The former college student said she had been raped three times as an undergraduate at Florida A&M University, twice by students and once by an acquaintance who was on campus regularly.
She withdrew from the university and filed suit, saying that campus officials did not do enough to investigate the claims and protect her from being attacked again and again. As a precaution, she identified herself in public court papers only as S.B.
Her school fired back three times with a demand for the court: Reveal her full name or toss out the case.
For years, students have filed sexual assault complaints under pseudonyms, which allow them to seek justice without shame or fear of being targeted. Universities have generally accepted the practice.
But in two recent lawsuits — S.B.’s case against Florida A&M University and a suit by nine women against Dartmouth College — the schools have demanded that students publicly reveal their identities, going against longstanding legal practice intended to protect plaintiffs in sensitive disputes.
Experts on sexual assault cases say that these demands amount to a newly aggressive stance by universities that face potentially damaging lawsuits, and that they run counter to the spirit of federal civil rights policies. The identities of the women in both cases are known to the university lawyers, but not to the public.
“What you’re seeing in this particular case is real hardball,” said Andrew Miltenberg, a lawyer who typically represents men accused of sexual assault. “And it’s still not the way most lawyers or schools handle it. They’re a little bit more gracious about protecting someone who was their student.”
On Wednesday, S.B.’s lawyer sent a letter to more than 40 state legislators objecting to the university’s tactics and asking them to investigate the matter.
Unmasking the abuser | Dina McMillan | TEDxCanberra
Women are the predominant victims of violence at the hands of men they know. Dina McMillan teaches women how to identify the signs of potential violence before it happens. Dr Dina McMillan is a social psychologist with a Master’s degree and PhD from Stanford University in California. In 2006 she identified the specific tactics used by abusers to establish and maintain abusive relationships. Dr McMillan published a ground-breaking book, But He Says He Loves Me: How to Avoid Being Trapped in a Manipulative Relationship, which offers rare insight into the minds of abusive predators and details the careful strategy of manipulation they use to ensnare women in abusive relationships. This knowledge has been crafted into a unique set of prevention programs called Unmasking the Abuser, designed for early intervention and improved response. It offers a simple way to reduce the number of teen girls and women in abusive relationships with tools to clearly identify the manipulative tactics used by abusers even in the first stages of a relationship. It also highlights the ways teen girls and women can assess their own vulnerability and then minimise it.
The Economics of Soaking the Rich
What does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know about tax policy? A lot.
I have no idea how well Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will perform as a member of Congress. But her election is already serving a valuable purpose. You see, the mere thought of having a young, articulate, telegenic nonwhite woman serve is driving many on the right mad — and in their madness they’re inadvertently revealing their true selves.
Some of the revelations are cultural: The hysteria over a video of AOC dancing in college says volumes, not about her, but about the hysterics. But in some ways the more important revelations are intellectual: The right’s denunciation of AOC’s “insane” policy ideas serves as a very good reminder of who is actually insane.
The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance (although Republicans blocked him from an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with claims that he was unqualified. Really.) And it’s a policy nobody has every implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.
.. To be more specific, Diamond, in work with Emmanuel Saez — one of our leading experts on inequality — estimated the optimal top tax rate to be 73 percent. Some put it higher: Christina Romer, top macroeconomist and former head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimates it at more than 80 percent.
Where do these numbers come from? Underlying the Diamond-Saez analysis are two propositions: Diminishing marginal utility and competitive markets.
Diminishing marginal utility is the common-sense notion that an extra dollar is worth a lot less in satisfaction to people with very high incomes than to those with low incomes. Give a family with an annual income of $20,000 an extra $1,000 and it will make a big difference to their lives. Give a guy who makes $1 million an extra thousand and he’ll barely notice it.
What this implies for economic policy is that we shouldn’t care what a policy does to the incomes of the very rich. A policy that makes the rich a bit poorer will affect only a handful of people, and will barely affect their life satisfaction, since they will still be able to buy whatever they want.
So why not tax them at 100 percent? The answer is that this would eliminate any incentive to do whatever it is they do to earn that much money, which would hurt the economy. In other words, tax policy toward the rich should have nothing to do with the interests of the rich, per se, but should only be concerned with how incentive effects change the behavior of the rich, and how this affects the rest of the population.
But here’s where competitive markets come in. In a perfectly competitive economy, with no monopoly power or other distortions — which is the kind of economy conservatives want us to believe we have — everyone gets paid his or her marginal product. That is, if you get paid $1000 an hour, it’s because each extra hour you work adds $1000 worth to the economy’s output.
Have you ever met Donald Trump in real life? Is he the same person that the media portrays him to be? How is he different when not seen through the eyes of the media?
While President Trump’s modus operandi rubs many people the wrong way, it is important to stop and reflect on just how devilishly useful he is. He alone has shone a light on the terrible, hate-filled, biases in our MSM. There is no going back to the way this use to be, thankfully. This is historical change. He has also unmasked so many of the previously-thought-to-be “virtuous” institutions. So many organizations have shown their true motives. Through their reactions to President Trump, they’ve show us all their cards, and many…many of us do not like what we see. I have learned so very much about corporations, tech giants, retailers, colleges and schools, agencies, special interest groups, and social justice groups – based on their ghastly manipulative and vicious responses to President Trump. And these are institutionally important things that would never have been made known to me as the average consumer… any other way.
So, yes, I’ve been in the presence of Trump 2x. They were positive experiences.
.. President Trump makes people mad. He makes people so mad that they forget to keep their masks firmly in place. Their masks fall away and we see who they truly are. This is what I mean about President Trump being so devilishly useful.