Women can’t stop rape
I started to write a reply to Tamanou’s comment below, but it grew and grew, so better to post it here:
He asked:
“… what can be done to make it less unpleasant for young women to report these atrocities, to provide a more supportive environment for those who have been violated like this, and to make it more likely that bastards like these will be caught?”
What a question! Where to start?
Firstly, similarly to how the Government has invested millions in making sure that there is a national 24 hour domestic violence helpline (0808 2000 247, by the way), we need to make sure that there’s a national rape crisis helpline. At the moment, there’s a patchwork of local provision with massively unstable funding run by dedicated volunteers who are really prone to burnout after a few years. Many areas have local lines, but London Rape Crisis closed in 2001 after they lost all their funding, and in 2003 the national Rape Crisis Federation folded after the Home Office withdrew their financial support. Even where there are existing lines, they often open for very short periods only - a few hours on specified nights a week, which, given the nature of the issue, isn’t ideal. I’m not underestimating the enormous dedication and commitment of the volunteers - I know I couldn’t do their job - but I think it’s time for a more national response, an always-on resource, ready to give information and provide a listening ear immediately.
(picture by Jackie Fleming for the Truth about Rape)
Secondly, the first point of contact with the police needs to be improved. I’d use the model of the Sexual Abuse Referral Centre - SARC, which is a building furnished like a house with medical suite and examination rooms, and specially-trained officers ready to take statements from women and others who have experienced rape or sexual abuse. There are a handful (just 13) in the UK at the moment, but only a very few women live near enough one for it to be their first point of contact.
Thirdly, we need a recognition that the woman who has been raped is more than just a witness to a crime, which is often how she is treated. Whilst a defendant will (rightly) be prepared for court by his lawyer, the woman will often have little support or prewarning about what the experience will be like, how the court process works or when things happen. This is getting better - there are some great pilots around, and Victim Support have some great schemes to support women, but again, it’s a patchwork.
Fourth, we need specialist prosecutors who understand rape cases and are prepared to go the extra mile and understand the detail of forensic evidence. Specialist rape prosecutors have overseen a huge rise in the conviction rate in the US.
Fifth, judges must stop allowing defendants’ lawyers to bring up a woman’s past sexual history or allow defendants to cross-examine rape survivors. This was supposed to have been outlawed a few years ago, but lawyers are still getting away with playing on the prejudices of juries, the resentment of judges for a prohibition of what they see as relevant lines of enquiry and the lack of expertise of non-specialist prosecutors.
Sixth, women who have been raped need to have access to counselling and support, on the NHS or otherwise free of charge, straightaway and for the long term. This is where rape crisis centres come into their own - for woman-centred formal and informal emotional support. Their families may also need some help, particularly the partners of women who have been raped, who often end up absorbing the misery as they try to support their loved one.
But all of this is a sticking plaster compared to the enormous changes we need to make to people’s attitudes about rape, to stop it in the first place. Think of all the ways in which accepted thinking about rape, women and sexual activity disadvantages her and makes the attack possible, legitimising it in the mind of what is probably a very outwardly-normal young man:
- Firstly, she’s lucky that anyone believed her, as she’d been having underage sex, making her a slapper at risk of teenage pregnancy and him a wide boy, doing well for getting his end away so young; already her status is lower than his.
- She broke up with him, and then insulted him, diminishing him in the eyes of his peers; many would find his reaction understandable, even if they didn’t condone it, because rape is about asserting power, not about sex.
- They’d already been having sex for a period of time, so even though she had broken up with him and even though she didn’t want it, many might think that it didn’t make much difference, once more didn’t matter.
- She was 15, out on her own; it might be argued that she shouldn’t have been.
- Having sex with a woman while one’s mates look on has been popularised by “roasting” sessions involving footballers and female fans, whether they consent or not, and where there have been allegations of abuse, no-one has been prosecuted; again, this normalises the situation in a society obsessed with celebrity, and makes it clear that rape is a low-risk activity.
- The popularisation of “date rape” as opposed to normal rape also sends this message that the act isn’t really rape, and the media furore about the naming of men accused of rape sends the message that many women make up accusations of rape, thus making it less likely that she will be believed, causing her to exercise self-censorship and not report, and thus diminishing the possibility of negative consequences for him.
- Even were he to end up in trouble, he could rely on at least some of the police, the CPS, the judge, the jury and the lawyers holding attitudes that disadvantage her and privilege that nice young man, coached and scrubbed up well, in the interview room or (unlikely, but it does happen) in the dock.
- No doubt, many members of his community and perhaps his own parents would consider the incident a “youthful indiscretion”, which shouldn’t derail his prospects of university and a happy life.
