One of my students was sexually assaulted in the entrance foyer of her building last week. Russians generally have nice enough apartments, but they're in hideous crumbling concrete Soviet blocks for the most part, with the mailboxes beaten to shit and hanging free, graffiti all over the stairwells, and elevators that are alternately full of piss and shit or don't work at all. Often the lightbulbs aren't replaced.
This is because people own their own flats; nobody but the state owns the building, and so unless the people get money together or fix things themselves, they won't get fixed.
So she went in the front entrance, got grabbed by a guy with a knife, who drug her up into the stairwell and made her strip and tried to force her to give him a blow job. She refused so he cut the top of her head with the knife -- finally someone heard the screams and came out to investigate -- chased the rapist away and out into the street.
Imagine opening the door when your daughter rings the doorbell and she's standing there naked, hysterical, and covered with blood. . . Jesus.
Now somehow, they found the guy and arrested him; something about he went to hide in a ratty lowlife bar around the corner, and the cops somehow knew he would, and went and found him there, threatening to beat the bartender within an inch of his life if he didn't point out everybody who'd come in in the last thirty minutes.
Open and shut case, more or less; bloody fingerprints and all that, and he has a record, and apparently there are about five unsolved rapes cases much like this one.
The girl wasn't seriously hurt -- though she thought she was going to die from all the blood, scalp wounds always bleed like a bastard, and of course there's the usual mental trauma.
The cops, by way of solace, I suppose, told her a story about a recent case they had -- a 54 year old man was sitting at a bus-stop and four young guys came up to rob him, and then beat him up, and then drug him back into a park and gang-ass-fucked him.
Now why exactly four young men would want to gang-ass-fuck a 54-year-old man, when this is essentially a city full of young women, I don't understand exactly; okay, I understand rape is supposed to be a crime of violence, not of sex, but hell, it's not like they were locked up in prison or something. Maybe they just got out.
Anyway, too embarrassed to call the cops, he nearly died of internal hemmorhaging before admitting what had happened in the hospital.
Is there a lesson there? Uh. . . well. . .
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