Imagine this

From the Skydancing blog: Little Girls Do Not Cause Men to Rape Them:

I have news for James McKinley. Little girls do not cause men to rape them. I don’t care what articles of clothing those little girls are wearing or how much make-up they have on their faces. They are not responsible for the actions of rapists. These young men weren’t “drawn in.” They made their own choices to commit a horrible crime. I frankly don’t give a shit that they “have to live with this for the rest of their lives.” What exactly does McKinley imagine it will be like for an 11-year-old who was raped by 20-plus men? Does McKinley even have the ability to imagine what that will be like? Or does he simply think of the victim as some kind of throwaway? A girl who deserved to be punished for her “dressing older than her age” and talking to teenage boys on a playground?

A little girl enters an empty lift. As the door starts to close, a few seconds later, a man runs down the corridor towards the lift, re-opens the doors, and enters the lift. They’re alone in the lift together.

Girl takes standard safety precaution of standing in front of the control panel, close to the door. She glances over her shoulder at the man standing behind her and to her left, just once. The lift’s security camera can hardly see the man – he’s standing in the corner where he’s out of its direct view. The girl shifts her head, moves her hands, but never looks around again.

About 30 seconds later, the lift reaches her floor and the door opens.

The man makes his move: he hits the button to close the door and grabs for the girl, blocking her exit with his arm.

She grabs his arm, and he goes down. For the next thirty seconds, he literally never gets off the floor as the girl wearing a judo gi administers a beating – when the door opens again and he tries to escape, she grabs his collar and jerks him back. Finally he runs for it, and she follows.

Wojdan Shaherkani, born in Mecca, trained in judo by her father, became the first Saudi-born woman to compete at the Olympic Games on Saturday.

Kayla Harrison became the US’s first Olympic gold medallist in judo on Saturday. Six years ago she gave evidence against her first judo coach, Daniel Doyle, and he was sentenced to jail for 10 years for sexual abuse.

“In my mind back then I still felt it was my fault,” she said. “I felt I had done something wrong and he was going to jail. I should be in trouble. That it took two to tango. I thought it had been a real relationship – and that I loved him and he loved me. I thought I was going to marry him.”

She was 13 when the abuse started. When he was charged, Doyle was ordered not to make contact with her but, according to Harrison’s mother, he continued to do so, using disposable phones and ordering his victim to do the same.

A month after the first revelation, Harrison’s family moved her 800 miles from her Ohio home to Massachusetts and the care of Jimmy Pedro, an Olympic medallist and the son of Big Jim Pedro, doyen of American judo coaches. Harrison was also getting other phone calls telling her not to go to court. She was told it was all nonsense, something that had happened only in her own her head.

Jimmy Pedro said:

“We could help her with her judo skills but first we had to put her life in peace. She had to face this person in court, put him behind bars and move on with her life. We told her, ‘What you are doing is 100 per cent correct and we stand behind you’.”

After her gold medal victory, Jimmy – who won two Olympic bronze medals in 1996 and 2004 – said:

“It was meant to be. This is your destiny, Kayla Harrison.”

What makes a lift an unsafe place for a little girl to be?

The presence of a rapist.

Edinburgh Hollaback, launch party 6th September 2012.