Rape is Rape, With or Without Bystanders
(Trigger Warning) There was nationwide outrage and heartbreak yesterday as more details emerged and several arrests were made in the case of the 15 year old girl who was raped and beaten outside a high school dance. Due to the fact that many (10, 12, 20?) onlookers watched and cheered while the girl was attacked, the incident has grabbed our attention.
Sadly, this was not the only case of gang rape in the news. Several others were written about, mostly in local newspapers, but will probably never make the national spotlight or will fade away as soon as a different story takes their place.
-A 16 year old girl testified she was kidnapped and raped in Santa Rosa by three men.
-Earlier this month, three men were sentenced to life in prison for a gang rape in Florida.
-And then there was the woman who was raped by her Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Iraq. Apparently, she was not the only defense worker attacked. But this story made headlines when Senator Al Franken proposed an amendment that would withhold defense contracts from companies that restrict employees from bringing charges of assault to court. Read more here about Franken’s amendment and the 30 Republican senators who opposed it.
The presence of bystanders in the Richmond rape scares us and makes us question humanity. But every violent attack, including this one, calls for outrage –regardless of the headlines. One in six women and one in 33 men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.
As parents, we wonder how we can protect our children and how we can raise our sons and daughters to have compassion and respect for human life. For more facts on rape and information on prevention and victim support, visit RAINN, The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. For information on violence against women, visit the U.S. Department of Justice Office of on Violence Against Women.
More on this topic:
http://www.care2.com/causes/womens-rights/blog/hollywood-and-richmond-the-common-link/
I am So damn angry about this unbelievable, brutal behaviour. And I’m talking about the on-lookers. They might as well have stuck their body parts into this poor girl themselves….Because they RAPED her, too.
STOP blaming the parents, teachers, media, and god forbid, some sort of psychological “mob mantality” shit.
Stop blaming everybody else rather than the RAPIST, the MURDER, the PERVERT….
I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. Elie W. said that “INDIFFERENCE” is worse than HATE….
This is a PERFECT example of indifference and the absence of empathy and commpassion.
I am frightened for this generation…and the next. The on-lookers must be prosecuted along with the RAPISTS.
That’s all there is to it….
It is very hard to write about. These two authors did a great job: http://www.rachelsimmons.com/2009/10/reminder-a-15-year-old-girl-was-brutally-gang-raped-while-over-twenty-teenagers-watched/
Every so often I get the idea to do a blog post titled “Today’s rapes,” or something similarly awful, and go through tons of newspapers/Google and link to all the stories about cases of rape that I can find. The point being to show that there are an obscene number of these stories every day. But whenever I try, it is way too sad to continue.
Anyway, all this is meant to say that I agree, all such crimes are outrageous. It’s easy to get lost in the details of this girl’s story, because it’s immediately clear that what happened to her was WRONG. People don’t always see the “wrong” so quickly in rape cases.