The statistics on rape in the US are truly horrible. On average, a woman is raped every two minutes and every year about 32,000 women get pregnant because of rape. One needs to keep those numbers in mind to understand why Republican Senate candidates like Richard Mourdock (who thinks that rape is god’s will) and Todd Akin keep saying these crazy things that either minimize rape or suggest that women were asking for it or simply have to deal with the consequences. They cannot stomach allowing that many abortions. And they are by no means the only such people in the Republican party.
Humorist Andy Borowitz says that some Republicans worry that Republican politicians’ focus on rape and misogyny is crowding out their racist message.
“I understand the appeal of Mourdock’s anti-woman theme, but I worry that it’s going to overshadow our core value of racism, which is still our best shot at winning this thing,” he said.
“In politics, you’ve got to dance with the one who brung you.”
Hoping to heal a possible rift with so little time left until Election Day, the R.N.C. chairman Reince Priebus said today that there is room for both views in today’s Republican Party: “Our ‘big tent’ message to voters should be this: come for the misogyny, stay for the racism.”
Cartoonist Ted Rall explains the Republican view of science when it comes to rape.
One wonders how long the party can continue to keep such people within the fold and still think of themselves as a national political party and not some crackpot misogynistic, racist club.
It absolutely comes down to cognitive dissonance
There are two contradictory views
1) Abortion is wrong under all circumstances
2) It is wrong to make someone give birth two a child conceived through rape
They can’t maintain a belief in both of them so one has to give. As God is more important than women to these people, it is the belief that affects actual people that they find ways of rationalising away.
Out of a population of 310,000,000 Americans, of whom half are female, that’s one in 5000 who become pregnant by rape. The actual number of women raped is more than those who got pregnant, which means it’s worse than 1-in-5000. Some estimates put chance of a woman being raped at some point in her life as high as a 1-in-6, and the chance of pregnancy from intercourse without condoms at 5%. If only 5% are getting pregnant, then the numbers of total victims is worse than I can imagine.
And worse still, the only women less likely to be raped are the oldest, it happens to every age group. One US government stat says under 12 girls are 15% of the victims; being prepubescent is likely the reason young girls don’t get pregnant, not they they aren’t assaulted.
http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assault-victims
The statistics on rape in the US are truly horrible.
Rape is truly horrible (I have a near relative who was held down and raped by four men she had never seen before) and requires near relatives to be restrained from vigilantism. But one still has to ask whether the US statistics for rape are comparable (per capita) to EU statistics, and whether the latter are compiled with the same defining criteria (the US definition of rape is highly inclusive, but I have an anecdotal report that an assault that would be called a rape in the US would be a lesser offense in a particular Scandanavian country).
Oh ya, Mourdock and Akin. If the R’s were serious about closing the gender gap, they’d perp-walk the two of them out of the party, on camera. God’s will is irrelevant if you want votes.
“the same defining criteria”
No, not exactly.
“comparable (per capita) to EU statistics”
http://www.seksueelmisdrijf.nl/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=228&Itemid=258
for the Netherlands.
Rape means verkrachting -- 12% of Dutch women has been raped at least once.
Thanks for the link*. After a chase around official websites in the US and in European countries where Mrs Corva (Våldtäkt) or I could read them, I’m forced to conclude that the lifetime victimization rate for women over this culture, based on interviews or anonymous reporting, is probably somewhere between 15% and 25%. Official reported rates seem almost meaningless. However, the notion that rape- or incest-initiated pregnancies should be carried to term seems to be restricted to US Repubs and the Vatican.
*It offered a test of the notion that if one knows English and German (studied there, ages ago) one can at least read Nederlands. Even knowing how language changes as one travels down the Rhine, what one finds is that both those languages offer an abundance of false friends. 😉