But is it? Is it a no-brainer? Because it seems like the media has been bending over backwards over the last year or so to not only excuse rapists, but even attack the people who say that the rapists were wrong to rape. Actually that wouldn’t do, you can’t just come out and say that it’s OK to rape, so instead they say that it’s not rape, and then condemn people for saying that it is.
And if you weren’t familiar with the phrase “blame the victim” before you very well should be now, because victims are taking the full brunt of the blame in any high profile cases. The typical reaction we see when a girl gets raped is, “What, you got raped? Well... it’s probably your own damn fault. Slut. Why are you trying to ruin that man’s reputation with your false accusations?”
We tell girls not to dress too provocatively, we tell them not to walk through certain neighbourhoods, we tell them to learn martial arts, but funnily enough we never simply tell men, “Hey, don’t rape!”
Unfortunately for women the bar for reporting rape is very high in our society. I don’t mean legally – although the situation ain’t great there either – I just mean in terms of people’s reactions to it. If you’re a virgin nun, and are in your church – which happens to be in the country, not a rough part of the inner city – and you get assaulted by two guys, and even though you scream your head off nobody hears you, then yes, we’ll accept that you were raped. Probably. Anything less than this, however, and we’ll have doubts. (As a society, I mean, not me personally.) Say, for example, the scenario is the same except that it was only one guy instead of two, there will be some people who’ll be thinking, even if only in the back of their minds, “Are we sure that she really fought back as much as she could? It was only one guy, after all...”
We are so programmed to not take women at their word when they report rape that we simply won’t listen unless we can convince ourselves that they were totally, completely, inarguably innocent of any wrongdoing. If there’s any form of slip-up, or anything she could have possibly done differently, we have no sympathy for her. None. If a girl meets a guy in a bar and they hit it off and they start to make out, and then later on they go back to his place and she tries to stop but he won’t take no for an answer, she’s got very, very little hope of anyone taking her side. We will go out of our way to try to see his point of view. “But she was leading him on!” we’ll cry, “She shouldn’t have been making out with him in the bar in the first place! What a tramp, making out with a guy she didn’t even know!” The sad part is that if she’d just made out with a stranger in a bar and that was the end of it we’d view her as being “fun,” but if she gets raped later by the same guy she’s no longer “fun,” she’s a “slut.” The subtext is that she deserved it. There’s no room for nuance in this debate: you are either 100% innocent of any blame at all, not even blame we could invent, or it’s your own fault.
Whereas, in my mind, there’s no room for nuance the other way: If you rape a girl, you’re in the wrong, no matter the circumstances. Regardless of how she was dressed, or what came before, or even what came after, if you had non-consensual sex (or activities of a sexual nature) with a girl you raped her, and you were wrong.
Maybe the worst example I can think of is the Steubenville case, where two guys spent an evening dragging an incapacitated drunk girl around town, raping and molesting her and capturing it all on their cell phones to post on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. What I’ve just written should induce shock and horror in all of us at what happened to that poor girl. What ended up happening, instead, was a lot of reaction in Steubenville’s residents and the media blaming the girl for her own rape, and worrying about how these two boys’ reputations were going to be ruined, and the effect it would have on the football team the boys belonged to.
This is one example, there are others. We, as a society, seem to be so worried about the possibility of false accusations of rape that we refuse to take rape seriously at all, and as a result women are far less likely to report it – and who can blame them, since the ones who do come forward are not only blamed but “slut shamed” for their supposed and assumed role in the event?
This rant was prompted because of a post on Lux Alpatraum’s Tumblr, in which she, in one sentence, summed up the concept so much better than I could in a long, rambling post:
If we’re not willing to label people as rapists, then, sure, we can live in a world without rapists. But it won’t be because we’re in a world where no one is getting raped.
After I published this post I saw a study from the Government of Canada called The Gap in the Gender Gap: Violence Against Women in Canada, which had the following quote:
ReplyDelete"Public education for everyone is important, however, up to this point significant emphasis has been put on teaching women and girls about the risks of victimization. Yet we do this for no other public safety issue. For example, the response to the problem of drunk driving is not to educate the population about how not to be hit by a drunk driver. Current public education campaigns are beginning to address themselves to potential perpetrators and bystanders—encouraging bystanders to intervene if they see the potential for violence. This is an important shift away from a framework in which victims are held responsible for the crime committed against them."