Two weeks ago a man in France was arrested for raping his daughter. Sheâd gone to her school counselor and then the police, but they needed âhard evidence.â So, she videotaped her next assault. Her father was eventually arrested. His attorney explained, âThere was a period when he was unemployed and in the middle of a divorce. He insists that these acts did not stretch back further than three or four months. His daughter says longer. But everyone should be very careful in what they say.â Because, really, even despite her seeking help, her testimony, her bravery in setting up a webcam to film her father raping her, you really canât believe what the girl says, can you?
Everyone âknowsâ this. Even children.
Three years ago, in fly-on-the-wall fashion of parent drivers everywhere, I listened while a 14-year-old girl in the back seat of my car described how angry she was that her parents had stopped allowing her to walk home alone just because a girl in her neighborhood âclaimed she was raped.â When I asked her if there was any reason to think the girlâs story was not true, she said, âGirls lie about rape all the time.â Â
She didnât know the person, she just assumed she was lying.
No one says, âYou canât trust women,â but distrust them we do. College students surveyed revealed that they think up to 50% of their female peers lie when they accuse someone of rape, despite wide-scale evidence and multi-country studies that show the incident of false rape reports to be in the 2%-8% range, pretty much the same as false claims for other crimes. As late as 2003, people jokingly (wink, wink) referred to Philadelphiaâs sex crimes unit as âthe lying bitch unit.â If an 11-year-old girl told an adult that her father took out a Craigslist ad to find someone to beat and rape her while he watched, as recently actually occurred, what do you think the response would be? Would she need to provide a videotape after the fact?Â
It goes way beyond sexual assault as well. Thatâs just the most likely and obvious demonstration of âwomen are born to lieâ myths. Womenâs credibility is questioned in the workplace, in courts, by law enforcement, indoctorsâ offices, and in our political system. People donât trust women to be bosses, or pilots, or employees. Pakistanâs controversial Hudood Ordinance still requires a female rape victim to procure four male witnesses to her rape or risk prosecution for adultery. In August, a survey of managers in the United States revealed that they overwhelmingly distrust women who request flextime.  Itâs notable, of course, that women are trusted to be mothersâthe largest pool of undervalued, unpaid, economically crucial labor.
Pop culture and art are just the cherry on the top of the icing on a huge cake. The United States is among the most religious of all countries in the industrialized world. So, while some people wring their hands over hip hop, Iâm more worried about how men like Rick Santorum and Ken Cuccinelli explain to their daughters why they canât be priests. I know that there is hip hop that exceeds the bounds of taste and is sodden with misogyny. But, people seem to think that those manifestations of hatred are outside of the mainstream when, in reality, itâs just more of the same set to great beats.  Hip hop has nothing on religious misogyny and its political expression.Â
An entire political partyâs âsocial policyâ agenda is being pursued under a rubric that insists women need âpermission slipsâ and âwaiting periods.â The recent shutdown? Conservatives holding the country hostage because they want to add anti-abortion âconscience clauseâ language to legislation. Whose consciences are we talking about? All the morally incompetent and untrustworthy men who need abortions?
Itâs no exaggeration to say that distrust of women is the driving force of the âsocial issuesâ agenda of the Republican Party. From food stamps and âlegitimate rape,â to violence against women and immigration policy. âWe need to target the mother. Call it sexist, but thatâs the way nature made it,â explained the man who penned Arizonaâs immigration law. âMen donât drop anchor babies, illegal alien mothers do.â I could do this ad infinitum.
See entire piece at Role/Reboot here.Â
theartofmadeline
blakekathryn
