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We watched the familiar trajectory of violation, trauma, disillusion, and finally vindication, seemingly forgetting we had sort of seen this story before.Įvery other movie aired on Lifetime or Lifetime Movie Network features some kind of violence against women. Later in the series, when the show was on its last legs, Kelly would be raped again, this time by a stranger. For many young women that episode created a space where they could have a conversation about rape as something that did not only happen with strangers. I remember, for example, the episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 where Kelly Taylor discussed being date raped at a slumber party, surrounded, tearfully, by her closest friends.
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Can you think of a dramatic television series that has not incorporated some kind of rape storyline? There was a time when these storylines had a certain educational element to them, a la A Very Special Episode. The casual way in which we deal with rape may begin and end with television and movies where we are inundated with images of sexual and domestic violence. is more concerned about the eighteen men than one girl.
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It is not a stretch to imagine why James McKinley Jr. We jokingly say things like, “I just took a rape shower,” or “My boss totally just raped me over my request for a raise.” We have appropriated the language of rape for all manner of violations, great and small. We have also, perhaps, become immune to the horror of rape because we see it so often and discuss it so often, many times without acknowledging or considering the gravity of rape and its effects. As Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver ask in their book Rape and Representation, “How is it that in spite (or perhaps because) of their erasure, rape and sexual violence have been so ingrained and so rationalized through their representations as to appear ‘natural’ and inevitable, to women as men?” It is such an important question, trying to understand how we have come to this. While there are certainly many people who understand rape and the damage of rape, we also live in a time that necessitates the phrase “rape culture.” This phrase denotes a culture where we are inundated, in different ways, by the idea that male aggression and violence toward women is acceptable and often inevitable. We live in a culture that is very permissive where rape is concerned. It is difficult for me to make sense of how anyone could lose sight of that and yet it isn’t. It was an eleven-year-old girl whose life was ripped apart, not the lives of the men who raped her. It was an eleven-year-old girl whose body was ripped apart, not a town. The overall tone of the article was what a shame it all was, how so many lives were affected by this one terrible event. Strangely, there were no questions about the whereabouts of the father while this rape was taking place.
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There were even questions about the whereabouts of the mother, given, as we all know, that a mother must be with her child at all times or whatever ill may befall the child is clearly the mother’s fault. There was discussion of how the eleven-year-old girl, the child, dressed like a twenty-year-old, implying that there is a realm of possibility where a woman can “ask for it” and that it’s somehow understandable that eighteen men would rape a child. James McKinley Jr., the article’s author, focused on how the men’s lives would be changed forever, how the town was being ripped apart, how those poor boys might never be able to return to school. The Times article was entitled, “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” as if the victim in question was the town itself. There is video of the attack too, because this is the future.
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The levels of horror to this story are many, from the victim’s age to what is known about what happened to her, to the number of attackers, to the public response in that town, to how it is being reported. I read an article in the New York Times about an eleven-year-old girl who was gang raped by eighteen men in Cleveland, Texas. There are crimes and then there are crimes and then there are atrocities.