- And if he cared to look at the record of reporting and prosecuting rape, he comes to the conclusion that society doesn’t consider it important enough a crime to put resources into combatting.
So it’s all stacked against her from the start.
So how do we tackle this? I wish there were a neat answer, something tick-box that we could do, a one-hour year nine lesson we could send our young men to that would weed out the possibility that one day they might rape their girlfriend. There isn’t. It’s the same hard old slog, instilling respect for women in our young men, making it clear that just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should. I’m not convinced that pornography per se has anything to do with it; I think it’s more to do with a culture of disrespect for women’s autonomy, embodied across our society - the slapper culture, the idea that my mum and my sister are special, but all other women are just up for it and fair game. Maybe it’s the final frontier for feminism - we’ve shown that we can do men’s jobs and earn our own money, make political decisions and lead the country, but as of yet we haven’t found a way to prevent men showing their power over our bodies through rape.
I have a hunch that intensive developmental group work with young men, giving them a space to talk, building their confidence, self esteem, and the ability to sustain healthy relationships, might be worth a try. There’s some great work out there for perpetrators of domestic violence that is successful in changing their behaviour, and some of that might be adapted to a universal programme with young men, maybe.
In the meantime, what to do? How effective can a parent or a teacher or a youth worker be against the arrayed forces of the mainstream media, newspapers, men’s magazines and street culture? We need a national campaign challenging accepted views about what constitutes “rape”; it is a disgrace that there is no national campaigning voice on rape. The Truth about Rape show us what needs to be done, but on an immense scale - every bus stop, every local radio station, every doctor’s surgery, every school, every pub, every betting shop, every young man.
I didn’t necessarily want to say this in the post, but I think it’s worth saying here that I don’t subscribe to the idea that all men are rapists, and that I believe that men who experience rape or sexual assault should have dedicated services to support them too.
Spot on! Thanks for laying it all out so clearly, I’m having a hard time detangling my feminist thoughts from the bare facts of this case, being so close to it and all.
Whilst I agree with the fact that any form of assault is abhorrable, especially rape, I am slightly concerned by the male-leanings of your post.
Somebody I know from back home was raped by a woman outside a pub. He was traumatised from it - and at points was even scared to go into school (she was in the same place).
I know you cleared this up in the first comment after your post, but the final sentence of your post was quite concerning, particularly when you commented “every young man”, as if women are incapable of committing sexual offences themselves.
I know this isn’t true, and in fact, the result of that image was quite damaging for the person mentioned above. Instead of getting his case taken seriously, he was merely laughed at and it was dismissed.
I have lost count of the times I have (or my male friends have had) girls grope our backsides (trying my hardest not to go up my own arse here.. that’s not the point I’m trying to make) in the students’ union - when we plainly don’t want them to. Try going to a bouncer and reporting that. If a bloke did the same thing to a girl, they’d be out and barred.
Chris, I really hope that you’re not trying to set up an equivalence between rape and getting your bottom grabbed here. I feel sorry for the sexual assault your friend suffered, no matter who was the perpetrator. As I said above, I hope he’s getting support and seeking criminal redress.
BUT I am so tired of anti-feminist men trying to make out that men suffer DV and rape and discrimination equally to women. They don’t; the stats show it, but also it’s clear from the most rudimentary knowledge of history.
Rape is about power, not about sex, it’s about reasserting the historic power men have over women’s bodies.
Let’s try a comparison: anyone getting murdered by hanging is horrific, but if it’s a black man in the deep South hung by a white man, the history of that symbol, quite aside from any racist intent on the part of the murderer, makes it doubly powerful and doubly horrific. That’s how I feel about rape.
I’m interested to hear your perspective, as a young man, on how we can stop rape.
While we’re on the subject, this article from the US pointed up to me quite how hideously powerful the religious right is getting:
The wait in a Catholic hospital after rape.
I agree with an awful lot of whats written above, most of which is sensible and important and should be implemented as soon as possible. However, I think not allowing cross examination is a step too far. As a law student, I’m almost certaint his would contravene the right to a fair trial enshirned in the ECHR. Remember that while nothing compares to the sheer torture of rape, beeing falsely accused or posibbly wrongly convicted is a rough ride in itself
To PS - you’re missing the point of what Antonia said:
Judges must stop allowing defendants’ lawyers to bring up a woman’s past sexual history or allow defendants to cross-examine rape survivors.
The point she was making is not, as you seem to think, to stop victims of rape being cross-examined at all, but when the defendant chooses not have be represented by a lawyer and is the one doing the cross-examining rather than lawyers.
