A Little Good News From The Old Neighborhood

In the old days, I used to waste my time trying to have reasonable conversations on Reddit.  And I once pointed out that I've never heard of a woman or women dragging a random man or boy into their car, sticking things up their butts, and murdering them.  Yet the reverse happens so often that it doesn't always make the news. And because Reddit is Reddit, someone sent me an anonymous link to "Reddit cares," a thing where you can get mental health resources, because I made that totally obvious point.  The suggestion being that I'm unhinged for noticing the rampant violence that men do against women and girls.

In yet another example of the same super-obvious point, a 13-year-old girl was allegedly abducted by an adult man in Texas, as reported in the video above.  After two days of being sexually assaulted and driven around, she found herself in my old neighborhood, Cambodiatown, in Long Beach, California.

This is a very high-crime area, where anything could have happened to her aside from the kidnapping.  But it's also an actual neighborhood, where people know each other.  We even know a lot of our local homeless people in the area.  There are some really good people there.  I'm so glad she was able to get helped.

What bothers me about this story is that yet again the same old magic eraser of police work was used.  She was listed as a runaway despite being forced into a car at gunpoint.  The girl was 13 years old, and the authorities still found a way to not look for her, to blame her and assign her full agency for her own plight at the hands of a grown man.