Rape Culture: An Opinion
December 21, 2016
An Opinion on Our Society’s Distorted Culture
You may see a shaken head. Maybe a little shove. You could hear “no” bounce off the walls of the bedroom, or the alley, or off walls of prestigious school buildings. With one unheard shout, or a shout that never came but should be assumed, the walls were now painted a shade of anxiety and guilt. Now splattered with the silence of the ignored call for help, the disregarded refusal for consent. Everything in their minds screamed no, yet it was not enough. The victim lie helpless, yet struggled to fight off and keep what they owned. They lost.
Some run after. Some scream. But others sleep it off.
There is a girl who cries in her bedroom, and doesn’t understand what happened with her new boyfriend. He fled hours ago, but still the tears stain her cheeks and drain her crimson-tinted eyes. She tells her mother, the one she really trusts, and she is in disbelief. But she is the only one to believe her.
There is a boy who sits alone outside his dorm room, not wanting to face his roommates and tell them what has happened. They’ll tell him he finally got laid and how he’s so lucky.
A girl comes home with bruises, and her dress with a giant rip in the hem. Her father warned her not to wear that dress to the party, he shakes his head, now look what happened.
From a group of 6 girls, one of them will have to face this reality. They will have to live in silence, in fear of what people will think. She will test her luck and see how a trial might treat her situation. They’ll ask her questions that could mean life or death. “What were you wearing? See, that’s why you got raped, you were wearing a dress an inch too short” or, “Didn’t anyone tell you not to be on the street so late? You had this coming.”
From a group of 10 of these victims, one is a male. He’ll come home, confused and disoriented, to keeping a silent mouth as he makes his way to his bedroom. But there is no escape. People will find out sooner or later – the person who did it will surely spread it to everyone they know, and they’ll congratulate him. He tells no one the amount of time he screamed no, stop, I don’t want this, because people would think he’s crazy.
Every two minutes, an innocent falls into the pool of statistics.
Out of 1,000 rapes, only 344 are reported. And of those 344 reports, 6 perpetrators will be incarcerated. People become afraid to face anyone. They think the chances are slim, there’s no way there will be justice. To 656 victims, this is the ugly truth. When only .6% of perpetrators are put into jail for their terrible crime, it becomes apparent that something is disgustingly wrong with the way our system treats rape victims. This, along with many other factors, is called rape culture.
According to the FBI, only 2-8% of rape accusations are false, so why does our society constantly turn away a victim’s cry for help?
Why do we blame girls for their fashion decisions if they are raped? A girl should be able to walk the streets in whatever she’d like to wear without fear of being sexually harassed or assaulted. If someone is unable to control themselves after seeing someone with their shoulders bare or exposed knees, that is their problem and should never be the victims. When we tell girls to stay home after 9pm and to wear clothes that cover-up, we are further encouraging the fact that if a girl is raped, that all the blame should be on her. Instead of fighting the fire itself, the perpetrators of these disgusting crimes, we blame the trees caught in the wildfire for being flammable.
We teach our girls that promiscuity is a sin and our boys learn that the more ‘bodies’, the better. It is easier for a girl to convict her rapist if she as seen as an innocent to the justice system, a well covered-up body with no previous experience in sexual encounters, who was as sober as her judge. But her polar opposite has a more difficult time in incarcerating her perpetrator, and only because of blatant victim blaming. It is increasingly more difficult for a boy to accuse, because all he will hear is that he should be ‘grateful’ for what happened. No matter the times he yelled “no”, the society we live in will twist his words and make it as though his mind was saying “yes”.
