Commentary: Texas has always been tough on women. It's worse now.
Joyce Winslow
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights considers any nation’s abortion law that excludes rape a form of torture because it denies victims closure and healing. Texas now exerts that torture on women, its 61 percent male legislature blind to the astonishing number of rapes here. You might expect a high-population state to have more rapes, but when figured per 100,000 citizens, Texas still ranks high with 13,000 forcible rapes in 2020, according to the Texas Department of Safety. Most victims were white, college-educated women whose trust of a so-called friend or acquaintance was brutally betrayed.
A 2015 deep dive report by the Statewide Sexual Assault Prevalence Study found that women waited many days to report the crime to police because they thought “nothing would happen to the rapist. ” They were right. In 2019, even after rape laws were tightened, just half of reported cases were prosecuted and only half of those resulted in jail time. Police figure only ten percent of rapes gets reported.
That puts into stark perspective Governor Greg Abbott’s claim to “work tirelessly to make sure we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them.” How will he find the bad guys if women rightly figure it’s futile to name them? How do any of us believe Abbott’s promise of “aggression” after 376 police loitered 77 minutes in Uvalde while children were being slaughtered?
Texas' heinous abortion law is but one of many sexist laws echoing through state history. In 1870 the state legislature raised the legal age of sexual consent from 7 to 10 -- long after 32 other states set the bar at 16. Current Romeo and Juliet Laws still protect a 17-year-old boy who impregnates a girl three years younger. It’s on her to prove she did not say “yes.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/commentary-texas-always-tough-women-115902275.html