CONSENSUAL RAPE
OPINION/NEWS/BLOG
Los Angeles (The Karney Report)— The War on Rape and Incest Victims Launched in Alabama––Domestic Sexual Terrorism
Here is the story that broke this week-for survivors—for all of us—for those who love and support women.
Does This Woman Looked Like She Consented to Rape or Incest?
‘Consensual Rape’– Rep. Barry Hovis, Republican lawmaker, while arguing on the Missouri State House Floor.
“Let’s just say someone goes out and they’re raped or they’re sexually assaulted one night after a college party — because most of my rapes were not the gentleman jumping out of the bushes that nobody had ever met,” Hovis said. “That was one or two times out of a hundred. Most of them were date rapes or consensual rapes, which were all terrible.”
And this got me in full warrior mode…
Key
Points
- I am a victim of incest perpetrated before I could talk and then raped before the age of 10 by someone I trusted and loved. As a young woman, I was date raped after my upstairs neighbors’ party, and then sexually assaulted by a law school professor in the first week of law school.
I have been fighting this war my entire life — sexual terrorism.
To call what happened to me and the millions of other survivors ‘consensual rape’ is to tell enslaved people that their enslavement was consensual.
And this made me feel caged…
Key
Points
- Rape Culture. We have always lived in a culture where women and children are considered “chattel” or property. It is natural then to use the ‘property’ anyway the owner wants, with or without the ‘property’s’ consent.
- This idea is so deeply embedded in our unconscious that it is no ‘accident’ that Rep. Hovis said it out loud. That rape and incest were consensual. After all, if women and children are property, then their consent is implied, as one can do anything with personal property one wants. You own it; you break it, you keep it, you pay for it. This idea of “consensual rape” is about sexual slavery, sexual terrorism, and property rights. Property is owned, people, on the other hand, are beings of choice. You take away the choice; you take away the other’s humanity. This results is our return to the status of owned and enslaved property.
- Therefore, the next logical step is, if you get pregnant by rape or incest, we will force you to have the child since we own you anyway. Sexual terrorism on the enslaved is satisfying to the owner and terrifying for the caged.
- I have been a terrified, enslaved victim.
- The thinking by rapists and incest aggressors is, that if it feels good, it must be good, and therefore, the rape was consensual.
- Rape does not feel good. I was left torn and bleeding. Imprisoned and ravaged.
- It’s a lot easier to look oneself in the mirror, after committing domestic sexual terrorism, and tell yourself, “she wanted it,” “she must have liked it,” then to see a rapist in the mirror.
- I didn’t “want it.” I didn’t like it. It wasn’t consensual. It hurt. I screamed and cried and fought and kicked, and bled and got slapped more and almost strangled by his strong arms and hands over my mouth. Torture pleases the torturer, not the victim.
- To force a woman or child to bear a child of rape or incest is a crime in furtherance of the conspiracy of sexual, domestic terrorism and a unique form of torture.
- If a woman is forced to bear a child, she does not want, what is it like for the child once born?
- Hell on Earth! As an unwanted child, my mother made me pay daily for having been born a girl. My mother burned and beat, sexually abused, and tortured in revenge. She pimped me out to my predator to keep him around. I paid the price of being an unwanted child.
Now imagine if you were raped and forced to bear and raise your rapist’s child for 18-20 years. Looking into the face of that child every day, and seeing the monster who raped you, how would you cope?
The victim is forced into reliving the sexual violence over and over with PTSD, flashbacks, and uncontrollable terror attacks every time they see the face of their child. Days filled with trauma, fear, humiliation, self-loathing, PTSD, depression, anxiety. Daily, you are fighting thoughts of suicide, infantilism, drug, and alcohol dependency.
Does this promote the type of love, nurturing, and good parenting every child deserves?
And finally, what if the rape victim is an 11-years old child?
Lucia was raped at age 11 by her grandmother’s 65-year-old boyfriend, which resulted in the child’s pregnancy.
The child begged the doctors and the priest to “Take out the thing the old man put in me.”
Both the priests and the doctors tried to push the limits on Lucia’s health while doctors bought time for the fetus to grow and become viable. The child was being forced to carry the fetus to term.
“The priest offered to buy the baby from me,” Lucia’s mother said during an interview a month ago at her lawyer’s office in Argentina.
Abortion is illegal in Argentina (a heavily Catholic country), except in cases of rape or when the pregnant woman’s life is in danger––both of which applied to little Lucia, according to the doctors who were eventually called in to operate on her.
Lucia’s attorney said, “There is not one of Lucia’s rights that was not violated.”
Lucia’s short life has been one of abuse and neglect. She was raised in a tiny poverty-stricken shantytown in a conservative province in Argentina.
