If you’re drunk and get raped, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself, says NSW Police Commissioner

Oh look, the NSW Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, is a rape apologist: Girls’ drink pact:

YOUNG women planning a night out should tell their friends if they plan to have sex to avoid unwanted and potentially dangerous drunken encounters, the NSW Police Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, has warned.

What’s a rape apologist? Well, I’m glad you asked. Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog has a wonderfully clear definition, that even people like Andrew Scipione should be able to understand:

The simple answer is that a rape apology is any argument that boils down to the myth that rapists can be provoked into raping by what the victim does or does not do.

Most people who make such arguments are not consciously intending to defend rapists. They are simply repeating arguments they have heard before and haven’t fully examined.

Clearly Scipione was sleeping through the several months of mainstream media coverage about SlutWalk. But it does go some way towards explaining why we still have police officers who believe rape myths.

While the non-drinking Police Commissioner is retreating from his earlier calls to raise the legal drinking age from 18, now he is calling on young women to “look out for your mates”.

Yes, telling people – not just young women – to look out for your mates is a good thing, but most people already do that. It’s a bit frightening to think that NSW Police’s anti-rape strategy is “hey women, don’t get drunk and you won’t get raped, but if you do get drunk and raped then you should take responsibility for your actions”. Not only is that offensive victim-blaming, but it’s telling women that they will be safe from sexual assault if they don’t get drunk, and that is simply bullshit. Scipione would know that.

Mr Scipione pointed The Sun-Herald to a soon-to-be-published study of 235 female university students, aged 18 to 25.

One-quarter drank twice a week and the same number drank heavily in a single session at least four times a month, the University of Wollongong study found.

Those who drank heavily were more likely to find themselves in dangerous sexual situations. And yet almost half said they never, rarely or only sometimes used a condom during sex.

I don’t know if Scipione doesn’t get it, or if the journalists – Nick Ralston, Saffron Howden – don’t get it, but unsafe consensual sex is not the same thing as sexual assault.

About 3000 people aged 15 to 24 are admitted to Australian hospitals each year for acute intoxication. Between the late 1990s and 2005-06, the rate of young women being admitted to hospital doubled.

That statistic is meaningless if you don’t give a figure. For all we know, there could have been only five women admitted to hospital for acute intoxication during the 90s, so for that to double in a decade is hardly cause for wringing of hands over young women not behaving like ladies anymore.

“In the past we always saw this overuse, the abuse, the drunken behaviour, the violent behaviour, the stupid behaviour … that was predominantly the domain of young men,” Mr Scipione said. “It’s not that way any more.

“It’s now unfortunately something that’s seen as cool: to be drunk as a young woman. For the life of me, I don’t know what’s that attractive about some young woman vomiting in the gutter at 3am after a big night.”

What’s attractive? Judgey Scipione, who gives a shit about what you find attractive? A woman’s purpose is not to be attractive at all times, just in case a man happens to look at her. If all you have to offer the public discussion around binge drinking is that you think it makes young women look unattractive, then we need a new Police Commissioner. One who thinks with his brain, not his penis.

Mr Scipione, the father of two sons and a daughter, said he wanted young women to take responsibility for their safety when drinking before they became victims of crime.

When you tell women that they are personally responsible for whether or not someone else commits a violent crime, you’re letting the criminal off the hook. You’re giving them an excuse for what they did. I wonder if he tells his son not to rape women?

Here’s the thing, NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione. I’ll stop blogging and tweeting about you being a rape apologist if your rape prevention strategy starts to prominently involve the following:

“Hey guys, when you go out tonight, DON’T RAPE ANYONE”.

When skirts break the law

I was talking about SlutWalk last night and the conversation kept coming back to personal responsibility. That you need to take personal responsibility for your own safety and unfortunately that means not wearing something too provocative.

I can see why this idea is so widespread, because on the surface it makes sense. But I call bullshit. Because when you say that, what you’re really saying is the other person is not responsible for their actions. And if you dig deeper into that, what does it mean? That women should have personal responsibility but men shouldn’t? That men are so controlled by sexual urges that they simply must stick their penis inside every nearby vagina? We all know that’s rubbish. Even douchebags know that it’s wrong to jump on someone in the street and have sex with them. And we know that even douchebags know this because we don’t see it happening. So how on earth is it my fault – or my skirt’s fault – if someone else decides to break the law?

