It Isn't Really Rape If Your Son Does It

Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address warned us about the dangers of the "military-industrial complex".

John F. Kennedy offered this challenge:  "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

And what memorable oratory did Bill Clinton leave for us?   "I did not have sex with that woman!"  Or, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

It seems that Jim Bob Duggar is taking lessons on semantics from our forty-second President.  That is ironic, in a way, because about the only thing he seems to have in common with Clinton is Arkansas roots. 

But it seems that for a self-professed Christian, he's doing everything he can to emulate Bill from Hope's respect for the truth.  Now, I can't fault him for defending his son:  Most parents would do the same for their kids, even after those kids have done the most unspeakable things.  Still, I have a hard time hearing a defense, whoever may make it, of someone who takes advantage of someone else sexually.

He says that when his son Josh molested his sisters, who were adopted, "it was nothing like rape."  Rather, he insists it was "just inappropriate touching over the clothes" while the girls "were sleeping".  According to Duggar the Elder, the girls weren't even aware of what he had done.  In contrast, the police reports state that at least one of the girls woke up during the incident.

Now, almost anyone would agree that touching a child's private areas--whether or not there is clothing or anything else between the toucher's hand and the child's privates--constitutes sexual molestation.  In fact, most people--including most clinicians--would agree that it's molestation if the person, of whatever age, being touched can't or doesn't consent.

And, whatever we might say about the State of Arkansas, it defines sexual molestation  as rape. 

As  a transgender woman and someone who survived childhood sexual molestation and sexual assault as a young adult, I find Jim Bob Duggar's dissembling particularly offensive.  You see, he and his wife have been propagating the lie that all transgenders are pedophiles as part of their campaign against transgender equality.

I wonder how they define "transgender" and "pedophilia".

Rape Victim Charged With Indecency

What do you do if you are assaulted and your attacker files charges against you?

Apparently, that is just what happened to a woman in Tunisia.  According to reports, three police officers approached her and her fiance when they were in their car in Tunis, the capital city.

Two of the officers raped her in the car.  The third took her fiance to a nearby ATM to extort money from him.

The woman filed a complaint against the officers.  After they were charged with rape and extortion, they claimed they found her and her beau in an "immoral position" in the car.  Neither the police nor any other authority would say what was meant by "immoral position."  However, the country's interior ministry repeated the claim, according to Amnesty International.

As a result, the couple was charged with "intentional indecent behavior," which could land them in prison for up to six years. 

Some might say, "Well, that's the Middle East."  What they don't realize is that women--and, especially transgender women--sometimes meet with harassment and worse from law enforcement officers and other authorities. Now, because the US is a secular country, its representatives of power can't invoke Sharia or Mosaic or any other kind of religious law against us. On the other hand, they can--and, in some cases, do-- claim that we somehow provoked their behavior.   Or they claim that we pose some sort of danger we couldn't pose even if we'd wanted to.

Or they simply dismiss us or find other ways of discouraging or intimidating
 us from speaking up about inappropriate behavior.  (Think of implicit and explicit threats of losing one's job.) 

After all, who is a better target for violence, and a better object of the abuse of power, than someone who is frightened and silenced?

 

Dow Down, Rape Up

Some of my students at York College are social work majors.  Others work for City agencies, including the Department of Education and the Office of Human Resources. Ever since the  city and country have tumbled through a recession and into a depression, they have been telling me that there has been more domestic violence.  It's not hard to see what they mean:  I have heard more and more stories about it from acquaintances and through various grapevines.


Now, it seems, the level of violence against women (which is what most of those domestic violence cases are) has escalated.  Instead of conducting it behind closed doors, more and more of it is happening on the streets and in other public areas.  None of the female students I talk to, especially those who enter or leave the campus after dark, feels safe.  Several have told me about men who tried to sexually attack them; others have told me about people they know who were attacked.  And, if my experience is any indication of anything, I think at least a couple of those women are telling "proxy" stories, if you will:  They themselves may have been attacked, or have somehow escaped an attempted attack but, for a variety of reasons, didn't want to say that they were so victimized.  Also, nearly every researcher in this area reports that sexual assault is one of the most under-reported crimes.


