We must fight the voice that says: stay home, keep your legs closed and your eyes lowered
In 2013, we face a choice.
‘It’s always sad to see young women become victims of sexual offences,» wrote Heather Keating, the head of Hastings Police, on her Twitter feed on the last day of 2012. “Don’t Drink too much on New Years Eve [sic] and regret your actions!”
There’s a slim chance she could have been talking to men, telling them not to get drunk and assault someone, but that’s not a message that law enforcement has yet managed to promote successfully in the 21st century. Sadly, Keating’s meaning was as clear as it was predictable: women should take responsibility for “protecting” themselves from sexual assault because sexual assault is just a fact of life.
It was a good year for rape apologists in 2012. We had American politicians telling us that there is such a thing as »legitimate rape», that “some girls rape easy”; we had a British politician telling us that date rape is simply “bad sexual etiquette”. But as Jessica Valenti wrote in The Purity Myth, »being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don’t get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren’t careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.”
Keating’s words, by contrast, recall the depressing dogma of Constable Michael Sanguinetti, who told a group of female students in Toronto in 2011 that they should avoid »dressing like sluts» if they didn’t want to be raped, kicking off the SlutWalk protests around the world.