25
   

Hey, Can A Woman "Ask To Get Raped"?

 
 
firefly
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 07:26 pm
@Arella Mae,
Quote:
Then I am thoroughly confused by the title of that play.


No, I think you're confused by the title of Wendy McElroy's article--she's suggesting feminists support rape, which is just crazy. McElroy does not like the play. But, because other women do like it, does not mean they support rape.

The title of the play is, "The Vagina Monologues"--it's different women, of various ages and backgrounds, talking about their vaginas. It doesn't celebrate rape at all. I think it's supposed to be a celebration of female empowerment. As I said in my other post, I wasn't impressed when I read the play, and I've never seen it performed. But, apparently many women do find it meaningful, and I'm glad that it helps to raise money to fight violence against women.
Arella Mae
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 07:30 pm
@firefly,
Oh my! I was totally confused! Sheesh! I must be getting old. But isn't part of the play about a woman seducing a 13 year old? I need to go back and read it again.

This is what I was talking about:
Quote:
In the award-winning radical feminist play by Eve Ensler entitled The Vagina Monologues, a 24-year-old woman plies a 13-year-old girl with alcohol, then sexually seduces her. By statute and by feminist definition, this "seduction" is rape. Yet, from the stage, the little girl declares, "Now people say it was a kind of rape ... Well, I say if it was rape, it was a good rape..." Apparently, the reference to "good rape" has been deleted from some performances but the surrounding language makes the rape’s goodness clear. For example, the little girl eulogizes her orgasm:


So let me see if I got it straight. The ones that some call rape feminists are against what is in that paragraph? I am sorry I am so confused.
firefly
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 07:34 pm
Using a victim adovocate to help rape victims seems like a very good idea, even if the victims decide not to go through with prosecuting their attacker.

Quote:

Misconceptions about rape remain and are a burden to victims
October 24, 2010
Rachel Dissell, The Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Our mistaken ideas about what rape is start as early as preschool, with lessons about "stranger danger."

Sensational news reports about women attacked in dark alleys by unknown perverts add to the confusion, as messages about who we say the bad guys are get pounded into the public consciousness.

But the majority of rapists and molesters don't lurk in dark corners. They are often people we know -- relatives, neighbors, dates. Rapes don't always fit the patterns we've come to expect.

Our wrong-headed perceptions create a conundrum for victims, detectives and prosecutors, who must decide whether to battle the myths and pursue justice or avoid a spectacle of second-guessing and blaming the victim that, some say, can be as traumatic as being sexually violated -- like a second rape.

"Victims of rape often don't get justice simply because public perception does not match reality," said Megan O'Bryan, president and chief executive of the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center.

Part of the center's mission is to end those myths through education and advocacy.

But that can be of little solace for victims tangled in the system now. "It is such a slow process due to a culture that still seeks to blame the victim," O'Bryan said.

Decades of national studies and victim surveys back up anecdotal evidence that says that more than 60 percent of sexual crime victims are attacked by friends, dates, former boyfriends, husbands or relatives -- people they know.

In Cleveland, that number is even higher. Of 339 rapes reported this year through July, nearly 75 percent involved someone the victim knew.

Many times alcohol or drugs are involved. And often there is little evidence of physical injury. Cases typified as "he said, she said" are the least likely to be reported and most likely to go unprosecuted.

Unfortunately, sexual perpetrators understand those same biases and exploit them, said Sgt. Liz Donegan of the Austin Police Department, known for its work in combating sex crimes.

"As a society, we are allowing these crimes to happen to a certain extent," she said. "Perpetrators know we will blame victims and challenge their credibility."

For more than eight years the Austin department has collected information on sexual assaults it handles.

And it is fighting the rape culture by sharpening its investigative techniques toward the typical victim -- rather than concentrating on the less common stranger cases.

A special commission appointed by Mayor Frank Jackson this year to examine how sexual assault cases are handled in Cleveland referred to Austin's work in many of its recommendations for change.

Donegan, who has supervised the adult sex crimes unit for eight years, said police and prosecutors need to push back against the cultural myths among the public -- and within their own professions.

"It's realizing that there's often alcohol involved and that there's often no injuries. And that most of the time the investigation is going to be hard and going to come down to a consent issue," Donegan said.

"Being a police officer, you want to see things in black and white," she said. "Sex crimes are almost always gray."

