Gina Tron was attacked by a serial rapist in 2010. She describes her enraging experience reporting the crime to the NYPD:
I was interviewed by a detective who kept asking me about what I was wearing at the time and who told me that this case would probably never make it anywhere because I was intoxicated. Instead of focusing on what was done to me, most of his questions focused on why I didn’t fight back harder and run away sooner. The answer to both was because I was afraid and operating on a kind of autopilot–I never imagined anyone would accuse me of failing to get away.
I went to see the same detective at the Special Victims Unit (the division that deals with rape) a few days later to look through pictures of convicts on their database.
I spent hours scanning photo after photo of criminals to see if I could spot my guy. The detective was extremely discouraging about it, saying that it was a waste of time. He kept commenting to his buddies about how I looked like so-and-so from some other police unit–I couldn’t tell if it was a compliment or an insult, but my intuition was telling me it was the latter. I was probably being sensitive, but I really wasn’t happy about having my looks talked about, since I was literally searching for my rapist. I could barely take care of basic hygiene needs at the time, let alone look nice for the cops, and I told him to please stop talking about my looks. He replied that he was doing me a favor by humoring my iffy rape case, and that if I continued to give him attitude he would just drop it.
The indignities don’t end there. Marcotte fumes:
Women, it turns out, are in a perpetual state of consent unless they bring weapons to bars and are able to wield those weapons against rapists who have made it clear that they are willing to beat you into submission. Because of this, there’s probably a rapist still wandering around Brooklyn, hanging around groups of people in bars, and picking off women to kidnap and rape. And now he knows that the system is built for him to keep right on going.
Amanda Hess adds:
Reading the piece, I thought of a friend who told me that when he has children, he hopes they won’t be girls. His boys, he says, would benefit from a progressive upbringing that teaches them not to victimize women. But his girls would be impossible to protect from other people’s kids. Apparently, the thought of daughters who might be violated scares him so much that he’d prefer they didn’t exist.
The Dish 