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Sexual Harassment - Causes of Sexual Harassment

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On average, there are 463,634 victims (age 12 or older) of rape and sexual assault each year in the United States.¹

Younger People Are at the Highest Risk of Sexual Violence

Ages 12-34 are the highest risk years for rape and sexual assault.³

Those age 65 and older are 92% less likely than 12-24 year olds to be a victim of rape or sexual assault, and 83% less likely than 25-49 year olds.⁴

Read more statistics about about child sexual abuse.
Women and Girls Experience Sexual Violence at High Rates

Millions of women in the United States have experienced rape.

As of 1998, an estimated 17.7 million American women had been victims of attempted or completed rape.⁵

Young women are especially at risk.

82% of all juvenile victims are female. 90% of adult rape victims are female.⁶

Females ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.³

Women ages 18-24 who are college students are 3 times more likely than women in general to experience sexual violence. Females of the same age who are not enrolled in college are 4 times more likely.⁷

Read more statistics about campus sexual violence.

Men and Boys Are Also Affected by Sexual Violence

Millions of men in the United States have been victims of rape.

As of 1998, 2.78 million men in the U.S. had been victims of attempted or completed rape.⁵

About 3% of American men-or 1 in 33-have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime.⁵

1 out of every 10 rape victims are male.

Transgender Students Are at Higher Risk for Sexual Violence

21% of TGQN (transgender, genderqueer, nonconforming) college students have been sexually assaulted, compared to 18% of non-TGQN females, and 4% of non-TGQN males.

Sexual Violence Can Have Long-Term Effects on Victims

The likelihood that a person suffers suicidal or depressive thoughts increases after sexual violence.

94% of women who are raped experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during the two weeks following the rape.⁹

30% of women report symptoms of PTSD 9 months after the rape.10

33% of women who are raped contemplate suicide.¹¹

13% of women who are raped attempt suicide.¹¹

Approximately 70% of rape or sexual assault victims experience moderate to severe distress, a larger percentage than for any other violent crime.¹²

People who have been sexually assaulted are more likely to use drugs than the general public.

3.4 times more likely to use marijuana

6 times more likely to use cocaine

10 times more likely to use other major drugs

Sexual violence also affects victims' relationships with their family, friends, and co-workers. ¹²

38% of victims of sexual violence experience work or school problems, which can include significant problems with a boss, coworker, or peer.

37% experience family/friend problems, including getting into arguments more frequently than before, not feeling able to trust their family/friends, or not feeling as close to them as before the crime.

84% of survivors who were victimized by an intimate partner experience professional or emotional issues, including moderate to severe distress, or increased problems at work or school.

79% of survivors who were victimized by a family member, close friend or acquaintance experience professional or emotional issues, including moderate to severe distress, or increased problems at work or school.

67% of survivors who were victimized by a stranger experience professional or emotional issues, including moderate to severe distress, or increased problems at work or school.

Victims are at risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

Studies suggest that the chance of getting pregnant from one-time, unprotected intercourse is between 3.1-5%¹³, depending on a multitude of factors, including the time of month intercourse occurs, whether contraceptives are used, and the age of the female. The average number of rapes and sexual assaults against females of childbearing age is approximately 250,000. Thus, the number of children conceived from rape each year in the United States might range from 7,750-12,500.¹² This is a very general estimate, and the actual number may differ. This statistic presents information from a number of different studies. Further, this information may not take into account factors which increase or decrease the likelihood of pregnancy, including, but not limited to: impact of birth control or condom use at the time of attack or infertility. RAINN presents this data for educational purposes only, and strongly recommends using the citations to review sources for more information and detail.

Native Americans Are at the Greatest Risk of Sexual Violence

On average, American Indians ages 12 and older experience 5,900 sexual assaults per year.¹⁴

American Indians are twice as likely to experience a rape/sexual assault compared to all races.

41% of sexual assaults against American Indians are committed by a stranger; 34% by an acquaintance; and 25% by an intimate or family member.

Sexual Violence Affects Thousands of Prisoners Across the Country

An estimated 80,600 inmates each year experience sexual violence while in prison or jail. ¹⁵

60% of all sexual violence against inmates is perpetrated by jail or prison staff.¹⁵

More than 50% of the sexual contact between inmate and staff member-all of which is illegal-is nonconsensual.¹⁵

Sexual Violence in the Military Often Goes Unreported

6,053 military members reported experiencing sexual assault during military service in FY 2018. DoD estimates about 20,500 service members experienced sexual assault that year. ¹⁶

DoD estimates 6.2% of active duty women and 0.7% of active duty men experienced sexual assault in FY 2018.

Understanding RAINN's statistics

Sexual violence is notoriously difficult to measure, and there is no single source of data that provides a complete picture of the crime. On RAINN's website, we have tried to select the most reliable source of statistics for each topic. The primary data source we use is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which is an annual study conducted by the Justice Department. To conduct NCVS, researchers interview tens of thousands of Americans each year to learn about crimes that they've experienced. Based on those interviews, the study provides estimates of the total number of crimes, including those that were not reported to police. While NCVS has a number of limitations (most importantly, children under age 12 are not included), overall, it is the most reliable source of crime statistics in the U.S.

We have also relied on other Justice Department studies, as well as data from the Department of Health and Human Services and other government and academic sources. When assembling these statistics, we have generally retained the wording used by the authors. Statistics are presented for educational purposes only. Each statistic includes a footnote citation for the original source, where you can find information about the methodology and a definition of terms.

Learn more about RAINN's statistics.

Sources:​

1. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, 2019 (2020). Note: RAINN applies a 5-year rolling average to adjust for changes in the year-to-year NCVS survey data.

2. i. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sex Offenses and Offenders (1997); ii. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Crimes Against the Elderly, 2003-2013 (2014).

3. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sex Offenses and Offenders (1997).

4. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Crimes Against the Elderly, 2003-2013 (2014).

5. National Institute of Justice & Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence Against Women Survey (1998). (Statistic presents information on the total number of male and female victims in the United States, using a study from 1998. Because the U.S. population has increased substantially since then, it is probable that the number of victims has, as well. RAINN presents this data for educational purposes only, and strongly recommends using the citations to review any and all sources for more information and detail.)

6. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement (2000).

7. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Rape and Sexual Victimization Among College-Aged Females, 1995-2013 (2014).

8. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Female Victims of Sexual Violence, 1994-2010 (2013).

9. D.S. Riggs, T. Murdock, W. Walsh, A prospective examination of post-traumatic stress disorder in rape victims. Journal of Traumatic Stress 455-475 (1992).

10. J. R. T. Davidson & E. B. Foa (Eds.) Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: DSM-IV and Beyond. American Psychiatric Press: Washington, DC. (pp. 23-36).

11. DG Kilpatrick, CN Edumuds, AK Seymour. Rape in America: A Report to the Nation. Arlington, VA: National Victim Center and Medical University of South Carolina (1992).

12. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Socio-emotional Impact of Violent Crime (2014).

13. Allen J. Wilcox, David B. Dunson, Clarice R. Weinberg, James Trussell, and Donna Day Baird, Likelihood of Contraception with a Single Act of Intercourse: Providing Benchmark Rates for Assessment of Post-Coital Contraceptives, Contraception Journal, (2001).

14. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, American Indians and Crime, 1992-2002 (2004).

15. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2011-2012 (2013).

16. Department of Defense, Fiscal Year 2019 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, (2020).

17. David Cantor, Bonnie Fisher, Susan Chibnall, Reanna Townsend, et. al. Association of American Universities (AAU), Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct (September 21, 2015). (" Victim services agency" is defined in this study as a "public or privately funded organization that provides victims with support and services to aid their recovery, offer protection, guide them through the criminal justice process, and assist with obtaining restitution." RAINN presents this data for educational purposes only, and strongly recommends using the citations to review any and all sources for more information and detail.)

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1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime.

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Gov. John Bel Edwards signed two new laws this week meant to protect people who complain about sexual harassment and other misconduct from being silenced. Sen. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans, sponsored both measures, and they go into effect Aug. 1.

The first will prevent people accused of sexual misconduct from moving forward with lawsuits for slander, defamation or libel against an alleged victim while a complaint is being investigated.

Morrell had said this issue has been coming up at colleges and universities, with a friend at Tulane University advising him on the proposal. He noted a trend among faculty members or other university employees suing students who accuse them of sexual harassment or assault, in an effort to force the student to withdraw their complaint. Most students don't have enough money to fight such lawsuits, Morrell said.

This new law would allow a person to move forward with a defamation lawsuit eventually, but only after the sexual harassment complaint had been resolved.

The second law will allow a court to throw out a non-disclosure agreement if it prevents someone from talking publicly or sharing information about criminal activity. It will apply to current and future non-disclosure agreements.

The new law will apply non-disclosure agreements covering more than just criminal sexual misconduct, but Morrell said he was inspired to author the legislation because at least one of the young women former USA Gymnastics physician Dr. Larry Nasser abused had signed a non-disclosure agreement about her assault.

Disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein, comedian Bill Cosby and conservative television personality Bill O'Reilly all used non-disclosure agreements to keep allegations of sexual harassment and assault quiet for years.

Non-disclosure arrangements have also been in the news because President Donald Trump has reportedly used them often to hide potentially damaging or embarrassing information about him. Specifically, adult-film star Stormy Daniels is fighting to throw out a non-disclosure agreement she signed to keep her quiet about an alleged affair she had with Trump before he was in office.

Louisiana's new law would not have gotten Daniels out of her agreement with Trump, because the contract doesn't deal with a criminal act and Daniels had said their sexual arrangement was consensual.

Only sexual assault, rape and other crimes kept hidden through a non-disclosure agreement could get the contract thrown out by a judge, Morrell said.

. . . . . . .
Julia O'Donoghue is a state politics reporter based in Baton Rouge. She can be reached at jodonoghue@nola.com or on Twitter at @jsodonoghue. Please consider following us on Facebook at NOLA.com.

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Sexual harassment victims protected in new Louisiana laws

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Gov. John Bel Edwards signed two new laws this week meant to protect people who complain about sexual harassment and other misconduct from being silenced. Sen. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans, sponsored both measures, and they go into effect Aug. 1.

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"I want people to know that this movement isn't stopping. We're going to move forward until we have an equitable and safe space for women."

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"I want people to know that this movement isn't stopping. We're going to move forward until we have an equitable and safe space for women."

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The men file in, a few wearing pressed button-down shirts, others jeans caked in mud from work on a construction site. They meet in the living room of an old taupe bungalow on a leafy street in a small Southern city.

Someone has shoved a workout bike into the corner to make room for a circle of overstuffed chairs dug up at the local Goodwill. The men jockey for a coveted recliner and settle in. They are complaining about co-workers and debating the relative merits of various trucks when a faint beeping interrupts the conversation. One man picks up a throw pillow and tries to muffle the sound of the battery running low on his ankle bracelet, a reminder of why they are all there.

Every one of the eight men in the room has been convicted of a sex crime and mandated by a court to see a therapist. Depending on the offense, their treatment can last several months or several years. (TIME has given both the men and the therapists pseudonyms in this story.)

They sit in the circle, the man who exposed himself to at least 100 women, next to the man who molested his stepdaughter, across from the man who sexually assaulted his neighbor. The group includes Matt, whose online chats led to prison; Rob, who was arrested for statutory rape; and Kevin, who spent decades masturbating next to women in movie theaters.

Some of the men's crimes aren't all that different from the allegations against public figures such as Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore. Unlike the famous men, they cannot afford lawyers to draft nondisclosure agreements, or arrange hush-money payments, or appeal guilty verdicts, as Cosby's attorneys are planning to do following his conviction on sexual assault in April. (Cosby could also be ordered to seek therapy.) Nor can they attempt to stage professional comebacks or publish mea culpa memoirs.

Instead, these men were all found guilty and had their names added to a state sex-offender registry. They will remain on that list for decades and, in some cases, the rest of their lives. Anyone can search online for the ugly details of their crimes, including employers, partners and their own children. A judge has limited where most of the men in this room can live, work and socialize-and whether they can access the Internet. Some are unemployed, and many live paycheck to paycheck, dependent on the few employers who are willing to tolerate their criminal history.

The more than 800,000 registered sex offenders in the U.S. may feel that their parole restrictions are onerous, but the mere presence of a known offender in almost any community precipitates clashes of competing interests and legal battles that have only intensified in the wake of the #MeToo movement. In at least 10 recent lawsuits filed in states from Pennsylvania to Colorado, civil rights proponents argue that sex offenders face unconstitutional punishments that other criminals do not, and they note that there are no government registries for murderers or other violent felons in most states. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case challenging the limits of the registry in its October term.

But advocates for the millions of women, men and children who have experienced sexual violence are pushing back on any reforms, and 12 states have passed or proposed further restrictions on offenders in the past year. "What most of my clients want is their attacker gone," says Lisa Anderson, a lawyer who represents survivors of rape. "If I could brand them with a scarlet letter on their forehead I would, because I don't want any woman hurt like that again."

Most people find it difficult to reconcile the hope that rehabilitation is possible with the impulse to push these men to the periphery of society forever. Punitive measures alone, however, have not been found to meaningfully increase community safety. Meanwhile, therapy-when paired with tough parole restrictions-can significantly reduce the chance of re-offending, according to the American Psychological Association. "It's hard for me to believe that someone could violently ignore the will of another and then be taught not to cross that line," says Anderson. "But if it's possible to teach them empathy, then that should be mandatory."

There are about 2,350 therapists across the nation who provide court-mandated treatment to sex offenders. (Counseling is also offered through prisons and other government institutions.) Judges refer the offenders to psychologists or clinical social workers who are authorized by states. In some cases, the government subsidizes the cost of treatment. Private therapists can refuse to see certain patients at their discretion.

Cheryl, a clinical social worker, and Jennifer, a licensed professional counselor, oversee the weekly meetings in the bungalow. They have worked with both victims and perpetrators for almost 20 years. They do not have to accept all referrals from the state--and they say there are certain men they simply won't treat, such as those who repeatedly prey on children, and seem unwilling to change. But they say that by the time most of their patients leave therapy, they are equipped to take responsibility for their actions, to understand what led them to commit their crimes and, finally, to empathize with their victims. "Working with these men and watching them change actually gives me hope for all men," says Jennifer. "Because if people can't change and grow, well, then what are we going to do with all these bad men in the news, with all the bad men who are still out there?"

Unable to silence the ankle bracelet, Cheryl and Jennifer decide to start the session despite the distraction. "The topic on the table today," Cheryl says, "is how we failed ourselves and others and how we hold ourselves accountable for that failure."

Matt, 30, grips a pillow on the couch as he recounts his story. He had always had trouble talking to girls. He would lose track of his words and fidget. In high school, he turned to chat rooms where nobody could see his awkward mannerisms. He started skipping class and parties to talk online. The conversations fueled his sexual fantasies.

"It led to a devaluation of whoever was on the other side," he says. "They weren't a person. They were a means to an end. I never actually hurt anyone physically. But I left an emotional holocaust."

He met his fiancée not in a chat room but at college. He was studying political science in the hopes of becoming a lawyer and maybe, someday, a Senator. He aspired to higher office, he says, "'cause nobody is going to say: A United States Senator? What a f-cking loser." He says doctors diagnosed him with everything from ADD to depression to borderline personality disorder. (Jennifer believes that Matt is somewhere on the autism spectrum.)

Even while in a relationship, Matt continued to linger in chat rooms. When he was 26, he met what he thought was a 14-year-old girl online. He had been arguing with his fiancée, but this girl laughed at his jokes and spent just as much time in front of the computer as he did. After the chats became sexual, she asked to see him in real life. Eventually he agreed to meet her at a Walmart across town from his job.

"I get there, and there's nobody there. I'm excited. I'm just like, 'Nothing bad can happen now. I can go back to work where I'm supposed to be,'" he says. "Not two seconds later I see these blue lights, and hear, 'Police. Get on the ground.' Turns out [the 14-year-old] was a police officer the whole time."

The consequences were swift. Matt went to prison for 11 months. He lost his career and fiancée. He now works a job in construction that he says he hates.

As Matt recounts his story, Jennifer cuts in to ask him how he justified having a sexual conversation with a teenager in the first place. "I thought, At least I'm not touching her," Matt says. "I didn't think of a 14-year-old as a child. I thought of myself at that age being highly sexualized. I thought everyone was, or at least everyone was pretending to be."

"O.K., S-T-O-P," Jennifer interrupts. "That's a cognitive distortion, right there."

A sex offender, Jennifer later explains, often commits a crime by rationalizing it in some way: she wanted it, or my needs mattered more than hers. They convince themselves that a false notion is true-a cognitive distortion. Therapists' work often consists of challenging their clients' false beliefs and encouraging them to develop a more realistic view of the world.

There isn't one standard method for treating sex offenders. But many experts have come to agree that identifying motivations and thought patterns is essential. Still, some therapists favor a much more confrontational method. "I saw treatment providers shaming and demeaning people, and literally having people get on their knees and say, 'I'm f-cked up. I'm f-cked up. I'm f-cked up,'" Cheryl says. "I would much rather reach out my hand and say, 'Let's talk about how f-cked up you are.'"

Recent research published by the American Public Health Association suggests that focusing on punishments rather than positive goals can actually increase the chance of recidivism. In 2006, the Department of Justice endorsed more progressive methods such as the Good Lives Model, which aims to teach people how to fulfill their emotional and physical needs without hurting others. That includes challenging sexist behaviors and skewed social views that lead them to hurt other people.

In one group session, Cheryl and Jennifer pose a scenario meant to do just that: a man walks into an office, and a female receptionist smiles at him. Should he ask her out on a date? Two 50-something men in the group say they've always assumed every time a woman smiles or wears a short skirt, she's coming on to them. One of the men in his early 30s argues that the receptionist has to be friendly to do her job. Jennifer points out that the receptionist is in an impossible position: if a valued customer hits on her, she may fear that she'll be fired if she rejects him.

After each weekly discussion, Cheryl and Jennifer give homework assignments, such as asking participants to fill in a timeline of high and low moments in their lives, or writing a statement from the perspective of their victims. Lately, they have asked their patients to discuss the dozens of men who are making headlines for alleged sex crimes.

Matt watched the trial of Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics doctor who was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison for molesting more than 160 women and girls. "The prosecutor was calling him a menace to society, and I'm like, Yeah, that guy is a menace to society," says Matt. "But the lawyer in my case was using the same phrase about me. I'm not claiming I'm some great guy or whatever, but I didn't use my power to hurt [hundreds of] people."

The consensus in this group, which includes men who trafficked in child pornography and men who assaulted their stepdaughters, is that Nassar is a monster. "They don't want to see themselves in those men," says Cheryl. "The men in group sense that these famous men are entitled."

While Matt sat on Jennifer and Cheryl's worn-down couch, forced to take responsibility for his offense, Harvey Weinstein-who is under investigation for rape in New York-was in Arizona at a spa-like treatment facility that charges $58,000 for a 45-day stay and is known for treating "sex addiction," a controversial diagnosis not found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Sex-addiction treatment is designed to help people with impulse-control issues and, like Alcoholics Anonymous, focuses on abstinence and avoiding triggers.

Experts emphasize that men who commit crimes like rape, assault and indecent exposure should receive sex-offender therapy, not sex-addiction therapy. Sexual behavior that is coercive or violent is a crime and very different from someone who compulsively cheats with a willing partner or misses work because he can't stop watching porn. Psychologists who work with sex offenders say many men try to use the "sex addiction" label as a way to abdicate responsibility for actions that are illegal and abusive. The only way for them to get better and to lessen their risk to society, therapists say, is to confront what they have done, not excuse it.

People have been sharing their problems with Cheryl all her life, even before she was a therapist. During a session, she lets every emotion show, frowning in sympathy and rolling her eyes when patients try to fool her. She began her career working with children who had been abused. When first offered a chance to work with sex offenders, she refused. But she decided to go to a session out of curiosity. "I was like, 'Oh, God, I'm walking into this group of disgusting, dirty, icky men," Cheryl says. But when she arrived, the men looked like her neighbors and friends, and some genuinely wanted to change. She decided to take on the challenge, and later she and Jennifer started up a practice.

