Honoring a Rape Victim as More Than a Statistic : Crime: We must be better informed and protected in this plague that strikes another woman every six minutes.

One year ago today, while most of us were sleeping and safe in our beds, Penny Nanopoulos was raped and murdered in her home. It is still hard to write these words or to accept that fact. We write to remember Penny and to let people know how violence can become, very suddenly, very real. The threat of such violence against women is something that we simultaneously fear and deny. We write because it is impossible not to be changed, and not to want to change others, when something you cannot bear even to imagine happens to your dear friend.

Penny was a lovely, strong woman, a fierce advocate for her beliefs, a civil-rights attorney who worked for the rights and dignity of other women. She won restraining orders for women beaten by their “loved ones,” fought for better support for homeless people and represented victims of sexual harassment and gender discrimination. She brought to her work an instinctive sensitivity to the people she represented and an intellectual integrity that promised a lifelong and productive commitment to civil rights. She was denied that chance, and we were all denied the contributions she would have made, by a violent, hate-filled man.

We do not know why Penny was killed, or by whom. We cannot change what happened to her, but we can try to make life safer for others and to increase people’s awareness of how common and how constant this kind of violence is.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae) have introduced bills in both houses of Congress--SB 15 in the Senate, HR 1502 in the House--that would help fight violence against women. The legislation calls for increased federal funding for domestic-violence shelters and rape-crisis centers, education programs to help reduce judges’ gender and racial biases in sexual-assault and domestic-violence cases, the creation of a national commission on violent crime against women, longer federal sentences for rape (in the Senate bill) and mandatory treatment for convicted sex offenders (in the House bill). Both versions contain a civil-rights provision that declares that violent crimes motivated by the victim’s gender are discriminatory and violate the victim’s civil rights, under federal law.

Rape (and murder) of women is not just a federal problem; it is a problem within each state, each city. Women (and men who care about women) all over the country need to insist that the police, the courts and the media respond with attention and outrage to this growing pattern of violence.

Some people in law enforcement are aware that these crimes are terribly common. But most of us are innocent of this knowledge until we or our friends become victims. After Penny was killed, we learned that there had been at least seven other rapes in her neighborhood in the previous few months--and no warnings were made by the police or the media.

In the last 10 years, reported rapes have risen four times faster than the total crime rate. No place is safe: Date rape aside, a woman is most often raped in her home or her workplace. The FBI estimates that a woman is raped somewhere in the United States every six minutes. The National Victim Center, in a recent study, reports that rape is much more common than that; they estimate that there are 1,871 rapes every day, more than one a minute. The number of rapes reported annually in the United States is five times that of West Germany, France or the United Kingdom and 10 times that of Mexico, Greece or Japan. We deny this, as a society, so completely that there is no national clearinghouse for rape statistics.

In Los Angeles, most rapes--even some serial rapes--don’t make the news. We can find no numbers on how many women are raped and then murdered. If the victim is murdered, her rape disappears from the statistics; she becomes a genderless victim of homicide, and the sexual hatred involved in taking her life disappears.

Our response of anger and fear as we learn of this reality is not hysteria; it is a righteous claim for a public commitment to ending this pattern of violence. Public knowledge about this crime is the first step toward revealing the extent of this crisis of violence against women, from which we all--women and men--suffer.

This commentary should not have had to be written. Penny should still be here. She should still be able to work in her garden, to cook wonderful Greek dinners for her friends and to work with great skill and commitment to further the cause of women in all aspects of their lives. Were she still here, we could be working with her, to get this legislation passed and to force public acknowledgment of the problem of violence in women’s lives.

There is nothing that will make Penny’s death easier to accept for her family and those who loved her. We can only remember, mourn and fight on--for her, and for women whose lives we may yet save.