Revealing Truths

A couple of days ago I posted some “News of my area” that detailed how a 15 year old girl was attacked, dragged into the bushes and raped on her way home. I posted the article to show that violence against women is happening everyday but also to measure the reaction. A commenter called “antsy” felt the need to tell me what was the real deal.

Such gems from this commenter include insinuating:

--That I assume all victims of crime are women when I should know better. It's dangerous to be a human, not just a woman.
--To claim that it’s hard to convict a man of rape and get him any significant jail time is “sensationalized crap”
--Oh.. and Antsy knows this because he lives with a man who was “victimized” by a false accusation.

Antsy suggests his roommate was framed by a woman who changed her mind about wanting sex. He says of the trial, “Let's be serious, even if he was found innocent (he wasn't, there was barely even a trial. All she needed to do was cry before the jury), it wouldn't matter, because the general public snubs people who are even accused of rape, let alone convicted.”

First and foremost, when people are accused of rape they are snubbed, as are victims.

I don’t know your roommate. It is possible that he was wrongly convicted of sexual assault but I sincerely doubt it. It takes a lot more than a girl crying in front of the jury to send a man to jail. It takes evidence of some kind. Innocent until proven guilty, remember? And I might have trusted what you said a little more had you not spoken against women with such bitterness. You say “don't think it hasn't happened that a woman has a less than benevolent agenda and will try to spin the story to her advantage.”

Women aren’t perfect but false reporting is less likely than you might think. Statistics vary greatly I believe it would take a rather angry woman to bring false accusations.

When a rape victim comes forward there isn’t always a rape shield law in place or the defense lawyers can get around it. Coming forward as a victim of rape (directly after an attack) means
--a rape examination at the hospital. Clothes are taken as evidence, the woman's body is photographed, and she endures an invasive internal exam--- this assuming she goes directly to authorities. The next step, or first step if a woman is reporting a rape after time has passed is
--the police station…Hours spent giving reports and reliving the horror over and over again.
--Next are criminal trials that can drag on for months all the while hearing the whispers in the community.
--Finally she faces her attacker on the stand while cross examination tries to poke holes in the story… suggest that she’s lying, vindictive, insane. It’s called the nuts or sluts approach. You’re either nuts and you imagined it or you’re a slut and you deserved it.

My heart is honestly with the innocent accused victims who sit in jail. In this past year I can think of several stories where men have been released from prison because DNA evidence has proved their innocence. But please don’t act like women bring accusations of rape for fun or because it’s “in their advantage to do so.”

If you think that way, here are some facts you should probably be aware of:

--Women are 10 times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate.
--Every day four women die in this country as a result of domestic violence
--Every year approximately 132,000 women report that they have been victims of rape or attempted rape, and more than half of them knew their attackers.
--It's estimated that two to six times that many women are raped, but do not report it.
--Every year 1.2 million women are forcibly raped by their current or former male partners, some more than once
(Violence Against Women: A National Crime Victimization Survey Report", U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., January 1994.)

Women and girls in the world suffer from genital mutilation, dowry death, bride burning, being sold into sex trafficking not to mention rape, spousal abuse and stalking.

Antsy if you want more information:

National District Attorneys Association

Or go TO THIS SITE where you can read about a man who raped a sex worker at knifepoint to “teach her a lesson” received 6 years in jail with possibility of parole after just two years served.

Violence Against Women is more prevalent than violence against “humans in general” 80% of trafficked humans are women and victims of rape are 99% more likely to be female than male. And another sad story that illustrates the hatred and violence against women… (goes with the picture above)

National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, Sunday Dec. 4, 2005 at the Vancouver

December 6, 1989 – A lone man walked into an engineering class at the University of Montreal. He separated the women and told the men to leave. After the male students complied, the man began to shoot the women with the semi-automatic rifle he had brought with him. In the end, after 14 women were dead, Marc Lepine the man who screamed “I hate feminists” before he opened fire, took his own life.

So next time you roll your eyes at women who "cry rape" think about the facts. This doesn't mean your roommate can't be a victim, but don't come on this site and try to sell me bull that it was easy to convict him just by putting a crying woman on the stand.