They both still work with survivors and know that the damage these men have wrought on their victims cannot be undone. But they have come to believe counseling can curtail most offenders' impulses and allow them to function safely in society. "I hear the awfulest stories and even have to excuse myself to throw up," Cheryl says. "Sometimes these guys come in here complaining about having to drive a little further to get groceries because they're on the registry, and I'm like, 'To hell with you. Think of how your victim feels.'"

Many patients don't want to contend with what they've done to their victims-at least initially. Some therapists ask their patients to attend local sentencing hearings and listen to other victims' testimonies. Others instruct their patients to role-play as their victims. Cheryl opts for a more personal approach.

When Rob was 20 years old, he partied a lot. He would stay out late, ignoring his mom's texts and "drive home drunk, literally every night." He met a 15-year-old girl at a party and had sex with her. Her parents pressed charges, and Rob didn't tell his own mother until he had a court date set. He spent one year in prison for statutory rape and another two for parole violations. When he first met Cheryl, he told her, "Lady, I'll sit here, but I don't need therapy, and I don't care about this." Eventually, he became one of the most active members in the group.

He does electrical work now, thanks, he says, to the therapy he once dismissed. He got the job through a man who went through Cheryl's program before him. Rob recently proposed to his fiancée and has since brought her to a few individual therapy sessions. She is older than him and has two daughters; he can't attend their school plays or graduation.

Cheryl asks Rob how treatment has helped him to take responsibility for what he did. He speaks in vague terms about how he "f-cked up." Cheryl stops him. "Define what 'f-cked up' means. Be specific."

"I had a good job. I was working," he says. "Instead of listening to my family and the people who cared about me, I just rebelled."

"And then what happened?"

"I committed my offense." He can't bring himself to say what that offense was.

"What were the consequences of that?"

"I lost everything."

"That's still about you, honey," Cheryl says. "What happened to your victim?"

"Her life was affected-I don't know how. I haven't had contact with her."

Cheryl changes tack. "You've almost got two stepdaughters about [your victim's age]. What do you think the impact would be on them, meeting someone like you when you were 20?"

"I mean, they'd be traumatized. They'd be-" he's quiet for a minute. "I can't think of the right word. I'm stuck." He looks down into his lap.

"You're getting ready to become a parent," Cheryl says. "So I'm really challenging you. What kind of person were you then, the person you wouldn't want your stepdaughters to meet now?"

"I didn't care about anything. I was drinking, using drugs. I just wanted to get my rocks off. It didn't matter with who or at what age. We try to talk to them, the kids, about that because, well, they're like my kids."

"I've seen you grow up," says Cheryl. "You came to us with an eff you, eff me, eff whatever attitude. Now you've got these two girls and you get to tell them, 'I was the 20-year-old boy who couldn't wait to get with some sweet little 15-year-old.' And you can tell them you didn't give a rip about that girl as long as she was gonna like you. I mean, you didn't force her, you didn't trick her.'"

"Well, I didn't trick her, and I did."

Cheryl smiles. "Thank you for correcting me."

"I tricked her because I had the nice car. I used what I had to my advantage when I wanted. Did I trick her into a dark alley? No. Was it mutual? Yes. But I had nice things. I was able to buy the drugs and alcohol. So yes, I did trick her. And I don't want them to get tricked-even if it's mutual. They're too young to know."

Later, she asks Rob if he would want to talk with his victim in person if he could.

"Honestly, no," he said. "I've got a good thing going right now, and I feel like if I heard that I just f-cked her life up, it would send me in this spiral."

"But that is what empathy is," Cheryl says. "Sitting across from your victim and listening to her and understanding how she feels." She tells him a story of a client whose neighbor found him on the sex-offender registry and confronted him in a grocery store. "You hurt a child," she yelled at him in the cereal aisle. This patient, Cheryl says, had a moment of self-realization. He dropped to his knees on the linoleum floor and said, "I used to be that man that did those awful things to the little girl and the amount of regret I have is sometimes unfathomable."

That, she argues, is truly taking responsibility for your actions.

"I would meet with her if she wanted to," Rob says. "I would just be scared. I just-it would be hard."

Cheryl has observed these sorts of conversations between assailant and survivor before at the request of both parties and believes they have the potential to be healing. Some victim advocates are skeptical. "Every time I saw my rapist, I threw up," says Anderson, who became a lawyer to defend victims of assault after a professor raped her in graduate school. "One of my clients was forced to talk to her attacker, and she became suicidal."

Sex-offender therapists and victim advocates are often on opposite sides on questions of crime, punishment and rehabilitation, though both ultimately hope to reduce sexual violence. The data on treatment is limited, but what there is points toward the value of therapy. While there are no recent, official statistics on national sex-offender recidivism, an overview of studies looking at the numbers in Connecticut, Alaska, Delaware, Iowa and South Carolina found that the rate is about 3.5% for sex offenders. That figure takes into account all crimes, including parole violations, not just sex crimes.

In 2010, research published in the American Journal of Public Health suggested that strict laws about registration, surveillance and residency can create a feeling of hopelessness and isolation that can actually facilitate re-offense. Several studies show that rehabilitative therapy, when paired with legal measures, can give offenders a sense of hope and progress and reduce recidivism rates by as much as 22%.

To many survivors and advocates, the experience of sexual assault is so horrifying that any recidivism risk is too high. "The emotional toll on the victim when it does happen is immeasurable," Anderson says. "Those nightmares last a lifetime." There are also far more victims than perpetrators, which increases the potential consequences of any re-offense. There are fewer than 1 million men on the sex-offender registries; sexual-assault victims number in the millions, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, a survivor advocacy group.

Kevin, 68, one of the men in Cheryl and Jennifer's therapy group, traumatized hundreds of women. For 45 years, he was a compulsive exhibitionist. He would visit movie theaters, sit next to a woman and masturbate once the lights dimmed. He fantasized that the women were aroused by his behavior, though he now says, "They never actually were." He did this nearly every day, sometimes multiple times a day.

Kevin spent time in jail and psychiatric treatment centers but never went to prison. He managed to hold down a job as a clerk at a home-improvement store. Eventually, he stopped exposing himself, but not because of therapy. "I got older, my sex drive got lower. I got on a drug that basically is designed, if you take in high doses, to reduce your testosterone level and reduce your sex drive," he says. "I'm not sure that just therapy would have been able to break the cycle."

But Kevin says the sessions have helped him understand the motivation for his behavior. He now believes that he exposed himself in the hopes of making a human connection, however irrational that may sound. "When I would do it, it was like I was in a trance. I'm just absorbed in what I'm doing, trying to get a positive response, which I very seldom got," he says. "It took me a long time to figure out that women don't want to see that. They find it disgusting."

Whether you believe that therapy can redeem someone like Kevin may depend on whether you believe people can learn empathy. Researchers at the University of Cambridge published a study in March that suggests subjects' ability to empathize with others had little to do with their genetic makeup and more to do with how they were raised. Empathetic people are made, not born.

Many of the men Cheryl and Jennifer counsel experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse themselves when they were young. As the therapists often say in group, "Hurt people hurt people." At sentencing hearings, Cheryl testified to the likelihood that a sex offender can reform based on their history. But there are no guarantees.

In October, the Supreme Court will consider a complicated case challenging the federal laws that govern some sex offenders. The decision could allow hundreds of thousands of convicted offenders to move more easily across state lines and eventually remove their names from the sex-offender registry.

Even if that suit fails, civil rights proponents and victim advocates will likely confront each other again in the nation's highest court. A Colorado federal judge recently ruled that the state's sex-offender registry is unconstitutional. He said the list constitutes cruel and unusual punishment because it can subject these men to ostracism and violence at the hands of the public and that it fails to properly distinguish between different types of offenses.

The Colorado judge's decision ignited outrage. In response, attorneys general from six states wrote a joint amicus brief to overturn the ruling on appeal. In their brief, the attorneys general quote a judge from a separate case regarding sex offenders in Wisconsin: "Parents of young children should ask themselves whether they should worry that there are people in their community who have 'only' a 16% or an 8% probability of molesting young children."

In an attempt to resolve the tension between public safety and individual redemption, the law has settled on an imperfect compromise: sex offenders are inscribed on a registry, sometimes permanently. But they are also ordered to attend therapy to get better. The bad men are left in limbo.

Inside the small taupe house, Cheryl and Jennifer work to move through that limbo, one conversation at a time. As the bright winter sun sets and the office grows cold, a group therapy session comes to a close 45 minutes after it was supposed to. The men rise from the worn couch and pull on their coats and hats. One has to head home to meet his parole-mandated curfew. The man with the ankle bracelet needs to charge his battery. They file out slowly, loose floorboards creaking under their feet. Tomorrow, Cheryl and Jennifer might text some of these men to see how they're doing. They might call their wives or bosses or parole officers. They'll review the homework the men have turned in and prep for individual therapy sessions.

After those meetings end and the men leave the house for good, Cheryl and Jennifer may never know what becomes of them. Mostly, they hope they won't read about them in the news.
This appears in the May 21, 2018 issue of TIME.

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Can Bad Men Change? What It's Like Inside Sex Offender Therapy

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The men file in, a few wearing pressed button-down shirts, others jeans caked in mud from work on a construction site. They meet in the living room of an old taupe bungalow on a leafy street in a small Southern city.

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It is unlawful to harass a person (an applicant or employee) because of that person's sex. Harassment can include "sexual harassment" or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.

Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person's sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general.

Both victim and the harasser can be either a woman or a man, and the victim and harasser can be the same sex.

Although the law doesn't prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).

The harasser can be the victim's supervisor, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or someone who is not an employee of the employer, such as a client or customer.

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It is unlawful to harass a person (an applicant or employee) because of that person's sex. Harassment can include "sexual harassment" or unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature. Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature, however, and can include offensive remarks about a person's sex.

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Students Walk Out To Protest Gun Violence | The Daily Show

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"According to Williams, the research shows that when people hold a negative stereotype about a group and meet someone from that group, they often treat that person differently and honestly don't even realize it. "

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"According to Williams, the research shows that when people hold a negative stereotype about a group and meet someone from that group, they often treat that person differently and honestly don't even realize it. "

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Childish Gambino - This Is America (Official Video)

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An Alabama police department said Monday that three white police officers who threw a black woman onto the floor of a Waffle House during an arrest on Sunday, threatened to break her arm, placed a hand on her throat and exposed her breasts, had acted appropriately.

The officers, from the Saraland Police Department, were sharply criticized after a cellphone video of the confrontation was posted on Facebook, with some calling them racist and overly aggressive. The footage starts with one of the officers standing over the woman, Chikesia Clemons, and trying to place her right arm behind her back as she sits in a chair.

The video then skips ahead, picking up as two officers grab Ms. Clemons's arms and shoulders and toss her onto the restaurant floor. "What are you doing," Ms. Clemons yells at the officers, as they try to bend her arms behind her back.

"About to break your arm, that's what I'm about to do," an officer replies.

During the scuffle, Ms. Clemons's strapless shirt comes undone, exposing her breasts in the middle of the restaurant. When she is handcuffed, an officer turns to her friend Canita Adams, who is recording the video, and says, "You want to come fix her clothes?"

Within hours of the video being posted online, members of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter and others began protesting at the Waffle House, which is just north of Mobile, Ala., comparing the episode to the arrest of two black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia this month.

"I don't feel like she was treated fairly," her mother, Chiquita Clemons-Howard, said at an N.A.A.C.P. meeting on Sunday evening. "I want to get justice for my daughter."

David Smith, the president of the Mobile County N.A.A.C.P., did not respond to a message seeking comment on Tuesday.

In an odd coincidence, the arrest of Ms. Clemons occurred at about 3 a.m. on Sunday, around the same time a man armed with a rifle opened fire in a Waffle House outside Nashville, killing four young people of color and injuring four others.

Ms. Clemons, who was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, and Ms. Adams, who was not arrested, could not be reached for comment on Tuesday. Ms. Clemons-Howard, who told the Alabama news media that she was speaking on her daughter's behalf, did not return a call seeking comment.

After the Starbucks arrest, the Philadelphia police chief apologized, as did Starbucks's chief executive, and the company announced it would shut down 8,000 stores in the United States for a day next month for racial-bias training. The arrest in Saraland, Ala., has not drawn the same reaction from Waffle House.

Both the Police Department and Waffle House have said that the cellphone video did not show the full story and that the officers acted appropriately and had reason to arrest Ms. Clemons. A Waffle House spokesman said "police intervention was appropriate."

On Monday afternoon, the Police Department released a portion of a 911 call from a Waffle House employee and footage from two security cameras inside the restaurant.

In the 911 call, the worker said her manager had asked her to call because two women and a man acting "drunk and disorderly" had arrived with alcohol and were refusing to throw it away. The security footage had no audio but showed Ms. Clemons, 25, and Ms. Adams, 26, pointing and yelling at employees.

At a news conference on Monday, Detective Brian Mims said the women were cursing and threatening them.

"'You ain't going to be here tomorrow,'" Detective Mims said the women told employees. "'I may have a gun. I may have anything. I can come back up here and shoot this place up if I need to.'"

When the officers arrived, Detective Mims said, Ms. Clemons refused to comply with their orders and resisted placing her hands behind her back. He said her race played no role in what happened.

"Based on the interviews conducted," he said, "it was based solely on that they were asked to take their beverages out and not to consume them on premises."

The Police Department did not release the names of the officers but said that none of them would be disciplined.

Ms. Clemons's mother told AL.com that the encounter on Sunday morning had started over plastic utensils. The women asked for plastic ware with their meal, her mother said, but a waitress told them that the utensils cost 50 cents extra. When Ms. Clemons and Ms. Adams objected and said they had not been charged for them in the past, the waitress canceled their order, Ms. Clemons-Howard said.

The police arrived when the women were trying to get the name of a Waffle House supervisor to file a complaint, Ms. Clemons-Howard said. "The footage shows the story completely," she told AL.com, referring to the cellphone video.

Detective Mims said Monday that the waitress was following Waffle House policy to charge customers for plastic ware if they plan to dine at the restaurant. A company spokesman did not immediately answer an email seeking comment about its plastic ware policy.

Doris Burke contributed research.

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Black Woman's Violent Arrest at Alabama Waffle House Was Justified, Police Say

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An Alabama police department said Monday that three white police officers who threw a black woman onto the floor of a Waffle House during an arrest on Sunday, threatened to break her arm, placed a hand on her throat and exposed her breasts, had acted appropriately.

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The president of Nordstrom Rack is offering a face-to-face apologyto three African American teenagers after they were falsely accused of stealing from a store in Missouri.

Dirone Taylor, Mekhi Lee and Eric Rogers II said they were shopping on Thursday at a Nordstrom Rack in Brentwood, near St. Louis, when store employees called the police on them and accused them of shoplifting.The police showed up but determined there was no crime.

Nordstrom Rack president Geevy Thomas flew to St. Louisand was planning to meet with the teenagers and their families on Tuesday, the teens told CNN.

"I just want to explain to him the situation," said Taylor, who graduates from De Smet Jesuit High School in St. Louis on May 20. "I don't want it to happen to anyone else. I want to see what repercussions will happen."

Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St. Louis chapter of the NAACP, said in a statement that the three students, Taylor, Lee, and Rogers, "were guilty of nothing but shopping while being black."
"These are good kids," Pruitt told CNN. "The most remarkable thing was, when I asked them, what do you want [from Nordstrom Rack], they said, make sure no other black kids and their families have to go through the same thing."

Rogers, who graduates May 22 from East St. Louis Senior High School, told CNN that he and his friends are used to being watched in stores, but this time was different.

"I felt like I was unequal," Rogers said. "By them calling the police, with everything going on, anything we could have done could have affected us, and could have drastically affected our lives. In a way, I was scared. But I couldn't show it."

Taylor and Rogers were shopping for shirts for prom.

The third student, Lee, a freshman at Alabama A&M, said he felt "overwhelmed, embarrassed and humiliated."

Chief Joseph Spiess of the Brentwood Police Department spoke to CNN and credited the three responding officers for their patience.

"They [the teens] were a bit confrontational with the officers initially, and then the officers explained why they were there," said Spiess.

He said the officers had the dispatcher re-broadcast the call for them "so that the teens could hear the report, which really helped. They got it."

"The success story here on our end -- [was that] the officers really let these kids talk, the officers figured out they weren't stealing, they had receipts for what they had," said Spiess. "Police then talked to the Nordstrom Rack people and explained there was no crime."

Related: Nordstrom bets on virtual reality with new NYC store

The store apologized to the teens.

"We did not handle this situation well and we apologized to these young men and their families," Nordstrom Rack said in a statement to CNN affiliate KMOV. "We want all customers to feel welcome when they shop with us and we do not tolerate discrimination of any kind."

Nordstrom Rack is a subsidiary of Nordstrom .

Related: Starbucks to close 8,000 stores for racial-bias training

This is the latestracially charged incident to involve a major company in 2018. Last month, two black men were arrested at a Starbucks in Philadelphia for trespassing after they sat in a store without buying anything. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson later met with the men and apologized, according to the company. He also apologized publicly, calling the incident "reprehensible."

Starbucks is planning to close 8,000 stores on May 29 for racial bias training.

CNNMoney (New York) First published May 8, 2018: 4:09 PM ET

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Nordstrom Rack apologizes for falsely accusing black teens of stealing

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Dirone Taylor, Mekhi Lee and Eric Rogers II said they were shopping on Thursday at a Nordstrom Rack in Brentwood, near St. Louis, when store employees called the police on them and accused them of shoplifting.The police showed up but determined there was no crime. Nordstrom Rack president Geevy Thomas flew to St.

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Two black men said they were humiliated when staffers at their New Jersey gym twice called police on them and wrongly accused them of not paying, despite one of them being a member for eight years.

Rachid Maiga, 27, and Tshyrad (shah'-RAHD) Oates, 25, told WNBC-TV they were playing basketball for a few minutes at the LA Fitness club in Secaucus on April 15 when an employee asked them to leave.

The dispute appeared to be resolved, but the pair said a club manager soon confronted them and told them to leave and called police. The two men said they felt like suspects as officers escorted them to the lobby.

Oates later posted videos of the confrontations, and the Irvine-Calif.-based company apologized. The three employees directly involved in the incident are no longer with the company, according to LA Fitness.

Maiga, a semi-pro basketball player, had been a club member for eight years and even paid a premium for the location because of its prized basketball court.

"I'm not the type of person that likes to put my problems out there," Maiga said. "This has happened to me before - racial profiling."

Civil rights attorney William Wagstaff III, who represents the men, said LA Fitness' apology wasn't sincere. "If that video had not gone viral, they wouldn't have apologized," he said.

Maiga said he won't return to the Secaucus gym because he doesn't feel welcome there.

"We have to say something, continue to speak up, not be nervous to have this conversation." Oates said. "We want people to talk about it until they realize it's wrong."

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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2 black men 'humiliated' when gym staffers called police

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Two black men said they were humiliated when staffers at their New Jersey gym twice called police on them and wrongly accused them of not paying, despite one of them being a member for eight years.

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Cops allegedly targeted a Brooklyn actor in what has become an ugly trend - getting cuffed for shopping while black.

Rob Brown, 29, who starred with Sean Connery in 2000's "Finding Forrester" and starred in HBO's "Treme," says he was unlawfully detained after buying a watch for his mom in Macy's Herald Square.

The actor filed a lawsuit against Macy's and the NYPD on Friday - and is now the third black New Yorker to sue the Police Department over a shop-and-frisk since May.

"You can't let injustice roll like that," the Amherst College grad told The Post, adding that the cops made him miss his mom's college graduation.

"I'll never get that time back. My mother was walking across the stage looking for me."

All three shoppers were detained by police and accused of making fraudulent luxury purchases at top Manhattan shopping destinations.

Brown's attorney, Nicholas Elefterakis, said "it's an epidemic. It's unbelievable."

Brown, who played a jazz trumpeter in the HBO series "Treme," says he was illegally searched by undercover detectives near the Sunglass Hut inside Macy's after he bought his mom a $1,000 Movado watch on June 8.

"Police officers ran up to him, arrested him, and then kept him in a jail cell in Macy's," Elefterakis said.

