Think Humanely

Imagine a little girl, small for her age – shy, full of self doubt – who finds herself called into her principal’s office. The principal pulls down the blinds in his office. He locks the door. Then he tells the girl, not even a teenager, what she needs to do in order to succeed in school. He runs his hands across her still developing body. Soon the principal takes off his pants and demands that she takes off hers. He rapes her. But not just once. Several times. Over and over and over and over. He never stops. Ever. Not of his own free will. He only stops when he is finally transferred to a different school (where he simply starts again with another student) or becomes so old that he’s no longer capable of the same sexual abuse that he is so accustomed to.

Now try to imagine the type of people it would take to defend the principal in the scenario above. What kind of completely sick, twisted, completely fucked up individuals would support someone who actively rapes children? Try to imagine the people defending the principal by accusing his critics of bigotry. Try to imagine the people actively helping him get away with it so that he can continue to rape girl after girl after girl. Try not to stress yourself too much with what should be an impossible riddle. The answer is sadly predictable: the religious. A more specific answer is, of course, the Catholic Church.

Both the current and past popes (the former Pope is currently up for Sainthood) have intentionally conspired to cover-up the crimes of pedophile priests. Writes Christopher Hitchens

There are two separate but related matters here: First, the individual responsibility of the pope in one instance of this moral nightmare and, second, his more general and institutional responsibility for the wider lawbreaking and for the shame and disgrace that goes with it. The first story is easily told, and it is not denied by anybody. In 1979, an 11-year-old German boy identified as Wilfried F. was taken on a vacation trip to the mountains by a priest. After that, he was administered alcohol, locked in his bedroom, stripped naked, and forced to suck the penis of his confessor. (Why do we limit ourselves to calling this sort of thing “abuse”?) The offending cleric was transferred from Essen to Munich for “therapy” by a decision of then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, and assurances were given that he would no longer have children in his care. But it took no time for Ratzinger’s deputy, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, to return him to “pastoral” work, where he soon enough resumed his career of sexual assault.

…

Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church’s own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated “in the most secretive way … restrained by a perpetual silence … and everyone … is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office … under the penalty of excommunication.” (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism! (See, for more on this appalling document, two reports in the London Observer of April 24, 2005, by Jamie Doward.)

The Church even accuses those with the “audacity” to point out these crimes of being the equivalent of anti-Semites. Those poor rapists – how evil and prejudiced we all must be to condemn them for torturing children and women. PZ Myers adds the following damning piece of information:

The Stranger has a revealing article on pedophile priests — in particular, it focuses on the native populations of Alaska and Canada, which were used as a nice, obscure dumping ground for the very worst sexual predators the Catholic Church could provide. Small children were raped, entire villages are decimated by mental health trauma and suicides brought on by these monsters, and in one particularly appalling instance, a priest was caught raping a dying woman he was supposed to give the last rites. There’s also an interview with a former priest who was a “cleaner” (yes, he actually calls himself that), brought in to tidy up the messes these evil men brought into a community…before they got shipped off to another community.

The sheer concentration of known sex offenders in these isolated communities begins to look less like an accident than a plan. Their institutional protection looks less like an embarrassed cover-up than aiding and abetting. And the way the church has settled case after case across the country, refusing to let most of them go to trial for a public airing, is starting to look like an admission of guilt.
Here’s the reason why the church covers up for rapist priests.

“Why does the church keep sending these priests, who have come to be such a major liability, back into ministry? ‘It’s all about keeping the stores open, keeping the revenue rolling,’ Wall says. The Alaskan provinces in particular, Wall says, were a source of revenue–not from the Native population living there, but from parishioners in the lower 48 who were encouraged to donate for the Native ministry up north. ‘You could raise thousands to fund a mission that cost very little to run,’ Wall says. ‘The profit margin is huge.’”

In the hypothetical that opens this post, men and women would raise all forms of hell. Parents would lay waste to all those who committed these vile atrocities and those who protected them. But not when it comes to religion in general or the Catholic Church in particular. Organized religion gets a walk. The Pope will never be charged with anything. The majority of these priests will never face any significant punishment, as has always been the case. Children and women will continue to be systematically abused and raped, and it’s all because people respect an institution that is entirely undeserving of it.

