Hate Crimes: A Rape Every Minute, a Thousand Corpses Every Year

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/gender/hate-crimes-rape-every-minute-thousand-corpses-every-year

Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The story of the alleged rape of an unconscious teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team was still unfolding, and gang rapes aren’t that unusual here either. Take your pick: some of the 20 men who gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, were sentenced in November, while the instigator of the gang rape of a 16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced in October, and four men who gang-raped a 15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in April, though the six men who gang-raped a 14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at large. Not that I actually went out looking for incidents: they’re everywhere in the news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually be a pattern.

There is, however, a pattern of violence against women that’s broad and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked. Occasionally, a case involving a celebrity or lurid details in a particular case get a lot of attention in the media, but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this country, in other countries, on every continent including Antarctica, constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.

If you’d rather talk about bus rapes than gang rapes, there’s the rape of a developmentally disabled woman on a Los Angeles bus in November and the kidnapping of an autistic 16-year-old on the regional transit train system in Oakland, California -- she was raped repeatedly by her abductor over two days this winter -- and there was a gang rape of multiple women on a bus in Mexico City recently, too. While I was writing this, I read that another female bus-rider was kidnapped in India and gang-raped all night by the bus driver and five of his friends who must have thought what happened in New Delhi was awesome.

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. The most horrifying thing of all of it is the percentage that are reported.

I think its 10% or 20%. I know many women who have been raped, some who have been gang raped, but not a single one that reported it. The pandemic is far deeper than it looks from the crime reports.

Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

I hope you're not implying that men are the "gender of violence" though. Men get raped too, and are even less likely to report it.

[seabeyond]

2. first, i agree. the crime reports arent a comfort and it is very frustrating when mra types use the

drastic drop in rape as a .... what is the problem, rape is down. i do not buy it.

secondly.

I hope you're not implying that men are the "gender of violence" though. Men get raped too, and are even less likely to report it.

this makes no sense. whether men/boys are raped or not (and they are, horribly), 98.something% of rapes committed are by men. ya. that would make men "gender of violence" if you want to use those terms. because boys/men are also victims, the assaulter is still man.

[napoleon_in_rags]

3. The real question though is what percent of men rape.

That's a minority. So if you're willing to label all men as somehow connected to rape, you're firing blame on a whole lot innocent people. If you think about it, its a bit like labelling non-whites as the races of gang violence: Though a disproportionate percent of gang violence is non-white, it doesn't mean that the majority of non-whites are involved in gang violence, far from it.

[seabeyond]

4. what is this "all men" as if ANYONE has EVER said anything so fuckin' stupid, yet men continually

say, that is what is being suggested?

[MadrasT]

5. Why am I not surprised?

That from the first comment, someone makes this about men being victimized, and jumps up to defend men.

Jesus H Rollerskatin' Christ.

Every. Fucking. Time.

[seabeyond]

6. a totally amazing break down in logic. nt