Who Gets to Rape?
- Ash A Milton
- 20 hours ago
- 20 min read
How Power in the USA Decides Which Men Have the Right to Violate Women and Children
Let us begin with an uncomfortable truth: under patriarchy, women and children have historically been property. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Legally, economically, sexually—property. And the question that patriarchal power structures have always answered is not how to prevent violence against this property, but who has the right to access it, use it, and damage it with impunity.
This is the framework we must apply to understand America’s rhetoric about protecting women and children from sexual violence. When politicians, particularly white male politicians, invoke the specter of dangerous immigrants and criminals threatening “our” women and children, they are not expressing concern for women’s safety. They are asserting a property claim. They are declaring: these women and children belong to us, and outsiders may not touch them. The corollary, left unspoken but enacted daily through our institutions, is that insiders retain full access rights.
The empirical evidence for this framework is overwhelming. When we examine who actually commits sexual violence against women and children in the USA, and who faces consequences for it, a clear pattern emerges: those with institutional power—political power, religious authority, state power—rape and abuse with near impunity. Those without such power, particularly Black and brown men, particularly immigrants, are surveilled, prosecuted, and punished far beyond their statistical representation among perpetrators.
This is not a failure of the system. This IS the system, working exactly as designed. The issue has never been about preventing rape. It has always been about who is allowed to rape.
The Lie of the Dangerous Outsider
In January 2025, President Donald Trump—a man found liable for sexual abuse in civil court, a man accused by more than two dozen women of sexual assault, a man who bragged on tape about grabbing women “by the pussy”—returned to the White House promising to protect American women from immigrant rapists.
This is not irony. This is patriarchy functioning precisely as intended. Trump can simultaneously be a perpetrator and a protector because protection under patriarchy has never meant preventing rape. It means controlling access. The outrage is not that women are violated; the outrage is that the wrong men are doing the violating.
The statistics expose this lie immediately. Between 2012 and 2018, in Texas—the only state that tracks immigration status at arrest—undocumented immigrants were arrested for sexual assault at roughly half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens. A national study covering all 50 states from 1990 to 2014 found that undocumented immigration does not increase violence; the relationship between undocumented immigration and violent crime was generally negative.
Yet the administration mobilized the military to the border, deployed ICE agents into communities, and allocated $170 billion for immigration enforcement. Not because immigrants commit more sexual violence—the data proves they commit less—but because they are committing ANY, and they do not have permission. They are violating the property rights of American men, who reserve the right to rape American women for themselves.
The Men with Permission
Who does have permission? The answer is visible in every institution of American power.
Start with the presidency itself. Donald Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women. A federal jury found him liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll—the judge explicitly stated this met the definition of rape. Trump was convicted of falsifying business records to conceal payments to Stormy Daniels after what she describes as a non-consensual encounter while his wife recovered from giving birth. His response to the Access Hollywood tape, where he described his pattern of sexual assault, was not contrition but defiance: “It’s a very scary time for young men in America.”
And the voters said: yes, you may rape.
Sixty-two million Americans, knowing all this, gave him permission to return to power. Because under patriarchy, powerful white men have always had the right to rape. That is what power means.
This permission is not partisan. Joe Biden was accused by Tara Reade of sexual assault in 1993 when she worked in his Senate office. Seven additional women accused Biden of inappropriate touching and violation of personal space. Biden acknowledged the women’s discomfort but denied Reade’s assault allegation. Democratic voters, like Republican voters, weighed these accusations and elected him anyway.
Bill Clinton’s presidency provides an even starker example. Paula Jones accused Clinton of exposing himself and requesting oral sex when he was Arkansas governor. Kathleen Willey alleged he groped her in the Oval Office. Juanita Broaddrick accused him of rape in 1978. Clinton settled Jones’s lawsuit for $850,000 with no admission of guilt. He was impeached not for sexual misconduct but for lying about a consensual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky—a relationship that, given the massive power differential, raises its own questions about meaningful consent. Democrats defended him. His popularity remained high. His wife, despite being humiliated publicly, was expected to stand by him, which she did—because women in proximity to powerful men are required to accept their violations as the price of that proximity.
