Chrissie Hyndes victim blaming SMH

[FayKorgasm]

guardian.com/society/2015/aug/30/chrissie-hyndes-rape-comments Link

I always liked her but not after this.

Swan, pretty much all burglary prevention is about making the other house look easier to burgle. Put up a burglar alarm - fake or real. Get lights on a timer when your neighbour hasn't. Hide your TV when your neighbour hasn't. Etc.

Unfortunately, I can't hide the presence of my vagina and nor can my neighbour, no matter how thick our curtains skirts.

Rape is about power anyway. Not sex.

It's some male's mentality that needs to change, not female's behaviour.

For a start, to make rape completely unacceptable in social and individual terms. And it would help if conviction rates were much higher.

In Crissie's example, why is it even legal for those mento carry messages claiming to support rape? Shouldn't those gangs be in jail just for those messages?

Yes, Yonic, to follow your analogy, I may be able to prevent my house from being burgled by installing a timer. But I'd rather my neighbour's house wasn't burgled either. The solution to rape is not an arms race of personal safety clothing, gadgets, training etc. After all, where does that end? Should I be getting myself a tank?

And all these commentators saying "well, in an ideal world you'd be able to walk around naked, but in the real world there are bad people around" - don't seem to have any interest at all in changing that. There will be bad people around as long as you continue to accept or even defend them. And blaming the victim is defending the rapists.

Yonic - there's a nasty little thread about high heels in AIBU. I don't wear high heels but the sheer level of judgemental comments being made almost makes me want to.

This discussion about self-defense / running etc is nonsense.Despite being until recently quite slim, I have never been sporty. For the sake of this argument what is usually meant by "running like a girl" describes my style of running exactly - uncoordinated, slow and inefficient.

I haven't seen it, Lass. I think I must have hidden AIBU from my Active threads somehow. Unless the hackers did it, if so I should probably be thankful!

Looking at the paper I saw this headline "Chrissie Hynde: Stockholm review" and it made me think of Stockholm syndrome, where a victim sympathises with their captors.

I think Ms Hynde has internalised what she sees as her 'guilt' or 'compliance' or 'part' in that situation and sadly is sharing that now as if it is in any way her fact. I feel very sorry for her. But I really don't think sharing those thoughts was helpful. She could have shared her 'story' in a different way.

For the record IMHO being in the company of dodgy individuals is risky and I would do all I could not to be in their company. But we all know it is not only the 'obviously dodgey individuals' that rape. And none of that excuses a rapist. The reason all these rapes are happening is because some men rape not because some wear heels. But then we all know that!

And I really never buy into this comparison of protecting property with protecting personal safety. They are two different things.

Interesting opposing comment on the Telegraph from a rape victim and a rapist's view

if you instruct a girl on how to 'avoid being raped' (however that works) the underlying message is: "Make sure he rapes someone else

Do now you aren't victim blaming, you are blaming the ones who didn't get raped, well done you.

Makes me feel selfish for all the times I got away.

It just shows that taking so called measures to prevent being raped leads to a race to avoid falling under a rapist's sights. When the blame should be at the rapist's door for having raped.

But it's all nonsense.
You could sleep naked next to a man (and we often do) that he wouldn't think of raping us. Whereas rapists will.
The same with women being drunk or wearing more revealing clothes than the average woman (we are all sluts, but 18th century standards anyway).

I do think that the implication that rapists should be pushed onto more vulnerable people is a nasty one, yes.

Clearly no-one is congratulating or blaming any of the women in this. But 2 seconds thought that the idea is that you divert a potential attacker onto someone else is great from a personal perspective but shit from the point of view of any kind of social conscience or from a societal / general law and order perspective. The vulnerable in our society should be afforded careful protection - children, people with disabilities, the elderly, and so on. And they are at higher risk of assault or exploitation. So yes, the idea that sex offenders should be directed to the vulnerable is a horrible idea, when you give even 2 seconds pause.

If a man breaks into my house and says he will rape me or my 4yo DD, who do you think I choose.

Of course in real life rapists often do target the vulnerable. Sadly some of those vulnerable people are put into a category of "deserving victim" and rapists are given the AOK for those victims.

The whole thing is awful really.

And I'm aghast at the idea that if women and girls change their behaviour the incidence of rape will go down. There is always someone, somewhere, they will be able to get. One of the people who the current advice says it's right and proper to throw under the bus.

Dear god, Atenco, that isn't what I meant at all! I'm really sorry that's how it came across. My point was that teaching girls how to avoid getting raped may or may not work, but it doesn't solve the problem of men raping people if they think they can get away with it.

Someone said they disliked the property analogy. I think it's really useful to show how stupid the "she deserved it/she encouraged it" notion is.

At the very worst a victim of a theft might be told it was very stupid to park his Porsche in a dubious neighbourhood, leave his briefcase on show and forget to lock the car; at the very worst his insurers may refuse to pay out. But if the car is stolen, it is still a crime- if the thieves are caught the defence will never lead a defence that he asked for it to be stolen or he provoked them into stealing it. At most it will be a plea in mitigation at sentencing - the thieves were desperately poor /weak-willed/very young/ very stupid but it won't be a defence. No one will suggest it isn't a crime.

