Fight the “rape-is-okay” culture

Submitted by Anon on 8 October, 2005 - 2:53

The Portman Group — a group set up by the brewers to promote “sensible drinking” — has recently produced a report highlighting the high rate of sexual assaults on young women after they get drunk. The report’s conclusion is, not to ask why men continue to sexually assault women, but that women should stop putting themselves at risk. This kind of thinking — “if you have had a few, girls, you are asking to get attacked” continues to be a prevalent one in society. And it explains much of the now very low rate of rape convictions. Sofie Buckland looks at the issues.

Rape conviction rates hit an all time low in 2003, with just 5.8% of reported rapes ending in a conviction, a figure that drops even lower for contested cases; where the defendant pleaded not guilty, only 3.4% were convicted.

In 1985 the police had a 24% chance of getting a conviction. Even as rape law has been reformed, special police units set up and campaigns launched, more and more women are choosing to drop their cases. And the Crown Prosecution Service is taking fewer cases to court (just 14% in 2002). What’s going on?

The ever-popular right-wing media myth is, of course, that women lie. Commentators such as Melanie Phillips have made this a staple of their columns, Phillips claiming in 2005 that the police face “an epidemic of spurious accusations”.

While it is not necessarily true that every dropped case sets a guilty man free, Phillips’ assumptions must be questioned in light of what we know about the criminal justice system and societal attitudes to rape.

The myth of the malicious woman is becoming ever more prevalent. At the same time an anti-feminist and reactionary “men’s movement” enjoys increasing popularity. Seemingly innocuous groups such as Fathers 4 Justice (who may have legitimate concerns about child custody law) actually chime in with a rising tide of anti-woman and anti-feminist sentiment by the so-called “masculinists” who wish to see a return to traditional gender roles.

Rape cases where celebrities have walked free, such as the US sports star Kobe Bryant, have also fed into the myth that all non-convictions are false claims by perhaps publicity seeking women.

But is this right-wing stereotype of spurned women seeking revenge based in truth? In fact the police estimate that 3% of rape allegations are malicious or false; that’s 3% of the one in five rapes that are estimated to get reported.

MELANIE Phillips takes her myth-making one step further. She suggests that the “dark figure” of unreported rapes, estimated by the British Crime Survey to be up to 40,000 in 2003, is also a fabrication by women. She attacks the methodology of the survey, claiming that anonymous questionnaires allow for women to lie.

It is really stretching the bounds of sanity to suggest women are so pathologically unable to tell the truth we even lie on confidential forms... just for the fun of it.

Philips ignores why anonymous reporting was introduced because that would mean admitting that rape still carries a social stigma. If rape still carries a social stigma then, logically, there would be less incentive for woment to lie about being raped. The invisibility of rape in crime statistics is a result of the methods of collecting data, not low incidence.

So social attitudes are still a crucial factor in understanding why up to four in five rapes go unreported. The stigma of being a rape victim remains complex and painful: it implies passivity, being “damaged goods”.

And we still live in a society where women are held to a higher standard of traditional sexual morality than men. We’ve all protested against the slapper/stud dichotomy, where promiscuous women are denigrated and promiscuous men are simply enjoying a “natural” male sexuality, but we rarely stop to think how these attitudes affect the way rape is dealt with both by victims and society. Women who have had casual sex are still seen as complicit in their own rape, by virtue of the fact they have sought sex before, so any sexual encounter was probably consented to.

This plays out in courts as well as in the tabloids. Although the 1999 Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act protected rape victims from having to answer questions about their sexual history in court, this was over-ruled after the introduction of the Human Rights Act. Evidence on sexual history is now admissible on the decision of the judge. The judiciary of course is not known for its progressive views on gender. No wonder then that women are being put off pursuing a conviction when the defendant’s lawyers may be able to bring up a history of casual sexual encounters on which to make a case against rape.

The law was re-interprested under the Human Rights Act on the grounds that it was reasonable to inform the jury of the victim’s relationship to her alleged rapist — whether they were strangers or lovers — something prohibited under the 1999 Act. This reflects how social perceptions of rape can be played off to prevent convictions. Whether a couple are married or strangers is irrelevant to proving that consent was obtained before sex, unless you live in a society such as ours, where consenting once to sex means forever giving up the right to bodily autonomy.

THE idea of prior consent highlights another rape myth that now prevents convictions and even affects the way victims view their rape. The phrase “date rape” now permeates our culture. It is seen as a separate, lesser crime than “real rape”. But is no less wrong to force a women to have sex with you against her will if you’ve bought her a few drinks and taken her back to your place, than it is to do it to a stranger in dark alley.