I recently wrote about the rather obscene opposition to Senator Al Franken’s proposed amendment to cease doing business with defense contractors who refuse to allow their employees to sue in court when they have been raped by coworkers or superiors. It would be rational to assume that given the public blowback that resulted from such misogynistic and greedy ideology, the thirty Republicans who voted ‘No’ would either back peddle, devise a better excuse to justify their arcane belief system, or vomit forth some unholy union of these two options. But no. Not this GOP. Watch this clip from The Rachel Maddow Show, which features an interview with Jamie Leigh Jones, one of many who was brutalized by defense contractors and denied her day in court by a company more concerned with profit and protecting rapists than it is in justice, morality, and all things decent:

The senators refuse to defend their vote, but not out of guilt or shame. It’s more likely that it’s out of arrogance and disrespect. We, they think, don’t need to explain ourselves, and certainly not to women. It’s also likely that their refusal to defend their vote is out of the obviously erroneous conviction that they are simply right and everyone else is wrong. Imagine being asked to defend your belief that you’re against slavery or slaughtering infants. You wouldn’t even bother. Such moral truths, like our rights as free citizens, are self-evident. And in their own twisted way, these thirty men (and yes, they are all men) firmly believe that they do not need to answer questions because they actually have the moral, legislative, and judicial high ground.

As disturbing as either of these scenarios is, neither is nearly as contemptible and depraved as the news reported in The Raw Story. Daniel Tencer notes

according to a report at the Huffington Post, the amendment — though considered to be wildly popular — may have trouble getting any further. Reporter Sam Stein cites “multiple sources” who told him Sen. Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, is considering watering down the amendment, or eliminating it altogether, when it goes to a vote on the Senate floor as part of a defense appropriations bill. Stein reports:

“Inouye’s office, sources say, has been lobbied by defense contractors adamant that the language of the Franken amendment would leave them overly exposed to lawsuits and at constant risk of having contracts dry up.”

As Rachel Slajda reported at TalkingPointsMemo, despite the horrible optics of appearing to be in favor of rape, both the White House and the Pentagon are opposed to the amendment, at least in its current form.

Liberals and progressives shouldn’t be surprised that the Pentagon is opposed to Franken’s amendment. The fact that Obama, the great liberal hope, also opposes it is shameful and an utter embarrassment to all who consider themselves one of his supporters. Furthermore, that even one of our elected representatives can be bought off to ignore the due process of rape victims should trigger an automatic recall, if not a constitutional convention. There is something deeply, sickeningly wrong with not just our democracy, but with our people. There is a disease eating away at us, and these politicians are our canaries. Their gross immorality, indifference, and corruptness are our warning sign: change now or forever lose your way.

Think what you will of Al Franken the comedian, but as a United States senator Franken has continued to impress. His most recent act of distinction is an amendment that would bar federal business with companies that refuse to allow their employees to seek redress in a court if they are raped, assaulted, or discriminated against by coworkers or superiors.

A number of defense contractors currently force their employees to sign away the right to sue if they are raped. Why would contractors include such a callous contractual agreement? Apparently, it is because rape is a systematic problem within their ranks. Arguably the most notable example of this barbarous behavior is that of Jamie Leigh Jones. A 19-year-old Jones was brutally gang-raped by coworkers at KBR and Halliburton in Iraq. While our troops fight for “freedom” and “democracy” in Iraq, this young woman was locked in a shipping container after the raping finally ended. KBR/Halliburton security guards were posted outside the container and Jones was denied medical attention. While Jones was eventually freed, she was told that she would be fired if she brought attention to what was done to her. And while Jones has received the bulk of the media attention when it comes to this issue, she is, sadly, not alone.

Karen Houppert recounts what happened to Dawn Leamon, a KBR paramedic, during her time in Iraq:

That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, she found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand–but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth.

Over the next few weeks Leamon would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp’s military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. “Because then, all of a sudden, if you’ve done exactly what you’ve been instructed not to do–tell somebody–then you’re in danger,” Leamon says.

Houppert goes on to write, “a growing number of women employees working for US defense contractors in the Middle East are coming forward with complaints of violence directed at them. [...] a rash of new sexual assault and sexual harassment complaints are being lodged against overseas contractors–by their own employees. Todd Kelly, a lawyer in Houston, says his firm alone has fifteen clients with sexual assault, sexual harassment and retaliation complaints [...] against Halliburton and its former subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root LLC (KBR), as well as Cayman Island-based Service Employees International Inc., a KBR shell company.”

Fortunately, Franken’s amendment passed with 68 votes. What is tragic, however, is that thirty Republicans voted against it. In other words, the perverted GOP voted 3 to 1 against Franken’s proposal. Watch Jon Stewart satirical attack of this disgraceful behavior:

Every single one of those thirty GOP senators, all of whom are men, should be forced to tell Jones, Leamon, and every other woman raped while working on behalf of their country, why they shouldn’t be able to seek justice.

Jones said that the passage of the amendment “means the world to me [. . .] It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it.”

