Rash of Drug Rapes in Kitchener, Ontario

From the Kitchener Record:

Teenage girls as young as 14 are seeking counselling for sexual assault after being given date-rape drugs, a local crisis centre says.

This month, counsellors took an increased number of calls about Rohypnol, Ketamine and GHB, commonly-known as date-rape drugs, said Anna Haanstra, spokesperson for the Kitchener-Waterloo Sexual Assault Support Centre.

The agency gets about 100 crisis calls a month, she said. This month, about a dozen calls were from young Cambridge women between 14 and 18 or from their mothers. This figure represents an increase in calls from Cambridge, Haanstra said.

"The fact that we have seen an increase shows us it's an issue beyond the cases we have seen," she said. "Most women don't know to call us."

Drug-assisted rape isn't just a big city crime, a college crime or a Spring Break crime. It's spreading and it has to be stopped! I strongly suggest that prosecuters add attempted murder charges to rape charges whenever they can, and that they always push for the maximum sentence because of the dangerous and degrading nature of these crimes.

Update: In Reno, police reported that 34 out of 205 sexual assaults in that city in 2004 were drug-assisted. That's over 16 percent!