You in particular? Of course not.
I hate that I soooort of agree with this, but with some caveats. I think part of the reasons I have had an instinct of focusing on the potential victims rather than the rapists is just… I honestly have no clue what even can be done about it. You’re right that “teach people not to be rapists” is mostly a platitude. I want to be careful here, I’m not making an argument like “a certain number of people are just born to be rapists and nothing can change that”, but it’s more… I’m not confident messaging on consent and explaining what rape is are helping. People are taught what rape is, there’s endless messaging about consent. What you see is people rationalizing what they did, or disagreeing with the messaging.
Like the guy who groped my ass and made a kissy face at me when I was drunk trying to get home alone in Downtown Portland at 1:30 AM during a bipolar hypomanic episode. I shouldn’t have been doing half those things, but he also shouldn’t have groped me at a bus stop and I’m lucky it didn’t go further. But like… I’m highly skeptical he had never heard he shouldn’t do shit like that. Maybe getting arrested would help but I uh, well, I didn’t exactly want to stick around waiting for the police to come I got away and went to another bus stop. I couldn’t have described the guy well enough for the police to find him anyway and nobody is going to do a city-wide manhunt at 3AM for “tall white guy with dark colored hair who grabbed a woman’s ass” when he’d probably be off the bus and home within 25 minutes.
For my ex why raped me? I mean I technically said yes after 30 straight minutes of saying “no, I don’t want to” and her badgering me saying “yes you do.” And like… I don’t think that was a power play. I don’t know how to prevent that, if someone had sit down and explained it to her I’m sure she’d have seen why it was wrong, but I think a lot of that was tied in a fear of her losing me or me other issues tied into her very low self esteem. Deep insecurity. Hell, I almost echoed it with my other ex when he said no and I freaked out and asked if he didn’t find me pretty anymore and then immediately caught myself and said “wait, what the fuck, that was shitty of me, I’m sorry.” I understand where those feelings come from, and I think some rape comes from the same places toxic relationships come from. Some of it can be solved by education and societal conditioning, but I’m not sure how to conclusively solve “people are insecure or mentally ill and do garbage things because their mental issues are working against them” other than unsatisfying non-answers like “better mental healthcare.”
The best explanation I can come up with is power structures – people who have too much power enables abusers to move around and exploit people too easily. One thing that was really eye opening for me was the article Why Your LARP’s Safety System Will Fail: A Hacker’s Guide to Engineering Player Safety. i’m not a LARPer, but it gave a very good overview about how systems meant to protect people can be subverted by abusers and other “black hats” to better recruit victims.
I came to some of these conclusions in the queer community and smaller feminist organizations. Since the queer community and local feminist communities are smaller, you can see this sort of behavior emerge in a smaller community. Once you’ve seen, e.g., all-female organizations where it turns out some woman at the top was abusing her power it becomes clear that people worm their way into power, or carefully groom the members of a group to be “on their side”, and then use that leeway to enact abuse (sexual, emotional, physical, or otherwise), regardless of gender. It’s just power, in our society, is so heavily skewed male that 99 times out of 100 it’s men that tend to be the ones either in the positions to enable or cultivate this, and have the benefits of society-wide privilege that allow them to escape consequences (most of the time, not all).
Rape, unlike many crimes, doesn’t always have the clearest things we can just fix. It’s not like theft where you could probably prevent 98% of it by working to eliminate poverty – which is hard but is at least a clear goal. Murder is more frequently than not tied to something specific – in some cases it’s something where fixing poverty and inequity will help, in some cases it’s just heated stuff, in some cases it’s similar societal factors to rape where it’s things like “toxic masculinity” or “inciting incidents probably tied to another societal problem” (e.g. revenge for theft, which see above).
The best I can come up with are fairly fundamental, radical changes to society. Upending media by critiquing toxic masculinity, and eliminating power structures. The toxic masculinity thing is a fight that’s being fought, but just saying “toxic masculinity in our media is a problem” is like… yeah, everyone has heard it. We’re working on it and it’s slow, but it faces the same issues as “educating people not to be rapists” because they’ve familiar with the discourse, they just rationalize/disagree. For the rest, no joke rape is one of the biggest reasons I’m an anarcho-communist. Eliminating the hierarchy in favor of more temporary, fluid interpersonal organization has in my opinion had the greatest success in my life and in others peoples’ lives that I know in terms of eliminating abusive bullshit. That’s how I tend to organize spaces I’m in and as far as I can tell it’s working. It’s not foolproof but it helps. But I somehow feel like walking into a thread and talking about how we should solve CEOs and powerful actors sexually assaulting people by saying “we should abolish the state, eliminate hierarchy by providing peoples needs with communal resources, seek consensus in governance, and organize locally and non-hierarchically” would rightly get me yelled at for ignoring the topic.
