Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, December 14, 1993 TAG: 9312140267
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NORMA V. LUGAR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Half the country is suddenly afraid?
How does Davis define the terror of an 11-year-old girl whose classmate is kidnapped, raped and bludgeoned to death with a shovel? Or that of a 78-year-old West End matron who is also kidnapped, then gang raped and dumped in one of Richmond's ``safest'' sections? An elderly Washington widow who is impaled on a broom handle by a roving gang? An infant who is the victim of incest at six months of age? The Central Park jogger? The 81-year-old butchered in her home? The legion of disfigured, crippled, battered wives?
Are we sick yet? Are we scared?
Perhaps he has never understood what it means to be physically smaller and weaker; to be less politically powerful; to have little financial clout; to be such an easy, unvalued victim that even justice can take a holiday ... while one judge dismisses a child-rape case because a witness is late and another has the male organs to call an 8-year-old victim ``seductive.''
Perhaps he's so cushioned in the safe, adult-male world that he can't imagine the dread every female feels when she simply walks alone to her car after dark. Or, God forbid, the car breaks down in a dangerous area. I hope he never does.
Certainly, no one has the right to disfigure another's body. However, Davis would do well to weigh the Bobbitt affair and its less-publicized brother act (a California woman charged with castration of her husband) against centuries of sexual abuse, genital mutilation and crimes of passion against women.
Sad to say, as the atrocity score now stands, it's men, millions; women, two. I for one would be happy to take my chances in a world where all male- originated violence disappears and only female violence remains.
If men really did get terrified, however, it would take more than a pitiful drop of female violence to do it. It would take the full knowledge of what's truly grisly ... the increasing stories of how often male ghouls prey upon their own sex ... innocents like James Bulger, 3-year-old nursery-school students, pre-adolescent altar boys.
Are we sick now? Are we scared?
How wonderful it would be if men truly did get petrified; if they trembled at the idea of harming another human being with a thought or touch, much less knives, guns and assorted instruments of torture; if they valued honor and unselfishness as much as making money and a big name; if they valued women, children of both sexes and other men; and if they believed that, as true men, they were bound by a moral code to protect all the above with their lives. Strangely, there once were men like that. Now and again, there still are.
Frankly, I'd like to see these very men get so frightened out of their pants ... and complacency ... that they decide they won't take it anymore. What champions they'd be in the war of human dignity for every sex and every age. Right now, we have no recourse but to pray for better homes, better jails, better counseling and, most importantly, that none of these horrors happen to us.
Shall we begin?
\ Norma V. Lugar of Salem is vice president of Marketing and Publications at National Business College.
by CNB