Quote:
Originally posted by AGDee
I have worked with kids who were worried that they'd gotten pregnant under such a circumstance and were, therefore, having to tell their mother about it. Some attempted suicide instead, leading them to be admitted to the hospital, when the story then came out.
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This is true, but I think that if the girl in the letter had gotten pregnant from the encounter, the letter-writer would have mentioned it. Instead it sounds like the daughter told her mother pretty soon after the event. I don't know any 16-year-old girls who would do that if the sex was consentual. Some of them might if they had gotten pregnant, but they would definitely wait until they knew for sure whether or not they were pregnant.
Quote:
Originally posted by kappaloo
Why would this mother write Dear Abby? Well, I think this thread shows how unwilling society is to acknowledge date and marital rape. The mother could honestly be confused. Maybe Dear Abby wasn't the right way to solve her question, but that doesn't make it any less likely.
One more time:
As the letter reads, it is rape. If you think the latter is false or wrong, that's different. To be honest, I'd love to think that this letter was written by some 13 year old girls who just wanted to see if they could get in Dear Abby - because then no girl was raped.
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My personal thoughts on Dear Abby are that she doesn't usually use letters she's gotten from people (and obviously when she does, she edits them severely). Most of the time, I think, she takes scenarios that are important or common enough that she gets asked questions about them fairly often and either makes up a letter or cobbles several of them together. Of course, this is all just a guess on my part -- but you know, it's kind of like those advice columns in Seventeen magazine. I could never believe that any teenage girl would write in to ask Seventeen, "This boy is flirting with me and I think he's going to ask me to Prom, but I hate him! How can I turn him down gently????" when, you know, it would take a month or two for their answer to appear in the magazine, way too late for any help. The answers in published advice columns aren't for the people who write the letters -- they're for other people who are going through the same situation.
For those of you who are saying that this letter doesn't sound believable because "why would you even have to ask if this is rape? of course it is!" -- look at this thread. There are plenty of people who would hear about a scenario like this and immediately dismiss it as probably being consentual. And sadly enough, there are still plenty of people who think of rape as ONLY being some stranger jumping out of the bushes and attacking.