Five Ways We Contribute to Rape Culture Without Realizing It

What is rape culture? You might hear about a scandal in the news- say, for instance, that the U.S. air force reports that of 170,000 people surveyed in 2014, 20,000 men and women reported receiving unwanted sexual contact, many of which included violent, probing sexual assaults. Out of the 20,000, for half of those women and 34% of those men, the assaults involved penetration of some sort (sometimes with an object).

It is safe to say that there is an “epidemic” of rape- the air force calls the number of assaults “appalling.”

In December 2013, six school officials at Steubenville High School plead not guilty to charges  that basically amounted to creating a path of least resistance for rape culture to thrive: "allowing underage drinking," "contributing to delinquency of a minor," "obstructing justice," and "failure to report child abuse or neglect" are just some of the few. Given the turned heads, and even the encouragement of adults, young male athletes that represented the pride of their town were given free reign to drink their inhibitions away and engage in date rape.

It is easy to see how this contributes to rape culture, but what are some everyday things that other bystanders did to contribute? And are currently turning our heads more than we should be for the youth on our own communities? Should we hold the school officials accountable without wondering if our own local heroes are doing the same thing, and we are, by our attitudes, actions, and even inaction to our sisters, daughters, and mothers, contributing to a climate where a girl blames herself or would not want to disclose she had been raped? Serena Williams wondered aloud  about the Steubenville girl's lack of responsibility for "putting themselves in that situation." Does that sound like you? What does that have to do with contributing to rape culture?

So we click off the TV and imagine that “Rape culture” is often a term associated with specific subcultures of America, such as fraternities, athletic teams, the air force; basically ones that has gotten a lot of news coverage lately. This serves a purpose to highlight places of highly concentrated sexual assaults, but can also serve to mask the fact that America itself is a rape culture.


Wait, what?
How could that be? Nobody is pro-rape. You do not sit around in front of the evening news with a foam finger and leap up to celebrate every time a rape is mentioned; in fact, the truth is likely to be quite the opposite. Most men surveyed in a study believe that rape should be met with severe punishment.

Yes! Throw the rapist in the alligator pit!! Yeeaahh! That's a mighty fine way to castrate!

Yet the conviction rate for rape is between two and four percent.  And this is coming from the FBI, where the "F" does not stand for “Feminist.” Victims of sexual assault are the least likely to get a conviction out of all victims of violence, and it has nothing to do with women lying, but everything to do with our beliefs about the world.

1. You Want Rapists to Look a Certain Way

Wait, what about my beliefs?

This appallingly low conviction rate is partly explained by the fact men believe the rape myth that “real rape” is a man jumping out of the bushes and forcefully raping a stranger, a belief which persists despite the fact that most rapists are acquainted with their victims. If rape is evil and should be punished, but most rapists know their victim, and, according to the Department of Justice, rape happens every two minutes (!), then there is a large amount of friends, boyfriends, husbands, peers and co-workers out there who are evil and should be put away for a long time.

Not pictured: reality

But they are not, and that is the fault of ignorant and fearful men who do not believe that most men accused of rape fit the profile of a rapist. Police officers were asked in a study to take a survey called the “victim credibility scale,” and about 20% said they were unlikely to believe a married woman who claims she has been raped by her husband . Most men fear being unjustly accused, causing a huge gulf between societal attitudes on the one hand and societal actions on the other likened to a “sexual schizophrenia.”  Thus, there is enough cognitive dissonance between our beliefs/feelings and our actions as a society about rape to keep a modern-day Freud busy for the rest of his life.

2. You Believe That Women Lie About Rape

FOX News and men's rights groups have argued that a discussion of alleged-Rape Culture needs to be balanced out by noting the rate of false accusations of rape. The men's rights argument goes like this: These instigating attention whores are vindictive, they might argue, and while a man might ruin a woman’s inner life by raping her, a woman can ruin a man’s inner and outer life (social life/career) merely by accusing a man of rape, forever tarring his image.

