I gather part of the calculus of whether or not a person’s comment has crossed some kind of line is the person’s history - someone who comments in threads about rape consistently or even solely to imply “she shouldn’t have done ” is going to be noted and commented on, while someone without such a history might get a pass for a similar remark.
So you don’t like to be told you’re victim-shaming? Well, you shouldn’a be mouthing off like that all the time, then.
So, uh, do we have a consensus?
Is it possible…?
~Max
Nah. We haven’t even gotten into statutory rape yet.
Don’t forget this one:
[ul]
[li]Why didn’t you scream when the car ran over you? The fact that you didn’t scream makes your entire story suspect![/li][/ul]
Does your opinion change in case of statutory rape? Wouldn’t 100% of the blame still fall on the rapist? Is not the line between advice and victim-blaming still whether blame is shifted away from the perp and onto the victim?
~Max
Gets tricky sometimes. In cases that I would consider rape regardless of the age difference, then yes, 100% on the rapist.
But in strict liability jurisdictions where both parties are willing and are close in age, I don’t think there’s a rape at all, let alone anyone to blame.
Oh, well I think that’s another question entirely.
Honestly I think we might all agree on the question at hand here, though. Assuming it is a rape (or other crime, as per QuickSilver’s contribution).
~Max
Or police use of force.
No, no we don’t. What do you think we all agree on?
I suspect half the people reading this still believe that while it’s not a woman’s fault if she gets raped, taking “precautions” like dressing conservatively and not walking alone after dark on campus are common sense, reasonable precautions.
In your previous post you said there’s no evidence that clothing has anything to do with how rapists choose their victims. I have no reason to dispute that (certainly no cites!) and I haven’t seen anybody else here dispute that.
As far as I know, the “common sense, reasonable” explanation is that rape is usually (>50%) through people known to the victim, such as an acquaintance, boyfriend/girlfriend, former boyfriend/girlfriend, etc. It’s not like one in six (American) women walk around dark alleys and shady clubs wearing lingerie and singing Nirvana.
I mean, there are occasional crazies that jump out of the bushes and drag unsuspecting girls back into their sex dungeon. But in the grand scale of things, that’s not why one in six women have been raped.
What do you think we disagree about?
~Max
Of course, that line isn’t always so clear.
Should we be giving “obvious advice” to junior high school students? High school students? College freshman?
I mean, however obvious a piece of advice is, there are always people who haven’t heard it yet.
My personal view is that “victim blaming” is such a broad concept that it has basically lost all meaning. Any term that can encompass both an attempt to lessen the sentence for a convicted rapist by bringing up the victim’s outfit, and also well-meaning advice to incoming college freshmen about not getting blackout drunk, is too broad a term.
One specific point that has irked me from time to time is people saying things like “hey, we spend all this time teaching women how to avoid being raped, how about we teach men not to be rapists”. Which sounds all clever and subvert-the-patriarchy-ish. But does it really mean anything? Should we or should we not give piece of advice X to incoming college freshmen women? A tricky question… because striking the right balance between common sense behavior to minimize risk vs gross interference with a young women’s ability to freely live her life is a tricky one (and one I certainly can’t claim I can properly place). But however we strike that balance, there’s no reason that should have anything to do with what we teach young men about being decent human beings. Are there things we can do to educate young men better to reduce the number of potential rapists out there? Almost certainly, and we should do so (within reason, of course… mandatory chemical castration for all 13-year-old-boys has its own issues). But until we’ve gotten to the point where teaching-boys-not-to-rape is going to reduce the number of rapists to zero, we shouldn’t discontinue the advice-on-minimizing-risk side of things just to make some point.
You and I personally or the people in this thread?
I think the issue is that crime in general is seen as a society-wide problem but crimes against women are seen as being forces of nature that women have to adapt to. I remember one of these conversations years ago, and I was making basically the same point I am making here, and someone said “Well, those aren’t crazy restrictions. Those are the same basic guidelines I got about leaving campus when I was at Johns Hopkins”. And that’s exactly my point: women are told that it’s just a sad reality that they have to live in a world that is analogous to inner-city Baltimore in the 80s: when men are at that level of risk, we call it a break down of society, we demand our government takes decisive action, or we move. If a college told Freshman boys at Orientation “Never leave your drink unattended: too good of a chance someone will roofie it so that they can steal your wallet and probably kick the shit out of you at the same time, for fun. Happens a lot around here”, it would be unacceptable. How is any college letting that happen? But girls are routinely given this advice.
