Summary: When urban Americans think of rural life, we often think of Mayberry RFD and placid law-abiding life seen on countless other TV shows. Community values; people who are salt-of-the-Earth, living in Libertarian paradises free of big government. There is a test case of this vision. We call it Alaska. Read these accounts. I hope you feel shame for our nation.
As always, the question is action. Are these news stories for citizens, or entertainment for subjects? If you live in Alaska, will you do anything? Are you passengers or crew of America?
.
Contents
- The bad news about rape in Alaska
- The worse news
- For more information
- Fantasy does not help
.
(1) The bad news about rape in Alaska
Let’s do this in two steps. First the bad news.
First in a series of articles revealing the third world-like conditions in our midst: “Why is Alaska the rape capital of the US? Because we allow it.“, Carey Restino, op-ed in The Arctic Sounder, 5 April 2013 – Opening:
The statistics are sickening. One in every four women in Alaska will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. The Alaska rape rate is 2.5 times the national average, and the child sexual assault rate in Alaska is close to six times the national average. For the Native Alaska population, the numbers are even rougher. One out of every three American Indian and Alaska Native women will be raped during her life, and three out of every four American Indian and Alaska Native women will be physically assaulted. Three out of four.
Eventually this has come to attention of the national media: CNN’s series on rape in America: looking at Alaska, 4 February 2014 — Opening:
“Alaska has an epidemic,” Gov. Sean Parnell told me. It’s not bear attacks or deadly roads. It’s rape and violence against women. Reported rape is more common in Alaska than any other state, according to 2012 FBI crime estimates. The per capita rate is about three times the national average. In America’s “Last Frontier” state, nearly 80 incidences of rape are reported per 100,000 people, the data show. Nationally, the rate is 27 per 100,000.
… A 2010 survey shows 59% of adult women in Alaska experience intimate partner violence, including threats, and/or sexual assault. And 37% suffer from rape or sexual violence.
(2) The worse news about rape in Alaska
Now for the worse news, because “why” is often the most important question: “Why Rape Is Much More Common In Alaska“, Erin Fuchs, Business Insider, 26 September 2013 — Excerpt:
.
How did Alaska get to be such a dangerous place for women? Two possible causes are its high population of Native Americans — nearly 15% compared to the 1.2% national average — and its remoteness. South Dakota is also a rural state with a a high Native American population of nearly 9%.
Native Alaskans make up 61% of rape victims in the state, and Native Americans make up 40% of sex assault victims in South Dakota, The New York Times has reported. One in three Native American women has said she’s been raped in her lifetime, according to a frequently cited Justice Department report from 2000. Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped than women of other races, that report found.
Nobody knows for sure why Native American women are so vulnerable to rape. Some experts blame alcoholism and the breakdown of the Native American family, The Times has reported. In the past, Native American tribes have not been allowed to prosecute non-Native Americans for raping members of their tribes, which also could have compounded the problem. (Obama recently signed a law that gives tribes more power to protect Native women, though.)
In very rural areas, like Alaska, women simply can’t rely on police to come help them if they’re raped. One 19-year-old Native Alaska woman who lived in a village of 800 called the police after a stranger broke into her home and raped her in the middle of the night, the Times reported in 2012. The police didn’t answer, so she left a message. They never returned her call.
One study found that just 11% of rapes reported to the Anchorage Police Department between 2000 and 2003 led to a conviction.
What does this mean? Here’s the bitter reality: we extract a vast fortune every year from Alaska’s minerals. We’re too cheap to provide basic police protection to rural communities — especially those who are mostly minorities. Maintaining order has been a characteristic of civilization for thousands of years. But not in America, where libertarians and conservatives advocate small government — except in their well-protected enclaves.
More about this sad situation: “The lawless ‘end of the land‘”, John D. Sutter, CNN, 4 February 2014 — Excerpt:
Over the course of several years, Beth’s boyfriend shattered her elbow, shot at her, threatened to kill her, lit a pile of clothes on fire in her living room, and, she told me, beat her face into a swollen, purple pulp. These are horrifying yet common occurrences here in the 200-person village of Nunam Iqua, Alaska, which means “End of the Land” in the Yupik Eskimo language. Yet the violence is allowed to continue in part because Nunam Iqua is one of “at least 75 communities” in the state that has no local law enforcement presence, according to a 2013 report from the Indian Law and Order Commission.
“There would be someone to call for help” if there were police, said Beth, a 32-year-old who asked that I not use her real name because her abuser is still free. “Someone who could actually do something — right there, as soon as they get the call.”
Seems reasonable, huh? Not in rural Alaska. Here, state troopers often take hours or days to respond, usually by plane. The flight takes 45 minutes, at minimum. Alaska State Troopers will tell you they’re doing the best they can to police a state that’s four times the size of California and has very few roads. The challenges are daunting, to be sure, and I don’t blame the hard-working law-enforcement officers. But the logistics can’t be an excuse for impunity.Alaska is failing people who need help most.
… The scope of the tragedy in Nunam Iqua, a Yupik Eskimo village, is unthinkable: Nearly every woman has been a victim of domestic or gender-based violence, rape or other sex crimes, according to women I met in town; a corrections officer in Bethel, Alaska, the regional hub; the director of the women’s shelter in Emmonak, Alaska; and Nunam Iqua Mayor Edward Adams Sr., whose wife was slashed across the face by a family member, he said …
Statewide, 59% of women suffer from intimate partner or sexual violence.
