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Why does everyone feel so sorry for men accused of being predators?
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: July 22nd, 2014
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/14/men-acc...
Why is it in a culture purporting to take allegations of sexual assault and harassment seriously that victims suffer more social punishment than their accused attackers? Young women are shamed, harassed and called whores while the men accused get rallied around. The misplaced empathy makes predators' lives easier and assaults more difficult to punish. Immediately after a guilty verdict came down in the much-watched Steubenville sexual assault case, for example, CNN reporter Poppy Harlow bemoaned the lost "promising futures" of the two convicted rapists. She failed to observe, in that moment, that the verdict didn't ruin their lives their decision to rape did. But at least those rapists actually served time; the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (Rainn) reports that only three out of every 100 rapists go to jail. This is in large part because of how under-reported sexual assault is: according to the US Justice Department, over 60% of rapes and 74% of sexual assaults aren't reported to police. Given the abysmal way female sexual assault survivors are treated by the criminal justice system and society more broadly these numbers shouldn't be shocking. Given all this, it seems odd that we continue to worry about the reputations of men who are accused of sexual wrong-doings. Until we shame attackers with the same contempt that so many people reserve for women who come forward until we shift the disdain from victim to perpetrator rape, sexual assault and harassment will continue to run rampant and predators will continue to attack.
Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse news articles from reliable major media sources.
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