school, at age 13 or 14, a few girls complained to a teacher that the boys in their class had been groping them and the teacher said that they were “being oversensitive.

In another example, a woman recalls waiting at a bus stop when a man walked up to her and grabbed her bottom but everyone around her who had witnessed the incident remained silent.

a woman recalls how a man sat directly opposite her on the train and touched himself and then got off the train on the next stop, as if nothing had happened.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that misogyny and gender-based violence are also correlated with broader threats

a spike in gender-based violence — particularly domestic violence — correlates with “rising levels of insecurity in society more broadly.”

A sudden disappearance of girls from schools, for example, could point to a rise of fundamentalist views

“If only we were to listen to women and pay attention to the misogyny and aggression and violence that they deal with on a daily basis.”

As pervasive as sexism, misogyny and gender-based violence are, none are inevitable and they can be countered

“The term ‘violence against women’ is a passive construction — there’s no active agent, it’s a bad thing that happens to women,” he explained, but it’s as if “nobody’s doing it to them.”

“shifts the accountability off of men and the culture that produces them and puts it onto women.”

The second step is recognizing that male aggression against women is a manifestation of a broader systemic problem. “There’s this impulse to pathologize the individual perpetrators — that somehow the individual perpetrator is some monster who just kind of crawled out of the swamp,

“But if you accept the concept that it’s systemic, then there are policy implications and political implications and introspection that can be uncomfortable.

“And how that message plays in the community, how you talk about it, how you have police understand it.”

“Making misogyny a crime is like making racism a crime — it’s unfortunate, it’s ugly and we wish people wouldn’t do it, but you can’t punish somebody for saying something,” he said.

In other words, they’d have to show that the man assaulted her because she’s a woman, which is a tough standard to meet.

In the United States, a crime motivated by gender bias is considered a hate crime at the federal level and in 35 states.

Reporting hate crimes also requires a police force that is trained to appropriately respond to those complaints.

But that would only broaden the powers of law enforcement, which several women’s rights groups argue wouldn’t do much to prompt deeper cultural change.

. Many still felt, according to the survey, that incidents like name calling or groping seemed too normal for the police to take seriously.

“So what’s the point of me going to the police station and sitting there for two hours with a policeman who probably just thinks, ‘Why are you wasting my time?’”

One example that a police officer provided for the document quoted a man as saying: "I'm a Syrian! You have to treat me kindly! Mrs. Merkel invited me," referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"We must examine again and again whether we have already done what is necessary in terms of ... deportations from Germany in order to send clear signals to those who are not prepared to abide by our legal order."

More than 100 complaints have been filed, including several for rape.

We have dozens of new pronouns in colleges (for all those genders that have suddenly sprung into existence), and biological males competing in all-female high-school athletic teams (guess who wins at track).

Worse, we have constant admonitions against those who actually conform, as most human beings always have, to the general gender rule.

We have gone from rightly defending the minority to wrongly problematizing the majority. It should surprise no one that, at some point, the majority will find all of this, as Josh Barro recently explained, “annoying.”

I say this as someone happily in the minority — and who believes strongly in the right to subvert or adapt traditional gender roles.

But you can’t subvert something that you simultaneously argue doesn’t exist.

the core contradiction of ideological transgenderism. By severing the link between sex and gender completely, it abolishes the core natural framework without which the transgender experience makes no sense at all.

It’s also a subtle, if unintentional, attack on homosexuality. Most homosexuals are strongly attached to their own gender and attracted to traditional, natural expressions of it. That’s what makes us gay, for heaven’s sake. And that’s one reason the entire notion of a common “LGBT” identity is so misleading. How can a single identity comprise both the abolition of gender and at the same time its celebration?

Exceptions, in other words, need a rule to exist. Abolish gender’s roots in biology and sex — and you abolish gay people and transgender people as well.

Yes, there’s a range of gender expression among those of the same sex. But it’s still tethered among most to the forces of chromosomes and hormones that make us irreducibly male and female. Nature can be interpreted; it can even be played with; but it cannot be abolished. After all, how can you be “queer” if there is no such thing as “normal”?

