Featured Item
2009 OFCC Calendar
| Dispatch: Reported rapes soar in Columbus |
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| Written by Jeff Garvas | |
| Monday, 31 March 2003 | |
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Columbus has the highest rate of reported rapes among the largest U.S. cities, federal crime statistics show. Data for the first half of 2002 -- the most recent available for cities nationwide -- as well as for all of 2001, show a rate here twice that of Los Angeles and four times as high as New York City. And Columbus is no standout among Ohio cities. Rates of reporting are higher in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Dayton -- higher even than here. Christine Long, who was raped 15 years ago in her Grandview Heights apartment and now lives on the Northwest Side, blames the state's sentencing laws. The man who raped her in August 1988 had been released from prison eight months earlier after he had served seven years of a 15- to 75-year sentence for raping two other women. Eventually Long bought a gun. "It was the first time I felt I could go to sleep.'' In the mid-1990s, Long championed a successful move to ban weightlifting equipment in prisons and jails. She supports a measure currently in the Ohio legislature that would allow some Ohioans to carry concealed weapons. Click here for information on how concealed carry reform can reduce this victimization of women in Ohio. |
