A reasonable person might think that certain cases of rape would be clear cut and that it would be all but impossible to blame the victim of a crime, especially one with witnesses, photographs and other documentary evidence, for her own assault. But, we don't live in a world where a reasonable person can think that at all. Instead we live in a world where people are surprised because of widespread outrage over cases like the one in Steubenville.
Yesterday, in our fatiguing chronicling of rape, the Steubenville rape trial began.  ABC reported that two boys "took liberties" (such an interesting turn of phrase if you think about it) with a drunk girl and now face rape charges. Attorneys for the defendants, two star football players (as everyone is intent on reminding us), argued that the boys did not rape a drunk 16-year old girl, whom they performed sexual acts on, because she "didn't say no."  The lawyers are asking the court to believe that there was no nonconsensual contact during a long night in which these boys (just like these boys) put their fingers into the girl's vagina, attempted to have her perform oral sex (she couldn't hold her mouth open), allegedly urinated on her and were photographed dragging her around by her hands and feet. As one of the boys was quoted saying in a tonally rape-friendly media piece, "It just felt like she was coming on to me."  Which, of course, is clear license to treat a living girl like an inflatable silicon sex doll.
If traditional coverage and similar cases in the recent past are any indication, what will inevitably evolve in the next few weeks is a media narrative about these boys, their football aspirations, their dashed hopes, and their basic all-American Boy Goodness. The flip side of that narrative is that a drunk, possibly lying, definitely regretful, stupid, slutty, selfish and careless girl ruined their hopes for the future. She'll be yet another "spider who lured them" and "ruined their lives." Here is where we indulge in the national sport of victim-blaming in high-def digital. The kind that allows us to blame one person for her own assault and avoid the rigorous self-reflection necessary to understand the system that produces kids who think its okay to humiliate and violate a limp and incapacitated girl for kicks. Why aren't we talking about why the 40+ teenagers involved that night didn't step in and stop what was happening?
I am hoping this case will be different and that we've reached a tipping point, but early signs aren't particularly heartening.
This isn't "just" about alcohol or teens or dashed football aspirations. It has much broader implications about consent and what we are failing to teach children. Alcohol and drugs don't turn people, primarily girls and women, into rape victims. Rapists do. And while we'd like to think these things can't be avoided and are accidental, they can be avoided and are, in fact, rarely accidental at all. These two boys may not have set out to deliberately drug the girl in question, or get her intoxicated for their purposes, but they took deliberate and aggressive advantage of the fact that she was drunk to the point of obvious and witnessed incoherence. This is done regularly with malice. Systemic tolerance for rape means they have traditionally gotten away with these crimes.
I'm pretending that I will successfully make this a shorter post than usual, so I am sparing you the data-bingey itemization here. However, at the end of this post is a list of 50 similar cases where men, (not the sole perpetrators, but the overwhelming majority) humiliated, raped and otherwise sexually assaulted people (including other men) who were drunk, drugged, asleep, anesthetized, comatose or otherwise incapable of giving their affirmative consent or saying "no." The perpetrators of these crimes include students, doctors, lawyers, police officers, dentists, cab drivers, homeless men, sales men, and other everyday rapists. In other words, rapists who don't think they're rapists. This list provides some specific context, as opposed to the larger context of all rape, in which to think about Steubenville.  Victims' ages span decades. Where they were raped runs the gamut. They didn't wake up and go out on the day of their assaults thinking that their default condition was consent to sexual activity by virtue of existence. Even if female. This list and others like it explain why this incident exploded as it did in social media.
Aside from the question of why anyone wants to engage in sexual activity with an unresponsive person, how would people think differently about this case and similar ones if two boys had "taken liberties" with a 55-year old nun described by witnesses as "not moving," "limp," "incapable of coherent speech," "carried by her hands and feet," "so raped," and "dead"? Which brings us to this: What is it about a girl, experimenting with alcohol the way her male peers do, that makes such a stunning difference to so many people asking in confusion, as in the case in Ohio, "What is there to try?"  Honestly?
