Woman 92 victim of sex assault.Her eyes bright with fear,the 92-year-old woman could only whisper to police of "the terrible things" the man had done to her. A man ,Phoenix police say,who was just one of several people who'd used the frail old lady's home because she was too weak to resist.Police say Albert Pollarena, 47, sexually assaulted the woman over several days after moving uninvited into her townhouse near 35th Ave. and Indian School Road. "She was sweet,would say hello when she walked out to the cab with her walker," neighbor Elia Jimenez said. "But some bad people around here,prostitutes,drug people,took advantage of her." That is right from the paper. She was very alone and vulnerable,she was unable to prevent prostitutess and transients from sleeping in her home.One ran up a $500 phone bill.If a cop who checked on her every so often hadn't seen her in 3 weeks had not stopped there Sunday morning, this would still be going on.She said she hurt all over,the creep threatened to kill her if she told anyone,she was terrified. What I would'nt do to take a baseball bat to that sick bastard!!!That poor woman!!! There are some sick twisted scum out there.That just makes me sick.

in 1988, my 90 yr old aunt rachel was raped at gunpoint in her own home....the 3 men who did it stole money as well as other stuff from her house. ......then 6 months later, they came back, raped her again, and murdered her. it was the crasziest most horribly disturbing thing...

i know of a grandmother who was murdered by being stabbed in the eye repeatedly w/ a pair of scissors. there are a lot of rape & abuse cases in nursing homes, too. when i was young, i went to visit an elderly relative in a nursing home. i walked down a corridor & saw a frail old man being beaten by an orderly. i was horrified. i tried to tell several different adults, only to be told to shut up & mind my own business, if i didn't want a beating, myself. i also saw a dying man in a nursing home being flatly denied anything to eat before he died. he was hungry & requested food. "i ain't gonna feed you, fool. you're just going to die anyway," the nurse snapped at him. a relative & i went & bought the man a full dinner & sneaked it back into the nursing home. we fed it to him ourselves. people go on & on about child abuse, but nobody seems to give a shit about what happens to the elderly.

I guess old people aren't cute enough to get sympathy. Have any of you heard about or read this new book that claims rape is programmed in men's biology? Something about how it helps with the evolution of the species? I'm wondering how this book would explain the above cases.

it's called "The Natural History of Rape" and from what i've read about it, it's totally crock of shit. Incredibly bad science. Here's a good review of the book: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/29/rape/index.html In a probable answer to Rhiannon's question, I don't think that the authors would have much to say about this issue, as they believe rape is a hard-wired reproduction strategy above all.

I love old people and I think they're cute as hell, especially the habits and rituals they have. Nothing can explain why somebody would do any of those things to them, let alone to anyone. That book is full of shit. Rape is a crime of violence and power, not of sex and procreation.

I just want to know why the neighbors didn,t do anything,they sure sounded like they knew what was going on.I use to be a candy striper for a nursing home,it was so sad,I conviced myself that I put a little light in their lives,I probably didn,t.One real sweet woman,Pearl was her name,nobody ever came to see her,her daughter was killed in a car accident when she was in high-school and her husband had passed away.She had an old doll that she talked to,it was her daughter.I think about that sometimes,how scarey it would be to just be cast aside,old frail,with nobody to care for you.

Yeah. I get really paranoid about that sometimes. It must be terrible to e helpless like that, having known what it was like to defend yourself. Argh. That story really pissed me off. I want to go beat someone up now. That's no good.

It's not INCREDIBLY bad science. BAD SCIENCE has had some really fabulous standards set for it. Let's go with: dubious interpretations of material with dubious scientific basis to begin with. It's actually not an especially interesting or novel approach. I've been reading shit like this for years.

In Japan, people used to take the elderly to the mountains and throw them away - kind of like throwing out the trash - because they (the elderly) did not perform any valuable function within the village society. (Reminds me of 'The Beach')