Reporter's Notebook

Does the person using verbal pressure, manipulation, and coercion to make a partner have sex with them really not think that what they're doing is wrong? Does the person who has to prop their partner up during sex because that person is too intoxicated to fully support their own weight really think there’s mutual consent and enjoyment going on?

There certainly are blurry situations when both parties are intoxicated and make reckless decisions that one or both of them later regret, and it’s difficult to say where these situations fall. But assuming that someone does see another person’s intoxication or personal insecurities as an opportunity to acquire sex from them, I’m not going to say their crime is less heinous simply because there was no physical force involved.

Another reader looks at even blurrier situations:

An important aspect of the rape discussion I don’t think you’ve covered: what about situations that the culture defines as rape but the participants don’t?

I knew a young man who’d been convicted of rape when he was 18 years old, as a result of the following situation. He’d just turned 18, with no sexual experience at all, literally a choir boy, when he met a girl online. She was sexually active and invited him over to her place one afternoon, when her mother was at work. She was a month shy of her 16th birthday. (I don’t know if he knew this at the time.)

Her mother came home and caught them in bed together. She called the police and his life came apart at the seams. He wasn’t sentenced to time in prison, but rather five years of probation, which required him to attend weekly group therapy sessions with men who had raped children, pulled women into vans, and so on.

Every session began with each man having to admit out loud that he’d “forced his penis into a woman or girl who didn’t want it,” which wasn’t true at all in his case. In addition, he had to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. He died shortly after I met him, of a heart attack, at 31. If the girl had been a month older, or he’d been a few months younger, none of this would have happened. Was he a rapist?

In my own case, I was initiated into sex by my baby-sitter when I was a pre-teen boy. I think she was 16 or 17. I wasn’t hurt or traumatized in any way I can recognize. I felt honored that she had any interest in someone so much younger. Was I raped? If so, it’s still one of my most treasured memories from those years.

As young girls in the ‘80s, many of us had our first encounters with feminism through self-defense classes we took with our classmates and mothers. At the time, it was one of the most visible aspects of the movement, because the notion that a woman could protect herself, and was not dependent on a man for safety, was entirely subversive. After all, with increased freedom comes increased responsibility—and responsibility is not the same as blame.

New feminists, in my opinion, ignore this at the risk of becoming hypocrites and splintering the movement (all of the freedom, none of the responsibility). There is also an issue of choice at play here. As an autonomous, free-thinking woman, shouldn’t I be able to choose how I wish to respond to my own attack?!

And yet, the issue of rape culture still needs to be addressed. All things being equal, it should only be necessary to talk about the ways women can protect themselves in the rare instance when a crazed and violent perpetrator seeks to assault them.

We live in a society in which rape is ignored, victims are shamed and silenced, and a general climate persists in which otherwise normal young men and women are becoming perpetrators and victims because their view of consent and sexual agency is so incredibly skewed. Young men don’t know what they’re doing is rape, or feel so much pressure they don’t care. And young women don’t know they can say no and are afraid to speak up about assault if they do.

So society itself also needs to be addressed. I guess the full analysis leaves room for both aspects of the discussion.

* Below is some data to back up the assertion that “self defense and resistance as rape prevention are real and effective solutions.” From the National Institute of Justice:

In a 2005 report commissioned by NIJ, researchers examined a variety of sexual assaults and other physical assaults against women. The study did not focus specifically on college students. The researchers found that potential rape victims who resisted their attackers physically and verbally significantly reduced the probability that a rape would be completed and did not significantly increase the risk of serious injury.

Most self-protective actions significantly reduce the risk that a rape will be completed. In particular, certain actions reduce the risk of rape more than 80 percent compared to nonresistance. The most effective actions, according to victims, are attacking or struggling against their attacker, running away, and verbally warning the attacker.

In assaults against women, most self-protective tactics reduced the risk of injury compared to nonresistance. According to the researchers, the only self-protective tactics that appear to increase the risk of injury significantly were those that are ambiguous and not forceful. These included stalling, cooperating and screaming from pain or fear.

A separate study found that even when a rape was completed, women who used some form of resistance had better mental health outcomes than those who did not resist.[1]

A caveat:

Law enforcement officials, however, counsel caution against automatically using violence or other forms of resistance. People who are assaulted are advised to assess the situation and trust their own judgment about the best way to respond.

