Susana Martinez’s administration (NM) wants rape victims seeking child assistance to prove they were raped.
Hints of this attack on victim began last March, when Martinez named April as Sexual Assault Awareness Month but added the word “forcibly” with rape, implying that some rapes were less legitimate than others.
Now, Martinez's administration has now proposed changes to NM applications for childcare assistance. Current policy protects mothers who are rape victims from having to deal with their assaulters in order to obtain child support. But the changes would make mothers prove that “forcible rape” had occurred.
The new policy would move the state “backward toward victim blaming,” say activists.
Raped women should not have to "prove" they were assaulted in order to care for their children. Tell NM’s Children, Youth and Families Department not to adopt these changes.
We, the undersigned, find it disturbing that New Mexico, which has a high rate of rape, would consider making life even more difficult for the victims of this devastating crime.
Field Director with Strong Families, Adriann Barboa, who once benefited from state-subsidized child care assistance herself, told the press she is “’saddened at the state's move to decrease access to a much-needed benefit for our women and families.’”
Others are justifiably outraged at the proposed changes and the compromising language being injected into the discussion about rape.
In another statement, Strong Families said that New Mexico’s “attempt to qualify differing levels of rape is especially egregious coming from the nation’s first Latina governor, a former tough prosecutor from southern New Mexico, and a prominent speaker at the Republican national convention. Leaders want to emphasize that rape is rape, period.”
Worst of all is the burden this policy change would put on victims, already left struggling economically to support children, having to also prove that the assault against them was “forcible” enough to qualify as rape in the state’s estimation.
Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check points out that some of these women have left violent partnerships, were date-raped, “were impregnated as a result of incest, or through other "non-forcible" but nonetheless equally violent and denigrating means of sexual violation.” It should be obvious that expecting these victims “to first re-engage with their abusers to seek child support, putting control of their lives back into the hands of someone by whom they were violated in the most profound sense of the term or to prove somehow they were victims of "forcible" rape or incest,” would be painfully unfair as well as downright cruel.
We request that the state reject these new policy changes and not move backward in its definition of rape, towards blaming the victims.
