RAPE

I was watching the news the other day and they were reporting on a woman who was raped. Her car had broken down and she chose to walk home. She had walked a significant part of the way when a man stopped and offered her a ride home. He instead drove her to the park and even though she jumped out of his vehicle and ran, he caught up to her and raped her. The spokesperson for the police department described the situation and then stated..."we cannot require everyone to not take rides from strangers but...". So, he has already blamed the victim for her own rape because she chose to get into the car with a stranger. That really made me angry. I understand that women need to take safety precautions, but why do we live in a society where that is necessary? Why is it that in a moment of crisis the foremost thing on our mind is that we may be raped, beaten or murdered???

Adrienne Rich commented on this in her article "Taking Women Students Seriously". This is a long quote, but it is well worth the read.

"The undermining of self, of a woman's sense of her right to occupy space and walk freely in the world, is deeply relevant to education. The capacity to think independently, to take intellectual risks, to assert ourselves mentally, is inseperable from our physical way of being in the world, our feelings of personal integrity. If it is dangerous for me to walk home late of an evening from the library, because I am a woman and can be raped, how self-possessed, how exuberant can I feel as I sit working in that library? how much of my working energy is drained by the subliminal knowledge that, as a woman, I test my physical right to exist each time I go out alone? Of this knowledge, Susan Griffin has written: '...more than rape itself, the fear of rape permeates our lives. And what does one do from day to day, with this experience, which says, without words and directly to the heart, your existence, your experience, may end at any moment. Your experience may end, and the best defense against this is not to be, to deny being in the body, as a self, to...avert your gaze, make yourself as a presence in the world, less felt'".

I wonder how many men, when their car breaks down, are worried about whether they will be raped, beaten or murdered?

I worry about being raped, beaten or murdered every night when I lock my doors before I go to bed.

Rather than a focus on how pathetic this society is that a woman's car can break down and she ended up raped, we focus on the fact that in that moment of crisis she wasn't considering the fact that she would be raped. I personally am sick and tired of the way rape is always thrown back on the victim because they didn't make the right choice, wore the wrong clothes, they were drunk, whatever stupid excuse men can come up with for why women get raped or why they feel women deserve to be raped.