Who's the Real Victim?

I was doing my daily news scroll before I attend to any actual work I have to do and I came across one that almost made me throw up from disgust. It was an article from The Daily Beast about how a rape victim found her rapists online.

With the given pseudonym, Claire was raped in 2013 in San Diego after a girls’ night out with a friend of hers. Her attackers, Jonas Dick, Alex Smith and Jason Berlin were part of an organization called Real Social Dynamics (RSD). Dick and Smith were known as teachers through the organization. What were they teaching? How to pick up women. Yup, that’s right, and their student was Berlin.

 Jonas Dick

They set out at night at “pull o’clock” (2am, which is when the bars close) to find women whom they can easily shuffle along to their apartment and engage in sexual intercourse.

Claire was given a drink in the apartment and then found herself naked and face down in her own vomit with Berlin and Smith also naked and erect. Her friend Laura then found her and scurried her to the police where she was given the rape kit. The police then did not perform and adequate investigation and left her case cold because cases that involve intoxication are rarely brought to court due to the skewed timeline of the victim.

After she found her rapists on the RSD website she was soon then able to bring them to justice where Dick and Berlin have been prosecuted and Smith may or may not join them and will be decided on October 20th.

 Jason Berlin

I read every day, or at least it seems, that women are being raped and their rapist walks free or with minimal sentencing.

Let’s take a recent case, Brock Turner. A Stanford University swimmer was caught raping a women and was only sentence to 6 months because his attorney argued that sending him to 14 years in prison would damage his chances of becoming an Olympian and a bunch of other bullshit for lack of a better word. Come to find out that earlier this month he was released three months early for good behavior. Oh, almost forgot to mention that Turner is banned from swimming for the USA team. Getting six months to stay competitive became irrelevant because he can’t swim.

 Robin Camp

Or how about the Canadian Judge Robin Camp who told a rape victim that she should’ve kept her knees together to prevent the rape from happening. Not only did he say that, but to the men on trial he told them that next time they need to nicer to girls so that they don’t wake up and claim rape.

1 in 3 women have fallen victim to rape, attempted rape, domestic violence and or sexual assault. That is an outrageous number, why have we as a nation allowed this to happen. Now that’s not to say that we haven’t taken action because the numbers have gone down but as a woman myself I can not justify 1 in 3 as an improvement. 64% of rape victims don’t even go to the police or seek any other form of help because of the scrutiny they undergo during trial or even under investigation. The 36% of those who do report it, again either receive no justice or alleviation from the pressure they're put under because on the chance that their case does go to trial they have to stare or be stared by their attacker(s) and recount every step. Even before that process, the rape kit procedure is not a quick one or a comfortable one stated by the victim in the Turner case. The process of trying to bring their rapist to justice is a long dark road that most do not have the stamina for mainly because their privacy is put on public display and not everyone can handle that.

Allow me to add that women are not the only ones who fall victim to this, men have also reported. However, if the scrutiny for women is as bad as it is, it’s worse for men.