Philobiblon: Rape: Victims are still blamed

Monday, November 21, 2005

Rape: Victims are still blamed

There's an extremely disturbing report out from Amnesty International about attitudes towards rape in Britain. It is no wonder that conviction rates are so low, when the general public - which means of course the juries - just don't get that the rapist is responsible for his own actions, not the victim.

"A third of people believe a woman is partially or completely responsible for being raped if she has behaved flirtatiously, a survey suggests.
The Amnesty International poll of 1,000 people also found over 25% believe she is at least partly to blame if she has worn revealing clothing or been drunk."

Woman's Hour this morning had an excellent report on the Amnesty findings, and the broader issue. It seems that while there have been many improvements in police and other official attitudes (although they are still far from perfect), the next big step is going to have to be with public opinion.

Yet how to do this. How do you convince a Daily Mail reader?

I was thinking that the campaign that is yet to happen - one to empower men to report male rape - might have some answers here. If a man gets raped, was it his fault if he was drunk?

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Talking of the Daily Mail - you should take a look at the comments section of the coverage here. Some prime examples are on my blog in case the Daily Mail is in the habit of purging comments after 24hrs..

11/21/2005 04:16:00 pm  
Blogger Natalie Bennett said...

Thanks, great link. There are (for a Daily Mail site) a lot of surprisingly decent comments in there, but also a large number of "buts" and "howevers", along the lines of: "Rape is wrong, but ..." which pretty well follows the results of the survey. Sadly.

11/21/2005 10:42:00 pm  

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