Women still being blamed for their rapes
“What did she expect to happen at one in the morning after sneaking out?”
That’s Attorney Joseph DiBenedetto, speaking to Fox News about the alleged rape of a then-14-year-old girl in Missouri by a 17-year-old boy.
DiBenedetto, a defense attorney, had no involvement with the 2012 case, which was dismissed initially, despite an iPhone video for evidence, and is now being reopened after a media firestorm.
Why DiBenedetto was given a voice on the subject I can’t imagine, but his view, that a woman can play a role in her own rape, is frighteningly common. Especially, it seems, among politicians, judges and lawyers, who wield enough judicial power to ensure that the number of rape convictions remains at a dismally low 25 percent — and that’s among the only 18 percent of rapes that are reported at all.
A bit more background on the case in Missouri: Two teenaged girls were hanging out, rebelling a bit by sipping from a bottle of liquor stowed in a bedroom closet. After some late-night text exchanges, they ended up sneaking out to meet some older boys at a party where there was drinking going on.
This is all, so far, common teenage behavior. Reckless, sure, but secret liquor and sneaking out of the house are practically iconized as part of growing up.
These are the kind of crimes that you admit to your parents later in life, and everyone laughs about it. It’s not in any way an invitation for what happened next.
At the party, Daisy Coleman, who has decided to make her name public (“I’m nothing more than just human, but I also refuse to be a victim of cruelty any longer,” she said), was given a large shot glass of liquor by her alleged rapist, Matthew Barnett. After that, events blur, until her mother found her on the family’s front lawn, where the boys from the party had left her, her hair frozen in the January cold. Her friend was allegedly assaulted, also, and was able to fill in details Coleman could not of what happened to them both.
Coleman filed charges; lots of evidence was gathered. More than usual in a case like this. And then, the case stopped there. Perhaps, some argue, because Matthew Barnett’s grandfather was a prominent Missouri state politician. Thanks to a story in the Kansas City Star, however, the case has been reopened.
Add to DiBenedetto’s offensive voice that of Emily Yoffe, who argues in a column for Slate that we must teach young women not to drink alcohol. She writes, “a misplaced fear of blaming the victim has made it somehow unacceptable to warn inexperienced young women that when they get wasted, they are putting themselves in potential peril.”
Yaffe’s goal, she says, is to give young women power by telling them all about the things that could happen to them if they aren’t careful (“Looking out for your own self-interest should be a primary feminist principle,” she writes). Because nothing makes young women feel in charge more than living in fear of potential rape. And, on top of that, fearing that if something bad did happen to them, it would be construed as their fault, not the fault of the person who actively harmed them.
Speaking of living in fear, it sounds like a place like Maryville, Mo., is not a very safe place in general, despite being a small town of 12,000. After Daisy Coleman’s mother lost her job at a vet clinic as a direct result of the case, and the family was forced to move out of their home and put it up for sale, the house was burned to the ground. Should Daisy Coleman have somehow stopped that, too?
Op-ed space, and talking-head blathering, is being devoted to telling young women not to drink, to be careful and on guard, while the message to young men to not rape — or what rape actually is, and that it doesn’t always involve dark alleys and clear screams of “no” — is still secondary.
And while alcohol does present its problems, especially for young people, telling women to avoid it all together won’t solve the problem. In fact -and I can’t believe I’m saying this, after all those years of reading freshman composition papers on the subject — it would probably help more if we lowered the drinking age and allowed young people to get accustomed to alcohol consumption, rather than making it a forbidden fruit to be binged on in secret.
After all, young men are more likely to commit rape while being intoxicated themselves. Where are the talking heads and op-eds that warn about that?