Victim Blaming Only Encourages Abusers: Why Victims Are Never At Fault.
Warning: This article includes topics regarding sexual assault and rape that may be triggering to those who have experienced sexual assault or had similar experiences.
This stigma associated with women’s sexuality has lasted since the dawn of time.
To the point that it has become an argument, a rebuttal — a blatant scheme to crucify the innocent. Something to weaponize against those who are being shunned because of the prejudice that surrounds them, and could even be used as an opportunity to play moral police and dictate what’s worthy of sympathy or not
But morals can be subjective. They don’t even bear that much relevance to the issue at hand, a lot of the time they’re not even morals and values, to begin with.
It’s nitpicking irrelevant details, an excuse for the mob to find an aperture for the perpetrator’s wrong-doings, and make it seem as if what had supposedly provoked the perpetrator carries the same weight as their crimes. But it doesn’t.
If it did carry the same weight, the damages wouldn’t be reduced if done to anybody else, it’d still bear its immorality regardless of the circumstances.
For example, you can’t say a woman was asking to be assaulted because of the way she dressed, acted, or spoke. You can’t say she deserved what had happened to her, thinking the crime that was committed is on the same level of severity as her choices.
Because if the circumstances were different and she had dressed, acted, or spoken in the same way but with her lover who would never harm her, the outcome would be different, she wouldn’t have ended up harmed.
If she had dressed the same way as her close female friends, she also would not have been harmed.
Now, if you put the criminal in a different circumstance and applied what he did to either his friend, lover, or stranger, the severity would not be reduced any less.
The way a woman dresses or acts around a rapist will never carry the same weight as a rapist’s intentions and what he decides to do to act out on those intentions because they are not on the same level.
Wearing attractive clothing is not asking for it, displaying a certain behavior is not asking for it, being in a secluded area around the rapist is not asking for it, and being intoxicated is not asking for it.
If a mutual agreement is absent in an interaction involving two people where the other suggests sexual intercourse, no one is asking for it, it is coerced. Forced upon the victim regardless of what they were wearing or how the rapist chose to interpret their actions as either inviting or tempting.
This issue became widespread during the passing of Christine Dacera, a flight attendant in the Philippines who was found dead in a hotel room after attending a party with predominantly male guests, a lot of whom were her close friends.
The Philippine National Police branded the case as solved following the arrest of 3 suspects charged with rape and murder. However, there are still major speculations considering Christine died of an aneurysm and that almost all of the male guests she was seen partying with have identified as queer as well as the lack of evidence proving said guests took part in her death nor was there any signs of struggling correlated to sexual assault. With that being said, the case has started to become a little bit blurry.
On one hand, that hasn’t stopped people from making extremely unnecessary comments saying that if rape did take place at the scene of the crime, it wouldn’t have been debatable as to why it happened, due to how with what Christine was last seen wearing and how she willingly decided to attend a party made up exclusively of men, is that it’s no surprise she ended up in the predicament she was found in.
Now, when I tell you, that despite the countless times this argument arises whenever a story of sexual assault or rape happens, is that it never fails to disgust me.
Disgust as well as mortified me at how people could think this way. That as soon as a woman is brought forward about being sexually assaulted, people’s automatic response is to ask “Well, what was she wearing?”
As if that holds any kind of significance whatsoever. As if that held any weight on whether or not someone deserved to be killed or raped, because, news flash, nobody deserves to go through either.
Regardless of how the victim was acting, speaking, or how they were dressed, no one deserves to go through that. No one deserves to be ridiculed for whatever impression they may have left, but instead, the only people who do deserve to be held accountable are those who thought it would be a marvelous idea to commit sexual assault and rape in the first place.
You’d think with how far we’ve already progressed in today’s society, that this is something we shouldn’t even have to debate about.
It’d be more understandable to debate whether or not Burger King is better than McDonald’s, but debating whether or not a girl deserves to be sexually assaulted based on what she is wearing.
Because if we look at the bigger picture here, this debate would have instantly been disclosed if everybody just set aside their prejudices, and preconceived notions of how a woman should dress and let it sink in that despite who the person is or what they were doing, is that no one deserves to be raped.
To set aside your conservatism, to set aside what you were led to believe in how a woman should act or dress, and to set aside your deeply embedded misogyny.
This dispute is correlated to a deeper systematic issue that ties in with sexism and how men have been granted power all their lives.
How women were taught to be more vigilant, more modest, and more demure at the expense of not being killed or disrespected by men as if the impunity that men have been granted is women’s fault.
