rape – Page 10 – Another angry woman

How the police enforce rape culture

Trigger warning: This post discusses rape, rape culture and abuse of power

The police, as we know, have a horrible track record regarding rape. Allegations are often not taken seriously and, in some situations, the police actively fabricate paperwork to make cases go away. It is hardly a surprise that the vast majority of rapes go unreported.

The women who have been let down by the police after finding the courage to report their rapes know this best, and three of them are suing the Met for the terrible treatment they received. Two claimants were attacked by serial rapist John Worboys, who might have been caught earlier had the police listened to the women.

The police didn’t listen. In fact, the opposite was true:

“It rings in my ears, the officer saying ‘a black cab driver just wouldn’t do it’,” she [a survivor] said.

“It felt like they didn’t want to know. In my dreams I’m screaming ‘why won’t you believe me?’.”

My heart goes out to this woman. The crushing dismissal of her report, after such a horrifying violation has happened.

The behaviour of the police here is one of the more overt manifestations of rape culture: not believing the survivor. Maybe the officer acted in good faith, not meaning to maliciously throw out a rape case (as some have). Maybe the officer had just absorbed a few stock phrases and attitude from rape culture.

It doesn’t make a difference. The police have a unique position of power: ultimately, they get to decide if they can be bothered to help a rape survivor. Every moment of following rape culture logic is failing the survivor who asked for their aid. Every piss-poor half-arsed investigation is failing the survivor who has asked for their aid. Every fraudulent document throwing out the case is failing the survivor who asked for their aid. These survivors have chosen to pursue a certain course of action, actively engaging with the state to ask for its aid.

And they are being failed.

Who benefits from this arrangement? Rapists. Each time this happens, things get a little easier for rapists. They know they can get away with it. They know that the odds are in their favour because the state will help them out.

Rape culture only ever benefits rapists, and the police are using their power to reinforce it.

Between 2008 and 2012, there have been 56 documented cases of rape, sexual assault and harassment. In many of these cases, the complaints have been covered up and the survivor disbelieved. In a frighteningly large number of the cases, no criminal charges were ever brought. It is hardly surprising, then, that the police have a vested interest in keeping rape culture in roaringly good health: they are benefiting from it.

I am wholly critical of the notion that the power the police have could ever be used for good, to help overturn rape culture from the top down. At best, police can only be as progressive as the society that spawned them, so they will still be steeped in rape culture. This is without factoring in the psychological effects that turn all coppers into bastards.

There is vast room for improvement before the revolution, though. They can, quite easily, stop so actively reinforcing rape culture by starting from a position of always believing the survivor, even when it’s their mate who stands accused. They can, quite easily, actually bother investigating rape cases properly, respecting the courage of the survivor to come forward. Improvements are possible. I wish I could be less pessimistic about the police force’s will to try.

The rejection of the notion of enthusiastic consent: a facet of rape culture

Enthusiastic consent is a simple notion: a move beyond “no means no” into “yes means yes”. It means communicating about what you want in bed. It means checking if your partner(s) is into whatever you’re doing. It’s easy and it’s hot.

Most people tend to Get It. Some know the terminology, the principles, the politics behind it. Others just possess an essential skill for being a good fuck. These are the sorts of people I tend to surround myself with.

I forget, then, that some people don’t get it. It is most obvious when engaging as a feminist with rape apologists: when pointing out a sleeping woman can’t possibly give enthusiastic consent, the very notion of being able to say yes (rather than the absence of a no) is rejected. They might lash out by saying that that would somehow “ruin sex” (spoiler alert: it doesn’t) or that that would render a lot of sex non-consensual (spoiler alert: it does).

The rejection hums in the background like white noise. It crops up in jokes (“it’s not rape if you shout surprise!”) and advertising. I realised just how widespread it was when I read this piece of sex advice from Tracey Cox (self-identified “sexpert” with a good publicist) on Lovehoney (who sell mid-range sex toys generally aimed at the male gaze). A man wrote in complaining his wife wouldn’t give him oral sex after a bad experience. Cox replied:

Wow! This happened TEN YEARS AGO and she’s still using that as the reason why she doesn’t want to give you oral sex?

