Victimizing the Victim Again by Charles Blow
Victimizing the Victims, Over again
In the Kavanaugh hearings, Republicans fabricated it articulate that the old, male-dominated order will prevail.
The Federal Agency of Investigation is on the case.
The agency is now looking into allegations that the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh engaged in aggressive sexual misconduct — including assault and possibly rape — when he was in loftier schoolhouse and college.
And yet there is a gnawing in my gut that nothing we do now will fully or fifty-fifty sufficiently cause u.s. to recover from the tremendous damage already done by the way the Senate has treated these allegations and the way that the media has covered them.
We take severely damaged the conviction of survivors of sexual assault, especially childhood sexual assault, to come up forward to the authorities and talk openly about what happened to them.
At the same time that the accuser Christine Blasey Ford's example has inspired countless victims to experience empowered and share their trauma in all style of forums, the way that her backbone has been met in the Senate with condescension, contempt and hostility has secured in many survivors a sense that ability will non exist sympathetic to the disclosure; it will care for it equally an barb and an assault.
The message that the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Commission sent to survivors, more often than not women, just besides many men, is this:
Your pain is non our problem. Your bodies are not your own. Your voice, fifty-fifty at its strongest, is still weaker than any man's, no thing how sniveling and snide. We are here to protect the order, an onetime guild, in which men dominion, even when unruly and reprobate.
They are maxim to survivors: Your word and your brownie may be all that you have, but they are not enough for you to exist believed. They are saying that fearfulness and trauma may accept shocked yous into silence, but in the end, you lot volition be punished for that silence. They are proverb that the failure of survivors, including children, to properly study and document their victimizations will be viewed later not as evidence of fear and shame, but as bear witness of concoction and deceit.
"Why didn't somebody call the F.B.I. 36 years ago?" Trump asked on Fox News. Can yous imagine: a fifteen-yr-old girl struggling with processing a sexual attack having the presence of mind, sophistication and wherewithal to track down the proper F.B.I. contact in the pre-internet historic period and report something that few people even talked about in those days?
These senators are telling teenage boys this:
You tin can drink beer like it's water and nosotros will believe yous when you say you have had perfect recall your unabridged life in spite of it. You tin can write all sorts of damning horribleness in your yearbook and have multiple people charge you of sexual assault, and all the same nosotros will nonetheless hail you as a paragon of integrity and tell you lot in forepart of the earth that "you've got nada to apologize for," every bit Senator Lindsey Graham said of Kavanaugh during the hearing.
What those senators are proverb to all of us is that, for them, patriarchy and privilege occupy positions of primacy in this land. And, when that primacy is threatened, it is perfectly reasonable that those afflicted would whine and rage at the possibility of being denied that to which they are owed, as birthright and gender benefit.
As sexual assault accusers go, one would take been hard pressed to find ane more able and affable than Ford. She is a professor who talked nearly the alleged assault earlier Kavanaugh's nomination, one who past all accounts wanted to remain anonymous. Compelled by her ain sense of patriotism, she finally came forward and told her story with grace and composure as millions of Americans watched.
The senators, unable to impeach her credibility outright and leery of exposing their callousness and contempt, chose instead a patronizing paternalism. They shed crocodile tears for Ford, painting her every bit a victim, yes: not of Kavanaugh but rather of the Democrats on the committee. To them, somehow she was a clueless pawn in the Democrats' game to asperse and indeed destroy the proper noun of a skilful man.
This diminished and belittled in every style the very real and very credible accusation that Ford made and completely blotted out the incredible backbone it would accept for a person to appear before them if it indeed happened to them.
In other words, the Republicans on the committee patted her on her head while spitting in her face up.
And somehow we still have the gall to feign astonishment that people wouldn't immediately report an attack, instead holding it for a year, decades, maybe even a lifetime.
People don't come forward because of authorities similar the Republicans on the commission, the ones who will belittle at you lot, arraign you and not believe you.
Just every bit Ford was creaking the door open up and empowering others to come out of the cupboard with their own stories, Republicans on the committee rushed to slam it back close and secure its closure with enmity if necessary.
They demand to make survivors quake with fearfulness again.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/30/opinion/assault-survivors-kavanaugh-trauma.html
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