She might have been held back a couple of times.
Heh, that’s my fault. I seem to recall being 11 in fourth grade, but looking back I was 11 in fifth grade and I was old for my class.
The OP’s thread title made me think of the Pitcairn rape trial of a few years ago, where literally most of the adult male population of the entire country (well, British territory) were tried for rape. Granted, the territory’s population is only 50 people (give or take a few), but while I’m sure the OP was being hyperbolic (is that the correct word for “employing hyperbole”?) with their thread title, “half the community” is not a hyperbole here.
(Sadly, this case comes from being so incredibly isolated, with a small population base, that the sexual pairings are extremely limited. Despite all residents claiming to be devout Seventh Day Adventists, the rapes have been going on for generations, and have been taught as a “way of life” on the island (the women of the island defended the practice in the trial). I think the excrement only impacted the proverbial air circulating device when a foreigner came to the island and discovered what was going on.)
You’re really serious? I knew that attitudes towards rape victims were still messed up but I had no idea just how bad. This makes “Maybe it happened because you were wearing a skirt/dress” look normal.
No, I think Jragon is trying to say that even the worst tragedy can produce a glimmer of good, a sentiment with which I heartily agree. I think he just said it in a way that perhaps didn’t convey his intent.
At least that’s what I got out of it.
Lynn said she made the best decision she could under the circumstances–submit to what the rapists told her or get beaten. She did what she felt she had to do. Jragon’s response was that maybe being beaten would have been a good thing. It’s just like…is there nothing a rape victim can do that won’t be scrutinized?
I think we all know the answer to that question. I don’t think Jragon meant to convey what he apparently did, but I do wish people would realize that all the ‘‘rational preparation’’ in the world cannot prepare anyone for the actual experience of being assaulted. There are statistics, and probabilities, and then there is the experience of having someone much older and stronger tell you to get in the car or he’s going to beat you.
I have often lay awake at night imagining what I would do if someone broke in. What if they had a gun? What if they had a knife? I’ve done all sorts of heroic things in my daydreams, like smashing a lamp over the would-be assailant’s head, or crouching behind the door and waiting until he entered to lay out the surprise attack. I imagine all of that ‘‘preparation’’ would amount to jack shit were I actually staring down the barrel of a pistol.
I also think, Jragon, you’re underestimating the potential negative impact of reporting a rape and having it ignored. The potential consequences for someone making claims of rape can be pretty dire, and negative reactions by friends and family members have been proven to increase the probability of PTSD following a trauma. In fact, I’m willing to bet one of the reasons rape leads to PTSD so much more frequently than other traumatic events is in part due to the lack of social support victims face following disclosure. As someone who reported sexual abuse to a counselor and pretty much had my family disown me as a result, I have no issue believing that keeping your mouth shut is the most rational choice. Sometimes I honestly wish that I had never said a word. That is one hell of a Pandora’s Box to open, and I don’t think you should minimize that in your rational consideration of ‘‘the right thing to do.’’
Yes, I’d say it’s best to look at every negative experience as such, to not do so is to let the experience control you. Now, it’s not like this is easy at all, and it’s not like you can’t be overwhelmingly hurt, sad, angry etc while looking at it like this. I’m just saying, looking at it like this in the long run can make things better, and generally people want things to be better. It’s a very emotional, terrible, heart-wrenching experience, but just because something has an effect on our emotions doesn’t mean we can’t also use our brains.
No, specifically in this case I’m measuring the reaction, not what she did to “cause” her rape. Like I said, it ridiculously minuscule, and wrongness worth mattering lies on the people who didn’t instruct her correctly, and of course the rapists. Besides, there are damn good reasons to be wrong, like being traumatized, it’s not like I blame her, I’m just trying to look at this in as much of an emotionally detached manner possible to see if I can sniff out a cost/benefit analysis of actions one can take in the aftermath of bad rape situations.
Like I said, in this specific case I’m measuring the aftermath, when the rape already happened and she could have reported them for a concrete crime. Going to jail tends to inhibit rape of little girls by that party. And these people aren’t interchangeable, even if she somehow prevented them from raping her altogether the next person is an unknown, she could know martial arts to take down groups of attackers (a little outlandish). It’s not necessarily a direct exchange, different situations can pop up. Hell, maybe they would have robbed a convenience store instead and they would have gotten arrested before they even tried another rape.
That’s pretty much what I’m trying to say.
Well, strictly speaking I don’t think anything anybody does should go without scrutiny, that’s how we learn things, that’s how we develop new means to make the world better. Now, there is a such thing as time and place, I’m not going to scrutinize the girl to her face or her parents, but on a message board far away from her attention I think its ultimately useful to society to try to objectively look at every little part of the situation, no matter how insensitive it seems.
And no, I didn’t say she shouldn’t have submitted to getting raped. She had two choices: get raped or get beaten and possibly killed. Getting raped was the logical choice at that juncture. What I was referring to is that after the fact she can either not say anything and get raped repeatedly (which happened), or she can call the cops once home. The latter choice has a lot of potential positive outcomes, it’s no longer a strict division between “raped” and “beaten” and starts to include possibilities like “getting them in prison.”
