You’re young, you’re female and you’ve just left home and possibly your home city. You’re also lonely—maybe shy, and taking some chances with alcohol so that you can mix more easily. You’re now in a high risk group to be raped or sexually assaulted! However, not being young, female, isolated from family, and not overindulging in alcohol does not give you immunity to rape. Anyone can be raped and rape
is common.
Does it help or hurt to know this? Well, both. Sexual assault affects all women, not just the direct victims. If we know about the risk factors, as women we can keep ourselves safe by staying at home, not working late hours, not drinking—in other words, we can limit our lives until we have no life. That hurts! And it won’t work!
It won’t work because sexual assault is not usually committed by strangers. This certainly does happen, but for the most part men will assault women who are their flatmates, partners, acquaintances, dates, sisters, daughters and step relatives. And serial rapists are simply men who have perfected ways to achieve sexual access irrespective of situational ethics and your consent.
Here’s how. He will meet you at a bar, cafe, party—anywhere. You will like him because he can be charming—some may say manipulative. He will ask if you would like to go somewhere else with him tonight or meet again and you will agree. Having carefully chosen his location to minimise others’ interference and your resistance, he will coerce you sexually. And you will doubt yourself and doubt your memory of how it went down because he will say you led him on, you consented, or it didn’t happen that way. And worse, if you agree to go anywhere with him, his defence team will argue, and usually successfully, that everything that happened from that moment on was consensual.
As women, how do we get the balance right between keeping ourselves safe and limiting our lives to the point of compromising self-actualisation? Can we trust and like men, while also developing a scrutinising eye for men who are sexual predators? Are these even the right questions to be asking?
Or are the questions better asked of men and by men? For instance, as men, how do you manage the cognitive dissonance which, as women, we are sure you must have if you suborn the will of our mothers, sisters, friends, and daughters to your sexual needs? As men, how do you not understand our right of control over our bodies? As men, how do you not understand the great harm that you do us?
In my next article on sexual assault, I will talk more about this harm. *
Linda Beckett (PhD)