Tag Archives: rape

To The Accused: I Do Not Accept Your Apologies

17 Nov

These past few weeks have been overwhelming. Weeks? Months, maybe. It’s hard to keep track. It has to be months, though, because it all started with Bill Cosby, Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes. It started with a flurry and it turned into a blizzard. I wonder if there will be an avalanche before it is all over, and if there is one who will be buried – the accused or the accusers. I wonder whether all the people coming forward are empowered by their sisters and brothers in trauma or whether they are afraid, like I am, that we have to seize this moment, right now, and run with it as far and as fast as we can before we lose it. Before it becomes about something else. Before this reckoning gets silenced and the conversations I have been hearing all around me start happening less and less; until eventually they become once again what they were – a bunch of us women talking in hushed tones, telling each other who to avoid, where not to go, and offering hugs and tears and sheer unbridled rage because that is all we have to give. We have, it seems, an unending well of that. Of rage and of support for each other.

I don’t know about all of you but what we are living through right now is hard. It physically hurts. I have felt like I’ve been punched in the gut, in the face. Like my heart has been ripped out of my chest again and again with every new allegation, every new story. There are just so many. And I knew there were, of course I knew. I’m not stupid. My girl friends, every single one of them, has experienced some sort of sexual abuse, sexual harassment. We’ve been touched, raped, followed, stalked, catcalled, sent unwanted photographs, masturbated in front of. Me and my group of friends are not unique, no. We are the norm. We are representative of just about every single woman who walks the face of this planet. We all have stories. We all have experiences. And now, once again, we are doing the work. We are coming forward, telling our stories, defending ourselves, explaining rape culture.

Every single time I have to say the same things I have been saying to the seemingly never ending parade of clueless men I feel defeated. It’s like an assembly line that just never seems to end. Honestly, I am heart broken and I am angry. So very, very angry. We all are. Sometimes I think if we could harness all the female rage built up over the centuries we could power every single electrical grid in the world with plenty of energy left over. That is how real this anger is, how deep it goes. And it isn’t just about men, it is about us too. We were raised by the patriarchy just the same as everyone else. So at the same time we were reading about equality and learning about women’s rights and paying lip service to how far we have come, we were being sexually abused and it was so damn normalized that we didn’t even know to call it what it was.

***

I came to political consciousness a few years before Monica Lewinsky was labeled a slut by the national media. It happened in 1998. I was 15 years old. I remember talking to my mom about it, not understanding why what the President did in his bedroom concerned us. I didn’t think someone’s extra-marital affair should overshadow the important things that were happening at the time like the assault of Abner Louima by the New York City Police Department or the fact that after 156 years of British Rule Hong Kong was turned over to China. I didn’t understand why we weren’t discussing our tragic and embarrassing response to the Rwandan Genocide or how scary The Unabomber was. But Monica Lewinsky’s experience was a huge deal for reasons that I could not understand because I was raised in a social climate that blames women, calls us gold diggers and power seekers. While out society lives and dies by the Church of Male Power, it refuses to acknowledge how that power is wielded as a weapon and how women are so often the victims. Bill Clinton had sexual contact with his 22-year-old intern and then he lied about it. He was impeached but not for his treatment of Lewinsky because that simply didn’t matter. He was impeached because he lied about it. And then, since we have been talking about apologies recently, he said something that I find to be so incredibly insulting, so incredibly dehumanizing to every single woman everywhere

I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

He did not have sexual relations “with that woman.” It makes me queasy to just type those words. That woman. I can hear his voice in my head saying those words. And to think, Lewinsky didn’t even want to come forward with what had happened. Yet she at 22 was dragged through the mud. Still to this day, 20 years later, “Monica Lewinsky dress” is one of the first items to come up when you google her. Bill Clinton was able to go on and finish his presidency, to continue to play an important in world politics. She will always be associated with that dress and its semen stain.