After handing over his ID, Brown "was told that his identification was false and that he could not afford to make such an expensive purchase," says his suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court.

Brown was detained by cops for more than an hour and released without being charged, the suit says.

His accusation is similar to that of a black college student from Queens who was detained by cops after buying a $350 Ferragamo belt at Barneys in April.

In a suit filed Monday, Trayon Christian, 19, says cops at a station house asked him "how a young black man such as himself could afford to purchase such an expensive belt."

Another black shopper, Kayla Phillips, 21, of Brooklyn, was stopped by cops in February after buying a $2,500 Céline handbag at Barneys.

A rep for Macy's said the claim was being investigated, while a spokeswoman for the city's Law Department said the claim would be reviewed once received.

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Cops allegedly targeted a Brooklyn actor in what has become an ugly trend - getting cuffed for shopping while black. Rob Brown, 29, who starred with Sean Connery in 2000's "Finding Forrester" and starred in HBO's "Treme," says he was unlawfully detained after buying a watch for his mom in Macy's Herald Square.

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A black teenager is shopping for justice - claiming snooty Barneys staffers and New York City cops racially profiled him for credit card fraud after he bought a $349 belt.

Trayon Christian, 19, told the Daily News he filed a lawsuit after he was targeted by staffers at Barneys' Madison Ave. flagship store and detained by police because they didn't believe a young black man could possibly afford to buy such an expensive belt.

Christian said his paycheck had just been direct deposited into his Chase bank account, so he went straight to Barneys on the afternoon of April 29 to buy the pricey Ferragamo belt with a silver buckle and a reversible black and white strap.

"It was a quick trip. I gave them my debit card, I signed my name," he said.

According to his lawsuit, the clerk asked Christian to show his ID, which he did.

But he got no more than a block from the store when two undercover NYPD detectives stopped him near E. 60th St., the lawsuit said.

"They said my card wasn't real, it was fake. They said someone at Barneys called to report it," said Christian.

"I showed them my school ID and my driver's license," said Christian, who was 18 when the incident allegedly occurred.

"I kept thinking, 'Why is this happening to me?'" he said.

According to his lawsuit, he was detained in a holding cell for about two hours.

He was then released with his debit card, his belt and an apology from the police, Christian said.

A spokeswoman for the NYPD denied Christian was detained for two hours, saying he was brought into the precinct at 7:04 p.m. and was allowed to leave at 7:45 p.m.

"Mr. Christian was held in police custody for approximately 42 minutes and as soon as we determined that the card was authentic, he was immediately released," said Inspector Kim Royster.

He was never charged, according to his attorney.

"I was nervous the whole time, but not really scared because I knew I had done nothing wrong," said the teen.

After he got home, he got angry.

"I brought the belt back to Barneys a few days later and returned it. I got my money back, I'm not shopping there again," he said. "It's cruel. It's racist."

Calls to Barneys, which is led by CEO Mark Lee, were not returned.

The city Law Department said it hadn't seen the court papers yet.

"We are awaiting a formal copy of the lawsuit and will review the claims upon receipt," said Elizabeth Thomas, a Law Department spokeswoman.

The NYPD said it has gotten 53 grand larceny complaints this year for credit card fraud at Barneys' Madison Ave. store and has made more than 47 arrests. But it's unclear how many of those arrested were actually charged with a crime and how many were, like Christian, released.

Plainclothes officers visit Barneys periodically because of problems with fraudulent use of cards, the NYPD said.

Christian's attorney Michael Palillo said the teen, who now works at Target, has a clean record.

"He's never been arrested. His only crime was being a young black guy buying a $300 belt," the lawyer said.

The student's Facebook page shows pictures of a fashion-loving teen. In some, Christian is sporting various belts with buckles encrusted with glittering "F's" - but it's not clear if they are also Ferragamo items.

He's also seen posing for selfies in a series of baseball caps that have been color-coded to match his clothes, with a gold chain and an earring peeking out.

Christian's mother, Selena Christian, said she was outraged at the upscale store's treatment of her son.

"Barneys said his card was stolen, they said he shouldn't have that much money in his account," said the 40-year-old school bus driver. "I am shocked. He's a good kid."

The hardworking mother could find only one reason for her son to be singled out after he'd shown ID to the Barneys staffer.

"It's because he's an African-American," she said. "It's wrong. They shouldn't have done this."

Being publicly questioned, searched and handcuffed and then detained in a police precinct cell caused Christian "great physical and mental distress and humiliation," the lawsuit said.

"His reputation and character were injured and he was embarrassed," the court papers said.

The incident was due to the "negligence, careless[ness] and recklessness of Barneys" and the undercover detectives, the lawsuit alleges.

Christian is suing the NYPD and Barneys for unspecified damages.

Off-the-rack Barneys facts:

* Founded in 1923 as a discount men's store by Barney Pressman.

* Didn't introduce a women's department until 1976.

* Was originally Barney's Clothes, and then Barneys. The store lost its apostrophe in 1981.

* First store outside of New York was opened in Seattle in 1990.

* The chain went bankrupt in 1996, and emerged from bankruptcy in January 1999.

* Had no CEO between 2008 and 2010, when it was run by a seven-member executive board.

* Its Madison Ave. flagship store is more than 250,000 square feet.

* The Pressman family sold the chain in 2004, and it has changed hands twice since then. It's now owned by Perry Capital.

* Lady Gaga designed some of the flagship store's holiday displays in 2011. Jay Z is teaming up with the store this year for a collection and window display titled "New York Holiday."

* The store's 2012 "Electric Holiday" display caused a kerfuffle when it featured rail thin model versions of Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck. The store noted the lanky versions of the stout stars were featured in a dream sequence, and that Minnie "happily awakens as her normal self."

* Barneys CEO Mark Lee, 50, is a San Francisco native.

* Moved to New York in 1980 as an acting student at New York University.

* First fashion gig was in 1984 as an assistant buyer for Saks Fifth Avenue. Has since worked at Giorgio Armani, Yves St. Laurent and headed Gucci before landing Barneys gig.

* Salary is reportedly seven figures, with equity in the company.

UPDATED: Barneys CEO releases statement

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Barneys accused teen of using fake debit card for $349 belt because he's a 'young black American male': lawsuit - NY Daily News

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A black teenager is shopping for justice - claiming snooty Barneys staffers and New York City cops racially profiled him for credit card fraud after he bought a $349 belt. Trayon Christian, 19, told the Daily News he filed a lawsuit after he was targeted by staffers at Barneys' Madison Ave.

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Updated: Tuesday, May 8, 2018, 11:15 a.m. EDT: It turns out that one of the three filmmakers who were recently stopped by a swarm of police cars for checking out of an Airbnb is the granddaughter of the late, great reggae singer and prophet Bob Marley.

The woman in the photo above has been identified by the New York Daily News as 33-year-old Donisha Prendergast, the daughter of Sharon Marley, who is the daughter of Rita Marley and was adopted by Bob Marley. Last week, Prendergast and two of her cohorts, Kells Fyffe Marshall and Komi-Oluwa Olafimihan, were stopped from leaving in their car by at least seven police cars and a helicopter after a white woman in a Rialto, Calif., neighborhood called police to say that there were "three black people stealing stuff."

The Daily News also reports that the trio plan to sue the Rialto Police Department and that Prendergast promises to release a longer version of the video encounter.
Earlier:
Unfortunately, the spate of wypipo calling police on black folks simply living their lives- playing golf, working out, having coffee-continues.

Add asking about whether it's protocol to pay for plastic utensils to the list of things you...
Read more Read

This time the incident involves a group of three black filmmakers who were staying in an Airbnb home rental in the Golden State. A woman named Kells Fyffe-Marshall posted on her Facebook page last week that as she and two other black friends were leaving their rental in Rialto, Calif., they were met with a throng of seven police cars and a helicopter, because why not call the whirlybird in on this?

The kerfuffle went down because a white neighbor took it upon herself to call said law enforcements on the friends, allegedly because they didn't "wave to her" (did she know them?), and also because three black people taking luggage out of a home automatically means they're robbing the joint.

When two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks on Thursday for simply sitting there,...
Read more Read

Fyffe-Marshall said that the confrontation was humiliating enough but quickly escalated after a "sergeant" arrived (it's always that guy, right?) and "insisted that [they] were lying," making them prove that they were lawfully in the right for leaving a house with luggage. Also, the cops had never heard of Airbnb. So the filmmakers had to call the guy who owned the place, who confirmed that all was legitimate; however, they were still detained because the matter involved a "felony charge."

Here is Fyffe-Marshall's entire account:

During our time in Cali we have been staying at an Airbnb. The 30th was our second morning and at about 11am we checked out. The four of us packed our bags, locked up the house and left. As you can see 3 of us were Black. About 10 seconds later we were surrounded by 7 cop cars. The officers came out of their cars demanding us to put our hands in the air. They informed us that there was also a helicopter tracking us. They locked down the neighborhood and had us standing in the street. Why? A neighbour across the street saw 3 black people packing luggage into their car and assumed we were stealing from the house. She then called the police.

At first we joked about the misunderstanding and took photos and videos along the way.

About 20 minutes into this misunderstanding it escalated almost instantly. Their Sergeant arrived... he explained they didn't know what Airbnb was. He insisted that we were lying about it and said we had to prove it. We showed them the booking confirmations and phoned the landlord... because they didn't know what she looked like on the other end to confirm it was her.. they detained us - because they were investigating a felony charge - for 45 minutes while they figured it out. He made me show my ID and made it clear I was being tagged.

We have been dealing with different emotions and you want to laugh about this but it's not funny. The trauma is real. I've been angry, fustrated and sad. This is insanity.

The cops admit that the woman's reason for calling the police was because we didn't WAVE to her as she looked at us putting our luggage into our car from her lawn.

But they pulled over three filmmakers! We documented it all!!!!! #wedidntwave#arighttoberight #racialprofiling #privilege#rightourstories #therevolution#whenyoupulloverfilmmakers @shaunking@amandaseales

@iamdonisha @komiolaf @ahutchphoto

OK. White people. Please stop calling the police on black people simply living their lives. It is the height of aggression (although you are using a proxy, which is the apex of passive aggression). Be clear: Black people tend to die when police are called. This is not hyperbole.

And even if said black folks end up miraculously not dead, the experience is often humiliating, emotionally exhausting and disheartening, not to mention traumatic.

You need to really get over yourself and really interrogate why certain people make you "uncomfortable" or "scared" or send your mind automatically to "criminal." Working against your own knee-jerk prejudices may save a life.

Tell a friend.

About the author

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1 of 3 Filmmakers #BlackWhileAirbnb-ing Is Bob Marley's Granddaughter; Plans to Sue Police Over Excessive Stop [Updated]

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Updated: Tuesday, May 8, 2018, 11:15 a.m. EDT: It turns out that one of the three filmmakers who were recently stopped by a swarm of police cars for checking out of an Airbnb is the granddaughter of the late, great reggae singer and prophet Bob Marley.

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Two African American men arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks last month have reached a settlement with the city and secured its commitment to a pilot program for young entrepreneurs.

Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson chose not to pursue a lawsuit against the city, Mike Dunn, a spokesman for the city of Philadelphia, told The Washington Post. Instead, they agreed to a symbolic payment of $1 each and asked the city to fund $200,000 for a grant program for high school students aspiring to become entrepreneurs.

"This was an incident that evoked a lot of pain in our city, pain that would've resurfaced over and over again in protracted litigation, which presents significant legal risks and high financial and emotional costs for everyone involved," Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement.

Nelson and Robinson appeared on Good Morning America Thursday morning to talk about the settlement and their goals for the grant and Starbucks moving forward. Robinson said he and Nelson would take part in the company's racial bias training and work with former Attorney General Eric Holder, who is involved in shaping the May 29 curriculum and other long-term initiatives.

Robinson said they aimed to focus the program on "our communities, our 'under-served' communities," and that the entrepreneurship grant would also go toward financial literacy training.

Stewart Cohen, Nelson and Robinson's attorney, noted that the $200,000 grant was set to last one year. Nelson he hoped the program would continue "generation after generation."

"The most important thing is the foundation, the fact that we have a seat at the table to work on reforms, being included in the racial bias training, leading forward. And hopefully other companies take what Starbucks is putting into perspective and follow," Nelson told Good Morning America's Robin Roberts.

Cohen said that Starbucks's chief executive, Kevin Johnson, has also offered to "personally mentor" Nelson and Robinson and continue to build a relationship with them.

Robinson also said Starbucks would help him and Nelson take courses to complete their bachelor's degrees. At the end of the interview, Robinson asked Roberts if she would take part in their work, to which she said she would "be honored."

"There are people out there that have other solutions, so we can keep moving forward like we really want to," Robinson said.

Funds for the $200,000 program will come from the city's Finance Department budget, Dunn said. The city, Nelson and Robinson will work together on developing a committee to award the grants.
[Tell us: Have you experienced discrimination in a public place?]
The city has also invited Robinson, Nelson and their attorneys to submit thoughts and recommendations to the city solicitor on other ways of promoting equality in public places, including restaurants and retail establishments.

Cohen, Placitella and Roth, the Philadelphia law firm representing Nelson and Robinson, did not immediately return a request for comment.

Also on Wednesday, Starbucks announced that it had reached an agreement with Nelson and Robinson that will include an undisclosed financial settlement "as well as continued listening and dialogue between the parties and specific action and opportunity."

Starbucks chief executive Kevin Johnson said he welcomed the chance to begin a relationship with Nelson and Robinson. "Starbucks will continue to take actions that stem from this incident to repair and reaffirm our values and vision for the kind of company we want to be," Johnson said in a statement.

A company news release said more details "will be provided in a mutually agreed public statement."
[Starbucks arrests: Who gets to decide whether you're a patron or a trespasser?]
In an April 18 interview with " CBS This Morning," Starbucks executive chairman, Howard Schultz, said he hoped to work with Nelson and Robinson and use Starbucks's resources to advise and support their business ventures.

"We will provide them with a foundation of learning and provide them with an opportunity to be part of our company either directly or indirectly as a result of this situation," Schultz told co-host Gayle King.

On April 12, Nelson and Robinson arrived 10 minutes early for a business meeting at a Starbucks in the Center City neighborhood of Philadelphia and wound up leaving the location in handcuffs. Upon arriving, Nelson asked whether he could use the restroom, and was told by a white manager that the restrooms were only for paying customers.

"And I just left it at that," Nelson told "Good Morning America" last month.

After Nelson returned to the table where Robinson was sitting, the manager approached them to ask whether she could help get them drinks or water.

Two minutes later, she called the police to report "two gentlemen in my cafe that are refusing to make a purchase or leave." Officers arrived a few minutes later. Robinson recalled thinking that "they can't be here for us."

Nelson told "Good Morning America" that the police told him and Robinson that they had to leave without any discussion. They were then arrested, and Robinson said they were not read any rights or told why they were being arrested.

Charges of trespassing and creating a disturbance were dropped that night.

Shortly after Nelson and Robinson told their story, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross personally apologized and said that if he had done anything to worsen race relations in the city, "shame on me." Ross had previously said the officers involved "did absolutely nothing wrong."

Last month, Starbucks announced it would close 8,000 stores for anti-racial-bias training on May 29. Johnson and Schultz met with Nelson and Robinson personally to apologize.

As protests broke out at that Philadelphia Starbucks, Johnson and Schultz appeared in television interviews to pledge that the company would work to combat unconscious bias and racial profiling among its employees.

In a video message, Johnson said, "I will fix this."
Read more: White golf course owners said five African American women were playing too slowly. Then they called the police. A woman was tackled by officers at an Alabama Waffle House. Police are defending the arrest. LA Fitness employees called 911 on two black men they said didn't pay. They had.

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Two black men arrested at Starbucks settle with Philadelphia for $1 each

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Two African American men arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks last month have reached a settlement with the city and secured its commitment to a pilot program for young entrepreneurs. Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson chose not to pursue a lawsuit against the city, Mike Dunn, a spokesman for the city of Philadelphia, told The Washington Post.

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An amateur video of a man being arrested while drinking an iced tea in a North Carolina parking lot kicked up a controversy after it went viral online, notching over a million views.

Posted to YouTube on April 29, the video shows Christopher Beatty, who also goes by his hip-hop moniker, Xstrav (short for Xtravagant), drinking an Arizona Iced Tea with his friend Tino Brown in the parking lot of a Fayetteville liquor store. They are approached by a man in plain clothes who says he is a police officer but does not produce a badge.

Later identified by the Fayetteville Observer as Cumberland County Alcoholic Beverage Control Law Enforcement officer Rick Libero, the man then asks Beatty if his iced tea contains alcohol. Beatty, who is black, tells him it does not, and the officer, who is white, tells Beatty to give him the can. Beatty refuses, and the officer tells him: "Leave the property. You have five seconds to leave."

When Beatty refuses to leave (in the video's description, Brown explains the two men were about to enter the liquor store to make a purchase), the officer pushes Beatty against the car and tells him to put his hands behind his back. When Beatty resists being handcuffed, the officer tackles him and handcuffs him on the parking lot's blacktop.

A second video, also with over a million views, shows Beatty being placed in the back seat of a Fayetteville Police car.

"The way Mr. Beatty carried the beverage appeared suspicious," Libero said, according to court records, the Observer notes.

Although the Cumberland County Alcoholic Beverage Control did not return a request for comment, the agency told local CBS affiliate WBWT-TV that Beatty is charged with trespassing, resisting arrest and delaying and obstructing a law enforcement officer.

Beatty was given a $2,000 secured bond and is scheduled to appear in court June 6, WBWT-TV says.

Click the video above to watch, and tell us what you think in the comments section.

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An amateur video of a man being arrested while drinking an iced tea in a North Carolina parking lot kicked up a controversy after it went viral online, notching over a million views.

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Police handcuff 6-year-old student in Georgia

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Police in Georgia defended their decision Tuesday to handcuff and arrest a 6-year-old elementary student after the school called to report a juvenile had assaulted a principal and was damaging school property. Milledgeville police said they were called to Creekside Elementary School on Friday for an unruly juvenile, who was allegedly throwing a tantrum.

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A police officer arrested three teens last week as they were standing outside a store in downtown Rochester, New York. Their crime: Waiting for a school bus.

The three boys - Raliek Redd, 16, Deaquon Carelock, 16, and Wan'Tauhjs Weathers, 17 - are star athletes at Edison Tech high school, and were waiting to be taken to a basketball game when they were spotted by an officer.

It seems the store adjacent to their pick-up spot was being monitored by police due to past complaints from the owner of teens loitering outside.

The officer asked the teens to disperse, but they explained that they were waiting to be picked up by a bus. The officer again asked the teens to disperse.

"We tried to tell them that we were waiting for the bus," Wan'Tauhjs told WHEC. "We weren't catching a city bus, we were catching a yellow bus. He didn't care. He arrested us anyways."

The three were charged with with disorderly conduct and obstructing the sidewalk.

While they were being handcuffed, their coach, Jacob Scott, arrived at the scene and attempted to reason with the cop.

"He goes on to say, 'If you don't disperse, you're going to get booked as well," Scott recalled. "I said, 'Sir, I'm the adult. I'm their varsity basketball coach. How can you book me? What am I doing wrong? Matter of fact, what are these guys doing wrong?'"

A school board member has since come out in defense of the arrested teens, saying this is not a new phenomenon.

"I'm very concerned about a pattern of young people being abused by police authority," Rochester City School Board Member Mary Adams is quoted as saying. "To me, this seems like a really clear case, part of a pattern."

The boys were scheduled to enter their plea before a judge last Friday, but their hearing has been postponed until December 11.

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Three Teens Arrested for Waiting While Black

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A police officer arrested three teens last week as they were standing outside a store in downtown Rochester, New York. Their crime: Waiting for a school bus. The three boys - Raliek Redd, 16, Deaquon Carelock, 16, and Wan'Tauhjs Weathers, 17 - are star athletes at Edison Tech high school, and were waiting to be taken to a basketball game when they were spotted by an officer.

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Myesha Senior planned to accept her psychology degree with a dash of flair.

