Politics in Brief

by SOCHIE NNAEMEKA

Octo­ber 2009

Direc­tor Roman Polanski’s recent arrest in Switzer­land has stirred the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity.  The terms of the debate are neb­u­lous.  Polanski’s “artist” sta­tus has, in some minds, exempted him from pun­ish­ment.  Oth­ers believe that his very iden­tity as an artist has made the crime unfath­omable. More Polan­ski sup­port­ers believe that his inno­cence or guilt is entirely irrel­e­vant as 36 years in refuge, dur­ing which he has remar­ried and become a father, have nec­es­sar­ily been heal­ing– as if it is he, and not his vic­tim, who deserves the heal­ing time.  The frame­work of this debate is increas­ingly ambigu­ous because we as a soci­ety have failed to edu­cate our­selves about sex­ual abuse. This faulty frame­work also hints at an egre­gious moral pub­lic­ity cam­paign that paints crim­i­nals with a sin­gle brush stroke, lead­ing us to rede­fine the act per­pe­trated to con­form to our under­stand­ing of the perpetrator’s iden­tity or social value.

Closer to home, Yale released its 2008 Cam­pus Safety Assess­ment Study, which noted a jump in “forcible sex offenses includ­ing forcible rape”– from 4 reported in 2007 to 11 in 2008.  The uni­ver­sity should be enter­tain­ing ways to dras­ti­cally reduce the num­ber of such offenses. Our first goal should always be to actively main­tain mod­els of jus­tice and to cre­ate safe com­mu­ni­ties founded on egal­i­tar­i­an­ism. Whether in the work­place, in the dorms, or on our streets, an empha­sis needs to be placed on the individual’s own­er­ship over his or her non-commodifiable body and enforc­ing zones of sex­ual free­dom and trust.

Sochie Nnae­meka is a senior in Yale Col­lege. She is the Pol­i­tics Edi­tor for Broad Recog­ni­tion.