Thursday, July 22, 2010

Corrective Rape

On Tuesday night after playing some FIFA 10 on my PS3, I was locked in on something on ESPN. E:60, a show on ESPN, had a segment on corrective rape. I did not watch the entire video on corrective rape as I have heard about it during the winter of this past year. But this sort of thing came to mind, and I just had to write this down. For those of you who do not know what corrective rape is, here is the Wikipedia version of corrective rape: a criminal practice in South African culture, whereby men rape lesbian women, purportedly as a means of "curing" the woman of their sexual orientation. If you read my blog post from Sunday, you will see an article from BBC News about rape in South Africa. If you don't already know now, South Africa is one of the leading statistics of the practice of rape in the world, as women are more likely to be raped than it is to probably get a job in the United States (a bit of an over-exaggeration, but I think you all get the point). Rape is a horrible and frightening experience, something that I hope none of you (and myself) ever experience in our lifetime. But it does happen, and it does happen very often, more often than you actually think. There are many organizations that deal or talk about rape of both men and women, but the sad part is that authorities don't always know that rape could or have happened to a person, because either that person is traumatized by it and does not want to report it, or because of many other reasons such as the fear of being threatened, or because the person who raped you is a family member or spouse or boyfriend. Whatever the case may be, rape has been on the down-low (in other words, it is all hush-hush) and the authorities need to know. But if watching the video down below is not enough for you to do something about the fact that rape is happening more often than you think, then you should seriously start thinking now.

The video of E:60's segment on corrective rape can be seen here: http://espn.go.com/video/clip?categoryid=3060647&id=5181871

1 comment:

  1. E:60 often has fantastic stories of relevance to this class. Thanks for sharing this important story with everyone.

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