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I started writing this post last August, and found it all too aggravating, so it’s been sitting in the draft folder since then. This week’s publication by the UK Home Office of a survey on public attitudes towards violence against women has made it topical again.

These figures appear to actually show the situation is worse than we thought from that pivotal 2005 poll by Amnesty. For example, Amnesty found about 1/3 of people think women who’ve been flirting are responsible if they get raped, whereas the Home Office poll puts the figure at a shocking 43%. About 50% believe that women in prostitution bear some or all of the responsibility if they’re raped.

Elsewhere, grave doubt was expressed that attitudes of holding women responsible for sexual violence directed towards them was in fact a popular community view, to the extent that a position paper from an academic conference was mercilessly mocked for this sentence:

Women who are raped or who suffer domestic violence are somehow thought of in the popular imagination as a stereotype. According to this, the women are asking for it, dressed inappropriately, provoking it – responsible for it.

Like quite a few other people, my response to this mockery and argument that no way is this a common attitude towards domestic and sexual violence was largely you have got to be kidding – but apparently not. I offered to produce cites, and began to do so, and then the original thread went pear-shaped and I was so sickened that I didn’t complete it.

There was eventually some retreat on that thread from the mockers/deniers to claiming that no-one actually says in so many words that a woman is responsible for being raped or bashed, but they made no acknowledgement or analysis of the implications of common remarks about rape victims such as “look at what she was wearing” or “she shouldn’t have been drinking like that” or “what did she expect when she went to a footballer’s room?” (I dunno, maybe to just have sex with that one footballer, instead of being surprised by a queue of his very large mates blocking the exit from the room?). One doesn’t have to state an attitude directly for that attitude to be clearly implied by/inferred from the other things one says.

Another weird aspect of that particular discussion was an immediate assumption that the phrase “in the popular imagination” somehow only applied to a male view of sexual violence, and that it implied a universal male view at that. Let’s make two things very clear:

Nothing in the original report to which such objections were made implied that victim-blaming was only popular amongst men. Many, many women also hold views that other women who are victims of sexual violence contribute to their own victimisation by behaving recklessly or unwisely (this seems to be almost a totemic belief system – if women can believe that it is only those women who do “the wrong things” are victimised, then they feel safer so long as they themselves don’t do “the wrong things”). Popular does not mean universal. Two very popular musical artists are Michael Jackson and Britney Spears, yet I have never owned a recording by either of them. No one recording artist has ever had an absolute majority of the record-buying public buy one of their recordings, and yet enough people do buy recordings of certain artists that those artists are described as popular – it requires 1,000,000 “sales” in the USA to be awarded a “platinum album” by the RIAA, which means purchases by far fewer than 1% of the adult population. I’m sure the perspicacious reader can come up with many similar examples from other fields of human taste and opinion.

So, let’s lay that whole misrepresentation to rest, shall we? “Popular” simply refers to a noticeable proportion of the population. The original report was in no way a slam against men as a whole when anyone who has done any study in this area knows that when it comes to jury trials it is both men and women who are critical of a victim’s behaviour, and the report was aimed at a readership that could be expected to already know that (especially in light of this recent Australian Institute of Criminology report, which found that pre-existing attitudes towards rape victims are the strongest determinant in jurors’ assessment of witness credibility).

In the AIC 2007 report, jurors who were politically conservative men with lower-level educations are more likely to believe that the defendants are not guilty of rape than those jurors with higher educations, but despite many other jurors finding the witness credible uncertainties about what actually constituted consent and ensuing reasonable doubt meant that 75% of the jurors felt that the appropriate response was a not-guilty verdict. The study also showed that if victims, following a sexual assault, do not behave in ways that the jurors imagine rape victims should behave, then they tend to find them less credible regarding the issue of consent (and that their general beliefs about how “real” rape victims behave were highly stereotypical).

I certainly find attitudes that are popular enough to result in a not-guilty decision from 75% of the jury pool to be popular enough to be concerned about. Summarising such attitudes about sexual violence against women as “asking for it, dressing inappropriately, provoking it – responsible for it” does not seem like too far a stretch to me.

A separate community survey in Victoria (Taylor & Mouzos, 2006)showed the following (as summarised by the AIC 2007 report):

one in 10 respondents believed that women are more likely to be raped by strangers and another one in 10 couldn’t say

about one quarter disagreed that false claims of rape are rare and one in 10 couldn’t say (if a juror starts with the assumption that women often lie about rape, this will influence the way s/he interprets testimony)

fifteen percent agreed that women often say ‘no’ when they mean ‘yes’ and one in 10 couldn’t say (testimony that the complainant said ‘no’ is unlikely to convince jurors with this belief that she did not consent)

seven percent of males and four percent of females agreed that women who are raped often ask for it

forty-four percent of males and 32 percent of females believed that rape results from men not being able to control their need for sex (responsibility for rape is therefore removed from men because it is not within their control)

A similar study in Ireland had broadly similar figures (although they asked some different questions, including sexual history/revealing clothes) and found that

Dramatic differences in empathy towards victims based on age and social class are revealed. Gender, however, had little impact.

