* Why was she drinking? * Why was she dressed that way? * Why was she leading him on? * Gay panic defense -- literally arguing that a hate crime wasn't a hate crime because the murderer panicked about the victim being gay ...
This isn't new. MeToo was a response to believing that just maybe things were going to change.
To make this clear, I'll apply it to something else: It isn't OK to tell a kid not to play out in a highway, because that is victim blaming, and you're saying that it is OK for drivers to run kids down. Parents who tell kids to say out of the road are perpetuating a hit-and-run culture.
Real people get hurt when we pretend that victimhood is fully unrelated to the behavior of potential victims, or that pointing out foolish behavior is somehow an approval of a criminal's actions.
Sexual assault is unrelated to the victim's behavior because no matter how foolish you were, if your attacker wasn't a vile fucking shitbag then it wouldn't have happened. People who commit assault make a choice, every single time. And then they get away with it, because other people somehow believe that "the kid came out of nowhere and I couldn't brake in time" and "she was drunk and wearing a short skirt, what was I supposed to do" are equivalent defences.
Edit for clarity: I'm not saying that you're justifying the attacker. I'm saying that while advice like this is sometimes practical before an attack happens[1], it's irrelevant after the fact. Entirely. Every time. Because sexual assault doesn't happen by negligence (which can legally and logically be shared by both parties), it happens by intent. So we should stop asking what she could have done, and start asking what we can do.
[1] Although trust me, every woman is fully clued up on the fact that she could be attacked at any time - have your ever been asked to walk a coworker to her car?
Counterexample: There was a recent episode of Vice titled Consent, which included a mediation between a man and a woman where the man had no conception that the woman hadn't consented.
It's not hard to see why this is common. When you have a power dynamic, even subtle and unofficial ones, someone who doesn't want to consent has an internal conflict. They neither want to participate nor want to harm their relationship with the other person.
Those types of situations are horrifying. If you signal refusal using overtly transparent methods (throw a drink in their face, scream, slap them), they'll get the message but at the cost of making a scene and potentially souring the relationship. If you try to be too subtle they won't get the hint. The middle ground exists, but with pressure on both sides, it's not the least bit surprising that sometimes someone errs too far on the side of not making a scene. I don't mean to blame the victim in a moral sense, but in a technical sense where sometimes the situation is hard and the right balance isn't clear.
In many of these cases it's still fair to blame the other person for not getting the message, but the failure can certainly be in perception rather than intent. In a sense it is very similar to when you hit a kid in the road because you weren't paying enough attention.
I have been watching this discussion and loathe to jump in. I'm glad to see a few comments adding some nuance, in spite of this being a conversation with very polarized positions.
This statement needs qualification. The majority of cases of sexual assault that my undergrad unversity's Title IX office handled consisted of cases where the accused believes sex was consensual. Such as not knowing that the accuser had taken drugs beforehand, the accuser claims to have withdrawn consent partway through but the accused reported that consent was never revoked, etc.
Granted, it could be possible that the types of sexual assault accusations that are reported to the Title IX office aren't the same types of assault reported to the police.
Advice is not irrelevant after the fact. First, there's always next time. Second, other people can learn by example. It's like the advice given alongside car crash pictures shown in driver education classes; this is useful even if the person in the crash is long dead. Learning from the mistakes of others is important.
Today, people are afraid to point out mistakes and give safety advice because it gets seen as "victim blaming". This is a problem.
If you insist on "asking what we can do" though, and you are honest about it, then you've really kicked a hornet's nest. Sexual assault rates vary around the world, and some places change suddenly when the population changes. Good luck having a productive discussion on the matter.
If you're walking in a bad neighborhood at 3am and you get mugged, should you have chosen your path more wisely? Maybe. But would anybody say that _because you chose to walk in a bad neighborhood and you got mugged, the mugger isn't at fault and shouldn't be prosecuted for the crime they committed_?
No, probably not. Mugging is a crime, and just because you put yourself in a situation where you're more likely to get mugged doesn't make it less of one.
Why does the same not apply to sexual assault?
Yes, the mugger is morally and legally at fault. Absolutely.
And by walking in that neighborhood at 3 AM you at least increased your probability of being mugged. Morally, people in that neighborhood shouldn't be like that. But they are like that, and you knew it, and you walked there anyway. Morally, it isn't your fault, and yet what you did was definitely unwise. In an ideal world, it shouldn't make any difference where you walk. But this isn't an ideal world, and in the world we've got, with the people we've got, you need to pay some attention to where and when you walk.
But, are you not going to tell your kids, "don't walk in dangerous dark streets at night" and "scream if someone tries to mug you"? No, of course not, because it would be idiotic not to, it's just common sense! Then why wouldn't you tell women (well, people in general), "don't be alone with people you don't trust" and "scream 'no' if someone tries to rape you"? It's common sense!
Victim blaming is when you say "Well, if you hadn't been alone with somebody you didn't trust, you wouldn't have been raped"; it's technically a true statement, but it puts the onus on the woman (why was she alone with somebody she didn't trust, something she's been told not to do?) as opposed to on the rapist (why did they rape somebody?).
While it's valuable to give people tools to avoid situations that might go bad, it's still important to recognize that the person at fault for the situation going bad is the person who commits the crime, and not the person who ended up in a bad situation.
Sure. Which is why, in addition to telling people to wear seat belts, we also make people take Driver's Ed so that they can demonstrate that they at least nominally know the rules of the road and can drive safely.
What's the Driver's Ed version of teaching people not to commit rape or sexual assault? When I was in college, there was a freshman orientation activity that talked about consent, but it wasn't mandatory, not all colleges have it, and not all people go to college. Who's teaching high schoolers about the nuances of consent and what it means to sexually assault somebody?
Do you tell banks that they shouldn't have kept so much money in the vaults if they didn't want to get robbed?
Well, it becomes a meme of some sort, with everybody making fun of the bank. For example: there is over a million dollars in cash, the bank is near multiple good escape routes, the bank's cameras and alarms are broken, the "vault" has a hollow interior door, etc.
Why not? When two people don't have the presumption of consent, what's the harm in checking to make sure "hey, is this something you want to do?"
The data in those charts, if it has any statistical merit, does indicate an attitude shift: more people agreeing with anti-victim sentiments one year later.
Maybe people have taken "To Kill A Mockingbird" to heart.