|
Edited on Sun Feb-20-11 01:34 PM by Rozlee
What happened to Lara Logan shouldn't happen to any woman. Or man. Or child. Pat Benatar might have been on to something when she said to stop using sex as a weapon, although the lyrics of her song have nothing to do with the real horrors of rape and every other form of sexual abuse.
I have a rabid Islamophobe in my family who says that the rapists' religion and ethnicity have everything to do with her assault. Americans and Christians would never have done something so horrendous to a woman.
News flash. Rape is all about equal opportunity. It knows no race, religion, socio-economic status, ethnicity, age, or even gender. It's an act of violence and opportunity; an act where a predator forever scars the life, or in extreme cases, maybe even takes the life, of his/her victim.
In the Tailhook Scandal, 87 military women were sexually assaulted by 100 officers, who probably didn't take it much further than they did because they didn't think they could get away with anything worse. It was behavior that had been institutionalized in the Marine Corps and didn't interfere with one's conduct as an officer and a gentleman. Boys will be boys. Aw, shucks.
Christians would never rape Muslims? Tell that to the almost 50,000 Bosniak women who were raped by Christian Serbs during the Bosnian War. It wasn't random raping and pillaging. It was encouraged and a part of the systemic ethnic cleansing going on in the country. Rape rooms were made in concentration camps specifically for this purpose and women impregnated by their rapists' were kept prisoner until their pregnancies were too far advanced to be terminated. Pope John Paul II prayed over the incidents and told the women to please bear their rapists' babies. That's not to say that Serbs were the only victimizers. They were responsible for the overwhelming amount of the rapes. But, in all wars, all the helpless and defenseless suffer.
The military today is rampant with cases of sexual abuse. Almost a third of military women report being sexually assaulted at some point during their time in service. When I went into the Army Reserves in the late 80s, things were evolving from the horror stories the older military women told me. We were given mandatory classes on sexual harassment in the workplace. But, in theater in the first Gulf War, I noticed that things got kind of loosy-goosy as far as sticking to workplace harassment rules. They got worse in the one 6-month tour of duty in the second Gulf War I served in. But, my daughter, who served a half dozen tours told of a new testosterone-filled atmosphere where it seems everything goes. Maybe being around danger fuels testosterone. It sounds as good as an insanity plea anyway. But, women are being sexually harassed and raped in large numbers in todays wars and it's overlapping into stateside duty. And the good ol' boy network is once more firmly in place. The top dogs in the chain of command are turning their heads and saying, like Abu Ghraib, it's all a few bad apples.
At home, one in six American women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. And the FBI states that less than 40% report it. Think it's only women? Wrong. 3% of men will suffer from non-prison rape at some point in their lives and it's not just gay men and gay perpetrators as the myths would have us believe. 40% of men that are raped are heterosexual and women are just as likely to rape men as men are. The statistics are 91% rape victims being women to 9% being males in the entire population both prison and non-prison.
My heart goes out to Lara Logan. And to all victims of this heinous crime that's happened to so many innocents since the beginning of humanity. If I'd had my way, I would have made us all with sex organs that made us reproduce by splitting down the middle or shooting out spores. But, then, that wouldn't have helped. Many rapes don't even involve the use of the primary sex organs. You're just as likely to get raped by an inanimate object as by your attacker's body itself. And don't get complacent because you've got a gun in the house or you can pump some serious iron. Blackmail and extortion are also popular weapons to force sex from both women and men.
Right now, in the U.S., a woman is getting raped. Two minutes from now, another one will be. Two minutes after that, another one will be. Two minutes after that....
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(821 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
