Le Sigh to end all Le Sigh's and a cry for help
It has been one weird ass set of weeks. srsly. So, two tuesday's ago, I had to present my Cosmopolitanism in Journalism Ethics with my group. None of my provided clips were in our group video, so it looked like I did jack shit on my end (which is so not of the good, considering our fourth person contributed zilch and didn't even bother to come to class the day of the presentation). So basically all I did was repeat what cosmopolitism was (the other guy in our group kinda stole my thunder on that by talking before me). I seriously said all of two sentences in our twenty minute presentation.
I deserve the fricken' slacker of the year award, right? No! Because I ended up being IT girl because neither of them new how to convert a Windows Movie Maker file into a video file. So. That was what I contributed to our project, after having to go buy Doctor Who Series One for the fricken satelite 5 episode where the 'journalists' live in the future. Seriously, only one of our clips was even about cosmopolitianism! One was a series of the Geico cavemen commercials and the other one was about Rwanda not being covered for the right reasons (reporters covered the evacuation of white Westerners rather than the slaughter of thousands of innocent people). At least mine was about mainstreaming journalism for all of the world. Anyway, we got a 4.0 on the presentation, so I'm not gonna bitch too much about it.
Then on monday of this week, I had to do my Elizabeth Bishop presentation in one of my English classes. Once again it was a group presentation. (Seriously, we're grown-ups now, can't we be trusted to do an assignment on our own?). I was scared shitless, like I am with all presentations. And I had every fricken right to be. One of the girls (there's like three guys in our class of fifteen) in our group's grandfather passed away (i'm assuming some time after ten am, because I talked to her then about making copies of a poem for class). So the brain-trust that is the other girl in our group decides we're just gonna go ahead and present. Which was stupid. Srsly. I stuttered my way through my presentation (I'd like to point out that I totally got the shit end of the assignment - the first girl will present an analysis of a poem that we pretty much helped her do in the first place and the second brain-trust-y girl got to do the bio section. What did I get stuck with? Fricken' looking up articles and reviews about the poems which sucked a nut.) and I felt like a fricken moron. I always do.
Wednesday was seriously the highlight of my entire week (except the part where my sister had to come to my dorm room and print out a hundred and eighty pages of crap and eat through three ink cartridges). Now, I have to take y'all back in time to the twenty-first of Feburary. Jill had a midterm in her Milton class. A midterm she was freaking out about. Before the test, Jill ate some pizza-rolls, even though she felt incredibly ill the day before from eating them. Jill felt slightly sick after eating them, then ran late to class and up three flights of stairs. Jill almost passed out during said test and left immediately after she finished (she could barely concentrate she felt so bad). Flash back to this wednesday. Said test was passed back. I called my mom to tell her what I got, and the convo went like this:
Me: Remember how I got food poisioning from those pizza rolls?
Mom: Yeah, you skipped a class because of it, Jillian Marie.
Me: Remember how I called you after the test because I was so sick? Well, we got the tests back.
Mom: And? Did we fail?
Me: No. Not really.
Mom: Jillian.
Me: I got a 3.5!
Mom: You should get sick more often.
Me: Geez, thanks mom. I'm kinda all excited about it.
Mom: Just don't slack of now, just because you did good on one -
Me: I know, mom! (Said mostly because I know she hates when I say that)
Cue to Thursday - when I think I'm going to have to present my Kobe Bryant rape case in ethics- srsly, it's been pushed back by five weeks now, because we just take too long in analysing them as a group. I'll give y'all the gist of it - the chick who claimed that KB raped her five years ago had all of her personal biz spread out on the web and by certain disc jockeys in the sake of 'fairness' - their reasoning was if their beloved and oh-so-sainted KB's getting hitched with the rapist stigma, girly's gotta get her name on that too. Her college paper got in on it too, by interviewing her friends and people who knew her (while never using their full names nor using hers for the sake of her privacy). I have to answer three questions, and the biggest one I'm having an issue with is: should rape be treated any differently than other adult crimes: murder, robbery, and other big crime. I came off on this originally as: Yes, hell yes, it should be treated differently because it's different than those other crimes.
The victim or potential-victim has to live with the consquences of the potential attack for the rest of her/his life, and no-one can tell me that it doesn't seriously screw a person up for life. It's a violation that deeper and more personal than any other kind of crime. Someone else was inside your body without your permission, threatening your life if you don't do what they demand of you. You have two options: do what they say, or fight and neither one guarentees that you'll walk away from the situation alive. Hell, yes it's a different kind of crime. I posed this question to my mom and sisters and (apart from the jaw dropping moment my sisters and I had when my mom uttered the now-prolific line with such force: "I think convicted rapists should be castrated. And then they should eat it!", which prompted us all to say throughout Frankenmuth "And then they should eat it!" after everything.) they all agreed that it should be treated differently. Of course, that's asking a third grade teacher, a mother of two girls and a grandmother with three daughters.
But then during the five-week pushback, I read up on it and stumbled on some articles from when the big scandal broke that made me re-evalutate my stand. Some say it creates a stigma and in general a few of family and friends finding out about it more than a health or safety concern. It also leads to the 'she-was-asking-for-it by wearing/talking/acting that/that way stigma. I get the first stigma, but I don't think it's so much the finding out about it as it is the feeling of I-should-have-done-this.
Reviewers who left comments on the articles argued back and forth about revealing a possible-rape-victim's (sorry, it works better than accuser-of-rape, that just slants it against the person) identity. Right now the accepted policy is to not run the name without the person's consent (unless, you know, you get potentially-raped by someone famous, apparently). Personally, I could give two shits about Kobe Bryant or the endorsement losses he suffered because he couldn't keep his pecker in his pants, but the girl-in-question dropped the criminal charges against him and filed a civil suit because she was getting threatening emails and phone calls from his devoted fanboys and fangirls for putting their superstar in jail over it (and wasn't he released in like hours?) that got to be too much.
this is where you come in, gentle viewers.
Do you think rape cases should be handled differently than other major crime cases?