Helen Speaks

I’m so fed up with reading stuff about rape, rape jokes, victim blaming (eg blaming a teenage girl for when she is raped by a group of adult men) and so on. I tried to stop reading feminist blogs for a bit, thinking I’d be reading fewer stories about rape, rape jokes, and victim blaming but guess what, turns out that the reason feminist blogs write about those things is because the world is full of rape, rape jokes and victim blaming.

When I was younger I remember e-mails doing the rounds with advice on how to avoid being raped. Stuff like “rapists grab women by their ponytails”, “rapists are less likely to threaten women with umbrellas” etc. It seemed brilliant at the time – armed with that knowledge, I could go out with my hair tucked into my coat and an offensive enough umbrella, and no one would attack me! Actually, I’ll admit I’ve been out with my hair in a ponytail and without an umbrella or even handy attack alarm on multiple occasions since then, even on my own, in the dark. I’ve not been raped either – but that’s perhaps not surprising. Most rape victims know their rapist, and by the time they’re in danger, it’s a bit late to be taking the ponytail out or making sure there’s an umbrella in sight.

Part of the problem with helpful tips like these is that they can feed into the idea that a woman must do certain things to prevent being raped, when the reality is that there are many different contexts in which a rape can happen, many of which cannot be foreseen or prevented by the victim, unless we require everyone to live alone in personal reinforced nuclear bunkers. For instance, Eamonn Holmes asked rape survivor Hannah Cant why she didn’t take a taxi. He conveniently missed the point that taxi drivers can be rapists too.

A little while ago I read a list of Sexual Assault Prevention tips guaranteed to work – tips like “Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.”

At first I thought this was just a funny, feminist-y twist on the original, meant entirely for satirical purposes. But the more I read, the more I am convinced that we need more ‘tips’ of this kind. Rapists are not a force of nature, they are people – people with minds, and therefore reasoning skills. Rape is not going to stop because women followed all the right rules to prevent being raped, not least because women aren’t the only sort of people who are ever victims of rape.

But it will stop if people decide not to be rapists. A 2011 ad campaign in Vancouver with the slogan Don’t be that guy coincided with a 10% reduction of sexual assaults in Vancouver.

It may seem obvious, but people need to know that…

…having sex with someone who is too young to consent is rape.
…having sex with someone who lacks mental capacity, whether through drunkenness, simply being asleep, or any other cause, is rape.
…lying to a person to get them to have sex with you is rape.
…refusing to stop having sex with someone who has asked to stop is rape.
…intimidating someone into having sex with you is rape.
…pressurising someone who is unsure about having sex with you into having sex with you is rape.

And just because someone hasn’t said no doesn’t meant that they consent. Not saying no is not the same as saying yes.

Does this seem ludicrously obvious? Bear in mind that Julian Assange’s own lawyer Ben Emmerson QC at Assange’s extradition appeal hearing defended his client by saying that an encounter in which he penetrated a sleeping woman was ‘entirely consensual’. Julian Assange is a clever man. If he cannot apparently figure out that someone who is asleep cannot consent, then I worry for the rest of humanity.

It’s not enough to tell people how to not be raped – we need to tell people to not rape.