I guess the tl;dr of my post is “I think society is fundamentally rotted, due to being structured in a way that inherently enables abuse, rape being one form of it, and the only good solutions I can think of radically destroy that structure and replace it with something entirely new. But going into a rape discussion talking about seemingly unrelated restructuring of the entire governmental and social structure would read as an unproductive non-sequitur, even though I truly believe one of the only ways to resolve rape in our society is to fundamentally alter it at the roots.”
He’s referring to my posts in an 8 year old thread, which were bad and wrong. I essentially was arguing that we should teach people to make “rational choices” in these situations that would “reduce rapes in the future”, such as teaching girls who were raped to go to the police. This is dumb for a lot of reasons and was partially me working through blaming myself for my own assaults, partially just having absorbed shitty arguments, and partially me having a pollyanna view of the world and the social system writ large at the time, where I basically just believed there were a few people who were “just bad” and if we taught people to deal with them they’d all like… idk… be gone? See also my really old thread on pedophilia where I had this weird rosy view that if we just quietly punished pedophiles and didn’t bring up how bad it was to kids they wouldn’t be traumatized which was… uh… certainly A Take I Had that came from the same dumb place.
IMO, it’s victim blaming when your criticism of the victim’s actions is meant to put the primary blame on them rather than the perpetrator. But it’s completely fair to point out when someone has done something monumentally stupid that went badly. For example, bringing strangers to your house to have sex with them, you’ve got to know at least a dozen ways that can go extremely badly. The person who did you wrong was the primary villain, but you INVITED THEM INTO YOUR HOME AND YOU DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THEM! Taking drugs from strangers at parties is another one of my favorites. Sure, the guy who gave you dangerous shit without telling you is the primary person culpable, but you took drugs from a stranger!
Also, the argument that we should teach people not to be bad is senseless. We do that already and most people are not bad. It’s more productive to teach people who the bad people target and why so they can avoid being a victim.
Your argument is based on the premise that people will always accept responsibility for the consequences of their own actions, which is clearly not the observed reality since ever.
Speaking of consequences, the logical outcome of “no victim blaming, ever” is the inevitable increase of victims. It goes like this, whenever someone says don’t do X because Y can happen, the observation is usually one based on previous experience (personal or more often third party), therefore the statement don’t do X or Y will follow is “victim blaming” the undefined person who did X and then Y happened.
To clarify, the argument goes like this:
-You should wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle.
-Why?
-Because people get hurt or die from not wearing a helmet.
-Like who?
-For example my brother in law was killed because he was not wearing a helmet.
-You are a horrible person by victim blaming your brother in law and should never say such things.
The point is, one can’t advice don’t do X or Y is bound to happen without “victim blaming” all the people who did X and then Y happen in the past.
The solution to that it’s either to stop giving advise derived from previous experiences or come to grips with the idea that actions (or inactions) have consequences therefore we should be proactive in the way we act to minimize the possibility of negative consequences regardless of what other people may or may not do to also bring about those negative consequences.
The pedestrian getting hit by a truck is a good example of this, if you say to a child to look both ways before crossing at a zebra it’s because you recognize that even though the child is 100% in the right to cross and vehicles should invariably stop the reality is that the world doesn’t work like that, the reality is that for whatever reason (carelessness, impairment, malice, etc) someone, somewhere will not stick to the rules and combining that with the naive expectation that everyone, everywhere, every time will do ends up in a disaster.
I’ll add one more thing, IMO the people who must love the no victim blaming" mantra the most are perpetrators, it makes their work so much easier.
I find it curious how this discussions miss the obvious, “victim blaming”, it’s right on the label.
“You shouldn’t have done X to avoid Y” No blaming.
“You deserve Y because you did X” Blaming.
The problem is people reading what they want to read from a statement like the first one, they want to infer the person meant the second either because, presumably they want to believe the person making the statement has bad intentions or character or they’ve been conditioned to interpret everything in a certain way.
It turns out sometimes phrases mean things that transcend the literal meanings of the composite words.
