Comments Elsewhere

Amp,

Thanks for this post.

This puzzled me, though:

In virtually any context other than a crime committed by US soldiers, a 14 year old girl who was raped and murdered would be called a girl, not a “woman.”

That’s probably true, but why is it important? Is raping a woman, then murdering her and burning her body to cover up, any less monstrous than doing the same thing to a “girl”?

The language might not provoke the same level of outrage amongst the average newspaper reader: sexual assault against children or adolescents tends to be treated as if it were more of an outrage than sexual assault against adult women. But if it doesn’t provoke the same level of outrage, then that’s a problem with the audience, not a problem with the newspaper.