Jamie Leigh Jones, 26, is one of several women who worked for KBR and former parent Halliburton Co. who say they were sexually assaulted or harassed while working for the companies in Iraq. Jones says she was raped in 2005 while working for KBR at Camp Hope, Baghdad. …
Juan A. Lozano for Associated Press, Houston Texas, June 20, 2011
When the criminal courts failed to act, her lawyers filed a civil suit, only to be met with Halliburton’s response that all her claims were to be decided in arbitration – because she’d signed away her rights to bring the company to court when she signed her employment contract. … You’ve probably done the very same thing without even knowing it. … It’s taken Jones nearly six years and a hearing in the US Senate to force her employer, Halliburton into open court.
Laura Flanders for the Guardian, June 27, 2011
See also: Arbitration - Part 1
2011.7.08.Fri.1200 | Tags: law enforcement
Helen L. Walters says her boss called her a ‘hooker,’ a ‘bitch’ and a ‘streetwalker.’ Sometimes he brandished a riding crop in front of her and once he left condoms on her desk.
Ms. Walters, then a trading-room secretary at a California brokerage firm, filed a complaint against him alleging sexual harassment. In a formal hearing, he readily admitted to the whip and the condoms, and to using all of those epithets. Her case, legal scholars agree, seems a textbook example of illegal harassment as defined by the Supreme Court: a situation in which a ‘reasonable person’ would find the work environment ‘hostile or abusive.’
So why did Ms. Walters lose?
Ms. Walters slammed into a little-known, but extraordinarily daunting, roadblock facing many women in the securities industry: Bias complaints, like any other employee dispute, must go through the industry’s mandatory-arbitration system. That means victims’ complaints can’t be heard in court by judge or jury, no matter how strong their merit.
Men’s Club: Riding Crop and Slurs: How Wall Street Dealt with a Sex-Bias Case, Wall Street Journal, June 9, 1994, by Margaret Jacobs, as quoted in Judicial Apartheid, by Pam Martens.
[W]omen felt they might be taken seriously. But instead of the claims being ushered into the vaunted U.S. court system, where sunshine and continued public debate might have led to real change… claims were heard in secret in hotel rooms, the typical venue for the mushrooming use of private arbitration in the U.S. today.
Will France Tidy Up After Housekeeper Charges? Counterpunch, June 7, 2011, by Pam Martens.
2011.6.26.Sun.1200 | Tags: law enforcement economics
“… nudity – that’s right out of the manual of the CIA for ‘enhanced interrogation’. We’ve seen it applied in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. It’s what the CIA calls ‘no-touch torture’, and its purpose there, as in this case, is very clear: to demoralise someone to the point of offering a desired confession.” (Link)
2011.4.15.Fri.1200 | Tags: law enforcement private eyes
Undercover police officers routinely adopted a tactic of “promiscuity” with the blessing of senior commanders, according to a former agent who worked in a secretive unit of the Metropolitan police for four years.
The claims follow the unmasking of undercover PC Mark Kennedy, who had sexual relationships with several women during the seven years he spent infiltrating a ring of environmental activists. Another two covert officers have been named in the past fortnight who also had sex with the protesters they were sent to spy on, fuelling allegations that senior officers had authorised sleeping around as a legitimate means of gathering intelligence. …
Basically it’s just regarded as part of the job. It’d be highly unlikely that you were not [having sex]. …
“The best way of stopping any liaison getting too heavy was to shag somebody else. It’s amazing how women don’t like you going to bed with someone else,” said the officer, whose undercover deployment infiltrating anti-racist groups lasted from 1993 to 1997. …
one stipulation by senior commanders was that undercover officers should be married, so that they had something to return to.(Source: vruz)
Reblogged from calecake 2011.3.04.Fri.1200 | Tags: law enforcement private eyes
Women, wear pants in Paris at your risk and peril! You are breaking the law, according to a 200-year-old police ruling that has never been struck from the books.
“In 1800, a decree by the police prefecture banned women from wearing trousers unless they had specific authorisation,” says the historian Christine Bard, author of a new book on women’s “conquest” of the right to wear pants.
“The rule was never repealed – it still stands,” said the author, whose newly-published Political History Of Trousers retraces the history of the garment from the French Revolution to the modern-day. (
link)
See also:
Polls show the majority of French people support the ban.
2010.10.21.Thu.1200 | Tags: law enforcement There's a place...
By Charles Wilson, Associated Press, August 14, 2010
INDIANAPOLIS—The nightmare began with a party: three teenage girls with a webcam, visiting an Internet chatroom and yielding to requests to flash their breasts. A week later, one of the girls, a 17-year-old from Indiana, started getting threatening e-mails.
A stranger said he had captured her image on the webcam and would post the pictures to her MySpace friends unless she posed for more explicit pictures and videos for him. On at least two occasions, the teen did what her blackmailer demanded. Finally, police and federal authorities became involved and indicted a 19-year-old Maryland man in June on charges of sexual exploitation.
Federal prosecutors and child safety advocates say they’re seeing an upswing in such cases of online sexual extortion. They say teens who text nude cell phone photos of themselves or show off their bodies on the Internet are being contacted by pornographers who threaten to expose their behavior to friends and family unless they pose for more explicit porn, creating a vicious cycle of exploitation.
One federal affidavit includes a special term for the crime: “sextortion.”
Reblogged from newstfionline 2010.9.19.Sun.1200 | Tags: trendy law enforcement