…

It’s one thing being a little miffed at your husband coming in your mouth when you aren’t expecting it. Quite another, refusing to give you oral sex for a decade afterward. I mean, really? It sounds like you have good sex but I think you’re within your rights to suggest, nicely, that perhaps it’s time she, well, got over it.

She then goes on to give some tips to help this man coax a woman into participating in a sexual encounter with which she was not comfortable including this:

At that point, she removes her mouth and continues using her hand to finish you off. If – shock horror – it happens again and you ejaculate into her mouth, have a box of tissues next to her. She then just spits it out. Easy. Course, she could try swallowing it and stop behaving like semen is sulphuric acid, but perhaps you could work on that later!

The trivialisation of the woman’s issues with oral sex and complete lack of any consideration that she’s not into that and that’s OK is a more subtle indicator of this wider societal rejection of enthusiastic consent.

In trying to elucidate why this belief is so prevalent, the misogynists are a good place to start: at least they’re honest about their disdain for sexual autonomy. They think it’s too hard, and that a shift in thinking would stop them being able to rape whoever they feel like. And that’s a gear the perpetual motion machine of rape culture.

It pervades thought, and leads to exactly the sort of ghastly advice given by Tracey Cox, who has internalised some deeply problematic beliefs (I am going to kindly assume she isn’t writing sensationalist crap knowingly repeating societal beliefs to make a few quid). The truth is, nobody has “get over it”, nobody has to do anything with which they are uncomfortable, and a “yes” is just as important to respect as a “no”.

It may feel difficult to fight something so thoroughly ingrained. But it’s a battle that can be won and must be fought.

Why rape jokes aren’t funny: the science

There’s been an awful lot of discussion surrounding rape jokes this week. It all seemed to start with a “comedian” named Daniel Tosh deciding to announce that he thought it would be funny if an audience member got gang-raped. Numerous comedians waded in to defend this piece of alleged humour. Tosh’s fans cheerily threatened to rape anyone who thought that maybe the joke wasn’t on. Accusations of humourlessness flew around.

But here’s the thing. It wasn’t humour. It flies in the face of funny.

There’s been rather a lot of research into humour and how it works. One of the major veins in this research is Incongruity Theory, which I touched on in explaining why Jeremy Clarkson isn’t funny. Essentially, Incongruity Theory posits that humour is the state of realising incongruity between a concept in a certain situation and the real objects which are thought to be related to the concept. This is what is almost always missing from rape jokes: there’s no incongruity. Rape is a horribly commonplace occurrence. There’s no incongruity. It’s just something that’s there, humming in the background. It’s like the antiquated comedians asking “what’s the deal with buses?”.

Another theory in play is Benign Violation Theory. Under this theory, humour happens when the recipient receives a threat to how things “should be”, the threatening situation seems benign, and they can see both of these interpretations at once. One of the conditions to be satisfied for benign violations to occur is psychological distance: the ability of a person to feel far away from the threatening situation. When it comes to rape, once again, this is a tricky condition to be met. Women are brought up to fear rape in the hope that it will somehow make us be more careful and therefore magically stop us getting raped. And let us not forget the sheer numbers of survivors.

The theories offer an explanation of some people who might find rape jokes funny: people who have not been paying attention to the world around them. The privileged, the wilfully ignorant. They might find rape jokes funny. It says a lot more about them.

Imagine that you are a comedian. You tell a rape joke, and 20 men in the audience laugh. Of these guffawing pricks, 19 of them are, at best, tedious little solipsists, who probably watch Top Gear and would be just as amused if you asked about the deal with buses. The other one is a rapist, who will go home thinking his behaviour is perfectly normal and everyone’s in on the joke. If you find being this comedian a remotely desirable situation, please report to your nearest neighbourhood SCUM chapter for an induction that definitely doesn’t involve razorblades and meathooks.

The problem with rape jokes extends beyond only being funny to narrow-minded wankers and rapists: there are real-world effects. Some studies suggest that after exposure to sexist comedy, men are more likely to discriminate against women and less likely to donate money to women’s organisations.

Ultimately, the humour fall flat at every level. Unlike a hackneyed Knock Knock joke, though, rape jokes can have dangerous consequences.

“Colour journalism”: coded apologism for violence against women

A few weeks ago, a young woman journalist in Egypt was severely sexually assaulted and was brave enough to share her story. She was rewarded with a comment thread full of people telling her she must have been making it up. Many were the standard shit, but others took a different tack: because she was a journalist, she must have been lying.