In other words, they argue "Those feminists are hiding from the fact that the FBI crime index counts 8% of rapes as unfounded, compared to just 2% of other crimes that turn out to be unfounded." 

Thank you for being so fair and balanced! This is big news!

Even scholarly reviews of the literature on false rape allegations note that most studies average out to a count of between 2 and 8%. FOX News (in a video I now cannot find) called the differences between the conclusions of the different studies in literature reviews irreconcilable and said because of this, we cannot learn anything from them. So, time to wipe off our hands and walk away from irrelevant feminism, and to conclude that the idea of Rape Culture is questionable at best.

Lauren Nelson, an author on rape culture, laid the smackdown in her criticism of this. Essentially saying, “Okay let’s go with the conservative estimate of 8% false rape accusations and go from there,” she proceeded to remind us how many flaws there are with using this number as the actual number.

The FBI says that rape is seriously underreported. Nelson takes an even more conservative estimate of reported rapes at 37 percent (32 is the current FBI number), and then computes the actual number of rapes into the equation of unfounded rape reports. This shows that 3% of rapists are falsely accused, more in line with the average of other falsely reported crimes listed in the FBI crime index. 

Because her math is a conservative estimate, the reality might be 2%.

Then she went further and looked at how most rapists get freed before a conviction is made, and how some police departments giving FBI their data use questionable standards for rape victims. 

Given the fact that some police documented a rape report as false if the victim did not appear disheveled in one study, this is not unwarranted. Nelson concluded that 1.5% of all rapes, then, are false reports.

The reality is that because most rape victims are acquainted with their attacker, the attacker can rely more on psychological control, such as intimidation or manipulation of family and friends, rather than force. If a victim knows their attacker, they might be unaware of the fact it was rape, have very complex emotions to process, and very heavy decisions to make about getting out of their attacker’s lives before they report the rape, due to fear of retaliation. The lack of physical evidence of force, and the fact that a woman waited a long time to disclose and report the rape might damn her in the face of family, friends, police, prosecutors, judges, and juries who are afraid they may judge and convict an innocent man.

The desire not to falsely convict someone of rape is all well and good. However, take a look at the next infographic and wonder if our caution does not have very unbalanced consequences:

Sources: FBI and Dept. of Justice

In the final analysis, men actually have a higher chance of getting sexually assaulted themselves than of being falsely accused of it.

3. You Believe that the World is Predictable and Just
 

So your friend tells you they have been raped. One of the first things you might do is feel confused and want to make sense of it, and after a bit, feel horrified and want to stop thinking about it because it is too heavy.

But be careful- when someone discloses a rape to you, do not minimize, downplay, deny, or imply that the women did something to provoke it. This is not the time to play Devil’s Advocate or pseudo-marriage counselor, you know the suggestion- “I think you both made a mistake.” This is not the time to think about the sanctity of marriage or your family’s reputation if this ends in divorce. But chances are, you might end up thinking “This would have never happened to me, I did the right things to avoid a situation like this.”

"I told you never to move to the city! At least I can say I did all I could."

We take for granted certain things about the world: random acts of violence do not just happen, and good things happen to good people. Researchers call this “Just World Theory,” and belief in it explains much of the victim-blaming that goes on in cases of rape.

So rape victims break some kind of predictable rule of safety in order to get raped. Yet a vast amount of women would all have to have been acting like “bad people” if that were the case- remember, because as the FBI stats earlier showed, one woman is raped every two minutes. The notion that these women were acting out of some bounds is likely easier for men (and women) to believe than the notion that bad things could happen to anyone at any time, outside of our control. Yet the comfort people get from this core belief happens at the expense of the women whose reputations are put on trial when they charge their attackers with rape.

Studies have reported that men believe rape myths at higher rates than women, though some women who have disclosed rape to their own mothers have been told to “stop being such a nag” and “be a better wife to your husband." It is hard enough for women to press charges against men, knowing chances of getting a conviction are slim and that their character will likely be questioned. Family and friends should not make things worse by interrogating or criticizing the victim.

