Rape Unsimilarity

Surely you are familiar with the “Duke Rape Case,” it would be about impossible not to be. Maybe you’ve not followed every detail and do not know all of the specifics, but you probably know that there was an alleged rape that involved some Duke Lacrosse Team players. I have followed it only because Duke is in the city of Durham, where I worked at a personal injury law-firm in my last life, the one I had before moving to the Middle East. The case is about an “exotic dancer” who alleged, originally, that twenty members of the Duke Lacrosse team raped her on the night in question when the Lacrosse Team threw a party and hired the alleged victim and another young lady to dance for them. The story was later “changed,” and now the victim alleges that only three of the members of this team raped her. If you are that interested in keeping up-to-date with this saga, LaShawn Barber has covered it from day one and she’s done the best damn good job of anyone in doing so! Durham’s local paper, The Herald Sun also covers some aspect of this case on an almost daily basis.

There is a fairly recent rape case here in Saudi where seven men have been arrested for gang raping a woman in Riyadh. Okay, so the Duke case, now involves only three men – but originally it was twenty. The “similarity” between the Duke rape and this rape is that the rapes involved multiple “rapists.” The biggest glaring difference between the two cases, one of two “unsimilarities,” is that fact that while the victim in the Duke rape case has been shrouded in secrecy – no one – outside the Duke Lacrosse Team, Kim Roberts Pittman [the second “exotic dancer”], a few medical professionals and the Durham authorities [Police Department personnel and the Durham County Attorney’s office] knows who this alleged victim is. In the case, here, not only has the victim been identified by name, as has her husband, but a 4” X 8” color photograph of the victim was printed with only her eyes blacked out.

The other “unsimilarity,” is that in the Duke case all three young men involved have been identified – their names, ages, addresses, family incomes, outside interests, college majors, high-school records, previous criminal records, kindergarten behavior, bicycle colors, etc., have been displayed for all the world to see. Here, however, the rapist’s names have not been provided to us, and any other information that would typically be given, specifically the nationality of the rapists, is left out. This other glaring omission, that the nationality of the seven rapists has not been specified, did not go unnoticed. Today’s Arab News has three Letters to the Editor, the authors of which all zoned in on what isn’t there.