This is exemplified in some rather ghastly tweets from @leninology, who said:

Natasha Smith’s account of being raped in Egypt is dripping with racist poison, and related very much in the style of ‘colour’ journalism.

When asked to clarify what he meant by colour journalism, he did:

basically, it’s there every time there’s a case of fraudulent journalism and it should always raise alarm bells.

Thanks to the clarification, there is no way this can be construed but as “this woman was making it up”.

It is hardly the only instance of woman journalists speaking out about experiences of gendered abuse being disbelieved in this fashion. If you’re feeling particularly strong (and I wouldn’t recommend it) check out any unmoderated comment thread on any article in this vein.

They argue that journalists exaggerate and therefore this woman must be exaggerating her experience all for the point of a good story, and, often implicitly we therefore shouldn’t believe this woman speaking out in the public sphere about an experience of violence or abuse.

It’s a coded method of articulating an age-old rape culture trope, often among those who pretend to be progressive. These people know they look like raging shits if they outright say they do not believe a first-hand account, so they dress it up in a faux-concern for press standards. They pretend that they don’t think all women are liars, just those who speak out via the mainstream media, because they’re journalists and for some reason that makes them different from all other women.

It kills two birds with one stone, when people throw around accusations of colour journalism. It allows faux-progressives to attempt to put space between themselves and their misogynistic views, and it contributes to silencing women. The phrase “I don’t believe you” keeps us quiet; it is used as a weapon. Cloaking it makes no difference and achieves the same ends.

The truth is that statistically speaking, these women are unlikely to be making it up. False allegations are staggeringly rare, and their incidence is inflated by proponents of a culture of violence to allow it to thrive. Yes, the mainstream media is thoroughly fucked, and riddled with lies, but it is worth remembering that these lies tend to be about others rather than an unbroken stream of a woman talking about an experience she is astronomically unlikely to be lying about. A woman talking about abuse, violence or even rape is never an appropriate forum for a debate about press standards, and to say otherwise is no more than veiled apologism.

When I last wrote about rape culture’s use of “I don’t believe you” as a weapon, I concluded that we need to meet this weapon with a loud chorus of belief, in every comment thread, in every tweet. This still stands, and must stand every single day.

Update: I have since spoken to leninology and he accepts the implications of embellishment he made were out of order

Sweden and rape: the myth of the feminist haven

National stereotypes of Sweden tend to involve pop music, loud jumpers, sexual liberation and a fairly good grasp of feminism and gender politics. Julian Assange labelled Sweden the “Saudi Arabia of feminism”, presumably due to their desire to ask him some tricky questions about the rapes he probably perpetrated.

A vital part of good gender politics is taking rape seriously. Rape is a frighteningly common occurrence, and is typically gendered. These issues must be dealt with sensitively. A few stories have come to my attention which suggest that Sweden is not doing very well at this at all. Trigger warnings apply for the remainder of this post, and any links.

In one case, a cis male perpetrator was acquitted for attempted rape because his survivor was a trans woman. The survivor had not had SRS, and did not have a vagina. The court ruled that because the perpetrator had set out to rape a woman and the survivor was not a woman the crime could not have possibly happened. This verdict seems to imply that, simply by being trans, a person cannot be raped. This “not a real woman” line rears its head from all corners, from the misogynists to some branches of radical feminism. It is a thoroughly repugnant, antediluvian mode of thought that needs to be extinguished.

Regardless of gender or sex, a person can be raped. That a court bought a defence that stated “actually, she turned out to be a man” suggests not only that trans women cannot be the targets of sexual abuse, but also cis men. The ruling reflects the patriarchal belief that rape is something that exclusively happens to women who make ideal victims.

Another case involves a young woman with Asperger’s who was raped. The perpetrator was acquitted as the Court of Appeal ruled that he could not read the woman’s expression due to her disability. This acquittal represents the swallowing of a different rape myth: that consent is the absence of a “no” rather than the presence of a “yes”. The implications of this case for other non-neurotypical survivors are quite, quite terrifying.

And of course, one can make the point that the allegations against Assange were not taken seriously by the authorities initially. While Assange’s cheerleaders like to suggest that this is due to some sort of evil conspiracy and the lying bitches were probably making the whole thing up anyway, there is a rather more mundane explanation for this: rape allegations against powerful men are seldom taken seriously. It was only as Assange’s star began to fall that Sweden began to take an interest.

