The Progressive Assault on Women’s Last Line of Protection: Holding Rapists Accountable

The radical left's push for prison abolition sets its eye on persuading women to let their rapists go free

Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article and all op-eds published by WAHF are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of WAHF.

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Last weekend, a horrific and ludicrous article in The Nation went viral on X. The article, “Why I Didn’t Report My Rape,” was written by Columbia University doctoral candidate Anna Krauthamer. In the article, Krauthamer sought to justify her decision to refrain from filing a police report after being gang raped by six men throughout the night.

In her own words:

“The simple answer to the question of why I never reported the rape is that I believe in the abolition of police and prisons. The less simple, less articulate answer is that to pursue prosecuting and potentially incarcerating other people is inconceivable to me, even when they have hurt me more than I could have ever believed possible. Because of this, I can only vocalize what I want in negative and inherently impossible terms: that all I want is for it to never have happened. The prospect of being a participant in other peoples’ incarceration is as alien to me as anything could be, to the point that I can only conceive of it in childish terms—how silly and strange it would be to have a group of people incarcerated at my expense when doing so would do nothing to fix the damage they have already so thoroughly done.”

The emergence of transgender ideology has brought about the erosion of women’s rights and safety in every way. On this Substack, we have reported on this relentlessly. Wild radical political theories have become the basis for dismantling legal, social, and moral safeguards that protect women. The removal of barriers was then normalized and the seriousness of harms to women minimized by credentialed individuals presented by institutions as intellectuals. These credentialed people are supposed to be smarter than us, deeper than us, and know better, when what they’re really good at is stringing together many words in ways that confuse and make others doubt even the most basic, universal truths.

On the right, the anti-abortion movement remains bold. Defeating Roe v. Wade wasn’t enough. In some states, abortion rights are practically outlawed. Supporters of the movement are working overtime to take mifepristone off the market.

Through it all, rape remains universally condemned. It stands as the single type of harm against which women can demand society’s unyielding support and protection.

Not anymore. Last weekend, the dam broke. The progressive left is now trying to take down this final frontier of women’s rights.

In Anna Krauthamer, progressive media has found a credentialed, intellectual martyr to indoctrinate women into believing that sexual assault against them is less important than prison abolition, a doctrine that leftists have been pushing for quite some time. The ideology came to light in 2020 with the call to Defund the Police. It led to the rise of a wave of Democratic state attorneys like Chesa Boudin, George Gascon, and Pamela Price of California, who were best known for refusing to prosecute violent criminals and releasing them back onto the streets. Crime became so damaging and rampant under their watch that Boudin and Price were eventually recalled, and Gascon lost his re-election bid.

Yet, the prison abolition movement still has legs. Local government attorneys like Alvin Bragg of New York and Larry Krasner of Pennsylvania who are more interested in coddling rather than punishing criminals are still serving.

But my reason for writing this article is not to debate this movement or our criminal justice system. The problem I want to raise is that the supporters of this movement are pushing to end incarceration completely, even at the expense of women’s lives and safety. In 2022, the Massachusetts Bail Fund posted $15,000 for the release of Shawn McClintock, a convicted sex offender facing rape charges. Within weeks after his release, McClintock kidnapped, raped, and strangulated another woman at knife point.

Prison abolitionists know that sexual crimes against women are the biggest obstacle to their cause. The Prison Research Education Action Project, which published Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, admitted in their Handbook that they invariably encounter the question of “what about the rapist?” The admission was followed by an offer of data from their own studies that “genuine solutions to the problem of rape and other violent crimes are in no way related to imprisonment of offenders,” along with multiple doses of gaslighting, crocodile’s tears, and supportive words by wolves in sheep’s clothing. I will not digress to recount all their lunatic thoughts. You can read them in the embedded link to their Handbook.

To advance their movement, prison abolitionists must overcome the strong and unassailable public support against rape. For good reasons, no amount of intellectual or ideological arguments on their part would change public opinions. So, they needed a poster child–a rape victim who would voluntarily forgo pursuing imprisonment against her rapists and tell us letting raprists go free is what rape victims really want.

Enter Anna Krauthamer. So passionate is she about prison abolition, she felt in her bones that she could “never participate in any chain of events that might send someone to prison.” Not even men who violently raped her for an entire night. Doing so would be akin to “jumping off the building.”

Reading her article, I felt a depressing sense of deja vu. So many elements of her article mirror how transgender ideology slow-boiled women into giving up their own rights, dignity, and safety at the altar of left-wing illiberalism. All is done through obfuscation to blur the line of moral clarity.