Our culture pushes the idea that women can somehow prevent rape – by not wearing certain items of clothing, by not getting drunk, by not walking around alone at night, by doing self-defence classes – and all of this ignores the fact that it’s not strangers women should fear. I’m not sure why our culture keeps pushing this lie. Maybe it’s because women are so used to being the ones who have to change – we have to be more masculine at work if we want a pay rise, we have to be different in some way if we want to get a boyfriend, we have to give up our bodies to grow humans, we have to accept that six or twelve months off work will damage our careers forever – that rather than teaching people not to attack or rape others, it’s just easier to make it yet another thing that women should do. I hope this is the reason, because the alternative is just too heartbreaking: that when women are attacked it’s their own fault and so the attacker shouldn’t be punished. Can you imagine if we told men that it’s their own fault for being in public if someone king hits them in the street?

Which brings me back to SlutWalk. I don’t think it will stop fuckwits groping women, or raping them, or believing it’s their right to say something nasty to a woman about her body. You can’t rid the world of fuckwits. But you can get people talking about the shit that women have to put up with when they’re in public. And maybe a journalist will think more carefully about the words they use when writing about violence against women. And maybe when a douchebag makes a nasty comment on a news website, other readers will pull them up. Or the moderator will realise that it shouldn’t be published because it’s offensive. And maybe when some idiot says a woman was “asking for it”, everyone else will point out how ridiculously stupid that is.

If someone else breaks the law, what on earth does it have to do with what I’m wearing?

Police and rape myths

I’m not surprised that every dickhead with an internet connection leaves comments on news websites about how a rape victim deserved it because she’d been drinking. I’m disappointed that journalists – who are generally more educated and more small-l liberal than the general public – continue to peddle rape myths, such as if you drink you deserve to be raped. And now I’m just pissed off that even the police think you asked for it: Research tackles police ‘rape myths’:

New research has found police are more likely to press sex assault charges if the alleged victim did not drink alcohol or wear provocative clothing at the time of the offence.

The ABC story doesn’t have a lot of info – just five sentences – but the Charles Sturt media release is more informative:

Professor Goodman-Delahunty said that reporting to police is the first, and potentially, most important step in the legal processing of sexual assault cases, and common reasons given by victims of sexual assault for why they fail to report these crimes include fear of lack of support or disbelief by police.

“Rape myths are commonly held beliefs and attitudes about sexual assault cases that are generally false, such as the belief that rape is most likely to be perpetrated by a stranger. These myths can affect one’s view of a sexual assault victim and a perpetrator, as can contextual factors such as victim attire and victim intoxication, which may increase the perception that the complainant was responsible for the assault, or the perception that the complainant is not credible.”

The study found that officers in general don’t let their perception of the victim’s intoxication influence them, but if individual officers believe rape myths, they “perceived the complainant as less credible, attributed her greater responsibility for the incident and were less likely to believe that she communicated non-consent. They were also less likely to regard the alleged perpetrator as guilty of sexual assault, and were less likely to recommend that the alleged offender be charged.”

Research from the Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault found that only around 19 per cent of rapes are reported to police. And, as if this figure isn’t already too low, police investigate less than 40 per cent of these reports. And before you tell me that it’s because most women make it up, only 2.1 per cent of the reported cases were designated as false.

I’ve mentioned this here before, but in 2001 I was attacked by a taxi driver. I was coming home after a few too many wines. When I said ‘just here, thanks’, he didn’t stop. I repeated it. He kept driving. Then he turned down a dark residential street and sped up. He grabbed my leg (I was sitting in the back) and tried to pull me into the front of the car. I screamed and swore at him, and wound down the window and started yelling his driver ID number in the hope that someone would hear. He kept calling me a dirty slut and filthy whore and pulling on my leg. When I kicked him in the face, he stopped the car and turned to grab me again. I was halfway out the door before the car had even stopped moving, but he managed to grab my bag. There was no way I was letting him have it – it had my keys and address in it. We both pulled and the bag ripped in two. I scooped as much as I could out onto the road and slammed the door.

He drove off.

I had no idea where I was.

A man came out of his house and asked if I was ok. He told me I’d ended up three suburbs away.

I called my good friend and flatmate, who drove me straight to the police station.

I told the officer everything that happened and he took notes. Then he said that although he didn’t doubt my story – he said it happens all the time, taxi drivers preying on drunk female passengers – he’d have to put in the report that I’d been drinking. I was fine with that. He then talked me out of pressing charges. He said the driver would just claim I tried to do a runner and that he was trying to keep me in the cab until he got to a police station. He said security footage of me drinking at the bar earlier in the night would be shown in court, as evidence that I was of bad character. He said that because I wasn’t sexually assaulted or beaten up, it wasn’t worth pressing charges because I’m the one whose reputation would be damaged. He said to call the taxi company and make a complaint.

The woman on the phone at the taxi company was horrified. But she said all she could do was make a note of the complaint. They couldn’t pull the driver off the road until the police contacted them. Since I wasn’t pressing charges, they wouldn’t hear from the police.

