From The Guardian:

1988 Teachers become suspicious when injuries are noticed on the face of one of the girls at school, but they are subsequently blamed on bullying. The other daughter stays away from school with a broken arm. During this time, and on several occasions over the next 14 years, doctors raise concerns with the sisters about abnormalities in the foetuses of their unborn children. One doctors tells a daughter not to have any more children with the same man and questioned the children's paternity. Any involvement with the father is disputed.

Early 1990s The family move from South Yorkshire to live in small villages in Lincolnshire.

1997 The brother of the two women goes to police with "hearsay evidence" of incest. Police look into the claim but no further action is taken.

1998 One of the daughters phones ChildLine in an attempt to report the ongoing abuse. She asks for a guarantee that the sisters would be able to keep their children but hangs up when that cannot be given.

2004 The family move back to South Yorkshire, and while social services again become involved, the abuse is not detected.

June 2008 The case comes to the attention of authorities. The father is arrested.

Because, the New York Times argues, "the wide gap between the sentences raised questions about whether Ms. Santiago shouldered an extra burden as she faced judge and jury: the duty to be a good mother."

Nixzaliz was also beaten brutally by Rodriguez, and some victims' rights advocates believe that she is getting unfair treatment from the justice system. According to the Times, "Details of Ms. Santiago’s troubled past — her learning disabilities, her abusive relationships and her miscarriage shortly before Nixzmary died — have caused some who followed the trial to wonder about her capacity to help her daughter." Others, like Columbia Law School director of Gender and Sexuality Law, Katherine M. Franke, believe that Nixzaliz's harsher sentence reinforces stereotyped parental roles. Women are saddled with "all the obligations and responsibility — and ultimately the punishment — for what happens to their children.”

However, the prosecution said that Nixzaliz encouraged the beatings, and jurors say they were most swayed by the following evidence: "Ms. Santiago did not immediately call an ambulance and instead bathed the girl and put her to bed. A neighbor testified that Ms. Santiago was calm that night, wailing only while the neighbor was on the phone with a 911 operator."

Seeing Failure as Mother as Factor in Sentencing [NY Times]

After Only Two Weeks An Adoptive Mother Gives A Child Back

• Men become less fertile after the age of 24 and a risk of bipolar disorder is increased in children who are fathered by a man age 55 or older. • A North Korean woman is on trial for allegedly sleeping with South Korean military officials in exchange for classified military information. • A sociologist from Canada says that single fathers should not be prevented from seeing their children, even in cases of incest or abuse, because normal contact will help the fathers cope. • A circuit court judge in Florida has ruled that the state's 31-year-old ban on openly gay men and women adopting children is unconstitutional. • Should we encourage senior citizens that are regulated to nursery homes to have sex with each other? Oh, why not. • Hurt in the line of duty! A Florida sheriff's deputy suffered a serious injury after a storm drain grate fell on his arm after he was done rescuing a kitten who was caught in the drain. • Round things that appear next to each other will be chronicled in a these-things-look-like-boobs book (aptly) called One-Track Mind. • A 16-year-old girl in India killed herself after she became consumed with fear that small-scale "Big Bang" experiments in Europe would cause the end of the world. • A man from Santa Clara, California has been authorized to drive around with a vanity plate reading "HIV POZ," showing other motorists that he shouldn't feel ashamed (or keep secret) his HIV status. • An Australian woman was fined yesterday after she sent letters to a convicted sex offender's neighbors telling them that he is a child molester. • The Royal College of Midwives in England is claiming that "freebirths," or births without any medical assistance, are on the rise in America. • Graeme Reeves, the Australian OB-GYN who assaulted and inflicted genital mutilation on his patients, has been arrested and charged with 17 offenses against 10 women, with more coming in. •

Bunch's group sessions involve a male and a female leader who don't take crap from their attendees and call them out when they say sexist things. They discuss everything from why a man would refer to grown women as "girls", to why catcalling is not a compliment to the women abusers additionally tend to harass, and any other sexist acts women are stuck dealing with on a daily basis. The men are asked to think about sexism as another way of exerting dominance over others, in the same way many of them have experienced being harassed by the police based on the color of their skin. Bunch doesn't fool himself that he's changing many minds — his advise to victims of abuse is to expect the same abuser back no matter how much he promises that he's changed — but he figures that maybe getting them to think about sexism and to be held strictly accountable for attending the classes (at the risk of being jailed) is a start.

Bunch probably wouldn't self-identify as a feminist, but he says such wonderfully feminist things like:

Calling [violence against women] a woman’s issue serves men because then men don't have to get involved in it. We need to start re-framing it, holding men accountable, changing the language so we have to start looking at our statistics in a different way like what you’ll see if you Google "domestic violence" is "domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women." That talks about the victim, but it doesn’t say anything about the perpetrator.