Transgender people exist and should be treated with absolutely the same human respect, decency, and civil equality as anyone else. But they don’t disprove traditional notions of gender as such — which have existed in all times, places, and cultures in human history and prehistory, and are rooted deeply in evolutionary biology and reproductive strategy.

Intersex people exist and, in my view, should not be genitally altered or “fixed” without their adult consent. But they do not somehow negate the overwhelming majority who have no such gender or sexual ambiguity.

the entire society does not need to be overhauled in order to make gay or trans experience central to it. Inclusion, yes. Revolution, no.

The added problem with this war on nature is the backlash it inevitably incurs. There’s a reason so many working-class men find it hard to vote for Democrats any more. And there’s a reason why a majority of white women last year voted for a man who boasted of sexual assault if the alternative was a triumph for contemporary left-feminism.

You can’t assault the core identity of most people’s lives and then expect them to vote for you. As a Trump supporter in Colorado just told a reporter from The New Yorker: “I’ve never been this emotionally invested in a political leader in my life. The more they hate him, the more I want him to succeed. Because what they hate about him is what they hate about me.”

One of the features you most associate with creeping authoritarianism is the criminalization of certain political positions. Is anything more anathema to a liberal democracy? If Trump were to suggest it, can you imagine the reaction?

And yet it’s apparently fine with a hefty plurality of the Senate and House. I’m referring to the remarkable bill introduced into the Congress earlier this year — with 237 sponsors and co-sponsors in the House and 43 in the Senate — which the ACLU and the Intercept have just brought to light. It’s a remarkably bipartisan effort, backed by Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz, among many solid Trump-resisting Democrats and hard-line Republicans.

it would actually impose civil and criminal penalties on American citizens for backing or joining any international boycott of Israel because of its settlement activities. There are even penalties for simply inquiring about such a boycott. And they’re not messing around. The minimum civil penalty would be $250,000 and the maximum criminal penalty $1 million and 20 years in prison. Up to 20 years in prison for opposing the policies of a foreign government and doing something about it!

I’m not in favor of boycotting Israel when we don’t boycott, say, Saudi Arabia. But seriously: making it illegal?

Every now and again, you just have to sit back and admire the extraordinary skills of the Greater Israel lobby. You’ve never heard of this bill, and I hadn’t either. But that is partly the point. AIPAC doesn’t want the attention — writers who notice this attempted assault on a free society will be tarred as anti-Semites (go ahead, it wouldn’t be the first time) and politicians who resist it will see their careers suddenly stalled.

pointing out this special interest’s distortion of democracy is not the equivalent of bigotry. It’s simply a defense of our democratic way of life.

Tuesday's shootings took place at two spas in Atlanta and another in Acworth, about 10 miles west of Woodstock -- which left eight people, at least four of them Asian women, dead.

Authorities located Long about 150 miles south of Atlanta in Crisp County. State troopers took him into custody after using a special pursuit maneuver to spin his car out of control.

Sheriff Frank Reynolds of Cherokee County, where the Acworth shootings took place, told reporters Long "made indicators that he has some issues -- potentially sexual addiction -- and may have frequented some of these places in the past."Reynolds said those issues could be the motivation behind the shooting.

A law enforcement source said the suspect was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours on end watching pornography online.

Gun was purchased legally

Long purchased his gun legally at a local gun store, Big Woods Goods in Holly Springs, Georgia, an attorney for the company confirmed to CNN.

Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”

The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina

states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.

Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters).

“Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World” in 2018, in which she described the results of a 2016 pre-election survey she and two colleagues had commissioned

The results were telling: People who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism.

The 2016 election, Gelfand continued, “turned largely on primal cultural reflexes — ones that had been conditioned not only by cultural forces, but by a candidate who was able to exploit them.”

Gelfand said:Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.

In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.

The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued,is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France,

cultures that don’t have a lot of threat can afford to be more permissive and loose.”

The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive

My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.

Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side.

Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.

If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?

Along the same lines, if liberals and conservatives hold differing moral visions, not just about what makes a good government but about what makes a good life, what turned the relationship between left and right from competitive to mutually destructive?

