The topic is rape.
I feel small as I write about it. Not because of my stature but in contrast to the presence of rape everywhere in the world and its proximity in every woman’s daily life.
Anna. Barbara. Rachel. Erin. Barb. Amy.
Reported and unreported. A single attacker and men in a group. Strangers and a household member. One incident and multiple incidents. In the USA and in a foreign country. Minors and adults. One pregnancy.
My friends and acquaintances. They survived. I cannot say, Those women survived because some were under eighteen years old. These six survived.
In a newspaper account of a rape on a train in India (Oct. 2021), it was said that four of the eight “people” who committed the attack were apprehended. That noun reminded me of a commercial about pregnant “people” taking the Covid-19 vaccine.
Anna. Barbara. Rachel. Erin. Barb. Amy.
Females. The attackers, males. I don’t have their names.
In the Dominican Republic, even when the identity of a rapist is known (bartender, security guard), hotel staff do not report the attack of a guest to police. Sometimes the men hired to protect female tourists rape them after escorting them to their rooms.
A television series called “I Survived” airs first-person accounts of harrowing experiences from abductions to seafaring catastrophes to bear attacks to farming accidents. When I was a teenager in New York state, a news report said a young woman in California, after being abducted and sexually brutalized, had been found alive with both arms severed. Her name was not given, and I wondered about her for decades. In a recent episode of “I Survived,” wearing prosthetic arms, the woman, still in California, described what happened and how her life turned out.
The man who brutalized her believed she would die after he tossed her over the side of the road, for no one could climb up that sheer mountainside without arms. That young woman did. After all that had been forced upon her, the fighting spirit within prevailed, and she made it to the road where two men stopped and brought her to the hospital (a male and female couple did not stop, frightened by the woman’s appearance).
The presence of a husband or boyfriend does not protect a woman from stranger rape. The newlywed on the train in India was attacked in front of her husband and other passengers. In the Midwest, a woman and her boyfriend drove to an isolated farm property for a phony job interview. The rapist fatally shot the boyfriend, then imprisoned and assaulted the woman for weeks before she was rescued.
Laws against rape, abduction, torture, and imprisonment have no impact on a male or a group of males whose goal is to rape or abduct or torture or imprison a female.
Serving time in prison does not prevent or discourage convicted rapists from raping again when they are released. Some rape within days of getting out.
Therefore, I have one goal concerning rape: to stop it.
I want rape to become an act so undesirable a man won’t even think about doing it.
I want the act of rape to be so unthinkable that men worldwide stop raping—be they individuals or soldiers or rebels in guerrilla warfare.
Of course, a goal that big requires a plan, which I have. It won’t stop rape immediately, but once the plan gets going, the number of incidents will drop. With the plan widely implemented, rapes, even by high school boys, will decrease.
This simple, cost-saving plan excludes imprisonment. And it does away with sex offender registries. (However, for maximum effectiveness, statutes of limitation for the crime of rape should be repealed.)
My plan to end rape by making it so unthinkable pornographers go bankrupt, is called
thumZoff!®
It involves officially cutting off the thumbs of a man the first time he is convicted of rape—and letting him go.
Thumbs are more essential to activities of daily life than most people realize. Folding the thumbs in against one’s palms, then trying to open a door or brush one’s teeth, will prove my point.
Since predatory men typically subdue women by strangling them, sometimes from behind as they’re walking, sometimes from the front with knees pinning them down, thumb removal would deprive a would-be rapist of a crucial weapon.
I’m not looking for maverick justice. I want legal, codified justice that works, that stops rapists, that prevents rape. The outcomes I seek require the action of women
* fed up with male predation
* vocal, tireless, visible, persistent
* with the perseverance as those who successfully challenged assumptions and laws about voting, divorce, abortion, help wanted ads, personal credit, property ownership, and paternal child support.
thumZoff!®
won’t prevent rapes at first, but after men nationwide experience the sentence of digital amputation and, post-healing, are released into society, the numbers will drop. Convicted men—prohibited from wearing gloves—will live as public service announcements on two scores: “I got caught” and “Don’t you do it.”
If American convicts’ stories and images go viral,
thumZoff!®
could catch on internationally.