Monday night, Los Angeles Magazine held a gathering they called a Women’s Leadership Reception. it was co-hosted by Editor-in-Chief Mary Melton and Publisher Amy Saralegui along with City Controller Wendy Greuel.

The women present were an eclectic mix. They were from government (like Greuel, city planning director Gail Goldberg, and longtime California Democratic powerhouse, Roz Wyman) from journalism—(Director of the Annenberg School of Journalism, Geneva Overholser, columnist/radio host, Patt Morrison, KPPC’s Shirley Jahad, KCET exec Val Zavala) —from literature and the arts…from the nonprofit sector and, well, from a lot of varied fields– County Counsel Andrea Ordin, L.A. Conservancy chief Linda Dishman, author Gina Nahai. However, unlike most such gatherings, although all of us knew a few people, no one but perhaps the LA Mag editors who did the inviting, seemed to know a lot.

It took about fifteen minutes of collective shyness before everyone ventured out to talk to those whom they’d not met.

A lot of intriguing and decidedly non-small-talkish conversations seemed to emerge from the mingling (even though accessories were occasionally mentioned).

For instance, I heard from Emmy winning composer Laura Karpman that she was in the middle of writing an “multi-media opera called The One Ten—about…well… the 110 Freeway. It seems that the 110 turns 70 in December of this year. So to commemorate the anniversary, the LA Opera offered Karpman a quirky commission to create an opera about it. (Laura and librettists M.G. Lord and Shannon Halwes blog about their creative process here.)

Wendy Greuel veered easily between topics that included her newest audit (more on that another time) and and the fact she and Wyman were two of the three women ever to get pregnant and have a child while serving in LA public office. (The third was Gloria Molina, said Greuel.)

“I’m glad she took on the DWP,” I heard two different women whisper when they spied Greuel.

Stephanie Stone, the Vice Chair of LA County’s Veterans Advisory Commission, told me disturbingly that according to the most recent estimate, 25 percent—likely more—of the women soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, have been sexually abused during their time in the service. One out of four.

(I’ll be following up on that story.)

I heard from Elena Stern of Para Los Ninos about the desperate need for psychological counseling among the children living on Skid Row whom her agency serves.

I talked with Literary agent Bonnie Nadell, who was the longtime agent of the late David Foster Wallace, about whether she thought that D.T. Max, who wrote the long, unutterably sad, but relievingly informative story about DFW in the New Yorker, was the right person to do the upcoming biography of Wallace. (She did. She thought he’d be good. And, since she’d known both men for over 20 years, I figured she was in likely the best position to judge the matter.)

Mary Melton also mentioned, when she gave her welcoming speech, that Roz Wyman was the youngest LA City Council person ever. (She was first elected in 1953 at the age of 22.) Mary also said that Roz was instrumental in bringing the Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957, figuring that LA needed its own sports team.

And so it was that, as the longest night of the year unfolded—along with myriad conversations—everyone seemed to settle into the pleasant realization that it was nice (even if merely for a change) for just girls to get together with just girls…in LA. (And a kick-ass group of grrrllls it was.)

Thanks to LA Magazine for making it possible.

Abbas Be was held captive in a most brutal manner in a Delhi brothel. After she was freed, she returned to her home city of Hyderabad, became a bookbinder and now puts her sisters through school.

How does a newspaper stay relevant?

No publication has anything even vaguely resembling a comprehensive answer to that question, but in at least one section of the New York Times, for at least one day—Sunday, August 23—the editors have made their newspaper important by devoting the entire NY Times Magazine to the issue of oppression of women worldwide, and the absolute necessity—practical and ethical— of working for women’s rights.

It is not surprising that the central article in the magazine is written by Nicholas Kristof—together with his wife and fellow Pulitzer winner, Sheryl WuDunn, (and with gorgeous photos by Kay Grannan). Kristof is a deeply moral and discerning journalist who is unafraid of advocacy when he feels the cause is righteous.

The article is adapted from Kristof and WuDunn’s new book, Half the Sky, which will be released in early September.

Here is how it begins:

IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

The entire article is a shocking and impassioned call to action. For instance there is this:

The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.

For those women who live, mistreatment is sometimes shockingly brutal. If you’re reading this article, the phrase “gender discrimination” might conjure thoughts of unequal pay, underfinanced sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In the developing world, meanwhile, millions of women and girls are actually enslaved. While a precise number is hard to pin down, the International Labor Organization, a U.N. agency, estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, including sexual servitude. In Asia alone about one million children working in the sex trade are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery, according to a U.N. report. Girls and women are locked in brothels and beaten if they resist, fed just enough to be kept alive and often sedated with drugs — to pacify them and often to cultivate addiction. India probably has more modern slaves than any other country.

