asking for it?

[antoinettechigur]

Just been thinking about this turn of phrase and wondering what it really can mean.

Follows on from lots of lunchtable discussion at work of a current rather high profile case in which some men are being accused of raping one of a group of women who were at their house after nightclubbing (just keeping it a tiny bit vague as trial not over yet. Most of my colleagues were analysing the woman's reported behaviour and discussing whether she had "asked for it" by getting into a vulnerable situation. When I asked "what, she wanted to be raped?" the responses were along the lines of "Oh of course not, but you know...". Nothing very specific. Another colleague joined me in the suggestion of questioning why these discussions/reports always focus on the woman's behaviour, not the man/men's in the situation.

So what does it all mean? What do people mean when they say a woman was "asking for it"?

Well, thought I better start a thread as I always turn up late to the interesting discussions these days

I find that it's interesting that the advice relates to situations where it's "socially acceptable" to be raped.

I did have someone "jump out of the bushes" on me. According to the advice, I did everything wrong. I was walking down a quiet street (the one where I lived) at night (only about 9.30pm but still dark) on my own and with bags (although I never thought that was relevant before) and a man came from nowhere and assaulted me. He didn't get time to do much because a neighbour heard me scream and came out to see what was going on so he was scared away. I never thought twice about reporting it to the police as although I did everything "wrong" according to the advice I knew it would be taken seriously, and it was.

The time I did everything "right" and made sure that I was safe and walked home with a friend was the time I didn't report it because I thought no one would believe me over him.

Has anyone seen this little gem in today's news?

Obviously we can't be certain of the guilt of the alleged perpetrators but, to me, it makes for chilling reading.

It would appear from this that we are expected to shout and fight if we are terrified/traumatised and if we don't then, clearly, there is nothing wrong.

This is a fantastic thread.

I agree with dittany about magical thinking. Someone said upthread that they thought a lot of women who victim-blame are saying "well she shouldn't have been that drunk" or "well she shouldn't have been out that late" in order to pretend to themselves that, because they don't do those things, they won't get raped. That sounds about right to me, and I think Soapboxqueen was indulging in a bit of that, though she might not have been aware of it.

I'm like ISNT in that I'm pretty fatalistic about it - there are some things we can do to protect ourselves - and The Gift Of Fear is WONDERFUL and EVERYONE should read it - but putting the onus of rape-prevention on women is absurd, and wrong. Men can stop rape, (and yes, I do mean MEN can stop rape, not just rapist can stop raping). Men can stop rape because they have more cultural clout in this world than women do, and so they can be more powerful voices in stopping rape-culture.

I love the Gift of Fear because it TELLS you to listen to your intuition when you realise something isn't quite right, and it TELLS you : Don't be afraid to come off as a bitch.
Rapists and abusers KNOW that women are regularly shamed for 'not being nice' to men. Gavin de Becker notes some of the ways that men who are violent towards women being to coerce them verbally, even as they meet, and how they pick out their targets. To know that it's ok to listen to your intuition, and to know that it's better to be cold or standoffish or stuckup than violently assaulted... was oddly liberating.
I learned about the book from this pandagon thread, which was interesting. Somewhere in the comments someone discusses their best rape-avoidance/prevention tip: get the hell away from anyone who doesn't respect your boundaries or hear you when you say 'no.'

I'll be telling my one-day dc that, I think.

Sorry, loads of posts and I'm in a rush, but just in reply to this bit of your post hoo - "if women themselves think this, what hope is there?" - this very discussion gives me hope. A random bunch of women on the interweb recognising that this sorry state of affairs is not inevitable and exposing the myths surrounding rape for what they are.

I was just over 12 when I was sexually assaulted and it took me years and years to realise it wasn't my fault. I have also not told anyone about it, bar my grandmother - and even that was 15 years after the event

My attacker was my father's friend. He had seen me grow up, seen me as a toddler, as an infant. I was entering adolescence and wasn't yet comfortable with my own body and often did things that shouldn't be done because I was still a little girl in my head. I used to sit on my dad's lap. I also used to greet "Uncle Dan" (name changed) with a huge hug and a kiss. I thought nothing of it as it was what i'd always been doing. The day he attacked me, my mum had left the house to drop a package at a neighbour's. In the fifteen minutes she was gone, he kissed me (tongue and all), felt my breasts and inserted his fingers in me. I went into lockdown as I couldn't really understand what was happening. I froze, I didn't fight back, I didn't scream. When mum came back, he just continued talking as normal, like nothing happened. I ran away into my room and cried and cried and cried. I cried every night for ages, but never in front of anyone.

After that incident, I made sure I was never at home when Dan came to visit (he tried a lot to get me alone, I think he saw my silence as consent!). I also developed a mistrust of men in general, and couldn't bear any male to touch me, even a handshake. The next man to touch me was dh at age 21, after 7 years of friendship (in other words, I knew I could trust him). He has never hurt me, never forced himself on me. It was only through his attitude to me that I came to realise how horribly my trust had been broken by fucking Dan. I hope he's rotting in hell, the fucking bastard.

