When
I write these musings of mine, I’m trying to sort things out in my own mind and
when people share their comments with me I read them. Your comments often help
me look at problems from a different angle and even if I don’t reply, I do read
them.
Sometimes
I try to be funny, sometimes I’m snarky, but I’m trying to think out loud… and
I’m trying to get you to think as well.
I
take the easy part, I ask the questions… I have lots of questions.
One
of my questions is why is it when things happen “over there” in faraway places
the media jumps on the story and runs with it, but when things happen in Canada
they slide under the radar?
Not
too long ago the media was abuzz with stories about rapes in India. Before that
there was a story about a poor girl in the Maldives who was to be given 100 lashes
for being the victim of rape, but when rapes occur here, we don’t seem to hear
about it.
I’m
thinking first about Rehtaeh Parsons. I don’t recall anything coming across my
screen about the alleged rape of a 15 year old girl by four boys in 2011, but
I’m in Ontario. I don’t know if this story made the regional news or even the
local news in Nova Scotia. It should have.
The
saddest part of Rehtaeh’s story is not that she was raped, but the
victimization she faced after the rape.
The harassment and hate she had to suffer through for 17 months until
she was unable to take anymore.
Rehtaeh
is not alone, in the last few days a young woman in Windsor, Ontario has come
forward telling her story as a rape survivor.
She was raped by her boyfriend and suffered through the same abuse that
Rehtaeh suffered through. She also tried
to commit suicide to end the torment that she was living in. She’s speaking out because she wants other
victims to know that they are not alone.
The
message needs to get out.
When
there was a serial rapist in Toronto, a woman Tweeted a list of things to
prevent being raped. She suggested
learning martial arts, carrying mace, and to stop dressing like a slut.
This
woman’s claim to fame was that her father is a politician in Toronto.
Her
comments caused another woman to come out about being raped. She was hurt and offended that people assume
that only sluts or women and girls who dress like “sluts” get raped. She said on her Facebook page that she had
been raped, and that the dress she was wearing was the same one that she had
worn to her Grandmother’s birthday.
Hardly “slut gear” by any means.
The
response to her coming out about being a rape victim was amazing. She received many messages of support, but
she was stunned by the number of messages of support from other rape survivors
who had managed to carry on.
It
really is a crime that it took the death of Rehtaeh to spur any action
surrounding her case. The initial
investigation by the RCMP determined there wasn’t a good possibility of
conviction so they let the matter slide.
17 months later and after Rehtaeh’s death Darrell Dexter, the Premier of
Nova Scotia wants to look into the handling of the rape case by the RCMP. Just a little late I think.
Rehtaeh’s
parents and Dexter also had meetings with Stephen Harper. They didn’t have much to say afterwards, and
neither did the government, but it seems that the response will likely be more
laws.
Another
law is not the answer. There were a
number of laws broken here. Rape,
possession and transmission of images of the rape, the harassment, and no one
was brought before the courts. No one
was found guilty of an offence, there was no justice.
When
I sat down to write this I looked for the statistics on rape in Canada and
there really doesn’t seem to be much to go on.
I ended up looking at Wikipedia to find there were 576 reported rapes in
2010, their most recent number. Those
576 rapes boil down to 1.7 people per 100,000.
But, and it is a
big but, less than 10% of rape victims report the crime.
That
means there are likely 2 rape victims per 10,000 people in Canada in 2010. That means that it is entirely possible that
you personally know someone who has been raped.
I also found a statistic that 25% of Canadian women have been raped at
some point of their life. That’s 1 in 4
women.
There
has always been a stigma to rape. For
some perverse reason people think that women who get raped were asking for
it. We don’t think that a home owner is
to blame for having their house broken into because they had nice things. But we’ll blame the rape victim if she was
wearing makeup or a dress just to look nice.
The
way we have treated the women who have come forward to report rapes is horrid. They’ve been dragged through the mud in the
court system with lawyers trying to show that they were asking for it. The community often looked down of these
women as being beneath contempt because only bad girls got raped. And then there are the idiots who seem to
think that because a girl gets raped she must be some sort of easy lay and they
want to get some too.
It’s
no wonder they don’t report the crime.
Would you?
This
isn’t something new. It has been with us
a long time. The only difference is that
today we have social media that is capable of reaching an untold number of
people within seconds. The stories might
have rumours between friends back in the day or in coffee klatches, later on
rumours moved down the line on the telephone, but always limited to a few at a
time. A post on Facebook can reach
hundreds or thousands and a Twitter message can suddenly go to millions.
So
what is the answer? Will another law
help?
It
might, but we don’t seem to be able to enforce the laws we already have. And if rape victims are too afraid to come
forward will these laws help at all?
What
we need to do is to understand that rape happens to nice girls. And we need to teach our kids that bad things
like rape happen to nice people and sadly we need to start teaching this to
kids before they leave elementary school.
I’m
not saying this is a school thing, parents teach kids too, and it should be
parents teaching this to their own kids.
CBC
Windsor had an interview with a 14 year old girl who was raped when she was 12. She said that she was harassed and bullied by
the others at her school when they found out.
When the interviewer asked her about it, she said that the other kids
didn’t understand, they didn’t realize what they were doing was wrong.
She
is very wise for 14 years old.
We
need to remove the stigma from being a victim of rape. We need to enable these girls and women so
that they can be confident that they will not suffer for naming the person who
committed this crime against them.
Earlier
I mentioned that less than 10% of rapes are reported in Canada… That means that
90% of the rapists are not charged, not brought to justice…
Think
about it,
BC
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