Ten-Year-Old "Consents" to Rape?!

I haven't posted lately because I've been busy with projects and because I've been rather dispirited over the news. Nothing seems to change. The Democrats are in the majority in the House and Senate, yet they seem to be only weakly challenging the administration. There are a few lone voices--voices we've heard all along--but the Democratic leadership capitulates too easily to the fear of being negatively branded by Republican propagandists sometime in the future: fear of being called unpatriotic or weak on terror or [fill in the blank]. . . .

But more on that in the future.

Having earlier posted on the horror of Saudi Arabian attitudes toward women who are raped, I would be remiss if I didn't bring to your attention two recent news items that I found through Broadsheet, stories that remind me all too vividly that sexual oppression and hateful, violent attitudes toward women are not limited to one culture. I hate to sound like a throw-back to the 70s, but, by god, are we progressing at all in our attitudes toward women? The first article is about a rape case in Australia: a ten-year-old girl was gang-raped, and the judge in the case did not send the perpetrators to jail because the girl "probably consented" to the rape. What ten-year-old consents to rape?

The second story is of a young woman from Houston, Texas, who was gang-raped by her colleagues in Baghdad, all of whom worked for Halliburton/KBR. After complaining about the rapes, she was kept under guard in a shipping container. After a sympathetic guard loaned her a cell phone, the woman called her father, who contacted the State Department. People were then sent to release her from the shipping container. Since then Halliburton/KBR and the State Department have worked to cover up the case, evidently. According to what the young woman told ABC News, Army doctors examined her and found evidence of rape--anally and vaginally--but--surprise!--the rape kit disappeared after being turned over to KBR security.

Ah, the vanishing rape kit act! In the 1980s, one of my aunts was raped in Dayton, Texas, and Liberty County officials lost her rape kit, too--very conveniently as they were accusing her of making up her story of her attack. When her experience became locally public, several women called her to describe similar experiences they had had with Dayton and Liberty County police.

Just as I was counting my blessings as a woman that I didn't live in an oppressive culture that holds women guilty for being raped, I am reminded that not too far beneath the surface, similar attitudes lurk in my own culture. When are we going to win this war?