“Well, she was walking alone home drunk from the Strip at 2 a.m. I mean it is awful that happened, but she was being pretty stupid.”
Don’t walk alone at night. Don’t wear revealing clothes. Don’t walk in poorly-lit areas. Don’t walk home drunk. This is the rhetoric that we are met with when discussing sexual assault, and this is the rhetoric that we use when discussing how to prevent it. Notice a pattern here?
This type of dialogue is an example of rape culture. According to rape culture, rape is a fact of life and women are responsible for protecting themselves from it. Women who wear the right clothes, go to the right places and associate with the right people, conventional wisdom holds, won’t be attacked. We are even more likely to blame women who are sexually active, as if a woman who has sex with some people should be open to having it with anyone. In reality, of course, rape is the fault of the rapist and no one else. The true blame for the crime should always be on the person who committed it, not on the victim. Feminism fights against the societal epidemic of victim-blaming.
Victim-blaming is a problem in discussions of rape in ways that it is not a problem in discussions of other crimes. When a car is robbed, no one suggests the burglar is less guilty if the victim left his car unlocked, even though we all agree that locking one’s car is good advice. On the other hand, once rapists are accused, they are often found not guilty because attorneys use victim-blaming rhetoric to defend them in court. Women are sometimes afraid that they will be seen as slutty or irresponsible if they admit to being raped, and so decide not to report their rapists in the first place. And many victims know the person who assaulted them, such as in instances of date rape. Partly as a result of these pressures, in the United States only 46 percent of rapes are ever reported and only 3 percent of rapists are ever imprisoned.
This attitude is even visible on UT’s campus. For example, in response to sexual assaults on campus, we receive emails and text messages from the university warning us about what not to do or how to stay safer. However, we don’t receive messages saying “friends don’t let friends roofie someone,” nor do we receive explanations about what consent means and why it should be honored. “No means no” is a great place to start in discussions of consent, but a much more important guideline is that “Yes means yes” — if both parties do not give “enthusiastic consent,” neither should move forward. Only this latter type of dialogue will really end the problem.
Instead of asking why women do things that lead to them getting raped, we should be asking why men perpetrate rape. The same parts of our culture that tell women they’re “asking for it” if they wear short skirts tell men that women in short skirts are fair game, whether those women give consent or not. We project males to be animalistic and controlled by instincts. We don’t hold them to standards because the conventional wisdom holds that they can’t help themselves. This stereotype is limiting and rather insulting to males.
Feminism seeks to change the conversation from focusing on how women can keep from being raped to how we can keep men from raping. We understand that it is important to be aware of risks and try to keep yourself safe. We don’t recommend walking home drunk and alone late at night. But sexual assault is never the victim’s fault. Blame needs to be placed solely on the individual responsible for committing it.