The bipartisan nature of this permission structure reveals something crucial: this is not about political ideology. This is about power itself. Both parties protect their powerful men. Both parties’ voters accept sexual violence as the cost of political victory. Both parties demand that women subordinate their safety to men’s ambitions. The permission to rape is granted by power, not party.
Then examine his Cabinet. Matt Gaetz, nominated for Attorney General, faced allegations of sex trafficking and having sex with a 17-year-old. A witness testified she saw him with an underage girl. He withdrew only when the political cost became too high, not because what he allegedly did was disqualifying. Pete Hegseth, now Defense Secretary, was accused of sexual assault; he paid the woman to stay quiet. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now HHS Secretary, was accused of groping his children’s babysitter; he apologized via text but dismissed it as having “skeletons in my closet.” Linda McMahon faces a lawsuit alleging she enabled sexual abuse of teenage boys in WWE.
What links these men is not just accusations. It is immunity. They faced consequences only when political calculation demanded it—and even then, minimally. Gaetz withdrew but was not prosecuted. Hegseth paid money but was confirmed. Kennedy dismissed his actions but leads a major federal agency.
They retained their power, their positions, their access. Because they have permission.
The Holy Right to Rape
If political power grants permission, religious authority sanctifies it. More than 5,300 Catholic priests and clergy in the United States have been accused of sexually abusing children. The number approaches 7,000 when incomplete investigations are included. These men raped children—overwhelmingly boys, but also girls—for decades, and the Church’s response was not to stop them but to protect them.
Only 3% of accused priests were convicted. Only 2% went to prison. Of 4,392 priests accused of abusing 10,667 children, only 384 were even charged. The Church paid over $4 billion to make victims go away, but almost no one went to jail. Nearly 1,700 credibly accused priests now live freely in communities across the USA, more than 500 within 2,000 feet of schools and playgrounds. They are not in prison because they had permission. Men of God may rape God’s children. This is their divine right.
Southern Baptist leaders show the pattern extends beyond Catholicism. Nearly 400 have been convicted of sex crimes against more than 700 victims since 1998. A 1984 survey found 39% of Protestant clergy admitted to sexual contact with congregants, 12.7% to intercourse. Research shows 90-95% of clergy sexual exploitation victims are women. These are not isolated incidents. This is systematic access granted by patriarchal religious structures that position men as spiritual authorities and women and children as their flock—a term that does not accidentally echo property ownership of sheep.
In 33 states, clergy are exempt from mandatory reporting laws. The law itself grants them permission to keep secret what they know about child rape. They answer to no one but God, and God, conveniently, is silent.
The State’s Monopoly on Rape
If religious authority sanctifies rape, state power monopolizes it. Law enforcement officers commit sexual violence at staggering rates, with systemic impunity that makes even the Church’s protection of priests look half-hearted by comparison.
Between 2005 and 2015, a law enforcement official was caught in a case of sexual abuse or misconduct every five days. The Cato Institute found sexual misconduct generates more complaints against police than any issue except excessive force. In six years, roughly 1,000 officers lost their badges for rape, sodomy, sexual assault, child pornography, or sexual misconduct. But no government entity tracks this data systematically. The true number remains deliberately hidden.
When officers are caught, consequences are minimal. Of police officers charged with child sexual abuse, 83% were convicted—but only 61% received prison time.
A full 24% received only probation, fines, or community service for raping children. Half of those imprisoned served less than five years. Officers convicted of sexually assaulting adults fare even better: fewer than half were even fired from their jobs.
Consider domestic violence. Forty percent of police families experience domestic violence—four times the rate of the general population. In the LAPD investigation of 225 officer-involved domestic violence cases, 30% of accused officers were promoted. One officer who raped his girlfriend received an “official reprimand.” Later, he received another reprimand for inserting a gun into her vagina without consent. He was not prosecuted. He was not fired. Because men with badges have permission. The state grants its enforcers the right to rape, and the state protects its own.
Women who report police sexual violence are dismissed as “police groupies.” Victims’ credibility is questioned based on their alcohol use, their mental health, their sexual history, their neighborhood. The same tactics used to discredit all rape victims are weaponized with particular force when the rapist wears a badge, because questioning him means questioning the state’s authority.
