2013: The Year to End Rape

warning: this post is graphic.

I don't have any original thoughts to report, but I just wanted to pass on an incredible new site that I found: Women Under Siege. Part of Women's Media Center, it highlights instances of sexualized violence around the world, and writer Lauren Wolfe recently decreed that 2013 be the year to end rape.

She describes the gruesome story that made its way through the news before Christmas: how a 23-year-old female medical student in India was randomly chosen by a group of 6 men to be the victim of a disgustingly horrifying gang rape and assault.

Wolfe writes how her body was "destroyed by the bodies of the men who allegedly assaulted her and also by the rusting metal bar doctors say they used to penetrate her. The bar removed part of her intestines."

This image and thought has stayed with my for days now - the agony that woman must have felt is incomprehensible.

Women's Dignity March on Jan 2, in Dehli, India

After being hospitalized, the woman died from her wounds a few days later. Wolfe writes: "It has taken an attack that lies nearly outside of comprehension to prompt demonstrations, but the outcry has begun."

Thank God.

Were this woman's death to go unnoticed, as one of the countless rapes that occur every every year, her death would become even more tragic. This gruesome act must be the beginning of a movement. It must be the catalyst to bring a world struggling to admit the realness and prevalence of rape into the light. We must use it as a way to begin the discussion about rape in our own country - and while reports of this terrible nature are not common in America, rape is nevertheless a common act that is not bound to the third world or people of different ethnicities and cultures.

So, here's the action: talk about this rape. Think about the terror that women in some countries live with every day, and how even in America and the rest of the first world, it is basically a statistical certainty that there has been a time in every woman's life when she has felt unsafe. For some women, this feeling is a constant reality. Talk about what happened in Dehli, talk about what happens here, and talk about what needs to be done to change the paradigm, whatever you believe that to be. Talk talk talk. Get the conversation going. That's how historical change is started. This is the year for open conversations about sexual violence, about rape, about how to end it, and for taking action. This is the year to end rape.