Now it is the hotel maid who is on trial

There are two kinds of criminal trials in which the alleged victim, and not the alleged perpetrator, are put on trial.  One is murder.  The other is rape.

I reported on a number of the first kind back in the 1960s, when I covered the criminal courts (among other things) for The Daily Mail in Hagerstown, Md.    I reported on several murder trials in which a wife was charged with murdering her husband, one in which a son was charged with murdering his father.  In all cases, the defense was that the dead person was so abusive that the accused was driven to the breaking point, and could not be blamed for the killing.  The juries agreed, and maybe they were right—but the dead person never got to tell his side of the story.  That is one of the serious disadvantages of being dead.

In a rape case, the alleged victim gets a chance to tell her side of the case, but the burden is on her to prove she is worthy to be believed.  The defense is almost always to attack her reputation so that the jury will believe the defendant and not her.  This is what is going on in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape trial except that it is the prosecution, not the defense, who is attacking the alleged victim’s behavior.  This is highly unusual behavior for a prosecutor.  I never before heard of a prosecutor publicly trying to undermine his own case before it goes to trial.

The prosecutor says that the victim lacks credibility because she told conflicting stories about her life in Guinea, in Africa, before being admitted as a refugee into the United States, and because she has unsavory associations in the United States, including a convicted drug dealer to whom she allegedly made a phone call about the case.  There are two things to note about this.  One is that the maid’s lawyer does not deny them.  The other is that they have nothing to do with the only relevant issue, whether or not Dominique Strauss-Kahn committed rape.

I am content to let the jury weigh the facts in the case.  If there is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed rape, he should be acquitted.  But Strauss-Kahn’s narrative is so far outside my frame of reference that I can’t process it in my mind.  He says that he emerged naked from a shower, saw a hotel maid in his room, threw her down on a bed and had oral sex with her, and that she consented to it, but later changed her story.

I try to imagine what would happen if I were in a hotel, saw a maid in my room when I came out of the shower, and decided to grab her and have her perform oral sex.  Maybe it is because I am a product of American small-town life in a past era, but I can’t think of this as normal and acceptable behavior.

Sexual abuse, hotel maids and why unions matter

Do rich and powerful men ever commit rape?  Evidently many people – including Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher, and Ben Stein, the conservative American writer and TV personality – think that the eminence of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, could be guilty of the charge of attempted rape brought by a hotel maid who, as they both point out, is a mere nobody.

Public opinion polls indicate that a majority of the French people, and an overwhelming majority of French socialists, think Strauss-Kahn was set up.  And judging by the comment threads of some of the on-line articles I’ve read, there are many Americans who think a white Frenchman who pays $3,000 a night for a hotel room is inherently more credible than an African immigrant maid.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn

The fact is that hotel guests who sexually abuse hotel maids often get away with it.  Hotels want to please their guests.  Hotel maids – often women of color, often poor immigrants, sometimes illegal immigrants – are often working on the margin of economic survival, and know they can easily be replaced.  If a hotel guest gropes them, or exposes himself, or worse, it is risky to mention it.  The hotel has every incentive to believe the guest rather than the maid.

If you can do something with impunity, a certain number of people will do it.  There are rich people who think their wealth gives them impunity.  There are international civil servants who think diplomatic immunity gives them impunity.

The maid allegedly raped by Strauss-Kahn was a poor immigrant from Guinea, in West Africa.  She might not have spoken up if not for a supportive employer, the Sofitel hotel corporation, and a strong labor union, the New York Hotel Trades Council.  Holding a union card, being protected by a union contract, meant that she did not have to face with wealth and power represented by Strauss-Kahn on her own.  As the old union song, “Solidarity Forever” goes, What force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? But the union makes us strong!