Yet women are far more likely to be raped by someone they know (an acquaintance, ex-partner, partner, friend) than this sociopathic stranger. So many of these “normal” rapes are now being cast in an ambiguous light by the term “date rape”. Once again the deviant woman stereotype crops up. Women who accept drinks, lifts and attention must know they’re leading men on, and cannot expect to escape without paying for it.

As long as sex is seen as something women “surrender” to men in return for male protection, chivalry and attention, instead of being seen as something women enjoy, the “date rape” myth will continue.

The most recent rape myths are those concerning alcohol, and the rape of women while they are drunk. Female binge drinking, increased alcoholic intake society-wide and general “irresponsible” behaviour have become have been blamed by senior police officers for increased rape rates. Here only a woman’s actions that are called into question; she is held partly responsible for her rape. The real guilty party, the rapist, is being ignored. Why?

Rape is perceived as a given in human society, something inevitable — as an instinctive, not a conscious behaviour on the part of men. And so it is, at least partially, condoned. Feminists may often be called “man-hating”, but in reality it is far more offensive to men to suggest that they cannot control themselves, and so women must take every precaution around them.

So what can be done about rape? A critical factor in low levels of reported rape is access to Sexual Assault Referral Centres (SARCs), specialist police units which are only available in 11 cities in the UK. Without one of these centres a woman’s first point of call after having been raped is a local police station.

That is often ill-equipped to deal sensitively with physical examination, counselling and the taking of a statement. It is at this crucial point many women are put off pursuing a case, or even thinking they have been raped at all.

High profile women’s magazines such as Glamour are currently running campaigns to improve the level of provision for rape victims, and raise women’s awareness of the services they can access.

Unfortunately the media is increasingly unwilling to engage in “old fashioned” political issues such as women’s rights. They do not want to be labelled feminist. The ideological side of why rape happens and why it continues goes unreported.

Whilst improving rape crisis provision will help, we need more than this. Bourgeois feminists and mainstream campaigning groups often lose sight of the end goal of stopping rape. They thereby partially accept society’s myth that it is inevitable.

Men can help to stop rape, by taking collective responsibility for it and challenging the rape supporting behaviours and attitudes of other men. We have a rape-is-okay culture, and no amount of women hiding away, covering up and not drinking will stop it; rape is a men’s issue too.

Many seemingly unrelated issues feed into rape-is-okay culture — a key example being heterosexual pornography. In recent years porn has become increasing brutal. While consuming porn doesn’t turn every man into a raging misogynist, as some conservative critics would have it, viewing real life violent acts performed on women (the majority of porn is male dominant/female submissive) perpetuates negative image of women. We are seen as ever-ready and ever-willing for sex, even of the most painful and degrading kind.

WE do not advocate censorship or imposing morality on mostly male consumers. Socialists strive to educate instead of censor, to challenge and dispel rape myths at every opportunity.

Furthermore, it is important to remember porn is a capitalist, not a male, malaise; this kind of violent product is not available because men want it, rather men want it because it is available. We live in a system where markets are created not discovered.

The hard-sell of porn and porn-like images leads to an artificially constructed idea of male sexuality as aggressive, dominant and violent towards women. Thus porn feeds into rape, and rape myths; the idea that men wield power over women, sexually, and that rape is simply an extension of “normal” male sexuality, whatever that is.

That said, we should reject the oversimplification by some feminists that porn is responsible for rape. A complex process of socialisation and other factors leads to men raping women. At the same time it is important to acknowledge how rape is the product of conscious choices men make in their behaviour towards women, and these choices are often informed by stereotypes, attitudes and values passed on through media such as porn.

I’m not an “anti-porn” feminist, with all the censoring connotations that implies; I’m against porn as it stands now, not the idea of recording or photographing sexual acts per se. Sexual fantasies cannot and should not be labelled as right or wrong, but the reality of violent fantasies being acted out on women, en masse, on film brings with it messages and values in the same way all media does.

Rape is a two-fold issue. It both springs from and perpetuates sexism; fear of rape is used to keep women submissive, restricting our movements and our sexualities. In order to stop it, we must not only work to dispel rape myths, and encourage men to take collective action, but also reject the idea of sex as a commodity, and our bodies as commodities by extension; pornography and other media that use porn-like images such as advertising must be challenged in order to break the rape-is-okay culture.

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