***

I guess the point I am trying to make is that we all grew up steeped in it. And some of us were victimized and, at the time, we didn’t even know it. And as we have gotten older we started to realize that the way men treat women, although it is normalized, is not normal. It is not right. And for as complicated as we make it, something that I believe we as a society do in order to justify its continuation, it actually isn’t that complicated. Sexual abuse, sexual misconduct and sexual assault is wrong. It has always been wrong. It is wrong whether it was at the hands of Roy Moore or Al Franken; Bill O’Reilly or Harvey Weinstein; Kevin Spacey or one of the presidents of the United States. They should all get the same treatment. They should all be taken down. They should have been taken down years ago. I have no sympathy for any of them. I don’t care what they thought the “social climate” was like when they did what they did. I don’t care how they justified it to themselves over all the years they tried to keep it quiet. Some of them, I’m sure, never thought it was wrong to begin with. They never thought about a day that for them was so normal but for the victim could have changed the course of her or his life. But that is not my problem. It is theirs. So I want them all to shut the hell up. It’s our turn.

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The Complexities of Shame

28 Apr

I learned something about myself this week: I am ashamed of my body. Now this isn’t a fishing expedition. This isn’t to get people to come out of the woodwork with all kinds of positive reinforcements. That isn’t what this is about. And, honestly, it has nothing to do with how I look in a lot of ways. It is, I think, largely about the fact that in my never-ending intellectual quest to understand my role in this world as a female, I have neglected to take care of myself…or, I guess more specifically, to engage in self-care…by which I mean to place importance on my own sense of empowerment, my own autonomy over my sexuality, and, perhaps most importantly, my own definition of it. Let me explain.

Earlier this week I was at a store buying a bra. As you ladies know, buying a bra is no easy task  – especially when it involves procuring support for a pair of boobs that have not been sized in years in advance of wearing a backless dress. Wearing a bra in the right size for you is a life-changer. Believe me. I feel like a brand new woman today. That’s not the point. So there I was at this fancy lingerie store with my good friend. I have never been to a fancy lingerie store as the main event; I’ve always been the sidekick. I have never thought that fancy lingerie was really “my thing,” whatever that means. We were in the changing room and the lovely woman who was helping me kept bringing me in all these different bras to try on. I kept putting on bra after bra and while my friend kept looking and telling me how good this one looked, or how pretty that one was, or how sexy I looked I just stood there, staring, feeling like I was wearing a costume. I felt like a little kid dressing up in her mom’s high heels and lipstick, prancing around the house like an absolute diva. (I never actually did this but I feel like it’s a thing that happens?) I just kept standing, staring at myself in these beautiful things, understanding that if I saw someone else in them I would think how incredibly beautiful and sexy she looked. How in control of her sexuality. But when I looked at myself I just felt…silly. I felt like I was trying to be someone who I am not. It was like, if there was a touch of cleavage showing then I had undone all the hard work I had put in over the years. All the effort of getting people to see me as a human and not a sex object. But part of being human, I think, is sometimes feeling sexy. And understanding that it doesn’t always have a negative connotation.

So obviously I got to thinking about it.

And thinking.

And thinking.

And it dawned on me. All of the years of the wrong people calling me sexy for all the wrong reasons, in all the wrong places, with all the wrong intentions had eroded my ability to understand that being sexy can, in theory, be empowering. I see that other women can do it, and I don’t look at them and think that somehow they are doing something wrong, that they are abandoning the cause, or whatever. I just don’t get how they do it. But this isn’t about women at large. This is about me. This is about me and the ways that I have internalized all the years of being a woman, or, I suppose more accurately, all of the years I’ve spent feeling like a sex object. And this is not to say that I feel like that all the time. That is by no means the case. A lot of times I just feel like a person. But often, not always but often, when my being female is made apparent to me, it is made apparent in a disempowering and hyper-sexualized manner. To the point that sometimes I just want to throw down everything I have, grab a bullhorn, and scream, for everyone to hear,

I AM NOT HERE FOR YOU! I DID NOT WAKE UP FOR YOU! I DID NOT GET DRESSED FOR YOU! AND I AM CERTAINLY NOT WALKING DOWN THIS STREET FOR YOU!

