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What is a woman to do? Turn on the TV and you get a good look at rape culture.
When asked, many migrants say the journey itself is no more dangerous than staying still. People do not move out of ignorance or sheer panic; they respond rationally to irrational events. Why remain in a place when oppression or calamity has destroyed every reason to stay? War, genocide, ethnic persecution, and ecological disaster present migrants with an impossible choice between familiar violence and unknown danger.
On the vast, heavily patrolled corridor along the US-Mexico border, aid organizations estimated in 2014 that 80 percent of women and girls had been raped in transit—an apparent increase from a 2010 Amnesty International study showing that 60 percent were raped.
“What becomes possible when we’re being real with each other?” she asked. “Maybe your feelings get hurt when I tell you I don’t like the way you’re touching me.” How many times have I hesitated to tell a partner what I liked or didn’t like, for fear of hurting their feelings, for fear of having to care for their emotions in the aftermath of that disclosure? I thought to myself as she talked. “But what is possible after that?” she continued. “Learning new ways of touching. Once you’ve experienced that erotic awakening you cannot settle for suffering.”
Daddy said that I was spoiled, but I worked more at thirteen than he did; like Cliff Huxtable, he was home a lot while Mommy worked at the phone company.
“The survivor who was raped at knifepoint feels guilty she has taken up the space of a survivor who was raped at gunpoint. Everyone believes there is suffering worse than her own, that they should be strong enough to cope without me.”
Date rape was a risk you took because you were a girl and you’d agreed to go on a date. The line between just being a girl on a date and being a “tease” never even existed.
