V．Special Groups Suffer Discrimination and Physical Assault
American women faced obvious discrimination on employment and career development. The poverty, health and safety problems of children were worrisome. Persons with disabilities suffered from violent victimization. Rampant sex harassment and infringement contributed to a swarm of protests.
-- Women suffered from serious threats of sex harassment and infringement. In October 2017, the scandal of American film producer Harvey Weinstein who sexually harassed a number of female stars broke out. Many Americans from all walks of life initiated a “#MeToo(Victim)” campaign on social media platforms to encourage the victims to protest against the widespread sex harassment and infringement, receiving active responses from about a million people. According to a report from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 60 percent of women experienced harassment at work (https://www.usatoday.com, December 8, 2017). According to a report published on November 22 in 2017 on BBC website, former USA Olympic gymnastics sports doctor Larry Nassar was charged with sexual assault against more than 130 women in his care, including a number of Olympic gold medalists. According to a report published on December 18 in 2017 on the website of Huffington Post, Alex Kozinski, a federal appeals court judge, received accusations from multiple former female clerks of inappropriate sexual behavior. According to the annual sex harassment report published in May 2017 by the U.S. Department of Defense, 14,900 cases of sex harassment happened in 2016 in the army (http://abc7ny.com, December 13, 2017). According to a report published on December 15 in 2017 on the website of Huffington Post, the privacy of the female victims could not be guaranteed and they lived in fear that people were going to track them down and figured out who they were, which inflicted negative impact on the victims to lodge a sex harassment accusation.
-- Serious gender discrimination on employment and career development. According to an employment report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the retail trade lost 54,300 jobs between October 2016 and October 2017, but the experiences between men and women were starkly different: women lost 160,300 jobs, while men gained 106,000 jobs (http://iwpr.org). According to a Pew Research Center survey, 57 percent of women say the country hasn’t done enough to give women equal rights with men and 38 percent of women cite gender discrimination experiences related to hiring, pay or promotion (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org).
-- Children’s personal rights faced serious threats. According to statistics released in July 2017 by the FBI, 68,068 cases of physical assault against children aged less than 10 years old were reported in the United States in 2016, 97,588 such cases against children aged between 11 and 15 years old and 159,963 such cases against youths aged between 16 and 20 years old. Among all the cases, 83,611 are sex offense cases (http://ucr.fbi.gov). According to a report released on November 28 in 2017 by the U.S. Institute for Women’s Policy Research, nearly one in five high school girls experienced bullying while over a quarter of Hawaii women reported unwanted sexual contact in their lifetime.
-- The health condition of poor children was worrisome. According to a BBC report on December 11 in 2017, there were 13.3 million poor children out of the U.S. poverty-stricken population, accounting for 18 percent of U.S. children. Nearly 9 million children in the United States (11.8 percent) were grown up in persistently poor families, accounting for 11.8 percent of the U.S. children（http://www.mobilitypartnership.org, May 18, 2017）. According to a survey on the health condition of the public housing residents in the District of Columbia, 33 percent of adult interviewees reported having a child with asthma, 21 percent of them reported having an overweight child and 14 percent of them reported having a child with a chronic disease（http://www.mobilitypartnership.org, March 6, 2017）.
-- Violent victimization against persons with disabilities. According to statistics released in July 2017 by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of violent victimization against persons with disabilities was 2.5 times higher than that for persons without disabilities above 12 years old between 2009 and 2015. The rate of violent crimes against persons with disabilities tripled that for persons without disabilities（http://www.bjs.gov）. According to statistics from the 2016 FBI Hate Crime Statistics Program released in 2017, out of the 6,063 single-bias incidents reported in 2016, 1.2 percent of them were prompted by disability bias (http://ucr.fbi.gov).
