‘Consensual Rape’– Rep. Barry Hovis, Republican lawmaker, while arguing on the Missouri State House Floor.
“Let’s just say someone goes out and they’re raped or they’re sexually assaulted one night after a college party — because most of my rapes were not the gentleman jumping out of the bushes that nobody had ever met,” Hovis said. “That was one or two times out of a hundred. Most of them were date rapes or consensual rapes, which were all terrible.”
Sexual Assault-Rape
I am a victim of child sexual abuse perpetrated before I could talk and then raped before the age of 10 by someone I trusted and loved. As a young woman, I was date raped after my upstairs neighbors’ party, and then sexually assaulted by a law school professor in the first week of law school.
I have been fighting this war my entire life — sexual terrorism.
To call what happened to me and the millions of other survivors ‘consensual rape’ is to tell enslaved people that their enslavement was consensual.
And this got me burning…
- Rape Culture. We have always lived in a culture where women and children are considered “chattel” or property. It is natural then to use the ‘property’ anyway the owner wants, with or without the ‘property’s’ consent.
- This idea is so deeply embedded in our unconscious that it is no ‘accident’ that Rep. Hovis said it out loud. That rape and incest were consensual. After all, if women and children are property, then their consent is implied, as one can do anything with personal property one wants. You own it; you break it, you keep it, you pay for it. This idea of “consensual rape” is about sexual slavery, sexual terrorism, and property rights. Property is owned, people, on the other hand, are beings of choice. You take away the choice; you take away the other’s humanity. We return to the status of owned and enslaved property.
- Therefore, the next logical step is, if you get pregnant by rape or incest, we will force you to have the child since we own you anyway. Sexual terrorism on the enslaved is satisfying to the owner and terrifying for the caged.
- I have been a terrified, enslaved victim.
- The thinking by rapists and incest aggressors is, that if it feels good, it must be good, and therefore, the rape was consensual.
- Rape does not feel good. I was left torn and bleeding. Enslaved and ravaged.
- It’s a lot easier to look oneself in the mirror, after committing domestic sexual terrorism, and tell yourself, “she wanted it,” “she must have liked it,” then to see a rapist in the mirror.
- I didn’t “want it.” I didn’t like it. It wasn’t consensual. It hurt. I screamed and cried and fought and kicked, and bled and got slapped more and almost strangled by his strong arms and hands over my mouth. Torture pleases the torturer, not the victim.
- To force a woman or child to bear a child of rape or incest is a crime in furtherance of the conspiracy of sexual, domestic terrorism and a unique form of torture.
- If a woman is forced to bear a child, she does not want, what is it like for the child once born?
- Hell on Earth! As an unwanted child, my mother made me pay daily for having been born a girl. My mother burned and beat, sexually abused, and tortured in revenge. She pimped me out to my predator to keep him around. I paid the price of being an unwanted child.
Now imagine if you were raped and forced to bear and raise your rapist’s child for 18-20 years. Looking into the face of that child every day, and seeing the monster who raped you, how would you cope? The victim is forced into reliving the rape or incest over and over with PTSD, flashbacks, and uncontrollable terror attacks. Days filled with trauma, fear, humiliation, self-loathing, PTSD, depression, anxiety. A day you are fighting thoughts of suicide, infantilism, drug, and alcohol dependency.
Does this promote the type of love, nurturing, and good parenting every child deserves?
And finally, what if the rape victim is an 11-years old child?Lucia was raped at age 11 by her grandmother’s 65-year-old boyfriend, which resulted in the child’s pregnancy.
The child begged the doctors and the priest to “Take out the thing the old man put in me.”
Both the priests and the doctors tried to push the limits on Lucia’s health while doctors bought time for the fetus to grow and become viable. The child was being forced to carry the fetus to term.
“The priest offered to buy the baby from me,” Lucia’s mother said during an interview a month ago at her lawyer’s office in Argentina.
Abortion is illegal in Argentina (a heavily Catholic country), except in cases of rape or when the pregnant woman’s life is in danger––both of which applied to little Lucia, according to the doctors who were eventually called in to operate on her.
Lucia’s attorney said, “There is not one of Lucia’s rights that was not violated.”
Lucia’s short life has been one of abuse and neglect. She was raised in a tiny poverty-stricken shantytown in a conservative province in Argentina.Finally, nearly a month since the first doctor saw her, Lucia was given the procedure. Lucia is still confused about what happened to her, why she had a massive bulge in her stomach, and is still, according to authorities suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
Had Lucia been in Alabama, or Texas or a migrant child seeking asylum at the U.S. border, she might have been forced to bring the baby to term.
Would you inflict such pain and inhumanity on another to force a woman or child to give birth to a child borne out of rape or incest? Isn’t that the epitome of cruelty? Don’t victims live matter? Don’t sexually terrorized victims count? Are we just chattel?