Shame-based double standards make people think that girls who drink themselves blotto deserve what they "get" and patriarchy demands that we think of boys as unable to control themselves. Can you imagine boys and men living with double standards that police everything they wear and do in a way that they are made to understand that they should "expect" someone to use their bodies in any way they please if they are "impaired" in some way? That the likelihood of this happening is ridiculously high?  What would happen if we restricted men's freedoms the way we casually and routinely do women's? In other words, if we "took" men's "liberties"? Or if they even had a clear understanding of how rape imperils their liberty. As in... it is a punishable crime. Instead, we're intent on telling girls to be afraid -- of being raped or seeking justice if they are. Seeking justice for the victims of rape should not be portrayed as some kind of unfortunate inconvenience for their rapists.
The list took me less than 10 minutes to compile and barely skims the surface.  All of these are examples of people using power in predatory ways to assault other people when they are incapacitated.  Whether they understand their actions in this way is irrelevant and their inability to understand why their actions are repugnant, dehumanizing and ethically wrong is the result of rapey norms and a failure of education and culture. Contrary to popular mythology about "accidents," these are crimes of control -- not a lack of control. The people who do these things refuse to acknowledge the basic humanity of the people they assault -- the right to not be an object for someone else's use. They deny the central, civilizing principles of consent and the role it plays in the law and more broadly in culture. The communities that produce them similarly fail.
In relation to Steubenville and similar situations, fully 28 percent of women and 3 percent of men experience sexual assault on college campuses. We send people off to school with close to zero information regarding sexual assault, rape, consent and the law. Then add alcohol and stir. The result? Between ½ and ¾ of cases of campus rapes, similarly to the Steubenville case and countless others, involve alcohol and "impaired functioning."  As Tara Murtha recently put it, "The preferred weapon of choice in a typical campus rape is confusion."  Only 5 percent will report these experience because they fear shaming and encountering well documented and widespread institutional tolerance for the crime of rape. This is significantly less than the 46 percent reporting rate in the general population. But, even then, 97 percent of those who rape walk free. We're sick and tired of rape being treated like an unimportant joke and being told in thousands of ways that the victims of rape should pay for the crimes of their rapists.
While teaching people about consent isn't going to change the behavior of predatory serial rapists, it will cultivate a culture that encourages effective bystander intervention and teaches both women and men how to reduce risk. What we have now and by default are subtle and overt messages that teach children, like the two Steubenville boys and the kids who watched them, to treat other human beings -- disproportionately female ones -- as dehumanized prey instead of as a people for whom they should feel compassion. Why is this taboo? We are failing left and right.
In the meantime, kids in Steubenville will pay a high price. The thing is, the boys probably are basically "good." Although I think they are clearly at fault for violating this girl's body and human rights, I do not think it's their fault that they were born into a culture where "nice guys" rape all the time and get away with it. We could avoid an awful lot of hardship and wasted lives if we disregarded the repugnant antics of those who are aggressively opposed to a fairer distribution of rights and confronted these issues head on.
As I recently said when participating in a Women Under Siege forum on victim-blaming, explaining context and shifting the focus from individual people to the systems that produce them isn't a mentality of victimization, it's a critique of the deeply entrenched, destructive attitudes at the heart of violence and oppression, and the first steps toward dismantling them. That is a matter of personal responsibility.
50 Cases of Context
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I skipped your list of examples the first time, only now mustering enough courage to delve into it... and I've stopped about half way through, as it became too unbearable. The man who raped his dying stepdaughter was the final straw for me (among so many).
What we see in it is what we, women, have known all along: that rape is not an isolated crime committed by some deranged men on the outskirts of society, but an everyday activity perpetrated by all those "trustworthy" male pillars of our communities -- doctors, businessmen, policemen, teachers, fathers.
I cannot imagine any of your critics here (or elsewhere) spent any time going over this list, which was, sadly, prepared with such an ease as these cases are all around us -- and not because our culture has suddenly became strangely demoralized, but because, thanks to our technology, we can finally disseminate relevant information and appreciate the real extent of this problem that has always plagued our society. If they did, they would obviously support you and not dismiss or criticize.*
Thank you again for being such a clear and persistent voice for human decency.
*Assuming, generously, that they still possess a working conscience.
"Don't rape" -- not a complicated concept.
For example, a lot of your examples involved unconsciousness. This is obviously a major issue involving violation of trust. On the other hand, you have the gangrape and the jogger who was assaulted. No doubt this is terrible, but those issues need to be addressed differently. The perpetrators in those cases are not in a position of trust, they're using brute force to subdue their victims. This is a different issue entirely. Both are horrible, but both need different approaches to finding a solution.