Her family's roots are in Jamaica, so she was going to flash a Usain Bolt pose, then strut across the stage at the University of Florida's graduation ceremony. Her mom was a giddy accomplice, ready to hoist the Jamaican flag and scream when she saw her daughter's face on the arena's giant screen.

They thought it a fun and tasteful way to pay tribute to the four years of hard work that Senior had accomplished to get to Friday, and they weren't the only people who planned ostentatious celebrations among the 10,000 college graduates in gowns and mortarboards last weekend. One graduate did a back flip on the stage. Another proposed to his girlfriend. Many others snapped stage selfies.

But Senior's moment quickly soured.

Mid-pose, an "inappropriately aggressive" marshal at the ceremony grabbed her and pushed offstage as thousands watched and others recorded. Videos of her and other similarly treated black students spent the weekend ricocheting around Twitter.

Many saw more than an over-the-top marshal and a botched attempt to maintain decorum.

Just over 6 percent of the student population at the University of Florida identify as black or African American, according to Forbes. But 100 percent of the students being bodily removed in the worst videos were black, including Senior.

"I was getting ready to do the Usain Bolt pose," she told The Washington Post. "I tried to do it really fast. I saw the guy coming toward me ... and when he pushed me, I almost fell, and I caught myself. But he pushed me so far that I passed the lady's hand that I was supposed to shake."

It happened several times to several people on Friday. Nafeesah Attah, who planned to flash a Delta Sigma Theta sorority hand sign, was pushed so hard her cap fell off as she struggled to maintain balance. Oliver Telusma spent a few seconds in a sort of rotating bear-hug with the unidentified university official.

A short time later, University of Florida President W. Kent Fuchs found himself apologizing, saying school officials were "inappropriately aggressive in rushing students off the stage."

Attah and Senior said they received personal calls from Fuchs, who apologized and said the university was taking steps to make sure the actions didn't happen again. The marshal responsible for the action is being investigated, he told them.

Fuchs didn't return a message from The Post seeking comment, although he made a public apology at the next day's commencement exercises.
['I was just reading a book': Canadian cops called on black man reading C.S. Lewis in his car]
It was unclear what, if any, disciplinary actions were being taken and what specific steps the university was taking to ensure it didn't happen again. In his apology Fuchs did not say why the marshal had treated the students in that manner.

The students who got the worst of it had mixed emotions about the university president's response. Senior said Fuchs was gracious when he called her. But his apology didn't come after she was pushed, she noted, it came after the university was roasted on social media. And Fuchs was sitting on the stage when Senior and the others were hurried across it. He did nothing in the moment, she said.

Students who had been rushed off the stage insisted the damage was done. They had only one chance to walk across the stage as an undergraduate, and it will forever be a bad memory, they said.

Telusma told ABC News he felt bad for his family, whose "lasting memory, at least for undergrad, will be them watching their son having his back turned toward the audience and being handled like a savage animal."

As UF's very involved commencement website can attest to, institutions of higher learning have to stage-manage large, quasi-public events full of unpredictable people who don't always follow the rules of decorum. Cellphones go off. So do clothes. Then there is this potty-mouthed graduation fight that happened to the soundtrack of "Pomp & Circumstance."

There is only so much that administrators can do to control - or punish - misbehaving students who are about to walk out of a university for the last time.

Attah told The Post she understood the need for decorum. But she believes her actions were not undecorous or any more extreme than the actions of some white classmates who were not manhandled.

"A lot of people think that it's very trivial," Attah said. "It speaks to the bigger and larger issue of race relations in the United States at this time and making sure that black students feel comfortable at these universities. This is the time to highlight black excellence; instead we were treated like criminals at our very own commencement."

For Senior, the effects of the marshal's actions endured long after the graduate hung up her cap and gown. That night, she went out with friends to celebrate one of their last times together before moving onto the next chapter in their lives. But the night was muted, Senior said, because she spent a good chunk of it responding to people criticizing her on Twitter.

"I was not being disrespectful," she said. "I have home training. My family was there watching. I didn't push nobody. I didn't yell at nobody. I was very collected. Now people are making it into this whole different argument. It is just the hidden racism."

"At this point, you want to call me an animal and say we're ruining a traditional ceremony," she said of the critics, some of whom were especially harsh. "I just want to tell those people, 'You guys are the animals. I'm pretty sure if this was a white [graduate that was manhandled], you would be like, oh no, fire [the marshal], shut down UF.' "
Read more: Two pelicans crashed Pepperdine University's graduation. Hilarity ensued. Trump questions whether key funding source for historically black colleges is constitutional Trump expresses 'unwavering support' for historically black colleges, after questioning constitutionality of funding source Senator on Trump's shortlist to head FBI dropped as speaker at historically black university

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Black students celebrating their graduation say a marshal shoved them away from the stage

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Myesha Senior planned to accept her psychology degree with a dash of flair. Her family's roots are in Jamaica, so she was going to flash a Usain Bolt pose, then strut across the stage at the University of Florida's graduation ceremony.

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Sometimes you just want to be able to use a coupon to save on a pizza deal, but if you're a black man trying to use a coupon at a North Carolina Pizza Inn, you may be out of luck. Unless you have your handy-dandy "racism support human," also known as a white friend, to run interference.

Link Alexander says he tried to use a coupon at a Rocky Mountain, N.C., Pizza Inn that advertised a free buffet, but he was immediately denied because the manager said he did not recognize the signature on the coupon. Hours later, Alexander's white friend activated his ally powers like a good white friend should and was able to use the same exact coupon.

Alexander wrote about the incident on Facebook:

In an interview with WRAL-TV, Alexander explained that his roommate Rex Casey decided to test out the coupon and returned to the same location. A server immediately accepted the coupon and seated Casey. Casey wasn't having it, and summoned the manager and asked if he was actually able to use the coupon, since he covered the signature.

"He was like, 'Oh yeah, that's not a problem, etc., etc., and while he was agreeing to it, I took my hand off the coupon," Casey said. "As soon as he saw it, he recognized it. He immediately jumped into the same thing he told Link: 'The issue is, I can't really read the signature. I can't tell whose signature that is. I can't make it out. I don't think the owners would allow me to accept it.'"

In response to the racism allegations, Pizza Inn's corporate office stated: "This particular restaurant did not recognize the coupon that was presented and did not accept it from either guest. Our employees were exercising caution, as customers have attempted to use fraudulent cards in the past."

In addition, the franchise owner at the location tried to clarify the situation and apologized to Alexander and offered a free meal.

"We try to make our procedures clear on coupons but it does not always work," Steve Stancil stated. "I take full responsibility in that all our managers should be on the same page and obviously they were not."

Alexander is taking his appetite elsewhere.

About the author

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#CouponingWhileBlack: Pizza Inn Denies Black Man's Coupon but Accepts Same Coupon From White Friend

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Sometimes you just want to be able to use a coupon to save on a pizza deal, but if you're a black man trying to use a coupon at a North Carolina Pizza Inn, you may be out of luck. Unless you have your handy-dandy "racism support human," also known as a white friend, to run interference.

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Most flight attendants are subjected to sexual harassment by passengers, according to a survey by the Association of Flight Attendants.

The survey, the first of its kind from the flight attendants' union, reported that 68% of flight attendants experience sexual harassment during their flying careers.

More than a third of survey respondents said they experienced verbal sexual harassment from passengers within the last year. Of that group, 68% said they experienced it three or more times, while one-third said it happened five or more times.

"This is a silent epidemic in our country," AFA president Sara Nelson, who's been a flight attendant for 23 years, told CNNMoney. "This is an industry that is steeped in a sexist past. The airlines for a very long time sold tickets based on defining air travel in a sexual way and oftentimes flight attendants were the object of that."

Flight attendants described the verbal harassment as "nasty," "dirty" and "unwanted." They said passengers would proposition them, tell their sexual fantasies, and request pornographic videos and pictures.

The survey says this harassment occurred "despite the prevalence of abuse and the emergence of the #MeToo movement" which seeks to bring an end to sexual harassment and assault.

"I used to get cornered in the back galley and asked what my hottest layover was," said Nelson. "When I started flying I used to get asked if I was a member of the mile high club. That was a common quip from a passenger."

Eighteen percent of the survey respondents said they experienced physical sexual harassment within the last year, and of that group, 40% said it happened three or more times.

Related: How to talk about sexual harassment at work

They described being "groped," "grabbed" and "slapped," above and below their uniforms. Some of them said they were followed, cornered or lunged at, and hugged, kissed or "humped."

Nelson said that harassment also interferes with the attendants' role as first responders since "we can't do that as victims ourselves."

Only 7% of survey respondents said they actually reported the abuse to their employer, and 68% said their employers haven't done anything to address the abuse.

Related: Are you obligated to report sexual harassment at work?

Nelson, who is employed by United, said the CEOs for the threeairlines wrote open letters denouncing sexual harassment and announcing zero tolerance policies.

In a statement, Alaska Airlines said "We appreciate the partnership with the AFA, law enforcement and experts to do our part in addressing this pervasive societal issue." Spirit and United did not immediately respond to messages from CNNMoney.

The survey results are based on responses from 3,500 flight attendants from 29 US airlines. They survey was conducted in February and March of this year and80% of the respondents were women, and 20% were men.

Harassment isn't just a problem faced by women, said Nelson. "I've seen incredible harassment towards my male flying partners," she said.

Related: How bartenders fight harassment and workplace violence

This is the first time the AFA has done a survey like this, according to the group's spokeswoman. Last year, the AFA did a survey about passenger-on-passenger assault.

The Center for American Progress conducted a study last year about sexual harassment in the work place. The study, which looked at sexual harassment charges in a 10-year span ending in 2015, found that one-quarter of charges were filed in the service industries "including many low-wage jobs that are often occupied by women."

CNNMoney (New York) First published May 10, 2018: 6:18 PM ET

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68% of flight attendants have been sexually harassed, survey says

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The survey, the first of its kind from the flight attendants' union, reported that 68% of flight attendants experience sexual harassment during their flying careers. More than a third of survey respondents said they experienced verbal sexual harassment from passengers within the last year.

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"To the people I insulted, I apologize," he said Tuesday in a message on Twitter and LinkedIn.

On May 15, a video posted on social media showed Schlossberg at a Fresh Kitchen in Manhattan, angrily telling employees and customers who were speaking Spanish to speak English because "This is America!"

"If they have the balls to come here and live off my money, I pay for their welfare," he says, asserting incorrectly that undocumented immigrants are eligible for federal public benefits. "I pay for their ability to be here. The least they can do ... is speak English."

He continued to express his displeasure to an employee and threatened to call US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

"My guess is they're not documented. So my next call is to ICE to have each one of them kicked out of my country," he says.

Schlossberg,who has been seen on video aggressively confronting strangers on their identity in the past, appeared contrite Tuesday about the Fresh Kitchen incident. He did not mention any of the others.

"Seeing myself online opened my eyes -- the manner in which I expressed myself is unacceptable and is not the person I am," he wrote. "I see my words and actions hurt people, and for that I am deeply sorry."

He wrote that "people should be able to express themselves freely" but "should do so calmly and respectfully."

"What the video did not convey is the real me. I am not racist. One of the reasons I moved to New York is precisely because of the remarkable diversity offered in this wonderful city. I love this country and this city, in part because of immigrants and the diversity of cultures immigrants bring to this country."

US Rep. Adriano Espaillat told CNN that he and Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. filed a formal complaint against Schlossberg with the New York State Unified Court System, seeking to have his law license suspended until he "amends his actions."

On Thursday, Corporate Suites, the company that operates the business center where Schlossberg has a law office, said it was terminating its agreement with him.

"We found Mr. Schlossberg's statements offensive and contrary to our community norms," Corporate Suites President Hayim Alan Grant said in a statement. Grant said Schlossberg did not have full-time office space with Corporate Suites, but the company provided mail and phone services for his business and Schlossberg had access to the center to meet with clients.

Since last week's video went viral, two men came forward with other stories about Schlossberg becoming belligerent in public.

Willie Morris said Schlossberg bumped into him on the sidewalk and called him an "ugly f***ing foreigner" (Morris is from Massachusetts).

Morris said on Tuesday that Schlossberg, through his apology, appears to be trying "to save face."

"I believe he's upset he was caught multiple times being racist and that it's probably been very damaging for him," Morris told CNN.

Morris said Schlossberg will "be more careful about how he acts in public for a while" and that the lawyer should demonstrate his "change of heart" through "actions instead of blanket apologies."

In another instance, Isaac Saul described Schlossberg angrily yelling at an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man who was participating in a protest, accusing him of being a fake Jew. Both encounters were caught on video.

Saul, lead editor for the digital media organization A Plus, saw the Fresh Kitchen video and said he recognized Schlossberg from a previous encounter at a protest outside Saul's Midtown Manhattan office.

On May 25, 2017, Linda Sarsour, an American Muslim political activist, was speaking at a City University of New York graduation ceremony. Saul said there was a protest against Sarsour just outside his office, and anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller and far-right personality Milo Yiannopoulos attended.

Saul also said there were Haredi Jews -- ultra-Orthodox Jews who, in some cases, are stringently opposed to Zionism and the state of Israel -- counterprotesting in support of Sarsour's speech.

Saul said that after the protest ended, he saw some members of the protest "get in the face" of the counterprotesters.

In video of the confrontation, Schlossberg can be seen yelling profanities and saying, "You are not a Jew" at the counterprotesting Haredi Jews. He also flips his middle finger at the counterprotesters.

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says he's not a racist and offers an apology - cnn

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Alanne Orjoux, Paul P. Murphy and Ray Sanchez, CNN

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Attorney in rant that went viral says he's not a racist and offers an apology

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"To the people I insulted, I apologize," he said Tuesday in a message on Twitter and LinkedIn. On May 15, a video posted on social media showed Schlossberg at a Fresh Kitchen in Manhattan, angrily telling employees and customers who were speaking Spanish to speak English because "This is America!"

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USC President Urged To Resign Over Response to Abuse Claims

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Professors demanded the University of Southern California president resign amid allegations against a school health clinic gynecologist

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"With a single step, Kim Jong Un broke with decades of hostility and distrust to become the first North Korean leader to cross into South Korean territory since 1953." 

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"With a single step, Kim Jong Un broke with decades of hostility and distrust to become the first North Korean leader to cross into South Korean territory since 1953." 

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"Opioids reach every part of society: blue collar, white collar, everybody. It's nonstop. It's every day. And it doesn't seem like it's getting any better."

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"Opioids reach every part of society: blue collar, white collar, everybody. It's nonstop. It's every day. And it doesn't seem like it's getting any better."

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Most Americans understand, at least in part, how bad the opioid crisis has gotten. But, to review: In 2015 alone, opioid overdoses claimed more than 42,000 lives in America, which is more than 500 percent increase over the number of opioid-related deaths in 1999.

Even more troubling, 75 percent of people who abuse heroin now say they got their start abusing prescription drugs. Studies show that over 50% of people who abused prescription painkillers got them from friends or relatives for free; 25% of them received it from a doctor.

As a surgeon-in-training who constantly prescribes both inpatient and outpatient pain killers, these figures are more than just a little alarming. And after a long day, I've often found myself asking the sobering question: Am I contributing to the opioid epidemic?

In part because of my own concerns, in my department at Duke University Hospital, I was recently tasked with developing a new pain protocol to try and standardize our post-operative pain regimen in order to limit the amount of narcotics given to patients. The overarching goal is simple: To only give opioids to those who really need them, in as sparing an amount as possible.

After a long day, I've often found myself asking the sobering question: Am I contributing to the opioid epidemic?

But even with the opioid epidemic splashed across media headlines nationwide, this mission has proven to be far more difficult than most might imagine, and it has even made me very unpopular among some of the staff and doctors of my own hospital.

The problem, of course, is that, in many ways, it is so much easier to over-medicate patients, especially those who struggle with pain that can interfere with emotional and physical recovery. Giving patients what they want for pain makes for a much more enjoyable hospital stay for them, and an easier patient for us to take care of.

But when I examined the available research on opioid-related deaths and addiction, it became clear that despite the extra discomfort some might feel, in the end, many patients are better off without opioids, even if it means more discomfort.

For interventionalists and surgeons, appropriately and effectively managing postoperative pain has always been a challenge. None of us joined this profession to hurt people, and it feels natural to treat the pain that we see in front of us each day as aggressively as possible. Many of my patients have cancer, deformities, infection and/or other pathologies that violate tissue and destroy anatomy. We see patients suffering, and our reflex as doctors is to help them.

Despite the extra discomfort some might feel, in the end, many patients are better off without opioids, even if it means more discomfort.

(Additionally, doctors may face many other external pressures to treat pain, since pain control is part of several metrics included in the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey, which is linked closely to Medicare reimbursements.)

Unfortunately, treating pain often has its own complications. For instance, studies have consistently shown that opioid use in the hospital is often associated with an increase in inpatient mortality and aggregate morbidity, including respiratory failure, surgical site infection, mechanical ventilation, pneumonia, myocardial infarction, and postoperative ileus (when your intestines stop contracting), as well as prolonged hospital stays and non-routine discharges. In other words, giving a patient opioids to treat post-operative pain can make them sicker.

And in April 2017, researchers at the University of Michigan released the results of a population-based study of 36,177 surgical patients which found that there is a small but significant proportion of patients who develop new and persistent opioid use, beyond what is to be expected for pain relief, after both major and minor elective surgeries. They called persistent prescription opioid use "one of the most common complications after elective surgery." These findings have been replicated in other studies, and in many different surgical fields, too.

What can health care providers do to address these problems?

For one, we should look abroad. In numerous other countries, opioid use is much lower than it is in the United States, even though the physicians there do many of the same surgeries. This is likely because patients receive far, far fewer opioid medications in and out of the hospital, due to costs, availability and doctor preferences. I'm sure that some patients have a more painful experience in those countries than they would here, but in the big picture, and, as difficult as it is to practice, maybe a little more discomfort is what some of our patients need to spare them some of the widely-recognized complications of opioid-based pain management.

Researchers called persistent prescription opioid use "one of the most common complications after elective surgery."

This is not to say that patients should be left writhing in pain in their hospital beds: We need to start using a multi-disciplinary and multi-modal approach to pain management. Surgeons need to engage in early education with their patients about post-operative pain management and the risks of medications, as well as setting realistic expectations about what post-surgery pain will be like.

Additionally, health care providers need to identify those most vulnerable to opioid addiction, including those with mental health issues or pre-existing substance abuse, and establish more sensitive processes that ensure they experience as little pain as possible without relying on potentially dangerous opioids.

We also need to rely more heavily on other medications in our arsenal, such as acetaminophen, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, muscles relaxants and nerve agents. And health care providers need to be innovative and creative and find different ways to implement pain medication delivery, using methods like steroid injections and epidural catheters.

Providers must also work harder to encourage those who do develop addictions to enlist in rehabilitation, and they should involve more frequently other specialists in crafting and carrying out treatment plans, especially pain management doctors and psychologists.

Most importantly, all providers need to look in the mirror and ask themselves if we are being good stewards of prescribing practices, or if we are part of the problem we see in the news.
Dr. Jacquelyn Corley is a neurological surgery resident at Duke University Medical Center, a member of Duke Global Neurosurgery and Neuroscience and a human rights journalist focusing on health-care-related topics.

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Opinion | Fixing the opioid crisis may mean more pain for my patients

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Most Americans understand, at least in part, how bad the opioid crisis has gotten. But, to review: In 2015 alone, opioid overdoses claimed more than 42,000 lives in America, which is more than 500 percent increase over the number of opioid-related deaths in 1999.

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Shown Here:
Introduced in House (02/09/2017)
Opioid Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 2017
This bill requires the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to award grants to states to develop a peer review process to identify and investigate questionable or inappropriate prescribing and dispensing patterns of drugs classified as schedule II or III under the Controlled Substances Act, which are drugs with an accepted medical use that have the potential to be abused and addictive.

This bill amends the Public Health Service Act to require HHS to establish grant programs to: (1) facilitate training to increase the capacity of health care providers to screen and treat patients to prevent drug abuse, and (2) develop continuing education criteria that allow health profession boards or state agencies to certify appropriate education for safe prescribing of schedule II or III drugs. The Health Resources and Services Administration must award grants to evaluate the prospect of state health professions boards expanding the authority of providers to prescribe drugs to treat drug abuse.