"I don't get it! You said you were dressed in a sweater and jeans, and watched your drink all night. You're not telling me everything, young lady!"

Not long ago, there has been controversy in the media about Serena Williams’ comment on the Steubenville Rape Case. She had implied that the rape had been a mix of boys acting stupid, bad parenting and girls who should have known better.

Even though she said the bulk of the blame should go to the men, she spent some time chastising the rape victims for putting themselves in a vulnerable position.  This is something which women are who are sexually assaulted are often familiar with: a counterfactual thought.

Counterfactual thoughts routinely begin with “If only I…” and end with “…this event wouldn’t have happened.” Women who go this route with their thoughts after a rape tend to blame themselves, and this often leads to depression. The problem with these kinds of thoughts is that rape is assumed to be a predictable and unchanging part of the background of everyday life, while women’s actions are seen as changeable (especially in hindsight).

But what Serena and others downplay is the fact that both men and women’s actions are mutable. There is no threshold of sexual arousal beyond which men cannot control how they act on their urges. Both genders are capable of change, and yet women are forced to do all the work. One third of women in a study reported that fear of being raped was ever-present, and another third reported altering their lives to take precautions. In essence, the big double standard of our Rape Culture is that rape-fearing women are asked to accommodate for rapists, to do all the rape-prevention work, while men who are worry-free about getting raped feel little to no push to organize against rape. This is male privilege. 

Pictured: The Rape-Prevention Industrial Complex

4. You Believe that Rape is a Woman’s Issue
 

Rape is part of the background of life, it will always be there, and so women must accommodate rapists. Everyday men have no responsibility. These are typical assumptions that play out in places like college campuses. A cross-cultural study turns the first assumption, that of rape being an inevitable part of society to look out for, on its head: some cultures have so few rapes each year that they were basically rape-free.  The study's author compared these societies to those he labeled "rape-prone," and discovered that "Rape is interpreted as the sexual expression of these forces in societies where the harmony between men and their environment has been severely disrupted." There is something unique about campus culture: about one in four college women have reported surviving a rape or attempted rape, while by comparison, one in six women in the general population have. College-aged women are four times more likely than other women to experience date rape. 

What about the assumption that everyday men have no responsibility to prevent this? While 99% of incidents at college are involve men raping women, sexual assault prevention has typically focused on ways for women to prevent rape. Has any university really asked why sexual assault prevention has focused on women instead of men? Even asking the question of why women are the targets of rape in significantly most cases, as opposed to men being the targets, asks the question of what many men must be thinking about women. If our actions are the results of our thoughts, then rape is the product of men’s mental content.

Why is rape a woman’s issue, then? If attacks on the United States lead to the U.S. sending soldiers and spies into the Middle East to fight terrorists instead of simply training Americans how to spot and stop a terrorist, then why are attacks on women seen as the victim’s issue, with all the resources devoted to educating and training women rather than sending resources to the battlefield of men’s minds? And what little resources women get at best: violence against women is prosecuted at the lowest rate compared to other forms of violence, as rape is prosecuted at a rate of 2 to 4 percent.

Terrorism works by making people afraid to go out and participate in daily activities of society. Rape is sexual terrorism. Women worry about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the essence of terrorism is that you never know when that is. 

If a man wants to take a walk in a woman's shoes, he might experience it more as jumping in a woman's shoes.

Rape is sexual terrorism because many women are left feeling less free than men to do the same exact things that men do, such as being in a self-service laundromat or apartment laundry room at night, and not any irrational fear, given the once-every-two-minute frequency of rape which the FBI estimates. 

And of these women, some will have internalized notions that rape is not random but happens to “certain kinds” of women. Rape myths like this, and myths that “good things happen to good people” so if someone gets raped they must have done something wrong, work together. They create a path of resistance against women who try and come forward after having been raped. The path of least resistance, then, becomes to “know her place,” and accept the inevitability of rape or some “failure” on her part to prevent it. And so in resignation women silence themselves before their family, friends, and the court system get a chance to silence them. Out of all campus rapes, only 5% of them will be reported to the police, a number far below the 40% of all sexual assaults which the general population reports to the police.

