On the Saturday, August 3, Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC, after a discussion of the sentencing of rapist and kidnapper Ariel Castro, host Melissa Harris-Perry made an over the top comparison between the house Castro built to hold his sexual assault victims and institutions like colleges and the military.
As she segued from the Castro case to a discussion of the problem of sexual assault in the military, the MSNBC host began:
The twisted house that Ariel Castro built was designed to protect himself and keep his victims silent and hidden. And in some American institutions that were designed to promote intellectual and political freedoms, we find instead that this same culture of institutional self-preservation at the expense of survivors of sexual violence on college and university campuses, where victims' concerns go unaddressed and perpetrators go unpunished.
She added:
And in the U.S. military where an epidemic of sexual assault is met with an unwillingness to protect soldiers who have been victimized and a reluctance to prosecute their cases outside the chain of command.
Harris-Perry turned to one of her guests, retired U.S. Marine Captain Anu Bhagwati, as she posed:
Now, Anu, I just kept thinking of the many conversations we've had about chain of command and about sexual assaults in the military. No one is suggesting that four-star generals are Ariel Castro, but that notion of, like, build the house to protect the perpetrator and not the victims just felt very familiar, felt resonant in this story.