Yet, Kristof and WuDunn’s purpose is not merely to catalog the horrors. They also come to us carrying armloads of victory stories, astonishing tales of courage displayed by women who, when given only the tiniest bit of help and rescue after ghastly abuse, were able to remake themselves into positive forces for thier families, their communities and themselves.

There are so many problems in our world that it is easy to recoil from the ungraspably large problem of women’s oppression worldwide. Yet, Kristof, WuDunn aim to convince us otherwise, that this complex and multi-faceted problem is in fact a remarkable and timely opportunity that we would be wise to embrace as if our lives depended upon it, which—in this globally intertwined new world of ours —our lives very well may.

In the early 1990s, the United Nations and the World Bank began to proclaim the potential resource that women and girls represent. “Investment in girls’ education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world,” Larry Summers wrote when he was chief economist of the World Bank. Private aid groups and foundations shifted gears as well. “Women are the key to ending hunger in Africa,” declared the Hunger Project. The Center for Global Development issued a major report explaining “why and how to put girls at the center of development.” CARE took women and girls as the centerpiece of its anti-poverty efforts. “Gender inequality hurts economic growth,” Goldman Sachs concluded in a 2008 research report that emphasized how much developing countries could improve their economic performance by educating girls.

Bill Gates recalls once being invited to speak in Saudi Arabia and finding himself facing a segregated audience. Four-fifths of the listeners were men, on the left. The remaining one-fifth were women, all covered in black cloaks and veils, on the right. A partition separated the two groups. Toward the end, in the question-and-answer session, a member of the audience noted that Saudi Arabia aimed to be one of the Top 10 countries in the world in technology by 2010 and asked if that was realistic. “Well, if you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country,” Gates said, “you’re not going to get too close to the Top 10.” The small group on the right erupted in wild cheering.

Read the rest here, and watch the audio slideshow here.

And here are easy ways that each of us can get involved.

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PS: Also very much worth reading is Dexter Filkins’ story, A School Bus for Shamsia, about the struggle to keep a school for girls open in the heart of Taliban territory in Afghanistan.

In a report issued on Monday, Human Rights Watch released a 68-page report that detailed the approximately 12,669 untested rape kits scattered through various police agencies across LA County, including approximately 5,100 held by LAPD.

In other words, it’s worse than we originally thought when Laura Chick’s audit brought the problem to light last October.

Through interviews with police officers, rape treatment providers, and rape victims, the Human Rights Watch report documents how, after the initial violence of the rape, women find the rape kit procedure invasive and weirdly humiliating. Yet they subject themselves to the kit because they are told it will help catch their rapist. So when law enforcement fails to to test the kit, says the report, it is one more blow to the a woman who has been assaulted.

The best story on this recent news about the rape kid backlog was done by my pal, KPCC’s Frank Stolz.
who said the department was building a case tracking system specifically to deal with sexual assault kits “so this never happens to anybody again.”

Stoltze: But police have waited so long to address the backlog, they’re overwhelmed with DNA evidence. Beck says the LAPD needs more criminalists to conduct the testing, but elected officials have tended to support hiring more police officers instead.

Beck: Hiring cops is sometimes more sexy than hiring criminalists. So you have to realize that we do need more police officers, but we do need more criminalists.

One elected official who could—and should—take the rape kit situation a lot more seriously is Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch told Frank that the mayor refused to meet with her group.

That needs to change.

Yesterday, City Council Member Jack Weiss announced that he was allocating $25,000 from his discretionary General City Purposes funds to:

…… help the LAPD implement a Sexual Assault Kit Tracking System that includes a Victim Notification System. The system will give victims of sexual assault the ability to contact the LAPD via phone or email to learn whether evidence from their case has been tested. This notification system will help LAPD improve accountability to victims in line with the state Sexual Assault Survivors DNA Bill of Rights.

Kudos to Councilmember Weiss for moving so quickly.

However, the mayor is in a position to push this issue and not just track the problem, but get it solved.

Stoltze: Last year, the mayor promised to back a plan to hire 24 more LAPD criminalists. Activists will learn whether he follows through on that promise when he releases his new budget in a few weeks.

The fact that Antonio has been so quiet on the issue is infuriating. Maybe now that will change. Or maybe not.

Up to you, Mr. Mayor.

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UPDATE: For a great background story on the LA Rape Kit issue read this one by Christine Pelisek of the LA Weekly, published last month. Terrific stuff.

Over at Racialicious, a lively site that describes itself as “a blog about the intersection of race and pop culture,” there is an essay that is very much worth reading about the issue of what author Latoya Peterson describes as “Not Rape.”

(The essay is excerpted from a new anthology published this month called Yes Means Yes.)

