Deserving of rape?

With the whole Steubenville rape trial over and two young men convicted of using a young woman as nothing more than a living blowup doll to abuse and degrade as they saw fit, I thought I would try to get my thoughts down about the issues I saw with this whole mess and what they mean to women and the rights we have.

The young woman, the victim, is incredibly brave. I would hope that I would have had the strength and courage to stand up and testify about being so callously disregarded as a human being, but I'm not sure I would have. She faced ridicule, harassment, and now death threats, all because she didn't allow her rapists to get away with what they did. She didn't remember what happened that night, piecing it together only through pictures and information shared by others on social media. Her social media, a world so important to kids now that to see this stuff about herself posted there, laughed about, disparaged and jeered at, certainly caused permanent scarring. Yet she still sat in a courtroom and testified against the two young men, not even being broken when she was shown a picture of herself from that night that she hadn't seen before.

Her so-called friends accused her of lying, even in the face of video and pictures of her being assaulted. They distanced themselves from her when this went viral, saying that she had a habit of drinking too much and so this rape couldn't have actually occurred. These were people who'd seen her being digitally penetrated and derided, people who'd witnessed it first hand and those who'd seen it on the internet or their cell phones, and yet they still chose to think of the actions of the two rapists as anything other than rape. Because she had a habit of drinking too much, as if that excuses the things that were done to her. I guess when a woman is not conscious, her body is a public playground and a free for all, to be used as anyone around her sees fit.

People watched this happen. They watched the crime occur and they took pictures of it and laughed. What kind of youth has been raised that when they see something so awful happening, they won't step in but instead egg it on? This didn't happen when I was a teenager. We protected our friends. If a group of us went to a party together, we stuck together and we left together. No guy wormed his way in between us and one of our girls, separated one of us from the herd so to speak, and got away with it. We would simply move in, surround her and get her out of harm's way. We had each others' backs. That seems to no longer exist.

And then there is the sentencing of these two criminals and the reaction to it. They each got a year for the rape. One year. One of them also got an extra year for distributing the images, which I have to call bullshit on because isn't that child pornography distribution and doesn't that have worse penalties? I think these guys were charged with crimes less than what they committed because of this sickening boys will be boys attitude, and how sad is it that now their lives are ruined, blah blah blah. They were tried as juveniles. They raped a girl and were tried as juveniles, at the ages of 16 or 17. We will try an eleven year old who shoots an abusive parent as an adult, but we won't try two damn near adult age young men as adults for raping an unconscious girl. I'm trying to wrap my mind around the reasons that might be because I certainly can't imagine a more vile crime than raping a person who is passed out and then distributing the images.

Yes, this girl got really drunk and she very well may have been flirting with these boys early in the evening. It doesn't mean she deserved to be violated. It doesn't mean that she asked for it or that her poor choices (and yes, they were poor choices) mean she deserved less justice. I'm willing to bet there were many drunk guys at this party, maybe even passed out drunk guys, who didn't have fingers stuck into their orifices while pictures were taken, and if that did happen, would we be having a conversation about drinking and poor choices? Maybe or maybe not. While we might still be shaking our head at such horrifying drinking activity, I don't think anyone would be thinking the guy asked for it or deserved it.

We need to stop trying to find ways to justify sexual assault. Until we do, we will be forever dealing with rapes of this nature. I mean, we are human and humans have used rape as a weapon for most of their existence, but this girl wasn't spoils of war. She was just a drunk girl who was taken advantage of and we can't be okay with that in any way. We can't be questioning what she did wrong when she was the victim of this crime, and we can't be trying to find ways to explain such horrible behavior in a way that leads us to more ways for women to not get raped. It's time the message becomes "Don't rape."