And the state’s authority to rape must not be questioned.
The Promising Young "White" Men
If police officers represent state authority granted permission to rape, young white men with “promising futures” represent another protected class: those whose potential value to society—specifically, their athletic or academic achievement—outweighs the harm they cause to women. The pattern is consistent, the language nearly identical across cases.
In 2016, Brock Turner, a Stanford University swimmer, sexually assaulted an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. Two graduate students witnessed him thrusting on top of her motionless body. When they shouted, Turner tried to run. They chased him down and held him for police. He was convicted of three felony counts of sexual assault. He faced up to fourteen years in prison. Judge Aaron Persky sentenced him to six months in county jail. Turner served three months. The judge’s reasoning: “A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him.” On him. Not on the woman he raped. On him. Because Turner was a talented swimmer with Olympic aspirations, and prison would interfere with those aspirations.
The same year, David Becker, an eighteen-year-old high school athlete in Massachusetts, digitally penetrated two unconscious classmates at a house party. Both women woke to find him assaulting them. One pushed his hand away multiple times before he stopped. His friends called him “David the Rapist.” He was charged with two counts of rape and one count of indecent assault. He received no jail time. The case was “continued without a finding,” meaning if he completed two years of probation, the charges would be dismissed entirely.
He would not have to register as a sex offender. He would have no criminal record. His attorney explained to the court: “We all made mistakes when we were 17, 18, 19 years old, and we shouldn’t be branded for life with a felony offense. The goal of this sentence was not to impede this individual from graduating high school and to go onto the next step of his life, which is a college experience.”
In 2025, Candon Dahle, a Brigham Young University baseball pitcher, was arrested for sexually assaulting a girl from the time she was seven years old until she was twelve. Five years of repeated rape of a child. The victim told the court: “My earliest memory of the abuse is 7 years old, but I know he was touching me before that. Almost every time we were together, Candon was touching me under my clothes. I was just 11 years old when he covered my mouth because he didn’t want the family close by to know what he was doing.” Dahle was initially charged with felony lewd conduct with a child. Through a plea deal, the charges were reduced to “felony injury to a child.” He was sentenced to 180 days in jail and eight years of probation. He will not register as a sex offender. The prosecutor noted that the mediation to reach this deal was “the longest I’ve been involved in”—hours of negotiation to ensure that a man who raped a child for five years would not be labeled a sex offender.
The logic is always the same. These young men have futures. They have promise. They are athletes, students, achievers. They made a mistake—twenty minutes of action, in the words of Brock Turner’s father. A youthful error. Boys being boys. To punish them would ruin their lives, destroy their potential, brand them unfairly. The women they raped are nowhere in this calculation. The child Dahle assaulted from age seven does not factor into considerations of fairness. The two women Becker violated while they slept are not granted concern about their college experiences, their futures, their lives. Only the rapist’s future matters. Only his potential. Only his promise.
Compare this to Cyntoia Brown, sentenced at sixteen to fifty-one years for killing the man who purchased her for sex. Compare it to Sara Kruzan, sentenced at seventeen to life in prison without parole for killing the man who had been raping her since she was thirteen. Compare it to Alexis Martin, sentenced at seventeen to twenty-one years to life for her involvement in the death of the man who trafficked her—even though she was being raped in another room when he was shot. These girls had no futures that mattered to the courts. Their promise was irrelevant. Their potential was not considered. They were property that fought back, and property that destroys property must be destroyed in turn.
But Brock Turner had a bright future in swimming. David Becker deserved his college experience. Candon Dahle should not be burdened with sex offender registration for raping a child for five years. The hierarchy is clear. White men with institutional affiliations—universities, athletic programs, respectable families—are granted futures. Their potential outweighs their violence. Black and brown girls who kill their rapists have no potential worth preserving. Their lives can be sacrificed to teach the lesson that property must not resist its owners. The young men’s lives must be protected to teach the lesson that men with promise have the right to use women’s bodies, and that right must not be infringed by consequences.
Who Is Not Allowed: The Racialized Border of Rape Rights
If white men with institutional power have permission to rape, the system must aggressively punish those who rape without permission. This is where race becomes explicit.