I would love it if my experience, and I can only speak for myself although I imagine there are plenty of other women out there who feel similarly if not the same way, was less like this. I wish I could brush off some of the bullshit and find my sexuality empowering. But I think the thing is that my sexuality has for so long been used as a weapon against me, been used as a way to make me feel small and less whole, that I don’t even know how to trust it. It’s like a separate part of me, almost. Like a lot of times when my sexuality is pointed out, I become less Rebekah the  Woman and more Rebekah the Object. And surprise surprise, I don’t like to be Rebekah the Object.

I mean, okay, so get this. Just now, I decided to look up the word “sexuality” on the Internet to make sure that I was using exactly the word I wanted and this is the definition I was given:

a capacity for sexual feelings

And its use in a sentence:

she began to understand the power of her sexuality

The power of it.

That is what I am talking about. Sexuality as a weapon. Or as something that is not easy to control by its posessor. Something that can, if not properly tended to, control her. Either use it to your advantage or it gets used against you but there is no opting out of the game. You can’t just say

Nah, I’m cool with just being in the world, going through my day and then unleashing my sexuality for the person, or people, I wish to share it with.

And, as I am sure you have all guessed, the significance of the “she” in that sentence was not lost on me. Of course she began to understand. And you know how she figured it out? Probably because someone showed her by using her sexuality to disempower her in some way. She realized the usefulness of it. What she could do with it. And that’s where I get a little bit lost. Somewhere in here, in all of this, to me, reads something of a manipulation. I try to go through life as something of a straight-shooter. People more or less know where they stand with me. I don’t keep my feelings quiet, and when I do manage to keep my mouth shut my facial expressions and body language always out me. So my issue is that there is something slick, something calculating, something unsavory about the way we talk about sexuality.  I know it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t always have to be a con. But sometimes it feels like that’s the way we talk about it to such a degree that it just becomes what it is in practice. And it’s like, sexuality is its own separate being as opposed to a part, with so many other parts, of a complex human.

But back to the dressing room. There I was, in that dressing room, trying to find a bra that wouldn’t draw more attention to my chest. A bra that wouldn’t give me more cleavage. A bra that wouldn’t undo all the hard work I’ve done to prove that I am well rounded. Hard work that has made me everything but. And, it’s like, I know that now we say that

strong is sexy

and

smart is sexy

and somehow sexy is supposed to be empowering, and meanwhile everything about high school dress codes and cat callers on the street and rape victim blaming and sexist comments and rape as a fucking war crime tells us that our sexuality, our sexiness, is something to be hidden and contained and something we should be shamed for, or hurt because of. Except for sometimes. Mostly in private. And how do we balance that? How is it our best friend and our mortal enemy all at the same time and how do we, on so many occasions, not have ownership of it? It’s like this weird, fucked up commodity that we can trade in, but only on occasion and with permission, and people may or may not try to make us feel badly about it. And sometimes that just seeps in. And some of us feel like maybe it’s best to try not to trade in it at all. But we’re not allowed to do that, either. It’s almost like we can’t do anything right.

So I don’t know. Maybe shame is the wrong word. Maybe feeling shame just plays into the whole damn thing. I guess what it is more than anything is that I just want to feel whole and autonomous and in a world where we have control over very little, I would like to be the only one – barring tragedy – with control over my body. And of course, it isn’t that I don’t want people to find me sexy. It’s just that I want the idea of being sexy to feel less unbalanced, less like something I use to get something, I want it to be more holistic. I want the idea of sexy, from the jump, to extend beyond just the physical rather than that having to be an add-on. And I know some of you are saying that it can be, and maybe you have found a way, but I don’t know. I just think it is too complicated, and so many of those complications  don’t stem from us. Rather they are learned behaviors given to us by society at large.

Clearly I’m still working this out.

I remember someone, after watching me do something kind, told me how sexy he thought that was. And for the first time in a while, since my ex was around probably, I felt good about being sexy. I felt like it was because of who I am rather than what I look like. And that’s something I can get behind. It’s about sexiness as a whole being, rather than sexiness as an entity apart. And I guess I wish it was always like that. Because I think my friends are sexy and, while they are all beautiful and handsome in their own ways, it is more because they are caring and smart and giving and funny and complicated and team players and all those other things that make them incredible humans.

