Ending rape culture

A Woman’s Worth is not in the Length of her Skirt

She was wearing a mini skirt…She went to a club on her own…
She had had too much to drink…
She was a flirt…
She was dancing too close…
She let him into her dorm…
She didn’t say no…

Imagine how many times you’ve heard a variation of this sentence which makes her the subject of the verb when in actual fact she was the object of action – an action she never chose for herself, asked for, did not partake it which she will have to live with and relive for the rest of her life.

Two high-profile rape cases made headlines over the last two weeks. First it was the 16-year-old who was brutally gang raped in a Rio de Janeiro slum by no fewer than 30 men who had posted  a 38-second video on Twitter bragging about having sex with her.

Then came the Stanford University rape case where star athlete Brock Allen Turner facing a a sentence of maximum 14 years in state prison for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman was sentenced to only six months in jail because the judge, Aaron Persky, worried that a longer prison sentence would have a “severe impact on him”—yes, the rapist—and said, “I think he will not be a danger to others.”

In Brazil, Even after the police made public a segment of a cellphone video which shows the teenage victim of a gang rape naked on a bed, weakly pleading “no, no” to her laughing attackers, there were defenders of the accused. Their reasons?

She had attended sexually charged dance parties in favelas called baile funk…
She had a boyfriend…
She used recreational drugs…
She willingly and willingly consented to visit a house in the favela of Morro de Barão known as “the abbatoir”…
She already had a three-year-old child…

It isn’t gang rape, they said, it is group sex.

In America, despite being spotted by two graduates thrusting his body on top of the unconscious, half-naked woman behind a dumpster, upon realising his victim was unconscious throughout the ordeal, armed with a powerful attorney keen to dissect the victim’s personal life, Turner was free to re-write the script according to which…

She agreed to dance with him…
She agreed to go to his dorm room…
She consented to being fingered behind a dumpster…
She had orgasmed after a minute of digital penetration…
She didn’t say no…

Robbed of any remembrance of the night, she was robbed of her dignity all over again. The villain of the story blamed “campus drinking culture” for his act; even having the audacity to center himself as the primary victim, as he claimed she was conscious the entire time. And yet, more concerned about his well-being than the fact that the offender had still not fully grasped the gravity of his crime, Persky rewarded him with a reduced sentence in a horrifying example of rape culture.

“It is in movies, in video games, in fashion and in music” stated a 2014 Al Jazeera report of rape culture, before defining it as “normalisation of sexual violence against women.”

I go one step ahead and say rape culture is any culture which raises men to think:
She was wearing a mini skirt…
She was out late at night…
She was drunk…
She agreed to come to his house/dorm room/slum shack…
She didn’t say no…

Rape culture is any culture that teaches girls, from an early age, to mind what they wear, where they go, how long they stay out, how much they drink, how they walk, talk or laugh instead of teaching boys, no matter what she is wearing, where she goes, how long she has been out, how much she has had to drink, how she walks, and talks, or laugh, she is not there for his taking.

Sadly, until we learn to educate our boys the right way and for as long as they have c***s and we have c***s, as Twitter user @ClaraCryss wrote, in the aftermath of the Rio gang rape, “being born a woman is living in the uncertainty if you are going to be the next victim of rape.”

On Monday, 420 pairs of underwear were laid out on the sands of Brazil’s Copacabana beach in protest, each represent the number of women who are raped every 72 hours in Brazil, totaling up to about 50,000 women each year. In America, one in five women have reported being raped at some time in their lives. Sadly from the frat houses across the US to slums of Rio de Janeiro, rape culture is everywhere.

Among the red and white underwear on Copacabana beach were 20 large poster boards showing photographs of women with the red outline of a hand over their mouths, part of an exhibit called “I will never be silenced” by the artist Marcio Freitas. A striking echo of the parting words from the brave woman who stood up to Turner and Persky’s pesky sentence as she read him a letter describing the “severe impact” the assault had on her.

“I hope that by speaking today, you absorbed a small amount of light, a small knowing that you can’t be silenced,” she said, “You are important, unquestionably, you are untouchable, you are beautiful, you are to be valued, respected, undeniably, every minute of every day, you are powerful and nobody can take that away from you. To girls everywhere, I am with you.”

And we are with her, and with others too – the countless nameless “young girls” and “unconscious women” who have been robbed of their dignity and their peace of mind, and those living in a rape culture. Let us stand together, look out for each other and speak up until we see a day when a woman’s worth is not measured by by height of her heels or the length of skirt, or what’s in between her legs.