Felix Rojas, 44, arraigned after video showed him performing sexual acts on unresponsive passenger
Authorities in New York have charged a man with attempted rape after surveillance video taken showed him performing sexual acts on an unresponsive passenger who was later determined to have died.
Police have been looking for suspects in the case for weeks, after footage captured two different people robbing the corpse of a man on a train traveling from Brooklyn to Manhattan, one of whom allegedly sexually violated him.
Felix Rojas, 44, was arraigned on Tuesday, three weeks after authorities said he abused the male victim inside a subway car. Rojas, who was arrested on Sunday, has also been charged with attempted grand larceny.
I’m responding a second time because I think this is an important point to make as a top-level response.
This is a fucked up take. This says that a rape victim must suffer, and if they aren’t suffering, then it wasn’t rape. Just, no. People process things differently. Some will be more and some will be less traumatized by being raped.
Forcing a particular experience onto a victim, saying they must feel a certain way, is just so incredibly problematic. A victim can feel whatever they feel and process a crime against them however they want. And the way they do so doesn’t change whether a crime was committed against them.
Edit: And with a very literal reading of the statement, it also says that if someone kills their victim after raping them, then it’s not rape—because there isn’t a living victim who is suffering. I’m sure that’s not what you meant, but it’s important to think about these things and how we convey them.
It doesn’t say that at all. What it does say is that it shouldn’t be considered rape if it was performed on a dead body, which makes sense since this type of stuff is usually considered “abuse of a corpse.”