Rosen writes: "The truth is, women are not safe. Every 6.2 minutes, there is a reported rape. One in five women is likely to be sexually assaulted in her lifetime."
Enough is enough: A student prays for Jyoti. (photo: Reuters)
Rape: The Universal Crime
24 February 13
he feminist writer Susan Griffin called rape "The All American Crime" in Ramparts Magazine in 1971. She was the first feminist to explain that men rape children, elderly and disabled women, not just girls dressed in mini-skirts. In other words, she challenged the belief that that rape was a sexual act, fueled by men's irrepressible sexual drive. Instead, she argued that rape was an assault against a woman, fueled by the desire to control and harm her, not a sexual act at all.
While I became a professor of history at the University of California a few years later, an elderly woman was raped by a man who stalked the campus looking for prey. He finally found a woman in her 90s and raped her in Davis's Central Park. (I can't find the newspaper story, but I remember the terror he caused among the town's women.) In 2012, a 43-year-old man raped a 73-year-old woman in New York City's Central Park and even boasted about how many elderly women he had raped. So, no, rape is not a sexual act.
Griffin was right. Even more, we now know that rape is the universal crime. Men don't need seductive young bodies scantily dressed to incite them to use their overwhelming power over a vulnerable woman. Even though rape has been declared illegal in war as a means of demoralizing an enemy, the Balkan wars revealed the creation of "rape camps" on all sides.
And has anything changed? Well yes, there was a huge outpouring of protest against the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in India in December 2012. But after that atrocity, countless rapes followed in Timbuktu, Mali, just weeks later. In every ethnic strife, opponents rape women as part of the spoils of their victory. It's in the newspaper every day with sickening regularity.
Closer to home, I recently received a message from the Berkeley police, notifying me that the number of rapes in Berkeley, California, has doubled during the last year. The twenty rapes that occurred in 2011 jumped to 39 in 2012. Many of these crimes took place near campus, where I live, and some, as you would expect, involved alcohol and drugs, according to the local news station, KGO. Very likely, some of these involved date rape, a term not used until the women's movement coined it.
Then I read a story in the New York Times that women are now among the loudest voices against gun control. They are crowding the shooting ranges, learning how to shoot and protect themselves. Why? Because of fear of rape, fear of gender violence of all kinds, and probably fear of criminals as well as immigrants in the border states.
The truth is, women are not safe. Every 6.2 minutes, there is a reported rape. One in five women is likely to be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. Nor is a woman safe in the military. As the New York Times recently reported, "The rate of sexual assaults on American women serving in the military remains intolerably high. While an estimated 17 percent of women in the general population become victims at some point in their lives, a 2006 study of female veterans financed by the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated that between 23 percent and 33 percent of uniformed women had been assaulted." A new documentary film about sexual assault in the military, "The Invisible War," is up for an Oscar. Let us hope it has some impact on our culture.
Rape, as feminists have always argued, keeps women off the streets and relegates them to the private sphere of the home. It is a form of social control that makes every woman afraid of moving about in the public sphere. Rape makes every woman somewhat afraid of the night. That is why women activists created "Take Back the Night" protests in the late 1970s: they wanted to reclaim public space.
Is this the kind of world we want to live in? When will rape become as unacceptable and as illegal as slavery is in civilized societies? Not in my lifetime.
Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times, is Professor Emerita of History at the University of California Davis and a Scholar in Residence at the University of California Berkeley. Her most recent book is The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America.
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Web site: www.ruthrosen.org
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But not only there-- but the horrible front cover of this month's W Magazine, with the head and bare shoulders of beautiful, white-skinned, dark haired Lara Stone, leaning back with her reddend lips half-opened and a thin bright red ribbon around her neck and tied up over her chin. It is visually shocking and one cannot but think of Nicole Simpson after OJ's first slash. It's horrible and should be universally protested. But it's tolerated as are the hundreds and hundreds of women tortured, murdered and missing in Juarez, Mexico. And nothing is done.
How deep does this hatred of women-- and their mysterious power of birth that men can never have--- go ???
As a victim of incest as a child, and rape as an adult, I know only too well what these heinous crimes vilely committed by patriarchal misogynist men against innocent children and women do to alter a woman's life forever.
After many years of hard work, costly counseling, and 12 step programs, I finally consider myself a survivor at age 67 of these horrific violent crimes perpetuated against me by misogynist men which negatively changed the course of my life.