It’s very hard to describe this in a compelling way because victim blaming these days frequently isn’t an obvious “she was asking for it”, but rather a tenor of the conversation. Nobody is saying “it’s her fault and she should’ve prevented it”, rather it’s a lot of, oftentimes even extremely well meaning, people hyperfocusing on the victim’s behavior. Victim Blaming behavior doesn’t per se strictly say the person is at fault for being raped, but it is continuously fostering and approaching discussions in such a way that focuses on how the victim could have prevented it.
Now there’s a lot of reasons for this, I outlined above that part of it is just that preventing rapists doesn’t have an easy solution we can just do short of some radical societal restructuring. Some of it is that, especially online, people want to talk about stuff especially if it’s a big horrible news story and there’s not much to talk about if everyone “wow, those rapists are fuckers and should be in jail. This is horrible, I hope the victim gets the help they need”. Some of it is just societal conditioning that women should protect themselves from rape, murder, abuse, etc.
I think a lot of people see being accused of victim blaming the way they see being called racist or some other form of bigotry, and it has the same solutions. Like… sure, what you’re doing is contributing to a culture that puts the onus on rape victims (or has undercurrents of white supremacy, or devalues gay people, or thinks women are inferior), it hurts but there’s like… a very simple thing you can do to not contribute to it and stop being told you’re doing the thing: stop… saying those things. Just consciously go “do I need to pick apart how she acted?” because you probably don’t, and everyone probably already knows all the ways to prevent rape you’re going to bring up unless you’re literally a self defense instructor for high school girls. If you have to comment on something just point your finger at the issues with our culture, with the way abusers dodge consequences, or at the way we reinforce this behavior. It’s probably equally pointless and won’t change much, but at least it doesn’t make people feel like they’re at fault for not preventing their own assault, which they’re probably doing a good enough job of beating themselves up for anyway.
In the worst case the next thread on rape quietly ends after 20 people make a single comment saying “wow, fuck those rapists, hope they burn” and it sinks, and like… nothing of value of was lost.
I think the issue around victim blaming is very simple - we never see “Guess he shouldn’t have been driving a nice car, he should have been driving a beater” when someone is carjacked. Few people say “He shouldn’t have been walking by the side of the road if he didn’t want to get hit by a drunk driver.”
IMHO, it’s timing. Saying it beforehand is warning and advice, saying it after the incident is victim blaming.
This isn’t inaccurate. After the fact, even anything that would be valid advice beforehand becomes victim blaming. The perpetrator is the one who did the wrong thing, so the victim shouldn’t be grilled over what they did. There’s no reason to care what the victim did or didn’t do, except to apportion blame. And the victim is not to blame for rape, no matter what. Before the fact, though, there is no victim to be blamed.
That said, the way the OP asks the question, he seems to also be asking “what counts as valid advice and isn’t offensive?” And, in that case, there are bad things to say ahead of time that are often called “victim blaming logic.” This includes stuff about what to wear, or unreasonable restrictions.
Personally, I’d say to stick with advice that isn’t specific to rape. Saying not to get blackout drunk is good advice for your own health and safety, even if rape wasn’t a thing. Keeping your drink with you is prudent not only to avoid rape, but to avoid anyone putting anything in it as a prank, like spiking the punch. Telling people to be careful who they hang around with, and to stay away from bad neighborhoods at bad times is good advice no matter what. Teaching self defense and how to get out of and flee a bad situation is good for all sorts of situations.
But even that can be problematic if this advice becomes the focus. The focus should remain on finding ways to stop the rapists, not on advice to avoid being a victim. We manage it with nearly every other crime, so I know it can be done with rape.
Sure, maybe “teach the rapists not to rape” is a bit glib, because it largely isn’t “teaching” in the normal sense. (Though not entirely–teaching about consent is vital, and should be a repeated lesson that is begun at an early age.) But the focus should still be on stopping the perpetrators.
We manage it with basically every other crime. It shouldn’t be so hard with rape.
There should be as much advice on how to avoid getting raped as there are guides about how to not get your car stolen or your house broken into. Sure, the occasional advice is fine, but it’s not the focus of trying to stop those types of crimes from occurring.
And, again, none of this applies one bit after a rape has occurred. None of it. Advice on how to avoid rape is not appropriate after a rape has occurred, period.
Your last paragraph, does that in anyway whatsoever help prevent future rapes? A course of events like you described certainly will add nothing of value either.
Of course you are aware of the expression “Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, that paragraph, essentially, declares that we should not learn from history.
