Many years ago, I was a volunteer at a rape crisis center. We didn't have any professionals working there. The director was a tall, stately African American woman who resembled Michelle Obama physically and in personality. A social worker by profession, she ran her little group on a shoestring budget out of an office in the YWCA. A few times a month, we'd answer phone calls that were relayed to our homes, and we'd go to the hospital if the police called.
One of the victims I worked with has haunted me since the day I met her. I never learned how her case turned out because before it went to court, I moved to N.Y. because I'd gotten a job there.
She was 12 when I met her, a rangy tween who was even shorter than my 5'3", a pretty blonde with sad hazel eyes. Our first conversation was stilted, until I told her I'd been one of the lucky ones. When I was 8, a 12 year old neighbor kid had "captured" me in a game of cowboys and Indians. I was being held "prisoner" in a friend's one-room treehouse, with a noose around my neck fastened to the rope that held my hands; if I squirmed too much,t he noose tightened . If I'd been less innocent I would have realized this wasn't the usual game. I was up in that treehouse with him and no one seemed to know what was going on. Feeling scared, I asked him to let me go. Instead, he untied the straps of my one-piece playsuit, and tried to undress me.
THAT I knew was wrong, and I screamed.
Loudly. REALLY loudly.
Loud enough that someone's mother came and told him to let me go, because I obviously didn't want to be play any more.
"I'm glad you got away, " she told me, "because it's awful." She cried in mya rms, and told me the story.
She was an inner city kid of a single Mom who'd moved there from Tennessee. She'd been hanging out on the stoop of her Baltimore rowhouse when a neighbor, someone she knew by sight but wasn't well-acquainted with, pulled up and asked her if she wanted to go with him to run an errand, and he'd buy her an ice cream.
Oldest trick in the book, but this was 1978, and sexual abuse of kids wasn't all over the news, and she was 11, and she sorta knew him. She also knew she wasn't supposed to go with anyone who wasn't well-known to her mother, but well, she knew him, kinda, so it had to be okay and Mom wasn't around to ask anyway. The rest you can figure out.
She didn't tell her mother until a month later. She was afraid she'd get into trouble. But she was having trouble in school, and crying, and having nightmares, so her mother knew something was wrong, and finally got her to tell her what had happened. Her mother took her to the police. There was no physical evidence, of course, but a vaginal exam indicted she'd had sex of some sort. ANd she could identify the neighbor.
To no one's surprise, this wasn't his first time molesting a pre-teen. He was married to girl he'd taken up with when she was 14, and she was now 16 and pregnant. She'd refused to testify against him, so there was no case. He'd abused a 13-year- old, and her parents had wanted to press charges until he began to threaten them over the phone. Scared that he'd do soemthign worse, they changed their minds.
You'd think this would be a pretty clear-cut case, but the asshole prosecutor wasn't so sure, I learned when I met with him. He was young and a jerk, and rather handsome. She had a crush on him, and tried to impress him by acting more mature than she was. He told me he wasn't sure it was really rape, because, well, she hadn't been hurt physically, no bruises or broken bones (like bruises would be there a month later?),and she probably wasn't even a virgin. After all she was a tough little street kid from a bad neighborhood. But it was at least statutory rape since she was so young, so he had no problem prosecuting, though it'd like get pleaded down to statutory rape, which was likely what it actually was. In short heonly aprtially beelived her.
Shades of John Boehner and his fellow Republicans. They likely wouldn't have believed it was a real rape, because insufficient force wasn't used. She was 12, and s five feet tall and one hundred pounds soaking wet with her clothes on. He was twenty-fucking-six and a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier. He didn't have to hit her to force her to lie there and endure her own violation. She knew that he could kill her easily, and he told her he would if she didn't do what he said. So she lay there. It wasn't consensual, but it wasn't sufficiently violent in this prosecutor's mind, just as it wouldn't be sufficiently violent for Boehner and his bully boys and girls.
I wanted to punch him. It was the first time I ever felt that kind of anger, where I wanted, no, needed to physically harm someone. This son of a bitch didn't think a threat from a full-grown man to a 12-year-old wasn't enough to call it a "real" rape.
I managed not to apply my fist to his perfect nose. I simply told him in a soft voice that if he'd held this child while she cried about it, he'd know just how real it was.
The rapist didn't show up in court that day, and his lawyer got an extension. I left Baltimore a few months later. I never forgot that prosecutor. I think I hated him as much as I hated the rapist.
And now I know that good old Boehner and the good Christian Republicans would have denied that child Medicaid abortion had she gotten pregnant because it wasn't a real enough rape for their tastes. She was lucky. She didn't get pregnant because she hadn't even begun to menstruate. And how ridiculous tat sounds to me: she was lucky because she was raped before she had begun to menstruate.
And that is why this new law they're proposing to further restrict government funded abortions makes me so insane with rage, at every single Republican, starting with the women, who co-sponsored this bill. Because that child is the face of the victims they'll force to bear their rapist's child. Before they dare to sit in judgment on rape victims, they need to get out of their plush offices and meet the women and girls to whom this happens. Because it could be their daughters who are the patient sitting in that ER in a paper gown sobbing themselves into migraines.
Or, Michelle Bachmann, that could be you.
Yes, you. Nice middle class, white, Midwestern YOU,under the wrong circumstances. And I would bet that if a man much larger than you got you alone and threatened to kill you, and you didn't have your trusty gun with you-- you might choose not to fight, too, to save your life. And if you got pregnant, you'd be able to afford an abortion. Rapists don't discriminate--and neither does pregnancy.
Note: I won't be able to hang out and respond to everyone, but this case has been in my mind since I read about this law. I had to get it off my chest. At 5:30 I am gonna have to leave with husband for dinner with MiL. Set up a while ago, but I couldn't put off writing this diary, and still be bale to eat anything tonight. This kind of case gives you the real kind of heartburn, an anger so deep your chest and heart ache.