Anna, I follow you and enjoy much of what you write. That’s the prelude so you know this is not a face-on attack — as so many comments in this area can appear to be. Now the comment.

Assuming I correctly read the intentional irony of your post, you take the side that any idea a person who has been raped could be seen as responsible in any way is to be dismissed. You do not actually state that position, but it feels like the gist of your article. It is in any case a common position and often presented by the sort of mock confession of guilt you use here. But I am not sure it is a very useful stance as I’ll explain.

To understand a situation is not to excuse someone’s conduct within that situation. Therefore, to properly understand why rape occurs we should never be frightened of examining any idea, regardless of what that idea may seem to imply.

However, although that is a commonly expressed starting position, matters often seem more complex than such a perspective suggests. Life itself is complex — a situation that undermines any idea that the guilty party is necessarily 100% one person or the other.

There is also a cultural problem here. Regardless of the detail or theoretical framework that any sociologist or psychologist may use for any social phenomenon, the very fact that they are working in social sciences embodies the determinist’s idea of cause-and-effect, as opposed to freewill. Therefore, however much any party is seen as the supposed cause of any act, there will always be an implication of a prior cause — domestic violence, porn, video games, patriarchal mindset or such in the case of rape.

This highlights what is a cultural train crash in that any attempts to explain matters effectively do start to excuse acts - at least inasmuch as the rapist can be seen as subject to external influences. Taken to its logical conclusion, none of us are responsible for anything at all, and reality is just a set of predetermined events which we witness unfolding. I know psychologists who make this argument.

It becomes arguable that insisting the victim should never be blamed is totally justifiable. But it is also arguable that this is actually a covert way of avoiding the complexities involved in directly blaming the perpetrator. In any case, the true complexities of the situation are such that as soon as any move is made to assign blame in any direction, it can potentially be assigned in both directions — notwithstanding the finer details of any particular incidence.

Herein lies the problem: within popular perspectives of what culture and society are, it is possible to excuse everyone, at the same time as it is also possible to allocate a portion of blame, guilt or responsibility in any direction. Given we actually have no cultural consensus on the determinism-versus-freewill issue, it is no surprise such issues prove utterly intractable. There are arguments on all sides, and for all sides.

If the determinists have it right, there is absolutely no point in discussion. But we normally live and talk as if intelligent understanding of these matters is possible, and that human conduct can thereby improve — or at least avoid satisfying its animal instincts in such ugly ways. If that is where we are coming from, it seems we should abandon the continual finger-pointing between victim and perpetrator — terms that are themselves judgemental — and keep the debate open.

Agonising over what actually happened in specific rape cases is closing the cell door after the villain has fled. Until the many social conditions that can contribute to the motivation to rape are addressed by forms of intelligence that encourage all-round responsibility for all our actions, you and I are probably just scratching at the edge of the real issues.