Too disgusted to come up with some catchy title for this post. Really, really disgusted:
While it’s a common tactic of abusers, it’s something no one expected of Republican Florida state Rep. Kathleen Passidomo.
During debate over a bill that would legislate a dress code for Florida students, Passidomo blamed the alleged gang raping of an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas on the way the young girl was dressed.
“There was an article about an 11 year old girl who was gangraped in Texas by 18 young men because she was dressed like a 21-year-old prostitute,” Passidomo declared.
“And her parents let her attend school like that. And I think it’s incumbent upon us to create some areas where students can be safe in school and show up in proper attire so what happened in Texas doesn’t happen to our students,” she added.
What kind of sick person blames an 11 year old girl for a gang rape by 18 boys/men in order to justify a dress code? The lack of common decency and basic humanity among this current breed of Republican politicians astonishes me. What next? Salem style witch burnings? These are nasty, ugly, just plain mean people.
But I suppose that’s what we must expect from a group of “holier than thou, better than you” hypocrites. Maybe if that girl had been a puppy Kathleen Passidomo and many of the residents of the town where the gang rape occurred would have shown more compassion for her.
But I doubt it.
Update [2011-3-17 17:33:9 by Steven D]: Kathleen Passidimo is now attempting to walk back her remarks and claim they had nothing to do with blaming the victim. Here’s the link:
Rep. Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, said she was “really hurt” this week when she was accused in the blogosphere of blaming the gang rape of an 11-year-old Texas girl not on the 18 alleged attackers, but on the girl.
“The blame is solely on the boys for what occurred,” Passidomo said of the alleged attackers. “Those kids were going to find somebody. They’re predators. They’re going to be dealt with through the judicial system. But the young girl has to deal with this for the rest of her life. My whole comment was, how do we protect these kids from predators?
“One of the ways is to teach them how to dress appropriately.” […]
Passidomo discussed the story during Tuesday’s committee meeting, which The St. Petersburg Times reported about on its Florida politics blog, The Buzz.
“There was an article about an 11-year-old girl who was gang-raped in Texas by 18 young men because she was dressed like a 21-year-old prostitute,” Passidomo said during the meeting, according to the St. Petersburg Times. “And her parents let her attend school like that. And I think it’s incumbent upon us to create some areas where students can be safe in school and show up in proper attire so what happened in Texas doesn’t happen to our students.”
That comment was picked up by blogs around the country, including the Huffington Post, many of which accused Passidomo of blaming the victim.
When asked about the quote, Passidomo said “I don’t think that’s exactly what I said, but I don’t know.”
“The point that is disturbing to me or distressing to me is that anyone would think anyone would blame and 11-year-old for this horrible assault,” Passidomo said.
Passidomo, who has three adult daughters of her own, said she was devastated after reading the New York Times article about the attack. If the girl’s school had a stricter code of dress and student conduct, the girl might have had some extra protection, she said.
I will let you make your own judgment as to whether Ms. Passidomo has responded to criticism of her initial remarks about the rape in an appropriate manner.
Nothing, I mean absolutely NOTHING, that comes out of a RepubliKKKan/Tea Baggers/Koch-whores mouth surprises me.
I expect the most hateful and previously inconceivable ideas to be accepted by the radical right as normal ans standard.
The real question is why did anyone vote for them?
I know why: Americans for Prosperity and other astro-turf groups just made campaign commercials that were “just made up.”
Evidently people don’t say it as much as they used to: this is a free country. Republicahs: little neurotic dictators; see wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere.
Given the nature of right-wing propaganda, was the story even true. Was the girl indeed dressed like a “21-year-old prostitute”? And what exactly is that supposed to mean.
There is an argument for dress codes in schools. Actually it is for school uniforms. It works against the forming of cliques based on income.
It is amazing how many Republican women are misogynists.
I saw this story over at ThinKProgress and in an update she tried to clarify that she was only quoting the NYT story. She claims it wasn’t her interpretation of the story. Her second quote in your post however, proves that she really thought this girl brought it on herself by wearing skimpy clothes. I guess someone doesn’t understand that rape is an act of violence.
this is who they are. why are you expecting any different from them?
Victim-blaming: it’s what the Republicans do.
Maybe things would have turned out better if the parents of those young men had taught them NOT TO RAPE. How refreshing it would have been if one of them had stepped up, escorted the young girl out of the trailer and taken her home, telling the others it’s wrong to rape women.
But that’s just my take on it.
This touches on a pet peeve of mine: the labelling of rape, domestic violence, etc. as “women’s issues.” Hello? It’s men who are committing these crimes. The problem, and the solution, rest with changing the norms of (some) male behavior.
