Is "rape culture" responsible for child rape, incest and pedophilia?

[thucythucy]

208. Which tells you what?

To repeat: one in five girls, one in twenty boys, will experience sexual abuse. This isn't just random violence happening here or there. It would appear to be pretty pervasive, cutting across all lines of class, race, ethnicity.

A part of how I see rape culture playing out is in the proliferation and easy acceptance of myths about sexual violence and abuse. For instance, the notion that child sexual abuse is something done primarily by strangers. The reality is that it's most often done by family members and family friends. Sometimes the abuse goes on for years. Often other family members know but choose to look the other way, or deliberately deny what they see, what they KNOW is happening. Family members might even rally around the perpetrator, singling out the abused child as "the family problem."

Our culture spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year feeding the military industrial complex (which, BTW, has its own rape culture). How much do we spend on rape education, identification, prevention? Our culture spends billions on a bogus "war against drugs" and yet--as has been pointed out on this very thread--tens of thousands (probably more) rape kits rot in police warehouses every year for lack of funding--or interest--in having them analyzed. It's hard to cite any other category of serious violent crime where crucial evidence is so often treated with such stunning indifference.

I think you're deluding yourself in thinking that this culture genuinely takes the abuse of children all that seriously. No more than it takes child poverty all that seriously. Yes, some progress has been made in recent decades (and in terms of sexual violence that progress is largely the result of feminists--generally women--working, organizing, struggling to make it happen) but far too often abuse gets swept under the rug. Now and again a particularly egregious example of abuse will be prosecuted--Penn State for instance--but even there it's only after years of abuse, only after multiple victims come forward, only after the host institution does everything it can--generally with the support of the local community---to cover up the abuse, to minimize it, to excuse the perpetrator.

No problem can be solved if people refuse to see the extent of the problem. On a whole host of issues--from climate change to gun violence to drug addiction to sexual abuse--this society, this culture or substantial parts thereof remain locked in stultifying denial.