freckles make me strong.

(via robotheartpolitics)

Trigger Warning

Three years ago in B.C., Canada, a woman woke up in the bed of the man in the image to the left. She was bleeding and bruised, and though she remembered going out for a night on town, she didn’t remember how she got in this bed, or what had happened to her. Medical examinations determined that a man had vaginally penetrated her, and also found sedatives in her system.

The man’s name is Fernando Manuel Alves, and he pleaded guilty to sexual assault in the rape of this woman. He was initially charged with sexually assaulting three other women, and administering a noxious substance, though those charges were eventually dropped.

Despite pleading guilty, though, to the rape of a woman who has described since feeling the loss of both her will to live and ability to feel safe, Alves is not going to spend a single day in jail. No, instead, he received a 9 month conditional sentence, and placement on the sex offender registry.

Why, exactly, is Alves not being sent to jail for his violent crime, when non-violent criminals are sent there all the time? Well, that would be the point of particular interest:

In sentencing, the B.C. provincial court judge said Alves was not pathologically dangerous but had committed a crime of opportunity.

The judge ordered that Alves be placed on the sex-offender registry for the next 20 years but that he not spend time in jail.

Yes. Seemingly, since the judge felt the need to express as much during sentencing, Alves is not going to jail because he is believed to be not pathologically dangerous. And the way we know he is not dangerous is because his crime, his rape, was one of of opportunity.

One can only assume that when a rape is called a “crime of opportunity,” the “opportunity” in question is a woman being in the rapist’s presence.

And this would be true even if there wasn’t good reason to believe that Alves had deliberately set out to impair is victim for the purposes of assaulting her. Because you know what? Drunk women are everywhere — and this is especially so when you own a pub, as Alves does. Sleeping women are everywhere. Unconscious women are everywhere. Women out by themselves are everywhere. Women in “vulnerable situations,” that would not be vulnerable at all if there weren’t men out there looking to attack us, are everywhere. We, women, are everywhere.

And our bodies are not walking opportunities for violence.

Our autonomy and right to safety does not lose value, and the violation of that autonomy and safety has no lesser significance, just because a misogynistic man saw them as such.

Saying that Alves raped his victim as a crime of opportunity is not only greatly absolving him of full responsibility for his heinous, life-altering actions. It’s also saying that the victim is partially to blame. It’s saying that by existing, whether it be existing alone, or existing while drinking, or existing in public, or simply existing as a woman at all, she created an opportunity for a rapist. Not giving Alves jail time for this reason says that if a woman presents such an “opportunity” — again, by existing — that it mitigates her rapist’s actions. Frankly, the judge, whether man or woman, is aligning themselves with the rapist by presenting a rape as understandable when an “opportunity” presents itself.

And a culture that says “well, come on, can you blame him? She was there!” is a culture where men rape with few consequences and many excuses.