Welcome back! It's time to hold our weekly discussion on rape and sexual assault. We're into week seven. We have a set of regular readers and commenters for whom I am very thankful. But it would be nice to expand the conversation. Please feel free to share the diary and ask folks to come join the comments. I know these conversations are not always easy but with each one, I learn something new. I hope that you do as well.
Just a quick reminder for all of us. We are sharing a list of statements that come from a 1990 survey of high school kids. That means much of the wording of these statements is dated and we would not choose to ask similar questions today. Sometimes, it's only a word or two that we might change; sometimes it's an entire idea. But that's part of the appeal of this project - to see how mindsets have changed in twenty years. Do the same questions even apply? It's why I haven't asked for just True or False answers but leave room for Shades of Gray. I just ask that you don't get mad at me for the wording nor ask me to explain what I think they're looking for. I want your gut reaction - just like those students had to give their gut reactions 20 years ago.
One reader is especially concerned that we have to be extra careful when discussing rape and sexual assault. I would agree. That means we all need to know how to handle difficult conversations that don't always use clear terminology or express an idea in an exacting manner. That's how conversations work in real life, especially that life outside of DailyKos. It forces each and every one of us to think about what words really mean. It helps us prepare for the day another Todd Akin talks about legitimate rape. Or the day your father-in-law tells your daughter that she shouldn't wear that item of clothing because she's asking for trouble. Or the day that the policeman asks what in the world you thought you were doing walking down the street at night.
I don't believe that this series will make rape less likely to happen. I do believe that cultural change will eventually do that and when we don't have to have these conversations anymore, it will mean that we have succeeded. There won't be any finish line to cross - change in a society isn't like that. But slowly and surely conversations like these and the thousands of others that take place in daily life will change minds, change perceptions, and finally, change an entire culture. The process is gut-wrenching at times. Thanks for bearing with it.
A recap of statement number six can be found below the fold.
The poll below will be:
Statement 7: Rape is prevalent among high school and college students.
Statement #6: True or False: An unwilling victim could prevent rape if she or he wanted to.
According to the survey authors, this statement is false.
The 1990 survey found that before taking a rape awareness class 58.7% of the students answered correctly. After the class, 71.8% answered correctly.
Kossacks chose False 84% of the time. Only 2% voted True but a grand 13% voted Shades of Gray. And the comments reflect the problems with the wording of the statement itself. Almost immediately I was asked what the survey takers actually meant. Was it every victim could prevent rape or just some victims? How could a victim be willing? Were the survey takers implying that some victims want to be raped and therefore wouldn't do anything to prevent it?
The conversations alone are eye-opening and worth taking a read even a week after the fact. But I wanted to find some facts to back up the authors' premise. Here's what I could glean off the internet that deals with facts: very little. It is impossible to prove a non-event. If someone prevented a rape from their behavior, it won't show up in the statistics. It can't. Not unless they knew for sure they were going to be raped beforehand.
What about fighting back during a rape? Does that work as a preventative measure? Many would immediately say, yes, of course it does! Others caution that it depends on the situation. This is best summed up by a PBS program called No Safe Place:
There is not universal agreement on how a woman should respond during an attack. Some experts suggest a woman should resist, fighting back with every imaginable resource. They cite statistics showing that if women fight back, their odds of being raped are cut in half, while their odds of being injured are raised by 10 percent. Most experts caution that there is no one correct response. The important thing is to live through the assault.
Many women are taught that fighting back endangers their life and that it is better to survive the attack by not fighting. One military base actually gives this advice via a pamphlet and the progressive community was in an uproar over it.
“It may be advisable to submit [rather] than resist,” reads the brochure (.pdf), issued to airmen at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, where nearly 10,000 military and civilian personnel are assigned. “You have to make this decision based on circumstances. Be especially careful if the attacker has a weapon.”
http://www.wired.com/...