The original NYT story carries a lot of the blame for this. It brought up the issue of how she was dressed, and also spent a lot of time quoting people worrying over how the rape charges have impacted the lives of these poor upstanding young men, and not a word wondering how a brutal gang-rape affects an 11-year-old. Ignorance on these issues is hardly confined to Tea Partiers.
There are times when compassion simply isn’t enough. Support is the only option. And since this election I’ve seen nothing from the R’s except an outright move to Khadafi women, lower & middle class. They do so publicly, loudly and without apology.
Certainly after seeing so many voting and continuing their support of this clique one has to face the question of how can we allow them to have any voice in our society…or is this where we are going?
That little girl could have no clothes & it would still not justify her rape.
All of those who violated her person should be tried & hopefully receive the full penalty of the law, but we hear how what they did will affect them.
One of my granddaughters is 11 years old.
I know I couldn`t rest until they were all punished.
Even my call for pacifism would be shunted aside.
That lady is disgusting.
Her walk back is still garbage. this has nothing to do with clothes. I remember one day walking home from high school and being approached by an older man(forties) in a car. I can’t remember the exact wording but it took me a little bit to understand that this man was trying to solicit sex. While this was a busy road, it was still a residential neighborhood with a couple of churches along the way. I was wearing jeans, a turtleneck and a flannel shirt over it. What you wear isn’t the problem.
Is there a difference between suggesting a contributing factor and suggesting blame? Conceding the obvious – there is no excuse for rape or assault of any kind – are we saying that it is wrong to suggest that attire could be a contributing factor?
Rape is a crime.
There are no contributing factors, except the acts of the perpetrators.
Really? No contributing factors? Is that true of handguns and assault rifles?
Oscar,
Those who commit crimes using handguns & assault rifles are the perpetrators of those crimes.
The users are the contributing factors.
My argument stands.
So the legality and accessibility of handguns and assault rifles are not contributing factors?
The fact that they are legal & accessible does not contribute to their illegal use. Those who use them to kill or maim are the contributing factors, ie the perpetrators.
If you look down in many areas, you shall possibly observe stones.
If one were to pick up a stone & bash his brother`s head in, the stone would not be a contributing factor.
Cain would have just started the discussion,… one that I`m Abel to continue (pardon the horrible pun)
As an example, the authorities were in my house at one point in the past.
One of the officers in charge asked me if I had any weapons in my house.
I told him, yes, absolutely, as I pointed to the broom, & mentioned that I had numerous knives in my kitchen drawers.
I also mentioned the chair by the porch door that I could smash him with. I didn`t hesitate to also bring up the set of horseshoes near the horseshoe pit in my yard that I could inflict
great bodily harm with.
I hope you do get my point & realize I`m not trying to be argumentative.
Peace, my friend.
No problem, I get your point – I just wanted to tease it out a bit. I believe that there are contributing factors that in no ways nullify or even modify culpability. What a woman wears can contribute to her being targeted for attack as opposed to someone else being targeted, but it does not mitigate the culpability of the perpetrator(s), and it is virtually certain that if the one woman wasn’t targeted then another would have been. To that point the attire is irrelevant – someone was going to be attacked by the perpetrator(s) – but to ignore the contributing factors is to set people up for problems that they might be able to avoid.
Same with weapons – I get annoyed with those who want to ban guns as a cure-all to mass murder, but I do acknowledge the easy access to weapons of mass destruction as a contributing factor in mass murder. My point on guns is that the overwhelming majority of murders come retail, not wholesale, and banning guns won’t decrease the murder rate by a tenth of a point – a knife, a rock, or a broomstick will do just fine in most cases.
I try to acknowledge the whole picture – in engineering, even a zero-force member is a member of the system…
Oscar,
“To that point the attire is irrelevant – someone was going to be attacked by the perpetrator(s) – but to ignore the contributing factors is to set people up for problems that they might be able to avoid.”
Imagine everyone naked then.
Wouldn`t that remove any contributing factors, or would one then say, “you should have seen how she was walking”.
Usually it is the alleged guilty party that brings up the “y`a buts”, iow`s, the contributing factors.
Think of it this way:
Consider a stoplight with no pause between red and green lights. As soon as it turns red for North-South it turns green for East-West. Someone going North-South is trying to make the light while someone going East-West sees the light turn green. They meet in the middle – clearly the guy running the light is at fault, but the guy going East-West failing to see the speedster was a contributing factor, as was the lack of a delay between the light turning red for North-South and it turning green for East-West.
That doesn’t change the fact that the guy running the light is 100% culpable for the accident, but it does help us to understand how we might be able to prevent a similar accident in similar circumstances – a delay in the light would give speedsters time to clear the light, and looking both ways before exercising one’s right of way would help to avoid collisions.