Another question for you to consider, abusive relationships, is it “victim blaming” to tell a person stuck in an abusive relationship (which I will note may include sexual abuse) that they are in an abusive relationship? It can be breaking them out of the tissue of justifications they’ve weaved for the abuse they receive, or actions that enable the abuser to carry on such as break up and “reconciliation” cycles.
Is it a case of blaming the victim to tell someone in an abusive relationship, when themselves, through deep rooted denial or believing they deserve it or that is how things are supposed to be or even poor impulse control, don’t realize they are being abused and their own behaviour help to perpetuate the situation?
Surely you must know such things happen, and that often the first step to put an end to them is for the victim to take action to leave or break the spell, so to speak, the abuser has cast on them; whichever way it takes action by the victim to stop being a victim (because of course the abuser would have no motivation to do it), is telling the victim what the action should be “victim blaming”?
Regarding your last paragraph, something that I’ve read about a few years ago, a girl committed suicide after fleeing from a tantric yoga retreat, or something along those lines, it turned out IIRC, that sexual abuse by the “Guru” was rampant and disguised as a spiritual experience; that girl again IIRC had been abused, left, returned was abused again and ended up killing herself. Between the first instance of abuse and her return to the place and person who abused her should everyone around her refrained from telling her to not go back? after all you are quite definitive that they shouldn’t: “Advice on how to avoid rape is not appropriate after a rape has occurred, period.”
How about other women who may had been contemplating going to that place under that “guru”, should everyone who knew about the situation refrained from advising them against putting themselves in a situation where they could end up being sexually abused?
Do… do you really think a bunch of randos on an internet forum rubbernecking and talking about ways to avoid rape is seriously going to prevent future rapes? Like… what… what do you think groups at risk of violence talk about? Even if you’re a cishet white male you’ve almost certainly heard just about every meaningful variant of how to avoid rape by the time you hit 20. I have heard literally every single permutation about how to not get murdered, raped, abused, assaulted, or discriminated against by now. I could honestly probably make dosh as a fortune teller predicting what someone will say when asked how to protect oneself against these things. We pass around stories about the creepy guy who seemed like he was following us and how we handled it like they’re fucking campfire tales.
When I go to queer events, often run by queer POC, they constantly remind people throughout the event to keep an eye on their drink, make it open knowledge that any of the event organizers can be contacted at any moment if someone is being suspicious or making people uncomfortable. And since they’re queer events and frequented by POC, and both groups are at risk of police profiling, it also ends with “and remember, don’t talk to cops” and reminders on white and/or cis and/or heterosexual allies to protect their differently marginalized friends on the way home.
I did have one friend, one friend who would drink from random cups at a party and leave their drink unattended. And y’know what? We did intevene because even though we were always there with them and there was no real risk of rape due to that people just like… roofie drinks because they get off on drugging people, or in case someone whose cup they randomly picked up spiked their own drinks cuz they like that. But the thing is – this also wasn’t due to a lack of knowledge. Their logic was “oh it’s a queer event! It’s fine! The queer people in this town wouldn’t do anything!” They had some fucked up view that queer people (or non-queer people attending queer events) would ever do anything wrong, and no force would convince them otherwise. This was, to put it mildly, really fucking stupid. It doesn’t happen often, but since then 4-5 people have gotten roofied at queer events and adjacent events like burlesque shows in towns. Now this is over 3-4 years, so it’s not frequent, but it happens and we try to clamp down on it.
But like… yeah, sure, if someone is actively being a fucking trainwreck in your field of view and you’re close to them then sure, point it out. But barring that, your armchair internet analysis of what some kid should’ve done to not get raped is… not helpful nor needed.
Also, I’ve been in an abusive relationship, two actually, I almost lost friends because everyone was telling me it was bad and I always defended my abuser and never left. They would refuse to talk about it with me after a certain point because it was too sad, frustrating, and exhausting for them. Abusive relationships are very complicated beasts, and while it can be related to and involve sexual assault I feel like it’s a very different and far more complex topic. Randos on the internet still shouldn’t be armchair narrating, but if you’re in the life of someone being abused then, yes, it’s probably worth bringing up and if they don’t listen (most abuse victims probably won’t at first) well… like I said, it’s messy. Also, even in that case there’s a difference between “I mean it’s really on you for staying in the relationship” and “hon, they’re abusing you, you need to get out and making excuses for them isn’t helping you it’s just enabling them to hurt you more.”
