Over there I made a case as follows:
Taking the 30% figure you gave as the top margin for victims of rape/sexual abuse, then if just 5% of men are rapists that means around 6 victims per rapist. Some rapists may only rape once, of course, and then there are serial rapists who have many more victims, but I think it is reasonable to assume that a man who is inclined to rape once and does so, will likely do it again unless he is caught and stopped. We already know that conviction rates for rape are extraordinarily low.
I was trying to suggest that while 1% may be too small, I did not believe there to be a need to assume a large proportion of men are rapists. 5% is just 1 in 20.
However, in a blog post response to the "99% of men are decent people" claim, Amber Rhea reminds us to:
consider that ~70% of all rapes are committed by someone the victim was close to (often in their home) – a relative, spouse, neighbor, friend. Those stranger in a dark alley scenarios are not realistic, but I didn’t think I’d have to repeat that fact on a blog among feminists. It’s Feminism 101.
If we assume that spousal/friend rape is only going to be 1 or 2 victims per rapist (there is potential for higher, but we're looking for broad averages here) then 70% of 33% is around 20% (it's actually 23.1% but we'll allow a little bit of leeway for those repeat offenders who rape more than one friend). Maybe the other 10% of rapes are commited by 1-2% of men (who would have to be all repeat offenders), so we've got an estimate of the proportion of men who are rapists now running at 20%+1% - 23.1%+2% which is basically 21% to 25%. That's 1/5 to 1/4 of men commit rape at some point in their lives.
I deeply, deeply, want that not to be true. I want there to be some flaw in the mathematics, or in the assumptions on which I've based it. But then I recall that when men in South Afrcia were given the chance to respond anonymously, 25% of them did say they had committed rape. It is only cultural arrogance that would make us believe that British or USAian men would be any different.
That figure means that in any class at the schools I grew up in, the expected value of future rapists would be 2 or 3. It means that when you're at the pub and there's 20 other blokes there, on average you'd expect 4 or 5 of them to be a rapist. Is it any wonder that I want to disbelieve the maths? I don't want "my" gender to be that bad, I want it to be just a few "bad apples". But after running these numbers, I do not think it is realistic to ignore them.
The other debate was about "victim-blaming", and although the debate ran around various corners, to me I think it is summed up by Rootietoot's comment:
I don't see myself as a victim, but a survivor. I don't see weakness as anything other than something to be pitied. Perhaps it is ignorance, but given my history, I don't really think it is.
The fundamental disagreement, that maybe I failed to communicate properly, is that being the victim of an abuser - and indeed, being being a repeat victim - is not a matter of "weakness". It's a matter of being prey. Yes, strength or weakness can factor into that but such is human life that the strong can easily become prey of another. Either through circumstance or through the designs of a predator, even the strong can become damaged or wounded; as Hexy puts it in a comment to Ren's post, "Victim blaming, of any form, is a means of allowing the blamer to feel that they would never be in the position of the victim. By making it her fault, one can reassure oneself that they would never make those mistakes."
We are all, by sheer virtue of being human, capable of making a mistake once. And if we make it once, we can make it (or a different one) a second time. Sometimes, the consequences of the first mistake make a second mistake more likely, even if we believe ourselves to have been made immune to making another mistake. Victim-blaming is a way of avoiding the realisation that, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."
Just as I want so hard not to believe that there could be so many men who are rapists, so it is that some people, I suspect, want very hard not to believe that it can happen to anybody. It s an all-too-human trait to hide from the fact of our own vulnerability, our own mortality. Victim-blaming of this sort seems to me to be built of such nature.
Amber wrote, "I was going to go on a tear about rape culture, but fuck, I just can’t right now – I just don’t have the energy." I don't know that I can do much better, but remember - if 1 in 5 men is, or could be, a rapist - and you tell a rape joke... you're telling him what he did (or is going to do) is okay. Any time there's 4 or 5 men around and you make that joke, there's a strong chance that one of them doesn't think it's a joke, he thinks it's permission. Any time it's portrayed that a normal and acceptable way of getting a woman to sleep with you is to get her drunk so she doesn't know what she's saying "yes" to (or indeed, that a way to attract a man is to pretend to be so pissed you can't think straight) then it says that it isn't her consent that matters, it's whether you get to "do it" with her. And that says it's okay to rape. The insane meme that says that a woman is advertising as sexually available if she wears revealing clothes, therefore she's available to everyone who sees her - a message repeated so often in the media - tells those 1 in 5 men that it's okay to rape her.
And
It's unfortunately the case that if such a high proportion of women are victims of rape - and also domestic violence and other forms of VAW - often multiple times, then the only realistic assumption is that a high proportion of men are commiting these crimes.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, we're used to thinking of crime in terms of a small number of criminals, which have a disproportionate impact on the rest of the population. But it doesn't seem like this is the case when it comes to VAW, in part because in many cases the man involved may go away believing he's not done anything wrong, and his actions are validated by culture and his friends as 'normal', not abusive and certainly not criminal.
This doesn't mean men are 'inherantly' bad or anything, but it does mean there's a big job to do and it will take a lot to shift this, and only approaching it in terms of a criminal justice angle - while important - is not going to be sufficient. It's one of the things which makes it so upsetting to see the general backlash against Harriet Harman's ideas on integrating lessons which address domestic violence into primary schools, because if young children can begin to absorb some of these notions about what is a healthy and what is an abusive relationship, then it's possible we might get somewhere.