My mistake. I apoligise.
Somebody I know from back home was raped by a woman outside a pub. He was traumatised from it - and at points was even scared to go into school (she was in the same place).
Many men are raped, Chris (most by other men); the official figure’s 0.2 per cent, but the true figure is probably higher. The SARC centres Antonia mentioned are for anybody; Rape Crisis Centres give men information about support groups; the Rape Crisis Centre’s web page gives further information.
http://www.rapecrisis.org.uk/
and Victim Support will of course help your friend
I have lost count of the times I have (or my male friends have had) girls grope our backsides (trying my hardest not to go up my own arse here.. that’s not the point I’m trying to make) in the students’ union - when we plainly don’t want them to. Try going to a bouncer and reporting that. If a bloke did the same thing to a girl, they’d be out and barred.
You’re having a laugh aren’t you? Unless you have some kind of utopic students’ union they are as much a hotbed of casual misogyny and unwelcome sexual contact from men to women as the rest of the world. While I’m sure that having your butt groped is deeply unpleasant, one might argue that it takes on a different resonance in a world where 1/4 women experience rape during their lives, and the groper belongs to a group which is not only bigger and stronger than yours, but also has its reality privileged above yours.
Antonia, I think this is spot on. As an ex-RCC volunteer, I was also wondering what you think of the working structure of the RCC movement, and whether you think it needs to professionalise to offer the services that women need?
Emma,
I’ve never worked for an RCC, so anything I say is from an outsider’s perspective. I do work in the women’s sector, though not in service delivery. I bow to no-one in my admiration for the volunteers that deliver the services, and nothing I say is meant to impugn their hard work and dedication.
I think for me, the discussion needs to start from what makes a difference for the victims of rape, not from the perspective of what would make a convenient organisational or ideological structure for those of us who care about the issue.
As I said above, I think it might be time for a more reliable, professionally-delivered (though not necessarily professional) always-on crisis/first response service, backed up by ongoing one-on-one or group-work to support survivors longterm face-to-face, delivered locally by women volunteers and professionals. I’m also anxious to find a solution that means that your postcode doesn’t get you a better service. Finally, I would nver want to lose the sense of defiant community self-defence that the women pioneers of the rape crisis movement brought to it, in a time when services for survivors were non-existent.
I think the crisis line must be delivered by government funding, as voluntary funding (community donations and fundraising) and institutional funding (local authorities, grants and trusts) have demonstrably failed to deliver a sustainable long-term support service. This doesn’t mean that government should deliver the service: the 24 hour DV line is funded by government and Comic Relief but delivered by a partnership of Women’s Aid and Refuge, with a national call centre in Bristol, staffed by professionals and volunteers. I’d follow that model.
Only a national organisation could have the resources and credibility to run the national phoneline, but having that back-up for local areas is crucial in terms of supporting women. Crucially the DV helpline works because it is able to refer to local services (refuges etc) that can provide intensive ongoing support. I’d like to see a network of women-run and community-owned centres that can provide face-to-face and remote support through counselling and groupwork, as well as practical help through the court process where necessary.
To deliver this vision, I’d like to see a national federation of independent local RCCs, autonomous as they are at the moment, but with stable core funding from national or local government. The national federation should set minimum standards and quality-assess local projects, but they should be free to develop to meet local circumstances.
Now, this picture isn’t perfect: I do have some problems with the idea that some local control of centres and helplines would be devolved upwards to a national federation. I don’t think that national voluntary organisations are necessarily responsive enough to local circumstances, I think they tend to impose one-size-fits-all solutions. But the savings in terms of quality control, support for financial and administrative issues (because too many small community organisations are terrible employers) and the national voice, campaigning for women, may be worth making the sacrifice for.
My main worry is that any engagement with national and local government will mean losing the woman-centred-ness of the movement: although the SDA makes exemptions for service delivery to women where the all-women nature of that service contributes to its success, the political pressures about making a grant to women-only organisations would be difficult to manage. No matter how often we made the argument that rape is overwhelmingly a crime against women, the pressure would be on to open the service to men who’d experienced assault, because their numbers are so small that an appropriate national service to meet their needs is a practical impossibility. Unfortunately, that would decrease the effectiveness of the service to women, as it might lose its poliical edge.
Losing some of that politics might be no bad thing, though: I’ve read of crisis lines refusing volunteers because they were trans, and because they’d served in the IDF. Now those are some attitudes I’d be happy to leave behind.
What do you think?
Antonia
I agree with you, wholeheartedly!
I think that in Scotland we are probably a little bit closer to the model that you’re describing: we have a national network of autonomous centres and are working towards a joint set of policies and practices.
