It’s a common argument that invariably boils down to the same nonsense: If the victims were different, they wouldn’t have been victimized. It’s a comforting myth, guaranteed to make it easy to pretend that sexual assault is something that only happens to people who make bad choices. It’s also a myth that has been thoroughly debunked by the Justice Department, RAINN and many other organizations. A Federal Commission on Crime of Violence study found that just 4.4 percent of all reported rapes involved “provocative behavior” on the part of the victim. (In murder cases, it’s 22 percent.) It also found that most convicted rapists could not remember what their victims were wearing. Studies show that women with passive personalities, who tend to dress in layers, long pants and sleeves and high necklines, are actually more likely to be raped. In one study, 1 in 3 college men said that they would force someone to have sex if they could get away with it, and that has nothing to do with clothing.

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We know that anyone from a nun to a soldier can be a victim of sexual assault — including men. In fact, while everything from attire to alcohol consumption is blamed when women are raped, military sexual assault statistics show that men in the military are at a slightly greater risk of sexual assault than women. Now either the three-piece military uniforms and combat boots are leading people astray — or clothing has nothing to do with what makes rapists assault people. The sad reality is that rapists choose to rape, often more than once, and studies show they are also often guilty of other violent crimes.

The cultural assumption that rape is something that can be prevented by behaving a certain way has never been extended to include male victims. While some of those assaults are characterized as hazing or bullying, the reality is that we don’t assume male victims are at fault for existing near a rapist. (Male victims face other damaging notions, like the idea that men cannot be raped or that men enjoy the sexual attention of older, predatory women. Both of these incredibly dangerous ideas makes men less likely to report an attack and should be challenged, along with the idea that women can only hope to avoid rape by not being tempting.)

Despite the fact that 9 percent of sexual assault victims are young men, we don’t insist that they dress differently. We don’t warn young men not to tempt their teachers with their bare biceps, knees or other body parts. We don’t warn young men not to be a distraction to their female classmates, or regulate whether they can wear shorts in the summer to school. When a news story breaks about an adult female teacher preying sexually on a boy, no one asks what he was wearing or insists he should have known better than to be alone with her. So what’s the point of policing skirt lengths, of advising young women not to go to certain places, to protect their drinks instead of focusing on telling rapists not to rape?

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Women who express their fear of being assaulted as a reason to avoid strange men on the street are often chided for thinking that “all men are rapists.” And indeed, studies show that a small percentage of men are responsible for most sexual assaults. But the anti-rape campaigns that are put forward on campuses, in the military and elsewhere focus on the idea that the only way a woman can be safe from sexual assault is to change her behavior, to change her attire, to never do anything that could potentially increase her risk of being a victim. There’s an assumption that rapists are just one of those unavoidable aspects of life, and the onus is on women, who make up 91 percent of victims, to insulate themselves.