Society teaches 'Don’t get raped' rather than 'Don’t rape'
by HILARY BEAUMONT | JULY 4, 2010
Why do we ask survivors to take responsibility for having been raped?
Disclaimer: Some scenes in this story may be triggering for people who have experienced sexual assault. Names in this story have been changed to protect the identities of sexual assault survivors.HALIFAX—Jenna never wants to see her purple semi-formal dress again. She loves it, but she is reminded of that night in early April when someone slipped what she suspects was Ketamine into her drink.
When she finished class at 4 pm that day, Jenna rushed to her friend’s place to get ready. She wore her mom’s sparkly earrings and bracelet, black kitten heels and the silky, knee-length dress. It was the end-of-the-year celebration she’d been waiting for—a chance to blow off some steam with her friends and classmates at Dalhousie.
She remembers everything about that night—feeling happy, dancing to bad music with her friends at The Palace—up to a point. It’s as if the rest of the evening didn’t happen. She woke up in her bed feeling nauseous and hung over. She stepped into the shower and felt bruises on her chest. It took her the rest of the day to piece together what happened. When she did, she felt embarrassed. She recalled blurry flashbacks of a man in her room, on the third floor of her house. He was white, but she doesn’t remember anything else about him, only that he sat there in her computer chair, looking at her from across the room. Jenna asked him to leave, but he wouldn’t.
A short skirt is not an invitation.
At the hospital, nurses confirmed her suspicions with a rape kit. They gave her a list of side effects associated with Ketamine, a “date rape” drug. Her symptoms fit perfectly. The police took her pretty purple dress for DNA evidence.
We tell women to cover their drinks, to dress conservatively, and to walk home in groups—never alone at night. While Jenna still thinks those are great ideas, she says they didn’t work for her. She covered her drink as often as she could that night, and she stuck with her friends. Jenna worries no-one is looking at the big picture. It’s not her fault she was raped; she doesn’t take responsibility. Instead, she blames the man who raped her. Too often the media, the police, our parents and even our friends are quicker to point out flaws in sexual assault survivors’ actions.
"Don’t get raped"
Section 271(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada defines “simple sexual assault” as: Any attack of a sexual nature in which force is used. No physical injury is necessary to prove that an offence has occurred. When prosecuted as an indictable offence, this form of sexual assault carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
Nova Scotia has the highest rate of sexual assaults in the country—double the national average, according to a 2009 report by the Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women. A 2006 Halifax Regional Police report shows that on average one sexual offence is reported per day in Halifax. However, a 2005 Juristat report showed only eight per cent of sexual assaults are reported in Nova Scotia.
This year in Halifax the Avalon Sexual Assault Centre declared May Sexual Assault Awareness Month. On May 20, at Province House, politicians and community members spoke out publicly against sexual assault.
Avalon’s mission is to shift responsibility from the survivor to the attacker by educating the public.
The centre defines sexual assault as: “Any form of sexual activity that has been forced by one person upon another. Without consent, it is sexual assault. Sexual assault can happen between people of the same or opposite sex. It includes any unwanted act of a sexual nature such as kissing, fondling, oral sex, intercourse or other forms of penetration, either vaginal or anal.”
Before we begin our interview, Jackie Stevens, the Avalon Co-ordinator of Community Education, closes her door, as she usually does when someone comes into her office. When a woman, or sometimes a man, sits in the comfy chair beside her desk, Stevens—wearing electric-blue cat-eye glasses—doesn’t judge or offer advice. Instead she gives the person plenty of information so he or she can make an educated decision.
Too often the people who sit in that chair blame themselves.
“If I hadn’t trusted that person, if I hadn’t gone out drinking with my friends, this wouldn’t have happened to me,” the sexual assault survivors tell Stevens.
Rather than automatically thinking that way, she says society needs to see that an attacker has chosen to take advantage of someone who is vulnerable.