Finally, nearly a month since the first doctor saw her, Lucia was given the procedure. Lucia is still confused about what happened to her, why she had a massive bulge in her stomach, and is still, according to authorities suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
Had Lucia been in Alabama or a migrant child seeking asylum at the U.S. border, she might have been forced to bring the baby to term.
Would you inflict such pain and inhumanity on another to force a woman or child to give birth to a child borne out of rape or incest? Isn’t that the epitome of cruelty? Don’t victims lives matter? Don’t sexually terrorized victims count? Are we just chattel?
Conclusion: Follow the Timeline:
It may seem like the issues of child sexual abuse, incest, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are separate issues from the fight in Alabama about reproductive rights. But the truth is our rights over our own body have been stolen from us since babyhood by incest and child sexual abuse, through pre-teen sexual harassment and abuse, to young womanhood campus rape and sexual harassment, followed by marital rape and domestic violence, and then to seniorhood, where 87% of elderly disabled women are sexually assaulted and raped. Taken together, it forms a timeline. And the fight of our lives.
Can you imagine laws that require doctors to serve 99 years in prison for performing a vasectomy on a man? Or, in the alternative, making men pay 100% of the costs of raising the child until their 25th birthday or college graduation? Under the theory it’s your child, you wanted it, you must pay for him or her?
Better yet, requiring men to stay home and raise the child while women go off to work as motherhood is the biggest cause of the gender pay gap? Women earn equal to men until they have their first child.
How about technology and science developing male birth control mechanisms so the onus doesn’t just fall solely on captured female bodies. 100 woman can have only 1 child. But a 1 man an have 100 children.
Once you have a child you are no longer free. You can’t run, you can’t hide, you can’t be the wanderlust, spirited young woman who followed her dreams, fearless, daring and brave, the person you were before.
If you choose to have children and assume the responsibility, the joy, the ups and downs, the zany moments, the love, and challenges of family and parenthood, God bless you. But if this is not something you want in your life, but are forced to go through with it as sexual punishment, control over your body, or from rape or incest then it’s nothing more than sexual control and domestic terrorism.
We gasp on the battlefield, our hearts pierced with the arrows launched, fallen warriors each of us, waged against women and survivors. Your physical health is at risk. Your freedom is at risk. Your ability to support yourself, fulfill your career dreams. The day to be anything you wanted to be, soar as high as you could dream, are over. Now is the moment. ” And Still I Rise–-by Maya Angelou
“Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries…
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise…”
She was raped at the age of 8. Her rapist was found guilty, but spent only one day in jail. After he was released, he was murdered. Because of this, she became mute for almost 5 years, believing her “voice killed him. ” “I killed him that man because I told his name.”
Her name was Marguerite Ann Johnson. Later in life, she changed her name to Maya Angelou. When she finally found her voice she had a lot to say. Challenged by James Baldwin, Angelou wrote her autobiography, which became, “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.”
“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.” Maya Angelou.
Legal Ease
Legal Points to Think About
How Good Are Americans At Taking Care of Children After They Are Born:
How Many Children are Currently in the Foster Care System?
What happens to the unwanted, abandoned, or abused children already born? Foster care, foster homes?
There are roughly 400,000 children in the U.S. foster care system. Of that number, 107,918 foster children are eligible for and waiting to be adopted.
The average age of a waiting child in foster care to be adopted is 7.7 years old, and 29% of them will spend at least three years in foster care.
The rest, approximately 300,000 are left to languish in foster care, being bounced from foster care home to foster care families, until they age-out of the foster care system and are either thrown out on the streets and become homeless or become easy targets of sex traffickers.
A new foster care documentary, Breaking the Cycle, explores exactly how intertwined the foster care system is with homelessness and human trafficking.
How Many Children are Homeless or On the Streets Today:
2.5 million children each year are becoming homeless.
National Center on Family Homelessness. A staggering 2.5 million children are now homeless each year in America. This historic high represents one in every 30 children in the United States.
How Many Children Go Hungry in America Today:
16.2 million children.
16 million American kids struggle with hunger each year. An estimated 48.8 million Americans, including 16.2 million children, live in households that lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis. As a result, about 1 in 5 children go hungry at some point during the year.
How Many Children Do Not Have Healthcare in the U.S. Today:
The number of children in the United States without health insurance jumped to 3.9 million in 2017 from about 3.5 million the year before, according to census data.
How Many Child Are Available for Adoption Today:
There are about 2 million couples currently waiting to adopt in the United States — which means there are as many as 36 waiting families for every one child who is placed for adoption. “But these families want white, newborns for the most part,” our source explained. “The older the child, the harder to place.
