–Micheal Jul 9, 2014 @ 17:25
“Rape Is No Joke” is looming close to being a logical paradox in the extreme in the era of anti-rape underpants, anti-rape finger nail polish, anti-rape gadgets and the failed promise of safety and security for women and children. Maybe it is an invalid argument for some people like the women who died at their own hands after being raped by ISIS fighters in Mosul, but hopefully still valuable in promoting critical thinking. “Rape is no joke”.
Maybe I have become cynical while I look at the battered face of Irina Krashkova who was raped a year ago by police in the Ukraine; I hear the sobs of survivors who call;
Rape Survivor Irina Krashkova
and I think of the poor little darling kid who was raped aboard a train near Bankok, suffocated and thrown off the train this summer (2014) –am I losing my mind or is she better off not having to suffer the long, slow cruel torture that follows sexual assault for so many.
The Rape and murder of a girl, 13, on a Thai train sparks calls for capital punishment for rapists. An initial forensic test found that the girl died of suffocation before being thrown out of the train. She had been raped. This child was raped aboard a train and then tossed overboard to her death. Thailand has a horrible track record for dealing with rapists. It’s a global centre for the child sex trade. People caught and convicted of rape offences, once arrested and sentenced, usually get pardoned and released from jail. And when they get out, they commit the crime again and again to the point that judicial power in Thailand is no longer sacred.
While talking to RINJ volunteers via data-line from Northern India I saw such enormous disconnects across the globe. Ordinary people in Uttar Pradesh are removing two child bodies–rape victims–from a mango tree and across the globe George Will in the Washington Post asserts that young women are coveting the status of rape ‘victimhood’.
How do I explain this?
In the decades of working as a defence and foreign affairs journalist and editor ( http://TheWednesdayReport.com) I learned while covering eight wars and as many ‘other conflict’ armed actions that while rape is horrifically common throughout the world, and more so rape in conflict zones, so, too, are psychological operations intended to shape perceptions and outcomes of conflicts.
Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and now the Islamic State all practised horrible sexual violence tactics in their psychological manipulations of their nations’s population.
We cannot protest this conduct too much. Stay the course. We must do our work within the confines of sane, rational thought and action.
There is no point in ranting for the death penalty, a violence provoked by violence. It’s time to stop violence.
Rapists can’t be cured so they must be imprisoned and kept away from the population. Rape is about power and control and the punishment should suit the crime. I believe the more you think about this the more satisfied it will make you feel and maybe your rage will pain you less. The most rigorous punishment for rapists is prison. Don’t kill them. Don’t take the law into your own hands. Rapists need to be in jail where they are stripped of all power and control and get demeaning baggy, droopy-drawers jail-house pants and a life behind bars. They lose all control and can start repenting in maybe twenty, thirty years when they finally get it. (Read our articles about RINJ Foundation’s sentencing guidlines for rapists. https://rinj.org/blogs/stiffer_penalties_for_rape.htm)
The RINJ Foundation tried mid-summer 2014 to convince people in Tulsa not to arm themselves to the teeth and form vigilante posses to go after a man who had attacked eight women in their homes raping five of them in the worst possible manner–stories you don’t want to hear.
Dare I say, “There is a God”? The suspect after apparently committing his last crime on Sunday ran his car out of control on the ramp of Hwy 40 and put himself into an immovable object and a terminal coma. I believe as I write this his life support may be terminated by his family if indeed their request is carried out.
A day later, on the CBC radio I heard Conservative MP Robert Goguen questioning rape survivor Timea Nagy in the most demeaning and condescending manner. He was trying to make a joke exploiting her tale of a brutal rape to advocate rhetorically his support for a stupid law the government is pushing through the Commons.
I think maybe we can educate George Will and the Washington Post for a good result but these misogynistic supercilious politicians like Robert Goguen in Ottawa are so far gone down their path of misogyny they are unredeemable. That witness was at a complete loss to comprehend what this dodgy actor was doing to her. “You don’t get it,” he concluded.
I should make it one of my life’s greatest achievements and so should you to make certain that persons who have such disdain and contempt for women never ever take a position of responsibility, like Member of Parliament.
The law this revolting, unbriefed Robert Goguen person was trying to peddle is one that the Tories will use to eliminate the unseemly quasi-public sight of a male or female prostitute trying to communicate with and assess the potential danger of customers (i.e.: the phase of communication wherein sex workers decide for themselves is it a ‘john’ or a psycho?).
The Tories in Canada are trying to resurrect an old failed law that takes this tacky back-street practice to an out-of-sight place like maybe a pig farm where some of the worst rapes and bloody murders take place (Remember Robert William Pickton of Port Coquitlam BC?).
This conduct in an academic sense is a perfect example of why Canada’s Parliament as an institution has become completely obsolete. It also shows the huge disconnect between politicians and ordinary real people. If this Robert Goguen is an example of what level of cognition sits in those seats of the Commons, that would make it remarkably clear that the Commons has finally disconnected completely from the country of Canada and has no comprehension of what is an ordinary Canadian and what the governance needs of such a citizen might be.
Did you ever consider that people like President Bashar al-Assad, George Will and Robert Goguen, people who, without a clue or smidgeon of real empathy, are in authority with power and control over others–people who share in common that fact that they each continue to promote rape culture–are the worst sex criminals of all–worse than the ones that actually do the rapes they do under carte blanche approval of a patronizing patriarch-produced rape culture.
I went back to organizing NGO staff to go to Syria and Iraq to gather evidence on 26 rapes done as war crimes under President Bashar al-Assad’s by his regime’s darkest evildoers and hundreds more by ISIS. As I read the translations of statements of some rape crime (war crime) witnesses describing the rapists I kept seeing the supercilious face of Robert Goguen. Sometimes the enemy is represented by a strange icon. Rape culture is the enemy–stupid patriarchal freaks are the icons.
Micheal O’Brien is The CEO of The RINJ Foundation