Here’s another study, from the University of Oregon:

A UO sociologist finds that women who took a ten-week self-defense training were significantly less likely to experience unwanted sexual contact than those who didn’t. … Jocelyn Hollander [looked] at the outcomes for 117 college students who received this self-defense training versus a control group of 169 students who did not. Of those, seventy-five from the first group and 108 from the second agreed to take part in a follow-up survey or interview.

The results are clear: a much lower percentage of the women who took the self-defense class reported incidents of unwanted sexual contact than the women who did not take the class (see chart).

Something to add to the discussion? Drop us a note. And thanks for all the great ones so far, including the ones that don’t get posted because of space and pacing.

Decades of research on sexual violence has shown that rape often occurs in contexts where we, through our cultural dialogues and habits, are not expecting it—for example, when the perpetrator is known to the victim, or rather than using extreme physical force, the perpetrator uses alcohol/substances/verbal threats. Contrary to being harmless, these rapes affect survivors in so many ways and for potentially long periods of time.

As a community we can use this knowledge to be proactive bystanders, recognizing that situations we assume to be part of the “normal” experience of socializing and sex are often environments with high-risk factors for sexual assault. By being aware of the risks, we can be more vigilant of our friends and those around us, taking on a community-level responsibility for prevention as opposed to an individual-level responsibility.

One pitfall is to assume that prevention means abandoning all environments of risk, when in fact prevention can be maintaining a higher level of awareness and caution in those places (e.g. drinking environments). And we can be less doubtful and more supportive of individuals who come forward to report a rape.

Another approach to prevention that leaves blame with perpetrators is educating young people on sexual assault and coercive interpersonal behavior, again in an effort to reduce the social myths about “normal sex” that enable sexual predators. Promisingly, holding multiple information sessions on these topics with middle school students over a period of two to three months led to decreased reports of sexual victimization and predatory actions among participants several years later.

And finally, a word of caution about empowerment. Those who experience sexual assault cruelly and unjustly have their power wrested from them in that moment by a perpetrator. Regaining power is a complicated, crucial, and unique journey, and conversations about empowerment in a context of healing are different than conversations about empowerment in a context of prevention.

The backdrop for this conversation, after all, is a reality where 67 to 80 percent of acts that meet a Justice Department definition of “rape or sexual assault victimizations” are not reported to police.  Society and survivors alike have a strong tradition of already placing plenty of power with victims and not with perpetrators. Unfortunately so many conversations about rape are pandering and petty arguments over the use of words, anecdotes, and analogies, when there is enough consistent data and research available for us to ground our conversations in reality and focus on solutions.

Anything important we’ve missed in the discussion so far? Drop us a note.

The distinction between the onus for prevention and criminal responsibility is getting muddled: of course the perpetrator is the only person responsible for the crime, and of course, in a specific instance of rape, it is entirely inappropriate to broach prevention at risk of exacerbating the victim’s tendency to feel ashamed. But speaking generally, the major point is that the onus for prevention cannot be placed on the perpetrator, any more than the onus for defeating ISIS can be placed on ISIS. It’s nonsensical. A rapist is not going to heed a listicle of ten ways to avoid sexually assaulting a person, and a PSA on serial killing will never stymie a future Ted Bundy.

Only a decent society and potential victims can take steps to prevent rape. It’s unfair for any responsibility to fall on potential victims, but we live in a world where systemic solutions are slow-moving and imperfect. We have to consider prevention from the individual point of view. Obviously the most controversial subject of prevention is clothing, and I think nothing short of a gender-concealing robot suit would have any effect. But if we care about prevention more than fairness, we should be willing to study the situations around sexual assault and the minds of sexual deviants from every angle, and consider and share every conclusion.

Any final thoughts? Shoot me an email and I’ll post. Update from a reader, who quotes the one above:

[T]he major point is that the onus for prevention cannot be placed on the perpetrator, any more than the onus for defeating ISIS can be placed on ISIS. It’s nonsensical. A rapist is not going to heed a listicle of ten ways to avoid sexually assaulting a person...

I actually think their point about separating responsibility for prevention vs guilt is reasonable, but the argument I quoted is flawed. A big part of the modern anti-rape movement is the realization that many people sincerely do not realize they’re committing rape—for example, with women who are too drunk or otherwise incapacitated to consent.