The United States abolished the enslavement of African-Americans in 1865, due in no small part to the Thirteenth Amendment. African-Americans were by no means suddenly treated rightly afterward. For more than one hundred years they continued to face violence, suspicion, bigotry, and laws aimed at oppressing them. What they did not face, however, was forced servitude. They no longer had masters, plantation owners who beat, killed and raped them. And while they may have finally escaped that fate, hundreds of thousands of women and children have not. These individuals serve as sex slaves all across this country, no freer or safer than the slaves of our founding generations. The difference, however, is that while physical and sexual abuse was a means to an end for plantation owners, for those who kidnap and buy women, rape is the end itself. There is no field to till. No dishes to serve or mansion to maintain. There is only their body.

It’s estimated that 20,000 women and girls are smuggled into this country every single year to serve as sex slaves. 20,000. The barbaric futures that face these women, in a country that routinely prides itself on being the only country in the world whose people are granted their rights by God, a country that routinely tells itself that “America is a shining city upon a hill,” is heinous beyond words. The details that follow cannot begin to communicate the horror of such a “life.”

Professors Janice Raymond and Donna Hughes published an extensive investigation into trafficking in the U.S. They found that the age of buyers ranged from 15 to 90. Put yourself in the shoes of the thirty-year-old bought by the fifteen year old boy, or the twelve-year-old girl sold to the ninety-year-old. 58% of sex slaves “said that men expected them to comply with all their requests. Almost half […] reported that men expected sex without condoms.” Another 45% said they were assaulted if they asked the John to use one. 86% were beaten by buyers. 80% were sexually assaulted. 50% “described frequent, sometimes daily assaults.”

CBS conducted an undercover investigation in which their reporters attempted to buy a young girl, Nicoleta. The following describes what happened in a hotel room with her “owners:”

Nadia brings out the girl, “Nicoleta”, to meet with Van Sant. She and her business partner and husband, Costel, put Nicoleta on display in the filthy apartment where she services clients.

To rescue Nicoleta, it is crucial that Van Sant and the 48 Hours team convincingly play the role of cold-hearted traffickers.

Nicoleta undresses. “They usually show the girls to see she doesn’t have any marks, any skin disease so they can show she’s good to be used,” says Matei. “It’s, like, when you say, sell a cattle in the market.”

“To you, it’s a human being. To them, it’s not,” adds Matei.

After buying her, the little girl told the reporters that this was “the first time she’s been outside in more than a year.” What did this girl’s life, her body, cost the reporters? $1,800.

But not all sex slaves are brought in from other countries. Many are taken from their homes or grabbed off the streets. There is this tragic example: “What started innocently with [a girl’s] infatuation with an older male classmate turned to date rape caught on film by some of the rapist’s friends. They used the photos to blackmail the girl into sexual slavery that lasted two years and involved hundreds of men.”

And this story from a now grown woman, recounting the 24-year-old who manipulated her into thinking he loved her when she was 14:

Later that evening, his friends came by the motel. At first, he told me to have sex with someone. I did not want to so his friends raped me. Afterwards, he said “that wouldn’t have happened if I would have just listened to him at first.” I blamed myself instead of being angry at him for being raped. I was angry at myself for not listening to him in the first place. After that, he picked my clothes out, told me what to wear, what to say, how to walk, what to say to “Johns” and how much money I was to bring back to him. He then forced me to go out into the streets.

And this , girls who “were compelled to have sex with 130 men per week, beaten, raped, and forced to undergo abortions.”

The consequences of this nightmare are understandably severe. Raymond and Hughes found that 80% felt depressed. 41% felt hopeless. 64% had suicidal thoughts and 63% “had tried to hurt or kill themselves.” Long-felt repercussions include dissociation, cutting, substance abuse, the loss of a sense of future, flashbacks, and chronic nightmares.

A MSNBC report notes that “in a coordinated nationwide sweep in July, federal, state and local authorities made more than 640 arrests and rescued 47 children in just three days.” The report mentions this as if a testament to the progress that the authorities are making to stem this terrible tide. But they are wrong. The federal, state, and local authorities would have to keep up that same coordination, that same success rate, every day, all day, for the next 425 days just to save the 20,000 who were brought into the country this year, not counting the ones like the 14-year-old gang raped in a hotel room. What about the year before that? And the year after?

. . . The average age at which a girl is first forced into prostitution is 12-14.

60% of sexual assaults are never reported, making solving the ones that are that much more important. Rape is a terribly brutal crime that once came with an equally terrible punishment: execution. But there’s no longer a federal death penalty for rape. Now, according to a 1992 study, the average amount of time a rapist spends in jail is 5.4 years. Now, when a woman is brave and strong enough to report the indefensible crime, she faces ridicule, shame, ostracism, and persecution. Now, the accused, depending on how powerful he is, gets a #1 selling jersey or movie roles . Michael Vick has been punished more severely, both by the legal system and his profession, for dog fighting than have his colleagues who beat and rape women. And now, police barely investigate the crimes at all. Women are left to languish, hoping that the monsters who attacked them will be caught, or at least actively pursued. The reality? The DNA evidence isn’t even tested.