Sexual assault cases are 3 1/2 times as likely to be prosecuted in villages where the officers are present, said Andre Rosay, director of the University of Alaska Anchorage Justice Center. Rates of serious injury from assaults are also 40% lower in villages with a VPSO {Village Public Safety Officers}, he said.
… In October 2005, for example, a 13-year-old girl in Nunam Iqua was raped “on a bed with an infant crying beside her and her 5-year-old brother and 7-year-old cousin watching” during the more than four hours it took troopers to arrive by air from Bethel, according to an Amnesty International Report titled “Maze of Injustice.”
“After raping the girl, the man fired a shotgun, reportedly missing her by inches,” the report says. When I asked about the rape in the village, a few people said they didn’t remember it. Perhaps that’s because of so many subsequent tragedies. Or perhaps it’s because the emotional wounds are still too fresh.
Because response times are so long, some Nunam Iqua residents have stopped calling the authorities entirely, forced to handle urgent matters on their own.
… Basic services like medical care and fire service are largely missing. A medical professional only staffs a local clinic some days, because she must rotate to other villages. Paula Napoka, that health aid, said others have left the job because it’s dangerous. In 2010, health workers made headlines when they quit because of a “hostile environment” and refused to return without a trooper escort.
More stories. Heartbreaking stories. Unnecessary stories. Disgraceful stories for America. “Rape Culture in the Alaskan Wilderness“, Sara Bernard, The Atlantic, 11 September 2014 — Excerpt:
One night a few years ago, when Geneva was 13, a man she’d grown up with stumbled into the room she shared with her two sisters in Tanana, Alaska, a tiny village northwest of Fairbanks, and climbed on top of her. He was drunk and aggressive.
“He tried getting into my clothes,” she recalls. “He tried putting his hands under my shorts and inside my shirt.” She struggled and pushed, but he was years her senior and made of muscle; he pulled her on top of him. She kept pushing and yanking until she suddenly shot backwards and tumbled off the bed. “He was so blacked out, he was like still asleep; his eyes were closed,” she says. “I was watching his face, but his face didn’t move at all. His breathing was normal, but his hands…” She pauses, and the word hangs thickly in the air. “His hands felt like he was awake.”
Afterward, she ran into the living room and burst into tears, stuffing her face into a pillow so her parents wouldn’t hear. She didn’t tell them, then; she was scared and ashamed. “I guess I just felt like I was dirty. I guess that’s what victims feel like. They feel dirty and just want to clean everything off.”
The following summer, Geneva was fast asleep at her family’s fish camp downriver, while a group of adults drank and caroused in the next room. She awoke to someone tugging down her pants, reaching between her legs; she struggled and kicked, and he lumbered out of the room.
In fact, Geneva says, she’s been grabbed, chased, followed, and molested so much in her short life that she’s now made it a habit to lock the bedroom door at night and shove a chair under the knob so no one can come in; she’ll wait up, trembling, until everyone at a party is passed out cold before she can comfortably fall asleep. She’s learned to avoid being alone with friends’ dads, or with grandpas at village potlatches, or with boys at basketball games, who’ve repeatedly groped her breasts and buttocks. “It’s just random, like, you’ll think everything’s all normal and then you’ll feel something on your backside,” she says. “You just freeze.”
Geneva is a tall basketball player with bright eyes, rectangular black-framed glasses, and a wide, eager smile. She has no trouble listing accomplishments and affinities: She’s ambidextrous by choice, grew up doing all the rugged outdoor chores men do, raves gleefully over beloved local foods like fried moose heart and walrus in seal oil.
But for years, she felt scared, hypersensitive, and depressed. She never told her parents about the incident; she was too afraid of what would happen, and anyway, when she told one of her sisters, the only response she received was a dry laugh. “It happened to all of us,” her sister had said. “Just leave it alone.”
Growing up in Tanana, a town of 254, the prevalence of this kind of thing was common knowledge, but rarely discussed. Everyone knew the local elder who’d molested and raped his daughters and granddaughters for decades until he was arrested for touching another family’s girls; after four years in jail and another half dozen or so at a cabin downriver, he was back on the village tribal council. One of Geneva’s great aunts was molested and raped by an uncle for years; dozens of years later, the aunt’s grown daughter told her that the same uncle had molested her, too. Sometimes people pressed charges; most of the time, though, nothing happened. “These perverts travel from village to village, from potlatches to dances,” Geneva says. “And then they get drunk and you don’t know what they’re going to do.”
These things happen despite our wealth because we don’t care about our fellow Americans, about our women and children, or about justice. All the high tech and macho military adventures doesn’t make up for that.
(3) For More Information about American justice
Other articles:
- “Maze of injustice: The failure to protect Indigenous women from sexual violence in the USA“, Amnesty International (2007)
About justice in America:
- Sparks of justice still live in America – cherish them and perhaps they’ll spread, 11 September 2009
- An opportunity to look in the mirror, to more clearly see America, 10 November 2009 — About our prisons
- Being a third world nation is a state of mind, as we will learn (about prison rape), 19 March 2011
- Our prisons are a mirror showing the soul of America. It’s not a pretty picture., 28 March 2011
- The Collapse of American Criminal Justice System — Excerpts from The Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William J. Stuntz
- ore about the collapse of the American Criminal Justice System, 20 September 2011
- Final thoughts about America’s Criminal Justice System, 21 September 2011
- Richard Castle shows us the dark reality of justice in 21st C America, 28 May 2014
(4) Fantasy does not substitute for collective action
Watching films about caped Jesus is fun, but not a substitute for collective action that can shape the real world.
.
.
.