Information is beginning to filter in:
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WOMENSE-NEWS)–Accounts of rapes in the Louisiana Superdome and other evacuee sites are beginning to trickle in to counselors and the clergy more than three weeks after Katrina hit New Orleans.
Police in major evacuation sites such as the Houston Astrodome are now accepting reports as well.
On Sept. 13–the same day that Women’s e-News reported that the Houston Police Department was not taking courtesy reports of rapes that happened in other jurisdictions–Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt sent out a circular to personnel, instructing them to take reports and hold them for safekeeping until other police jurisdiction are prepared to deal with them, spokesperson Johanna Abad said.
Reports by people who said they witnessed rapes are starting to filter in to rape counselors, said Judy Benitez, executive director of the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault in Hammond. The foundation is beginning to compile a database of reports without specifically naming victims but including enough details about incidents in an attempt to rule out duplicates and get a better count, she said. The reports are being taken from victims as well as witnesses, Benitez said, but she did not know how many reports had been gathered by press time.
There is, however, a definite, responsible-sounding witness:
New Orleans singer-songwriter Charmaine Neville, in a Sept. 2 video aired by WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge, La., said she had reported to New Orleans police that “a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys who had come . . . into the neighborhood where we were that were helping us to save people, but other men . . . they came and they started raping women . . . and then they started killing.”
Despite what some people have reported about no multiple deaths and no multiple rapes in the Super Dome and in the Convention Center, I believe that it is only a matter of time–and possibly for some women impregnated against their will–before the full story is known.
First, the media as well as political leaders were convinced that anarchic hell was breaking loose in NO, and that it was so terrible and dangerous that aid workers couldn’t go in until the troops arrived.
Now, we’re asked to believe that few or none of these crimes were committed at all?
Did you catch the coroner processing bodies from NO saying on NPR a couple mornings ago that he attributes the many detailed, graphic reports of rapes and murder to HALLUCINATIONS brought on by extreme stress and deprivation?
And now it comes to light that the police department in Houston wouldn’t even accept reports of rapes in NO from evacuees for two weeks?
Is anyone in a position of power (in either law enforcement, political leadership, or the media) even trying to keep up the appearance of giving half a shit about the people who were stranded at the Dome and convention center?
No.
Now they are using Mr. Bell Curve Charles Murray and a voracious so-called recovering gambling addict to explain away their large part of the blame for not responding quickly to thousands of hungry, impoverished Americans trapped in fetid, dangerous waters filled with snakes and alligators.
who reassured Americans that the cleansees left to perish in the nursing homes “drowned peacefully.”
He actually said that? OMFG!
I can think of a few peaceful ways of dying, drowning is most definately NOT on that list! What a complete asshat!
In the chaos, why would there not be rapes? There are rapes without chaos, all the time.
I seriously doubt anything will be done about it though,with victims –here– perpetrators–there- and no way to pull it together into a courtroom.
Some more– ‘collateral damage’.
OMG I get so tired of it.
I believed it at first. But then when it came out that maybe it was all made up, I took it as a lesson for me to face the fact that I have got some ingrained prejudices that can be played on (in spite of the fact that some of my best friends are….)
Then when I asked my husband about it – he said he never believed it at all. Now, I guess it depends on who’s telling me about it. I’d like to use my heart instead of my lizard-brain.
You’re right – it will take a while before we really know anything.
The overkill about marauding blacks, and then the revelation that this was overblown, has obscured the real possibility that some things DID happen during this time of madness. Most definitely not the entire community in the Dome or the Center were preying upon each other, or that black people were shooting at ‘copters (reports that I heard was that if this was occurring, the shooters were trying to get their attention on the roofs of flooded homes).
Understand that between the overkill and the overblown, the truth is way in the middle.