My newspaper training tells me to use words like “allegedly” and “accused of” so as not to assume that someone is guilty of a crime until the person has been found guilty in a court of law.  I will say that, based on the facts that have come out, the police had probable cause to make an arrest, and prosecution to bring charges, and let it go at that.  But the burden of proof is on the prosecution, as it should be.  Dominique Strauss-Kahn will, I am sure, enjoy the full benefit of the law in presenting his defense – if the case even goes to trial.  I’d say the odds are that the alleged victim will be offered a huge cash settlement to keep the charge from ever coming to trial.

The Julian Assange rape case

There are two aspects to the Julian Assange rape case.  One is his actual guilt or innocence.  On that I think all reasonable people have to reserve judgment.  The other is whether the case was exploited for political purposes.  On that I think the evidence is clear.

For Aaron Bady’s well-reasoned argument for withholding judgment on guilt or innocence, click on If You’ll Pardon the Presumption.

For Nate Silver’s well-reasoned analysis of the political motivations behind the handling of the case, click on A Bayesian Take on Julian Assange.

For more information about exactly what Julian Assange is accused of, click on 10 days in Sweden: the full allegations against Julian Assange [Added 12/20/10]

“Our century’s greatest injustice”

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are husband and wife journalists who jointly won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on China.  In their book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, they argue that just as slavery and totalitarianism were the great moral issues of the 19th and 20th centuries, crimes against women will be the great moral issue of the 21st century.  After reading the book, I do not think that statement an exaggeration.

Millions of women are targeted for sexual slavery, rape, “honor” killing, and genital mutilation, and tens of millions allowed to die of neglect in childbirth or otherwise, specifically because they are women.  But the struggle for justice for women is a very different kind of struggle than the battles against slavery, fascism and Communism.

Nicholas Kristof was once at the India-Nepal border, and an Indian customs official went through his gear fairly thoroughly, to make sure he didn’t have any smuggled DVDs.  This was on a route where Nepali peasant girls are smuggled into India to be prostitutes, and Kristof asked what success the customs official had in stopping such trafficking.  The customs official said such an effort would be useless.  Young Indian men need access to prostitutes in order to protect the chastity of young Indian women.  The customs official said that if this means Nepali peasant girls have to be forced into prostitution make this possible, this is an unfortunate necessity.

As Kristof noted, the reason the customs official was so concerned about smuggled DVDs is that the United States government put pressure on the Indian government to protect intellectual property rights.  He was not concerned about human trafficking because this is not an issue any government has raised.

The authors are frankly propagandistic.  Reporting mainly from southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, they tell story after story, by turns gruesome and inspiring, about atrocities against women, the courageous responses of some of them, and what philanthropic Americans and other Westerners have done to help.  They throw in enough statistical information to persuade people like me that the stories they tell are not isolated instances.

The authors say that rape and prostitution are worst in countries such as India, Pakistan and Iran where male honor most requires protection of female virginity.  “Honor” requires prostitution to protect “decent” women, and it makes rape an effective tool of humiliation and social control.  Kristof and WuDann tell the story of a village girl in Pakistan who was sentenced by the village council to be stripped and publicly gang-raped to punish not her, but her brother, for some misdeed.  The expectation was that she would commit suicide out of shame, and this would be humiliating to the brother.  But her parents kept watch and prevented her from taking her life, a village Muslim elder denounced the rape as un-Islamic and she went to the police who, surprisingly, arrested the attackers.  With the help of money contributed by Americans, and publicity by Kristof, she founded a girls’ school and then many schools.

The suppression of prostitution, murder and rape is a question of law enforcement.  There are other problems no less serious, but harder to get a grip on.  Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, wrote an essay in 1990 on “100 million missing women.”  Women live longer than men, and so there are more women than men in much of the world, including Latin America and much of Africa.  Yet in China, India, Pakistan and certain other countries, men outnumber women.  The reason, Kristol and WuDunn say, is that parents don’t try as hard to keep their daughters alive as their sons.  Studies in India show that girls in India don”t get vaccinated as boys do, and are 50 percent more likely to die between ages 1 and 5.