There is therefore one common solution: men stopping to force sex on a woman (or a man, as the case may be).
Ted Bundy knew that what he was doing was wrong. No amount of "teaching" him that rape is wrong would change that.
Here's a better thought or facts actually
1) This was rape, and the boys need to be punished
2) The girl was being irresponsible
3) ALL Teenagers AKA. "kids" are irresponsible
4) The punishment for making an irresponsible decision as a child is not rape
5) The punishment for a teenager/child who rapes needs to be determined over time and evaluation, not treated like an adult.
6) We cannot blame children for alcohol being available to them!
7) We cannot teach children everything, because even if we fear our parents/supervision, we make decisions and experiment despite what we've been taught. Sometimes with peer pressure and/or absence of supervision; we don't even realize were making bad choices until it's too late (adults included). You're either psychotic or a liar if you say you've never done anything stupid and regrettable as a child.
8) Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but not all opinions are correct.
However when you make an unbiased opinion and actually think of things logically and focus on both grey areas and black and white (which too many people don't know how to do). Then you can actually give justice.
The debate over fault is even more shameful. Should this young woman have been this drunk? no- none of these students should have been drinking. But to use her condition as a justification to rape and demean her is the worst type of behavior and if they would be so callous to this young woman, how will they treat other women they come in contact with in the future.
I wonder what the attitudes would be if the tables had been turned and it was one of these football players that had passed out and a group of young girls had decided to film the same type of acts on a young male, penetrating him with objects, urinating on him, demeaning him, and then posting and sharing video of the acts?
Would law enforcement and the local people of this town suddenly have thought this was a violation? I imagine the attitude toward the victim would no longer be geared toward his condition being the root cause of the act.
Don't you know that crimes are much more serious, when committed against males? Males are more human!
Or so some people seem to think...
I guess it's somewhat common for college or even high school students to "prank" people (primarily males) who've passed out drunk - dropping their pants and painting smiley faces on their bare buttocks, putting them in compromising positions with a potted plant, painting their toenails and fingernails pink, etc. (I'm not talking about rape or sex in these pranks). Basically just dumb stuff making fun of the passed out guy to tease him.
If carried along those lines, (no sex) most young guys probably don't see it as a big deal.
Why do we have to tell girls and women to travel in packs, don't drink, never take a drink a man hands you, don't walk anywhere in the dark or by yourself or dressed for a date, or look vulnerable or pretty or desirable? Learn self-defense, carry pepper spray or a taser or a gun, learn how to scream "Fire!" because people ignore cries of "Help!" or "Rape!" Check in with a roommate or friend or parents during a date. Never trust a male to do the right thing. . . . . . . ?
Why don't we just teach boys and men, "DON'T RAPE!"
Recall Malamuth's study showing that about half of men admit freely they would force sex on a woman if they knew they could get away with it.
These boys are getting what they deserve, but that doesn't change the fact that this girl was raped. In the real world telling girls to be careful with alcohol when they're around teenage boys is good advice. Following Soraya's advice that girls pretend the world is other than it is will only lead to more pain. Teenage boys who rape teenage girls need to be punished severely. However, in the real world there are always going to be boys who take advantage of girls. For their own sake, they need to be sensible about when, where, and how they drink and their parents need to make sure they understand the world as it is, not the world as they wish it would be.
It's not about women. There have been cases where someone is killed in the middle of the street (a lot of times men) and nobody does anything at all, not even call an ambulance. It is a universal disregard for human life, and I find it appalling. But by making it about women only, you're missing the entire picture.
"The communities that produce them similarly fail."
"We send people off to school with close to zero information regarding sexual assault, rape, consent and the law."
"to treat other human beings -- disproportionately female ones -- as dehumanized prey instead of as a people for whom they should feel compassion. Why is this taboo? We are failing left and right."
--I was never taught anything about it in school. I'm teetering on ancient, but I don't think times have changed.
Steubenville might not have happened with pre-structured group dynamics, OR might have been stopped. If we want the young to be responsible in their social structure, their mode, it has to be taught in that mode. Not doing so continues the dehumanizing effects of "stranger-ism" and the Digital Age, and continues rape culture and objectification: I killed the dragon, I get the princess or prince.
~~ "I'd like to apologize to her family, [the] community. No pics should have been sent. That's all sir," said Mays. ~~
So he only apologized for the pictures and not the rape? Why? Is it because the pictures are what damned him?