Has there ever been a better time to be a rapist in New Zealand? The answer to that might come down to your gender. While short shrift has been given to misogyny following the WC revelations, some rapists seem to be being gifted a hall pass.
So what is this rape culture we hear so much about? The definition the national MSM discussion on rape culture seems to have hitched its wagon to is clear enough.
“rape culture is the cultural and social framework that enables violence against women”
To one wondering what we might call the culture and social framework that enables violence against non-women, unfortunately our MSM don’t have a phrase for that yet, it’s not yet a thing.
By contrasts Wikipedia’s definition of rape culture is:
“Rape culture is a sociological concept used to describe a setting in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality.”
In this instance rape culture is not defined as targeting one gender, because at some level most of us can understand that rapists aren’t that selective.
So what are some societal attitudes about gender and sexuality in contemporary New Zealand? A flurry of articles earlier in the year; It’s time to teach teenage boys about consent — whether they like it or not, Dear parents. We need to talk about your sons, The facts of life should come from parents, not overloaded teachers, Villainesse investigates rape culture in New Zealand schools, Men need to fix New Zealand’s rape culture, highlight one populist heteronormative attitude beyond a shadow of a doubt: boys, men, sons and fathers in New Zealand; you and you alone are the problem.
The media concertedly wants our youth — specifically boys — to learn about consent while our law is unequivocal on the point that cis boys can’t be raped:
“(2) Person A rapes person B if person A has sexual connection with person B, effected by the penetration of person B’s genitalia by person A’s penis, —
Basic anatomical reality dictates that we are trying to teach consent to those who we as a society have deemed legally unrapeable. We expect males to naturally understand the social boundaries accorded to females yet we offer males very little sense of having their own boundaries — and by the same token - having their own right to consent — as our media asks time and time again “what is wrong with our boys?” — how is it that they do not respect consent?
While paying scant attention to WC protest organiser Sorcha Ashworth’s rather telling:
She says it’s common for people to take advantage of others when they’re drunk. It happens to boys and girls, she says (are you surprised?) and there’s “a disgusting double standard” where there’s less of an outrage when a girl takes advantage of a guy.
Why are we not having that discussion? Why does that discussion tend to be marginalised and erased? How might this gendered erasure of “a girl taking advantage of a guy” contribute to ongoing confusion about consent? Why is our media silent around these questions when research reveals such a conflicting picture?
Stemple has long focused her research on how sexual violence against men goes under-reported. In 2014, she released a paper on male victims of sexual violence which analyzed several national surveys and found that, when taking into account cases where men were “made to penetrate” someone else, the rates of nonconsensual sexual contact between men and women were basically equal: 1.267 million men said they had been victims of sexual violence, compared with 1.270 million women.
Why might we expect these trends to be any different in a country as sexually liberated country as our own?
The New Zealand I grew up in is a place where three male students sodomised our male classmate and were very publicly admonished with a slap on the wrist: they were suspended while the victim left school in shame. It’s a country where our 25 year old female teacher initiated a sexual relationship with my classmate without recrimination: a place where I’ve been held down and forced to penetrate on more than one occasion, bitten and coerced into sexual activity by female partners at a frequency out of step with any “official’ NZMSM narrative. Ours is a land where my best friend and his mate drugged and sexually assaulted me and of course I didn’t report this or any of the above to authorities, because none of this is remotely reflected in our media’s gender preclusive framing, and perhaps this is in part because none of it fits our legal definition for “rape”. Obviously there are other exacerbating factors, regardless these crimes simply do not exist in our populist discussions about rape and rape culture.
The more that our conversation about rape is bundled up with stereotypes: the more the word rape is used in conversations about other things: the more it’s discussed in terms of just one (gender) rather than all intersections of humanity: portrayed as a delinquent behaviour or a defect of genetics rather than a crime: sanitised for water cooler chats, as something that might be eliminated by addressing the symptoms — misanthropy and the desire to dominate and harm — rather than the reasons fueling it and the systemic structural conditions enabling it, then rapists rest easy.
Because it’s not just rapists that do damage — it’s words and attitudes too and if we’re serious about addressing rape in our society, then education is essential, but it must be implemented in acknowledgement that consent only carries as much weight as the possible recriminations of ignoring other’s right to consent — as specified in the word of law.
At our school at least, we had sex education in the 90s. I was in that class when we learned about consent, sitting beside someone who — I didn’t know at the time — would come to be my future “rapist”. We knew what consent was, but we did not know what rape was, we were told “rape isn’t about sex it’s about violence”, but there was negligible violence in the way I was assaulted by that classmate. Even now I feel incredibly uncomfortable describing anything I’ve experienced as rape, not because I wasn’t raped, but because our society refuses to name it and recognise it as such.
As a pre-op transgender woman I’m acutely aware that no matter how I am violated, no attack will meet our preclusionary outmoded defintion of rape .
Looking at recent high profile cases such as The Roastbusters in which no charges were laid, or the Scott Kuggeleijn rape trials in which he was ultimately found not guilty it’s clear that regardless of consent education our country is not institutionally equipped to begin to scratch the surface of our rape culture: our threshold for prosecution is too high, it’s commonplace for trials to result in hung juries.
Solutions to this proposed by Andrew Little in 2014 entailed an inquisitorial system, and where a judge interviewed the alleged victim after conferring with prosecution and defence lawyers. The suggestions also specified that the accused in a rape case would have to prove consent to be found innocent. This is in breach of the UDHR:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 11, states: “Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.”.
I’m no lawyer but it would seem reasonable to expect that we could implement systemic changes to address our rape culture without violating international treaties.