I guess, in short, I like it when it feels well-rounded, all-inclusive. Because what I find sexy is someone who is smart, with a big laugh and a bigger heart, who is engaged in the world around them and also in a constant state of self-improvement. Because the physical stuff fades, eventually. Gravity does its work. But the rest of it, that takes longer to erode if you put the work in.

But for me, and as it concerns me, when it is just the physicality of it – that just doesn’t feel like mine anymore. I don’t feel like I own that. It’s been taken from me too many times. And maybe that’s why the shame sneaks in.

(And please, don’t anyone send me text messages saying you think I’m sexy. That’s not the point. And then I’ll feel like a shitty writer and that would ruin my day. Don’t ruin my day. It’s nice out.)

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Roosh Lives in His Mom’s Basement

6 Feb

People. This is just so good. SO GOOD.

So have you been reading about that guy Roosh? The self-proclaimed pick-up artist who organized all those pro-rape rallies and then cancelled them because he could no longer protect attendees from “unattractive women and their enablers?” Obviously he is a total scumbag. Anyway, so you know how we are all always joking about those anonymous male internet posters who actually live in their mother’s basements and have no friends? Well guess what?

ROOSH LIVES IN HIS MOTHER’S BASEMENT! IN REAL LIFE!

No really.

To be fair I’m not sure whether or not he has friends but I am going to guess no. Or, if he does have friends (and the word “friend” does not include people who just blindly follow all of his hate-filled misogynist rhetoric), that they also live in their mom’s basements and they all video conference and breath really heavy through their noses. People do that, right?

So the Daily Mail staked out Roosh’s mom’s house in Silver Spring, Maryland and took a few pictures of him answering the door to some cops who he had summoned there to complain about all the threats he was getting as a result of his publication of a supposedly satirical article (so not satirical at all) advocating for the legalization of rape on private property. Because if it is legal, then it isn’t rape, right? Semantics, after all. And now Anonymous has launched a doxxing campaign of Roosh and his followers.

Okay so there is some fucked up shit here. People shouldn’t stake out other people’s mom’s houses. Even if those people are complete and total dick heads who should have their Internet privileges taken away. (Could you imagine if we took people’s internet privileges away?) And people also shouldn’t dox other people, even if the proposed doxxees have initiated their own doxxing campaigns against people they don’t like. There is a lot to be said for taking the high road. And as much as I sort of love Anonymous for operating in the grey oftentimes on behalf of victims of rape, sexual assault and online sexual harassment, a lot of their tactics are, well, problematic. But of course so is the sexism and victim-blaming that is rooted in our society as well as in our legal system – from law enforcement on up. It all makes me crazy.

But – regardless of our feelings about the tactics used to uncover this information – we now have rock solid confirmation that Roosh actually is the total loser we all thought.

Roosh lives in his mom’s basement. So in theory when he “picks up” a woman (which I want to say I bet never happens but sadly I think that is probably untrue) using his methods of degradation and negging and whatever the fuck else those idiots are doing these days, he has to spring for a hotel, get her to take his sorry ass back to her place, or bring her to his mom’s basement where I guarantee you he has a single bed and a Transformer’s comforter. (No intended offense to the Transformers. They are, in fact, more than meets the eye.)

So to all you pick-up artists in training: your guru clearly uses his right hand a lot more than he is letting on. Or else he has soundproofed his mom’s basement. Or maybe he waits until his mom goes out with her friends or to run errands before he watches porn on his 12 computer screens or sneaks someone in through his window. It doesn’t matter. He lives in his mom’s basement. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

 

 

 

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A Reflection Post-Delhi

3 Jan

A little over a week ago when I was at work and before any customers came in, I was listening to the news while I set up the bar.  CNN was covering the protests that had swept through India after the brutal gang rape of a female student in Delhi, a city that is known for having high instances of sexual attacks.  The station had set up an interview with someone they considered important and knowledgeable — a man in his mid-to-late 40s — in order to get some local input on the attack itself as well as the protests that had erupted in its aftermath.  He said the normal things.  You know, how horrible the attack was, how he hoped the young woman would pull through, how surprised he was by the size of the protests when so many similar attacks (although I would imagine the majority of them far less brutal) had elicited nothing to that degree.  And then he said something (which I will paraphrase), by way of explanation of the rape itself, that has been clanging in my head for the past 8 days:

The reason these attacks have been happening is because of the percentage of males to females in the overall population.  These men don’t have women to settle down with.  There aren’t enough of them.  So they are frustrated and this is what happens.

