I'm surprised there has been no mention of the Stanford rape trial and sentence on all nurses. I'm opening up the discussion as I feel it pertains to us in many ways. One as people who may have been victims or know others who have been victims of sexual violence and two as nurses that have taken care of others in this situation, whether directly in ER or a patient suffering from PTSD with other health problems as well.
I applaud the survivor's bravery and her impact statement that has gone public. I hope this will comfort other survivors, but even more I hope this will discourage rape in general. Campus rapes are common and rapes at frats are in the news frequently. Once again a college athlete got off with just a slap on the wrist, although I don't think he counted on all the negative publicity this case has garnered.
What disturbs me the most is the letters of the parents to the judge. The father's don't punish him for 20 minutes of action. Then the mother's letter, who by the way is a nurse for gynecological surgeries and in the past as a pediatric nurse, who had not one iota of empathy for the victim. Her letter simply astonished me. I can't believe as a woman, as a nurse, as a mother of a daughter she had no empathy for the victim! This troubles me the most! I imagine in her years as a nurse she must have taken care of a rape victim and her total lack of empathy for the victim disturbs me greatly!
He put debris with signs of trauma in the lady parts of an unconscious woman. That's rape with a big dose of somnophilia. (Yes, I had to look that up). He's a sick kid.
Specializes in Flight Nursing, Emergency, Forensics, SANE, Trauma.
I so much want to be the person who wishes violence right back on this scumbag as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse by my karate instructor.
But....
That won't heal the victim. It won't fix the problem. It'll create another victim and just continue to cycle of violence. He's obviously not right. Something about his sense of right and wrong is skewed somehow. Is he sociopathic? Maybe he is incapable of seeing himself as wrong? I don't know. All I know is I am so disgusted with the world in general right now.
Honestly, I feel like I want a one way ticket to the moon. I tired of the violence, victimization, the denial, and the hate.
Specializes in Flight Nursing, Emergency, Forensics, SANE, Trauma.
By the way: is there any way to change the subject line to include "trigger warning"... I feel like it definitely needs it. I had to pop an Ativan after reading the posts. (Not to sound weak)
She seemed to be doing ok until she read about the account in the paper.... .
Did you read her letter? Did you read the part where she wished she could take off her body like a jacket? She specifically said she was not okay, from the moment she realized her underwear was missing.
She was not okay, and she knew she had been raped before she went home from the hospital.
I'm walking away. I can feel myself getting irrational/ emotional and wanting to verbally lash out. I highly doubt many people take kindly to having a man explain they weren't really raped, because it wasn't violent enough. I'm a survivor because I will not be a victim. I thought my whole triggered phase was past me - I was wrong.
I have a question that is on the topic of intoxication and consent which has always bothered me. Lets say at this same college party another pair of kids are both near or at black out intoxicated, end up in one of the bed rooms, and wake up next to each other without clothing or memories of what happened the night before. Neither were in a state to give consent, but here they are. Perhaps BOTH are very uncomfortable and feeling violated. Who is the perpetrator and who is the victim in this situation?? Did a rape occur?
I have a question that is on the topic of intoxication and consent which has always bothered me. Lets say at this same college party another pair of kids are both near or at black out intoxicated, end up in one of the bed rooms, and wake up next to each other without clothing or memories of what happened the night before. Neither were in a state to give consent, but here they are. Perhaps BOTH are very uncomfortable and feeling violated. Who is the perpetrator and who is the victim in this situation?? Did a rape occur?
I have a lot to say on the matter, but I know this thread is already a very difficult one to wade through. I'm composing a reply offsite but I'll have to step back and take a deep breath before I decide whether I should keep going with this discussion.
I have a question that is on the topic of intoxication and consent which has always bothered me. Lets say at this same college party another pair of kids are both near or at black out intoxicated, end up in one of the bed rooms, and wake up next to each other without clothing or memories of what happened the night before. Neither were in a state to give consent, but here they are. Perhaps BOTH are very uncomfortable and feeling violated. Who is the perpetrator and who is the victim in this situation?? Did a rape occur?
The best way I can come up with the answer to this is with a personal anecdote. When I was 18, I was backing out of a parking space and distracted. Someone else was also backing out of a parking space and distracted. We hit each other. The police were called, naturally, and they determined that since both of us were equally at fault, neither of us could expect compensation from the other, and neither of us were going to be charged with anything.
This is a very similar scenario. I would say rape occurred because neither could give consent. However, since both parties were both rapists and victims, prosecution would be meaningless, and both people should be able to walk free. I think it would be unfair to punish either one, but if there was any sort of punishment, it should be applied equally to both people.
I know OP asked other people how they feel, this is how I feel. This is something I would never share in public, as there is such a culture of empowerment through victimhood...
As a gay man I can only offer my personal experience with being in situations that I should not have been in... and because of the way I was socialized I don't see it as a huge violation. Now if a stranger attacked me and penetrated me, I would feel very violated and call that rape.
There's the operative phrase and the reason that this conversation is so crazy-making for the women here. 1sttime was raised as a male. As such, he was socialized very differently from females and his whole line of thought is a paradigm of the reasoning behind rape culture. That male perpetrators are not responsible for their own behavior, real men cannot be dominated and thus cannot be victims like women, that their victims are responsible because they provide the opportunity for rape and besides it wasn't rape. He's totally bought into the rape culture narrative because of his socialization. If a female survivor wrote this, I suspect that the conversation with him would have gone very differently.
Many men, and not just gay men, have been raped. They are a fairly invisible population and I suspect this is why: socialization. I don't know if 1sttime's experience and his inner dynamics around it are typical of male survivors or not. My own focus has always been on the majority: women and children.
Curtis Lepore, a Vine celebrity apparently, raped his girlfriend while she was unconscious after a head injury. He claimed it wasn't rape because they'd previously had consensual sex, and pled down to a non-rape charge to avoid trial. That was California, and having sex with an unconscious person is rape by state law.
I found the Oklahoma case - knew I wasn't crazy! Not so OT after all, considering the course of this thread.
An Oklahoma court has stunned local prosecutors with a declaration that state law doesn't criminalize oral sex with a victim who is completely unconscious.
The ruling, a unanimous decision by the state's criminal appeals court, is sparking outrage among critics who say the judicial system was engaged in victim-blaming and buying outdated notions about rape.
... But legal experts and victims' advocates said they viewed the ruling as a sign of something larger: the troubling gaps that still exist between the nation's patchwork of laws and evolving ideas about rape and consent.
(The court held that) Forcible sodomy cannot occur where a victim is so intoxicated as to be completely unconscious at the time of the sexual act of oral copulation,†the decision read. Its reasoning, the court said, was that the statute listed several circumstances that constitute force, and yet was silent on incapacitation due to the victim drinking alcohol. We will not, in order to justify prosecution of a person for an offense, enlarge a statute beyond the fair meaning of its language.â€
Wow. I had no idea the mother was a GYN nurse. That particular fact floors and disturbs me greatly (it goes without saying that the rest of the story is hideous). As an OB nurse, I have dealt with rape up close and personal, as have all of my colleagues, and to think that one of our "own" could be so insensitive is just unfathomable to me. The mother's refusal to support the victim and call rape rape isn't just willful ignorance at that point, and becomes something more insidious and malicious, IMO.
Mom is an OR nurse, specializing in Gyn surgery.
She writes well enough to have made the judge forget the plight of the victim.
floridaRN38
186 Posts
This post just gets crazier and crazier. I can't even keep up anymore. [emoji4] I just find it so fascinating with SOME of the comments 🙄