Remembering what matters

I started to feed this troll comment with a list of U.S. citizens who've committed sexual assault, but that much is obvious.

What is more interesting was a quick search of "rape" and "sexual assault" on LA Indymedia. Since the beginning of the 2006, there have been:

• 1 article on sexual assault by an undocumented person
• 2 reports on rape by Mexican military
• 2 articles on the women of Chihuahua and Juárez
• 2 articles on the nature of rape in Mexico
• the Iranian conviction of a teenager for being the victim of rape
• the rape of children at Abu Ghraib
• and one local forum on gender violence.

Do you see that pattern I do? If one believed LA Indymedia, one would think that nearly all rapists are from other countries--chiefly Mexico, that the only U.S. rapists were stationed far away at Abu Ghraib, and occasional forums on rape thwart all the U.S.'s sexual crimes.

Without doing the count, the pattern seems to hold generally for at least the past two years of LA Indymedia. I don't think I need to explain what it means that LA Indymedia posters will post articles about citizens of other countries who rape and assiduously disregard U.S. citizens who rape. The racism and xenophobia is obvious.

But more important is the effect: on LA Indymedia, U.S. rape and sexual assault survivors are so rare as to be invisible, and therefore survivors of rape and sexual assault by non-U.S. citizens--all but one, foreign nationals themselves--become "freaks," suspicious, and oddities--anyone but, as many rape victims truly are, the women around us.

So the next time you see an article on LA Indymedia about rape or assault by a non-citizen, remember the really story is that of the survivor, not the criminal. And then pause and think of the survivors around you who don't post their stories on Indymedia. They are the sisters and brothers of the foreign nationals whose significance in Indymedia's world has been defined by the actions of their rapists.