A 15-year-old girl comes to Belfast for a holiday. Walking with friends after a night out, she is brutally raped in the forecourt of a garage, while her friends are humiliated and beaten with an iron bar by the rapist's accomplice. Then the rapist drags the already hurt and traumatised girl up a laneway and rapes her again. He takes her mobile and calls her mother to boast about what he has done.
It is a horrific and terrifying story.
The girl, her friends, her mother and her family will need all the love and understanding their families and friends can provide, and will hopefully also get support and counselling from voluntary and professional services. The depth of their distress is too painful to imagine. Families of teenage girls just venturing out into the adult world must be particularly disturbed. The rape of any woman terrifies all women.
This rape happened in nationalist west Belfast and local politicians swiftly condemned it.
The SDLP's Patricia Lewsley pointed out that it must have been planned and that "these sick criminals will strike again". The safety of the community required that anyone with information should contact the police as quickly as possible, she said.
Sinn Féin MLA Michael Ferguson said: "I would urge local women not to travel home alone and for God's sake to be vigilant. We have to find these depraved animals."
Sinn Féin's response is troubling. This young girl was not alone. Her friends, two young men and another young woman, were rendered powerless.
Putting the emphasis on what women should do to avoid rape ignores the reality, that rapists prey upon women in many situations. Babies are raped. So are elderly women. Women are raped by husbands, boyfriends, brothers, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and strangers. They are raped in their homes, in cars, in lanes, in parks, at parties and in workplaces.
Of course women can and must be careful but the truth is that the potential victims of rape can't stop it.
Most women blame themselves for rape – agonising over what they could have done to prevent it. This is true when the victim is a young woman who dressed up, went to a party, had too much to drink and took a lift home with someone she fancied. It is also true of women raped at gunpoint and women raped by gangs. It is true of women raped during the genocide in Rwanda.
Rapists are not "depraved animals". They are men and boys.
The men who carried out the attack on Friday night must, indeed, be caught, as they are clearly very dangerous. The only responsible advice from community leaders and politicians to anyone with any information in these circumstances is to give it to the police.
This is what the Belfast Rape Crisis Centre is urging people to do. The PSNI is investigating this rape – along with the 95 other alleged rapes reported to it since April. No other authority can do it. Third party reports are just not a viable option. This is urgent. Sinn Féin's equivocal position is deplorable.
This rape was particularly shocking but, as Eileen Calder of the Belfast Rape Crisis Centre points out, rape is much less rare than people like to think.
There have been several other brutal attacks in west Belfast alone in recent times and the BRCC is aware of others of similar ferocity across the north which weren't reported to the police and didn't reach the public eye.
Most days, the women working at the centre hear from someone new who has been raped. Some have been raped recently, some many years ago. In 2003, the Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) report – carried out in the Republic – found that almost six per cent of women and almost three per cent of men surveyed had been raped before they were 17. Overall, 42 per cent of women had experienced some sort of sexual abuse or assault in their lifetime and one-in-10 had been raped. Almost half of the 3,000 women and men surveyed had never told anyone.
Rape needs to be taken on at every level. We need to challenge the vicious sexism which underlies it. We need to back rape crisis centres. We need to change the laws. But right now, we need those who know who the rapists are, to tell the police, immediately. To do otherwise is to collude with them and to enable them to rape again.
