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Will it ever end? You make one bone-headed remark about an 11-year-old who was “gang-raped in Texas by 18 young men because she dressed up like a 21-year-old prostitute” and it’s like you’re a bad person or something. HuffPo picks on you, we pick on you, the Buzz picks on you; New York Magazine, RawStory, and ThinkProgress pick on you — and now Salon.com chimes in with a vicious little editorial that’ll reach more readers than most of those others combined. And why’s that? Just because you blamed an 11-year-old’s rape on her mother’s sense of fashion.
Poor Kathleen Passidomo! The Republican state rep from Naples has been in office only a couple of months, and already her name is mud in the national media. Her defense, such as it is, is that she got her idea about the 11-year-old’s mum’s culpability from this New York Times piece, which is bogus — the piece, alas, doesn’t say anything about the girl’s clothes being to blame. Passidomo has further stated that she couldn’t possibly be so reactionarily anti-feminist/pro-patriarchy as to have blamed the rape on fashion, because she’s “been involved with” the Shelter for Abused Women and Children for “many years.”
I called the shelter to confirm this, and guess what?
It’s true! Or almost true, anyway. According to the shelter, Passidomo was “involved with fundraising” for “several years” but “didn’t actually do anything on the property.”
But, look — no matter where Kathleen Passidomo exists on the feminist spectrum, whether she’s a closet burqa-wearer or the secret owner of a lucrative chain of abortion clinics — the fact is, Kathleen Passidomo probably doesn’t think
this 11-year-old deserved to be gang-raped. How do we know? Because
Kathleen Passidomo is a human being, and human beings do not generally
feel that justice has been served when children are tortured and
brutalized. However regrettable her phrasing, what Passidomo was trying
to express is an obvious if unpopular truth: that although a child has
every right to safety in any environment she chooses to enter, that right will not be equally protected by all individuals in all environments.
In a less boneheaded way, the Times story
from which Passidomo allegedly got her weird notion also reflected this
truth. As a result, it has been almost universally condemned. Here
are the passages that offended thousands of readers and prompted a
sharp critique from the Times‘ public editor, Arthur S. Brisbane:
Residents
in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the
Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for
months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and
fashions more appropriate for a woman in her 20’s. She would hang out
with teenage boys at a playground, some said.“Where was her
mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a
handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. “How can you have an
11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?”
Many commentators, such as this one,
believe this kind of reporting should never have been done; that if the
reporter’s interview subjects mentioned the girl’s precocious dress or
her habit of palling around with teenaged boys, the information should
have been left out of the story. I wonder how these commentators would
have responded if the girl had been said to have dressed like a tomboy
or to have hung around with a children’s choir from a local church. If
it’s acceptable to report one set of facts but not the other, then we
have entered an era in which politics demands the obfuscation of reality. An OK ethos for politicians, maybe, but pure poison to
journalism.
Please note that the Times story never used
the word prostitute. That was Passidomo’s invention — she assumed
that any 11-year-old who looks like she’s in her 20s must be a
girl of loose morals or have sprung from the loins of a harlot. But Passidomo’s a God-fearing Republican, so what should we expect?
If we want politicians with a 21st-century understanding of sex and
sexuality, we oughtn’t cast our ballots for people who think Jehovah
destroyed an entire city because he didn’t like how its inhabitants were
using their naughty bits. Atavist or no, Passidomo still has a point.
The world is dangerous, and a politically progressive sense of justice is insufficient to
keep its children safe. Too many of our fellow humans will never share that sense of
justice — priests and politicians no less than teenaged hooligans from
the Quarters. This is an enduring truth, and it will endure even if Kathleen Passidomo learns to speak like an
intelligent adult or if the Times stops reporting what it finds.
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