The Drug Enforcement Administration must request that practitioners registered to dispense controlled substances screen patients for potential drug abuse before prescribing a schedule II or III drug.

The Food and Drug Administration must consider whether naloxone (a prescription drug used to rapidly reverse an overdose of heroin or other opioids, which are drugs with effects similar to opium) should be available without a prescription.

HHS must convene or coordinate with an interagency working group to encourage states and local governments to increase opportunities for disposal of opiates (drugs derived from opium) and to reduce opportunities for abuse of opiates.

The Government Accountability Office must review federal opioid abuse activities and make recommendations to reduce opioid abuse and overdoses.

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H.R.993 - 115th Congress (2017-2018): Opioid Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 2017

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Opioid Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 2017 This bill requires the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to award grants to states to develop a peer review process to identify and investigate questionable or inappropriate prescribing and dispensing patterns of drugs classified as schedule II or III under the Controlled Substances Act, which are drugs with an accepted medical use that have the potential to be abused and addictive.

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I was one of a handful of former officials to meet with them when they were just developing their current strategy. Those talks offer the best information we have about how to achieve denuclearization.

Reuters / KCNA

What exactly do the North Koreans mean when they say they're willing to denuclearize? And how exactly would they do so? These are the key mysteries at the heart of the upcoming Trump-Kim summit-and indeed they threatened to derail the whole thing this week when Kim Jong Un objected to National-Security Adviser John Bolton's vision for it. In a statement attributed to Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, North Korea chastised Bolton for his invocation of the "Libya model" of unilateral denuclearization as a template, noting that the "world knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which have met miserable [fates]." The White House quickly walked back Bolton's remarks.

The exchange did little to clarify how the U.S. plans to achieve denuclearization. But for a group of former U.S. government officials who have been meeting with North Korean officials over the past decade, North Korea's own plans are anything but hidden. A series of meetings with North Korean officials in 2013, which I attended along with other former U.S. officials, holds valuable clues-and they show that the North Koreans have given a great deal of thought to denuclearization and almost certainly have a concrete plan of action for the upcoming summit, whether the White House does or not.

Related Story

What Does 'Denuclearization' Mean to Kim Jong Un?
Those meetings happened five years ago, but they took place at the very beginning stages of the nuclear strategy Kim is executing to such dramatic effect now. At the time, Kim Jong Un had just enshrined his byungjin policy, stating that the North intended to develop a nuclear arsenal as a shield behind which it could modernize its economy. North Korean officials explained in these private sessions that Kim had issued the new policy after concluding that his country needed more nuclear weapons to deter the United States. It wasn't just that the North Koreans were concerned about escalating tensions in late 2012 and early 2013, as well as continuing flights of nuclear-capable U.S. bombers over the Korean Peninsula. The North Koreans also felt Washington and Seoul thought they could bully the North during the leadership transition that had begun with the death of Kim Jong Il in December 2011. One North Korean official I spoke to then said "nuclear" equaled "survival."

But other officials said that was only under "present circumstances," and their approach could change if the tense relationship between the United States and North Korea improved. That might explain a puzzling move by the North in June 2013, when the the National Defense Commission-the top government body in Pyongyang chaired by Kim-issued an important new pronouncement that it was open to negotiations on denuclearization. The Obama administration dismissed it at the time as propaganda. But a senior North Korean diplomat told a member of the American delegation that he himself was surprised Pyongyang was speaking of denuclearization again-especially after it had taken the issue off the table not long before.

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What the North Koreans Told Me About Their Plans

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I was one of a handful of former officials to meet with them when they were just developing their current strategy. Those talks offer the best information we have about how to achieve denuclearization. What exactly do the North Koreans mean when they say they're willing to denuclearize?

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This story is an expanded version of a page that appears in the September 2017 issue ofNational Geographic magazine.

Babies going through opioid withdrawal have a distinct way of crying: a short, anguished, high-pitched wail, repeated over and over. It echoes through the neonatal therapeutic unit of Cabell Huntington Hospital in Huntington, West Virginia. A week-old girl has been at it, inconsolably, since six o'clock this morning. At 10 o'clock Sara Murray, the unit's soft-spoken, no-nonsense nurse manager, sighs. "This may be a frustrating day," she says.

The opioid epidemic in the United States is painfully evident in hospital newborn units across the country. In 2012 nearly 22,000 babies were born drug dependent, one every 25 minutes, according to the most recent federal data. As the opioid crisis has escalated dramatically over the past five years, those numbers have surely climbed.

West Virginia, at two and a half times the national average, has the highest rate of deaths from drug overdose-mostly from opioids. Cabell County, which averaged about 130 overdose calls to 911 annually until 2012, received 1,476 calls last year and is on pace to reach around 2,000 this year. Emergency workers saved many of those people, including an 11-year-old, but inpatient treatment programs have long waiting lists. At Cabell Huntington Hospital, one in five newborns has been exposed to opioids in the womb.

"What you're seeing here is the tip of the iceberg of substance use," says neonatologist Sean Loudin, the unit's medical director.

In 2012 the neonatal intensive care unit became so overwhelmed by drug-dependent babies that it had to turn away newborns with other medical needs. The hospital opened this specialized unit to treat withdrawal. It typically has 18 babies. On this day there are 23.

The babies shake, sweat, vomit, and hold their bodies stiff as planks. They eat and sleep fitfully. Swaddled, they lie in bassinets or in the arms of nurses, parents, or volunteers. The place doesn't have the hustle or beeping machinery of an ICU. Instead there are dim lights and hushed conversations because the babies need calm and quiet. Many also need methadone or other medication to relieve their symptoms. They are weaned from it over days or weeks.

"OK," Murray whispers to a bleating 41-day-old boy. She gently lifts him to her chest, cradles him firmly, and places a green pacifier in his mouth. He sucks it fast and hard, like a piston.

Opioids pass readily from a pregnant woman's bloodstream through the placenta and across the fetal blood-brain barrier. When birth abruptly shuts down the flow of the drug, the baby's nervous system can trigger the agitating symptoms of withdrawal. Studies show that 55 percent to 94 percent of newborns exposed to opioids develop symptoms. Prenatal exposure to other widely used drugs, including benzodiazepines and certain antidepressants, also can lead to withdrawal shortly after birth.

The condition is called neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). Experts don't consider it to be addiction, which, by definition, means a person persists in compulsive drug use despite terrible consequences. By the same logic, NAS is also a misnomer-abstaining, or just saying no, is different from experiencing the physical anguish of withdrawal. But medical experts have come to accept the NAS label because it's less fraught with stigma than words like "addiction" and "withdrawal."

In some cases the mothers themselves are in recovery. They didn't misuse opioids during pregnancy but took methadone or buprenorphine, the frontline medications for treating opioid addiction. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends their use during pregnancy despite the risk of NAS, for the obvious reason that sobriety is safer and healthier for a woman than shooting heroin or popping painkillers or trying to go cold turkey on her own. It's also much better for her child. But encouraging as it is, the growing use of medication-assisted addiction treatment means that even when the opioid crisis eases, hospitals like Cabell Huntington will continue to be swamped with babies in withdrawal.

To manage the condition, most hospitals use an assessment tool developed at the height of the heroin outbreak in the 1970s. Babies are rated every four hours on the severity of 31 symptoms, including excessive crying, sweating, tremors, and frequent yawning. The scores help doctors determine whether to put babies on methadone or other medication. In most cases the scores support drug therapy. Now some researchers are challenging that approach.

"It's archaic," says Elisha Wachman, a neonatologist at Boston Medical Center and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine. "What ends up happening is that babies get overmedicated." Too often, she says, they experience withdrawal from their treatment, which prolongs their misery and their hospital stay.

A handful of researchers around the country are revamping NAS treatment to rely less on medication and more on parental bonding. Wachman has abandoned the old score sheet for assessing the babies. "I couldn't care less how many times they yawn," she says. Instead, she evaluates them on just three measures: eating, sleeping, and being consoled. Rather than transfer babies to an ICU or a specialty unit, Boston Medical Center keeps them with their moms throughout their stay. Wachman encourages the women to breastfeed and clutch their babies skin to skin. One hundred fifty volunteers-most of them medical students and hospital employees-put in two-hour shifts as cuddlers. The waiting list to hold babies has 200 names.

Before the hospital changed its approach, 86 percent of the babies with NAS it treated received medication. Now it's 30 percent. The babies generally spend nine days in the hospital, down from 19 days under the old protocol. The average cost of a hospital stay for a baby with NAS is $19,655 at Boston Medical Center, compared to a national average of $67,000.

Wachman says sound treatment for the babies must go hand in hand with compassionate, comprehensive care for their mothers. The medical center runs a prenatal clinic for women with addiction. The obstetricians prescribe buprenorphine and prepare women for the possibility that their babies will have NAS. The clinic also offers counseling, social services, psychiatric help, peer support, and education about infant care. "When the moms come in to deliver, they're in the best shape they can be," Wachman says. In July the medical center opened a clinic that provides pediatric care for babies born with NAS and addiction services for their mothers.

It's not clear how opioid exposure affects long-term brain development. Surprisingly little research has been done, and most of it predates the current crisis and the widespread use of highly potent synthetics, such as fentanyl. Some studies show subtle cognitive and behavioral differences among children who were exposed to opioids before birth, but the problems are less severe than the intellectual and attention deficits associated with fetal alcohol exposure. The studies don't answer a key question: Do the neurodevelopment issues stem from drug exposure or poverty or other chronic stresses? Some researchers believe that social factors and a stable environment are bigger influences on a child's future than NAS.

"We keep hearing about the babies, and that it is important, but there needs to be much more of a focus on women and making sure they're taken care of well," says Uma Reddy, a maternal-fetal medicine expert at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Jordann Thomas was introduced to OxyContin in ninth grade. In her high school bathroom, a friend showed her how to crush the pill, dissolve the powder, fill a syringe, and inject herself. She tried heroin two weeks before she turned 16. The decade that followed was a blur of intravenous drug use, arrests, prison, probation, recovery, and relapse. At 26, she turned her life around. She credits a good recovery program and medication-assisted treatment.

She was on a standard treatment, which combines buprenorphine and another drug. When Thomas learned she was pregnant, her doctor switched her prescription to buprenorphine only, explaining that it was safer for the baby. She says nobody mentioned the risk that her baby might develop NAS until she went into labor and an intake nurse at her local hospital asked what medications she was taking. Her son was born weighing six pounds, 14 ounces, on an April afternoon. Twelve hours later he was rushed to the neonatal treatment unit at Cabell Huntington Hospital, nearly an hour away.

"That guilt I felt about using and hurting the people I was hurting when I was getting high was the same guilt that came over me when I found out my son was going to withdraw because of a drug I took that I was told was safe," Thomas says.

She was terrified to learn he would be treated with methadone. And she felt sick watching his rigid little body sweat and twitch. "It was something awful trying to change his diaper and trying to get him to relax his leg," she says. Nurses reassured her he'd be OK. One by one, his symptoms disappeared.

Unlike Thomas, few of the other moms were in recovery during pregnancy or received good prenatal care. "Our majority are women in desperate situations," says Loudin, the medical director. Some don't know the full list of substances they've taken or are too scared to talk about it.

Murray, the nurse manager, says treatment was relatively straightforward just a few years ago, when the main problem was painkillers and then heroin, and babies showed classic withdrawal symptoms. Now more babies have been exposed to heroin plus cocaine, methamphetamine, and whatever else is making the rounds. Recently a newborn didn't respond to treatment until the medical team figured out that the baby had been exposed to gabapentin, an antiseizure drug that relieves pain and anxiety. It was the first sign that the drug had shown up on local streets. "We're seeing all kind of bizarre symptoms we are not prepared for," Murray says.

Many babies now need care longer. Thomas's son has been here five and a half weeks. On a recent afternoon he lies on his back in a clear bassinet, sleeping with his mouth slightly open. Thomas strokes his belly and feels his diaper. His eyelids flutter, but he doesn't stir. "Without this program, I don't know where I'd be," she says.

He weighs more than 10 pounds. He scores well on tests of hearing and visual perception. He smiles a lot and flings his arms playfully. He's scheduled to be discharged in two days.

"We're ready to go home," Thomas says. "Finally."

Fran Smith is a freelance writer and editor.Max Aguilera-Hellweg is a photographer who also trained as a medical doctor.

HOW TO GET HELP: For more information about drug addiction and treatments, go to ourlist of resources.

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This story is an expanded version of a page that appears in the September 2017 issue ofNational Geographic magazine. Babies going through opioid withdrawal have a distinct way of crying: a short, anguished, high-pitched wail, repeated over and over. It echoes through the neonatal therapeutic unit of Cabell Huntington Hospital in Huntington, West Virginia.

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We are Republican, Democratic and independent. We come from the East, South, Midwest and West. We are conservative, progressive and liberal. We are men and women. We include eight members of the Circle of Chiefs, the highest conservation honor of the Outdoor Writers Association of America. We are all different in many ways, but we have important commonalities. We are Americans; we are gun owners; we are hunters; and we support responsible firearm regulation.

Yes, the Seco nd Amendment conveys a right to "keep and bear" firearms. But rights come with responsibilities, and we all have a moral responsibility to address America's crisis of gun violence.

We avoid the term " common sense ," understanding the wisdom in Voltaire's words ― "Common sense is not so common."

Perhaps nature's unpredictability, or the predictability that either our abilities or our equipment will fail at the most inopportune moment, have conditioned us to find solace in simplicity. We believe simple and responsible steps can and must be taken to end the cycle of gun violence and tragedy to which we are all witness in today's America.

We do not need AR-15s or any assault-style weapon to hunt game.

We are at a turning point. There are now 265 million guns in private ownership - more than at any time in our nation's history, and owned by a smaller proportion of the population than ever. Only about 30 percent of Americans own guns, and about 60 percent live in gun-free households. The long-term trend away from gun ownership will continue. As people who own and use guns respectfully, we feel an urgency to speak up for a simple, sensible approach.

Hunters and hunting are also declining. In 1955, 10 percent of Americans hunted. Today, it's less than 5 percent. But the positive image of the hunter as a skilled and conscientious "sportsman" is being abused in defense of an out-of-control gun culture.

Most hunters own guns principally to hunt game. We use them safely and respectfully: If someone is injured during their use, it will most likely be a friend or family member, since that is who we hunt with. We don't buy a lot of guns. We usually have a few favorites, often passed down to us by fathers or grandfathers. The gun industry figured that out decades ago, and switched to creating guns for a different market.

That's not to say that all hunters are like-minded on the issue of regulating firearms. As our numbers have dwindled, many have found a comforting alliance with Second Amendment radicalism. But we believe this is not representative of most hunters, and certainly not the tradition of the hunter-sportsman.

We do not need AR-15s or any assault-style weapon to hunt game. That's not to say some people won't use them to hunt. But they are simply not necessary, and are actually not preferable for legitimate, fair-chase hunting.

We believe that simple, responsible reforms in firearm policy are an urgent necessity. Hunting and hunters should not be seen, or used, as a shield against constructive bipartisan solutions. We see the need and opportunity to frame compromise between the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms and the Fifth Amendment's right to life and liberty.
Here's where we would begin:
1. An age minimum of 21 years to purchase any gun;

2. Anyone on the Terrorist Screening Center's "no-fly list" may not purchase or possess firearms;

3. Anyone on Social Security disability due to mental illness may not purchase or possess firearms;

4. Prohibit new sales of semiautomatic assault or tactical-style weapons;

5. Prohibit new sales of semiautomatic shotguns or rifles (except .22-caliber rim fire) that can hold more than 10 rounds;

6. Prohibit any accessory designed or mechanical modification intended a) to increase the rate at which any firearm may be discharged; or b) to increase the magazine capacity of a semiautomatic rifle beyond 10 rounds (except .22-caliber rim fire);

7. Mandatory and universal background checks for all firearm sales;

8. Prohibit sales of firearms except through registered/licensed dealers (no direct private sales);

9. Enact gun violence restraining order authorities allowing courts to temporarily prohibit a person from purchasing or possessing firearms when a family member, community welfare expert or law enforcement officer presents evidence of a threat; and

10. Repeal the " Dickey ban" on scientific research in the area of gun violence and implement the Institute of Medicine's 2013 gun violence research agenda.

These suggestions are simple to implement and enforce. They do limit the rights of honest and law-abiding citizens, but they are responsible limitations that do not infringe the ability of Americans to hunt, shoot, or protect themselves and their families. And in comparison to the 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who have been stripped of all of their rights, and of life and liberty, it is a small price to pay.

There are simple, responsible solutions. No one should use hunters and hunting as an excuse to avoid pursuing them.

Jim Low, former president of the Outdoor Writers Association of America and 13-time recipient of the *Member of the Circle of Chiefs, the highest conservation honor of the Outdoor Writers Association of America Izaak Walton League's Outdoor Ethics Communication Award*
, retired nature journalist*George Harrison
Rich Patterson, former president of the Outdoor Writers Association of America*

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Opinion | An Open Letter From Hunters About Gun Reform

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We are Republican, Democratic and independent. We come from the East, South, Midwest and West. We are conservative, progressive and liberal. We are men and women. We include eight members of the Circle of Chiefs, the highest conservation honor of the Outdoor Writers Association of America.

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children of parents with substance use disorders

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Parental substance use was cited as a factor in a third of all foster placements in 2015.

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The Santa Fe High School shooting is a developing story and details will be updated.

The places change, the numbers change, but the choice of weapon remains the same. In the United States, people who want to kill a lot of other people most often do it with guns.

Related

The number of U.S. mass shootings depends on how you count

Public mass shootings account for a tiny fraction of the country's gun deaths, but they are uniquely terrifying because they occur without warning in the most mundane places. Most of the victims are chosen not for what they have done but simply for where they happen to be.

There is no universally accepted definition of a public mass shooting, and this piece defines it narrowly. It looks at the public shootings in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter (two shooters in a few cases). It does not include shootings tied to gang disputes or robberies that went awry, and it does not include shootings that took place exclusively in private homes. A broader definition would yield much higher numbers.

Mass shootings are a small slice of total gun deaths

Source: Gun Violence Archive, Post research

This tally begins Aug. 1, 1966, when a student sniper fired down on passersby from the observation deck of a clock tower at the University of Texas. By the time police killed him, 17 other people were dead or dying. As Texas Monthly's Pamela Colloff wrote, the shooting "ushered in the notion that any group of people, anywhere - even walking around a university campus on a summer day - could be killed at random by a stranger."

Search for details of a particular shooting. The most recent is selected.

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Analysis | More than 50 years of U.S. mass shootings: The victims, sites, killers and weapons

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The Santa Fe High School shooting is a developing story and details will be updated. The places change, the numbers change, but the choice of weapon remains the same. In the United States, people who want to kill a lot of other people most often do it with guns.

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NEW ORLEANS-W.K. Kellogg's (WKKF) 2012 conference kicked off with what is now familiar news regarding racial inequity: Racial inequity exists, and it's not decreasing. In the conference's first plenary session titled " Unconscious Bias and Race," Dr. David Williams, professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, cited studies documenting that when Latinos and African Americans were treated by physicians for a broken bone in their leg, they received pain medication significantly less often than white patients with the same injury.

The data were not new. They came from a 2002 Institute of Medicine report on racial and ethnic disparities in health care, which stressed that "a large body of research underscores the existence of disparities." As examples, the report stated

... minorities are less likely to be given appropriate cardiac medications or to undergo bypass surgery, and are less likely to receive kidney dialysis or transplants. By contrast, they are more likely to receive certain less-desirable procedures, such as lower limb amputations for diabetes and other conditions.

The data beg an obvious question, and Williams did not disappoint. "How on earth do we make sense of this?" he asked. "How is it possible for the best trained medical workforce in the world to produce... care that appears to be so discriminatory?"

The answer, Williams argued, is unconscious discrimination. According to Williams, the research shows that when people hold a negative stereotype about a group and meet someone from that group, they often treat that person differently and honestly don't even realize it. Williams noted that most Americans would object to being labeled as "racist" or even as "discriminating", but he added, "Welcome to the human race. It is a normal process about how all of us process information. The problem for our society is that the level of negative stereotypes is very high."