For years afterwards, I only got in those taxis with that booth-thing around the driver. To protect me from him.

I don’t remember what I was wearing (it was in nine years ago), but it wouldn’t have been provocative. The most provocative thing I own is a small badge that says ‘I hate your band’. We’d been out for dinner and too many drinks after class, so I’m guessing it was trousers and a t-shirt. [Update: As Lexy pointed out in the comments below, my outfit has nothing to do with it. However, I wrote about what I was probably wearing to indicate that the police officer couldn’t have made a judgement about my story based on my outfit.]

In the years since, I’ve got some great lawyer friends who think I’m mad not to have pressed charges. But I was a broke student who believed him because he was a police officer and I have that weird middle-class respect for police officers. My point is that many people would believe an officer who said it wasn’t worth pressing charges. And if they’re making a judgement call about you based on unsubstantiated myths, then we have a serious problem.

Polanski for beginners

Today’s story from AFP – so probably picked up by most news outlets in the Western world: Polanski breaks his silence on sex case.

For starters, would it be described as a “sex scandal” if it involved convicted pedophile Dennis Ferguson, rather than movie darling Roman Polanski? And while I’m here, can journalists please stop calling the child abuse cases linked to the Church a “sex scandal”. A sex scandal is what Tiger Woods got himself into. A religious leader sexually abusing children in his care is NOT a sex scandal.

”I can remain silent no longer because the California court has dismissed the victim’s numerous requests that proceedings against me be dropped, once and for all, to spare her from further harassment every time this affair is raised once more,” Polanski wrote.

Ohhh, so your only concern is for your victim? Excuse me if I don’t believe a fucking word of it.

Polanski is alleged to have plied a 13-year-old girl with champagne and drugs during a photo shoot at the Hollywood Hills home of his friend, the actor Jack Nicholson, before having sex with her despite her protests.

“Having sex with her despite her protests”? That’s called rape. And I wonder if using the word “champagne” rather than “alcohol” is to imply that it was classy? Hey, she got champagne, in Jack Nicholson’s house, she should shut the fuck up about calling it rape, because clearly it was romantic. I won’t link to it here because it’s awful, but I’ve read the testimony the girl gave and it’s brutal. It also includes anal rape. So it’s not like they were getting hot and heavy and he was charged on a technicality because she was underaged. He pleaded guilty and then did a runner, to live the next 33 years in freedom. Ok, so he wasn’t able to go back to the US, but big deal. A friend of mine was kicked out of the US for breaking into the booze cupboard on a cruise ship and getting hammered. She can’t go back to the US either, and she didn’t rape any children.

The Paris-based filmmaker said he had been forced to mortgage the apartment which has been his home for more than 30 years to meet his legal costs. ”I am far from my family and unable to work,” said the director, who completed work on his latest movie, The Ghost Writer, in his chalet in the Swiss ski resort of Gstaad, where he has been confined since being released from custody on December 4.

Oh, poor fucking diddums.

Reports of looting

Chileans affected by the earthquake have no food, water and electricity, so is it really fair to call them looters? How are people in a disaster zone supposed to get to their money to buy food if ATMs and EFTPOS aren’t working? Hence the whole “disaster zone” thing. It’s wrong for Western media to be pointing fingers and saying “ooh, look at the looters”. They did it with Haiti too.

Update: The ABC has been playing a game I like to call “Drunk girls deserve to be raped”. In a story about taxi driver MD Kowsar Ali who raped a woman:

The 18-year-old woman had been drinking with friends in the inner-city before hailing a taxi to take her home to the city’s southern suburbs.

So what if she had been drinking with friends? Whether she had one glass of wine or was blind drunk is irrelevant. But I don’t think the journo who put this sentence in was thinking “she asked for it”. It’s one of those things that you just put into stories without thinking, but it’s part of rape culture. Melissa McEwan at Shakesville explains it best, but here’s a part of it:

Rape culture is telling girls and women to be careful about what you wear, how you wear it, how you carry yourself, where you walk, when you walk there, with whom you walk, whom you trust, what you do, where you do it, with whom you do it, what you drink, how much you drink, whether you make eye contact, if you’re alone, if you’re with a stranger, if you’re in a group, if you’re in a group of strangers, if it’s dark, if the area is unfamiliar, if you’re carrying something, how you carry it, what kind of shoes you’re wearing in case you have to run, what kind of purse you carry, what jewelry you wear, what time it is, what street it is, what environment it is, how many people you sleep with, what kind of people you sleep with, who your friends are, to whom you give your number, who’s around when the delivery guy comes, to get an apartment where you can see who’s at the door before they can see you, to check before you open the door to the delivery guy, to own a dog or a dog-sound-making machine, to get a roommate, to take self-defense, to always be alert always pay attention always watch your back always be aware of your surroundings and never let your guard down for a moment lest you be sexually assaulted and if you are and didn’t follow all the rules it’s your fault.

