Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [117]
She laughed as Alex held his hands out to her and she took him back quickly. “Isn’t he great?” she said as she chucked him under the chin.
I pushed my cart down the aisle, happy that I had seen her and that things were going better than I would have predicted.
SEXUAL VIOLENCE
On Sunday mornings I wake early. Everyone in my family sleeps in and I like the time alone to read our local paper. One Sunday these were the headline stories: THE NIGHTMARE BEGAN WITH GOOD-BYE was about Candi Harms, a first-year university student. Candi lived in an apartment with her parents a mile from her boyfriend’s place. Between 11:40, when her boyfriend walked her to her car, and midnight, when she was due home, something happened. Her abandoned car, with her keys and purse still in it, was found in a remote area north of town.
There was an article on Kenyatta Bush, an A student and a homecoming-queen candidate. Kenyatta disappeared from her high school one morning. Her backpack and books were found beside her car. Her body was found in a ditch the day of the school’s homecoming.
Another headline announced that domestic violence was at an all-time high. One out of two women will be battered at some time in her life. In 1991, more than one million women reported being the victims of violent crimes at the hands of husbands or lovers; four thousand women were killed. Police estimated that more than six million assaults actually took place. In America, a woman is a victim of domestic violence every eighteen seconds.
On an inside page of the Sunday paper, a new fashion line was on display. The photo showed skimpily clad models wearing high heels at a New York show. On their tight, short outfits, over their breasts and buttocks, were painted bull’s-eyes. The caption of the fashion photo read: “Walking targets.”
These stories about women and girls were being told in every paper in America. They have a chilling effect on all young women. Many report their fears of being home alone, driving and going to swimming pools or theaters. Their confidence in their ability to navigate their world is eroded. They speak to the heart of the question, What is our environment like for girls?
I recently saw a bumper sticker on a young man’s car that read: “If I don’t get laid soon somebody’s gonna get hurt.” He is not alone in his philosophy. On any given day in America, 480 women and children will be forcibly raped, 5,760 women will be assaulted by a male intimate partner and four women and three children will be murdered by a family member.
The newer the study, the worse the figures. Rape is the “tragedy of youth” because 32 percent of all rapes occur when the victim is between the ages of eleven and seventeen. More than 15 percent of all college women have been raped since they turned eighteen. There is ominous evidence that the incidence of rape is increasing over time—the younger the age category of respondents, the higher the incidence of reported rape.
Statistics gloss over thousands of sad stories. This year one of my students missed class many times because she was being beaten by her boyfriend. Another group of students presented a panel discussion that included the results of a questionnaire about abuse in our classroom. None of the men but more than half the women students reported having been abused in a relationship. The last three times I’ve spoken at a high school class, a girl has approached me afterward to tell me she’s been raped.
Classes on self-defense are filled with women and girls who recently have been victimized. I ask in my college classes what men do to protect themselves, and they say that they do nothing. I ask about women and we fill a blackboard with the ways women are careful. Fear changes behavior in a thousand ways—where and when young women can go places, who they talk to and where they walk, study and live.
I have seen so many victims of sexual assaults, some recent, still bruised and in shock, others struggling to come