“She was asking for it.”
No, she wasn’t.
Clothing doesn’t offer any justification for sexual violence. A victim's choice of attire is not a mitigating factor in rape cases and should be removed altogether from admissible evidence.
I’ve read a few articles recently that lashed back against feminism and one of those articles stated: one of the dangers of feminism is that it encourages women to wear what they want when they want and to take no responsibility when she faces dangers associated with what she wore:
Suggesting that she may want to consider dressing in a different way in order to avoid that attention, and the dangers associated with it, is crossing the line.
The major issue I have with this line of reasoning is that there’s a well-hidden presupposition that women are actually responsible for any danger faced because of their choice in attire and that kind of thinking must be pushed back.
There’s no place in our society for that kind of wrong-headed victim-blaming which is based on factually incorrect assumptions and flawed reasoning. I’ll be blunt — if men show women attention, I don't see the problem, it’s a standard interaction quite important to the relationship formation process but if a person ignores a rejection, forces themself on another and then blames them because of clothing, that’s a real…
