Parody on anti-rape posters ‘offensive’
Campaign calls for legal action, professor says
Posters that parody a successful anti-rape campaign developed in Edmonton and now used worldwide are offensive and likely violate copyright rules, says a University of Alberta professor involved in developing the campaign.
The posters put up around the University of Alberta campus and possibly downtown this week use images from the Don’t Be That Guy campaign and change the text to send the opposite message, said Lise Gotell, chair of the U of A’s department of women’s and gender studies and an expert on Canadian sexual assault law.
“What they’ve done is they’ve taken four of the posters we created and they’ve manipulated them,” Gotell said.
“These posters, I think, are quite troubling … What’s been done to transform an anti-sexual-assault campaign into a rape-apologist campaign is just deeply offensive.”
One of the Don’t Be That Guy campaign posters uses white text on a black background that reads: “Just because she’s drunk doesn’t mean she wants to f**k.” A rewritten ad posted online, labelled Don’t Be That Girl, reads: “Just because you regret your life choices, doesn’t mean it’s rape.”
Another unauthorized campaign image, which is posted around the U of A campus, includes the text: “Just because you regret a one-night stand, doesn’t mean it wasn’t consensual.”
The posters play on the myth that regret causes false reports of sexual assault, Gotell said. Canada already has low reporting rates and low conviction rates for sexual assault, she said.
“What these posters are going to do, when people see them, is play into this myth that there’s a huge problem with false allegations, which we know empirically is wrong. They may in fact discourage people from reporting, because the research also shows that women are very likely to minimize their experiences of sexual assault.”
A coalition of groups fighting sexual assault called SAVE (Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton) announced the Don’t Be That Guy campaign in November 2010, in response to statistics that showed alcohol played a role in about half the sexual assault cases police investigated in 2009. SAVE is made up of various groups including the U of A department of women’s and gender studies, the Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton, Responsible Hospitality Edmonton and the Edmonton police.
Most previous campaigns to fight sexual assault focused on prevention tips for women, and the SAVE campaign was designed to focus its message on the perpetrators with print and transit advertisements including ads posted above urinals in bar washrooms.
The ad campaign last year won an Alberta Crime Prevention Award and has been used throughout Canada, the United States and in Australia and New Zealand. “It’s a very, very popular and successful campaign,” Gotell said.
Representatives from SAVE plan to meet Monday to decide how to respond to the unauthorized posters, she said.
“My position is that this demands some kind of a legal response. There are clear intellectual property issues,” Gotell said. “When someone has manipulated our images to disseminate such an offensive message, of course, we should respond to this in a very clear way.”
The university also has clear policies that prevent people from putting up posters without permission, Gotell said.
Kristopher Wells, of the University of Alberta’s Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services, received emails Tuesday notifying him about posters on the U of A campus. Wells called campus security and security staff will be taking the posters down.
“They’re obviously not supported by any organization,” Wells said. “That poster just shows why there’s a need for the (Don’t Be That Guy) campaign and the education work that still needs to happen if people still think that’s a joke or a funny parody.”
Many people commented on the posters on Twitter Tuesday, including Coun. Don Iveson who condemned the Don’t Be That Girl messages.
“It’s not funny and it’s cowardly,” Iveson said in an interview. “If there’s someone who wants to debate these issues, a real person who wants to debate these issues, they should come out and we should be talking about sexual assault in Edmonton, because it’s a real issue. It’s one of our crime indicators that’s rising, and it’s very troubling. The tactics are cowardly and the issue is not a laughing matter.”