As a set, Niemi wrote, conservative binding values encompassthe values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals

She cited research thatfound 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals

Conservatives and liberals, Niemi continued,see different things as threats — the nature of the threat and how it happens to stir one’s moral values (and their associated emotions) is a better clue to why liberals and conservatives react differently.

Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior as morally relevant and wrong.

Underlying these differences are competing sets of liberal and conservative moral priorities, with liberals placing more stress than conservatives on caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values

conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”

Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right.

For example, binding values are associated with Machiavellianism (e.g., status-seeking and lying, getting ahead by any means, 2013); victim derogation, blame, and beliefs that victims were causal contributors for a variety of harmful acts (2016, 2020); and a tendency to excuse transgressions of ingroup members with attributions to the situation rather than the person (2023).

Niemi cited a paper she and Liane Young, a professor of psychology at Boston College, published in 2016, “When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims,” which tested responses of men and women to descriptions of crimes including sexual assaults and robberies.

We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity)

Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated, increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators.

A central explanation typically offered for the current situation in American politics is that partisanship and political ideology have developed into strong social identities where the mass public is increasingly sorted — along social, partisan, and ideological lines.

What happened to people ecologically affected social-political developments, including the content of the rules people made and how they enforced them

Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the U.S. historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.

Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:

I would guess that the reason conservatives are more likely to blame the victim has less to do with binding values and more to do with the just-world bias (the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, therefore if a bad thing happened to you, you must be a bad person).

Belief in a just world, Hartshorne argued, is crucial for those seeking to protect the status quo:It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world

Conversely, if you generally believe the world is not just, and you view yourself as a moral person, then you are likely to feel like you have an obligation to change things.

I asked Lene Aaroe, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, why the contemporary American political system is as polarized as it is now, given that the liberal-conservative schism is longstanding. What has happened to produce such intense hostility between left and right?

There is variation across countries in hostility between left and right. The United States is a particularly polarized case which calls for a contextual explanatio

I then asked Aaroe why surveys find that conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”

Numerous factors potentially influence the evolution of liberalism and conservatism and other social-cultural differences, including geography, topography, catastrophic events, and subsistence styles

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, elaborated in an email on the link between conservatism and happiness:

t’s a combination of factors. Conservatives are likelier to be married, patriotic, and religious, all of which make people happier

They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals also place politics closer to their identity and striving for meaning and purpose, which is a recipe for frustration.

Some features of the woke faction of liberalism may make people unhappier: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, wokeism is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in reverse, urging upon people maladaptive mental habits such as catastrophizing, feeling like a victim of forces beyond one’s control, prioritizing emotions of hurt and anger over rational analysis, and dividing the world into allies and villains.

Why, I asked Pinker, would liberals and conservatives react differently — often very differently — to messages that highlight threat?

It may be liberals (or at least the social-justice wing) who are more sensitive to threats, such as white supremacy, climate change, and patriarchy; who may be likelier to moralize, seeing racism and transphobia in messages that others perceive as neutral; and being likelier to surrender to emotions like “harm” and “hurt.”

While liberals and conservatives, guided by different sets of moral values, may make agreement on specific policies difficult, that does not necessarily preclude consensus.

there are ways to persuade conservatives to support liberal initiatives and to persuade liberals to back conservative proposals:

While liberals tend to be more concerned with protecting vulnerable groups from harm and more concerned with equality and social justice than conservatives, conservatives tend to be more concerned with moral issues like group loyalty, respect for authority, purity and religious sanctity than liberals are. Because of these different moral commitments, we find that liberals and conservatives can be persuaded by quite different moral arguments

For example, we find that conservatives are more persuaded by a same-sex marriage appeal articulated in terms of group loyalty and patriotism, rather than equality and social justice.

Liberals who read the fairness argument were substantially more supportive of military spending than those who read the loyalty and authority argument.

We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation’s official language.”

In one test of persuadability on the right, Feinberg and Willer assigned some conservatives to read an editorial supporting universal health care as a matter of “fairness (health coverage is a basic human right)” or to read an editorial supporting health care as a matter of “purity (uninsured people means more unclean, infected, and diseased Americans).”

Conservatives who read the purity argument were much more supportive of health care than those who read the fairness case.