Conclusion: Follow the Timeline:
It may seem like the issues of child sexual abuse, incest, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are separate issues from the fight in Alabama, Texas and other states enacting draconian laws to force women and teens into having babies.But the truth is our rights over our own body have been stolen from us since babyhood by incest and by child sexual abuse, through pre-teen sexual harassment and abuse, to young womanhood rape and sexual harassment, followed us into marital rape and domestic violence, and then to senior hood, where 87% of elderly disabled women are sexually assaulted and raped. Taken together, it forms a timeline.
How Good Are Americans At Taking Care of Children After They Are Born?How Many Children are Currently in the Foster Care System?
What happens to the unwanted, abandoned, or abused children already born? Foster care, foster homes?
There are roughly 400,000 children in the U.S. foster care system. Of that number, 107,918 foster children are eligible for and waiting to be adopted.
The average age of a waiting child in foster care to be adopted is 7.7 years old, and 29% of them will spend at least three years in foster care.
The rest, approximately 300,000 are left to languish in foster care, being bounced from foster care home to foster care families, until they age-out of the foster care system and are either thrown out on the streets and become homeless or become easy targets of sex traffickers.
A new foster care documentary, Breaking the Cycle, explores exactly how intertwined the foster care system is with homelessness and human trafficking.
How Many Children are Homeless or On the Streets Today?
2.5 million children each year are becoming homeless.
National Center on Family Homelessness. A staggering 2.5 million children are now homeless each year in America. This historic high represents one in 30 children in the United States.How Many Children Go Hungry in America Today?
16.2 million children.
1. 16 million American kids struggle with hunger each year. An estimated 48.8 million Americans, including 16.2 million children, live in households that lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis. As a result, about 1 in 5 children go hungry at some point during the year.How Many Children Do Not Have Healthcare in the U.S. Today?
The number of children in the United States without health insurance jumped to 3.9 million in 2017 from about 3.5 million the year before, according to census data.How Many Children Are Available for Adoption Today?
There are about 2 million couples currently waiting to adopt in the United States — which means there are as many as 36 waiting families for every one child who is placed for adoption. “But these families want white, newborns for the most part,” our source explained. “The older the child, the harder to place.Children adopted privately from the United States are most likely to be white (50 percent); the majority of children adopted internationally are Asian (59 percent).
People of wealth and power use the “private adoption” option and pay for a baby. 62 percent of children adopted privately are placed with the adoptive family when they are newborns or less than one year old. That’s because “most people want newborns, not a ‘pre-owned’ child,” one private adoption attorney said in a phone interview in Los Angeles.In Conclusion:
“Incest and rape victims are crushed between being barred from justice as survivors and serving more time for abortion than their rapist or incest aggressors”—Shari Karney.- We ask that you donate even $1.00 for victims of child sex abuse. www.roara1.org. (The cost of an item at The .99 Cents Only Store).
- We ask you not to forget the plight of survivors of child sexual abuse, sexual assault, harassment, and rape. We ask that you write to your U.S. Senator and Congressperson to support The Civil Rights Act for Victims of Sexual Violence (“CRAVSV”).
After Thought:
Do Women Suffer a “Motherhood” Pay Gap?
Motherhood is the biggest cause of the gender pay gap. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/upshot/even-in-family-friendly-scandinavia-mothers-are-paid-less.htmlThe pay gap between men and women is much smaller until the first child arrives. Then women’s earnings plummet and their career trajectories slow. Women who do not have children, by and large, continue to grow their earnings at a similar rate to men. There are still differences because of discrimination and other factors, but researchers say that motherhood explains a large amount of the gap.
Children hurt mothers’ careers. This is, in large part, because women spend more time on child rearing than men do, whether by choice or not.The cost of raising a child in the U.S. Parents save up: It costs this much to raise a kid.
The estimated cost of raising a child from birth through age 17 is $233,610 — or as much as almost $14,000 annually, the Department of Agriculture says. That’s the average for a middle-income couple with two children. It’s a bit more expensive in urban parts of the country, and less so in rural areas.
“Being sexually abused at such an early age was the scar on my soul. But I feel like it ultimately made me into the person I am today. I understand the journey of life. I had to go through what I went through to be here. But now it’s time to take action to save the next generation of women and children from what we went the
Shari Karney is a survivor’s attorney. She represents victims of child sexual abuse by sexual predators such as a member of the clergy, a teacher, celebrity, sports coach, wealthy businessman or any other powerful person, Karney Law is here for you.
Shari Karney, Attorney at Law
Child Sexual Abuse Attorney
A Survivor’s Attorney
www.karneyadvocates.com
sharikarneylaw@gmail.com - If a woman is forced to bear a child, she does not want, what is it like for the child once born?
