From Democracy Now
This is a portion of a transcript from Megan Williams and what she described as her experience when she was kidnapped, raped, and tortured for a week. Now, this is what I want to know: what constitutes a hate crime? A hate crime must be a “conspiracy against constitutional rights.” What part of being gang raped; forced to eat human, rat, and dog feces; enduring unfathomable emotional and physical violence and torture while being called racial slurs by 6 individuals does not qualify as a conspiracy against Megan’s constitutional rights?
I’ve got to be going crazy.
Or maybe I’m that naive.
Or maybe this world is just becoming a place I don’t want to recognize as home anymore.
MEGAN WILLIAMS: They were torturing me. They all passed a knife around that was — and stabbing me. I was trying to get away as they were stabbing me, and they were holding me down and stuff. And they smothered me with a bag. That morning, I had a bag wrapped around my neck and everything. They choked me. They made me eat dog poop, rat poop and human. They made me drink their urine. And each time, they braided some switches together, and they were beating me across the back. They tore my clothes off me and everything.
These are the words of a womyn who I believe.
I’ve come across it more than once, and the whole idea is just absurd. I mean, I can think of multiple hate crimes that were committed by people who knew the victims.
It all just feels like denial that hate crimes could happen at all.
So if you know the people who inflicted violence and hate upon you, it’s not a hate crime. That’s straight out crazy, isn’t it, Lisa? How does that work? It’s like saying only strangers are capable of doing this…like interpartner violence is not really violence because you know the person. Domestic violence isn’t really violence because you share a home, family, life with someone.
It’s a thought beyond error.
Thanks for the reply.
I posted about Megan Williams on my blog a week or so ago, and received a response that “It’s not a hate crime because the victim knew the attackers,” but that logic just doesn’t make sense to me.
There was also some weird stuff about how labeling it a hate crime was playing into the prosecution’s hands, and that the charges would already be enough to put the attackers away for life.
I don’t know, it’s like there’s no responsibility to engage what happened, and to just treat it as an intellectual curiosity.
If you’re crazy and naive, I’d rather be crazy and naive with.