Kentucky GIves More RIghts to Rapists Than to Their Victims

It's a catch-22 Joseph Heller never dreamed of.

One of Akin’s most outspoken opponents is Shauna Prewitt. When she was a 21 year old college student at the University of Chicago, she was raped and became pregnant. She ultimately decided to have the baby. Shockingly, her rapist attempted to get custody of her daughter. Rapists do this as a bargaining tool, asserting their power over their victims. The rapist will allow the victim to have full custody if they don’t prosecute him for the crime of rape.

In 31 states, there are no laws that bar rapists from seeking custody or visitation rights. These states include: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Prewitt explains, “My attacker sought custody of my daughter, but thankfully I got lucky and his visitation rights were terminated.” According to Prewitt, nearly 25,000 women become pregnant as a result of rape every year. Congressman Akin later retracted his comments, claiming he misspoke in the interview.

Kentucky and the other 30 states are refusing to treat rape as the violent crime it is.  Other convicted criminals are not permitted to profit from their crimes, yet because Kentucky and 30 other states insist on treating women as less than human, men who rape get rights their victims are denied.

It doesn't have to be that way.


From Salon:

But a new bill before Colorado lawmakers would block rapists from exerting parental rights. Republican state Rep. Lois Landgraf, the House sponsor of the bill, is seeking to end a system whereby victims must still “face some relationship with the rapist.”

A 2010 Georgetown report on “Giving Birth to a Rapist’s Child” put the estimate of the percentage of women who carry and keep the children conceived via rape at between 32.3 percent and as high as 64 percent. And though the bill, which has already passed unanimously out of the state Senate, would not change the game for women who are still struggling through the Colorado legal system with their children; it would apply to convictions after July 1 of this year.

Protection for victims would not be automatic, either. Victims would instead be able to “file a petition in juvenile court to prevent future contact with the parent who committed the sexual assault.” But it represents a move toward far greater protection all around – a firm stance that convicted rapists are “not relieved of any obligation to pay child support unless waived by the victim,” while also granting victims the right to “a no-contact protection” if they wish. And because justice doesn’t always take place in a courtroom, the bill also proposes a task force to investigate parental rights when there have been allegations of sexual assault without a conviction.