How women were forced to carry the burden of being cautious in their day-to-day lives instead of dismantling this “Boys will boys.” narrative to justify one’s ignorance.
That instead of telling girls to stop dressing or acting a certain way, how about we tell these boys to not be rapists? So girls and women won’t have to succumb to societal conformity and restrictions to protect their well-being?
I tried so hard to figure out how this argument came to be, and why anyone would think this was okay. Of course, I know all of this goes back to a long-lasting patriarchal practice with men asserting their power and society perpetually allowing them, but I wanted to go deeper.
The psychological kind. Of course, it’s no mystery why men would defend other men when they commit sexual assault, due to complicity and this unspoken pact between them that despite acts of violence, the perpetrator who initiated it probably had the right to do so as long as they are male.
“Because that’s my brother, and I’m going to project my need for power onto other men despite the crimes that they have committed.” is what I would assume a man is thinking about when he decides to defend either a male rapist or abuser, because isn’t that was abuse and sexual assault all stem from? The need for dominance? Because men have always been granted power, whether it would show discreetly or not.
By handing them power, it doesn’t always have to be direct handouts, the fact that you dismiss cases like this by blaming the women first is already giving men that you either know or don’t know that advantage, because you’re validating them, by dismissing what their fellow men are doing, and as Abraham Lincoln said, if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
Now, society isn’t primarily made up of men, is it? Of course, women have just as much say in this as those their male counterparts.
This is where the narrative starts to become depressing because you’d think when a woman gets sexually assaulted is that other women would stand up for her, defend her, console her, and tell her it’s not her fault.
But sadly, that isn’t always the case. A lot of the time this ongoing stigma continues because women also partake in these recurring witch hunts that consist mostly of moral policing.
I wondered why other women would feel the need to think this way without feeling resentful and bitter because I couldn’t wrap my head around it. For them to think in such a manner despite the harmful implications of their words and what defending men like this would do to them.
In the end, as much as I hated thinking about it, all of this stemmed from women wanting validation from men. It always does.
Because in times when men question the credibility of a woman’s story when she steps forward about being sexually assaulted — either by asking what she was wearing or how she was acting or what location she was in, they’ll take these very specific but irrelevant details to cultivate a narrative that completely isolates other women.
How do they do that? By coddling them so they could get away with harming them in the end.
They will criticize the woman’s appearance so that the rapist will walk away unscathed, and also so that they could shift the blame by praising another woman so that crimes of sexual assault will continue to be swept under the rug as they tell other women:
“As long as you don’t act or dress the same way, it won’t happen to you, because this only happens to women with horrible values and priorities, who think it’s okay to dress that way, so if you want to avoid going through that, be better.” Implying that the victims are the villains here.
It’s the way other men choose their biases and impose them onto women, and women, being forced to submit to the systems of patriarchy, will eat this up to obtain men’s approval. To appear better in their eyes.
So of course, they’ll discriminate against the victims. Blame them for the way they looked or acted because a woman’s sexuality is only seen as desirable if dictated by men, and the more that this is encouraged, the more these ways of thinking will contaminate how a woman views herself or others.
Whether it be cases of sexual assault, or when a man cheats on a woman, the woman’s first reaction is to blame the woman first instead of blaming her partner for cheating on her, to begin with.
So that we can avoid letting men take accountability for their wrong-doings because we’ve been taught even at a young age that a man’s approval goes beyond our better judgment.
Even in circumstances that include literal death and violence, we still let men walk away without being given rightful consequences for their crimes, it’s because even when they’re wrong, they’re still right. It’s because it was imposed on us that a man can never do anything wrong.
It’s always either how a woman acted or how a woman spoke. It’s never about the man’s voluntary actions, that which he could’ve repressed.
Because if all men just had the common decency to not harm women, the statistics for rape and sexual assault wouldn’t be at such an all-time high.
Women wouldn’t have to check the mirror before going out to see if what she is wearing is too attractive or if she’ll incite something animalistic in a man because a woman’s body is not a sin, it is her own and it doesn’t harm anyone.
Rape would not exist if there weren’t rapists, and rapists would not exist if we just don’t validate them even when they’re clearly in the wrong and let them walk away from their crimes without being held accountable.
The only time anyone should come forward about how a girl shouldn’t dress a certain way if she is underage, aside from that? What gives you the right to say that a young girl or grown woman’s body and how she dresses is deserving of sexual assault?
This goes out for all victims, whether a man or a woman, no one deserves to be sexually assaulted, regardless of what you are wearing, the only person deserving of consequences is the perpetrator.
No victim is or will ever be asking for it.