And the problem with this broad range is that when we complain about a victim blaming culture, someone always jumps up and says “why can’t we admit that getting so drunk you pass out in a strange, public location is a bad idea?” Then they won’t talk about the rest: having established that this one extreme case might be worth addressing, it’s then used as an umbrella to justify the rest. If you try to talk about the other “advice” you get a lot of “well, I’m not going to draw the line” and “women have to decide what they are comfortable with” and a complete unwillingness to address actual cases. This is fantastic because by leaving it vague, they can shake their head and tsk tsk whenever a woman does something “risky” or gets assaulted, but never have to defend their actual position.
The problem is that “we” teach lots of conflicting messages.
“Young ladies shouldn’t go out partying late at night with guys they don’t know. That’s a recipe for rape.”
"No wonder you don’t have a social life, girl! You don’t go to any frat parties! No wonder you’re lonely!"
“Ladies should always dress modestly and not do things that could send the wrong message. Because that’s a recipe for rape.”
"It’s not surprising you don’t have a boyfriend. You dress like a nun, girl. Put on some skinny jeans and heels and ditch the sweatshirt. Show off what your mama gave you."
“Ladies should not accept drinks from guys because roofies. That’s a recipe for rape.”
"What do you mean, you wouldn’t accept the drink that hot guy brought you? How do you expect any guy to show interest in you if you treat them like horseshit right out of the gate?"
“Ladies shouldn’t get drunk. That’s a recipe for rape.”
"Girl, everyone gets wasted in college. Live a little! Besides, as your friend I’ve got your back. I’ll make sure you get home safe. We got this."
It doesn’t seem like there’s consensus on whether “advice” like “she shouldn’t have gone to that party” or “she shouldn’t have got blackout drunk” to avoid getting raped constitute victim blaming. There seems to be consensus that it isn’t good advice and in reality, rape happens because rapists are terrible people, but not on whether thinking that something like this is just an honest mistake.
I hope there can be consensus that there is a significant group of people who intentionally propagate the myth that women are “asking for it”, often by masking it as a suggestion/advice, and that whether they know it or not, people who spread this are aiding in blaming rape victims. I think that while a lot of people who go down this route are not consciously thinking through the victim blaming every step of the way, the subconscious can make connections faster than the conscious, and there can be a part of them that realizes what they are doing even if they never consciously decided to spread misogyny.
You said it exactly right!
Lots of people seem to think that only women can be victim-blamed. Here are two examples where it wasn’t:
- Several years ago, a young man was murdered in a fight at a really scummy strip club in my town. I know that I was not the only person who thought, “This man should not have been in that strip club at 3:30am, or any other time for that matter; he should have been at home with his wife and baby” and while that was true, he didn’t deserve to die as a result;
and
- This story made headlines when it happened, and I later saw a program about it on either Oxygen or Discovery ID. TL : DR - A woman came home from work and found her policeman boyfriend murdered and the house ransacked. In time, it was discovered that he was perusing Craigslist to satisfy a kinky sex life she knew nothing about, and he eventually crossed paths with people who were stupid enough to try to pawn a police radio and service revolver, which was how they got caught. :smack: Yeah, you’d think a cop would know better than to look for strange on Craigslist, but anyway…
https://www.cnn.com/2015/09/01/us/texas-abilene-police-officer-killed/index.html
Text: “You shouldn’t get blackout drunk at a frat party.”
Subtext: “Because frat bros like to rape drunk girls.”
Victim-blaming is loading all the judgment upon the text, and none on the subtext. Rape is a nameless faceless force of nature; you’re not allowed to criticize it, you’re only allowed to hide from it. And you’d better hide well, because it’s your fault if it happens to you.
Some do, AND THEY SHOULD. Just because someone is male does not mean that his life does not matter; some people (okay, women) don’t seem to have an issue with male crime victims, because, well, women.
Here’s a thread I started about this a while back.
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=825823&highlight=blackout
I explictly said, earlier, that no one should be getting pass-out drunk, and that that was good advice for both sexes.
The advice that you quoted is the advice that you can’t leave your drink unattended while you dance or go to the restroom, because someone will drug you. If men were being drugged and beaten often enough that it wasn’t safe to leave a drink unattended, we wouldn’t treat it as a problem of men not paying attention. We would consider that unacceptable.
ETA: Do you think what I said means that I don’t think male lives matter? Because that’s how I read your last comment because I am, well, you know, a woman.