And then there was clattering and screeching noises inside my head and I had to sit down.

Okay, so, it is true.  There are more men than women in Delhi.  According to the Delhi Census of 2011, the city itself has an overall population of 16,753,235.  Of that 16.7 million people, 8,976,410 are men and 7,776,825 are women.  So that you don’t have to do the math, that means that, in 2011 at least, there were 1,199,585 more men than women living in Delhi.  Sure, that’s a lot of people.  And sure, I imagine it is very frustrating for men who want to get married and have sex…or have sex and get married…or just have sex.  Being frustrated, as legitimate as it may be, is no excuse to get together with your friends, pretend to drive a shuttle bus, and pick up a girl off the street who is simply trying to get home and literally rape her to death.  No amount of frustration can ever justify that.  Ever.

You know what that is?  That sounds to me like you are trying to take the weight of responsibility off of these mens’ shoulders and blame it on sheer numbers.  They simply couldn’t help themselves.  Their desires to stick their penis in something was simply too great.  They were powerless to resist.  You know what I think?  I think that what happened to that woman, what those men did to her, was generations in the making and not just in India but everywhere.  All over the world.  (This analysis does not take the onus of responsibility off the individuals who perpetrated this attack, but simply is an attempt to put it into a greater context of inequality and violence.)  We are all guilty.  Sure, female infanticide is a part of it.  But the fact that there are less females than males is not what makes female infanticide a crucial part of this story.  The mindset that allows the killing, the neglect, the abandonment of female children is what makes this important.  The mindset that many people have that females are worth less than males is what allows people to justify killing their own babies and is part of the society in which these men are raised.  It is what allows them to see women as less human than they are.  As simply a hole in which to stick their penises.

But it goes beyond India.  And it goes beyond infanticide.  That is just one small part of it.  We, unfortunately, live in a world where, as I have said before, the female body is a battle ground.  Where the word of a female does not count for as much as the word of a male.  I read today in the newspaper that the Indian government, in response to this attack, has fast tracked the investigation and the trial of these men in order to show that this is not acceptable behavior.  But what about all the other rapes that were never investigated in India?  What about all the unopened rape kits that sit on shelves in cities and town across the United States, their statutes of limitations running out?  It’s a lot of work, it takes a lot of resources, to go through all those kits and we simply can’t keep up with the rate of sexual assaults.  But shouldn’t that be the biggest sign that something is wrong?  That we are dealing not with a few isolated incidents but instead with an epidemic?  Women are raped every single day.  Every single one.  Every day a man, or a group of men, decide to force open the legs of a women and violate her.  Insert himself inside of her.  And every day a man, or a group of men, all over the world gets away with it and the woman is left to pick up the pieces.  Often it is she is who vilified.  At what point are people in the mainstream, not people in a corner of the internet, but people with power and sway going to admit that we have a worldwide problem with the way we think about women.

We need to stop making excuses.  We need to stop trying to blame specific policies or cultural norms or religious laws.  We need to realize that we have a serious worldwide, cross-cultural, cross-societal, cross-religious deficit in the way we view women.  We can change laws.  We can have protests.  We can even hang a few people.*  But until we look inwards and understand that this view of women is engrained in us, all of us, nothing is actually going to change.  We will have another horrific gang rape in Delhi, or a small town in Texas.  We will have another woman assaulted by a powerful man, be it the French leader of an international organization or the president of the United States, and then dragged through the media, her reputation completely destroyed while, for the most part, the man continues in his pursuit of power and sex relatively unscathed.

