The high three native information tales the opposite day concerned males abusing ladies. One was about an Uber driver who allegedly raped a passenger. Another was concerning the Celtics head coach doing sexually offensive issues to a feminine worker of the Celtics group. The third was a whopper about three Stoughton cops who sexually exploited and abused a weak younger girl for greater than 10 years.
All three tales have one factor in frequent: males in energy benefiting from their authority to abuse ladies. Even extra newsworthy than the boys’s inhumanity is that not one politician mentioned something.
Big elections are simply over a month away and no politician was outraged by these offenses towards ladies. Not even Maura Healey spoke up, and he or she says she deserves the ladies’s vote as a result of she cares about ladies’s points. What ladies’s subject is extra essential than sexual violence and exploitation?
If the tales have been about abuse of Asian folks, Jews, Black males, and so forth., politicians could be preventing with one another for air time to declare themselves essentially the most involved. Healey, Michelle Wu, Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Andrea Campbell and anybody operating for canine catcher could be calling press conferences and asserting their new plans to cease the violence. But when the tales are about males abusing ladies – we get crickets.
How many ladies must endure earlier than some politician says one thing?
The Stoughton Police story alone ought to have had each public official talking out. A 26-year-old girl with psychological issues was sexually exploited for greater than 10 years by males who have been supposed to guard her from, properly, males like them — males who take sexual benefit of girls with issues. It’s unhealthy sufficient that any man would exploit an emotionally troubled girl; a cop doing it’s a entire new stage of depravity.
To those that suppose the #MeToo motion has helped, suppose once more. Anyone can prop up a hashtag. Men sexually abuse and exploit ladies as a result of they know our authorized system will most likely do nothing about it, particularly in states like Massachusetts the place the rapists’ foyer has a chokehold on Beacon Hill.
Other states ship folks to jail after they use their authority to take sexual benefit of others. Massachusetts ought to get with this system and make it against the law for cops, Uber drivers, lecturers, docs, attorneys, employers, and so forth., to have sexual contact with anybody topic to their authority, no matter consent. Put one other approach, the regulation ought to clarify that there can by no means be legitimate consent in such circumstances.
Sexual harassment legal guidelines typically cowl these abuse-of-power conditions, however they solely apply in employment and academic contexts. They don’t cowl Uber drivers, cops, docs, and so forth., and so they’re not legal legal guidelines, which implies even after they do apply, the perpetrators can’t be despatched to jail. They simply write a examine and the entire thing goes away.
What the Stoughton cops did to that poor girl ought to by no means go away — despite the fact that the so-called “independent investigation” makes an attempt to shut the e book on the saga by saying no provable crime passed off, whereas it rambles on about how the cops violated some code of honor factor.
Really?! The girl died after allegedly turning into pregnant by one of many cops. Reports name it suicide, however does it make sense {that a} girl with no historical past of suicidal ideation killed herself proper after the cop who supposedly impregnated her paid her a go to that he mentioned turned very heated?
The investigative report blacks out a lot of the proof, so we’ve got no approach of really realizing what truly occurred. While we wait round for an unredacted report we must always assume there’s extra to the story, and that the “more” could be very unhealthy for the cops.
Meanwhile, how about honoring the sufferer’s tragic life and premature dying by altering the regulation to verify no cop ever once more commits rape-by-badge.
Wendy Murphy is a lawyer and victims’ rights advocate.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”