Saturday, July 12, 2008

It's about time

This absolutely blows my mind. I mean FINALLY we are starting move past the outdated view that woman are to blame if a couple can't conceive.

Maybe this means people will start listening.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

SMH: Fail

You know, the Sydney Morning Herald seems to alternate between being pretty good, and failing. Epically. Today was a day of epic fail. Why? This article by Georgia Waters:

Couple's pact to impregnate daughter

Getting the heebie-jeebies already?

I did. So I read the article. It is about, as the headline states, a couple deciding to impregnate their daughter. What the headline doesn't state is that the girl is 15. Now, on the off chance my understanding was wrong, I looked at consent laws for Queensland. Just as I suspected, the age of consent in Queensland is 16.

This means that attempting to impregnate a 15 year old is rape. Let's see if the article calls it rape.

The girl's 39-year-old mother and 35-year-old stepfather, who cannot be identified under Queensland law, penned a handwritten "contract" with the girl, before the man began having daily sex with her over two-and-a-half months in late 2006.
Hmm, no not there. what about...

They [...] tried for several weeks to impregnate the girl using the
man's sperm, which he had masturbated into a syringe.
When the method failed, however, prosecutors said the man began having sexual intercourse with his stepdaughter up to three times a day.
Woops, did it again! Guess SMH doesn't know that sexual intercourse without consent is rape, and that a fifteen year old cannot, under QLD law, give consent. But it's actually worse than the two sections I've quoted here because:

...the man had begun sexually abusing the girl from the age of 12.
When her mother learned of the abuse three years later, prosecutors said the couple struck a deal with the then-15-year-old that she would bear them a child because their two other biological children had been born with genetic defects.
So, a man rapes his stepdaughter for three years, starting when she's twelve. Her mother finds out, and, instead of reporting her rapist husband to the police decides to use the girl as an incubator. His own defence barrister calls him "disgusting" and "despicable".

Why can't the SMH get it right and call it rape?