Lucinda Breeding

The has been a season of terror and agony for the world’s women.

At least it feels that way.

As the summer turned into fall, global news organizations released a raft of stories and heartbreaking photos of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Packed nearly like cord wood into camps for “internally displaced people,” women and girls looked haunted as they pulled back into the shadows of buildings and tents in refugee camps. Women and girls who were willing to speak about their trauma did so as if they were a third party to the violence, like they were reading from a transcript about a person they didn’t really know. The women told stories of marauding bands of poorly trained Congolese soldiers — deployed to protect the citizens of eastern Congo — hunting women instead of rebels, who also target women. The Washington Post reported that since January, as more Congolese soldiers were deployed in villages, rapes have been counted in the thousands.

Then, director Roman Polanski was detained for a decades-old rape of a child — only to be wrapped in the loving arms of the Hollywood elite — including a devastating list of actresses and technical craftswomen who should know better. The plaintiff in the case even made public pleas for the case to be dropped because of the unwanted attention she gets each time the story is exhumed. There were a few surprises — namely that of director, screenwriter and comic book artist Kevin Smith, who tweeted a short judgment against Polanski: “Please don’t be one of those FREE POLANSKI people. Look, I dig ROSEMARY’S BABY; but rape’s rape. Do the crime, do the time.”

Smith is known for his foul-mouthed characters and coarse content, though his movies usually suggest there’s something about humanity worth saving. He’s also married and is the father of a daughter who will be 13 some day and, most likely, around powerful directors.

Even more recently, an Oakland, Calif., teenager went to the Richmond High School homecoming dance on her own. That night, on the school campus, the 15-year-old girl was beaten and gang raped for nearly three hours while a reported 10 to 20 bystanders stood around and watched. Reports said that some bystanders pulled out their cellphones not to dial 911, but to photograph the crime.

Just days ago, news broke of the Mohler family in Missouri. A man and his four sons have been accused of sexually assaulting family members over 15 years. Then there’s Phillip Garrido, the man charged with the abduction, rape and false imprisonment of Jaycee Dugard 18 years ago.

It’s not that violence against women is suddenly getting worse. It’s probably been a global reality for as long as people have existed. It’s been a coordinated, tacitly condoned war strategy since the time of hand-hewn weapons. Sexual violence is an extension of human dysfunction, human evil and a patriarchy that too often goes sour.

When a season becomes so crowded with the faces of women — and in the cases where the victims are juvenile girls, footage of a high school alley or a pedophile’s backyard compound — thinking people start to wonder about complicity.

How do such horrors happen so often? Who is responsible for them? Is it all of us?

It’s nearly impossible to pinpoint Patient Zero, the afflicted one carrying this germ. And then there is our entertainment, where fresh young females run screaming from mutants, ex-cons and sociopaths.

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit runs in back-to-back marathons on daytime cable television. Watch enough of them and you start to see the disturbing way female corpses are lighted, positioned and filmed. And it is a cop drama about a unit charged with investigating “particularly heinous” sexual crimes. In one sense, this troubling Law & Order franchise gets it right. For too many women, a hero doesn’t intervene. And for too many women who survive sexual violence, everything from their appearance to their behavior is blamed for making them vulnerable to foul play.

Complicity begins at home. The entertainment we consume shapes our views of propriety. It’s our job to watch it critically, and tune in to programming that presumes that men don’t need to have self-control and women are accountable for their behavior and that of the men they hang out with.

Too many of us — more than 20 years ago, it seems — expect women in the public eye to be sexy above everything else. If that sounds strident, visit the Internet message boards for this season of Top Chef, where female contestants are deemed “stupid,” “worthless” and without talent not because they scald every dish they make, but because they’re fat, don’t wear makeup while slaving over a hot stove or have a tattoo on their neck. There are hairy, fat and tattooed men in the Top Chef kitchen, but they don’t elicit the same response. The anger against the not-so-cosmetic women feels misplaced, somehow.

Elite cyclist Lance Armstrong and his doping allegations get more public interest that do the Congolese women. He also gets public interest in changing international cycling policy. Armstrong seems more heroic, maybe, pedaling faster — though divorce, cancer and scandal — than do women running from soldiers who were hired to protect them.

That we’re so inert when it comes to these atrocities indicts us all. Either we’re too immobilized by the intractable violence in our world, or we’ve decided to assume the most about men, women and how we live together.

Neither is acceptable. A world of boys and girls wait to inherit this place. It will take an act of God, probably, to turn the tide of global, cultural violence against women. But would it hurt to rein in the body-snarking, the hyper-sexualization and the “pornification” of women in our lives? Is it possible to adjust our expectation that every woman in the public eye — whether she’s forecasting the weather or making a souffle on television — meet pinup girl standards?

No, it wouldn’t hurt, and yes, it is possible.

It might not reach the Congo, but it’s a start. 

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com.