A Crime Unsolved

WHEN Sydney feminist, “media researcher”, prolific public speaker and award recipient Nina Funnell was set upon late one night in a Huntleys Point park by an unknown man with a box cutter, she was done a double injustice. There was, first of all, the attack itself, which must have been a terrifying experience for a 23-year-old, as the still-unknown assailant beat her viciously about the face, attempted to strangle her and promised, just for good measure, to do her in. Ms. Funnell, who had taken self-defence classes, sent her assailant fleeing into the night, neatly demonstrating the soundness of her frequent recommendation that all women equip themselves to fight back.

The second injustice, the more enduring and insidious one, was the attacker’s choice of victim. Had Funnell been a secretary or checkout chick, a nun or even a stripper, her account of the assault would most likely have been accepted with nary a raised eyebrow. Instead, as Christine Jackman writes in this weekend’s Australian magazine,  Funnell “does not know why there are some who, years later, still monitor her words and turn up in online forums to spread rumours that she lied about her experience”.

Funnell is bright – the improvement in her writing from gender studies undergrad (see the Upskirting article or her defence of Paris Hilton, published just days before the 2007 attack) to opinion-page fixture makes that clear as day, so it is a little difficult to grasp why she is baffled that her account has attracted disbelief in some quarters. As a women’s activist and, presumably, a keen student of women’s news and issues from around the globe, she must surely be aware that she matches a very specific profile, that of the feminist hoaxer. As Anne Hendershott, a sociology professor at the University of San Diego, put it, “Hate crime hoaxes are by far the most prevalent type of campus ‘crimes.’ Many of these have a rational basis on the part of perpetrators in attempting to bring attention to their cause.” Also worth reading are Heather Mac Donald’s recent analysis of the “campus rape epidemic” and this New York magazine report on a wave of alleged rapes at Columbia University. For a counter view, see The Slutty Feminist’s thoughts.)

That is not to say Funnel was not attacked “in the park where she walked her dog”, nor to question her veracity to the slightest degree. Advocates for female victims of sexual assault have fought long and hard to overcome stigma, smear and suspicion, so the default position of anyone who supports a fairer and more equitable world must always be to accept such a version of events as offered. To do less would do more than diminish Funnell’s ordeal -- it would make things worse, make justice that much harder to obtain, for all her wronged sisters. As a committed feminist, it is inconceivable Funnell would wish to sow doubt amongst police and officers of the court who process the complaints of other women.

Nevertheless, it is some misguided members of the sisterhood’s enthusiasm for promoting such incidents, even when they occur only in the purported victim’s imagination, that continues to casts its wisp of a shadow over Funnell’s credibility. The rare nature of the park assault, as she understands, is a factor in that disbelief.

… violent, ‘stranger danger’ sexual assaults make up less than 0.1 per cent of sexual assaults meaning that only 1 in every 1000 sexual assaults looks like what happened to me.

Not that suspicion has festered in official circles, where Funnell’s public profile has expanded greatly since that night in a park by the water, which she recounted two months later in a harrowing column for the Silly.  Harrowing in more ways than one:

The questions I get asked most often are "what time did it happen?", "what were you wearing?" and "was he 'Middle Eastern'?"
The first two questions I automatically dismiss. Yet people continue to interrogate me over my attire. If my outfit was to blame for causing this assault, then I should probably be writing to the people who made my jeans, demanding they halt production on their "invitation-to-rape" line of clothing.

But what about the third question? This is a hard one. Having spent a good chunk of my university career campaigning against racial stereotyping, I always cringe when I disclose the fact that "yes", this man was "of Middle Eastern appearance". By that I mean he had a deep olive complexion, dark bushy eyebrows, a five o'clock shadow and a thick accent. But during the assault I yelled at him, calling him "a pathetic cliche", for a reason.

Why do I cringe when I say he was of Middle Eastern appearance? I wouldn't be shy about stating that he was "Caucasian", had that been the case. Am I being too politically correct in not wanting to talk about the issue of ethnicity? Or am I right to not want to perpetuate a racial stereotype that damages a community already under fire?
I don't have answers to these questions yet.

