It has been on my mind all weekend. It has made me angry and frustrated, sad and afraid every time I have allowed the thought to creep up from the back of my mind and forward to my consciousness. I just can’t shake it, and maybe I’m not supposed to. I am after all human.
I read in the paper this Saturday about a thirty year old woman being raped by three men seen fleeing from their crime. I am sad to say that in my country, which allegedly is the best country in the world to live in according to the UN, assault and rape has become a common crime happening way to often for comfort.
Rape is a violation of body, privacy, freedom, mind and soul. It is taking something from another person using violence, scarring them for life. I get a lump in my throat just by thinking about it. It is, I believe, the worst thing anyone can do to another person. And to do this, in stripping this victim of all that is holy and tearing down their safe world and leaving them with nothing but fear, in a body they no longer own for themselves, you would have to be a monster. A rapist must be without conscience and humanity. How is it even possible to do this to someone? And when it is done, how can one live with himself?
In the cases that we have seen in media this last year it has too often been reported that there have been two, three or even four rapists in one assault. My mind keeps going back to this summer, when a girl, twenty years or so, got assaulted and raped in her own home, by two men. And this other girl, barely eighteen gets pulled from the road and into a van with four men. What monsters, what filthy cowards! What awful creature who thinks it can do this to another human being. Grown up men who rape a defenseless girl in an act of misplaced domination. Don’t they, themselves, have mothers? Sisters? Daughters? A hart?!
I hope they have nightmares of the victim screaming, I hope they see her eyes every time they close their own. I hope they are tormented every day for the rest of their life, like she surely is.
The punishment for said crime is ridiculous! It underestimates the worth of a girl, of her life and her freedom, her peace of mind. She is ruined for life, and IF the rapist get caught (90% of all rapes are not reported), and IF he gets convicted (the police dismissed eight out of ten cases), he is sentenced for just a few years in prison even though the law opens for a sentence up to ten years (twenty one years if there are more than one rapist). The punishment for the victim is harder and longer than that for the rapist! The victim’s punishment is for life! They claim that in my country there is gender equality. But if that were true, I imagine the punishment for rape would be much harder.
I wish for a superhero. I imagine him, cape and all, going out into the night, saving my sisters and punishing the evil. I wish for humanity to grow in our cold society and for us, everyone, to take to the streets in protest of what is happing. Not just for the victims in my country (eight - to sixteen thousand every year) but all over the world. For all the women, men and children who have been robbed of their self-worth and left in shame, and for their loved ones picking up the pieces. A march against rapists who take, with no moral, something they have no right to take. Who do it hiding in the night, in cars waiting, at war using it as a weapon, in pairs of two and three, like cowards, like beats of man. Like the roaches they have become, I want them to feel not even worthy to be crushed under our shoes. How can we allow this to continue? To read about it and not care enough, to know and yet ignore the frustration and hate, the anger and the fear.
My street is unsafe for me to walk in at night. I hate the men who made it like this and the system who allowed it to continue. And I hate us for not rising up against it. For this I am sorry I am only one..
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