Honestly, I just don’t think it should be that hard.  Part of being a human being, in my estimation, is to keep your eyes and ears open and constantly take things in, learn and adjust your behavior.  Maybe you were raised somewhere where everyone told you the Holocaust never happened and that Jews were born with horns.  But then you read Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz” and you realize what you were told simply isn’t true and you set off to learn and understand and adjust yourself to your new understanding of history and the world.   Women and men are physically different, sure, but in terms of our worth in the world we are equal.  It’s simple, just start there.  Without women, there would be no men and without men, no women.  We need each other for the species to survive.  So it’s not just that we need to respond to specific instances of infanticide, of rape, of abuse, of victim blaming. We need to acknowledge, and respond to, the environment that allows these things to continue happening.  We all, barring perhaps the sociopathic, think that murder is wrong, evil.  So why not rape?  Why not date rape?  Why not violence against women overall?  Let’s start there.  Raping a woman should mean the end of a political career.  It should be a sign that something is severely wrong with the perpetrator.  Rape is far too commonplace because people get away with it.  Because, for so many, the woman played a crucial role in her own assault simply by existing.  Because, in some places and to some people, a woman is tarnished by her rape, is considered dirty, undesirable.  The woman feels embarrassed, ashamed.  But it is us, all of us, that should feel ashamed that this keeps happening, again and again, and we don’t really, seriously, try changing the scope of the conversation.  So let’s try.

*For the record I am never in favor of capital punishment.  Let them rot in jail, I say.  And Indian prison, or so I have read, is not a fun place to live out your days.

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Thinking About Jailing the Victim? Here’s Why Not.

20 Apr

This is a post I have been thinking about writing for about a week now.  The idea was to give my rage a little time to dissolve.  As any friends or frequent readers might have already guess, this was an exercise in futility.  On April 15th, the New York Times (belatedly) published an article about a 17-year-old rape victim who was detained in Sacramento County, California (either in violation of, or due to the existence of, Marsy’s Law) for failing to appear at the court case against the man who was accused of raping her.  She was, ultimately, held in juvenile detention for 25 days for failing to appear twice.  The judge on the case deemed that rather than continuing to hold her until her scheduled appearance on April 23rd (almost a full month after she was first placed in custody on March 27th) she would be tracked using GPS monitoring.  Apparently her appearance is necessary because her attacker has been deemed a threat to public safety.

I really don’t even know where to start with this one.  According to the Times article, prosecutors in the case believe this girl is the missing link to putting away her attacker, a man who has a long criminal record including one prior rape.  Fair enough.  But ultimately that decision, whether to go through the strains of a trial, should be in the hands of the victim and not the criminal justice system.  As my friend Carrie said in a recent conversation, it should not be about justice, it should be about her justice.  Having been the victim of assault myself, as many women have been and, unfortunately, will be, I can understand her apprehension about coming forward.  I never told anyone what happened because I was afraid it was my fault.  I felt embarrassed and ashamed.  I, also, was 17.  Now, 11 years later, looking back on it I wish I had come forward and said something.  Who knows what this person did later.  Who knows whether his actions escalated.  Who knows whether by my coming forward I could have helped save someone else from experiencing the same thing I did.  The thing is that when I was 17 I wasn’t the same person I am now, at 28.  I was more concerned with healing myself, moving forward with my life, my freshman year at college, than I was with holding him (offiicially) responsible for his actions.  Come to think of it, I don’t think I even fully recognized, or named, the assault for a long time after it occurred.  Sure, the thought of seeing that person again, with whom I had a lot of friends in common, made me really uneasy but I don’t think I truly knew why that was.  I blocked it out and it took a number of years before I had the courage to admit to myself what had happened.  And again, I felt a sense of shame.  I was a strong woman, an independent woman, I shouldn’t have allowed this to happen.  But the thing is, it had nothing to do with how strong or independent I was, and I certainly didn’t let it happen (or “ask for it” which seems the common vernacular).  It had nothing to do with me as a person at all, really.  It had to do with his power and my, simply by being born a woman, lack thereof. It had to do with the society in which he and I were both raised.  My point here is that I understand the desire the prosecutors have to put this man behind bars.  He is a reprehensible human being.  But putting the responsibility for the safety of an entire community, and the possible punishment of a career criminal, on the shoulders of a young woman who likely feels responsible for her own assault is just as reprehensible.  She needs to heal, in her time and in her way, she needs support, she needs to either speak out against him or not, she needs to do what she needs.  And, really, she is the only one who knows what that is.  But since they have jailed her, since that has happened, here are some reasons why I find it incredibly problematic.

