Let’s all celebrate the royal birth while women keep getting raped and punished for it – wheee!

Girl with a Gun
by monsterdimka at morgueFile

So the news was chock full of the royal birth! Wow, someone had a baby! Can you believe it?  That’s so rare.  Amazing.  Babies being born.  I’ve never heard of such insanity!

But I have heard about other insanity.

For example, I did hear about a 13 year old girl in Austin, Texas, who was gang raped by at least 10 men who recorded the attack with their cellphones and cheered each other on.  

Then I heard about a guy from NJ on a plane who went ahead and sexually assaulted the woman sitting next to him once she fell asleep. 

Finally I heard about how a woman in Dubai was “pardoned” after she was raped.  Yup, you read that one right.  She had to be pardoned because she had been sentenced to 16 months in prison for “having unlawful sex, making a false statement, and illegal consumption of alcohol.”  Of course, the fact that she’s been pardoned means that the man who raped her was also pardoned.  Since her case was dropped, so was his.  

Had you heard about any of those?  Were those things plastered across the main pages?  Or were they dropped down, below the amazing news of a birth? 

Do you know how easy it was for me to find those three stories?  Way too easy in some ways.  Hard in others.  Easy because they’re out there.  There are plenty more that I could toss into the mix here.  But they were hard to find because they get buried.  Because they aren’t important enough, in our eyes, to make it to the top of the list.  Because we’d rather celebrate someone rich popping out a kid than care about women who are being abused and attacked.  Maybe we need to shift our priorities just a bit and start caring about people who need it.