It’s the Cycle of Violence, Not “Stupid Victims.”

Stumbling at random around the internet, I happened upon a knock-off “fail blog” sort of site with a screen cap of this website.  [For those unfamiliar, I’m referring to a very tired internet meme in which the poster highlights something seemingly contradictory, ridiculous, or otherwise egregiously incorrect for the readers’ amusement.]

The story of interest was circled in red.  See if you can guess which lines the commenters all found absolutely HILARIOUSLY ludicrous.  About three-quarters of the way down this police blotter transcipt, there is a notation about a crime committed in the West precinct of Huntsville, Alabama – a woman “told police she was raped about 4:30 p.m. Saturday in a field near Triana Boulevard and Johnson Road after accepting a ride from a man she said raped her two years ago. “

Now, when I saw all this, I was, first and foremost, brokenhearted.  My first thought was to the tragic cycle of abuse that would lead a woman to get into a car with a man who had raped (and likely otherwise abused) her before.  Being the internet masochist that I am, I was foolish enough to read all the comments, knowing exactly what I would find.  There were about a hundred of comments, the tamest of which said only “LOL WTF” and dozens calling her a stupid whore, a slut, a liar, and the like.  I read variations on the theme until I felt sick and closed the tab.  I’m actually almost glad I can’t find the link to the site I read originally because I’d prefer to spare you all the agony.  As it is, this link to the transcribed blotter has two victim-blaming comments.

But let’s think about this for a second.  It is clearly not as simple as a girl getting into a car with a man she knew only as her rapist.  The first thought of most commenters was clearly not that this man was a former partner and possibly that this woman had nowhere else to turn – it was of the Rapist as an identifiable criminal, a stranger to his victim except on the occasion of the rape.  Society at large has been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the myth of the stranger rapist springing from the bushes that we fail to comprehend the realities of sexual assault.

Even if you turn off your critical thinking abilities for a moment and just look at the statistics, a rapist is most often a friend, a partner, a relative — almost anyone BUT a stranger.  This is not to erase stranger rape as an experience or a possibility, but to assume this girl “deserved to be raped” because she got in the car with a shadowy, evil, lurking Rapist-with-a-capital-R is absurd.

And, let’s all please remember, revictimization isn’t further “evidence” that the victim is bringing it on herself — it’s part of a pattern of violence.

Tags: feminism, rape, sexual assault