Revolution #235, June 12, 2011
Rape and a World of Violent Domination Over Women
In October 2010, pledges of the Yale University chapter of the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) marched through campus for an initiation ritual. They chanted, “No means yes, yes means anal.” Yale is one of the “elite” universities in the U.S., and past members of DKE include U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices, and heads of major corporations.
Seven months later, university officials announced that DKE was banned from recruiting and holding events on campus. But the Yale campus paper reported that it is “unclear whether the University will have any sway over the future of the fraternity.” The executive director of DKE called the campus ban “excessive” and said they will appeal. And the fact remains that the October incident was a vicious and blatant message of hate and threat of violence against women, which went viral with over 170,000 views on YouTube. This typical story compelled Revolution to create this center spread.
Rape and a World of Violent Domination Over Women
Rape is a vicious, dehumanizing crime. It is an expression of the routinely oppressive and often violent subjugation of women by men that is part of the normal functioning of this society—codified into laws, the mass culture, the family, and all mainstream religion.
- Worldwide, at least one in three women and girls is beaten or sexually abused in her lifetime.
- An estimated one million children around the world, mostly girls, enter the sex trade each year.
- A woman born in South Africa has a greater chance of being raped than learning how to read.
- Gender-based violence kills and disables as many women between the ages of 15 and 44 as cancer, and its toll on women’s health surpasses that of traffic accidents and malaria combined.
- One in four college women in the U.S. have either been raped or suffered attempted rape.
- A woman is beaten by her partner every 15 seconds in the U.S., and three women are killed every day by possessive lovers and abusive husbands.
- One in three women who join the U.S. military will be sexually assaulted or raped by men in the military.
- In the Congo, where the rape of women has been a systematic part of a civil war, tens of thousands of women and young girls have been so brutally raped that their insides are torn apart and they can no longer hold their bladders or bowels.
- Pornography, including its extensive portrayal of sadistic violence against women, is a concentration of this society’s objectification and domination of women. Over the last 20 years, as porn has become more mainstream, it has also become “more overtly cruel and degrading” to women.
- In Basra, in U.S.-occupied Iraq, the price to hire someone to carry out an “honor killing” of one’s wife or daughter is a mere $100.
- One out of every three women in the United States will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime.
- According to official U.S. government statistics, there are about 385 reports of rape and sexual assault a day—or about 16 an hour.
- Only 16% of rapes in the U.S. are reported to the police.
NO
MEANS
NO
“Women are not breeders. Women are not lesser beings. Women are not objects created for the sexual pleasure of men. Women are human beings capable of participating fully and equally in every realm of human endeavor. When women are held down, all of humanity is held back. Women must win liberation, and they can only be liberated through the revolutionary transformation of the world and the emancipation of all of humanity, and through being a powerful motive force in that revolution...
“When so few will dare, this declaration is calling for something unseen in generations: an uncompromising outpouring of women and men the world over who refuse to see women oppressed, beaten, imprisoned, insulted, raped, abused, harassed, exploited, murdered, spat upon, thrown acid at, groped, shamed and systematically diminished.”
Excerpt from “A Declaration: For Women’s Liberation
and the Emancipation of All Humanity,”
Revolution #158, March 8, 2009
References (listed in order)
UN Commission on the Status of Women, February 28, 2000
“Profiting from Abuse,” UNICEF, New York, 2001
“Rape-silent war on SA women,” April 9, 2002 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1909220.stm)
Violence Against Women Information, Amnesty International (http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/women-s-rights/violence-against-women/violence-against-women-information)
Statistics from Coalition Educating About Sexual Endangerment (CEASE) at Ohio University (http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~ad361896/anne/cease/rapestatisticspage.html)
UN Study on the World's Women, 2000 (cited by Amnesty International at http://www.amnesty.org.au/svaw/comments/2370/)
“Homicide Trends in the U.S.,” Bureau of Justice Statistics (http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/homicide/tables/intimatestab.cfm)
Ann Wright, “Is There an Army Cover Up of Rape and Murder of Women Soldiers?” April 28, 2008 (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/04/28)
Press release from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), June 27, 1996 (http://www.icty.org/sid/7334)
From interview with Robert Jensen, author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, by Sunsara Taylor, http://revcom.us/a/186/sunsara_jensen-en.html
“Hitmen charge $100 a victim as Basra honor killings rise,” The Observer, November 30, 2008 ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/30/iraq-honor-killings-women)
Statistics from Coalition Educating About Sexual Endangerment (CEASE) at Ohio University (http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~ad361896/anne/cease/rapestatisticspage.html)
National Crime Victimization Survey, 2007, U.S. Department of Justice (http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/cvus07.pdf)
Statistics from Coalition Educating About Sexual Endangerment (CEASE) at Ohio University (http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~ad361896/anne/cease/rapestatisticspage.html)
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.