There was a perception that the cases were lousy, that the victims were not credible, Donegan said. The department leadership educated officers and began demanding that the so-called acquaintance rapes be investigated with the same vigor as stranger rapes. Attitudes began to change, and the more challenging cases got worked on, she said.

But that doesn't mean that all the cases are solved or that all the victims feel great about the process.

Detectives still have to walk a fine line between their duties as impartial investigators and the need to let victims know the criminal justice system supports them. And they have to give victims the ultimate choice and control over whether they want to participate in a prosecution, Donegan said.

In Austin, advocates employed by the department and the courts have played an increasingly larger role in sex-crimes cases. They respond to 9-1-1 calls and go to hospitals. They prepare victims for what types of questions to expect when interviewed by detectives. They explain each step in the case. And if the case goes to court, they are there, too.

Until recently in Cleveland, volunteer and professional rape crisis center advocates were mainly linked with victims when referred by hospitals, by detectives or, further down the line, by prosecutors.

Now, the rape crisis center has a victim advocate stationed in the sex crimes unit to review all reports and quickly offer help to victims-- whether they choose to prosecute or not.

Most people who report sexual attacks drop out of the process after making the initial report, according to a Plain Dealer analysis of reports from 2004 through 2008.

Detectives' reports often note that the victims can't be found or decide not to cooperate with the investigation. Less than 30 percent of reported cases ever make it to court.

Current members of the Sex Crimes & Child Abuse Unit declined to talk about how public perception plays into their interaction with victims.

O'Bryan said that pursuing prosecution isn't always the best decision for many rape victims.

"It is a personal decision that balances many factors including what is going on it that victim's life and the fact that many perpetrators are known and trusted by the victim, making it a less 'believable' rape," O'Bryan said.

"Many victims don't want their experiences scrutinized or to sit face-to-face from their perpetrator in court through a lengthy and often re-victimizing process. So they decide it is simply better for their healing not to prosecute."

But that decision has to be one that is made after a case is investigated and a victim is fully informed, said Donegan.

"We want victims to have that choice and that control," she said. "But if the default is not going forward because it's easier, then you will never challenge the status quo."

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/10/misconceptions_about_rape_rema.html
Arella Mae
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 07:39 pm
@firefly,
I think it is a marvelous idea! Having even one person that understands with you while you are going through the aftermath can be so encouraging. Do you think the "blame the victim" will ever totally go away?
0 Replies
 
OCCOM BILL
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 07:40 pm
@Arella Mae,
Arella Mae wrote:

I am rather perplexed. I thought there was a statute of limitations on rape? Not that I think he shouldn't pay for his crime but I don't understand how they can arrest him 25 years later.
Statutes of Limitations vary, and so do exceptions to same. A quick look at Florida seems to indicate that about 35 years ago they decided there should be no limitation on this type of case, if the offense was committed against a minor and was reported within 72 hours. Good for them!
BillRM
 
  -4  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 07:41 pm
@firefly,
The poor poor police if they do their jobs and filter out the likely false rape charges then they are uncaring male bigots.

If they do not do this screening they are tying up the legal system going after innocent men.
0 Replies
 
Arella Mae
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 07:44 pm
@OCCOM BILL,
Okay, I wasn't aware of that. Thanx Bill! There is justice in this world!
0 Replies
 
Intrepid
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 08:15 pm
@Arella Mae,
Arella Mae wrote:

I am rather perplexed. I thought there was a statute of limitations on rape? Not that I think he shouldn't pay for his crime but I don't understand how they can arrest him 25 years later.

b]Rape suspect arrested 25 years later[/b]
DEERFIELD BEACH, Fla. (WSVN) -- Officials have finally solved a decades-old rape case.


Another case of 26 years later, but in reverse.

News Alert
B.C. man acquitted on decades-old rape conviction

Ivan Henry has been acquitted of the sexual assault charges that sent him to prison for 26 years, thanks to a B.C. Court of Appeal ruling Wednesday.

For the latest on this breaking story, visit http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/10/27/bc-ivan-henry-ruling.html

I know that Billy & Hawkeye will probably jump all over this like a jackel at a rabbit convention, but the opposite situation has to be presented in fairness.
Arella Mae
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 08:17 pm
@Intrepid,
How wonderful for him! His attitude is absolutely inspiring. Thank God for DNA and modern science.

