An Ugly Story

This afternoon I was tuned into NPR's All Things Considered, a program I listen to perhaps once a month. Today they featured a story about a burgeoning sexual abuse scandal in New York's Hasidic community. The presenter, with a suitably grave voice, told us of a little boy who was violated in a mikvah, and a second boy abused by a rabbi at his Talmudical school. It was an horrific story, filled with the sorts of denials and cover-ups that we all got used to when this was happening in the Roman Catholic church. It is good that we still have members of the media who are willing to dig in and unearth these sorts of stories; brought into the bright light of scrutiny, perhaps healing can begin.

But that's not why I'm writing this.

I don't mean to trivialize the very real suffering of these little boys and their altar boy predecessors, or ignore the heinous crimes committed in the name of God by their abusers, but...isn't what makes this a national news story the simple fact of the victim's gender?

More than one in six American women have been the victims of attempted or completed rape. Of those, one in five were assaulted before they reached the age of twelve. That's roughly four percent of the female population of the US, something like six million girls. For every two dozen women you know, the odds are that four of them have been the victims of violent sexual assault, and for one of them it happened in her pre-teen years.

How many little girls have to be raped before it becomes a national scandal worthy of attention of All Things Considered?