Another gang rape.
Stop it stop it stop it. This is making me cry.
I know this particular case does not necessarily deserve any more media attention than the others—in cities, in villages, in marriages—that go unreported by victims and unreported on by journalists, but the fact that this is indeed a headline is profoundly disturbing to me.
Am I simply more sensitive to and thus aware of the issue now that I am a sexual being myself, and a young woman living independently in the big wide world? Is it my own fear of being threatened and assaulted and brutally torn apart that is welling up in me such a visceral reaction?
Have media outlets simply realized that stories like these fan multiple flames? Are they catering to the tides of public opinion about feminism, sexual politics, and young male violence? Do they file these news items with more regularity because the topic has become a hot-button issue, or has it become a hot-button issue because new agencies are finally making it so? Does this mean we will soon reach a saturation point and become inured to such records of violation? "Another day, another gang rape"?
Or—the worst answer—are the numbers of sexual assaults actually increasing? Are there so few real deterrents for harassers and such a culture of silence surrounding victims and such a patriarchal desire for bare raw power that rape is more than ever... an ugly but largely unavoidable fact of life?
That is unconscionable.
These are essentially the same questions I have about supercharged natural disasters and mass school shootings. Do we simply hear about them more often nowadays because the way news is proliferated has fundamentally changed, or are they truly occurring with more frequency than in earlier decades?
The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. Are we slouching towards Bethlehem? Will our gaze be always blank and pitiless as the sun? Let us tame the rough beast soon, lest it consume us all.
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