So, there’s this raging debate and this big divide on the question of “How should we be proactive about the problem of rape/sexual assault of women?” People fall in two camps – those who think that the reality of rape is such an immutable reality that although women maybe don’t deserve to be raped, certainly it’s only common sense to place the burden of avoiding danger entirely on them. Thus you see lists and instructions including guidelines such as not exposing too much skin, not getting drunk, and not walking in dark alleys alone at night. (Nevermind the lack of correlation between these things and actual rape.) Others, however, are outraged at the sexism of these implications and the way it can be used to blame the victims for their own rape, and the idea that it’s ok to severely restrict a woman’s freedom to dress as she pleases and move freely about in society under the name of protecting her. Instead, they argue, rapists are responsible for their own behavior, and the solution is to hold the perpetrators responsible, rather than the victims. We’ll call the first group the “Women, be safe!” group, and we’ll call the second group the “Rapists, don’t rape!” group.

And neither side is coming any closer to reaching a consensus.

One reason why they are stuck in such a stalemate, is because the “Women be safe!” side, scoffs at the idea of decreasing rape by directly appealing to the rapists. They argue first off that most men don’t rape (no disagreement there), and second, what makes you think that a potential rapist is going to listen to you if you tell him it’s bad?

It’s the second argument which we need to look at more closely. I think the “Women, be safe!” group imagines that the “Rapists, don’t rape!” group is advocating a school curriculum in which a teacher gathers her students and says, “Now boys, when you grow up, you’ll see women and you’ll think they are very pretty. But you must not rape them, even if you want to! If she says no, you need to accept that answer and stop there! No means no! Rape is bad!”

It’s a pretty ridiculous mental image, not to mention offensive on several levels. Skipping issues of offensiveness, the bottom line is that it seems entirely ineffective. Rapists are bad guys! They don’t care that they are doing something bad! That’s why they are rapists! What makes you think they would respond to anything that anyone would say to them?

Now here we get closer to the heart of the problem. “Bad guys.” I would argue that anytime you hear any labeling of “bad guys” when discussing issues in society, you’ve almost always met an “us vs them” fallacy, where by labeling someone an outsider, with the accompanying assumptions that they are fundamentally different from you, you’ve limited your ability to truly understand them. Because, whenever you label a group as being the “bad guy”, you basically dismiss their humanity in a way which reduces them to an overly simplified, two-dimensional cartoon villain. And as such, you’ve destroyed your ability to understand the true dynamics and motivations which are creating problematic trends. You decide that they are “not like you”, that they operate on a different set of internal motivations, values, and guidelines than the rest of us – and that this difference fundamentally alters their humanity. You can’t reason with bad guys. All you can do is keep them as far away from you and yours as you possibly can, so as to minimize the damage. And on an individual level, particularly if you yourself have been raped, this makes a lot of sense. But on a meta level, when dealing with a societal problem as a whole, it limits our ability to understand what is really going on in order to be effective.

From that perspective, appealing to rapists is ridiculous. But the fact of the matter is, that although rape is a horrific thing, many steps beyond merely “bad”, rapists are still humans. And they do respond to social conditioning and societal expectations. This dichotomy where rapists are seen as evil villains cackling maniacally at the thought of women’s lives destroyed while tapping their fingers together in a scheming manner, has no resemblance to reality.

It’s not that all rapists just don’t give a fuck about right and wrong because they all entirely lack a conscience – instead, it’s that many of them have managed to rationalize to themselves that what they are doing is not actually rape, that everyone else is doing it, and thus, that what they are doing is not actually wrong. This article discusses a study in which men will admit to rape, just so long as you don’t call it that.

And that’s key. Some of the perpetrators of these attacks aren’t operating on an entirely different moral code from the rest of us – some of them are rationalizing rape against the same moral code we all tend to agree upon! And when we understand this, it only follows that there are ways to approach things from the “Rapists, don’t rape!” perspective that doesn’t involve gathering little boys around a teacher’s knee and talking to them in a condescending and stigmatizing way that assumes that all little boys will grow up to be rapists if not taught otherwise. It involves a much broader and more global conceptualization of the problem – that it rests in the attitudes and ideas of the culture as a whole, and that’s where we need to tackle the problem, not by making little boys feel that they are somehow evil simply for being male. It rests in a culture which is willing to laugh at rape jokes, or among guys who will high-five each other for “scoring” with a drunk woman. If men are able to rationalize that “it’s not really rape” and “this is how everybody gets laid” then this means that not enough people have challenged their ideas. And that’s everybody’s problem.

The most important lessons here won’t come from a teacher lecturing and shaming little boys. It will come from the friend who says “Dude, that’s not cool” when someone makes a rape joke, or the buddies who act alarmed and not congratulatory when alcohol is used to increase a guy’s odds of “getting lucky” that night. It comes from the attitudes that every single one of us holds, naturally expressed in situations throughout life, which combine to create an environment where the social conditioning we all receive will undermine a rapist’s ability to rationalize that these things are not rape, and that everyone is doing it. As another blog recently put it, “There are other sentient human beings involved who can also be taught how to not ridicule people, how to not view women as objects, how to not rape.”

Of course, this will not singlehandedly eliminate all rape. Some rapists know exactly what they are doing, and some of them really don’t care. Some of them seem to not have much of a conscience. There are, in fact, some bad guys out there. But if we are trying, as a society, to minimize the damage, we need to realize that there’s a significant number of rapists who can be influenced, and we need to realize the messages that we are sending to them when sexist jokes are funny and consent is not given the utmost priority, always. That’s what “Rapists, don’t rape!” is really about – not targeting all males as if they are all potential rapists.

Note: For the purposes of this blog, I have focused on situations in which rape victims are women, and rapists are men. I do, however, understand that it can go the other direction, and that both victims and perpetrators can be either male or female. The reason for this specific focus is because I am responding to those who give safety tips to women in order to supposedly prevent them from being raped by men. This is the focus of the public dialogue on this topic, and I am responding to this public perception of the problem. They have chosen to specifically focus on situations of male attackers and female victims, and so I focus my discussion on that specific scenario.