He also thinks we should all start saying "the leading cause of injury to women is men's violence." It's Bunch's combination of cynical resignation about the men he serves and his hopeful idealism about the society he'd like to change that makes him — and the work he's trying to accomplish — so fascinating.

Class Teaches Respect for Women to Batterers [WNYC.org]

Related: A Call To Men
Safe Horizon's Domestic Violence Accountability Program

Perhaps, as Schrager points out, people are more willing to give money to animal organizations because they perceive animals as blameless. Battered women? Not so much. "Perhaps we prefer helping animals because we believe they have a greater need. People often think a battered woman is free to leave her situation, while animals are physically prevented from leaving," Schrager writes. "Humans are easier to blame for their circumstances. Because we do not grant animals the same freedoms, we also do not assign them the same level of responsibility for their situation."

So is it wrong to give money to animals when you don't give money to human causes? Is there a charity hierarchy that should be widely acknowledged?

Does One Abused Woman = 100 Abused Puppies? [More Intelligent Life via Newser]

Only 7% of women say their health professional has ever asked them about domestic violence, notes the Times, and many of the doctors feel that asking is ineffective and a criminal justice issue — not a medical one. All the while, "Abused women are at increased risk of chronic pain, depression, anxiety and alcohol and substance abuse, and they can have problems taking their medication correctly and getting to appointments. In one recent study, women who said they had been abused within the past year were more likely to have partners who interfered with their medical care," according to the Times. The issue speaks to larger questions of health care, because we're dealing with a system where many battered women don't have health insurance to go to the doctor in the first place.

All the same, Felicia Cohn, director of medical ethics at UC Irvine laments that "the continuing inattention [to domestic violence] is both inexcusable and embarrassing. This is a public health pandemic with immense health care implications.”

Screening for Abuse May Be Key to Ending It

CDC: 25% Of American Women Are Victims Of Domestic Abuse

But it's not just photographers looking to profit off of the Fritzl family's misery. A hospital worker allegedly snapped some pictures of Elisabeth and her children and tried to sell them for upwards of 200,000 euros. Two out of three of Elisabeth's children who were kept in the cellar with her — Stefan, 18, and Felix, 6, — along with the three raised above-ground, Alexander 12, Monika 14 and Lisa 15, are all at the hospital with their mother. Elisabeth's oldest daughter, Kerstin, who was raised in the cellar, is still in a coma, but sources say she is on the mend.

Elisabeth is planning to be interviewed for her television debut by reporter Christoph Feurstein, the same guy who interviewed Natascha Kampusch, the other young Austrian woman who was locked in a cellar for several years. Elisabeth is expected to discuss the child she had who died and was subsequently thrown in the furnace by her father. "It might not be good for the psychological healing process but Elisabeth's heart pumps nothing but pure venom for him," a source tells the Daily Mail. It's vaguely ironic that the Mail, a rag that publishes tabloid pictures of Lisa Marie Presley merely to poke fun at the pregnant star "piling on the pounds," would be the paper to suggest that the media's gone too far in the Fritzl case. But at least someone's pointing it out.

Elisabeth Fritzl Is To Talk About The 24 Years She Was Imprisoned In Her Father's Dungeon On Austrian TV [Daily Mail]
Exclusive: Kerstin Fritzl Winning Fight [Sunday Mirror]

Austrian Man Locked His Daughter In The Basement For 24 Years
Who Is Josef Fritzl?

Another issue raised by the Guardian (and our own commenters) is how Fritzl's wife, Rosemarie, did not know what was going on right under her nose. Franz Pölzer, head of the criminal investigation of Fritzl, says"It defies logical thinking that a woman who has had seven children with her husband would make it possible for him to have another relationship with his daughter and have another seven children."

For now, the focus is on psychologically rehabilitating Elisabeth and her six children. "It could take between five and eight years," to restore any sort of normalcy to their lives, according to Mas Friedrich, the psychiatrist who looked after Natasha Kampusch — the other woman famously kept in an Austrian cellar. Trying to determine the motivations of a complete psychotic like Fritzl, however, could take an eternity

Josef Fritzl: The Unanswered Questions [Guardian]
Austria: Natasha Kampusch Says Fritzl Children Should Stay In Cellar [Times of London]

Earlier: Austrian Man Locked His Daughter In The Basement For 24 Years

This kind of abuse of power, of course, is nothing new. (We saw something similar earlier this year when immigration official Isaac Baichu who asked a Colombian woman for oral sex in exchange for her green card.) And for now, Burgess is out on $50,000 bail, although, if he's convicted of all the charges he currently faces, he will get a sentence of 467 years in prison. Hey: Maybe he and douchenozzle Joe Francis can share a cell!

