As you can expect from a man who has a blog just so he can bitch about whatever he feels like, there are a lot of things that really piss me off. One of the things at the top of the list of things that piss me off is blaming victims of rape fore being raped. Oftentimes such blame comes in the form of people claiming a woman shouldn’t have worn revealing clothing or gotten drunk at a party. But the Arizona Attorney General’s Office may have just taken the cake. A woman is suing the state because she was raped by a prisoner while working at the prison. The Attorney General’s Office is claiming she was at fault because the prison failed at provider her effective security:
“Plaintiff is an ADOC (Arizona Department of Corrections) employee who routinely worked at the prison complex,” Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Weisbard wrote in his motion to dismiss. “By being placed in a classroom at the complex, the officers were not placing Plaintiff in any type of situation that she would not normally face. The risk of harm, including assault, always existed at a prison like Eyman.”
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Normally, such tests are given in the visitation room, which is monitored by security cameras and corrections officers. But on that day, because of a special event, she was sent to an unmonitored classroom, handed a radio and told to use it if there was any trouble, her lawsuit says.
The test lasted 90 minutes during which not a single corrections officer checked on her or radioed to ask if everything was OK. As they finished, six inmates left, returning unescorted to their dorm. One, Jacob Harvey, lingered.
According to the lawsuit, the 20-year-old inmate grabbed her from behind and took her to the ground as she struggled. He then stabbed her repeatedly in the head with a pen, choked her, slammed her head into the floor, tore away her clothes and raped her, the lawsuit says.
The teacher told investigators she screamed for help, but no one came. After the attack, Harvey tried to use her radio to call for help but it was tuned to a channel the guards didn’t even use. Eventually, Harvey allowed her to phone for help.
In other words the Attorney General’s Office is saying she should have known the room was unmonitored and therefore demanded a different room and to verify the radio given to her was set to the proper channel. Its defense is literally claiming she was at fault for being raped because she wasn’t a trained security expert. I don’t even have words for how disgusting that claim is.
Prisons are supposed to be completely controlled facilities. That’s why there are walls, fences, bars, and guards literally everywhere. But even in these tightly controlled environments the state can’t protect people. It really makes you wonder why anybody expects the state to protect them. This also shows that the state will sink to some really goddamn awful levels to dodge responsibilities for its failures.