“We are frightened all of our lives by the incipience of this violence: The rapist may be a stranger, or a man we thought we knew. The act of rape for women is of its very nature never predictable, never chosen, never a fight one has wagered on, always a surprise attack, and for no reason. In the moment of rape a woman becomes anonymous. Like all victims of terrorism, there is something awesomely accidental about her fate. She is like the duck flying in formation which the hunter chose to shot down – she appeared in his gunsight.”
SUZANNE LACY
Rape Maps
“The maps displayed in this mall are not to show where to go and where not to go – what to do and what not to do. The truth is that no place is safe. Children are raped in their homes by their fathers, women picked off the streets in broad daylight and raped in their beds at night. By exposing the facts of our rapes – the numbers of them, the events surrounding them, when they are happening, where, WHO IS DOING IT, we begin to break down the myths that support the rape culture.”
“In 1975 the number of forcible rapes in Los Angeles County exceeded 48 of the 50 states in the US. In a decade of increasing urban violence, LA has achieved the tragic distinction of ‘Rape Capital of the Nation.’ Projecting the current estimated rate of rape, nearly a million women currently residing in the county will have been victims of rape at least once during their lifetimes – an average of one in every three women.”
Suzanne Lacy's Three Weeks in May: Feminist Activist Performance Art as "Expanded Public Pedagody" by Vivien Green Fryd
It Is Always The Woman Who Is Raped, Deena Metzger