Saturday 19 April 2014

Victim Blaming

And Supporting the Rapist/ Abuser

I did a post on rape culture reasonably recently, but to be honest, I barely scraped the surface of rape culture after rape. I touched on the objectification of women, and how that puts the blame of the victim, but I never really got into the nitty gritty of the subject of victim blaming.

I have been lucky enough as of yet, to be part of the two thirds of women who have not been sexually assaulted. However, I have also had the pleasure of men in vans, builders, and once a random guy on the other side of the road whistling, or beeping the horns as I walk by.

The one experience I had when I was around eleven or twelve which freaked me out the most was this, to get home from school, I catch a train, and then a bus, and to walk home from the bus stop I can either take a short cut through the woods or I can take the long walk around a narrow footpath and road (surrounded by woods on both sides anyway). And once, in broad daylight, before I even got to the woods, as I walked past the bus stop, a passenger in a car leaned out of his window and hollered at me "If you go into the woods, I'll rape you."

Gee, thanks sir. Needless to say, I took the road.

But I've spoken about rape culture, and it is not from these experiences that I wish to draw. It was instead the aftermath, when, the next day at school I told a few friends what had happened. Two out of the three I told were massively supportive, as the third appeared to be, until:

"What were you wearing?"

And she didn't mean it in a massively aggressive way. She wasn't outright telling me that being threatened with rape was my own fault. But in that careless sentence, she immediately pulled the blame away from the person at fault to the victim.

Often victim blaming after rape is not said in an aggressive way. It might be like the comment that the otherwise lovely Carrie Hope Fletcher tweeted:

"I'm trying to encourage people to love and respect themselves enough to know they're worth more than being treated like crap..."

This said in the concept of healthy relationships originally sounds okay, before you realise that in fact, by implying that the victims of abuse do not love and respect themselves, they are at fault. Victim blaming is not necessarily done by bad people, it is done by careless people who do not think through their words.

But sometimes it is done vindictively, when a person has access to all of the evidence and is well educated on a subject, and they still decide to blame the victim. This can be understandable in the sense that often, as rape and abuse is so often commited by people the victim (and so often teh victim's friends, aquaintances, family, workmates) it is difficult to fathom that a person you know and love could be guilty of this heinous crime. People often go into denial, and begin to defend the rapist/ abuser.

"He wouldn't do something like that."

Perhaps he didn't; perhaps you're right. But in standing by an alleged victim, you lose no moral ground if they are wrong. By standing by a rapist or abuser, you make the situation a million times more difficult if the victim is real - and the victims are so often real, that if the statistics were an experiment and women that lied about rape were results also - the women that lied about rape would be completely disregarded as rare anomalies.

Sometimes the media jump on the bandwagon - see what happened in Steubenville - and this leads to the general public deciding to jump on aforesaid bandwagon, leading large proportions of the world to begin victim blaming on the women and men abused in high profile cases. "Slut, whore, deserved it". 

There are even cases when taking a neutral stance can become victim blaming. If there is significant evidence, or if the abuser has admitted to doing the crime, then by saying things like "I'm not going to take an opinion because there isn't enough fact" casts so much doubt onto the victims story, making you an enabler for further abuse. Again, by rallying around the victim, you have nothing to lose. By rallying around the abuser, the victim has everything to lose and will lose it.

Victim blaming is what leads to so few women even coming forward to report crimes, with only 7% getting a conviction - and many of those do not end with the victim receiving any time of jail. And people wonder why so many women and men do not report rape.

Bella Fern xx

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