Monday, June 24, 2013

Violence and Accountability

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. 

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