Blue Notes from a Red Zone

Rape Happens

For the past few weeks, my work hours have been taken up with reporting statistics and writing commentaries on rape in our local community. It's a truly dreary task, because it's one area in which progress is very hard to discern. The number of rapes continue to inch up each year, totaling over 120 for the past 12 months. The number of convictions, however, holds steady at 5 per year. The culture, as reflected through music, movies, video games, and advertisements, becomes ever more misogynistic.

I am fortunate to have two women working for me who are incredibly engaging and effective sexual assault prevention educators. They walk into high school classrooms, detention centers, alternative schools, and military bases, and they start tackling the hard questions. The resistance they meet is tough. Perhaps because first-term airmen tend to be brash and self-confident, the hostility is right out there in the open. Initial comments range from "bros over hos" to "all women are evil" to "those teenage girls know what's going down. They know you're just out for the sex, and they are glad to deliver."

By the end of the two-hour period, those same young men are less certain of their convictions, and the rest of the group is seriously engaged in reexamining attitudes and beliefs. New ideas and possibilities have been planted in suddenly fertile soil, with positive results. One concrete example is that of a young man who was attempting to rape a young woman on base, when he stopped and thought to himself: "This is just what Miss Stephanie said not to do." So he left and turned himself in. I grant you that it would have been better had he stopped prior to the rape attempt, but it was progress.

But really, can even the most amazing one or two hour presentation make much of an impression when a much different message is strongly embedded in the greater culture? Well-known examples include the appalling video games, and the beer ads, and the rap music lyrics. But even those pale in the face of rape tolerant attitudes ingrained in schools, neighborhoods, and communities.

Like communities everywhere, our county faces regular scandals at some school or other, in which an unpopular girl accuses a student athlete or service club member of rape . The students, faculty and parents immediately start lining up to take sides, and the line in favor of the boy is invariably longer by far. The girl is judged by her status relative to his, and found wanting. Of course, a girl of lesser status is exactly the person most likely to be raped, since rapists (even the youngest ones) select girls who are less credible than themselves, and besides, they feel entitled to take what they want from their inferiors.

Three incidents have happened over the last five years that remain chilling reminders of local attitudes. The first involved a child protection worker sent to investigate the reported molestation of a 10-year-old girl by her stepfather. The worker came back and said, "there is no way I'm going to turn in that father. You should have seen what that girl was wearing. She was just asking for it!" The second involved a woman who was actually working for me as a rape prevention educator. On what became her last day on the job, she was incensed when a teacher at her son's school was arrested for raping multiple 14 and 15-year-old students. "What was he supposed to do?" she said. "Those girls came to his house, flirted with him. Of course he had sex with them." The third involved a local psychiatrist who had sex with a teenage client. His physician friends simply could not accept that anyone they knew would do anything so appallingly unethical and illegal, and refused to believe in his guilt even after he admitted it.

The most immediate thing that stands out about these crimes is that they were hideous betrayals of young girls by men they should have been able to trust. While the general public seems to be most distressed by stranger rape, it is the rape by those who should be protecting and caring for us that has the most devastating effect on the victim and her future. The second thing is the knee-jerk reaction by uninformed strangers to unite and publicly castigate the victim for harming her rapist. Sadly, they are no different from the victim's family, who usually also sides with the rapist as well, especially if the rapist is the primary breadwinner.

What is it about rape that allows otherwise decent and caring people to be so quick to condemn victims, and excuse criminals? I suppose part of the answer is that rape involves such a total violation of the human spirit that we don't want to face the fact that it exists. We resent the victim who reminds us that we are all vulnerable to horror, and we push her aside. Another answer is that by casting victims into the role of "them," we can ensure that people like us are safe. She didn't live by the rules, so she was raped. We adhere to the myths, so we are secure.

However, I think the larger issue is greater than that. From the earliest times, men have equated women's sexuality with sin. Pandora opened the box. Eve ate the apple. Women draw men into sin, and women who have cajoled men into committing sexual crimes are defiled, impure, damaged. In some cultures, women can be executed for the sin of having been raped. In our culture, the stigma is so great that few rape victims will even admit to having been attacked.

So is there hope for a humane society that values women equally with men, and abhors rape rather than condones it? I don't have any answers, but I look at my beautiful daughters, my compassionate son and my tiny grandson, and think that hope must lie somewhere. To think otherwise would be to despair for my children's future, and that, I can't do.

posted by Lenore Wilson @ 7:42 PM