The XX Factor: What women really think.

Alaska’s High Rate of Rape

A new message to Sarah Palin popped up on YouTube this weekend. The video features young girls begging that she not "undo everything they (the girls' feminist mothers and grandmothers) fought for." What stood out to me was the statistic that "women in Alaska get raped over twice as much as women in the rest of the country." It's true.  

Alaska has struggled with a high rape rate for years, especially among its rural population. According to an FBI report in 2007, the rate was 77.4 per 100,000 people, which is 2.58 times higher than the national rate of 30 per 100,000.

The video also claims Palin has done nothing to reduce the high rate of rape and doesn't care about violence against girls and women. It's worth noting that the problem existed long before she made the jump from hockey mom to political figure. But is there anything to the criticism?

Last year, Amnesty International blamed the federal government, along with state government, for the high sexual assault rates among Alaska Native women. At the state level, the report cites the difficulty state troopers, a group of 240 commissioned troopers, have patrolling the large state. Responding to a call can take hours, or even days, the report found. In 2005, troopers received a call from a village 150 miles away in which a man had beat his wife with a shotgun and barricaded himself in the house with four children. Troopers arrived more than four hours later and after the man had raped a 13-year-old Alaska Native girl.