Tuesday, April 18, 2006

He Said, She Said: Does it ever change?

I have something to say about this Duke case where people are all screaming, "Hey, no DNA! See? Them white boys is telling the truth!"

WTF people?

If anyone has ever paid any bit of attention to rape cases, a majority of them lack any kind of DNA evidence and it's almost always her word(s) vs. his word(s) combined with the hard evidence. For heaven's sake, there was the OC case where the dumbasses videotaped themselves raping, sodomizing and sexually assaulting an obviously passed out 16 year old girl yet the first trial still resulted in an acquittal for, are you ready for it, lack of evidence. A Chicago case very similar to the one in OC had similar results. Hopefully an appeal is forthcoming and the woman in the Chicago case gets justice, too. And how can we forget about the judge who dismissed a 17 year old woman's accusations of rape and in turn charged her with falsifying a police report because she didn't act traumatized enough after the incident?

So when I read that warrants were issued to collect DNA samples from 46 of the 47 Duke Lacrosse players, I was like Hell yeah! Because seriously, I'm really tired of the rape apologists since I can't rape myself and women don't usually rape other women. Our current society creates and sustains a rape culture. When is the collective whole gonna understand, digest and work against it for all women's sake? Why is it we have to wait until they have daughters for them to get a clue? Don't they have mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers and/or wives/girlfriends?

My heart sank when I saw the DNA results (from the boys who were actually tested) came back negative. I'm also guessing only the boys who truly didn't do it were the ones who stuck around to get their mouths swabbed instead of, like their teammates, being shipped off to avoid responsibility.

Of course my soul was elated once again to read that 2 boys were arrested then charged with rape and sexual assault because the victim has positively ID'd them a week or so ago. And a sealed indictment was issued by a judge. It is important to remember that a prosecutor can't give all their secrets away to the general public because it could severely hinder a case; I'm betting the defense attorney's are going to try for a change of venue as it is (and wouldn't be worth their salt if they didn't).

But most importantly, I say a man is guilty of rape before he's officially indicted because let's face it, a man rapes a woman every single minute of every single fucking day. The world has over 3billion people in it so it's a fair estimate. Notice that it's not women raping men, it's men raping women and often times it's brutal and/or fatal. And I'm really getting sick of those who think we (women) should just sit back and wait for the guilty verdict before we vilify those poor boys.

I've already given you 3 very recent cases where a rape did obviously take place but guilty verdicts were not forthcoming. Even with video evidence.