Slutwalk. Yes means yes and no means no. Simple and to the point, just in case you got muddled. This is people who have no power, no voice, trying to make themselves heard. To take back some control of their lives.
A New Zealand lawyer friend told me that in New Zealand, by law, it's assumed that if the woman is drunk, then she is in no position to give her consent. Here, if the woman is drunk, then the court assumes that she must have been up for it. A simple shift in prospective and suddenly you can understand why the police have such a hard job putting a case together to go before a jury and why there is an only 7% conviction rate.
I consider myself lucky, I've never actually been raped. I've been physically assaulted and threatened with rape, but when you ask around, open up, you suddenly find that it's not just you. I even had a male friend at university who was stalked, but because he was male, the police didn't take it seriously.
Three men, although I hesitate at calling them men, walked behind me discussing how they were going to rape me as I walked along a canal path in broad daylight. I never reported it, and part of me feels very guilty about that. What if this was the start of a pattern for them, that their actions slowly escalated until a woman/ girl was actually raped. I could have stopped them. Or could I? I never actually saw them. I could never pick them out of a line-up and who would believe me? It was most probably a bad joke. Three guys who thought it would be funny to wind up a single lone girl.
I still can't walk along a canal by myself or with the children.
A Simple Reminder
Thanks for sharing this post - more needs to be written about the reality of rape and the fear of it, and the fear of not being taken seriously or even blamed if you dare to report it.
ReplyDeleteThanks dandelion girl, I love this post! We should all be braver and tackle these scary topics, call things the way they really are and then maybe society would feel less comfortable about accepting rubbish like "she was asking for it", "she's just embarrassed in the cold light of day, she was totally up for it at the time" or "so many girls just make these things up". The truth is ugly but it doesn't mean it shouldn't be faced.
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