Because the victim is responsible for not being raped

Cross posted

TRIGGER warning: this post discusses rape.

“Women should not be walking home alone in hours of darkness. You just have such vulnerability then.”

Source: Attack prompts police warning

So how, pray tell, is a woman to get home then? By teleporting?

The woman who was assaulted had just walked a friend home, and had only a short distance to go. The place where she was attacked is a well lit residential street in Palmerston North. Yet the warning is going out to women: don’t even think about being independent, about assuming the right to move about your own town freely. Remember always that you personally are responsible for making sure that some assailant doesn’t attack you. Lock yourself up, constrain your movements, live in fear.

This is a real lose:lose for women. I’ve been told by some people who have larger, stronger bodies than mine, that I should just get over my concern about walking alone at night, and go ahead and do it, because it’s silly to worry all the time. Yet when women do just that, when they do avail themselves of the freedoms that citizens in our society are supposed to enjoy, then if they are assaulted, they are blamed for it. They shouldn’t have been out walking in the dark.

There’s not a word of blame placed on the assailant in the story about this assault. Elsewhere in the paper there is a story about people vandalising street signs, but no one has suggested that it’s the city council’s fault for having street signs in the first place. Instead, the city council is asking the public to intervene, and promising that they will crack down on offenders.

The public has to be prepared to be more vigilant and step in and say ‘Hey, we’ve had enough of this; let’s ring the police and get the police in on the job and catch these people in the act’.”

Mr Cuff said the only answer to the problem would be to “prosecute them, and prosecute them hard”.

Signposts matter.