When Stevens reads articles about drunk driving, the police are quoted telling people to stop drinking and driving. But when she reads articles about sexual assault, there is no warning telling would-be attackers not to rape. Instead, the authorities tell potential victims to take precautions.
She doesn’t claim to see every article, but yellowing copies of the Chronicle Herald are piled alongside today’s issue in a bin behind her.
In a Metro News article from March 19, 2010, Dalhousie University spokesperson Billy Comeau told students to “be aware of their surroundings and to take all precautions when they are out travelling” in response to a man grabbing a 19-year-old female student from behind in Halifax’s South End. In a Chronicle Herald article from May 14, 2010, a prosecutor told parents to “watch what their children are doing, both online and within the proximity of their house and outside the house,” in response to a Halifax woman allegedly luring a girl over the Internet and sexually assaulting her.
“Rather than always putting out the messages of ‘don’t walk alone’ or ‘don’t drink’ or ‘don’t talk to strangers’—all of those things—we need to say ‘don’t sexually assault,’” Stevens declares.
As a result of these misplaced messages, we say, "She shouldn’t have been walking home alone late at night," or, "She shouldn’t have worn a short skirt," rather than, "He shouldn’t have raped her."
The way a woman dresses or acts does not cause or prevent sexual assault; an attacker rapes someone because they want to exert power and control over him or her. The attacker is solely responsible for the crime. However, this responsibility is lost in translation through the police, the courts and the media.
Eighty-four per cent of people over the age of 15 who are sexually assaulted are women, according to the 2009 Status of Women Canada report. More than 90 per cent of those accused are men.
Sexual assault is a social problem, Stevens says, with lingering patriarchal structures* at the root of offenses by men toward women.
“There’s a lot of perception of sexual assault as an isolated incident that happens to certain people and it’s perceived as a very individual issue. The Avalon Centre takes the approach that sexual assault is a social issue and that the root causes are based in patriarchy, violence, oppression and inequality. Sexual violence is just one form of how that inequality and power imbalance is played out.”
Stevens says sexual assault and violence against women is interconnected with sexism and other forms of oppression such as racism, homophobia, and discrimination based on disability, gender identity, cultural background and lifestyle choices.
“Often times people who do experience sexual violence may be targeted for very specific reasons because of their vulnerability,” she says.
Elizabeth McCormack, a local activist who also works at the Dalhousie Women’s Centre, wouldn’t be considered pushy if she were a man. Her voice is louder than the average woman’s. Her tone is aggressive.
“If I’m too confident, I’m a bitch,” she says.
McCormack agrees that the root causes of male to female sexual assault are male privilege and the imbalance of power.
“Women weren’t legally human beings until 1920. If you’re property up until 1920, what role did sexual assault play in the world? Zero. There’s no such thing as rape—only for women. The pressure was on women to not allow men to ‘ruin’ them because women’s value and worth was placed in their virginity, their purity, so they could sell their sexuality to a man as property.”
As a result of historical imbalances, she says young men often feel entitled to “get drunk and get laid,” especially in a university atmosphere.
One in five male university students surveyed in a 2006 StatsCan study said forced intercourse was alright “if he spends money on her,” “if he’s stoned or drunk,” or “if they have been dating for a long time.”
One in five Canadian women surveyed in a Juristat report said they had unwanted sex with a man because they were overwhelmed by the man’s continued arguments and pressure.
“If we can change the response and how we think about sexual assault then we will change the rates of sexual assaults because it becomes less natural, less normalized; there’s more public scrutiny and judgment around it,” McCormack says. “The problem is, it’s very much a part of male culture.”
*According to Avalon, “patriarchy” refers to “the current societal framework, the structure of which has historically kept men in positions of power and authority in society, and has encouraged the domination of other nations, races and cultures of people for economic and political gain.” In the not-so-distant past, women were placed in inferior roles and their sexual, financial and personal autonomy were suppressed. That framework still lingers today; women are still not equal to men.