A legal system is always inextricably bound up in the beliefs of the culture that created it. Rape culture is alive and well throughout the world, and therefore this damaging set of assumptions gains a degree of credibility as judges believe untruths and the minds of the lawmakers are swaddled in lies. Sweden is no different, and its implementation of “justice” is as likely to engage in rape apologism as any other legal system. It is not a haven of feminism, it is the same as anywhere else.

Many thanks to @konvention who linked me to the article about the woman with Asperger’s.

This week in misogyny: “I don’t believe you”

Trigger warning: this post discusses and links to attacks on rape survivors who talk about their experiences

“I don’t believe you”. These words squat at the back of survivors’ minds, a little silencing gremlin. We fear not being believed, and it keeps us quiet and allows aggressors to go unchallenged. It allows rape culture to flourish and thrive.

It isn’t an unfounded fear. This vile little phrase drops like a guillotine blade wherever survivors dare to speak.

It lurks at every corner. Sometimes it seems small, like many tweeters declaring they disbelieved young vocal feminist journalist Laurie Penny’s account of misogynistic, aggressive bullying from a drunk David Starkey. Other times, it’s enormous with people telling a survivor that a horrific sexual attack she was brave enough to publicly talk about must not have happened. It’s all part of the same problem. It silences our voices.

It is due to this culture that the I Did Not Report twitter account had to deactivate and move to a more moderateable space. Twitter was not a safe space for survivors to share their experiences. Anonymous defenders of rape sprang up, uttering that despicable little phrase and far, far more.

They want us to shut up. They want us to stop talking about what happened to us. Those four seemingly-benign words are violence, coercion, a weapon. Hearing them is agony. The knowledge that they might be unsheathed is often enough to silence.

This is all so upside-down, arse-backwards fucked up.

Too often, it is only the voices of the defenders of rape and their powerful catchphrase that is heard. This is something that must change.

Where you see a survivor speaking out, commend them. Tell them you believe them. Make it known that for every mouthy little shit wanting to conserve a culture of rape and violence, there are hundreds who believe survivors. Drown out those ugly little voices. Do not be afraid to call out the apologists. They need to hear that they are wrong, dangerously so.

It is a sorry state of affairs when the three most gratifyingly beautiful words in the English language are currently “I believe you”. Yet they are, and these are words that must be shouted.

I still think Julian Assange is a rapist.

Trigger warning: this post discusses rape and links to some nasty examples of rape apologism

The latest in the saga of rat-faced probable rapist Julian Assange: having lost countless extradition appeals, he has skipped bail and is trying to skip the country to go to Ecuador.

I have written before about how Julian Assange and Wikileaks are two mutually exclusive concepts, and that Wikileaks has never raped anyone, but Assange probably did based on what his own defence lawyers have said. It’s also a remarkably silly decision for a self-proclaimed hero of free speech to decide to go to Ecuador.

The thing about Ecuador is that they’ve got a pretty bad record on letting journalists speak their minds, unless they’re thinking about how thoroughly brilliant government is. Assange is, I suppose, fairly chummy with the Ecuadorean president, so maybe this relationship can work, and our self-proclaimed hero of free speech can live out the rest of his days as a state propagandist. If his plea for asylum goes through, I suspect Wikileaks will never publish anything remotely critical of Ecuador again. So much for free speech.

Usually for the excuses Assange is using–that he might face the death penalty in the US for his work with Wikileaks–the place you would probably want to seek asylum is Sweden. Sweden is pretty fucking good on not extraditing people: their law means they cannot send someone to a country with the death penalty or for political offences. And they take CIA rendition flights very seriously. Simply put, Sweden would not extradite someone like Assange for his work with Wikileaks.

So why won’t Assange go back to Sweden, where he is still phenomenally unlikely to find his arse extradited? All that is left, once the smoke and mirrors of the inflated threat of extradition from Sweden clears, is the fact that Assange raped two of Sweden’s citizens. And of course, Assange’s fans are still banging the rape apologism drum.

