Assigning degrees of significance to sexual crime insults victims
In the course of the ongoing debate over the federal government's support of abortion, Congress has come to a generally acceptable compromise: only offering funding for abortions in cases of incest, rape and danger to the mother's health. This compromise recognizes that there are reasons for ending a pregnancy that have less to do with personal whim and that morally-debased methods of impregnation should not be prolonged through an involuntary pregnancy and parenthood.
A new bill in Congress, however, would specify the definition of rape to exclude support for victims of rapes that are not "forcible," including statutory rape, rape in which the woman was drugged or given excessive amounts of alcohol, rape of women with limited mental capacity and many forms of date rape.
The act of forcing sex upon another person — whether that person has refused or is incapable, for whatever reason, of making a choice — is a physical violation of the body. It is a destructive denial of the sanctity of selfhood and it ignores the basic human right of self-determination. Worse, the rapist utilizes the shame assigned to rape by society in order to ensure the silence of the victim, thus making the society an accomplice after the fact.
It is our duty as a nation to offer the fullest support to rape victims and fully denounce the crime and the criminal — especially in light of our culture's fundamental attitude toward the crime itself. As a culture, we often look to the victim of the rape for the catalytic elements that caused the rape, rather than recognizing the rapist as the only agent.
This new bill only encourages this attitude and structure. Rather than asserting rape's singularity as an indefensible crime, this bill actively argues for degrees of rape. Legal definitions may identify different forms of rape for the purposes of exactitude in criminal proceedings, but this bill differentiates degrees, not forms. Because the current support of abortion is based on "acceptable" reasons for an unwanted pregnancy, the inclusion of rape as an "acceptable" reason underscores how unacceptable it is as an act. In only supporting abortion for victims of some forms of rape under the new bill, Congress redefines the acceptability of rape, saying that only some forms of rape are absolutely unacceptable. If all forms of rape were truly equally unacceptable, we would not make such distinctions on a federal level.
The danger of this bill lies in its future authority as a precedent. Under our legal system, a bill on federal funding of abortion can trickle down to influence the entire legal system. More dangerous is the influence of such bills over our cultural mythology and discourse. Within our discourse already is this concept of degrees of rape; this bill threatens to codify this concept.
The debate over the federal government's support of abortion should and must continue. In the process, however, let us not sacrifice the dignity and right to suffering of a multitude of rape victims — who, we must remember, are the victims of a crime, not the wrongdoers.
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