“A rape culture is a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm. In a rape culture both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable as death or taxes. This violence, however, is neither biologically nor divinely ordained. Much of what we accept as inevitable is in fact the expression of values and attitudes that can change.”
From “Transforming a Rape Culture” by Emilie Buchwald, Martha Roth and Pamela R. Fletcher.
It was a with a heavy heart and a sickening sense of deja vu that I read through the sordid, sad details of the report written by Professor Alexis Jay into the grooming and horrific torture and sexual abuse of young working class girls in Rotherham, England. In this small town, with a mere 50,000 inhabitants, the author of the report estimates that at least 1,400 girls (and this figure is considered to be on the conservative side, the true number of victims could be far, far greater) were groomed, raped, tortured, trafficked and beaten by groups of Pakistani British men. Even though social workers and small community groups such as Risky Business repeatedly reported their concerns to the police, the council and managers of various agencies, nothing was done. The girls were seen as unreliable, promiscuous liars, drug addicts and/or troubled petty criminals who were asking for it. Some girls were charged by the police with minor criminal offences, whilst the men who were terrorising these children were allowed to continue to abuse with impunity. And they are probably still doing so as you read this.
This is rape culture.
The media commentary and public uproar has been predictable. Whilst the report itself identifies the fact that organisations were wary of mentioning the ethnicity of the offenders for fear of being perceived as racist as adding to the failure to protect these vulnerable young women, it also exposes the fact that, yet again, the voices of young girls when accusing powerful, well-connected men were disbelieved, discounted and ignored. In the wake of similar grooming and abuse cases involving British Pakistani men and young white working class girls in Derby, Rochdale and Oxford, it’s clear that there are big issues to address about the misognystic attitudes of a significant minority of young men within the British Pakistani community. And yet … I read comment after comment demonising all Muslims, all Asians, all Pakistanis in the wake of these horrors. It’s very easy for us to demonise communities we see as foreign, as other. Have we already forgotten these names … Jimmy Saville, Max Clifford, Rolf Harris, Ian Watkins and Stuart Hall? Why are we not asking the same questions of what we perceive as our own culture, and asking whether British societal values have had a part to play in these dreadful events? Rapists and child abusers are white, black, brown and yellow. They are Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jewish and atheist. They are poor, rich, working, middle and upper class. There are few common denominators. But they do exist; the vast majority of those who commit sexual offences are male, and these crimes are committed mainly, although by no means exclusively, against women and girls. Our collective refusal to admit that there is a huge problem with sexual violence against women and girls in this country allows this abuse to continue unhindered.
This is rape culture.
How many more police investigations will it take for us to admit that we are failing women and girls? How many more resignations and reports and children raped and women beaten and murdered do we need to prove to the general public that we live in a deeply misoygnistic society that sees the stories of vulnerable women as lesser testimony than the words of powerful men? Despite the recent onslaught of cases of sickening abuse, we still read columns in the newspapers saying urging us to let sleeping dogs lie, it’s all a witchhunt, that women and children who were assaulted and abused all these years ago don’t deserve justice, and that perverted old men should be left in peace.
This is rape culture.
Take a look at these Government statistics for England and Wales. Between the years of 2009/10 and 2011/12 an average of 78,000 people were raped; 69,000 were women, 9,000 men. As rape is a hugely under-reported crime, the true figures are likely to be much higher. 4.6 % of all women aged between 16 and 59 have been the victims of rape or attempted rape. In 2011/12, one in five females between the ages of 16 and 59 have been the victim of a sexual offence or attempted sexual offence since the age of 16. Again, the true figure is likely to be much higher. Despite these astronomical figures (which are conservative estimates), on average there are only 1,097 rape convictions (across both genders) every year.
This is rape culture.
We live in a country where our government and police formulate policies whereby undercover police officers are encouraged to have sex with female environmental and animal rights activists, even having children with them, before vanishing from these women’s lives. Some call this state sanctioned rape due to the deception involved. No one cares about the ruined lives of these women and children. Indeed, some government ministers think it’s a good thing.
This is rape culture.
Women and young girls’ experience of the police when trying to bring the perpetrators of sexual offences against them to account is at best a very mixed bag. As in the Rotherham case, some police forces seem reluctant to investigate cases properly. New figures released by the Inspectorate of Constabulary show vast variations between different regions of how many recorded rapes ended up being classified as “no crime”. In Cumbria it’s only 3 %, but in Lincolnshire it’s a staggering 33 %. This has to beg the question as to whether certain police forces are bothering to deal properly with these type of offences. The Metropolitan police opened Project Sapphire specifically to deal with rape and serious sexual violence to great fanfare. By 2013, after several failed investigations, the project faced a massive overhaul after the Southwark unit was found to have encouraged women to drop allegations to boost detection rates, with the result that the husband of one woman who had dropped charges against him went on to murder their two children. The IPCC report condemned officers, saying their approach of “failing to believe victims” was “wholly inappropriate”. One Detective Constable was jailed for his failure to investigate claims of sexual offences and for falsifying police records. In London as a whole, 19 officers were disciplined, including three who were sacked. From March 2012 to March 2013, the Metropolitan police found 165 sexual offences and incredibly five rapes so trivial that they let the perpetrators walk away with nothing more than a caution.
This is rape culture.
