It’s my job to pick up the day’s newspapers for the Reference Department. For years, we’ve had a subscription with a 24-hour convenience store just up the street, but they’ve decided to no longer carry newspapers. I’m sure the decline in newspaper sales in and of itself is an issue we could discuss, but today I’m thinking about something else. Something that really pisses me off and causes conflict within me at the same time.
The front page of the Troy Record this morning pictured a young white man in prison blues sitting next to an attorney in court, and the headline read “Pluff Pleads Guilty to Rape on Bike Path.” The victim agreed to the plea because it meant she wouldn’t have to testify. Pluff got sentenced to 20 years, but I’m not sure how long before he’ll be up for parole (it’s too soon for it to appear on the DOC website). I’ve mentioned that I’ve done prison advocacy work, and I will continue to do so, but when it comes to sexual assault and prison abolition, my feelings tend to trump my politics. I’m one of the lucky ones, but I have loved ones who have been raped, molested, and tortured. It’s hard to reconcile these two issues for me, especially if the rapist white (statistically, the majority of them are). Let the mofo rot in prison and maybe even get a taste of his own medicine for all I care. I admit it: I feel this way about sex criminals, and this feeling causes some tension with anti-cop, anti-prison movements.
When I went online to reread the story later that morning, I noticed another disturbing headline: “Restaurant Worker Arrested for Abduction.” His victim was luckier–she managed to miraculously escape from a moving van and run for help, but only after she had been forced to strip at gunpoint.
According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), “Sexual assault has fallen by more than 60% in recent years.” That’s a good thing, for sure, but on a day like today when I’m reading about a rape and an attempted rape in the same paper, it doesn’t feel like much has changed.
RAINN also cites stats that “73% of sexual assaults were perpetrated by a non-stranger.” Not true in these two cases: both the local incidents in today’s paper were committed by total strangers. The Record reports that the DA acknowledged that this is rare, and “that fact makes this crime extremely unusual and dangerous. ‘These are the kinds of cases where the likelihood of serious injury or assault is the highest,’ he said.” The Record also reports that this is also the second local case of a victim narrowly escaping a would-be rapist in the last four years: “Such cases are rare in this community. An attempted kidnapping occurred in the Saratoga Springs High School parking lot on Halloween 2005, when a high school student narrowly escaped from her would-be abductor, a Connecticut man who was subsequently convicted. [DA] Murphy said the two cases are ‘like lightning striking twice.’”
Hopefully so. RAINN’s most recent numbers say 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. When I was a grad student in the mid-1990′s, that number was more like 1 in 4 (college students remain a higher risk group for sexual assault). Even with a decrease in numbers overall, RAINN reports that there is a victim of sexual assault in the US every two minutes, and that there were 248,300 reported victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault in 2007. And, this number doesn’t include the estimated 60% of unreported sex crimes.
The woman who didn’t want to have to relive her experience in court is still a hero to me because she survived. The woman who kept enough of her wits about her while being driven naked at gunpoint to a remote location so she could jump from the back seat of a van into the front and then out the door so she could run to safety is also a hero because she survived. We all have to save ourselves in a rape culture, however the hell we can. You two ladies and the other 248,298 victims this year are in my thoughts.
