Should You Fight Back If Attacked by a Rapist?

Four women sit around a kitchen table, discussing sandwiches.
They are a diverse group.
Sophia, 54, is Native and has only been on the street for a year, since her husband died and she couldn’t afford to pay the bills. Juvette, 37, is African American and has been on the street for 12 years, while Lydia, who is white, has been out here for three years. Lastly is Jess, 38, who is Hispanic, has been out here for 15 years.
Today they want to talk about serial rapists — those men who prey upon the women on street.
These are rapists who attack over and over, counting on the strained relationship between the women and police, knowing that the women are less likely to report an attack to police for fear of being arrested for prostitution and that the police, historically, are less likely to care.
In Albuquerque, women who well sex on the street get raped about four times a year and many of the attackers are serial rapists. In fact, there are at least five serial rapists attacking women on the street at any given time. They are men of all ages and backgrounds. We know this because while the women rarely report the attacks to police, they will talk about them to Street Safe volunteers and we keep a list of such men, called the Bad Guy List. On the list at the moment is a bearded white man in his 60s who is known on the street as the Santa Claus rapist. Another is a well-dressed African American man in his 40s who is always described the same way— very nice at first only to change to a monster in an instant. A third is a Latino man in his early 20s who has been on the list since he was a teenager.
Because Street Safe keeps a list of such attacks, we also know that almost 15% of these serial rapists specially outfit their cars so they can more easily kidnap the women. They will weld the doors shut, disable the passenger door locks or make sure that once a seatbelt is secured, is can’t be unlocked. That kind of dedication shows that these men are not planning on stopping any time soon.
The only ones capable of stopping them are police. Yet, if the men are arrested, the system often fails the women, which is what happened when a serial rapist was arrested this past March.