Crimes of Power, Crimes of Passion

The year seems to be getting underway with a focus on a hard but painfully necessary discussion about rape.

In India, the rape and murder of a young woman, allegedly by a gang of five men, has the entire country debating the status of women, while Stateside a similar incident is shining an unpleasant light on a small Ohio town and the prevailing attitudes not only about women, but about the status of high school football players in small towns.

These days, of course, reflections of such incidents surface in electronic form. Two high school footballers in Steubenville, Ohio, are being charged in the rape, but a recording of another player mocking the girl has gone viral on the Internet, betraying an attitude held not only by him but by others around him. Now, many are wondering whether the authorities are minimizing the incident to protect the football team.

There is always collateral damage with these things now. In Steubenville’s case, the attention being paid to this is earning the town an unsolicited label – not nearly as permanent as Aurora or Newtown, of course, but one that could leave a scar.

Many of us may be pleased with this country’s growing tolerance for such things as gay marriage, and we may think of ourselves in general as being pretty enlightened on issues of equality. But let’s remember that women have had the right to vote here for less than a century. And on a very basic level, when it comes to the question of how women function, men can still display a surprising level of ignorance. Some of them get elected to Congress.

Rape is a crime I don’t understand. I wasn’t raised with any particular focus on respecting women, but it wasn’t a problem: the women around me were always respected, and while society may have accorded them a different role, they were never considered “less than” anyone else. Why there are those who feel this way is something of a mystery to me, but if this seems enlightened, I can’t take any credit for it – that’s just the way it was when I was growing up.

But if rape is a crime of power, and not passion, as they say, it means those who commit it are simply afraid of losing what they think they have or believe they are owed. And yes, even in 2013, we do need to have a serous discussion about where such attitudes come from, and how we’re going to deal with them.