Watch your Language

A 15-year-old Black girl was raped in Florida recently, by six men, at gun point (the Whataboutourdaughters.com blog brought this to my attention). Watch this video and listen to the interviewer. Listen to every word.

Did you hear what I heard?

The interviewer asked the perp: "Did you guys take advantage of that girl?"

Take advantage?! To take advantage is to take the upper hand, seize opportunity in an unequal competition, exploit a weakness or mistake someone else has made. It's that last part that has me seeing red . . . that these six men "took advantage" of the young girl focuses on the contributions of all parties, including the girl, to her rape -- instead of linguistically focusing entirely on the violent crime that is 100% the responsibility of the perpetrators.

But it's more than that. I have to rely on my sense of language as a native speaker of English. How do you, YOU, use the phrase "to take advantage of"? This is how I use it: my husband and I recently bought over a hundred dollars worth of stuff, plants and such, from Home Depot. We got to the car and in scrutinizing the receipt, realized many of the items hadn't been charged to us. Now, 98% of the time, I march right back in, albeit reluctantly, point out their mistake, and cough up more money. I don't want the teller to get in trouble; I don't want the business to lose money; I don't want to have a big black puddle of a stain on my conscience. But this time . . . well . . .? It was Home Depot. We've spent thousands there. My anti-corporate prejudice (in spite of my knowing I depend heavily on corporations) won out, and my normally intact conscience took a holiday. We considered it our lucky day.

That is taking advantage. We exploited someone else's mistake. Things turned our way, we had the upper hand because we had knowledge of a mistake that someone else did not, and we rolled with it. We did the wrong thing. Unfortunately, humans are very susceptible to this sort of moral justification and sneakiness. We often take advantage when we think our conscience won't be too marred. We put the situation in the scales, weighing the amount of harm done others against the amount of gain for ourselves, and if it's not too terribly awful for the other party, we justify giving ourselves the bonus.

Or is that just MY morality shtick? Am I the only one who thinks "taking advantage" is something that ranges from a little bit creepy to pretty darn disgusting -- but not generally completely devoid of any moral reasoning?

I'll tell you what the first rapist in this case did that was "taking advantage" of the 15-year-old victim: when she went to his apartment (she apparently knew him) and the door was closed, the perp asked her for sex. That asking is taking advantage -- of a closed door, of his age, of her innocence and immaturity, of her physical weakness in comparison to him, of her perhaps unwise decision to enter an man's house, even though she may have considered him friendly and a friend. His even ASKING for sex was taking advantage.

If that's where the story ended, the reporter would have been entirely appropriate in asking the perp, "did you take advantage of that girl?"

But that's not where it ended. He pulled out a gun, and forced her to have sex with him, and then five others.

Is that taking advantage? Let me ask you something different, to clarify my point. If burglars use crowbars and an ax to break through your locked front door, do we say they took advantage of your failure to have a metal door? If a sniper kills seven people in the street, do we say he took advantage of their not constantly looking up for potential killers? In both cases, yes, the criminals took the advantage. But do we SAY they took advantage?

No. We don't use those words. Because when people have overwhelming and complete power over other people, we focus on the force they use -- not on what the victims did to allow the scales to tip in the direction of the perpetrators. When force is overwhelming, there are no scales, there is no weighing in the balances. And there is no detectable moral reasoning -- that fudging we do with our justifications. There is no possible explanation except brute force.

When that young woman had a gun pointed at her, she was confronted with overwhelming criminal force. When she alone was pitted against six men, she faced overwhelming criminal force. There was no competition. There was nothing she could do. She had no way of getting a so-called advantage back. She was tortured and terrorized. And the criminals were not pursuing an opportunity for themselves. They were destroying an innocent life.

So please. Can we watch what comes out of our mouths? And if something pops out -- hold it out in front of your nose and stare at it a while. Does it betray some assumptions you didn't realize you were making?

We all have a role to play in reducing the incidence of rape. Watching our language is something all of us can do. Because how we talk about rape is how we think about rape. And those beliefs make it either rather easy, or very difficult, for rapists to do what they do.

P.S. Did you hear, in that video interview, the neighborhood parent say that what was so terrible was that the rapists "took away her privacy"? I've been trying to wrap my mind around that one. I just don't have the energy right now. Maybe you can help us out? What do you think of his choice of words?