Friday, May 25, 2007

Unprosecuted rape: As American as...

...apple pie and baseball. Good thing, too, for the members of the De Anza Community College baseball team in California who are being charged with absolutely nothing after sexually assaulting a teenager (17 years old) at a house party. The ripple effects of the Duke lacrosse apparently have run all the way across the country because despite witnesses and a huge amount of local publicity, none of the eight men are being prosecuted because the DA claims there is not enough evidence.
Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy and Diane at The Dees Diversion have posted about the case so I won't go into just how ridiculous it is that once again the players and their supporters are crying "poor persecuted white men are we." That's been covered.
I will say that it is quite saddening to find that, even as many of us yearn for more women in positions of power, that a woman actually in power were at the center of the decision not to prosecute: the DA Dolores Carr. I figured out long ago that just because women are in power does not mean they are actually going to make the world a better place; that women are not inherently better than or more moral than men. But I still hold out hope that women who have experienced some of the crap the patriarchy throws at us (though the patriarchy throws a lot of crap at men too and not too many of them have risen up) would make women who actually get to make important decisions more likely to see through all the rhetoric: that consent is pretty hard to come by when you're nearly passed out drunk; that girls enjoy sex so much they want to have it with three different guys one right after the other; that girls are so magnanimous that they want other men around to watch them enjoying all this sex.
Despite the despondency that seems to set in when reading the details of the case, major commendations have to go to De Anza students Lauren Chief Elk and April Grolle who rescued the victim from the room and took her to the hospital. And further kudos to community members who have protested at Carr's office.

1 comment:

Diane said...

What is really sad is how the blogger who posted the item at MoJo Blog (Mother Jones) got ripped apart for daring to suggest a rape had occurred. "Innocent until proven guilty," etc., but the enraged commenters seem to have missed the point that no has was even charged with a crime. And they fail to see how this case has anything at all to do with Duke.

I'm not sure which is more disturbing--the sexism or the stupidity. At any rate, I didn't dare blog about it at MoJo because I knew what would happen.