Victims thrice over?!

Since the position paper on the penal code amendments (see earlier blog "Rape is Rape") I have been thinking about rape on and off. Hearing from someone recently about her friend's date rape has sparked my pondering again, as had postings in another blog about rape.

The idea that we were deceived as teenagers keeps coming back to me again and again. (I don't mean intentionally, I'm sure school teachers and principals and family members meant well and were themselves deceived.) There are two prongs to the deception.

First is that the biggest danger lay in being attacked by strange men lurking in bushes on our way home from school. Granted that many of us had been flashed at from said said bushes after dark, and possibly an equal number had been molested on buses at some point in our lives, but the likelihood of actual rape was probably a lot more remote. By today's statistics, over 90% of rape survivors knew their assailants (a significant number of whom are their own husbands). Unless the situation was dramatically different in the 80's, we were at far greater risk of rape when we were in supposedly safe and familiar environments rather than at bus stops.

The second deception is that rape is the most degrading and awful thing that could happen to us. I'm not for a moment suggesting that rape is not a heinous crime and that rape survivors suffer from long-lasting and sometimes debilitating trama. It is an invasion of the privacy of (usually women's) bodies and most often a complete betrayal of trust. Yes, rape in and of itself is terrible. But I suspect that society makes it far worse than it already is, on several fronts:

1. Society places huge value on a woman's virginity and chastity. This may not be as bad now as it used to be, but a woman who has multiple sex partners is, well, still a slut. Therefore the loss of that chastity, even without the woman's consent, is a disgrace.

2. Except in the most indisputable cases (eg. where the woman had covered every inch of her body with unattractive clothing and she was raped literally in the bushes by an ugly man in broad daylight and suffered major injury as she struggled mightily to prevent the rape from happening), society will always wonder if the woman asked for it. Things that people have deemed asking for it include: wearing revealing clothing, walking alone after dark, being in a bar, accepting a lift from a man, having an alcoholic drink, inviting a man home for dinner/going to a man's home for dinner.. etc etc. Even the absence of clear injury will prompt people to ask, if she didn't consent, why didn't she struggle...

3. The fear of being pregnant or catching a disease. Unwed pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections are amongst the greatest taboos in society. Never mind how the woman got to be pregnant or infected, she still becomes a social pariah. Patriarchal notions of masculinity probably mean that the rapist won't be using condoms, increasing the likelihood of both scenarios.

Because these notions are so deep-seated and drummed into us through social conditioning since we were born, we may not even be able to break through them when our nearest and dearest has been raped, thus compounding the trauma and the sense of isolation for the rape survivor when even her own family judges her.

There probably aren't many crimes where the "victims" habitually get blamed, and where they blame themselves. (I don't like the word "victim" but cannot think of a more suitable word and so have stuck to it for now.)

This is reflected in the level of trauma experienced by rape survivors. I thought of kidnap with torture as a possible analogous crime. Both involve being restrained temporarily against the victim's will, and both involve a violation of the victim's body. Even where the kidnap lasts for over 2 weeks, and where the victim was denied basic amenities and was beaten up daily etc, the level of trauma usually still cannot compare with the trauma experienced by a woman who had experienced 10 minutes of rape. I have heard of complete breakdown and even suicide by rape survivors, but not of kidnap victims. For me, the reason must lie in society's perceptions and treatment of kidnap vs rape victims, and not just in the nature of the crime itself.

It is not possible to change society overnight. If women reject the prejudices described above, we would be in a much better position to support our sisters who have been raped, and God forbid, if this were to happen to us, we would at least be in a better position to live through it with our sense of selves intact.