This week, living in Oklahoma as a female just became that much scarier.
After a 17 year old boy forced a 16 year old girl to participate in oral sex while she was heavily intoxicated, a court ruled that due to her unconscious state -- he was dismissed. Let me say that again. She was unconscious and drunk -- so the court let him off for raping her. In the arguments, he said it was consensual yet she recalls nothing.
This is not just a problem in Oklahoma though, most rapists do go free. Whether the ruling be because the victim was unconscious or because their outfit was "revealing". In the end, after court cases and unreported rapes, only 1 in 16 rapists will ever spend time in jail.
This is unacceptable.
Women should not be afraid to walk down the street in the middle of the night, or be scrutinized for what they are wearing. More importantly, their rapist should not be set free after it was uncovered that she was intoxicated and unconscious during the act.
Unfortunately, the ruling of the courts was based on the law because there was a massive hole that did not account for an unconscious individual in the criteria for the crime they were prosecuting. This hole is being fixed and hopefully, within the next few weeks, Oklahoma will have a new rape law that will prevent this issue from arising in the future.
Quite frankly, this is a major problem in the United States that needs to be addressed. What the country needs are lawmakers who realize we are behind in creating adequate punishment for these heinous crimes. When only 0.06 percent of rapists spend time in prison for their crimes, there isn't an issue with our women, there is an issue with our laws. It's time to catch up and fix these rape laws so the times of sharing awful rulings on Facebook of men getting let off for forcibly raping someone while they are drunk ends.
As a college student, I have a one in five chance of being sexually assaulted in my undergraduate years. That's terrifying. In a woman's lifetime, she has a one in four chance. I'm sick of being afraid of this happening to myself or my sisters. For my future daughter, something needs to change. At one point in time, laws didn't protect against rape at all. Hopefully soon, laws will protect against all sexual assault and create simpler means of trying these cases and allowing women to feel safe.
Stop asking what she was wearing. Stop asking if she was drunk. She didn't want it.
