Out and Back

The culture of victim-blaming is alive and well

Stepping out from behind my semi-anonymous blogging persona for a moment, I was dismayed (but not altogether surprised) to read a report in one of the local papers about a sexual assault on the Clemson University campus. (My husband is a grad student at Clemson and we live nearby.)

The story reads, in part:

Clemson University police advised students Friday to walk in groups of threes and fours after sunset after a student reported that she was sexually assaulted by two men in a campus parking lot on Perimeter Road early Friday morning.

The student, 18, was exiting her car when one of the men grabbed her from behind and sexually attacked her in Parking lot R-1 about 1:30 a.m., Clemson Police Chief Johnson Link said. She said she was then forced to the ground and attacked by a second man, he said.

She had been waiting in the parking lot for campus escort assistance, Link said. The campus escort is a service offered through the university Police Department that provides an escort for students going across the campus at night.

The student notified Clemson educators several hours later, Link said.

Like a lot of newspapers, the online edition of the Greenville News has a "story chat" feature that allows readers to post their reactions, comments, and thoughts about the various articles, opinion pieces, etc. It makes for entertaining reading a lot of the time, but sometimes the comments that get left are just upsetting. In the case of this article, someone named sillyhunter posted the following (emphases mine):

This story has some questions................Why was this child out in a parking lot this late? Why wait to report a rape later the next morning.....Had enough time to decide if it was a rape or not?? And if she doesn't know about safety in this day and age maybe college is not for her. Sounds like she still needs to be under the watchful eye of a responsible adult. Maybe went to a frat party and had one drink to many and got just a little too loose and had party regrets the next morning??????It's always somebody else's fault never the victim. The difference between a stupid victim and smart person is that one is the victim.

I just about upchucked when I read that comment. I posted my own response (I use the handle "coneydog" when posting to the forums on the Greenville News website) and was heartened to see that someone else posted a response basically telling sillyhunter to shut up.

Yes, dear ones, the culture of victim blaming is alive and well in South Carolina. I guess I'm not surprised, considering how much misogyny still pervades society down here. Any locals who come across this post are probably going to tell me to go the fuck home, Yankee, but I'm not backing down on this one. Rape is an underreported crime, and despite the notoriety of the Duke lacrosse rape case (in which the charges were eventually dropped because the alleged victim kept changing her story and there was no physical evidence linking her to the three players she accused) the number of truly false reports of rape remains quite low. (One reference I found suggested as low as 2% of all reported rapes in the U.S. are false.) And for every rape that is reported, how many go unreported because the victim is ashamed, afraid, or forcibly silenced?

Ladies, it doesn't matter how much you had to drink, what you were wearing, how well you knew the guy, or what you may or may not have done with him in the past. If you didn't want to have sex with him and he went ahead and fucked you anyway, he raped you. It doesn't matter if you fought back or not or if you told him to stop or not, because silence does not equal consent. And to the young woman at Clemson, I hope they catch the pigs that did this to you. For every insensitive creep that calls you "loose" and accuses you of having "party regrets," there are many more of us who care about you and support you without ever having met you. Remember that.

Dreadful

As much as I would like to ignore the news most days (too damn depressing), I usually tune in to some news outlet or another at some point during the day.  I like to have at least a vague idea of what is going on in the world, in the country, and in my little corner of South Carolina.

Sometimes, though, in the quest to be informed, I hear news stories that I wish I could go back and "un-hear."  Such was the case this week when I heard about Tara Grant, the Michigan wife, businesswoman, and mother of two who was strangled and dismembered by her husband in early February.  (He was arrested over the weekend and the big news yesterday was that he had confessed.)

We'll probably never know why Tara's husband, Stephen, killed her... police said that they had argued shortly before her death about her frequent business trips... but I have a hard time believing that that was the only motive.  At any rate, it will take someone with more psychiatric prowess than I have to see into the mind and motivation of a man like that.