***
Why women don't report sexual assault
Disclaimer: Some scenes in this story may be triggering for people who have experienced sexual assault. Names in this story have been changed to protect the identities of sexual assault survivors.
“How does it feel to be a Monday?” he yelled across the street to a group of black people.
When Laura didn’t laugh, he turned to her and clarified: “You know, Monday—the worst day of the week.”
That was when Laura knew something was off about him.
“That’s not OK,” she said. “It’s not funny to be racist.”
He hastily apologized. She called him an asshole. Laura's roommate walked on ahead, furious.
He said he was nervous because he really liked her.
“Don’t say that shit. It’s not funny,” she said.
Laura met him in grade seven, through a close friend, at a party. They chatted over MSN on and off. In her second year at Dalhousie, he messaged her on Facebook. He was at Dal too! Did she want to meet for coffee? They met, once. She ran into him that night at the Alehouse. The place was packed with people she didn’t know. She was there with her female roommate. He bought drink after drink for Laura. He wanted to take her on a date sometime. She said, “We’ll see.” When the girls were drunk and it was time to go home, he offered to walk them. They gratefully said yes.
It was mild for mid-October. They walked up Sackville Street, took a right, and walked past the graveyard where Alexander Keith is buried. Laura’s roommate kept her distance. A few minutes later they came to her front door.
“Can I come inside for a minute?” he asked. “I just want to talk to you. I feel like shit about what happened.”
“Fine,” she said. “Fine.”
She let him in. Her roommate was already inside with her bedroom door locked. They walked to Laura’s room on the main floor and she went into the ensuite bathroom, brushed her teeth, took out her contacts and changed into sweatpants. When she opened the door, her room was dark.
“What’s going on?”
“I’m right here,” he said from the bed.
She sat on the bed. He was under the blankets.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m just being really comfortable.”
“This isn’t a sleepover party. You said you wanted to talk."
“Whatever. It’s cool. You know me.”
She had the spins so she lay down under the covers. He was naked.
“This isn’t cool,” she said. “I don’t really like this.”
He ripped off her sweatpants.
“This isn’t OK. I’m really pissed off at you. I don’t want to sleep with you. Stop. Don’t do that.”
She started to cry. He was taller and stronger than her. What was she supposed to do?
Laura woke up the next morning to a note on her desk. Her attacker had written: “Get Plan B. We didn’t use a condom."
According to a 2004 Juristat report, in 64 per cent of sexual assault cases the survivor knew his or her attacker.
Laura didn’t report her rape.
A few days later, when she couldn’t handle her feelings by herself anymore, she called her mom.
“I got sexually abused,” she said, sobbing, and told the whole story.
“Well you’re fucking stupid,” her mom said. “What do you expect, letting a boy into your house. What, do you think you’re a slut?”
“We often tend to look for, ‘What did you do?’ or, ‘What was it about you that caused [your rape]?’” says Jackie Stevens, co-ordinator of community education for the Avalon Sexual Assault Centre. “We still do that as a society. We tend to do that more than, ‘What causes this person to commit a sexual offence?’ or, ‘What’s wrong with that person?’ We still put the blame on the victim as to what caused the sexual assault."
Rather than report what happened, rather than deal with blame or disbelief from authorities, Laura wrote a poem called “Tattoo.”
...This violence you’re playing
Is far too intense
So in my defence I’m saying
Stop.
Because men like you have had me tattooed,
Stripped me nude on the first date;
You’d wait for my last sip of the grape to drain
Then rape.
Soon you’d be out on to my sisters;
Blaming our bushes for begging,
Claiming our cunts couldn’t come,
So you’d just keep on banging
‘Til we bled, soaked the bed,
And you’d leave us to rot...
“Ideally”—Stevens lets out a soft, skeptical "Heh"—“because we have a crime-and-punishment kind of culture, because we have a legal system, [rape is] supposed to go through the legal process, but in reality, sexual assault is one of the lowest reported crimes.”