None of us ever said innocent men don't get accused of rape or get convicted.
.
0 Replies
 
firefly
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 08:29 pm
@Arella Mae,
Quote:
So let me see if I got it straight. The ones that some call rape feminists are against what is in that paragraph? I am sorry I am so confused.


Don't apologize. I think McElroy's article is confusing, particularly if you are unfamiliar with the play. One of the voices in the play is that of a 13 year old girl (in later versions raised to 16 year old) who had been sexually traumatized earlier in her life (I guess by a man, I really don't remember). As an adolescent, she is seduced by an older woman and has a pleasurable sexual experience with that woman which helps to "cure" the damage from her earlier sexual trauma and makes her realize she doesn't need men. Yes, that would be statutory rape, and people did object to that--that's why the character's age was later raised to 16.

I think the playwright was extremely misguided in using this as an example of how females can help each other recover from earlier sexual assault traumas at the hands of men, or how women can find sexual pleasure with each other rather than men--which appears to have been the playwright's intention, rather than any promotion of statutory rape. It is a variation on the theme of the older woman seducing a 13 or 16 year old boy who is unsure of his masculinity and his having a very enjoyable sexual experience, although that would be statutory rape too even though the boy enjoyed it. It was appropriate that this particular episode in the play generated considerable controversy, and that the age of the character was raised. But it's also only one episode in the play, and the playwright's intention was to deliver a pro-female message and not to promote or celebrate statutory rape. It may also have been based on an actual female's account, since the playwright interviewed several hundred women before writing the play. I suspect that those audiences who enthusiastically applaud the play are responding to the play's overall "message" and, particularly with the girl now being 16, do not think about it as a rape. I honestly do not recall how I viewed it when I read the play. It might have been one of the reasons I really didn't like the play.

"Rape feminists" is what those who oppose the rape laws call the women who support the rape laws.

BillRM
 
  -3  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 08:35 pm
@Intrepid,
No I am not jumping as there had been over a hundred men who had as of now been released due to DNA evidences not only for rape but for murder and others such crimes.

I am always happy that some innocent man is released and at the same time sadden that the laws of probability would indicate that there are far more men now serving sentences for crimes they did not do where no DNA evidence now exist to set them free. Thank god we now do have DNA technology to end stop such injustices in the future from happening.

This has little to do with the problems of women knowingly pressing false charges against men for sexual assaults that were in facts acts of consensus sex.

There are also no end of news stories of such events happening as in this thread I had proven over and over.
0 Replies
 
Arella Mae
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 08:36 pm
@firefly,
Okay, now I get it! Thank you for explaining it to me. I definitely don't think they should have used the seduction of a 13 year old or a 16 year old for that matter as a way of helping someone that had a traumatic sexual experience. I believe that could cause even more damage to an already confused person.
BillRM
 
  -4  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 08:45 pm
@Arella Mae,
Quote:
definitely don't think they should have used the seduction of a 13 year old or a 16 year old for that matter as a way of helping someone that had a traumatic sexual experience. I believe that could cause even more damage to an already confused person.


You do not get the point at all lesbian sex is good and healing and can repair the harm done by heterosexual sex.

This group who pumps up the danger/risk of sexual assaults seem to have more then it fair share of females men haters among them.
0 Replies
 
firefly
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 08:45 pm
@Intrepid,
This man was not imprisoned on the false accusation of females, so it won't make Hawkeye and BillRM happy. Actual rapes had apparently occurred.

And this exoneration was not based on DNA evidence, Arella Mae.

The judge apparently misinstructed the jurors, among other things, and that contributed to the convictions.
Quote:

Henry's convictions related to the rapes of several women that occurred between May 1981 and June 1982 in three Vancouver neighbourhoods.

On Wednesday the appeal court ruling quashed all the convictions and granted him an acquittal on all 10 counts.

The appeal court said the trial judge erred by instructing jurors they could find Henry guilty because of his reluctance to participate in a police lineup in 1982 and that the instructions on the proper identification of a perpetrator were inadequate. Henry represented himself at the original trial.

It also ruled the charges should have been divided into separate trials and a mistrial should have been declared when the Crown abandoned an application for jury instruction.