[…]

The results of the poll support the results of the ground-breaking Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) report in 2002, which found 15% of the population believed a raped woman was not an innocent victim.

Let’s examine the shockingly high numbers of both men and women who agree that “rape results from men not being able to control their need for sex” and what that indicates. Other studies show juries are unsympathetic to victims who have consumed large amounts of alcohol and that there is a wide assumption that it is reasonable to assume that silence equals consent, even when the victim is too intoxicated to speak. Combine the attitudes that men cannot control their sexual urges and that women say no when they mean yes and that silence equals consent, and you essentially have a large proportion of the population holding the attitude, rarely openly expressed, that men should not be expected to resist any temptation to have sexual contact with unconscious women in their vicinity (and that women should not expect to be safe if drunk in the company of men, therefore if women are drunk in the company of men and non-consensual sex takes place, they have contributed to their own assault by offering the opportunity to men who cannot resist).

This attitude towards alcohol consumption also presents women who are out drinking as unquestionably signalling sexual availability of a general definitely-tonight-with-anyone nature rather than just of a potential maybe-sometime-with-someone nature, and that men cannot be expected to tell the difference themselves or to respect those boundaries if they are expressed, no matter how directly and clearly. This attitude that silence is assumed to mean consent means that a defence lawyer can bully a woman who was too drunk to remember into agreeing that she can’t be absolutely sure that she said no, and that a judge can then instruct the jury that the fully sober security guard who “took advantage” of her while so drunk that her friends had asked him to escort her to her room should thus be given the benefit of the doubt (Ryairi Dougal was found not guilty).

This view of men as unable to resist an opportunity to rape is a popular community attitude, it is NOT a feminist view of men. Feminists argue that men should be expected to be able to refrain from raping a vulnerable woman, and that is is unreasonable to exculpate men on the basis that they have no control over their sexual urges. Men are right to feel insulted by the belief that they cannot resist sexual temptation, but it is wrong to blame feminists for this belief. This widespread belief goes back centuries and even millennia before feminism, and is reinforced every time someone expresses the view that “men can’t help themselves” with regard to sexual continency. (Catch 22: when women actually do act on the assumption that any man cannot resist the sexual temptation of a woman too vulnerable or incapacitated to resist, they are described as paranoid despite having heard this message throughout their lives.)

So, below are more samples of academic articles, news reports and opinion columns which show that the idea that women are responsible for their own rapes – that they ask for or provoke sexual violence by dressing inappropriately or engaging in unsafe behaviours (including behaviours at home with their partners) – is very commonly held indeed.

Anyway, on with the cites:

Rape Myths

By far the most common rape myth is that the primary danger is from a stranger in the bushes. Yet the fact is, that in study after study (of rapes both reported to the police and community surveys of rapes that were not) that most raped women report knowing their accused rapists socially. In Australia in 2003 78% of female victims knew their attackers and 65% of sexual assaults took place in private dwellings rather than public places . Yet there is still a perception that only stranger rape is “real” rape, that other incidents of sexual coercion are more likely to be viewed as misunderstandings within a relationship rather than being understood as a deliberate decision to employ or threaten force in order to gain sexual intercourse with a nonconsenting victim.

The second most common myth is that most acquaintance-rape attacks occur on women who have been drinking alchol, who have gone with their attacker willingly while intoxicated and later been coerced into sexual activity. Yet official UK Home Office figures show that “there was some evidence of alcoholic consumption by the victim prior to the offence (although not necessarily intoxication) in 31 per cent of cases”, which while significant(popular?) is not a majority. Other research indicates that in most cases both people are drinking, and in cases where only one of the people has been drinking, it is more likely to be the man who is intoxicated.

Negative attitudes generally

Australia

The results demonstrated that a significant proportion of students held unfavorable attitudes toward rape victims, perceived the victims as being responsible for the rape, and perceived the victims as contributing to their assault.

[link]Perceptions of Rape and Sexual Assault Among Australian Adolescents and Young Adults

XENOS and SMITH J Interpers Violence.2001; 16: 1103-1119

Studies have shown that a disturbingly high level of teenage boys condone sexual violence, reinforcing the need for sexual violence prevention education in secondary schools (Bateman 1991).

