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Date Rapes Aren’t the Victims Personal Responsibility, Thank You, Seattle Times

Recently, an article was published in the Seattle Times and it’s a terrible, blaming the victim, and uses feminists as the blame for why women aren’t protected. The article, titled, “Personal Responsibility and the Rape Debate” was published at the end of January of this year, by a right leaning, Milo apologist.

The article defends Captain Peter Rose, a police captain with the New York City police department, that was recently quoted as saying that he regards, “true stranger rapes” as “more troubling” than when the victims already knows the attacker, examples; date rape, spousal rape, incest rape. After large public outcry, including protests in his precinct, he offered an apology, posting on Twitter that, “my comments were not meant to minimize the seriousness of sexual assault”. However, his comments, and the following article by the Seattle Times, were absolutely minimizing of non stranger rape.

The author starts off the article with typical right wing offensive tactics, and while that’s not surprising, the rhetoric she’s preaching is harmful, wrong, and on a large platform. Her opening quote, “Such distinctions make some feminists uncomfortable, but they shouldn’t. No one does women a favor by treating them like children bearing no responsibility for their own safety“. Not only does this completely dismiss that not only women get raped, another rhetoric perpetrated by the right, it also insists that the woman that do get raped somehow want to babied by society. Another lie. People want to be comfortable, and safe, and not have to carry weapons to fight off people they might know when they’re turned down.

She continues, suddenly blaming “online dating culture” for the sheer amount of date rapes, but doesn’t back the quote up with any kind of facts. Not only are date rapes wildly under reported, according to Canadian statistics, six out of every hundred sexual assaults are reported, according to the same statistics, only 1-2% of date rape “sexual assaults” are reported. These kind of articles, putting blame on people for, as she says, “A woman who voluntarily goes to a private place with a guy she just met two hours before has behaved unwisely“.

It’s these kind of hypocritical people that have no idea what they’re writing about, writing simply to attack rape victims, and try and humiliate them on a public platform that adds massively to the amount of under reported rapes. Date rape is not taken seriously, people feel that if you willingly went with someone, maybe to “give them a chance” like society is always demanding, that you’ve also signed up for whatever happens to you while you’re there. It’s an absolutely unfair amount of hypocrisy to demand that women “give men a chance” or “give them a break and get to know them”, and if they make that attempt, with a man that they don’t know very well, they get sexually assaulted, and then blamed for going there in the first place. If then the woman says that she doesn’t trust men after that experience, which is perfectly rational, she’s then called a “b*tch” or “a misandrist” and that “not all men are the same”.

For her final, flawed argument, she does state that women can sleep with multiple partners, but then insists that it’s full of risks and mentions that “Skydivers don’t have armies of helpers running along the ground with safety nets“. Because somehow in her mind it makes sense to liken going on dates to men to jumping out of a literal plane and expecting someone to have a net. Her end quote, “But rapes by total strangers are the most horrendous. They should be more troubling to the police — and the public, as well“. The end quote summing up her absolute rape blaming nonsense, really speaks to the fact that the majority of society somehow thinks that someone that grabs you in the middle of the night, is scarier that someone that you know, and probably trust, raping you. The rapist you know, and trust, that should respect you as a person, but doesn’t, is just as terrifying as someone that doesn’t know you.

Instead of blaming the victim for what happens to them, the blame is solely on the rapist. Rape culture kills. Rape victims are harassed, abused, and have very little access to help, or justice after the claim. Rape victims are not all women. Rapists are not all men. Feminists are largely responsible for fighting for men that have been raped, as hyper-masculinity is a huge reason that men don’t report rapes when they happen to them. However, rape by men is a huge problem in our society, and as 80% of rape victims in Canada are women, and 80% of those women were assaulted by people that they know.

Date rape, and spousal rape, enormous issues, and absolutely not “less scary” than rape by strangers. Date rape is not “personal responsibility”. Rape culture needs to be blamed, along with the actual rapists. When we force rapists to take responsibility for their actions, and don’t give them easy outs like, “she shouldn’t have come to my house”, we are helping end rape culture, and protecting people. If rapists don’t have ways to justify that what they’re doing isn’t wrong, society won’t be lenient on both them and their sentences, and people will be more comfortable in coming forward to get justice for what as happened to them, meaning more rapists charged, and more people safe.

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