There are over 400,000 rape kits sitting in labs, waiting to be tested. Human Rights Watch, in a significant and thorough investigation of the matter, notes “testing a rape kit can identify the assailant, confirm a suspect’s contact with a victim, corroborate the victim’s account of the sexual assault, and exonerate innocent defendants.” The organization points to several examples of the consequences of neglected kits:

Catherine was in her forties, living with her young son. She was awakened at midnight by a stranger who raped her, sodomized her, and forced her to orally copulate him – repeatedly […] When it was over, the police brought her to the Rape Treatment Center [at Santa-Monica – UCLA Medical Center]. Like all rape victims, her body was one of the crime scenes. She consented to the collection of evidence.

The detective was told by the crime lab that it would take at least 8 months to analyze Catherine’s rape kit. The detective said he knew from the “MO” in this crime that the rapist was a repeat offender […] He personally drove the kit to the state lab – where the kit still sat for months. When it was processed they got a “cold hit.” Catherine’s rapist was identified. He was in the offender database.

During the months Catherine’s kit sat on a shelf, unopened, the same rapist attacked at least two other victims – one was a child

Rape kits aren’t simple. It’s not like having blood drawn. There are questions, many of which force the victim to relive the experience in detail: what were the circumstances; details about the attacker(s); was a condom used; what was the nature of the sexual conduct/acts; where did he ejaculate; what happened after he was done; the date of the victim’s last menstrual period and last time she had sex, etc. STD, HIV, and pregnancy tests are performed. The victim’s pubic hair is combed. Anal and vaginal cavities are examined and photographed. The body is scanned for saliva and semen. This can take several hours.

More examples from the HRW report:

A sexual assault nurse examiner told Human Rights Watch of treating a child who had been abducted and raped near a school bus stop. When the child described the attack, the details struck the provider as nearly identical to the story of another child who was abducted from the same bus stop and raped, and was treated at the same clinic three months prior. When she contacted the police officer in charge of the investigation to inquire about the results of the rape kit test from the earlier case, he informed her that it was still waiting for testing at the lab, and might not be tested for another six months [which means that if the rapist continues to strike with the same frequency, two more girls will be raped]

…

An investigating officer told […] about a case he was working on in which a college student was raped as she tried to get into her car. The officer requested testing for the rape kit, but eight months after the request still had no received test results.

…

A rape victims’ advocate had a client whose rape kit test results came back more than a year after the rape had occurred. When an investigating officer told the victim that the DNA profile in the kit matched an offender in the DNA database, the victim no longer wanted to participate in the case. The advocate told Human Rights Watch, “She couldn’t go back to the nightmare of her rape. I think that if the detective had been able to identify her rapist in the weeks and months after it happened, she would have been able to cooperate.”

The worst offender in terms of backlogged kits is Los Angeles County, with a minimum of 12, 669 kits awaiting examination. And according to HRW, “499 kits are attached to cases past the 10-year statute of limitations for rape in California, making it impossible to prosecute the alleged assailants even if they were to be identified. Under California law, if those 499 had been opened within two years of the attack, the statute would no longer apply. Thousands more rape kits were destroyed untested.”

Imagine: someone grabs you from behind and pulls you into his car or grabs you on the way to school and rapes you, an attack not only physically brutal but so psychologically devastating that it increases the odds of life-long depression, suicide, developmental disorders, PTSD, alcoholism and drug use, eating disorders, personality disorders, psychosomatic conditions, body dysmorphic disorder, and sexual dysfunction. Imagine that afterward you have to relive the assault in excruciating detail, answer questions about your personal life, climb up on an examination table and put your legs in stirrups, to once again be treated like a physical object. Now imagine that the evidence that results, evidence so important and compelling that having it dramatically increases the odds of a conviction, is sitting forgotten on a shelf, collecting dust. And the rapist remains free.

If there is any potential hope, one might be able to find it in the news that “Sheriff Lee Baca of Los Angeles County has agreed to direct over $3 million in his FY 2010 budget to testing physical evidence in rape cases for DNA matches.” And while “the funding estimate is an essential step for the county to eliminate its backlog,” what is to keep another backlog from developing?

RAINN , the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network, tells us that there were 248,300 victims of sexual assault in 2007, and that’s not counting attacks of girls under the age of 12. That’s an assault every 127 seconds. 1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted at some point in their life. And only 6% of rapists will ever spend even a single day in jail for their inhumanity.

If you have been a victim of sexual assault, or know someone who has, you can find some valuable help here.