She is still working it out, apparently, a process demonstrated by a piece for The Punch in which she demonstrates her solidarity with Muslim women by decrying as sexist nonsense any attempt to ban the burqa.

After the article’s publication in the Silly, Funnell was installed on the NSW Rape Crisis Centre’s committee, toured the country and spoke to thousands of students, also making the short list to become her state’s official entrant in the Young Australian of the Year. She collected an Australian Human Rights Commission award, took a seat on the board of The National Children’s and Youth Legal Center and the Premier’s Council on Preventing Violence Against Women. Yet, as Jackman notes in her article about the prevalence of anonymous, online venom, those disquieting questions continue to be raised by people demanding “that she provide intimate details or release police photos of the injuries she suffered.”

It must be extraordinarily painful for Funnell to relive the attack so often and in so many varied venues and before so many different audiences, including the Young Australia selection panel, but one cannot help thinking that her doubters have a point. If she were to release those police photos, it would go a long way toward silencing the naysayers, not to mention putting to bed so many other circumstantial factors that, to a suspicious mind, suggest the assault was not as presented.

There is the location of the attack, for starters. A lonely and little visited reserve where a logical attacker might have expected to find very few potential victims. There are few ways in or out of the enclave, so it is a real surprise that an assailant who demonstrated so little tactical sense in selecting his pouncing ground has yet to be arrested – especially as Funnell has said the police hold DNA samples scraped from beneath her fingernails.  Put simply, the guy cannot be too bright, the police must be incompetent or both of the above.

Another factor eroding Funnel’s credibility, at least to some, is the coincidence that many of her complaints about rapes' investigation and aftermath are, to be blunt, verging on the cliché:

On more than one occasion I have had to comfort rape survivors who have been lectured and judged by arrogant, unthinking pharmacists who have scolded them when they came in to purchase the morning after pill, having just been raped.

Funnel is uniquely qualified to bear witness against patriarchal pharmacists, who must be quite common if she alone has absorbed several reports of rape victims being further demeaned at the prescription counter. But that is what she reports and, once again, we must accept it at her word.

It would be easier, though, if she were to release that supporting evidence. Rape is a shocking crime, perhaps the only offence for which a case can be made for the re-introduction of corporal punishment. Funnell bravely bared the details of the assault in Sydney’s serous broadsheet. Why, and here the sympathetic observer must side with the skeptics, can she not release those photos of her injuries? It would silence the critics at a stroke and put, quite literally, a human face on sexual assault. More than that, it would do much to focus attention on the message, rather than the messenger.

FOOTNOTE: While the venom of which Jackman writes has left its mark on Funnell, those harsh words prove very difficult to find. This is about the only critical entry an hour’s concerted googling managed to turn up. It doesn’t make for edifying reading, but dismay at such stupidity is mitigated by the fact that the posters are hip-hop aficionados and, therefore, morons by definition.

If readers who find any other examples of the harassment Funnell lamented to Jackman can provide links via comments, it would be much appreciated.

 

Whack!

NOT to boast, but 94 strokes for 18 holes is a very creditable performance for a Bunyip. Watch out, Tiger.

Contagious Clive

IF YOU ever inherit an office, desk and chair from Clive Hamilton, do make sure to have everything thoroughly sterilised and fumigated. Whatever strange virus drives Clive to see benefits in democracy’s suspension* and to know with every fibre of his being that global warming will kill us all, possibly as soon as Wednesday, it must be catching. What else but a brain-rotting infection of Hamiltonian virulence can explain the bug-eyed alarmist’s successor at the Australia Institute,  Richard Denniss, who has a phobia of white goods in general and refrigerators in particular.

"When billions more people in China, India and other developing countries decide they want a fridge, quite frankly we'll be in big trouble … but I don't hear many Australians saying that in order to reduce our emissions I'm going to give up my fridge."

Clive has cried wolf quite a few times in the Fairfax press, so that explains the condition afflicting Silly stenographer Matt Wade, who quoted Denniss and penned today’s column. Let Australia’s very own Typhoid Mary enter your building, perhaps just once, and the contamination will consume every ounce of grey matter it can find on the premises.

