Men do it, and get away with it, why?
I don't have the time to research the data of long-term captivity crimes in the US or globally. You can find scattered lists here and there. Deep research is not necessary to reveal the clear gender segregation in this crime. It follows with all sorts of sexual violent crime - a preponderance of male perpetrators on one side, and criminal/legal institutions who fail miserably on the other.
Why do accosted women go unfound, but medicinal marijuana brings SWAT teams and all their brutality? The War on Drugs knows no bounds, the War on Sexual Violence is . . . what?
Getting the Facts Straight
Elise Cintron, neighbor of the Castro brothers on the 2200 block of Seymour Avenue in Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood, south of downtown, reported this a few days ago,
"said her daughter once saw a naked woman crawling on her hands and knees in the backyard several years ago and called police. 'But they didn't take it seriously,' she said."Well, one call, you can imagine might not be enough.
Oh wait, there was more?
Israel Lugo said he, his family and neighbors called police three times between 2011 and 2012 after seeing disturbing things at the home of Ariel Castro. Lugo lives two houses down from Castro and grew suspicious after neighbors reported seeing naked women on leashes crawling on all fours behind Castro's house.Others had spoken up. We can't say it was entirely because people didn't intervene. The same system that has its eyes and ears out for weed plants growing indoors can't seem to muster the same intensity to find imprisoned females. A naked woman crawling on her hands and knees in the backyard not taken seriously reminded me of a story.
Though I hate to bring up his name, the Jeffrey Dahmer case provides a similar history of general neglect towards victims. Konerak Sinthasomphone was one of Dahmer's victims. His story is uniquely tragic because he almost got away.
Whoever is planning it, or implementing it, or recreating it day by day, I can't say exactly. All I know is that we live in a world where victims like these are ignored, dismissed, and denied full humanity by institutions that resist doing things any other way. The perpetrators and institutions in question are nearly all entirely men, or controlled by men.Two women, Sandra Smith and Nicole Childress, discovered the victim, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, after he had managed to escape from Dahmer's apartment, naked, bleeding from the rectum and heavily under the influence of drugs. They called 911, Balcerzak and his partner Joseph Gabrish were dispatched. Though the Laotian immigrant had been in the country for ten years and spoke English fluently,[1] in his drugged and brain-injured state, Konerak was unable to communicate his situation to authorities. Dahmer found the boy with the police and convinced them that the boy was his 19-year-old lover. Smith and Childress recognized the boy from the neighborhood and were convinced that Sinthasomphone's life was in peril. They communicated this to the officers and tried to save the boy. However, Balcerzak and his partner returned Konerak to Dahmer's apartment, against Konerak's and the women's protests. The officers noticed a strange smell in Dahmer's apartment, which was the decaying corpse of a previous victim in the bedroom, but made no attempt to investigate. Later that evening Dahmer sexually abused, killed, and dismembered the boy.
The policing of sexual violence must be a cornerstone issue of gender equality and human right. Yet it bumps head on with a deep-seated core organizing principle of masculinity - on a structural, legal, intellectual, and emotional level - that violence against certain marginal groups in society is not sufficient cause to intervene in the private affairs of men with a certain level of power. It doesn't take much power to glide above the system - the Castro brothers weren't special; Dahmer was a sweet-talker, but nothing special. These weren't hegemonic men by a long shot, but they still had enough of whatever it takes to keep the fuzz away from your home dungeon. That right there, in one particularly disgusting and gruesome form, is what I think Connell would call the "patriarchal dividend."
Although I agree whole-heartedly that there was a downfall on the system's part in not taking the calls seriously, I would think it's just that, a downfall on the system's part - not the police. Police officers are only allowed to do so much, their hands are tied with entering someone's home or actually investigating unless there is proven evidence they can bring to a judge in order to get a search warrant. And since the police don't answer the 911 calls, the dispatchers are also in the fire line of this "who's to blame". What troubles me the most about this case is that only one of the brothers is being charged; the one who owns the home. The real problem comes into the prosecution of the perpetrators themselves. Where is the justice for these women in only charging one of the men who were their captors?
ReplyDeleteAlso. In Dahmer's case. He had photographs of the boy, which he did in all of his murders turns out and convinced the officers that they were in a relationship and merely had a "lover's quarrel" and that the boy was extremely intoxicated. Once again, the police have their hands tied - they cannot legally enter the apartment. And the smell - everybody smelled it throughout the apartment. But even if the police had entered, it wasn't a messy apartment from the onset. Once the fridge and freezer were opened, well that's another story. And Dahmer was the ultimate manipulator: even the interviews I've seen where he is literally talking about eating people, I can't help but like him and honestly feel a sense of compassion for him (despite what's coming out of his mouth).
I think in order to really see a change in anything that has to do with legal issues, the local, state, and federal government must be blamed before the police. When there are laws that tie the hands of the protectors from adequately performing their duties, the laws must be changed.
Studying the sexuality , sexual behaviours, fetishes and the relationship with these heinous crimes needs to be explored some more. Considering both cases, their lies a variant form of satisfaction and pleasure which is manifesting it self in non-consensual activities on the part of a cruel sadistic practices. In this case , is the root of the problem a flawed response system and men who are forms of struggling masculinity or the fact that subverting or ignoring certain types of dangerous fetishes may be lurking in the shadows?
ReplyDeleteWhatever the case maybe, this society lacks understanding of what sexual assault or sexual related violence means because of a lack some type of comprehensive sexaulity education.In most instances because of this lack , there is no specific identification of abnormalities, no warning signs to pay attention to, to combat the issue of sexual violence.
In order to draft a legal system to address this issue, we need to under this relationship with forms of sexuality , sexual behaviour , sexual pleasure and these heinuous crimes.
Ofcourse , this is not as clear cut but this is a factor that needs further consideration in accordance to revisions of the justice system.
PS. I really like this post and Jennifer's comment
Great comments from the both of you, thank you. I agree with much of what both of you have said.
ReplyDeleteThe police deserve compassion and fairness, indeed. Included in that is not that we "blame" them, but we can and should point out their errors, especially when they are this blatant. Had they bothered to call in the routine background check on Dahmer that procedure required, they would have learned that Dahmer had been convicted of molesting Konerak’s older brother some years earlier. Their job is hard, but it shouldn't be so hard that they leave a bleeding boy to his peril while joking about being "deloused." There is a systemic problem here way beyond the cops on the beat, indeed, but those two cops in particular failed humanity hard that night.
Oh! If anybody wants to know about the dangers of fetishes/sexual sadism you can come to my senior capstone presentation! I have a focus on serial killers, but I go into the childhood which explains the emasculating features of their childhoods and why sexual fetishes are created. It could be helpful, or maybe not, but it's fun :)
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