I really wish I lived in a world where people didn’t believe a girl wearing certain clothes is asking to be raped. It makes me sad and angry at the same time. I was mindlessly browsing on twitter yesterday when I came across a tweet from Holly from Geordie Shore (no, I don’t follow her. Someone had retweeted it). It was a screenshot of an instagram picture of her wearing a really low cut dress, and a comment from someone saying it’s no wonder girls get attacked.
Obviously she was really upset and angry, and it was nice to see so many people defend her and females in general, stating that it’s never the girls fault and it doesn’t matter how we dress. But there was one tweeter who tweeted “well if you dress like a hooker you’ll get treated like one” and it made me so angry, like seriously so angry, that I couldn’t help but tweet her back. I try and steer clear of drama on my twitter but I couldn’t physically let her say to the world, rape is okay if you dress like a slut.
Anyway, long twitter conversation short, she (and so many people out there, sadly) believe that rape is a girls fault for dressing and acting like a slut. Never mind the fact that rapes are committed by men, on girls who say no. Or that children get raped, and women who aren’t dressed ‘like sluts’ get raped. Screw all that.
According to Rape Crisis, 400,000 women are sexually assaulted and 85,000 women are raped every year in England and Wales. Guess how many rapists get convicted? 1000. And that’s after an average of 16 months after the rape has been committed.
It’s not hard to guess why so many cases get off. Up to one third of cases are dropped by the victim, and there’s been a lot of research which suggests that this is because the victim feels that nothing will be done, or they’re worried about interrogation in court. Within the police, and the justice system, there are a lot of people who don’t feel rape is really a crime. That if a girl is drunk, or dressed provocatively, they were asking for it.
If we, as humans, say that girls dressed a certain way are asking to be raped, it legitimises rape and people think it’s okay. Rape just isn’t okay, ever. It doesn’t matter if a girl is walking down the street naked, drunk and married to the guy raping her. If someone says no, that’s it. Rape is never the victim’s fault. And I’m sick and tired of hearing people say it is.
I wrote here that people don’t challenge social norms, that we just do what society expects and accept it as right. It used to be common knowledge that men, particularly husbands, had the right to a woman’s body. It wasn’t until 1991 that marital rape became illegal. Me writing this post isn’t going to change someone’s belief that what the victim does or wears doesn’t make rape their fault, but if enough people challenge the idea, maybe it won’t be long until all rapists get prosecuted, and people stop victim blaming.