From Laura Russo,2000 Date Rape: A Hidden Crime, Trends & Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, No.157

(ref cited within that article: Bateman, P. 1991, “The Context of Date Rape”, in B. Levy (ed.), Dating Violence: Younger Women in Danger, Seal Press, Seattle)

From other countries:

In Hungary (from an Amnesty International Report referenced in an Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault newsletter):

Significant proportions of people surveyed in a public opinion poll believed that women were responsible for being raped (40% of men and 25% of women), and over 15% thought that domestic violence was an exaggerated social issue.

The same newsletter contains this quote:

At least 85% of them are whores: but they do not manage to come to an agreement. They are prostitutes: overtly or secretly … (A police officer and expert on rape issues in Cries Unheard)

Police attitudes towards sexual assault in New Zealand(Jordan, 2005): this report shows continuing beliefs that women routinely lie about rape and that accusations of non-stranger rape are simply sexual misunderstandings rather than genuine sexual attacks.

Perceptions of consent, rape myth acceptance and whether a coerced sexual act was perceived as a sexual assault

Many studies have shown that often sexual acts which meet the legal definition or rape/sexual assault may not be labelled as such by either the victims or the perpetrators, if they have an acquaintance relationship. This non-labelling is often claimed as evidence that no rape took place despite meeting the legal definition of such, and appears to reveal an attitude that women have more control in instances of acquaintance rape compared to stranger rape.

Was it rape? The function of women’s Rape Myth acceptance and definitions of sex in labeling their own experiences

PETERSON Zoë D., MUEHLENHARD Charlene L., Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas

Sex roles, 2004, vol. 51, no3-4, pp. 129-144

Abstract: In a phenomenon called unacknowledged rape, many rape victims do not label their experience rape. Does their level of rape myth acceptance influence this labeling process? In this study, 86 college women whose experience met the legal definition of rape described their experience, indicated how they labeled it, and completed the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale. Logistic regressions indicated that, for 2 rape myths (e.g., if women don’t fight back, it’s not rape), women who accepted the myth and whose experience corresponded to the myth (e.g., they did not fight back) were less likely than other women to acknowledge their experience as rape. Women were also unlikely to acknowledge rape when they did not label the nonconsensual sexual behavior sex.



Gender role and attitudes toward rape in male and female college students

Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, July, 1993 by Lynda A. Szymanski, Ann Sloan Devlin, Joan C. Chrisler, Stuart A. Vyse

Kanin (1967) found that 26% of the male undergraduates surveyed admitted that they had acted sexually aggressively on a date, which involved making a forceful attempt at intercourse causing their date to cry, scream, fight, or plead.

[…]

One in 12 men surveyed in this study admitted to acting in ways that satisfied the legal definition of rape or attempted rape, with 84% of these men believing that what they had done was “definitely not rape.”

Perceptions that sexually successful men can’t be rapists because “they don’t need to rape, women are throwing themselves at them”

This is a very, very common response any time an elite athlete or high status man is accused of rape, revealing a judgement that rape is purely a function of lust, and that a man who has regular sexual liaisons could therefore have no “need” to rape in order to have his sexual needs met. It totally denies that rapists can and do decide to use sexual assault as an expression of power, that subjugating and humiliating a woman who said no to sex is a big part, perhaps the major part, of the thrill.

Kanin found that this view of rapists as acting from sexual “need” (i.e. an extended period without sexual intercourse) was certainly not the case in his study of 71 self-disclosed dape rapists (according to the legal criterion “sexual penetration accomplished on a nonconsenting woman by employing or threatening force”).

The subjects were self-selecting college undergraduates responding to advertisements promising anonymity and counselling. All of the incidents of self-disclosed date rape were with women who they had been dating for at least several previous dates. All of these men had a generally high rate of sexual success and therefore a high rate of expecting continued sexual success. Frustration of their expected success prompted the employing/threatening of force in order to gain sexual penetration.

Kanin et al used a control group initially consisting of 227 men (white, unmarried, undergraduate students from 15 different classes) to complete the same surveys regarding sexual behaviour as their 71 subjects, aiming to compare heterosexual non-rapists with heterosexual rapists. When collating the survey they excluded men who disclosed as homosexual, and they also exluded another 36 men for disclosing that they had either attempted or succeeded in gaining coitus throught the use of force or threats.

Social Psychology and Human Sexuality: Essential Readings

By Roy F. Baumeister, Published by Psychology Press, 2001, ISBN 1841690198, 9781841690193

Chapter 11, Author Eugene Kanin pp. 236-237

Opinion columns in mass circulation newspapers

Here’s just a sampling of op-eds that have been commented on by one particular feminist blogger. It is a representative but far from comprehensive sampling of attitudes that are both common and popular.

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Categories: gender & feminism, health, language, relationships, violence