They fundamentally (probably wilfully) misunderstand consent, one site thinking that a sleeping woman should have probably expressed non-consent if she didn’t want to be raped while asleep. Another, an incoherent mess suggesting that the site was put together by run-of-the-mill rape apologists rather than the hackers, laments Sweden’s “gender politics”, considering the whole thing to be some sort of big feminist conspiracy to get men to wear condoms. And of course, the survivors are dragged through the mud again and again, and my heart goes out to them. Not only do they suffer the utterly vile abuse of the fans, but they are instrumentalised in a both real and perceived international power struggle by a reboant chorus of cunts who can’t tell the difference between a rapist and a website.

The rape apologism shows the last resort of people with no other form of argument. The US extradition threat from Sweden is flimsy, but Assange wants to evade any form of accountability for his actions.

Which makes things difficult. In my ideal anarcho-utopia, there would be no courts and no extraditions (for there would be no borders). Sexual violence would be addressed through transformative justice and community accountability, with the needs of the survivor put first. But here’s the pinch: it requires engagement from everyone. It requires the Assanges of the world to stop running and start to accept that they have crossed boundaries. It requires the rape apologists of the world to shut the fuck up and stop spinning conspiracies, expressing deep misogyny and outright lying about survivors.

It is due to people like this that we are stuck with the current system we have, deeply flawed and often harmful. They are doing themselves no favours.

Big thanks to @gwenhwyfaer, who pointed out to me how Sweden’s usually going to be the place you want to flee to if you’re in trouble politically.

This is how seriously the police take rape

I will confess to having a very low opinion of the police’s ability to handle rape cases, having written several times before on the matter. Even I was surprised, though, by this story. It shows things are even worse than I thought.

A second detective working in the Met Police’s Sapphire unit–a specialist unit for rape cases–has been arrested for falsifying documents in order to get rape investigations shelved. The recently-arrested officer was involved in over sixty cases, and in almost two thirds of them, he claimed the investigation was over. The other officer falsified statements and reports, and wrote to survivors telling them their investigations had stopped, even though this had not happened.

It’s a disgusting business. The people who sought help through official channels–who are already in a minority of rape survivors–have been thoroughly let down by some men covering the backs of rapists and working hard to preserve rape culture through any means possible.

This goes beyond not taking rape allegations seriously, which is enough of a problem in and of itself: the Sapphire unit also managed to miss at least two serial rapists through sheer negligence and not investigating properly.

Even the police have realised they might have a bit of a problem. They have said they have had their “Macpherson moment”–a reference to the Macpherson investigation into police racism following the Stephen Lawrence case. They promise to tighten up supervision and sack any officers who aren’t up to scratch. We all know the impact of Macpherson: police racism totally stopped overnight and they got better and certainly never racially abused anyone ever again. I have very little faith in the police’s ability to mend this and make it right.

So what can be done? Ultimately, the system needs to transform. Rape culture is why allegations are not taken seriously, and some turn to actively foiling rape investigations. It is rape culture–every tiny aspect of it, not just the ones we can see–that needs to go, not a few “bad apple” policemen so the Met can pretend they have done something.

Update: Gherkingirl has written a very powerful (though triggering) post about her experience of negligence and forgery from Sapphire. Her bravery and persistence has led to positive change and this story going public, though it’s sad that this ever had to happen to her in the first place.

If I had my way, this woman would be dead (according to her)

Meet Rebecca Kiessling. Kiessling was conceived in horrific circumstances: her birth mother was brutally raped at knifepoint. Her mother sought an abortion, and, because it was illegal, ended up giving the baby for adoption. It is a very sad story for both the unnamed woman, and for Kiessling herself.

In her struggle to process the circumstances surrounding her birth, Kiessling has become a vocal spokesperson for the anti-choice movement, speaking out to make abortion illegal, in particular attacking “the rape exception”, a watered-down anti-choice position which suggests that abortion should be available for rape survivors. She uses the following rhetorical device to make her point:

Please understand that whenever you identify yourself as being “pro-choice,” or whenever you make that exception for rape, what that really translates into is you being able to stand before me, look me in the eye, and say to me, “I think your mother should have been able to abort you.” That’s a pretty powerful statement. I would never say anything like that to someone. I would say never to someone, “If I had my way, you’d be dead right now.”