The court ruled any of the errors would require a new trial if considered alone but that evidence against Henry as a whole was incapable of proving the element of identification on any of the 10 counts, and thus the verdicts were unreasonable.


Part of the problem might have been that this man represented himself at trial, so his defense might not have been as good as it might have been had he used an attorney.

The main injustice is that it took so long to go through the appeals procedure before the conviction could be reversed.


Arella Mae
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 08:47 pm
@firefly,
I really shouldn't try to discuss much when I have a bad headache. Well, for whatever reason this innocent man was released I say praise God! His attitude is one to be admired. It surely cannot be easy to let that go. Kudos to him!
0 Replies
 
firefly
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 08:59 pm
@Arella Mae,
Quote:
I definitely don't think they should have used the seduction of a 13 year old or a 16 year old for that matter as a way of helping someone that had a traumatic sexual experience. I believe that could cause even more damage to an already confused person.


Well, it's a play. And nothing makes playwrights experts in understanding sexual trauma or how to heal from it. And the overall views in the play, and the "message" are those of the playwright. The playwright doesn't represent all women, or even most feminists, in her views, but, apart from this play, she has become an advocate for ending violence toward women. It's that advocacy that has kept this play performed yearly on V-Day. Otherwise, I really think it would have drifted into obscurity long ago.
Arella Mae
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 09:01 pm
@firefly,
I am glad that the author is an advocate. I wonder if their view might have changed a bit re that scene.
0 Replies
 
firefly
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 09:25 pm
This news report should not contain the man's name--the use of his name helps to identify his daughter. Under rape shield laws her identity should be protected. Particularly because she is only 11, her identity should be protected. Most news stories of incest usually do not give the name of the relative/perpetrator for that reason.

Quote:
Palmdale man held in rape of 11-year-old daughter
The Associated Press
10/27/2010

PALMDALE, Calif.—A Palmdale man has been arrested on suspicion of raping his 11-year-old daughter.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department says 33-year-old Christopher Martinez was arrested Tuesday. He remains jailed Wednesday on $4 million bail.

Authorities say they began investigating Martinez in August after the girl reported that her father repeatedly had raped her over the past two years in their home and at a rented Antelope Valley motel room.

He was charged last month with five felony .
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_16446463
BillRM
 
  -4  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 10:18 pm
@firefly,
http://mobile.salon.com/mwt/excerpt/2010/09/20/my_lie_maran

In the late 1970s, a handful of feminist scholars did some groundbreaking research and delivered some distressing news: one in three American women and one in ten American men, they reported, had been victims of childhood sexual abuse.

Their studies proved that incest wasn't the rare anomaly it was long believed to be. Incest happened often. It happened in normal families -- in the house down the street, in the bedroom down the hall.

A psychological phenomenon called repressed memory had allowed this outrage to go unacknowledged, even unknown. As Freud had first asserted a century earlier, the impact of child sexual abuse on young psyches was so profound that victims often lost their memories for years or decades. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were walking around with the time bomb of untreated childhood sexual abuse ticking inside them.

For better and for worse, these findings transformed incest from a dirty little secret of American family life into an American obsession. During the 1980s and early 1990s, several cultural icons, including Susanne Somers, former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur, Roseanne Barr, and Oprah Winfrey, went public as incest survivors. Incest memoirs hit best-seller lists. "The Color Purple," whose protagonist had borne two of her father's babies, won the Pulitzer Prize. Sympathetic and sensational incest stories proliferated on TV news shows and after-school specials and in newspapers and magazines.

Reported cases of child abuse and neglect surged from 669,000 in 1976 to 2.9 million in 1993. During those years, according to "Victims of Memory" author Mark Pendergrast, up to one million families were torn apart by false accusations of sexual abuse.Mine was one of them.

Many of these accusations were made by adult daughters who claimed to have repressed and then recovered memories of childhood molestation by their fathers.

I was one of them.

In courtrooms around the country, daughters sat sobbing on witness stands, pointing across the room at their fathers, listing the atrocities their fathers had committed against their bodies and their souls.

If I'd been just a bit more suggestible (more impulsive, more vindictive), I might have been one of them.

Here's how I became convinced that this lie was true.

