Caltrops - Tansin A. Darcos's Alter Ego





	[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"]Paul Robinson Feb 1, 2005, 11:52:47 PM The local weekly paper reported an incident over in Fairfax County in which a guy in an SUV got talking to a girl at a bus shelter and won her confidence enough that she accepted his offer of a ride. The driver took her to a remote location and raped her. He then drove her a ways and fortunately he let her go. She went home and reported the incident and was taken to a local hospital with minor injuries. I think about the horrible waste of this kind of incident. Clearly if this guy had the capacity to win a girl over into getting into his car, he probably could have talked her into willingly having sex with him if that's what he wanted. But obviously it wasn't. Rape isn't a crime of sex, it's a crime of violence and power; it is an act in which the perpetrator forces the victim to accept whatever they wish to do to them. As the Supreme Court of California said: "By its very nature, rape displays a 'total contempt for the personal integrity and autonomy' of the victim; '[s]hort of homicide, [it is] the "ultimate violation of self."' <i>Coker v. Georgia</i> 433 U.S. 584, 597, 603 (1977) [53 L.Ed.2d 982, 996, 97 S.Ct. 2861] (plur. opn. of White, J.; conc. and dis. opn. of Powell, J.).) Along with other forms of sexual assault, it belongs to that class of indignities against the person that cannot ever be fully righted, and that diminishes all humanity." <i>Mary M. v. City of Los Angeles</i> 54 Cal.3d 202,222 (1991) [285 Cal.Rptr. 99; 814 P.2d 1341] Eve Ensler, in her book The Vagina Monologues, had this to say: <font face="times new roman">As I traveled with the piece to city after city, country after country, hundreds of women waited after the show to talk to me about their lives. The play had somehow freed up their memories, pain, and desire. Night after night I heard the same stories - women being raped as teenagers, in college, as little girls, as elderly women; women who had finally escaped being beaten to death by their husbands; women who were terrified to leave; women who were taken sexually, before they were even conscious of sex, by their stepfathers, brothers, cousins, uncles, mothers and fathers. I began to feel insane, as if a door had opened to some underworld and I was being told things I was not supposed to know; knowing these things was dangerous. Slowly it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women - that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life, and this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all. I do not think I am being extreme. When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet. You force what is meant to be open, trusting, nurturing, creative and alive to be bent, infertile and broken.</font> I grieve for the innocence of what was probably a lovely little lady that has been destroyed by some unforgivable bastard who probably could have gotten what he wanted without having to commit sexual assault, but decided to force himself upon her. Instead of some guy giving a nice girl a nice time, he's now ruined some poor woman's entire life. If she ever trusts a man at all it may be years. She'll probably grow up believing that all men are the type that this scumbag was. I am saddened and disgusted at this sort of thing. It bothers me terribly even though I happen to be a man. I understand that it is entirely possible this girl could have claimed that she was raped rather than admit that she had (consentual) sex with some guy, but this sort of thing happens so often that I'm sure a similar incident has occurred - probably in the same city - and some woman really was raped even if it wasn't the specific incident I read about in the paper. It is the point that it wasn't necessary, not whether a sexual assault did or didn't happen in this particular incident. Some man violently stole something that he probably could have freely gotten without force. And that is why I grieve. Paul Robinson February 1, 2005 [/quote]