People of wealth and power use the “private adoption” option and pay for a baby. 62 percent of children adopted privately are placed with the adoptive family when they are newborns or less than one year old. That’s because “most people want newborns, not a ‘pre-owned’ child,” one private adoption attorney said in a phone interview in Los Angeles.
Children adopted privately from the United States are most likely to be white (50 percent); the majority of children adopted internationally are Asian (59 percent).
In Conclusion:
“Incest and rape victims are crushed between being barred from justice as survivors and serving more time for abortion than their rapist or incest aggressors”—Shari Karney.
After Thought:
Do Women Suffer a “Motherhood” Pay Gap?
Motherhood is the biggest cause of the gender pay gap. The pay gap between men and women is much smaller until the first child arrives. Then women’s earnings plummet and their career trajectories slow. Women who do not have children, by and large, continue to grow their earnings at a similar rate to men. There are still differences because of discrimination and other factors, but researchers say that motherhood explains a large amount of the gap.
Children hurt mothers’ careers. This is, in large part, because women spend more time on child rearing than men do, whether by choice or not.
The cost of raising a child in the U.S. Parents save up: It costs this much to raise a kid.
The estimated cost of raising a child from birth through age 17 is $233,610 — or as much as almost $14,000 annually, the Department of Agriculture says. That’s the average for a middle-income couple with two children. It’s a bit more expensive in urban parts of the country, and less so in rural areas.
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Let your heart go out to all survivors who feel caged, living in shame, grief, and pain. Let us remember that we (you, me, all of us) are the only ones who can make a difference, demand justice, bring compassion to victims, and hold perpetrators legally and morally accountable. To do so, we must eliminate all statutes of limitations for sexual violence. Civil rights lawsuits need to be filed against the United States government for violation of our civil right to life, liberty and the pursuit of property. We must not punish victims of rape and incest by forcing them to give birth. All women must have free reproductive rights. We cannot enslave women and control their bodies.
- We ask that you donate even $1.00 for victims of child sex abuse. www.roara1.org. (The cost of an item at The .99 Cents Only Store).
- We ask you not to forget the plight of survivors of child sexual abuse, sexual assault, harassment, and rape. We ask that you write to your U.S. Senator and Congressperson to support The Civil Rights Act for Victims of Sexual Violence (“CRAVSV”).
Where do We Go From Here? JUSTICE FOR ALL SURVIVORS
Together we must act to end the “scourge on humanity” of sexual assault. Please help us sponsor legislation that creates a civil right for survivors to be free of sexual violence.
Call to action:With stories coming out daily coupled with victims left in the wake of the national disaster of sexual assault, we ASK that Presidential candidates like #Senators Harris, #Warren, #Booker, #Klobuchar, #Sanders, #Gillibrand, Former Vice President #Biden, Governor #Inslee, Mayors #Castro and #Buttigieg, and candidate #Beto O’Rourke take up the mantle of sexual violence as a cornerstone of their national campaign. Sexual violence deserves to have the same national platform, cultural transformation and legislative attention that Global warming, health care, and a living wage for all.
The issue of sexual abuse is too important to remain silent. Millions of Americans are denied their humanity by sexual violence.
It’s a bipartisan issue. It’s a human rights issue––The civil right to be free of sexual assault and violence.
Sexual violence and assault don’t discriminate based on political party, race, sexual orientation, or geography.
My prayer and life’s mission is that some good will come out of it.
From pain to purpose.
Shari Karney, Attorney and Founder of ROAR as ONE, a non-profit organization focusing on the rights of action for survivors of all forms of sexual abuse and sexual harassment.
Shari Karney, Attorney, survivor, legal analyst.
“From pain to purpose. Being sexually abused at such an early age was the scar on my soul. But I feel like it ultimately made me into the person I am today. I understand the journey of life. I had to go through what I went through to be here. But now it’s time to take action to save the next generation of women and children from what we went through. Shari Karney, Esq. Author of an upcoming memoir, “The Perfect Family…From Pain to Purpose.
Please support survivors and Roar as One (www.roaras1.org). Our mission is pursuing justice for survivors of sexual assault and violence.
We need to come together, speak up, stand up, rise now. ACT AS ONE. ROAR AS ONE.
Rise
Organize
Act
Restore
We must recognize and enact laws that protect the basic human right to be free of sexual assault and sexual violence. Enact nationwide Federal Civil Rights Legislation for victims of sexual abuse, rape, child sexual abuse. Join our Civil Rights Movement to get legal rights and recognition of sexual violence as a violation of human civil rights. Help us remove the Statute of Limitations nationwide for sexual assault, sexual abuse, and continuous child sexual abuse, in both civil and criminal courts. Allow survivors and sexual violence victims to file in Federal court.
©Legal Education Unlimited, Inc. (This is a publication of Legal Education Unlimited, Inc.)