Black men receive federal sentences 13.4% longer than white men for identical offenses. They are 23.4% less likely to receive probation. Black Americans are imprisoned at five times the rate of white Americans. This disparity exists despite the fact that Black women experienced a 47% increase in rape and sexual assault victimization rates between 2022 and 2023. Black women are raped at higher rates, yet Black men are incarcerated at higher rates. The contradiction resolves when you understand that the system is not designed to protect Black women. It is designed to punish Black men for violating white patriarchy’s property claims.
The history is explicit about this. Lynching was justified as protecting white women from Black male rapists—while white men raped enslaved Black women with total impunity, a right enshrined in law. After slavery, the rape of Black women by white men continued largely unprosecuted, while accusations against Black men, true or false, resulted in execution without trial. Emmett Till was murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman—a woman who later admitted she lied. His murderers were acquitted. This is not ancient history. The woman admitted her lie in 2017.
The system has not changed; it has refined. Now Black men are not lynched but mass incarcerated. White men are not granted explicit legal right to rape Black women, but they are granted immunity through institutional protection. The Catholic Church’s victims are disproportionately Black and brown children. Police sexual violence targets women of color, undocumented women, sex workers, intoxicated women—women whose lack of social power mirrors their lack of protection.
The border, then, is not just physical. It is the border of who belongs to white patriarchy. Black and brown men do not belong, so they may not rape white women. Immigrant men do not belong, so they may not rape American women. But white men with institutional power belong fully, so they may rape anyone beneath them in the hierarchy. Women of all races. Children of all races. Their secretaries, their parishioners, their arrestees, their patients, their students. The hierarchy grants them access.
When Property Fights Back
What happens when women and girls refuse their assigned role? When they resist the men granted access to them? The answer reveals the system’s true function with brutal clarity.
In 2004, Cyntoia Brown was sixteen years old. She had been forced into prostitution by a 24-year-old man who called himself “Cut Throat.” He raped her, beat her, and told her she was born a whore. He sent her out to bring back money. On August 6, 2004, she was purchased by Johnny Allen, a 43-year-old white real estate agent. Allen took her to his home. Brown, terrified and conditioned by months of abuse, believed Allen was reaching for a gun. She shot and killed him.
Prosecutors did not see a child defending herself from a sex trafficker. They saw a Black girl who had killed a white man, and they charged her with first-degree murder and robbery. She was tried as an adult. In 2006, at age sixteen, she was sentenced to life in prison. She would not be eligible for parole until 2055—when she would be 67 years old. For defending herself against a man who purchased her body, a Black child received a harsher sentence than most of the Catholic priests who raped thousands of children. She received a harsher sentence than the police officers who raped women in their custody. She received a harsher sentence than any of the men in Elected Officials and Cabinet members accused of sexual assault.
Brown’s case is not unique. It is a pattern. In 1994, Sara Kruzan was sixteen years old when she killed George Gilbert Howard, the man who had groomed her since she was eleven and trafficked her for sex since she was thirteen. She was tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. At her trial, she was not permitted to testify about the years of abuse. The jury heard that Howard had a family and a business. They did not hear that he raped children. Kruzan served eighteen years before California Governor Jerry Brown released her in 2013. She was finally pardoned in 2022—twenty-eight years after she killed the man who had been raping her since childhood.
In 2013, Alexis Martin was fifteen years old. Her trafficker, Angelo Kerney, forced her into prostitution starting at age fourteen. Martin and others planned to rob Kerney. During the robbery, someone else shot and killed Kerney while Martin was being raped in another room. She never fired a weapon. She was not present when the shots were fired. Prosecutors charged her with aggravated murder anyway, arguing she was the “mastermind.” They tried her as an adult. She was sentenced to twenty-one years to life. In 2020, after Kim Kardashian featured her case in a documentary, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine granted her clemency. She had served seven years. But her clemency was conditional—she remained on parole with an ankle monitor, forbidden to leave the state. In 2022, she violated parole. She was sent back to prison, where she remains today, facing another fourteen years to life for a crime committed when she was fifteen.
