When a woman is raped, people equip a boys-will-be-boys defense. The focus quickly strays from the fact that it's a rapist's responsibility to grasp his own sense of self-control, and soon it becomes about the woman and her choices: where she was, what time it was, who she was with, what she was wearing. People say she was asking for it, as if any woman would induce that on herself willingly, and we forget that access to a woman's body is not a rapist's prerogative. We forget the weight of the word "no," we forget the weight of no words spoken at all, and we forget that no, women don't enjoy being raped, they didn't have it coming, and that after raping a woman, you've carved "rape victim" into her identity. Until rapists can be held accountable for the assaults they perpetuate, people will keep sitting behind their screens tweeting about the "lack of safety for women in Islamic countries," all while the United States sits comfortably atop all other countries on the list of the world's highest rape rates. We deem sexual assault a third-world problem when hundreds of thousands of rapes occur in the US each year and likely as many as that go unreported.
Every 98 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. 1 out of every 6 American woman has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape against her, according to RAINN, the nation's largest sexual assault hotline. RAINN also estimates that for every 1,000 rapes perpetuated by different rapists, 690 of them will go unreported, and only 6 of the rapists from those crimes will be incarcerated. Rapes are oftentimes unreported because a victim fears retaliation from the rapist as punishment or did not believe that the rape was severe enough to be reported. The growing number of reported rapes met with no end result of conviction on the rapist's side explain the standpoint of the 13% of rape victims who didn't report their rape for fear of the case being mishandled by authorities. If the criminal justice system is incapable of building trust in rape victims that their cases will be appropriately handled and that the rapist will receive an appropriate punishment, what have we achieved? When violence against women is one of the biggest women's rights issues American feminists advocate against, why are some people believed to be justified in saying that feminism is unnecessary because all previous inequalities against women have been resolved?
In Ancient Rome, rape was defined as a man abducting a women without the consent of the man who held authority over her (as this was in a point of history in which women were still considered an object of ownership of a specific man). In Ancient Rome, Ancient China, and other anachronistic societies, because of the stigma of being a rape victim and infrequent conversation about sexual assault, the suicides of female rape victims were normalized. In 17th century France's legal system, the woman's consent was irrelevant - without a woman's father's consent, any intimacy between her and a man was considered unjustified by the law and was prosecuted as rape. Rape law went through its most significant changes in the better part of the 20th century, but it still had a fairly narrow definition, as it only applied to assault between an unmarried man and woman. Despite the time that's passed since then, some people still employ the medieval argument that marital rape is justified because marriage vows serve as lifelong irrevokable consent to all future intimacy.
Modern victim-blaming outside the US extends into the law; Morocco only very recently repealed a law that allowed rapists to be free from criminal prosecution if they married their victims, not matter how young the victim was or what the rape's circumstances were. The law was modified in 2012, after a 16-year-old rape victim Amina Filali was forced into wedlock with her 26-year-old rapist, who held her at knifepoint and raped her. She later committed suicide. As is the root of so many other injustices human rights violations against women around the world, her family and a judge forced her into marriage with the rapist in an attempt to uphold the family's honor, because questions such as "How will anyone marry her if she's a rape victim? What does that say about her morals?" were more salient concerns that Amina's well-being. Most families turn to lenient laws like these; instead of showing sympathy for their daughters and pursuing justice for them, families find it more important to succumb to the stigma of having an unmarried rape victim for a daughter by promptly marrying them off. Rape is typically criminalized in Morocco, and Amina's rapist would have been imprisoned had her family not chosen to exploit a loophole in the law that only further victimized a woman already going through the inexplicable pain of having been assaulted by subjecting to her to married life with the man who raped her. Similar marry-your-rapist laws were only recently repealed in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Peru, and Uruguay.
Other similarly barbaric punishments of rape victims instead of their rapists include honor killings and imprisonment of the victim herself. Honor killings, leading back to the passé notion that a woman breaking the taboos of her society has tarnished her family's honor and thus deserves severe punishment, are relatively common in developing societies. Rape victims are killed by their families, who often believe that women are only raped out of their own carelessness, lack of strong values, disregard for their family's reputation, and other similarly victim-blaming sentiments. In other conservative societies, despite rape being inherently inconsensual, women are imprisoned for adultery or premarital fornication, while their rapists escape unscathed. It's reprehensible for women to be punished for violence committed against them and for people to so quickly accept the mindset that rape and sexual assault never occur without reasonable provocation.
Women around the world live in fear of being raped or sexually assaulted, or even worse, facing the consequences brought upon them by their own family. This is the reality we live in - in which women are imprisoned and killed for being raped as though it was their choice, in which instead of imprisoning rapists, they're given a get-out-of-jail-free card in which they can marry their victims and only continue to mistreat them with the newfound power they're given, and in which a woman is pettily reduced to an object.
No comments:
Post a Comment