Women and Their Issues

Via Longreads — a wonderful service that you, too, can support! — here is a story from a small town in Missouri that endured its own Steubenville-esque trauma in January 2012, when a senior football player from a prominent family was accused of raping a 14-year-old girl while she was intoxicated. Another male student allegedly filmed the act on a cell phone. Maryville, Mo., initially rallied around the girl, but within just two months, the county prosecutor dropped charges against Matthew Barnett, the girl’s alleged rapist. There is a lot to process in here, but one thing that stuck with me is when the local sheriff said that the victim’s mother — a widow who lost her job and her home in the months following the assault, and saw her daughter through two suicide attempts in the past year and a half — “clearly has issues.” [Kansas City Star]