Sorry, that was a very long post. But very cathartic. Whenever I think of that day, I still feel the desperation, the fear, the hurt.

oh Lutyens

So very sad for you, Lutyens. Something similar happened to me, and there was so much shame surrounding sex in my house that my reaction was "I can't tell my mother, this will kill her...I can cope..." It took me a long, long time before I wanted to talk about it (actually I never wanted to talk about it, but I did want to have talked about it, if that makes sense), but I do feel better for the therapy I've had. I hope you're getting the help you need. And I hope he's rotting in hell, too - your abuser and mine. Bastards.

Two posts that sprang to mind when I was working away, thinking about this thread in the back of my mind: this post at fugitivus talks about how women are socialised to behave in ways that leads them to be rape and then blamed for being raped, and it's clearer than my point was upthread. She writes: "it is not okay to set solid and distinct boundaries and reinforce them immediately and dramatically when crossed ('mean bitch')... it is not okay to make personal decisions that the adults or other peers in your life do not agree with, and it is not okay to refuse to explain those decisions to others ('stuck-up bitch')... it is not okay to completely and utterly shut down somebody who obviously likes you ('mean dyke/frigid bitch)."

That's worth a read, if you're interested.

The other thread that I LOVE when discussing how women are damned if they're nice (asking for it!) and damned if they're not (Bitch!) is Schroedinger's Rapist which is at Shapely Prose. That thread is so damn good I re-read it every couple of months just to nod along.

dittany - s'true though! And it reminds me of the whole 'what do you most fear from the opposite sex?' question, where men responded that they were afraid of being laughed at, and women responded that they were afraid of being killed.

Ugh, that BBC story is horrendous. She didn't scream so she absolutely wanted it.... Right. OR she was thinking: if I stay really quiet hopefully it will be over soon and they won't beat me up.

dittany, this is why I hate it when people put responsibility on the rape victim and the "situation".

I'm sure if my case had reached the media, the reaction would be:

1. Why did the mum leave her alone (a la Polanski case)
2. Full-body hugs by an adolescent girl? Mixed signals, what did she expect?
3. Why did she not scream or fight? She must have consented.

Why does no one ever dissect the motives of the rapist? Why are the actions of the victim so paramount to the crime?

that fugitivus article is brilliant, really cogent and well-stated.

I couldn't link to the other one though, can you try re-linking blakcurrants?

Actually, a few months after the incident he stopped being invited over, and my parents cut off contact with him. Maybe he was overtly creepy and they noticed, or they saw how uncomfortable I was around him, or maybe they had a falling-out that had nothing to do with me. Either way, I didn't have to suffer his presence for very long, thank God!

I suspect a proper dissection of rape would lead to the unravelling of patriarchy itself (because when you start to think of what needs to change to improve the situation, you soon see that those changes would be very far reaching). So there's a hell of a lot at stake.

there is still such a stigma about having been sexually asaulted though

why ??

moesworth yes.

I used to think that if all of the men who have ever sexually assaulted anyone suddenly vanished off the face of the earth, there'd be hardly any men left.

And that is a big problem, isn't it.

If all women suddeny started reporting all sexual assaults, and teh police had to investigate them all, they woudn't have time to do anything else.

It is not in the interests of our society in lots of ways to take this stuff seriously.

After all women have been raped and attacked for milennia - but we carry on being wives and mothers and doing the housework and holding it all together.

if every time a woman was attacked she removed herself completely from society and went to live on an island somewhere forever, then maybe people would do something.

AF that's the other problem isn't it - if no-one talks about it then the problem is hidden. we all deal with our experiences by ourselves. BUT that is why this board has been such a revelation to me. from here I have talked about what has happened, heard about what has happened to otehr people, started threads, signed petitions, read blogs. This is a great thing that is happening here IMO

ISNT, thankfully I really don't believe that the majority of men are potentially sex-offenders

because that would be too awful

I agree with you though, that MN has taught me soooooo much

I had my bloody head buried in the sand for such a long time...

I don;t really either, it was just a dark thought moment.

I do believe it is a pretty significant minority though - especially when you include things like grabbing at women randomly and all the stuff we are supposed to laugh off.

I imagine that if you asked most men if they thought it was a crime to feel someone's bum at the bar in the pub, they would laugh at the idea.

yes, I reckon significant minority too

I'm not sure, I think all men can be sex offenders given the right combination of circumstances, just as all women can be murderers/ child abusers / insert undesirable thing here, given the right combination of circs - war, famine, attack etc. None of us knows what we're capable of and that's probably a good thing.

I have a nasty suspicion that one of the reasons some men go along with the rape culture, is that they're leaving the door open for them to participate in rape - just in case. It's very notable that often, men are far more likely to condemn a man who comes on too strong to a woman, or is a bit sexually aggressive or subjects her to unwanted attention, than women are - and those more hardline men, are the ones who aren't wanting to keep that door open IMO.