Trump’s Election is a Triumph of Rape Culture

People are trying to normalize his election victory, blaming it on failures of Kamala Harris’s campaign or problems in the Democratic Party. Don’t let them.

For anyone who cares about girls and women, this has been a bitterly hard week. Period. Not only does Trump’s election represent a reality where the country cares less about women going septic and dying in parking lots due to a lack of reproductive health care than the price of a tank of gas, but it is a triumph of the rape culture that is at the very heart of misogyny.

Rape culture is not just the fact that men like Donald Trump rape. Nor is it just the fact that such crimes are a ubiquitous feature of life as we know it, with over one in five women the victim of rape or attempted rape in our lifetimes. (An estimated 2.6% of men report this kind of victimization too.) It is also the fact that so little happens after the fact. Just 0.6% of rapes will result in the rapist being incarcerated—a far lower rate than for comparable crime categories, including assault and battery, robbery, and so on. Rapists face impunity at every level of the criminal justice system: victims are too afraid or numb or traumatized to report it; rape kits are never performed; rape kits languish for years, even decades, especially for marginalized victims; rapists are never investigated; well-evidenced cases are never prosecuted under so-called “exceptional clearances,” as I wrote in my book Entitled. And, of course, even when prosecuted, many rapists are not convicted, or are subject to extraordinarily light sentences, due to himpathetic worries about harming the rapist’s “bright future.”

Some rapists even go on to be president.