This article is fucking depressing, not to mention rage inducing and triggering for anyone who has ever experienced...
This article is fucking depressing, not to mention rage inducing and triggering for anyone who has ever experienced assault or violence.
It's also directly relevant to what is happening with the SCOTUS nomination. Rich, privileged kids and adults permit and enable totally unacceptable behaviors and castigate and cast out anyone who doesn't play by the rules. The chief of which is keep your mouth shut.
And one reason it matters 'all these years later' is that we are supposed to get better as a society and stop rewarding and enabling this crap. Every person who gets a pass because 'the rules were different then' is one more time we perpetuate that behavior into the future, because there are no consequences. They do fine and live their life and get even more privileges for it. You don't stop it tomorrow, you already allowed it yesterday, so you stop it today. Right now. Otherwise you are saying it's really ok to behave that way, so keep on keepin' on. Not to mention we don't say it's ok to murder someone just because it happened years ago or rules were different, etc. Rape and assault are violence, not sex. Stop dismissing it as if it were meaningless and harmless.
Once she made it out of the hospital and into addiction treatment, Wyatt’s counselors told her she needed to invest her trust in a higher power — to have faith.
Oh, screw you. No, really. Because the way to deal with trauma is not to reinforce the idea that you are devoid of agency and should just sit around letting shit happen to you. Give up even more, because you're helpless! Magic will sudden solve everything for you and it will be all better! Not to mention any higher power that let's this kind of thing happen can go stuff itself.
This is my imperfect offering toward that end: a record of what happened, and the willingness to have been troubled by it all these years. It still troubles me now — it will always be unresolved — and I hope that it troubles you, because the moral conscience at ease accomplishes nothing.
It's hard not to still feel a lot of anger toward this reporter for also having done nothing all those years ago. And yet having done this, she has done more than anyone - the legal system, the lame apologies. For one thing, we clearly need a national no statute of limitations on rape and assault so no evidence can ever be destroyed. We need to have more prosecutions like the one in Steubenville. We need to stop teaching that sports stars (or anyone) are entitled to assault and rape. And we need to consider consequences for the adults that facilitate, enable, conceal, and straight up lie about these things.
We need to stop giving rich (white) people a pass because they're rich. We also need to have some pointed conversations with the women who have been co-opted and facilitate this - hello Cindy Marks, whoever you are, and all the horrible cheerleader moms who instead of supporting the victim's mother ostracized her, too.
We need to do a better job of teaching The Scarlet Letter and we should do a blunt teaching unit on Peyton Place (book and movie) in high school. This is the ssdd and pretending these things don't happen and re-victimizing the victims is not how you make it stop happening. If we're too afraid to deal with the real world, maybe we can at least use fiction (based on reality in the one case) to get over it and start doing something real to change things.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/opinions/arlington-texas/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.59c2aac8c246
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/opinions/arlington-texas/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.59c2aac8c246
It's also directly relevant to what is happening with the SCOTUS nomination. Rich, privileged kids and adults permit and enable totally unacceptable behaviors and castigate and cast out anyone who doesn't play by the rules. The chief of which is keep your mouth shut.
And one reason it matters 'all these years later' is that we are supposed to get better as a society and stop rewarding and enabling this crap. Every person who gets a pass because 'the rules were different then' is one more time we perpetuate that behavior into the future, because there are no consequences. They do fine and live their life and get even more privileges for it. You don't stop it tomorrow, you already allowed it yesterday, so you stop it today. Right now. Otherwise you are saying it's really ok to behave that way, so keep on keepin' on. Not to mention we don't say it's ok to murder someone just because it happened years ago or rules were different, etc. Rape and assault are violence, not sex. Stop dismissing it as if it were meaningless and harmless.
Once she made it out of the hospital and into addiction treatment, Wyatt’s counselors told her she needed to invest her trust in a higher power — to have faith.
Oh, screw you. No, really. Because the way to deal with trauma is not to reinforce the idea that you are devoid of agency and should just sit around letting shit happen to you. Give up even more, because you're helpless! Magic will sudden solve everything for you and it will be all better! Not to mention any higher power that let's this kind of thing happen can go stuff itself.
This is my imperfect offering toward that end: a record of what happened, and the willingness to have been troubled by it all these years. It still troubles me now — it will always be unresolved — and I hope that it troubles you, because the moral conscience at ease accomplishes nothing.
It's hard not to still feel a lot of anger toward this reporter for also having done nothing all those years ago. And yet having done this, she has done more than anyone - the legal system, the lame apologies. For one thing, we clearly need a national no statute of limitations on rape and assault so no evidence can ever be destroyed. We need to have more prosecutions like the one in Steubenville. We need to stop teaching that sports stars (or anyone) are entitled to assault and rape. And we need to consider consequences for the adults that facilitate, enable, conceal, and straight up lie about these things.
We need to stop giving rich (white) people a pass because they're rich. We also need to have some pointed conversations with the women who have been co-opted and facilitate this - hello Cindy Marks, whoever you are, and all the horrible cheerleader moms who instead of supporting the victim's mother ostracized her, too.
We need to do a better job of teaching The Scarlet Letter and we should do a blunt teaching unit on Peyton Place (book and movie) in high school. This is the ssdd and pretending these things don't happen and re-victimizing the victims is not how you make it stop happening. If we're too afraid to deal with the real world, maybe we can at least use fiction (based on reality in the one case) to get over it and start doing something real to change things.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/opinions/arlington-texas/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.59c2aac8c246
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/opinions/arlington-texas/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.59c2aac8c246
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