Villains and Victims

One thing I have gotten from group therapy is the idea of perpetrator and victim. Then along came The Other Crime Victims from Jstor which fuels the fire with:

In one 1996 study, a full 20% of respondents at one Midwestern prison had been pressured or forced into sexual contact at least once, with about half of those cases constituting rape. If 10% of people in prison are sexually assaulted, it holds that when taken with the country’s high incarceration rate of the nation, the United States has the largest male rape survivor population in history.

And:

 The dichotomy between criminal and crime victim blurs when looking at women in prison. A 2014 issue of The Hill out of the Indiana Women’s Prison conducted an informal survey of sexual victimization. Of the 200 survey respondents, 96% had been sexually victimized as children. Of those, 90% of the abuse occurred not by a stranger but by a relative or other adult they’d been taught to trust. Sharon Collins, the author and survey administrator, laments the fact that Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous are widely available but there is no treatment available for the women to heal from their traumas. “If you are in that situation,” Collins asks, “do you continue to turn to drugs to try to numb the pain?”

I have a very indistinct thought about a play with this theme but also with this question: what do we call people who treat other people as Americans treat their incarcerated?

sch 4/30/22