We should know by now that the first rule of woke is to redefine words. It comes as no surprise, then, that Krauthamer sought to create confusion and doubt by questioning the common definition of rape.

“Much of what complicates the solutions that institutional and legal processes offer is that they are contingent upon instances of violence meeting standardized definitions of and timelines for violence to be processed that often diverge from a victim’s own experience of harm.”

She went on to argue:

“If sex is full of gray areas, then so is sexual violence and how it can be experienced. But institutional frameworks for processing sexual violence are black-and-white. They demand empiricism about something that can’t always be enumerated. Similarly, rape’s social meaning and our understanding of what kind of injury and harm it is has always been unstable.”

I’m now hearing in my head the question that has beguiled us all including the U.S and U.K Supreme Courts: What is a woman?

Her entire paragraph is giving me flashbacks to the heap of gaslighting by trans activists:

• Sex/gender is a spectrum. (Rape is full of gray areas–perhaps a spectrum to be experienced.)

• Societal definitions of “man” and “woman” are too black and white. (Institutional framework for processing rape is too black and white).

• Biology is insufficient. A woman cannot be defined. It is an essence. It is a vibe! (Rape can’t always be enumerated. Empiricism doesn’t work. Who knows? Maybe rape is just a vibe too.)

• Sex/gender is a social construct. (Rape’s meaning is social.)

• Gender identity is fluid. (Our understanding of rape is unstable.)

To be fair, Krauthamer did not say that rape is not an act of sexual assault. Rather, she shifted the definition away from the act itself and expanded it to focus on the rape victim’s personal feelings. The same way that trans ideology shifted the definition of women away from biological fact and expanded it to focus on gender identity.

“When you yourself struggle to articulate what rape even is—what kind of injury it is, how to measure its impact on a life—it becomes easier for others to speak for you.”

This is a page directly from the transgenderism playbook (or maybe it’s the woke playbook): No one is denying biology! But biology is not the be all and end all. Some people have an inner sense of gender. If they aren’t allowed to express their gender identity, other people would define them by their birth sex!

I have no doubt rape victims experience a wide range of emotions. Few would dispute either that different rape victims would feel different emotions. But let’s be clear on one thing: “Rape” is not defined by how the victim experienced it or how she processes it afterward. Commonly understood, rape is sexual intercourse without consent.

The definition is indeed black and white, even if the details of rape cases differ and whether consent is clear in any given case. This meaning of rape is not unstable, even if the victim filters her experience in her own mind to process what happened to her.

But in the illiberal progressive playbook, facts and common understanding are inconvenient and irrelevant. They want to remake our society based on how individual people feel.

“When our most powerful institutions tell us what healing and repair are and aren’t, and how the versions of them that are available should make us feel, turning to the realm of the experiential and the emotional counters that wish fulfillment logic of the state and institutions.”

Say what?

Deciphering this paragraph of word salad was a challenge. As best as I can understand, it is a complaint that our criminal justice system does not deliver healing and repair, and therefore Krauthamer chose to look inward to her own emotions.

What I will say is this: “The realm of the experiential and the emotional counters” sound eerily like “my truth.” As we have learned from our push back against gender ideology, when everyone has their own truth, women as a collective class will no longer have a shared common ground, and women’s rights will cease to exist. That is the end result for rape if prison abolitionists get what they want to chase their utopian dream.

Another tool Krauthamer deployed from the trans/woke playbook was exploitation of female empathy.

“I don’t want to ruin the lives of my rapists and I don’t know if they have children.”

Won’t someone please think of the rapists?! If not, won’t someone please think of their children???

I don’t want to give more air to the phrase “suicidal empathy”. Conservatives are currently using this phrase to paint women as defective leaders and the cause of all our social ills. But when a gang-rape victim like Krauthamer chooses not to report the violent crime against her because she doesn’t want to ruin her rapists’ lives, it’s hard to describe her choice as anything but suicidal empathy.

But her empathy gets even more preposterous.

“My empathy for these men is perverse, its recipients undeserving. Maybe it simply stems from the fact that (as I’ve been told) I’ve always been too nice, too apologetic, which is a characteristic itself I feel tired of apologizing for.”

Hear that? That’s it! She’s done apologizing for it. She knows her empathy is perverse, but she will not be shamed anymore for empathizing with men who harmed and traumatized her. This is the new female empowerment! Making sure male rapists who violently assaulted women will get away unpunished is the new female empowerment.

Even the trans movement didn’t go this far.

Yet, like trans activists who express tremendous sympathy for those who identify as trans, including convicted rapists and murderers housed in female prisons, Krauthamer’s empathy does not extend to other women who are now put at risk of harm by the men who raped her because she let them off the hook.