Some readers may doubt this diagnosis, rightly pointing out that there was precious little mental capacity inside Fairfax to begin with, so how to measure the erosion of the negligible. Fortunately there is a control, Clive’s admirer Robert Manne, whose diseased mental state led him not only to believe that his mate might replace Peter Costello as the Member for Higgins, but also to urge the Australian’s readers to believe it as well.  Manne shines in the pantheon of Australia’s Silly-designated public intellectuals, so no one is safe.

Watch as Clive's madness further infects Manne:

FOOTNOTE: Because Clive’s delirium now leads him to deny saying many of the bug-eyed things he does, here is the quote as published in the Courier-Mail: “This is because the implications of 3C, let alone 4C or 5C, are so horrible that we look to any possible scenario to head it off, including the canvassing of ‘emergency’ responses such as the suspension of democratic processes.”

Ms. Sweet's Alimentary Deduction

IT’S only Crikey, so we can afford to give thanks for the errors and inanity populating that daily epistle to people who, while now earning too much to read Green Left Weekly with a clear conscience, remain bogged in the smug, undergraduate sensibility that is the essence of Eric Beecher’s little business strategy. If not for the errors and howlers that brighten Crikey’s daily snooze-a-thon, the publication would qualify for listing under the Pharmaceutical Prescriptions Act (1953) as a life-threatening soporific. If you notice a colleague nodding off at his or her desk, be confident that the latest dispatch has reached the in-box.

There was, however, a Crikey item yesterday, copied, pasted and passed along by reader Bob on the Murray, that defied the norm, not for its content but as a remarkable testament to one writer’s willingness to analyse statistics in accordance with which way the wind of accepted opinion happens to be blowing. Writer Melissa Sweet, who is a veteran health reporter, reported in Thursday’s edition that stories asserting a surge in bowel cancer amongst younger people were misleading -- a beat-up, in other words. As Sweet put it, citing one of her sources:

...[WA GP Brett] Montgomery’s analysis (which as he acknowledges merits further review) suggests there has actually been a slight decline in the proportion of bowel cancers occurring in people under 35, depending on which time frame you examine.

Bowel cancer is one of those “safe” subjects, the left’s only interest being that it did not carry off Tim Blair a few years ago. Sweet is thus free to exercise reportorial diligence and question the science, the presentation of statistics in graphs and charts, and the apparently arbitrary selection of periods of years over which the “cherrypicked” numbers can be cast as an ascending trend. Sweet’s suspicions may be justified or they may not, but the important thing is that she can address the alleged misrepresentation without being excoriated as a cancer denier or tumour-frendly tool of, as militant vegans prefer to believe, Big Meat.

On global warming, however, Sweet’s skepticism goes walkabout, as her 2007 cover story for Rural Doctor leaves no doubt. Global warming will present all manner of problems to country physicians, she reports, mentioning dengue fever and various other maladies poised to scourge the bush as temperatures soar. The article’s certainty is summed up in the index, “The Heat Is On: How climate change is threatening rural health and what needs to be done”, and the publication’s editrix, Marge Overs, expands the alarmist line in her note to readers:

In March, leading epidemiologist Professor Tony McMichael addressed the National Rural Health Conference in Albury about the impact of climate change on rural health. His wake-up call left many of us shifting uncomfortably in our chairs, as he painted a dire picture of new and changing disease patterns, of increasing injury and death from floods, droughts and heatwaves, and of ecological processses that will change crop yields, human nutrition and health. In this issue Melissa Sweet investigates climate change and rural health, and whether enough is being done to protect vulnerable rural communities.

Funny, ain’t it, how one topic brings out a reporter’s inner statistician while another inspires nothing but unquestioning stenography. While all Sweet’s observations about the poor reporting of bowel cancer statistics could be applied to assertions about the impact of climate change, they aren’t.

CONUNDRUM: How will Ms Sweet report this development?

Mouth Of The Yarra

ACCUSED by a Phage reporter and fellow Fairfax employee of spreading "nonsense" about the cost of our PM's carbon tax, there could be little doubt that 3AW's Neil Mitchell would very soon be saying something rather pointed about Melbourne's "quality journalism" broadsheet. That moment has now gone to air, and it is well worth hearing.

