Thought for the Week

In 1989 a young woman in Colorado was raped and while she recovered in the intensive care unit a debate raged in the local media as to why she wasn’t wearing underwear under her pantyhose and whether this meant that she had invited the attack.

In 1991 a young woman was forced at gun point to perform oral sex on her date who then raped her vaginally and anally. Her date had locked her in his bedroom but she was able to call the police after he fell asleep. They found her hiding in a closet, recovered the gun and arrested her assailant. At the preliminary hearing the judge ruled that because the woman went willingly to a party at the defendant’s house prior to the attack there was not enough evidence to establish that the defendant forced her to engage in these acts against her will. The case was dropped. The defendant had been arrested three times previously for the same charges against different women. All of those cases had been dropped by the same judge for similar reasons.

In 1992 a jury found Mike Tyson guilty of criminal sexual assault. He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison even though the sentencing guidelines required him to serve six to thirty years. Shortly after his release, a mere eleven months later, Miller Beer hired him as a spokesperson.

In 1999 a 13 year old girl was brutally gang raped by three older boys in an abandoned shed. A fourth boy who stood as “look out” told the police that the boys had sex with her after she had passed out from drinking too much alcohol. The police found her in the shed naked and unconscious, covered in blood, vomit and urine. The detectives didn’t want to press charges because earlier in the evening she had told her girlfriend that she “wanted to get some”.

Last Monday three boys aged 8 and 9 years old were charged with raping an 11 year old girl. The father of one of the boys said that the girl had wanted to have sex with the boys and that she only said it was rape because she didn’t want to get in trouble with her parents.

I was a criminal prosecutor in Chicago for many years and focused on sex crimes. I was also a rape crisis counselor. I have heard many horrible stories, but nothing shocks me more than society’s response to sexual assault victims and its ignorance as to depth and extent of the issues created in the wake of sexual assault. Even as a prosecutor I felt impotent to make any real change. Those in law enforcement who dealt often with rapists and their victims held firmly to archaic beliefs; beliefs that made it impossible to effectively help the survivors or prosecute their attackers.

Sexual assault is incredibly widespread but it is also horribly misunderstood. In the United States, 683,000 women and girls are raped each year. That means 1.3 are raped per minute, 78 per hour, 1,871 per day. To compare, the American Cancer Society estimates that approximately 202,044 American women are diagnosed with breast cancer and 40,200 women die from breast cancer each year. Therefore, we are far more likely to know someone who has survived a sexual assault than breast cancer.

Fighting breast cancer has become a daily event in our lives. Pink ribbons adorn everything from cans of soup to cashmere sweaters reminding us to support to the cause. This is the proper response to something that so tragically impacts our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters. Why then is sexual assault, which impacts so many more women and children, such a silent epidemic? The answer lies somewhere in our society’s views on rape and sexual abuse.

It is my hope that this blog will provide comfort and information to those who seek and need it. I hope that by being informed and talking about sexual assault issues that we can find out and then change why the treatment and prevention of sexual assault is not addressed more aggressively; why individuals either blame the victims for their own sexual assault or don’t believe them at all; why survivors can’t or won’t get the help and support they require. It is my hope that our coalition on this blog will help find the answers to these and other such questions and that we can then educate our community about the true nature of sexual assault. It is my hope this blog will help to make our community a safer place for women and children.