In 1982, I edited a book by one of those pioneering feminist researchers. I was shocked and moved by what I learned, working on the book I'll call "The Incest Secret." With missionary zeal -- and without considering the tunnel vision, good guy–bad guy polarization, and dangerous excesses that often accompany that kind of heart-thumping fervor -- I spent the next few years writing exposés of child sexual abuse for local and national newspapers and magazines.

As a journalist doing what journalists do -- slouching toward objectivity, stumbling over my preexisting prejudices and proclivities -- I helped spread the panic: basing conclusions on skewed studies I believed to be accurate, citing manipulated statistics I trusted, quoting experts who proved more attached to their points of view than they were to the facts.

Along with other writers on both sides of the issue, I used quotation marks to declare my allegiance, calling it recovered memory, not "recovered memory"; incest survivor, not "incest survivor"; "false memory syndrome" not False Memory Syndrome.

I didn't just hand out the Kool-Aid. I drank it. I didn't just write about recovered memories; I spent a decade trying to recover my own. Shortly after the 1988 publication of the Bible of the recovered memory movement, "The Courage to Heal," I joined the ranks of self-identified incest survivors and accused my father of molesting me.

The full story of how I came to that conclusion is complicated. [To read an interview with Meredith Maran, click here.] During that time, I was in love with a woman who identified strongly as an incest survivor. I was in therapy with a woman who believed in recovered memory. Many of my friends were incest survivors. I'd been plagued by strange dreams -- dreams in which little girls whose fathers had raped them told me, night after night, that I was one of them. I made a list of the "evidence" and presented it to my brother over dinner one night. I've never seen him look so miserable.

"I've read your articles," he said finally. "I know this kind of thing happens all the time. I just never thought --"

"I know," I said. "Me neither. It took me a long time and a lot of therapy to put the clues together," I said. "But there's no other way it makes sense."

"Doesn't that seem weird to you?" he asked. "Your girlfriend was molested. Your best friend. Now you."

Tears sprang to my eyes. "It's shocking to me, too," I said. "But I really need you to believe me."

"I do," my brother said. "I do believe you."

In March 1992, accused parents banded together to form the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). "When the memory is distorted, or confabulated," the FMSF newsletter declared, "the result can be what has been called the False Memory Syndrome; a condition in which a person's identity and interpersonal relationships are centered around a memory of traumatic experience which is objectively false but in which the person strongly believes."

Although false memory syndrome was the invention of laypeople, not a medically identified condition, the phrase burned its way across the country, setting off the firestorm that would come to be known as "the memory war."

Even characterizing the conflict was cause for controversy. Was the "outing" of child sexual abuse a brave crusade to save children's lives, or a witch hunt reminiscent of others in the American hall of shame?

Nearly overnight, "false memory" replaced "recovered memory" on the American tongue. Therapists were sued for implanting false memories, stripped of their licenses, ordered to pay six-figure settlements to clients who'd once credited them with saving their incest-ravaged lives. Accused molesters' convictions were overturned. Many but not all of the accused were set free.

Families devastated by incest accusations were now bifurcated, also, by warring beliefs about truth and memory. If the outraged parents -- my outraged parents -- were right, they were the victims, and their daughters were -- I was -- the perpetrator. If the daughters were right, we were the victims, our parents the perpetrators, denying the trauma they'd inflicted upon us. Each side allied itself with a phalanx of opposing experts who built constituencies and careers on unproved certainties.

When the culture tilted toward disbelief, I leaned that way too. In 1996, I faced the truth that my accusation was false. I apologized to my father and my family, quit incest therapy, and broke up with -- truth be told, was dumped by -- my incest survivor lover.

A few years later, just when I'd fully regained my mind and my memories, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and began to lose his.

Redemption-wise, my father's diagnosis left me two options.

I could hope my father would forget the wrong I did him, along with the other bits and bytes that were slipping through the fissures in his brain. Or I could convince him to have a conversation with me about what I did and why I did it and how sorry I was.

A girl can dream: maybe he'd even forgive me, so I might step into that shaft of light and begin to forgive myself. But first I needed to understand. How had I -- more neurotic than some, but surely less neurotic than many -- come to believe that my father, a man lacking the cruelty to squash a spider, had sexually abused me throughout my childhood and spent the next twenty years covering it up?

How had so many other people come to believe the same thing at the same time?

In "Creating Hysteria," Joan Acocella's 1999 exposé of the sex-abuse panic of the 1980s, she wrote, "One of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of psychotherapy seems to be coming to an end."

