This Morning 12/29/12 Don't Rape

The death of the 23-year old student raped and brutally assaulted by six men on a moving bus in Delhi, India has shocked, grieved, and angered a nation of women and men enraged by the lack of "official" response to the overall issue of rape.  In a country that reports a rape every 54 minutes, according to the State of the World Population Report, it is estimated that in actuality, 70% of rapes go unreported there.  The devastating story of this one young woman's life and the circumstances of the attack and her eventual death have pushed the issue of violence against women in India into a necessary international dialogue of how it is societies can not only protect our women, but also expeditiously investigate and prosecute rapists.

The easier legal problem can be helped with the cooperation of victims (immediate reporting) and law enforcement (effective response times and education of response teams) so that policing can be fact-based and not belief-based.  Further policy can be implemented so that criminal prosecution is broad-based in its definition of rape.  Monetary rewards (and dowry issues in India) need to be removed from the equation so that motivation for false charges is minimized.  Name-and-shame proposals, similar to Megan's law, can be somewhat preventive.

The higher order, more far-reaching, and most difficult aspect of this issue is protecting our women.  I'm not talking about physical protection; I'm talking about how to change the attitude that has made it acceptable for rape to exist.  In order to even talk about this subject, there has to be a discussion of the societal status of women.

We refer to women as a social grouping, a demographic, a constituency, and a special interest group as if they don't account for over 1/2 of the world's population.  As such, women are the majority.  In most governing bodies of the developed world, the majority rules where policy and legislation are concerned.  Despite that women, by their majority, don't elect women as representatives, the fact that women are the most represented "constituency" of the population ought to impel priority of women's needs.

It is at the most basic level of societal influence - the laws by which a society is governed - which forms our ideas and ideals of how a functional society works.  If the laws governing the protection of a segment of society are flaccid, then the citizens are given to assume the value of that segment as minimized.  Women have been cast into a minimized value segment of society across cultures for at least a thousand years.  In the context of industrialized societies, 300 years of agrarianism drove the stake between the value of women and the value of men.  The importance of the family unit began to suffer at that point.

Women talk about rape.  It is the subject by which we define whether we've been lucky in life or not.  Depending on your resident country, you can be either very lucky or very unlucky.  The following graphic is a very small sampling printed on the India Tribune website.

Teaching our societies to not accept rape, just as we don't accept anarchy, involves education of our children and re-education of adults and our media.  Showing or implying rape in any context must encourage ending the heinous act, not glorifying it as a right of passage like the American entertainment media seems to propagate.

We must stop teaching our women "don't get raped" and begin teaching our men "don't rape!"