it's a mad mad world

I volunteered to work at the Sexual Assault awareness table sponsored by Project Unity (which pretty much means my women’s studies class) every monday for the next three weeks and my first day was today. I didn’t really get that concerned about it because I’ve worked tables before, but then I realized the nature of the questions that this table could raise. I think the only other tables I’ve sat at were for pretty nondescript things. Like PISSED trying to register voters. Not even a big deal, you know? Who’s going to get really angry about voter registration. Anyway though…

Laura and I walk to the Union together and she sets down the box of materials we have and I volunteer to carry the table over. I get this idea in my head that I can carry the table with the chair on top of it. Of course, the extra weight causes the table to be really off-balanced so I stop to adjust things and get it moved. This man asks me if I need help carrying the table/chair combo and I tell him that I think I’ve got it but thank him. Meanwhile, I’ve pretty much no idea why I’m being obstinate and not accepting help from anyone. I consider whether or not I need the help and decide that I can probably lift it for the next 20 feet and then I do. So I thank the man. Then, he picks up my Sexaual Assault awareness ribbon and hands it to me. I say thank you again.

I sit at the table and help set it up with Laura and while I look over the material it occurs to me that the questions will probably be harder than just “who do i show my id to?” like with voter reg, et cetera. I ask Laura, “How is this table usually received?” and she said most people look at it really positively. they may tell you that they support the YWCA or what you’re doing and some of them may say that they’ve been sexually assaulted or have more difficult questions but the literature should be able to answer that. so I’m like awesome.. this won’t be a big deal. I’ve helped people with much harder questions than these before.

This is where it gets interesting: the man who offered to help me carry the table wanders over to it when we get it all set up and says that he doesn’t know how he can help the YWCA but that he really supports what we’re doing. We said thank you and I think both of us mostly assumed that would be the end of the conversation. But then, he goes on to say that he was in prison for eight and a half years after being convicted of child molestation. He explained that he had been in the Persian Gulf War and when he got back from the war he was injured and on a lot of medication, plus, he felt pretty much like a stranger in his own house so he started drinking as well. As one can imagine, these drugs do not work very well together, and his head didn’t work right anymore. So one night he was baby-sitting the next door neighbor and molested her. He didn’t go into a lot of details there.. but he did say how remorseful he was. He went to prison for it with the maximum sentence of 10 years with a 20% good behavior possibility. Now he’s serving 49 months of probation and he’ll be on Kasper (Kansas’ list in compliance with Megan’s law) until September 2013.

It seemed to me that his remorse for what he had done was pretty immediate. He said that he had been a victim of sexual abuse when he was a child and had never done anything to report it or seek counselling for himself. When the trial came, he plead guilty for his offenses against the girl and the state, even though the girl’s story had kept changing. She was pretty young obviously and she couldn’t keep the details of the story straight, but he confessed to the crime and because of that was able to plea bargain to 56 months. Then, the DA said that he was dangerous because he’d been counter-terror in the war and got him the maximum sentence. I didn’t really get the impression that he was upset about that at all though…

In prison, the first task of the sexual offenders therapy group was to write an autobiography. This forced him to relive the experiences of his personal abuse. Then the therapist asked him to put himself in the shoes of his victim and he realized the horror that he had caused this girl. He also realized that most of the other perpetrators were victims of abuse (about 4 out of 5 in his estimation) and that the majority of them were not willing to take any responsibility for the crime that they had committed. He said that most of them felt like the woman had deserved it. He commented on how most of these men had no women willing to come visit them. Instead, only sometimes the men in their family and their daughters would come to visit them. Because of this they all loved their daughters a lot and he said “But the way I see it, you know, the girl they did that too was someone’s daughter too…”

We spent some of the conversation talking about the attitudes in prison and society about the act and how violent prison mentality is. The major subject of our conversation was the laws that currently exist. He said that he doesn’t believe victims of rape should have to testify against the perpetrator to get a guilty verdict because of how traumatizing the rape is. Also, he said, strategically the defense attorney will make the victim relive all of the details that they initially gave in court and that when this happens the perpetrator is able to revictimize the victim because they have to go through all of the trauma of the rape again. He talked about how he got physically sick last week when he was watching CNN and there was a story about a man who had been accused of molesting two young girls but the defense attorney was really good and made it look like the kids were lying because their mom told them to and got the guy acquitted. Within 6 months of the original accusation, he was linked (by DNA) to a kidnapping, rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl. He talked about how we need harsher laws or to fix these flaws in the system so that this doesn’t happen.

Also, he said that he hates that drug abuse can be used to get off of the crime. We protect victims who pursue people under the influence of alcohol that alters their opinion.. but if both people are under the influence of drugs, it’s often really difficult to prosecute the perpetrator because they can just say that he or she wasn’t in their normal state of mind. This man would like to see this change.

Another change he wants to see happen is to see the past left out of the DA’s accusations. He gave the example that I could have sex with 1000 men but if the 1001st man did it against my will he should be sent to jail as if I were a virgin. Also, he thinks that from the theological standpoint, rape shouldn’t be considered a loss of virginity and the women who are victims of it should be allowed to wear white at their wedding. I didn’t realize that was still part of the church dogma. I think he also said that he doesn’t think th epast of the perpetrator should play into the sentencing process or the conviction process. Even though he was raped as a child, he never should’ve done this to the little girl and feels horrible about the trauma that he caused her.

I think the most shocking part of his testimony, to me, was that he acknowledged that rape does come out of sexual desire. The other rapists he knew in the prison system all admitted to wanting their victims. He says that part of it is about taking power but a huge part of rape is sexual for the perpetrator which I don’t know that I’d ever thought about it. I guess it makes sense but I hadn’t really heard much evidence on either side to suggest this to be the case. I’m pretty sure that the women’s studies book’s perspective is that rape is a reaction to the power structure of the patriarchy and mostly based on power with little or no sexual roots.

There were other really interesting parts of the conversation that I had with him but I think the most important thing is that it was a really really intense conversation that managed to completely alter or at least shake the foundations of some of my beliefs about people in general. His opinion and situation was so unique to most people that I was really interested in it. It was kind of comforting that he seemed so remorseful and I said that I respect that he’s now trying to take action against sexual offenders by working in advocacy and lobbying. At the same time though, I think about how digusting rape is and there were times in the conversation where I was so disgusted or angry that it made it difficult to cope with what was going on… I feel almost like I’m betraying the people I know who have been traumatized in that way.. but at the same time, he was a victim of sexual abuse as well, and I really feel like not acknowledging that there is this horrible cycle of sexual assualt that permeates so many levels of society and so many different races and classes does an injustice and makes the issue completley defeatist. He and I both agreed that the problem has to stop with the individual or it will continue throughout society. In a broad way, he personally gives a sense of hope that there is a chance for recovery. However, the picture he gives of the criminal justice system is terrible and mostly against the picture that I had. He talks about how Cops is the favorite show of the inmates and they cheer when the perp gets away, women get beaten, etc. He said that the hate in their eyes and the things that they find funny shows him that a lot of them, even the non-rapists, have the potential to rape because of the culture they’re subversed in in prison.

Wow. I’ll probably think about this some more and blog more later. It’s hard to say.

• Category: Journal