Sexualising rape on the ABC

Just then on The World Today on ABC radio, Mark Willacy was reporting on the protests over the US base in Okinawa. He said locals were angry over the rape of a 12-year-old “schoolgirl” by marines.

Why “schoolgirl”? Why not “girl”? It’s pretty likely that a 12-year-old girl would be in school, so do we need to know she’s a schoolgirl? Particularly when “schoolboy” is only used when the boy has achieved something, like winning a race against adults or beating them in a chess comp.

When I hear “schoolgirl was raped” I get angry, but I wonder if it has that same response in others? I know it shouldn’t, but the term “schoolgirl” does have sexual connotations. And when the type of male who belongs to Dude Nation hears “schoolgirl” and “rape”, does he think about sexy schoolgirls he’d like to fuck? I don’t know. I’ve met some pretty awful characters over the years and it doesn’t seem that implausible.

Blaming the victim #2

Caroline Norma has a great piece in today’s Online Opinion about the phrases we use to get men out of trouble. By asking “why didn’t she just leave?” when talking about a woman who is bashed by a man, we’re saying that the woman is somehow to blame for what happened. Indeed, why do we always ask “why do women stay with men who’ve hit them?” instead of “why do men hit women?”.

I love her Four Corners strategy: “because footballers must put up with being bashed around on the footy field, the sport inevitably attracts men with ‘risk taker’ personalities. This means they can’t be held responsible for bashing and raping women”.

On the surface it does seem plausible. But why aren’t boxers constantly in the news for bashing women? Or rugby union players? (Man Friend says it’s because union players tend to have a life outside sport, be it uni or work, whereas league players are paid so much they don’t need jobs and therefore don’t have any perspective.)

Whenever another league player is in the news because he doesn’t know how to control himself, how many times do you hear people say “there are predatory women out there who throw themselves at these players”. Again, it’s saying it’s our fault that men rape. And what does that say about Australian culture that we raise men who can’t tell the difference between someone who wants to have sex with them and someone who does not?

I’m going to end with a chilling warning from Caroline Norma: “Going on past experience, their bashing or raping by rich superstar sportsmen will cause barely a ripple in Australian society”.

Ah, silly me

Kyle Sandilands thinks he was helping the mother of the teenage girl:

“It was unfortunate that lie detector went south, it really was. But the whole reason that mum came on here in the first place was because she was a single mum that was worried sick about her daughter and she had no where else to turn and she didn’t know where else to turn and what to do. She really was at her wits end. And, you know, the reason we took ourselves off air…we weren’t suspended, we weren’t fired, we weren’t anything…we took ourselves off air because we wanted the story to die down because at the end of the day it was a girl, it was a teenage girl, and we didn’t want her to have any more distress than what was already caused. No else gave a shit did they?”

Here I was thinking that he and Jackie O strapped a scared girl to a polygraph machine and asked her about sex for the titillation of their audience.

I wish I said that #2

The Bitch Who Roared has a Media Misogyny Watch, with some great points about Charlie Pickering and Dave Hughes on Ten’s The 7pm Project. Check it out. (Her blog, not the tv show). It finishes with a comment from iblamethepatriarchy so true that I had to put it here too:

After hearing the “interview,” which was clearly child abuse (she was there against her will), it occurred to me that the fuckwad was demonstrating to the girl exactly what will happen to her if she ever accuses a man of rape: She will be grilled about “other sexual experiences” in order for the defense to claim she really is just a slut who wanted it and therefore the man must be innocent. Her feelings will be of concern to no one.

And you know what? I reckon I’m done blogging about him. He’s so tiresome.

I wish I’d said that

Rachel Hills has written a great piece for the Dawn Chorus about how the public reactions to Kyle and Jackie O and Matthew Johns says a lot about how we treat people who have been raped. There is still this disgusting public attitude that if a woman isn’t a virgin, then clearly she’s a dirty slut and is only making it up. I work in a newsroom where a story about the rape of a male is considered far more newsworthy than the rape of a female, instead of it being an horrific experience regardless of which hole is violated.

Anyway, this post is “I wish I’d said that” and John Birmingham on his Brisbane Times blog said it perfectly:
In what moral universe does interrogating an underage girl about her sexual history, while she’s hooked up to a polygraph and sitting in front of a live microphone, strike anyone as anything other the basest, most grotesque and abusive form of media exploitation imaginable?