Recently, the case in Maryville, Missouri involving two rape victims was re-opened. One of the victims, Daisy Coleman, released a piece sharing her personal story. In this statement, Daisy shares the personal pain she's suffered from the incident, including how many in her school and community treated her following the incident. She also discusses how the event affected her entire family: how her brother was bullied, her mom lost her job, and her house was burned to the ground. The treatment Daisy faced after the incident, and how less of the focus was on the responsibility of the perpetrators demonstrates how society continues to place 100% of the blame of a rape on the victim. Often after people hear about a rape, the questions involve something along the lines of "What was she wearing?" or "Was she drunk?", leaving the rapist completely out of the scene.
The link below was released by an Indian comedy group. It is a sarcastic response to the absurdity of society's beliefs when it comes to rape.
I think your blog post raises an important that often goes unconsidered when we discuss rape and rape culture. Certainly, victim blaming plays a role in the appalling law enforcement statistics that surround rape. Per the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, out of every 100 rapes, only 46 are reported to police, 12 lead to an arrest, 9 get prosecuted, 5 lead to felony convictions and only 3 rapists out of those 100 will serve time.
ReplyDeleteAlso: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxQnBR8OO_U
Really disturbing yet accurate characterization of how rape is viewed in this country. Do you have any suggestions for how in the future people could work towards eliminating this trend of falsely assigning a degree of blame to the victims? Do you think part of this tendency may be influenced by movies and other forms of culture that instill in people such misguided beliefs?
ReplyDeleteI think this is a really insightful view to the problem of rape worldwide. For centuries women have been told it's their fault for rape, and rape is even used as a tool of warfare; when military members rape a group of the opposing side's women it's supposed to feminize the men of the opposing group because the raping of their women shows that they aren't even masculine enough to protect their women from rape. When I was growing up I worked in the fashion industry and worked with young models a lot, and I would constantly hear stories of photographers attempting to or actually raping the models while on set, or forcing the models to have sex with them in order to grant them the gig. When brought up to the agency, the agency would claim that the women models must've "came onto" the male photographers and therefore caused the rape. It's unbelievable how beliefs and ideals like this still exist in modern society.
ReplyDeleteIncredible first point, juxtaposing the oppression of the western hyper-individualist perspective and a middle-eastern deterministic moral perspective.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to me how so many different cultural narratives get manipulated to question the validity of rape claims.
So glad you highlighted this. I can't tell you how many people in my life have received similar reactions after being assaulted. Daisy is such a brave young woman among so many.
Thanks for the post!
I really like your position that you posed in this article. I believe that rape, like issues regarding race or gender, are topics that men are oblivious and ignorant on the actual effect and pain that rape can cause. As a male, I’ve heard many a time of men either being accused of rape or has always sided with the males on the issue of rape. For men, being horny all of the time, we assume that if a girl got raped she was either “asking for it”, like any woman would ask to be raped, or she had it coming to her, like any woman deserves to be raped for anything that she has done. Until women start to be respected like men do in all aspects of our society rape will continue to happen. As a society we must want to protect our women and ask more of each other in protecting and respecting our women. On Blame it on the Victim.
ReplyDelete-Think Free, Break the Chains