Acocella's prediction was true, and false. The sex-abuse panic did recede. But ten years later, it still hasn't come to an end.

"When you once believed something that now strikes you as absurd, even unhinged, it can be almost impossible to summon that feeling of credulity again," Margaret Talbot wrote in The New York Times Magazine on January 7, 2001. "Maybe that is why it is easier for most of us to forget, rather than to try and explain, the Satanic-abuse scare that gripped this country in the early 80's -- the myth that Devil-worshipers had set up shop in our day-care centers, where their clever adepts were raping and sodomizing children, practicing ritual sacrifice, shedding their clothes, drinking blood and eating feces, all unnoticed by parents, neighbors and the authorities.

"Of course, if you were one of the dozens of people prosecuted in these cases, one of those who spent years in jails and prisons on wildly implausible charges, one of those separated from your own children, forgetting would not be an option. You would spend the rest of your life wondering what hit you, what cleaved your life into the before and the after, the daylight and the nightmare."

As Talbot says, the panic hasn't ended for the preschool teachers and fathers and uncles who were convicted of child sexual abuse 20 years ago and remain incarcerated today.

It hasn't ended for the children, now adults, who testified against those prisoners at age four or 10 or 30, some of whom have since acknowledged that their accusations were false.

I'm guessing it hasn't ended for the 1.8 million people who have bought copies of "The Courage to Heal." Or for the book's coauthor, Laura Davis, whose books and workshops are focused, now, on forgiveness and reconciliation.

It hasn't ended for the tens of thousands of families still struggling to recover from false accusations made decades ago.

Most important, it hasn't ended for a society that decries the mass hysteria of Salem and McCarthyism while continuing to elect presidents, wage wars, and deny its citizens health care and civil rights based on confabulations presented as facts.

Recent American history is rife with examples of the damage done when millions of people become convinced of the same lie at the same time. Choose your favorite fiction from this list, or add your own.

The George W. Bush "victory" in the 2000 election. The list of books that Sarah Palin allegedly banned from the Wasilla Public Library. The persistent rumor that her youngest son was actually her daughter's child. The allegations of Barack Obama's foreign birth, terrorist associations, reverse racism, and socialist tendencies -- first promulgated to prevent his presidency, later used to derail it.

How many and how much have we lost in the seemingly endless War on Terror, triggered by the fictional connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks? The phrase "Weapons of Mass Destruction," invented as a cry for war, has become shorthand for cynical political manipulation and the mass, willful suspension of disbelief.

President Obama's efforts to provide Americans with health care were nearly defeated by the myth that if the program were enacted, "death panels" run by government bureaucrats would decide whether Granny lives or dies.

Gay people's right to marry (my right to marry) is still being denied in most of the "united" states, ostensibly to protect the heterosexual nuclear family from destruction, and -- wait, it gets more incredible still -- to keep American children from being recruited to homosexuality in their classrooms.

In November 2008, the Wall Street Journal predicted, "In 300 years' time, our descendants -- who will, of course, pride themselves on their superior rationality -- will read of the recovered-memory-driven prosecutions of parents (usually fathers) as we now read of the Salem witch trials."

"We may expect further such episodes of popular delusion and the madness of crowds," the article warned, "unless we straighten out our thoughts about the way our minds work -- or, if that is not possible, at least about how they don't work."

I wanted to look back, 20 years later, at one episode of popular delusion -- mine, ours. My painful, public exposé of the way my mind worked and the way it didn't is offered up with remorse, yes, but also with a pulse of hope: that I, and we, will learn from this history so we're not destined to repeat it.

Meredith Maran is a contributor to Salon. Her book "My Lie," from which this is excerpted, comes out from Jossey-Bass on Sept. 14.

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0 Replies
 
firefly
 
  1  
Reply Wed 27 Oct, 2010 10:54 pm
Quote:
Why Don’t We Accept Victim-Blaming From Rapists?
by Amanda Hess
Apr. 15, 2010

Last month, convicted rapist Daniel Katsnelson administered some advice to the two York University students he raped in 2007. After pleading guilty to entering a campus residence, prowling for open doors, and then raping two students, Katsnelson told his parole officer that he hopes the girls learned something from all this:

Katsnelson indicated he hoped his victims could take something “positive” away from the experience of being sexually assaulted. “When asked what that might be, he suggested that maybe she will now know to keep her doors locked,” the pre-sentence report stated.