Now I've found out that in an area not far from where I live, a young woman was raped by three young men as she walked home from work in the wee hours of Sunday morning.   They dragged her into a parking lot in an industrial area of Long Island City, in the shadow of the Queensborough Bridge.  The particular spot where she was attacked is all but deserted most nights and weekends after workers go home, but the area around it is developing into a trendy residential area.  It is closer to Manhattan's East Side and Midtown than any place outside Manhattan, and the neighborhood offers unparalleled views of the UN, Empire State Building and other landmarks.  I sometimes ride or walk down that way for those reasons; also PS 1, a well-known art exhibition space located in a former public school, is just steps away.


What angers--but, unfortunately, doesn't surprise--me is the way some have responded to it.  Some have expressed and given support to the victims, but others--mainly in comments left in response to online stories of the incident--say, in essence, that she "had it coming to her."  Some insinuated that any woman walking through that area at the hour she was attacked must have been a prostitute, or was breaking the law in some other way.  Just from the standpoint of logic, such a response is offensive:  After all, do people say that people who drive too fast, sell marijuana or commit other kinds of low-level crime "deserve" to be the victims of violent sexual assault? Of course, the assumption that the young woman was a "street walker" is equally offensive.  News reports said that she lived and worked nearby; my guess is that she was a waitress in one of the bars or diners within blocks of the site or, perhaps, was dancing in one of the clubs.  People who do those kinds of work often are going home at three, four or five in the morning. (In fact, I've had students who came from such jobs to morning classes I taught!)  


The thing is, getting raped--or simply living a life that is, in various ways, shaped by the threat of such crimes--has absolutely nothing to do with one's age, physical attractiveness or actual or perceived economic status.  It's all a  matter of domination and control.  Since my transition, and especially since my surgery, I can see that some men see women's bodies and wills as things to be controlled and dominated--or broken, if we won't submit.  When such men lose whatever "grip" they have on the world--for example, when they lose their jobs--or when they never had that "grip" in the first place, they get angry.  And they turn that anger on women, gays, transgenders, members of races or nationalities or religions other than their own, or anyone whom they feel is not in his or her "place."


Of course, one of the problems with acting on such (mis-) perceptions is that the people such men attack are, as often as not, little if any better off than they are.  If the young woman who was attacked was walking home from a job as a waitress or dancer, she probably wasn't making very much money and wasn't much, if at all, in a better social or economic position than those young men.  Furthermore, whatever she has, she didn't get by taking anything away from those guys.  They never would have gotten whatever job she was working; even if they could have had it, they probably wouldn't have taken it, or wouldn't have lasted more than a week in it.  (I've worked in a coffee shop and know how frustrating it can be to deal with customers!)  


Naturally, I feel sympathy for the young woman who was attacked.  I also feel very, very worried, for I can't help but to think "there's more where that came from."  I hope that there isn't, but if economic conditions continue to deteriorate, I don't know what will stop the tide of violence against women from swelling.  Meantime, I advise my female students, co-workers and friends to be very, very careful. Then again, I don't think most of them need to be told that.

The Look

I can tell them from a mile away.  They're the ones who want to take you aside to talk to you.  They think they're doing something wrong, and they're waiting for--and fearing--your reaction.  And that's exactly the reason why they talk to you, and hope that you don't react the way others have screamed at, scolded or even beat them.


I first noticed that look--They're looking to you even when they can't look into your eyes, and they won't look into you--in a woman I dated a long time ago.  I was about 24; it was not long after I returned from France and my grandmother had died, and not long before an uncle would die and a friend would commit suicide.  She was a dozen years older than I was, and had divorced a few years earlier. For me, that was an eon:  I was still in high school when her alcoholic husband was beating her.  


We got into an argument about something I've long since forgotten.  Having almost no coping skills for such situations, I suggested that it might be better if I left.  "No," she insisted.  "At least you didn't beat me."


