http://fromthoughtsintowords.blogspot.com/2013/06/violence-and-accountability.html
Lately, there have been many media reports about rape incidents and the
public’s responses to them. So discussions of victim-blaming, what it constitutes,
and why it is wrong have been making a regular appearance in various electronic
magazines and on discussion forums. The discussions that have made the most sense
to me have been those that have emphasized that rape is an act of violence and
domination.
As many have already pointed out, there is too much of a tendency to think
of rape as a sexual act, and to therefore explain it away as a “normal”
response to a victim who was “asking for it.” I have often heard the argument
that, if we were talking about any other form of violence, or if the rape
victim was male, people would not be so quick to resort to victim-blaming. I
don’t agree with that, though. In fact, based on what I have seen and heard
over the years, I think that more and more people are inclined to view vulnerability
as something to be detested and dominance and power as ideals. It is very much
evident, not just in the way they talk about rape victims, but also in the way
they talk about other individuals or groups of people who have been subjected
to violence, systemic or otherwise.
These are learned attitudes. They’re not just pulled out of the thin air. That’s
why I absolutely agree with those who say that we have to educate youth and
adults to regard rape as unacceptable and to hold rapists responsible for their
actions. But I think the education has to be broader than that. It really
should address our attitudes towards violence and victims of violence as a
whole.
An
article on RHRealityCheck discusses precisely this issue, referring, at
some length, to the violent sexual assault of a 13-year-old boy, the use of
euphemisms to disguise the violence that was done to him, and the subsequent
scapegoating of the boy and his family by residents of their town. The boy’s story
is told in greater detail here.
I find it very troubling that the town turned away from the boy when it
seemed evident that the violence he was subjected to was part of a ‘tradition.’
This form of sexual violence is likely to have been done to other boys, and
probably will be done to yet others – the town residents’ sons, brothers,
cousins, nephews, grandsons. So why isn’t the first instinct of these people to
protect the boy? Also, where on earth did the boy’s attackers learn how to rape
a younger boy? This is not the behavior that anyone in their right mind expects
of teenage boys. Were they themselves victims of similar attacks in the name of
“hazing”? The article raises very troubling questions about the types of
communities we’re living in and about our safety and the safety of those we
love. It makes it pretty evident that violence and victim-blaming are problems
that we need to address now.
This work is
licensed to Rose Kahendi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0
Unported License.
