Originally published on the CGS blog on August 21, 2014.
When you dress like that, you are asking to be raped.
For every man in jail for rape, there should be a woman in the cell next to his.
It wasn’t uncommon to hear my prep school teachers utter sentences like these. Though their statements outraged me, I never took them to be indicative of society as a whole; surely no one outside of my backward little Northern Virginia community would actually blame a victim for her own assault. After graduating, however, I would come to realize how wrong I was about that.
In later years, I learned of not only the prevalence of rape across the globe, but the cultural acceptance of it. In Afghanistan, for example, sexual violence is a widespread and underreported problem. It often comes in the context of forced and child marriage, domestic abuse, and police brutality. Because of the high value placed on girls’ virginity, rape victims who come forward often are shamed and may even be imprisoned for “moral crimes.”
Here in the US, rape culture is illustrated by the epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses and the failure of administrations to take appropriate action. Another major indicator are incidents like the Steubenville rape case, in which the respective offenders were sentenced to a mere one and two years in detention, while those in mainstream and social media alike mourned the loss of the boys’ “promising futures” and attributed the crime to the victim’s intoxication.
India is another country plagued by rape culture. According to a 2012 report, two women are raped every hour. Particularly notorious are the gang rapes and subsequent murders occurring last year in New Delhi and more recently in Uttar Pradesh, where the victims’ bodies were left hanging from a tree.
Last week, I am happy to report, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a significant step toward combating the issue.
While giving his first Independence Day speech, Modi condemned India’s rape problem and addressed the role of societal and family responsibility in preventing rape. He challenged Indian parents to focus on raising their sons better rather than merely shielding their daughters:
In every home, parents ask daughters lots of questions as to where she is going, when will she return, and ask her to inform them when she reaches her destination.
But have you ever asked your son where he is going, why is he going and who are his friends? After all, the person committing the rape is also someone’s son.
Modi touches on an important point here. There are two common ways of looking at rape in cultures that tolerate it:
1) Rape consists of isolated incidents committed by born criminals.
2) Rape is something that good men can’t help but do when women provoke them.
Either way, we have no control over rapists. Women, therefore, must be responsible for preventing their own victimization.
Perhaps this is easier than admitting that there might be something seriously wrong with society; that rapists are not nameless, faceless monsters, but among our families and friends; that our culture has helped form them by failing to instill the importance of treating women as equals and respecting their human rights; that those rights are absolute and do not depend on what a woman wears, where she goes, or how much she has to drink.
The Prime Minister has started a much-needed international dialogue on the issue. Let us hope that this will lead to dispelling the myths perpetuated by rape culture in India, in the US, and around the world.