A 2005 statistical profile of Nova Scotia by Juristat found that only eight per cent of sexual assaults are reported to police.
Over the last decade, acquittal rates for sexual assaults have risen in this province while remaining stable for other violent offences, according to a 2009 report by the Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women. Over the same period, the proportion of prison sentences handed to adults convicted of sexual assault has significantly declined, again remaining stable for other violent offences.
“The high incidence of sexual assault in Nova Scotia, combined with a declining police and court response to sexual offences, leaves women in this province in a position of vulnerability,” according to the report.
“Even when someone has been convicted of a sexual crime, they might serve their time, whatever that is,” Stevens says. “But the impact on the victim is never going to change, is never going to go away. Regardless of what happens to the perpetrator, the trauma and the stigma attached to the person who has experienced victimization is never going to change—because of our perceptions.”
When a woman comes to her for help, Elizabeth McCormack of the Dalhousie Women's Centre tells her not to report the rape.
“I say to women: ‘Don’t bother.’”
The local activist says the legal system is a bandage solution that doesn’t prevent sexual assault.
“I don’t have to get them to report. All I have to do is empower them, to let them know that they’re loved, to let them know that they did nothing wrong, that every anger, every hate, every feeling that they have is completely justifiable. If there’s any way that you want me to help you express those feelings, I’m here for you," she says.
She says creative expression, such as writing a letter to the newspaper, helps a woman grow past her negative experience; the court system does just the opposite.
“If a woman chooses to use the justice system to redress the crime that has befallen her, she had better be prepared to absolutely have no human dignity at all when it’s over. You better be prepared that everything you screwed, licked, ate, puked, shat, for the last 25 years, is now fair game.”
Many sexual assault cases rely on a man’s DNA evidence. If the victim cannot prove there wasn’t consent, or if the defence can establish reasonable doubt about lack of consent, that DNA evidence often won’t matter. All it proves is that they had sex.
McCormack says the defence will often try to undermine a woman’s credibility to show she is making up the rape because then it is one person’s word against another’s.
“That’s a big barter: 'I will give you my human dignity in exchange for justice for this crime.' We don’t do that to other so-called victims. That’s why women don’t report it, because, ‘I can handle the rape; I can’t handle the loss of human dignity.’”
Women tell her all the time: “The worst thing that happened to me is not that I got raped.”
Laura’s poem didn’t help her get over her experience, but it did help empower her.
...But this time I’m on top
Tattooing you.
How does it feel
Being used just for the skin you’re stuck in?
Like my needle slowly stretching your outsides thin?
When you’re red I’ll spread you out
So I can slowly
Fuck you instead.
But me, I won’t leave you chewing
Your swollen cheek, doing nothing,
Soul stolen and weak.
I would wait until morning and tell you
Why.
El Jones doesn’t censor herself. She speaks the raw truth regardless of criticism or praise, both of which she’s garnered as a black spoken word poet and professor at King’s College.
In her poem “If I Had a Penis,” Jones points to inequalities between the sexes, such as men earning 30 per cent more than women in the same jobs with the same skills. She says these inequalities are at the root of rape.
“If I had a penis, I’d be on the right side of rape statistics, and my reproductive system would never be used for politics."
“I’d go out at night wearing short skirts without getting blamed for being raped, and I wouldn’t even need to wear short skirts because, hey, I’d have a penis, and when you have a penis you don’t need to put yourself on display.”
We see sexual assault as accidental, she says, or as acted out by men who are sociopaths. However, a 1993 StatsCan survey showed half of Canadian women have experienced at least one incident of sexual or physical violence.
“We still tend to phrase rape as abnormal—‘What is it that made this man rape?’—as if it’s an oddity, not part of society."
Jones says sexual assault is systematically deployed against women worldwide.
“I think we have to consider it an act of terror that’s upon women in our society. It’s so endemic to our society and so many women suffer from it.”
Sexual assault by men is the same rape for all women, she says, but it takes on different forms depending on race, class and cultural background.
“When it comes to women of colour, it’s who’s considered ‘rapeable,’ and that’s where the difference is." Like sex workers and women living in poverty, Jones says women of colour are more vulnerable because they are not considered ‘real’ women. “So raping that woman isn’t the same as raping a white woman, a white middle-class woman, in many cases.”
When black women were considered property, slave owners would often rape them, sometimes to produce more slaves. Jones says labouring women were not considered real women because of their muscular bodies, and they weren’t considered vulnerable because the assumption was they could protect themselves: “She could have fought him off, so she must have wanted it.”
Even today, Jones says black women aren’t considered human in a lot of ways. In fashion ads, black women are presented as backdrops to white women. Dark black women are considered threatening and non-human, she says.
“Black women aren’t in the position where people see them as fully human, as receptive of any kind of generosity. So that makes you rapeable.”
White women don’t often report rape because they fear blame or disbelief from authorities due to sexism, but the Avalon Centre and Jones agree women of colour are at increased risk because of racism.
Jones says police are less likely to believe women of colour when they report sexual assault. On the other hand, black women are less likely to trust white authorities because of Nova Scotia’s history and reputation of unfair law enforcement.
“It’s not your people who are coming to take the report,” Jones says. “It’s going to be a bunch of white male cops—or white females—not necessarily people who understand you.”
As a result, the sexual assaults of black women go unreported.
Because the African Nova Scotian community is so close-knit, and because the majority of sexual assaults are by acquaintances, a black woman may not report rape by a neighbour or relative. The same is true within immigrant populations, according to Jones and Avalon: due to the small populations of immigrant communities, women risk social isolation if they report sexual assault to police.
There are fewer reports of sexual assault in Aboriginal communities as well, according to Avalon, and Aboriginal women are three times more likely to be sexually assaulted than non-Aboriginal women.
An Amnesty International report from 2004 showed that racist and sexist attitudes toward Canadian Aboriginal women made them more vulnerable to sexual assaults. Several studies over the last decade showed Aboriginal women had less access to justice in Canada because of racist and sexist stereotypes.
“The portrayal of the squaw is one of the most degraded, most despised and most dehumanized anywhere in the world,” wrote Metis professor of Native Studies Emma LaRoque in 1994. “The ‘squaw’ is the female counterpart to the Indian male ‘savage’ and as such she has no human face, she is lustful, immoral, unfeeling and dirty.”
According to a Canadian research paper from 1998, “Aboriginal Women: Invisible Victims of Violence,” up to 75 per cent of sexual assault survivors in Aboriginal communities are young women under 18. Half of those are under 14. One-quarter are younger than seven.
“Such a grotesque dehumanization has rendered all Native women and girls vulnerable to gross physical, psychological and sexual violence,” LaRoque wrote. “I believe that there is a direct relationship between these horrible racist/sexist stereotypes and violence against women and girls.”
As a result of these lingering stereotypes, and distrust between communities, Jones says silence surrounds the sexual assault of coloured women.
“You don’t hear black women speaking out,” she says. “If you go to something like Take Back The Night, there’s three or four black women total."
On a wall just inside the Dalhousie Women’s Centre, flash photos from last year’s Take Back The Night protest show white women marching Halifax’s dark streets together.
“It’s not old news that mainstream feminism has tended to focus on issues relevant to middle-class white women and ignored women of colour, poor women. I think there’s a lot of distrust. Affirmative action has tended to benefit white women. White women have been co-oppressors in a lot of cases. So on the one hand white women suffered patriarchy, but at the same time when white women allied themselves with white men*, they helped put down women of colour as well. It’s not like women of colour aren’t aware of that.”
* White women also allied with white men against black men. Historically, white men carried out a lynching when a white woman claimed to be sexually assaulted by a black man. When lynching was common, consensual interracial sex was also common, but white women often feared social isolation for having sex with black men.
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