Forced without Consent DA

Russell Cohen Hawken School JF 2011 Resolved: In the United States, juveniles charged with violent felonies ought to be treated as adults in the criminal justice system I negate. The resolution questions how the justice system ought to evaluate actions so the value is justice. The criterion is minimizing instances of sexual attack. There are three reasons why you prefer this value criterion over the affirmatives. First, it has been scientifically shown that rape leads to low self-esteem and even suicide. Cheryl Bell writes in the Yale Law Review:

Cheryl Bell et al.-1999 Rape and Sexual Misconduct in the Prison System: Analyzing Americas Most Open Secret 18 Yale Law and Policy Review 1999.

who have not suffered such abuse.99

One of the most common psychological effects of sexual abuse in prison is rape trauma syndrome,96 which most often results in a loss of self-esteem and an inability to trust others.97 The 1994 study of a state prison in the Midwest conducted by Cindy Struckman- Johnson, found that nearly 80% of inmates who were pressured or forced to have sexual contact suffered significant emotional harms, half experienced depres- sion, and one-third contemplated suicide.98 Further, prison rape victims are seventeen times more likely to attempt suicide than prisoners Second, forced sexual activity derealizes the victim because the victims thoughts are not included. This in turn leads to perpetual violence against them. Judith Butler writes:
Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence By Judith Butler. 32-34. 2004.
Lives are supported and maintained differently, and

support and will not even qualify as grievable. A hierarchy of grief could no doubt be enumerated. We have seen it already, in the genre of the obituary, where lives are quickly tidied up and summarized, humanized, usually married, or on the way to be, heterosexual, happy, monogamous. But this is just a sign of another differential relation to life, since we seldom, if ever, hear the names of the thousands of Palestinians who have died by the Israeli military with United States support, or any number of Afghan people, children and adults. Do they have names and faces, personal histories, family, favorite hobbies, slogans by which they live? What defense against the apprehension of loss is at work in the blithe way in which we accept deaths caused by military means with a shrug or with self-righteousness or with clear vindictiveness? To what extent have Arab peoples, predominantly practioners of Islam, fallen outside the human as it has been naturalized in its Western mold by the contemporary workings of humanism? What are the cultural contours of the human at work here? How do our cultural frames for thinking the human set limits on the kinds of losses we can avow as loss? After all, if someone is lost, and that person is not someone, then what and where is loss, and how does [the] mourning take place? The last is surely a question that lesbian, gay, and bistudies have asked in relation to violence against sexual minorities; that transgendered people have asked as they are singled out for harassment and sometimes murder; that intersexed people have asked, whose formative years are so often marked by unwanted violence against their bodies in the name of a normative notion of the human, a normative notion of what the body of a human must be. This question is no doubt, as well, the basis of a profound affinity between movements centering on gender and sexuality and efforts to counter the normative human morphologies and capacities that condemn or efface those who are physically challenged. It must also be part of the affinity with anti-racist struggles, given the racial differential that undergirds the culturally viable notions of the human, ones that we see acted out in dramatic and terrifying ways in the global arena at the present time. I am referring not only to humans not regarded as humans and thus to a restrictive conception of the human that is based upon their exclusion. It is not a matter of a simple entry of the excluded into an extablished ontology, but an insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade? Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization. What, then, is the relation between violence and those lives considered as unreal? Does violence effect that unreality? Does violence take place on the condition of that unreality?

[T]here are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe. Certain lives will be highly protected and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious

[However,] [i]f violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost, or, rather, never were, and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly in this state of There are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts, and there cannot be. If there were to be an obituary, there would have to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition.
or collectively? Is there a story we might find about those deaths in the media? Are there names attached to those children? deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of the object. The derealization of the Other means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral. The infinite paranoia that imagines the war against terrorism as a war without end will be one that justifies itself endlessly in relation to the spectral infinity of its enemy, regardless of whether or not there are established grounds to suspect the continuing operation of terror cells with violent aims. How do we understand this derealization? It is one thing to argue that first on the level of discourse, certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized, that they can fit no dominant frame for the human, and that their dehumanization occurs first, at this level, and that this level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization that is already at work in the culture. It is another thing to say that discourse itself effects violence through omission. If 200,000 Iraqi children were killed during the Gulf War and its aftermath, do we have an image, a frame for any of those lives, singly

Third, sexual attacks are reprehensible on a deontological level because they use the victims as a means towards the assaulters ends, treating the victims as objects towards an external subjective end. My sole contention is that there is a higher chance of juveniles being sexually assaulted in adult prisons. When juveniles are introduced into the criminal justice system, their relatively smaller size predisposes them to sexual assault. According to Vincent Schiraldi who was funded by the California Wellness Foundation:
Vincent Schiraldi and Jason Zeidenberg-1997 [Funded by the California Wellness Foundation], The Risks Juveniles Face When They Are Incarcerated With Adults Justice Policy Institute. 1997.
These

statistics seem to fit with what some criminologists call the "prototype" prison rape victim: someone young, if not the youngest inmate within a given institutional system. Professor Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University's School of Public Health points out that "because they are physically

Forced without Consent DA

Russell Cohen Hawken School JF 2011 diminutive, they [juveniles] are subject to attack.... They will become somebody's 'girlfriend' very, very fast." 21 In an expose on prisons published in The New Republic, a corrections officer is quoted saying that a young inmate's chance of avoiding rape were "almost zero.... He'll get raped within the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours. That's almost standard."22 As the juveniles sent to adult prison system will be the youngest inmates on the
block, they will likely face the greatest risk of being sexually attacked.

Vincent Schiraldi and Jason Zeidenberg-1997 [Funded by the California Wellness Foundation], The Risks Juveniles Face When They Are Incarcerated With Adults Justice Policy Institute. 1997.

Statistics also show this grave fact to be true, as Vincent Schiraldi continues:

result in an inmate being raped. A group of researchers in 1983 found that among the residents of six juvenile institutions, 9.1 percent of youth inmates reported being a "victim" of a sexual attack. 16 But a 1996 study of adult prisoners in Kansas found that 15 percent of inmates reported to being "forced to have sex against their will."17

A 1989 study by a team of researchers compared how youth reported being treated at a number of juvenile training schools, with those serving time in adult prisons.14 Five times as many youth held in adult prisons answered yes to the question "has anyone attempted to sexually attack or rape you" than those held in juvenile institutions. Close to ten percent of the youth interviewed reported a sexual attack, or rape attempt had been levied against them in the adult prisons, while closer to one -percent reported the same in the juvenile institution. 15 Another set of studies suggests which system is more likely to adult institutions. An Australian survey shows that of 183 inmates aged 18 to 25 surveyed in a New South Wales prison, one quarter reported being raped or sexually assaulted, and more than half said they lived in fear of it. 18 A recent Canadian survey
showed that among 117 inmates surveyed in a federal prison, 65 incidents involving sexual assault were reported. Among those, the odds of victimization were eight times higher for a twenty year old prisoner than the oldest inmates in the system.19 "Compared to non victims," the study reports, "victims tended to be younger, housed in higher security settings, and in the early part of their prison term." 20

Surveys in other countries have found similarly higher rape rates for young offenders in

Thus, since treating juveniles as adults in the criminal justice system leads to rape of juveniles, I negate.