Below is a comment from “kristinab” from the website jezebel.com on the blog post here.
It struck me as very true and worth repeating…
“we ask so much of rape victims.
we ask them to be attractive enough to be rape-able.
we ask them to be victimized by someone that no one would want to have sex with anyways, cause otherwise, the guys would have just found someone else to have sex with, right?
we ask them to not just say no, but to say no in a certain specific way.
we ask them to be virgins, in many cases, or at least, if they are a certain age, married.
we ask them to be dressed a certain way, or at least, NOT dressed a certain way, so as to minimize the possibility that they provoked their rapists.
we ask them to be sufficiently emotional afterwards, and to have the correct attitudes about forgiveness.
we ask them to be near strangers to their rapists.
we ask them to live in very nice neighborhoods, refrain from traveling alone through not-nice neighborhoods, and refrain from asking the wrong person to help them navigate the not-nice neighborhoods.
we ask them to never ever drink socially when on a date with a potential rapist.
we ask them to know which guys are “like that” and which aren’t so that they can be responsible for their safety and stay away from the “wrong guys”.
we ask more from rape victims than we do of any other kind of victim, and it’s really heartbreaking. My anthropology teacher said yesterday that “for women, there are few, if any, countries that are truly ‘developed’, or ‘first-world’”, and i have to agree.”