5. You Get Defensive For Your Tribe

Whether you are a sports fan, a fan of a celebrity, or there is a star teacher or other public favorite in your life, you are at risk for getting defensive for your tribe. Also, it may be especially hard to identify yourself as part of Rape Culture if you are in a historically oppressed group. Jewel Woods, a black feminist, writes that when he engages people in conversation about items on the Male Privilege Checklist (see part 1 of 3 in this blog series), he encountered the most resistance from black and brown men. Indeed, he says, some items on the Male Privilege Checklist did not apply to men of color. He created the Black Male Privilege Checklist, which is here:

http://jewelwoods.com/node/9

"If it look as though I have something profoundly interesting and enlightening I'm about to say, it's because I do."

The truth for many people of color is that of intersections in their oppressed identities- for example, a Black woman may feel pressure to keep domestic violence a non-police matter, due to the way the criminal justice system treats Black people in this country. Note the following on Jewel Woods’ list: “I do not have to worry about being considered a traitor to my race if I call the police on a member of the opposite sex, (number 75)” and “I don’t have to choose my race over my sex in political matters (number 1)”. 

In addition to this, whether you are black, brown, LGBT, Muslim, or Jewish, you might know and respect the person a woman is accusing of rape- maybe he is even a community leader or a “symbol of strength” and you don’t get how they could rape anyone. Maybe you are at a gay-friendly event where the leader of the event is well loved by all, but sexually harasses you. Maybe you do not wish to “air our dirty laundry,” and reinforce negative stereotypes about homosexuals as promiscuous. But Male Privilege, Sexism and Rape Culture wins every time a woman or man is silenced because she feels as though she has to choose her minority group over her sex.

The straight white Christian majority is in on this, too, and have the media as a powerful psychological tool. Nearly everyone loves athletes and soldiers, which is why so many people are quick to defend them, and may be why rape is so extraordinarily prevalent in college fraternities, school and professional sports teams, and the armed forces: no one wants to believe anything bad about their tribal heroes, whether that tribe is Duke University, Steubenville High School, or the symbolic vanguards of America itself- the troops.

At the outbreak of the Kobe Bryant alleged-rape case, a team of researchers at Aurora University in Illinois counted the number of online articles from ESPN and CNN to local and regional newspapers (156 in total). They then tallied how many articles presented rape myths without challenging them, and how many presented them and then challenged them. The alleged victim in this case might have guessed it: the majority of the articles (there were 102) contained at least one myth-endorsing statement that went unchallenged. The researchers also documented that the media made more positive comments about the athlete ("the boy next-door") than about the victim, and more negative comments about the victim than about the athlete. As the alleged victim backed off moving forward with the trial, the attorneys said "that she believed she could not get a fair trial after all of the leaks and errors in this case." This influential media bias is the kind of resistance we give to people who go after our favorite athletes, our symbols of strength and hope.  

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Conclusion

Whoever we are, internalized myths and male privilege push as along the path of least resistance that keeps the Monopoly game of sexism operating. In essence, by assuming women are lying, or by trying to explain away their rapes as something that could have been prevented if they had done something differently, we are acting as gender police who keep women as a group down below men in society’s hierarchy. You do not need a law to dictate how women should dress in order to pressure women to conform. All you need are the unwritten laws of the game of Male Privilege to create resistance. All you need is the smug thought "I never would have put myself in that position," and for that attitude to be read loud and clear.

Link to part 1- "Three Reasons Men Are Sexist  and White People Are Racist Without Realizing It" 

http://opensystemtoj.blogspot.com/2015/06/three-reasons-men-and-white-people-are.html

Link to part 2- "Three Reasons We Are All (Gender) Police"

http://opensystemtoj.blogspot.com/2015/06/three-reasons-we-are-all-gender-police.html