I suppose the one thing I've taken away from this tragedy is that we don't know our loved ones nearly as well as we think we do.  If someone had asked Tara on her wedding day if she thought her husband would kill her in the future, she probably would have been horrified at such a suggestion.  It's like what the neighbors say when they find out they've been living next to a serial killer for years: "Oh, he seemed like such a nice person.  Quiet, kept to himself, never caused anybody any trouble."  I guess we never really know.

Assorted assholes

Wow, am I ever on a tear!

This whole Mark Foley thing is appalling to me, but even more appalling is the apparent attempt to cover up the whole thing by the Republicans.  These are a lot of the same guys who went ape shit on Clinton over the whole Lewinsky thing.  To them I say, "At least Monica was legal, you morons."

On a more serious note, I volunteered for CASA when I was living in Missouri.  If you don't know, CASA stands for Court-Appointed Special Advocates.  As a CASA volunteer, it was my duty to represent the rights of abused and neglected children in court.  I saw and dealt with some pretty horrific things, including two little girls (ages 4 and 6) who had been sexually molested by their father (after he had gotten their mother hooked on meth.)  I also met a four year old boy whose bipolar mother was dating a guy with a hair-trigger temper, and when mom was off her meds and in a major depressive episode, the bf just couldn't deal with an active four-year-old.  The child's grandparents took out a restraining order against the bf on the kid's behalf.  In both cases, it was up to me to recommend to the judge what was in the best interests of these poor children.

So when I read about an adult who uses his power and influence to sexually exploit minors, I get more than just a little pissed off.  I have seen, firsthand, what happens when children are abused and exploited, and I'm shocked not only by Rep. Foley's behavior, but also by the manner in which his Republican friends appear to have tried to cover it up.  There's no excuse for this kind of garbage.

And don't even get me started on the recent school shootings, in which young girls were victimized by half-cocked men.  A recent post on feministing.com exposes the underlying misogyny in these attacks.  Once again, anyone who thinks the feminist movement is dead or useless needs their fucking head examined.

OK, this makes my blood boil

I still keep up with the news in Allentown as much as I can, and this story really got my attention.  To sum up, earlier this week, a woman was carjacked while shopping at the Lehigh Valley Mall.  The carjacker pulled a knife on her, forced her into the car, and drove off with her.  In addition, the asshole sexually assaulted her and when he ordered her to go down on him while he was driving, she decided she'd had enough and jumped out of the car onto route 33 at a very high rate of speed.  Fortunately, she survived the jump and is in the hospital recovering.  The best news of all is that the carjacking little bastard was captured in Mississippi early yesterday morning.

Here's why this story got me all riled up.  For two years, I lived in a beautiful, historic Allentown neighborhood in a fantastically unique house.  In two years, the only crime-related problems we had were a hit-and-run sideswiping of my car, and a break-in to the same car about a year later.  Yes, those incidents were annoying, bothersome, and inconvenient.  But I would like to take a second to point out that those two types of incidents are endemic anywhere you have to park your car on the street or in a driveway.  Stuff like that could happen in the suburbs, too.  Or in the parking lot of the toniest apartment complex.  Anyway, despite the abuse my poor car took, I always felt very safe in our neighborhood, and as we all know, I loved my house.

However, whenever I told anyone where I lived, I got a wide-eyed stare and a, "why on earth would you want to live down there?" or "the crime is so terrible there," or "hope you speak Spanish!" or some other disparaging comment about my neighborhood.  One woman told me that her husband had told her never to drive down 7th Street (which is one block over from where we used to live) after dark.  Poppy-freakin'-cock, people.  I've driven down 7th Street at all hours of the day and night and nothing bad has ever happened to me.

So I would like to take a second to point the following out to all those haters whose ignorance perpetuated a lot of negative stereotypes about my wonderful Allentown neighborhood:  A WOMAN WAS ABDUCTED AT KNIFEPOINT (AND SEXUALLY ASSAULTED) FROM OUTSIDE THE JC PENNEY AT YOUR PRECIOUS, SAFE, SUBURBAN LEHIGH VALLEY MALL!!!!

Why on earth would you want to go shopping there?