‘US laws fail to protect women’

The United States does not properly protect American women, particularly those that report crimes of domestic violence and rape, says a prominent political analyst.

American women are not protected; there is one woman raped every two minutes in the United States, says Anna Lekas Miller, a writer for the US-based weekly magazine The Nation.

“The system is really pitted against women, which is awful because it’s not their fault; it’s the rapist’s fault. So much victim blaming happens where a victim is dressed in an inappropriate way or is too drunk to be able to give consent, or is painted as a hooker,” Miller said.

The US legal system lacks substance and isn’t properly enforced, making it difficult for women to seek retribution for crimes committed against them, she went on to say.

“In just so many cases, it is really difficult to get any kind of justice for your rape. By justice I mean having the rapist be put in jail, be tried in court and then put in jail for a sentence that’s longer than a year, because even when convicted, most rapists are only in jail for a year, which is awful,” Miller further explained.

“There are cases where police officers rape women,” she said. “These are the cases that the media’s covering and you know that there are just so many other cases out there that the media’s not looking at, things like the everyday women.”

Every day in the US, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends, and women are six times more likely to be violated by intimate partners than men.

About 30 percent of the women serving in the US military have been raped, with over two-thirds also reporting that they have been sexually assaulted while in the military, reports indicated.