Victim-shaming and ‘rape culture’

I have noticed a pattern. A shamefully, infuriatingly consistent pattern.

Whenever a news website reports about an assault on a rural farmer or a vulnerable pensioner, there is a unanimous outcry of compassion for the victim and anger against the perpetrators. Not a single person demands to know whether the victim had perhaps left their door unlocked or kept valuables in their less-than-secure home. Everybody agrees that what happened to these people is wrong.

The comments sections are teeming with blame on the perpetrators, the politicians, the lack of Garda presence. But nobody ever blames the victims. It does not occur to a decent person to withhold their sympathy until they have been assured that the assaulted farmer or pensioner had not been sitting in his parlour, drunk, with his back door on the latch. Because even if that were the case, no one but a ‘scumbag’ would then conclude the assaulted person had ‘asked for it’.

Yet every single report on assaulted, battered, raped and even murdered women, is followed by rows and rows of cynical and downright hateful comments, full of nasty assumptions and speculation about the victim’s conduct and morals. In these comment sections, I have seen women being blamed for their own murder, vilified and sneered at for falling victim to a brutal rapist, and being accused of reverse-engineering a vicious assault on their own lives.

Now imagine the outrage George Hook would face if he said something like: “It seems the poor assaulted farmer was fairly plastered that night ... and he should have known better than to display his family silver on the sideboard. You can’t just abdicate personal responsibility like that!”

My point is, nobody even queries such victims’ backgrounds and behaviour. We accept that a crime has been committed and the perpetrator is to blame.

But somehow with female victims it is exactly the other way around. “It takes two to tango”, was one of the first comments left recently on a news website’s report on a woman who was murdered by her married “lover”. The comment was left by someone who is probably described by his mates as a “sound bloke”. It was followed by many similar ones.

That is what women and enlightened, compassionate men mean when they speak of “rape culture”. Any man who doesn’t question his stance on this malignant reality, or doesn’t confront those who perpetuate it, remains part of the problem and is complicit in upholding a global network of abuse that causes untold harm and pain. Every hour, every minute, every second of every day.

There are women, too, who are quick to blame female victims of rape and assault. It’s a typical long-term effect of patriarchal structures in any type of society. Petra Kindler Ferrybank, Co Waterford