Understanding the power of unconscious bias has emerged as a new mission for leaders and advocates working to bring racial healing and racial equity to communities across the U.S.

Dr. Gail Christopher, vice president for program strategy at the Kellogg Foundation, explained that centuries of a racial hierarchy in America has left its mark on our society, especially pertaining to how people of color are perceived by whites. "Our society assigns value to groups of people," she said. "It is a process that is embedded in the consciousness of Americans and impacted by centuries of bias."

Of course, doctors are not the only ones who express unconscious racial bias. Dr. Phillip Goff, assistant psychology professor at UCLA, showed examples of how law enforcement officials can be influenced by unconscious bias not only when it comes to race, but also in regard to what they perceive to be threats to their masculinity. Over 80% of incidents that involved police use of deadly force were preceded by threat to the officers' masculinity. "'Fag' is a deadly word," Goff observed. In fact, Goff's research suggests that threats to masculinity were much more predictive of deadly use of force (in highly realistic simulation exercises) than explicit measures of racial prejudice. Racism, it turns out, is not necessarily perpetrated by racists but by people who feel threatened for other reasons and are not aware of their racial bias.

Here's Goff revealing one of social scientists' " dirty little secrets."

Goff's findings may allow us to reconcile the existence of racial inequity on a variety of different indexes with the increasingly popular rhetoric that racism no longer exists.

"That is an illusion," said Rachel Godsil, the director of research for the American Values Institute.

The last panelist, john powell, director of the Haas Center for Diversity and Inclusion and Robert D. Haas Chancellor's Chair in Equity and Inclusion at the University of California Berkeley, elaborated. "The fact that we have these deep, unconscious biases - and it's conflicted around race ... we can be primed to be racially fair, we can be primed to be racially anxious - and it doesn't make us a racist. It makes us human. And if we're going to address it, we have to acknowledge that."

"There are three types of not knowing," powell explained: 1. What we can't know, like how many neurons are firing at any given moment, 2. What we don't care to know, like the color of the car we pass at a particular intersection, and 3. What we don't want to know. When we talk about racism, we usually talk about #2 and #3, and those are important conversations to be having. We all need to care. We all need to want to know. But #1 is important as well.

Indeed, unless we intentionally go out of our way to learn about and become aware of our own bias, it is likely to spill out at the most inopportune time, like during a stressful traffic stop (in the case of a law enforcement officer) or during a medical emergency in the ER. As powell observed, "when there's tension between conscious and unconscious drives, the unconscious usually wins."

The good news is that it doesn't have to. We just have to learn to become aware and be willing to acknowledge our own biases and then consciously override them. Denial and professed racial color-blindness only makes things worse.
For more racial analysis of news and popular culture, join the | Between The Lines | Facebook page and follow Mikhail on Twitter.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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Studies of Unconscious Bias: Racism Not Always by Racists

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NEW ORLEANS-W.K. Kellogg's (WKKF) 2012 conference kicked off with what is now familiar news regarding racial inequity: Racial inequity exists, and it's not decreasing.

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Inside Sexual Harassment's Hidden Toll on Equal Pay

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Thousands of employees each year endure instances of sexual harassment at work. Here's how that contributes to the gender wage gap.

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A team of researchers at Columbia believe that small changes to college life could make campuses safer.

If I were asked by a survey to describe my experience with sexual assault in college, I would pinpoint two incidents, both of which occurred at or after parties in my freshman year. In the first case, the guy went after me with sniper accuracy, magnanimously giving me a drink he'd poured upstairs. In the second case, I'm sure the guy had no idea that he was doing something wrong. I had joined a sorority, and all my social circles were as sloppy, intense, and tribal as the Greek system-the groups that made these incidents possible are the same ones that made my life at the time so good. In college, everything is Janus-faced: what you interpret as refuge can lead to danger, and vice versa. One of the most highly valorized social activities, blacking out and hooking up, holds the potential for trauma within it like a seed.

I got to thinking about this-and picturing my college self as a sort of avatar in an extended risk simulation-after talking with Jennifer Hirsch and Claude Ann Mellins, at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, in Washington Heights, on a biting, windy day last December. Hirsch, an anthropologist, and Mellins, a clinical psychologist, are Columbia professors. Both women are in their fifties, have shoulder-length brown hair, and grew up in Jewish families in Manhattan. They share a sharp, maternal pragmatism-between them, they have five sons, ranging in age from fifteen to twenty-three. For the past three years, they have been leading a $2.2-million research project on the sexual behavior of Columbia undergraduates. The project is called SHIFT, which stands for the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation.

The problem of campus sexual assault can seem unfathomable and intractable. We generally think of it as a matter of individual misbehavior, which, various studies have shown, most prevention programs do little to change. But Hirsch and Mellins think about sexual assault socio-ecologically: as a matter of how people act within a particular environment. They are doggedly optimistic that there is, if not a single fix, a series of new solutions.

A four-year residential college is what sociologists call a total institution: it controls the conditions under which students eat, sleep, work, and party. "You can just imagine all these contextual dimensions in college that could be tinkered with to create a less stressful, less hard-drinking, more respectful environment," Hirsch said. The assumption is that some college students are committing sexual assault when they don't intend to, and that many are more vulnerable to sexual harm than they ought to be. Either idea can be controversial, and focussing on contributing factors, such as drinking, rather than just on the bad acts of perpetrators, can seem beside the point. But Hirsch and Mellins insist that their approach to prevention does not ignore personal responsibility; rather, it aims to nudge students toward responsible behavior on a collective scale. The first time we met, on Columbia's main campus, Hirsch put it to me more plainly: "We have to stop working one penis at a time!"

SHIFT was born out of a crisis. In the past several years, as students all over the country became more vocal about the problem of rape in college, the press seized on a series of dramatic incidents, including one at Columbia. A rare combination of academic talent and initiative was then unleashed by the university, which may have felt the need to demonstrate its commitment to the cause, and this produced, after two years of sunup-to-sundown effort, the most rigorous, nuanced, and wide-ranging examination of the problem that has ever been carried out on a college campus. "It's better for universities if sexual assault is positioned as a matter of sexual health, rather than as a scary threat," the journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis, who published a book last year, "Blurred Lines," about sexual assault on campus, told me. She added, "We're in a new phase of the movement."

You can trace that movement back at least four decades, to 1977, when a senior at Yale named Ann Olivarius-along with another student, three graduates, and a male professor-sued the school, citing quid-pro-quo sexual harassment by professors, a hostile environment, and a lack of reporting procedures. The plaintiffs, advised by a recent Yale Law graduate named Catharine MacKinnon, argued that this was a violation of Title IX-the federal statute, passed five years before, that prohibits gender discrimination in educational institutions. The women lost the case, but the district court ruled that it was "perfectly reasonable to maintain that academic advancement conditioned upon submission to sexual demands constitutes sex discrimination in education." Two years later, MacKinnon published her landmark book, "Sexual Harassment of Working Women," which argued that "economic power is to sexual harassment as physical force is to rape."

The proper scope of Title IX was argued in court over and over in the years that followed; rulings narrowed its application, then expanded it again. Meanwhile, anti-rape activism progressed on campuses across the country. Take Back the Night marches, which had begun in the seventies, became a feature of college life in the eighties; Columbia's first Take Back the Night march was held, in front of the Barnard gates, in 1988. The Columbia University Senate passed the first school-wide sexual-assault policy in 1995-it required that complaints be handled through an alternative form of the school's standard disciplinary procedure. Student activists weren't satisfied: they wanted the deans who handled sexual-assault cases to receive additional training, and they wanted to know how many incidents were being reported. They staged a prolonged campaign that culminated, in 1999, in a twenty-three-hour vigil, during which hundreds of students marched through campus shouting, "Red tape can't cover up rape!"

Seven years ago, the Office of Civil Rights, under President Obama, issued a "Dear Colleague" letter, reasserting that sexual violence on campus was a violation of Title IX, and pushing universities to handle sexual-assault cases in a timely, transparent, accuser-friendly manner. A year later, the Department of Justice expanded its definition of rape to include male victims and multiple types of violations. (The previous definition-"the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will"-had been in place since 1927.) Today, the D.O.J. defines sexual assault as unwanted sexual contact, which means that groping counts, as does attempted assault. The crime hinges on intention, and there are often no witnesses, which makes it uniquely difficult to adjudicate in any legal system, let alone one made up of college administrators. Campus judiciary systems don't have a criminal court's investigative powers or evidentiary procedures, but they do have many of a criminal court's responsibilities. To complicate matters further, everyone involved in the process-accuser, accused, administrator-essentially works under the same roof. Betsy DeVos, Trump's Secretary of Education, has called the current approach a "failed system," and said that she would seek to replace it.

It might seem simpler to let the criminal-justice system handle things, but universities have a responsibility to insure that women have equal access to education. And, in addition, many students prefer to address these matters outside that system-they don't necessarily want to send their assaulters to prison, and they may not be able to prove their cases beyond a reasonable doubt. Columbia now has twenty-three staffers with Title IX responsibilities, including case managers, investigators, and administrators, and provides free legal services to accusers and accused. The school's gender-based misconduct policy is thirty-one pages long.

Freshman year at Columbia, as at any college, can be overwhelming: awkward encounters at parties in the "social dorm," where the long wooden doors can be taken down to serve as beer-pong tables; a rush to find a home base in extracurriculars and clubs. Juliana Kaplan, a Barnard junior, told me, "On the one hand, you have kids at Columbia who come from kings of Wall Street-you have a secret society based completely on wealth. On the other, you have a demographic of first-generation, low-income students of color. People come in through very different contexts." When I asked her about the tenor of student conversation on sexual assault, she told me, "I try to remember that some people have been super aware of these issues for their whole life, due to any number of factors, and then there are some people, such as men, who have to actively learn about it while they're here."

Five years ago, a Columbia sophomore named Emma Sulkowicz filed a complaint with the university, accusing another student of rape. (Sulkowicz, who has been working as an artist since graduation, identifies as non-binary, and uses the gender-neutral pronouns "they" and "them.") A consensual encounter on the first day of the school year had turned violent, Sulkowicz alleged: in the midst of sex, the student anally penetrated and choked them while they struggled and told him to stop. (He has consistently maintained that the entire encounter was consensual.) Sulkowicz decided to report the incident after another student said that she'd had a similar experience with the same man. Columbia held a series of hearings and found the man "not responsible," and Sulkowicz was subsequently denied an appeal. The following April, twenty-three students and alumni, each with a story of assault, filed a hundred-page federal complaint against the university. Student activists formed a group called No Red Tape, evoking the protests of the nineties. When the fall semester began, Sulkowicz, an art major, started carrying a fifty-pound, twin XL mattress around campus. It was a performance project: they would stop carrying it, they said, when the student who had raped them was expelled. (Sulkowicz carried it until graduation; the man they accused later sued Columbia, arguing that the university's support of the project, for which Sulkowicz had received academic credit, constituted gender discrimination, negligence, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The university settled with him out of court.) Soon after Sulkowicz began carrying the mattress, dozens of other Columbia students brought mattresses to the steps of Low Library and told their own stories of sexual assault.

It was around this time that Jennifer Hirsch attended a meeting of Columbia's Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Council, where faculty members gathered in a conference room and picked over a catered breakfast. She sat next to Suzanne Goldberg, who at the time was a special adviser to Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, on the subject of sexual-assault prevention and response. The debates concerning rape on campus and what to do about it have been waged primarily between students and administrators, with professors off to the side. Hirsch had become frustrated by the focus, in those debates, on adjudication and punishment, rather than on the ways in which the environment of college makes students vulnerable. As the meeting ended, and people began collecting their things, Hirsch turned to Goldberg and spontaneously proposed conducting an ethnography: she would interview students, learn the everyday context of their sex lives, document the stories that the university couldn't see. Goldberg said that sounded terrific, and told Hirsch to write up a few pages pitching the project.

A couple of weeks later, Hirsch popped into Mellins's office, two floors down from hers in the Mailman building. The two professors have been friends since 2005, when Hirsch, who teaches in the sociomedical-sciences department, began doing work at the H.I.V. center at Columbia, which Mellins co-directs. Hirsch handed Mellins the paper she'd drafted, and began peppering her with questions. Mellins was the lead author of a 2011 study into the mental health, drug use, and sexual behavior of adolescents who had been infected with H.I.V. in the womb or as infants. She knew something about discussing uncomfortable matters with young people, and quantifying those conversations for research purposes. She answered Hirsch's questions, and started asking her own.

Hirsch looked at her closely. "Do you want to do this with me?" she asked.

They spent the next few weeks brainstorming-on the phone, over e-mail, in each other's offices, on whiteboards. They thought about the relevant expertise of their colleagues. Who really knew about interpersonal violence? Who really knew about epidemiology? Statistics? Trauma in young adults? As the fall turned crisp, they tracked down the faculty members whose help they wanted, and asked them if they would join SHIFT. In November, 2014, they submitted their proposal, and Goldberg quickly secured the university's approval.

Goldberg, who is in her mid-fifties and speaks with a flat, equanimous affect, became Columbia's first executive vice-president for university life in 2015. She has a long career of progressive advocacy-she was a co-counsel for the defendants in Lawrence v. Texas, which nullified Texas's sodomy law. She leads Columbia Law School's Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, and she was integral to the development of SHIFT. ("We had many breakfasts," Hirsch explained.) But she has become a maligned figure among student activists. Amelia Roskin-Frazee, a senior involved with No Red Tape, spoke to me dismissively about the Sexual Respect Initiative, a consent-education requirement, instituted by Goldberg in 2014, that included an arts option: students could write a poem, submit a drawing, or perform a dance. When I asked Goldberg about this criticism, she said, "The initiative meets students where they are."

Roskin-Frazee is a queer activist who, at fourteen, founded a nonprofit that provides schools and shelters with L.G.B.T.Q.-themed books. She is currently suing Columbia. She says that, two months after arriving on campus, she was violently raped in her dorm room by a stranger, and that, a few months later, she was raped again, by an assailant she suspects to be the same person. (She told me more than once that she knew this was not a typical campus assault; last year, she wrote a piece for HuffPost criticizing the notion that "true stranger rapes" are any more serious than those committed by people who know their victims.) She asked to move out of her dorm room, and alleges that Columbia violated Title IX by requiring her to do so within twenty-four hours, and telling her it would cost five hundred dollars. Columbia has moved to dismiss Roskin-Frazee's lawsuit, arguing that she obstructed her own investigation by waiting months to file an official report. In October of last year, with a group of protesters, Roskin-Frazee barged into one of Goldberg's law classes to publicly accuse her of endangering student survivors.

The creation of SHIFT was announced to the university at the end of February, 2015, in an e-mail from President Bollinger. Hirsch and Mellins began soliciting applications for a paid undergraduate advisory board, ultimately selecting a dozen or so students, including members of the Greek system, student-government leaders, a ballerina in Columbia's General Studies program, anti-sexual-assault activists, a sex educator, a Barnard student, and an R.A. For the next two years, when school was in session, the group met over bagels at 8 A. M. every Monday. The board created a typology of Columbia students-the hyper-involved, the completely disinterested, the kids who find their thing and stick to it-and corrected the researchers in their sometimes fumbling attempts to classify student identities. (Each time they pointed out such a mistake, one student-board member told me, the researchers' eyes would pop in surprise, and then they'd come back the next week saying, "We had seventeen meetings since the last time we saw you, and we're going to do what you say.") The students planned promotional events, setting up SHIFT tables outside the dining hall and the gym. They brought the researchers, who answered questions for students, and made sure they always had snacks. "Snacks, we learned, were a really big thing," Hirsch said.

Meanwhile, Hirsch and the Columbia sociologist Shamus Khan prepared a team of ethnographers-current and recent grad students, who were close to their subjects in age-to talk with undergraduates about intimate subjects. These interviews would be the first big component of SHIFT's information-gathering. The ethnographers began, that fall, with "participant observation"-i.e., hanging around football games and drinking club soda at student bars. Shortly afterward, a story appeared in the student newspaper the Daily Spectator, in which an unnamed sophomore said that Khan had been spotted taking notes at 1020, a popular bar near campus. (The plans for the ethnographic research had been announced in the Daily Spectator months before.) The story was picked up by the Post, which reported that "Columbia University researchers are spying on the school's students at bars and campus parties as part of a new study about sexual health and violence-and the students say it's creeping them out."

In fact, by all accounts, the process went pretty smoothly. Some students, after talking to the researchers for a while, invited them to parties, or to kick it in dorm rooms. Many university employees are required to report sexual assault to the Title IX coördinator, but the researchers received a waiver so that they could promise students confidentiality while engaged in SHIFT research. Alexander Wamboldt, an affable, bearded Princeton Ph.D. who worked as a SHIFT ethnographer, told me that it was important, in these encounters, to "model good, consensual research behavior"-he announced his name and his purpose, along with a disclaimer about confidentiality, before entering a conversation. He and the other researchers conducted one-on-one interviews with a hundred and fifty-one students about their sex lives and their experiences at Columbia. (Students were paid for the time they spent in these interviews.) Hirsch and Khan sorted through the data and adjusted their approach when they weren't getting all the information they needed. Wamboldt was hired to focus on so-called high-status men, such as those involved in athletics and fraternities, a group of students who hadn't, up to that point, spoken much with the ethnographers, perhaps wary of the possibility that they'd be portrayed badly in whatever the researchers wrote up.

The interviews were bracing. Talking about sex brings a lot to the surface-students discussed loss, family, trauma, hardship, fear. Some of the men Wamboldt spoke to cracked offhand jokes about having been raped. The members of the ethnography team soon decided that they needed to do a mental-health check-in at their weekly meetings: they would go around the room, and everyone would relate how he or she was coping with the work.

In one advisory-board meeting, Mellins and Hirsch shared preliminary observations, and Mellins brought up affirmative consent-the practice of actively, mutually soliciting enthusiasm throughout a sexual encounter, which is now the legal standard for universities in New York and California. Most college students learn about it in orientation seminars or from online modules that they are required to complete. Mellins told the administrators that affirmative consent rarely factored into the experiences that students were describing.

"One of our institutional advisers pretty much fell off her chair," Mellins told me. "She said, 'How can it not be a thing? We're working so hard to teach them.' And our point was: there's a really broad disjuncture between what students learn and what they actually practice." The researchers found that the practice is much simpler to understand than its detractors, who tend to picture a stack of paperwork accompanying every make-out session, seem to think-and also less common than its proponents would like to believe. ( SHIFT plans to publish a paper on affirmative consent later this year.)

Hirsch and Mellins launched the second phase of the study, an enormous daily-diary project, in October. Four hundred and twelve students were asked to fill out a short online questionnaire every day for sixty days. (The student board convinced the researchers that the only way to maintain subject participation through midterms was to pay: diarists got a dollar an entry.) The idea was that researchers would be able to quickly scan each twenty-four-hour period for mood, sleep, sexual activity, substance use, and unusual experiences. The pool of data could then be parsed for patterns and fine-grained interactions. Researchers might find, for example, that unwanted sexual contact is more likely to occur in the midst of other crises, or after a person has experienced unwanted sexual attention in another setting.

In January, 2016, the SHIFT team recruited students for Part 3: a sweeping, onetime survey. The student board roped in peers with the promise of gift cards, and by talking to them about how important the project was, how it could show that Columbia took sexual assault more seriously than other universities, and how, if they participated, they'd get snacks. (Students who took the survey in SHIFT 's temporary office got fruit, candy, pizza, and chips.)

The survey contains hundreds of questions, many of them startlingly intimate. It seems likely that no previous survey has so accurately reflected how sexual assault actually occurs in college-as an event embedded within the fabric of everyday life, which both perpetrator and victim understand based on their background, their habits, their state of mind. The survey asks students about sleep, exercise, eating habits, mental health, where they get alcohol, what sort of dorm room they live in, where they party and how. It asks about money, family, friends, their sexual experiences before college, their sense of agency and of self-worth. It asks about gender identity and attraction, about the moments just before an incident-who was around, what was happening-and what followed, immediately and in the long term. It asks about consent: if students expect their partners to ask, if they think it's a matter of body language, if they think that asking once at the beginning of a hookup is fine. It asks about attitudes regarding sex and gender, sussing out common cultural biases: To what degree do they think that women lie to get ahead? Do they think that men should reveal vulnerability? Do they believe that it can't be rape if both people are drunk? Are they not at all sure, a little sure, somewhat sure, pretty sure, or very sure that they could say no to having sex with someone if they want to date that person? What if they want the person to fall in love with them, or if the person won't use a condom? What if they've had sex with the person before?

