First off, I feel that this certain OP warrants a prelude. My topic today is of the sensitive sort, and I don’t want you to feel unprepared for the unsheltered truth because I won’t hold back for fear of making you uncomfortable. So here’s your warning: my OP today is about rape culture. What does that mean? A rape culture is a culture where objectification of the body is normal, and victims are blamed for getting themselves raped. A rape culture is where rape is downplayed because clothing is provocative and behavior was too flirty and “only no means no.”
Where am I even supposed to start with how wrong this kind of culture is? I could start with the statistics. For every one hundred rapes, only forty of them are even reported, only ten rapists will be arrested, only eight of them will be prosecuted, only four of them will be convicted of felony. But three, only three, will even spend a minute in jail. How does that sound to you? That ninety-seven percent of rapist will walk free. It doesn’t sound very good to me. It doesn’t sound like rape culture is working very well to prevent the problem. Today, seven hundred and twenty people will be raped. By the end of this year, the number will have added up to 262,080.
I heard about this article once; it was about one of those 262,080 and her rapist. It said that the woman had been HIV positive when she was raped, and her rapist tested positive for HIV after he raped her. It was an online article, so there was plenty of commentary. Most of the comments? She should have told him that she had an STD. She should’ve been forced to wear some kind of “red flag” that would have prevented his catching of the disease. No one cared about the trauma that woman faced, the horror she went through. Only that she had passed on her disease to her rapists. THAT is rape culture.
What else is rape culture? How about the idea that teaching possible victims how they should act and what they should wear is how we should be preventing rape. We tell them that they should watch their drink and learn to stay safe when we should be telling the victimizers not to drug people and not to make individuals feel the need to be concerned over their safety. Let me tell you something, if a man was shot on the street and bled to death on his way to the hospital, no one would rave on about how he should’ve been wearing a bulletproof vest or he shouldn’t have let himself bleed out. You would hear no complaints about the injustice of the gunman having his whole life ahead of him ruined because the man he shot had the audacity to die. So how is that different from blaming a victim of rape for causing her own rape? Can you see how it doesn’t work that way? Let me tell you something else, rape predates miniskirts and flirting does not equal an invitation.
I also don’t understand how a victim can be “asking for it.” Rape is, lawfully, the crime of an offender forcing a person to have sexual intercourse with him or her. Therefore, you can’t ask to be raped. It’s definitively impossible. Excusing your behavior by saying that your victim was “asking for it” or the way the victim was dressed was “like putting a sirloin steak in front of a dog and expecting him not to eat it” is admitting that you have less basic home training than my 11 year old Chihuahua. Cory absolutely loves those Beggin’ Bacon strips you see on television. He’ll run to it immediately if I put one in his bowl, but the difference between him and the rapist who makes those kind of excuses is that my dog has self-control. If I tell Cory no, he won’t go to it. He understands the word “no”. Shouldn’t comparing yourself to a dog, then, offend you? If you admit you have less self-control than one, I’d think it would.
You know, it’s not surprising though, that only three percent make it to jail. Injustice for rape victims is not so astonishing when the judicial understanding of rape is that “only no means no”. If the victim is passed out drunk, then they cannot say yes or no and it is their fault for getting too drunk. If the victim is too afraid to say anything, well, they should’ve said no. Rape is not the presence of no, it is the absence of yes. We need to understand that instead of “only no means no”, “only yes means yes”.
The number of rapists that get away is too high. The number of rapes period is too high. Why? Because we try to prevent rape by placing prevention responsibility on potential victims instead of potential rapists. That doesn’t prevent rape; it just causes a different person to be raped. Just because nine girls out of ten at a small party keep their drinks close and go home with a friend doesn’t mean the one girl that doesn’t won’t be raped. Telling the potential victims to be careful is just telling a rapist to rape the non-careful one. I repeat, it doesn’t work that way.
If we want to prevent rape, we need to take prevention back to the source. We should be teaching people about consent and to not objectify the body. We need teach people that it is not okay just because you can get away with it. We need to teach people that it is not okay just because she’s wearing a short skirt. We need to teach people that it is not okay because she’s drunk. We need to teach people that it is not okay. Don’t you see? This is not a victim problem. This is a culture problem.