Young Rape Victim a Symbol of Outrage : Comatose girl, 9, has become a focal point of Chicago black community’s concerns. But some doubt wisdom of using tragedy to highlight public issues.

She is 9 years old and blank to the outside world she once played in. She lies curled in fetal position in a rehabilitation clinic bed, under 24-hour watch by police guards. In the few waking moments that interrupt her fitful coma, her eyes open and eerie noises gush from her throat.

She is Girl X, the victim of a brutal assault and rape in a seventh-floor stairwell at Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project--and an unwitting symbol of outrage in this city’s black community.

In the two months that have passed since neighbors found Girl X unconscious--poisoned with gasoline and her belly scrawled with ink-stained gang signs--Chicago’s black leaders have raised more than $200,000 to help pay her medical bills and have cited her case as an example of a laundry list of social and cultural ills: the public’s inattention to sexual assault, the failure of police to devote adequate resources to inner city neighborhoods, the paltry coverage of ghetto crime by a mainstream media obsessed with the more middle-class and whiter trappings of the JonBenet Ramsey murder case.

“Girl X’s case teaches us that we need to look much harder at what happens to young girls and teenagers, even in the toughest neighborhoods,” said Toylee Green, who directs a sexual assault program for a South Side Chicago YWCA. “The reality is that girls are being assaulted in housing project buildings in this city and they’re not getting the attention that the Girl X case has got.”

“What’s unique in this case,” said former antiwar militant Bernardine Dohrn, who now heads the Northwestern University Law School’s Children and Family Justice Center, “is that there’s been such a clear and sustained response from the bottom up.”

Yet some activists who played a critical role in raising funds for Girl X and awareness of her plight are cautioning about how far the private dimensions of a tragic case can be stretched to highlight public issues.

“This is one situation where we decided that we were going to help,” said Marv Dyson, a radio station president who spearheaded the $200,000 fund-raising effort on behalf of Girl X. “But I think you get on shaky ground if you try to use this poor little girl’s tragedy to push some agenda that doesn’t fit.”

In the weeks since WGCI AM (a soul oldies station) and FM (a black contemporary format) began appealing for money to help Girl X and her family, Dyson has been deluged with calls from relatives of other young assault victims asking for similar aid. Dyson has turned down the requests, not because he is any less sympathetic or fails to see the symbolic ties between the cases, but simply because Girl X’s case is different--both in her savage treatment and in the primal state in which she was left.

“I appreciate what happens to all these victims,” Dyson said. “But this was unique. When you see her in that hospital bed, you get so sad and so [angry].”

Dyson himself has a 9-year-old daughter, yet like so many Chicagoans, the initial horrific report of Girl X’s plight on Jan. 9 passed him by. But columnists with the Chicago Defender, the city’s black newspaper, and the Chicago Sun-Times kept up public pressure--even as police investigators were unable to find any culprits (detectives have yet to make any arrests in the case).

When a morning drive-time disc jockey and a station personnel director showed him columns about the case on Jan. 30, Dyson was moved. The next day he told his staff the station had to do something. “We decided on a fund-raiser.”

Parking a mobile studio outside the hospital where Girl X lay, station DJs held a 16-hour on-air marathon. All day long, listeners showed up at the hospital bearing checks and cash. Even after it ended, the checks kept coming. Los Angeles Lakers star Shaquille O’Neal sent $2,000. Geraldo Rivera gave $1,000 and had Dyson on his show. Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan provided security to take Girl X’s mother to her clinic every day. Even at the clinic, black staffers drop by the child’s room, checking on her progress as if the child “was their own,” Dyson said.

Yet despite the black community’s instant embrace of Girl X, Dyson doubts that her case is any sort of turning point. “When this case dies away, it will be business as usual,” Dyson said. “I don’t see the mayor [Richard M. Daley] talking about it. I don’t see it stopping rapes. I don’t see police treating the less sensational cases any differently.”

The only evident spillover, other activists say, is fear. At the Cabrini homes, young girls “aren’t being sent out by their moms to the store at night,” said Cora Moore, a Cabrini tenant leader. “You don’t see the girls running around the buildings like they used to. Their mothers keeping them home. Now they know what could happen.”

Even that newfound caution, Moore worries, may not last. “You know what happens when people forget. Give ‘em a few months. Those youngsters will be out by themselves again in no time.”