Twenty-five hundred Columbia and Barnard undergraduates were invited to participate in SHIFT's survey, and sixty-seven per cent of them did so. I took the survey myself one day at the end of December-answering in the present, as a twenty-nine-year-old, and thinking about how I would have answered at eighteen. In the course of a half hour, I felt nauseated, and then oddly comforted, by how well the questions were outlining my life. A detailed constellation emerged of all the things that had protected me in college: a chemically stable disposition, satisfying relationships, a sense of control over my experience at school, a lack of confusion about what I wanted sex to be. My vulnerabilities-a certain recklessness, a freshman-year social life that depended on spaces and substances provided by men-were just as clear. I could see the desires and the habits, sexual and otherwise, that traced the path between then and now. I started to wonder if the research that SHIFT is producing might start closing the gap between two seemingly contradictory realities. Sexual assault on campus is frequently portrayed as lurid and dark and complex. But the experiences that live in our heads are often obvious and ordinary, sometimes heartbreakingly so. SHIFT is, in a sense, a reporting project of unprecedented scale, a map that genuinely reflects the size of the territory. It could be one of the first endeavors to show the magnitude and the texture of the problem at the same time.

S HIFT's research concluded in the fall of 2017. Since then, the team has been analyzing the data and preparing to publish a slew of papers about the results in peer-reviewed journals. (In December, Hirsch and Khan sold a book about SHIFT, tentatively titled "The Sexual Project," to Norton, to be published in 2019.) The first paper, which appeared in the open-access online journal PLOS ONE in November, laid out what the team learned about the frequency of sexual assault at Columbia. Sexual-assault research is notoriously contested and spotty-many regularly cited statistics come from studies with big design flaws, such as small sample sizes, or loose definitions of "college student." The record-setting response rate for the SHIFT survey makes its data unusually comprehensive and reliable. In certain important respects, its numbers are in keeping with previous findings: a little more than one in five respondents said they had experienced sexual assault since starting college-twenty-eight per cent of women, twelve per cent of men, and nearly forty per cent of gender-nonconforming students. (The survey did not use the term "sexual assault"; it asked about "unwanted sexual contact.") But there were also surprises. It's long been established that women and L.G.B.T.Q. students are especially vulnerable to assault; SHIFT found that students who are struggling to pay for basic necessities are, too. Men in fraternities are, in fact, more likely than other male students to be perpetrators; SHIFT found that they were more likely than other men to be victims as well. A culture that doesn't teach men to ask for consent often doesn't teach them that they can withhold it, either.

Hirsch and Mellins avoid the term "rape culture" when discussing their work. I've never liked that phrase, not because it doesn't name something real but because it emphasizes the way that the world is already prepared to hurt me, rather than emphasizing my personal, and not entirely predictable, relationship to the world. (As Jennifer Doyle, an English professor at the University of California, Riverside, puts it in her book "Campus Sex, Campus Security," the term distances sexual violence from "the force of the ordinary.") Hirsch and Mellins often talk about "sexual citizenship," which they define as a "person's understanding of his or her right, and other people's equivalent right, to sexual self-determination." In the conference room at the Mailman building, Hirsch told me, "Part of what I see our work doing is disrupting these scripts that women give consent and men secure it-that men are sexual agents and women are gatekeepers, which is affirmed by consent education that frames men exclusively as potential perpetrators."

"Of course, you don't want to minimize the fact that women are still holding the burden on this, in terms of absolute numbers," Mellins said. She hesitated. "But you want to work in a way where there isn't a single story." A trans student who is assaulted at a party is experiencing something different from a freshman girl whose hookup is ignoring her protests in a dorm room. Both of them are experiencing something different from a boy who has never imagined that he would ever give or receive a no. Mellins pointed to an article about a Brown University student who'd been assaulted in a bathroom by another man, and then, later that day, attended a standard prevention workshop, where he felt entirely alone. "If you don't give someone permission to be at risk, then they can't seek help," Mellins said.

The researchers discussed their findings with the student board-they're all still in a group chat together-and also with administrators. Certain fixes, they've realized, are impossible to implement. All college students would benefit from drinking alcohol in a gentler manner: often with food, rarely in basements. But colleges can't encourage that among underage students without breaking federal law. When I was talking with Hirsch and Mellins, I thought about my own experience with the Greek system. The National Panhellenic Conference, which adheres to rather antiquated gender norms, forbids sororities from holding parties where alcohol is served, which means that, at many schools, the most accessible parties for freshmen take place on fraternity terms, and on fraternity turf.

Every school's environment is different-where students drink, how they get home from parties, the geographies and the conditions of their vulnerability-and the nudges and interventions have to vary accordingly. But Hirsch and Mellins hope that their research can serve as the beginning of a network of innovative cross-campus studies. In the meantime, they're talking to administrators about the interrelationship of mental health, substance abuse, and sexual assault, and about how different types of incidents and different types of students require different types of prevention and response. Many of these conversations have echoed long-standing conclusions in public-health research, and also what some students are already asking for: more crisis support, more consideration for specific populations, more access to spaces on campus that feel like their own. "I'm grateful the SHIFT team chose to do this," Roskin-Frazee told me. "I hope they are persuasive to administrators who are not easily persuaded."

One night in January, I called Emma Sulkowicz to talk about Hirsch and Mellins's project. Sulkowicz was disarming and philosophical, despite having spent five hours in the dentist's chair earlier that day. Sulkowicz had not heard about SHIFT before, and was politely resistant to the idea: "My view in this whole thing is that, the more that Columbia can retreat behind 'Here's a program, here's a study, here's a process,' the less that any human that finds themselves in this machine will ever be incentivized to act based on their moral compass."

What if, I asked, the idea behind the study was tinkering with the machine, figuring out how to reorient that moral compass?

"That makes me think of asking someone to wash the dishes, and they tell you, 'I'll try,' " Sulkowicz said. "I think that's the difference between spending two million dollars to try to understand the conditions that create a community that's conducive to sexual assault versus just doing the right thing-expelling people who sexually assault other students."

Sulkowicz wants to change behavior, too, but thinks that punishment is more efficacious than tweaks to campus life. When Columbia settled the lawsuit filed by the man Sulkowicz accused of rape, it put out a statement, noting that his "remaining time at Columbia became very difficult for him and not what Columbia would want any of its students to experience." But Sulkowicz believes that what he went through had a salutary effect. "He's been scared shitless," they said. (The man's lawyer called this statement "preposterous," and said that he had done nothing wrong.)

Sulkowicz also said something that I kept hearing from Columbia students: "It's about finding a way to make your institution, and the people who run it, more human." Earlier that week, I'd spoken to a former SHIFT student-board member named Morgan Hughes, a laid-back twenty-three-year-old hip-hop musician. She called me from a coffee shop in Cleveland, where she'd moved after graduation. She had been a disengaged student, by her own account, mainly focussed on her music. Her friends at school, most of whom were people of color, had found it difficult to secure space and permission from Columbia to hold their own events, she told me. "Everything is so regulated, so limited, everything's super uptight," she said. "Columbia always says they're listening, taking students into account, and then they turn around and make a decision that doesn't acknowledge any of that conversation. But SHIFT did listen. They changed their agenda based on what we talked about. It didn't feel like we were just wasting our breath."

Would SHIFT make things different at Columbia? "Every four years, there's a new student body, and I think Columbia is used to just waiting it out," she said. "But this time there are professors involved. Shamus Khan is going to be there, Jennifer Hirsch is going to be there. It's up to Columbia if they want to shoot themselves in the foot and ignore it, but people are actually paying attention to this." She paused, and coffee-shop noises tinkled in the background. "I mean, Columbia, you should want to solve the problem, so you don't keep having to solve the problem, you know what I mean?"

The question now is whether Columbia values SHIFT as a flagship research project or as a practical guide to institutional change. I asked Goldberg, over the phone, whether she thought Columbia would change after SHIFT. She had spoken carefully throughout our conversation, seeming to calibrate every word against the various, sometimes competing interests that she's expected to balance. "I think," she said, "that SHIFT's research is profoundly important to the work we are doing here." It will be difficult, under Title IX, for people who live or work on campus to entirely separate sex from bureaucracy. When I asked Mellins what she hopes to ultimately accomplish with SHIFT, she said, "I'm a clinician. I've come to feel that, if the work we do makes the lives of even a small amount of students better, that's what we want. We want to eradicate sexual assault, but, short of that, I think we just want to make a difference."

The SHIFT approach, for all its rigor and scope, is in some ways remarkably modest: the idea is that small structural adjustments to student life could change how students interact with one another-help them find their moral compass more easily, feel more at home on campus, have some obstacles cleared out of their path. These humble expectations can seem deflating. But SHIFT makes a powerful argument that sexual-violence prevention must embrace the ordinary and the particular. Its programming suggestions may matter less than its potential to transform how people think about the problem. At one point in my conversation with Hirsch, she brought up an optimistic analogy. Forty years ago, alcohol played a role in more than sixty per cent of traffic deaths. Since then, a comprehensive, multilevel campaign against drunk driving has cut that number in half. This required institutional change, in the form of new laws, and social change, as school and community programs taught people to designate a driver and to intervene when a wobbly friend grabbed his car keys. It also involved changes to the physical environment: cities established police checkpoints, and offenders were required to install Breathalyzer locks on their cars. Citizens lobbied for better street lights, more speed bumps.

A version of this thinking applies to life in college: there are checkpoints and speed bumps that could decrease the likelihood of harm. Picture the freshman who's depressed but doesn't realize it, or can't get an appointment at the counselling office, or doesn't trust the counsellors. It's easier to just drink twenty beers each weekend. On one of those weekends, he goes to a party and meets a girl who hasn't slept in two days and is subsisting on cereal; she didn't want to come to this party, but her roommates gave her an iced-tea bottle full of Fireball and dragged her out. The boy and the girl start talking. Their friends cheer when they make out. At 2 A.M., when the party begins to clear, one of them says they should get a bite, but no place on campus is open. They go to her bedroom, but there's nowhere comfortable to sit except the bed. What happens next is a blur of mismatched fears and assumptions. The girl panics, freezes, thinks the guy will hurt her if she yells at him, starts making horrible calculations of futility: anyone who hears this story will think it's her fault for inviting him in. The guy, having half-deliberately drunk himself beyond conscious decision-making, ignores her stiffness and whatever she's mumbling; he thinks he's doing exactly what college students are supposed to do. There are at least a dozen small changes beyond their control that might have led to a different outcome. There will always be people, mostly men, who experience a power differential as license to do what they want. But SHIFT proposes that it is possible to protect potential victims and potential perpetrators simultaneously, and that we are, at this moment, less eager to hurt one another than we seem to be. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the February 12 & 19, 2018, issue, with the headline "Safer Spaces."

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
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It's lunchtime on a Tuesday, and the kids are piling into a pizzeria booth in Coral Springs, Fla., to plot a revolution. "The adults know that we're cleaning up their mess," says Cameron Kasky, an 11th-grader at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who started the #NeverAgain movement to curb gun violence three weeks earlier in his living room. "It's like they're saying, 'I'm sorry I made this mess,'" adds buzzcut senior Emma González, "while continuing to spill soda on the floor."

Kasky and González are sitting with two more of the movement's leaders, Alex Wind and Jaclyn Corin. Except they're not sitting, exactly. They're crouching diagonally on the seat and leaning back on one another's knees in order to devour their calzones while maintaining as much physical contact as possible. Corin throws a crouton into González's mouth. Kasky uses Corin's knees as a pillow. The conversation turns from their fellow organizer David Hogg ("So laser-focused," González says, that "he could make his body get pregnant if he wanted to") to the conspiracy theory that they're actors being paid by shadowy donors (prompting Kasky to ask why his credit card was recently declined at McDonald's) to their prolific trolling of the NRA. They agree that the gun lobby's spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, is "very hot but kind of scary," as González puts it.

The pizza joint is a few hundred yards away from the school where 17 of their peers and teachers were murdered a month ago. At 2:21 p.m. on Valentine's Day, according to authorities, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, a former student, entered the freshman building armed with an AR-15 and opened fire into four classrooms on the first floor. Corin had just delivered carnations to the building to raise funds for junior prom; she had handed one flower to a girl who was shot minutes later. After the fire alarm went off during his AP environmental science class, Hogg took a video of students crouching inside a tiny classroom to hide from the shooter. The video went viral, landing him a recurring spot on the cable-TV circuit. The next day, Kasky invited Wind and Corin over to his house to plan a march for gun reform. Together, they started the #NeverAgain hashtag on Twitter.

Most of these kids cannot vote, order a beer, make a hotel reservation or afford a pizza without pooling some of their allowance. On the surface, they're not so different from previous generations of idealistic teenagers who set out to change the world, only to find it is not so easy. Yet over the past month, these students have become the central organizers of what may turn out to be the most powerful grassroots gun-reform movement in nearly two decades. For much of the rest of the country, numbed and depressed by repeated mass shootings, the question has become, Can these kids actually do it?

No one thinks it will be easy. Gun violence in America is one of those problems that can feel truly hopeless. The U.S. has only 4.4% of the world's population, yet it accounts for roughly 42% of the world's guns, according to the comprehensive 2007 Small Arms Survey. And roughly 31% of the world's mass shooters are American, according to a University of Alabama study. Even as mass-shooting deaths mount, our Second Amendment has made gun rights a third-rail issue: roughly 90% of Americans agree on "common-sense" solutions like universal background checks, yet absolutists stand in the way of any meaningful action.

After Adam Lanza killed 20 first-graders and six staff members at a Connecticut elementary school in December 2012, politicians tried to tackle the issue. President Obama issued Executive Orders to strengthen the background-check system and study gun violence, and several states tightened gun restrictions. Yet Congress failed to pass a modest bipartisan bill to close loopholes for gun sales. In the five years since, a familiar pattern has emerged. Every month or so, a killer shoots innocent people at random. There is a brief period of mourning. Democrats offer feeble pleas for new gun limits; Republicans offer "thoughts and prayers." No substantial laws are passed, and the nation moves on. This was the response when Omar Mateen killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub in 2016; when Stephen Paddock massacred 58 people at a Las Vegas concert last October; when Devin Patrick Kelley killed 26 people in a Sutherland Springs, Texas, church in November.

But in the days after the Parkland shooting, something different happened. The Parkland kids, at once tearful and cutting, publicly called out the NRA's influence on national politics, and shamed the leaders they considered responsible for the nation's lax gun laws. (Privately, they have dubbed Florida Governor Rick Scott "Voldemort" and called Senator Marco Rubio some names that are unprintable.) Their voices quickly went viral. González had no Twitter account before the shooting-11 days later, she had more followers than the NRA. They called for specific changes like a renewed assault-weapons ban, universal background checks and digitized gun-ownership records.

Perhaps most important, the Parkland kids painted the NRA and their allies as the mortal enemies of the roughly 50 million schoolkids growing up in what Kasky calls "the mass-shooting generation." They took the mantle of "personal protection" from the gun lobby, while reframing the larger gun debate along generational lines.

And so news that was once met with sad resignation now drives teenagers to march in the streets. On March 14, nearly a million kids across the country left class for the National School Walkout to protest the school-shooting epidemic. Support for stronger gun regulations spiked to 68% after the shooting, up from 60% last November, according to a Politico/Morning Consult survey. Public support for the NRA is down to 37%, according to a WSJ/NBC poll, the first time since 2000 that the organization has been viewed more negatively than positively. Companies from Delta Airlines to Hertz to MetLife cut ties with the NRA. Dick's Sporting Goods announced it would stop carrying assault weapons. Florida, known for its historically soft gun policies, passed a bill March 9 that bans bump stocks, imposes a waiting period, raises the minimum age to buy a weapon and allows cops to take guns from mentally disturbed people. Sixty-seven NRA-endorsed Republicans voted for the bill, and the gun-friendly GOP Governor Scott signed it.

How a movement catches fire is always a mystery, but the Parkland kids seem matched for this moment. They're young enough to be victimized by a school shooting, but old enough to shape the aftermath. Like many teenagers, they're at a peculiar stage in their lives where they feel at once vulnerable and invincible, highly social yet impervious to the etiquette expected from adults. Their bombastic style mirrors President Trump's: they call their enemies names and hurl sick burns at politicians and lobbyists as if they're shouting across the locker room.

None of which means they'll actually succeed, and the kids are not entirely naive about their chances. They know the GOP-controlled Congress is unlikely to pass meaningful new gun laws. Although Trump briefly signaled support for strengthening background checks, he quickly abandoned that position. Nor do the Parkland kids speak for everyone, by a long shot: polls show that young people as a whole do not necessarily favor stricter gun laws than their parents. Which means the kids face the same question as the movements before them: If this government doesn't respond to their demands, did their movement make a difference?

The first big test will come on March 24 with the student-led March for Our Lives, which already has registered more than 800 demonstrations in all 50 states and on six continents. ("Sorry, Antarctica, y'all are gonna get shot," Kasky quips.) The organizers plan to allow only young speakers to address the Washington march, and only artists under 24 can submit official poster designs. The march is meant to expand voter registration among like-minded members of the school-shooting generation: the kids that grew up post-Columbine, who huddled behind barricades during active-shooter drills and learned to tape construction paper over classroom windows.

From there, the Parkland kids plan to make gun reform the central issue for young voters in the midterms. "We're going to show these politicians that we're coming for them," says Hogg. Kasky is more ambitious. "The world failed us," he says, "and we're here to make a new one that's going to be easier on the next generation. If you're against that, then get out."

The youth revolt is being planned in a donated office space in a strip mall, next to a mediocre deli in a small town near Parkland. To get inside the three windowless rooms where the #NeverAgain movement is headquartered, you have to knock three times on a locked glass door and then loudly identify yourself so the kids are sure you're not an armed stalker. (They have received death threats.) Inside the lair, there are boxes of March for Our Lives T-shirts and a bust of Robert F. Kennedy next to whiteboards with schedules of conference calls. On one wall there's a collage of mail that runs the gamut from encouraging to obscene. (An excerpt from one letter, sent to 17-year-old Parkland organizer Delaney Tarr: "Shut the f-ck up, you stupid f-cking c-nt.") On another there's a map of the U.S. where the teens have labeled the hundreds of sibling marches. A broom closet near the back bears a sheet of notebook paper that says Cameron Kasky's office, directly across from a tiny bathroom labeled Cameron Kasky's other office.

Everything crackles with a sense of ferocious optimism. It feels like the last rehearsal of a high school musical, halftime at state championships, the final days of senior year. The kids stream in and out on no particular schedule, tumble to the floor to read their fan mail, twirl around on chairs while composing tweets and crowd into a tiny conference room for calls with reporters or lawmakers. One day, they spent an afternoon making a video mocking NRA spokeswoman Loesch (they call her "the woman from the SuperBeets commercial" after digging up an old spot she did for a beet-juice product). Another day, they met with Representative Ted Deutch, a Florida Democrat who represents Parkland in Congress. There's a sense that anything can happen in this little corner of the teenage universe, because all kinds of things can.

Gun politics have vexed adult organizers for decades, but so far the Parkland teens have had striking successes. Even though the kids are disappointed in the Florida bill ("It's like they tried to take a big step forward and then tripped," Hogg says), it's still the first significant piece of gun legislation to come out of the Florida legislature in at least 20 years. The March 14 school walkouts, organized by Women's March youth groups, surpassed the 750,000 protesters who flooded the Washington Mall for the Million Mom March in 2000 in what was then the largest gun-safety protest in U.S. history. "This youth movement is unprecedented," says Kris Brown, co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which was formed by the organizations behind the 2000 march. "What's different here is that the children who are impacted are older, and they are able to give voice in a way that could not happen before."

