There are days where it can be difficult to believe in humanity...and then there are days when it is damn near impossible to either believe in it or even come close to understanding just how dysfunctional it is.
Rape culture world-wide is appalling. To have it perpetuated in the United States so blatantly...I am embarrassed, outraged, shattered.
CNN I didn't think it possible for you to get me to a point where I would turn off your news station as quickly as I do Fox News, but you have managed to succeed on that front. Shame on you for perpetuating the rape culture notion that it is always, always still the victim's fault.
On a day when the victim in the Steubenville, Ohio rape case might have and should have received some measure of justice, CNN took to the air to report the breaking news of the guilty verdicts in a report that was suffused with sympathy for the convicted football players and offered no concern for what the young woman has been through. CNN anchor Candy Crowley and reporter Poppy Harlow just couldn't imagine how "incredibly emotional" and "incredibly difficult" it was to hear the verdicts "as these two young men who had "such promising futures, star football players, literally watched as their lives fell apart."
The Guardian piece, Steubenville and the misplaced sympathy for Jane Doe's rapists: Rape is unique in US society as a crime where the blighted future of the perpetrators counts for more than the victim's, is exactly the kind of news article that shouldn't have to be printed in our "enlightened" society. And yet...thank goodness it is being printed and I hope to high heaven that it can start to elicit some sort of shift in our collective perception of rape.
But rape isn't any other crime in America, or elsewhere...It's the only crime in which the level of intoxication of the victim is considered by some, like the convicted rapists' lawyers and some in the media, to be mitigating evidence. It's the only crime in which the perceived attractiveness of the perpetrators to other people or the victim is considered relevant information. It's the only one in which we're encouraged to sympathize with why perpetrators picked their victims – their supposed drunkenness, their clothes, their reputations – and then blame the victims for making themselves attractive targets
If you have managed to run across this daily read, it was probably accidental. I'm pretty sure I have no grand following. The good news is, if you ran across this and now want to do something proactive to address rape culture please consider going to change.org and signing the petition requesting CNN step up to the plate and apologize for news coverage that sympathized with the rapists.
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