On X, many raised this point. By not reporting her case, her rapists are free to sexually assault women again. They might’ve even been emboldened, having gotten away once. Krauthamer admitted that her own friends had told her the same.

Interestingly, in her answer to this problem, she never addressed the possibility that locking up her rapist would stop them from raping other women. She went right on to dismiss the criminal justice system as being inadequate for the victims. It is as though these men raping other women is already an inevitable outcome; one that she expects women to accept. The only remaining issue is why prison is not the right response.

In any case, if her perverse empathy for her rapists had led to more women being raped, her justification is to demoralize and discourage women by telling them that the criminal justice system too often fails rape victims. The system offers women too little or nothing at all. Therefore, victims shouldn’t even try.

To the rape victims who nonetheless have the courage to brave the process of going through trials to put rapists behind bars, Krauthamer switched to gaslight mode. Incarceration, she said, is just the legal system and institutions telling rape victims what they should want (ie punishment of their rapists by incarceration). She said that this is not what rape victims really want, because rape victims’ feelings are complex and vary.

In other words, reframe your trauma.

It cannot be that rape victims actually want to see their rapists jailed. Different rape victims want different outcomes for their rapists. Different rape victims have different emotional needs. If you’re a rape victim, what else would you like to see instead to happen to your rapists? Maybe something gentler and kinder? Like rehab? Or therapy? A symposium on feminist theories might help them finally see the light.

Krauthamer wants to free victims not from their rapists, but from the criminal justice system that she claims is deceiving them into believing that imprisonment of their rapists is justice delivered.

“The disparity between what institutions tell us we should want or desire as rape victims, or what they tell us was or was not our real experience of sexual assault, creates a cognitive dissonance that is confounding to reconcile.”

Why does this sound so much like trans activists’ argument that society deciding who is a man or a woman is wrong because it does not give room for various TQ2Sqwerty++++ to reconcile with their “authentic self”?

What I find confounding is why Krauthamer thinks our legal process for dealing with criminals is the system telling rape victims anything. The courts and our laws do not exist to validate the feelings of victims of rape or any other kinds of crime. They’re not there to answer each and every individual victim’s wish, although the imprisonment of their violators may help some victims to feel a sense of justice served.

Our criminal justice system is a public institution to hold criminals accountable for breaking laws. It is there to enforce the social contract among everyone living within a society so that members of the society can rely on a basic level of trust and assurance to engage with one another. It exists to relieve and prevent individuals from taking justice into their own hands when someone breaches the social contract. Without it, trust will disappear. Our society will fracture, and everyone will be out for themselves.

Krauthamer either misunderstands the role of the court, or she was gaslighting when she said, “Unless rape can be recognized and adjudicated by a court, the rape has effectively not occurred.”

Maybe she feels that way. But this is flat out not true. Our courts are not the arbiters of the truth of whether a rape did or did not occur. Rather, our courts are tasked with deciding whether an accused perpetrator had committed rape beyond a reasonable doubt. In plenty of cases, the accused escaped punishment on procedural grounds, police errors, having money to hire a better lawyer, or other reasons. The failure to convict says nothing about whether the crime did or did not happen. All it means is that the legal criteria for conviction have not been met.

The flaw in Krauthamer’s argument is that she misrepresents our courts as the source of truth and deliverance, like God. She then faults the courts for failing to provide either because they cannot give each individual victim what she needs emotionally to heal.

“Even if the rapists are found guilty and sentenced to prison, the victim’s damage won’t go away and it won’t change what they did to her.”

What Krauthamer wants is for the entire ordeal of her gang-rape to have never happened. She said this in her article. I can say with absolute certainty that this is what every victim of every crime, rape or otherwise, wants. But this is asking for the moon. Nothing in the world can make that happen. Rejecting our criminal justice system because it cannot work magic is juvenile.

In the rest of her article, Krauthamer delved into her feelings. That part of the article reads like a stream of consciousness essay through which she is still trying to resolve her grief and find peace, interspersed with excuses and justifications for why incarceration is not the answer.

Maybe writing this article was cathartic for her. Maybe it’s her way to seek readers’ affirmation of her choice. I don’t know. I’m not a psychologist.

What I want to know is why The Nation decided to publish it. For sensationalism? For clickbait? If it were an article exploring the various different feelings experienced by rape victims, it might’ve offered the public insights into their struggles. As it stands, though, it is but one woman’s complicated thoughts about a crime done to her, aggrandized by a fervent zeal for a political cause. It is akin to a manifesto of a madman or a serial killer, which gives us hints it contains revelations about motives. But in fact, it offers nothing. Maniacal self-explanations never do. They only ever show us the writer’s mind is twisted and obtuse.

