Dear media, please call it rape

Greg Kelly, son of NYC police commissioner Raymond Kelly and co-host of “Good Day New York” on Fox 5, is being investigated for sexually assaulting a woman. Yet the headline that just came up in my news feed was this:

The media needs to call sexual assault what it is. When headlines continually conflate rape and sexual assault with ‘sex’, they contribute to a culture that ignores, and even condones, sexual violence. 

UPDATE: Look at this! Good on them.

Watch me on Anderson today!

Hey y’all, I’m going to be on Anderson Cooper’s daytime show today talking about purity balls and abstinence. (The founder of purity balls, Randy Wilson, is also on.) You can check your local listings for when the show will be on. In the meantime, here are a couple of clips from the show. 

THIS is why you don’t report on what the victim was wearing

Obviously there are many, many reasons why reporting what a sexual assault victim wore is fucked up. One is that people - including lawmakers - read it and believe that it has some bearing on why rape happens. This just turns my stomach.

Rep. Kathleen Passidomo (R-Naples) said she’d read recently a horrible story out of Texas about the rape of a young girl.

“There was an article about an 11 year old girl who was gangraped in Texas by 18 young men because she was dressed like a 21-year-old prostitute,” she said. “And her parents let her attend school like that. And I think it’s incumbent upon us to create some areas where students can be safe in school and show up in proper attire so what happened in Texas doesn’t happen to our students.”’

Via The Raw Story