This story is so vaguely remembered as to be effectively meaningless in figuring out what should be done. As poorly stated as it is then like… I guess generously assuming people knew she was assaulted the first time and she told them she was going back then I guess people should’ve told her it was a bad idea? But, having been abused and sexually abused myself, I’m like… absurdly skeptical that was the actual situation and your half-memory of a story you heard fourth hand does not give me confidence this is in any way a meaningful scenario for anything other than to serve as a tortured example for this argument. It sounds like you’re blaming her or her loved ones for the conditions which brought about her (second?) rape and subsequent suicide which is uh… kind of fucked up if true. Or assumed she was somehow too stupid to make her own decisions.
Like… if it was an open secret this guy was an abuser uh… why… why did he still have a position? Why was anyone recommending girls go to this camp in the first place? I’m not saying that as incredulity that it didn’t happen, quite the contrary, but there are just so many preventable things here with the existence of the camp and the reputation of the abuser that allowed him to keep doing this that are wrong before you even get to analyzing the dynamics of “a girl got raped twice and killed herself,” which has potentially endless reasons beyond her being a naive little lamb who needs advice that I don’t care to enumerate because, again, the more glaring issue is why did this fucker have an active camp giving massages to women when he was a known abuser. There’s so much more productive to analyze there than the actions of those who were raped. Like… what fucking material conditions give rise to and protect rapists?
Though I will give one caveat to “focus on the rapists”. We need to be careful to not center the stories of the rapists over the stories of the victims when discussing how to prevent rape. Another very common problem is like… deep analyses of horrible peoples’ lives. Things like these glamorous docudramas about serial killers or flashy articles like “inside the mind of the Football Rapist” or whatever. While it’s important to analyze the conditions that give rise to rape and how to both prevent further rape from happening and prevent new rapists from developing, and sometimes that does involve looking at case studies, it’s also important to not overly focus on the personal stories of individual rapists, lest we risk humanizing the rapists at the cost of dehumanizing the victim.
Alright, where does all that material for discussions on what to do, what not to do and why come from?
It’s only fair if the victims asks you to Monday morning quarter back for them.
If you’re laid up in the hospital because of a car accident and your best friend comes to visit you, do you really think you think it would be fair for him to point out how monumentally stupid it was for you to have been going ten miles above the speed limit right before the accident? Of course you wouldn’t think this was fair, because who is your friend to act like he knows how the whole thing went down? Sure, maybe you were speeding. But he doesn’t know that speeding was the cause of the accident. And even if it was, it’s shitty to throw that up in your face when you’re already suffering the consequences of your lapse in judgment.
I know someone who was almost the victim of rape. The most scary kind of rape too–where the guy broke into her home and she woke up to find him standing over her. Some would say that it was monumentally stupid for her to have lived in such a bad neighborhood as a single female. And it was stupid of her not to have better security (better locks, an alarm system, a gun in her night stand). But just like millions of people speed on the highway every day without ever getting an accident, millions of people manage to live in bad neighborhoods without security systems and without ever getting raped. Someone ALWAYS thinks they know what “monumentally stupid” looks like because everyone thinks they are experts in risk assessment. They can’t see all the “monumentally stupid” risks they take, but they are always able to detect them in other people’s behavior.
If someone is so stupid that they can’t learn from past lapses in judgment, what makes you think they are going to learn from some rando internet guy lecturing them from a perch of self importance?
I would hope most people wouldn’t say such a thing. But those who would—or people who do any victim-blaming in general—I suspect that one reason is that they want to believe that we live in a fair world, where if bad things happen to you, it’s your fault somehow: there’s something you could have done differently to prevent it. And those bad things won’t ever happen to me, or people I care about, as long as we take the right precautions or don’t take the risks the victim took.
A lot of rapists don’t think they’re rapists. “Rapist” isn’t a species of human born that way from a womb. “Rapist” is a sui generis monster.
Just look at sex comedies from a few decades ago. We have had to teach young men that it’s actually not okay to get a girl drunk and take advantage of her. It’s not okay to ignore when a woman has refused consent. It’s not okay to wear a Darth Vader costume and have sex with a woman who thinks you are her boyfriend in a Darth Bader costume.
The reason we have had to do this because there are societal vectors that have told young men that these things are okay, things like women need to be forced to say yes, because they don’t really mean no, or they’ll change their mind about saying no once you show them how good you sex.
Or that it’s okay to keep pressing over and over again once consent has been refused.
These are ways in which we have had to teach young men not to be rapists.