I want to be very clear that I’m not equating Krauthamer to serial killers. Despite my criticisms of her article, she is still a rape victim. My disagreement with her reasoning does not diminish the trauma she suffered. I’m deeply sorry and saddened to learn what happened to her. I hope she finds peace. After what she has endured, she deserves our sympathy.

The Nation, however, does not. The publication of her article contributes nothing to stopping rape, improving our court system, or advancing constructive political discourse. The only thing it does is to create doubt among women about one of their most sacred, basic human rights. It exploits women’s empathy, including Krauthamer’s. Its purpose is to break down the last frontier of women’s rights in service of a radical ideology. It is propaganda.

For all her education and credentials, Krauthamer is a rape victim whose reasoning is shaped and clouded by her still ongoing struggle to come to terms with her trauma. Her views are confused. She thinks she is acting to uphold a principle.

But as someone likely old enough to be her mother, I want to offer a bit of advice to young women. There are times when it is admirable to sacrifice oneself to uphold principles. Soldiers die defending their countries. Defenders of freedom endure torture for their cause. Standing for what you believe, no matter the cost, can be noble.

For women, there is one important caveat: if the sacrifice for your cause involves sexual gratification of men, then what you’re doing is not fighting for your cause. You’re being used. This is especially the case if your sacrifice of sexually gratifying men dehumanizes you.

And rape dehumanizes.

Krauthamer thinks sending her rapists to jail will accomplish nothing. Readers, I ask you: What do you think allowing her rapists to remain free will achieve?

If they knew she had voluntarily refrained from reporting them, would they thank her? Would they feel guilt and remorse and apologize, or would they smirk and think she’s a fool?

Would it embolden them to prey on others just like her again?

What do you think?

Finally, women who are rape victims might have a host of reasons for not coming forward to report the assault. Shame, fear, mental fragility from trauma, reluctance to relive the incident through the legal process, self-blame, a desire to forget, or not wanting to see the perpetrator again. The list goes on. Krauthamer is right that the emotions of rape victims are complex. No one should blame them if they’re unable to report the rape and press charges.

But if you’re a victim, the opportunity to report the case and see your rapist imprisoned is what society can offer to show that it stands with you, not him. Whatever the outcome of the trial, you should have no illusion that his punishment alone will make you whole. Your rapist damaged you. Unfortunately, you’re the only one who can repair and heal yourself. The road to recovery may be long, difficult, and painful. No one, whether courts or society, can walk it for you. All they can offer is a hand to help you reach the next step. Sometimes, they fail and lead you to stumble.

That doesn’t mean going to court against your rapist is worthless. A criminal trial may return to you a measure of power. It is a chance for you to exercise power over him who sought to dominate you. It puts the pen in your hand to write a different ending so that the sexual assault is not the last thing that happened in that ghastly ordeal. You can reclaim agency and control, which may give you a sense of closure.

A conviction in a criminal trial will also strengthen your ability to recover financial damages in a civil suit if the rapist has the means and you choose to pursue it. Such restitution may be necessary to cover the costs of mental health and other treatments. Also, your willingness to report and navigate the litigation process will demonstrate to you your courage and toughness, which may help facilitate your recovery.

Locking up your rapist will prevent him from harming more women. Krauthamer’s empathy is misplaced. Despite being raped, she still has an abundance of compassion and empathy to waste on the men who harmed her. It is not a rape victim’s responsibility to save other women. But if you have compassion and empathy within you, give it to other women instead and protect them from having to go through what you went through.

Reporting crimes and sending criminals to jail is not only about what the victim gains or whether imprisonment is effective. The system is part of our social contract, which maintains trust so that we can function as a collective. That trust depends on all members participating and abiding by the rules, even if the rules are imperfect. Reporting crimes is one way you contribute to keeping your society intact.

Do not be fooled by the progressive left’s push to destroy protections for women against sexual assault. Prison abolitionists offer no data or evidence that their proposed alternatives are effective. All they have are statistics that the current system is flawed. But if the system is inadequate, the solution is to find ways to improve it. The answer is not to sacrifice women’s safety, life, and humanity.

I’m a listener to the wonderful podcast, The Rest is History. Recently, they aired a four-part series on Jack the Ripper. If anyone needs a reality check and a reminder why the solutions offered by prison abolitionists for managing men who commit violence against women are unrealistic and naive, give it a listen.

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