It is a very emotive argument, and thoroughly fallacious. To counter it, I am going to use as ludicrous an example. In the following scenario, I have travelled back through time to late 1984, and my mother–who, by the way, is a happily married woman impregnanted by the conventional means of happily married monogamous couples by my lovely father–is considering an abortion, because she doesn’t want a kid right now. The embryo inside my mother will become me, and I know this. So what would I do? Would I look her in the eye and say, “go on, mum, kill me, you big killy murderer”? Would I wave around pictures of foetuses and pray aggressively in her face? Would I ask Margaret Thatcher to ban abortion?

No. I am pro-choice, so I would respect that choice the woman who could have been my mother made, and I would respect it as I dissipated into the time-void. I wouldn’t be dead. I’d have never existed at all.

Because that’s how choice works. I don’t want Rebecca Kiessling dead. I want a world wherein any woman can make the choice to terminate a pregnancy. I do think Kiessling’s mother should have been able to abort her, just as I think my mother should have been able to abort me if that was the choice she made.

It must be horrible for people like Kiessling to find out that their existence is the result of a brutal attack. Nobody should have to go through it. Not Kiessling, and certainly not the woman who gave birth to her. Yet Kiessling’s proposed solution–banning abortion–would lead to the suffering of millions more women, forced to carry pregnancies or endure dangerous illegal abortions. The violence inherent in taking away a safe option for women is stark: with what she is proposing, Kiessling endorses a different kind of invasion of women’s bodies. She would be better placed throwing her energies into building a world where rape is not possible.

Chodes, weeping, syphilis, &c., &c.: in which Brendan O’Neill attempts faux-feminism.

Trigger warning: This post discusses rape apologism. It also quotes Brendan O’Neill.

We all know by now that Brendan O’Neill is a weeping syphilitic chode. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that his latest chancre-ooze pertains to the Ched Evans case and he is wrong wrong and wrong again.

Now, there’s a pleasant surprise in the article–if, by pleasant surprise you were expecting someone to shit into your mouth when they merely piss in your eyes–Brendan O’Neill doesn’t just come out and say “I HATE WOMEN I HATE WOMEN I HATE WOMEN” (or some variant thereof; the chode is a known rape apologist). Instead, he chooses to focus largely on anonymity of survivors in rape cases. Naturally, he’s against that, comparing it to being exactly the same as people tweeting about the Ryan Giggs superinjunction.

Anyone who is above penes-wider-than-they-are-long-so-infected-with-the-Great-Pox-they-drip-pus-everywhere in the evolutionary scale will recognise that a footballer trying to cover up the fact he put his dick somewhere he shouldn’t is rather different from throwing the survivor of a traumatic crime into a torrent of the abuse inherent in rape apologism. Brendan O’Neill, of course, isn’t.

His first two arguments for abolishing anonymity in rape cases are the standard ones which system justifiers will trot out to appear reasonable, and are essentially cramming the tongue deep into the ringpiece of archaic statutes. They are therefore too tedious to repeat. What is more interesting is chode-face’s final argument:

And thirdly, and worst of all, having anonymity for rape complainants contributes to the idea that women who have been raped have something to be ashamed of. It actually adds to the stigma attached to being a rape victim.

[irrelevant example snipped]

But women who have been raped have nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of. They are simply victims of a terrible crime, not stigmatised individuals whose names must never be spoken in polite conversation. The women’s rights activists who defend anonymity for rape complainants are giving credence to the idea that rape victims must be treated as uniquely damaged individuals who must remain hidden behind a permanent veil of anonymity.

Brendan O’Neill is concern-trolling, pretending to have the interests of women firmly at heart. Nadine Dorries often utilises a similar approach when she claims to be “pro-woman” rather than “pro-life”.

And it is entirely false. Anonymity in rape cases is an option, and, given the reaction towards women who have the misfortune of being raped by someone well-liked, it is an option many choose to hold on to. It enables survivors to report their rapes without the fear of abuse and humiliation. There is a stigma surrounding rape, but that is absolutely nothing to do with anonymity for the proportionally microscopic number of cases that make it to court; it is everything to do with rape apologism and rape culture.

Couching the position in false concern is at best completely misguided, and, being familiar with O’Neill’s drippings, more likely highly disingenuous. To remove this protection for survivors would serve only rapists, who can sleep a little safer in the knowledge that people will be less likely to report and their cheerleaders will tear any who do to shreds.