Yet again, the system punishes rape victims.

[la_marquise]

This report is unspeakable: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-11707903
Here we have a woman punished for being intimidated by her rapist. It's clear that the judge in the case believed that her allegation of rape was genuine, but he and the prosecutors still value public male time more than her safety, her mental health or her well-being.

Comments

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

I shall not horrify you by discussing the exact details of how the judge and prosecutors need to die, and just express complete agreement with you.

Sadly, this sort of attitude is prevalent in many places:

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/11/bullied-to-death.html

"Samantha Kelly endured merciless taunting from classmates after they learned that the high school freshman had accused a senior of rape.

The weeks of harassment eventually became too much. Samantha went home from school Monday and hanged herself in this community southwest of Detroit.

With their key witness dead, prosecutors on Wednesday dropped criminal charges against the older student, saying they had no case without the accuser's testimony ..."

That's interesting. Because Kelly was 14 and the accused rapist, Joseph Tarnopolski, is 18, and, when the alleged assault was originally reported, "it was considered a statutory rape case, meaning the pair had consensual sex but that she was under the age of consent." Tarnopolski does not deny having a sexual interaction with Kelly, but claims it was a "mutual thing."

Which seems to suggest that prosecutors could still pursue a statutory rape case, even if they cannot pursue it as a more serious sexual assault charge. But I guess the crime doesn't matter now that the victim's dead. Good thing they don't apply the same standards to murder cases.

Meanwhile, this case reveals that US educators still have a metric fuckton to learn about how to assess bullying and harassment in schools:

"Principal Donovan Rowe said school officials investigated the alleged bullying and found nothing overt. Rowe said on occasion he walked behind Samantha as she went from class to class and witnessed no harassment."

You say no students harassed her while the principal was trailing behind her? Fascinating. What a revelation.

I would love to see this case open up a national conversation about talking rape accusations seriously, about victim-blaming, about victim-shaming and -silencing, the way that we've begun a national conversation about anti-gay bulling. But I suspect that's not going to happen.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Too many girls and women are still suffering in this way in too many places. But it's never a major enough issue to those in power.