Well, most people who are raped are attacked by people they know, so clothing would not be a factor.
However, it makes a kind of intuitive sense that if one wished to attack a stranger, one would chose someone who looked low-class by the way they dressed - the notion being statistically, less likely to complain, or be taken seriously if they do, so [the perp] more likely to get away with it.
“Dressed like a slut” may well be a metric for ‘dressed low-class, authorities won’t take [the victim] as seriously’.
In many places, attacking ‘low class’ women makes solid sense, if the perp wishes to remain an un-arrested predator. The BC cops caught lots of shit for exactly this reason during Picton’s reign of rape and murder - all his vics were drug-addicts and prostitutes, so the cops basically ignored them.
Thus not a sex thing as in ‘she was so hot, she was asking for it’ but a class thing, as ‘dressed like that, she must be in a class of person it is easier to get away with attacking’.
It doesn’t even have to be true, as long as enough predators think it is true.
The backstory is the 16-year old girl was wearing oversized blue jeans, a large sweater and a heavy jacket. It was cold outside that day. It was November. In Wisconsin.
is where these arguments always get hung up, and I can never tell if it’s over a real disagreement. No, the laws aren’t written such that an element of the offense is “victim was dressed respectably.” Obviously. But it has always been a problem that one available defense to a claim of a sexual assault is consent of the alleged victim, and that explicitly and implicitly, things like the victim’s mode of dress are considered as evidence of consent. The law recognizes a distinction, but people aren’t always so scrupulous about it. Like that constable demonstrated. In practice, most rape victims are not dressed the way he was talking about, so the lesson from what he was saying was “if you do get raped, you might as well not give anyone any reason to doubt you.” It’s not rape prevention. It’s a call for better P.R. And I think that’s understandably offensive to people. That little leap in logic from “don’t do X if you don’t want Y” to “Y is caused by X” is where everybody gets all up in arms, but at least historically there’s really no denying that’s what it has meant.
So it should be a moot point, but it isn’t. Which is what the slut walk is about - public dress is not a way of communicating consent, and if we all know that it’s irrelevant, it would be a good idea to try shutting up about it, considering the history. It seems convenient that some people’s response to this is something like “Duh, moot point, nobody disagrees,” as if it’s totally crazy that anybody felt the need to point it out, but somehow there’s always an appropriate context for stuff like
Ordinarily, now is when there’s an argument about whether that’s victim-blaming or just good constructive dialog about the part we can control, since we’re just saying, you don’t walk around with a big bag of cash late at night, why make yourself a target, if you can mitigate the risk by making wise decisions then how is that bad advice, and all that.
Can I preemptively point out that whatever value it might have to anybody “intuitively,” which is to say speculatively and probably based on a lot of the stuff that some people are claiming is the problem, it is basically useless as far as anyone can tell empirically (because even though rape victims are frequently blamed much more than other victims, very few rapes seem to be provoked compared to other crimes), which makes it a strange choice to be the thing that fuels the debate in every public conversation about sexual assault? It’s like, if somebody mentions to you once that carrying salt in your pocket keeps demons away, you just smile and nod at them - they’re trying to help! But if they bring it up every time something bad happens to anyone, you start to wonder, like, you think this is an important point?
Are you saying that anybody who is against rape should be willing to BE raped or you don’t think they have the courage of their convictions? I think the message here is that how you dress should be no excuse for rape. In Saudi Arabia not wearing a burqa in public is considered grounds for rape by some (probably most) Saudi Arabians. We recognize that as sexist and totally unfair easily. But perhaps we do not see it so easily in our own culture?
And just to prove why this is a thing: a comment by a police office in Toronto sparked this worldwide movement. And again, this week, a police officer, in Toronto, took the opportunity to victim blame two young women who were victims of sexual violence. This time, it came down to schoolgirls shouldn’t travel to school in their uniform skirts, but should change on campus, because wearing a skirt on Toronto’s public transit is just too provocative and makes them targets for perverts.
The school disseminated this horrid message to the students, too. Because you’re never too young, apparently, to learn that it’s your fault when someone breaks the law and disrespects your body and the bounds of public decency if you’re female and wearing… anything.
The point of Slutwalk isn’t to prove that one is tough enough to hang around a tough neighborhood dressed in something skimpy. It’s to state that if one does, that still wouldn’t justify someone attacking them. There is no excuse for sexual violence.
Uh, what? The protests are intended to change attitudes and bring an issue to the forefront of the public’s awareness. Walking dressed that way alone at night would not acheive any of the goals of the movement.
No. I did not say that. I simply said that protest is misconcieved and unlikely to change anything as it is. Because it is not being provocativly dressed that is a risk. It is being provacativly dressed in a high risk situation. Its like protesting against burgarlaries by waving fistfuls of cash at a protest, no one is going to steal it there.
[QUOTE=Annie-Xmas]
I don’t care if a woman is wearing a tiny teeshirt and tight jeans cut off at the crotch–Nobosy has the right to put a finger on her.
Rape is NOT about sex. It is about dominance and control
[/QUOTE]
I agree with the first part. As for the second, as my very female pupil master liked to say, “that is the first thing they tell you in Law School, and the very first thing you realise is bullshit when you get to practice.”
I remember this case. The judge let the rapist off with probation because “women invite rape by the way they are dressed.”
I remember a Montel Williams where he interviewed a 25 year old man in prison for getting a 10 year old pregnant. His excuse? “She was dressed like Brittany Spears.”
You know, misogyny is fast becoming like words such as "Unconstitutional, Unislamic, terrorism, obsence, meaning “stuff/opinions I don’t like”.
Misogyny means hatred of women. Has anyone expressed any opinions on this thread which can be construed as such by any reasonable person?
[QUOTE=StusBlues]
Interesting. Can you elucidate this a little? No snark intended–I’m genuinely curious as to her rationalle.
[/QUOTE]
Her rational having been a Crown Prosecution Service solicitor before qualifying for the Bar was the same as mine after I got on my feet in Court. Rapes are of far too many stripes to reduce their causes, trggers and motivations into a simplistic statement like “rape is about power not sex”. From my own (admittedly limited, although spent mostly in a Sexual Crimes Unit) time in prosecutions, I know that as well. You have rapes which occur in the course of other crimes, for example a burgalar enters a house and is confronted by a female householder in the course of the burgalary and overpowers her, then rapes her. A distressing amount of these cases end up murdered for good measure. Your might have rapes which occured between intimate partners, rapes which occurred between new aquainatances, rapes which occured after or during a night out, which occured after the consumption of alcohol or where the rapist went further then what the victim had consented to, or where the victim changed her mind halfway through. All of these were undoubtedly rapes, but the motivations and triggers for them varied. In some, certainly the issue was that of power (serial rapists for instance), in others it was oppurtunity, or where the perpertrators self control was overwhelmed by urges (very common in cases where drugs or alcohol were involved).
In some cases, the victims apparel was a factor, one of many, but certainly a factor in the motivations of the rapists. So I would say that it certainly was a risk factor, along with alcohol, drugs, clubbing, bringing people home.
How do you find the parts of posts you respond to without reading any of the other parts that explain why your responses are going to miss the point?
The point is please don’t say dressing like a slut is the cause of (or suggest it’s the most important way to prevent, if you like) rape, because it is not. A guy said that it was. They thought he shouldn’t. That is what they have protested. Now we understand the point of what they have protested.
(And can get to the real entertainment, which is where we say that dressing like a slut causes rape.)