{"id":38565,"date":"2023-06-07T15:33:37","date_gmt":"2023-06-07T19:33:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/?p=38565"},"modified":"2023-06-15T15:34:06","modified_gmt":"2023-06-15T19:34:06","slug":"column-what-does-a-predator-look-like-not-what-the-haters-want-you-to-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/column-what-does-a-predator-look-like-not-what-the-haters-want-you-to-think\/","title":{"rendered":"Column: What does a predator look like? Not what the haters want you to think."},"content":{"rendered":"

By<\/span> Yvonne Abraham<\/span><\/a><\/span> Globe Columnist,<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

What does a predator look like?<\/span><\/p>\n

The question has long been crucial for the cynics who fuel America\u2019s culture wars, leveraging fear to win votes. It is also crucial to those of us who genuinely want to confront the scourge of sexual assault.<\/span><\/p>\n

To hear the culture warriors tell it, predators put on wigs and sparkles and read stories to children at public libraries: Taking their cues from bigots of decades past, conservatives have tried to make drag queens into monsters, accusing them of being pedophiles and of \u201cgrooming\u201d children. To these hate-mongers, transgender women are equally terrifying, menaces supposedly lying in wait in girls\u2019 and women\u2019s bathrooms, ready to attack.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Both stereotypes\u00a0<\/b>are ludicrous, but those who push them are working from a playbook as old as America: Demonize marginalized people, and deploy them as foils, by calling them a threat to women and children \u2014 white women and children, that is.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a cruelty with which older members of the LGBTQ+ community are acutely familiar, as are Black and brown Americans of every age. The line there runs right from Emmett Till to the 1990s hysteria over fictitious\u00a0\u201csuper predators\u201d\u00a0<\/a>to Trayvon Martin and countless Black men and\u00a0women\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0children shot<\/a>\u00a0and killed because armed neighbors took one look at them and decided they were life-threatening.<\/span><\/p>\n

If only abusers were as easy to spot as the haters contend.<\/span><\/p>\n

The truth is, they look like everyone else \u2014 including, and especially, cisgender white men. They wear uniforms, cassocks, and nice suits. They\u00a0teach our kids<\/a>\u00a0in school and\u00a0coach them<\/a>\u00a0in sports. They\u2019re popular and respected and trusted. They are devoted parents, brothers, husbands, uncles. They live in tony towns and humble ones. They are strangers and friends, creeps and colleagues. They appear\u00a0<\/b>utterly unremarkable.<\/span><\/p>\n

But nobody is talking about banning\u00a0priests<\/a>\u00a0or lawyers or\u00a0police officers<\/a>\u00a0from story time.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe reality is that there are people who cause harm and sexual violence, and survivors of sexual violence, all around us every day,\u201d said Hema Sarang-Sieminski, deputy director of Jane Doe Inc., a coalition of groups fighting sexual assault and domestic violence.<\/span><\/p>\n

Take the two cases playing out in Boston courtrooms this week, where two clean-cut attorneys are answering rape charges.<\/span><\/p>\n

A dozen women have accused\u00a0former Suffolk and Essex County prosecutor Gary Zerola of strikingly similar rapes<\/a>\u00a0since 1996. Zerola, named a \u201cmost eligible bachelor\u201d by People magazine in 2001, has been acquitted or avoided prosecution on previous charges. He\u2019s currently standing trial for raping an acquaintance who says she\u00a0<\/b>woke up to him assaulting her<\/a>\u00a0after she got drunk on a night out with Zerola and his girlfriend.<\/span><\/p>\n

And Matthew James Nilo, a 35-year-old lawyer, was\u00a0arraigned Monday<\/a>\u00a0after being arrested\u00a0in attacks on four women in Charlestown in 2007 and 2008<\/a>. Investigators connected him to the unsolved rapes this year using advances in genetic genealogy. In three of the attacks, Nilo, then a North End resident, allegedly lured women into his car, drove them to remote Terminal Street in Charlestown, threatened them, and raped them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Police had to rely on genealogy to make the connection, because the lawyer wasn\u2019t in any DNA database.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat happens over and over again,\u201d said Barbara Rae-Venter, a genealogist who works to help identify suspects in murders and rapes\u00a0told the Globe<\/a>. \u201cThe people we identify have no record. They are not on anybody\u2019s radar.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

One in four women, and one in 26 men, have experienced a completed or attempted rape,\u00a0according to the CDC<\/a>. One in two\u00a0transgender people\u00a0<\/a>reports being sexually assaulted. If so many of us are survivors, it stands to reason that a significant share of us are perpetrators. And most of them are not on anybody\u2019s radar.<\/span><\/p>\n

That notion is hard to take for a lot of people. But that reluctance to acknowledge the frequency of assault, and the apparent ordinariness of those who commit it, empowers abusers and isolates victims.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t want to see that this harm is so prevalent and around us, it is far easier to imagine a small number of serial rapists, extreme offenders,\u201d Sarang-Sieminski said.<\/span><\/p>\n

And easier still for some people to imagine that those predators are members of groups they deride, rather than a member of their own. Where would be the comfort \u2014 or the political advantage \u2014 in doing otherwise?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Yvonne Abraham Globe Columnist,   What does a predator look like? The question has long been crucial for the cynics who fuel America\u2019s culture wars, leveraging fear to win […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-coverage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38565\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janedoe.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}