Over the last few years there’s been a lot of publicity and discussion about police rape in New Zealand, including a damning report into how police respond to police officers who rape. ((In case you were wondering, they make the rapist one of the highest police officers in the country)) Given this you’d think the police would try, at least a little bit, to avoid looking like they’re blaming women who have been raped for their rape. You’d be wrong:
Police are warning young women against walking alone at night, after a Wanganui teenager was abducted and sexually violated on the weekend.
[…]“It’s a timely reminder to young girls that they shouldn’t be walking on their own,” Ms Mansell said.
“These types of attacks are rare but they do happen and girls who are walking the streets on their own at night-time are making themselves targets.”
I wanted to write less about rape, not because I don’t care, but because I feel like I was writing paint by numbers posts, where I assembled basic feminist ideas one after another.
1. The people who are responsible for rape are the rapists.
2. Blaming women for being raped is not acceptable.
3. If you tell women to modify their behaviour to avoid rape then you are placing the responsibility for rape in the wrong place.
4. Avoiding being out alone out night is a serious restriction on a woman’s freedom.
5. Anti-rape advice isn’t just victim-blaming, it’s also wildly inaccurate.
6. Most rapists know the women that they are rape.
7. Rape is most likely to happen in someone’s home.
8. A woman who walks home with a man she knows is at more danger from rape than a woman who walks home by herself.
9. Clint Rickards is a rapist. ((Not strictly speaking relevant for this particular paint by numbers post, but I wanted a number for it.))
I guess I’ll keep writing it till there are no longer people who need to hear it.
It’s your #3 I disagree with.
In my experience/opinion, protecting yourself against crime generally involves modifying your behaviour. Yes, it’s not fair–but it’s how it is. Locking your car should be unnecessary, but it isn’t.
While the post you quote is egregious, I do have a question:
How would you phrase an admonition to women to avoid behaviors correlated with a higher incidence of rape, without implying that you’re blaming the victim?
“Don’t walk alone late at night, that’s when the rapists come out and they’re less likely to bother groups”?
For me, the difference is twofold.
1) There’s a difference between proactive and reactive. Taking a self-defense course or carrying a taser is proactive. That is, it only comes into play if a woman is assaulted, and doesn’t involve modifying her behavior in all situations because of the possibility of danger in some situations.
Compare this to ‘don’t walk alone at night’ or ‘don’t dress in tight clothing’, which both affect the everyday lives of women in a restrictive fashion whether they’re ever assaulted or not.
2) Even when suggesting proactive solutions, care must be taken to be really goddamn clear that if a woman doesn’t take your suggestion, and she is assaulted or raped, she bears NO, NONE, 0% responsibility for that.
I know some people lock their car doors while they’re driving for fear of carjacking.
I don’t.
If I were stopped at a red light, and a dude jumped into my car, stuck a gun in my face, and carjacked me, I doubt that there would be many people excoriating me for not locking the doors, and it would be really clear that whatever happens, it’s the carjacker’s fault.
That’s the difference between crimes that affect men (or men and women equally) and crimes that affect women.
There’s nothing wrong with taking extra steps to be safe. I’m not critical of that choice at all. It’s just that whether you take those steps or not, when a crime is committed, it’s the criminal who commits it, not the victim.
—Myca
Did you intend for this to be a feminist-only thread? If so, the plug-in isn’t working.
There was a capitalization problem that prevented the plug-in from being activated. I’ve fixed it now, so this problem shouldn’t happen again in the future.
I do not identify as feminist. Please feel free to delete my initial comment; the post was not identified as feminist-only when I posted it. (I’m checking yes to get this through.)
SamChevre – the difference is in the type of behavior modifications women are supposed to make in order to be safe. A) They tend to be overly restrictive. Locking my car affects my life only minorly. Never walking alone at night removes a major part of my life, and one that is highly conducive to my continued sanity. B) When a rape happens, people tend to leap immediately to “What did she do/not do that got her raped?”, and there’s always something that she could have done differently. If I were to get raped on one of my frequent nightly walks, the fact that I’ve walked by myself at night for twenty years without a problem would be seen as no excuse for taking such a dangerous risk.
I’m sorry I didn’t get the plug-in right – can we not let the thread drift along this particular, predictable, line.
In theory letting people know that some behaviors are more dangerous then others isn’t a problem. However the suggestions always seem to restrict women and uphold traditional gender norms even as they ignore the most common sources of danger (friends and family) and focus on the more unusual (stranger danger).
I also think that as much as possible good practices should be embedded into our physical and social environment. Warning women not to walk alone is far less effective then providing living streets with lots of pedestrian traffic at all times of the day, ground level shops and restaurants and useful public transit.
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