I don’t pay too much attention to
the current celebrity culture these days, but occasionally I come across a
news story that requires truthful commentary instead of the usual media
advocacy spin. The actress Gabrielle Union—who I never heard of before—is also apparently
a “well-known” black and gender victim advocate. A great deal of what she advocates,
according my research, not surprisingly borders on the kind of self-service that dispenses
with reality and "righteously" denies the validity of alternative points of
view. Union has claimed that 24 years ago she was raped at “gunpoint” during a
robbery at a Payless shoe store, and because of that incident she now has a “credibility”
issue because she has just completed a film which is directed and starred in by
Nate Parker, another person I am completely unfamiliar with. In 1999 as a
college student, Parker—who is also black—was accused by a white female student
of rape, but was acquitted of the crime. I don’t know if he was actually guilty
or not (the alleged victim supposedly had an “active” sex life, if that means anything), but Union,
gender victim advocacy groups and the media are all behaving as if he was guilty,
which is indicative of the insidious nature of the very act of mere accusation.
I have a bad habit of not playing
by the “rules” of current “victim” advocacy; truth is more important to me than
sitting on my hands and being a masochist (especially as an “ethnic” person) who
is supposed to quietly endure a barrage of misinformation and falsity. This latest
media incident just regurgitates
the usual lack of insight. I’ve written before about the “epidemic” of domestic
violence incidents committed by WNBA players against mainly female “intimate
partners,” including at least one murder; yet for the media, these episodes are
not worth reporting, for reasons one need not speculate too hard about. Because sexual assault is characterized as a
female victim only crime, it has allowed government reporting agencies, the media
and gender advocates to ignore other forms of violent crime committed by women.
We don’t get a sense of the “big picture,” because it is politically incorrect.
While men are more likely to commit
violent crime than women, this doesn’t mean that such crime is any more or less
repellent because of gender—as I noted in my recent posts on child killings.
One rare document is the 2000 “Special
Report” by the Bureau of Justice that revealed that 22 percent of all “arrestees”
are women, and two-thirds of those were arrested for “violent” crimes. 16 percent of felony convicts are women, and
as well as those in correctional institutions. Since 1990, the rate of increase
of female offenders doubled that of males. 28 percent of all female violent
offenders are “juveniles.” Some—but by no means the majority—of offenders
claimed to have been “abused” in the past, although probably most people can
make that claim in regard to corporal punishment by a parent or simply because
they want someone to feel “empathy” for them, rather than judge them as they
deserve to be. The average sentence and
time served by women were on the average much less than men for “equivalent”
offenses. Of course, these have to be taken in the context of relativity, and
men are obviously much more likely to be involved in crime, violent or
otherwise. But the point should not be lost that women are not the complete “victims”
they claim to be.
Other interesting information in
the report: For every racial/ethnic demographic save for blacks, the percent of males and females in the population
is or is nearly identical; black females, on the other hand, outnumber black
males 52-48 percent, which in raw numbers is a significant difference; you can rationalize the difference however
you wish. Other findings: The percent of victims of violent crime who were
injured and/or required hospitalization from the committing of the crime was
roughly the same whether committed by a male or a female—the different
certainly not as “significant” as the report tried to imply. Although half of
violent crime in raw numbers by females was committed by white women, and “only”
a third by black women, all this means is that black women commit violent
crimes at a far higher rate than white women, in fact three times their percentage
of the population. One may recall a local incident which occurred in Seattle’s
Metro tunnel, when a gang of black females beat another black female while a security
guard simply stood by and watched, not knowing what to do; it was this incident
caught on video camera that led to Metro “revamping” its security, employing “tougher”
looking guards in “official” looking law enforcement outfits.
The report also found that although
the murder rate by both male and female offenders had decrease slightly overall
in recent years, this was not true of black women, who committed six out of
every 10 murders by female offenders. The percentage of black females convicted
of crimes went up from 117 per 100,000 in 1990 to 212 per 100,000 in 1998.
These numbers may not appear to be that significant in the “big” picture, but
they nevertheless are “significant” in the fact that this represents seven times
the rate of white females. Of course we shouldn’t ignore the report’s other
items, like one-sixth of all Hispanic males—a large percentage of those in
federal prison for non-violent (or for that matter, non-criminal) legal
immigration violations—will serve time in prison at some point in their lives, while
28.5 percent of all black males (more than one-quarter) will serve time in
prison at some point in their lives; this compares to “just” 4.4 percent of
white males and 3.6 percent of black females.
There are of course social
implications to all of this. Two-thirds of female offenders under probation
supervision were white, while two-thirds in state and federal prison were
minority; does this indicate more “favorable” treatment of white offenders?
Also, 7 in 10 women in correctional institutions had minor children; how does
having a mother in jail effect their attitude concerning crime when their own
mothers cannot teach them right from wrong?
Not much in the way of more
recent research has occurred since then on the subject, but a “briefing paper”
by the liberal reform advocacy group The Sentencing Project in 2007 merely
repeated the trends, finding that the percent increase of incarceration of
women over the past two decades double that of men, the net number increasing
four times during that period. How to explain this? The report claims that
female are more likely than male inmates to suffer from “mental illness” and
abuse as a child, although not by that
significant a margin, and one wonders to what extent it is a sympathy “act.”
What we may be seeing is that judicial systems (outside of Texas, perhaps) are
less willing to uses such claims to look the other way in meting out punishment
for crimes committed by females.
But the media and gender advocacy
groups have little use for such statistics.
We are fed one line to forward a self-serving victim narrative that
bares only the slimmest relation to the facts, and no one is “served” by that.
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