Prison Sex-Slave Operation Alleged [AP via CBS News]
Custer Co. Sheriff Resigns In Sex Scandal [The Oklahoman]

Earlier: Immigration Official Makes Colombian Woman Do Oral For Green Card
Dear Florida Governor Charlie Crist, If You Can't Charge Joe Francis With Hate Speech, Here's An Idea

Deciding how far to push the obvious reference to male genitalia must have been tricky. The spot wavers on both sides of the line—and I think that works very well.

Even though the rigidly hierarchical caste system was outlawed in India 60 years ago, violence based on class differences still occurs. "To go to that other kinship group without being invited is itself a kind of breach and the father would think he was behaving in a way that was kind of humiliating," University of Chicago cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder told CBS News. "It's not hard to see how [Subhash] would just lose it."

Back in Mumbai and Delhi, things aren't particularly cheery for Indian women, either. There has been a rash of public sexual abuse so prevalent that the Hindustan Times has taken to calling it the Mumbai Molestation. In some situations, crowds of 70-odd men have descended upon as few as two women, groping and pinching them. The molesters have very little repercussions, experts tell the paper. According to Dr. Samir Parikh : "The case in point in which a mob attacked two women late in the night proves that the men knew they would not be singled out. Those people were hidden in a mob and by doing something unacceptable they had a big sense of arousal. And when so many people are doing the same thing, they are basically reinforcing into each other that it is okay." Maybe we should get those pink sari-clad female vigilantes, the gulabi gang, from the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to come to Mumbai and teach the local molesters a thing or two about "okay."

Cops: Arson And Murder, By Way Of India [CBS News]
Mumbai Molestation [Hindustan Times]
What Makes Our Men Do Such Things? [Hindustan Times]

Earlier: Pink Ladies

So, in the 10th grade, when my boyfriend punched me in the face standing next to my locker during the end of lunch for breaking up with him and refusing to listen to why I should get back together with him, not one student (and there were plenty around, believe you me) jumped in, or offered to help, even after I was alone. Magically, there were no teachers around. This is at a "high-end" public HS in a suburban town in the Bay Area. Stunned, I got on a bus and went home.

My mother told me, years later, that yes, she noticed the little cut-out article from a teen magazine screaming "10 Signs You Might Be In An Abusive Relationship!" taped onto the mirror in my bedroom. And yes, she also had more than an inkling of why I was crying myself to sleep every night. But! Some lessons, she sighed, I needed to learn all by myself. (Yes; she's still a cunt. Sad, sad, sad.)

I was pregnant by the end of the 11th grade, yo.

Mock the cycle of violence all you want, but to a 15-year-old girl who's simultaneously in the throes of her father's sentencing for being a pedophile and comforting her mom on the side of the freeway instead of the other way around, I suppose I was just holding onto my "first love" because there was nothing else to hold onto, actually.

After that, I surgically isolated myself from all of my friends, but stayed active in extra-curricular activities and college prep classes and continued working 20 hrs. per week; I'm really fucking lucky that I was a total goody-two-shoes and didn't fall into drugs or alcohol, that my nasty little addiction was comprised of things like medals, solos, straight As and certificates.

Anyway, if just one adult - maybe even an older kid - had pulled me aside, looked me in the eye and said, "Real love doesn't make you feel like this, it doesn't do this to you," it would have made a difference.

I had an abusive boyfriend in high school who pulled this exact shit. Basically, getting you pregnant is a way to keep you under control and dependent on them for the rest of your life. He raped me and held me hostage so I couldn't go to the cops, and, after a few days, let me call my mom. She told me not to bother coming home since I had "run away" and he held me while I cried, saying he would be all the family I would ever need.

Watch out for guys who give you sob stories about how many abortions they've had to "live through" or some such shit. It just doesn't happen by accident that often. Serial impregnators exist.

I went through this in the 11th and 12th grade. With my mom going through a nasty divorce my much older than me boyfriend manipulated my vulnerable mind in the worst way. I was also held hostage in his house, subjected to many a slap down and was knocked up twice before I graduated high school. Finally I found the strength in me to break free of the abuse. It took a few visits from my precinct but he finally left me alone.

I went through this in the 11th and 12th grade. With my mom going through a nasty divorce my much older than me boyfriend manipulated my vulnerable mind in the worst way. I was also held hostage in his house, subjected to many a slap down and was knocked up twice before I graduated high school. Finally I found the strength in me to break free of the abuse. It took a few visits from my precinct but he finally left me alone.

when I told my mother that my controlling, emotionally abusive boyfriend raped me, her exact comment was, "Well, you HAVE had sex with him ..."

When I was 17, I was dating a much older man who basically oozed evil out his pores. Aside from raping me and knocking me unconscious during sex, he once confessed to me that he pressured me to have sex without a condum in hopes that I would get pregnant and be unable to leave him. Didn't work!

Friends May Help Teens Date Safely [CBS News]
Ealier: Kids Today