That’s why you have campaigns like “Don’t be that guy [poster seen above],” which are actually trying to address rape prevention from the male perspective. Their effectiveness seems to be inconclusive so far, but the premise doesn’t seem unreasonable on the face of it.

Anyway, thanks for doing this discussion! It’s an interesting one to have.

Say you’re driving without a seat belt and someone hits you, ejecting you from the car. If you were belted, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt as bad, or maybe at all. It’s the accident your fault? No, of course not. Could you have foreseen trouble and done something to minimize it beforehand? Absolutely.

That analogy only goes so far, but I think it’s the gist of what people are saying.

Another reader rolls out more analogies:

I have the responsibility of cleaning the snow off of my sidewalk after a blizzard. I am not to blame for it snowing. I have the responsibility for locking my doors and carrying insurance. I am not to blame if I am robbed or my house burns down (unless I set it ablaze myself).

There is a difference between taking responsibility and accepting blame. All people have the responsibility to take reasonable measures to protect themselves, but they are not to blame if they are assaulted or raped. Until people recognize that difference, then there will be tragedies that could have been prevented, if only some people taken precautions.

An excellent and tragic point from this next reader:

I can assure you rape victims rarely feel free of culpability, even when they’ve checked off all the boxes of “things to do or avoid in order to prevent getting raped.” We can speak in generalities about what women should or shouldn’t do, but that by definition puts the onus on the victim versus the perpetrator, which is a difficult argument to hold together.

Drop us a note if you want to join this discussion.  

Shit happens, for sure. The difference between the empowered person and the victim is that the former refuses to see him/herself as a helpless object. In this instance, Chrissie is deciding to focus on herself and what part she played in the instance, and not merely saying that someone did X to helpless, innocent little her. She is a better, stronger person for her attitude.

And I’m not blaming the rape victim here. I’m applauding how she responded to her rape, by HER deciding to take back some level of control by taking some level responsibility for the obvious mistakes in judgement she made. It’s a hugely self-actualized thing to do.

At UCLA where I work, every year a dean warns young women not to get drunk out of their minds at frat parties or Spring Break, because the stats show that they raise their chances of being raped astronomically. And each year the dean (a female) gets slandered as anti-woman and a rape apologist by the kids who are angry at the fact that humans can be very ugly and that life is unfair.

Another reader has a similar stance on the dangers of college life:

In a perfect world, female students would be able to drink as heavily as they would like with no risk of sexual assault, and no amount of drinking makes them deserve to be raped. In this world, though, alcohol is the most common date rape drug. It shouldn’t be considered impossible to tell students that while a woman incapacitated by drinking is in no way to blame for her rape, she still should be aware that controlling her level of intoxication is a vital part of protecting herself.

Rapists exist and will continue to exist for some time. It’s clear to any sane person that a rapist is completely to blame for a rape. We are right to disagree with the Hyndes of the world when they seek to remove blame from the correct targets and heap it on those who suffer from their actions. But taking that to an extreme—where we ignore realities and withhold advice that could help women—isn’t positive either. We need to find a balance between the two.

All this makes me think of a quote from an article I read recently regarding a rape drug detection device in the form of nail polish that would test drinks for contamination on-the-spot:

“Whilst Undercover Color’s initiative is well meaning, on the whole,” [Katie Russell from Rape Crisis England & Wales] said, “Rape Crisis does not endorse or promote such a product or anything similar. This is for three reasons: it implies that it’s the woman’s fault and assumes responsibility on her behalf, and detracts from the real issues that arise from sexual violence.”

“For us, we work with victims to make them realise that they did nothing wrong,” she added. “Among primary cases, some do ask if they could have done anything to stop it. Products like this suggest otherwise. The emphasis must be placed 100% on the perpetrator.”

That organization isn’t suggesting the devices wouldn’t work for the intended purpose; they are literally saying that they would rather these tools did not exist because they imply even to the slightest degree that a woman might take an active role in protecting herself. They would discourage women from using them—and perhaps allow actual rapes to happen that could have been prevented—in order to protect the sanctity of this idea.

There’s something wrong with that stance.

Disagree? Drop us a note and I’ll post the strongest counterpoints.