I’m aware, I’m taking the most emotionally detached approach possible. I just think that drilling stuff like this into kid’s heads is liable to make them more likely to do the right thing. Yeah, it’s emotional and I don’t blame them at all, making that choice under emotional distress is bound to be incredibly hard no matter how prepared you think you are. I just think that preparing makes you more likely to do the right thing (whatever it is, and in whatever situation) than not preparing at all.
I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily underestimating the effect of those scenarios, what I might be doing is underestimating their relative likelihood. Yeah, that’s a shitty situation, possibly even worse than being beaten and killed. On the other hand, I don’t want to give catchall advice to a rape victim that says “keep your mouth shut because nobody will believe you.” It may be a bit naive, but it seems to me promoting that point of view ultimately causes more societal harm than good. At the same time, if keeping quiet is truly the least likely to cause, on average, the most harm, I don’t want to ask anybody to martyr themselves for the sake of some nebulous ideal of making the world a better place. It really does depend on probabilities and weights (and no, in real life you can’t assign some numeric weight to a situation, I’m just using the term for ease). I suppose it depends on the situation to a large degree, in this case keeping quiet may very well have been the correct option, it does seem like her assailants were well connected enough that she might have been made a mockery of and then just get raped more. I personally still think that telling still is the best choice, but perhaps it’s not quite as clear cut as I initially thought when I was pondering it.
And in the story, we hear the locals saying that she was a ho, that she basically asked for it because of her dress and behavior. I would say that this little girl knew EXACTLY what sort of reaction she would have received if she’d reported it…that is, that SHE would be blamed for it. So in addition to getting raped, she got shamed as well.
Some stuff just sucks, and there is no redeeming factors. I was once violently assaulted and the attackers broke three of my vertebrae. Nothing good came of it. There were no lessons learned, no deep revelations, nothing good at all. It hurt, scared my family, messed up what should have been a very important time in my life, and gave me nightmares for a couple years. That’s it. That’s what it did. Not everything happens for a reason. Not every hurt makes us stronger.
Having a pedophile try to drag you into a car at the age of 8 and having to convince a police officer that no that man was not your father certainly is. Having a teacher threaten to flunk you if he didn’t get a blow job at the age of 11 certainly is. I definitely know I had seen more of the rough side of the world at 11 than a child growing up in Cleveland, Texas. I’ve been to Cleveland. It’s rural and isolated and suffers from all the evils of small towns, but it’s hardly as dangerous as many places.
I do think you have a point. In one longitudinal study I read about, general sex abuse education for elementary school students did absolutely nothing to prevent sex abuse - but it did significantly reduce the number of kids who developed PTSD, theoretically because they had already learned and understood that it wasn’t their fault, and had some clue what to expect. In that sense I think general preparation is good.
But you can also hear strong messages like this every day and still be unprepared. I rationalized the hell out of my own abuse while watching specials on Oprah and feeling very sorry for ‘‘those girls.’’ I know it’s not the same thing, but I find it completely within the realm of possibility that this girl never identified what had happened to her as rape, never considered that it could be anything other than her fault and her responsibility. And I think that can happen regardless of the extent to which one is educated or prepared. To give you an idea of how common that might be, take a gander at one of the old ‘‘grey rape’’ threads on this Board and how many women report clear examples of rape and don’t identify it as such, even years later, with the wisdom of age.
I feel like violently assaulting someone when they say ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade’. If life doesn’t give you sugar too, that lemonade will suck, and I don’t like lemonade very much anyway. Hopefully there is a positive side to this incident because it’s exposure will make more people aware of the problem, and decrease the chance of it happening again. But I don’t see a positive side for the victim at all. I find it hard to believe that the victim is in any way better off from being gang raped. I don’t think that’s what Jragon intended to say, but I can understand someone reading it that way.
Darn, if only they had been Muslims, magellan could have started another thread.
My point wasn’t “she is better off from being gang raped” or even necessarily “make the best out of your rape” so much as “her life was hell while being gang raped, but the eventual arrest of the perpetrators via <insert action here> would make it less of a hell.” Fair enough that in this case the whole town was basically against her, maybe she did make the right choice. And I’ll check out those “grey rape” threads.
I think what a lot of people are forgetting is that the people who should be teaching safety to children who end up being raped and molested, are the very people doing the raping and molesting. Most victims of molestation are molested by people they already know.
So a little girl who “should know how to keep herself safe” is only doing what she’s been taught her whole life, that she is a sex toy and she better keep quiet about it.
And saying she should have told after, trust me, many of us tell and many of us are not believed and those who do believe don’t care to do anything anyway.
In one of the links to the story, I read that the girl’s parents are having a tough time of it and may split up. The girl has expressed regret about having told.
That’s so sad. If she’d known all the trouble telling would cause, she wouldn’t have told. I’m sure that attitude is very common in kids in these situations.
Thank you, this is exactly what I am trying to convey
And specifically, why didn’t her parents do anything about it, and why didn’t the parents of the people who were raping her do anything about that?
The victim is not responsible for her actions, because she was eleven years old. Who the bloody fuck was responsible for her actions? And why the hell didn’t they do something before it ended up in gang rape?
Regards,
Shodan
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