Rapist Sentenced to Community Service at Rape Crisis Centre; More Nigerian School Girls Stolen.

Michelle Obama also recently voiced her concern about the stolen Nigerian girls. Image via Twitter.

Welp, misogynists and other such bigots have done a great job keeping me busy as of late, and this week was no exception. A judge in Texas, for example, has just sentenced a convicted rapist to do community service hours at a rape crisis centre.

Also, more Nigerian schoolgirls have been stolen from their village, and no one (besides the girls’ parents) seems to be doing much of anything but handwringing and moaning about it. The world has been too slow to react, and now, it might be too late.

More Nigerian Girls Have Been Abducted, And Aid Might Be Too Late

Last week, I wrote about how no one seems to give a damn about the 223 (according to the Nigerian government) Nigerian women and girls stolen from their school in the village of Chibok over three weeks ago. Well now, everyone seems to give a damn about how no one gives a damn, but the only result is lots of blustering and further inaction.

In the meantime, eight more girls, reportedly between the ages of 12 and 15, were stolen from their village Monday night. At this point, the lack of action from military and government is signifying a deep hatred of women, and of Black women in particular.

For example: In response, the UN has “warned” Islamist militant group Boko Haram against selling the girls. But, really, that amounts to little more than a slap on the wrist.

"We warn the perpetrators that there is an absolute prohibition against slavery and sexual slavery in international law,” said UN human rights spokesperson Rupert Colville. “These can under certain circumstances constitute crimes against humanity," he told a news briefing in Geneva.

No shit. Colville also urged Nigeria's federal and local authorities to “work together” to rescue the girls. Because it’s really likely that they’re just going to hop to it and start doing an adequate job now, three weeks after the fact. Colville sounds like a helpless father trying to admonish an unruly teen, and an impotent response like this undermines the entire intended purpose of the UN.

The inaction is made worse by the fact that this isn’t the first time Boko Haram have taken it upon themselves to abduct women and girls. Nigerian journalist Alexis Okeowo did a great segment on CBC’s Q Tuesday morning, and she said it’s routine for Boko Haram to pluck women off the street, or from their homes. These young women often wind up as sex slaves. This mass abduction, in other words, is not an isolated incident.

Okeowo wrote about the girls for the New Yorker blog. She reported that Boko Haram is responsible for 1,500 killings in the past year alone, and she also reminded us that:

“The day after the abduction, the Nigerian military claimed that it had rescued nearly all of the girls. A day later, the military retracted its claim; it had not actually rescued any of the girls. And the number that the government said was missing, just over a hundred, was less than half the number that parents and school officials counted: according to their tally, two hundred and thirty-four girls were taken.”

The lying, on top of the inaction, on top of the fact that president Goodluck Jonathan still says he has no sweet clue where the girls are, signifies, in my view, a total lack of concern on behalf of the government.

Canada, the US, and the UK have all offered to help. But it’s been over three weeks. Is it too late? A lot of rapes and unwanted pregnancies can happen in three weeks. Further, it’s unlikely that all of the girls are still being held together in one group, which will make finding them and bringing them home even more challenging. The shame on this one lies not only with the Nigerian government, but with the international community.

If you’re not mad yet, this video shows the supposed leader of Boko Haram saying he will “sell the girls in the market, by Allah. There is a market for selling humans.” Also, you should be mad, because these circumstances in Nigeria can be boiled down to this: Today, right now, Black women are being stolen from their homes in Africa, and being sold into slavery.

I’m no expert on Nigeria’s political climate, or on war tactics. But one thing I do know was nicely summed up by writer and publisher Christelyn Karazin on her site Beyond Black & White: “If those poor Nigerian girls were white, there would be UN conferences and demands and threats made until every last girl was returned to her family or someone would have a scud missile up his ass.”

Rapist Sentenced to Community Service… At a Rape Crisis Centre

This past week, Texas judge Jeanie Howard angered the internet by sentencing a convicted rapist to community service at the Dallas Area Rape Crisis Center.  The centre wasn’t consulted about it, though, and promptly asked that the sentence be changed, according to Salon’s Katie McDonough.

Howard sentenced the 20-year-old man to 45 days in jail and 250 community service hours at the centre. He was, reportedly, 18 when he raped a 14-year-old classmate.

Working at a rape crisis centre with people who have been sexually assaulted takes a healthy mix of training and experience, along with superlative levels of kindness and empathy. Forgive me, but these aren’t exactly the traits widely exhibited by rapists.

Howard is right about the fact that the solution to rape and sexual assault lies in better education, but she’s enforcing that in absolutely the wrong way. Education needs to happen before the fact in order to prevent these crimes, and if you want to employ education as a rehabilitation tactic, it’s got to be done far away from people who are already scarred from being sexually abused. These people are not helpless victims, but we are often prone to excessive feelings of vulnerability.

Education on rape and sexual assault needs to happen at a younger age. We need to teach boys (and girls) about sex and what constitutes consent in elementary school. So many parents are still squeamish when it comes to talking about sex with their children, but that’s only exacerbating the problem.

And while talking to your children about sex might be awkward, teaching them about consent and respecting others’ bodies and spaces doesn’t have to be. This wonderful piece by Paige Lucas-Stannard explains that even so much as forcing a child to hug an adult when they say they don’t want to can give entirely the wrong impressions about consent.

I would normally want to attack Howard like an actual canine bitch, but today, for some reason, I actually feel like her thinking was coming from the right place. She was, perhaps, trying to get the experts who work at the centre to teach the rapist some empathy. It wouldn’t have been wholly preposterous, for example, to arrange some sort of class or other work with staff from the crisis centre in an effort at rehabilitation. As it stands, though, her decision was woefully inappropriate, and possibly dangerous.

In the end, Howard said she would change the sentence at the centre’s request, adding that she would reassign his community service hours to a different location.

@sarratch