Fighting Rape Culture: Real Tips
Note: Original post written on September 5, 2014.
The new academic year has started and once again students are attending seminars on staying safe on campus. These orientation workshops typically focus on tips for women like: “Take control of your online life;” “Make others earn your trust;” “If you see something, say something;” “Be aware & stay alert;” “Make plans & be prepared;” “Party smart;” “Be a good friend;” “Stick together in groups.”
I’m sure all of this is good advice, but it misses what I have come to see as the crux of the matter: Teaching girls and women that if they just try hard enough they can avoid sexual assault places responsibility for rape on the shoulders of targets and potential targets rather than on the shoulders of perpetrators and of political and cultural power-brokers.
As a parent and an educator, I feel obligated to tell my children and students the real truth: Rape is a weapon used to amass, exert and enforce power. It has nothing to do with the behavior or attitude or psychology or sociability or preparedness or intelligence or skirt length or alcohol use of particular girls and women.
Here are the real “tips” that our children and students need to know.
In 2012 there was (brief) international outrage over the brutal gang-rape of a student on a Delhi bus in 2012. This was far from an isolated incident. Women and girls in India are raped on buses, in schools, in bathrooms and at home. They are raped in the context of inter-religious, inter-ethnic and inter-caste violence. They are raped for being educated and they are raped for being uneducated. According to a recent International Men and Gender Equality Survey, nearly one in four Indian men has committed sexual violence at some point in their lives. Rape in India must properly be seen in the context of femicide: The gender ratio in India is at its most unbalanced since 1947, with 1000 boys for every 927 girls. The “missing girls” are eliminated through selective abortion, infanticide, abandonment, preferential feeding of male children and adults, through torturing or killing young married women for their dowries. Tip #1: Politely thank your university or community for rape crisis hotlines and for those shiny whistles they give you so that you can make a scary noise when you are assaulted. And then insist that they invest in educating and socializing men about women’s humanity and that they put significant resources into ending gender violence at its source.
Read more of this post here.
