I think the point here is not just that some bad judge did some bad stuff in the UK (though his comments in the sex abuse case are certainly icky and make me glad the kids I work with don't have him overseeing their cases). There will always be assholes. And there have been instances of female judges doing some pretty outrageous things too, which incidents were covered pretty substantively on a lot of feminist blogs that I read (I'm thinking specifically of the judge who suggested a fat woman must have appreciated the attention when she was raped because, you know, what else makes you feel more beautiful than some sexual assault?). Sexism is something we all learn and we all perpetrate.

The point that I gather from this issue is about how our larger culture - the one in which all of us participate - helps fuel this type of problem. Girls in the West are increasingly being placed in a double bind, marketed to as a demographic interested in adult-type clothes and makeup, which cause them to look older and more sexually suggestive, then denied justice when they are abused because the abuser can claim they looked too, you know, adult and sexually suggestive. This is not something that some asshole judge started; we are all complicit in this to the degree that we support the corporate culture that sells sex to children, particularly female children.

What I would like to see in response is not just anger at this judge (however deserved it is), but the names of companies that design and market things like thongs and makeup to ten year olds. If I buy any of the products made by the same company, I've lined the pockets of people who are doing serious disservice to our children.

I've no personal problem with people choosing to post anonymously, because I really don't think it will change the level of vitriol for people to need a screen name. I just have a practical issue: when there are so many people posting anonymously (on some threads it's like 2/3rds of the people, especially on Broadsheet), it's very difficult sometimes to have a back-and-forth because you can't tell who is saying what or how many people are saying anything at all. Many times I've found myself starting a post with "@ Anonymous" and realizing that probaby about six or seven people think at first I'm talking to them. Then when a new Anonymous posts I have no idea if it's the one whose post I've already responded to or it's a new person entirely. I totally understand why someone would want to remain Anonymous from thread to thread, because folks can get "followed around" and badgered otherwise (it's too bad, because imho you build a better online following by having recognizable individuals posting on a regular basis), but within the same thread it gets extremely confusing.

Just a few cents that were rattling around in my mental pockets.

I was blaming all of us for the attitudes that lead to sexual assaults, not just men. I was also very careful to use the term "abuser" precisely because women can also commit this type of crime (against girls as well as boys, I might add).

And given that a huge proportion of the men who I see in therapy were molested as children, have told no one else about it their entire lives, and continue to suffer serious consequences as a result, I agree completely that it is a huge issue deserving way more attention. Our culture is definitely complicit in hiding men's traumas -- it is one of the great injustices that gender role constiction does to males.

However, the legal issue here hinges on the adult/sexual clothing that the girl was wearing, and I have never heard of a case involving a male victim where his clothing factored into the determination of guilt or the harshness of sentencing. So the cultural criticism I was suggesting about the fashion industry doesn't seem to me to be applicable, or at least not the same. The activism that needs to be done to respond to these two problems does not seem to me to be identical, either: for male victims, what is needed is more awareness raising and advocating for greater sentencing parity. For female victims, it has to do with changing attitudes about what it means to dress "provocatively" and finding ways to encourage our culture to stop sexualizing little girls.