Rape Culture: It exists and we as a society have to do something about it

March 19, 2013 -- A girl was raped in the town of Steubenville, Ohio in the US in August 2012 and the media is treating the recent conviction of the teenaged perpetrators of this vicious act with sympaty.  She was victimized again following the rape when pictures circulated online showing the unconscious teenage girl being dragged around to different parties by her rapists who laughed and were encouraged by onlookers who captured a personal memento of the occasion on their cell phones.

The rape lasted for hours with the perpetrators driving the young girl from party to party, raping her, assaulting her, and filming themselves doing so.  

The girl was victimized for a third time when CNN gave sympathetic coverage to the convictions of the rapists.

Related:

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And now the girl is being victimized again as she and her family receive death threats via Twitter and Facebook following the conviction of the perpetrators.

This is neither the first time nor will it be the last time (sadly) that a woman is raped and then photos of the incident posted on the internet as some sort of sick memento of the occasion.  Rapes happen everyday in our so called civilized society and many of them go unreported.

Related: 

Rape statistics by country

What this incident (and the many others that go unreported) says is that western society is not evolving when it comes to misogynist and degrading attitudes towards women, especially as it relates to teenagers and young men (and it doesn't matter how young they were, in the eyes of the law they were old enough to know better). At best society is stagnant and at worst it is devolving, and the pervasiveness of modern technology has a part to play in this ([1] [2]). It shows that the veneer of social civility that is trumpeted by western society (i.e. the sort of things that happen in PUT NAME OF DEVELOPING COUNTRY HERE would never happen in PUT NAME OF WESTERN DEVELOPED COUNTRY HERE) is thin as paper and it takes very little for the social contract that permits civilized society to exist to break down. The fact that so called civilized people stood by and let it happen is also an indication of the existence of evil in society that goes willfully ignored or unnoticed.

Our society is sick and it is getting sicker because of the neanderthal attitudes about the place of women in society that continue to be pervasive despite decades of efforts to change these attitudes by the thoughtful, progressive and feminist minded. This sort of mindset can be directly linked to actions by right wing governments who cut programs that help and support women, and the conservative minded within society who support and advocate these sorts of government cutbacks. Those cuts are attacks on women and they are indicative of an attitude within a significant segment of society that women should just shut up and deal with this sort of thing privately.

It's an attitude that is wrong!  Rape culture exists and we as a society have to do something to eliminate it.

To do or think otherwise should sicken and anger everyone!

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