I must comment on the horrendous attack on Lara Logan and the equally disgusting reaction to that assault.
The beating and rape of Logan has NOTHING to do with her whiteness, her blonde mane, her career choice as a war journalist, her penchant to place herself in the line of fire, her past romantic history, or her unfortunate reality of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It has EVERYTHING to do with the cowardice of her attackers, bolstered by a situation where the basic structures of morality and civic control have diminished to the point of permitting mayhem to flourish.
Rape is an act of violence. The perpetrators are weak individuals who, due to failures in their own lives, are forcing themselves on women to give themselves a false sense of success, power and control. They are the lowest forms of life. Their victims in no way should be attributed any blame, because this process actually offers solace and rationale to the rapists. Is this simple enough to understand? Is there any part of this sick, cowardly, chicken-shit behavior that you do not understand?
It also needs to be said that to condemn the entire male gender for rape is equally wrong. Rape is not committed by all men; it is committed by a sick, weak minority.
So let Lara Logan be. Many other horror stories from female journalists have surfaced since Logan made her’s public. Because these victims are all in the public’s eye, being reporters, many of these accounts are de rigueur for recent editions of just about every media outlet, whether they be print, broadcast or Internet. One would have to be dead and buried to assume that rape is a rarity and that it hits predominantly those females in journalism.
Just because rape is such a frequent crime all over the globe does not mean we should abide it. Rapists should be treated with the full force of the world’s justice system. That is, of course, assuming that a justice system actually exists to punish these crimes. Until that happens, uniformly and globally, there is a tacit (if not vocal) approval for the rapes to continue. As if the act of rape is not destructive enough, the common practice of assigning guilt to the victim and the general acceptance, and indeed the dismissal, of this outrage is even more catastrophic than the initial act.