Alleged rapist; screengrab via ABC 13
Summary: A 12-year-old girl getting raped is bad enough, but what a detective said about the rape was even more disturbing.
On October 16th, an adult man allegedly had sex with a 12-year-old girl inside a Houston CVS store. Surveillance video footage shows him approaching the girl in a corner of the store, and then moments when he was at least partially unclothed. Then he and the girl went into the ladies’ room, where they allegedly had sex.
This story is horrifying. But, amazingly, the pure facts are not the most disturbing part of the tale.
Houston Detective Michael Kelly told ABC 13 that the girl “was not necessarily all that unwilling.”
Yes. That’s right. A police detective and the reporter at ABC 13 felt that it was reasonable to say that a 12-year-old child could be “not unwilling” when raped by a man in his twenties.
A man having sex with a pre-teen girl should constitute rape to any reasonable person, and in no uncertain terms. There should be no question about that in anyone’s mind. This kind of crime should be appalling and disgusting to anyone hearing about it.
The detective did acknowledge that the act was still illegal. He told the reporter that a person can’t consent to sex in Texas until age 17. But he still suggested that this heinous crime was partially the girl’s fault – not even calling it rape.
What has to happen for anything to be a clear, explicit case of rape? If the violation of a child can be partially dismissed as consensual, how much worse does it have to get for people to look at a sexual assault as a crime, as part of a serious cultural epidemic, rather than blaming a “not unwilling” child victim?
Source:
http://abc13.com/news/police-say-man-had-sex-with-12-year-old-girl-in-restroom/1066670/