A condom with teeth?! What in the...

Last night on my train ride home, I picked up a newspaper and in my venture through it I found a rather disturbing article. It was titled, Anti-rape condom at World Cup. As I read on, I learned that this condom was developed by a South African doctor, Dr. Sonnet Ehlers, who was determined to give away 30,000 of these babies for free before the World Cup.

You might be thinking, how generous of her, but allow me to elaborate. The idea behind this anti-rape condom, is that the females would wear them during the excitement of the much anticipated World Cup soccer tournament as a precautionary measure. The Rape-aXe, as it is being called, features tiny hooks that would latch onto an attacker's penis, causing them great pain and would ideally allow the victim to escape. These little hooks can then only be removed at a hospital which would cause an attacker to be identified as such. The only thing is that all of this is based on a theoretical situation yet in any given attack I would have to assume that there could be drastically varying circumstances in many respects such as the surroundings, the people present, and the psychological state of anyone involved. What I'm trying to get at, is this to me seems like a mad scientist testing their invention on the ignorant masses.

The article mentions that Dr. Ehlers' inspiration was drawn from a rape victim who allegedly said, "If only I had teeth down there." This communicates to me that Dr. Ehlers, who must see many rape victims in her line of work, has allowed her emotions to cloud her judgement and create such a device. Rape is the product of a much deeper psychological issue and should be dealt with as such. As the cliche goes, you can't fight fire with fire. To solve the real issue behind the dreadful act of rape, we must first search for the cause which must be a deeper psychological anguish within attackers. Creating a condom that bites back (literally) will only feed that fire and make them angrier. This was my initial thought: what if the attacker is so angered by the pain they are feeling, that they inflict an even more enraged assault to the victim?

The article does mention that Women rights' activists have brought this up as a concern along with the fact that there is a possibility that some women could potentially use it against innocent men. I hadn't thought of that but, this is a very real and dangerous repercussion to this product. The truth is, there are too many subjective circumstances that this cannot possibly be the solution to rape especially considering that it doesn't actually prevent anything and would only cause more problems. I do admire her passion for such a cause and applaud the creativity but there is simply too many negative contributing factors that makes this product too much of a wild card to provide any real solution.