While I have participated in many Take Back the Night events, and other similar events, I am still emotionally affected each and every time I learn of another woman or child being raped, whether it is in the US military or across the world, or when more evidence is exposed with the role the Roman Catholic Church played in not only covering up and enabling pedophiliac priests to continue to sexually abuse little children for centuries, not just decades!
Until women take their power back and leave these patriarchal institutions, I am afraid there will be no positive change in this regard.
Patriarchal religious books were written by men, not God. with a specific (hidden) agenda to control women and children, and to take dominion over Mother Earth's resources.
Let's see: Who taught those little boys to treat women like that? Hmmm, they couldn't have picked it up from their fathers, because those were hardly allowed to interact with their children. No four letter words or porn on TV except rape offcourse. And when the kid becomes 15 or 16 his friends tell him, women say always NO even when they actually mean YES. Their proof: "Ever heard a woman say YES?". And how again is this young man to know any better? From his manhating mother blaming all men (including him) for all the wrong decisions she has made in her (and indirectly his) life?
If he is lucky, having sisters might give him pause to recalibrate his skewed views on women.
Keep complaining dear Feminists, the failure is one of your own making and it is about time to start taking responsibility. (something grown-ups do). Until then, expect the problem to get worse.
Oh, I forgot you were only looking for an easy opportunity to play drama queen. After all Feminism was meant to empower women NOT assume responsibilitie s. I know, I can still hear the man-hating feminists screech, "men are responsible". And you know what? I agree, real men always are.
Fighting terrorism is the only thing that the good old boys in Washington care about fighting. They don't care about rape. They see it as a personal problem.
Maybe we should re-brand rape as terrorism. Then they might try to do something. It is a cultural problem and it goes very deep. It is in the discourse of the socialization of males as teens. All that can be changed. It takes time but cultures do change with effort.
I think that castration would be a better alternative.
Imagine having to live without your former physical and mental "leading edge" as it were? I think a lot of guys would prefer death to that and it might even make them think and even repent over the long barren years they face.
I'm no shrinking flower or puritan (wherein resides self-righteousn ess and hypocrisy) but I've never had the slightest desire to have power over anybody.
Isn't love about sharing and expressing feelings of intimacy confidentially, whatever your sex or orientation?
And for those of you who jump on the "single mother" households rationale, much of this is caused by economic inequality, despair and guilt caused by long-term unemployment, racism and high housing costs which serve singularly or in combination to destroy families through the stress of everyday survival in a "Winner take all" society without universal health care, mental help or counseling, a social safety net for all and the shrinking possibility of a decent education.
All this perpetrated by the same ambitious and corrupt, power-seeking suits in a stifling Congress, Senate and Judiciary who excuse or even applaud the causary excesses of Wall Street whilst bloviating about the same "Family Values" they are helping to destroy.
When a culture cannot come to grips with the intentional brutality of rape meted upon women and girls (and defenseless boys, by the way) of all ages by men and boys of all ages- in groups and singly- then we fail as the more "intelligent" animal. Blaming someone else, their dress, their "no-means-yes", "raised by a single-mom"...i s the easiest and weakest way out.
When our "culture" contributes to this lack of respect for women/girls/boy s and our children are fed a bounty of brutal, violent, abusive, disrespectful visual messages then the results are going to be predictable.
When college boys are seen as "just kids" after they've gang-raped a drunk girl at a frat party and not been prosecuted- that too is the kind of message that says: RAPE IS OKAY.
When American soldiers are accused of raping their fellow female troops- it was a the trauma of war to blame. Even Generals have gotten off the hook for raping and/or sexually harassing NOT ONLY WOMEN but men as well.
Rape, as a previous poster stated, is NOT about sex...it is about power over someone weaker than themselves.
What a sensible person you are whatever gender you are.I am a man and I agree with you one hundred percent whoever you are.We have too any damn professors and not enough people.
Statistics for sexual assault most often focus on only reported cases, and the vast majority of cases are unreported. Up to 90% of child sexual assaults go unreported.
In my own case, it happened when I was 4. I didn't report it until I was 11, and when I did report it, no action was taken. They didn't even contact the perpetrator. He was abusing his daughter as well as myself. I've been re-victimized over 5 additional times since then. I'm talking about rape, here, not attempted rape, not "innapropriate touching" or exposure to pornography, or anything "less".
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