Is There a Sexual Assault Epidemic?

On Wednesday, I posted a story that made light of what I called the sexual harassment epidemic, which is  outing alleged predators every day. The accused include both the very liberal and ultraconservative, straight and gay. In many instances, the victims have waited decades before coming forward. This hurts their credibility. But in some cases, several people say j'accuse. That corroborates these indictments.

Two people - Monkey Momma and Dr.Paige Van Wirt - took issue with me. I want to highlight their views.

Monkey Momma tees off on this sentence from my Wednesday story. "It seems that everyone has been subjected to horrifying sexual abuse in their teens or early twenties."

Actually, what it seems like is our society has a very pervasive sexual assault problem. One of the reasons this problem has not been effectively dealt with is our tendency to "laugh it off" or make light of what is really a very serious and sad problem. Victims, more often that not, fail to come forward in a timely manner simply because of the attitude represented in this very surprising and disappointing blog post.

The #metoo movement has made it acceptable to finally reveal past assaults that have haunted victims for many years. For the first time in my own memory, men & women are coming forward with their stories, and for that I very much admire them. Because of our society's tendency to make light of these horror stories, people need a lot of guts to reveal the predators in our midst.

As the mother of a son and a daughter, I am big believer in the Innocent Until Proven Guilty concept - in other words, you can't just totally believe every victim's account at face value. Evidence is needed before a life should be destroyed by would could be, theoretically, lies. However, when multiple victims come forward telling the SAME story about the SAME predator, and a pattern is revealed even years later, then it is (in my mind) safe to assume that these victims are collectively sharing accurate and real histories about criminals who have (so far) gone unpunished. In no way did these victims enjoy their torture, as your blog post seems to suggest. It is not flattering to be targeted by a pedophile or a rapist or sexual predator. Victims didn't earn their crimes, by either their actions or their "attractiveness" - they were simply targeted by sick criminals who have, up until now, enjoyed the tacit protection of a society that really could not give a shit.

I do not personally have a #metoo story. I have been damned lucky. I see now that so many of my close friends and family didn't escape their youth unscathed, and I thank the gods for my good fortune. I admire those who have finally found the courage to speak out about past horrors. You're lucky, Bernie. But just because you dodged a bullet, it doesn't mean the same bullets didn't strike someone else.

Dr. Paige Van Wirt went off on a comment I made defending my Wednesday story. " “I reject the notion that sexual abuse or even harassment is prevalent.”

Ask yourself why. Is it because you were victimized by false accusations? You clearly understand that having been a victim of false accusations does not mean is isn’t painfully prevalent. Part of the reason sexual harassment continues to be a problem, the reason why it continues to happen, is exactly because it is behavior that occurs away from cameras, other people, or any way to meaningfully ‘prove’ that it happened. If it was easy to prove then the perpetrators would not do it! The sudden deluge means that people who have for years, decades, nursed their own pain and memories in the dark, finally feel like there is a platform to share their experience and humiliation without people like you coming down on them and saying “there is no proof!” If the coach at Penn State had not caught Sandusky in the shower with those boys, would the problems not have happened because the boys could not ‘prove it’? If those boys came forward decades later and said “ yes, this horrible, life-changing thing happened to me”, some who even considered killing themselves because of the pain, would they not have been listened to because there was no proof, or not listened to because too many years had lapsed? Patterns emerge, there is strength in patterns, but at the end of the day this is a problem that occurs in the dark, and to dismiss the current wave of allegations as ‘simply unbelievable’ shows a poor understanding of this very real problem.

One of my points was that there was only anecdotal evidence of a problem, no hard facts. But as I looked into this question a little more closely, I discovered there are statistics that tell us that we may very well have a problem. Every 98 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted.