I didn’t ‘get raped’. Someone chose to rape me.

Last week, I posted a Facebook status about seeing the face of the man who raped me for the first time in almost ten years in my Instagram ‘Explore’ tab. There was an outpouring of responses to it, some useful, some presumptuous, mostly benign. (Two people shared the post, which struck me as an odd choice to make regarding someone else’s deeply personal trauma, but social media encourages us all to do weird shit, so…)

Yesterday, I made a “hey, how are you?” call to the family friend whose house I instinctively went to hide in after being raped. She was my favourite of the pastors in charge of the Teens Church I attended. She housed me for a night or two — I wonder what she told my mother? — but we never really talked about it after that. Until yesterday.

She had seen my post and made a comment about using my experience to help young girls. It was one of the responses I had mixed feelings about, but I hadn’t taken my feelings about any of the comments to heart. In fact, I had mostly forgotten about the post. So when I called her it was out of genuine (and completely unrelated) affection, which is why I felt a twinge of dismay when the conversation turned towards that post.

She wanted to talk about personal responsibility. “It’s important to talk about these experiences because it helps other young girls know that they can speak up. But I always try to also talk about setting strong boundaries around yourself.” My heart sank. “You know, you really shouldn’t have been in that situation at all. You shouldn’t have been in the guy’s house, especially since you were supposed to be in school…”

I’m grateful that it took ten years for my auntie to get the chance to properly say this. I vaguely remember things sort of heading in that direction when I first showed up to her house that day, but between how distraught I was and how worried she must have been, there wasn’t much of an opportunity for an extended talk about what I could have done to ‘avoid getting raped’. I don’t think I would have recovered as quickly (‘quickly’ being ‘over the course of eight or so years’) if the person I had run to had told me I was somehow at fault for being a barely 16 year old girl to whom it had not occurred that someone can work to earn your trust simply because they plan to rape you.

The 25 year old that I am now has a much better understanding of the world, and more importantly, has learned how to stand up for herself. As my auntie headed down the quite mainstream path of victim-blaming, I briefly considered hanging up and pretending it was network failure. I can’t believe I’m burning my own credit for this. But then I remembered something I recently learned: I have nothing to lose by speaking up when someone is harming me. If they truly care about me, they will listen and adjust their position. If they don’t, they don’t truly care about me and I’m better off alienating them by insisting on being treated well.

So I didn’t hang up. I said, “that’s not at all a fair thing to say, auntie.” She paused. For the next twenty or so minutes, we discussed why it is unhelpful to talk to young girls (and other populations made vulnerable by the prevalence of sexual predation in our societies) about setting boundaries, as if that can somehow supersede rapists’ decisions to rape people. I’ve decided to share a recap.

1. There is nothing a person can do to prevent rape. The very nature of rape is the removal of personal agency, so all responsibility for rape is entirely the rapist’s. The range of contexts within which rapes occur and the gamut of victims of rape reveal that the only commonality is the existence of people who choose to rape.
2. Teaching people that if they do xyz, they will not get raped implicitly reinforces the idea that rape is the victims’ fault. (Do XYZ = no rape == rape = your fault for not doing XYZ properly/often enough etc. etc.). Note: this is not to say that people should not be discouraged from making reckless choices that endanger themselves and others. But the idea of ‘recklessness’ only holds water in the context of actual personal responsibility. Don’t drink and drive. Wear your seatbelt. Don’t cycle in the dark without reflective gear. Don’t go in the sea at high tide. These are behaviours that are discouraged because they are within the person’s control. “Don’t get raped” erases the presence of the most powerful actor: the person doing the raping.
3. Simply teaching young girls to ‘set boundaries’ in the absence of a culture that holds rapists accountable for crossing those boundaries is a (pointless) cop-out. No matter how many boundaries people set, rape and other sexual violence will continue to take place because our societies coddle, protect and provide plausible deniability to rapists. How does a young child set boundaries against rapist family members, for instance? Or students against teachers? Female workers against a well-liked pastor? Juvenile ‘delinquents’ against a matron?
4. Victim-blaming is rooted in a cultural tendency to avoid the very hard work of enforcing accountability. Predators choose their victims based on power differentials and are emboldened by the certainty that the people/institutions who can make up for those differentials would much rather avoid the discomfort involved in standing up to them. Rapists don’t materialise out of thin air; they are people with spouses and friends and coworkers and children, people we celebrate and pray and commiserate with. We all know at least one. Many of us know several. And we would much rather avoid that reality than address it — address them.
5. Accountability does not only have to come at the hands of the law. One of my favourite alternate realities to imagine is one in which the claim people make to silence victims — “you’re going to ruin someone’s life!” — actually happens. Imagine if I named my rapist and everyone who patronises his (rather popular) business publicly and immediately boycotted it. Imagine if his partner left him and his advertisers bailed. Imagine if everyone at his church asked him every Sunday why he raped a young girl. Imagine if all his friends told him they didn’t want to be associated with him. Imagine if we actually believed victims and leveraged the considerable power of social shaming in their defence. I wonder how many rapists would continue to rape in such a world.

A lot of people get raped. A lot. This has been statistically explained as being because most rapists are serial offenders. Yes, YES, there are important conversations to be had about how any absence of consent is in fact rape (see this series of Medium posts with Doc Ayomide). But not understanding consent because of a lack of comprehensive sex education is not to be conflated with actively choosing to override, ignore or completely eliminate the possibility of consent. And rapists who do that get away with it because we focus all our energy on the (potential) victims rather than on the actual rapists.

The conversation with my auntie ended on a better note than it had started, and I think she came away from it with a new perspective. Also, I made her call me back halfway through the conversation. I wasn’t about to burn all my credit on a call that started with “you should have been in school.” Pffft.