This is What Happens When Rape Isn’t Taken Seriously
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Every 92 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted; and every nine minutes, that victim is a child. Do you know how many of those, who perpetrated these heinous crimes, actually receive prison time? Five out of every thousand.
The United States Criminal Justice system is woefully unprepared to handle these cases in a timely or fair manner. Just today, a local North Carolina newspaper reported that the rape kits, and other evidence, collected in the rape and murder of three women, in 2017, are still sitting in the state lab, untested.
It’s no wonder that perpetrators of sexual violence are the least likely to go to jail or prison.
But why are all of these tests just sitting in evidence or even in a lab, and not being tested. There are a number of reasons; the detective on the case did not request DNA results, the laboratory is too busy to test the kit right away, but most of all, because it’s not been made a priority.
Three out of every four victims of assault never report the attack.
Do you wonder why? I don’t. I’m one of the three.
I’ve been the victim of sexual assault, battery, marital rape, regular old rape, sexual molestation, and sexual harassment. Yep, all of them. By different people, at different times in my life. I’ve reported some instances, and kept others to myself.
Why? Because I learned, at a very tender age, that reporting things such as this gets me absolutely nowhere.
Recently, a friend here wrote an article discussing her experience of almost being raped, and how she got away. She talked about how her own parents thought that a woman that could allow herself to be raped was asking for it. She must be dressed inappropriately, be in the wrong place at the wrong time, etc. Another friend wrote in her personal blog off site, about numerous instances of sexual misconduct, and minimized the attacks on herself. She didn’t want others to think she was saying that what she had personally been through was as bad, or worse, than what they could possibly have experienced.
This is the world we still live in, today. Now, imagine it 20 years ago, 30 years ago. The first time I needed to report sexual molestation was almost 36…
