Guess who doesn’t care about “rape culture?”
In March 2017, a 15-year-old girl in Chicago was lured into a basement and gang-raped by five to six males. The girl was threatened with a pit bull if she tried to flee; she was picked up and thrown around. One of the participants live-streamed the rape on Facebook. So far, two boys, 15- and 14-years-old, have been arrested in the attack. The 15-year-old slapped the girl in the head while she was performing oral sex on him. Up to 40 people watched the rape live; none reported it to the police or to Facebook.
Since then, threats, taunts, social-media bullying, and physical assaults have been directed at . . . the victim and her family, not at the rapists. A group of girls beat the victim’s twelve-year-old sister last week, reports DNA Info Chicago. One of the girl’s attackers said: “Why [did] you send my brother to jail,” according to her mother. You want to see an example of “blaming the victim?” This is it. People ring the family’s doorbell and surround the home in a menacing way, the girl’s mother has told the Chicago Tribune. The victim has been moved to an undisclosed location to escape the constant insults and bullying, but the family has not yet raised enough money through a GoFundMe campaign to follow her.
Critics of campus feminists regularly suggest that if those alleged defenders of women’s rights and safety really want to upend “rape culture,” they might move to Afghanistan or Somalia. So far, no gender-studies professor seems to have taken up the suggestion. But here is a less demanding sojourn. Go to the inner city and confront the routine misogyny and violence directed at females, often by other females. Last week, a social-media inspired fight broke out among girls at a suburban Philadelphia high school that injured half a dozen faculty members and three security officers. One female teacher was knocked unconscious; other teacher injuries included a dislocated shoulder and concussions. Teachers polled in a February 2017 “climate survey” at the school described endemic student violence and lawlessness, reports Philly.com. Last year, a 17-year-old girl from Coney Island, Tajae Warner, was beaten to death by a group of teens led by 18-year-old Sabrina Agard-Ford; Ford’s blow knocked Warner out and she entered a fatal coma after hitting her head on the pavement.
Yet the Left continues to pump out a series of interlocking lies: that “rape culture” is a product of Western civilization exclusively, practiced primarily by heterosexual white males, and its most egregious seat is the pacific American college campus; that minorities are victimized predominantly by white racists; that police presence and proactive tactics in minority neighborhoods are a function of bias, not crime; that disparate racial rates of school discipline reveal teacher bias; that the disciplining of black girls, in particular, constitutes racial injustice. The Left gets away with these lies because of the virtual taboo on the reporting of inner-city dysfunction. This Sunday, a mass shooting broke out in Chicago at a memorial for a Hispanic gang member shot and killed hours earlier. Two masked men with rifles opened fire on the crowd gathered at the shrine, killing a woman and man and wounding eight others, reports DNA Info Chicago. The national media barely cocked an eye. Last year in Chicago, 4,300 people were shot, one person every two hours, including two dozen children under the age of twelve. Had the victims been white, there would have been a revolution. But because the victims were overwhelmingly black, no one pays attention, both out of a reluctance to call attention to black crime and out of an unspoken assumption on the part of the media that that is simply what black people do.
Until that liberal condescension changes, liberal pieties about “rape culture” and other alleged sins of Western society will continue to be just so much obfuscating nonsense.
This piece originally appeared on National Review Online
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of The War on Cops.
This piece originally appeared in National Review Online