A Womens Media Center Journalism Project*
By
Lauren Wolfe/Director
— December 17, 2012
Author Consolee Nishimwe, second from right, sits with her sisters and
brothers in front of her Rwandan home in 1993, just a few months before
the genocide began. The house was destroyed; her brothers were all
killed. This is the only photo she still has of them.
About once a day someone comes to this website by searching “Are rape
victims to blame?” I hope when these visitors arrive they find some
solace in the message they find here that rape victims are not culpable,
ever, no, never. Unfortunately, they will also find information on how
rape survivors are blamed mercilessly around the world for the violence
perpetrated against them.
From Mexico to Sudan, women who survive brutal sexualized violence are forced out of their homes, divorced, and killed. Men chastise women who have been raped,
such as in this instance in Burma: “Prostitute! If you want to sell
sex, we will build you a small hut in the jungle,” one woman’s husband
said after a soldier raped her. “You can sell sex there.” Her own
children told her: “Whore, you are not our mother, don’t come see us
anymore.”
In this country, we’ve seen our politicians and leaders make ignorant
and insensitive statements such as what one judge said to a woman who’d
been sexually assaulted in a bar in Arizona last summer: “If you
wouldn’t have been there that night, none of this would have happened to
you.”
“This.” “Happened to.” “If you wouldn’t have been there.” Dismissive, fault-finding, victim-blaming.
These words have an impact. We are watching women commit suicide in Syria and living with the toll of honor killings globally. According to a 2011 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 35 percent of women in an Australian survey who had experienced gender-based violence later tried to commit suicide.
Women are literally dying from blame.
With all this in mind, we held a Twitter chat last week on
victim-blaming with the hashtag #RapeIsRape. I asked Gloria Steinem,
this project’s founder, if she’d be willing to share some thoughts on
the subject with our followers. She wrote what you’ll see below, and
inspired me to seek out more thoughts from leading writers, activists,
and survivors. Here are their words:
Invading and devaluing: The double impact of victim-blaming
Victim-blaming
isn’t unique to females. Crimes against humanity have often been blamed
on the victims. The theft of entire continents was rationalized by
“scientific” craniology proving that their inhabitants were “savages.”
Read Exterminate All the Brutes,
a brilliant small book by Sven Lindqvist about the invention of racism
to justify taking over land. In this country, enslaved Africans were
seen as permanent children who couldn’t care for themselves. Even class
and criminality have been said to be inherited, and poverty may still be
blamed on the poor.
But blaming females has a double impact: invading female bodies
sexually and then de-valuing them as spoiled and ruined—all because
female bodies are the means of reproduction that are “owned” by one male
so he can “own” children. Females may be the last worldwide case of
victim-blaming. The “honor” of some men, families, and cultures is
written on the body of a female.
Women’s rights are human rights, and must shift the blame from women
who suffer sexualized violence to men who inflict it; from women who are
raped to men who rape; from battered women to battering men; from
sexually abused children to adults who sexually abuse.
Right now, the victim still may be punished more than the criminal, men
may assault females to punish other men, and victimized females are
often punished more than the males who victimized them.
—Gloria Steinem
Born ‘evil’: When men think women deserve abuse
My
first experience of victim-blaming occurred when I was raped at the age
of 7. While my perpetrator assaulted me, he blamed me for his actions
and told me I had to be punished for my sins. He was my nanny at that
time and a student at a conservative Christian seminary in Dallas. He
essentially used the theology of original sin as the justification for
his actions. Since I was born “evil,” he concluded that I deserved to be
abused. This was also his rationale when he forced me into
sex-trafficking.
I’ve spoken extensively with other women who were trafficked in the
U.S. Some have shared that the johns they encountered used a similar
kind of religious language.
Patriarchal religion has played a significant role in blaming victims
of sexual assault. This is deeply interconnected with distorted views of
gender and sexuality. When I worked with a rape crisis center in Idaho,
one of our clients was a 17-year-old girl who was assaulted by an
acquaintance on a date. She was devastated by this violation and
confided in her pastor about the experience. Instead of trying to help
her find recovery resources, he publicly shamed her in church for
“losing her virginity.” He literally made her stand up in front of
everyone and confess her “sexual sin.”
I have seen countless examples of victim-blaming in my work as an
activist and media commentator. The justifications may change, but they
are never acceptable. We must openly challenge this kind of poisonous
and dehumanizing discourse in our communities and mass media. Survivors
deserve respect as they engage in the healing process, not further
victimization.
Collectively, we must learn how to become a compassionate witness. We
cannot overcome injustice if we keep blaming the oppressed for their own
oppression.
—Brooke Axtell
The many faces of victim-blaming
The accounts we receive on the Everyday Sexism Project
website reveal how heartbreakingly prevalent victim-blaming is. A
university student wrote that she receives regular faculty e-mails
telling female students “not to go home alone in the darkness.” But “if
you ask male students, they don’t even know about the problem…they come
up with, ‘She wore a skirt, she asked for it.’”