“political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective

In “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Willer, Yuan Chang Leong of the University of Chicago, Janice Chen of Johns Hopkins and Jamil Zaki of Stanford address the question of how partisan biases are encoded in the brain:

society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos.

The four authors argue that their “findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.” These results, they continue, “shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.”

The authors used neural imaging to follow changes in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (known as DMPFC) as conservatives and liberals watched videos presenting strong positions, left and right, on immigration.

or each video,” they write,participants with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of conservative-leaning participants became more likely to support the conservative positio

Conversely, those with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of liberal-leaning participants became more likely to support the liberal position. These results suggest that divergent interpretations of the same information are associated with increased attitude polarizatio

Together, our findings describe a neural basis for partisan biases in processing political information and their effects on attitude change.

Describing their neuroimaging method, the authors point out that theysearched for evidence of “neural polarization” activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content.

The question is whether the political polarization that we are witnessing now proves to be a core, encoded aspect of the human mind, difficult to overcome — as Leong, Chen, Zaki and Willer sugges

— or whether, with our increased knowledge of the neural basis of partisan and other biases, we will find more effective ways to manage these most dangerous of human predispositions.

With elections this month, analysts say conservatives are trying to hobble the nation’s leading left-of-center newspaper. The Asahi has long supported greater atonement for Japan’s wartime militarism and has opposed Mr. Abe on other issues. But it is increasingly isolated as the nation’s liberal opposition remains in disarray after a crushing defeat at the polls two years ago.Continue reading the main story

Among the women who have come forward to say they were forced to have sex with soldiers are Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos, as well as Dutch women captured in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony.

The revisionists, however, have seized on the lack of evidence of abductions to deny that any women were held captive in sexual slavery and to argue that the comfort women were simply camp-following prostitutes out to make good money.

Many on the right have argued that Japan’s behavior was no worse than that of other World War II combatants, including the United States’ bombing of Japanese civilians.

Since August, The Asahi’s daily circulation has dropped by 230,797 to about seven million

Mr. Uemura said The Asahi had been too fearful to defend him, or even itself. In September, the newspaper’s top executives apologized on television and fired the chief editor.

Mr. Uemura did not attend, explaining that he was now reluctant to appear in public. “This is the right’s way of threatening other journalists into silence,” he said. “They don’t want to suffer the same fate that I have.”

In recent years, Twitter and much of the rest of the internet have been getting hotter, more reflexively outraged, less fun. Venturing onto social media these days, I often feel like a cat burglar stepping through a field of upturned rakes. I could imagine my dumb joke getting picked apart for all the ways it was problematic — “New York Times writer casually encourages bestial sexual assault! #deertoo” — bringing me ever closer to cancellation.

Think of Day One as a private social network for an audience of one: yourself.

You post updates to it just as you might on Instagram or Facebook.

The app — which runs on Macs, iPhones and iPads, syncing your entries between your devices — can handle long text journals, short picture-focused status updates, and pretty much anything else that comes across the digital transom.

I use it to jot down my deepest thoughts and shallowest jokes; to rant and to vent; to come to terms with new ideas I’m playing with, ideas that need time to marinate in secret before they’re ready for the world; and to collect and reflect upon all the weird and crazy and touching artifacts of life

It’s unsocial. Indeed, it’s downright antisocial. Nothing about the app is meant to be shared — it is protected with your Apple security credentials and backs up its data to the cloud using end-to-end encryption, so that the only way someone can get into your diary is by getting hold of your device and your system passcode.

Day One creates something so rare it feels almost sacred: A completely private digital space.

The best way to describe this feeling is to liken it to friendship. I feel comfortable dishing to Day One the way I would to a close friend I trust completely.

one of the few digital spaces that provides you mental space for contemplation and consideration

journaling has been shown to be good for mind and body, reducing stress and anxiety, improving interpersonal relationships, and promoting creativity

a digital journal offers several benefits over paper. Easy accessibility is a big one

you can tap out a journal while you’re in line at the supermarket

because so much happens on screens now, Day One offers greater fidelity to daily life. Instead of describing the insane conversation I had with my co-worker, I can just post a screenshot.

photography, which adds emotional heft to the rigidity of text.