1.  According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) 54% of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported.  That’s a lot.  They even came up with this incredibly useful, and incredibly depressing, bar graph that pictorializes rape conviction rates.

Convictions

Source:  RAINN

  1. Justice Department, National Crime Victimization Survey: 2006-2010
  2. FBI, Uniform Crime Reports: 2006-2010
  3. National Center for Policy Analysis, Crime and Punishment in America, 1999
  4. Department of Justice, Felony Defendents in Large Urban Counties: average of 2002-2006

If one were to do a risk-reward analysis of the results of coming forward after a rape or assault, one would likely conclude that reliving a traumatic event in front of a group of strangers to most likely not succeed in putting someone behind bars is not really worth it.  It partially explains why so many rapes and assaults go unreported and also might explain why this specific victim decided against reporting to her court appearance the first two times she was required to do so.

2.  It is not, I repeat not, the responsibility of this 17-year-old girl, or any other rape or assault victim, to protect the community from his/her attacker.  Sure, it would be great if she felt compelled to do so and even better if it worked in her favor.  Clearly this man is a monster and shouldn’t be free, but to force a victim to face her attacker against her will is inhuman.  The prosecutors in this case can not know, even if they themselves have been assaulted in their lifetime, what this girl’s life has been like, how she might feel about her attack, the fear she might have of facing her attacker, the trust or distrust she might have towards law enforcement and the justice system.  No one but her knows how she is feeling and no one but her can make the decision as to how she would like to go forward.

3.  Back to the rape report statistics, why do people not have the ability to have a big picture understanding of things?  I get it, the prosecutors want to put this man in jail.  But how about the ways in which this story is going to impact other victims of rape and assault?  Do they really think that by putting this girl behind bars they are instilling any sort of trust in law enforcement and the justice system’s ability to handle cases such as this?  Do they really think that other victims are going to feel safe reporting their own attacks when the possibility they will be jailed for being afraid to appear in court is in the back of their minds?

4.  If you have ever followed a rape or sexual assault case that has garnered national, or international attention, then you will know that the woman is rarely portrayed as a hero for standing up to her attacker.  In our justice system, in media coverage, and in our society she is a slut until proven otherwise.  The victim-blaming runs rampant.  Press coverage, and casual conversation, is rife with questions and assumptions.  What was she wearing?  What was she doing out at that time of night in that area of town?  Where was her mother?  Had she ever lied on any document on public record because if she had, if she was capable of lying then, what’s to make us think she isn’t lying now?  How many sexual partners had she had previously?  Was she promiscuous, or perceived as being promiscuous, in her life?  How much had she had to drink?  You get the idea.  If the victim is not perceived as relatable and trust-worthy then the assault never happened.  She is forced to defend her past, her actions, and her personality as if she is the one on trial.  And then, as if that wasn’t enough, she has to look at examples like Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in which he is respected and she is still, 17 years later, running away from the image of a semen-stained dress.  She is defined by her assault and he by his accomplishments.  With events like these to look to, who can blame a victim for not wanting to put herself through it?

Maybe it seems as if I have taken my analysis of this specific incident a little too far.  The point of the matter is that no unique rape or assault exists in a vacuum separate from all the rapes and assaults, and official responses to them, that came before.  Every single day women are in danger of becoming victims and, by jailing this young woman, Sacramento County has just taken, on behalf of the entire criminal justice system, a step backwards in terms of its openness to female victims of sexual violence.  We are further silenced, unprotected, disempowered, and victimized because of actions such as this.  And now this young girl has yet another trauma to overcome, the trauma of her own incarceration.