What a remarkable company! Fairfax's two most visible assets in Australia's second-largest city, and each now chucking mud at the other.That raspy, geriatric chuckle you can hear? It's Rupert Murdoch enjoying the show.

Tim Coal Botch, er, Colebatch

WELL-KNOWN home renovator Ross Garnaut dropped his carbon-trading report the other day, and in a rare example of Gillard government competence the talking points reached their intended stooges in a timely fashion. Tim Colebatch certainly visited his mail box, because the Phage economics editor’s adulatory advocacy of the great man’s plan to rob Peter to pay Sir Humphrey (who will give a bit of what’s left to an impoverished Paul), touched all the bases: China is going green. Obama is a green inspiration. Cancun and Copenhagen weren’t failures, but coherent roadmaps to a global green future. We cannot expect originality from The Phage, but surely Colebatch could have done one of those “quality journalism” checks before parroting the party line’s biggest clanger – “California … will become the 11th US state with emissions trading.”

Actually, it could almost have been the twelfth state, because eleven states in the north east corner of the country had come to an agreement about taxing, directly or indirectly, just about everything.  Then, two weeks ago, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie pulled his state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). Paraphrasing those talking points and picturing China as a green paradise, a reverie that requires a very energetic imagination, must have let Colebatch just a tad weary, as a little googling would have brought up Christie’s thoughts on the matter. They are worth repeating.

"RGGI allowances were never expensive enough to change behavior as they were intended to and ultimately fuel different choices," Christie said. "In other words, the whole system is not working as it was intended to work. It's a failure.
"RGGI does nothing more than tax electricity, tax our citizens, tax our businesses, with no discernible or measurable impact upon our environment," he continued.

Christie’s admirers keep urging him to contest the presidency in 2012, overtures he has rejected. That will be America’s loss. Melbourne’s loss will be The Phage, done in by people like Colebatch, who disdain facts and research in order to peddle the fantasies they find ideologically congenial. 

The Prophet Motive

THE WORLD must look a little different from the bench, perhaps not so firm and hard and fast as it seems to your garden-variety citizen, the innocent sort who brings to the courts a belief that justice is rational, consistent, never swayed by race or creed. Judge Margaret Rizkalla of Victoria’s County Court is aware that the workings of the legal mind can be a mystery to the common folk, especially where sentencing is concerned, and she has gone to the trouble of explaining the imponderables she must wrestle when giving bad people what’s good for them.

“Sentencing is one of the most complex tasks a judge undertakes because it requires balancing a number of complex factors, both personal to the offender and particular to the offence, in order to provide a just and appropriate sentence, whilst at the same time providing justice to the offender. It isn’t a mathematical equation – in the final analysis it does require the individual judge to make a subjective assessment of all the relevant factors and to determine how they will be applied in fixing a sentence. It is never easy.”

Rizkalla must have put a good deal of thought into deciding the appropriate punishment for Damien Tektonopoulos, who masqueraded as a masseur and rubbed 14 women the wrong way. In 2007 Rizkala sent him away for ten years, with a minimum of eight to be served. It is impossible to feel sympathy for such a nasty piece of work, but his decade in a cage does raise an eyebrow after the judge’s latest “subjective assessment”, which saw Almahde Ahmad Atagore imprisoned for a series of very similar assaults. In the Libyan student’s case, however, the sentence was a mere five years, with his release anticipated in 2013. If  Tektonopoulos feels hard done by after copping twice the time for essentially the same crime he needs to understand that Atagore had an excuse, at least as Rizkalla sees things. Being a Muslim, the way Australian women dress and behave could only inflame Atagore’s lusts. 

“It seems you were very ill prepared to deal with cultural differences,” the judge told him. It is too late for Tektonopoulos to shrink his stretch by embracing the Prophet’s creed, but if the courts were to review Atagore’s sentence, perhaps with a view to adding a few years, it might make our homegrown perv a little happier to know that judges, some judges, really are opposed to discrimination based on race and religion.