Yes, you morons, sexual violence is uniquely evil
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Just about everyone outside of the execrable dregs of academia understand rape is a uniquely pernicious crime and, tragically, often a uniquely difficult crime to prove. Unlike other violent crimes of assault, burglary, and homicide, both witnesses and evidence are scarce in civilian settings, and shame leads many victims to shower away the forensic proof on and in their bodies and remain silent.
Rape as a weapon of war is quite different, and especially when the perpetrators are medieval barbarians such as Hamas.
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Unlike even the Nazis, whose ideology it inherited, Hamas chose to proudly broadcast all of its crimes against humanity in the glee of Oct. 7. The terrorists flooded the internet with countless videos of naked Jewish women, contorted in ways that only sustained physical abuse and death would allow. One of the most harrowing was a video of a woman not just bleeding from her rectum and through her pants but also her Achilles slashed to stop her from being able to run away.
Since that fateful day, Israel has leveled northern Gaza, Hamas has violated a second ceasefire, and southern Gaza is finally on the chopping block. Although negotiators succeeded in acquiring 108 civilian hostages from Hamas, more than 100 remain in terrorist custody. According to Puck News, three White House officials confirmed that Hamas is not releasing any more of the 17 remaining female hostages because they’ve been repeatedly sexually abused.
“One official said they think Hamas is keeping these women in order to keep raping them,” Puck’s Julia Ioffe reports.
One would assume that in the aftermath of the #MeToo era, Western bastions of liberalism and feminism would be unequivocal in not just their condemnation of Hamas’s terror in general but its sexual abuse of women, who are disproportionately Jewish and Israeli, in particular. Alas, no.
The most egregious responses range from the self-serious hand-wringing of House Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal of Washington, who could not condemn the rape of Israelis without blaming the Israelis in the same breath, to the genuinely mentally ill.
Here, Heidi Matthews — a York University professor who specifically “researches and teaches in the areas of international criminal law, the law of war, international legal history and political theory” — is taking offense at “sex exceptionalism.” What the hell does that mean? According to the Stanford Law Review, it’s the belief that “that sexual assault is graver than nonsexual assault.”
To which most of us would say:
It should really, really, REALLY go without saying that, yes, sexual violence is indeed worse than other types of violence. Still, for the morally broken people who need a reminder, here are just a few of the reasons why.
For starters, rape can result not just in unwanted pregnancy (something ostensible liberals used to care about) but also in countless permanent and life-threatening conditions. Physically, these include HIV/AIDs and other incurable STDs, genital bleeding, and pelvic injury up to and including the broken pelvises attested to by witnesses of the rapes by Hamas. Mentally, consequences include depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychosis, and suicide.
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But beyond the material consequences, rape is a violation in a way that a punch or a gunshot is not. It is specifically an exercise of power, with the powerful physically subjugating a person — often but not always a woman or child — to abuse and use their bodies in the most intimate and humiliating of ways.
Crimes against humanity include other types of violence, but yes, rape is one of those that is particularly evil. Not too long ago, that was an obvious thing to say.