Hi Genie:
I have to agree with you about violence. I had occation to pose a question to Judge Posner, the founder of the Chicago School, Ecconomic Theory of Law, when he proposed, in a rather idiodic book, that rape was a crime of sexual market place... that his reflection that the instance of rape in Japan proves we who feel rape is a crime of violence are wrong.
He stated that Japan has a mesogenist culture and a low instance of rape, proving that it is a crime of sexual market place, as he called it. I pointed out that there are cultural differences which create a different kind of alianation in Japan, so violent crime in general was less common than in other industrial societies, yet one can find a corelation between the instance of violent crime and rape, and in the communities which had more violent crime in Japan, you have more rape.
This is not to be arguementative about the issue, and not to desexualize the crime, I understand Peg to mean that the sexual objectification aspect adds an aspect of harm to the crime which goes beyond the harm of other assaults, in that it robs a part of sexual identity and replaces it with a sexualized objectified identity.
As to the range of ages of those harmed in Bangladesh, I am not surprised, the more I work on this issue, the worse it turns out to be, the more I don't understand how the State Department can say this is not an instance of genocide, but sporatic and unpolitically connected as they clame in the country reports. Please demand of your governments involvement in helping the people of Bandladesh. They are far away, but they are humans like you.
Larry