Robbery and Rape
Our house was broken into last year. We were on vacation, and found out about it because our friend who stopped by to feed the cats alerted us. The thieves tried all kinds of different ways in till they found one that worked, and eventually made off with a number of things, among them my Mac Powerbook and our large flat-panel plasma TV. It was more an inconvenience than anything else, because we were insured (although not well, it turned out…) and they didn’t take anything personal or irreplaceable. A ripple in our lives, if you will.
Here are some things that did not happen following the robbery and subsequent investigation:
- No one pointed to our large front windows and remarked, “Of course someone came in and took your TV. You were flaunting it through those huge windows. Who could blame them?”
- No one remarked on gifts we had given to people in the past and implied or outright stated that obviously the thieves just assumed we were giving them our TV, since we have given other people gifts in the past.
- No one took an in-depth history of our past gift-giving behaviors, including what the first gift we ever gave was, how old we were at the time, and how many people we had given gifts to since then.
- The detective conducting the investigation never paused, looked at Sean, and asked if we were sure we wanted to continue the investigation, because this kind of thing could really ruin the thieves’ lives, and were we absolutely certain we hadn’t just given them our TV and forgotten?
- No one suggested, even for a moment, that maybe we had given the thieves our TV and then regretted it afterwards, so we made up this whole “theft” story just to punish them.
- No one said that if we had really wanted the thieves to not take our TV, they wouldn’t have—we would have had better locks on our doors, we would have had ADT. No one suggested that it was really our fault that someone took our TV.
- It was never implied that we should feel grateful that such clever thieves wanted our TV in the first place, or that we should feel fortunate that our TV was so nice that someone would want to take it.
- No one said anything ridiculous, insensitive, and unsupportive like “I would neverallow my TV to be stolen!” or “I would rather be dead than have someone steal my TV.”
- We’ve never been made to feel that we are somehow “damaged goods” or “troublemakers” because someone stole our TV.
Why is it that the same courtesy extended to us, who suffered what I described as no big deal, a ripple in our life, isn’t extended to rape victims? Even rape victims who are too young by definition to consent to any type of sex?