The pattern is unmistakable. Cyntoia Brown, Black. Sara Kruzan, Black. Alexis Martin, mixed race. All were girls. All were being raped by adult men. All killed or were involved in the killing of their rapists. All were tried as adults. All received sentences that would keep them imprisoned for decades or life. All had their status as rape victims minimized or excluded from consideration. And all required extraordinary intervention—celebrity advocacy, documentary films, national media attention—to achieve even partial justice. Most trafficking victims who kill their abusers never receive such intervention. They die in prison.
The disparity is not accidental. It is definitional. These girls were property that destroyed property. Under patriarchy, this is the ultimate transgression.
A white man who rapes a child has merely exercised his authority. A girl who kills to escape rape has committed murder.
The system responds accordingly: maximum punishment for unauthorized resistance, minimal punishment for authorized violence. A priest who rapes dozens of children receives probation. A police officer who rapes a woman in custody receives community service. A girl who kills the man raping her receives life in prison. The math is clear. The hierarchy is explicit. Property does not have the right to defend itself from its owner.
The Victims the System Abandons
If the system exists to regulate who may rape rather than to prevent rape, then certain victims are structurally excluded from protection. They are victims of authorized rapists—men with permission. And women who belong to authorized rapists have no meaningful recourse.
Consider what happens when an undocumented woman is raped by her American husband or boyfriend. The Trump administration has systematically dismantled programs that helped such women. The U visa program—created specifically to allow undocumented victims of domestic violence and sexual assault to cooperate with law enforcement without fear of deportation—has been undermined by policies allowing ICE to arrest people in courthouses and health centers.
A 2025 survey found 75% of immigrant abuse victims are now afraid to contact police. Seventy percent are afraid to go to court regarding their abusers. Human Rights Watch concluded that these policies “benefit abusers, making it less likely that they will be apprehended and prosecuted.” This is not a bug. It is the point. The system grants American men—citizens with power—the right to rape undocumented women with impunity, because those women are unprotected by design. They do not belong to the protected class. They are available.
The same logic applies to women and children raped by priests. They can report to the Church, which protects its priests. They can report to police, who often defer to religious authority. By the time they sue, decades later, statutes of limitations have run out. The Church pays settlements with no admission of guilt. The priest continues his ministry elsewhere. The victim receives money but no justice, because justice would require acknowledging that men of God do not have the right to rape children. And patriarchy cannot concede that point, because it would destabilize the entire hierarchy.
Women raped by police face perhaps the most impossible situation. They are told to report crimes to the very institution that employs their rapist. When they do, they are met with skepticism, blame, and often retaliation. The officer’s colleagues investigate. The officer’s union defends him. The prosecutor, who works with police daily, decides whether to charge. The judge, who depends on police testimony, decides the sentence. At every stage, the state protects its monopoly on authorized violence, including sexual violence.
What Protection Means Under Patriarchy
The word “protection” reveals its own violence when we examine what it actually protects. The Trump administration promised to protect women from immigrant rapists. It did not promise to protect immigrant women from any rapists. It did not promise to protect any women from American rapists, police rapists, or clergy rapists. The protection is not for women. The protection is for the right of powerful men to maintain exclusive access.
This is why the administration can spend $170 billion on immigration enforcement while cutting funding for domestic violence programs. This is why it can nominate multiple men accused of sexual misconduct for Cabinet positions while claiming to protect women from migrant crime. This is why it can dismantle U visa protections while invoking murdered women’s names at rallies. None of this is contradiction. It is clarity.
The system protects the prerogative of men with power to rape while punishing men without power who rape.
It protects white male access to women and children of all races while restricting Black and brown male access to white women.
It protects the right of the state, the Church, and the ruling class to violate those beneath them in the hierarchy while maintaining the illusion of law and order through aggressive policing of the powerless.
Women and children are not protected. We are distributed. American women and children are distributed to American men. The rhetoric of protection is the rhetoric of ownership.
When Trump says he will protect “our women,” the possessive is not accidental.
When white supremacists march chanting that they will not be “replaced,” they mean their access to white women will not be replaced by the access of nonwhite men. When a church warns of threats to “family values,” it means threats to patriarchal family structure—the structure that grants fathers and husbands authority over wives and children.