Anti-rape blogger Cara Kulwicki wasn’t surprised by Katsnelson’s comments; she encounters disgusting sentiments like that one every single day. But she was surprised to learn that mainstream media outlets reacted with disgust to the “lock your doors” lesson. After all, when victim-blaming tips are handed down by anyone other than a convicted rapist, nobody seems to bat an eye. Kulwicki writes:


And far more than I’m surprised by his comments, I’m surprised by the fact that the media seems to be almost as appalled as I am. The statement isn’t just printed in the article, it’s featured in quite a few headlines. His words are referred to as “startling” and the “revulsion” of listeners is carefully noted. And while relieved that for once publications aren’t just parroting back the victim-blaming excuses and framing of a rapist and his attorney, I also simply cannot help but ask myself: where the hell are they the rest of the time?


Where is the shock and outrage when it’s argued that a victim shouldn’t have gotten into a car or entered a building with her assailant? Where is the outrage when it’s argued that if women didn’t get themselves so drunk, rapists wouldn’t rape them? Where is the outrage when it’s essentially stated that sex workers can’t be raped? Why is it not a cause of shock and source of headlines when a sexual assault is explained away as verifying the genitals of a person the assailant suspected was trans? Where are the expressions of horror when those who failed to stop the reported and ongoing rape of a woman with a mental illness declare themselves to have not been negligent? Where are the editors shaking their fists when a defense attorney goes out of his way to note that an alleged victim was a drug user? Where is the anti-rape media perspective when the assault of a child by an adult is being referred to as “sex”? Where are they? Because nine times out of ten, they’re turning the other way.

As far as victim-blaming sentiments are concerned, Katsnelson’s comments were far from extreme. Last fall, a series of sexual assaults were reported inside a freshman dorm at the George Washington University. In October of last year, a University of Maryland student entered the residence early in the morning, prowled for open doors, and then sexually assaulted several women, placing his hands down their pants and forcibly kissing them. In response to the attacks, G.W. student newspaper the Hatchet—the leading media source on campus—performed an act of victim-blaming nearly identical to Katsnelson’s. The assaults, the paper’s editors wrote, served as a “valuable reminder of the necessity for students to lock their doors at all times and to take responsibility for guests you bring into residence halls.”

When a rapist blames his victims, we’re appalled. When we do it, we’re just being “realistic,” “concerned,” “protective,” “responsible.” Why are we outraged when rapists blame their victims, but not when we blame them? Because while it’s unseemly to blatantly support the sorry excuses of a convicted rapist, we’re still invested in supporting a culture of victim-blaming that shifts the responsibility of eliminating rape away from society as a whole, and onto individual victims. When Katsnelson tells his victims to “lock their doors,” he’s shifting the responsibility for the rape off of the rapist. When the G.W. community tells victims to do the same thing, it similarly excuses the campus of taking any meaningful action against sexual assault.

But when rapists start using the same victim-blaming arguments we do, it makes it a lot harder for us to keep up the narrative of blame without being identified as rape apologists. One solution to this problem is to tell those rapists to shut up, because it’s making us look bad. So we call out a rapist for revealing himself to be—gee, who would have thought!—a rape apologist, and we draw a line in the sand that helps to protect our own right to victim-blame. We use the same tactic to excuse our own casual homophobia and racism. Our homophobic slurs and racist jokes are just “ironic” and “anti-PC” and “social commentary,” but when a gay basher or a white supremacist uses the same words, well, that’s just socially unacceptable. The reason we are allowed to use these words, we tell ourselves, is because we are not truly homophobes, or racists, or rape apologists.

In other words, the only people who are allowed to blame rape victims are people who don’t really, truly believe in their heart of hearts that the victim is at fault. This clever little set-up helps keep victim-blaming alive while preventing any victim-blamer from actually being identified as a bad person. It’s also inspired the use of the very popular construction, “I’m not blaming the victim, but [enter victim-blaming sentiment here].”

In the end, the only people who are allowed to use the language of rapists are the millions of people in this country who haven’t actually been convicted of the crime. How is this not a rape culture again?

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/04/15/why-dont-we-accept-victim-blaming-from-rapists/

 

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