Thursday, April 06, 2006
Duke
People all over the country are expressing their shock & outrage over the rape of an exotic dancer by the Duke Lacrosse team (yes…I left the alleged out of there on purpose). I’ll meet them halfway. I’m outraged, but not even a little shocked. Anyone who hasn’t had their head in the ground knows that college parties are extraordinarily dangerous places for women. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) has linked heavy drinking to 70,000 cases of sexual assault and acquaintance rape yearly. 55% of gang rapes on college campuses are committed by fraternities, 40% by sports teams, and 5% by others. About 25% of sorority women report having been raped, which is even higher than the general number for women on campus. Could it be that they spend so much time at frats & their parties? There’s also very good reason to believe that these statistics are a dramatic under reporting of the actual number of assaults. Both because victims are often embarrassed, and because colleges proactively attempt to suppress and avoid reporting of rapes on their campuses (can’t be good publicity). So while I’m pissed, I’m really tired of people pretending like this a big shock. Like it’s something rare. Because it’s happening all the time, across the country, people just don’t like to talk about it.
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3 comments:
This story is awful in both the viciousness of the attack and the how very common it is.
I've been reading way more about this story than is helpful. I feel for the poor girl at the middle of it who was just trying to pay for her own college tuition while raising 2 kids, I'm really familiar with that struggle. So she took the only job that would pay well enough to do that and is being treated abominably not just by the fuckwad rapists but by the misogynist asswipes who think she was asking for it by trying to earn a living. Now if she had tried to go to school while on welfare- those same pissheads would say she was gaming the system as a welfare queen. She's fucked anyway you look at it.
I want to perform vivisections on the entire lacrosse team (I don't care that only 3 of them did it- the rest of them aren't talking about it) and then I want to tear out the tongues and break all the fingers of the people who say she was asking for it.
Besides all the whole affair connects with, hate is the bottom-line. How could people develop so much of it? Hate that is not isolated, so common that it barely surprises; so prevalent that committees and lawyers and consultants spring into action like clockwork; so expected that we know the general plot already, just not the ending.
Barely over a week from the blue house massacre, we've moved on, with only the families left to fill in the whys and why nots. Yeah, we have to, but the pestilence festers in young boy's brain until the next time. Are we civilized or have we simply civilized the way we deal our still savage behavior?
I can't find the link to this story... ?
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