Two things have prompted this post. The first was a social media post highlighting that the language we use around rape, in particular, renders the perpetrator invisible. “She was raped” => a victim, and a crime, but no perpetrator.
the second was listening to Baroness Louise Casey discussing her report into the scandal of “group based child sexual exploitation”. She was talking about the ways in which we sanitise language around this type of crime, and I do understand that we need a ‘code’ for general discussion, but she said that this code allows the full weight of what’s been done to be hidden- and this, I think, can lead to it being more easily ignored.
I was also struck by her pointing out that in these cases, ethnicity is statistically important- but in the general and the specific, we are not saying what ALL the perpetrators of rape and “GBCSE” have in common, which is that they’re MEN. Men do these things. She is (rightly) calling for an examination of whether there are cultural factors at play here- so should we not also be calling for an examination of what is happening with men that they are almost entirely responsible for crimes like these?
we sanitise and disguise these most disgusting crimes, by our language. We talk about these things happening to people. We obfuscate about what is being done and by whom.
Are we protecting the vulnerable or are we protecting men from confronting what their brethren do, when we take out the perpetrator from the crime of rape, and when we don’t look at men as a group and ask them WHY some of them are doing these things, and HOW can we prevent them?
is it unreasonable to ask the male sex to admit and confront the violence and brutality meted out by men? And that our language should start reflecting the actors, rather than the victims of these crimes?