The #NeverAgain organizers built a movement with the skills they learned in high school. Hogg, an aspiring journalist who studies TV production at Stoneman Douglas, has anointed himself the movement's "press secretary." Corin, the bubbly junior class president who did a 50-page term paper on gun control last year, organized roughly 100 students to travel to Tallahassee to lobby the state legislature. Kasky and Wind, both drama kids, have given some of the most emotional testimony about the shooting and their dead classmates. González gave a speech about the NRA's influence that was informed by an AP government lesson on special-interest groups.

The kids are social-media natives who have used Twitter to stir up the same kind of fervor Trump does. If the President can mock his enemies, they reason, then why can't high school students? "People always say, 'Get off your phones,' but social media is our weapon," says Corin. "Without it, the movement wouldn't have spread this fast."

Teens have always had a unique talent for humiliation, and social media only sharpens their knives. If the Parkland kids were targeting their classmates instead of powerful lobbyists or Senators, their taunts could be mistaken for bullying. But going up against the NRA, they're like mouthy Davids slinging stones at Goliath. "They're using Twitter as a means to ridicule, to dismiss, to brush past the usual criticisms and just say, 'These people are full of it,'" says Robert Spitzer, a professor of political science at SUNY Cortland who has written five books on gun policy. "The door for this has been opened by Donald Trump himself."

As teenagers who survived a school shooting, they're politically hard to hit: if the NRA or the GOP fight back, they are attacking young victims of a tragedy. One GOP candidate for the Maine house of representatives who called González a "skinhead lesbian" on Twitter faced so much online backlash that he dropped out of the race.

The students have had plenty of help. They've raised more than $4 million from small donors on the crowdfunding site GoFundMe, plus a couple million more from celebrities like George and Amal Clooney, Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey. A top Hollywood PR firm is assisting with press requests pro bono, and Women's March organizer Deena Katz is volunteering as a consultant on the march. The gun-reform advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, backed by billionaire former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, has given out more than $1 million in grants to local organizers planning sibling marches around the country, and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is sending busloads of kids to Washington, D.C. Democratic megadonor Tom Steyer pledged $1 million to gun-safety groups' efforts to register more high school students to vote. "Our biggest problem is that we're getting too much help," says Corin.

They know that other youth campaigns against gun violence, including those led by black activists in urban communities, have not gotten the same financial support or media attention. "We came from an affluent area, and we're mostly white, and we have to use that privilege," says Tarr. The kids say they are trying to correct the imbalance. A letter from the Dream Defenders, a racial-justice group formed after the killing of Trayvon Martin, is hanging on the office wall. And in early March, the teens invited young activists from the Peace Warriors, a Chicago anti-violence group, to Parkland to discuss coordinating their efforts. "We're fighting for the same thing," says Arieyanna Williams, a high school senior from Chicago who has been working with the Peace Warriors since sophomore year. "We found our voice in Parkland. We didn't really have it here."

Inside the office, there is no adult supervision beyond Matt Deitsch and Kaylyn Pipitone, two 20-year-old college students and recent Stoneman Douglas alums who help with things that only adults can do, like signing contracts and insurance forms and paperwork for their 501(c)(4). "We want the grownups we need in this, and nothing more," says Kasky. "We only have people doing the things that as 17-year-olds we cannot." At an early #NeverAgain meeting, parents asked how they could help, recalls Alex Wind's mother.

The answer came back: "Order pizza."

The March for Our Lives almost certainly won't lead to major gun legislation in Congress this year. But the Parkland teens are taking the long view. To them, this movement is as much about mobilizing young voters as it is about gun violence. The voter-registration group HeadCount plans to dispatch roughly 5,000 volunteers to sign up young voters at U.S. marches. The Parkland kids say their goal is for 4 out of 5 young people to vote in November's midterm elections. "Either have the politicians pass legislation or set them up to be voted out," Kasky says. "It's a win-win." If only it were that simple. Only 39% of voters between 18 and 20 voted in the 2016 election, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, and only 14% of voters that age showed up to cast a ballot in the 2014 midterms. Previous turnout drives have not had much success.Not all young people vote Democratic, either. While Trump has a historically low approval rating among millennials (only 6% strongly approve of him, while 46% strongly disapprove), almost a third of millennials lean Republican, according to a Pew survey. Only 49% of 18-to-29-year-olds favored a renewed assault-weapons ban in a 2015 Pew survey, while more than half of respondents of other age groups did support a ban.

They envision a youth political movement that will address many of the other issues affecting the youngest Americans. Hogg says he would like to have a youth demonstration every year on March 24, harnessing the power of teenage anger to demand action on everything from campaign-finance reform to net neutrality to climate change. But even if none of this works-even if they never pass comprehensive gun reform, and net neutrality fails, and Citizens United endures, and climate-change legislation stalls-today's teenage rebels will become tomorrow's establishment leaders, informed by the experience that may already be shaping the gun debate.

And that, says Hogg, is the bottom line for politicians who side with the NRA. "You're gonna be smeared in the textbooks. Your legacy is gone," he says. "If you don't stand up with us now, you'll be standing against us."

- With reporting by Melissa Chan/New York

Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte.alter@time.com.

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How Parkland Students Are Taking on Politicians in the Gun Control Battle

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It's lunchtime on a Tuesday, and the kids are piling into a pizzeria booth in Coral Springs, Fla., to plot a revolution. "The adults know that we're cleaning up their mess," says Cameron Kasky, an 11th-grader at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who started the #NeverAgain movement to curb gun violence three weeks earlier in his living room.

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Florida student to NRA and Trump: 'We call BS'

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Never Again MSD is an American student-led political action committee for gun control that advocates for tighter regulations to prevent gun violence. The organization, also known by the Twitter hashtags #NeverAgain, and #EnoughIsEnough, was formed by a group of twenty students attending the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSD) at the time of the deadly shooting in 2018, in which seventeen students and staff members were killed by the alleged gunman, who was a former student at the school and armed with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle. The organization started on social media as a movement "for survivors of the Stoneman Douglas Shooting, by survivors of the Stoneman Douglas Shooting" using the hashtag #NeverAgain. A main goal of the group was to influence the 2018 United States elections, and they embarked on a multi-city bus tour in June 2018 to encourage young people to register to vote.

The organization staged protests demanding legislative action to be taken to prevent similar shootings in the future and has vocally condemned U.S. lawmakers who have received political contributions from the National Rifle Association (NRA). It was credited in the Washington Post as winning a "stunning victory" against the NRA in the Florida legislature in March 2018 when both houses voted for various gun control measures./ The law increased funding for school security and raised the required age to buy a gun from 18 to 21.

Among the organization's most prominent members are Alfonso Calderon, Sarah Chadwick, Jaclyn Corin, Ryan Deitsch, X González, David Hogg, Cameron Kasky, and Alex Wind. Corin, González, Hogg, Kasky, and Wind were featured on a cover of in March 2018. In December later that year, it was announced that the March for Our Lives activists made the shortlist for Time's Person of the Year at number four.

The group was co-formed by Cameron Kasky and his high school friends in the first four days after the shooting, which was committed by a gunman who was a former student at the school and armed with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle.

The initial three co-founders were Kasky, Alex Wind, and Sofie Whitney. On February 15, 2018, one day after the shooting, Kasky met with Wind at a candlelight vigil. Wind stated, "The day after the shooting, we said something needs to happen; there needs to be a central space; there needs to be a movement." After the vigil, Kasky invited Wind and Whitney to his house. Kasky came up with the name "Never Again" while the group stayed up through the night to make plans, and he posted "Stay alert. #NeverAgain" to Facebook.

Over the next three days after the shooting, the group gained over 35,000 followers on Facebook. Kasky recruited other Stoneman Douglas students David Hogg, X González, and Delaney Tarr at a gun-control rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida where they spoke; other students quickly joined. The students gave as many interviews as they could to television networks. The group said they worked quickly to take advantage of the national media attention given to the shooting and its aftermath. Numerous Stoneman Douglas students have been shown in media coverage. By the next day, the group had created Twitter accounts and announced a March for Our Lives nationwide protest, for March 24, 2018.

Stoneman Douglas teacher Ivy Schamis, who had been teaching her Holocaust History class about combating hate when the gunman fired shots into her classroom, stated she thought the Stoneman Douglas students' #NeverAgain hashtag was inspired by the class on Holocaust history. In the classroom there had been a banner saying "We Will Never Forget," which a Holocaust survivor had given to Schamis. Kelly Plaur, a student survivor from that class, is the great-granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor. Plaur protected Schamis during the shooting. According to Schamis, the gunman was unaware he was shooting into a class on the Holocaust, even though he'd scrawled a swastika onto one of his ammunition magazines. Schamis was presented with USC Shoah Foundation 's inaugural Stronger Than Hate Educator Award in 2019. During her acceptance speech at the award ceremony, Schamis honored the two students Nick Dworet and Helena Ramsay from her class that were killed during the shooting. Schamis added, "We share our stories in the hope that others understand that hate is not OK, it's never OK."

The Fort Lauderdale gun control rally at Broward County Federal Courthouse on February 17, 2018 was attended by hundreds of supporters. Elected officials and gun control advocates, including Florida Senator Gary Farmer, called for common sense gun laws and firearm safety legislation. At this rally, Emma González began her speech with a moment of silence for the 17 victims killed in the school shooting. She then gave an impassioned 11-minute speech, in which she demanded to know where the "common sense" was in America's gun laws, calling out members of Congress who have accepted contributions from the NRA. González was noted for rebuking " thoughts and prayers" from the government and President Donald Trump.

To support the gun control rally, Never Again MSD spoke out in the media about the importance of taking action to change policy. In an opinion column for CNN, Cameron Kasky wrote: "We can't ignore the issues of gun control that this tragedy raises. And so, I'm asking-no, demanding-we take action now." Delaney Tarr wrote an op-ed for , in which she discussed why she and her fellow students were organizing in response to the mass shooting at Parkland. She stated "Knowing that we can keep this from happening to even one more person is the only thing that makes me feel even a little bit better about living through this senseless tragedy."

The first organized #NeverAgain movement protest was a march on the Florida State Capitol in Tallahassee on February 20, 2018. The group worked with congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Florida Senator Lauren Book to arrange a bus trip for one hundred students and fifteen parent chaperones to the Capitol to voice their concerns with lawmakers and demand action on gun violence. Jaclyn Corin was a key organizer of the bus trip protest. A report in Vanity Fair suggested it was her idea to have the bus trip soon after the shooting because it was alive in the news cycle; she said "the news forgets - very quickly - we needed a critical mass event." Sofie Whitney, one of the organizers of the bus trip, was interviewed by CNN's Chief Washington Correspondent Jake Tapper while on the bus en route. Several students, along with Fred Guttenberg, father of a slain student, watched from the gallery as the Florida House voted against considering a bill to ban assault weapons (such as AR-15 style rifles) and high-capacity magazines in a vote of 71 to 36. More than 3,000 people attended a rally at the Capitol the following day.

Never Again MSD and other groups have also played a part in corporations' revocation of NRA sponsorships and discounts for NRA members. Firms which have severed ties with the NRA include the First National Bank of Omaha; car rental companies Hertz, Avis, Enterprise, and Budget; insurer MetLife; Symantec software; home security firm SimpliSafe; and airlines including Delta and United.

Never Again MSD has been credited for including persons of color within their movement. Jaclyn Corin recognized that "Parkland received more attention because of its affluence," while David Hogg faulted the media for "not giving black students a voice." Alex Wind said the protests were about ending gun violence against all communities.

March for Our Lives, a nationwide demonstration that included a march held in Washington, D.C., took place on March 24, 2018. The event was conducted in collaboration with the nonprofit organization Everytown for Gun Safety. Hundreds of thousands of protesters showed up at demonstrations across the United States, as well as internationally, to demand action against gun violence. Many Marjory Stoneman Douglas students spoke out in Washington, DC. González briefly spoke, naming the victims, before standing silent on stage for four minutes. She was on stage for six minutes and twenty seconds, the length of the Parkland shooting.

Yolanda Renee King, Martin Luther King Jr.'s 9-year-old granddaughter brought in by Corin, said during her speech, "I have a dream that enough is enough." In addition to sharing the stage at the protest with King, they also passed the mic to Virginia African-American elementary school student Naomi Wadler. Sir Paul McCartney, speaking to CNN at a sister march in New York City, revealed his T-shirt reading "We can end gun violence."

Never Again MSD has worked to organize town hall meetings across the United States to hold Congress members accountable for their position on gun laws. For town halls on April 7, 2018, the group confirmed events in 30 districts. At a town hall near Parkland, supporters passed out red bumper stickers calling for an assault weapons ban.

Cross-country gun control tour

In June 2018, Never Again MSD announced that the group would travel throughout the United States and hold rallies that summer to call for stronger gun control, and to encourage teenagers who would be eighteen by November 2018 to vote in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. The group stated that it intended to appear in cities where the NRA held the most influence. During the summer and fall, the students traveled to every district in Florida and 30 states across the country, visiting over 100 communities, registering 50,000 voters, and raising awareness about gun violence. In the weeks before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, the group engaged in another national tour specifically focused on election-related efforts like educating, registering, and encouraging youth voters to vote in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.

George and Amal Clooney donated $500,000 to the organization to help with the cost of organizing the March for Our Lives demonstration, which they also participated in. Following the Clooneys' announcement, other celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Steven Spielberg pledged to match the $500,000 donation.

In a editorial entitled "The NRA's worst nightmare is here," Dean Obeidallah compared Never Again MSD to the "early days of the #MeToo movement, which caused a cultural shift regarding sexual misconduct."

After some schools threatened to suspend students for participating in peaceful Never Again MSD (#NeverAgain) protests, hundreds of U.S. colleges pledged they would not penalize students disciplined for taking part. These colleges, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, and the University of Florida, added their names to #NeverAgain Colleges.

In March 2018, Michelle and Barack Obama penned a handwritten letter to the students of Parkland, expressing admiration for their advocacy against gun violence:

We wanted to let you know how inspired we have been by the resilience, resolve and solidarity that you have all shown in the wake of unspeakable tragedy ... Not only have you supported and comforted each other, but you've helped awaken the conscience of the nation, and challenged decision-makers to make the safety of our children the country's top priority. ... Throughout our history, young people like you have led the way in making America better.

Attempts to discredit the Never Again MSD movement in the media have taken the form of verbal attacks and misinformation by right-wing Republican leaders. Former Republican senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum attacked the Parkland activists verbally during an interview with , suggesting that students should take classes in CPR rather than marching in Washington. The Washington Post quoted several doctors ridiculing Santorum for suggesting CPR, which is useless for trauma and blood loss. Leslie Gibson, a Republican candidate for the Maine House of Representatives, disparaged X González and David Hogg, but later apologized for his comments and withdrew his candidacy. Iowa Republican Representative Steve King's campaign criticized X González for displaying her Cuban heritage.

NRA board member and rock musician Ted Nugent described the Parkland activists as "mushy brained and soulless liars,". Alex Jones, a right-wing conspiracy theorist and host of InfoWars, led a campaign to discredit Emma González, David Hogg, and other March for Our Lives protesters by comparing them to Nazis.

Fake pictures and GIFs of X González tearing up a copy of the U.S. Constitution circulated on social media in March 2018. The images were doctored from originals of González tearing up a shooting target sign. Actor and conservative commentator Adam Baldwin defended circulating the doctored images as "political satire".

In March 2018, the Florida Legislature passed a bill titled the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act. It raised the minimum age for buying firearms to 21, established waiting periods and background checks, provided a program for the arming of some teachers and the hiring of school police, banned bump stocks, and barred potentially violent or mentally unhealthy people arrested under certain laws from possessing guns. In all, it allocated around $400 million. The governor signed the bill into law on March 9. He commented, "To the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, you made your voices heard. You didn't let up and you fought until there was change." John Cassidy stated in The New Yorker, "This was the first time in thirty years that Florida had passed any gun restrictions, and it was a direct response to the Never Again movement, which was founded by students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School." suggested that Republican lawmakers have generally remained silent about gun control measures because "they depend heavily on NRA campaign donations, and even more on the NRA's cadre of pro-gun voters". Since February 2018, 67 new pieces of gun violence prevention legislation have been passed in 26 states across the country.

1. NPR, Brakkton Booker, June 16, 2018, NPR, ^ Parkland Survivors Launch Tour To Register Young Voters And Get Them Out In November. Retrieved July 7, 2018, "...summer they're hitting the road with a new mission: turn the wave of young activism they helped spark into an energized voting bloc ..."

2. ^ "Students Who Survived Florida Shooting Want Politicians To Know They're Angry". All Things Considered. NPR. February 16, 2018.

3. Washington Post, ^ A rarity for the NRA: Defeat. Retrieved March 9, 2018, ".The students ... their victory over the National Rifle Association in a state that has long done the gun-rights group's bidding was nothing short of stunning ..."

4. Sanchez, Ray; Yan, Holly (March 9, 2018). "Florida Gov. Rick Scott signs gun bill". CNN.

5. ^ CNN Wire (February 14, 2018). "The fire alarm blared. Then the gunshots began and students ran for their lives". WHNT News. ..."I never thought something like this would happen, especially in Parkland, Florida. ...

6. ^ Pazzanese, Christina (March 20, 2018). "Parkland students: The violence must stop here". Harvard Gazette. ... since the massacre at their high school, students Emma Gonzalez (from left), David Hogg, Cameron Kasky, Alex Wind, Matt Deitsch, and Ryan Deitsch have become among the most recognizable faces in the #NeverAgain movement ...

7. ^ "Parkland Students On Cover Of Time Magazine". Houston Public Media. University of Houston. Associated Press. March 22, 2018. ... The cover features Marjory Stoneman Douglas students Jaclyn Corin, Alex Wind, Emma Gonzalez, Cameron Kasky and David Hogg ...

8. ^ Associated Press (February 20, 2018). "Shooting survivors to travel to Fla. capital for rally". .

9. ^ Bruney, Gabrielle (February 18, 2018). "Survivors of the Florida School Shooting Are Planning to March on Washington". . Hearst Communications.

10. ^ "Gun control rally held Fort Lauderdale in wake of deadly school shooting". CNN. February 17, 2018.

11. ^ "Florida student Emma Gonzalez to lawmakers and gun advocates: 'We call BS'" (Includes video and transcript). CNN. February 17, 2018.

12. Obeidallah, Dean (February 25, 2018). "The NRA's worst nightmare is here". CNN.

13. ^ Popken, Ben (February 24, 2018). "More companies cut ties with the NRA after customer backlash". NBC News. ...cutting ties with the NRA were the car rental groups Enterprise, Hertz, Avis and Budget ... MetLife ... Symantec ... SimpliSafe. Delta and United ...

14. ^ Karson, Kendall (March 24, 2018). "Parkland survivor Delaney Tarr's 2018 message: 'I'm voting for my life'". ABC News.

15. ^ "Young Parkland activists announce nationwide tour ahead of midterm elections". NBC. June 4, 2018.

16. ^ "Parkland students will tour the nation to register voters and demand change". CNN. June 4, 2018.

17. ^ Robillard, Kevin (March 25, 2018). "Santorum: Parkland students should learn CPR instead of marching". . ... Rick Santorum said Sunday that students ... should have responded to the massacre of their classmates by 'taking CPR classes' instead of 'looking to someone else to solve their problem.' ...

18. ^ Stevens, Matt (March 18, 2018). "'Skinhead Lesbian' Tweet About Parkland Student Ends Maine Republican's Candidacy". The New York Times. Mr. Gibson called one Florida student, X González, a "skinhead lesbian," and another, David Hogg, a "moron" and a "baldfaced liar."

19. Chauncey Devega, April 4, 2018, Salon magazine, ^ The right's Parkland problem: A symptom of authoritarian parenting: Conservatives see the Parkland students as disrespectful and dangerous - and those feelings stem from primal fears. Retrieved April 4, 2018, "...Republican elected officials have, for the most part, remained silent ... depend heavily on NRA campaign donations, and ... NRA's cadre of pro-gun voters. ... ."

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Never Again MSD is an American student-led political action committee for gun control that advocates for tighter regulations to prevent gun violence.