When we talk about rape, we often say how barbaric it is, how awful it is, how rapists deserve many, many years in jail, and yet these views do not seem to be represented in our country’s laws.
We all know about the realities of the way rape victims are treated in the courtroom, like they are the criminals rather than the victims, and we all know about the light slap on the wrist that offenders such as Brock Turner often get. In fact, according to RAINN, 994 out of 1,000 rapists will not go to jail or prison.
Yet we rarely talk about how, in most of this country’s states, rapists can have parental rights over children conceived during their rape. Until I learned that rapists get parental rights, I just assumed that common sense and common decency commanded that they never catch even a glimpse of any child conceived due to their rape of a woman. And yet, in many states, they can get parental rights.
There are no circumstances under which a rapist deserves to have or should be given parental rights over children conceived as the result of his violent, barbaric rape of another human being.
The fact that this is allowed proves how little our laws actually value and protect rape victims. Laws like this are part of the reason why, according to The U.S. Department of Justice, only about 16% of rape cases were reported to the authorities.
That is sickening. This statistic screams that our system is broken, that rape victims are not being protected, and yet we continue to ignore it.
Women are afraid to say that they have been raped; they know exactly what the courts will put them through, and they also know that it is very likely that their attackers will go unpunished or will receive a punishment that is more a slap in the face to the victim than it is a relief.
In 2013, Frances Andrade went to court in an attempt to get her rapist convicted. The cross-examination was so harsh that she told a friend that it felt as if she had been “raped all over again.”
Although her rapist was convicted of five counts of indecent assault, Andrade was so traumatized by the rape and experience in court that she killed herself a few days after her court appearance.
The court’s protection of rape victims doesn’t just fail in the courtroom, though. Some women choose not to abort a baby conceived as the result of rape, either because they feel that abortion is wrong or because in Noemi’s case, she felt that her baby girl hadn’t been the one to do anything wrong. The baby didn’t deserve to die for her father’s violence.
Keeping these babies, however, opens up a whole lifetime of terror for rape victims. Noemi’s rapist was convicted, but he took a plea bargain of third-degree rape. Nebraska, where Noemi lives, has laws in place that only terminate parental rights if the rapist is convicted of rape in the first degree, so her rapist has been granted parental rights over her child.
Not only does Noemi have to communicate weekly with her rapist through texts and emails, keeping him informed about her daughter’s health, schooling and general life, but she now has to drop her baby girl off at her rapist’s house for two and a half hours – unsupervised – every week. And the time her daughter spends with her mother’s rapist will only continue to increase as time goes by.
Keep in mind that this man is a convicted sexual predator. He raped Noemi. What will keep him from raping her daughter, too?
This law means that Noemi’s nightmare never ends. Many rape victims suffer from PTSD; 94 out of 100 women suffer from PTSD during the two weeks after their rape, and 30 out of 100 women still suffer from PTSD nine months after their rape.
Rape victims already have to live with the mental fallout of being raped, which is difficult enough in and of itself. Yet our justice system is forcing women like Noemi to face their rapists on a weekly basis, to pass their babies off to men they know from experience are dangerous and violent.
This law is almost like telling a jewelry store owner that he is required, by law, to let a man who has been convicted of robbing his store watch it, unsupervised, for several hours each week. He has to be given the keys, told how much money the jewelry store owner has on-site, where all the money is, the passcode to the security system, and all the other important details.
Except it’s not like that because this law isn’t endangering a jewelry store owner’s money or the jewelry in the store. It’s endangering the lives of real people. The lives of people who have already been violently attacked by the man they are forced to communicate with, and the lives of the children who are left alone with violent sexual predators for hours on end.
It’s a recipe for disaster, and it is not justice. There is no hint of justice in these laws – they border insanity, in my opinion. Yet all the petitions I could find on the subject are closed, having never met their target goal of signatures. Why don’t we care? Will we refuse to care about this issue until it affects us directly?
There is a bill, H.R. 1257, in the works regarding rapists’ parental rights. It was referred to the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations on March 31, 2015, but no further action has been made.
It only takes a minute to write a quick email asking the committee to pass the bill, and if enough people do so it will urge them to look at it sooner. Here is a list of all the committee’s members, but there is a Virginian representative, Randy Forbes, on the committee. You can email him using this link.
This is a way for us to have our voices heard, a way to contact the people who will decide the fate of many of these women. Sending a quick email, which will take a maximum of five or ten minutes of your day, will impact real people. It could ensure that this bill won’t sit in limbo for years on end, and it could urge our government to take one step closer to giving rape victims and their children proper protection. Isn’t that worth five minutes?