The property thing is interesting, actually, the more you think about it.

Most people will say, silly to leave your front door wide open and go out, for example, but they would also say that most people would not steal anything from a house even if the front door was open, the only people who will do that are criminals or of a criminal bent and are not good people and need to be caught etc.

With sex offences, people say, silly to leave your front door open (newsflash women can't actually lock their vaginas away! which is one part of why this analogy is so shit) but to go with it, they say, well that tempted someone to commit that offence, that means you are responsible for their actions, it doesn't mean that the person who did this was a criminal or of criminal bent, they might well be a perfectly law-abiding normal person who was almost forced to commit this offence, what else could they have been expected to do.

Which leaves us with some pretty disturbing ideas about how a large tranche of the general public view sex offences and sex offenders, and men more generally.

With the property thing, do people ever draw this analogy when little children are raped, or elderly people, or men? No, it is used for females in their reproductive years. Which again shows up some pretty disturbing ideas about this whole business.

It never ceases to amaze me how feminists are accused of hating men, when we're the ones saying "Well, hang on a minute, the only type of person who rapes is a criminal, most people aren't criminals, so we should be perfectly safe most of them time" and yet on the other hand, you have supposed MREs and their handmaidens telling us that men actually can't be trusted if there's a flash of tight going about not to be forced to rape that woman.

Who do we believe? Feminists who think that men can be trusted to behave like humans or men who seem to have the opposite view.... and yes yes NAMALT

I'm actually heartened to see the other particularly stupid article linked to is by Julia Hartley-Brewer. It's the sort of rubbish one expects from her. It would be more worrying if there were 2 of her.

I hope at least there is some debate that helps clarify that rape is only and solely the rapists' fault.

One of the problems with these kinds of discussions is that some people seem to see things as a sort of zero sum game where any talk of how a woman can do or not do X, Y or Z, that it would be sensible or responsible to do or not do X, Y or Z, to reduce her chances of being raped, inherently implies a corresponding reduction in the level of fault a rapist is considered to be held at.

Whereas it is perfectly possible to believe that the rapist is 100% to blame for their own actions while at the same time think it wise or sensible for a woman to not leave her drink unattended, not wear A, B or C, not get drunk past a certain point, not take a shortcut down a dark alley at midnight, and various other examples that often come up.

It is also perfectly possible to believe that the rapist is 100% to blame for their own actions while at the same time thinking that a woman who does not stick to some such piece of advise is acting irresponsibly, foolishly, recklessly, or whatever.

But instead of concentrating on whatever the piece of advice is and whether or not is is reasonable, or whether OTOH it is too freedom-reducing or plain inaccurate, instead things descend to claims of victim-blaming or reducing the fault of the rapist.

For instance, instead of
"don't leave drink unattended" - "I think that's reasonable"
"don't wear a short skirt" - "that diminished freedom too greatly, and besides there is no evidence I know of which links chance of being raped to length of skirt"

you get "so you are saying that if a woman wears a short skirt/leaves drink unattended and gets spiked, then she only has herself to blame and the rapist is partly off the hook" when that hasn't been said at all.

Although I am aware of course that sometimes it actually is.

The problem with what she says is that she took "responsibility" over what happened.

Yes, we can act to lower the chances that we suffer particular types of rape, but we are not responsible for the rape if it happens. Nobody can be 100% alert all the time, nor 100% distrusting all the time.

• if we lower the chances of it happening to us, we are effectively pushing the assailant onto someone else

While this is great for the first person, it isn't a way to approach a problem at a societal level, is it. This is the only crime where having it happen to someone else, and not even looking at the criminal appears to be acceptable.

As in this case, as Lweji says, she takes 100% responsibility. If she takes 100% responsibility, then there is literally no-one else responsible. So either it's not a crime, or if it is, the person responsible for the crime is the victim.

And then lots of people come along and agree

advice to people (all people) on general safety = great. Lots of things can go wrong if you get so pissed you can't stand up, for example. Most likely you will hurt yourself / fuck all your friends off / lose stuff etc.

Advice to one specific sex about things that they have to do in order to prevent this one specific crime = victim blaming shite.

advice to people (all people) on general safety = great. Lots of things can go wrong if you get so pissed you can't stand up, for example. Most likely you will hurt yourself / fuck all your friends off / lose stuff etc.

I have seen reports where a blind drunk victim has been described as being taken of advantage of. But this was in the context of " rather than helping him you took advantage of the situation to steal..."

And there is nothing wrong with that comment. Stealing from someone who is blind-drunk is despicable. So is raping them.

A man taking advantage of a woman is quite often code for a man raping or sexually assaulting a woman as well.

Obviously raping or stealing from a stone cold sober person is wrong too.

The case I am thinking of involved a man so drunk that he could have died who was relieved of cash, cards and phone. The drunkenness of the victim was treated by the court as exacerbating the crime not contributing to it.

That's interesting, Lass.