Devastating WaPo opinion piece about the aftermath of a rape...
It's a long read, and it brought me to tears several times, but I think this is required reading.
(Apologies if a re-post; I searched for it but did not find it on here...)
There is a paywall, but it looks like other news outlets are starting to post excerpts.
But it floors me that people STILL wonder about women who don't come forward...
"Aug. 11, 2006, was a sweltering Friday night in the midst of a long, fatally hot summer. A 16-year-old girl reported that she was raped that night, in a storage shed off a dirt road in my hometown of Arlington, Tex. Nobody was ever prosecuted for it, and nobody was punished except, arguably, her: By the end of the fall semester, she had disappeared from our high school, leaving only sordid rumors and a nascent urban legend."
-snip-
"On and off over the next three years, I reviewed police documents, interviewed witnesses and experts, and made several pilgrimages home to Texas to try to understand what exactly happened to Wyatt — not just on that night, but in the days and months and years that followed. Making sense of her ordeal meant tracing a web of failures, lies, abdications and predations, at the center of which was a node of power that, though anonymous and dispersed, was nonetheless tilted firmly against a young, vulnerable girl. Journalists, activists and advocates began to uncover that very same imbalance of power from Hollywood to Capitol Hill in the final year of this reporting, in an explosion of reporting and analysis we’ve come to call the #MeToo Movement. But the rot was always there — even in smaller and less remarkable places, where power takes mundane, suburban shapes."
-snip-
"The story of Amber Wyatt’s assault begins in some sense a decade earlier, with another assault — and another failure of irresponsible adults and their children to face consequences. In 1996, another 16-year-old Arlington girl was allegedly sexually assaulted at another high school party, and another opportunity to prosecute those responsible was ignored. And, with that, another moment of clarity that could have turned toward reform instead degenerated into a rally for the guilty."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/opinions/arlington-texas/?utm_term=.15eba1733840
= new reply since forum marked as read
