I did read the article, and I think that people are getting really the wrong message. . .the message that supposedly rape survivors are sinners, rape is a sin, etc. . .but it’s not from the article itself.
The article mentions that the young girl and her family were attacked by armed thugs in a home invasion. She resisted being raped and they angrily shot and killed her.
Since then, her story has moved people in Nigeria.
Her early life also seems to have been one in which she stood out among her peers for her firm faith, her kindness, her wish to do penance and to encourage others to such actions (quite rare in this indulgent society, even in Africa).
This is not about how choosing to fight back in a rape situation, even if it results in physical death, somehow cheapens or defiles the person who doesn’t choose to fight back. I
Apparently in today’s society, we have swung the pendulum so far that instead of demonizing the woman who, through no fault of her own, is raped (and whose integrity, purity, etc. are not then ‘lost’ and who is not a weak evil person ever after). . .we now demonize the woman who chooses to fight rape. We sneer at her. “You holier than thou traitor! Why do you try to make us feel as if we’re not as good as you? Why did you fight? Your death is meaningless! You are nothing! People like you show everything wrong about religion and faith! How COULD the Church even THINK about holding up ‘these women’ as saints? Don’t they realize how they are hurting the feelings of all the women who didn’t die during a rape? The nerve. . .”
I don’t know if this chasm can ever be bridged. The vitriol, the rhetoric, the sheer blinding anger, may be too much. For the woman who ‘sees’ another woman fighting back and dying in a situation where if she had accepted the rape she would have lived, it seems today that the second woman is stupid and to present her actions is noble is absurd, and dangerous, and hateful.
I’m sorry that the world has come to the point where we don’t understand that in the situation this young woman was in, it wasn’t so much that she was trying to preserve her virginity–though virginity is an important gift for women and men–but she was trying to keep these would-be rapists from mortal sin as well. We keep forgetting about the fact that there are two people in this. Yes, the men wound up committing the mortal sin of murder. Which is not ‘worse than’ rape; mortal sin is mortal sin. BUT there was always the chance that her resistance might have ‘shocked some sense’ into them.
We’ve always had different advice about how to handle a rape situation. I’ve heard everything from "accept it’ to "fight it’. It depends on the situation. Sometimes ‘accepting it’ means the attacker will then let you go; sometimes it will make them kill you. Sometimes fighting will get you to safety; sometimes it will lead to your death. But blaming and hating a woman because she resisted a rape is as bad as blaming and hating a woman because she didn’t resist, IMO.
