It's been a marathon week for shouting, paranoid lunatics. Just in case global warming, nuclear proliferation, H1N1, drug-resistant bacteria and the inevitable extinction of our sun weren't all scary enough, there's a new global nemesis to face off with: gang rape. Over the past week, countless newspapers, cable news stations and blogs have sounded off on what they think of the gang rape of a student from Richmond High School in Richmond, Calif., and the results are far from surprising America still thinks gang rape is bad. What I find more disturbing is the absurd media attention being given to the case and the exorbitantly expensive "solutions" being proposed.
Truly, rape is a terrible crime on par with murder that affects not only the victim, but also friends, family and the community at large. I'd like to take this moment to extend my most sincere sympathies to the victim of this tragic crime and her family. However, I think we should also take a moment to recall the countless other victims of rape, no matter their age, race or location. And why stop there when we can also memorialize the victims of kidnapping, torture, murder and even genocide, as they and their communities have also lost?
Despite all appearances, I have no intention to make light of the Richmond gang rape I intend merely to standardize it. Consider the oft-quoted statistic from the U.S. Department of Justice that someone in America is raped every two and a half minutes; by my calculations, that means 576 people are raped every day, so between the Richmond rape and the press time of this column, 5,760 Americans have been raped. What, then, makes this case somehow worse than the others? Is there a statute of limitations on how long a rape has to take place or how many people are involved before there has to be a national response? Does that make other underreported rapes less important?
The Richmond rape was just as horrifying as every other sexual assault in this country it just reads better off a teleprompter because of the circumstances. At any rate, commentators and pundits across the nation are busy thinking of "solutions" for rape in our public schools now that this crime has received national attention. There are plans to put security guards at school entrances, install security cameras across campuses and force hours and hours of additional training on our teachers, among other proposals. These plans aren't just made of hot air; according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the West Contra Costa Unified School District approved a plan last Saturday to provide extensive fencing around Richmond High School, presumably to increase safety.
I'd be shocked if other school districts didn't make similar moves lest they risk public outrage, but where is everyone going to be when it comes time to pay for these initiatives? We'll probably have moved on to some other issue, saddling our public education system with even more debt.
It's difficult and painful to do so, but when tragedies like these become publicized, we as a society must be able to grieve without taking excessive action. We can't increase the drinking age every time a drunk teen gets involved in a car accident, and we also can't make our schools look more like prisons every time some act of violence is perpetrated on our campuses. It's a matter of balancing costs you can't put an absolute cost on a life, but you can put a relative cost on one. If I have $100,000 to invest in sexual assault prevention, should I choose to invest it on high school campuses, where it is relatively unlikely (only 8 percent of all cases, according to a 2005 Department of Justice study), or in densely populated inner cities (over 50 percent of rapes occur in the home of the victim or someone close to the victim)? We can't let individual cases like that of the Richmond teenager color our greater efforts for a better society.
No one should have to suffer through the tragedy that poor girl did, but society should not hurt itself simply because of one tragic experience. I hope that her community does continue to mourn the event and engage in the healing process, but we should reserve our resources for where they are really needed, not where we think it would be noble and honorific to invest them. The best thing we can do to pay homage to her tragedy is to prevent similar ones from taking place in the future, not turning our teachers into jailors.