Another young woman wrote: “I have friends who have been raped and not
told anyone because they had passed out drunk and so felt it was there
[sic] fault.” Yet another account reads: “I was raped at a party after
being drugged… .When I had the courage to tell what happened I was
blamed by everyone. I had to do a lot of tests, including HIV and no one
supported me. My family and friends abandoned me saying it was all my
fault because I acted like a whore.”
These stories go on and on: Strangers judge and blame; family members
refuse to believe survivors; survivors blame themselves. This
internalized finger-pointing is perhaps the hardest to hear about. In
addition to everything else they must bear, victims are forced to carry
the heavy burden of self-blame.
Often, they report that this prevents them from telling anybody about
what has happened. Social misconceptions about rape and rapists also
play a significant role.
One girl described being raped at 14. “Took me years to even label that
a rape,” she said. “In my head, it was my fault. And everybody knows
that rapists aren’t cute boys, they are shady men hiding in bushes,
right?” Another woman reported being told by a nurse, as she had blood
tests after being raped, to “be more careful next time.”
We’ve received hundreds of accounts. But almost none report justice,
conviction, or even criticism of the perpetrator by the confidant the
victim chose to tell.
—Laura Bates
Let’s talk about systems, not victims
Victim-blaming
continues to be the rule, not the exception. For women, this is
particularly true, living as we do with a cultural preference that so
persistently portrays women as the cause of our own undoing. In cases of
rape, even more so.
So, why? What purpose does this approach—to rape, murder, racism, poverty—serve?
One, it props up widespread denial of unpleasant realities. Two, it
keeps the focus on individuals, instead of systems of oppression.
Regardless of whether the issue is related to rape, racial inequities,
or poverty, it is easier to blame the victim than to admit to systemic
problems. In the United States in particular, this flies in the face of
national mythologies rooted in success and exceptionalism. Three, we
have millennia worth of histories, myths, and parables in which women
are the cause of their own, and often, others’, woes. Those stories,
written by the powerful about the powerless, form the basis for deeply
entrenched cultural attitudes about blame, shame, sex, and power. Those
stories inform the casual blame assigned to rape victims regularly.
This goes a long way toward explaining why although extensive studies show that between 6 percent and a maximum of 10 percent of rape claims may be false, college students think that up to 50 percent are.
Since the early 1970s, when objections to victim-blaming entered the
public discourse, victims-rights advocates have been accused of having a
victim mentality—one in which we’d rather ignore personal
responsibility and the culpability of women in their own victimization.
Others claim that it would be better to stop considering blame at all
and to think instead of the roles that each person plays in the dynamics
at hand. That might work as an academic exercise, but in terms of
changing culture, I think it is virtually useless.
Shifting the focus from people to systems isn’t a mentality of
victimization, it’s a critique of the deeply entrenched, destructive
attitudes at the heart of violence and oppression, and the first steps
toward dismantling them. That is a matter of personal responsibility.
—Soraya Chemaly
‘Little compassion was shown for victims like me’
In my homeland, Rwanda,
in 1994, my family and I were forced into hiding for three months,
moving from place to place trying to evade capture and certain death by
hordes of extremist Hutu militiamen and civilians intent on eliminating
all members of my Tutsi tribe.
We encountered a myriad of traumatic experiences during that period,
including—to name a few—witnessing my aunt being savagely killed as she
tried to escape from killers, followed by the hunting down and killing
of my dad later the same day, and, weeks later, painfully witnessing my
three young brothers, ages 18 months to 9 years old, being forcibly
taken from us at one of our hiding places and brought back to our
burned-out home and chopped to death. Apart from these and other
unbelievable events we faced daily during the genocide, I was personally
targeted and subjected to rape and torture and infected with HIV at the
tender age of 14.
I know firsthand the difficulties rape victims face in trying to deal
with the deep psychological, emotional, and physical trauma. In my
situation, I suffered in silence for months after being raped at the
height of the genocide, while simultaneously having to deal with other
more gravely catastrophic situations we faced at the time.
Even more hurtful, however, was the fact that at the end of the
genocide little compassion was shown for victims like me. On occasion
after returning to my hometown, I would hear people on the street making
sarcastic, degrading comments about women who were raped. For example:
“Those women’s lives are over—no one will be interested in them
anymore!” Such remarks only served to further erode my already shattered
dignity and confidence.
I believe that people in general need to become more sensitized to the
deep-seated effects of rape on the psyche of its victims, especially
when offenders or members of society compound the indignity those
victims have faced by being insensitive to what they have been through.
—Consolee Nishimwe
Respect a woman's body—and her right to it
I
have grappled for years with the question of why people blame rape
survivors. The honest-to-god answer is that wherever I've looked, I’ve
found that victim-blamers place an arbitrary value on women’s chastity.
Chastity…it almost sounds like a positive word. But it isn’t. It means that women are held to a higher, no, different
standard than men. While how highly it’s regarded varies from culture
to culture, generally in this country for victim-blamers, not having sex
outside a committed relationship—usually marriage—or one-night-stands
means a woman is chaste, thus, good.
This means that even in the United States of America, which was founded
on the principle of personal liberty, a woman is repeatedly reminded
through slut-shaming that she must preserve this nonsensical value by
restricting her freedom and only having sex with her husband or
boyfriend.
