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.
