Apologies if this has been all over the place already but it’s a national holiday around these parts so I haven’t been online much.
MA State Rep. Fattman Says Rape Survivors Should Fear Reporting Crime via Change.org News
Massachusetts State Rep. Ryan Fattman believes that rape and abuse survivors ought to be afraid to report their assault, assuming they are undocumented. No really.
We hear a lot of justifications for the flawed “Secure Communities” program, which requires local law enforcement to fingerprint both criminals and victims alike and check these prints against a federal immigration database. While it sounds innocuous enough, this causes mass insecurity by deterring undocumented immigrant victims and witnesses from going to the police to report violent crime, out of fear that they will be the ones who end up behind bars. The justification usually rests on pooh-poohing these concerns and attempting to brush them aside as illegitimate. But State Rep. Fattman is taking a new approach: “My thought is that if someone is here illegally, they should be afraid to come forward.”
He went on to explain to Mother Jones that his quote was taken out of context. The context? “If someone got into a car accident, it’s obviously a tragic event. But if they’re drunk and they crash, it’s a crime. If that person was drunk and survived the accident they would be afraid to come forward. I think if someone is here illegally they should be afraid to come forward because they should be afraid to be deported.” To recap: rape survivors are equivalent to drunk drivers.
In Fattman’s world a drunk driver, who puts other people’s lives in jeopardy by choosing to drink intoxicated, is the equivalent of a woman who lacks proper immigration status (which is an administrative violation, by the way, Mr. Fattman). A drunk driver who causes an accident – perhaps injuring or killing others – is equivalent to an immigrant who has never harmed or endangered another person, but has been herself raped. Meanwhile, if the survivor is discouraged from reporting, the rapist, the actual criminal, will get away with his crime and can go on to assault another woman.
More at the link above.
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