It gets worse, though.
This “women’s chastity” thing has been idealized to the point where, to
many victim-blamers, it’s the single most important value there is to a
woman—sometimes the only value. Therefore, the preservation of it is
perhaps the most important responsibility that’s bestowed upon a woman.
And she will be blamed if she fails—even if she is powerless to stop a
“sexual” encounter from happening because someone’s holding a gun to her
head.
I hope you know it’s painful to write this, but it’s what I believe the
truth is. If Americans want to eliminate victim-blaming in the U.S.,
they have to change their attitudes and abolish this degrading value
system by putting an end to treating women’s bodies differently than
those of men.
Not only does it result in horrible things like preemptive
victim-blaming—“You should just lock yourself up at home or get
raped!”—but also other equally horrible things like slut-shaming.
Ultimately, however, it’s just a killer of personal liberty.
—Josh Shahryrar
Silencing the witness
It’s
important to remember that the phenomenon of victim-blaming is not just
prevalent in rape. It’s the method by which people in power protect and
maintain support for their coercive and criminal activities, a method
that turns people against their own best interests and against
themselves.
Victim-blaming occurs predominantly in issues of class. Regardless of
your gender, race, age, sexuality, if you are poor you are seen as
responsible for your poverty. No system put you there; according to the
dominant culture, your hunger, your homelessness are your own problems.
There is also this common notion that rape is the only crime where the
responsibility falls on the victim to avoid and prevent their
brutalization by the hands of another. But this is also false. Crimes
such as the systematic, institutionally sanctioned theft of fair wages,
health care, food, shelter, and education are perpetrated and go
unpunished because of this “victim responsibility” model. It’s up to you
not to starve, to budget to the last penny, to manage your wage cuts so
that corporate shareholders can afford their second homes.
The real function of victim-blaming is not simply to take focus away
from the perpetrators, but to make sure that those who could help the
victim don’t. Make sure they believe whatever has transpired is simply
inevitable. Women have always been raped and will always be raped unless
they do something themselves to stop it. The poor will always be poor
unless they pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Victim-blaming creates irresponsible cowards.
It creates a world where there are no perpetrators, where those who
have been harmed live in shame and those who witness remain silent. It
is an essential part of the cult of antisocial masculinity.
And it’s time to take a good long look at that cult. It’s time to bring it down.
—Cara Hoffman
What if?
More
than 20 years have passed since I was raped while serving as a Peace
Corps volunteer in Niger, West Africa. The memory of the rape itself has
faded. But the memory of the response I received from Peace Corps staff
members when I reported my rape and sought justice has not.
“I am so sick of you girls going over there, drinking, dancing, and
flirting. And then if a guy comes on to you, you say you have been
raped.”
“It is your word against his. He said you wanted to have sex, and we believe him.”
Young and naive, I believed if I “did the right thing” I would be
supported. Instead, I was blamed, and very effectively silenced. Two
decades would pass before I would “come out” publically about my rape, despite working in the field of trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder. I broke my silence to help pass legislation
to reform the Peace Corps policies around sexual assault. I learned
quickly from my work on the Hill that victim-blaming is pervasive across
the political spectrum.
GOP Rep. Todd Akin’s August statements about “legitimate rape” were
widely and justly reviled. But I’ve heard similar sentiments from the
left: After telling a liberal Democratic staffer that there had been
1,000 sexual assaults in the Peace Corps over the past 10 years, he
replied: “How many of those were real rapes?”
To my surprise, one of our strongest allies was right-wing congressman
Ted Poe, who said publicly during House hearings: “As a former judge,
let me just say this. Sexual assault is never, never, the fault of the
victim.”
What if our public leaders all spoke like this? What if they honored the 12 million and counting
rape survivors a year in America? And what if all 12 million of us
stood up and said, “I was raped”? We could actually bring victim-blaming
to an end.
—Karestan Koenen
About
*WMC’s Women Under Siege is a journalism project that
investigates how rape and other forms of sexualized violence are used as
tools in genocide and conflict throughout the 20th century and into the
21st. Originated by Gloria Steinem, it builds on the lessons revealed
in the anthology Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust by Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel, and also in
At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance—a New
History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of
Black Power by Danielle McGuire. In the belief that understanding
what happened then might have helped us prevent or prepare for the mass
sexual assaults of other conflicts, from Bosnia to the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, this Women’s Media Center project is exploring
this linkage to heighten public consciousness of causes and preventions.
The project has two main components:
-
A public education plan to demonstrate that rape is a tool of war (not
only a crime of war, but also a strategic tool). This plan includes
testimony from and partnership with survivors of modern wars from Bosnia
to Darfur.
-
An action plan to push for the creation of legal, diplomatic, and
public interventions to ensure the United Nations, international
tribunals, and other agencies with power will understand the
gender-based threats as a tool of genocide and will design protocols to
intervene and halt gender-based genocide.
Please click over to WomenUnderSiegeSyria.crowdmap.com for our live, crowdsourced map of rape in Syria. To read more about the map, click here.
WMC’s Women Under Siege project is funded by contributions from
individuals, corporations, and foundations. We are not funded by the
U.S. or any other government.
