Reported by CNN, a rape incident took place a month ago at a party in Steubenville, Ohio by two teenagers on the high school football team. The video posted by an anonymous young man at the party, presumably an eyewitness, told his version of what happened.

In the video the “eyewitness” shooting the video repeats that the girl is dead. He uses the word dead as a slang word for lifeless not literally dead. Another young man on camera then says, “She is deader than Andy Reid’s son… deader than OJ’s wife…” In the background with noise and boys’ voices someone yells the word rape. Someone says, “This is not funny,” only to be drowned out by laughter of the main speaker and those supporting him. When asked “What if that was your daughter?” the main speaker on camera answers, “If that was my daughter, I wouldn’t care. I’d just let her be dead.” “Besides,” he says, “Is this really rape because you don’t know if she wanted to or not.” An onlooking teenager says, “You are sick.”

CNN commented that what stands out from the incident is that it demonstrates a split in the boy rape-prone sexual culture. Some young men continue to believe that when a girl gets drunk, staging a sexual display for their buddies it is part of a night’s fun. They do not think of it as rape. Some of their friends, however, disagree. In their conversion to manhood, they are able to name rape when they see it.

The definition of rape in the United States is “a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without the party’s consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent; such as one who is unconscious, incapacitated, or below the legal age of consent.”

But the U.S., India, Africa and other countries have been protesting recently to change the laws to expand the definition of what is considered rape. Many are protesting and pushing for the victims to be supported and the rapists punished. Especially after the recent gang rape incidents in New Deli, India.

According to an article by The Daily Beast, the arrest rate for rape in 2010 in the U.S. was 24 percent, which was exactly what it was in the late 1970s, when tracking such data began. New York City has tried to adopt better policies since 1999 when a policy of testing every rape kit booked into evidenced. The kits have resulted in at least 2,000 cold hits (when the DNA profile from the rape kit matched a DNA from a separate crime scene or offender in a local, state or national DNA databank) as well as 200 active investigations, arrests, or prosecutions. Since 2003, the NYPD has seen its arrest rate for rape increase dramatically, from 40 percent to 70 percent of reported cases.

According to The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, on average in 2010, 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner. That equals more than 12 million men and women raped in a year.

More than 79.6 percent of female victims of completed rape are raped before their 25th birthday with 42.2 percent experiencing their first completed rape before the age of 18.

Yes, rape has been happening since the dawn of man and the view of women being second class citizens has been going on for centuries, but it is deplorable to know the view of women to some, most in the younger generations, has not changed especially since many women today have higher paying jobs than their husbands or boyfriends and usually juggle that along with housework, children, a family, a social life and so on.

It is sad to say that when asked about this particular incident reported in Ohio, most young men brush it off and said she probably wanted it or passed out on purpose. How could someone answer that? Why do some people think that way?

No matter if a person is drunk, conscience, dresses sexually reveling or not; every person deserves to be respected. No one has the right to violate anyone at anytime. Some men need to stop listening to what their friends and the media says and keep their hands, urges and egos to themselves.

It seems in this party, one night stand and drug crazed generation, men’s respect for women keeps decreasing. Our culture and society needs to change and stand up so that everyone is protected more than abused.

To see one of the videos described in the article or get more info go to CNN.

Image Courtesy : Eric.Parker

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Do journalists get post traumatic stress from listening to victims of extreme violence?

Being a journalist in countries where rape is used as a weapon of war is no easy task. Interviewing victims and listening to their most traumatic experiences can have a toll on anyone.

It was the early 1990s, years before the international community would formally recognize that the Guatemalan government used systematic rape on its Mayan women. Victoria Sanford was pursuing an anthropology doctorate at Stanford University. Moved by the stories of her Mayan friends, Sanford joined the non-profit Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Investigative Team and went to Guatemala.

Though the team’s job was to exhume mass graves, Sanford talked to the women, who told other women about her, before she began recording their stories. Sanford joined a team of journalists who interviewed victims across the globe.

The stories of the experiences these women went through are painful, graphic and sad. One girl was raped in a Darfur refugee camp and made an amputee when her assailants tried to kill her by cutting off her arms and legs. The Kosovo women cried, screamed, and let out their rage as they told how soldiers climbed on top of them, choked and beat them, and did things too graphic to explain. The soldiers killed the babies that were the products of the rape in order to further torture these women.

Each interview took hours as the women explained every detail at great length. Some women smothered their own children in order to spare them from the brutality of the soldiers.

Through all the experiences these women told her, Sanford remained silent. She cried with them, hugged them and let them pour their souls. However, the stress began to get to Sanford. She had trouble breathing and sleeping. She couldn’t tell these women to stop telling their stories because the least thing these women could do is explain their experiences in hope that the world would hear.

After a while, Sanford began experiencing secondary trauma. The women she was interviewing called it “susto,” fright sickness.

One morning when Sanford awoke, she was paralyzed. She couldn’t move her neck or sit up. Her body locked up from the stress of the interviews. Psychiatrists explained that she had a temporary psychosomatic paralysis, a rare symptom linked to post-traumatic stress disorder and secondary trauma. Though she got better through treatment, Sanford returned back to interviewing.

PTSD is a severe anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to any event that result in psychological trauma. Some of the symptoms include re-experiencing the original trauma through flashbacks or nightmares, avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, and increased arousal such as difficulty falling or staying asleep, anger and hyper-vigilance.

The traumas that these journalists face through interviewing are not from their own experiences, but that does not entail that the journalists cannot get PTSD. The paralysis that Sanford endured may be rare, but it shows that anyone can get it by just listening to the tragic experiences the victims explained in detail.

Image Courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/53478302@N02/4943573594/sizes/z/in/photostream/

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