Naming the System
We must name what this is. This is not a broken justice system. This is not a failure to protect women and children. This is patriarchy functioning exactly as designed. It is a system that has always treated women and children as property, and rape as primarily a property crime—a violation not of the victim’s bodily autonomy, but of the male authority’s proprietary rights.
Under this system, the question has never been “how do we stop rape?” The question has always been “who is allowed to rape?” And the answer, encoded in every institution, is: men with power.
White men. Citizens. Police. Priests. Politicians. Professionals. Fathers. Husbands. Boys with Futures. These men have permission.
Their violence is authorized. Their victims have no recourse because to provide recourse would mean challenging the fundamental structure of patriarchal power.
The men without permission—immigrants, Black men, poor men, men without institutional protection—are punished savagely, not because they commit more rape, but because their rape violates the property rights of authorized rapists. This is why an undocumented immigrant with no criminal record can be detained indefinitely while a police officer convicted of child rape receives probation. This is why a Black teenager accused of rape faces years in prison while a Catholic priest accused by dozens of victims dies in a comfortable rectory. This is why a President found liable for sexual abuse can appoint a Cabinet full of accused abusers.
The system is not broken. We are not failing to protect women. The system is working perfectly to distribute women to men according to hierarchies of power, and to punish unauthorized access while facilitating authorized access. Rape is not a violation the system seeks to prevent. Rape is a privilege the system grants to those who have earned it through power.
What Feminist Resistance Requires
If this analysis is correct—and the empirical evidence overwhelmingly suggests it is—then feminist resistance must reckon with what we are actually fighting. We are not fighting to reform a system that has failed to protect us. We are fighting to dismantle a system that was never designed to protect us, that cannot protect us without ceasing to be what it is.
This is why White Liberal Women have been declared the greatest threat to National Security in the USA - to the Patriarchy.
This means we cannot appeal to the state to protect women by increasing police power, because police are among the most prolific authorized rapists. We cannot appeal to religious institutions for moral authority, because those institutions grant their authorities the right to rape. We cannot appeal to law and order, because the law orders women as property and authorizes our violation by men with power.
We must build something else entirely. Accountability systems outside state power. Support networks for victims that do not require police reports. Economic independence that does not trap women in marriages to violent men. Immigration policies that do not abandon undocumented women to abusers. Mandatory reporting laws without clergy exemptions. Federal tracking of police sexual misconduct. Elimination of statutes of limitations for child sexual abuse. Actual prison time for priests and police who rape.
But most fundamentally, we must stop accepting the premise that women and children need male protection. Protection is the language of property. It assumes we belong to someone who has the authority to grant or deny access to us. Feminist liberation means refusing that framework entirely. We do not need protection. We need power. We need the power to defend ourselves. The power to leave. The power to speak and be believed. The power to prosecute our rapists regardless of their institutional position. The power to end careers, to revoke authority, to imprison those who violate us.
Until then, the question will continue to be answered the same way it has always been answered: by power, for power, in service of power. The men with badges will rape women they arrest. The men with pulpits will rape children in their congregations. The men in high office will rape their subordinates. And the men with none of these protections—Black men, immigrant men, poor men—will go to prison for doing the same things, because they committed the unforgivable crime of raping without permission.
This is not justice. This is not protection. This is patriarchy. And it will not reform itself. It must be dismantled, completely, before any woman or child is truly safe.
And yet, this need not be permanent. When the fight is over—and it must be fought—we will need to take care of the boys. Not the boys who raped. Not the boys who were granted permission. But the next generation. We must raise boys who are taught to feel the entire wonder of human emotions without shame. Boys who cry, who fear, who need, who connect. Boys who are taught that girls are autonomous humans just as they are—not property to protect, not territory to conquer, not resources to access. Boys who understand that their worth is not measured by dominance, that their futures do not require someone else's subjugation, that their humanity does not depend on someone else's dehumanization.
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This analysis is grounded in comprehensive federal crime data, peer-reviewed research, and investigative journalism from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Institute of Justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Human Rights Watch, and extensive reporting from The New York Times, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Associated Press, and others.