The truth is that many women have been taught to use their best judgement at the time but lets face it, our judgement is very compromised in the face of an attack. Many of us fall back lessons learned while growing up:
People wonder why women don’t “fight back,” but they don’t wonder about it when women back down in arguments, are interrupted, purposefully lower and modulate their voices to express less emotion, make obvious signals that they are uninterested in conversation or being in closer physical proximity and are ignored. They don’t wonder about all those daily social interactions in which women are quieter, ignored, or invisible, because those social interactions seem normal. They seem normal to women, and they seem normal to men, because we were all raised in the same cultural pond, drinking the same Kool-Aid.
And then, all of a sudden, when women are raped, all these natural and invisible social interactions become evidence that the woman wasn’t truly raped. Because she didn’t fight back, or yell loudly, or run, or kick, or punch. She let him into her room when it was obvious what he wanted. She flirted with him, she kissed him. She stopped saying no, after a while.
These rules for social interactions that women are taught to obey are more than grease for the patriarchy wheel. Women are taught both that these rules will protect them, and that disobeying these rules results in punishment.
http://fugitivus.wordpress.com/...
And thus, we face a new myth. It isn't that fighting back would prevent a rape, it's that not fighting back might imply that a victim is okay with being raped, that unwilling victim from above is actually a willing victim.
Myth: If a person doesn’t fight back, she or he wasn’t really raped.
Fact: Rape can be life threatening, particularly when a rapist uses a weapon or force to accomplish penetration. Submission is not the same as cooperation. Whatever a person does to survive is the appropriate action.
http://well.wvu.edu/...
Myth: The woman did not get hurt or fight back. It could not have been rape.
Fact: Men who rape or sexually assault women and girls will often use weapons or threats of violence to intimidate women. The fact that there is no visible evidence of violence does not mean that a woman has not been raped.
Another myth that goes hand in hand with this is that ' rape is a fate worse than death' and this links with the belief that women should fight and resist throughout. Faced with the reality of rape, women make second by second decisions, all of which are directed at minimising the harm done to them. At the point where initial resistance, struggling, reasoning etc have failed, the fear of further violence often limits women's resistance. The only form of control that seems available to women at this point is limiting the harm done to them.
http://www.rapecrisis.org.uk/...
And just a year ago a judge was finally reprimanded for a 2008 decision where he claimed:
“I’m not a gynecologist, but I can tell you something,” the judge said, according to documents released Thursday. “If someone doesn’t want to have sexual intercourse, the body shuts down. The body will not permit that to happen unless a lot of damage in inflicted, and we heard nothing about that in this case.
"That tells me that the victim in this case, although she wasn’t necessarily willing, she didn’t put up a fight.”
I think one of the reasons we have 13% of Kossacks voting shades of gray is that some of us really do believe that fighting back can make all the difference in the world. The sad thing is that some victims feel the same way after being raped:
I’m a survivor who can relate to every single word of this. I was a rule follower. I was “lady-like.” Polite. Well-mannered. Or whatever description you want to use to describe a woman who thought my respectability would save me from unwanted encounters especially when it involved a man who I considered a friend.
I know now that this is the greatest lie of them all.
Every single day I regret not screaming, kicking, punching, scratching and yelling NO! at the top of my goddamn lungs. And every day I know that I couldn’t because the me of four years ago didn’t like to make a scene. The me of four years ago was a rule follower.
http://feministing.com/...
This self-blame is not helpful because at the end of the day, the person who was wrong was the rapist, not the victim. Yet we as a society have yet to come to terms with this. We as a society have to reinforce the idea that fighting back is not a necessary part of a rape. We need victims to know it's not their fault and we need potential rapists (and judges, lawyers, military commanders, etc.) to know that a person not fighting back is not giving permission.
Diaries in the Series:
True or False: An unwilling victim could prevent rape if she or he wanted to.
True or False: Most rapists choose someone they know as a victim
True or False: Women provoke and invite rape by their appearance and behavior
True or False: Physically forcing someone to have sex is rape.
True or False: Rape Can Happen To Anyone
True or False: Most Rapists Commit Rape For Sex w/ Poll