Peterson writes about incidents that she and many of girls she grew up with experienced as teenagers when they were on the receiving end of actions that were not rape per se, yet were in most of the instances she mentions, clearly assault, and in all of the cases, traumatizing to the girls involved.

Yet, also in nearly every case the girls felt they were somehow to blame, so never told an adult.

Peterson thinks back on a particular “not rape” that happened to her—and its unusually calamitous aftermath. She wonders if things would have played out differently if only she had felt confident enough to report the boy who was the perpetrator.

Here’s a short clip from her story:

My friends and I confided in each other, swapping stories, sharing out pain, while keeping it all hidden from the adults in our lives. After all, who could we tell? This wasn’t rape – it didn’t fit the definitions. This was Not rape. We should have known better. We were the ones who would take the blame. We would be punished, and no one wanted that. So, these actions went on, aided by a cloak of silence.

For me, Not rape came in the form of a guy from around the neighborhood. I remember that they called him Puffy because he looked like the rapper Sean “Puffy” Combs. He was friends with a guy I was friends with, T. I was home alone on hot summer day when I heard a knock on the patio door. I peeked through the blinds and recognized Puffy, so I opened the door a few inches…..

You’ll find the rest here.

These issues are not easy to talk about, but Peterson’s story is a reminder that, if we haven’t already, we need to have frank discussions of this nature with our daughters.

It’s important.

I say this from personal experience.

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PS: Blogger Browne Molyneux who flagged Peterson’s essay for me points out that it calls creepily to mind the Orange County gang rape case that was back in the news last week at former OC Sheriff Mike Carona’s trial.

On Wednesday, October 15—just over a week ago—Esha Momeni was driving along the Moddaress highway in Teheran when she was pulled over by men who said they were undercover traffic police. The officers told her she had overtaken and passed another car, which was illegal, they said.

Esha is a 28-year-old graduate student at CSUN. She and her parents are Iranian Americans living in California, but Esha holds dual citizenship. Esha is getting her master’s degree in communication and had been in Iran for two months to finish her thesis on the Iranian women’s movement. She had been spending the day interviewing a group called the One Million Signatures Campaign, when the so-called traffic stop occurred.

The “officers” took her to her family’s home where they seized her laptop and the videos of interviews she’d conducted with women activists. Ominously, they already had a search warrant with them. In other words, the stop was anything but the spontaneous occurrence it had first appeared to be.

Then Esha was taken to Iran’s notorious Section 209 of Evin Prison where she has been held since, without being allowed access to friends or family.

This area of the Iranian prison system has an unusually menacing reputation. For instance, it is here where supposedly seditious writers and dissidents are usually taken. Some come out. Some do not. It was in Section 209 that Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi died in Iranian custody on July 11, 2003, after showing signs of being brutally raped and tortured.

Esha’s friends and schoolmates wanted to spread the word of her imprisonment right away. But Iranian authorities told her family that, as long as they didn’t go to the press, Esha would be released in a few days. Now a week as come and gone without her parents being allowed to see her, said Anayansi Prado, a filmmaker and friend told CSUN’s school newspaper, The Daily Sundial

So friends and such organizations as Amnesty International have begun speaking out.

Esha’s boyfriend, Hassan Hussein, has put up a website about Esha and her situation that he updates with any news plus statements from friends and professors.

The LA Times has a story in today’s paper, which tells a little about Esha’s background.

Here are some clips:

Momeni was born in California while her father was a civil engineering student at Cal State Los Angeles. Her family moved back to Iran when she was a child, Northridge officials said. A painter and musician, she earned an undergraduate degree in graphic design at Azad University of Tehran in 2002 and came to the Northridge campus two years ago.

Dave Blumenkrantz, a Northridge journalism professor who also serves on Momeni’s thesis committee, recalled that he and other faculty members had asked her to consider dropping her trip to Iran in light of possible dangers even though her project is more related to art and photography involving women than to anything overtly political.

“Concerns were raised,” Blumenkrantz said. “She said, ‘Thanks for the advice, but this is something I really want to do.’ She was not talking about it in a militant way, but her mind was made up.

“She’s just brilliant and very talented,” he said. “She is an original thinker.”

Esha’s friend and mentor, filmmaker, Anayansi Prado, said that the last time she talked to Esha, she believed her phone was being tapped.

According to Prado, Esha has not been charged with anything, but friends and family are extremely worried.

“I am very surprised by her arrest,” said her professor, David Blumenkratz. “I am certain she was doing nothing wrong. I’m sure all my colleagues in the world would be surprised to hear that a young communication and Art student has been arrested for no apparent reason.

CSUN Campus President Jolene Koester said that the university is contacting U.S. officials for help in Esha’s case.