For the rape and sexual abuse/assault cases that do end up in court, the victim often ends up traumatised, facing hostile questioning and sometimes being torn apart on the witness stand. Some women I know personally who have had to go through this process, cited their difficulty in coping with our adversarial legal system as affecting their ability to give evidence to the best of their ability, and acknowledging the fact that their middle class backgrounds, good mental health and family support helped them in their efforts to give convincing testimony. For many women and girls from troubled, working class backgrounds, just like those children in the Rotherham case, their backgrounds and issues were used against them, just as they are in many cases that reach court. Drug addiction, criminal records, perceived promiscuity, lack of education; all of these factors bias police and juries against victims of abuse and rape. And sometimes giving evidence can result in tragedy; in 2012 Frances Andrade gave evidence against her abuser, Michael Brewer (who was eventually found guilty of five counts of indecent assault), and likened the ordeal to “being raped all over again”. She killed herself days after stepping down from the witness stand. Tabloid newspapers continue to peddle the old lie that women delight in making false allegations of rape, even though they know full well that in the whole of England and Wales in a 17 month period from 2011-2012 only 35 false allegations of rape were made. And sometimes the ordeal doesn’t end after you testify and your rapist is found guilty. After Ched Evans, a footballer for Sheffield United, was convicted of rape, his victim’s name was outed on social media, she was threatened, and eventually had to change her name and be relocated to another area of the country. She received around £5,000 compensation. Ched Evans, on the other hand, is shortly to leave prison, after serving 2.5 years of a 5 year sentence, and is being welcomed back at Sheffield United (despite 60,000 people signing a petition to oppose this move), no doubt with a healthy salary, and before long we will see the unedifying spectacle of thousands of football fans shouting their support for him from the stands.
This is rape culture.
Our politicians pay lip service to womens’ rights, but their actions belie their words. Cuts in legal aid mean that vulnerable abused and trafficked women may no longer have access to justice. In the family courts, many women are having to represent themselves (if they can afford to bring the case in the first place) in the effort to try and extricate themselves and their children from domestic violence and forced marriages. resulting in unequal access to justice and unfair and dangerous outcomes. Domestic violence charities have had 100 % funding cuts. Even if we look at the laws in the UK we see a codified lack of protection for women and girls. A crime is currently classed as a hate crime if they are committed against someone because of their “disability, gender-identity, race, religion or belief, or sexual orientation”. Gender isn’t even mentioned.
This is rape culture.
I was born in 1980. My mother told me stories of the discrimination she faced as a young women and promised it would be different for me. But for just under the first third of my life it was perfectly legal for a man to rape his wife in the country and culture that I grew up in. Marital rape has only been considered to be a crime since 1991. When I was a teenager, the bare breasts of 16 and 17 year old girls were commonplace on page 3 of the Sun for the delectation of the straight male gaze. That newspaper even thought it proper to print a countdown to Charlotte Church’s 16th birthday, when she would finally be of legal age to have sex with. Before the age of 18 I had been groped and flashed at on more than one occasion. Since becoming an adult I have been had my arse grabbed, tits squeezed, experienced upskirt shots on public transport, unwanted fingers of random strangers shoved between my legs, and on one occasion inside my vagina, been threatened with rape, orally, anally and vaginally, by random men so many times I can’t even remember the final tally. And my experiences are not uncommon. They are normal. Ask any woman in the UK and you would be hard pushed to find someone who at the very least hasn’t suffered from a single event of your average everyday sexual assault.
This is rape culture.
We live in a society where a woman’s worth is based on her looks and perceived sexual attractiveness is considered the most important asset we possess. The internet has opened up a Pandora’s Box of misogyny. Revenge porn, where women’s lives are ruined by their exes posting sexual videos and photos of them on the internet, is not even considered a crime in the UK. We are only a click away from seeing images of violent, hardcore pornography, where women are degraded, spat on, insulted, hit, their every orifice stuffed with cocks. If consenting adults want to watch this, that’s fine by me, as they hopefully have the ability to make a distinction between fantasy and real life, but there are a generation of children and young people growing up with these sorts of images of sex and women as their main form of sex education. And we should all find that deeply worrying. If you don’t think that images can affect our perceptions of life, then why is advertising a billion pound global industry? Women in the public eye, especially feminists, are faced with a daily torrent of abuse online, including rape and murder threats. Feminists are slated by the media and online commentators for championing so-called trivial causes, like having a woman’s face on a £10 note, or objecting to bare breasts in newspapers. What these critics fail to appreciate is that the UK is still a deeply sexist society, as a UN human rights expert concluded earlier this year, and we live in a culture where women are still considered lesser than men in a myriad of subtle and not so subtle ways. We have a mountain to climb until women achieve equality, and every battle, however small, is worth fighting, so we can dismantle this discrimination, piece by piece. Because a culture of sexual objectification of women and girls, where one gender is perceived as lesser, a society where it’s normalised to see people who have vaginas as sluts and slags and bitches and hoes, all adds fuel to the fire of the perception of a woman’s body as something to be groped and penetrated whether she consents or not. This a culture that allows dreadful situations like Rotherham to occur. And unless we fight against it, and admit our failings as a society and how far we have to go, these travesties against women and young girls will continue.
This is my culture. This is your culture. This is British culture. And this is rape culture.
msmarmite 