Podcast: Play in new window
| Download (50.9MB)
*Trigger warning – The following content detail various news stories and experiences of rape which can trigger memories or experiences of sexual violence*
Rape prevention advice is often seen as innocuous and helpful, this myth has been demolished by lots of feminists. The pretty amazing Welsh-Iraqi comedian that is Nadia Kamil made a well received video spoofing “Rape Prevention Advice”, and the ever-excellent Zoe aka Stavvers, wrote this astoundingly good piece explaining why it was dangerous nonsense. Despite these engaging and important contributions, we know that rape culture remains dominant and those who question it are routinely mocked.
So it was a welcome surprise when Henry Bonsu of Colourful Radio graciously gave Nadia and myself, a platform to make the case against Rape Prevention Advice. We took it up and you can hear our discussion below. This is an edited extract of the show which includes the entire discussion. The rest of the show can be downloaded here Colourful Radio’s RSS archive. I blogged about the background to this discussion before here.
Have a listen and let me know what you think in the comments!
2 Comments
I haven’t listened to it, but I was there speaking & listening at the time so I hope my memory of it is still relevant.
I didn’t argue as hard as I would’ve liked against Juju’s “mutually exclusive” point because I felt she was quite fired up & pretty committed to this argument. But I want to put it across here that i actually don’t believe the two things (blaming rapes squarely on rapists & giving “advice” to women about their behaviour to “prevent” the possibility of an attack) are not mutually exclusive. (I think. The double negatives here are confusing me a bit & I’m writing this on my phone).
My point is that you can’t say you don’t victim blame if you also consider “rape prevention advice” to be sound. When you say women shouldn’t get drunk or wear certain things then if a woman does get drunk or wears something considered provocative & is then raped, you are saying to her that if she had changed her behaviour the attack wouldn’t have happened. So logically the two positions cannot coexist.
Additionally, as I mentioned on the show, most rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. The notion a woman can change her behaviour to avoid a rape is a dangerous fallacy. The only way to prevent a rape is for no one to rape anybody. Suggesting otherwise at all takes responsibility away from the rapist.
The fact that we even have this advice for women & none directed at possible perpetrators exposes the explicit misogyny in our culture.
Sorry if this doesn’t make much sense, I’m writing on my phone in a waiting room.
Makes perfect sense to me. General “Be safe” in an non-gendered way is reasonable in my opinion. It becomes victim-blaming when a person makes the link between the victim’s conduct with the instance of being attacked.Henry gave examples of being drunk which might mean you are more likely to get in a fight or get attacked. This is misleading as it attempts to aggregate all violence as equal and relative. So let’s deal with this, rape is not the same or analogous to street violence. Rape happens most often between people who know each other, not random attacks, so to compare the two is fallacious. Even in the rare circumstances when it is perpetrated by a random attacker, we know that sobriety is hardly any defence. To say that if a woman hadn’t got so drunk, she would have been less likely to get raped, offers mitigating circumstances for the rapist. This is then reproduced in the legal system, where the woman’s conduct is dissected, and many wonder why there are so low conviction rates.
In general, being drunk can lead to regrettable actions, but becoming “susceptible” to rape is not one of them. Rape is generated and about the attacker, not the survivor. A society that essentially asks women to police their behaviour and fails to address the largely male psychological and social distortions and confusion on sexual relations and gender, is a despicable one. The concept of enthusiastic consent should become the standard within normative sexual relations. We must fight against the idea that “rape is natural” or that “male violent behaviour cannot be tackled through education and material means”, for if we can’t then the idea of civilisation “Western” or otherwise becomes a cheap joke.