"Well, that just makes me a human being."


"That's not true.  Besides, you don't use sex on or over me.  You don't use sex, period."


I didn't quite understand what she meant.  I take that back: I knew full well what she meant, but I was sure that I couldn't have learned it in the same way she did.


Or did I?


Over the years, before and since I became sober, before and since my transition, females have come to me with that same look.  One was eight years old; another was seventy-nine and others were ages in between.  Of the in-betweens, I dated a few and had long-term relationships with two.  In the words of one, "My brothers used me for sex."  A student who talked me today said the same thing about her father.  Somehow, I knew, before she opened her mouth.  Another student, who did a tour of duty in Iraq before taking a class with me last semester, had that same look and confided a similarly appalling and terrifying story.  She and the student with whom I talked today spent time in foster care as a result of their sexual abuse and, in their new homes, were subject to more and new kinds of sexual violation.


I was spared the foster-care experience; my family was actually  stable, though it had its tough times.  And I was not abused by any family member.  However, I was molested by a close family friend.  Even when I wasn't consciously thinking of it--which was most of the time, for many years--the echoes of it still muttered like thunder through my sleep.   I can think of no other reason why other females wanted to talk about their experiences with me long before I was conscious of my own, and my own experience.  It seemed that wherever I looked, I saw their look.

A Victim Or An Accuser?

When is a victim an accuser?

She is when the crime against her is rape, stalking or domestic violence.

At least, that will be the case if a bill introduced by Georgia State Legislator Bobby Franklin is enacted.

I used female pronouns in the second sentence of this post because the vast majority of victims of those crimes are females.  For that reason alone, the bill is terrible.  

I am not the first person to report on this bill and its consequences for women who are victimized by sexual violence.  But so far, I haven't seen any comments on how much the bill reflects biases against class and lifestyle.  Given the nature of socioeconomic status and politics, those biases also are ultimately biases against women.

Franklin says that as long as there is no conviction, he wants people who report that they've been raped, stalked or battered to be classified as "accusers" rather than "victims."  For one thing, getting a conviction in such cases requires a lot of time and other resources of the victim as well as from law enforcement agencies.  Calling someone a mere accuser when she's a victim means that her complaint has less credibility than that of someone who reports, say, a burglary.  This would make getting a conviction an even longer, more difficult and more expensive process than it already is.  As women who are victims of such crimes tend to have fewer resources and are typically in more precarious work and domestic situations than other people, the changes Franklin wants will ensure that fewer victims will report such crimes against them.  

As it stands, the crimes that would be covered in the bill are among the most under-reported crimes.  According to a report from the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, 60 percent of rapes and sexual assaults are not reported to the police.  And, if unreported cases are factored in, only 6 percent of rapists ever spend a day in jail, according to the RAINN report.  People who say that they were victims of a crime that they didn't report, when asked, say that they didn't report the crime against them because of the logistical barriers involved in doing so and because they didn't feel that their complaints would be taken seriously.  Both of those factors would worsen if anything like Franklin's bill passes.

Sometimes I'm not optimistic about the course of events.  But I never expected to see, even in one of the reddest states, an attempt to re-create law based on notions about rape and the value of one gender vs. the other that people were starting to abandon during my adolescence.  In other words, it seems that Franklin still believes that women who say they're raped are simply fantasizing and "had it coming" to them.  Also, he's saying that our pretty little heads aren't capable of reason.  So, whatever we say is less credible than what men say.

African-Americans and members of other "minority" groups have similarly been seen as less credible.  That's a story unto itself, but it also relates to the story at hand.  Anyone who's seen as a "minority" by those in the power structure is believed to be less than credible:  childlike, or simply incapable of seeing things "clearly" and telling the "truth."

In other words, the bill that Franklin proposes is as much an attempt to disenfranchise people who only recently began to win and exercise the rights Georgians and other Americans have.  In that sense, he's the spiritual descendant of those who levied poll taxes and "grandfather rule"s against newly-freed African Americans during the Reconstruction.