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A Word on Statistical Inconsistencies

16 Mar

In response to my post According to Pridemore, Abuse is Not an Excuse, I received the following comment from a reader named “Rog”:

A million rapes in 2009? That is a very high number. FBI statistics for the crime category “forcible rape” report 88,097 forcible rapes in 2009: a greater than 10-fold difference from the CDC survey cited in your post. While I accept that idea that rapes are under-reported, I doubt they are under-reported to the extent that less than 10% of rapes are ever reported to law enforcement. Do you have some thoughts in regards to this discrepancy in statistics?

A quandary!  So I decided to do some research.  And Rog, this is what I came up with.  First, I think these two organizations are using different definitions of rape.  The FBI defines forcible rape as follows:

Forcible rape is the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will. Attempts or assaults to commit rape by force or threat of force are also included; however, statutory rape (without force) and other sex offenses are excluded.

I would like to just interject at this point that I find this definition of rape to be problematic for two main reasons.  First, men, as it turns out FBI, can also be raped.  In this specific case this narrow definition of “forcible rape” makes my job a bit easier as I am looking for women-only information, but I think it is counter-productive and dangerous to exclude a whole swath of victims from a basic understanding of the concept.  Second, I take issue with the use of “carnal knowledge” in this definition.  It is my understanding, and I verified this by a quick Google search, that carnal knowledge refers in the most narrow sense to penetration of the vagina by the penis.  In some more loose (no pun intended) definitions, it can include oral and anal sex, but it does not include penetration by a foreign object.  I am curious to see how far the FBI extends this terminology for the purposes of its definition of rape, but in my opinion, whatever it may be, it is not far enough.*

The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), on the other hand, defines rape in the following way differently.  I found this definition on a blog called The Curvature.  If you’re interested, you should read her post on this subject.  The author goes into a lot more detail about the failings of the NISVS study and its definitions better than I could ever do (including the near-omission of trans people from the survey) so I’ll leave that critique to her.  Anyway…

Rape is defined as any completed or attempted unwanted vaginal (for women), oral, or anal penetration through the use of physical force (such as being pinned or held down, or by the use of violence) or threats to physically harm and includes times when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent. Rape is separated into three types, completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, and completed alcohol or drug facilitated penetration.

  • Among women, rape includes vaginal, oral, or anal penetration by a male using his penis. It also includes vaginal or anal penetration by a male or female using their fingers or an object.
  • Among men, rape includes oral or anal penetration by a male using his penis. It also includes anal penetration by a male or female using their fingers or an object.

So part of what is going on in terms of statistical discrepancies might be that the definitions these two organizations are using are very different.  Another part is certainly, as you mentioned, under-reporting.  According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), about 60% of all rapes and sexual assaults go unreported.  (The rate of reporting is even worse for men than it is for women.)  RAINN then does a flow chart of sorts to show the likelihood of a rapist being reported, arrested, convicted, and punished.  It’s pretty depressing stuff.  So, if we were to call the statistic from NISVS an even million and assume that only 40% of those rapes are reported to a law enforcement agency, we are looking at 400,000 reported rapes, much closer to the FBI’s number.  If we then look at the discrepancy in definitions, with the FBI’s being much less broad than that used by NISVS, that could also account for a lot of the difference.  But also, and this is just my unsubstantiated opinion, I think the number presented by the FBI is just plain wrong.  And, to be completely honest, I think the one given by the NISVS is also low.  I think our definition and understanding of rape is woefully narrow.  I also think that, although the NISVS makes a stab at trying to understand and account for intimate partner rape, a lot of people do not report being raped by their significant other.  It’s understandable but it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.  Anyway, I could go on.  I hope this at least chipped away at the concern raised.  Thanks, Rog!

*The FBI’s new definition of rape (different from forcible rape?) that was released in 2011 states the following:  “Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”  I am assuming the statistics that Rog presented me with were using the definition of “forcible rape” rather than just regular run-of-the-mill rape, but I figured I would include both definitions.  Also, I am confused by this.

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