Violence Against Women

“Rape Is Rape” Bill Fails in NY Senate, Bronx Teacher Vows to Continue Her Fight for Justice

[Trigger Warning: This post contains references to sexually violent acts and threatening behavior.] Lydia Cuomo, a 27-year-old Bronx teacher, was brutally raped at gunpoint by drunken off-duty cop Michael Pena. That was in August 2011, but over the past year Cuomo has traveled to Albany, NY numerous times to tell her horrific story in hopes of finally finding […]

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Activists Project “Rape Is Rape” onto US Capitol Sunday

Stories of sexual violence, punctuated by the words “RAPE IS RAPE,” were projected onto the U.S. Capitol building last night in Washington, D.C. Activist groups Luminous Intervention and FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture organized the action with the intent of drawing attention to the discourse around rape culture, noting that “American culture is uncomfortable to the […]

Violence Against Women

Campaign Update: Rape is Rape

The FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Service is considering modernizing the definition of rape, which currently does not include forced anal sex and/or oral sex, vaginal or anal fisting, rape with an object (even if serious injuries result), and other injurious and degrading sexual assaults. As a result of the FBI’s outmoded definition of rape, thousands […]

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100,000 Have Told the FBI That Rape Is Rape. Have You?

By Annie Shields Nearly 100,000 people have signed onto the Ms. and Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) campaign to change the FBI’s definition of “forcible” rape. After a Ms. investigative report found that the FBI’s fundamentally flawed definition excludes hundreds of thousands of rapes from the yearly Uniform Crime Report, Ms. and FMF started a Change.org […]