The blog Helpful Comments has compiled comments from an AOL news story about the girl who was gang-raped at a school dance last week. All I can say is, they have stronger stomachs than I do. She – a 15-year-old, by the way – was drinking. She was wearing a skirt. She was female in the presence of rapists. All of which are apparently mitigating factors in the minds of these commentors.
When I take a cleansing breath, I can give great benefit of the doubt to these commentors and assume that they’re not *actually* blaming the victim of a gang-rape that put her in the hospital, that instead they’re trying to dig out from this awful incident some sort of cautionary lesson.
Unfortunately, in the rape apologist’s scramble to find some way to find fault with the victim in order to assure him/herself that something like this would NEVER happen to them, or their daughter, or their sister, they ARE, in fact, blaming the victim. I can promise you that this young woman is revisiting every decision she made that night, second-guessing, asking herself, if I’d only done this, not done this, then I wouldn’t have been in the position for this thing to have happened to me. I can promise you that she’s feeling every iota of her part in what happened to her that night, and will for the rest of her life.
Every rape-prevention program in this country does the same thing – don’t walk alone at night, don’t dress provocatively, carry mace, etc. How about this… DON’T RAPE PEOPLE. It just seems so much simpler, no?
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