I am jealous of American centres, which seem to be so much better resourced than ours, but I don’t know very much about how they operate.
As well as trans issues, I would also like to see some of the resistance to the idea of women as perpetrators of CSA fade.
Emma
Firstly, just because I’m not a feminist does not make me an anti-feminist.
Secondly, I apologise for my example on the “butt groping”, it was meant to highlight a separate point, but I clearly didn’t emphasise it that well. What I was trying to say was that from seeing what happened to the person I know, men who are sexually assaulted (albiet a vicious rape like my friend, or just an arse grab in the union) by a woman tend to get laughed at.
In regards to dealing with rape. I was involved in our date-rape campaign at Surrey when I was head of the student newspaper, and I made it a particular concern of mine to make sure students were safe on campus and had a way of getting home.
Unfortunately, like cutting the amount of murderers, cutting the amount of rapists in this country is a difficult task. Luckily, we have very few serious physical sexual attacks in Guildford, although recently a student was victim of an exposure.
In the situations where you are worried about anonymous attacks simply from walking down the street, there are ways we have always said may help:
1. Carry a personal alarm, most student unions sell them (and if they don’t they should) at quite a cheap price.
2. NEVER walk alone in the dark unless you have to. If this is unavoidable, get a taxi. If not possible, ensure that somebody knows when you are leaving and what time you should get to your destination.
Of course, most of my research was into drink-spiking, so I don’t claim to be an expert.
All I’ll say is that all sexual assault is abhorrable - and to be frank, I don’t give a flying toss which sex is committing the crime - the gender doesn’t make it any less wrong. That’s the point I was trying to put across.
And in regards to the “power men have over women’s bodies”, what is your explanation for females raping men, if there is such an objective reason as the one you gave for men raping women?
And no offense, but I don’t want to have any power over a woman’s body… I’m happy with my lovely man thank you very much
I was involved in our date-rape campaign at Surrey when I was head of the student newspaper, and I made it a particular concern of mine to make sure students were safe on campus and had a way of getting home.
I think that this is really laudable, and I know that I really appreciated the work done by the SRC at my university to do similar good work.
Luckily, we have very few serious physical sexual attacks in Guildford
I don’t believe that for a second! They may not be being reported, but even if we take the BCS figure of one in 20 adult women experiencing rape during their lifetime, then there’s an awful lack of reporting going on in Guildford.
Your suggestions about street safety are good ones, although men are more likely than women to be assaulted in the street. Sexual violence usually happens in the home, or its environs, and its usually perpetrated by someone the victim knows. Women have very little (relatively!) to fear from strangers.
I don’t give a flying toss which sex is committing the crime - the gender doesn’t make it any less wrong. That’s the point I was trying to put across.
You’re right, of course, in one way. To the individual I doubt very much whether it matters which gender the perpetrator is. In fact, as rape by men against women is more common, its probably easier to feel commonality with other survivors if your experience matches that.
The difference is akin (if you’ll pardon the analogy) to the difference between a white man in pre-civil rights Mississippi hanging a black stranger, and a black man in pre-civil rights Mississippi hanging a white stranger. Although both acts would have the same effect on the individual, and both would be objectively reprehensible, one would perpetuate a structural inequality and one would just be a random act of violence.
And in regards to the “power men have over women’s bodies”, what is your explanation for females raping men, if there is such an objective reason as the one you gave for men raping women?
That’s a good question, and one that I don’t have any answer for. Rape perpetrated by women against men is so under-reported and analysed that it’s very difficult to speculate as to its cause(s). It seems likely that this is because it is very rare.
Antonia, I thought long and hard about whether to post a comment here because I agree with 99% of your post, but I do want to contend one minor issue.
Rape is an awful crime and one that goes largely unpunished. Men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators and women overwhelmingly the victims. This does not mean though, that just men should be targeted for education as you suggest.
Women suffer discrimination across all aspects of our society and this is down to society’s prejudices as a whole not just men’s prejudices. Why else would there be so few female MPs when over half the electorate are women, for example?
Some of the most vehement ‘anti-feminists’ I have met have been women. Are these women not just as ignorant and bigoted as male chauvinists and in need of education too?
Yes, Neil. I’m an ardent advocate of a return to a modern version of consciousness-raising for all young women as well.
I was raped 12 years ago. I recently reported it to the Police and unsurprisingly the CPS won’t prosecute due to lack of evidence!
I am so frustrated and sad. I wish I could wave a magic wand so those in society and the judicial system who misunderstand this crime could see it from my point of view and CHANGE for the better for EVERYONE.